Textual Practice: Volume 2 No.3

TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 2 NUMBER 3 WINTER 1988

Contents

Articles

Discipline and discipleship JOHN FROW

In the rathouse of history with Thomas Pynchon: rereading V.ROBERT HOLTON

Facecrime: George Orwell and the physiognomy of politics

307 323

IAN HAYWOOD

343

The politics of Finnegans Wake DAVID PIERCE

363

Disarming voices (a nuclear exchange) CARDIFF TEXT ANALYSIS GROUP

375

Obituary

Allon White: A Tribute

389

Letter

Hermeneutic hubris RICHARD LEVIN

393

Reviews Michael Westlake, Imaginary Women ANTONY EASTHOPE

397

Charles Jencks, Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture NICHOLAS ZURBRUGG

401

Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History DAVID AMIGONI

407

Anthony Wilden, The Rules are No Game and Man and Woman, War and Peace BRIAN COATES

411

Thomas Docherty, John Donne, Undone STEPHEN GLYNN

419

iv

Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction ELIZABETH WRIGHT

425

R.Colls and P.Dodd (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, and M.J.Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 R.A.STRADLING

429

Thomas G.Pavel, The Poetics of Plot and Fictional Worlds DUNCAN SALKELD

435

Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization DANIELA CAVALLARO

443

Index to Volume 2

447

Discipline and discipleship JOHN FROW

I The transfer of knowledges is almost always mediated by institutions and by authorized persons. I set up some metaphors in this paper to try to examine these mediating processes by which knowledges are both reproduced and transformed. In particular, I take psychoanalytic and religious training as metaphors for the transmission of a discipline, and then I briefly extend the figure of discipleship to talk about literary pedagogy and the training of graduate students. Since the work of Foucault we ‘know’ that a discipline is not a body of knowledge alone, but is as well an organization of practices, a mode of institutional control, and a principle of limitation operating on discourse. This limitation, it must be stressed, is not the repression of a spontaneously developing knowledge but is precisely productive of knowledge; energy is an effect of structure, not its opposite. In Foucault’s lexicon there is a small but marked difference between ‘a discipline’ and ‘discipline’ in the sense of ‘disciplinary action’; and an equally small but marked difference between a discipline and a discursive formation. In each case, however, there is the possibility of recasting the unreflected concept of ‘a discipline’ in terms of the more complex concept to which it is opposed. Thus we could say that disciplines not only operate with a specific domain of objects, methods, techniques, and protocols for the recognition of true propositions, but they also act as mechanisms for the generation of new propositions within a particular conceptual and technical framework. These propositions may be either true or false; what defines them as valid propositions is that they are constructed in accordance with the rules for the formation of disciplinary objects and concepts.1 But disciplines function as much to reproduce an existing structure of knowledge as to produce new knowledge. For most disciplines, the complex interrelation between these two functions is bounded by the educational apparatus and established in the process of transmission of knowledge to ‘disciples’ and in their accreditation as legitimate knowing subjects. My first and most general line of argument, then, has to do with the forms of desire-for-knowledge which are mobilized in this process. A second and more specific line of argument running through the article is concerned with understanding how the process of transmission of disciplinary knowledge is bound up with processes of interpretation—that is, both how it authorizes interpretation and judgement, and how interpretative processes are intricated in a relation to disciplinary mastery. Here I suggest (but tangentially) the operation of a form of discipleship which is specific to the

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interpretative disciplines. If interpretative authority differs from other authorized knowledges, however, I do not seek to ground it epistemologically. My interest is in the institutional status of knowledge in its relation to desire. This interest should immediately require me to question the standing of my own enunciation: to question the forms of recognition and of will-to-truth with which it is invested. These are questions, I suppose, about the monologic genres of the academic essay and the public lecture; but the political consequences of these genres cannot simply be read off from their formal structure of enunciation, and there are no formal guarantees of the political correctness of any act of speaking or writing. The prescription of dialogue or group discussion, for example, may still be a coercive gesture; and I shall write later of some of the ways in which silence can be used in a secular or religious transference relation as a form of enunciative control. At the centre of these questions of speaking and authority is the problem of what Lacan calls le sujet suppose savoir. At stake here is the difference between ‘really’ knowing and being invested, under particular conditions, with a temporary and fictional attribute of knowledge. I shall be arguing that the failure to maintain the fictional status of the attribution of knowledge has reinforced the hieratic structure of the institution of psychoanalysis; but implicit in this argument is a presumption that the attribution of a right to know is indeed provisionally and fictitiously possible. II I begin, then, with that discipline which more than any other, and in an exemplary fashion, has both theorized and failed to theorize the social relations of interpretation involved in its practice. The striking thing about psychoanalysis, says Julia Kristeva in Histoires d’amour, is that it uses love as the basis of its cure. On the one hand it measures the confusions, the pain, the symptoms, and the hallucinations revealed by love against the minimal and irreducible reality of sex; and on the other hand it deliberately provokes a state of love between the patient and the analyst, in order not simply to mobilize these confusions and hallucinations, to present them for interpretation, but to work through them, to defuse them and finally to displace them in that ‘analytic pirouette’ by which the love transferred on to the analyst is again shifted in the achievement of an analysis. In this process the analyst is shown to be a lieu-tenant, the holder of the place of the Other, which he or she occupies ‘as a subject who is supposed to know—and to know how to love; as a consequence he becomes in the cure the supreme beloved and the chosen victim’.2 The text in which the transference relation is first opened to theorization is the ‘Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria’, or ‘Dora’—a fragment because the analysis was broken off by the patient in a refusal of these particular social relations of interpretation. The text has been intensively read in recent years, particularly by feminist critics, and I don’t want to repeat this history of reading. Let me instead simply outline the formal structure of the series of interpretations around which the case study is organized. In the first place there is a reading of the symptoms produced on Dora’s body. Freud interprets these symptoms in terms of the overdetermined displacement of sexual memories and fantasies, but insists that, rather than imposing his interpretations, he elicits each of them from Dora: ‘She knew about it already but the question of where her knowledge came

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from was a riddle which her memories were unable to solve. She had forgotten the source of all her information on this subject.’3 A second series extends this first set of interpretations into an analysis of the complex screen-relations between Dora’s father and Herr and Frau K., and of Dora’s role as an object of barter between the two men. Again, the analysis is said to be elicited from Dora herself; but Freud then proceeds to undermine it, and precisely because it is ‘a sound and incontestable train of argument’. When such coherence is encountered during treatment, it soon becomes evident that the patient is using thoughts of this kind, which the analysis cannot attack, for the purpose of cloaking others which are anxious to escape from criticism and from consciousness. A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content. All that needs be done is to turn back each particular reproach on to the speaker himself. (p. 35) Freud then proposes Dora’s complicity in her father’s affair with Frau K. and her identification with the older woman. What he doesn’t discuss is the possibility of his own identification with the father, or the position of the father, and the bearing this possibility might have had on his intervention at this point. The third set of interpretations is of those dreams that ‘seemed to call for insertion in the long thread of connections which spun itself out between a symptom of the disease and a pathogenic idea’ (p. 15). Two dreams are analysed in considerable detail, and reduced to a repressed matrix. Freud says of the second dream, for example, that ‘beyond the almost limitless series of displacements which were thus brought to light, it was possible to divine the operation of a single simple factor—Dora’s deep-rooted homosexual love for Frau K.’ (p. 105). The case that Freud builds up in the course of analysing the dreams is of a quasi-legal character, but he stresses that the interpretation is complicated by the role that the offer and the unravelling of the dream play in the relation between patient and analyst. ‘Everything’, he says of an earlier piece of dream interpretation, ‘fits together very satisfactorily upon this view; but owing to the characteristics of “transference” its validity is not susceptible or dennite proof (p. 74). Transference is a radical form of interference in the interpretative process, and, whereas other explanatory techniques can be acquired relatively easily, ‘transference is the one thing the presence of which has to be detected almost without assistance and with only the slightest clues to go upon, while at the same time the risk of making arbitrary inferences has to be avoided’ (p. 116). Nevertheless, it cannot be evaded, since it is a factor in the interpretative process, and since ‘it is only after the transference has been resolved that a patient arrives at a sense of conviction of the validity of the connections which have been constructed during the analysis’ (pp. 116–17). Transferences thus constitute the fourth set of interpretations on which the analyst must work. They are described, in a textual metaphor which runs through the whole case history, as ‘new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician’ (p. 116). The analyst is inserted into a ‘psychical series’4 which runs back to the fantasy structure of the Oedipus complex, and which is triggered off when repressed contents are in danger of being revealed. Here, Freud replaces

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both the father and—to his surprise—Herr K. But he is also inserted into a series of governesses: by being ‘dismissed’ with two weeks’ notice, ‘just like a maidservant or a governess’ (p. 105), he repeats both the K.s’ governess, who was seduced by K. and then sacked, and with whom Dora seems strongly to identify; and Dora’s own governess, who initiated her into sexual knowledge and who loved Dora’s father. Feminist readings of the case history have concentrated on the moment of Dora’s break with Freud; and indeed, in its assignment to the analyst of a blame which he refuses, it crucially reveals the desire of the analyst as a central component of the analysis. It is with the failure to take account of this desire that Freud is taxed by later theorists of the process of counter-transference. Muslin and Gill focus on Freud’s prescription of what would constitute a ‘healthy’ sexual response to an older man’s forced advances as evidence of Freud’s libidinal involvement with Dora through an identification with Herr K.5 Marcus suggests that the counter-transference was largely negative, and that the case functioned ‘as part of the process by which Freud began to move toward a resolution of his relation with Fliess—and perhaps vice-versa as well’.6 And Rose argues that interpretation works in the case as a form of resistance on Freud’s part—resistance ‘to the pressing need to develop a theory of sexuality, whose complexity or difficulty manifests itself time and again’.7 Several instances in the case history of Dora’s exclusion from Freud’s triumphs of interpretation indicate the problematic position of the analyst when interpretation becomes a paranoid display of mastery. In this respect the ‘Fragment’ repeats the tension running through The Interpretation of Dreams between the principle that interpretation involves above all the productive activity of the dreamer, with the analyst playing merely a catalytic role in the talking ‘cure, and a conception of the dream-text as an object given to interpretation ‘even independently of information from the dreamer’, and independently of the social relations set in play in the analytic situation.8 But it is precisely in terms of the social relations involved that Lacan attempts to defend Freud in his various theorizations of the transference. The psychoanalytic experience, Lacan argues, proceeds in a ‘relationship of subject to subject, which means that it preserves a dimension which is irreducible to all psychology considered as the objectification of certain properties of the individual. What happens in an analysis is that the subject is, strictly speaking, constituted through a discourse, to which the mere presence of the psychoanalyst brings, before any intervention, the dimension of dialogue.’ 9 With respect to this principle, the ‘conceptual inadequacy’10 of the notion of counter-transference consists in its reduction of the analytic relationship to an ‘intersubjective introjection’, that is, to a ‘dual relation’11 in which transference and counter-transference, as the psychological implication of two real individuals, balance each other out. But transference and counter-transference are not separate and opposed processes: The transference is a phenomenon in which subject and psycho-analyst are both included. To divide it in terms of transference and counter-transference—however bold, however confident what is said on this theme may be—is never more than a way of avoiding the essence of the matter.12 That is, the position of the analyst is always already involved in the transference, and this position which the person of the analyst occupies is a moment in a ‘psychical series’. Thus, ‘by

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opening up the dialectic of the transference, we must establish the notion of the Other with a capital O as being the locus of the deployment of speech.’13 It is because of Freud’s formal occupation of this function that Lacan can then argue that ‘the keys always fall into Freud’s hands even in those cases which are broken off like this one.’14 The dialectical structure of the situation itself resolves the transference. In her exemplary reading of Lacan’s ‘Intervention sur le transfert’ Suzanne Gearhart suggests that his analysis ‘hinges on a distinction between an actor implicated in the scene and a neutral position not directly implicated in it’, and this ‘distinction between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, between the subject who is caught up in the imaginary relationships described by the scene and the (position of the) analyst, is absolute’.15 Thus, for Lacan, the ‘personal and historical’ blindness Freud displayed in his analysis of Dora nevertheless doesn’t affect the structural possibility of a ‘neutral perspective from which the problems it caused could have been resolved’.16 This neutral position, that of the subject credited with possessing knowledge, is thought by Lacan in unitary and monolithic terms. It is affirmed as an institution rather than problematized as a place riven by desire, and this is because it rests upon a final appeal to the transcendental subject of knowledge; I shall return to this point shortly. For the moment, let me dwell briefly on the metaphor of those ‘keys’ which ‘always fall into Freud’s hands’. These are the fixed hermeneutic ‘key’ which is one aspect of The Interpretation of Dreams, and they presumably correspond to the ‘picklocks’ to which, Freud writes to Fliess, the case of Dora is yielding.17 If the metaphor is in the most banal way phallic, it is because that realism of knowledge which assumes that a stable and pre-given meaning can be released by use of the correct analytic instrument corresponds precisely to a realism of the phallus which equates it with the penis, as well as to what Lacan denounces in Freud himself as a ‘prejudice which falsifies the conception of the Oedipus complex from the start, by making it define as natural, rather than normative, the predominance of the paternal figure’.18 And it corresponds to that sexual realism which accepts the reality of female sexuality as the reality of the lack of the phallus, and which led Freud at a later date to believe that a male analyst could not be a suitable transference object for a homosexual woman patient (as he believed Dora to be).19 The interpretative realism which both invokes and secures the authority of the analytic position is avoided in Kristeva’s account of the relativity of interpretation to the play of fantasies of desire and authority in analysis. The analyst is not fixed in the position of the classical interpreter, who interprets by virtue of stable meanings derived from a solid system or morality or who at least tries to restrict the range of his delirium through a stable theoretical counterweight. This is not to say that analytic theory does not exist but rather that, all things considered, its consistency is rudimentary when compared to the countertransferential operation which is always specific and which sets the interpretive machine in motion differently every time.20 And because ‘the efficacy of interpretation is a function of its transferential truth’, interpretation has a directly political dimension. 21 At another level, however, this politics of interpretation is called into question by the institutional structure of psychoanalysis. Gayatri Spivak, for example, claims that Kristeva ‘fail[s] to question the sociohistorical

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symptomaticity of psychoanalysis as a disciplinary practice’.22 To a certain extent Kristeva is able to answer this charge by distinguishing between two different ways of assuming analytic authority: The analyst provisionally occupies the place of the Great Other insofar as he is the metaphorical object of an idealizing identification. It is by knowing this and doing it that he creates the space for transference. By repressing it, however, the analyst becomes that Führer for whom Freud already showed his abhorrence in Group Psychology.23 But this still conceives of knowledge, in Hegelian terms, as self-presence and a selfrecognition which makes possible the resolution of the transference. If knowledge is thought, however, not through the model of the capacity of a knowing subject to represent its knowledge to itself, but structurally, as the effect of particular disciplinary conditions of possibility, then this dialectic of self-recognition might perhaps lose some of its obviousness. III Let me develop a distinction here between two models of the transmission of knowledge. The first is the productive relation of an analyst to a client, or of a teacher to a student who is not being trained as a teacher. ‘Productivity’ here implies both that the knowledge transmitted may be transformed in its application, and that this transformation will not be built into the structure of the discipline. The second, reproductive, relation of a teacher to a disciple represents at once the strict control of disciplinary boundaries, and the possibility of a transformation of the boundaries which will be institutionalized in the discipline itself. It is to some of the contradictions and limitations of this second model that I want now to address my discussion through a consideration of the role of transference in the psychoanalytic training analysis. The training analysis was instituted in 192:2 to serve three functions: the transmission of technique; the provision of a control over the counter-transference; and the establishment of a lineal descent from Freud. It is thus a central part of that history of discipleship that Roustang recounts in Dire Mastery. This history is one of competition between Freud’s disciples for the position of favourite. Freud himself seems actively to have incited the struggle between Jung and Abraham, and Roustang suggests that he used his relation to Ferenczi as a means of liquidating his transference relation to Fliess, and that this process was then repeated with the other disciples. ‘At work in each case were: attachment to Freud’s person, demand for privileged recognition, jealousy of the others, and conflict about the inheritance.’24 This culminated in the constitution of the International Psychoanalytical Association around the figure of the charismatic leader. The mechanism of transference thus became the central organizational principle for the psychoanalytic institution. Roustang comments: If one compares Freud’s analyses of the Church and the army in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to his project for a psychoanalytic society in On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, one is forced to notice a strange relationship between the

two: loyalty to the founder, allegiance to one leader, adherence to one doctrine, rejection

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of dissidents, and other aspects. All these features defining the new society can be explained in psychoanalytic terms only by an identification with the leader as an object of love, as the ego ideal…if every psychoanalytic society reproduces the Church or the army, if by its very structure it passes on to its members the influences and the ill effects of identification and love, then psychoanalysis itself is certainly threatened or subverted, and its fine edge is blunted.25 In institutional terms, it is crucial that no provision is made for the dissolution of the transference in the process of training. Psychoanalysis is constituted as a discipline and as an institution in relation to an orthodox knowledge embodied in a knowing subject. Lacan says of this relation: As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere… there is transference. What does an organization of psychoanalysts mean when it confers certificates of ability, if not that it indicates to whom one may apply to represent the subject who is supposed to know? Now, it is quite certain, as everyone knows, that no psychoanalyst can claim to represent, in however slight a way, a corpus of absolute knowledge. That is why, in a sense, it can be said that if there is someone to whom one can apply there can be only one such person. This one was Freud, while he was alive. The fact that Freud, on the subject of the unconscious, was legitimately the subject that one could presume to know, sets aside anything that had to do with the analytic relation, when it was initiated, by his patients, with him. He was not only the subject who was supposed to know. He did know, and he gave us this knowledge in terms that may be said to be indestructible, in as much as, since they were first communicated, they support an interrogation which, up to the present day, has never been exhausted. No progress has been made, however small, that has not deviated whenever one of the terms around which Freud ordered the ways that he traced, and the paths of the unconscious, has been neglected. This shows us clearly enough what the function of the subject who is supposed to know is all about. The function, and by the same token, the consequence, the prestige, I would say, of Freud are on the horizon of every position of the analyst. They constitute the drama of the social, communal organization of psychoanalysts. 26 While it is crucial always to allow for duplicity and indirection in Lacan, it does seem that what he here invokes is a transcendental subject of knowledge, and that the invocation works to preserve the place and the reality of truth. In other words, this is a cognitive realism in the sense that it locates knowledge in a fixed place rather than in that structural relation in which the analyst—every analyst—stands in for the Other who is endlessly displaced in the Symbolic. Where Laplanche, for example, thinks of transference in terms of metaphor (Übertragung/metapherein), of fiction, of a misplaced and displaced addressee, 27 Lacan here anchors the language game of interpretation in a finally secure reality—and this despite the whole structuralist and anti-naturalist bent of his work.

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Although in principle there is always a discontinuity between texts and their consequences, it nevertheless seems likely that this reliance upon a trancendental subject has had marked disciplinary effects, with the repetition in the Lacanian community of precisely those structures Lacan had denounced as resembling the religious community of the church. In this reformed society external boundaries are maintained by the central role accorded to excommunication, and internal cohesion is built around the poles of adulation of the Master and the abjection of the disciples. Roustang again: In a group whose only goal is to acknowledge Lacan and to be acknowledged by him, the dissolution of the transference is a theoretical absurdity. After each congress, the participants wonder whom among the speakers Lacan will notice, which papers he will praise or condemn. And if he mentions no-one, whatever allusions he makes will be copiously interpreted. A system based exclusively on recognition by Lacan inexorably leads to the sterility of his disciples. Although Lacan himself complains of this, however, he refuses to acknowledge his responsibility or his need to remain unique.28 The 1979 dissolution of the École Freudienne (which was justified explicitly as a way of breaking the transference of the disciples on to Lacan) was followed almost immediately by the founding of the Cause Freudienne.29 And it is telling that all contributors to the journal Scilicet remained anonymous—with the single exception of Lacan.30 The opposition is that between the namelessness of those who are supposed to know, and who are subsumed in their formal roles, and the naming, indeed the father-naming, of the one who knows. The question at issue here is whether the structured organization of a discipline (and I take it that there can be no cohesive discipline of knowledge in the absence of a formal structure) is possible without a reliance upon the master/disciple couple, in however mediated a form, and in particular without a structural non-resolution of the transference. Roustang is pessimistic, arguing that ‘if the transference can be resolved in regard to the analyst, it must reappear in the very act of producing disciples’.31 My final metaphor for the disciplinary process, to which I now turn, is again concerned directly with this process of discipleship. IV In Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s novel A New Dominion, Lee and Margaret, two English girls of about 20, are living with their swami in an ashram built on cheap land outside Benares. The conditions are primitive, but these discomforts could be and were interpreted as blessings, for what surer test could there be of a disciple’s sincerity than the ability to overcome discomforts? There were many who fell short and one by one they went away, and Swamiji saw them do so with a smiling, loving acquiescence. It only made him draw those that remained closer to himself.32 The focal point of the group’s activities and of its relation to Swamiji is a hutment which has been fitted out as a communal prayer hall. The room is dominated by a picture of Swamiji’s own guru, ‘a very holy man who wore no clothes and sat on a deer skin’ (p. 81). Beneath it,

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seated in a big velvet armchair, Swamiji encourages the devotions of the disciples, inspiring them to chant the names of the gods ever more loudly and more devotedly. Lee and Margaret are at first embarrassed, reserved, unable to sing with the same abandon as the others; but slowly, as the days passed, cunningly, he enticed them out of themselves. To each of them it appeared and became clear beyond doubt with each successive meeting that he was concentrating only on her. At first, Lee thought she must be imagining it—after all, there were all these others, all intent only on him and drawing their inspiration only from him—what was so special about her that he should single her out from among them? To cure herself of her misapprehension, she would lower her eyes away from him but she could never do so for long because he seemed to be drawing her back, beckoning to her, telling her come, look up, look at me. And when she did, sure enough, there he was smiling at her—yes! at her alone!—so that she had to smile back and sing the way he wanted her to and cry out ‘Rama! Gopala! Hari! Krishna!’ with as much abandon as she could manage. And afterwards, when he distributed the bits of rock sugar that served as holy offerings, then too at her turn, as he put it into her mouth, there was this special message for her, this speaking without words that went right through her and reached it seemed to her into regions which no one had hitherto penetrated. (p. 83) In this community the ‘lateral’ relations between the disciples are characterized by competition and jealousy, whereas their ‘Vertical’ relation to the swami is one of immediacy. Lee visits Swamiji and realizes that he had been expecting her; ‘she knew he could see right into her and it both thrilled and frightened her’ (p. 101). This relationship is, of course, one of power, but what is at stake is accepting this, and thereby moving it to a different level. When Lee refuses to make a gesture of submission demanded of her, this refusal itself then becomes the object of an inquisition (just as ‘resistance’ in psychoanalysis is construed as a symptom); and Lee senses that her rebellion is not against Swamiji but ‘against myself, my own feelings’ (p. 123). Swamiji himself is clearsighted about what is involved in this process. He tells her friend Raymond: Lee is now in my hands. She is my responsibility to mould and to make. But before I can mould and make, I have to break. The old Lee must be broken before the new Lee can be formed, and we are now only at the first stage of our task…. I have to help her and guide her every step so that she will know that everything is nothing and also that she herself is nothing. Only then can she belong to me as the disciple must belong to the guru. (pp. 144–6) As time passes, Lee comes to realize that she has failed some test and incurred her guru’s disfavour. Becoming deeply depressed, she begins to withdraw from the group: I drag myself around. I’ve never been like this before. Everything is so strange, so dismal; it’s as if there’s no light in the sun, and those glorious Indian nights, well they too now are dark and drab to me. Even at the hymn-singing we have morning and evening when he always seems to be singling out each of us separately, even then I’m not there for him. Lately I’ve stopped joining in with the others when they sing. I must

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stand there silent; I don’t feel like singing. I’m sure he’s noticed—he always notices when anyone doesn’t sing fervently enough—but now with me he pretends not to. He ignores me completely. I don’t know why. I think about it all the time. (p. 185) When she speaks about this to another disciple, the girl avoids answering directly and tells Lee that ‘what was happening now was only between me and him. And if I could bring myself to understand that his present neglect of me was nothing but an extension of his love and care for me, my suffering would be at an end’ (pp. 185–6). The silence of the guru, that is, works like the tactical silence of the analyst in giving shape to a transference relation. 33 Lee continues to be unable to accept and trust Swamiji’s disregard of her (although she recognizes that this indicates her low stage of spiritual development). When she eventually reproaches him, he abuses her, rapes her, and defiles her, and then turns her out of the ashram. Other disciples are sent to fetch her back; and at the end of the book, despite her deeply ambivalent feelings (based in part on the fact that Margaret, who, in accordance with the guru’s teaching, has refused Western medicine, has become fatally ill and died), she returns to the ashram to take up her position as the favoured disciple. My interest here is in the abstract pattern of the master-disciple relationship. A novel doesn’t of course provide valid anthropological material, but this one does produce a clear general model of the process of doctrinal transmission—one which corresponds closely to other accounts of religious discipleship. This model is that of a practice of initiation and guidance, structured as a rite of passage with clearly defined stages and a definite psychological progression. The central moment is that of the transference on to the guru. He in turn is qualified to take on the responsibility for this transference because of his own successfully resolved training and his command of an esoteric lore and technique. (It is irrelevant that the lore may be totally banal in content; what matters is its charismatic enunciation.) The guru is characterized above all by his insight: Lee feels that she has been singled out by Swamiji; a former Rajneeshi writes in a very similar way that it seemed as though Bhagwan noticed only her in the crowd; 34 and Lacan’s disciples clearly envisage a similar possibility of recognition. But noticing may be extended to non-conscious levels, in a process of mind speaking to mind. Thus Freud recommends that the analyst should ‘turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ toward the transmitting unconscious of the patient’. The precondition for this is that he ‘must be able to communicate more freely with his own unconscious’, and it is precisely the purpose of the training analysis to make this possible. 35 The literature on the sociology of religion and religious psychology seems, for whatever reason, to be strikingly poor in descriptions of the process of doctrinal transmission. Let me follow van Gennep in isolating three stages in the passage through discipleship—first, separation; second, the transition across a threshold; and, third, aggregation. 36 The separation stage involves a passage out of an unsatisfactory community or an immature status; the finding of the single appropriate teacher; and the entry into a community of novitiates. Movement to the second, liminal stage is marked by various forms of dispossession —of one’s name, of clothes, of social status and its insignia. The central process here is the breaking down of the old ego. This may involve a ritual humiliation, as in the rape of Lee, or a ritual ordeal. The point is to enforce submission to the will of the master, and this will include both direct attack and what Goffman calls ‘looping’, in which defensive responses are themselves taken as an object of attack37—hence Lee’s feeling of bad faith when she is unable

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to make a gesture of submission. Finally, the liminal stage may incorporate an actual alienation, a period of wandering in the wilderness, as with Lee’s attempt to escape and Dora’s turning away from Freud. In this process of loss, what is discovered is that the guru had nothing to teach except that he had nothing to teach. The initiate discovers, in other words, that he or she already possessed the knowledge that was to be acquired, and that the task of the spiritual master was to bring about an awareness of this. The form of the process is its content. The last moment of the rite of passage is a rebirth into a new self. In theory this leads to a decisive break with the master, as the initiate in turn becomes a teacher, an enlightened one. In practice it seems that this resolution of the transference on to the master involves essentially a recognition of its fictionality; the guru teaches sitting beneath a portrait of his own guru, and it is through this resolution that the esoteric lore and the techniques associated with it are transmitted intact. V Transference relations of various kinds and various degrees of intensity obviously occur throughout any pedagogic system, although I shall suggest that the charismatic role of the teacher has been given a very particular institutional form in modern, text-oriented literary studies. But the analogy I want to pursue for the moment is with the training of graduate students—that is, with the moment of reproduction of the relations of literary knowledge. The ritual of the PhD has to do at once with the authorization of interpretative credentials and with the transmission—but also the controlled transformation—of a disciplinary structure. In its usual form it is organized as a passage from an undergraduate community to postgraduate loneliness; a breaking down of ego; and the acquisition of a specialized lore through a difficult and intense relation to a supervisor. The ordeal of candidature is a mad process in its assignment of a structural role to insecurity. It challenges the candidate’s sense of worth, provoking a trauma of loss as one of its central knowledge-producing mechanisms, one which is often cruelly prolonged or repeated. And this process is individualized; the absence of any theorization of its institutional dimensions works to isolate the candidate by denying him or her a procedural rationale for the trauma. It is not, of course, an individual process. In the first place, disciplines have external conditions of access, support, and reproducibility, which I have not attempted to discuss here. In the second place, the relation to the supervisor is no more a relation of one to one than it is in psychoanalysis. The supervisor is a representative of institutional and disciplinary authority, and the holder of a place in both diachronic and synchronic relation to the disciplinary authorities (although struggle within the discipline is also at stake in, and an effect of, the training—this is formalized in the French soutenance, where the supervisor acts as an advocate (rapporteur) for the candidate against the critique launched by the assesseur, and where what is at issue is in part the prestige and the strength of the supervisor). He or she thus mediates the candidate’s relation to the absent masters of the discipline, and in principle this mediation can be dispensed with, treated as a point of passage rather than as an embodiment of authority. But the embodiment is important both in terms of providing a focus for the relations of disciplinary authority and in terms of setting up the possibility of response. Embodiment should also be taken quite literally, however. The pedagogic relation

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in general and the candidate-supervisor relation in particular are erotic relations, in the sense that they depend upon the mechanisms of transference love. (This love may, of course, take the form of resentment or hatred.) In the case of a male candidate the relationship will take the form of Oedipal rivalry (in the German university system the supervisor is called the Doktorvater, ‘doctoral father’)—that is, a fantasy relationship involving at once emulation and hostility and culminating in the occupation by the candidate of the place of the displaced father figure: the place that had always been reserved for him. This pattern is complicated in the case of female candidates by the possibility that the erotics of the transference and the counter-transference can be taken literally, and realized in the form of either sexual blackmail or an exploitative physical relationship. Charisma and harassment are the two faces of pedagogic authority. I have assumed that the supervisor is a male, because it is a normatively masculine position. But there are clearly special problems for female supervisors, because they tend to be isolated in predominantly male departments; because they are often required to serve in an overdetermined erotic and maternal role in relation to female students; and because their anomalous occupation of a normatively masculine position subjects them to a continued pressure to prove their worth. This account sounds and in part is critical; but a criticism of a disciplinary structure can only be correctly based if it is aware of the functions this structure performs. A discipline is an organization of relations and techniques for the production and use of knowledge; there can be no knowledge whatsoever that is not enabled by some such structure, however informal, however embedded in everyday life it may be. The question is not, therefore, whether or not there should be disciplines and disciplinary relations, but can only be about their form, their relative flexibility, their productiveness, and so on. In a recent paper on the 1921 Newbolt Report on The Teaching of English in England Noel King suggests that the development of modern ‘English’—modern literary studies—both depends upon and reinforces a moral pedagogy in which the central charismatic role of the teacher and the character-forming effects of engagement with literary texts are foregrounded. Techniques of classroom teaching using texts as the basis for a continuous interrogation of moral experience are developed—in particular, dramatic declamation and a form of close reading relying upon a power of judgement which is at once literary and moral. The need the Newbolt Report responded to was for a form of teaching and examination…which could place the teacher—student relation at its centre, in a new kind of way, such that the student would be open to infinite noncoercive correction. The moral stature of the teacher had to be established, as the embodiment of certain norms and as the point at which a disciplinary system corrected students in an embodied fashion. The teacher becomes a point of relay for the construction of an autonomous, self-policing ‘pupil-life’. 38 Such self-regulation is the end effect of the mediating role of the teacher in relation to the literary text. The teacher’s enthusiasm will finally make possible an unmediated relationship of the pupil to literature, but ‘the “disappearance” of the teacher as a part of the pedagogical mechanism can occur only to the extent that the pupil has successfully mastered the techne of self.’ 39 To focus on the centrality of the teacher-pupil relationship to this ‘experiential’ pedagogy, says King, ‘is to remind ourselves of that set of emulable norms, the presence of an

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exemplary personage, at once therapeutic and charismatic; to remind ourselves, that is, of a system of pedagogical exchange from which we have yet to escape.’ And he suggests that ‘one of the current tasks of criticism might usefully consist in indicating the extent to which it is now possible for “English” to drop away without that system of pedagogy disappearing.’ 40 This system of pedagogy was developed in the first instance for use within secondary schools and for university undergraduate teaching. Let me recall the distinction I made before between two models of the transmission of knowledge: the first working through the ‘productive’ relation of a master to a non-professional client or student; the second through the ‘reproductive’ relation of a master to a disciple. This distinction corresponds very roughly to that between secondary and undergraduate education, on the one hand, and specialized postgraduate study, on the other. But the point is that the distinction is in no way absolute, since the first relation always in principle contains the possibility of the second (that is, of a reproductive use); and this, in turn, need not be structurally distinct from the first, ‘productive’ relation. Moreover, the correlation between the two models seems to me to be more striking in the case of literary study than for most other disciplines. I want to suggest that this is a result of the interpretative focus of literary study—its simultaneous nurturing of independent moral judgement, and control of the limits of judgement through the mechanisms of embodied correction. The questions of graduate-training and of a charismatic pedagogy are thus questions about the moral and experiential dimension given to judgement in literary studies, and about the processes of authorization of such judgement. This linkage is a part of our New Critical inheritance, and it does not seem to me to have been substantially modified by the structuralist and post-structuralist orthodoxies which have succeeded the New Criticism. But, while a rejection of the relatively intimate teaching relations fostered in this tradition might be salutary as a refusal of charismatic authority, it might well entail no more than a repression of the reality of transference relations and of the mediated transferential structure of interpretation. It might mean no more than a return to the positivist pedagogy of those ‘hard’ sciences, philology and history, which the New Criticism displaced from the centre of the discipline. 41 To ask whether the ordeal of discipleship can be dispensed with involves asking another, more fundamental question: whether there can be a dispassionate acquisition of knowledge. Perhaps there can be no generally valid answer to this question; but I believe that in the case of literary studies the answer must be that there can not. It is for this reason that I have placed the master-disciple relation at the centre of the process of doctrinal transmission. To assert the passional basis of the acquisition of at least certain kinds of knowledge is to say that there can be no unmediated relation to knowledge (no simple ‘love of knowledge’). The master—disciple relation, whether in a focused or a diffuse form, is a mechanism—archaic and clumsy—for investing the process of transmission of knowledge with a productive intensity. It is a politically fraught mechanism; and it remains, directly or indirectly, the horizon of all our disciplinary transactions.

Murdoch University, Western Australia

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NOTES 1 Michel Foucault, ‘The order of discourse’, trans. Ian McLeod, Untying the Text, ed. Robert Young (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 59–61. 2 Julia Kristeva, Histoires d’amour (Paris: Denoël, 1983), p. 19. 3 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fragments of an analysis of a case of hysteria (“Dora”)’ (1905 [1901]), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953), vol. 7, P. 31. Page numbers to this edition are given in the text in parentheses. 4 Sigmund Freud, ‘The dynamics of transference’ (1912.), Standard Edition, vol. 12, p. 100. 5 M.M.Gill and H.L.Muslin, ‘Transference in the Dora case’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 26, 2 (1978), pp. 323–4. 6 Steven Marcus, ‘Freud and Dora: story, history, case history’, Representations (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 303, n. 22. 7 Jacqueline Rose, ‘“Dora”—fragment of an analysis’, mlf, 2 (1978), p. 9. 8 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1901), Standard Edition, vol. 5, P. 342. 9 Jacques Lacan, ‘Intervention on transference’, in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 62. 10 Jacques Lacan, ‘The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power’, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 226. 11 Ibid., p. 246. 12 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 231. 13 Lacan, Écrits, p. 264. 14 Lacan, ‘Intervention on transference’, p. 67. 15 Suzanne Gearhart, ‘The scene of psychoanalysis: the unanswered questions of Dora’, Diacritics (March 1979), p. 116. 16 Ibid., p.115. 17 14 October 1900: The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Masson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 427. 18 Lacan, ‘Intervention on transference’, p. 69. 19 Sigmund Freud, ‘Psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman’ (1920), Standard Edition, vol. 18, p. 164. 20 Julia Kristeva, ‘Psychoanalysis and the polis’, trans. Margaret Waller, Critical Inquiry, 9, 1 (1982), p. 84. 21 Ibid., p. 86. 22 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The politics of interpretations’, Critical Inquiry, 9, 1 (1982), p. 270. 23 Kristeva, Histoires d’amour, p. 36. 24 François Roustang, Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan, trans. Ned Lukacher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 9. 25 Ibid., p. 17. 26 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis., p. 232. 27 Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 138. 28 Roustang, op. cit., p. 28. 29 Cf. Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); and Catherine Clément, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 30 Roustang, op. cit., p. 31.

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31 Ibid., p. 34. 32 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, A New Dominion (1972.; repr. London: Granada, 1983), p. 82. Hereafter page references appear in the text in parentheses. 33 Cf. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 62: ‘The agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks (for it is he who is constrained), but in the one who listens and says nothing; not in the one who knows and answers, but in the one who questions and is not supposed to know.’ 34 Sally Belfrage, Flowers of Emptiness (London: The Women’s Press, 1981), p. 164. 35 Sigmund Freud, ‘Recommendations to physicians practising psychoanalysis’ (1912,), Standard Edition, vol. 12, p. 115. 36 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960). 37 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 42. 38 Noel King, ‘“The teacher must exist before the pupil”: the Newbolt Report on The Teaching of English in England, 1921’, Literature and History, 13, 1 (1987), p. 27. 39 Ibid., p. 30; cf. Ian Hunter, ‘Culture and government: the emergence of literary education’, PhD thesis (Griffith University, 1986). 40 King, op. cit., p. 33. 41 Cf. Steven Mailloux, ‘Rhetorical hermeneutics’, Critical Inquiry, 11, 4 (1985), pp. 632–3.

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In the rathouse of history with Thomas Pynchon: rereading V. ROBERT HOLTON

‘One would have to exorcise the city, the island…. The continents, the world. Or the western part,’ as an afterthought. ‘We are western men.’ (V., p. 451) Hayden White’s argument ‘that the conviction that one can make sense of history stands on the same level of epistemic plausibility as the conviction that it makes no sense whatsoever’ 1 seems to echo a recurring concern in Thomas Pynchon’s work. Stencil in V., Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49, and Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow all seek to discern some order or pattern in the world and its history. An inevitable problem then arises to haunt them throughout the novels—is this pattern, order, meaning (if located) a property of the world and of history? Or is it a projection of the ordering perception of the one who is searching for meaning? If the order or meaning perceived is primarily a property of the interpreter’s perception, how, then, is that sublime object of interpretation—historical reality—to be approached? And what are the political implications of this problem? A number of critics have discussed the epistemological problems presented in Pynchon’s work, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to the precise setting or context in which Pynchon locates those problems. Yet these are essential components of the work. V. explores the aporias of epistemology at a series of specific and critical junctures in modern Western history, documenting the breakdown of white imperialist hegemony. His concern with science and various abstract bodies of thought is certainly important, but his radical questioning of power, politics, historical events, and philosophy of history ought to be taken seriously. There is an almost Pychonesque irony in the way in which many critics have maintained a blind spot in their readings of Pynchon’s texts, a blind spot that occludes the explicitly social and political dimensions of the work. Plater, for instance, dismisses the overt political history in Pynchon quite lightly in favour of a more abstract grounding of the work: ‘colonialism’, he writes ‘is only one of Pynchon’s several metaphors for the uncertainty relations of reality and illusion. Others work equally well.’ Stark, perhaps, is most adamant: ‘Occasionally he does discuss moral or social issues, but he usually subordinates them to other issues…. As a general rule, however, he focuses on literary, epistemological, and metaphysical problems.’ ‘Pynchon does not often refer to social and political history.’ Elsewhere he speaks of ‘the relatively minor importance of politics’ in V. In general, however, even those critics who, like Schaub, do acknowledge the social and historical dimension of Pynchon’s work devote most of their commentary to his various abstract philosophical and

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scientific concerns.2 In the following article I attempt instead to represent Pynchon as a profoundly political and historical novelist whose conception of the political and historical field has much in common with contemporary cultural and historiographical theory. According to White, prior to the formation of the discipline of history in the nineteenth century, the subject was considered a branch of the more general field of rhetoric, ‘the source and repository of tradition, moral exemplars, and admonitory lessons’. White writes: the historical field itself (that is, the past or the historical process) had to be viewed as a chaos that made no sense at all or one that could be made to bear as many senses as wit and rhetorical talent could impose on it. (CF, pp. 64–5) As history came to constitute a distinct discipline, rules of evidence and a more rigorous sense of factuality came into play, not only regulating the kinds of narratives a historian could produce but also altering the underlying conception of the nature of the historical field itself: ‘For this tradition, whatever “confusion” is displayed by the historical record is only a surface phenomenon’ (CF, p. 71) subject to correction by subsequent historians. White goes on to relate these dichotomous conceptions of history to the concurrent debate on the nature of the sublime and the beautiful. The irreducible confusion and the ultimately unrepresentable nature of the historical field are associated with the idea of the sublime, while the conception of history as possessing order, logic, or sense falls into the aesthetic category of the beautiful. As aesthetics superseded rhetoric and the beautiful gradually displaced the sublime as a category of judgement, the narratives both of history and of fiction were expected to display a more thorough sense of coherence, to make sense in a more complete and sustained way. Any single historical narrative should ideally exhibit both an internal coherence and a fidelity to ‘the facts’, such that it could be seen as one chapter of a narrative that, if extended long enough, could theoretically recount and account for all of history. This view of history is supportable only by the exclusion of the historical sublime: history as an awesome, perhaps incomprehensible, terrifying, multifarious, unrepresentable spectacle. The attempt to represent history in a narrative form, then, gives rise to some difficulties: the problem is not that history cannot be interpreted as much as the fact that it can be, endlessly, it seems, and in contradictory ways. As Ricœur notes, no matter which historiographical methodology is applied, the event is restored at the end of each attempted explanation as a remainder left by each such attempt…as a dissonance between explanatory structures, and finally, as the life and death of the structures themselves. 3 Similarly, Lyotard argues that the sublimity of the pure event subverts any attempt at final or full representation, and furthermore that the sublime is thus precisely what must be repressed in order for representation to occur. 4 The exhaustive narrative is by definition impossible and any history is necessarily a selective one. Selection of the events deemed worthy of narration, of narrative point of view, and of the narrative techniques employed thus fall partly under the compulsion of the need for narrative coherence, a compulsion that prompts White to ask ‘what kind of notion of reality authorizes construction of a narrative

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account of reality in which continuity rather than discontinuity governs the articulation of the discourse’ (CF, p. 10). With a few exceptions, notably in modern literature, narrative strains for the effect of having filled in all the gaps, of having put an image of continuity, coherency, and meaning in place of the fantasies of emptiness, need, and frustrated desire that inhabit our nightmares about the destructive power of time. (CF, p. 11) The continuity of the narrative realist form of historical discourse, its tendency to totalization, has another aspect, one that White borrows from Hegel: an ‘intimate relationship’ seems to exist ‘between law, historicality, and narrativity’, and, he observes, ‘this raises the suspicion that narrative in general…has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority’ (CF, p. 13). It may not be stretching the point too much to infer that problems of narrative continuity have to do with problems of authority in a more general sense as well. History is generally, as the saying goes, written from the vantage-point of the victors; to this may be added Fanon’s observation that objectivity has always been on the side of the colonizer. 5 In a similar vein, White argues: For subordinant, emergent, or resisting social groups,…opposition can be carried forward only on the basis of a conception of the historical record as being not a window through which the past ‘as it really was’ can be apprehended but rather a wall that must be broken through if the ‘terror of history’ is to be directly confronted. (CF, p. 82.) A number of historians, including White, have called attention to Chateaubriand’s heroic conception of the vocation of the historian: In the silence of abjection, when the only sounds to be heard are the chains of the slave and the voice of the informer; when everything trembles before the tyrant and it is as dangerous to incur his favor as to deserve his disfavor, this is when the historian appears, charged with avenging the people. (CF, p. 79) White does not, however, advocate a more rigorous ‘scientific’ approach to the writing of history, nor a return to the Covering Law Model. A breakdown in the idea of objective narrative realism and the recovery of the historical sublime may, he argues, be a ‘necessary precondition for the production of a historiography of the sort that Chateaubriand conceived to be desirable in times of “abjection”’. This postmodern version of the historical sublime differs, however, from its predecessors. Jameson remarks that the sublime is no longer subjective in the older sense that a personality is standing in front of the Alps and knowing the limits of the individual subject and the human ego. On the contrary, it is a kind of non-humanist experience of limits beyond which you get dissolved. 6

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This sense of dissolution that marks the sublime can be taken to refer as well to the dissolution of the continuity and coherence of narrative and its claim to represent reality realistically. The crisis in narrative authority has ranged from a questioning of the various aspects of the art of narration to a wholesale scepticism towards the possibility of narrative representation. Said writes that, for some contemporaries, ‘narrative, which poses an enabling arché and a vindicating telos, is no longer an adequate figure for plotting the human trajectory in society. There is nothing to look forward to: we are stuck within our circle.’ 7 If narrative coherence is threatened, as White’s remarks on the relation of narrativity and legality would seem to imply, then the cohesion and legitimacy of the social system are also being threatened. Along with the weakening of the authority of the narratives through which society understands and authorizes itself comes a concomitant crisis in that society. It is surely no coincidence that much postmodern fiction was produced in a period of social upheaval, a period during which many of the basic beliefs of European and North American society were subjected to radical critique. The dissolution of individual subjectivity resulting from the sublime corresponds on the social plane with a dissolution of certain kinds of social and narrative authority. ‘With the sublime,’ writes Lyotard, ‘we go a long way into heterogeneity’8—a heterogeneity that is rendered impossible by the dominance of monolithic ‘objectivity’ and ‘realism’. This heterogeneous discourse would by definition include the alterity which has been repressed by an imperialist culture and its totalizing narratives. In this sense postmodern historical relativism can be seen as the dissolution or delegitimization of any one cultural group’s claim to sole authority in the construction of historical narrative, an authority that is ultimately political in nature. The problem of separate, perhaps incommensurable, worlds of experience, and of a concurrent separation in the representation of that experience, has long been a central one for Pynchon, and he has often been quite specific about the social and political implications. As a student in the late fifties influenced by the beat movement he began ‘to get a sense of that other world humming along out there’ 9 beyond the privileged world of Cornell. His own early short fiction often turns on themes of class or racial separation, anticipating the social turbulence of the sixties. About that era, Pynchon writes: The success of the ‘new left’…was…limited by the failure of college kids and blue collar workers to get together politically. One reason was the presence of real, invisible class force fields in the way of communication between the two groups. (SL, pp. xv–xvi) As its title suggests, one of Pynchon’s few published essays, ‘A journey into the Mind of Watts’, is an attempt to map one such force field and to articulate the subjective experience of the residents of Watts as the possibility of riot simmered once again on the brink of boiling. At ‘the heart of L.A.’s racial sickness is the coexistence of two very different cultures: one white and one black.’ These two cultures, each with its own internal logic and historical trajectory, often confront each other over the barrel of a police revolver, ‘and the history of this place and these times makes it impossible for the cop to come on any different, or for you to hate him any less.’ 10 The eastern boundary of Watts, he writes, looks ‘like the edge of the world’. The idea of mental geography and frontiers continues in another image of the ghetto as a ‘country which lies, psychologically, uncounted miles further than most whites seem at present willing

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to travel’, 11 a country whose customs, dress codes, hairdos, and history simply do not mesh with the hegemonic white culture. While insisting on the existence of an invisible force field of race and class separating the inhabitants of Watts from the dominant white culture, Pynchon nevertheless attempts to bridge that gap, to interpret and represent the experience of the other with empathy, intelligence, and decency. Similarly, Said, in his essay on post-colonial intellectuals, writes: I think we should begin by accepting the notion that although there is an irreducible subjective core to human experience, this experience is also historical and secular, it is accessible to certain kinds of analysis, and… it is not exhausted by totalizing theories marked and limited by doctrinal lines or by analytic constructs…. That is we must be able to think through and interpret together discrepant experiences, each with its particular agendas and pace of development, its own formations, its internal coherence and its system of external relationships. 12 Images such as ‘the edge of the world’ and ‘invisible force fields’ posit a universe made up of non-synchronous 13 systems of ‘discrepant experiences’, and Pynchon’s frequent invocation of this difference, whatever its epistemological consequences, is firmly based in social and historical observation. It is by means of this firm grounding in concrete social experience that he avoids the trivialization that can be a consequence of moral or cultural relativism. For example, early in V. he states the problem in miniature. Profane is riding the subway, ‘yoyoing’ back and forth from one end of the line to the other for hours; during the course of the day he sees the atmosphere change radically: The shuttle after morning rush hour is near empty, like a littered beach after tourists have all gone home. In the hours between nine and noon the permanent residents come creeping back up their strand, shy and tentative. Since sunup all manner of affluent have filled the limits of that world with a sense of summer and life; now sleeping bums and old ladies on relief, who have been there all along unnoticed, re-establish a kind of property right, and the coming on of a falling season.14 Although the beach image suggests that the bums and old ladies have actually gone somewhere, Pynchon assures us that they have not. Instead, their power to impose the definition of what Sidney Stencil would call The Situation’ has been eclipsed: the affluent have ‘filled the limits of that world’, that is, defined it according to their own limited experience, then moved on without having been touched or affected in any way, without even having recognized the existence of an alterity whose definition of The Situation’ it has occluded. This little epistemological parable describes an aspect of power relations between the relatively rich and the relatively poor. Elsewhere, Rachel Owlglass, an upper-middle-class young woman who feels restricted by the limits of her world, laments that ‘Daughters are constrained to pace demure and darkeyed like so many Rapunzels within the magic frontiers.’ Since she realizes that she may not be able to escape, she asks Profane to tell her about the world outside: ‘How the road is. Your boy’s road that I’ll never see…. What it’s like west of Ithaca and south of Princeton. Places I won’t know’ (V., pp. 25, 27). Ithaca and Princeton function here as ideological boundaries as

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much as geographical locations, and the epistemological limits arise here through gender as well as class. 15 Those ‘magic frontiers’ recall ‘the limits of the world’ mentioned above and look forward to yet another similar instance: Esther meets a college boy who leads a conventional middle-class life but is attracted to the bohemian lifestyles of a group known as the Whole Sick Crew: He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever have been a line, or even if there is a line at all. He will learn how to be a twinned man and will go on at the game, straddling until he splits up the crotch and in half from the prolonged tension, and then he will be destroyed. (V., p. 58) This split between worlds separates a counter-culture from the mainstream, a phenomenon Pynchon has long been interested in. The ‘invisible force fields’ separating cultural groups find metaphorical expression in V. as well in the profusion of siege imagery—the siege of Malta and Foppl’s siege party are the most detailed, but there are many other passing references. The military siege with its focus on a wall separating opposing groups finds its epistemological correlative in the idea of fundamentally irreconcilable discrepant experience, or perhaps in White’s epistemological ‘walls that must be broken through’. The most extensive exploration of this problem in V., however, revolves around certain aspects of racial difference, examining a series of critical moments in the history of European imperialism when the West quite deliberately and strategically denied the validity and the reality of non-synchronous Third World experience as part of a brutal enforcement of its own priorities. Not only has imperialist Western culture not often cared to ‘think through and interpret…discrepant experiences’ together with other cultural groups; it has in fact attempted to eradicate some of those cultures entirely. Pynchon writes of the ‘racist, sexist, and protofascist’ spirit of the time preceding the publication of the novel in 1963, a time when ‘John Kennedy’s role model James Bond was about to make his name by kicking third-world people around, another extension of the boy’s adventure tales a lot of us grew up reading’ (SL, p. xxi). V. is, in a sense, a parody of those books—by Kipling, Buchan, Haggard, et al.—that contributed to the construction of the ‘manichean’ racial difference that JanMohamed locates at the very heart of that colonialist literary genre. 16 Clear though Pynchon’s political position is here, perhaps the most critically neglected aspect of V. is its political use of epistemological and historiographical problems as a means to break down the wall of objective realism, a wall that has protected the hegemonic culture of Western society. The general epistemological dilemma in V. is given one central formulation by British agent Sidney Stencil, who ‘remembered times when whole embassiesful of personnel had simply run amok and gibbering in the streets when confronted with a Situation which refused to make sense no matter who looked at it, or from what angle.’ As a result he problematizes the very existence of an objective reality. ‘He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment’ (V., p. 189). In order to minimize confusion—a costly danger in the espionage business (which is not merely an epistemological metaphor but also, and perhaps more importantly, a straightforwardly political one)—Stencil Sr has developed an alternative

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to objective appraisal: a form of epistemological teamwork. But this approach too is not without difficulties: Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world in only three. Hence the success or failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it. (V., p. 189) ‘The sublime’, writes Lyotard in a similar vein, ‘bears witness to the incommensurability between thought and the real world.’ 17 If, as Lyotard argues, the terror and the sublimity of the event lie in part in its unrepresentability, then for Sidney Stencil there is at least safety in numbers. Truth, or knowledge, thus ultimately becomes a problem not of verification (or at least not of verification alone) but of consensus, privileging the homogeneous over the heterogeneous. In fact, one of the lessons of V. concerns the final impossibility of representing the world coherently and fully from any single perspective, an unrepresentability that brings us back as well to White’s historical sublime. Stencil Jr’s quest for V. demonstrates both the futility of the attempt and the inevitable distortions that must result from such an obsessive and totalizing vision. In developing his consensus approach to reality and The Situation, Stencil Sr stresses the need for a ‘degree of rapport’ among those attempting to form the composite picture of it, suggesting that otherwise they would ‘form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous’ (V., p. 189). The word ‘mongrel’ carries here, as usual, a pejorative sense, and in V., with its acute awareness of race and colonialism, it carries a less abstract meaning as well—a racial mixture. Sidney Stencil’s insistence on a ‘degree of rapport’ suggests an ethnocentrism which serves to protect his version of The Situation from epistemological and political dissolution and guarantees the exclusion of the kind of discrepant or non-synchronous experience that Said and Bloch speak of. Like many of his generation (and ours), Stencil Sr acknowledges with regret the passing of an imperialist era which protected the homogeneity of representation and power. As an anti-colonialist movement gathers momentum in Malta with its ‘motley of races’ (V., p. 310), he reflects with resignation that There were no more princes. Henceforth politics would become progressively more democratized, more thrown into the hands of amateurs. The disease would progress. Stencil was nearly past caring’ (V., p. 489). In the world of Stencil Jr, however, that difference—while still central—is far less divisive. Racial purity, a fetishized ideal in the historical sections of V., is at times almost parodied. The members of the Whole Sick Crew and those with whom they associate are, by and large, as Rachel puts it, ‘Deracinated’ (V., p. 382) in both senses of the word: rootless and without sharp racial distinctions in the manner of Stencil Sr’s generation. While they are by no means oblivious to their particular racial backgrounds, with the exception of Mafia Winsome this awareness is not generally used as a principle of exclusion. Profane is Jewish-Irish, Rachel is Jewish, Sphere is black, Fergus Mixolidian is an Irish-American Jew, Profane spends part of the novel living and working with a Puerto Rican family. Esther does get a nose job, turning her ‘Jew nose’ into an Irish retroussé, but she is criticized for it by her friends and even by the doctor who performs the operation (V., p. 103). Most important of all, perhaps, is the identity of Paola Maijstral, who is Maltese. Malta is in the middle of the Mediterranean, the middle of

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the middle of the world, a point where Europe and Africa intersect. It is referred to as ‘a cradle of life’ (V., p. 382) and, echoing Sidney Stencil’s strictures against a ‘mongrel’ reality, the people of Malta are characterized as a ‘motley of races’ (V., p. 310). Malta is the site of a number of key episodes in the novel, and in one of the most powerful scenes the children of this ‘motley of races’, among the ruins of European Second World War bombing, disassemble V., who has come to be identified with a particularly evil form of reified racist colonialism. Ironically, when Stencil Jr tries to represent The Situation of 1898, his narrators constitute precisely the sort of ‘mongrel’ assortment his father would have rejected: P.Aïeul, Arab café waiter; Yusef, another Arab, a kitchen worker; Maxwell Rowley-Bugge, a disgraced expatriate English paedophile; Waldetar, a Portuguese Jew working on the railroads in Egypt; Gebrail, an Arab phaeton driver; Girgis, an acrobat and burglar working with a team of Syrians; and Hanne, barmaid in a German-style beerhall in Egypt. All of these characters try to interpret the behaviour of the same group of diplomat-spies, attempt to construct a version of The Situation. Thus Stencil Jr attempts to come to terms to some degree with the idea of a non-homogeneous interpretation of reality. Nevertheless, Stencil Jr is finally something like White’s traditional historian attempting to find both meaning and narrative coherence in history. His facts, of course, are incomplete, so in an effort to represent certain historical moments of importance to his overall narrative he must go beyond hard facts, blurring further the line separating fiction and history. History according to Herbert Stencil, as his name might suggest, is made to fit a pattern. Yet within the novel it is largely through Stencil’s narratives that we have access to history: Around each seed of a dossier, therefore, had developed a nacreous mass of inference, poetic license, forcible dislocation of personality into a past he didn’t remember and had no right in save the right of imaginative anxiety or historical care, which is recognized by no one. (V., p. 62.) The first historical dossier that Pynchon, via Stencil, presents concerns the Fashoda episode, a critical moment in European imperialism. In any narrative, focalization or point of view determines a great deal; chapter 3 presents a series of fictional events related to the historical crisis, each from a different point of view but always with the guiding vision of Stencil’s combination of ‘imaginative anxiety or historical care’ in the background. The eight separate focalizers in the chapter offer very different perspectives on the events they observe. In more conventional narratives, writes Rimmon-Kenan, the ‘norms’ of the text in accordance with which the events and characters are evaluated ‘are presented through a single dominant perspective, that of the narrator-focalizer’. Pynchon’s use of multiple focalizers undermines any single sense of norms as interpretative guides: the single authoritative external focalizer gives way to a plurality of ideological positions…. Some of these positions may concur in part or in whole, others may be mutually opposed, the interplay among them provoking a non-unitary, ‘polyphonic’ reading of the text.18

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This ‘non-unitary, “polyphonic” reading’ may presumably be extended to encompass a reading of history itself, a reading that could allow space for non-synchronous and disparate experience. In the other ‘Stencilized’ chapters as well, this technique is employed. Whether it is a shifting focalizer (chapter 7), Stencil’s adaptation of someone else’s story (chapter 9), or the rendering of someone else’s diary (chapter 11), ‘the single authoritative external focalizer’ is always undermined. Pynchon’s use of this technique allows him to present a glimpse of the world from various perspectives, an imaginative attempt to cross those ‘magic frontiers’ that separate different universes of discourse. We are reminded, however, of the difficulty of doing so, of escaping from our towers, by the fact that both the focalizers who provide a centre of consciousness and to some degree the events related have been ‘Stencilized’. Yet balancing this narrative instability is the historical detail: the Mahdi, the Fashoda episode, the siege of Malta. These are matters of historical fact, and Pynchon does not seem concerned with challenging that status. According to the history books, the Herero uprising of 1904 did occur and was suppressed by von Trotha in the manner Pynchon relates, and in 1912. the Bondels, led by Abraham Morris, did unsuccessfully rise against the white colonial government.19 It is worth pointing out that, whatever the epistemological traps that lie tangled within Stencil’s obsession with V., the subtext of every historical narrative he produces has to do with imperialist conquest or violence, with a steady current of racism. Even in the chapter ‘V. in love’, the least overtly political of the historical chapters, there occurs a profusion of references to race and imperialism probing the ‘erotic and aesthetic fascination with “the Orient”’ that Huyssen (and, of course, Said) has characterized as a ‘deeply problematic’ element of European culture.20 It is in these themes of race and colonial history that the continuity of V. lies, and it is a continuity that remains undisturbed by the epistemological aporias presented by the novel. However much the possibility of final knowledge is undermined and narrative shown to be unstable, Pynchon seems at times to address the reader directly and without a trace of epistemological distress: [Hanging] had been a popular form of killing during the Great Rebellion of 1904–07, when the Hereros and Hottentots, who usually fought one another, staged a simultaneous but uncoordinated rising against an incompetent German administration. General Lothar von Trotha, having demonstrated to Berlin during his Chinese and East African campaigns a certain expertise at suppressing pigmented populations, was brought in to deal with the Hereros. In August 1904, von Trotha issued his ‘Vernichtungs Befehl’, whereby the German forces were ordered to exterminate systematically every Herero man, woman and child they could find. He was about 80 percent successful. Out of the estimated 80,000 Hereros living in the territory in 1904, an official German census taken seven years later set the Herero population at only 15,130, this being a decrease of 64,870. Similarly the Hottentots were reduced in the same period by about 10,000, the Berg-Damaras by 17,000. Allowing for natural causes during those unnatural years, von Trotha, who stayed for only one of them, is reckoned to have done away with about 60,000 people. This is only 1 per cent of six million, but still pretty good. (V., pp. 244–5)

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All this information is a matter of verifiable historical ‘fact’. The only trace of irony in this section occurs in the last sentence, and it does nothing to undermine the certainty of the account; instead it lends power to it. Pynchon combines historical facts, even statistics, with what seems at times an almost allegorical symbolism in order to sharpen his critique. Mondaugen, at one point during the siege party, sets off in search of the power generator so that he can tap some of the electricity for his experiments. The generator he actually finds is of a more symbolic nature than he had intended, however: Foppl’s own planetarium, a circular room with a great wooden sun, overlaid with gold leaf, burning cold in the very center and round it the nine planets and their moons, suspended from tracks in the ceiling, actuated by a coarse cobweb of chains, pulleys, belts, racks, pinions and worms, all receiving their prime impulse from a treadmill in the corner, usually operated for the amusement of the guests by a Bondelschwartz [slave], now unoccupied. (V., p. 239) Ignoring the reference to slavery, one might argue that the epistemological metaphor here concerns the way in which we construct our universe and suggests that our constructions are, like Stencil’s, rather clumsy at times. Mondaugen has, odd though it may seem, danced into the room with a young woman whose declared ‘purpose on earth is to tantalize and send raving the race of men’ (V., p. 239). The rhythm of the music they had been dancing to is transformed into a kind of cosmic rhythm as Mondaugen released her, skipped to the treadmill and began a jog-trot that set the solar system in motion, creaking and whining in a way that raised a prickling in the teeth. Rattling, shuddering, the wooden planets began to rotate and spin. Saturn’s rings to whirl, moons their precessions, our own Earth its nutational wobble, all picking up speed; as the girl continued to dance, having chosen Venus for her partner; as Mondaugen dashed along his own geodesic, following in the footsteps of a generation of slaves. (V., p. 239) Again, it is possible to read this as a demonstration that love (or at least desire) makes the world go round. And Pynchon, with his fine sense of cliché, no doubt intends this. But the final allusion once again is to slavery, oppression. Without knowing it, Mondaugen has found the generator, albeit not the one he was looking for. So, ‘breathing heavily’, he ‘staggered off the treadmill to carry on his descent and search for the generator’ (V., p. 140). For the reader at least there should be less ambiguity surrounding the power generator and the generations of slaves who have powered this society as Mondaugen reaches bottom in his descent and finds, perhaps, the very slave whose place as generator on the planetary treadmill had been unoccupied. As if the entire day had come into being only to prepare him for this, he discovered a Bondel male, face down and naked, the back and buttocks showing scar tissue from old sjambokings as well as more recent wounds, laid open across the flesh like so many toothless smiles…. Mondaugen approached the man and stooped to listen for breathing

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or a heartbeat, trying not to see the white vertebra that winked at him from one long opening. (V., p. 2.40) The seemingly incongruous images that accompany this scene, of smiles and a wink, underscore with a grim irony the power of metaphorical representation. Thus the wounds represented here as smiles and winks can be read as the inscription of the desire and power of the oppressor on the literal body of the slave—from the point of view of the torturer, a point of view that Mondaugen has passively accepted. Eventually, however, he decides to leave the white enclave: ‘Mondaugen this time withdrew, preferring at last neither to watch nor to listen.’ He then makes a dramatic (again, almost allegorical) crossing of the ravine separating the siege party from the rest of the world—the siege is, in V., political and epistemological as well as military. He drops a plank across a narrow part of the abyss and works ‘his way gingerly across, trying not to look down at the tiny stream two hundred feet below’. The ravine constitutes a significant epistemological gap with overt moral consequences, and Mondaugen is crossing one of the ‘magical frontiers’, going beyond ‘the limits’ of that particular world. He makes his way through the scrubland until he meets a Bondel on a donkey: He let Mondaugen ride behind him. At that point Mondaugen didn’t know where they were going. As the sun climbed he dozed on and off, his cheek against the Bondel’s scarred back…as they trotted along the Bondel began to sing…. The song was in Hottentot dialect, and Mondaugen couldn’t understand it. (V., p. 279) Disoriented and in many ways uncomprehending after the literal bridging of a sublime abyss, an ‘invisible force field’, he has arrived at the conditions of possibility of another state of mind, beyond the siege mentality. The scarred back of the Bondel can be considered a kind of text that can be read in different ways in different cultural and historical situations (even as ‘smiles’ and ‘winks’), but the existence of the scars themselves is not in doubt. Although ‘history is not a text’, writes Jameson, ‘it is inaccessible to us except in textual form.’ 21 Here the text of history is inscribed in the scars on the backs of its victims. Writing of the cultural meaning of scars for another colonized group—Latin American Indians—de Certeau asserts that the Indians preserve a painful recognition of four and a half centuries of colonization. Dominated but not vanquished, they keep alive the memory of what the Europeans have ‘forgotten’—a continuous series of uprisings and awakenings which have left hardly a trace in the occupiers’ historiographical literature. This history of resistance marked by cruel repression is marked on the Indian’s body as much as it is recorded in transmitted accounts—or more so. For them, these ‘scars on the body proper—or the fallen “heroes” or “martyrs” who correspond to them in narrative’ constitute ‘the index of a history yet to be made’. 22 There is a clear moral and historical imperative governing Pynchon’s representation of ‘real’ historical events and their apparent pattern. It can be detected perhaps in the way the Bondel’s post-revolutionary song (a failed revolution) echoes in V. through decades and across

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cultures: in Porcepic’s appropriation of African polyrhythms for white European modernist music (V., p. 402) and in Sphere’s black American jazz with its ‘rising rhythms of African nationalism’ (V., p. 60). While a number of patterns do repeat in the historical and the contemporary chapters, it is an overstatement to claim as Hite does that reality in V. is somehow ‘static… which suggests that past and present exist simultaneously or even that they are reversible…in V. past and present reflect each other in receding vistas’. 23 There can be no question, for example, of reversing the genocidal atrocities carried out against the Hereros, and to suggest an equivalence to ‘Mafia Winsome’s intellectual racism’ is clearly as disproportionate as is her equivalence of Foppl’s siege party (with its racist torture, murder, rape, and depravity) and the relatively mild bohemianism of the Whole Sick Crew. 24 This response to the novel is quite common, however, and results from approaching it as an abstract philosophical statement or an epistemological puzzle (albeit a puzzle that may not allow the possibility of a solution) to the exclusion of the concrete social and historical detail. Patteson argues that, for Stencil, ‘V. is in a sense a vast hall of mirrors in which…an indefinite number of variations’ may be discovered, ‘but no way out of his dilemma’. 25 The recurrence of mirror imagery in discussions of V. is symptomatic of a prevalent problem in postmodernism: the possibility that an acceptance of relativity entails a trivializing of interpretation. Bloch argues that in some versions of historical relativism The very process of history is broken up…historical relativism is here turned into something static; it is being caught in cultural monads, that is, culture souls without windows, with no links among each other, yet full of mirrors facing inside. 26 A dangerous tendency of cultural relativism, Fabian adds, is the fact ‘that such mirrors, if placed at propitious angles, also have the miraculous power to make real objects disappear’.27 Bloch and Fabian undoubtedly have an important point: certainly there are aspects of postmodernism and cultural relativism that effectively de-realize history—it has been argued that some of White’s work, for example, lends itself to this possibility. Yet this need not be the case. There is a corollary to this mirror imagery: if placed at certain other propitious angles, mirrors have an equally miraculous power to present objects and perspectives previously unavailable to perception. Pynchon’s postmodern mirrors may indeed conceal many things and present many illusions and deceptions, but they also re-present historical situations and events that had hitherto remained obscured from sight. Under the cover of historical relativism, rather than making events disappear, he is making present what seems to be a remarkable history of Western racism from the atrocities of colonialism to the somewhat more covert racism of America at the time of writing. It is also not entirely accurate to claim, as Hite does, that ‘in V.… nobody seems to learn anything’. Sphere, Rachel, and Maijstral all seem to progress in their understanding of the world. And, while it is true that ‘Benny Profane’s last words in the book are “Offhand I’d say I haven’t learned a goddam thing”’ (V., p. 51), Profane is not set up as an ideal or universal specimen. Nor is Stencil, whose policy towards knowledge is either obsessive or ‘Approach and avoid’ (V., p. 55), to be considered a universal epistemological model: it hadn’t really ever stopped being the same simple-minded, literal pursuit; V. ambiguously a beast of venery, chased like the hart, hind or hare…. And clownish

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Stencil capering along behind her, bells ajingle, waving a wooden, toy oxgoad. For no one’s amusement but his own. (V., pp. 61–2) Surely there is a middle ground between Profane, who claims to understand nothing and to learn nothing, and Stencil, who seeks to comprehend the totality of experience. Much of the book is written in a slapstick tone which encourages at best a limited identification with the characters. As readers we need not choose only between the two; instead, it ought to be possible to learn something ourselves. The point here is neither to hypostatize facts nor to relativize them out of existence. As Said contends, ‘Facts do not speak for themselves but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them.’ And, he continues, in a tone almost reminiscent of Chateaubriand, where are the facts if not embedded in history, and then reconstituted and recovered by human agents stirred by some perceived or desired or hoped-for historical narrative whose aim is to restore justice to the dispossessed. 28 Pynchon’s history is an attempt to remind us about certain aspects of our heritage that, as de Certeau has observed, we might prefer to overlook as we select the materials from which to construct our narrative of the past. And, no matter how much it is argued that the past is our own creation, we create it out of a limited supply of building materials: ‘People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history’s rags and straws…. Doubtless their private versions of history showed up in action’ (V., p. 225). Doubtless everyone’s version of history does show up in action—which is why it is so important to examine the construction of history in order to come to an understanding of the complex relationship between ideology and praxis. In theory there may be an infinite number of designs for the rathouse, but in practice there is a finite (and remarkably consistent) number of headlines to build with, and many rathouses display a certain similarity. The building of a historical rathouse is not simply a matter of jouissance , of the free play of the imagination: such a ‘postmodern style of history’ would, as Foster fears, ‘signal the disintegration of style and the collapse of history’. 29 In Pynchon’s work, however, history is in no danger of collapse. The Herero—Bondel episode is not an isolated one in V. The Mahdi uprising, alluded to in chapter 3, was a nationalist, millenarian movement which had attempted to repel the colonizing British. Historical accounts of the Battle of Omdurman (1898), yet another of V.’s sieges, are chilling. Against a large army of Sudanese, most of whom fought with spears, the British forces used heavy artillery, with the result that on the battlefield more than 10,000 Sudanese died immediately, and uncounted more men, women, and children died of wounds or in the shelling of the city. As a fitting conclusion to this destruction, after the fighting was over, the tomb of the Mahdi, the only building of size in the city, ‘the focal point of the religious and political life of the capital’, and symbol of the culture’s narrative orientation, was destroyed.30 Elsewhere, one of Stencil’s impersonations considers the strange history of Egypt’s Lake Mareotis:

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Beneath the lake were 150 villages, submerged by a man-made Flood in 1801, when the English cut through an isthmus of desert during the siege of Alexandria, to let the Mediterranean in. Waldetar liked to think that the waterfowl soaring thick in the air were ghosts of fellahin. What submarine wonders at the floor of Mareotis! Lost country: houses, hovels, farms, water wheels, all intact. Did the narwhal pull their plows? Devilfish drive their water wheels? (V., p. 79) Here again we are given historical fact without epistemological complication but accompanied by a quiet but powerful, even lyrical, sense of historical pathos. The incident is a kind of historical curiosity as well, since it occurred as part of the British campaign against the French led by Napoleon, and neither nationality remained in Egypt long after the battle. It was in a sense a precursor to the Fashoda crisis, which also pitted the British against the French but without the overt colonialist motive for the British. E.M.Forster discusses the incident in his book on the city of Alexandria, and, as an example of historical relativism and the de-realization of history, it is worth juxtaposing his account with the account Pynchon gives to Waldetar. What is now ‘Lake Mariout [sic] was almost dry,’ Forster writes. ‘It contained a little fresh water, but most of its enormous bed was under cultivation.’ In a strategic move to isolate the French troops in Alexandria the British opened a channel. The salt water rushed in, to the delight of the British soldiers, and in a month thousands of acres had been drowned.’ The move was successful. The French surrendered and both imperialist armies retired: ‘we had accomplished our aim, and had no reason to remain in the country any longer; we left it to our allies the Turks.’ The elision of the inhabitants from this narrative is made all the more strange by use of the metaphor ‘drowned’ to describe the acres instead of the people whose fate does not, in this account, merit notice. Indeed, Forster suggests, they should be grateful for receiving the attention of Europeans; brief though it was, it rescued the area from a kind of native stupor: the sleep of so many centuries had been broken. The eyes of Europe were again directed to the deserted shore. Though Napoleon had failed and the British had retired, a new age had begun for Alexandria. Life flowed back into her, just as the waters, when Hutchinson cut the dyke, flowed back into Lake Mariout. 31 The problem of point of view in history is central here. Deserted by whom? The imperialist forces who returned immediately to Europe? The inhabitants whose lives were submerged beneath the salt water? White argues that although we claim ‘to rank events in terms of their world-historical significance…that significance is less world historical than simply Western European’, representing ‘a perspective that is culture-specific, not universal at all’ (CF., pp. 9–10). Forster unreflectively reiterates the kind of culture-specific historical narrative that White criticizes and Pynchon is self-consciously undermining. As one of V.’s characters points out, We can always so easily give the wrong reasons…can say: the Chinese campaigns, they were for the Queen, and India for some gorgeous notion of Empire. I know. I have said these things to my men, the public, to myself. There are Englishmen dying in South

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Africa today and about to die tomorrow who believe these words as—I dare say you believe in God. (V., p. 169) It is at a point such as this that Pynchon’s technical manipulation of narrative together with his overt subject matter combine to subvert orthodox historical accounts. This reference to South Africa is as timely now as it was in 1963 when V. was published; perhaps more so, as mainstream political and historical opinion on South Africa seems gradually to be catching up with Pynchon’s position of twenty-five years ago—yet another illustration of historical or historiographical relativity. White observes: The more historically self-conscious the writer of any form of historiography, the more the question of the social system and the law which sustains it, the authority of this law and its justification, and threats to this law occupy his attention. (CF, p. 13) Pynchon’s self-consciousness as a historian and otherwise have often been observed, but the problem of social or political authority has not generally been considered central to V. Nevertheless, whether the examples are drawn from European, Egyptian, Sudanese, Namibian, or Maltese history, the rooms in Pynchon’s rathouse exhibit a radical and consistent rereading of European imperialism. Yet Pynchon is no dogmatist: any final interpretation—of history or of his story—remains thwarted. As Schaub argues, ‘he is adamantly opposed …to the creation of any stable, fixed “history”’. 32 Pynchon’s project is not primarily a reconstruction of history from the point of view of its victims, although elements of this are present in the novel. Instead he works to decentre the possibility of an established authoritative objective account of historical events. Mink argues: The cognitive function of narrative form, then, is not just to relate a succession of events but to body forth an ensemble of interrelationships of many different kinds as a single whole. In fictional narrative the coherence of such complex forms affords aesthetic or emotional satisfaction: in historical narrative it additionally claims truth. But this is where the problem arises. Pynchon, of course, is well aware of the problem, and at the possible expense of ‘aesthetic or emotional satisfaction’ has sacrificed to some degree the totality implied in the ‘single whole’. Instead he is faithful to the fact that, as Mink writes, one event ‘may belong to different stories, and its particular significance will vary with its place in these different—often very different—narratives.’33 As Stencil Sr observes, The Situation is an n-dimensional mish-mash (V., p. 460). Pynchon might even agree with Jameson that postmodernism’s resort to the sublime and to relativity should not remain an end in itself; the point is rather To undo postmodernism homeopathically by the methods of postmodernism…to reconquer some genuine historical sense by using the instruments of what I have called substitutes for history.’ 34 While V. does not, by itself, articulate the discourse of the other to any great extent, by fragmenting the monolithic Western narrative of objective historical realism it works towards opening the discursive space in which that narrative of alterity, of non-synchronous and discrepant

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experience, may be articulated and possibly even understood. ‘There’s no organized effort about it,’ explains the narrator of V., ‘but there remains a grand joke on all visitors to Baedeker’s world: the permanent residents are actually humans in disguise’ (V., p. 78). Pynchon’s fiction constitutes an attempt to reveal the human behind the disguise, and to remind us that those other ‘permanent residents’, the ‘bums and old ladies on relief, have been with us on the subway all along. In his retrospective introduction to Slow Learner , published twenty years after V., Pynchon writes that ‘It may yet turn out that racial differences are not as basic as questions of money and power, but have served a useful purpose…in keeping us divided and so relatively poor and powerless’ (SL, p. xxi). Yet in V., written while the American civil rights movement gathered momentum, it is racial difference that is explored most fully. Pynchon’s fictional representations of history constitute in many ways an early example of the move towards racial integration and non-coercive understanding that was to become a central tenet of radical politics in the 19608. Early in the novel Paola teaches her friends a song that she had learned from a French paratrooper on ‘leave from the fighting in Algeria’— Algeria, being perhaps the best-publicized anti-colonial war immediately prior to the escalation of US involvement in Vietnam, was no doubt in the news while V. was being written: Demain le noir matin, Je fermerai la porte Au nez des années mortes; J’irai par les chemins. Je mendierai ma vie Sur la terre et sur l’onde, Du vieux au nouveau monde.

(V., pp. 18–19)

Closing the door on the dead years, for this soldier, can only mean closing the door on the historical era of colonialism. Yet most of the many military characters in V. seem to live below the horizon of history, without much awareness of the political and historical pressures behind military action. When the Suez crisis occurs, the sailors in V. talk of many things, but not of history or politics. The lack of awareness on the part of the characters in V. has been commented on by a number of critics, as has the novel’s lack of tangible hope. But there may be, as V.’s Eigenvalue says, folds and crests in the fabric of history such that if we are situated…at the bottom of a fold, it’s impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else…[and] it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the ’30’s, the curious fashions of the ’20’s, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see. (V., p. 156)

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V. may, then, be read as an attempt to foster, if not clear vision, then at least the necessary conditions in which clearer vision might be possible. To this end, Pynchon presents images of cultural and historical relativism and of the sublime, the latter being present in both aspects discussed by Lyotard. The first—the ultimately unrepresentable nature of the event and the plurality of historical interpretation—has been discussed earlier. ‘The art object’, writes Lyotard, ‘no longer bends itself to models [of the beautiful] but tries to present the fact that there is an unpresentable.’ The other aspect of the sublime is perhaps more peculiarly contemporary: ‘the sublime’, he writes, ‘is kindled by the threat of nothing further happening. …What is terrifying is that the It happens that does not happen, that it stops happening.’35 Lyotard’s idea of nothing further happening entails the end of the narrative, and the end of the social possibility of creating narrative can only coincide with the destruction of that society—as the plight of the Namibian Hereros in 1904 or in 1988 demonstrates, or as Said has argued in reference to the Palestinian question.36 The end of the narrative of history on a global scale is apocalypse, the sublime spectacle of unrepresentable terror. The sublime has not lost its link to terror,’ writes Huyssen. ‘For what could be more sublime and unrepresentable than the nuclear holocaust, the bomb being the signifier of an ultimate sublime.’37 As long as events continue to unfold, however, it is possible to represent them in one way or another as something happening, continuing the narrative as it were. But throughout V. the possibility echoes that the end of the story, the end of history, may be imminent, as ‘the balloon’ appears set to ‘go up’ on a number of occasions and Western society seems about to tear itself apart in war. The novel ends as the troops prepare for yet another neo-colonial showdown—Suez. ‘The Middle East,’ says Stencil Jr, ‘cradle of civilization, may yet be its grave’ (V., p. 387). This ending signals an attempt to connect the historical record and the novel itself to present conditions in the world, to historicize contemporary politics in a radical context. Pynchon observes that, although the First World War takes on the power of an ‘apocalyptic showdown’ in V., Our common nightmare The Bomb is in there too. It was bad enough in ’59 and is much worse now, as the level of danger has continued to grow…. Except for that succession of the criminally insane who have enjoyed power since 1945, including the power to do something about it, most of the rest of us poor sheep have always been stuck with simple, standard fear. I think we have all tried to deal with this slow escalation of our helplessness and terror in the few ways open to us, from not thinking about it to going crazy about it. Somewhere on this spectrum of impotence is writing fiction about it. (SL, p. xxix) In a study of the liberational possibilities of cultural relativity, Dirlik writes: Hegemony requires a center, not only in space but also in time. The decentering of the hegemonic group, be it class or nation, deprives history of a center and the hegemonic group of its claims upon history. Culturalism that achieves this end points to a liberating possibility, if only as a possibility. Yet the fragility of this sense of possibility must be noted. Indeed, as Dirlik (and many others) points out, some kinds of postmodern thought have the effect of de-realizing concrete

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historical experience quite thoroughly, compounding rather than helping to ease the post-colonial situation. What is needed, ‘it needs to be stressed, is not an epistemology the goal of which is to discover abstract truths, but an epistemology with an intention, one that seeks to overcome the alienation that is implicit in the notion of truth conceived abstractly.’38 There is no reason to assume that postmodernism, as an ‘ism’, can provide the appropriate concrete historical, philosophical, or political framework to support a radical position. If it is to do so, writes Huyssen, it ‘will have to be a postmodernism of resistance, including resistance to that easy postmodernism of the “anything goes” variety’.39 As a postmodern historiographical novel—a novel about historical representation as well as about historical events—Pynchon’s V. does point in that direction.

McGill University

NOTES 1 H.White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 73. Subsequent page references to this edition (abbreviated CF) will appear in the text in parentheses. 2 W.Plater, The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), p. 112; J.Stark, Pynchon’s Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information (Athens, Ohio: University Press, 1983), pp. 23–4, 105, 169; T.Schaub, Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1981). 3 P.Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 224. 4 J.-F.Lyotard, ‘The sublime and the avant-garde’, Paragraph, 6 (1985). 5 F.Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963) p. 61. 6 A.Stephanson, ‘Regarding postmodernism—a conversation with Fredric Jameson’, Social Text, 17 (Fall 1987), pp. 30–1. 7 E.Said, ‘Intellectuals in the post-colonial world’, Salmagundi, 70–1 (1986), p. 50. 8 J.-F.Lyotard, ‘The sign of history’, in D.Attridge, G.Bennington, and R. Young (eds), Structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 175. 9 T.Pynchon, Slow Learner (New York: Bantam, 1985), pp. xvi—xvii. Subsequent page references to this edition (abbreviated SL) will appear in the text in parentheses. 10 T.Pynchon, ‘A journey into the Mind of Watts’, New York Times Magazine, 12. June 1966, p. 35. 11 Ibid., pp. 78, 80. 12. Said, op. cit., pp. 55–6. 13 See E.Bloch, ‘Nonsynchronism and the obligation to its dialectics’, trans. Mark Ritter, New German Critique, 11 (Spring 1977). 14 T.Pynchon, V. (New York: Modern Library, 1966), pp. 37–8. Subsequent page references to this edition will appear in the text in parentheses. 15 The image is evidently an important one for Pynchon: his second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, employs the same image of a woman trapped in a socio- epistemological tower, and documents her attempts to escape. For an interesting analysis of Lot 49, and one of the few readings of Pynchon to take his social critique seriously, see P.Coates, ‘Unfinished business: Thomas Pynchon and the quest for revolution’, New Left Review, 160 (November—December 1986). 16 A.R.JanMohamed, ‘The economy of Manichean allegory: the function of racial difference in colonialist literature’, Critical Inquiry, 12 (Autumn 1985). 17 Lyotard, ‘The sublime and the avant-garde’, p. 7.

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18 S.Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 81. 19 While some critics have questioned the veracity of Pynchon’s historical detail in the light of the evident fertility of his imagination, Cassola argues that ‘Pynchon has taken the trouble to investigate everything to the last detail. His “historical” narrative [about Malta] is based on documentary evidence’: A. Cassola, ‘Pynchon, V., and the Malta connection’, Journal of World Literature, 12, 2 (July 1985), p. 311. 20 A.Huyssen, ‘Mapping the postmodern’, New German Critique, 33 (1984), p. 51; E.Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978). 21 F.Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 35. 22 M.de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 227. 23 M.Hite, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), p. 51. 24 Ibid., pp. 64–5. 25 R.F.Patteson, ‘How true a text? Chapter three of V. and “Under the Rose”’, Southern Humanities Review, 18, 4 (1984), p. 25. 26 E.Bloch, in J.Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 44–5. 27 Fabian, op. cit., p. 45. 28 E.Said, ‘Permission to narrate’, London Review of Books, 6, 3 (16 February 1984), pp. 14, 16. 29 H.Foster, ‘(Post)modern polemics’, New German Critique, 33 (1984), p. 73. 30 M.W.Daly, Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan 1898–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 4–5. 31 E.M.Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide (New York: Doubleday, 1961), p. 93. 32 Schaub, op. cit., p. 110. 33 L.Mink, ‘Narrative form as cognitive instrument’, in R.H.Canary and H. Kosicki (eds), The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Under standing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 144–5. 34 Stephanson, op. cit., p. 42. 35 Lyotard, ‘The sublime and the avant-garde’, pp. 10, 12. 36 Said, ‘Permission to narrate’. 37 Huyssen, op. cit., p. 46. 38 A.Dirlik, ‘Culturalism as hegemonic ideology and liberating practice’, Cultural Critique, 6 (Spring 1987), pp. 27, 45. 39 Huyssen, op. cit., p. 52.

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Facecrime: George Orwell and the physiognomy of politics IAN HAYWOOD

‘Rebellion meant a look in the eyes.’ Winston Smith’s description of the mode in which political opposition to the state commences in Nineteen Eighty-Four has bathetic power. The significance of the communication (rebellion) arises from a minute physical gesture (‘a look in the eyes’). That disparity attests to the repressive watchfulness of state surveillance techniques. Big Brother’s ubiquitous, public stare forces a fleeting, furtive challenge. In order to be a rebel, one must be able both to transmit and to receive the necessary information in a unique moment of private exchange, a flash of intelligence. The reading of faces is a political act. Yet Winston’s words do not identify the exact nature of that ‘look’. Despite his experiences with Julia and O’Brien, Winston cannot say what a rebellious face looks like; he cannot categorize the all-important signal transmitted from one pair of eyes to another. Like O’Brien’s ‘equivocal glance’ in the Hate Session, the ‘look in the eyes’ has a tenuous status, hovering on the borders of knowledge and mystery. On this unstable sign rests the instability of Winston’s rebellion. The reliability of physiognomical information is therefore crucial for Winston. But it is also crucial for the state, which studies faces for evidence of unorthodox expressions (facecrime). These are dilemmas inside the novel, to which we shall be returning. But the problem does not end there. The critic outside the text must also participate in the struggle to stabilize the sign. The value of the political vision in the novel rests heavily on the intense physiognomic activity that occurs. Moreover, physiognomy has a privileged place in much of Orwell’s previous writing. Before conducting an in-depth study of Nineteen EightyFour, therefore, it is necessary to investigate the concept of physiognomy and Orwell’s use of it as political discourse. The definition of physiognomy is ‘equivocal’. It refers to the discipline or skill of interpreting faces and expressions as keys to personality. The word also means the countenance itself, the object of interpretation. This duality is often ignored, and the ‘reading’ is collapsed into the ‘text’. A description of a face will strive to seem objective, masking the assumptions that must be made before expressions on the surface of a body can be allowed to correspond to emotions and qualities on the inside. For instance, to say a person has an ‘innocent’ face or a ‘naïve’ expression betrays many cultural presuppositions. Physiognomy as a science assumes that facial signifiers are causally related to the underlying signifieds of personality. The interpretative movement is from surface to core, but never back to the conditions of interpreting. Physiognomy has an ancient pedigree. The first treatise was written by Aristotle. Appropriately, he was one of its first victims. In an incident recalled by Parson Adams in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, a physiognomist named Zopyrus declared that Aristotle’s

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countenance revealed him to be a rogue. Public opinion was outraged, but Aristotle confessed he did in fact have many insalubrious propensities, and only his self-control had prevented people realizing this. In Orwellian terms, his facecrime had not been detected. Aristotle’s unmasking exposed a fracture in the procedure at its inception. On the one hand the body is the mirror of the soul: one’s expressions are formed involuntarily according to what type of a person one is. One’s face therefore will show certain ‘tell-tale’ signs. The logical conclusion of such a deterministic creed is cataloguing, classifying, and stereotyping, all of which involve grave moral problems. On the other hand, one can exert at least some control over one’s features, loosening the tie of signifier to signified, and forcing physiognomy to yield only partial knowledge, blocking its dehumanizing potential. Both camps celebrate the special function of the face as the site of the production and exchange of meaning. The disagreement is not about theory (faces can be read) but about the degree of usefulness: a social issue. For art, however, the problem is also an aesthetic one. Realism may aim to avoid stereotyping; the use of conventions and types may be the most readily available vocabulary. Art has been intimately involved in studying and fixing kinds of facial expression.1 One of the most famous exponents is Hogarth, the eighteenth-century satirical engraver and artist. His work contributes to the great age of physiognomy in Europe: the period stretching from Charles Le Brun’s Method for Drawing the Emotions (1696) and Expression of the Passions (1698) through Johann Lavater’s The Art of Understanding People (1772) to Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), by which time physiognomy was firmly established in the craft of the realistic novel. As a practising satirist Hogarth had to wrestle with the need to stereotype, to produce social types, to temper caricature with social realism. His comments in the Analysis of Beauty (1753) show a passion for, but scepticism about, physiognomy. Although there are correspondences between certain expressions and certain (particularly strong) emotions, a reliable translation from exterior to interior is not assured. As much as Hogarth deployed physiognomy in his prints, he needed a much more extensive visual vocabulary to perform his satirical attacks. Hogarth noted, for instance, that a grave expression does not tell the observer whether the cause of the expression is a trivial or important matter.2 Similarly, Henry Fielding wondered how hypocrisy could be shown on someone’s face: action and language also needed to be included (the Zopyrus story is a cautionary note). Nevertheless, there were followers of the more rigorous and hard-line schools of Le Brun and Lavater.3 Graeme Tytler has unearthed many interesting eighteenth-century celebrations of physiognomy. From our Orwellian position, some of these eulogies could be the work of the Thought Police. For instance, Lord Chesterfield offered his son some wordly advice for survival in the political world: Mind, not what people say, but how they say it; and if you have any sagacity, you may discover more truth by your eyes than by your ears. People can say what they will, but they cannot look just as they will; and the looks frequently discover what their words are calculated to conceal. Observe, therefore, people’s looks carefully when they speak not only to you, but to each other. I have often guessed, by people’s faces, what they were saying, though I could not hear one word they said.4

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Here language is a deception, not physical appearance. The impersonal, objective, and determined is more powerful than the personal, subjective, and voluntary (‘People can say what they will, but they cannot look just as they will’). Walter Shandy’s words in Tristram Shandy become even more chilling if they are politicized: There are a thousand unnoticed openings…which let a penetrating eye at once into a man’s soul; and I maintain it…that a man of sense does not lay down his hat in coming into a room,—or take it up in going out of it, but something escapes, which discovers him.5 The ‘penetrating’ movement is explicit. One’s personality is like a kernel in a shell, or the true reality (soul) behind a mask of surface expressions. Such is the way in which language and criticism have been thought to work conventionally: criticism permeates the text’s surface, ‘discovering’ the hidden reality; language, as Orwell himself believed, is a window, a framed pane of referentiality.6 Yet Walter Shandy’s eye can only see a ‘something’, and Chesterfield’s insight is unspecific (‘looks’). According to modern theories of language, it is very difficult for people to ‘say what they will’.7 Serious interest in physiognomy seems to have waned towards the end of the nineteenth century, coinciding with the decline of classic realism in the novel and the advent of photography. Darwin used photographs in his physiognomic studies, to increase their accuracy.8 The technological advance may not have been enough to rescue the discipline, but photography made available on a mass scale images of one’s own and others’ faces.9 Though physiognomy as a formal discipline withered, the reading of faces was ingrained as a cultural practice, and photography with its reputation for unparalleled realism became a major new site of physiognomic activity. Here for the first time were ‘real’ faces frozen in one particular expression and framed: the perfect window of representation, the fixing of meaning. But, as modern theory of photography shows, reading a photograph of any kind is the equivalent to reading any other text, and must involve the debunking of conventional notions of surface and depth. It is precisely that duality that plagues physiognomy. To complete this brief excursion into physiognomic epistemology we must therefore turn to photographic theory.10 Roland Barthes was one of the first theorists to attack the idea that a photograph is a ‘message without a code’—pure denotation with no connotation.11 To put it another way, there is no text without interpretation. To believe there can be is to endorse the nineteenthcentury illusion that a photograph is an unmediated copy of the real world, in which signifier and signified are fused. Yet most subsequent critical approaches still employ referentiality, a movement from the ‘surface’ of the photograph to something behind or beneath it. Even semiotics and structuralism suffer from this essentialism, or what Derrida called the ‘metaphysics of presence’. For Barthes, ‘all images are polysemous’ and made up of a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds which cannot be fixed.12 Victor Burgin has restated this post-structuralist position: Thus, presented with any text whatsoever, visual or verbal, the notion of ‘true signified’ must yield to Derrida’s différence or Peirce’s ‘unlimited semiosis’. The alternative is a metaphysics of interpretation through which an attempt is made to reconstitute the missing ‘presence’ which is felt to be the source of a singular and true content of the empirically given form of the text.13

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It might seem that this is merely a new form of subjectivism, but post-structuralism does not regard reader response as an act of unmediated free will but rather as the putting into play of ideological formations. Interpretation is an event, an interaction which occurs on the previously expendable ‘surface’ of the photograph: a photograph is not to be reduced to ‘pure form’ nor ‘window on the world’, nor is it a gangway to the presence of an author…the photograph is a place of work, a structured and structuring space within which a reader deploys, and is deployed by, what codes he or she is familiar with in order to make sense.14 To make sense is not to discover the truth, the ‘invisible bedrock of reality’.15 Connotation does not dissolve into denotation. To make sense is to realize that an ‘uncertain sign’ need not produce ‘terror’16 but rather might yield an insight into how received notions of truth are constructed. The first striking example of physiognomical insight in Orwell’s work comes at the end of the first chapter of The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell is leaving Wigan on a train when he sees a working-class woman trying to unblock a wastepipe in her garden: I had time to see everything about her—her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘it isn’t the same for them as it would be for us’, and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drainpipe.17 The incident has the persuasive force of a spontaneously frozen moment of intimacy, a baring of souls which serves as a political statement: the working class are not to be dismissed as ‘ignorant’. The expression on the woman’s face functions metonymically, standing for the ‘desolate, hopeless’, yet conscious suffering of ‘people bred in the slums’. Yet here metonymy is perilously close to stereotyping, one of the grave dangers of physiognomy. The woman has the ‘usual exhausted face’ whose features are determined by collective social experience (‘miscarriages and drudgery’). One of the sources of power in the passage, however, lies in the challenging of such patronizing outsiders’ views which are as ignorant in their middle-class complacency as those they stereotype. Presumably the look on Orwell’s face, could we see it, would not be one of pity. It is Orwell’s role as the looker, the observer, the physiognomer, that is problematical. The woman’s expression does not exist objectively. It is entirely his verbal construction. He does not try to conceal his outsideness. Indeed, the publication of Orwell’s diary of his Wigan experience has shown that he was originally on foot when the incident occurred.18 His reasons for relocating himself on a fictional train are worth contemplating. His position as an

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observer is given added dramatic force. His physical and social distance from the woman are increased, yet the ‘freezing’ of the motion of the train heightens the significance of the meeting of eyes, valorizes Orwell’s observational acuity, and justifies his political conclusion. The embellished version has the aesthetic edge over the original. Orwell places a window between his eyes and the woman’s, but the window dissolves in the act of looking through it, just as both language and the woman’s face provide access to a previously hidden truth, a revelation. Most importantly for Orwell, perhaps, there is an attempt to remove the privilege which has generated the insight. The woman ‘understood as well as [he] did’ the message to be gained. It is a characteristic Orwellian paradox that he tries to use his class position to declass himself. But there is a serious doubt whether the physiognomy of the passage will sustain this dissolution. The only definite information we have is the woman’s ‘round pale face’, almost a tabula rasa, or sheet of paper awaiting inscription, definition, meaning. Yet this never occurs. Her ‘expression’ is vague and not even her own (what is a ‘usual’ look of exhaustion?). Nor are the epithets ‘desolate’ and ‘hopeless’ reified as concrete facial features. Even the word ‘wore’ is possibly counter-productive, since it suggests not ‘worn’ (as in ‘worn down’) but wearing clothes, thus emphasizing the exteriority of what is being observed. Finally, and most damagingly, when Orwell moves to reverse the negativity of stereotyping (which he has also endorsed) there is no corresponding change on the woman’s face, no detail which shows that dignified and humanizing knowledge of her plight. There is only a double negative (‘not the ignorant’) and a further reference to ‘what I saw in her face’. What ‘I’ saw is Orwell’s subjective response, which will not translate into the objective ‘She knew’. The insight gained from the experience has been of Orwell’s artistic and political method. Orwell was only an incipient socialist when he wrote Wigan Pier (1936). The experience which really politicized him was fighting as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. He could temporarily exchange the pen for the rifle, participate in class struggle rather than observe it. Our access to his experience, of course, is Homage to Catalonia (1938), a literary reconstruction of events. Remarkably, the story which will unveil the birth of Orwell’s revolutionary political consciousness opens with a highly irrational physiognomic interaction. Orwell remembers seeing an unknown Italian militiaman at the Lenin barracks in Barcelona: He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a map which one of the officers had open on the table. Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend—the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist. There were both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors. Obviously he could not make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-reading as a stupendous intellectual feat. I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone—any man, I mean— to whom I have taken such an immediate liking.19 The aesthetic appeal of such an opening may well come from the mixture of mystery and sensationalism (‘commit murder’). Unlike the Wigan episode, the uncertainty of Orwell’s subjective reaction is highlighted. The instantaneous if inexplicable camaraderie with a

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stranger is what matters, its inexplicability strengthening its emotional appeal. This unknown warrior is not a sociological subject but a fellow outsider: both of them are foreigners. The artificiality of the camaraderie is stressed. After marvelling at the ‘queer’ way their ‘spirits’ met in seemingly ‘utter intimacy’, Orwell confesses: ‘to retain my first impression of him I must not see him again.’ For the physiognomy to yield results the intimacy must remain illusory, a fabrication. There is no meeting of eyes. There is no awareness on the soldier’s side. He is, after all, illiterate. All the insight and knowledge are Orwell’s, and he constructs the soldier as a symbol of unsystematized memory: ‘With his shabby uniform and fierce pathetic face he typifies for me the special atmosphere of that time. He is bound up with all my memories.’20 This is the raw material which will be crafted, shaped, and theorized into objectivity during the course of the book. Suitably, it is the rawness of the soldier which is his endearing aspect: his savage, reckless loyalty. He is a type, though he cannot be definitively classified; he may be anarchist or communist, though one wonders what a ‘typical’ anarchist’s face is like. As with the Wigan woman, facial features are absent. There is an elusive ‘something’ in the soldier’s expression which promotes actions, emotions, and attitudes but remains as unidentifiable as Orwell’s reasons for becoming excited. Note that in the last sentence of the extract Orwell reminds us that any instantaneous attraction to a woman is of a different (sexual) order—lest we may misinterpret his admiration for male physical features. Interestingly enough, when Orwell wrote a poem about the same experience, even the gender division is eroded: what peace I knew then In gazing on his battered face Purer than any woman’s!21 So the self-conscious foregrounding of vagueness and uncertainty, of ‘unstable signs’, may seem to avoid the dangers of loading physiognomy with objective political significance. But the absent information is still a problem. Orwell wants us to believe the ‘candour and ferocity’ are actually contained in the face. Without any evidence for this, there is the danger of the militiaman becoming a mere extension of Orwell’s consciousness, despite his ostensible function as ‘the flower of the European working class’.22 Yet to specify actual facial detail might particularize at the expense of typicality. The memory of the face of the unknown soldier is nothing less than the objective correlative of the whole war. When Orwell recalls the face—‘oh, how vividly!’—‘the complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate no doubt as to who was in the right’.23 The face is ‘a sort of visual reminder of what the war was really about’.24 These are remarkable statements. Despite the pointers to perspicuity (Vividly’, ‘see clearly’), the man’s face is a blank, a featureless cipher, which calls into question Orwell’s reduction of ‘complex side-issues’ into impressionistic, firsthand experience which will yield instinctive political wisdom. Orwell’s most sublime celebration of the face occurs at the end of the poem which concludes ‘Looking back on the Spanish Civil War’ (1942):

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But the thing that I saw in your face No power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst Shatters the crystal spirit. 25 The crystal may be transparent, but it is also a blankness. The ‘thing’ that is the spirit of human resilience, our humanist essence, is inviolable, but also invisible, abstracted beyond politics. A similar polarization between physiognomic knowledge and political experience can be seen at the end of the essay ‘Charles Dickens’ (1939). Again, physiognomy is not a mode of description but a form of argument. Again, the movement is from frank subjectivity through stereotyping to abstraction: When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry—in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.26 There is evidence here for the hotly disputed political backsliding Orwell underwent at the onset of the war. Factionalism is cowardly and spiteful, a far cry from the lengthy analysis of the various republican parties in Homage to Catalonia. Yet the political conclusion celebrating noble, humane non-alignment is undermined by the admission that it is not Dickens’s face under scrutiny but an idealization. To locate this face means looking ‘behind the page’, piercing the surface of the text to discover the buried presence which, paradoxically, is entirely of one’s own making. Dickens’s ‘actual face’ available on photographs is for some reason inadequate, although the phantom face is very similar. The similarity is almost an irrelevance, for the only physical details are a beard, ruddiness, and a laugh, hardly enough to signify the elaborate interpretation which follows. Action and emotion are presented as expression: the face is ‘of someone in perpetual struggle—which tells us nothing about the face. While the real face of Dickens remains locked away in its photograph, the textual Dickens can transcend temporal restrictions and be an object-lesson in ‘free intelligence’ for the squabbling sectarianism of 1939. His generous anger cannot be politically colonized, though it is a political statement, an heroic gesture. Orwell has given physiognomy a privileged status to enable him to escape the limitations of rational political discourse and achieve special insight into the human condition rooted in instinctive, unpolluted feeling. Orwell mistrusted theory, but even his commonsense

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empiricism needed to define experience in terms of wider, more impersonal forces. His lack of success in doing this has been the focus of much critical and political comment.27 In physiognomy, perhaps Orwell believed he had found the ‘peace’ of the ‘crystal spirit’, unshatterable, incontestable. The possibility that this humanist notion of ‘free’ human will is itself a construction of an ‘orthodoxy.’ would have been beyond him, or would have been refuted. Orwell’s ‘honest’ responses jostle with his attempt to transform the faces being read into political paradigms. Nowhere is the danger of this approach more apparent than in his physiognomizing of Big Brother’s real-life counterparts Stalin and Hitler. The problem is not in his professed admiration for them, but in the complexion of that admiration. Stalin receives brief treatment in a review written in 1938, where Orwell notes that ‘Stalin, at any rate on the cinematograph, has a likeable face.’28 This is too cursory to be taken very seriously, and in any case Orwell adds: ‘Al Capone was the best of husbands and fathers.’ Still, one might carp at the value of divorcing Stalin’s ‘likeable’ countenance from political context. The physiognomy of Hitler is much more substantial. Orwell wrote a review of Hurst and Blackett’s edition of Mein Kampf in 1940. The review begins dismissively. The book is merely the ‘fixed version of a monomaniac’ who strives to create a ‘horrible brainless empire’.29 Then Orwell changes tack, confessing: ‘I have never been able to dislike Hitler.’ There is something ‘deeply appealing about him’, though Orwell would ‘kill him if I could get within reach of him’. Note the opposition between the personal and the political. Orwell wants us to know where his loyalties lie, but subjective licence flourishes in inverse proportion to physical distance. Orwell can ‘reach’ Hitler through the text (which has not impressed him, nor has it conjured a phantom face behind the page) or more significantly through a photographic portrait. The actual presence of Hitler’s face would produce hatred. The photographic representation produces reverence: The fact is there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photograph and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is there. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The competing discourses are evident. Rational enquiry founders when it tries to penetrate the visage. Hitler’s ‘grievance’ must be accepted but its cause ‘can only be guessed at’. The denotation of his mind remains a mystery, but not the connotation, upon which Orwell waxes into a series of analogies, a marked elaboration on the heroism of Dickens. All this is generated by Hitler’s ‘pathetic, dog-like face’. The excessiveness of the physiognomical yield corresponds to a paucity of definition of the object. The possibility of Orwell’s succumbing like

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Winston Smith to power worship and the cult of the personality is perhaps not as outrageous as the claim that the fabricated knowledge in the physiognomic reading is exactly ‘how Hitler sees himself. He does not see his ‘grievance’ which has motivated his career, but the style of his response, his cultural ‘mythology’, as Barthes would say. Once that claim has been made, Orwell can explain Hitler’s political success in terms of this self-sacrificial appeal. According to Orwell, Hitler has grasped the bizarre psychological fact that people desire ‘struggle, danger and death’ of which he is the epitome, rather than being a hated oppressor. This act of mass empathy and identification is what sustains Hitler’s empire, and it is a conscious act of political manipulation. Whereas before Orwell examined the photograph the Hitler of Mein Kampf was an inert ‘fixed vision’, the physiognomy has liberated him, his political vision, and Orwell’s political insight. The irrationality of Orwell’s method matches perfectly the ‘hidden’ secret of totalitarianism: its appeal to the irrational.30 As one critic has rioted, the reading of Hitler’s face is an anticipation of Big Brother.31 In Nineteen Eighty-Four the need to make sense of physiognomy is of utmost importance for the characters and the critic. According to Goldstein’s manual ‘The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism’, the function of Big Brother is to ‘act as a focusing point for love, fear and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards any organisation’.32 Hence the existence of ‘B.B.’s’ face on huge posters, frontispieces to books, coins. This ‘guise’ (p. 167) attracts people’s strongest feelings, taking control of possibly subversive emotions which might deviate from strict loyalty to the party. Such is the totalitarian logic of totemism, a form of mass hypnosis or ‘false consciousness’. The cathartic cocktail of emotions is powerfully contradictory (love, fear). It is a highly ingenious regime, which can produce antithetical responses from the same image. Goldstein’s heretical writings describe the theoretical rationale behind the enigmatic machinery of conditioning. The effect ‘B.B.’33 has on people can be stated, but its confirmation, its actual performance, can only be witnessed in the ‘plot’ of the novel, the world of Winston’s empirical experience, the world of aesthetic writing (Goldstein’s manual has been criticized as a non-literary intrusion into the naturalism of the rest of the novel) and of dangerously uncertain signs. It is in the ‘real’ world of the novel that B.B.’s ability to ‘focus’ contradictory emotions must prove itself. An initial problem is that Winston is not meant to register a typical response to B.B.Winston’s consciousness, which filters the action of the novel, is seditious precisely because it is aware of the ways in which it is being manipulated. Winston can think on a conceptual, theoretical level, though he cannot achieve the systematic overview of Goldstein’s manual. Winston’s insights are constantly compromised by his experience, which paradoxically may lend those insights greater authority. In order to be able to resist thought control, Winston must be able to understand it, to know what the orthodox response to B.B.’s face ought to be. He must look at the face as a site of political struggle. Without its famous caption, we first see simply a man’s face on a large poster tacked to the wall in Winston’s block of flats: ‘the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features’ (p. 5). As Alexander Dallin has observed, there is Vagueness’ and ‘uncertainty’ in this physiognomy.34 B.B. is ‘about’ 45, and there is little to define ‘ruggedly handsome’, the only specific feature being a moustache (the latter detail has been enough for many readers to find the lurking image of Stalin, Kitchener, etc.). ‘Handsome’ is surely a subjective response, though Winston is probably meant to be registering the consensus view. There is a certain ‘reverence’ here, though nothing as yet

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approaching ‘love’. The problem is in deciding whether Winston is inside or outside that reverence. The next physiognomical detail introduces the possibility of ‘fear’: ‘It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move’ (p. 5). The appeal is to a familiar notion of optical illusion which does not have to be explained further. The important point is that ‘contrived’ alerts us to the fact that this is not an ‘unmediated’ reproduction of a ‘real’ face but a construction, a play of signs. The next sentence introduces the caption ‘BIG BROTHER is WATCHING YOU’, which seems to follow naturally, when in fact an illusory ‘following’ movement of the eyes is being invested with purposive intent: ‘watching’. The caption has given the face identity: a name (more on this later) and a mind—a ‘depth’ behind the image. This naturalizing continues when Winston looks at another poster and ‘the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own’ (p. 6). There is depth on both sides but the power of penetration is B.B.’s. The interaction has the aesthetic appeal of mystery, a considerable elaboration from the mere visual trickery of magnetic movement of the eyes, or the sinister state surveillance of ubiquitous ‘watching’. ‘Deep’ suggests an enigmatic, irrational relationship, which may or may not be typical, and may or may not be reducible to politics. The Hate Session ‘focuses’ these questions dramatically. The description of this public event is appropriately the most intense physiognomical episode in the novel. B.B.’s face exerts its maximum power. Winston’s unorthodoxy must struggle against absorption into collective hysteria. He must appear to respond correctly to the images of Goldstein (the Devil) and B.B. (the Saviour) while realizing they are contrivances. When the face of Goldstein is flashed on to the Hate screen it produces in Winston ‘a painful mixture of emotions’: It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard—a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. (p. 13) There is more physical detail here, most of which contributes to a crude racial stereotype. The ‘sheep-like quality’ is Orwell’s equivalent of the Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda which presented Jews as rats. Rats, of course, are Winston’s own private phobia. Goldstein is ‘sheeplike’ presumably to suggest his doctrines are just so much bleating (the diabolical equivalent of duckspeak) or that anyone who follows him is mindless. The comparison is an odd one nevertheless, made even odder a few lines later by the added quality ‘self-satisfied’. Anthropomorphic readings of animals’ faces have been another persistent problem of physiognomy. A face may be ‘self-satisfied’ and ‘sheep-like’, but it is difficult to imagine the two being connected. Likewise the essential connotations of Goldstein’s face rely on fragile connectives: ‘yet somehow’, ‘a kind of’. We do not know where the ‘cleverness’ and its opposing ‘despicable’ aspect come from. The former may have something to do with age and the spectacles perched in an old-fashioned and scholarly manner (both O’Brien and Charrington wear spectacles). Winston’s ability to feel reverence for Goldstein’s cleverness may mark Winston’s rebellious consciousness, his own intelligence. His revulsion would therefore be a conditioned, involuntary, state-induced response, though it is a heavy load for Goldstein’s ‘long thin nose’ to bear. Of course there is much other paraphernalia, but it is clearly the projected faces of

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Goldstein and B.B. that are the ‘focus’ of attention. Goldstein’s ‘sheep-like’ quality is given some objective authority when his face is temporarily replaced by an actual sheep’s face. We see here how the ‘plot’ of a novel may clash with its ‘story’. If we regard the latter as the basic raw material of Oceanic experience, there have been many Hate Sessions, and Winston has seen Goldstein’s face associated with a sheep’s many times. His response has been programmed. But as we read the novel the physiognomy is given first, to be confirmed by the gimmickry. In similar fashion Goldstein’s manual, which Winston reads just prior to his arrest, ostensibly confirms many of Winston’s previous insights. When B.B.’s face reappears on the Hate screen to pacify the audience’s hysterical hatred for Goldstein it is ‘full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen’ (p. 16). At least the irrational aspect of B.B.’s most perplexing feature (his calmness) is here foregrounded. The more his image appears in the novel, the more his face is able to connote. That may be appropriate in the dramatic unfolding of the tale, but runs up against the objection that B.B.’s face does not actually change. There is only one image, with the same expression, the same eyes, the same moustache. The illusory ‘mind’ behind the surface cannot change either. Only the reading of the image can change. Yet there is one variable: size. The face is literally ‘big’. Its power is bound up with its larger-than-life scale (‘because of constantly seeing it on posters he always thought of it as being a metre wide’ (p. 226)). That meaning of ‘big’ seems to make more sense than ‘big brother’—that is, older brother. According to Goldstein’s manual, the name is a ‘direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty’ (p. 172) to mask the actual transformation of the family into an extension of the Thought Police. But if Winston’s estimate of B.B.’s age is correct (‘about forty-five’) then he is a very old brother indeed to young people, not all that old to someone in their mid-forties, and, absurdly, a younger ‘brother’ to anyone above that age. So it is better to think of ‘big’ in terms of size. Given this logic, it comes as a risible shock to find B.B.’s face miniaturized on the backs of coins. As Winston looks at a 25 cent piece he assures us, ‘Even from the coin the eyes pursued you’ (p. 25). The optical trick was feasible for a metre-wide poster. Here it seems barely possible, and certainly nothing to be afraid of. Big Brother has become diminutive. A little further on in the novel Winston ponders the regulation portrait of B.B. on the frontispiece of a children’s history book: The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you—something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. (p. 67) Again there is a disparity between the ‘huge’ impact of the face and its relatively small size. The disparity extends to the extensiveness of Winston’s response and the unparalleled degree of eloquence it consists of. This is the ‘deepest’ response so far, the furthest Winston has been penetrated, the strongest register yet of B.B.’s terrorizing ability. The eyes are ‘hypnotic’: they affect the looker hypnotically. Or rather they typically have this effect. Winston is ‘almost’ hypnotized. His normal perceptions have to remain intact to make the description possible. Hence the fail-safe approximation: ‘It was as though…’. The precise signification of B.B.’s facial details cannot be fixed.

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This indeterminacy, this ‘deferred’ knowledge, actually becomes the physiognomical focus when Winston has a second look at coins at the end of part 1 of the novel: ‘The face gazed up at him, heavy, calm, protecting: but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache?’ (p. 86). There has been no mention of a ‘smile’ before this point. There are some logical absurdities that must be confronted. If the smile is ‘hidden’, there is no reason to suspect its existence. The moustache could equally conceal a grimace, a sneer, etc. There is also a problem with ‘heavy’, whose function must be kept separate from the physical lightness of the coin. But the crucial new information is the absent presence of the smile, as tantalizing as the Mona Lisa. If it can be confirmed, it may connote benevolence, the complement to the ‘calm, protecting’ (though not ‘heavy’) positive virtues of the image. B.B.’s moustache may exist only to produce this desire for and denial of a crucial sign. The moustache is almost a symbol for physiognomy: it is a surface suggesting an immanent meaning beneath it. The final logical flaw is that the moustache can never be penetrated or removed. It will remain in its ambiguous position. Perhaps, however, Winston’s recalcitrance is the real source of the lack of clarity. Once he is ‘cured’, he will see with ideological purity, with untainted vision, and the smile will yield its secret. That is exactly how the novel ends. The veil has been lifted. With a ‘soul white as snow’ Winston looks at a poster (for us it is the final look; for Winston, in many ways, it is the first): He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! (p. 239) The pursuit of the elusive sign is made the ‘focus’ of Winston’s whole life and the terms of his defeat. Yet the ‘kind of smile’ is not specified. If Winston can see its shape and semiotic function, that awareness is ‘hidden’ from language, having escaped the inevitable possibilities of ‘misunderstanding’, into a perfect realm where he can love Big Brother. The function of physiognomy as a ‘focusing’ of powerful emotions has been shown to be problematical. Winston’s lived experience does not readily complement the theoretical statements in Goldstein’s manual. The same tension can be found if we broaden our focus to incorporate the state machinery of which B.B. is the ‘guise’. He cannot really look into a person’s soul, despite Winston’s response. The real snooping and eavesdropping is conducted and directed by those forces ‘behind’ that guise, known collectively as the Thought Police: A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police…the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in his sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized…any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected. (p. 168) State scrutiny, personal paranoia, orthodoxy becoming instinct. Exactly how this watch on deviant signs is maintained is not explained by the manual, despite the mobilization of armies of professionals, including Swiftian scientists: ‘The scientist of to-day is…a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice’ (p. 156). The reason why the scientist has turned

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state physiognomer is ironically because thoughts cannot be read but only deduced. That leaves open the possibility that orthodox responses can be faked, and that is precisely the unstable space that Winston occupies. His facial expressions still remain partly under his control. A minute deviant sign is a major political triumph. But this unorthodoxy can never be shown: The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. (p. 52) These are Winston’s Goldsteinian insights. The totalitarian logic seems coherent, until we examine it with ‘minuteness’. The intention of the state is to ossify facial expression: there must be only one sign for the ever-narrowing range of signifieds. Connotation must become denotation. But we are not told how Party members are trained in ‘wearing’ the ‘proper’ expression. In the example Winston cites, one must look ‘credulous’, as if this will mean the same configuration on the face of each comrade. It is also difficult to know how one can mentally police an ‘unconscious look’, which by definition is involuntary. Presumably facecrime is there to deter, but that exposes the precariousness of the process. If conformity has to be coerced, it is not the ‘instinct’ the Party requires, and it remains a mere surface, the core untouched. This ambiguity is most strikingly demonstrated during the Hate Sessions. Winston ‘could not help sharing in the general delirium’: ‘Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction’ (p. 17). ‘Dissemble’ and ‘control’ are at odds with ‘instinctive’. The use of the generic ‘your’ indicates that the description applies to the ‘general delirium’, which surely is not meant to be seen (by the state, or us) as mass dissimulation. On the threshold of his journey to Room 101, Winston decides that to be successfully disloyal mere control of the features was not enough. For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name. (pp. 225–6) The irony here is that this paradoxical logic has all the trappings of doublethink, to which Winston is still resistant. Similarly, Winston’s own powers of physiognomy achieve results that the Thought Police would be proud of. One of the obvious ways in which those heinous ‘symptoms of inner struggle’ are spotted is by vigilant Party members scrutinizing each other. In this respect Winston is no different. He reads faces in order to respond with the appropriate expression on his own. Take the over-clever Symes, for example, whose ‘mocking eyes’ ‘seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you’ (p. 42). When Symes praises the genius of B.B., ‘a sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mention of Big Brother’ (p. 45). The response is carefully ambiguous. The construction of the sentence does not

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indicate whether Winston is willing the ‘flitting’ movement, or whether it is a weakly involuntary, ‘instinctive’ expression. Symes is perceptive enough to translate whatever happens to Winston’s features (we are not told) into a ‘vapid’ enthusiasm, though Symes is too obsessed with explaining Newspeak to report Winston for facecrime. Ironically it is Symes’s perceptiveness, Winston decides, that means he will be vaporized: ‘He sees too clearly…. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face’ (p. 46). The prophecy is correct. It is worth noting that Winston’s role as surrogate narrator of the novel requires him to provide physiognomical detail about most characters. There is not space here to look at all the instances, though they are uniformly interesting because all have political ramifications.35 The faces of O’Brien and Julia warrant most discussion, and I shall be focusing on them shortly. But attention must first be given to some other fascinating physiognomies. Stereotyping is far from being a bad thing in Oceania, since the intention of the state is to standardize everything, including facial expression. Thus Winston can excoriate the ‘beetlelike type’ ministry workers with their ‘fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes’ (p. 52). The choice of ‘inscrutable’ is interesting. It suggests not only that these clones are mindless automatons, but that whatever is behind the face is impenetrable, impossible to read (the ‘very small eyes’ are points of restricted entry). Rather than orthodoxy’s erasing the last vestiges of connotative slippage between signifier and signified, the latter has been walled off, encased by a mask which can only yield blankness, absence, leaving only a surface. Orthodoxy had precisely that effect on Winston’s wife Katherine: ‘She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it’ (p. 56). The reading of facial detail here is utterly unreliable, a complete red herring. ‘Bold’, ‘aquiline’, and ‘noble’ are the dead reminders of a bygone age where a Platonic correspondence could exist between physical and moral beauty. ‘Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’ The mind is a non-state, a vacuum, no longer occupied by thought. The problem for the state is that it has not yet abolished expression, which constantly promises to refer to the meaning ‘behind it’. Little wonder, then, that Winston’s memory is haunted by faces and vacuums. His description of Katherine is actually encased in a more dramatic memory: the encounter with the prostitute. Winston juxtaposes the debased sexuality of the latter with the debased frigidity of the former. Yet both women have the same attribute of an unreliable exterior. Initially this was the appeal of the prostitute: ‘She had a young face, painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party women never paint their faces’ (p. 54). The excitement of make-up is not its ability to enhance but its ability to conceal. Winston is lured to the subversive potential of a ‘mask’, the falsification, the fabrication, of appearance in a regulated world. When the lamplight reveals the horrible truth that the woman is not young but old, the mask begins to crack: The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all. (p. 58) Once the mask cracks there is only a ‘cavernous blackness’, the abyss of the dissolution of meaning, an elusive and treacherous ‘depth’. Winston is disgusted that he ‘went ahead and

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did it just the same’. Perhaps the vacuous area of non-meaning is as enticing as it is terrifying. When Julia puts on make-up for Winston (including the exact same perfume the prostitute used) her beauty is enhanced, though Winston cannot help recalling a ‘cavernous mouth’ (p. 117). Winston’s most galling memory is of his mother and sister. He is consumed by guilt. They disappeared one day when he had run off with his sister’s ration of chocolate. The last thing he saw was his ‘mother’s anxious eyes…fixed on his face’. (p. 133). He has never been able to interpret that expression, to know what she was really thinking. In his dreams that absence is transformed into powerful symbolism: Both of them were looking up at him. They were down in some subterranean place—the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave—but it was a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still see him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down .. . they were down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoidable order of things. (p. 27) In fact the ‘order of things’ in Oceania does not countenance the irrational ‘knowledge in their faces.’ Self-sacrifice, emotional ties, are ‘subterranean’. They have no possible signifiers in a regime which strives to make all meaning ‘unavoidable’. The only place for ‘cavernous blackness’ is in Room 101, the ultimate torture chamber of Miniluv (‘the place where there is no darkness’, as another dream prophetically informs him), where he will atone for his guilt. The reaching of physiognomy into the realm of the irrational is nowhere more advanced than in the contact Winston makes with Julia and O’Brien. Both relationships commence with highly charged, mysterious glances. In both cases Winston is certain there has been an almost telepathic communication. In both cases he misreads what is ‘written’ on the other’s face. His physiognomical powers are finely tuned enough to mark Julia and O’Brien out as special, but his interpretations are also fatally compromised. We are not told very much about Julia’s face. She is ‘bold-looking’ (p. 11). Winston is not attracted to her. She, like O’Brien, summons him: ‘Once when they passed in the corridor she had given him a quick, sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror’ (p. 12). As Barthes said, the ‘uncertain sign’ is a source of ‘terror’. To understand Winston’s excessive reaction we have to learn more about his profound sexual ambivalences.36 His relationship with Julia has elements of sadism, that with O’Brien elements of masochism. Ambivalence is a ‘black’ area of unfixed signification, an area which threatens the protagonist, the state, and the critic desperate to impose an interpretation. Julia’s ‘glance’ penetrates Winston with more savagery than B.B. ever manages. Winston assumes she is a member of the Thought Police, and in fact she has chosen him precisely because she has spotted his unorthodoxy: ‘It was something in your face. I thought I’d take a chance. I’m good at spotting people who don’t belong. As soon as I saw you I knew you were against them’ (p. 100). Winston’s hunch is not too far off the mark. Whatever that ‘something’ is, it is a reliable sign. It is significant that one of the effects of Winston’s

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torture is to batter his face beyond recognition and effectively give it ‘new shape’ (p. 225), a new set of signifiers for his changed feelings. Winston’s interior, however, is still intractable, leading to a mismatch: The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it registered would be different from the ones he felt. (p. 2.18) The state cannot possibly allow that degree of malfunction of physiognomy. Such a face would be no more than a mask. So there is an insidious logic in the form of torture devised for Winston in Room 101: a ‘mask-like attachment’ (p. 217) which is strapped to his head and from which rats will be released to strip away his face. The horror of the situation causes a ‘black panic’ (p. 230). It is no coincidence this reminds us of the ‘black terror’ of Julia’s first glance. The only way Winston can save himself is to tell the rats to ‘Tear her face off. When the two of them meet in the outside world again, their faces are duly changed. Hers is ‘sallower’, and her hair partly conceals a scar (p. 234). His face is ‘bloated’ and watery, the symptoms of his besotted quiescence. This time her ‘momentary glance’ is ‘full of contempt and dislike’, though Winston’s watery mind cannot be precise about the exact origins of the hostility: it could be the past; it could be merely his face. O’Brien’s face is presented in much more detail than Julia’s: O’Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming—in some indefinable way, curiously civilised. (p. 12.) We are prepared to tolerate the vagueness of ‘indefinable’ for the intriguing contrast of charm and brutality which is the fascination for Winston. The full implications of O’Brien’s ‘urbane manner and his prize-fighter’s physique’ are worked out in the torture scenes. At this stage in the novel, O’Brien’s incongruous features connote incongruous politics: ‘Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but simply intelligence.’ Perhaps. We have to rely on that absent ‘something’ again. The only certain unorthodoxy is the oddness of O’Brien’s features, later described as ‘ugly and yet so civilised’ (p. 143) and ‘ugly, and so intelligent’ (p. 202.). O’Brien ought certainly to be a target for the Thought Police. When his and Winston’s eyes meet during the Hate Session, it is ‘intelligence’ in a different sense which occurs: there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew—yes, he knew!—that O’Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakeable message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. ‘I am with you,’ O’Brien seemed to be saying to him. ‘I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don’t worry, I am on your side!’ And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O’Brien’s face was as inscrutable as everybody else’s. (p. 17)

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With hindsight we know that O’Brien is faking this look—a very remarkable skill which must lead some readers to disregard the ‘flash of intelligence’ as mystery-mongering. The incident is only slightly less credible, however, than the ‘real-life’ precedents studied earlier. The language of the passage is orthodox physiognomy: thoughts flowing in and out through the eyes. Winston’s reading of the ‘equivocal glance’ (p. 18) is given credence by Julia: ‘She was used to judging people by their faces, and it seemed natural to her that Winston should believe O’Brien to be trustworthy on the strength of a single flash of the eyes’ (p. 124). Such is the ‘equivocal’ nature of Winston’s inordinate trust in O’Brien that on several occasions O’Brien’s face and B.B.’s seem interchangeable in Winston’s mind. Once Winston is captured, this irrational likening becomes prophetic, for Winston takes on the role of the state. His ‘intelligence’ is at least as problematical as his ‘brutal’ side. The sadistic infliction of pain plays its part in Winston’s torture, of course, as does his own masochistic response. Critics have attributed Winston’s continual respect and admiration for his torturer to homosexuality (this explanation extends to B.B. also), power worship, guilt.37 By these criteria, O’Brien and Winston are on the same side: the diminutive Winston, the ‘prize-fighter’ O’Brien. But Winston’s ‘conversion’ from sinner to believer is the result not only of physical pain but of elaborate intellectual interrogation. O’Brien takes great pains to explain and argue the system, to undermine and destroy Winston’s view of the world. This is where the athleticism and power of O’Brien’s ‘intelligence’ proves itself. It comes as no major surprise to discover he helped to write Goldstein’s manual. O’Brien seems omniscient, as godlike as B.B. That is exactly where his intelligence becomes a problem. If O’Brien is still a part of the system he must use doublethink. He must believe even the more outrageous facets of the creed he espouses. It is much easier for Winston (and us) to see O’Brien as a controller and manipulator if not a producer of state ideology, able to wield it so effectively because he is not its subject like everyone else. This problem is presented in physiognomic terms. While tied down on a table, of course, Winston’s whole universe has centred on O’Brien’s face. When O’Brien’s pseudo-religious ranting rises to its fever pitches, Winston searches for knowledge in the face hovering over him: His face looked enormous because of its nearness, and hideously ugly because it was seen from below. Moreover it was filled with a sort of exaltation, a lunatic intensity. (p. 203) His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his face. He is not pretending, thought Winston; he is not a hypocrite; he believes every word he says…. His mind contained Winston’s mind. But in that case how could it be true that O’Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad. (p. 205) You could see it in his face. O’Brien knew everything. A thousand times better than Winston he knew what the world was really like…. What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself…? (p. 211) This is the final destination of Orwell’s physiognomy of politics: a lunatic intelligence, the inversion of signifying systems; ‘cavernous blackness’ of ‘lunatic intensity’. Whether or not the ‘enormous’ image is aesthetically and intellectually satisfying will continue to be debated. The face remains a surface upon which competing claims will be made. Winston’s reading of what can be seen in O’Brien’s face need not be correct.

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One final point. The last sight we have of Winston is of his shedding ‘two gin-scented tears’. Do these tears signify relief, remorse, self-pity, adulation? As physiognomers ourselves, we must continue to struggle with the productiveness of connotation, and to revel in its possibilities.

Roehampton Institute of Higher Education

NOTES 1 For information about the history of physiognomy, I am indebted to chapter 3 of Aaron Scharf, William Hogarth (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1979), Unit 7 of the Second-Level Arts Course, The Enlightenment’. 2 Ibid., p. 25. 3 Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), passim. 4 Quoted in ibid., pp. 137–8. 5 Quoted in ibid., p. 138. 6 ‘Good prose is like a window pane’: quoted from ‘Why I write’ (1946), in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), vol. 1, p. 7; this work is referred to as CEJL from this point. 7 For a useful summary of many of the modern positions on linguistic theory, see Richard Harland, Superstructuralism (London: Methuen, 1987), chs 7 and 10. 8 Scharf, op. cit., pp. 26–7. 9 An élitist objection to the advent of photography was that it lowered the standards of art. Baudelaire, for instance, reckoned that ‘From that moment our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal’: quoted in Victor Burgin (ed.), Thinking Photography (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 96. 10 I have found Victor Burgin’s work particularly useful in this section of the article. 11 See ‘The photographic message’ (1961) in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana, 1987), pp. 15–31. 12 From ‘The rhetoric of the image’, in ibid., p. 39. 13 Victor Burgin, ‘Photographic practice and art theory’, in Burgin (ed.), op. cit., pp. 54–5. 14 Victor Burgin, ‘Looking at photography’, in ibid., p. 153. 15 Simon Watney, ‘Making strange: the shattered mirror’, in ibid., p. 174. 16 Barthes, op. cit., p. 39. 17 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 16–17. 18 CEJL, 1, pp. 170–213, 177–8. 19 George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 7. Abbreviated from now on as HC. 20 HC, p. 8. 21 The poem concludes ‘Looking back on the Spanish Civil War’ (1942). See HC, p. 246. 22 HC, p. 244. 23 HC, p. 243. 24 HC, p. 243. 25 HC, p. 247. 26 CEJL, 1, p. 460. 27 See the contributions to Christopher Norris (ed.), Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984), and Raymond Williams, Orwell (London: Fontana, 1984).

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28 Review of Assignment in Utopia by Eugene Lyons, published in New English Weekly, 9 June 1938; CEJL, 1, pp. 333–4, 334. 29 Review of Mein Kampf, published in New English Weekly, 21 March 1940; CEJL, 2 pp. 12–14, 13. 30 Orwell believed Zamyatin’s We was superior to Huxley’s Brave New World because of We’s ‘intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism— human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is created with divine attributes’. See review of We published in Tribune, 4 January 1946; CEJL, 2, pp. 72–5, 75. 31 William Steinhoff, George Orwell and the Origins of 1984 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975), p. 186. 32 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 167. Subsequent page references appear in the text in parentheses. I am aware that Goldstein’s book was written partly by O’Brien, but for convenience’s sake I continue to refer to to it as Goldstein’s manual. 33 I use the Party shorthand for Big Brother, so there is no need to continue using quotation marks for B.B. 34 Alexander Dallin, ‘Big Brother is watching you’, in Peter Stansky (ed.), On Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York and San Francisco: W.H.Freeman, 1983), pp. 188–97, 88. 35 The most significant omission from this article is the face of Charrington, which has echoes of both O’Brien and Goldstein, and which undergoes a transformation into a face of a member of the Thought Police at the end of part 2. 36 See Antony Easthope, ‘Fact and fantasy in Nineteen Eighty-Four’, in Norris (ed.), op. cit., pp. 243–63; Paul Robinson, ‘For the love of Big Brother: the sexual politics of Nineteen EightyFour’, in Stansky (ed.), op. cit., pp. 148–58. 37 See the persuasive treatment of the religious implications of Winston’s torture in Patrick Reilly, George Orwell: The Age’s Adversary (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986), ch. 9.

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The politics of Finnegans Wake DAVID PIERCE

There is no more daunting task for criticism than an enquiry into the politics of Finnegans Wake, a text whose epigraph is perhaps best captured in the schoolboy Latin of the interrogators in chapter 15:

Magis megis enerretur mynus hoc intelligow. (478.17–18) Indeed, the more Finnegans Wake is explained, the less at times it is understood—which is a not uncommon pattern of response. Fog, together with cloud and rain, constitutes the natural ambience of this text, and becomes in turn emblematic of the relationship between it and the reader. At the opening of chapter 3 the reader is invited to ‘Chest Cee!’ But the fog is ‘Sdense’ that the reader becomes the object of scorn, out of place, a ‘spoof of visibility in a freakfog’ (48.1–2). Nothing is clear—not even the reader’s desire for clarity, which is being in some way spoofed—though there may be temporary, if misplaced, relief in that it is only a ‘freakfog’. For much of the text, the reader is like ‘Head-in-Clouds’ (18.23), anxiously awaiting the proverbial breaks in the clouds for a view of the earth below. But the fog continues. The first and last chapters of Book 3 begin with a reference to it—‘White fogbow spans’ (403.6); ‘What was thaas? Fog was whaas?’ (555.1)—and it is not until the final chapter that we are confidently, though perhaps ironically, informed by someone that the ‘smog is lofting’ (593.6–7). Not for nothing did Joyce refer to Finnegans Wake as his ‘experiment in interpreting “the dark night of the soul”’. 1 We can go further and, in the light of Roland Barthes’s attack on the distinction between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of writing, 2 add that this experiment is intensified for the reader by Joyce’s familiar coupling of experience and writing, by which means he underscores the fact that writing too is ‘experience’. Fog, dreams, the night—these are useful metaphors for the unknown territory here being charted. Joyce didn’t need Ezra Pound to tell him how difficult (that is, how painful) it was for the reader. He knew exactly what was involved: hence the constant promptings and encouragement to the reader not to give up. ‘Phew!’ (10.24) as we exit from the Willingdone Museyroom. ‘What a warm time we were in there.’ Indeed. Elsewhere we are told: ‘Cry not yet!’ (20.19), or, more simply, ‘Smile!’ (55.2). Later, words are put into our mouths: ‘This is nat language at any sinse of the world’ (83.12). We are even told who constitutes the ideal reader—someone ‘suffering from an ideal insomnia’ (120.13–14). Suffering, yes, but then even this purchase on the text is undermined by the humorous collocation of insomnia with ideal. It is a ‘book of Doublends Jined’ (20.15–16), ‘Work in Progress’, a ‘most moraculous jeeremyhead sindbook for all the peoples’ (229.31–2,), ‘all about crime and libel’ (419.34). But

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‘the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude’ (57.16—17). Indeed, we might not unreasonably conclude that Finnegans Wake is the ‘last word in stolentelling!’ (424.35). Lies, distortion, voices from afar (3.9, 407.14), impenetrable riddles and stories, history as ‘fabled by the daughters of memory’ (Ulysses, p. 20), together underline the difficulty (some might say the folly) of ever being able to determine the politics of Finnegans Wake. Then, too, we are unsure—yet it belongs to an early stage of any such investigation—if we are dealing primarily with parody, pastiche, or burlesque. Is the ‘collideorscape’ (143.28) showing us a universe where, following Nicholas of Cusa, there is a coincidence of opposites, or a world where things are linked arbitrarily? What is being mocked in bringing together disparate material in this way—one or more of the items referred to, or the human desire to make sense of such disparate material? Such questions serve to remind us of a wider modern fascination, which stretches across the sciences and the humanities, with Heisenberg’s ‘indeterminacy principle’, and perhaps it is for this reason that we need to address issues of clarification rather than increase the epistemological doubt never far from the surface of Joyce studies. To prevent adding to the confusion, it may be helpful if we isolate three areas for consideration in an approach to the politics of Finnegans Wake: the political context of Finnegans Wake, its political message, and political readings. The first belongs to a form of historical investigation and placing, to what Robert Weimann calls ‘past significance’;3 the second to the author’s implicit or explicit political message as contained in the text; the third to our own contemporary political interpretation of Finnegans Wake, or to what Weimann terms ‘present meaning’. Of course, these three areas significantly overlap, and Weimann would be the first to insist on the unity of the first and the third, the historical with the evaluative. But in Wake studies we are still some way off integrating the historical with the evaluative, and we need therefore to put down some markers. Too often in critical discussions of the politics of Finnegans Wake the tendency has been to focus on one area with little or no thought given to the other two areas. The best discussions—and I include here the work of John Garvin, Hugh Kenner, W.J.McCormack, and Seamus Deane—have come from investigations into historical context; less satisfactory—and I here instance the work of Phillip Herring, Diarmuid Maguire, and, though excellent in other ways, Dominic Manganiello—have been those which centre on the second area; the third area remains the least explored but, given the advances of recent feminist theory, the most promising.4 Here I concentrate on presenting an overall picture of what I take to be involved in discussing the politics of Finnegans Wake. In the first section I point up certain lines in recent developments, in the second section my intention is to clarify difficulties, while in the third I touch on alternative approaches to this particular topic. POLITICAL CONTEXT The political context of Finnegans Wake embraces a wide field of enquiry, which, for illustrative purposes, can be grouped under a series of headings labelled Irish, Anglo-Irish, European, myth, and history, and with further subheadings referring to pre-modern history, the nineteenth century, the Fall of Parnell, the Easter Rising, the Irish Civil War, and the inter-war years. In this regard we might note the significance of the date when Finnegans Wake was begun, for 1923 marked the end of the Civil War and of the revolutionary period

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ushered in by Easter 1916. Just as Ulysses belongs to a period of expectancy that found its now perennially hopeful expression in the one day in June in 1904, in a parallel way Finnegans Wake gives voice to the disorder and disillusionment that befell Irish politics in the immediate aftermath of the Anglo-Irish War, when civil war and internecine feuding broke out between the warring brothers Shem and Shaun. Shaun, as John Garvin makes clear, is not unlike the figure of Eamon de Valera, the ‘dogmestic Shaun’ (411.23), who rose from being a ‘mathmaster’ (4.4) to becoming ‘through deafths of durkness greengrown deeper… [the] vote of the Irish, voise from afar’ (407.12–14). This connection between Shaun and de Valera receives further support from Sean O’Faolain’s equally critical biography of the Irish leader published in the same year as Finnegans Wake. One passage might well be about ‘frank’ Shaun: Fundamentally his political integrity was unimpeachable…. If only… De Valera would once or twice say, ‘I am not infallible. I am no hero. I am no saint. I had to contradict myself. It was for Ireland’—the heart would open more readily to him, and one could without detriment either to the symbol or the man create the hero in full admiration.5 De Valera refused to acknowledge Lloyd George’s Anglo-Irish Treaty, which had been negotiated under duress in December 1921 by Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins, and the other Irish leaders. Instead, he proposed an amendment known as Document Number Two, which sought a looser association between Ireland and Great Britain. It was a narrow point of principle: effectively, the Irish delegates had been outmanœuvred by the British, who had used the familiar tactic of divide and rule. As someone once quipped, the only difference between the two documents was that one was signed and the other one wasn’t. Throughout Finnegans Wake there are references to Documents Numbers One and Two (see 358.30, 369.24, 386.20, 528.32, 619.19), and in chapter 15 ‘Keven’ (a Shaun figure) finds ‘dogumen number one…an illegible downfumbed by an unelgible’ (482.20–1). What distressed Joyce about de Valera was his moral uprightness, his dogmatic insistence on a formula of words, his narrow view of Ireland, and his willingness to plunge his country into civil war and thereby subject Nora and the children in April 1922. to ‘the premier terror of Errorland’ (62.25) (a phrase that yokes together de Valera as President of Dail Eireann, his parsimonious role in the treaty negotiations, and the ensuing terror which accompanied the breakdown of order). ‘The devil era’ (473.8), which is interpreted, significantly, in the context of the treaty negotiations as ‘a slip of time between a date and a ghostmark’ (473.8–9), had begun. In many ways the primary political context for Finnegans Wake is the Civil War, so much so that Hugh Kenner has suggested that the figure being waked is perhaps a participant in that conflict.6 Certainly, apart from de Valera there are enough references to other figures and events, as well as to fratricide, violence to the person, and decidedly sinister encounters, to support the notion that Finnegans Wake is a Civil War text. The presence of Erskine Childers, whose father Hugh Culling Eardley Childers (1827–96) was nicknamed ‘Here Comes Everybody’, is relevant here. Author of the thriller The Riddle of the Sands (1903), Childers took part in the Howth gun-running in July 1914; he later joined de Valera’s Republican side in the Civil War, and, having been caught with a pistol in his possession (given him by Michael Collins when the two were on the same side), was executed in November 1922 by a Free State firing squad. He is mentioned at 473.9, ‘chilldays embers’,

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and at 596.5, ‘hailed chimers’ ersekind’, where there is a play on his (and HCE’s) Englishness; he is possibly being referred to in the first question in the picture gallery chapter in the phrase ‘made a summer assault on our shores and begiddy got his sands full’ (132.20–1), and perhaps he is there, when the Document is being scrutinized in chapter 5, as ‘the eternal chimerahunter…the sensory crowd in his belly coupled with an eye for the goods trooth bewilderblissed by their night effluvia with guns like drums’ (107.14–17). Drawing attention to this particular context to Finnegans Wake returns us as a matter of course to the less ambiguous period preceding the Troubles and to the ‘Surrection!’ (593.2) of Easter Week 1916, ‘our hour or risings’ (598.13), and to the Proclamation of the Republic: ‘Eireweeker to the wohld bludyn world’ (593.3). The beginning of the last chapter of Finnegans Wake is a celebration of a new dawn, part of which takes its cue from 1916. ‘Surrection!’ is both resurrection and insurrection; ‘Eireweeker’ is both Eire, Easter Week, HCE, ear, and weaker; ‘the whole bludyn world’ is reminiscent of the papal address ‘Urbi et Orbi’ given at Easter and therefore linked with the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic from the General Post Office; it also picks up the phrase in chapter 1 used after the ‘erection’ of the wall—‘For whole the world to see’ (6.11–12). Throughout the final chapter there are references to the wider nationalist struggle for Irish independence: Sinn Fein, whose slogan we might notice did service for Joyce’s own ideological perspective, reinterpreted now as ‘oursouls alone’, is mentioned at 614.14 and 623.28–9; Patrick Pearse appears at 620.24; at 614.17 Parnell’s insistence that ‘newmanmaun set a marge to the merge of unnotions’ is dusted down again (compare its earlier formulation at 292.26–7) ; the unofficial nineteenth-century Irish national anthem and rallying call written by Thomas Davis appears as ‘Innition wons agame’ at 614.17–18; while Michael Dwyer, the 1798 rebel, has a walk-on part at 600.18. The celebration of Easter 1916, however, is short-lived, and with the ricorso we are back to the opening chapter again with ‘snake wurrums everyside’ (19.12), ‘sneaks’ (19.13), ‘racketeers and bottloggers’ (19.19), the ante- and post-bellum period, as it were, of ‘bloody wars’ (14.9) and ‘Killallwho’ (15.11). However, we can perhaps hear in the very last words of the chapter the Sinn Fein slogan, not now ‘ourselves alone’ but simply ‘a lone’ (628.15). For, if Finnegans Wake—caught as it is between 1916 and 1923—is concerned in no small measure with the theme of loss, then part of that loss turns on the historical failure of the Irish revolution to bring forth a new Ireland. In identifying the period 1916–23 as one of the strands that constitute the political context for Finnegans Wake, it is as well not to claim too much. For of course there are other strands, some of which are Irish, others of which are not. Some critics, for example, might wish to argue for priority to be assigned to the Roderick O’Conor sketch, which was the earliest passage of Finnegans Wake to be written. At the Treaty of Windsor in 1175 Rory O’Connor, the last High King of Ireland, pledged his allegiance—‘suck up’ (381.30) is how this is described in the text—to Henry II, and thus was initiated the modern phase of Irish history, caught between subservience to and rejection of the Crown. Others, aware that Joyce’s focus is on his native country but now broadened to include all kinds of material much of which is non-Irish, might wish to claim that the primary political context for Finnegans Wake is that of the exile in Europe, keenly alive to politics but guarded about taking sides, especially in a period that tended to see the destiny of man exclusively, as Thomas Mann observed, in political terms.

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Equally, we need to bear in mind that the relationship between text and context in the case of Finnegans Wake is perhaps qualitatively different from that which obtains with other works. The defeat of the left at the Battle of the Ebro in 1938 is a moment that haunts Malcolm Lowry’s ‘thirties’ novel Under the Volcano (1947). It is not only significant for the British consul’s brother Hugh, who was a correspondent for The Globe in Madrid, but it is also associated with the growth of fascism in Mexico—the British consulate in Cuernavaca is on the point of being closed, the Nazi German presence is increasing, and at the end of the novel the consul is murdered by fascist police. The political context for the novel, it can be legitimately argued, is the Spanish Civil War, its repercussions and meanings, which can now be felt worldwide. Among the political themes dealt with in the novel are: the defeat of the left, the image of life as an ‘arena’ where diametrically opposed viewpoints or political systems are in conflict (Mexico is described as being at the centre of the earth, Cuernavaca as the place where the American-style highway peters out, while a bullfight occupies a central episode of the novel), the shadow of world war, the problem of commitment especially for the writer, and the possibility or otherwise of private life in an age of politics. The political context for Under the Volcano, a novel that is often seen in non-political terms, is in fact especially sharp and revolves around quintessentially thirties concerns. Finnegans Wake (which is also in part a thirties text) cannot be tied back so neatly to any one political context. This, though, has nothing to do with its being more ‘universal’ or tackling ‘universal’ themes. Rather, it centres on Joyce’s rewriting of the relationship between text and context and the consequent disarray for the critic in determining what constitutes his or her role in such matters: there is no political unconscious in Finnegans Wake awaiting the supplementary attention of the critic. Hence the political context for Finnegans Wake needs augmenting by two other sorts of investigation, one concerned with Joyce’s intentions and message, the other with a second-order enquiry where the concept of a political context or ideas about the relationship between text and context are themselves subjected to scrutiny under what can be termed political readings. POLITICAL MESSAGE In looking for a clue to Joyce’s politics in Finnegans Wake we might well recall Shaun’s cautionary note in his portrait of Shem in chapter 7: ‘not even then could such an antinomian be true to type’ (172.17–18). Possibly in reaction to his Jesuit education and Catholic upbringing, Joyce hated to be pinned down. As an undergraduate, Stephen Dedalus refuses to sign Tsar Nicholas II’s petition for peace; as an established Irish writer, Joyce refused to join the newly formed Irish Academy of Letters. He even turned down an invitation to a St Patrick’s Day party at which the Irish ambassador was to attend, for fear that his presence might be misconstrued as a tacit endorsement of the Free State.7 In the biography, Richard Ellmann tells us that Joyce ‘refused to commit himself publicly in any way’.8 But in a sense of course he already had, for from the moment of his exile from his native country in 1904, which was a deliberate disengagement from Ireland, there developed a parallel and increasingly public commitment to writing. Unlike many British writers of the thirties, such as Edward Upward, W.H.Auden, Christopher Isherwood, or George Orwell, Joyce remained unimpressed by the distinction between writing and action. Hence the absence in his work of the exploration of the border, whether as symbol or reality. For him, writing was experience,

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and it remained the most effective instrument for reshaping and changing the world. Hence the significance (in part at least) of the image of the telescope in Finnegans Wake. At the same time, his commitment to writing went hand in hand with a Flaubertian desire as an author to refine himself out of existence and to make the paraphrase of his work formidable and, perhaps with his final work, impossible. These factors need to be kept in mind as we try to discover what it is Joyce intended by Finnegans Wake. In the late eighteenth century Edmund Burke voiced his opposition to Grattan’s Protestant Parliament on the grounds that, if the connection with Westminster were broken, the rights of Irish Catholics—which, he knew, were precariously few under English law—would be further eroded. Joyce’s view—and it is one that he never seems to have radically altered—was that genuine freedom for the Irish people was not to be equated simply with breaking the crosschannel link. Like Stephen, he understood how he was a servant of two masters—England and Rome. Historically, with the establishment of the Free State in 1922, the links with the Crown were broken, but the other tyranny continued and indeed—at least in the field of censorship and social legislation—flourished. ‘Healiopolis’ in the figure of Tim Healy—and we might recall Joyce’s childhood poem ‘Et Tu, Healy’, which contains (presumably) a scathing attack on Healy for his part in the fall of Parnell—was now in charge at the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park. If Joyce was a Republican, then it was of the Parnellite Home Rule variety; that is, he desired to break the connection with England—but not entirely (after all, he was in receipt of a Civil List pension and continued to travel under a British passport). I think it is against this background that we should interpret his remarks in Finnegans Wake about ‘freestouters and publicranks’ (329.31): he is not saying a plague on all your houses, whether Free Stater or Republican, but rather he is showing impatience with the narrowing of the political options available for his country. He was equally irritated with the Border and with the Border issue. In the encounter between the attacker and the adversary, ‘the boarder incident prerepeated itself’ (81.32–3), while in the portrait of Shem in chapter 7 Shaun declares: ‘He even ran away with hunself and became a farsoonerite, saying he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland’s split little pea’ (171.4–6). To muddle through rather than meddle with—here is the characteristic Joycean emphasis, now augmented with the familiar opposition between Europe as opportunity and Ireland as backward and provincial. It isn’t the whole story, of course, for what is Finnegans Wake doing if it isn’t meddling with ‘Irrland’s split little pea’? Indeed, throughout his writings Joyce strikes at the narrow definitions of Irish identity increasingly apparent from the 1880s onwards. Think of the censure of the Celtic Revival in ‘A Mother’, of the celebration of the outsider in Irish culture in Ulysses and its twin attack on Mr Deasy’s Orangeism and the Citizen’s one-eyed nationalism, or of the deliberate choice in Finnegans Wake of a hero who uses a ‘British to my backbone tongue’ (36.31–2) and whose surname is derived from a West Sussex directory. Who now, Joyce seems to be saying, can tell the difference between Mutt and Jute, the indigeneous Irish from the foreign invader? ‘Become a bitskin more wiseable, as if I were you’ (16.24–5). Conversely, who now can claim proprietorial or exclusive rights to English, given the writing of Finnegans Wake and given the way in which Joyce—like the Gaelic-speaking King—‘murdered all the English he knew’ (93.2)? It is appropriate to concentrate in the first instance on the Irish and on the Anglo-Irish context of Joyce’s message, but it is not enough. The audience for Finnegans Wake is an

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international one which, as Louis MacNeice put it, may or may not care ‘Who is the king of your castle’.9 Joyce’s message, in other words, exhibits more than an Irish inflection and contains a much wider appeal for a modern audience. Here we might single out two aspects: the theme of peace and the right to individual liberty. As chapter 1 demonstrates, human history in general and European and British history in particular has been a history of warfare, of ‘wills gen wonts’ (4.1). Hear its sounds of guns and wailing: ‘Brekkek Kekkek Kekkek Kekkek! Koax Koax Koax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh!’ (4.2–3). What better place to capture the essence of human history than a museum dedicated to war. In the opening chapter Joyce gives us the Willingdone, that monument to war and to the arrogant use of male sexual power which stands guard not only over the sexual misdeeds of HCE but also as it were over the whole text. In Joyce’s Notebook, VI.B.22 (p. 150), he lists a series of foreign words for peace, for paix—‘Hoping’, ‘Takiya’, ‘Hoa bink’, ‘Thai bink’, ‘Soc’, ‘Kuam samakkhi’, ‘berdamai’, ‘ju jen pen suk’, ‘shanti’, ‘sainte’, ‘sianta’, ‘al-solhe’, ‘soulhe’, ‘soulke’, ‘Khagagouthioun’, ‘dama’. As the first three words of the last chapter remind us, Finnegans Wake is a call for peace: ‘Sandhyas! Sandhyas! Sandhyas!’ (593.1). Samdhi, like shantih, is Sanskrit for peace, and so it is appropriate that, just as the first chapter begins with the fall of human history, the last chapter begins with an expression of hope, a turning of the page of human history, a coda to what has gone before. The Sanctus triplet is here perhaps the least ambiguous of all its appearances in the text—earlier we have had ‘Xanthos! Xanthos! Xanthos!’ (235.9), ‘Shaunti and shaunti and shaunti again!’ (408.33), and ‘Shunt us! Shunt us! Shunt us! (454.33). It also contrasts with the ‘Shantih’ of the last line of T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922.), which is in Eliot’s gloss ‘The Peace which passeth understanding’.10 Peace in Joyce is never associated with some higher realm of consciousness, but is invariably located in time and place, and we shouldn’t be surprised if the opening to the last chapter also mimes the Easter Rising, or indeed if hope for the future is shadowed by the hopes for the future in the past. The second aspect concerns Joyce’s constant references to individual liberty. In chapter 3, HCE is called a list of what he assumes are abusive names—‘Firstnighter, Informer, Old Fruit’, and so on. Though hurt, he does not rise to the bait; he is going through a period of religious reform, we are humorously informed, helped by ‘the dominican mission for the sowsealist potty’ and ‘the rowmish devowtion known as the howly rowsary’ (72.23–5). Instead, his response, captured in the lowly comma, in the change of typeface, and in the use of free indirect speech, is muted, defensive, and verbose: ‘but anarchistically respectsful of the liberties of the noninvasive individual, did not respond a solitary wedgeword beyond such sedentarity’ (72.16–18). Again, we cannot expect the antinomian to be true to type (in both meanings of that phrase), but I think we can detect in Finnegans Wake a plea for the rights of the individual to be respected. In this regard we might notice how such rights are seen not so much in terms of democratic or consumer rights but rather as the more basic right to be an agnostic, or not to have a gun pointed in one’s face, or perhaps—bearing in mind the special difficulties of the owner of a public house—not to have people invade one’s private space. Finnegans Wake does not contain the kind of political message that is to be found in, say, Sean O’Casey’s The Star Turns Red (1940) or in the great plays of Bertolt Brecht’s period of exile. Joyce shied away from the role of teacher, and the only lesson the Shem figure teaches is a subversive one, namely the geometry of ALP’s vagina (which is also presumably a sideswipe at the ‘mathmaster’s’ sterile approach to reality). It must be confessed that the

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political message outlined here amounts to very little. After all, there are few who don’t want peace or the right not to be unduly disturbed—especially at night. Compare the insightfulness about war everywhere apparent in Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), as in the Sergeant’s opening remark about ‘Peace—that’s just a mess; takes a war to restore order…no order, no war’, or in the Chaplain’s opinion that ‘war satisfies all requirements, peaceable ones included’, or in Brecht’s own view of the play—that war is ‘a continuation of business by other means’, that ‘no sacrifice is too great for the struggle against war’.11 By comparison, the discourse on peace in Finnegans Wake, especially when we recall its date of publication, is too generalized and bland, too lacking in the necessary edge and focus, to ultimately challenge us. This remains one of the central difficulties in centring a discussion of the politics of Finnegans Wake on the text’s political message, for even after the political platform has been identified, which is no easy task given the Flaubertian inheritance, there still remains the problem of the insightfulness or otherwise of what is being said. POLITICAL READINGS In outlining the political context and message of Finnegans Wake, a number of political readings have already been touched on. In this section the focus is on Weimann’s ‘present meaning’. A common objection to Finnegans Wake from the left and others is that reality is complex enough and that in writing Finnegans Wake Joyce has merely compounded it. Given that such a charge can be answered, another one often follows, for as Marx said in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’ 12 Put differently, could the time needed to understand Finnegans Wake be better spent changing the world? Is there not a tyranny on Joyce’s part in requiring so much time and attention from the reader? Have all the words written by the professors in interpreting the text contributed to anything significant beyond the Joyce confederacy? Has Finnegans Wake, in Brecht’s words, shortened ‘the age of exploitation’?13 These questions are difficult to answer but are worth raising because they challenge us to develop a more finely tuned political reading of the work—even if in the end we remain consumed by self-doubt, conscious perhaps, like Shem, of not ‘having struck one blow’ (176.29) (for Ireland or freedom). Among the many political readings of Finnegans Wake, two strands in particular can be mentioned here. The first concerns the way in which Joyce has widened a discussion of politics to include material often designated as outside its scope. In this regard his assault on the phallocentricity of language is telling. Nothing in Finnegans Wake has a single meaning; nothing can be tied back to a single source of meaning. This links, of course, on the one hand, with the ‘metaphors’ of fog, the night, and dreams and, on the other, with the confusion and doubt that surround the letter, the names of ‘characters’, or the significance of the title. But there is more to it than this. Phallocentric discourse is marked by the display and exercise of power: it assumes that the human subject controls, precedes, or exists outside language, that the position of the subject in language is unproblematic, and that its task as discourse is mastery over the world through science, rationality, and logic. Finnegans Wake radically questions such assumptions and makes us aware of the decentred subject, the problematic relationship of the human subject to language, and the central importance of excess and of

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what Hélène Cixous calls ‘écriture féminine’ or ‘feminine writing’. In this regard, HCE’s stutter, linked with his sexual guilt and with the cluster of meanings that surrounds the word ‘hesitency’, reminds us of a phallocentric discourse under pressure, and contrasts with the flow of language, with ‘gramma’s grammar’ (268.17), as articulated by ALP and the female voices, and with the accompanying attack on the patriarchal order. According to Derrida, meaning is never truly present in discourse but is ceaselessly deferred (or, we might add in the light of Finnegans Wake, recalled). Against the metaphysics of presence, Derrida posits the free play of the signifier. So it is with Finnegans Wake, a text which is fundamentally caught between the eye and the ear, between writing and speech. Two systems constantly hit off against each other, and at any one time both are co-present, but in such a way as to prevent the possibility of full presence. The form this lack of full presence takes is, like everything else in Finnegans Wake, varied. When some words are read out loud, their meaning becomes restricted, as, for example, with the word ‘boarder’ in the phrase ‘the boarder incident’ (81.32–3); in writing we see both meanings, but when it is spoken hear only one. Sometimes it turns on a syllable, as in the word ‘husbandry’ (38.11), which can be pronounced either as ‘husband dry’ or ‘husbandry’. The eye can take in both meanings, but in reading the word aloud we are of necessity forced to jettison one of the meanings. Sometimes behind the written word we can hear other words, as, for example, with ‘dumbestic’ (dumb, domestic, beast) in the phrase ‘dumbestic husbandry’ (38.11). At other times—and this needs a more extended gloss—we repeatedly notice ‘that patternmind, that paradigmatic ear’ (70.35–6), as Earwicker is called. Language, according to Saussure, is made up of paradigmatic and syntagmatic (or vertical and horizontal) relationships. In Finnegans Wake, many of the syllables, words, phrases, and sentences anticipate or echo each other and come to form a paradigm, a set of vertical relationships that lift them out of the syntagmatic relationships of the particular sentence in which they are embedded. Sometimes when this happens the reader is unable to integrate the two sets of relationship, seeing one, then the other, but never the two together as a unity. Thus ‘deltic dwilights’ (492.9) recalls Yeats’s Celtic Twilight, but it also revives ‘cultic twalette’ (344.12), and so the reader is momentarily caught between an extratextual reference and an intratextual paradigm. At the level of individual words, ‘deltic’ exists within a series of lexical sets which are perhaps related to each other only because of a common word: ‘deltic origin’ (Delphic oracle) (140.9), ‘deltas twoport’ (318.13) (death do us part), ‘triagonal delta’ (297.24) (ALP’s triangular delta). Similarly with ‘dwilights’, ‘cultic’, and ‘twalette’. On the other hand there are paradigms, such as St Augustine’s felix culpa, or refrains such as ‘The wren, the wren, the king of all birds’, or prayers such as the Hail Mary, that include many variations, so many in fact that the paradigm draws the reader away from the surrounding syntagmatic relationships, and it is at this point that we perhaps recognize the force of Derrida’s concept of the free play of the signifier. Finnegans Wake—and this in part accounts for the problematic status of its political message—refuses the distinction between denotation and connotation, being, as Samuel Beckett once proclaimed, ‘not about something; it is that something itself’.14 Furthermore, it mocks our legitimate readerly desires for a paraphrasable content. The aesthetics of high modernism here meets the more recent discussion that takes its bearings from psychoanalysis, semiotics, and linguistics, and is in turn given a radical and social nuance. Thus an aesthetics which had its origins in defeat and alienation—the fate of art after

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1848—takes on a political meaning in the work of critical modernists such as Brecht and Joyce. In Brecht it is closely allied with the struggle against fascism and for socialism; in Joyce it takes its most prominent form in the struggle against the identity of word and world. In the long run both struggles were—and are—necessary, and we should take care not to counterpose the two and assume we are obliged to choose one and dismiss the other. Finnegans Wake—and we need perhaps to invoke a distinction here between a political message and a political meaning—is a subversive text, which not only contributes to a strengthening of a potentially radical theory about language, gender, and the human subject but also continues to extend and test such a theory. For the second approach to a political reading of Finnegans Wake I turn to Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of Rabelais and to his concept of chronotope (chronos + topos): Rabelais’ task is to gather together on a new material base a world that, due to the dissolution of the medieval world view, is disintegrating. The medieval wholeness and roundedness of the world…had been destroyed. There was destroyed as well the medieval conception of history—the Creation of the World, the Fall from Grace, the First Expulsion, Redemption, the Second Exile, the Final Judgment—concepts in which real time is devalued and dissolved in extratemporal categories. In this world view, time is a force that only destroys and annihilates; it creates nothing…. A new chronotope was needed that would permit one to link real life (history) to the real earth. It was necessary to oppose to eschatology a creative and generative time.15 There is much here that is relevant to an understanding of Joyce’s project. Think, for example, of the usefulness of the phrase ‘gather together’ in connection with Finnegans Wake, a text that is the supreme example in literature of the concept of bricolage, where disparate, heterogeneous material is brought together not for any reason inherent in the material but because it can be assigned meaning and used to form part of a new view of the world. Joyce doesn’t reflect the world; he gathers it together. Or think of his ‘generative’ view of time. He deliberately eschews the apocalyptic sensibility and primitivism of many of his modernist contemporaries. Taking a longer view of history—which had been assigned to the Irish by the triumphs of the British—he saw the workings of much larger cycles than were available to those immediately involved in the establishment or protection of empire. This is summed up in an enigmatic phrase that recurs in Finnegans Wake: history is ‘the seim anew’ (215.23), ‘the same renew’ (226.17), ‘Sein annews’ (277.18). It is Joyce’s answer to the pre-Socratic dilemma of permanence and change, of whether or not it is possible to step into the same river twice. Here lies one of the key tensions in his last work, between the known pattern of human history, with all its ‘Killykillkilly’ and ‘wills gen wonts’, and the future destiny of the race and its ability or otherwise to live in peace. The Liffey has much to tell us, not only about the guilty secrets it has seen—‘O tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia’ (196.1–3)—but also about bringing human history into a closer alignment with the natural world, about listening to rhythms and sounds which predate the rise of civilization and within which our modern world should be enfolded. The comparison between Rabelais and Joyce is more complex than this, not least because Joyce recognized that the Irish ‘are still fundamentally a medieval people’ and that ‘Ulysses also is medieval’.16 In Finnegans Wake we are told that Shem is ‘weird…and middayevil

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down to his vegetable soul’ (423.27–8). Aquinas and scholasticism were among Joyce’s fathers and stood him ‘in good stead’ when he embarked on his voyage away from medieval Ireland and medieval Dublin towards the modern world of Europe and Paris. The historical irony is that Joyce, whose head was saturated with medieval ideas, whose natural bias was ‘the backward look’, and whose perspective was invariably long-term, came to be regarded in the inter-war years as the leading exponent of the avant-garde. But then Joyce had the advantage over his contemporaries of being more directly exposed to contradictory ways of perceiving the world and therefore of sensing more sharply the plight of being in some way disinherited. In giving up his religion and in exiling himself from Ireland, family, and friends, Joyce lost much of the ideology which bound him to the social structure and which lent him a sense of coherence and purpose. However, from his Catholic upbringing and Jesuit education he retained structures and forms and an interest in taxonomy which not only served him well in the period of The Waste Land and in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War, but which also stood him in good stead when he began to pick up the pieces of a disintegrated world and rediscover anew the ‘strandentwining cable of all flesh’ (Ulysses, p. 32).

College of Ripon and York St John NOTES Quotations from Joyce are taken from the Faber edition of Finnegans Wake, (1939), and from the new Penguin edition of Ulysses (1986). 1 Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1976), p. 327, to Harriet Weaver, 14 August 1927. 2 Roland Barthes, Image—Music—Text, selected and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1979), pp. 142–8. 3 See the chapter entitled ‘Past significance and present meaning in literary history’ in Robert Weimann, Structure and Society in Literary History: Studies in the History and Theory of Historical Criticism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), pp. 18–56. 4 For recent contextual studies, see, inter alia, John Garvin, James Joyce’s Disunited Kingdom and the Irish Dimension (Dublin and London: Gill & Macmillan; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977); William J.McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Seamus Deane, ‘Joyce and Nationalism’, in Colin MacCabe (ed.), James Joyce: New Perspectives (Brighton: Harvester; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 168–83; Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). For Joyce’s political message, see Philip Herring, ‘Joyce’s Politics’, in Fritz Senn (ed.), New Light on Joyce from the Dublin Symposium (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), pp. 3–14; Dominic Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); Diarmuid Maguire, ‘The Politics of Finnegans Wake’, in Giorgio Melchiori (ed.), Joyce in Rome: The Genesis of Ulysses (Rome: Bulzoni, 1984), pp. 120–8. For the third approach, see, inter alia, Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan, 1978); Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless (eds), Women in Joyce (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Bonnie Kime Scott, James Joyce (Brighton: Harvester, 1987). 5 Sean O’Faolain, De Valera (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), p. 173. On pp. 174 and 175 the word ‘frank’ appears twice. In September 1932 at the League of Nations, de Valera, his biographer tells

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us, ‘spoke with so much frank forcefulness about the League’; in the same speech de Valera declared, ‘Let us be frank with ourselves’. Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 290. Characteristically, Kenner is being provocative. See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce: New and Revised Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 643 n. Ibid., p. 708. Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. E.R.Dodds (London: Faber, 1979), p. 134. The phrase is from section XVI of ‘Autumn Journal’. T.S.Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1963), p. 86. Actually, modern students of comparative religion are reluctant to see equivalences between religions in the way Eliot does. It can also be noted in passing that samdhi and shantih are to be distinguished and cannot adequately be translated by the one word ‘peace’. Perhaps the use of the two words in Finnegans Wake is another example of Joyce intent on showing his superior knowledge over his rival Eliot. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. John Willett (London: Methuen Student Editions, 1983), pp. 3–4, 53–4, and xvii. From Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), p. 30. From his poem ‘A Bed for the Night’, in Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956, eds. John Willett and Ralph Mannheim (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976), p. 181. From Beckett’s essay ‘Dante… Bruno. Vico… Joyce’, in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber, 1961), p. 14. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1983), p. 205. The connection between Bakhtin and Joyce, especially in the context of dialogism, carnivalesque, and the grotesque, has been the subject of recent critical attention; see, for example, the first chapter of Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 1–16. Bakhtin’s insights into the workings of literary history could well be applied further in Joyce studies. Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce (London: Millington, 1974), pp. 92–4.

Disarming voices (a nuclear exchange) CARDIFF TEXT ANALYSIS GROUP

On 8 December 1987 President Reagan, on behalf of the USA, and General Secretary Gorbachev, on behalf of the USSR, signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in Washington to eliminate medium-range nuclear weapons. On behalf of the rest of the world the media breathed a sigh of relief. But even now a nuclear war is being waged. The mode of this war is textual. It involves a continual exchange of words, where battles are fought, subjects are enlisted, and the grounds of meaning and power are contested. An exchange of bombs would mark only the culmination and the end of such a conflict. But emphasis on the awful reality of nuclear weapons deflects from discussions of how nuclear power, the power to terrify and threaten, is discursive.1 Of course, nuclear issues are not independent of cultural practices but are produced by the power relations indissociable from the values and assumptions which sustain them. Moreover, the binary pattern of superpower confrontation takes the oppositional form that language seems to prescribe: one position defines itself by opposing the other, by fixing difference as opposition, and thus each superpower unifies its subjects in a relation of antithesis which appears as the condition of meaning. The unity of one position—its power and meaning—depends on its polar relationship to the other: position becomes an effect of opposition. But in the nuclear age this embattled relationship is also circumscribed by the threat (or promise) of the absolute effacement of the respective cultures and indeed identities of the USA and USSR. At this point the discursive perimeters which both specify and limit oppositional meanings are breached by the strange and subversive operations of textual difference. As dividing-lines slide, for example between the significations of peace and war, or between words and deeds, the unity of a position cracks and other meanings, alternative possibilities, emerge. Could it be that the ‘fabulously textual’ nature of the nuclear phenomenon is a peculiarly appropriate target for a critical analysis concerned with the production of meanings, the deployment of power and the effects of discourse?2 On 21 January 1985, in his second inaugural address, Ronald Reagan outlined prospects for peace. Peace was also a major issue in Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech on Soviet television on 29 March 1986, when he discussed the Russian moratorium on nuclear testing. (See Figures 1 and 2 below). While these speeches are not necessarily representative, they are significant instances of distinct discursive positions operating upon and exposed to the implications of nuclear war.

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THE MASTER’S VOICE The project of Reagan’s speech is to establish a unified, authoritative subject position for its audience by the invocation of universal human values. The text identifies these values as life, strength, progress, peace, and above all freedom and individuality. It does not differentiate between them; they are used interchangeably, synthesized within the ideological naturalness of humanism. The text also attempts to reconcile contraries: we are ‘to strive with all our strength toward the ultimate individual freedom, consistent with an orderly society’. It asserts an ideal of unconstrained individuals: ‘There are no limits to growth and human progress, when men and women are free to follow their dreams.’ It promises the regeneration of America, the nation and its citizens, physically, economically, and militarily, as Vibrant, robust and alive’, unified in commitment to ‘human freedom’. To perform this process of unification, it invokes the autonomous subject, even as it promises this subject’s realization as the absolute American and human (human-as-American) self. This self is ultimately located beyond cultural, racial, and political boundaries: ‘though our heritage is one of blood lines from every corner of the earth, we are all Americans’. Like God, this self transcends differentiation. From every dollar bill the American eagle similarly proclaims ‘e pluribus unum’: the absolute one unifies the disparate many. Reagan’s speech is also able to transcend temporal difference: while Reagan states, ‘we… are not given to looking backward’, the subsequent paragraph, and indeed the whole text, refers back to historical events. Even the present becomes history, as Reagan projects himself into the future to refer to his own period (the present in which he is speaking) in the past tense: We are creating a nation once again…. these will be years when Americans have restored their confidence and tradition of progress… when America courageously supported the struggle for individual liberty …and turned the tide of history away from totalitarian darkness into the warm sunlight of human freedom. The absolute self can efface historical difference: it transcends, omnisciently, the continuum which is simultaneously tradition and progress. The effect of this transcendence will be to install peace throughout the world: ‘we utter no prayer more fervently than the ancient prayer for peace on earth…. We strive for peace and security.’ Appropriately, the eagle clasps an olive branch. The humanist self, benevolently defined in a network of values in which ‘peace’ is privileged, promises to eliminate difference. But without difference there is no meaning. Signification is an effect of that system of differences with no positive terms which we call language. Thus the text cannot produce a unified position for the American subject, nor can it define its totalizing, humanizing project except by invoking a necessary, differentiating other. This can only be everything that is nonAmerican, and therefore non-human, a world awaiting the sound of its master’s voice: It is the American sound…. we fill the world with our sound—in unity, affection, and love: one people under God, dedicated to the dream of freedom that He has placed in the human heart, called upon now to pass that dream on to a waiting and a hopeful world.

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Here, in the final paragraph of Reagan’s speech, the force of textual difference—the invocation of the non-human waiting, hopeful world—is so potent that the speech subverts the unity that it claims to celebrate: far from eliminating difference, the speech, in spite of itself, recreates opposition. In any case, the waiting world was not always so hopeful. At the beginning of the speech George Washington, his hand on the Bible in a similar context, faced the ‘raw, untamed wilderness’. Other versions of history might people this wilderness with the indigenous population of America, reluctant to be tamed. Towards the end of the speech the larger spaces of ‘totalitarian darkness’ eventually bring to light threatening figures, the ‘allies of oppression and war’, and these are to be confronted on (and in) their own militaristic terms: ‘Human freedom is on the march’ and will brook no resistance. The United States, ‘a nation…mighty in its youth and powerful in its purpose’, with its ‘alliances strengthened’, must prepare to fight for and alongside human freedom: for freedom is our best ally, and it is the world’s only hope to conquer poverty and preserve peace. Every blow we inflict against poverty will be a blow against its dark allies of oppression and war. Every victory for human freedom will be a victory for world peace. In this sequence of military metaphors, in which blows are struck in the name of peace, it becomes apparent that the effect of the elimination of difference is to collapse the distinction between peace and war on which the meaning of those terms depends. Meanwhile the repressed differentiating other returns as a fully constituted enemy, the dark ally of evil. ‘We live’, the speech declares, ‘in a world that’s lit by lightning.’ And in a series of flashbacks, appropriately fragmentary, like some montage of old movies, the erstwhile star delivers a speech written for him to perform, mythologizing the American past in the present tense. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, the men of the Alamo and a nameless settler all prepare for war. A general falls to his knees in the hard snow of Valley Forge; a lonely President paces the darkened halls, and ponders his struggle to preserve the Union; the men of the Alamo call out encouragement to each other; a settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air. Into the unknowing air there ascends the American sound, a triumphant song, a palpable hit, which suitably celebrates a succession of conquests. Seen in this context a declaration earlier in the speech takes on a new and more ominous meaning: ‘Let us stand as one today: one people under God determined that our future shall be worthy of our past.’ The American eagle, of course, holds an olive branch in one claw, arrows in the other. In a nuclear age the promised elimination of difference by a nation in possession of more sophisticated missiles could well imply the disappearance of difference in an indifferent radioactive cloud: a final obliteration.

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THE VOICE OF REASON? If a certain cloudiness also envelops Reagan’s rhetoric, that could be part of the project: when threatening figures loom out of the dark, paranoia obscures distinctions. When Mikhail Gorbachev spoke to the Soviet people on television on 29 March 1986 to explain the USSR’s proposals for a nuclear-free world, the mode of address was altogether more straightforward, as the medium required: ‘Good evening, dear comrades! At our meeting tonight I would like to share my views with you.’ Evidently persuasion here is to be more relaxed, a sharing of views rather than an incitement to fervour. The speech begins with narrative. ‘Several days ago the United States carried out yet another nuclear explosion.’ There is nothing mythological on offer in this story, just apparently bare and certainly regrettable fact. ‘It is clear to us all that the timing was not chosen at random.’ The argument consistently reasserts its own clarity (to us all): ‘This much is clear This must be made absolutely clear.’ The subject position for the television audience is constructed as sensible and clear-headed. The spectator is invited to follow the presentation of a rational case supported by evidence, to understand its implications, and to grasp what has to be done. There are, Gorbachev urges, two possibilities: we must either disarm or die. The Soviet people, and people everywhere, must choose. The power of the speech depends on the familiarity of its rhetorical strategies. Ironically, from a European perspective, it is the Communist leader whose plain style, reasoned argument, unassuming manner, and transparent anxiety present themselves as reassuringly normal. This is a mode of address we readily recognize, and it draws on a system of differences we (think we) know. In Reagan’s speech the elimination of difference promised by nuclear possession underwrites the projected unity of an undifferentiated world and an absolute self. In Gorbachev’s address there is no nuclear promise but only a nuclear threat. Nuclear weapons undermine life and possibly result in its final obliteration. Whereas Reagan’s speech attempts to collapse difference into a transcendent present and a transcendent self, the project of Gorbachev’s text is precisely to make a difference, to start from difference and to ward off the death threat occasioned by its elimination, which is to make the difference of life and death. Difference in the form of a sought-for break with the past is the pivot on which the text’s move towards disarmament and peace turns. The speech differentiates the present from the past, both privileging the present (that is, life) as what is at stake in the arms race and at the same time problematizing it as a site of change: Today, in the nuclear and space era, one cannot think in categories of the past. All must ultimately come to realize that everything has radically changed. The question now is not only of the preservation of peace but of the survival of mankind as well. The present, constructed as continuous and stable in Reagan’s speech, is here unfixed, severed from the past, and thrown into a state of flux: it is conceived not in terms of similitude—history-as-present/presence—but as difference, as the place where history is held to account, where ‘responsible decisions must be taken’ if the nuclear ‘deadlock’ of the past is to be broken. Reagan’s text effectively effaces history by its appeal to an eternal present and by the simultaneity or synchrony of its filmic images. Conversely, Gorbachev’s speech recalls

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history, employing it as a narrative, a linear continuum. This diachronic narrative maps out a world whose metaphoric geography is one of steps, stages, and traversal. It is not the ‘waiting world’, the empty space, of Reagan’s text, it is not a world populated by unconstrained individuals, but one that is structured by the differences of politics, culture, race, and, above all, time. In its final stages the speech calls on this divided world—‘the American people and its government’, ‘the governments of the countries of Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America’— to break with the past, to recognize that ‘Time is running out’. ‘Mankind’, the speech warns, ‘is standing on a line that requires the utmost responsibility.’ This concluding caution urges the necessary abandonment of the past in order that a new, different road towards disarmament, life, and peace may be travelled. The precipice on which Gorbachev’s speech places humanity represents the dividing line which separates peace from war, reason from insanity, and life from death. The discursive strategies of the text are designed to identify and enlist peace-loving rational subjects against the US administration and its deadly irrationality in continuing to test nuclear devices, despite the USSR’s moratorium: Soviet people, like people of good will in all countries, are indignant at these actions of the United States. They write about this in their letters to the Party’s Central Committee and request that an assessment be made of the resulting situation. They ask how this should all be understood, what conclusions should be drawn, why the United States has taken such a step, and how our country’s leadership intends to act in these conditions.

Figure 1 Ronald Reagan, ‘Second inaugural address’, 21 January 1985, in Keesings Contemporary Archives, ed. Robert Fraser, vol. 31 (London: Longman, 1985), PP. 33, 387–8. There are no words adequate to express my thanks for the great honour you have bestowed onme. I will do my utmost to be deserving of your trust. This is…the 50th time that we the people have celebrated this historic occasion. When the first President, George Washington, placed his hand upon the Bible, he stood less than a single day’s journey by horseback from raw, untamed wilderness. There were 4,000,000 Americans in a Union of 13 states. Today, we are 60 times as many in a Union of 50 states. We have lighted the world with our inventions, gone to the aid of mankind wherever in the world there was a cry for help, journeyed to the moon and safely returned. So much has changed. And yet, we stand together as we did two centuries ago. When I took this oath four years ago I did so in a time of economic stress. Voices were raised saying that we had to look to our past for the greatness and glory. But we, the present-day Americans, are not given to looking backward. In this blessed land, there is always a better tomorrow. Four years ago, I spoke to you of a new beginning and we have accomplished that. But in another sense, our new beginning is a continuation of that beginning created two centuries ago when, for the first time in history, government, the people said, was not our master, it is our servant; its only power, that which we the people allow it to have. That system has never failed us. But, for a time, we failed the system. We asked things of government that government was not equipped to give. We yielded authority to the national government that properly belonged to states or to local governments or to the people

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themselves. We allowed taxes and inflation to rob us of our earnings and savings and watched the great industrial machine that had made us the most productive people on earth, slow down, and the number of unemployed increase. By 1980, we knew it was time to renew our faith; to strive with all our strength toward the ultimate individual freedom, consistent with an orderly society. We believed then and now: There are no limits to growth and human progress, when men and women are free to follow their dreams. And we were right to believe that. Tax rates have been reduced, inflation cut dramatically, and more people are employed than ever before in our history. We are creating a nation once again, vibrant, robust and alive…. We will not rest until every American enjoys the fullness of freedom, dignity, and opportunity as our birthright… and if we meet this challenge, these will be years when Americans have restored their confidence and tradition of progress; when our values of faith, family, work and neighbourhood were restated for a modern age; when our economy was finally freed from government’s grip; when we made sincere efforts at meaningful arms reductions, and by rebuilding our defences, our economy, and developing new technologies, helped preserve peace in a troubled world; when America courageously supported the struggle for individual liberty, self-government, and free enterprise throughout the world, and turned the tide of history away from totalitarian darkness and into the warm sunlight of human freedom…. Let history say of us, these were golden years—when the American Revolution was reborn, when freedom gained new life, and America reached for her best. Our two-party system has served us well over the years, but never better than in those times of great challenge, when we came together not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans united in a common cause…. Let us stand as one today: one people under God determined that our future shall be worthy of our past. As we do, we must not repeat the well-intentioned errors of our past. We must never again abuse the trust of working men and women, by sending their earnings on a futile chase after the spiralling demands of a bloated federal establishment. You elected us in 1980 to end this prescription for disaster and I don’t believe you re-elected us in 1984 to reverse course. The heart of our efforts is one idea vindicated by 25 straight months of economic growth: freedom and the incentives unleash the drive and entrepreneurial genius that are the core of human progress. We have begun to increase the rewards for work, savings and investment, [and to] reduce the increase in the cost and size of government and its interference in people’s lives. Fiscal policy. We must simplify our tax system—make it more fair and bring the rate down for all who work and earn. We must think anew and move with a new boldness, so every American who seeks work can find work…. The time has come for a new American emancipation—a great national drive to tear down economic barriers and liberate the spirit of enterprise in the most distressed areas of our country. From new freedom will spring new opportunities for growth, a more productive, fulfilled and united people, and a stronger America…. A dynamic economy, with more citizens working and paying taxes, will be our strongest tool to bring down budget deficits. But an almost unbroken 50 years of deficit spending has finally brought us to a time of reckoning…. I have asked the Cabinet and my staff a question and now I put that same question to all of you. If not us, who? And if not now, when? It must be done by all of us going forward with a programme aimed at reaching a balanced budget. We can then begin reducing the national debt. I will shortly submit a budget to the Congress aimed at freezing government programme spending for the next year. Beyond this we must take further steps to permanently control government’s power to tax and spend.

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We must act now to protect future generations from government’s desire to spend its citizens’ money and tax them into servitude when the bills come due. Let us make it unconstitutional for the federal government to spend more than the federal government takes in. Social objectives. We have already started returning to the people and to state and local governments responsibilities better handled by them. Now there is a place for the federal government in matters of social compassion. But our fundamental goals must be to reduce dependency and upgrade the dignity of those who are infirm or disadvantaged. And here, a growing economy and support from family and community offer our best chance for a society where compassion is a way of life, where the old and infirm are cared for, the young and, yes, the unborn, protected, and the unfortunate looked after and made self-sufficient…. Let us resolve that we the people will build an American opportunity society, in which all of us—white and black, rich and poor, young and old—will go forward together, arm in arm. Again, let us remember that, though our heritage is one of blood lines from every corner of the earth, we are all Americans pledged to carry on this last, best hope of man on earth…. Foreign policy. Today, we utter no prayer more fervently than the ancient prayer for peace on earth. Yet history has shown that peace does not come, nor will our freedom be preserved, by good will alone. There are those in the world who scorn our vision of human dignity and freedom. One nation, the Soviet Union, has conducted the greatest military build-up in the history of man, building arsenals of awesome, offensive weapons. We have made progress in restoring our defence capability. But much remains to be done. There must be no wavering by us, nor any doubts by others, that America will meet her responsibilities to remain free, secure, and at peace. There is only one way safely and legitimately to reduce the cost of national security, and that is to reduce the need for it. This we are trying to do in negotiations with the Soviet Union. We are not just discussing limits on a further increase of nuclear weapons. We seek, instead, to reduce their number. We seek the total elimination, one day, of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. For decades, we and the Soviets have lived under the threat of mutual assured destruction; if either resorted to the use of nuclear weapons, the other could retaliate, and destroy the one who had started it. Is there either logic or morality in believing that, if one side threatens to kill tens of millions of our people, our only recourse is to threaten killing tens of millions of theirs? I have approved a research programme to find, if we can, a security shield that will destroy nuclear missiles before they reach their target. It wouldn’t kill people, it would destroy weapons; it wouldn’t militarize space, it would help demilitarize the arsenals of earth. It would render nuclear weapons obsolete. We will meet with the Soviets hoping that we can agree on a way to rid the world of the threat of nuclear destruction. We strive for peace and security, heartened by the changes all around us. Since the turn of the century, the number of democracies in the world has grown fourfold. Human freedom is on the march, and nowhere more so than in our own hemisphere. Freedom is one of the deepest and noblest aspirations of the human spirit. People worldwide hunger for the right of selfdetermination, for those inalienable rights that make for human dignity and progress. America must remain freedom’s staunchest friend, for freedom is our best ally, and it is the world’s only hope to conquer poverty and preserve peace. Every blow we inflict against poverty will be a blow against its dark allies of oppression and war. Every victory for human freedom will be a victory for world peace. So we go forward today, a nation still mighty in its youth and powerful in its purpose. With our alliances strengthened, with our economy leading the world to a new age of economic expansion, we look to a future rich in possibilities. And all of this is because we worked and acted together, not as members of political parties, but as Americans.

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My friends, we live in a world that’s lit by lightning. So much is changing and will change, but so much endures, and transcends time…. We see and hear again the echoes of our past. A general falls to his knees in the hard snow of Valley Forge; a lonely President paces the darkened halls, and ponders his struggle to preserve the Union; the men of the Alamo call out encouragement to each other; a settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air. It is the American sound: it is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic—daring, decent, and fair. That’s our heritage, that’s our song. We sing it still. For all our problems, our differences, we are together as of old. We raise our voices to the God who is the author of this most tender music. And may He continue to hold us close as we fill the world with our sound—in unity, affection, and love: one people under God, dedicated to the dream of freedom that He has placed in the human heart, called upon now to pass that dream on to a waiting and a hopeful world. God bless you and may God bless America.

Out of the discursive flux of the nuclear age, Gorbachev’s text invites the rational subject to recognize itself as a person of good will, common sense, and humanity. The addressee is encouraged to identify with the reasonableness of the questions posed by the people of good will and to choose the evident sanity of reasoned dialogue between likeminded humanist subjects everywhere, rather than follow the élitist behaviour of the US administration which is ‘dictating its will’ in a mad, anti-humanitarian perpetuation of the arms race: ‘Everything indicates that the ruling circles of the United States have placed the narrow selfish interests of the military-industrial complex above the interests of the whole of mankind and the American people itself.’ Gorbachev’s text defines its own rationality against the US administration’s inability to adhere to the ‘natural’ correspondence of word and deed. It is this lack of transparency between signifier and referent that betrays the US administration’s unnaturalness: It would have seemed natural for the US Administration to support the Soviet Union’s initiative with practical actions and to respond to the expectations of the peoples. And, at any rate, to confirm precisely through deeds its own statements made in Geneva. But that did not happen. The US administration talks of peace but prepares for war: In words, it stands for the elimination of nuclear weapons. It has made a good deal of statements on that score. But in actuality, a gap between words and practical policy has again manifested itself. The US government has continued to conduct nuclear tests despite the Soviet Union’s call and example, despite persistent demands on the part of the American people and the peoples of the whole world. Meanwhile the USSR have ‘confirmed in deed’ their ‘responsible attitude’, offering a ‘concrete and realistic’ programme for ending the arms race. Thus we are invited to recognize that the USSR means what it says and stands for reason, nature, peace, and life.

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It is all so obvious, so clear, so familiar. But at the same time it is precisely the familiarity of the rhetoric which begins the text’s undoing. We have reached, the speech argues, a stage in world history which demands ‘new approaches to international security matters’. ‘Today,’ it insists, ‘in the nuclear and space era, one cannot think in the categories of the past. All must ultimately come to realize that everything has radically changed.’ And yet this summons to the new present is formulated entirely in terms of the categories of the past. Rationality, history as linear narrative, and the transparency of the signifier are all culturally relative, rooted in the European Enlightenment, and are all in question in the twentieth century. It is not only as an effect of nuclear weapons that everything has radically changed. But the most positive practical proposal the speech has to put forward, the highest aspiration it can imagine, is dis-armament, the negation of the present position in a return to a more innocent, pre-nuclear past. The implication is that nuclear weapons would dis-appear, leaving everything else as it was (and is), including, presumably, the two superpowers, representing incompatible and hostile modes of production, each still bent on the other’s elimination. The correspondence between words and deeds cannot be sustained. The US administration refuses to ‘play the game’ and respect the transparency of language: it uses words as weapons in a war of propaganda and so draws Gorbachev’s speech into the textual battleground. The latter finds itself speaking of more words, arguing for more talks and meetings: ‘We propose to meet, exchange views on this crucial problem and issue instructions to draft an appropriate agreement.’ The text culminates in a ‘call’ for a cessation of nuclear testing, foregrounding its own wordliness as it tacitly recognizes that words postpone a final obliteration and themselves have effects, like deeds. As deeds, words have different effects. This is apparent in the changing invocations of ‘security’. ‘Universal security’ is the end, the goal of the text’s desire ‘for a nuclear-free world’. This is the guarantee of peace and life for peoples of the whole world, but it depends on the unlikely event of the US administration’s acting in accordance with its words. ‘Otherwise, the Soviet Union will resume testing. This must be made absolutely clear. We regret it, but our own security and that of our allies will force us to do so.’ Suddenly ‘security’ requires the resumption of testing. In this shift the text calls a halt to its retreat from the threat of war, instead threatening its enemies with war. The threat is necessary if the speech is to have the required effect, to work as a weapon in the propaganda battleground. Gorbachev’s position thus becomes virtually indistinguishable from the one it sets out to oppose. The ‘universal security’, promised in the name of reason, humanity, and peace, slides into the ‘security’ of ‘narrow selfish interests’ which, in threatening the use of nuclear weapons, precipitates irrationality, barbarism, and war. In each text, then, the repressed figure of war returns to invade the promise of peace. Each time, universal life, single and self-identical, depends in practice on the willingness to deliver death, not only to the enemy, but to the universe itself. Each time, the reassertion of difference displayed within the text works to legitimate the build-up of nuclear weapons. Figure 2 Mikhail Gorbachev, ‘Speech on Soviet television’, 29 March 1986, in For a Nuclear-Free World (Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1987), pp. 67–72.

Good evening, dear comrades! At our meeting tonight I would like to share my views with you on the situation that has emerged around the Soviet Union’s moratorium on nuclear tests.

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Several days ago the United States carried out yet another nuclear explosion. It is clear to us all that the timing was not chosen at random. The blast was staged just before the end of the Soviet Union’s unilaterally declared moratorium. Yesterday it was learned that in the coming days, in the near future, the United States intends to set off yet another nuclear device. Soviet people, like people of good will in all countries, are indignant at these actions of the United States. They write about this in their letters to the Party’s Central Committee and request that an assessment be made of the resulting situation. They ask how this should all be understood, what conclusions should be drawn, why the United States has taken such a step, and how our country’s leadership intends to act in these conditions. We consider it our duty to respond to these questions, and this, in effect, is the reason for our meeting tonight. I must tell you frankly that we regard the present actions of the American Administration, which is continuing nuclear tests despite the pressing demands of the peoples, as a pointed challenge to the Soviet Union, and not only to the Soviet Union but to the whole world, to all peoples, including the American people. The question of ending nuclear tests has acquired tremendous importance now that whole mountains of inflammable nuclear material have been stockpiled in the world. This much is clear. Firstly, the ending of nuclear tests is the most realistic way of achieving an end to the arms race. Without such tests it is impossible to either perfect or develop new types of nuclear arms. In short, if together with the United States and other nuclear powers we were to reach an accord on ending nuclear explosions, if would be possible to get the entire process of nuclear disarmament out of the deadlock. Further, continued testing inflicts a tremendous and perhaps not yet fully understood harm on the environment, on the natural surroundings in which we all live. Do we not feel obliged to show concern for our own home? And not only for ourselves, but for our children and grandchildren as well. And finally, in this difficult endeavour we need not start from scratch, so to speak. A definite road has already been traversed and joint experience acquired: that is, tests in the atmosphere, in water and on land have not been conducted for many years now; nor have there been explosions in outer space. It was with due account pecisely for these circumstances that, after thoroughly weighing all the pros and cons, eight months ago, on the day of the 40th anniversary of the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union put forward an initiative of extraordinary importance—to stop all nuclear explosions both for military and peaceful purposes. And it called on the United States of America and other nuclear states to follow its example—to start advance along the road of nuclear disarmament. I have already had an opportunity to say that in conditions of unabating tension in the international situation this was not an easy decision for us to make. If you like, this step required both an awareness of the responsibility resting on the governments of nuclear powers, and the necessary political will. In acting as it did the Soviet leadership had the mandate of its people which knows the price of peace and sincerely strives for its preservation and consolidation, for cooperation with all peoples. Acting in this way, we proceeded from the deep conviction that the world in its development has entered a stage which calls for new approaches to international security matters. Today, in the nuclear and space era, one cannot think in the categories of the past. All must ultimately come to realize that everything has radically changed. The question now is not only of the preservation of peace but of the survival of mankind as well.

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These are the motives behind our decision to announce the unilateral moratorium on nuclear tests. The good initiative of the Soviet Union—and I am immensely pleased to say this—has been regarded with understanding and general approval in the world. Our action has been highly appreciated by the working people of all countries: communists and social democrats, liberals and conservatives, Christians and Moslems, a multitude of public organizations, prominent political figures, scientists and cultural figures, and millions of ordinary people. How did the other side conduct itself? That is, the US Administrarion. In words, it stands for the elimination of nuclear weapons. It has made a good deal of statements on that score. But in actuality, a gap between words and practical policy has again manifested itself. The US government has continued to conduct nuclear tests despite the Soviet Union’s call and example, despite persistent demands on the part of the American people and the peoples of the whole world. We set certain hopes on the Geneva meeting with the President of the United States of America and expected to reach an agreement with him on this matter as well. As you remember, encouraging statements were made there by both sides as well as jointly, statements to the effect that nuclear war is inadmissible, that such a war cannot be won, that neither side would seek nuclear superiority. The results of the Geneva meeting prompted us to take yet another step of good will: to extend the moratorium until March 31 of this year. We thereby confirmed in deed our responsible attitude towards the dialogue between the leaders of the two powers, and we hoped, of course, for reciprocal steps on the part of the US Administration. I think you will agree that our statement of January 15 of this year, which set forth a concrete and realistic programme for the elimination of nuclear arms, is yet another illustration of our true intentions—to put an end to nuclear confrontation. In taking this step, we thought least of all of how to gain extra ‘propaganda points’, as journalists say in such cases, of how to outsmart or outdo the other side. We consider such an approach to the burning problems of present-day politics inadmissible. Our actions were motivated by our responsibility both to the Soviet people and to other peoples, the responsibility for the removal of the nuclear threat, for the preservation and strengthening of peace. In February the leaders of six non-aligned states, expressing the prevailing sentiments in world public opinion, urged the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States to refrain from nuclear explosions until a new Soviet-American meeting. We consented to this. It would have seemed natural for the US Administration to support the Soviet Union’s initiative with practical actions and to respond to the expectations of the peoples. And, at any rate, to confirm precisely through deeds its own statements made in Geneva. But that did not happen. Everything indicates that the ruling circles of the United States have placed the narrow selfish interests of the military-industrial complex above the interests of the whole of mankind and the American people itself. The manner in which this is done is also quite significant: it is demonstrative, arrogant, disregarding the opinion of the world community. There is neither a sense of realism nor of responsibility. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the US ruling circles continue to lay emphasis on the pursuance of a militaristic line, to bank on force so as to dictate their will to other countries and peoples. Statements are openly made that it is precisely in this way that they will also influence the policy of the Soviet Union. What can be said about that? These are ill-fated attempts. Nobody has ever succeeded in using the methods of power-politics against our state, while now they are simply preposterous.

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The peoples of other countries are also ever more vigorously rejecting the outdated policy of diktat in international relations. The Soviet political leadership is now faced with the difficult question of how to react to this behaviour of the United States. Our position is clear. We believe that the world has now entered a period when responsible decisions must be taken. Yes, precisely a period when they are absolutely necessary. We will not deviate from the policy of preserving and strengthening peace, which was most definitely confirmed by the 27th Congress of the CPSU. Fulfilling the wish of its people, the USSR will further step up its efforts to ensure universal security, and will do so in cooperation with all countries and their peoples. As for our unilateral moratorium, I can say that it continues to remain in effect till March 31, 1986. But even after that date, as was announced, we will not conduct nuclear explosions if the United States acts likewise. We are again giving the US Administration a chance to take a responsible decision—to end nuclear explosions. Otherwise, the Soviet Union will resume testing. This must be made absolutely clear. We regret it, but our own security and that of our allies will force us to do so. I am saying all this in order that there be nothing left unsaid on that issue. At the same time I cannot stress enough that our main intention is to stop the nuclear arms race. The simplest, most explicit and effective step in that direction would be to put an end to nuclear explosions. We have proposed that talks be started immediately on a total ban on nuclear weapons testing, covering issues of verification. All variants are acceptable to the Soviet Union—bilateral Soviet-American talks, tripartite talks with the participation of Great Britain, or multilateral ones within the framework of the Geneva Disarmament Conference. We have come to the conclusion that the situation requires immediate action. It is not yet too late to halt the nuclear arms race. The first major stride in that direction is needed. Putting an end to nuclear testing by everyone concerned—first of all by the Soviet Union and the United States, as well as by the other nuclear powers—could become such a step. We attach tremendous significance to the solution of this task which concerns the fate of all nations. I am ready to meet with President Reagan as soon as possible in London, Rome, or in any other European capital that will agree to receive us, in order to reach agreement on this question. And I do not feel that there are political, technical or any other insurmountable obstacles to this. What is needed is the necessary political will and understanding of our mutual responsibility. We propose to meet, exchange views on this crucial problem and issue instructions to draft an appropriate agreement. We hope that this proposal of the Soviet Union will be duly appraised and correctly understood by the President of the United States of America, and by the governments of the countries of Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, of the whole world. Time is running out. On behalf of the Soviet people we call on the American people and its government, on the peoples and governments of all countries to work vigorously, by practical actions, for the ban on nuclear explosions to become a fact, an immutable norm of inter-state relations. Mankind is standing on a line that requires the utmost responsibility. The consequences of the nuclear arms race can become dangerously unpredictable. We must act together. This matter is of concern to everyone. That is what I wanted to tell you, dear comrades, at our meeting tonight. Goodbye.

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There are, of course, as Gorbachev indicates, interests involved: most obviously, these are the economic interests of the ‘military-industrial complex’. In both the USA and the USSR, however, there are in addition institutional investments in the production of nuclear knowledges: jobs, contracts, research grants are all at stake. In the free West the threat of world war in general and the nuclear holocaust in particular are also part of the entertainment industry: novels, strip cartoons, television drama, and Hollywood films exploit it. And isn’t there always a certain pleasurable frisson available in the News? The suspense depends on the certainty that the worst could happen… And then perhaps, in a world divided between two binarily opposed superpowers, it really seems obvious that national security might necessitate international obliteration. While Europe and the Third World remain sites of struggle between the USA and the USSR, each major power may well perceive safety in the capacity to reduce the other’s strength, and may assess its influence in terms of the visibility of that capacity. But while the possibility of nuclear confrontation sustains all these interests, whether narrowly economic or broadly institutional, whether national or international, they are not ultimately served by the implications of that possibility, the danger of nuclear war. Universal destruction serves no interests; indeed, it leaves behind no interests to be served. The piecemeal dismantling of nuclear weapons by means of treaties between the superpowers, however heartening, is no real solution. The danger lies in the binary confrontation itself, a confrontation between states capable of equipping themselves with chemical or other unimagined modes of global death. The alternative to binary opposition in textual terms, as deconstruction proposes, is the acknowledgement of difference. Does not the existence of the Third World (whatever the postcolonial assumptions inscribed in that term), as an arena of conflict between the superpowers, call in question the binary division of the planet? Moreover, it is important for Europe to realize that its interests, like those of Africa, Asia, and Australia, lie in repudiating the neo-colonial imperatives of the USA and the USSR, refusing to harbour their weapons or advance their economic ideological frontiers. If the opposing superpowers can hardly be marginalized, they can at least be invited to take their respective places in a world which acknowledges and, indeed, celebrates differences. It is a common critique of poststructuralism that deconstruction is a purely textual matter, whereas there is, as we all know, a world beyond mere discourse. This critique is based on the great Enlightenment obviousness of the subordination of words to deeds. But in the propaganda war textuality has primacy over action. And perhaps in turn a mode of textual analysis can define a political project, the commitment to difference, to a world of differences, in place of opposition. If so, we are left pondering the remarkable possibility that deconstruction is in the end a material practice.

University of Wales, Cardiff

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NOTES This paper was collectively written over a period on the basis of regular discussions. The main contributors were: Fakhereddine Berrada, Fred Botting (convenor), Jane Moore, Ian Whitehouse, and Scott Wilson. Other participants included: Catherine Belsey, Terence Hawkes, Kathy Kerr, Christopher Norris, Chris Weedon, and Jamal Samir. 1 See the issue of Diacritics, 14, 2 (Summer 1984), for theoretical discussions of the nuclear question. 2 ‘Nuclear weaponry depends, more than any weaponry in the past, it seems, upon structures of information and communication, structures of language, including non-vocalizable language, structures of codes and graphic decoding. But the phenomenon is fabulously textual also to the extent that, for the moment, a nuclear war has not yet taken place: one can only talk and write about it’: Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, Diacritics, 14, 2 (Summer 1984), p. 23.

Allon White

Allon White, a member of the Editorial Board of Textual Practice, died on 15th June 1988 at his home in Brighton. He had taught in the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex since 1980, and his principal publications were The Uses of Obscurity (Routledge, 1981) and, jointly with Peter Stallybrass, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Routledge, 1986). He was also one of the editors of the second LTP Journal published in 1983. The funeral was at Berwick in East Sussex, and Allon is buried in the churchyard there. It was his wish to be remembered by the planting of trees in Sussex (to replace those lost in the recent storm) and readers who wish to contribute to an appropriate fund may do so through Textual Practice. He is greatly missed by friends and colleagues, by fellow members of the Editorial Board, by his parents, and above all by his wife Jenny and daughter Catherine.

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Hermeneutic hubris

Although I agreed with many points in the critique of Stephen Greenblatt’s essay on Marlowe developed by Howard Felperin in ‘Making it “neo”: the new historicism and Renaissance literature’ (Textual Practice, vol. 1, no. 3 (Winter 1987)), it seems to me that there is a serious difficulty in Felperin’s own position—a difficulty that extends well beyond this particular controversy to the larger enterprise of post-structuralism. His basic objection to Greenblatt’s essay is that it violates the post-structuralist principle (shared by both of them) which holds that there is no unmediated access to ‘real’ and ‘true’ knowledge of a literary text or a historical epoch (which is itself known to us only through texts), since all interpretations of texts are actually ‘productions’ of the interpreter, and that anyone seeking to ‘privilege’ his own ‘production’ of literature or history by a claim to truth and reality is therefore guilty of ‘hermeneutic hubris’. He certainly demonstrates that Greenblatt violates this principle, but I am afraid that in his demonstration he violates it himself. For one thing, he does not treat Greenblatt’s essay as a ‘text’ that he is now ‘producing’, because he clearly believes that he has immediate access to its real, true meaning—in fact he even complains that one passage in the essay is ‘less than transparent’ (p. 2.66), although he insisted earlier that the ‘assumption of linguistic transparency’ was an error of the ‘old historicism’ that all good poststructuralists reject (p. 2.64). And his argument is based upon a number of assertions, also clearly meant to be taken as true, about Marlowe’s plays and ‘project’, and about what the Elizabethans thought and even what they were unable to think (pp. 264, 275). The climax of this hermeneutic hubris comes near the end of the article, where he concludes that ‘Greenblatt, in an important sense, understands Marlowe better than Sarracoll [taken as a typical Elizabethan] could have done’ (p. 275), when he should be referring to his own ‘productions’ of Greenblatt and Marlowe and Sarracoll. And even that lets him off too easily; what he really should have said, to remain true to his poststructuralist principle, is that his ‘production’ of the relationship between his ‘production’ of Greenblatt’s essay and his ‘production’ of Marlowe’s project shows a greater affinity than does his ‘production’ of the relationship between his ‘production’ of Marlowe’s project and his ‘production’ of Sarracoll’s mentality. But then his argument would collapse, since Greenblatt could simply reply that his ‘production’ of the relationships among his ‘productions’ of Marlowe’s project and of Sarracoll’s mentality and of his own essay is different. (He could of course only speak of his present ‘production’ or ‘reproduction’ of his essay because, according to the same post-structuralist principle, as Felperin tells us (p. 263), authors have no privileged access to the real, true meaning of their own texts.) And then Felperin would either have to shrug his shoulders and say, ‘Chacun a sa production’, or else rise above

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principle and try to prove, under the old pre-post-structuralist ground rules, that his view of the matter is—you’ll pardon the expression—truer than Greenblatt’s. If Felperin’s self-contradiction were an isolated case it might not be worth mentioning, but it seems to be typical of the discursive practice of post-structuralist critics (at least of those discoursing on the Renaissance), who regularly affirm some version of this same principle, and just as regularly proceed to ignore it when they start talking about literary texts or historical contexts. Thus Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, in the introduction to Political Shakespeare, assure us that ‘cultural materialism does not, like much established literary criticism, attempt to mystify its perspective as the natural, obvious or right interpretation of an allegedly given textual fact’ (p. viii); yet in their study of Henry V (in Alternative Shakespeares) they identify, among other things, ‘the basic concern of the play’ (p. 215), ‘the actual purpose of the war’ (p. 217), ‘what really torments Henry’ (p. 218), what the play’s ‘drive for ideological closure has systematically displaced’ (p. 222.), and the ‘real historical conflict’ it deals with (p. 225)—all, presumably, given textual facts recognized by their right interpretation. Malcolm Evans, in Signifying Nothing: Truth’s True Contents in Shakespeare’s Text, states that ‘all reading [is] an intervention and a production rather than a simple decoding’ of what is in the text (p. 137), and objects to Frank Kermode’s interpretation of The Tempest because it assumes ‘the play is there to be understood’ (p. 74), but a few pages later he praises another interpretation that is able ‘to reveal the contradictions’ in the play (p. 79), which obviously must be ‘there’ in order to be revealed. In The Tremulous Private Body, Francis Barker manages to affirm and violate the principle within a single paragraph: he first insists that in all historical criticism the past is ‘reproduced in order to be reshaped to present needs…and to believe otherwise would be to advance a hubristic objectivism’, and then complains that critics have been ‘recapitulating in the pre-revolutionary texts [of Shakespeare] the themes and structures which it was precisely the task of the revolution to establish’ (p. 15). And these examples could easily be multiplied, for every post-structuralist critic I have read is guilty of this kind of hubris. We are all guilty of it, as soon as we try to say anything meaningful about literature or history or their relationship. And perhaps the most hubristic of all are those who seek to deny their own hubris. RICHARD LEVIN

National Humanities Center, North Carolina

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• Michael Westlake, Imaginary Women (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987), 194 pp., £10.95 ANTONY EASTHOPE

In the film Alien (1979), after the ardours of her adventures, the heroine (played by Sigourney Weaver) ends sleeping in her transparent cocoon accompanied only by her cat. The tasks set to the heroine of Imaginary Women in finding her identity begin with her alone with her cat—but since she has as yet no name she is referred to in the text as Mac**ash and, to ensure her masculine pet has no more certainty of his identity, he bears indifferently the fraternal, musical, epic names Adolphus, Amadeus, or Augustus. Structured into three ‘thirds’, each consisting of thirteen short units and so listed at the beginning, the text of Imaginary Women comprises thirty-nine sections, in triple parallel to each other, repeating, embroidering, and modifying themes and figures, though not in a mechanical manner. Thus number 7 in each third is a graph, number 2 in each continues the cat’s tale, the penultimate concerns Gropius, the lover of six women, and so on, though the film sequences of I.4 (Polanski’s Chinatown) and II.4 (Hitchcock’s North by North-West) find no exact parallel when III.4 develops the story of Joyce Chan. From these thirty-nine sections, six, the first and last of each third, carry forward the narrative of Mac**ash. Not only is this narrative already firmly distanced from realism by being woven in with thirty-three units that are not really narrative at all, and not only is it explicitly placed in a parodic frame as the typical plot of a film noir (at least at first—towards the end the genre changes), but it is also a typical, even abstract story, since it enacts very much the construction of identity as understood by psychoanalysis. In his essay of 1931 on female sexuality Freud suggests that on discovering the threat of castration in the site of the mother’s body the little girl may (I) give up sexuality altogether, (2) refuse to believe she has not got the phallus, (3) seek to refind the phallus in the father and so, indirectly, in another man (the bridegroom). One way to epitomize Mac**ash’s attempt to trace a figure (her own identity) would be to say that of these three trajectories she pursues neither the first nor the third, and ends up neither dead nor married. What she does do—what happens to her—is rather more complexly suggestive. She does begin by losing the phallus (it is eaten by Adolphus, in fact). At the end of the first third she is asked by a pretty masculine mother-figure (Sophie, alias the General) if she will ‘accept any gift you are offered’ (p. 58), the gift turning out to be a microfilm blue-print (retrieved from Adolphus in II.1 in the least distasteful manner possible), a blueprint of the missile bunker under the hills ‘to the east of our city’ concealing the world’s central warfighting computer (its software has been implanted with a self-replicating feminist program called Absolution Nihilating Nuclear Armageddon or ‘ANNA’, whose function is to render all binary military orders undecidable). But the gift also turns out, in II.13, to be a black bird

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like that in The Maltese Falcon. This is lost in its turn when Mac**ash parachutes into the hills, is captured and tortured by the General until her head is cut off with an axe by her own simulacrum—at which point she becomes a copy of herself and, in III.13, is introduced into identity and the family by finding her name is Anna Mac Xi-ash (her grandmother is Chinese). Some elucidating comments must be offered. Via the blueprint and her name Anna, this quest for personal identity is linked to the epic, indeed global, narrative of our times, as it is in Pound’s Cantos and, more cogently, in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, when Tyrone Slothrop’s sexual career becomes intimately linked with the age of the nuclear missile. As Freud speculated in a famous paper (‘On transformations of instinct’), the phallus easily appears equated in a symbolic series with faeces (money, gift) and baby (here indiscriminately Adolphus, the blueprint he excretes, the black bird). In the words of Lacan, ‘Thus the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing, and this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of desire.’1 If read in relation to the pyschoanalytic account of the construction of identity, it is not at all surprising that Mac**ash should become herself as a copy of herself, ‘a perfect simulacrum’ (p. 132)—if identity is situated in a fictional direction, then self-identification is a simultaneous entry into language and death. What is surprising is that she acquires adult heterosexual desire (specifically, at the end, for the towering figure of Carrefour) through the intervention of the General and eleven other imaginary women, among whom, as Anna, she takes the place of the thirteenth. If identity and sexual difference are defined with reference to the phallus, and if the phallus is a symbol, a signifier (the signifier), then it (and identity) may be granted in the name of the mother (as it is to Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse), but only perhaps on condition that a matriarchal grouping now has a power comparable (though different) to that of patriarchy. And this may be the necessity, both structural and thematic, which binds together the other thirty-three sections in creating imaginary women epitomized at the end in the uncovering for the first time of the so far repressed thirteenth sign of the Zodiac, Ariadne the spider. (Of course. How have we managed without her so far?) The text refers in III.5 to ‘narrative, with its plot-obsessed paranoia’, and up to now this present account has pursued the same old obsession. Nevertheless some account first has to be given of the narrative, because to give a summary of the rest of Imaginary Women requires an act of prioritizing that the text refuses—all the other sections are equal in importance. (But importance to what? To making possible Mac**ash’s narrative.) From the other thirty-three sections I shall select three motifs or themes or figures or modes of discourse to represent the rest. One is mathematics. It is asserted that ‘mathematics fundamentally figures female absence’ (p. 34), a view expanded in the paragraph detailing ways in which twelve is ‘the patriarchal number’ (p. 190). The discourse of mathematics therefore constantly recurs across the text in a double significance—as a way in which the masculine imagination seeks to fix the feminine in place, and as the place where a non-Eurocentric logic of order (for this possibility Chinese culture is preferred) can postulate an order for this other. Hence the centre of each third (i.e. I.7, II.7, III.7) plots points on an x/y axis (sex/die?), culminating in a graph named as ‘woman < > mathematics’ (< > being the symbol for ‘greater or less than’). Hence also a text consisting of thirty-nine sections whose internal resonances work to subvert its programmatic ordering.

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A second figure which can be traced—by the reader—in the weaving together of the text is that presented in the narrative when Mac**ash is apparently decapitated by herself. This surfaces constantly elsewhere as the woman sawn in half by the magician and seemingly rejoined at the waist by a tattooed belt of film sprocket holes (35mm) (II.8 and again III.11) (this leading into the woman covered in tattoos of tropical fish in I.3), by the double fate of the Whole Hog who in II.6 is both killed by Sara Bella’s sword and in another continuum transformed by the same stroke from a werehog back into a handsome prince, by the doubling of Sara’s friends, Groundrat and Foundflat, in I.10, as well as the doubling of Mac**ash’s enemies, later friends, Mex and Booris (II.1). A third, minor trope is made up by a stuttered initial letter ‘f’. Introduced on the second page (‘Our f-f-f’; p. 4), the motif belongs to Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) in Chinatown, who refers to her incestuous object of desire as ‘my f-f-father’ (p. 21), becomes the copy of the Falcon given to Mac**ash (‘a f-f-fake?’; p. 123), is expanded in III.8 with its account of the exhibition of Matisse paintings (all of imaginary women) which may be artistic ‘f-f-forgeries’ and ‘f-f-fabrications’ (p. 159), and concludes, more or less, in the (non-fictional) name of the sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle (‘F for Faker or Saint Ph-Ph-Phalle’; p. 173), who paints death as a microcephalous woman riding a horse and wearing a red swimsuit. Sexuality, incest, death, fictionality, art: from this imitated slip associated meanings reach out to intersect with the tropical fish tattooed on Molly, fish eaten by John Huston and Jack Nicholson in the Albacore Club in Chinatown, as well as the ‘flawed fish’ eaten by Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by North-West, the ‘f’ inserted by J.J.Case (by mistake?) into ‘MacFlash’ (p. 54), La Jefe’s international state combine ‘FF&F (Fish Forestry and Finance)’ (p. 154), intersecting indeed with almost every occurrence of the phoneme /f/ in the text, making it liable to resonate in sympathy with those occurrences which are manifest instances of meaning. To cite Lacan again: But one has only to listen to poetry, which Saussure was no doubt in the habit of doing, for a polyphony to be heard, for it to become clear that all discourse is aligned along the several staves of a score. There is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as if attached to the punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended ‘Vertically’, as it were, from that point.2

Imaginary Women is a text which promises the reader no centre or anchoring point round which it will be structured. In the main, two modes of discourse are played off against each other, the six narrative sections, the thirty-three others. They constitute the two axes of the text, the syntagmatic axis developing as it were horizontally and the paradigmatic developed vertically from points in the narrative. Or better, in Lacan’s metaphor, it is like polyphonic music in which a theme is harmonized, varied, repeated in other modes above and below the single line. As this analysis has sought to suggest, in this text each term (trope, figure, narrative event) is connected synaptically in many-tracked association with (ultimately) every other. Linearity in the syntagmatic chain, as Lacan writes in the same passage, ‘is necessary’ as the place for identity, ‘a single voice’, and for the reader of Imaginary Women that position is afforded by the consecutive and coherent narrative in which Mac**ash finds herself. But, if the text provides this as the point of necessary stability for the conscious ego, it does so only

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by revealing the constructed dependencies of which this temporary fixity is an effect. A short way to suggest this is by pointing to this as a comic text, a sustained instance of the joke which is the consequence, Freud argues, when ‘a preconscious thought is given over for a moment to unconscious revision and the outcome of this is at once grasped by conscious perception’.3 Many of the jokes and examples of verbal play in Imaginary Women work by opening the signifier to unconscious meaning which exceeds retrieval in any subsequent conscious perception (in this respect ‘f-f-f’ is no joke). Dependency within the subject of ego on id, dependency of signified on signifier: it hardly needs to be illustrated that Imaginary Women is consciously artificial, constantly posing its reader in a position of self-reflection, drawing attention to the operation of the signifier (both verbal and written, mathematical and visual) through which its signified meanings are brought about. Inscribed throughout is the effect of its own assertion that the text is a fabrication, ‘of which the common root of the words “text” and “textile” is the clue’ (p. 147). A third dependency is harder to speak of, for the claim that this text articulates itself in relation to a social other can only be validated over time. Sufficient perhaps to suggest that the reworking of feminine identity, of the relations between patriarchy and (possible) matriarchal power, of the transformation of world order envisaged in the manifestos of Anna 1 and Anna 2 in III.6, catch up some of the deepest concerns of our time and point forward to a time when they achieve more satisfactory resolution. Imaginary Women is a novel which would not have been possible without the modernism of Joyce and the postmodernism of Nabokov, Vonnegut, and Pynchon. It is the most significant addition to the English novel since the publication here of Beckett’s Murphy in 1938.

Manchester Polytechnic

NOTES 1 Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 104. 2 Ibid., p. 154. 3 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 223.

• Charles Jencks, Postmodernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1987), 360 pp., £45.00. NICHOLAS ZURBRUGG

Definitions of postmodernism are the least satisfactory aspect of postmodern culture. For many critics, commentators, and creators, the concept of the ‘postmodern’ smacks of the same sort of ambiguity and artificiality as the titles of celluloid clones such as Son of Lassie, Jaws Two, Police Academy Three, Nightmare on Elm Street, part four, and so on. Accordingly the whole issue of postmodernity is often rejected as a non-issue by those who refuse to have postmodernity thrust upon them. Asked to explain ‘what in your opinion would constitute a postmodern drama, a postmodern theatre?’, the East German playwright Heiner Müller typified this derisory response with the amusing rejoinder: ‘The only postmodernist I know of was August Stramm, a modernist who worked in a post office.’ Other cultural cartographers, such as the architect Charles Jencks, make the timehonoured leap from the frying-pan of cynical indifference into the fire of misleading enthusiasm, and take the concept of the postmodern sufficiently seriously to caricature it in terms of exaggerated, onesided hypotheses. Jencks’s most recent and most comprehensive survey of postmodernism, Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture, attempts to reduce the general notion of postmodernity to one very particular impulse within postmodern art and architecture: the supposedly ‘positive’ nostalgia of the ‘new classicism’. Jencks opposes the ‘new classicism’, with its ‘ultimate aim’ of transcending mere copy and imitation, and effecting an ‘imaginative transformation’ of ‘a good prototype’ (p. 234), to the Romantic and modernist ambition to ‘make art original’ and to precipitate ‘creativity ex nihilo’ (p. 217) in accordance with avant-garde notions of ‘continual revolution’—or what Jencks dismisses as ‘the fetish of the new’ (p. 12). In place of the fetish of the new and the tradition of the new, Jencks identifies and advocates what one might think of as the fetish and the tradition of the ‘old’; indeed, in a recent interview published in Art and Design (August 1987), he makes much the same point when suggesting that the neo-classicist ‘postavant-garde’ is quite different from earlier radical traditions because ‘it doesn’t try to conquer new territories: for the old “shock of the new” of Duchamp, it substitutes the new “shock of the old” of Mariani’. One of the key examples in Jencks’s analysis of ‘the new “shock of the old”’, Carlo Maria Mariani, is, by Jencks’s admission, a painter whose work ‘at first glance…does indeed resemble dreary academic reconstructions’. ‘On a second look’, however, one notices incongruities within Mariani’s work which suggest that it ‘extends…myth’ (p. 48) by intermingling classical archetype and contemporary detail. Mariani’s Costellazione del Leone (La Scuola di Roma) of 1980–1, a fusion of allegorical iconography and satirical jest, is hailed by Jencks for its ‘remythications’. Deftly identifying Mariani’s friends, foes, critics, and dealers, Jencks

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explains: ‘New Yorkers will recognize Cy Twombly on horseback, looking a bit ridiculous with a Roman SPQR in hand; Franscesco Clemente gazes past a canvas held by Sandro Chia; Mario Merz is Hercules in an understated bathtub; a well-known New York art dealer waddles to the water as a turtle’ (p. 51), and so on, and so on. Doubtless this painting seems highly droll to Mariani and his pals, but it is surely naïve to equate such fancy dress with the shock of the old. One may effortlessly locate similar imagery and similar commentary in any of Vogue’s reports on this or that Sloane Ranger’s toga party. Or, turning to more highbrow pages, one might equally easily cite familiar modernist examples of ‘remythification’, from Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s Waste Land, Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Jones’s In Parenthesis, and a dozen other such texts. Discussing the ways in which the painter Ron Kitaj likewise depicts modes of ‘contemporary ritual fragmented by discontinuities of character, dress and ambience’, Jencks concedes that there is often a certain ‘Modernist flavour’ and a redeployment of ‘Modernist formal devices’ in this kind of hybrid, eclectic postmodern painting, and freely admits that ‘T.S.Eliot’s poetry, which suggests more than it states, is often an inspiration for this work’ (p. 24). In much the same way, Jencks repeatedly refers to the degree to which the ‘new classicism’ finds its visual precursor in the work of the modernist ‘metaphysical’ painter, Georgio de Chirico, referring, for example, to contemporary explorations of the ‘de Chirican tradition’ (p. 46) and of ‘de Chirican territory’ (p. 52), or specifying the way in which the painting of particular artists, such as Mariani, ‘evolved from de Chirico’ (p. 329). Glancing back still further, Jencks detects other early modernist traits within the ‘new classicism’, such as a ‘Baudelairian mixture of the transitory and classical’ (p. 132), and rather less consciously reiterates this poet’s poetics of correspondances, according to which ‘Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent’, when suggesting that postmodern multivalence may best be defined in terms of the ‘resonance’ with which it succeeds ‘in linking forms, colours and themes’ (p. 342). Putting his own aesthetic cards on the table towards the end of this book, Jencks explains: I support explicit iconographic programmes from which the symbolism emerges as a conscious product of the dialogue between designer and client….My own work, carried out in collaboration with other architects and based on symbolic programmes, is intended as multivalent design…my aim is to work out the links between function, space, ornament, inscription and theme so that a coherent scenario runs throughout the building. (p. 300) One can sympathize with Jencks’s project, even if one may have doubts about the aesthetic potential of the explicit iconographic and symbolic programme, and in many respects, despite all misgivings to the contrary, late postmodern creativity frequently coheres within systems of resonant (if unprogrammatic) symbolic gravity. One way or another, writers, composers, and dramatists such as William Burroughs, John Cage, and Robert Wilson are all presently exploring the kind of intangible compositional ‘links’ that Burroughs associates with ‘the unifying unities of disparate elements’, that Cage defines as the ‘coexistence of dissimilars’, and that Wilson seems to conceive of as ‘a rational communication taking place…by harmonious sensed reverberation’. As Jencks observes, the materials of many of the most successful postmodern buildings—and, one might add, of many of the most successful

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postmodern texts, musical compositions, and multi-media performances—are ‘carefully interconnected…to create a dissonant unity, a resisted whole, a disharmonious harmony’ (p. 305). Jencks’s awareness of this prevalent aesthetic of ‘disharmonious harmony’ is restricted by his idiosyncratic antipathy towards those modes of high-technological art and architecture which more than any others epitomize the postmodern spirit. Depending upon his mood, Jencks dismisses the very possibility of radical technological creativity for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, he speculates that this kind of revolutionary postmodern creativity is virtually a logical impossibility: ‘being “Post” in this sense might mean a strange even paradoxical thing: becoming more modern than Modern, more avant-garde’ (p. 12). Unwilling to acknowledge such innovation, Jencks either alludes to ‘the exhaustion of the avant-garde’ (p. 217) or else posits that the avant-garde eliminates itself in ‘a series of self-cancelling steps’; a hackneyed hypothesis that Jencks borrows from Umberto Eco’s ‘most amusing’ suggestion that ‘the moment comes when the avant-garde can go no further, because it has produced a metalanguage that speaks of its impossible texts (conceptual art)’ (p. 20). To be sure, the most theoretical and analytical wing of the postmodern avant-garde, born of the equally cerebral Duchampian impulse in the modernist avant-garde, culminated in the conceptual artists’ tedious ‘impossible texts’. But so too have the technological experiments born of the modernist avant-garde’s futurist impulse culminated in the exciting multi-media creativity of the postmodern avant-garde. Likewise, as Jencks suggests throughout his book, the neo-classicism of mainstream modernists such as Eliot and de Chirico has its postmodern culmination in the painting of Mariani and company, just as Baudelaire’s symbolist aesthetic seems to find itself revived and studiously systematized within Jencks’s own collaborations. Considered very generally, then, the work of the conceptual artists, the experiments of multimedia artists, and the paintings of the neo-classical systematic symbolists are all postmodern in the very elementary sense of coming into being after modernism, in the wake of modernist precursors. Considered more carefully, it might appear more judicious to characterize contemporary multi-media work as the most explicitly post-modern work of our time, in so far as only this creativity is inimitable in our time, and thus the perfect example of Jencks’s general distinction between the rare ‘significant breakthrough’ and the more mundane ritual of ‘repeating past formulae…copying and imitation’ (p. 217). Lacking technological precedent, and both revealing and exploring new discursive possibilities within and between the new media, such innovations are the incarnation of that strange paradoxical thing: an art ‘more modern than Modern’ (p. 12) and more avant-garde than the modernist avant-garde. However imaginative and amusing they may be, other manifestations of contemporary creativity seem fated to appear only partially postmodern; or post-modern in era but late modern in tenor, in so far as they repeat, revive, copy, imitate, parody, pastiche, or, at best, imaginatively transform prior discursive conventions stretching back from the recent modernist past to classical precursors. In this respect, Kitaj’s art is stylistically ‘late modern’ or ‘late Eliot’, just as Mariani’s paintings might appear ‘late modern’ or ‘late de Chirico’ in style. Yet, according to Jencks, contemporary multi-media and technological art is not so much postmodern as ‘late modern’ in character. Virtually dismissing modernism as a kind of counter-cultural adolescent fling, and thereby converting the term into an elastic adjectival concept (rather than respecting its function as a historical and aesthetic concept peculiar to

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the early twentieth century), Jencks rather derisively explains: ‘Late Modernism—the exaggerated, purified and incessantly revolutionary form of Modernism—will go on thriving as long as technology changes, the youth need counter-challenges and fashion rules consumer society; i.e. from now on.’ As his preface indicates, this distinction between supposedly ‘latemodern’ modes of technological revolutionary art and ‘postmodern’ neo-classical art leads his book to ignore—and to deplore—‘quite a few Post-Modern artists’ on the grounds that their work fails to offer a ‘classical synthesis’, fails to strike Jencks as ‘very convincing’, or fails to qualify for discussion, since, ‘in spite of claims to the contrary, they are Late- rather than Post-Modernist’ (p. 8). In order to substantiate this prejudice against the modernist and so-called ‘Late-Modernist’ impulse in the plastic arts, Jencks repeatedly criticizes its hypothetical inflexibility in much the same terms with which he alludes to cultural ‘suppression by the Nazis’ (p. 279). Thus, according to Jencks, the postmodern practice of ‘mixing languages’ is something ‘Modernists… would suppress’ (p. 36); ‘ad hoc amalgamations of a wide spectrum of tastes’ are something ‘contemporary Modernists found distasteful’ (p. 15); and the attempt to ‘merge’ the ‘major antinomies of twentieth century painting’ (p. 116) becomes an exclusively postmodern project typified by the architect Robert Venturi’s emphasis upon ‘hybrid rather than pure elements, “messy vitality” rather than “obvious unity”’, and the strategy of ‘solving difficult problems through virtuosic display rather than attempting to suppress them’ (p. 280). Jencks exaggerates the austerity and purity of the artists that he associates with modernism and late-modernism and oversimplifies the chronological and historical dialectic between ‘unity’ and ‘Vitality’. Both the modernist and the postmodernist eras are characterized by phases of messy, purist, and hybrid creativity: indeed, as the work of modernists such as Kurt Schwitters and postmodernists such as Ian Hamilton Finlay demonstrates, the most interesting artists of both movements work in a variety of styles and media, simultaneously or alternately employing contradictory materials and exploring contradictory ‘purist’ or ‘hybrid’ aesthetics. It makes no sense to juxtapose two movements such as modernism and postmodernism in terms of the crude stylistic dichotomy ‘Modernism: pure/Post-Modernism: hybrid’. Both movements evince variants of both styles. Accordingly, one needs to look beyond the intertextual ‘stylistic formulae’ within which Jencks claims that ‘any historical movement’ is ‘definable’ (p. 345), and to examine the ways in which stylistic patterns are modified by historical technological change. Finlay’s use of neon, for example, distinguishes his verbal sculptures quite radically from the typographic collages of Schwitters; his work is quite literally more modern than that of Schwitters (or, more accurately, postmodern), and the critic’s task in this instance is to evaluate and define Finlay’s achievement both in terms of prior discourse and in terms of new, emergent, ‘neon’ discourse. Jencks’s analyses of the five main subdivisions of postmodern art’s neo-classical tendency— the ‘metaphysical classical’, the ‘narrative classical’, the ‘allegorical classical’, the ‘realist classical’, and the ‘classical sensibility’—conscientiously sketch the careers of innumerable inconsequential antiquarians for whom Jencks himself frequently apologizes with such refrains as his confession that Mariani’s work ‘does indeed resemble dreary academic reconstructions’ (p. 48). Even the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, an artist Jencks clearly respects for the ‘challenging impulse’ (p. 121) of his vision, seems to leave Jencks a trifle uneasy, as he rather gingerly appraises Finlay’s ideas as ‘wonderfully mad but just’ (p. 94).

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Voluntarily restricted by his refusal to discuss ‘late modern’ technological art, Jencks lamely hints that certain painters evince a common ‘media style’ (p. 89) in so far as their images virtually oscillate ‘like a TV set’ (p. 15) or, perhaps, ‘like a Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse’ (p. 116). Jencks’s mixed allusions to present technology and to past literary party tricks typify the fundamental weakness of his book: its refusal to discuss those artists whose work does not simply revive surrealist games or resemble television but also employs television, video, sound collage, telematics, and all the other variants of contemporary technology, in order to create quintessentially postmodern art. To some extent, Jencks’s discussion of the four main modes of neo-classical architecture—‘fundamentalist classicism’, ‘revivalist classicism’, ‘urbanist classicism’, and ‘eclectic classicism’—makes amends for this weakness. Although this account pivots upon the crude formula ‘Death of Modernism/Rise of Post-Modernism’ (p. 27), Jencks’s obvious admiration for the achievement of his peers repeatedly leads him to modify his caricatural dichotomy between the late modern and the postmodern as he reveals his enthusiasm for many of the supposed shortcomings of late modern art. If late modernism presents ‘exaggerated, purified’ (p. 12) variants of modernist conventions, then, as Jencks admits, so too does postmodern architecture leave such conventions ‘extended and distorted’ (p. 331) or ‘affirmed and distorted’ (p. 345). Second, if late modernism appears to move with the times, ‘as long as technology changes’ (p. 12), Jencks’s conclusion predicts that ‘Modern…fabrication methods’ will likewise animate postmodern architecture and ‘make any and every style possible’ (p. 350). Finally, if late modernism appears susceptible to the ‘fetish of the new’ (p. 12) and manifests ‘commitment to a changing technology’ (p. 177)—as opposed to the nostalgic ‘commitment to anamnesis (i.e. the memory of past forms)’ (p. 177) and the ‘commitment to symbolism per se’ that Jencks finds ‘most exemplary’ (p. 300) in the buildings of Kiko Monta Mozuna—many of the other architects admired by Jencks display a surprisingly ‘late modern’ commitment to innovation and new industrial technology. To cite but two examples, Arata Isozaki is congratulated for his deployment of ‘new material’ to create ‘a new system of structured support’ (p. 292), while Ricardo Bofill is in turn hailed as the inventor of ‘a new kind of concrete texture and industrial craftsmanship’ generating the ‘sharp beauty’ that perhaps ‘only an eye trained in twentieth century architecture can fully discern’ (p. 264). As should be evident, Jencks’s reading of postmodern culture is both narrow-minded or of closed mind when it addresses contemporary modes of multi-media art, and very much of two minds when pondering upon the relationship between contemporary technology and contemporary archi tecture. One wonders why. At one point, Jencks seems the very epitome of good-natured tolerance when, defending the virtually neo-fascist austerity of James Stirling’s plans for the Neue Staatgalerie in Stuttgart, he reasons that ‘Only a fanatic would reject classicism in toto because of some bad historical connections’ (p. 326). It would appear that precisely these kind of ‘bad historical connections’ lead Jencks to reject technological postmodern art in toto. Quite early in his book, Jencks recollects the widespread demolition of modernist housing estates in the early 1970s, particularly the spectacular image of an explosion toppling the Pruiit—Igoe buildings in St Louis: an image which ‘came to symbolise the mythical death of Modernist architecture’ (p.27). Jencks’s critical faculties seem traumatized by this symbolic image. While he dismisses his arguments concerning the ‘Death of Modernism’ as ‘symbolic or ironic caricatures’ (p. 29), his

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abiding disdain for the environmentally alienating and impractical consequences of modernist architecture—or their ‘bad historical connections’—seems to precipitate his strange reluctance to acknowledge, acclaim, or even illustrate any postmodern creativity explicitly celebrating or supplementing the technological tradition of modernist ‘progressivist’ (p. 218) art. While his earlier, briefer volume, What is Post-Modernism? (1986), allows readers to know their enemy by reproducing an image of the artist Sol LeWitt’s metallic mechanical minimalism along with two vistas of the architect Norman Foster’s Hong Kong Shanghai Bank (an edifice which this earlier essay denounces as late modern, despite its supposed status as a ‘prime example of Post-Modernism’), Jencks’s magnum opus, a volume quantified in the publisher’s blurb as ‘305×250mm, 360 pages, 350 illustrations including over 300 in colour’, illustrates neither LeWitt’s conceptual constructions nor Foster’s ‘exercise in the difficult art of spending a lot of money well’ (p. 310). At best, the reader is left to imagine Foster’s building, encouraged by the wry injunction that it ‘has to be seen…as the beginning of a new stage in skyscraper evolution’ (p. 315). Has to be seen? ‘But where?’ the reader might well ask. Certainly not upon the pages of Jencks’s Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture. For all its virtues as a survey of the good, the bad, and the ugly ‘young fogies’ of postmodernism, Jencks’s survey of this movement’s art and architecture leaves much to be seen and (as this reviewer sees it) much to be desired.

Griffith University, Brisbane

• Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 315 pp., £19.95 DAVID AMIGONI

In Professing Literature, Gerald Graff proposes to reintroduce the American literary academy of the present day to its origins. Professing Literature thus seeks to engage with the current sense of crisis and disciplinary fragmentation by presenting a literary academy in a selfexamining mood with a historical picture of itself; the resulting portrait places the disquiet of the present in perspective, for it takes the form of a narrative plotted along the lines of a pervasive sense of disciplinary fragmentation. In many ways, Professor Graff’s project echoes Chris Baldick’s The Social Mission of English Criticism (1983), which presented a history of literary studies in Britain designed to tone down the claims of the ‘crisis in criticism’ school. A detailed examination of the historical record, Baldick argued, showed that the crisis in literary studies was not a peculiar condition of the present; rather, the institution had been in a permanent state of embattlement and disagreement. Graff’s strategy is similar: in the role of historian, he breaks up apparent continuities, and establishes patterns of identity where difference was previously thought to exist. While New Criticism has now reconciled its differences with humanism, in Graff’s study New Criticism emerges as the historical ally of deconstruction, in so far as both, at dispersed historical moments, have been taken to be asocial and anti-humanistic. Still, while Professing Literature presents an arresting thesis, the postures that Graff adopts in the role of historian seem to me to be problematic. I shall state what I mean by this a little later, but I should say at once that the problem is not peculiar to Graff; rather, it stems from ‘history’ as a mode of discourse. The point of Professing Literature is not to argue that, because there have always been disagreements, the American institution should not concern itself too much with those facing it now. On the contrary, Graff argues his case with a sense of urgency that is clearly focused on the current state of literary pedagogy. As Graff observes, the discipline of literature in the United States plays host to a heterogeneous range of interests—traditional Eng. Lit., American studies, and, more recently, the writing of women and black people. Yet, in spite of these recent incorporations, the institution of literary studies has remained unchallenged by these potentially radical forces; common ground occupied by traditional Eng. Lit. and black writing has produced, not conflict and sharp debate, but business as usual. Graff’s startingpoint is to ask how such a situation can arise. He finds the answer in a history that begins with an academy (the classical college) that enjoyed reciprocal relations with a general literary culture established in multifarious institutions (debating societies and the like); and is ruptured by the emergence of the modern, departmentally structured university. From this moment, literary studies became a professional concern, though not a coherent one based on shared goals and agreed aims. Indeed, Graff’s survey continually stresses the different

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available positions within the new academy: ‘investigators’, or research specialists, stood against ‘generalists’, while later ‘scholars’ opposed the goals of interpretative ‘critics’ and historicists sniped at New Critics. However, these differences were repressed, and the clinical drives of professionalism were served by the structure of the university literature department. According to Graff’s thesis, the literature department organized its discipline—in terms of both research and pedagogy—in line with the field-coverage principle. Specialists were employed to cover a particular aspect of the field and little else. Shakespearians did not interfere with the teaching of Miltonists, so that any particular cultural or methodological differences between them were necessarily buried by the organizational set-up. Moreover, casting a forward glance, Graff argues that the potential for the field to expand without any positive overall effect is unlimited, provided it continues to be defined according to the same principles; thus the failure (if that is what it is) of the study within the academy of writing produced by women and blacks can be ascribed to the functioning of the field—like every other aspect of the discipline, these new elements have been atomized by an organizational structure which closes their capacity for productive exchange with other components of the field. Like all good histories, Graff’s ends with a moral. Literature teaching is in crisis today, not because of the proliferation of ‘theory’, but because, as in every other instance of its history, none of these new positions can be brought into a productive dialogue with the others. History, then, instructs us to dismantle the field-coverage principle and teach instead ‘the cultural text’. In other words, as a paradigm of teaching practice, the text should be extracted from its specialist pigeon-hole and reabsorbed into the multicultural contexts of its production and reception. Graff’s prescriptions for a pluralist future apparently grow out of a historical method that projects itself as plural and flexible. The method is designed to deal with the complexities of a changing institution over time. Graff is keen to stress that what is put into an institution at one end, in the way of cultural manifestos and theories of pedagogy, may not be what comes out of it at the other. In stating this principle, Graff is clearly taking on versions of the history of the literary institution that compete with his own—particularly, the narrative of ‘the rise of English’ offered by Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), and the ‘genealogy of critical humanism’ elaborated by Paul Bové in his Foucauldian study of Intellectuals in Power (1986). On the one hand, Graff chides Eagleton for mistaking ‘pious wishes and pronouncements for institutional fact’ (p. 12) in the construction of his history; I take this to mean that Eagleton is charged with being uncritical in his acceptance of the hegemonic claims made on behalf of literary discourse. On the other, Bové is taken to task for being thoroughly undialectical in his panoptic account of the practice initiated by I.A.Richards in Practical Criticism. Instead of focusing on Richards’s ‘practical criticism’ as a component of the ‘hegemonic discourse and practices of Western disciplinary capitalism’ (Bové), Graff argues that it should be seen instead, within an institutional context, as a classbased onslaught on the quasi-aristocratic gentlemanly code that had dominated literary studies prior to the 1920s. These are interesting points, suggestive of internal institutional complexity. However, I am not sure how effective they are in serving Graff’s argument about the variables that can occur between institutional input and output. Where, in these instances, does Graff take ‘the other end’ of the institutional process to be located? Certainly not among the literature graduates who would have to seek employment in the disciplinary

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structures of capitalism, for Graff’s perspective remains rooted in the academy; whatever the problems with Eagleton and Bové here, both seem to me to project, more successfully than Graff, the sense that the literary institution is itself a component in a broader institutional and discursive history. Graff’s emphasis on flexibility and plurality in writing what he calls institutional history seems to narrow his historical purview rather than open it up. Strategically, though, the emphasis on methodological flexibility and plurality can, I think, be read as an attempt to wrest what Foucault has called ‘effective history’ away from Bové and his fellow genealogists. Graff quotes Bové at a very un-Foucauldian moment (a statement such as ‘the hegemonic discourse and practices of Western disciplinary capitalism’ is very hard to reconcile with Foucault’s distaste for metaphors of social totality), and implicitly sets his own method up as the legitimate one for discovering the heterogeneity sought by effective history. Thus Graff stresses that, in the context of institutions, ideologies are complex systems of values and meanings that will hold more than one position, and need accordingly to be interpreted with a genealogical sensitivity. Also, Foucault’s method of archaeologically uncovering the unspoken rules governing disciplinary practices is noted with approval by Graff at the beginning of his book. However, while Graff does follow these observations to produce some interesting reappraisals of the multiple possibilities embraced by certain critical doctrines thought hitherto to be monolithic (his section on New Criticism is especially good), in other respects his method leaves in place as much as it disturbs. The extent to which Graff is bound by preexisting categories paradoxically emerges when he is seeking to be disruptive. He invokes the critic Vida Dutton Scudder in his argument for dismantling the notion that literary humanism and radicalism are incompatible: Dutton Scudder was an amalgam of leftist commitment (inspired by Ruskin) and high literary culture. What Graff does not interrogate here (which is surprising, because he is alert to it in other places) is the extent to which forms of high literary culture are themselves political, in the sense that they make assumptions about intellectual leadership and representativeness potentially at odds with the egalitarian social discourses of the left. The work of Bové on literary intellectuals from Richards to Said at least attempts to confront these difficult political questions, while Graff, in this instance, leaves the political pretty much where it was always assumed to be confined. The impression of Professing Literature I am left with is one of a history that cannot be quite sure how it wants to operate. For all the posturing in pursuit of effective history, there are times when Graff constructs his narrative in discourse that echoes professionals from the discipline of history in their most negative of moods. At one particularly telling moment, Graff adopts the perspective of the ‘jaded observer’, in order to tell the reader that he has seen all this happen before, and now here we go again. In Professing Literature, history it seems can be a series of orthodox repetitions as well as the recovery of complex processes. The problems associated with Graff’s use of this discourse seem to me to be twofold. First, ‘jaded observers’ of the discipline of history generally impress upon you how they can only describe the past without offering any prescriptions for how things should be organized in the future; in this sense, the discourse seems to me to undermine Graff’s stated desire to break with the past. Second, a discourse which claims for its speaker the powers of pure description simultaneously purports to position itself neutrally and objectively in relation to those processes it reconstructs. Again, I find Graff’s practice here difficult to reconcile with his pedagogic strategy for the future—namely, teaching the literary text as a ‘cultural text’. What

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seems to me most valuable about this strategy is that it places a demand on the pedagogue to declare his/her ideological position when teaching a text. Yet the discourse of the balanced and objective historian that Graff affects at crucial points of Professing Literature, while creating distance between his project and other (as he calls them) ‘hyperpoliticized’ histories, also seems to create the effect that the project sees itself as somehow beyond ideology. Professing Literature is an impressively detailed and provocative thesis. It should serve as the basis for further work, such as a comparative study of the different experiences of institutionalizing literary studies in the United States and Britain. The problems I find with the book stem from its insufficiently self-reflexive stance in confronting the practice of historical enquiry. As I said at the beginning, these problems are not confined to Graff’s handling of them; they are inscribed in the discourses constituting history as a form of knowledge. Still, Professing Literature is a useful pointer to the fact that, in exploring the foundations of their discipline, literary scholars should interrogate, simultaneously, the theoretically complex business of professing history.

Liverpool Polytechnic

• Anthony Wilden, The Rules are No Game: The Strategy of Communication (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 432 pp., £25.00 • Anthony Wilden, Man and Woman, War and Peace: The Strategist’s Companion (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 335 pp., £29.95 BRIAN COATES The resistance to ‘transparent’ readings of literary texts generated by post-structuralist activity now reaches across most contexts in which English is taught and discussed. Yet the relieving absence of a univocally structured approach for reading, discussion, and appraisal, characteristic of these models of analysis, has also produced a deep anxiety in pedagogic method. For its own part, post-structuralist thought has countered the lack of ‘centre’ by showing a marked interest in its own production as discourse. As the written artefacts of philosophical and literary histories are subjected to the rigours of linguistic and ideological investigation, so too does the discourse of the scrutiny present fresh material for the project. Studies in the relation of structuralism to post-structuralism, the connection of feminism to semiotics, or Marxist theory to political and cultural praxis, figure as micro-systems restlessly searching for a stable environment, orphan disciplines seeking to rebuild a family circle. Unease with the positioning of deconstruction within traditional discourse is responsible for the circularity of the enquiry. J.Hillis Miller’s witty discussion of the parasite/host relationship, which concludes with a demonstration of the interdependence of the terms, smoothly assimilates post-structuralist method into the traditional disciplines. 1 Derrida, writing on the sign, worries at the issue: ‘we cannot give up this metaphysical complicity without also giving up the critique we are directing against this complicity.’ 2 Maintaining distance from the subject of the analysis involves a framing, a drawing of boundaries, the establishment of margin and supplement, all of which set up a friction within the destructuring activity that forms the organizing impetus of the deconstruction. The leverage exerted by post-structuralist analysis is inevitably contaminated with the material of its working. The binary system, the sign, subjectivity, origin, presence, metaphysics, and phallogocentrism are key terms, richly freighted with connotative and evaluative potential. The procedures of analysis (however mocked, rejected, disowned) stage a sequence of dualities: subject/object, observer/phenomena, analyst/analysand, man/woman, and so on. To make a significant swerve from the structuralism of hard rationality requires a deflection of the cultural ordinations set in motion by familial and national placing, institutionally ascribed status, the seemingly ‘natural’ organization of mind and body into a subjectivity. This is why post-structuralism constantly turns to its own historical formation, testifies to its ‘invention’, reinvents inventiveness; it functions, too, as an ideological signal of the capitalist environment, as in this discussion of the bourgeois-humanist subject by Terry Eagleton: The subject of late capitalism…is neither simply the self-regulating synthetic agent posited by classical humanist ideology, nor merely a decentred network of desire, but a contradictory amalgam of the two.’3 Post-structuralism here enables the tensions of capitalism to be

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articulated in the philosophic arena. It is the contradictions of the social that illustrate the fictiveness of the interiorized subject, and it is an emphasis on the constructed subject that grounds the social critique. On this view, the space for enquiry is circumscribed by history; we live inside a dialectic of conflicting subject inscriptions. For Derrida, a close reading of the philosophic tradition provides a centre for the decentring move. In the discussion of the sign quoted earlier, he indicates the presence of an aporia which frustrates the gesture of polemic. Articulation of proposals and counter-proposals is inadequate. The terms of discourse undercut its function: the metaphysics of presence is shaken with the help of the concept of sign. But…as soon as one seeks to demonstrate in this way that there is no transcendental or privileged signified and that the domain or play of signification henceforth has no limit, one must reject even the concept and word ‘sign’ itself—which is precisely what cannot be done.4 The use (made necessary by the logic of difference) of erased metaphysical and capitalist postulates is an underrated aspect of the programmes of Derrida and de Man. Like the fossils and lichen which play at the edge of the nature/culture debate, these assumptions locate a niche in the ecology of theory which evidences a narrative of risk, a risk of narrative in any chain of signification. Another analogy lies in the ‘as if of drama; the Derridian rite de passage through Western philosophic perspectives from Plato to Hegel contextualizes, ‘plays out’, the story of meaning-making, even as it seeks to deconstruct any discourse system that searches out conclusions. Deconstruction is an earned position, an assiduous re-reader and rewriter of the tradition, positioned yet unstable, ‘decentred’ within it. Anthony Wilden, in these wide-ranging companion texts, produces a context theory that brings together material culled from several disciplines. Anthropology is a key area, and Wilden makes interesting use of the work of Marvin Harris and Gregory Bateson in developing a structural network theory of culture. A dissatisfaction with the hierarchy that binary symmetries (white/black, man/woman) smuggle into the social organization leads to a theory of dependent hierarchies that can represent the deep structure underlying oppositional modes. The scheme operates on the principle that any system is constrained by its environment, yet that same system will illustrate a greater diversity and complexity than the supporting environment. Society is the environment of culture, yet it is dependent upon nature; langue is dependent upon langage yet sustains discours (on which parole is dependent). This relatively bland framework becomes energized in Wilden’s companion volume, Man and Woman, as he starts to gnaw at cultural history. Taking the seventeenthcentury ideology of the ‘new learning’ as a patriarchal construct concerned with the masculine domination of a feminine nature, he continues: In this sense, woman—as ‘body’—is the environment that man—as ‘mind’—depends on for his daily comfort, emotional support, sexual needs, and above all for his existence as a supposedly ‘manly’ man. And just as ‘body’ is viewed as the property of ‘mind’, so too is woman viewed as the property of man. (Man and Woman, p. 66) This reading of the seventeenth century has affinities with other recent work on the period, such as Thomas Docherty’s account of the ambiguities and paradoxes that problematize the

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female Other in John Donne, Undone.5 Wilden demonstrates the continued ‘double-bind’ of the systemic structure of capitalism, which produces consciousnesses which can disrupt the closed-field hermeneutic of their production only by gestures which seek to unify and transcend the binary inheritance. It is at this point that the project runs up against the questions raised of other post-binary initiatives such as semiotics, feminist practice, neoMarxism, and ‘new historicism’: how to legitimate a discursivity that is itself an effect of the system, how to ‘transcend’ without making a truth-claim, how to unify in the absence of patriarchy. The doctrines of autonomy, full presence, self-knowledge, and interiority insert themselves into the case at the point where the binary seen as ‘object’ predicates an observing ‘subject’. Wilden sidesteps this issue by punctuating the texts with rules, ex cathedra pronouncements which present a clean conclusion to each set of questions. At such moments, the loose-limbed features of the texts are transformed into jottings from the notebook of a philosophic policeman who has a case narrative in mind early on in the investigation: The Extinction Rule: To test for the orientation of a dependent hierarchy, mentally abolish each level (or order) in turn, and note which other level(s) or order(s) will necessarily become extinct if it becomes extinct. (The Rules are No Game, p. 74) The logic of this and other rules (Bateson’s, the Media, the Colonial, the Inevitable, Chu Teh’s, Murphy’s, Orwell’s) is unable to account for the psychoanalytic and social passages of the rule-exerciser, the prevalent conception of ‘mental activity’, or the fluidity of the signifier ‘necessity’. Although Wilden stresses the open-system boundaries of the hierarchies, his reliance on lists, numbers, and diagrams, even as he aligns the scientistic model with particular cultural, political, and social fields, is a dubious procedure. The texts, laced with ancient and modern quotations, epigraphs, aphorisms, pictures, and riddles, also seem intent on qualifying the proposed paradigms. The Rules are No Game is made up of three related texts. In two of these, film technique emerges as an organizing agent for several areas of discourse. Wilden quotes the economical repertoire of Disney animation method—by squashing and stretching the half-filled flour sack, Disney’s animation team was able to provide a ‘guide to maintaining volume in any animatable shape’—to prove that ‘attitudes can be achieved with the simplest of shapes’ (p. 152). This formula is linked with Greek, Renaissance, and Chinese theories of the elements to demonstrate the interaction of system and structure. Research into South Sea Island wave patterns and village plans of the Cheyenne and Bororo are similarly read as evidence of an endemic proto-structuralism. The technical aspects of film-making, particularly Eisenstein’s discussion of montage, are channelled into Wilden’s call for a ‘right-brain revolution’. Eisenstein’s innovations render him up as a colleague in Wilden’s project of re-igniting the ‘holistic and intuitive logic’ of the right brain hemisphere. His position is that the last 400 years have hosted a left-brain digital revolution: competitive capitalism has emphasized analytic logic, verbal significations, symmetrical order, and an intellectual linear mechanism. Right-hemisphere specialization would, by contrast, stress a pictorial, asymmetric, co-operative dynamism able to release the humorous, poetic, interpersonal potential of the subject into the social body. Eisenstein’s contribution to this cause stems from his definition of montage as ‘inner speech’ which is

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developed from ‘sensual thinking’; this, according to Wilden, is ‘the reason for reason itself’ (p. 276). Discussion of the left— right switch in revolutions concludes: ‘if that revolution is not primarily a right-brain, contextual, many-dimensioned, divers and open-system revolution, then it will not be a revolution but a rearrangement’ (p. 279). This critique of the capitalist system is initially explored through a harrowing examination of the conditions for, and of, war. ‘The naming of parts and the twentieth-century war’, the text making up the first section of The Rules are No Game, provides a series of case histories and a list of the cruelties and deaths caused by inadequate, careless, or deliberate strategies in the Boer War and the First and Second World Wars. Two clear points emerge from this scrutiny of war statistics and strategic method. First, ‘of the world total of 61 million deaths in two world wars, 97 per cent of the people who died were neither British nor American’ (p. 16). This conclusion follows on a well-documented account of the frequent use of ‘“colonial” troops to assault practically impregnable positions’ (p. 6). The second point (and one that is discussed in greater detail in Man and Woman, War and Peace) is the linkage of war with capitalist economics: over the two hundred years since the present economic system became dominant over most of the world, one can distinguish a long-term pattern of major booms and busts, about 54 years from peak to peak. Long-term depressions and expansions have each led to wars. This pattern suggests that war is an essential component of the long-term business cycle under capitalism, state and private. (Rules, p. 34) This theme occurs in both of the books. Wilden launches theories of military strategy, aggressive behaviour, and sexual inequality on the Kondratieff wave—inescapable effects of capitalist structures, evidences of the contradictions between society and nature that surface in a mercantile economy. Capitalism is locked in a double-bind, ‘between the unconstrained and quantitative growth it needs to maintain its precarious stability, and the entropic constraints on growth and pollution to which it is inevitably subjected by the requirements of long-range survival in a limited environment’ (Man and Woman, p. 58). Such double-binds and approaches to them through meta-communications and joke are symptomatic of the degree of order present in the social body. The survival ritual of the giftexchange cycle in Dobu society connects magic and economy—‘If you kill me by witchcraft, how shall I repay you this gift?’ Elsewhere, ideologies of the woman as subject and familial schizophrenia appear as types of Escher’s waterfall, the Cretan liar, and figure/ground inversions. Using the double-bind creatively forecloses completion, leads to win-win solutions, and reduces the context conditions of discourse and behaviour. In contemporary Western culture, the terror of the insoluble double-bind is exemplified in the stereotyping of women: Virgin (Mother), Wife, Whore, and Witch (Bitch)—these six terms and the pairs of imaginary opposites derived from them make up the basic lexicon of the code of Stereotypes from which the individual messages used to humiliate, terrorize, and control individual women in our society are selected and combined. (Man and Woman, p. 114)

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The consequences of such stereotyping are explored in grim detail in a chapter that develops the thesis of Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will. The body, as site of power transactions, instances the plundered colony that, in extremity, takes on the ideology of its oppressor, becomes the Other that is the imaginary of the colonizer, ‘a message passed between men’ (Brownmiller). The commodity fetishism of capitalism and its transformation of use values into exchange values pollutes and destroys the material and psychic constitution of the environment and its inhabitants. Conventionally, Wilden locates the shift towards a centralized patriarchal ideology in the early seventeenth century. Bacon’s injunction to ‘make her your slave’ (of nature), the Cartesian cogito, and the liberal theory produced by the English Civil War result in a cultural drift into the contradictions and aggressions that are a concomitant of capitalist structuration. In the 400 years of this process, messages come to displace codes. Feudal relations and manorial production carry with difficulty messages transmitted by the early bourgeoisie. Eventually, the messages overwhelm the codes, and a new system is set in place: By the mid-nineteenth century…when the industrial bourgeoisie won political and economic power…they are no longer merely messages in the system, but the embodiment of the newly dominant codes of the newly dominant mode of production, industrial capitalism. (Rules, p. 259) Following this model, it should be possible to trace the messages of an increasingly powerful working-class movement in the last hundred years. It is these messages, perhaps, that have become scrambled by the sheer force of monopoly capitalism and capital’s control of labour through a control of media, social resources, and various state apparatuses. Unsurprisingly, socialism has a history of fragmented and sporadic intervention in the social process during the modern epoch. Labour has been positioned as a colony and has produced its own ‘camp bosses’ in the form of ‘moderate’ leaders who interpret solidarity in terms of strike-free agreements with generous pension benefits. The second great financial crisis of the century in October 1987 (roughly in line with the Kondratieff wave) has come at a moment when the shift to a centre-left politics in the British Labour Party has made a significant, organized, oppositional analysis seem passé. Privatization, media manipulation, and the cultivation of regional and intra-class divisions by the Conservative Party have further disenfranchised the inarticulate, marginalized sectors of society. The slump in the stock exchange was not, unfortunately, a clash at an ideological level, a ‘historical moment’; more the result of a quarrel among dishonourable thieves about shares in the swag (the product of labour), a further rip-off of labour’s feeble spending power following the ‘small shareholder’ hype of recent years. This short survey of the two books gives some indication of the arrangement of material. The shifting spectrum of Wilden’s thought allows a slide from linguistic theory, anthropology, and ecology into cybernetics, systems analysis, economic theory, and the history of technology. Studies of media technique and influence, patriarchy, sexual violence and torture, mind and body images are seen here as various routes to the system/structure binarism that is a position of placement/displacement for the purposes of the texts. Choppiness, incompletion, and abrupt subject alternations are thus inscribed as textual manœuvre. Discourses are valued for their exchangeability; their ability to crisscross and harmonize with one another is

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highlighted. Somewhere, an unstated theory of unification (which runs counter to the deprogramming emphasis, the attack on linearity) lurks in the spaces between the chapters. Pictograms, charts, and photographs punctuate the text, offering ‘back-up’, the convenience of statistics, the airing of a rationale that the texts are anxious to undermine. This aversion to the production of a general theory of language and culture is strange in light of the author’s obvious relish for the theory of others. Yet the readings are selective. The absence of Althusser, Barthes, Coward and Ellis, or Pêcheux from Wilden’s bibliographies has much to do with the audience inscribed in the textual discourse. The complexity of the themes is muted by the chatty introductions, oddly patronizing definitions (‘Reality, real: what trips you up when you don’t pay attention to it—includes matter, energy, and the communication of many kinds of information’), and simplistic asides. There is an overload of detailed, anecdotal proof provided for point after point. The assembling of noted atrocities in war, sickening instances of torture and sexual persecution are intended to give weight to the scrutiny of capitalist, patriarchal ideologies, yet, perversely, the recounting of incident after incident diminishes the impact of the ideological critique and returns the reader to the transparent discourse of ‘experience’ familiar in fiction of the liberal tradition—‘your story against mine’. The reader role-plays the agonized insider, voyeuristically suspending moral and political insight in order to witness passively the tragic interactions of subjectivity and system. Generically, these texts seem to have strayed from the habitat of the TV series, where a hundred details can be smoothly joined to yield up one incontrovertible point after another, where the most disparate collection of material flows effortlessly into the mould of the 60-minute, audio-visual narrative. The domestication of cultural history in such works as Civilization and America is largely achieved through a cosy, didactic, chaining sequence; the signifiers in the production are carefully monitored to produce and reinforce the notion of a collectively determined homogeneous entity called ‘knowledge’ or ‘nation’. In Wilden’s texts, the language register remains unsettled. The reader is expected to take an interest in Saussure and Jakobson but s/he also requires lengthy notes on the Hollywood star system. Military history is a dominating concern of these texts, and Wilden plies us with reports, statistics, memoirs, and strategy manuals. The relation of this material to the structural anthropology and other theories of system and structure is validated but does not prove a critical linkage. At some level, everything is everything else, but this is not a useful generalization to explore—particularly when the author, as here, has a proven ability in historical framing. Take the discussion of the double-bind. Untying the notion of causality depends upon a detailed exegesis of the enabling phenomena (historical, linguistic, psychoanalytic, power-positioned, drive-related) of discourse. Wilden does not follow this route. Instead, after pointing out the structuring of various dominant/subordinate social arrangements into the figure of the double-bind, he continues: Some double-binds are universal—in the sense that ‘I am lying’ is a double-bound paradox for all users of analytic logic—whereas others are cultural or subjective, or peculiar to a class, race or sex, depending for their efficacy on the way they are interpreted, or on the way a person has been taught or trained to interpret them. (Man and Woman, p. 97)

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This distinction presents difficulties when analytic logic is contextualized within the history of twentieth-century philosophy or within the identity issues and personality-formation systems that surround the personal pronoun ‘I’. In these terms, what ‘I am lying’ generates is a recognition of the meta-level, the transcendent discourse that holds analysis in place. The ‘incompleteness’ of analytic logic is a clue to its ideologically constructed site of origin and valuation. Wilden touches on this issue when discussing possible routes of escape from the double-bind but avoids politicizing the critique by construing the transcendent in terms of formal logic or joke. It follows that the ‘ruses of end-orienting reason’6 remain in place. While historical process must function as if relative to a notional, incident-free infinity in idealist thought, the shift towards a radically lateral conception of subject, history, and structure that is the locus of these texts must contain a historiography that respects the materialist conception of events and is able to theorize them effectively. All too often, the dull cycle of deductive/inductive logic—principle, example, principle—pulls the texts away from a signed, cultural location, from the urgency of that liberating praxis in the areas of race, gender, and class that appears with rhythmic yet ineffectual frequency in the sub-texts of these volumes. Context theory, even with these shortcomings, could prove a positive agent in helping to untangle the internecine strife that has hindered the development of a post-structuralist political discourse. Stringing contexts, one to another, graphically illustrates the positionality of human discourse. Imperialism, gendering strategies, military systems, ecological structures, and the codes of pictorial, visual, and gestural language are here seen as contextsin-relation. Capitalism has spawned a spider-web array of systems that includes the selective emphases of the neurological circuit as well as the aggressive consumerism that commodifies even the kith and kin systems that bring it into being. Freud places the drive between the psyche and somatic dimensions of experience, a signifying that is and is not of the body, always constructed yet constantly valorized as ‘natural’. Context theory, like différance, plays on the interchange, the traced edges that unite yet separate our variety of interpretative manœuvres. Though Wilden does not mention the relation of his work to post-structuralism, there are strong connections with the refusal of originating formulas and the scanning of the periphery of mainstream culture in both deconstruction and context theory. Feminism and semiotics, by replacing essence with relation-manifest contextualization processes, seek to foreground the marginalized and dispossessed elements of the cultural nexus in line with the theories of these texts. Derrida’s statement of intent in ‘Limited Inc, abc’ clarifies this activity: I do not concentrate…on those points that appear to be the most ‘important’, ‘central’, ‘crucial’. Rather, I deconcentrate, and it is the secondary, eccentric, lateral, marginal, parasitic, borderline cases which are important to me and are a source of many things, such as pleasure, but also insight into the general functioning of a textual system.7 This ‘general functioning of a textual system’ is the target of Wilden’s ponderously compiled exposures and analyses. The difficulties with audience register, layout, and stylistic features are distracting but not barriers of substance. The presentation of a wide and valuable research area that is a near-neighbour to many recent post-structuralist concerns in the areas of law, politics, economics, the sciences, history, and literature is to be welcomed.

Thomond College of Education, Limerick

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NOTES 1 J.Hillis Miller, ‘The limits of pluralism: the critic as host’, Critical Inquiry, 3 (1977), pp. 439–47. 2 J.J.Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. A.Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 2.81. 3 T.Eagleton, ‘Capitalism, modernism and post-modernism’, New Left Review, 152. (July/August 1985), p. 71. 4 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 2.81. 5 T.Doherty, John Donne, Undone (London: Methuen, 1986). 6 J.Derrida, ‘The principle of reason: the university in the eyes of its pupils’, Diacritics, 13 (1983), p. 17. 7 J.Derrida, ‘Limited Inc, abc’, Glyph, 2 (1977), p. 180.

• Thomas Docherty, John Donne, Undone (London: Methuen, 1986), 253 pp., £4.95 (paperback) STEPHEN GLYNN

Since Donne is a poet who was constructed, at an identifiable historical moment, as central to the study of English literature, and since this centrality is a result of the alleged immediate experience of an undissociated sensibility which the strong speaking voice of his masculine rhythms offers the student, he would seem an ideal candidate for a deconstructive reading. Thomas Docherty’s John Donne, Undone provides such a reading with style and insight. It seeks both to historicize Donne’s poetry, situating it within the contemporary discourses of the scientific, the socio-cultural, and the aesthetic, and to problematize it by tracing out, via various Derridian pathways, the texts’ difference from themselves. This study, Docherty writes, ‘strives to evade being the final word on Donne’ (p. 2); rather, it ‘expands the concerns of these texts, obscures and mystifies them, and makes them available for re-reading’ (pp. 10–11). It is, as Docherty is well aware, deeply implicated in the texts it discusses, and it can itself easily be reread as a re-enactment of the Donnean themes and paradoxes it rehearses, as a series of encounters with a more contemporary decentring ‘new Philosophy’ that ‘calls all in doubt’. Indeed, one of the book’s many strengths is as a commentary on Derrida’s work, which, though it is only seldom alluded to, permeates John Donne, Undone. It is a rich and exciting text, which moves skilfully, and almost wholly successfully, between detailed analyses of Donne’s poetry and the general religious, sexual, scientific, and cultural discourses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and between an apparent historical specificity and the mazy play of the signifier after the manner of Glas or Dissemination. And it does all this with an admirable lucidity, for which, even though one knows that clarity is a deeply compromised ideological value, I am profoundly grateful. Docherty begins his decentring of Donne with a consideration of the decentring implications of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus. This text is, as Docherty argues, profoundly decentring in a number of ways. Obviously, it challenged the Ptolemaic system and, with it, the church’s authority. Less obviously, perhaps, it opened up the prospect of a universe founded on change, mutability, and imperfection, since the astral revolutions it discusses clearly have more than one centre and since these revolutions are frequently elliptical rather than perfect circles. Furthermore, it was itself a decentred text, which called its own status into question. In order to avoid charges of heresy, Andreas Osiander introduced an unsigned preface (which could be taken, therefore, as Copernicus’s address to the reader) suggesting, with a pragmatism that would delight Richard Rorty, that the treatise was an interpretative hypothesis rather than scientific truth. According to Osiander, it was not ‘necessary that these hypotheses should be true, nor even indeed probable, but it is sufficient if they produce calculations which agree with the observations’. That is, they could be taken as convenient

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fictions which would allow astronomers to make accurate calculations—rather as, today, navigators still use the Ptolemaic system, since it produces accurate calculations far more simply than the Copernican model—rather than as scientific truth. Thus the Copernican text is doubled against itself. To circumvent the censors, it calls its own status into question. It hints at a hidden referential truth—a series of heretical propositions—which are only available to the reader through a process of active interpretation which is itself a misreading of the text’s apparent protestations that it is poetic hypothesis rather than scientific thesis. Moving from Copernicus to Donne, Docherty traces an analogous process. In, for example, ‘The Sunne Rising’ and The Good Morrow’, Donne .attemp ts both a decentring and a recentring by banishing the sun to the periphery and proposing himself and his mistress as ‘the still point around which all else is supposed to revolve, and around whom all time passes, while they remain in some kind of position of supposed transcendence of history itself (p. 31). That is, the poems rehearse both a revolutionary break—from cosmology, past time, or both—and a recentring which seeks to put an end to Copernican historical time by situating the lovers in a timeless centrality. This recentring, however, is achieved by a male domination (‘She’ is all States, and all Princes, I,/Nothing else is’) which undermines itself, since, in the progress of reducing the woman to the site of commercial and geographic exchange—‘both th’ Indias of spice and Myne’— it depends on the possibility of metaphoric substitution and displacement which it characterizes as female. Furthermore, Donne’s attempts to rediscover stability and unity in the persons of the lovers themselves depend on sexual difference, on constituting a male ‘I’ which is a series of constructions, themselves dependent on the Other. As Docherty puts it: as we rehearse the text, we rehearse it always in the voice of the Other; that is to say, displacement within ourselves as we read or repeat the poem negates the possibility of stabilizing its meaning on a stable ‘us’, ‘I’, ‘reader’, just as much as it denies the possibility of stabilizing meaning on a ‘central’, ‘unified’, ‘stable’ ‘consciousness’ of an ‘individual’ called Donne. (p. 47) This leads Docherty to an extended discussion of ‘The problem of women’. For Docherty, ‘woman’ functions in Donne’s poetry as a threatening Other, permanently shifting and adulterous, who must be contained and controlled. The Other threatens communication itself, since it involves the permanent danger that Donne’s self-present meaning will be adulterated, and must be turned into an empty receptical into which Donne may pour ‘his words which are supposed to shape the Other in an imagined repetition of his own image’ (p. 52). Thus Docherty reads the shifts in size in ‘The Flea’—from flea to marriage temple to the ambivalent ‘living walls of jet’—as literally telescopic, in the sense that the recently discovered telescope allowed the fixed (male) observer to cause these vertiginous shifts in size and perspective, as an analogy to the speaker’s tumescent penis as, flea-like, it fills with blood, and, as the site in which the lovers meet, as the vagina. This Donnean will-to-power, however, subverts itself, since, in defining and moulding the Other, it introduces change, displacement, and instability (‘woman’ in Donne) as structural necessities in the (‘male’) self-definition. ‘The Anagram’ becomes a key text in this account. Docherty reads it as an unwilling assertion of the priority of displacement and disfiguration as such. There is, he argues, no

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sense of a prior beauty of which ugliness is a falling away. Rather, beauty and ugliness are both anagrams; ‘there is no figure, only disfiguration’ (p. 67). Thus woman is the site of a radical displacement which, it transpires, is also the force that enables poetry itself—‘If we might put the letters but one way,/In the leane dearth of words, what could wee say?’ The threatening and protean female Other becomes the necessary precondition of Donne’s attempts to establish a unified male identity. Consequently, since Donne attempts to control the Other by containing it, the Other’s threatening displacements menace Donne’s whole project. As Docherty’s analyses bring out, the implied sexual identities in Donne’s love poetry are easily scrambled; the possibilities of, for example, ‘Thy firmnes makes my circle just/And makes me end, where I begunne’, are, as Docherty argues, radically ambiguous. From anagrams and displacements, Docherty apparently moves back to the received idea of Donne as poet of the speaking voice, just as his Derridian progress seems to move back from Eperons to Of Grammatology. However, in a discussion based primarily on the religious verse, he suggests not only that Donne’s ‘speaking voice’ is doubled against itself in a permanent exile from pure presence, but also that it is marked by glas-like traces and displacements. Thus, for instance, ‘goest’ becomes haunted by ‘ghost’, ‘to’ by ‘two’ and ‘too’, in a series of increasingly complex (but almost always convincing) double readings. This leads to an ‘instertial’ chapter, ‘Identity and difference’, which brings together some of the threads of the argument into a net which then spreads out through the concluding sections of the book into an apparently more historicist discussion. The threads meet in a discussion of ‘crossing’—as in blessing, changing, transgressing, preventing. Docherty argues that Donne’s ‘imitatio Christi’ is, in part, an attempt to justify his own apostasy from his family’s Catholicism, since Christianity was founded on Christ’s apostasy from Judaism. It was also, as Joyce had noted, founded on a pun on a name, and via a discussion of the trope of antonomasia (the disguise or suppression of proper names) in Petrarch, du Bellay, and Sidney, Docherty discovers both a series of identifications between Donne and Christ in the Songs and Sonnets and an increasingly overdetermined play on ‘more’—as in Ann More, Donne’s first wife; as in Thomas More, his martyred maternal ancestor; as in folly, via Erasmus’s punning tribute to Thomas More, the Praise of Folly or Morias Enkomion; and, of course, as in ‘excess’. Religion and sexuality come together here, partly through Donne’s problematic relationship with his ancestral faith. As Docherty points out, Donne proposes a curious way of discerning the true faith in Satire 3, ‘Kinde pity chokes my spleene’: aske thy father which is shee Let him aske his; though truth and falshood bee Neare twins, yet truth a little elder is. This argument leads in different directions. At one level it is rooted in a patriarchal transmission of truth and the imperatives of primogeniture which, as Docherty argues, led Henry VIII to break with Rome. This line reduces women to ‘mutable vehicles through whom truth is mediated and represented’ (p. 200). At another, however, it simultaneously reduces the father to the mediating vehicle of a prior female church (‘shee’). In Donne’s case, of course, asking this question would lead him back to the forbidden Catholic Church he abandoned, which, through the mother’s line, is linked to Thomas More, who is in turn linked to Ann More. And her father, George More, had Donne imprisoned for his secret, transgressive

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marriage, which, in this context, Docherty reads as another betrayal of a father, one which refused ‘George More the degree of patriarchal control of his family and especially of his primogenitive history, which was the societal and ideological norm’ (p. 201). In linguistic terms, of course, it is precisely this possibility of a transgressive mutation that threatens the referent’s control over the sign, by allowing slippage and exchange between the signifiers, which makes poetry possible and historical interpretation necessary. This section of Docherty’s argument is probably the one least likely to commend him to more traditional Donne scholars. It is true that Docherty sometimes seems to waver between suggesting, on the one hand, the possibly unsupportable thesis that Donne was consciously manipulating these fortuitous coincidences of names or producing some of the stranger anagrams and antonomasias and, on the other hand, the stronger thesis that, whatever Donne may have thought he was doing, these uncanny echoes are certainly discernible in the poetry and can be made to signify. The move is reminiscent of some Derridian double readings—‘Plato’s pharmacy’,1 for example—which reach the same deconstructive positions by a rigorous exploitation of textual logic and by a Joycean play of signifiers, thereby calling into question the initial opposition between textual rigour and Joycean play. Docherty is well aware of this, and incorporates the point in his argument. Nevertheless, one could wish the point had been more strongly developed, since this section, in many ways the most exciting, is likely to be the one most strongly criticized. Docherty’s concluding chapter, a discussion of ‘Writing as therapy’, attempts to bring together contemporary medical and religious discourse in an analysis of, on the one hand, the results of the contemporary epidemic of syphilis and, on the other, the implications of the Protestant and Catholic views on confession. Syphilis, Docherty argues, led to the privatization of the sexual sphere; sexual activity was contained more and more within the family. Furthermore, since the contemporary medical ideology saw the disease as an impure foreign body (‘the French pox’) that men caught from women, men became increasingly obsessed with women’s ‘purity’, manifested by the hymen. The hymen, argues Docherty, was the ‘locus of exchange’ of women on the marriage-market; thus, yet again, woman becomes simultaneously (and for the same reasons) the threatening Other who carries possible disease and entropy and, as the locus of symbolic exchange, both the enabling condition of poetry and the model of health. The sexual isolationism and concern with individual ‘purity’ encouraged by the disease is associated for Docherty with the Protestant ethic of individualism and its downgrading of confession, since confession implies a social involvement in the body of the church. Furthermore, for Docherty, confession is a paradoxical activity, always implicated by excess. It simultaneously implicates the penitant in more and more sins, as an increasingly diligent self-examination brings more and more sins to light, and also undoes its function, since the narrative of confession produces explanations which tend (as Paul de Man remarks of Rousseau) to excuse the sins as they are confessed. Or, as Docherty puts it, ‘the more the confessor confesses, the more she or he has to confess’ (p. 239). Again, excess—More—works to undo Donne, whom Docherty reads as simultaneously driven inwards by the fear of syphilitic contagion and outwards by the need to confess. Confession (itself potentially transgressive in Donne’s England) becomes, like woman, like language, at once contamination and cure, a pharmakon.

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The Catholic Church might seem an improbable image of deconstructive transgression and excess—almost as improbable, perhaps, as the Anglo-Catholic royalist Donne, poet of the undissociated sensibility and the organic community, as bearer of deconstructive and decentring jouissance. And yet, as Docherty argues of Donne, quoting The Eighteenth Brumaire, when people ‘seem involved…in creating something that has never before existed, it is precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis that they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service…in order to act out the new scene of world history in this timehonoured disguise and this borrowed language’ (p. 247). Farce, perhaps, but farce and folly, moria, do not look quite the same at the end of John Donne, Undone as they did at the beginning.

Polytechnic of Central London NOTES 1 Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s pharmacy’, in Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 61–120.

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• Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), xii + 225 pp., £25.00 and £10.95 ELIZABETH WRIGHT

Malcolm Bowie puts these by now heavily institutionalized figures together for their quality of ‘as if’ thinking, that very quality which manages somehow to elude final capture by the institution. This is the term used by the German philosopher Hans Vaihinger in the wake of Kant and Nietzsche to designate the necessity of hypothesis. What he warned against was the turning of hypothesis into dogma, for the wishful constructions fabricated by mind out of reality have to be tested out according to the ends in view, namely the desires of the subject. It is Bowie’s particular interest to relate theory and desire, his specific brief being the relations between passions and hypotheses. To support his case he turns to Freud, Proust, and Lacan, all of whom are centrally concerned with the use of fictions in pursuit of goals. Bowie sets out to investigate this process by relating those who thought of themselves as scientists to one who thought of himself as a maker of fiction. The fruitfulness of this comparison resides in the argument that there is fiction in science and science in fiction. In the chapter entitled ‘Freud’s dreams of knowledge’ Bowie carefully examines a set of repeated dominant images in Freud’s work which reveal him on the one hand as subject to a masculine positivism and on the other as having a modern understanding of the scientific imagination as dealing in fiction, with the scientist as a teller of stories. Freud sees science as a search for pure knowledge, yet he is an insatiable hypothesizer; he is both an objectifier and a guesser. His self-images as archaeologist and conqueror show him to be on a quest for a unitary knowledge, yet this knowledge is continually disrupted by his epistemological dreams and fantasies: Hypotheses were, then, both frowned upon and assiduously cultivated by Freud. He was an expert observer powerfully drawn towards grandiose unobservables. Freucd’s writings derive something of their extraordinary intellectual density from their capacity to superimpose and interconnect these alternative views of knowledge. (p. 16) So what happens to a ‘scientific’ text when it becomes a conflictual site of facts and wishes? Bowie pursues this question by examining the work of a writer of fiction in whom he finds the same pattern of cognitive endeavour. In the chapter entitled ‘Proust, jealousy, knowledge’, he goes on to show how a supposedly negative passion such as jealousy and a morally suspect act such as lying can become sources of new knowledge. In the case of Proust, such a view runs contrary to the received one of a narrator who goes through a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress, whereby the negative is encompassed by the positive at the end of the journey. Instead of this harmonizing perspective, Bowie shows how in La Prisonière the lover becomes ‘an honorary

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scientist or scholar by virtue of his jealous calculations’, and not in spite of them: he is a producer and transformer of anxiety, specializing ‘in the telling of tactical lies designed to surprise Albertine into self-disclosure’ (p. 50). In the dialogue of the tormented lover Bowie traces an opposition between two kinds of jealous enquiry analogous to that between inductive and hypothetico-deductive methods of enquiry. In the course of a detailed analysis of the text he notes that the cognitive language of science appears in the midst of the narrator’s introspections. What emerges is that the bond between feeling and cognition, even so far as it applies to science itself, becomes manifest, leading him to pose the question ‘what kind of jealousy is science?’ One of the similarities is that the goal pursued by both scientist and jealous lover is forever receding, while the appetite for knowledge suffers no diminution. Another is that both are stimulated by their passions into fiction-making: lying and false presuppositions in the case of the jealous lover, bold conjectures in the case of the scientist. Bowie shows himself impelled by a similar appetite in his investigation of the introspections of Proust’s narrator, in particular of what underlies the cognitive rigour with which the narrator conducts a self-analysis which turns into an involuntary self-disclosure: in this he detects an ironic inconsistency between the remarkable clarity of this self-examination which has the semblance of an analysis and the fact that it nevertheless still betrays material only accessible to psychoanalysis. He examines tracts of this introspection in order to sift them for their unconscious elements. Of the large number of links to be made between Proust and Freud he selects two areas of interest, namely errors and slips, and bisexuality and homosexuality. As regards the first, he maintains that it is not the case that the unconscious appears only intermittently: though the effects seem to be minor, the underlying cause, unconscious desire, is ‘obdurate and unstoppable’ (p. 72). As an example he points to the narrator’s betraying himself when he apparently receives contradictory telegrams, informing him first that Albertine is dead and then that she is still alive. It is far from clear how this confusion came about: what is clear is that the narrator’s wish that Albertine was dead becomes obvious in the text. As regards the other area of interest, Freud’s examination of bisexuality led him to postulate the precariousness of gender. Proust’s novel centres on a character whose love objects are constantly changing gender. He falls in love with heterosexuals who turn out to be homosexual, which outrages him because he is in search of a fixed identity. But bisexuality is not only in the ones beloved; it is also in the narrator himself. Bowie discusses with perspicuity and considerable subtlety, to which this short account can hardly do justice, an episode in which the narrator and his mother are in an art gallery in Venice, looking at some paintings from Carpaccio (three illustrations are supplied). He finds the power of the narrator’s love for his mother emerging in the description of the episode, which at the same time reveals the narrator’s bisexuality. The narrator recalls looking at an old woman, a stray onlooker, who recurs in the bottom right-hand corner of two pictures that represent the martyrdom of St Ursula. In the same way as the old woman is the silent observer of St Ursula in the stages towards the martyrdom and at the martyrdom itself, so his own mother has watched and is watching over him in the crises of his life. The narrator is unaware that through this identification he thus occupies a feminine position. This revelation of his unconscious is repeated in another feature of the same scene, concerning a third painting by Carpaccio, in the background of which there is a youth wearing a cloak. A Venetian fashion designer had copied this man’s cloak and sold the design in Paris as a cloak for women, duly purchased by

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Albertine. Thus in the narrator’s mind there is a link between what was originally a man’s cloak and the bisexual Albertine. His own unconscious bisexuality is betrayed when his mother protectively places his shawl over his shoulders. This locates the source of a pain which he himself attributes to yearning for the lost Albertine, but which derives from his own gender uncertainty. Both Proust and Freud attribute the anguish of this uncertainty to a longing for self-dissolution in a mythical realm of primal unity, but the difference, Bowie maintains, is that where Proust speaks of Edenic ecstasy Freud speaks of the labour of analysis. Yet the introspective narrator who is rewarded with this ecstasy has had as a double throughout one whose contradictions have shown that bliss to be questionable. Freud, Proust, and Lacan each have ‘an extraordinarily keen perception of the human mind as the fabricator and refurbisher of wishful constructions, and each of them occupies for long stretches of his writing the middle realm in which theories and fictions are only fitfully distinguishable’ (p. 6). When Bowie comes to assign a place to Lacan as a fictionalizer of theories, Lacan’s own fictional characteristics come out more clearly than his relevance to the fiction we call literature. Bowie is in fact quick to question ‘the relationship between Lacanian theory and literary studies as one of reciprocal support and enhancement’ (p. 155). The relationship is rather to be seen as an ‘asymmetrical one’, and he is surely more correct in arguing this than in pointing towards the account of discourse contained in Freud’s theory of dreams, slips, and jokes. We already have this, and, as has been shown, Bowie has used it to shining effect in his analyses of Proust and Freud. Lacan provides a theory of discourse which is rather different from Freud’s, and it may well be that it serves to distinguish what we have been wont to regard as literary from another kind of literariness. For Lacan, ‘discourse’ is to do with the position that a subject occupies when it speaks to another, and these characteristics of a discourse must be present as an unconscious structure in every text. Lacan names four discourses, of which the ‘discourse of the hysteric’ is particularly relevant to Bowie’s project, for, far from referring to a pathology, this discourse refers to a structure which is indispensable to any production of theory or creativity. To reveal the discourse of the text, as Lacan has done in his interpretation of Hamlet and Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’, is not to indulge in reducing the text to any single interpretation, but to provide a general structure which can accommodate any number of particular interpretations, such as sociological or biographical ones. But the relation to the literary is indeed ‘asymmetrical’, as Bowie suggests. For, as soon as this structure is troped by the ‘discourse of the university’, the radical potential of such a reading turns into no more than a sophisticated reading of the castration complex. Psychoanalytic discourse analysis is not literary criticism, nor is it about rhetoric, but rather about the problem of naming and categorizing, which assumes traumatic dimensions in the text. Hence it is not surprising that in his two chapters on Lacan Bowie makes no attempt to interimplicate him with a literary text to the mutual enrichment of both as he does in the case of Freud and Proust. Lacan’s radical contribution to letters is perhaps better demonstrated by seeing him as a rival rather than as an ally in the production of textual theories of interpretation, opening up a new conflict between psychoanalysis and literature rather than papering over the old. This in fact accords better with Bowie’s critical conclusions than with his attempt to find links between Lacan and literature. Bowie derives from Lacan the notion that any conceptual scheme that claims to be an organon for the production of knowledge must take account of the subversions brought about by the unconscious that are inevitably attendant on any such

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scheme. Psychoanalysis thus defined reminds the theoretical intelligence that it must expect such subversions—and attempt to cope with them. Bowie criticizes psychoanalysis for not being critical enough of its own concepts, as any science must be, noting that psychoanalysis has rigidified in various ways under the ideological pressures of capitalism and has failed to take sufficient account of social determinations. Bowie finally reminds us that theories driven by passion lead inevitably to their own destruction. Nevertheless he urges that the play of theory be still seen as ‘anticipated certitude’, as he believes his three writers see it. Vaihinger might have added that play, the ‘as if, is responsible for that ‘joy resembling certainty’ of which Proust’s narrator speaks.

Girton College, Cambridge

• R.Colls and P.Dodd (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920 (Bromley: Croom Helm, 1986), 384 pp., £12.95 paperback • M.J.Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980, Pelican Books (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 240 pp., £3.95 R.A.STRADLING THE PROLOGUE It comes as a shock even to the hardiest reviewer to find a volume he is struggling to read, mark, and equitably assess acclaimed in a loud professional organ as already ‘celebrated’ and ‘now available in paperback’. Of course, this puff for the Colls and Dodd compendium appeared only in a publisher’s advertisement, and even when sighted in the TLS version it should not lend special authority to the claim. The weekly supplements have not yet acquired an official standing, though once the UGC is finally replaced with the new and undisguised Government Office for Academic Affairs one imagines that the Murdoch mouthpieces will strive to achieve this relationship. It’s all a question of discourse (of course), in this case the dichotomy between two discourses which academics perceive to be diametrically opposed, and believe (no less) to define their being. I refer to the value-systems of the blatantly commercial and the ostensibly impartial, in this case appearing in the same guise (to whit on the same page) distinguished only by the finest of differential marks in line and typeface. In one dimension, the pages of the TLS are like one of those harmless printed diversions often found in other tabloids which ask ‘readers’ to use their skill and judgement in specifying the detailed ways in which two apparently identical pictures in fact differ. In another, they carry a message similar to that of a notorious scholarly article by Jacques Lacan. Yet in our ordinary Friday coffee-time reading we unquestioningly accept this juxtaposition, or even miscegenation, of what we unthinkingly see as ‘the actual, the real, and the true’ with what we regard—equally automatically—as second-hand, slanted, and probably false. This strange, yet completely normal state of affairs is an intimate example of the workings of a Manichaean world, invisibly confirming the absolute dominance of binary modes in our intellectual lives. When this practice of mixing review with rave reaches the professional journals, such as Textual Practice—usually more than a year later—the discourses are potentially in direct conflict over a particular book. For example, whatever I’m going on to write about the Colls/ Dodd book may be countered even as you read (dear censor) by one of those publisher’s announcements which patrol such pages like an American fleet in international waters, carrying an armoury more than sufficient to sink the present reviewer’s opinion without trace. In such a way (inter alia) are the gulfs and straits of scholarship policed, the mines of dissent being carefully swept clear in the lanes of capitalism. The observation is uncomfortably apposite in this case, since the publishers of Colls/Dodd have recently been

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taken over by none other than the company whose (ahem) admirable foresight and sense of public service have moved them to sponsor the present organ. Caveat, lector, lest you be pre-empted. THE REVIEW In the wake of a general election campaign which, for the first time in two generations, witnessed all parties blatantly playing the card of patriotic sentiment, many of the essays presented by Colls and Dodd have a keen interest. After all, the essence of most party political broadcasts is that their particular version of a nationalist myth-system has the most natural appeal; and the runaway sales of the Thatcher package in 1983 and 1987 indicate that a new consensus, a kind of Gaullisme Britannique bien que manqué, is being created in our society. The excellent contribution of Alan Howkins on ‘The discovery of rural England’ is salient in this regard, not only because (in contrast to its companions) it draws on a plurality of sources—landscaping, architecture, and music—as well as the published word for its argument, but also because it shows how the indigenous socialism of Morris and the local libertarianism of Carpenter were both easily recuperated into a monolithic culture of bloodand-soil nationalism even before the First World War. This essay provides a keynote for the whole volume, more so indeed than the accomplished but necessarily more diffuse surveys of the two editors. It demonstrates how the archetypal ‘English village’, descended lineally from the equally mythical English manor, became the focal phoneme of the language of British nationalism. Not surprisingly, it was an artefact deliberately located in the south of England, but discovered lying there by an archaeology (as it were) as genuine and natural as the complementary and contemporary finding of the Piltdown Man, our original villager. Together, they offered incontrovertible proof that all humanity, civilization, and beauty can be traced to Sussex. Another promising area for colonization by cultural history is reconnoitred—but hardly boldly occupied—by Jeremy Crump, whose examination of ‘The identity of English music: the reception of Elgar, 1898–1935’ illustrates how a potent cultural warrior was manufactured, alongside Dreadnoughts and Lee Enfields, as an indispensable element of conscious nationalism. The fact is that Elgar achieved his popular apotheosis during the war to end wars. In music, as in science, and thus in the field of general education—a point perhaps not enough stressed here—so much of what is remarked by these essayists was, one way or another, the reaction to a perceived challenge from imperial Germany. It is noteworthy that in a clever TV fantasy, broadcast recently, Sherlock Holmes, standing in a Sussex meadow near the site of Piltdown, made several of these points for the benefit of a bemused Watson, to the accompaniment of the trio tune from Pomp and Circumstance, no. 4. The rural cottages kept in trim by innumerable progenitors of Thatcher and sighed over by Richard Jefferies (et al.) provided the basic bricks for the solid construction of Englishness, just as the countryside was there to be seen and felt as its immanent contextual truth. Nevertheless, the formation of this cultural system was undoubtedly a literary process first and foremost, for its discourse was systematically distributed by publishers, above all in the thriving magazine trade catering for what was, by 1920, a captive home market comprising over 90 per cent of a population able to read. To this extent, it may be granted, most of these essays are justified in basing themselves on printed sources, in the shape of feature

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journalism, novels, poetry, and (occasionally) government reports. Perhaps inevitably in an enterprise determined to achieve comprehensive coverage, there is much overlap of theme; close contiguity of argument, and even outright repetition. In terms of intellectual content, whole sections of the essays by Brian Doyle (The invention of English’) and Hugh Cunningham (‘The Conservative Party and patriotism’) and the prolix disquisition of Peter Brooker and Peter Widdowson (‘A literature for England’) are anticipated by the editorial chapters. A token feminist chapter (‘The Englishwoman’), presumably included out of a misplaced sense of ideological duty, lacks either appropriateness or originality. Its authors (Jane Mackay and Pat Thane) state at the outset that the place of women in the national culture was little different from that which they occupied in any of its European or transatlantic competitors, and the substance of what follows entirely fails to make any impression on this statement. It may be, of course, that the attempted assimilation of Bavarians into German culture, or of Bretons into French, followed a contemporary course very similar to that examined by D.G.Boyce in his penetrating study of ‘The marginal Britons: the Irish’; but a hypothetical comparative monograph would be far less limited in scope than any exercise in ‘Women’s History’. Disappointingly, the book is unable to provide clear methodological guidelines for a British version of ‘the new historicism’. Its lack of theoretical adventure renders many of its pages dully empirical, a perfectly reflexive confirmation of the vicelike control of British modes of scholarship. Its achievement is to demonstrate—even if mostly by accumulation of documentary example—how ‘Englishness’ became a wonderfully homogeneous blend of ideas and fancies. As a recent article by Paul Rich (in History Today) argues, even strictly English nationalist manifestations were subsumed in the general process. Perhaps this explains why the present writer, who has no English ancestors, is able to identify far more readily with Englishness than with a Celtic past which has remained mythical; that is to say, which has been far less powerfully translated into Myth. Fruit of the work of hundreds of willing artisans, and entirely the product of the middle class of a particular time and place (the Home Counties, 1860–1910), Englishness was successfully disseminated among all sections of the population of these islands. Successfully enough, at any rate, to reduce the political significance of class and other social differences, along with those of regional and intranational feeling, to a level at which it could be contained within a single state organism; and to fight, at the cost of enormous casualties and unbelievable privation, two total wars of national survival. No other modern political community, not excluding the USA, has been so successful in these terms. One only has to look at our near neighbour and recreation colony, Spain, to see the force of this argument. Spain is a multinational state for which the homogenizing concept of Hispanidad, contemporary with but far more succinct than ‘Englishness’, was created by the historian Menéndez Pelayo. Yet Spain became the modern locus classicus of brutal internecine strife. In Britain the minting of a national cultural discourse produced a consensus which in its day was even more sedulous and efficacious than the package of home and amenity ownership, Mediterranean holidays, and share portfolios currently in slow but sure seepage from Sussex into the vertical and horizontal interstices of our nation. Itself sparked off by work in the 19608 by writers like Tom Nairn, Mark Girouard, Raymond Williams, and Anthony Sampson, Martin Wiener’s book is in its turn the spiritual

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begetter of Colls/Dodd. It has become a cause célèbre of the 1980s, not least because its suggestive broad-left thesis has been expropriated to devastating effect by the propaganda of a new conservative generation. It is a tribute to the book’s influence that its point has been so quickly and so thoroughly misunderstood, immediately placing Wiener on the same plane as other Great Thinkers of History. His book miraculously erases the boundaries between Economic History, Sociology, Politics, and Criticism. Its robust riposte to generations of superior anti-American sentiment in Britain—emanating equally from pub, club, and common room—is a delight to be savoured. Even in a vastly expanded bibliography on the now-established subject of ‘The decline of Britain’, it will remain for some time at the centre of discussion and debate. For precisely the opposite case to that made by Wiener can still legitimately be advanced, one which might argue that a powerful social celebration of the industrial entrepreneur was a characteristic of the period down to the 1930s, at least. A different selection from the kinds of literary and historical sources utilized by Wiener could demonstrate that the British landowning aristocracy strongly confirmed a long-existing tendency not only to marry the wealth of manufacturing industry but to invest in it, join its boards, and directly to manage its undertakings. Possibly unknown in Sussex, this phenomenon is vividly illustrated by the story of the Bute enterprises in Cardiff. Therefore, it is possible to be convinced by Michael Sanderson’s objections to Wiener, argued from the contemporary perspective of the ‘regions’, the immense civic prosperity of the north and Midlands, with its great institutions and vocational societies, its printed magazines and manuals, its artistic and engineering artefacts, as opposed to the hindsights of the late twentieth century and the dazzling lights of London. From another and quite contrary viewpoint come the latest findings of ‘mere’ economic historians (Cain and Hopkins in recent issues of the Economic History Review). These seem to prove, quite contrary to Wiener’s essential premise, that an industrial culture was never established in England to an extent capable of meaningful ‘decline’, even before 1850; that the dominance/stranglehold of London, the City, the professions, and the central civil service was never seriously challenged in terms of quantitative wealth, let alone in those of qualitative culture, by the manufacturing dimension of the economy. As a student essay might put it, thus it can be seen that there is more than one point of view as regards this one. THE EPILOGUE Where does this leave us? Concluding, perhaps, that we can never be as self-aware as we like to think we already are. Good thing, too, since comfort is not the proper condition of scholarship, neither in its extrinsic nor in its intrinsic being. Certainty, consensus, and security are rather the business of politics. This aphorism is contrary to what has been generally accepted inside and outside the academic world for most of the modern era. Clearly this is the reason why we find so much of politics in the History, Criticism, and Philosophy of the past. Yet a future analyst of the twenty-fifth century is still free to decide that the spawning of deconstructive critiques which dismantled the existing structure of university disciplines in the last third of the twentieth century represented only the advance of a new structure and discipline, the evolution of a new hegemony. He or she might also consider how paradoxical yet how inevitable it was that the new socialism of the 19608, with its upfront proclamation of a society forged in the whiteheat of the technological revolution (oh glow, my PCW 8256!),

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should centre its intellectual being in a shiny new University of Sussex, to which its mandarins sent their brilliant and lovely daughters, a little Republic of Gentle and Humane Learning, modelled after the Florence of the Medici, where Industry and Technology were all unknown. And how inevitable yet paradoxical it was that the new Toryism of the 1980s should find its first academic consummation not in Sussex but in Salford.

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• Thomas G.Pavel, The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 18 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), £25.00 (hardback), £7.50 (paperback) • Thomas G.Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1986), £16.95 DUNCAN SALKELD

The researches into narrative structure of A.J.Greimas and Tzvetan Todorov—and, more lately, Claude Brémond and Mieke Bal—have sought to establish a concern with plot within the main arena of contemporary literary interests. Thomas Pavel’s The Poetics of Plot is a product of this recent history but holds out the prospect of breaking new ground in narratology by synthesizing and expanding on views already established. Pavel acknowledges the importance of Greimas, Todorov, Brémond, and others, yet proposes a new narrative grammar (designed to deal with the intricacies of Renaissance drama plot arrangements) which, he maintains, is better able to account for plot advance, the role of characters, and the relations between narrative and meaning. Against the strategies of Bal (and also Gérard Genette), Pavel holds that a discursive approach to plot precludes the study of narrative in the abstract and so rules out the possibility of extending this to other story-based activities such as drama, film, and narrative painting. The purpose of this grammar is to make explicit certain intuitive narrative techniques which loosely correspond to the kind of tacit knowledge theorized by Michael Polanyi. Pavel sets out to describe in detail the conventions and rules with which Renaissance dramatists such as Marlowe, Kyd, and Shakespeare constructed their plot lines. His main concern is with the ‘basic properties’ of the plot (e.g. hero, villain, helper), and with the task of generating abstract rules to disclose the tacit conventions which underlie the structures of Renaissance plays. But Pavel is also aware of difficulties inherent in the notion of a ‘narrative grammar’. Such talk might sound all too similar to the metalinguistic dogma which bestowed an appearance of objectivity upon literary interpretation in pre-structuralist days. Pavel clearly wishes to limit his claims. An abstract plot grammar, he maintains, will generate an account of only the formal narrative properties of the text. It will be incomplete inasmuch as it is limited mainly to generalities: ‘Texts are too complex to be accounted for by a single grammar.’ The aim of the grammar, then, is to identify plot outlines that are common to a selection of related texts. Pavel draws upon Chomskyan linguistics for his presentation of plot analyses. (He apparently shares Chomsky’s views regarding the innateness of certain linguistic learning abilities, and the neutrality of linguistic science.) The various plots analysed are charted according to Chomsky’s well-known ‘tree’ models. These are constructed by means of a

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categorial vocabulary designed to specify (in the abstract) the objects and narrative continuities of the text. The categories employed (for example, ‘move’, ‘problem’, ‘solution’, ‘auxiliary’, ‘tribulation’, and the additional facilities of ‘pro’ and ‘counter-’ prefixes) deal with the rules according to which the narrative is organized and transformed. Each designates a specific feature of the text: the ‘move’ concept signifies a link between actions and represents a choice between a range of options that brings about other ‘moves’ or the end of the story; an entire plot comprises a complex ‘move’ consisting of several simple ‘moves’ embedded under each other as the grammar requires. Additionally, the ‘problem’ and ‘solution’ categories enable ‘moves’ to be examined in detail; thus a ‘problem’ is generally a disadvantage besetting a character’s narrative intentions, while a ‘solution’ is an action which resolves this difficulty. The functions of these terms are illustrated from the plot of King Lear, where Edmund’s ‘solution’ to the problem of his illegitimacy becomes the contriving of Edgar’s banishment. The ‘move’ link between Edmund’s deception of Gloucester and Gloucester’s reaction is thus marked in the grammar by a ‘problem’ followed by a ‘solution’. Gloucester’s gullibility in the situation is marked as an ‘auxiliary’. In this way, Pavel builds up ‘tree’ diagrams of ‘moves’, ‘problems’, ‘solutions’, and ‘auxiliaries’ which chart the narrative development of Renaissance dramas. These diagrams are then computed into formulas which define the rules by which they are governed. But in order to keep the grammar sufficiently flexible transformations of narrative movement have to be accounted for. This is achieved in three ways: through the differentiation of classes of narrative ‘tree’; by allowing for incidental episodes which are inserted into the main narrative; and by noting when the ‘solution’ of an initial ‘move’ is broken down into a series of secondary ‘solutions’ relating to follow-on ‘moves’. Happily, Pavel’s ‘trees’ bear ‘narrative leaves’ which are designed to perform the same function as Todorov’s ‘narrative propositions’. These latter tell us what is happening in the plot without specifying any of the structural conditions which have led to the situation. The functions of ‘narrative propositions’ therefore differ according to their contexts, and it is the task of semantic interpretation to examine these functions. Pavel then applies this narrative grammar to English Renaissance tragedies. The operations of the ‘move’ grammar are explained with a discussion of Tamburlaine I. The relations between the plot domains of Mycetes and Tamburlaine are mapped out in a series of ‘moves’, each triggered by a ‘problem’ and completed with a ‘solution’, and it is shown that the meaning-content of these ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ shifts according to the rival perspectives adopted by the different characters. The discussion here—as throughout the rest of the book— is restricted mainly to structural instances of the narrative, although Pavel does offer some wider interpretative comments on the play—for example, that its emplotment reflects the political instability of the society in which it is set. Such insightful comment hardly manages to relieve the monotony of the analysis, however. Pavel continues by setting out the differences between Tamburlaine’s plot and the narrative beginnings of folk-tales, and constructing a more complex picture of the drama’s narrative development with the introduction of techniques of ‘move’ numbering and embedding. This is followed by a discussion of problems in narrative chronology. Pavel sees narrative time in Renaissance plays as idiosyncratic—more a property of particular events than a grand scale for the measuring of a succession of events—and he has some useful comments on how Tamburlaine I manages to achieve the narrative effect of chronology. Pavel then turns to semantic considerations of the structural regularities, conventions, and rules for action which

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constitute the plot. Here, Pavel draws important distinctions between the ontological, epistemological, axiological, and action aspects of narrative domains. Since plots may feature more than one narrative domain, he suggests, they require fuller classification. What Pavel is after here is some means by which the state of affairs in a domain and the process of its changes may be charted. These considerations are traced through to a point at which fundamental plot-governing maxims can be established in order to disclose the tacit assumptions according to which the narrative unfolds, e.g. ‘Power seekers succeed, power keepers fail’. The differences in plot construction of Marlowe’s later plays—Tamburlaine II, The Jew of Malta, Dr Faustus, and Edward the Second—are highlighted with similar plot readings. Pavel finds The Jew of Malta a more complex narrative than either Tamburlaine I or II, since it unfolds in a single tree, involving at least sixteen distinct moves. It presents a comparatively unified state of affairs (it shows ‘ontological homogeneity’), although the characters’ knowledge of the plot is severely restricted (or ‘epistemically partitioned’), and hence the greater element of suspense in The Jew of Malta than in any other of Marlowe’s tragedies. Dr Faustus is represented with two different narrative trees, the first showing the progression of episodes through which Faustus passes, while the second—representing the story of Faustus as a single event within the wider spiritual conflict between God and Lucifer—has a more simple but ambiguous plot. The uncertainty as to how the cosmology of the play is to be centred thus reflects broader historical tensions between the traditions of the medieval and Elizabethan theatres. Edward the Second marks a further change in Marlowe’s handling of plot. The ‘moves’ in this play divide evenly between two groups (a ‘polemical configuration’), and progress in a series of counter-moves which combine to form a single narrative. Pavel then draws general conclusions from his analysis of Marlowe’s plays which he offsets against current literary (structuralist) trends: ‘Contrary to such views, the preceding analyses suggest that a poetological perspective may well lead to interesting considerations about the artistic personality of individual writers.’ All this adds up to the fact that narratology tells us about authors: thus Marlowe’s rebelliousness in controverting standard morality (axiology), the capricious stances, the predilection for paradox, and the obsession with narrative exploration, are all aspects of a personal style and temperament borne out by the narrative grammar. And indeed this is quite possible, although similar observations are not drawn from the subsequent plot analyses of The Spanish Tragedy, Arden of Faversham, and King Lear—an indication, perhaps, of some difficulty on this question. Pavel concludes with some general observations on the usefulness of his proposed method of analysis. The ‘move grammar’ may be seen as a model for the understanding of certain formal properties of texts, and should be evaluated against the reader’s intuitions; it is relevant to the study of cultural and stylistic phenomena, especially to the definition of period style; the grammar helps to account for the integration of multiple plots, and it can be useful for distinguishing genres (Pavel finds the plots of Renaissance tragedies ‘solution orientated’, while the comedies tend to be mainly ‘auxiliary orientated’). Pavel has some valuable—almost Foucauldian—reflections on the uses of ontological, epistemic, and axiological approaches to narrative, and it is on these questions that his formalism comes closest to a discursive reading of the poetics of plot.

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This book should be of considerable value to those interested in narratology. It offers a comprehensive analytic procedure for the mapping of complex narrative arrangements and could potentially be developed beyond the borders of its period limitations. Pavel’s grammar also makes a serious effort to deal with the problem of agency in plot formation—a topic currently much ignored, as Wlad Godzich notes in his foreword. If Pavel had specifically set himself the task of applying transformational linguistics to the study of plot, he has certainly achieved that aim. But this book will not only please linguists and narratologists. It may also revive the spirits of critical formalists who wish to see restrictions imposed upon the recent literary fashions of ‘free play’ interpretation. But, as a contribution to modern critical debate, The Poetics of Plot has a somewhat limited usefulness. Although a merit of the book is that its arguments are developed in response to contemporary literary trends, it cannot be relied upon for a sure-fire challenge to post-structuralist theory. Without offering much in the way of warrant for his strategy, Pavel centres each move in the plot progression with a character, thus reiterating the embattled view of agency as an essential attribute of human subjectivity. While this may be of some shorthand value, it none the less helps to perpetuate rather conventional readings of the text. Such readings are not troubled either by a dependence upon intuitive notions of what constitutes a problem and a solution. What Pavel keeps silent about is the possibility that a ‘problem’ for the narrative might be determined by a framework of interests whose implications extend far beyond the provisional limits of the structure of the text. More importantly, the reading of such interests could be constitutive of a knowledge of the text in a way that the narrative grammar is not, since the latter—at least in Pavel’s hands—largely ignores the theoretical difficulty of historical specificity. To understand the rules that enable the production of a narrative grammar of a Renaissance play, Pavel suggests, is, to some extent, to understand the mind of the author. Misunderstanding, and the distortions of history/figuration, simply do not count—as they do for, say, new historicism or deconstruction. But the suspicion remains that, should this particular narration on narrative be pressed for its own ontology (admitting of ideal authors and readers), its epistemology (offering a structural knowledge of the text which reflects the intention of its author), and axiology (assumptions regarding authorship, the responsibility of agents, and narrative teleology), the interference of history would return upon Pavel. Such thoughts amount to the view that Pavel’s very worked-out and workable narrative grammar should not be taken as representing any kind of formalist knock-down of current post-structuralist ‘misreading’. Errata are ‘Edmond’ (p. 19), ‘received’ (p. 22), ‘that’ (p. 23), ‘cosiderations’ (p. 84). Fictional Worlds discusses issues in literary theory against the wider intertexts of literature and philosophy. Pavel is particularly interested here in the appropriateness of modal logic in recent analytic philosophy for the theorization of fictional worlds. This approach to fiction rejects certain recent trends in post-structuralist reading which subject texts to interpretation at a single ‘realist’ or ‘material’ level, since it puts fictional writing under the conditions of hypothesis or possibility. The results are fascinating, not least for the fact that Pavel produces reasoned arguments in defence of a phenomenology of fiction. Pavel’s quarrel with structuralism bears on specific points. Briefly, he regards early ‘scientific’ structuralists as guilty of an unfounded dogmatism. Against Lévi-Strauss, Pavel sees nothing ‘un-Saussurean’ about asserting the relative stability of the semiotic system, once it has been established. There is no reason, he thinks, for taking the arbitrariness of the sign as radically

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subversive of the symbolic order. Pavel contests four main structuralist dogmas: first, its ‘mythocentric’ privilege of narrative above other textual forms; second, its ‘semantic fundamentalism’, that is, the view that a semantic (binary) structure is constitutive of the text; third, its centring of the text and concomitant blindness to extratextual resources; and, fourth, its anti-expressive and reductionist stance on cultural matters. Such doctrines, he urges, must be replaced with a theory of fiction sufficient to generate a variety of models within which theorizing can more freely be carried on. The modal logic of ‘possible world’ semantics holds out precisely this prospect. Modern philosophy of fiction (in Pavel’s view) is largely divided between two camps: the segregationist and the integrationist. For the former, such as Bertrand Russell, Gilbert Ryle, and, more recently, P.F.Strawson, fictional statements come down either to atomized illogicality or permanent unreality. Against such a view, Pavel argues that these philosophers have restricted what can rationally be said about fiction to counter-intuitive and unnecessary limits. The truth or coherence of a fictional text cannot depend upon the micro-truth of the individual sentences which constitute it, since these may have no bearing on the macro-truthvalue of large segments of the text or indeed the text as a whole. While speech-act philosophy might be introduced to give the segregationist case greater flexibility and force, Pavel questions this approach as well. The rules for assertion that govern speech acts (as outlined by John Searle, and Gottfried Gabriel), which are said to be suspended in fictional utterances, have been systematically undermined by other philosophers such as Putnam and Derrida. Any last-ditch attempt at salvaging the speech-act theory of fiction on the basis of a distinction between genuine and pretended actions won’t do either, since this distinction is very frequently blurred in narrative fictions. Pavel thus takes the integrationist line, and argues for a more fluid conception of the fiction/reality distinction. That fictional texts cannot be regarded as strongly referential in the ordinary sense is no reason for arguing that they do not refer to any world at all. Pavel cites Quine on this point: ‘reference is nonsense except relative to a coordinate system’. In so far as fictional texts possess their own systematic constructions, there is no reason to deny reference to fictional entities and landscapes within such texts. Fiction can therefore be regarded as enjoying a marginal referential capacity which can be discussed on its own terms. Meinong’s theory of objects and Kripke’s theory of names are introduced to underpin this initial position. According to Meinong (and subsequent ‘Meinongians’), to list a number of object properties is always to postulate a potential, even if nonexistent, object for that list of properties. It follows from this that fictional descriptions given in a novel or a drama may be taken as referring to potential or possible entities. Under these conditions, the reading of fiction becomes a process of integrating the beings, objects, and entities of the text within the wider co-ordinate system of what is known about the fictional world and its relation to the non-fictional realm. This offers a philosophical means by which to theorize what has previously been termed ‘the suspension of disbelief. Pavel suggests that readers of fiction actually make some ontological commitment to the characters and entities of the text, and that this commitment is simply a question of degree. But not all fictional entities can be accorded the same ontological status. The ontic differences between objects require sorting into well-individuated beings and other, less precisely specified objects. Kripke’s theory of names as ‘rigid designators’ is useful here for the consistent identification of characters despite problems of change and incompatible property descriptions. The weight of Pavel’s

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argument is put behind the conviction that the notion of reference should be relaxed and relativized, thereby allowing for domains of fiction, mythology, and religion to be credited with their own referential practices. Within each domain, the rigid designation of individual names may still succeed without their having to refer to a single, ‘historical’ world. Kripke’s model structure of several possible worlds, each standing in relation to the others, furnishes Pavel with a philosophical topography for fictional worlds. While fiction cannot strictly be identified with metaphysically possible worlds, the analogy of fiction as world does fit our most common ‘readerly’ intuitions. For Pavel, the suitability of ‘possible world’ as a metaphor for fiction is too appealing to be passed over. The problem then becomes one of how to relate the modal logic of possible worlds to texts about them. Following Quine and Putnam, who show that the reference of a specific text cannot be unambiguously determined within a given world (Quine), or set of possible worlds (Putnam), Pavel maintains that the same text could refer equally well to any number of distinct worlds. Consequently, a metalanguage (‘Magna Opera’) which comprehensively described a universe of various worlds would be susceptible to the same indeterminacy. It is no different for fiction, Pavel argues, which within its co-ordinate system entails a multiplicity of actualities each different from the others. Just as the ‘real world’ is interpreted differently in a variety of texts, so fictional worlds are represented in other, usually later, texts. Pavel writes: ‘The universe of Greek gods and heroes was not invented anew by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; instead each developed a certain language or a certain angle of vision in relation to a relatively stable mythological universe.’ A ‘universe’ in Pavel’s scheme consists of a ‘base’ (actual) world and a constellation of possible worlds which surround the actual world and relate to it in various ways. The model structure of such universes and texts about them provides an internal perspective for the fiction/reality distinction. Fiction, like games of make-believe, involves at least a dual structure in which a series of actions can be interpreted simultaneously according to each of two universes. Children’s games are a simple example of this, while religious and fictional universes present a more complex picture. Universes of the latter kind are termed ‘salient structures’, since they include states of affairs and entities which do not bear isomorphic correspondence to the primary (actual) universe. This is not to collapse the religious and fictional worlds together, because the energy of the sacred world is lost to the fictional realm. Pavel applies these considerations to fictional texts, maintaining that salient structures are a useful hypothesis when it comes to the analysis of the internal structure of literary universes. Medieval and Renaissance dramas, especially, are preoccupied with ontological structure and experimentation. Different levels of actuality employed in these works require interpretation if the plays are to be understood. The internal structures of literary worlds (fictional and religious) are thus susceptible to a modal analysis, and the questions of interaction and relation which ensue form a key part of their overall interpretation. For Pavel—following Kendall Walton—to read a text is not simply to set out on one’s way to a possible world; it is rather to inhabit that world. The reference of textual fiction is thus integrated within the poetic medium of the work. There remains, however, the question of how borders and limits are to be imposed upon fictional areas. The restriction or expansion of fictional domains, Pavel holds, is governed not by any natural or necessary qualities of the text, but by historical constraints such as the extinction of belief in a particular mythology. Fictional borders, distances, and sizes may be difficult to determine, but they are none the

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less useful—even for analysing surreal and postmodern writings (the texts of Borges, for instance)—because they extend our perception of fictional possibilities. But are there any fixed criteria, therefore, for the demarcation of size and distance boundaries in fictional worlds? Pavel follows through a number of arguments recently put forward by aestheticians on this question (including Northrop Frye’s theory of fictional modes) and eventually comes down to the view that any such choices are ultimately ‘indeterminate’—others might even say undecidable. This is a useful conclusion for Pavel, who has all along battled against segregationist attitudes which would impose rigorous boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. But one senses that the lack of support from modal logic here, and the plain fact that there is nothing extralinguistic that could count as a fictional border, ought to cause Pavel some disquiet. The well-known tenets of deconstruction most readily spring to mind at this point. Pavel’s omission of Derrida’s discussion of this issue (in ‘Living on/border lines’) considerably weakens his case and leaves it desperately begging the question. Eliding the problem, the discussion moves on to the suggestion that, in times of ‘rapid change’, authors and interpreters of texts tend to maximize the incompleteness of fictional worlds. Pavel has postmodern and avant-garde fiction specifically in mind here, since these styles demonstrate to an extreme the difficulty of making sense out of the world. But, unlike certain theorists, he prefers not to celebrate the indeterminacy of such worlds. Pavel contends: ‘An important choice left to contemporary writers is to acknowledge gracefully the difficulty of making firm sense out of the world and still risk the invention of a completeness-determinacy myth.’ This is a practical and not a philosophical point: after all, isn’t this ‘choice’ precisely one which we are all making, all the time? Pavel returns to the challenge of structuralist theory in a chapter on conventions. For structuralists, the fiction/reality distinction has nothing to do with worlds or reference but everything to do with textual conventions. Since, on the Saussurean model, signs refer merely to other signs, and texts to other texts, poetic worlds can only come down to arbitrary intertextual semiotic systems. But Pavel questions the post-Saussurean notion of textual convention as producing the illusion of reference. He adopts instead David Lewis’s definition of convention as a mode of general conformity in which common knowledge of a regularity of behaviour plus a system of mutual expectations and preferences obtain together. Consequently, the relation between writers and readers should be understood as one of reciprocal co-ordination against a background of tacit expectations and co-operations already extant within the literary community. Pavel further maintains that Lewis’s definition of conventions might also be used to counter recent ‘death of the subject’ theories. The general game-playing of fulfilling expectations and coordinating actions within a system of widespread conformity can survive the absence of its co-players. The system of co-ordinate behaviour provides a less determinate theorization of textuality than the post-Saussurean model (for which a large part of conventionalism is unconscious and obligatory, the means of domination). For Pavel, as for Lewis, the alternative model of convention as a stabilization of co-ordinate actions is obligatory only in a weak sense: either conventions are respected, or they are not. Other choices of action are always possible. Indeed, for co-ordinate systems in which novelty plays an important role, the possibility for change in the convention game is unlimited. Pavel then goes on to argue for distinctions between types of convention which might be useful for literary analysis and history. He sets apart ‘constitutive conventions’, which

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comprise organizational rules such as grammar, from ‘pre-conventions’, which include the tacit categories of expectation and regularity already outlined. This not wholly successful distinction is duly applied to the reading of realist novels or Renaissance dramas. Pavel seems to think such conventions are somehow ‘there’ in the text, albeit difficult to ascertain. (Here The Poetics of Plot quietly underpins the argument.) But there is some uneasiness on this point. In the end, ‘pre-conventions’ amount only to a set of hypotheses about fictional worlds which somehow (it is not explained) constitute ‘an important part of the referential mechanisms of literature’. The fact that a rhetorical question is appended as a footnote to this sentence is unsettling. One suspects that Pavel’s ‘pre-conventions’ are little more than inferences drawn according to specific historical and ideological conditions. More persuasive, by virtue of their visionary appeal, are Pavel’s intimations that the worldview of a particular community can be divided into several ontological landscapes: mythological, fictional, and real. These landscapes index a plurality of worlds, all of which are possible alternatives to the firm intuition that there exists a single, stable, and ontologically coherent world. Marginal landscapes encompass versions of an ultimate truth which is always centred within a chosen, stable model of reality, and, where these conflict, the peripheral models must inevitably yield. Fiction is thus a much more complex phenomenon than either the illusion of a coherent world or an outmoded nostalgia for historically declined myths. Pavel’s perspective on fiction sees it better as a region of peripheral landscapes used for ludic and instructional purposes, and having their own ontologies and powers of reference. In a passage .which echoes the Wittgensteinian past and at the same time prophesies the postmodern future, Pavel asserts that in this ‘economy of the imaginary’ the history of fiction, as of reality, resembles a strategic game ‘wherein the strategic configuration of each stage of the game depends simultaneously on the rules of the games, the configuration in force at earlier stages, and the particular strategic aims pursued, with more or less talent, by the participants.’ This is a book of remarkable virtuosity which presents cogent arguments for rethinking the contemporary situation in the theory of fiction. Its consistent polemic deserves to incur the respect as well as the wrath of theoretical radicals, and provides enough material to fuel literary/philosophical discussion for some time to come. Errata are ‘Verion’ and ‘do’ (p. 75), ‘unversal’ (p. 76), ‘of’ (p. 87), and the publication dates of Kripke and Loux (p. 155; cf. pp. 164–5) and Manley (p. 157; cf. p. 165).

University College, Cardiff

• Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The

Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1986), 395 pp., £25.00 DANIELA CAVALLARO

Terry Castle’s book investigates the relationship between the masquerade as a popular, yet controversial, form of entertainment in eighteenth-century England (‘a highly visible public institution and a highly charged image’) and the fictional work of authors of the period. It proceeds from the assumption that unlike human suffering, which traditionally meets with dignified attention, human laughter has hardly ever been regarded as a respectable philosophical or historical topos. Both on the level of socio-historical exploration and on that of a more specifically literary analysis, this study reflects on the subversive role played by the masquerade in the eighteenth-century imagination, by virtue of its uncharted crossing of all social and sexual boundaries, ‘its erotic, riotous, and enigmatic associations’, and its consequent challenge to the forces of reason and order. Castle’s re-creation of the world of the masquerade as a historical phenomenon moves from the premise that the delight in disguise evinced by people of both sexes and all ranks in eighteenth-century London cannot be explained as a merely ‘decorative’ tendency, or else an uncomplicated symbol of the licentiousness peculiar to the upper classes of the age. In fact, ‘the pervasiveness and magnitude’ of the image of the masked assembly, or ‘promiscuous Gathering’, capable of attracting crowds that numbered in the thousands, as well as the voluminous literature that developed around this compelling event, suggest that the masquerade operated as a powerful symbol in the cumulative imagery of urbanity itself. Further, owing to its stylized, emblematic status, the masquerade could confront and meditate on issues—such as the notion of the self and the mysterious dialectics involving self and other—that were of vital importance in the philosophy and literature of the period. In this perspective, the mere adoption of a fancy attire could be seen to symbolize a more drastic act of existential violation and recombination, through the superimposition—upon a self that remains illegible, silent, and elusive—of a baffling phantasmagoria of personae and masks. Through the sartorial code, the young and the old, the female and the male, the obscure and the dazzling, the natural and the supernatural, heimlich and unheimlich, exchange their roles and mores, thus devaluing and demystifying any putatively unitary notion of identity. Not surprisingly, in Terry Castle’s view, the authorities would deem the masquerade’s encouragement of the hybrid and the ambiguous a shocking and offensive machination against decency (conveniently attributed to foreign influence). But, as this study most strikingly demonstrates, it is impossible not to detect in the eighteenth-century masquerade the traces of the ancient carnival rituals, the ‘festivals of Misrule’ that were as much a part of the tradition of Merry England as of any European country in the early modern period. The eighteenth-century masked assemblies could therefore be seen as the

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urban reinterpretation and attempt to recuperate the liberating and cathartic function of those archaic revelries which both the work of the Puritan reformers and the fragmentation of traditional rural communities had considerably weakened. In acknowledging the subversive nature of the masquerade and its literary correlatives as heirs to the carnival, Castle is clearly indebted to Bakhtin’s extensive study on the carnivalesque tradition and its incidence on the ‘dialogical novel’ of the Shandean type. But there are times when the author of Masquerade and Civilization seems inclined to question what he defines as ‘the idealized carnivals of Goethian and Bakhtinian discourse’ and lay emphasis on those elements of the masquerade which evoke images not so much of liberation and débordement as of encasement, of spatial and sociological restriction. The open-air setting of the primitive festivities, for example, is shown to be replaced by a ‘bounded setting’, a reflection of the bourgeois myth of a private carnival, neatly separated from the surrounding urban macrocosm. Castle sees this tendency as the longing to hold on to the illusion that the Saturnalian experience could indeed be an élite form of entertainment, a way of maintaining a separation between the sphere of privileged licence and the potentially disruptive urban scene. In fact, Castle observes, the ‘Lower Orders’ did manage to penetrate the inner sanctum, thus undermining the entrepreneurs’ dream of social exclusivity. But this too was probably taken into account as one of the masquerade’s essential characteristics. The sense of penetration or invasion could only add excitement and an anticipation of sexual pleasure to the general craving for transgression. Having identified Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode as the prototype for the eighteenth-century literature of the carnivalesque, and having considered the absorption of the masquerade’s motifs into contemporary theatre and fiction, Castle proceeds to analyse the incidence of the masquerade as a destabilizing force on the novel’s plot and its connection with the ‘working out of comic or providential narrative patterns’. In his analysis of Pamela, Part 2, the author notices that if the work of Pamela, Part 1 appears carnivalesque by reason of its reversal of the traditionally accepted relationships between servant and master, low and high, rake and virgin, in the sequel Richardson sets out to ‘decarnivalize’ his heroine, by denying that she has in any way changed at all (socially, morally, or simply through the discarding of peasant clothes and the adoption of quasi-fancy-dress aristocratic garments). Through the masquerade episode at the Haymarket, Pamela is returned to the theatrical and changeable element which is so essential to her heroinely character, and ultimately undeniable, despite her creator’s moralistic afterthoughts. But, if B.’s courtship of Pamela is centred on the heroine’s flair for disguise and metamorphosis, the courtship presented in Fielding’s Amelia is, conversely, based on an act of unmasking. Here, Castle argues, the paradoxical spirit of the masquerade strikes some of its highest-pitched notes, in so far as the mask does not really ‘hide’ anything fearful, and its dropping only increases the ecstasis experienced by the beholder. The dividing-line between the mask as a symbol of deception and the mask as a symbol of liberation remains uncertainly blurred. The discontinuous and contradictory nature of Amelia pointed out by so many critics is accounted for by Castle as a symptom of the general fluctuation and ambivalence of the carnivalesque mode. The character of the heroine herself as a fluid, eerie textual presence is thus seen to hint at the double-edgedness of the realm of the masquerade as both the orgy of intrigue and the exhilarated assertion of life’s mercurial multiformity.

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With his study of Burney’s Cecilia, Castle concentrates on the theme of a woman’s enjoyment of a freedom greater than the one usually allotted to her sex through the mask’s dispelling of sexual inhibition. The domain of the masquerade becomes an ideal space, a feminine utopia, cherished by the woman novelist, but also realistically renounced as the only too temporary counterpart of the right-side-up world where women are still marketable objects. The twofold nature of the masquerade discussed in relation to Fielding’s novel manifests itself in a new guise—the status of a utopia which, according to Castle, is also, inevitably, a dystopia. Castle’s association of the carnivalesque—‘this realm of dream, dismay, and laughter’— with the realm of women is all the more convincing when one considers the compelling dominance, in characters as diverse as Moll Flanders and Molly Bloom, Clarissa Harlowe and Clarissa Dalloway, Lucy Snowe, or Toni Morrison’s Sula and Jade, of a crucial element: the female psyche’s oscillation between solidity and a form capable of bringing existence into sharp focus, and the self’s sea-like dissolving. According to Terry Castle, it is with Inchbald’s A Simple Story, and its ‘minimalist carnivalesque’, that this mode’s most extreme implications are reached. Here it is only after the carnivalesque union has taken place that the masquerade topos is invoked, so that the normal movement of the eighteenth-century fiction considered so far is radically inverted. In a sense, the masquerade scene as scene becomes almost unnecessary, because what Inchbald is really concerned with is the way in which the controversial pattern of human relationships, temporarily created by the masquerade, spills over into the real world of the characters and pervades the rhythm of the plot, and the carnivalesque can thus be internalized. The waning of the carnivalesque mode, Castle suggests, is not necessarily an equivalent of the Fall from a Golden Age of unrestrained liberty, but the opening up of even more deeply questioning tendencies. The critic concludes his exhaustive study by reflecting that this movement towards the ‘private sphere’ develops further in the post-eighteenth-century uses of the masquerade imagery. In this context, pictures of transgression are presented in an unmediated way, and, as in the mimetic art of Hugo, Zola, Flaubert, and Eliot, they no longer take the shape of an emblematic and discontinuous ‘diversion’, but ‘become in some sense the central, self-conscious concern of the fictional enterprise itself. What Castle’s book implicitly demonstrates, however, is that the exclusion of the carnival experience from our lives runs parallel to the opposite tendency, among critics, to refer more and more frequently to the carnivalesque as a vital element in the ethological foundations of Western civilization. It is probably because of its tendency to release the word, make it eccentric, cluster disparate images or reel them off to suggest dizzying infinity of number, that the carnival yields its inexhaustible fascination for the critic. Indeed, one of the ways in which Castle has most effectively managed to re-create the spirit of the occasion he explores lies in the insistent reiteration of key words and phrases such as ‘magic’, ‘Voluptuous’, ‘ecstatic, ‘Vertiginous’, ‘intoxication’, ‘manic, impetuous play’, ‘hallucinatory state’, ‘transport’, ‘shifting mass of costumed forms’. Their cumulative effect is the conjuring of a whirling profusion of images, coherently organized, yet never smugly domesticated by the clarity of the style and the rigorous employment of quotations. One of the chief qualities of this study is that, by analysing the eighteenth-century masquerade tradition as a radical reformulation of ancient rites, it draws attention to the fact that in the works of those writers who are most significantly indebted to the world of the

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carnival (at least since the eighteenth century) the Saturnalian spirit has been ‘filtered’ and modified by the social and political changes that have occurred in the intervening period. The filter is supplied by the eighteenth-century masquerade itself and its amply documented escape from consistency and transparency. The carnival has a socially transgressive function, just like the spring festivals, the communal celebrations of birthdays, weddings, triumphs, or initiations, and, even more, the tradition of the juggling and tumbling acts, ballad singing, rural revels, mummings, and mock ceremonies of summer kings and queens and lords of misrule, normally associated with the realm of proto-comedy. The writer drawing on this vast repertoire of forms of Saturnalian release tends to use the festive atmosphere and the ‘clown’ ‘s ironic misrule, but this does not imply that she/he moves entirely within the sphere of ‘ritual’. Such a writer does not merely represent forms of social and psychological violation in order to clarify the underlying rhythms which satirical or fantastic writing share with the atmosphere of ‘holiday’. Rather, the novel seems to take over on a ‘professional’ basis what in the domain of carnival proper was performed by amateurs on holiday.

London

Index Volume 2

ARTICLES Andrew Belsey and Catherine Belsey Christina Rosetti: sister to the Brotherhood p. 30 Andrew Benjamin Translation and the history of philosophy p. 242, Cardiff Text Analysis Group Disarming voices (a nuclear exchange) p. 374 Seymour Chatman The representation of text-types p. 22 Ed Cohen Foucauldian necrologies: ‘gay’ ‘politics’? politically gay? p. 87 Graham Daldry Poetry as question: The Triumph of Life p. 261 Margreta de Grazia The essential Shakespeare and the material book p. 69 John Frow Discipline and discipleship p. iv Peter Goodrich Simulation and the semiotics of law p. 180 Mary Hamer Cleopatra: housewife p. 159 Ian Haywood Facecrime: George Orwell and the physiognomy of politics p. 341 Ajay Heble The poetics of jazz: from symbolic to semiotic p. 51 Robert Holton In the rathouse of history with Thomas Pynchon: rereading V. p. 321 Nancy Webb Kelly Homo aestheticus: Coleridge, Kant, and play p. 200 Christopher Norris Introduction—Philosophy and literary theory: the work of Donald Davidson p. 219 David Pierce The politics of Finnegans Wake p. 361 Ian Saunders The concept discourse p. 230 Peter Widdowson Terrorism and literary studies p. 1

REVIEWS OF Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young (eds) Post-Structuralism and the Question of History p. 105 Allan Bloom The Closing of the American Mind p. 280 Clive Bloom The ‘Occult’ Experience and the New Criticism p. 117 Malcolm Bowie Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction p. 422 Terry Castle Masquerade and Civilization p. 442 Jennifer Coates Women, Men and Language p. 137 R.Colls and P.Dodd (eds) Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920 p. 427 Thomas Docherty John Donne, Undone p. 418 F.W. Galan Historic Structures p. 293 William H. Gass Habitations of the Word: Essays p. 149 Jonathan Goldberg Voice Terminal Echo p. 111 Gerald Graff Professing Literature: An Institutional History p. 406 447

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Charles L.Griswold, Jr Self-Knowledge in Plato’s ‘Phaedrus’ p. 149 Charles Jencks Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture p. 400 Susanne Kappeler The Pornography of Representation p. 276 J.Hillis Miller The Ethics of Reading p. 295 Makiko Minow-Pinkney Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject p. 133 Thomas G.Pavel The Poetics of Plot and Fictional Worlds p. 432 Russell J.Reising The Unusable Past p. 290 Jacqueline Rose Sexuality in the Field of Vision p. 144 F.K.Stanzel A Theory of Narrative p. 130 Peter Szondi On Textual Understanding and Other Essays p. 123 Michael Westlake Imaginary Women p. 394 M.J.Wiener English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 p. 427 Anthony Wilden The Rules are No Game and Man and Woman, War and Peace p. 410