Textual Practice, Volume 4, Number 3 (Textual Practice Journal)

TEXTUAL PRACTICE

Editor Terence Hawkes University of Wales College of Cardiff Postal address: Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CFl 3XE. Editorial board Christopher Norris University of Wales CoElege of Cardiff (Rez Editor) Gillian Beer Girton College, Cambridge Catherine Belsey University of Wales College of Cardiff Angela Carter Terry Eagleton Linacre College, Oxford John Frow Queensland University, Australia Linda Hutcheon Toronto University, Canada Mary Jacobus Cornell University, USA Francis Mulhern Middlesex Polytechnic Editorial Assistant Tamsin Spargo

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Textual Practice is published three times a year, in spring, summer and winter, by Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London, EC4P 4EE. All rights are reserved. No part of the publication may be reprinted, reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now know or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author(s) and publishers, but academic institutions may make not more than three Xerox copies of any one article in any single issue without needing further permission; all enquiries to the Editor. Contributions and correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at University of Wales College of Cardiff. Books for review and related correspondence should be addressed to Christopher Norris at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CFl 3XE. Advertisements Enquiries to David Polley, Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. Subscription rates (calendar year only): UK full: £40.00; UK personal: £26.00; Rest of World full: £44.00; Rest of World personal: £28.00; USA full: $78. 00; USA personal: $50.00. All rates include postage; airmail rates on application. Subscriptions to: Subscriptions Department, Routledge Journals, North Way, Andover, Hants, SP10 5BE. ISSN 0950-236X © Routledge 1990 ISBN 0-203-98848-5 Master e-book ISBN

TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 4 NUMBER 3 WINTER 1990

Contents

Articles Translating Romanticism: literary theory as the criticism of aesthetics in the work of Paul de Man CYNTHIA CHASE

349

The question of literary value ANTONY EASTHOPE

364

The real plot line of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: an essay in applied deconstruction ROGER POOLE

372

Short cuts through the Long Revolution: the Russian avant-garde and the modernization of language KEN HIRSCHKOP

393

Farewell to the avant-gardes: some notes towards the definition of a counterculture ANDREW LAWSON

400

Divisions of deliria in Gradiva PETER BENSON

404

Reviews Paul Virilio, War and Cinema THOMAS DOCHERTY

413

Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality TERRY EAGLETON

416

Peter de Bolla, Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics GRAHAM ALLEN

418

Nicholas Zurbrugg, Beckett and Proust PETER MURPHY

421

Louis Althusser, ‘Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists’ and Other Essays CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

423

Gregory Elliot, Althusser: The Detour of Theory Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy David Macey, Lacan in Contexts ANN LECERCLE

434

Margaret Atack, Literature and the French Resistance JEAN-JACQUES LECERCLE

437

Index to Volume 4

439

Translating Romanticism: literary theory as the criticism of aesthetics in the work of Paul de Man CYNTHIA CHASE

‘Literary theory’—the name and the thing—has a quite peculiar historical specificity, intimated by the name’s ambiguous grammatical structure. It shares the ambiguity of the phrase ‘the criticism of aesthetics’, which evokes the criticism carried out by aesthetics, as well as criticism that takes aesthetics as its object. Paul de Man’s criticism has aesthetics as its target, but by dint of remaining, as I shall try to describe, an aesthetic criticism, and one which invokes, explicitly, ‘the critical thrust of aesthetic judgment’.1 Literary theory, i.e. what de Man wrote and taught from the 1950s on, is the theory of literature in a double sense. It is literature’s own theory—of literature, and also the theory of that (literary) theory. Literary theory, as de Man conceived of it, is not the set of theories about literature—its social function, its historical character, its formal resources, its structures. Literary theory takes the literariness of literature as its object, and investigates the problems that arise from this potentiality. In doing so, literary theory is literary—and it is theoretical— in a way that neither aesthetics nor that opponent practice, ‘critical theory’, can ever be, and thereby acquires a peculiar critical force. I want to fill out these claims—which were de Man’s—with a reading of an essay on ‘the poetics of reading’ where the criticism of aesthetics shows its scope as well as its predicament.2 But I want as well to suggest a historical dimension for this argument. Aesthetics, and also literature, develop and designate themselves as such concurrently with what is called Romanticism. Kantian critical philosophy grants aesthetics its ultimate significance: as guarantee of the continuity between perception and cognition, between aesthetic and rational judgment. Such is ‘the main tenet and the major crux of all critical philosophies and “Romantic” literatures’.3 Literary criticism and interpretation at their most effective today remain ‘Romantic’ in this sense, as de Man in The Resistance to Theory showed in some detail in regard to the typical and exemplary critical assumptions of the Prague linguistic circle, Michael Riffaterre, and Hans Robert Jauss and the Konstanz School.4 Those versions of structural aesthetics focus on the reader’s mode of perception. Their crucial critical premise is that ‘it is not sufficient for a poetic significance to be latent or erased, but that it must be manifest, actualized in a way that allows the analyst to point to a specific, determined textual feature’ (HI p. 33). This stress on ‘actualization’ of poetic meaning in a textual element perceptible to the analyst or reader, the insistence that such actualization is part of the very nature of poetic signification, marks poetics and literary criticism as an aesthetics. The fundamental assumption of such a poetics is ‘that the articulation of the sign with its signification occurs by means of a structure that is itself phenomenally realized’ (HI, p. 34). With this guiding assumption, a process of signification is assimilated to semantic cognition and to perception or phenomenal intuition. Aesthetics—the aesthetic premise— thereby fulfils its deepest vocation: to confirm the phenomenality of language. Language, as poetry or literature, is understood as art: as human making, and as symbolic, involving the non-arbitrary connection between form and meaning. The ultimate function of aesthetics is to ensure the validity of language and of texts as a mode of knowledge. These are rather considerable stakes. But if aesthetics comes into its own and has its epistemological function revealed to it, in the turn of the eighteenth century, so too does literature. The most concise historical reference one could offer for this development is Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenaeum, the review that existed from 1798 to 1800.5 For the allusion to Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis helps dispel the idée reçue that with Romanticism the mimetic function of literature is displaced by its ‘expressive’ function.6 The novelty of the Romantic moment would have to be understood not in terms of a changed alignment of priorities between an outside and an inside, according to a metaphorical model that maintains the phenomenal and cognitive identity of language, but rather in terms of the shift to a performative model. What language does, in naming and thereby negating and yet gaining the phenomenal world, emerges as literature’s aim and its subject.7 And this act and this operation oscillate between being a praxis that is the very mainspring of aesthetic criticism and its decisive interruption. Mainspring, in so far as language, as literature, concentrates on its formal, not merely its referential, properties, and the formalization thereby achieved appears as an action or entity that the text or the reader can also know. The substantiality precisely of a language freed from constant referential constraint, liberated into the totalizing self-generated interplay of tropes, promises as it were even despite itself, the substantiality of a world, the grasp, in language, on a phenomenal reality. But precisely the practice of literature as the act of figuration impels the disqualification and rejection of this confusion of the phenomenality of tropes with that of the material world. For the phenomenal aspect of language (sound, apparent formal structures) then cannot be assumed to converge with its semantic function as reference or signification. The undermining of that assumption—the awareness of that possible non-

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convergence of semantics and syntax— haunts and galvanizes those romantics and revolutionaries who proceed to the denunciation of literary and political discourse as rhetoric.8 In the Romantic period, ‘rhetoric’ becomes a weapon and an accusation. Wordsworth denounces Pope, the Jacobins denounce Brissot, Danton, Mirabeau. Why does the condemnation of ‘mere rhetoric’, ‘false rhetoric’, become a central gesture? That gesture repeats and reacts to the unleashing of the performative power of language through the political power of print. Literature declares itself in this historical conflict. Literature—pleonastically, Romantic literature—recognizes itself in and models itself on the Revolution, on events that are language.9 This implies an intensifying pressure: words are to coincide with their meaning, for their meaning consists in the act of their utterance. But the very freedom of utterance—both of literature no longer produced for patrons, and of political discourse no longer descriptive nor administrative but constitutive and legislative—means also its detachment from the constraints of representation and its discrepancy from the phenomenality of the social world. The rise of aesthetics makes it possible to meet this threat, this danger of the gap opened between meaning and language, between the phenomenal world and the materiality of language. In the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century aesthetics comes to replace the institutionalized discipline of rhetoric that flourished earlier and that returns later in the form of structuralist poetics. Literature, since Romanticism, remains ‘as the place where this negative knowledge about the reliability of linguistic utterance is made available’, as de Man puts it, and this means it poses the most formidable challenge to the vocation of aesthetics. ‘Literature involves the voiding, rather than the affirmation, of aesthetic categories’ (RT, p. 10). Romanticism would be the epoch where these two operations—the aesthetic and the literary—collide or coincide, and where their clash becomes the very subject of literary and philosophical texts. Romanticism thus inaugurates the discipline of literary theory, and that phrase or name reveals a problem which is also a historical one: the relation between literary theory and literature, and the relation between Romanticism and what comes after it. For it’s not so clear, given the analysis I have just outlined, how literature could be either exceeded or grasped by its theory, nor whether the Romantic era could come to a close. The problem of differentiating literature, as available knowledge of the specificity of literary as opposed to aesthetic or mimetic principles, from literary theory, can be seen to converge with the problem of defining our relationship to Romanticism, to the historical event; and the no doubt seductive character of this convergence hardly enables one to decline the challenge of the problem, since the temporality or historicality of such epistemological moments and rhetorical categories is just what comes into question with the advent of literature as such. With this problem in mind, the clue I will take up is de Man’s enigmatic insistence on the fact of our distance or difference from Romanticism. We have experienced it, he asserts, ‘in its passing away’. In the difficult and inevitable differentiation between the present and Romanticism, I would argue—between our texts as readers of Romanticism and the Romantic literary and philosophical texts ‘themselves’—the conflict between literature and aesthetics reveals its ramifications most concretely. De Man in 1966 saw fit to formulate this situation in terms of the difference between an ‘act’ and its ‘interpretation’ and a certain thematization of their ‘temporal relation’. I quote from the essay entitled ‘Wordsworth and Hölderlin’: In the case of romanticism…. The proximity of the event on the historical plane is such that we are not yet able to view it in the form of a clarified and purified memory…. We carry it within ourselves as the experience of an act in which, up to a certain point, we ourselves have participated…. To interpret romanticism means quite literally to interpret the past as such, our past precisely to the extent that we are beings who want to be defined and, as such, interpreted in relation to a totality of experiences that slip into the past. The content of this experience is perhaps less important than the fact that we have experienced it in its passing away, and that it thereby has contributed in an unmediated way (that is, in the form of an act) to the constitution of our own consciousness of temporality. Now it is precisely this experience of the temporal relation between the act and its interpretation that is one of the main themes of romantic poetry…10 What is the ‘event’ or the ‘act’ that constitutes Romanticism, and that ‘we’ have experienced ‘in its passing away’ ? De Man does not retain the existentialist vocabulary of this statement, and it holds ambiguities we can best revert to in other contexts. But one claim stands out: the act here identified with Romanticism is that of taking as a ‘theme’ precisely the relation between act and interpretation, the relation that is also our relation with respect to this act. We are positioned as interpreters of the act that is or was Romanticism; at the same time we are positioned as those who have experienced only in an unmediated fashion, as an act— not via an interpretation, that is—the passing away of the act constituted by a thematizing of the relation between interpretation and act. This seems a most uncertain position to occupy. With regard to our past or history, that which should be the object of interpretation itself carries it out, whereas we are separated from that interpretative relation by the event of its passing away. Our relation to Romanticism is being defined here as the interruption or absence of interpretation, and further as the interrupting or the disappearance of a thematization.11 In what sense might contemporary texts intending historical selfawareness do other than interpret or thematize their position? What is the operation that de Man’s own text could go on to perform, when his lecture directs our attention to that ‘theme’ of act and interpretation in Wordsworth’s and Hölderlin’s poetry? Even while his text turns as if to recapitulate and apply unproblematically what Romantic literature has had to say about interpretation and act, he has asserted that an interpretative relation to that material is lacking and that its thematization

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is a thing of the past. For these and other reasons, I shall speak of de Man’s writing as the translating of Romantic texts. One cannot do without the shift to a linguistic terminology, when a historical situation has been characterized at once as act and interpretation and as the interruption of the interpretative act and might as readily be called forgetting as remembering. De Man himself, following what has been called the Benjaminian turn in his writing after 1969 (and the essay on Romanticism entitled ‘The rhetoric of temporality’), adopts a linguistic vocabulary enabling him to distinguish between the formal and the semantic functions of language.12 In these terms it could be said that romantic literature thematizes the disjunction between those functions or between what Benjamin called ‘das Gemeinte’ and ‘die Art des Meinens’, ‘what language means and the manner in which it produces meaning’ (RT, p. 62). This leaves us with the question that will be the burden of my analysis: what is the status of the thematization of such a disjunction, and what is the other—that interrupts or has come after, this thematization? What is the cognitive and historical status of these operations? And of each, one may ask, also, does it belong to aesthetics or to literary theory? The access to these questions will be through characterization of these moments as linguistic operations. I shall approach this by reading closely some passages where de Man would define or rather differentiate the literary, or Romantic, text, and by tracing there how the distinction between the Romantic text and the literary-theoretical text occurs. The reflection on Romanticism and the criticism of aesthetics necessarily distinguishes between the phenomenal aspect of language (sound) and its semantic and referential functions. Their identification with one another is delusive, de Man argues. ‘Voice’ is a figure; in fact, the sound and the meaning of a linguistic utterance do not coincide. The theoretical target here is not only the phenomenon of ‘lyrical voice’, that actualization of the figure of ‘voice’ which is the generating principle of lyric poetry. The same figure comes into play in philosophical discourse. Like Derrida’s, de Man’s writing critically reflects on the phonocentrism of the philosophical tradition. Like lyric, philosophical texts are dominated by the notion of a speaking consciousness. Voice, or the notion of a speaking consciousness, are figures for ‘the deictic or demonstrative function of language’, de Man suggests, a function that itself involves a conflict between the function of language as representation and its function as postulation.13 The figure of a speaking consciousness is made plausible by the deictic function that it names’ (HI, p. 42); there is a crucial ‘logical difficulty inherent in the deictic or demonstrative function of language’14 that the figure of a speaking consciousness conceals. The conflict is present in the fundamental linguistic gesture: predication. In the passages I shall read closely, de Man analyses the account of the conditions of predication he finds in chapter 1 of Hegel’s Phenomenology together with the precisely comparable ‘allegory of cognition’ he finds in a lyric of Victor Hugo, entitled ‘Ecrit sur la vitre d’une fenêtre flamande’.15 Some of the key concepts for his argument are introduced in an earlier essay that draws on texts in The Will to Power to affirm that predication entails not simply recognizing or knowing, erkennen, but positing, setzen.16 Language can not only describe or represent entities, it can also postulate or posit them. Once the representational function of language is seen to take place by means of figures or tropes, by the assumed and imposed resemblances, the ‘aberrant totalizations’ of metaphor, de Man argues in the Nietzsche chapters of Allegories of Reading, language has to be conceived not only as representation, constatation, or cognition, but also as act, as a ‘positing’ not simply a cognizing of entities. Predication entails, that is, not simply the constatation of a pre-existing relationship between entities, but the positing of their existence and relationship. Yet this power, de Man goes on to emphasize, is fictional. We are not left comfortably in possession of a rhetoric of persuasion or ‘performance’ after the undoing of a rhetoric of cognition, for the operations of positing and of cognizing cannot coincide, are incompatible, and ‘if it turns out that [the] mind does not even know whether it is doing or not doing something, then there are considerable grounds for suspicion that it does not know what it is doing’ (AR, pp. 130–1). Such is the situation implied by the tension between the performative and cognitive dimensions of language. Neither ‘knowing’ or ‘doing’ remains, then, an apt characterization for the use of language, nor, therefore, for history. How to describe, once those notions of ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’ are in abeyance, what does take place—this is the task de Man’s essays on Hegel pursue.17 He engages the difficulties of the notion of a predication that posits. How can the link between a subject and a predicate be established, if it is not received from the entity itself nor built into a grammar whose structure mirrors relationships existing apart from it? Our reading of de Man’s account will be inseparable from the task of marking how performative and cognitive dimensions tangle in de Man’s own writing. Victor Hugo’s poem beginning ‘J’aime le carillon (‘I love the chime’) and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit have some significant thematic as well as rhetorical elements in common, even if it is a Romantic or ironic (say, a Friedrich Schlegelian) gesture to give them equal weight or the same sort of reading. Both texts can stand as apt examples of Romanticism’s supposed commitment to a genetic model, to genealogical and teleological modes of understanding, and to time as the preeminent condition of human experience.18 De Man’s reading of these texts will analyse how the figure of time is constituted, and how it is bound up with the figures of voice and face. The experience of time, which it is the meaning of Hegel’s and Hugo’s texts to provide and to valorize, is produced by a figure evoking the phenomenal aspect of language, its sound, and ascribing to it the meaning-bearing function of a voice or a face. According to chapter 1 of the Phenomenology (the focus of de Man’s discussion in a passage I will examine) the condition of the possibility of experience is achieved via a temporal progression on the part of ‘Natural Consciousness’, a ‘consciousness’ which is personified and given a face in Hegel’s text as

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a figure that speaks and points, that says for instance ‘Now is noon’ or ‘Here is a house’, and the component moments of whose gesture of pointing or deixis constitute the passage from mere sense-certainty to perception or Wahr-nehmung, ‘taking truly’.19 According to Hugo’s lyric, the privileged experience of time is provided by the chime of the bells of Flemish towns— a sign of time having the phenomenal presence of sound, which is personified and given a face in Hugo’s text as a female figure, ‘vêtue en danseuse espagnole’ (‘dressed as a Spanish dancer’), progressing down a crystal staircase. De Man’s analysis focuses on how the phenomenality of time, as of language, depends upon the linking of the phenomenal aspect of language, sound, to the semantic function of ‘the mind’ or consciousness, in a figure. He stresses that the poem consists in giving a phenomenal shape to an imaginary entity, time or ‘the hour’.20 ‘Hypogram and inscription’, De Man’s essay reading these Hegel and Hugo texts, was initially published in Diacritics as a review essay on Michael Riffaterre’s structuralist poetics. De Man deploys the term ‘inscription’ to name a non-cognitive, material dimension of language, language at the level of the letter, ‘prior’ even, say, to its phenomenal presence in the syllable or the word. The essay disputes Michael Riffaterre’s structuralist conception of literary language as non-referential or selfreferential, as the determinate negation of ordinary language referring to things—poetic language referring instead to ordinary language, to received ideas in the form of phrases, to words.21 Literature stands to ordinary language, in this view, as perception apparently stands to sense-certainty in chapter 1 of the Phenomenology, as its negation and sublation. This position is correct in asserting that textual structures are not modelled on nonverbal objects, but maintains a representational view of language in conceiving it as the determinate negation of entities rather than the indeterminable negativity of materiality and figure. Such a view overlooks or ignores the significance of language as inscription and of the postulation of ‘hypograms’ or semantic patterns in the process of reading. To make his argument—that, rather than being non-referential, literature, and language, are in some crucial respect non-semantic, inasmuch as they are inscription, or indeterminably significative marks— de Man recalls Saussure’s abortive project on anagrams, anagrammatic patterns in Latin and Vedic poetry. Saussure eventually abandoned the project as he discovered that no evidence could be adduced—no historical, but also no mathematical evidence—that could determine whether the patterns he had identified were deliberate or random, were encoded or merely the effect of probability or chance. This undid the premise with which Saussure began, that the formal aspect coincided with a semantic one, that the anagrammatic patterns concealed significant proper names, and it altered the sense of his term ‘hypogram’ for what he had been perceiving: ‘hypograms’, from hypographein, ‘to underline by means of make-up the features of a face’.22 Saussure discovered the impossibility of perceiving the semiotic process without conferring on some patterns of recurrence and not on others the status of meaningful articulations: only by means of make-up is a ‘face’ there. De Man’s essay describes the giving of face— prosopopoein, the figure (or catachresis) prosopopoeia—as the move that enables the predicative and deictic function of language to take place. De Man thus views Saussure as making a decisive theoretical inference precisely in so far as his work approaches Hegel’s texts on the sign and the symbol, which imply that the sign is only preserved, only apprehended or manifested, in the formal alignment of signifier and signified, form and meaning, which makes it in some sense a symbol, and which takes place through a gesture of predication that is essentially figural, a giving (not merely underlining) of face. ‘The relationship between sign and symbol however is one of mutual obliteration’, de Man writes. For the sign to operate as a symbol, in signifying, is for the functioning of language as signification to cancel what allowed it to come into being in the first place, the arbitrary power of position of the sign.23 The ‘symbolic manifestation’ of the sign—its phenomenal status—implies also its obliteration: that is the confounding lesson of Saussure’s encounter with the disappearance of the significative status of the sign in the very attempt to determine its formal and phenomenal limits. The irreducibly unrecognizable dimension of the signifying process, which de Man reading Hegel and Nietzsche had called the sign’s arbitrary power of position, is newly theorized in ‘Hypogram and inscription’ as the materiality of those marks that may or may not be signs—that can be signs precisely because they may or may not be significative. The non-semantic, the material dimension of the sign radically affects the conditions and status of deixis (indicating, pointing) and of perception. Those conditions are the topic not just of Hegel’s but of Hugo’s text, as Riffaterre acknowledges in selecting it as his example of ‘descriptive’ poetry (hence the best place to prove his claim that all poetry is not referential but self-referential). What, then, in Hegel’s and Hugo’s texts, is involved in the emergence of a sign that points, or in other words the condition of consciousness, as the state of indicating a present? What is required is that the materiality of language as an inscription— such as the word écrit or ‘written’ written in Hugo’s title and in Hegel’s text—be linked and identified with the phenomenality of a signified (such as, in those texts, time or the present). Pointing or indicating (and predicating) require that indeterminably significative material marks be linked and identified with a signified accessible to cognition as a meaningful form. ‘If there is to be consciousness (or experience, mind, subject, or face),’ de Man writes, ‘it has to be susceptible of phenomenalization. But since the phenomenality of experience cannot be established a priori, it can only occur by a process of signification’ (HI, p. 48). In Hugo’s poem praising the sound of the carillon that chimes from the bell towers of Flemish towns, the ringing of the bells, the carillon, de Man writes, ‘is the material sign of an event (the passage of time) of which the phenomenality lacks certainty’. Its evocation is important because ‘The phenomenal and sensory properties of the signifier have to serve as guarantors for the certain existence of the signified’ (HI, p. 48). This takes place via a specific figuration:

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chiasmus set up by prosopopoeia. The opening of the poem is, ‘J’aime le carillon de tes cités antiques,/O vieux pays gardien de tes moeurs domestiques/Noble Flandre,…’ (‘I love the chime of your ancient towns,/O old land, keeper of your domestic customs,/noble Flanders’). The underlying figure or ‘matrix’ of the poem, de Man establishes, is the prosopopoeia, the facegiving figure, ‘I love time’. That figure ‘accomplishes the trick [of] arbitrarily linking the mind to the semiotic relationship that connects the bells to the temporal motion they signify’. The phenomenality of the mind or cognition or the semantic function can seem to be ensured by the phenomenality of the signifier because the mind and time are linked in a chiasmus by the prosopopoeia ‘I love time’ The senses become the signs of the mind as the sound of the bells is the sign of time, because time and mind are linked, in the figure, as in the embrace of a couple’ (HI, pp. 48–9). The chime is apprehensible as a sign of time, which in turn makes consciousness apprehensible, because signifier and signified have been united in a form by the giving of face to the chime, by means of the figure linking time and its sign to the mind and its senses. Thus the phenomenalization of consciousness occurs, the apprehension of the indicating of something occurs, through an act of reading, the giving of figure, the prosopopoeia that gives a face to the sound of the bells. I will come back to the fact that it is a feminine figure and Flemish towns that are personified and apostrophized in Hugo’s prosopopoeia, and also to the comparable though dissimilar figures in Hegel’s text. But the significance of de Man’s reading lies first of all in results that can be stated abstractly. The generative principle of the poetic description, according to Riffaterre, was a ‘semantic given’—the cliché or topos ‘Flemish carillon’. To the contrary, de Man stresses that the generative principle of the description or deixis—and by the same token, the generative principle of perception or consciousness—is a fiction, a figure, the face-giving figure ‘I love time’, which frames and generates the description. The ‘I’ that loves times sees it as ‘l’heure’, the hour, which ‘arrives’ as if she were suddenly opening a door and descending a stair (‘it is the hour, unexpected and mad’, seen to ‘appear suddenly through the keen, bright hole/that a door of air would make, opening…. By a fragile stairway of invisible crystal/she descends…’). ‘I love time’ is the prosopopoeia that ‘posits voice or face by means of language’ (RR, p. 80). Thus we are dealing with an asymmetrical configuration as well as with the symmetrical chiasmus, ‘the senses are to the mind as the chime is to time’.24 The prosopopoeia sets up that signifying structure; the face-giving figure ‘I love…’ gives the face of a meaningful sign to the material signifier and the signified: This structure is asymmetrical rather than specular or one of equivalence. It is the radically asymmetrical relationship between the semantic or cognitive and the figural or positional dimensions of language. The crucial inadequacy of the symmetrical structure—or ratio—to conceive how phenomenalization takes place is that it fails to register the force of this operation—that of conferring semantic status on indeterminably meaningful marks. The symmetrical chiasmus represents this operation as the correspondence between two already constituted significative structures (such as ‘the mind’ and ‘nature’ or ‘subject’ and ‘object’). In effect it misconstrues syntax—the linguistic devices of meaning, ‘die Art des Meinens’—as inherently meaningful, the symmetrical correspondent of semantics; as though syntax were the mirror of logic, or of the real, and thus always already semantic and cognitive. By the same token the symmetrical ratios misconstrue semantics, or questions of meaning, as a lexical order, as a matter of a lexicon: the totality of ‘semantic givens’, in Riffaterre’s expression, or essentially a grammar or a code. Effacing the disparity between the cognitive and the positional dimensions of language, between ‘what language means’ and ‘the manner in which it produces meaning’ (RT, p. 62), the linked ratios efface the nontransparency of language, efface its very linguistic character. Such is the operation —performed within and on literature— of aesthetics. What it has to exclude is the figural condition of its own operation, the face-giving figure that underlies perception. Aesthetics thereby pursues its rationalist aspiration, to provide a science of perception. Any such aspiration is confounded by the figural condition of possibility of phenomenal cognition, which means that perceiving time—or the temporal existence of an ‘I’—is as much a product of fiction as the experience of ‘seeing’ the Hour when one hears the sound of bells. Aesthetics tries to preserve perception distinct from hallucination. It fails as a result of the authentic critical power lying in literature, in which the irreducible positional dimension of language comes to the fore. In the reading operation I chose to call ‘translation’, which ‘relates to what in the original belongs to language and not to meaning’ (RT, p. 84), as de

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Man put it, the irreducibility to cognition of the syntactical and figural aspects of language is admitted and verified, and, more than that, registered, repeated, translated, re-produced. Translations, de Man writes, disarticulate, they undo the original, they reveal that the original was always already disarticulated. They reveal that their failure, which seems to be due to the fact that they are secondary in relation to the original, reveals an essential failure, an essential disarticulation which was already there in the original. They kill the original by discovering that the original was already dead. (RT, p. 84) When you kill the original by discovering it is already dead what you are discovering is that there was that in the original that ‘relates to language and not to meaning’.25 We need now to look at how that translation is made in de Man’s own readings, as well as how the non-cognitive material element of language appears in Hugo’s and Hegel’s texts. Just as de Man objected to Riffaterre that the matrix of the Hugo lyric was not ‘le carillon flamand’ but more precisely ‘J’aime le carillon’, not a ‘semantic given’ but a figure, so he objects that the crux of the Hegel text is ‘the figural enigma…of a conscious cognition being in some manner akin to the certainty of a sense perception’: ‘a classical philosopheme’, as de Man writes, ‘not a kernel of determined meaning’ (HI, p. 47). De Man’s reading ‘relates to what in the original [of each text] belongs to language and not to meaning’. That this makes it possible to translate a so-called ‘classical philosopheme’ into a Romantic cliché, moreover a cliché about Belgium, is a disconcerting effect not untypical of literary theory (which may have much to do with its unpopularity among philosophers and psychologists). In addition to the figure, the other element in Hegel’s and Hugo’s texts not fully assimilable to semantic structures or phenomenal or symbolic aspects is inscription. Hugo’s lyric about the carillon is entitled ‘Ecrit sur la vitre d’une fenêtre flamande’— ‘Written on the pane of a Flemish window.’ De Man notes a drastic asymmetry between the written word ‘written’ and every other element of the text: ‘Every detail as well as every proposition in the text is fantastic,’ he writes, ‘except for the assertion, in the title, that it is écrit, written’ (HI, p. 51). Consciousness, in Hegel’s text, is similarly ‘false and misleading’ or fantastic, de Man argues: At that moment in the Phenomenology Hegel is…speaking…of consciousness in general as certainty in relation to the phenomenal categories of time, space, and selfhood. The point is that this certainty vanishes as soon as any phenomenal determination, temporal or other, is involved, as it always has to be. Consciousness (‘here’ and ‘now’) is not ‘false and misleading’ because of language [as Riffaterre had paraphrased Hegel’s argument]; consciousness is language, and nothing else, because it is false and misleading. (HI, pp. 41–2) De Man’s reading of Hugo’s ‘allegory of cognition’, as he calls it, guides, or retraces, his reading of Hegel’s chapter on ‘Sense-certainty’. To put it another way, the reading of Hugo translates into the reading of Hegel. This is the case not because (for de Man or for me) each text ‘means the same thing’; but because these two texts both ‘mean’ the validity of the experience of time, and in each case, the reading, as a reading, has to say what the text says rather than what it means. Each of the readings is itself a translation—in the first place, the literal translation of a single word: the German word ‘geschrieben’ and the French word ‘écrit’. These translate, of course, into the written word ‘written’—and it like them proves untranslatable in the sense that it is simply an inscription: it does not necessarily say or mean anything that the perceptible marks do not already manifest merely by being inscribed, ‘written’, on a surface. In that sense, the word ‘written’, written, does not really function as a sign. To ‘see’ this, though—to see ‘written’ as an inscription and not a name or a sign—takes some effort, some work; translating work, once again. Here de Man’s labour of translation consists in peeling off or screening out the usual meanings we grant to the word ‘written’ as we read it on the page and leaving visible just the opaque bit of writing, or writtenness. De Man’s translation makes us relate to that in the original word that relates to language and not to meaning. The result is a bit of language that lacks the phenomenal properties supposed to belong to a mother tongue or language of a fatherland. Within and outside three languages, the written down word ‘written’ persists as what it is, that is, neither a signification, nor a verbal sign or sound (‘geschrieben’, ‘écrit’, and ‘written’ are not the same sounds or letters). In such a way, in its material inscription, language remains to be read. It is the inscription that brings on die Aufgabe des Übersetzers. I meant to say, there, of course, ‘the giving up of the translator’, as well as ‘the task of the translator’, the coinciding of those two meanings in that one expression being a point made by de Man in his last lecture, on Walter Benjamin’s The task of the translator’. ‘One of the reasons that he takes the translator rather than the poet [as the exemplary figure]’, de Man argues, ‘is that the translator, per definition, fails…. If the text is called “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”, we have to read this title more or less as a tautology: Aufgabe, task, can also mean the one who has to give up. If you enter the Tour de France and you give up, that is the Aufgabe— “er hat aufgegeben”, he doesn’t continue in the race anymore. . . . The question then becomes’— says de Man—‘why this failure with regard to an original text, to an original poet, is for Benjamin exemplary. The question also becomes how the translator differs from the poet, and here Benjamin is categorical in asserting that the translator is unlike, differs essentially from, the poet and the artist’ (RT, p. 80). That question, the question for de Man in his final lecture, implies a judgment about every classicism or neo-classicism, and more particularly about Romantic poetry and aesthetics in

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so far as they define themselves in relation to that work of ‘refinding what was there in the original’, in the original poetry, that is to say, the Greeks’. What is Romanticism’s relation to that work, to that race? We, after 1800, and since 1914, or 1933, or 1942, might know that it’s better not to continue with the race. But I want to come back to that historical issue after looking first at how de Man translates the initial chapter of that Romantic work, the Phenomenology. If one asks, not only what that text says, but also what its reader says, reading it—he or she says, according to de Man, something which is a translation of what de Man suggested Benjamin to be saying, about the effort to refind what was there in the original: Gib’s auf! ‘Forget it!’ Here is the passage. Language appears explicitly for the first time in Hegel’s chapter in the figure of a speaking consciousness: ‘The assertion (that the reality or being of external things possess absolute truth for consciousness) does not know what it states (spricht), does not know that it says (sagt) the opposite of what it wants to say (sagen will). Every consciousness states (spricht) the opposite of (such a truth).’ [Phänomenologie des Geistes, sect. 20, p. 87. Translation and italics are de Man’s.] The figure of a speaking consciousness is made plausible by the deictic function that it names. As for written or inscribed language, it appears in Hegel’s text only in the most literal of ways: by means of the parabasis which suddenly confronts us with the actual piece of paper on which Hegel, at that very moment and in this very place, has been writing about the impossibility of ever saying the only thing one wants to say, namely the certainty of sense perception. Particularity (the here and how) was lost long ago, even before speech (Sprache): writing down this knowledge in no way loses (nor, of course, recovers) a here and now that, as Hegel puts it, was never accessible (erreichbar) to consciousness or to speech. It does something very different: unlike the here and the now of speech, the here and the now of the inscription is neither false nor misleading: because he wrote it down, the existence of a here and a now of Hegel’s text is undeniable as well as totally blank. It reduces, for example, the entire text of the Phenomenology to the endlessly repeated stutter: this piece of paper, this piece of paper, and so on. We can easily enough learn to care for the other examples Hegel mentions: a house, a tree, night, day—but who cares for his darned piece of paper, the last thing in the world we want to hear about and precisely because it is no longer an example but a fact, the only thing we actually get. As we would say, in colloquial exasperation with an obtuse bore: forget it! Which turns out to be precisely what Hegel sees as the function of writing: writing is what prevents speech from taking place, from zum Worte zu kommen, from ever reaching the word of Saussure’s hypogram, and thus to devour itself as the animal is said to devour sensory things (sect. 20, p. 87), in the knowledge that it is false and misleading. Writing is what makes one forget speech: ‘Natural consciousness therefore proceeds by itself to this outcome, which is its truth [(the knowledge that the Now or the Here is really a universal)— C.C.] and experiences this progression within itself; but it also always forgets it over and again and recommences this movement from the start’ (sect. 20, pp. 86–7; italics mine [de Man’s]). As the only particular event that can be pointed out, writing, unlike speech and cognition, is what takes us back to this ever-recurring natural consciousness [or the drive to translate as to refind what was there in the original, to state the certainty of sense perception [my translation— C.C.]]. Hegel, who is often said to have ‘forgotten’ about writing, is unsurpassed in his ability to remember that one should never forget to forget. To write down this piece of paper (contrary to saying it) is no longer deictic, no longer a gesture of pointing rightly or wrongly, no longer an example or a Beispiel, but the definitive erasure of a forgetting that leaves no trace. It is, in other words, the determined elimination of determination. As such, it goes entirely against the grain of Riffaterre’s rational determination of unreason. (HI, pp. 42–3) Let us read this passage. The ‘elimination of determination’ is the elimination of the possibility of determining once and for all whether a pattern is or is not significative, is or is not determined by a semiotic process rather than mere probability, which emerged in Saussure’s study of anagrams. Such is the impact of Hegel’s text, according to de Man, specifically because that text includes, not only an account of the negative correlation between what consciousness ‘wants to say’ and what it ‘says’, but the occurrence of inscription. In this essay de Man argues from Hugo’s descriptive poem and from chapter I of the Phenomenology that the conditions of cognition are prosopopoeia and inscription. His argument does not simply interpret this to be the meaning of Hegel’s or Hugo’s text. His reading follows the occurrence of prosopopoeia and inscription: it summons up a moment in Hegel’s text that corresponds to both the word ‘Ecrit’ in the title of Hugo’s poem and the prosopopoeia that frames the description of the sound of the bells (or of the sign that points). This moment in Hegel’s text is the passage that alludes to ‘this piece of paper I am writing on, or rather have written on’, in the next to last paragraph of the first chapter. This written down ‘this piece of paper on which I am writing’ differs altogether from ‘this’ or ‘here’ or ‘now’ as they are spoken— including the spoken reference to ‘this piece of paper’ that the paragraph goes on to discuss, presenting it as one more example of pointing and of the logical contradiction inherent in the deictic function: natural consciousness’s meaning to say the particular but stating the general. Like the written word ‘written’ in Hugo’s title, the written down ‘this’ differs from the demonstratives described and carried out in these texts. It is not pointing, but inscription, It is of the order of the anagrammatic patterns observed by Saussure: the distribution of letters was undeniably there, but its meaningfulness or

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nonmeaningfulness was indeterminable; it is ‘undeniable’, as de Man writes, but ‘blank’. This is the really disruptive indetermination, de Man argues—not the ultimately stabilizing undetermination between reference and the absence or negation of reference—that Hegel’s chapter brings out. As an exceptionally acute reader of de Man and of Hegel commented, on this paragraph of ‘Hypogram and inscription’, ‘he doesn’t just assert inscription but must find it as it “appears” in the text, when it says “I am written.”’26 Cathy Caruth was referring to de Man’s remark that by way of a ‘parabasis’, inscription ‘appears’ in Hegel’s text. I quote again: ‘As for written or inscribed language, it appears in Hegel’s text only in the most literal of ways: by means of the parabasis which suddenly confronts us with the actual piece of paper on which Hegel, at that very moment and in this very place, has been writing about the impossibility of ever saying the only thing one wants to say…’ (HI, p. 42). The ‘parabasis’, namely, in which Hegel suddenly writes of ‘this piece of paper I am writing on, or rather have written on’. The written down word ‘written’ is inscription; the allusion, the pointing to it, is a parabasis, a gesture of address that suddenly confronts the audience of a representation with the framework of its performance. (De Man takes the term ‘parabasis’ from Friedrich Schlegel, who defined irony as ‘eine permanente Parekbase’.)27 This parabasis suddenly gives a face to the agent that has been producing the text. The passage is a prosopopoeia of inscription, and it culminates in the reproducing of the gesture of ‘pointing out this bit of paper’, at the close of the final paragraph. The gesture asserting that what one means is precisely this thing here, for instance this bit of paper, repeats and renews the illusion of sense-certainty that the chapter has revealed to be false. The possibility of pointing to ‘this bit of paper’, then—the prosopopoeia of inscription—is the means by which occurs the process of consciousness as Hegel described it earlier in the chapter, in a sentence quoted by de Man: ‘Natural consciousness… proceeds by itself to this outcome, which is its truth [i.e. the knowledge that the “now” or “here” is really a universal]…; but it also always forgets it…and recommences this movement from the start.’ A complex and ambiguous effect takes place, then, with prosopopoeia: both the ‘appearing’ of inscription, of the materiality inassimilable to meaning, and the adducing of that materiality as the certainty of sensory evidence. This latter gesture is itself ambiguous, as the forgetting, on the one hand, of the disparity between ‘what one says’ and ‘what one wants to say’, between ‘what language means’ and ‘the manner in which it produces meaning’, but on the other hand, the forgetting also of the negative certainty of the universality of the ‘this’ exemplified in ‘this bit of paper’, a certainty which simply reverses sense-certainty, just as the doctrine of the nonreferentiality of literary language merely reverses and remains symmetrical with the doctrine of language’s stable referentiality. De Man’s reading of Hegel is a translation in the sense that it reads and reproduces this proposopoeia of inscription in his own essay. I quote: We can easily enough learn to care for the other examples Hegel mentions: a house, a tree, night, day—but who cares for his darned piece of paper, the last thing in the world we want to hear about and precisely because it is no longer an example but a fact, the only thing we actually get. As we would say, in colloquial exasperation with an obtuse bore: forget it! (HI, p. 42) Hegel’s text as ‘an obtuse bore’, the reader-function as a bored listener rebuffing him: such is the unromantic scene in which de Man casts the activity of historical self-consciousness. This is unlike the scene implied in the matrix of Hugo’s poem, ‘I love time’, in which time and mind are linked, as de Man observes, ‘as in the embrace of a couple’, and are identified through an exchange of properties. De Man’s scene of the impatient reader rebuffing a boring Hegel resembles rather the image in Hugo’s text of the Hour as a costumed and feminine figure ‘pitilessly awakening wearisome [ennuyeux: not simply ‘weary’, but ‘boring’] sleepers’. What takes place in de Man’s Hegelian—or Benjaminian— figure is not a union but an interruption.28 But it is also, as it were by the same token, a repetition, for to ‘Forget it!’ ‘is precisely what Hegel sees as the function of writing’. ‘Writing is what makes one forget speech’, de Man writes further, in a dense and untranslatable passage. ‘Writing is what prevents speech from taking place, from zum Worte zu kommen, …and thus to devour itself as the animal is said to devour sensory things, in the knowledge that it is false and misleading.’ For for ‘what is meant’ to ‘get into words’ would be for language to be supererogatory, since ‘what is meant’, ‘what one means to say’, means in this context simply the certainty of sensory evidence. Inasmuch as language subverts that intended assertion, it is necessarily ‘false and misleading’, in de Man’s words; in the words of Hegel that he is translating here, language ‘has the divine nature of directly reversing the meaning of what is said, of making it into something else, and thus not letting what is meant get into words at all’ (A.V.Miller translation, p. 66). What does not finally ‘get into words’ once and for all, thanks to language or to writing, is not only sense-certainty, however, but also its symmetrical opposite, or the negative knowledge that language is non-referential. For the referential, and the semantic, functions of language remain, with the inscription that ‘appears’ as a text, the indeterminably meaningful linguistic signs that require, like Hegel’s ‘bit of paper’, to be read. The possibility of writing and of history—like the possibility of writing history—thus depends, in de Man’s reading of Hegel, on a ‘forgetting’ that occurs through writing. There are no doubt two forgettings involved in the scene or operation de Man describes. One is the reversion of consciousness to the certainty of perception and the conviction it can say what it

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means. Consciousness always forgets the negative insight it had achieved, says Hegel, and ‘recommences that movement from the start’. The forgetting of what is achieved or past, in a recommencing that marks the passage of time, can be equated with the carillon, the chiming of the bells that Hugo’s poem reveals as a process of phenomenalization, and that de Man sees the poem’s fundamental trope figuring as the embrace of a couple. It comes about due to what seems another, different forgetting at issue in Hegel’s text, the forgetting done not by the reader or consciousness, but by ‘Hegel’ or the writing of writing. This moment corresponds not only to the inscription of the word ‘Ecrit’ in the title of Hugo’s poem, but to the asymmetrical configuration that makes legible the incommensurability between that non-semantic element and the trope that links the mind and time. De Man alludes to it in these terms: ‘Hegel, who is often said to have “forgotten” about writing, is unsurpassed in his ability to remember that one should never forget to forget.’ How translate that assertion? Hegel, de Man notes, is often said to have ‘forgotten about’ the topic and problem of writing. But (de Man implies) Hegel does something else: he writes. And he writes that down. Writes, ‘Write’. Notes down, as if on a list—this is how I translate ‘remember that one shouldn’t forget’—‘remember to write’. One should never, remembers Hegel, forget to forget. And de Man specifies the sort of forgetting of the past or of that ‘movement’ of ‘consciousness’ that is thus imperative. ‘The definitive erasure of a forgetting that leaves no trace’. Or ‘the determined elimination of determination’, of the determination, in all senses—starting with the sense that their relation is determinate and determinable—of the relation between meaning and language, signified and signifier, signification and form. The ‘determined elimination’ or ‘definitive forgetting’ of that determination of meaning would be precisely ‘die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’: the giving up of the race that would recover the original race or meaning. Or as de Man also put it—a trace of history clinging to his talk—to give up the Tour de France. This may be the place to consider the references to place or nation that mark, fleetingly, de Man’s Benjamin talk, and more prominently, of course, Hugo’s poem on Flemish chimes, which I should point out however was picked out first by Riffaterre, and only in that context by de Man as an exemplary ‘allegory of cognition’. The Hugo lyric apostrophizes ‘Noble Flanders, where the North warms itself, benumbed,/In the sun of Castille, and couples with the Midi!’ Flanders is identified as the site of the coming together of polarities evoked in geographical and national terms. Some of de Man’s earliest published writing, in 1941 and 1942 in Brussels in the collaborating newspapers Het Vlaamsche Land and Le Soir ‘volé’, sought to define a Flemish and a European identity in not dissimilar terms, as the coming together of ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ or of ‘German’ and ‘French’ characteristics. The attenuated, picturesque opposition evoked in Hugo’s lyric belongs to a highly charged history of European or western self-definition in opposition to and identification with the Orient or Greece, a history which for many in 1942, as also for a few in 1795 (the year of publication of Schiller’s ‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’), was a question of the history of Germany, and its destiny as a ‘race’ in some privileged relation to the original. I am dangerously scanting an immense, complex historiographical and philological labour here (for which I would invoke above all the scrupulous and forceful work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe),29 but I want to indicate however briefly the broadest stakes and implications of the figures de Man finds in Hugo’s ‘allegory of cognition’. When I spoke of ‘giving up’ the ‘Tour de France’, I had in mind the German invasion of France in the spring of 1940, which some observers (whose books de Man reviewed for Le Soir in 1941–2) saw as a race, a tour, a sporting event, an advance through virtually non-resistant territory.30 One may glimpse, fleetingly, in de Man’s example of the second meaning of ‘Aufgabe’ as the ‘giving up’ of the Tour de France, the linking of a philological task (translation) to a sacrifice, however mildly imagined in de Man’s actual example as giving up in a bicycle race.31 The exercise of translation involves giving something up, and that something includes the penetration of France by Germany—not only militarily, but also metaphorically, in a genetic model of literary history: the incursion of German Romanticism into French literature, for instance, ostensibly engendering the most genuinely poetic manifestations of modern literature, symbolism and surrealism32— as well as the hegemony of the original meaning or text. De Man’s commentary on the Hugo poem more or less ignores the national or geographical topoi and focuses on the erotic imagery which fills in the decisive structural framework for the description, the address to Flanders that frames the praise for the feminine figure of the carillon. De Man notes, The poem is a declaration of love addressed to something or someone, staged as an address of one subject to another in a je—tu situation which can hardly be called descriptive…these ‘descriptions’ can only occur because a consciousness or a mind (l’esprit) is figurally said to relate to another abstraction (time) as male relates to female in a copulating couple (line 5). (HI, p. 47) No doubt it is the case that in the chiasmus which de Man successfully establishes to be the main tropological scheme in the poem, the mind and time are ‘coupled’ and exchange properties, and this coupling can be assimilated to the one named in the text, which takes place, however, not in line 5 but in lines 3–4, the lines which address Flanders as the place where ‘le Nord… s’accouple au Midi’. De Man’s reading displaces the figure of coupling from the geographical or national entities on to the phenomenological ones, ‘mind’ and ‘time’. Again, this is interpretatively legitimate and precise, but it may also mark the repression of a loaded historical scenario, one which had had a peculiar resonance for de Man. The image of a coupling or an

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erotic encounter is perceptible, I think, in this passage from a review by de Man of Journal de France, by Alfred Fabre-Luce, in Le Soir on 21 July 1942: quelle utile sujet de meditation, quel fertile terrain d’observation que les convulsions de la France vaincue! L’histoire offre peu de themes d’étude aussi attachants que celui qui se déroule sous nos yeux a notre frontière méridionale: le choc de deux civilisations complémentaires mais souvent hostiles, la naissance d’un esprit nouveau sur les ruines des erreurs passées, l’angoissant problème de savoir si un des piliers de la culture occidentale parviendra a s’adapter aux exigences d’une autre ère… (‘Chronique littéraire. L’histoire vivante. Journal de la France (Tome ii) par Alfred Fabre-Luce’)33 ‘what a useful subject of meditation, what a fertile terrain of observation, the convulsions of vanquished France! History offers few themes of study as engaging as that which is unrolling before our eyes at our meridional frontier: the clash of two complementary but often hostile civilizations, the birth of a new spirit on the ruins of past errors, the anxious problem of knowing whether one of the pillars of occidental culture will succeed in adapting to the exigencies of another era…’ The combination of fatuous complacency, lugubrious righteousness, and excited voyeurism in this passage would be hard to equal, even for Paul de Man at twenty-two in other articles of the same provenance. What I want to bring out is that erotic and sadistic fantasy in the first sentence of witnessing ‘les convulsions de la France vaincue’, Marianne at last undone by the virile aggression of the Germans. De Man’s displacement in ‘Hypogram and inscription’ of the sexual allusion in Hugo’s poem from line 4 to line 5 and from the North and the Midi to the mind and time has the shape, I think, of an avoidance, the deliberate forgetting of a passage in his history which might have repelled him afterwards not only for the catastrophic moral and political error with which it was associated but also for the very tonalities of self-righteousness and the undercurrent of sadism that colour its scenario of defeat and sacrifice. In reading de Man’s allusion in his Benjamin lecture to ‘giving up’ in the Tour de France as I did, I was restoring some of the pathos, and lurid historical allusion, to a discourse that conscientiously and systematically empties them out.34 De Man’s colloquial translation of the impact of Hegel—‘Forget it!’—is an effect as well as cause of this strategy. De Man evidently strives in his own writing to avoid or check the ‘seductive’ power of pathos and symmetry. Whether such features as that ‘Forget it!’ or the illustration of Aufgabe with the Tour de France are encoded or random, motivated in the first instance by psychological defences, or by the accidents of rhetorical devising for an incommensurable semantic content, remains undecidable. What we can determine is that the pattern accords with an argument de Man is making in his essay on Hegel and Hugo and with the critique of aesthetics that informs his critical work. The scenario of a triumph and a defeat stands behind the imagery of coupling and the figure of chiasmus that structures the ratio linking phenomenal aspects and semantic function. The notion of gain for loss that informs the conception of the work as an exchange of properties between semantics and syntax, meaning and form, and the notion of a dialectical recuperation of meaning through the loss of its immediacy, are argued by de Man to efface the most decisive quality of language, its materiality as the disjunction of signs and meaning. De Man’s criticism suggests that in the aspirations of aesthetics, literature, and language face a historical threat: the rendering mute of their critical ability to differ from the perceived world, from the received world of ‘perception’ or of so-called ‘universal’ consciousness.35 That brings me, however, to a second interpretation of the style of de Man’s literary theory. The consistently or inconsistently anaesthetic or rather antipathetic style of de Man’s writing accords only contingently with his arguments, for these imply precisely that consistency of language with meaning is impossible, or rather, insignificant. Were literary theory to take the form of the most romantic and lurid pose, it could still be ‘saying the same thing’. De Man’s singular style is the trace of his history, which is not the same as the meaning of his work (although it may be, as Hegel said, its truth).36 It is irresistible though illusive to see this history as an itinerary—from, say, the review of Fabre-Luce affirming the determination of ‘history’, to the review essay on Riffaterre prescribing ‘the determined elimination of determination’. But let’s again translate the passages. One from 1942: There follows from this the demonstration of that ineluctable truth of history according to which, at certain moments, the weight of events becomes such that it draws nations in a certain direction, even when their will seems to oppose it. That is what has produced itself in this case: the politics of collaboration results from the present situation not as an ideal desired by all of the people but as an irresistible necessity which none can escape, even if he thinks he ought to head in the other direction. (‘Chronique littéraire. L’histoire vivante. Journal de la France (Tome ii) par Alfred Fabre-Luce’, Le Soir, 21 July 1942; my translation)

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Here is the one from 1981: Hegel, who is often said to have ‘forgotten’ about writing, is unsurpassed in his ability to remember never to forget to forget. To write down this piece of paper (contrary to saying it) is no longer deictic, no longer a gesture of pointing rightly or wrongly, no longer an example or a Beispiel, but the definitive erasure of a forgetting that leaves no trace. It is, in other words, the determined elimination of determination. (HI, pp. 42–3) We saw how a certain forgetting or elimination—of the fantasy of a nation in the ‘convulsions’ of a sexualized defeat—leaves traces in the essay to which this statement belongs. I would argue that the reading of the essay is enriched by this supplementary set of marks. But the model of an itinerary from bad politics to good or from ideologue to teacher won’t be adequate to this tension between determination or decision and overdetermination. For the differences that count are not just between but within the two texts37—within the very syntax of the sentence we have been reading. De Man’s writing could be called—and could be heard to call for both ‘the definitive erasure [that performs] a forgetting that leaves no trace’— subjective genitive ‘of—and, as we have just shown, ‘the definitive erasure [that excludes the possibility of] a forgetting that [would] leave no trace’: the sort of erasure (eraser) that is writing, or translating, which definitively prevents traceless forgetting, prevents the traceless assimilation of that which has been literature or history. De Man’s literary theory is perhaps necessarily ‘aesthetic criticism’ (as well as the criticism of aesthetics) in the sense that it retains the features, even if half effaced, of the topoi of European poetry and politics. But it would not be in those terms— aesthetics, its criticism, objective or subjective genitive—that one could make the critical distinction between two sorts of forgetting that are named by and take place in de Man’s writing and other critical writing as well. One has to go back to the technical terms of the rhetorical reading. There one can distinguish between the inscription and the deictic gesture of pointing it out. Inscription is ‘forgetting’ in the sense that uncertainly significative marks (like the written down word ‘written’) interrupt cognition. Pointing to an inscription, as an instance of a thing that coincides with itself, is a ‘forgetting’ of the elusiveness of that materiality, the figural force involved in perception. Yet the necessity of the ‘appearing’ in Hegel’s and in Hugo’s text of the inscription, in an actual textual feature such as the word ‘écrit’ or the word ‘written’, poses once again the difficulty of making that distinction. De Man, just as he criticized Riffaterre for doing, seems to depend on an ‘actualization’ of a significance in the texts. Yet the point is that inscription is not a signification, and that by themselves those inscriptions tell us nothing—not until they appear in a scenario set up in the text by means of a prosopopoeia. The prosopopoeia and parabasis in de Man’s text, as in Hegel’s, produce two distinguishable figures of forgetting: on the one hand, ‘Natural Consciousness’, or the bored reader saying ‘Forget it!’ to Hegel’s insistence on ‘this piece of paper’; on the other hand, ‘We’ or Hegel forgetting the universality of the particular as he writes down ‘this piece of paper’; Hegel’s writing down of writing, eliminating the structural determination of the sign. The first figure represents ideology, the second, the critical force of language or ‘theory’. So de Man maintains in The Resistance to Theory, in a passage that alludes to Marx’s German Ideology: It would be unfortunate, for example, to confuse the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies. This may seem obvious enough on the level of light and sound, but it is less so with regard to the more general phenomenality of space, time, or especially the self; no one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word ‘day’, but it is very difficult not to conceive the pattern of one’s past and future existence as in accordance with temporal and spatial schemes that belong to fictional narratives and not to the world. This does not mean that fictional narratives are not part of the world and of reality; their impact upon the world may well be all too strong for comfort. What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism. (RT, p. 11) Distinguishing between the two figures—ideology and the critical force of language—constitutes the ethics of reading. Nevertheless, the distinctness of those figures is a representational effect of the prosopopoeia and an effect it also dissolves. In the reading above, one had to speak in both cases of ‘forgetting about writing’, and this is telling. The drastically disorienting effect of prosopopoeia, in the readings of de Man, is to deprive us of a phenomenal or fixed distinction between ideology and the material conditions of cognition. The distinction between them is attenuated into the distinction between two recurrences of a linguistic function, reference: on the one hand, the inscription’s appearance in the text in a parabasis that refers to a fact (the undeniable but blank fact of the existence of writing); on the other hand, and with it, the reversion to the notion of sensory evidence, ‘the forgetting that is experienced by consciousness as a return to an attempt to refer’.38 The distinction can be made in a notation that I earlier evoked: the asymmetrical configuration that differs from chiasmus, that notes the disparity between the figural condition of meaning and the semantic structure of the sign. Such a notation—like a capital ‘T’ lying on its side, is the way Neil Hertz, who first thought of it, described it—is something different from a concept and from an image.39 It can tell you nothing you did not already know. It is not a symbol, but an inscription. It does not ensure, rather it interrupts cognition, the discursive understanding of the distinction that it cites. It is of the same order as

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the first, and not the second, kind of forgetting we have distinguished: the materiality of the indeterminably significative marks that are the condition of the possibility of language and of that second forgetting which is motivated, meaningful, a defence, a trope. Much of literary theory has the peculiar precision and instability of a notation, of uncompleted discursive form, since literary theory, unlike political or aesthetic discourse, does not attempt to saturate the context of its assertions. For the impossibility of ever doing so is something that—as literary—theory ‘knows’ from the start. This does not mean that theorists need not take decisions, both aesthetic and political. On the contrary. The irreducible priority of ‘forgetting’ in the first sense — the irreducible non-semantic, non-phenomenal dimension of language and history—implies that forgetting in the second sense may always take place, as well as the permanent uncertainty in distinguishing between them. But it also implies the critical theoretical imperative: because of the primacy of forgetting, forgetting will always take place, but let it not be of that one. Because of the material conditions of meaning, in other words, ideology will always recur, but let it not be that one: the aesthetic ideology. This comes near an issue raised at the beginning of this essay, that of the difference between literary theory and literature, and between contemporary writing and Romanticism. The distinction is difficult in so far as literature, like theory, is ‘the voiding of aesthetic categories’, and Romanticism the self-discovery of literature. And that lack of distinction is painful, not only because non-identity is painful, but because literature and Romanticism now carry a history, like politics and philosophy, that includes inconceivable suffering and disaster. It is with this in the background that I read de Man’s formulation of the difference I need to describe between literary theory and Romanticism, between translation and poetry. I quote: One of the differences between the situation of the translator and that of the poet, the first that comes to mind is that the poet has some relationship to meaning, to a statement that is not purely within the realm of language. That is the naiveté of the poet, that he has to say something, that he has to convey a meaning which does not necessarily relate to language. The relationship of the translator to the original is the relationship between language and language, wherein the problem of meaning or the desire to say something, the need to make a statement, is entirely absent. (RT, pp. 81–2) The predicament of the translator is to say the same things that the original text says, rather than meaning them; to write down what the previous text says or states, not what one wants to say. This could describe de Man’s own situation with regard to Hugo’s poem celebrating the coupling of the mind and time in terms of an imaginary geography of Europe. That ‘allegory of cognition’, as de Man pointedly calls it, is what his translation of the poem says. But this time, it is not what he says or ‘wants to say’. Cornell University NOTES 1 Paul de Man, ‘Hegel on the Sublime’, in Mark Krupnick (ed.), Displacement: Derrida and After (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 153. 2 De Man, ‘Hypogram and inscription’, in The Resistance to Theory (hereafter cited RT) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 27–53; hereafter cited HI. It was originally published with the subtitle ‘Michael Riffaterre’s poetics of reading’ in Diacritics, 11, 4 (Winter 1981), pp. 17–35. 3 Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 239; hereafter cited RR. See also Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths, Critical Fictions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Cynthia Chase, Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Jacques Derrida, La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). 4 These works include Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw, and Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (both Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Jan Mukařovský, The Word and Verbal Act, trans. John Burbank and Peter Steiner, with a foreword by René Wellek (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Felix Vodička, Die Strucktur der literarischen Entwicklung (Munich: W.Fink, 1976); Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978) and Text Production, trans. Thérèse Lyons (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); and Rainer Warning (ed.), Rezeptionsaesthetik: Theorie und Praxis (Munich: W.Fink, 1975). 5 Friedrich Schlegel, Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Ernst Behler (Stuttgart: A. Kröner, 1956); a partial translation appears in Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘Lucinde’ and the ‘Fragments’, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971). The original edition of the review is in the Bibliothèque Nationale and the library of the University of Strasbourg. 6 See M.H.Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 21–6. 7 Cf. Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Athenaeum’, trans. Deborah Esch and Ian Balfour, Studies in Romanticism, 22, 2 (Summer 1983), pp. 163–72.

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8 Cf. de Man, RT, p. 25; also Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the right to death’, trans. Lydia Davis, in The Gaze of Orpheus (New York: Station Hill Press, 1981); Jean Paulhan, Les Fleurs de Tarbes ou la terreur dans les lettres (Paris: Gallimard, 1954); and François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 48– 63. 9 François Furet (Penser la revolution française, Paris: Gallimard, 1978) identifies as the distinctive and ‘revolutionary’ feature of the French Revolution the identity between language and power in 1789–94, when speaking in the name of the people is the very stakes —both the means and the content—of power. Lynn Hunt (Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), describes how the Revolution was consolidated through symbolic forms of political practice (including a great variety of public festivities and rituals). Prior to these historiographical interpretations stands the historicophilosophical thesis of Maurice Blanchot according to which literature may be conceived as a certain identification with the Revolution, more precisely, the Terror (‘Literature and the right to death’; see note 8, above). Cf. also this passage in L’Entretien infini: ‘it is not from the revolutionary orators that the romantics will seek lessons in style, but from the Revolution in person, from this language made History, signified by events that are declarations: the Terror, as is well known, was not only terrible because of the executions, but because it asserted itself in capitalized form, making terror the standard of history and the logos of modern times. The scaffold, the enemies of the people presented to the people, beheadings performed simply for show, the evidence—the emphasis—of worthless death, constitute not historical facts, but a new language that speaks and has retained its eloquence’ (‘The Athenaeum’, trans. Deborah Esch and Ian Balfour, MLN, 22, 2 (Summer 1978), p. 167). 10 RR, p. 50; my emphasis on ‘in its passing away’. This essay was first delivered in 1966 as de Man’s inaugural lecture for the chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Zürich. 11 Thematization is elucidated in Werner Hamacher, ‘Lectio: De Man’s imperative’, in Wlad Godzich and Lindsay Waters (eds), Reading de Man Reading (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 173ff. Thematization presupposes the possibility of an unambiguous referential relation of literary language; but since the theme “reading” can always be used in a text as a metaphor for something else that would not be “reading” it is impossible to ascertain whether or not reading really is in fact thematized …’ ‘Reading is a praxis that thematizes its own thesis about the impossibility of thematization and this makes it unavoidable, though hardly legitimate, for allegories to be interpreted in thematic terms’ (Allegories of Reading, p. 209). 12 For the ‘Benjamin turn’ in de Man’s writing (Lindsay Waters, Introduction to Critical Writings 1953–1978 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 1iv–1ix), see Andrzej Warminski, Introduction and notes to Paul de Man, ‘Time and history’, Diacritics, 17.4 (Winter 1987). The turn to a rhetorical terminology is legible in the revisions (indicated in footnotes) between an earlier and a later version of the text, which was the fourth of the series of lectures in the Christian Gauss seminar delivered by de Man at Princeton in 1967. ‘The rhetoric of temporality’ is included in Wlad Godzich (ed.), Blindness and Insight, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 187–228. 13 Paul de Man, ‘Sign and symbol in Hegel’s aesthetics’, Critical Inquiry, 8.4 (Summer 1982), p. 768; see also ‘Lyrical voice in contemporary theory: Riffaterre and Jauss’, in Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (eds), Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 14 ibid. 15 Victor Hugo, Les Rayons et les ombres, ed. Pierre Albouy (Paris: Pléiade, 1964), vol. 1, pp. 1062–3. 16 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 121; hereafter cited AR. 17 De Man’s essays on Hegel include, in addition to ‘Hypogram and inscription’, ‘Sign and symbol in Hegel’s aesthetics’ (see note 13) and ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ (see note 1). The latter two will be republished, together with ‘Phenomenality and materiality in Kant’ and ‘Kant and Schiller’, in de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. A.Warminski, forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press. 18 Cf. AR, p. 79. 19 G.F.W.Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. J.Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952); trans. A.V.Miller, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 20 The poem reads as follows:

J’aime le carillon de tes cités antiques, O vieux pays gardien de tes moeurs domestiques, Noble Flandre, où le Nord se réchauffe engourdi Au soleil de Castille et s’accouple au Midi! Le carillon, c’est l’heure inattendue et folle, Que l’œil croit voir, vêtue en danseuse espagnole, Apparaître soudain par le trou vif et clair Que ferait en s’ouvrant une porte de l’air. Elle vient, secouant sur les toits léthargiques Son tablier d’argent plein de notes magiques, Réveillant sans pitié les dormeurs ennuyeux, Sautant a petits pas come un oiseau joyeaux,

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Vibrant, ainsi qu’un dard qui tremble dans la cible; Par un frêle escalier de cristal invisible, Effaré et dansante, elle descend des cieux; Et l’esprit, ce veilleur fait d’oreilles et d’yeux, Tandis qu’elle va, vient, monte et descend encore, Entend de marche en marche errer son pied sonore! In a modified version of Riffaterre’s translation (Text Production, p. 183): ‘I love the carillon of your ancient towns,/O old land, keeper of your domestic customs,/noble Flanders, where the benumbed North warms itself/in the sun of Castille and couples with the South!/The carillon is the unexpected and mad hour/that the eye thinks it sees, dressed as a Spanish dancer,/Appear suddenly through the keen, bright hole/that a door of air would make, opening./She comes, shaking over the lethargic rooftops/her silver apron full of magical notes,/quivering like a spear vibrating in the target;/ By a fragile stairway of invisible crystal,/alarmed and dancing, she descends from the heavens;/And the mind, that watchman made of ears and eyes,/as she goes and comes and climbs up and down again,/hears her sonorous foot wandering from step to step!’ 21 Among many extensive arguments of this position, cf. Michael Riffaterre, Text Production, pp. 185–6: ‘I am concerned with seeing how the utterance, far from being modeled on a nonverbal object, submits to the imperatives of semantic and formal associations among words.’ 22 HI, p. 37. See also Sylvère Lotringer, ‘The game of the name’, Diacritics, 3.2 (Summer 1973), pp. 8–16, and Jean Starobinski, Les Mots sous les mots: Les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). 23 de Man, ‘Sign and symbol in Hegel’s aesthetics’, p. 770. 24 Andrzej Warminski defines symmetrical and asymmetrical chiasmus and the crucial difference between them. See Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. xxxix–1i; and ‘Facing language: Wordsworth’s first poetic spirits’, Diacritics, 17, 4 (Winter 1987). 25 The violence and strangeness of the phrase ‘killing the original by finding it already dead’ is elucidated in Neil Hertz, ‘Lurid figures’, in Wladt Godzich and Lindsay Waters (eds), Reading de Man Reading (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 82ff, and ‘More lurid figures’, Diacritics, 20, 2 (Summer 1990). 26 Cathy Caruth, in an unpublished letter dated 31 January 1986. 27 Cited in de Man, Blindness and Insight, 2nd edn, p. 218; Schlegel, ‘Fragment 668’, in Kritische Ausgabe, Band 18, Philosophische Lehrjahre (1796–1806), ed. Ernst Behler (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1962), p. 85. 28 It is as if de Man’s figure were an allegory of ‘the philosophical style’ as defined in The Origin of German Tragic Drama [Die Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels] (London: New Left Books, 1977), where it is characterized by Walter Banjamin as ‘the art of interruption’ [die Kunst des Absetzens]. 29 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Hölderlin et les grecs’, Poétique, 40 (1979), pp. 465–74; La Fiction du politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987); ‘La Transcendance finit dans la politique’, in Rejouer le politique (Paris: Galilée, 1981). 30 This is an aspect of Henri de Montherlant’s account in Le Solstice de juin (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1941), reviewed by Paul de Man in Le Soir, 11 November 1941. Montherlant’s account also, however, affirms the profound symbolic meaning of the June solstice, in which the sign of the sun, the swastika, has triumphed over the Cross. Maurice Blanchot also reviewed the book, and like de Man’s, his review quotes and applies Montherlant’s sentence upon writers who ‘have given too much to current affairs for the past few months’—‘I predict, for that part of their work, the most complete oblivion…I hear the indifference of the future rolling over them, just as one hears the sound of the sea when one holds certain seashells up to the ear’—to Le Solstice de juin itself. (The passage provides the title for Jacques Derrida, ‘Like the sound of the sea deep within a shell: Paul de Man’s war’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry, 14 (Spring 1988), pp. 590–652). In effect a critique of Montherlant’s stance as aesthetic ideology, Blanchot’s review, ‘De l’insolence considérée comme l’un des beaux arts’, in La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), may also be compared with de Man’s later work. 31 As it happens (I am told by Neil Hertz), de Man was a fan of Eddie Merckx, the Belgian cycling champion, five times winner of the Tour de France in the 1960s. 32 This was a view taken by de Man in an article defending French Surrealist poetry and the review Messages (on the latter, see Thomas Keenan, ‘Documents: public criticisms’, in Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (eds.) Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 469–72). ‘A propos de la revue Messages’, Le Soir, 14 July 1942. For discussion of de Man’s review see C.Chase, Trappings of an education’, in Responses, pp. 68–70. 33 Wartime Journalism, 1939–1943, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 253. 34 Neil Hertz has interpreted the combination of analysis and emotively charged figures in de Man’s writing in ‘Lurid figures’ (see note 25 above). In a second essay (forthcoming in a volume of the 1989 colloquium on Paul de Man of the Swiss Comparative Literature Association) Hertz examines the thematics of sacrifice evoked and analysed in de Man and in Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. On the complex relation to the idea of sacrifice in de Man’s later work, see Hertz, ‘More lurid figures’, Diacritics 2, 20 (Summer 1990).

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35 See especially ‘Process and poetry’ and ‘The temptation of permanence’, in Critical Writings 1953–1983, as well as the essay on Jauss, ‘Reading and history’, in The Resistance to Theory. 36 Cf. Phenomenology of Spirit, sect. 109, pp. 64–5. 37 Barbara Johnson explains and demonstrates the displacement to ‘difference between’ of ‘difference within’. See The Critical Difference. Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. x–xi and passim. 38 Cathy Caruth, letter of 31 January 1986. 39 Neil Hertz, The End of the Line. Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 217– 39. On Hertz, de Man, and this notation of prosopopoeia, see also Cynthia Chase, ‘Primary narcissism and the giving of figure’, in John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin (eds), Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature (London: Routledge, 1990).

The question of literary value ANTONY EASTHOPE

Millions of artists create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator, and many less again are consecrated by posterity. Marcel Duchamp Theories of literary value fall into three categories: mimetic, expressive, and formalist. Aristotle founded the western tradition in aesthetics when he argued that poetry was ‘more philosophical’ than the writing of history because it showed not what had happened but typically the kinds of thing that do happen. Shakespeare’s Hamlet follows in that mimetic tradition, asserting that the purpose of theatre is to hold ‘the mirror up to nature’, as does Samuel Johnson in his ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ (1765), ‘Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.’1 Coleridge announces an expressive theory of value when he claims that descriptions of the natural world ‘become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion’.2 In the twentieth century this Romantic tradition that the literary text is to be assessed as a significant expression of the ‘imagination’ of its author becomes dominant in mainstream literary criticism. At the same time and in contrast, Russian Formalism has defined literary value in terms of the formal linguistic properties of the text. The question of literary value simply will not go away, despite recent arguments by a number of Marxist and poststructuralist critics. With different inflections these have put forward a common view: that literature is not an essence contained in the canonical text and independent of the way the text is read—value is a matter of construction in the present, a construction at once institutional and ideological. As institutions within capitalist society, universities and colleges have a vested interest in maintaining existing relations of power; as part of this interest, Englit. has promoted a mystified notion of literature as a high cultural form in comparison with which popular culture can be dismissed as of no value. Far from being neutral, the claim that literature expresses ‘imaginative power’ lends almost supernatural justification to specialized and controlling definitions of class, gender, nation, empire.3 I subscribe to this account of the hegemonic function of traditional literary teaching and have been one of those who have advanced it along with the others in Peter Widdowson’s collection, Re-Reading English.4 However, as it is usually put forward, the account of literature-as-construction is incomplete and inadequate. One way the radical critique of literature has succeeded is by deploying the trope of rationalist demystification. It has taken claims that literary value is a kind of essence inhering in the great texts and been able to expose that essence as a consequence derived from the mode of construction of the text; it has got away without having to discuss at all how texts might lend themselves to that construction, and has dismissed any attempt to talk about texts and literary value as mere reaction and nostalgic attachment to the values of God, England, Shakespeare, and St George. I mean to turn this procedure back on literature-as-construction theorists, start from the view that literary value is merely constructed, and only thereafter move to a discussion of literary value and literary texts. I shall do so because I find the literature-as-construction analysis one-sided. It relies on a covert and erroneous either/or: either literary value is a textual essence independent of the reader; or there is no literary value at all. In English ‘or’ is ambiguous between what logicians distinguish as the Latin aut (either/or) and vel (this or that or something else together). To be told ‘Either you believe in God or (vel) you do not’ makes assumptions about belief in God. Negation of this form then always reaffirms what it denies, and most literature-as-construction theory takes this form. It reproduces essentialism by assuming with it that value could only be an unchanging identity fixed for ever in the text; therefore it can only deny value by denying the text any identity and value at all. In concluding I’ll return to the problem of essentialism while defending the political implications of my qualified reinstatement of literary value. SOME LITERATURE-AS-CONSTRUCTION THEORISTS Raymond Williams in his 1973 essay ‘Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory’ was probably the first to denounce literary value as an institutional construction. He does so on the basis of an either/or. While sculptures, he accepts, have a ‘specific material existence’, literary texts do not; they are ‘not objects but notations’; therefore literary study should ‘break

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from the notion of isolating an object’ and, ‘on the contrary’ move to ‘discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions’.5 Two things are crucial here. The first is that the argument takes the form of an either/or, either object or practice. Second, by ‘notations’ Williams means something like transcription for he distinguishes elsewhere between ‘spoken words and written notations’.6 He thus steps aside from the linguistic distinction between signifier and signified, on the one hand the materially shaped sounds from which, on the other, meanings are produced within the system of a given language. Williams’s polemic has been expanded by Tony Bennett, who in Marxism and Formalism (1979) asserts that ‘in history, nothing is intrinsically “literary”, intrinsically “progressive”, or, indeed intrinsically anything’.7 I’m doubtful that this is a materialist position but it does underwrite his claim that the literary text is somehow non-existent or at least a vacuum, as when he claims that ‘the text is not the issuing source of meaning’ but ‘a site on which the production of meaning—of variable meanings—takes place’8 (in Bennett the same either/or has become a not/but). A similar assertion is made in American deconstruction when Harold Bloom writes that ‘there are no texts, but only interpretations’.9 Also across the Atlantic in an exciting and original book Jane Tompkins has analysed the American literary tradition and its construction by what she refers to as ‘the male-dominated scholarly tradition that controls both the canon of American literature…and the critical perspective within which it is interpreted’.10 According to this, literature is by definition a form of discourse that has no designs on the world. It does not attempt to change things, but merely to represent them, and it does so in a specifically literary language whose claim to value lies in its uniqueness.11 She names this critical perspective ‘modernist thinking’. In a dazzling concluding chapter entitled ‘“But is it any good?”’ Tompkins reviews the whole corpus of anthologies of American literature and especially three.12 She demonstrates first that each canonical anthology is selected according to the protocols of the modernist reading and second that the selection and construction constantly changes according to developing social and political concerns. It is a persuasive argument, and one whose literary-political effect is definitely progressive. The only defect is that Tompkins’s demystification of the canon accounts convincingly for the canon as construction but not for the canon as text. Acknowledging the counter-argument that though on the evidence of the anthologies ‘the perimeters of the canon may vary, its core remains unchanged’ she replies that the ‘very essence’ of the works of art is always changing because it is always interpreted differently, so that ‘Even when the “same” text keeps turning up in collection after collection, it is not really the same text at all.’13 What is the force of this ‘really’? On this showing a text could only ‘really’ stay the same text if two conditions were met: that the text as a text retained its identity (Moby Dick was always Moby Dick and did not, suddenly, turn out to be Hamlet); that the same text always produced the same reading. A reality in which the same text was thus really the same never existed and never will except in the transcendental domain supposed by the very literary criticism her argument seeks to oppose. Her denial—and the rhetoric of demystification—blocks any attempt to consider the identity of a text and how it might become available for the construction so well exemplified. EAGLETON AND FISH Two of the most powerful proponents of literature-as-construction are Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish. Eagleton’s hugely influential Literary Theory (the book has sold over 100,000 copies) opens with a witty and discursive argument to the effect that ‘anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature— Shakespeare for example—can cease to be literature’.14 Pointing to the variety of texts which have been classified as literature—from the sermons of John Donne to Gibbon’s historical work on the fall of Rome— Eagleton has little difficulty in showing that a series of features often taken to define literature do not in fact define it: the view that literature is fiction, not fact; that it defamiliarizes ordinary language; that it is nonpragmatic language; that it consists of texts which somehow refer to themselves. But this lively polemic exhibits a certain slide between acceptance that some texts are more literary than others and an outright claim that literature is anything we think it is. When chapter 1 says ‘“literature” may be at least as much a question of what people do to writing as of what writing does to them’15 some effectivity is attributed to the text, as it is in the qualification that one can think of ‘literature less as some inherent quality…than as a number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing’.16 An intervening formulation seems to make the text disappear altogether by imposing the familiar either/or: to define literature as non-pragmatic ‘leaves the definition up to how somebody decides to read, not to the nature of what is written’.17 A small print reading indeed, and maybe the brio of this opening statement leaves my reservations sounding casuistical. Later, there is a more formal announcement which affirms explicitly that literature does not exist, on two grounds: there is no ‘distinctive method’ for literary study and no stable object for such study—literature, says Eagleton (citing Barthes), is ‘what gets taught’.18 ‘Just think’, writes Eagleton, ‘how many methods are involved in literary criticism’ and continues:

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You can discuss the poet’s asthmatic childhood, or examine her peculiar use of syntax; you can detect the rustling of silk in the hissing of the s’s, explore the phenomenology of reading, relate the literary work to the state of class-struggle or find out how many copies it sold. These methods have nothing whatsoever of significance in common.19 But what common significance is demanded here? A natural science, such as chemistry, has both an object and a method; knowledge of the properties of substances is constructed through a method, a practice of proof and demonstration appropriate to that knowledge. But despite popular misconceptions, the object of chemistry does not consist of an essence such that we could always find all its essential features manifest in any one entity and common to all of them. What counts as the object and method of chemical knowledge today is vastly different from what it was a century ago and no doubt what it may be in a hundred years’ time. For an object of knowledge to be real it does not have to have an essence. Eagleton does not directly confront this philosophic issue—the ontological problem of universals—but displaces it on to the question of method and the claim that ‘literary theory’ does not have a ‘distinctive method’ implicitly because it does not have a ‘distinctive’ object. But what would count as ‘distinctive’ in either method or object? It’s being assumed that only if literature had a ‘distinctive’ essence could it have a distinctive method, and clearly this assumption with its attendant either/or (either literature as essence or no literature at all) has been surreptitiously imported from traditional literary criticism. The range of methods felt appropriate for the study of literature may demonstrate that it is a very slippery object but not that it is not real. The verdict must be ‘not proven’ —Eagleton has not shown that literature does not exist. Is There a Text in This Class (1980) by Stanley Fish proposes the most thorough-going and radical version of literature-asconstruction and, far from this leading inexorably towards a progressive politics, its conclusion is resoundingly conservative. As the papers collected in this book narrate, between 1970 and 1980 Fish began believing in literature as text and progressed to seeing it as only what the reader saw. Some of the essays were given in a week-long seminar at Kenyon College, after which the college newspaper praised Fish for his ‘intellectual skill’ but added that ‘it was not always the skill of a gentleman’, as Fish himself is gentleman enough to record.20 Is There a Text? poses the question of literary value across the usual either/or: ‘it is not that literature exhibits certain formal properties that compel a certain kind of attention; rather, paying a certain kind of attention (as defined by what literature is understood to be) results in the emergence into noticeability of the properties we know in advance to be literary’21 (that ‘rather’ is just a polite ‘but’). Move one asserts that all textual properties are humanly perceived. In his widely anthologized essay on the Milton Variorum Fish shows how the meaning of Milton’s sonnet on his blindness (crucially the last line) is undecidably ambiguous in a way that can only be resolved by the reader—the text thus becomes ‘an event in his experience’22 (in Fish only men can read). Move two draws the consequence from move one, that it leads to a radical subjectivism and relativism. In 1975 Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics appeared with the argument that all local interpretations of literary texts took place according to much more deeply imbedded protocols for reading which Culler described as ‘literary competence’ (briefly, that the text was thematically significant, metaphorically coherent, and unified, both thematically and linguistically). Subsequently, Fish undertakes move three. To elude the charge of subjectivism he proposes that texts are constituted by ‘interpretive communities’, shared intersubjective protocols whose authority arbitrates local differences about textual reading, and it is this which finally maintains responsibility ‘for writing texts, for constituting their properties’.23 Texts are stable because, though constantly subject to change explained only by the process of time, interpretive communities are stable. It is no good replying to Fish with the claim that these interpretive communities exist only in states of conflict and contradiction; by calling on the argument I’ve used myself earlier that a negation can only succeed by relying on criteria for judgement shared by the assertion it would countermand, Fish will always be able to show that disagreement is only possible within some wider circle of consensus (and he can always move the goalposts by widening the circle). Nor would it work to suggest that there were divisions in the interpretive community arising from different levels of textual reading corresponding to signified and signifier so that local disputes over interpretation of meaning took place in different terms from agreement about the fixed formal properties of the text and the materiality of its signifiers. As for ‘verbs, nouns, cleft sentences’ together with metre, rhyme and alliteration, etc., he says, ‘now you see them, now you don’t’24—there are no facts to which we have ‘unmediated access’, no textual feature at all that exists ‘independently of any interpretive “use” one might make of it’.25 Still less would it be any use pointing out that texts exist in physical form, get lost, forgotten, are rediscovered. There are no texts in this class, only readers, as an example might show. Fish recounts how a list of names was on the blackboard after one class when students came for another: Jacobs-Rosenbaum Levin Thorne Hayes Ohman (?)26

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so he told the second group this was a religious poem and asked them to interpret it. Which they did, pretty well in his account, by exercising their literary competence within the interpretive community. He even says the reading would have been performed just as well ‘if there were no names on the list, if the paper or blackboard were blank’.27 The rhetoric here is disarming, compelling us to swallow our cry, ‘You cannot be serious.’ But Fish is serious and his conclusion follows ineluctably from the logic of his argument. We have reached degree zero of literature-as-construction. Fish is riding a winner and knows it. You can’t complain about that but you can ask exactly what colour his horse is. In claiming there are no texts, only interpretations, Fish denies that a reading is a reading of a text so that in this sense the reading refers to a text. Whatever textual fact you bring up, Fish can always argue that there is no ‘unmediated access’ to facts and that the fact in so far as it is perceived by a human being (and facts always are) is not a fact but a human construction. To deny reference is to take a position of radical scepticism, and there’s no answer to that. You cannot refute scepticism and demonstrate reference without at some point deploying referential statements that assume just what you’re trying to prove. As Richard Rorty explains in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980), the epistemological quest for a way of refuting the sceptic is hopeless because their demand ‘is for some transcendental standpoint outside our present set of representations from which we can inspect the relations between those representations and their object’.28 This being the case we shall just have to wait and see whether the future will disclose an interpretive community able to manage without acts of reference. At present it does not and so I can cheerfully pose the question, can we refer to the text, Is There a Text in This Class? I think we can, and have spent the past couple of pages trying to do so accurately. If I have succeeded we may be sure texts are real, we can refer to them, and the assertion that there is no literature and no literary value once again remains unproven. THE GHOST OF GREAT LITERATURE To show that the arguments advanced by literature-as-construction theorists are unsatisfactory may seem a somewhat minimalist intervention. Yet Derrida has warned against the dangers attendant on the method of critique rather than deconstruction. For a critique, in thinking it can stand outside the argument it rejects, especially risks reproducing unwittingly the most insidious attributes of what it would exclude, whether this is literature or what Derrida means by metaphysics. In different ways each of the critics I’ve been discussing is haunted by the ghost of the canon and Great Literature as we were taught it twenty years ago. There is then a kind of negative theology insisting in the assumption that the absence of literary value is necessarily of the same nature as its former presence (Fish in an interesting aside says that the practice of literary criticism is assured through ‘the absence of a text that is independent of interpretation’).29 On my showing, each critic denies literary value only by presuming that it can only be an essence carried by certain texts as they march confidently across history always demanding the same readings from different readers (this masculinist metaphor is not accidental—essence is always phallocratic). If this instituted idea is the one we want to get rid of —and I’m sure we have to—a better strategy would be to deconstruct it rather than perpetuate it through critique and denial. Yet my objection is not only strategic—it is also that the now conventional literature-as-construction argument is theoretically inadequate because it fails to acknowledge that every textual reading is a reading of a text. This is the theme of William Ray’s book on Literary Meaning (1984), which argues the case with great cogency and is referred to here because its argument is surely correct. Ray states that there can be no firm or final dichotomy between literary meaning as objective structure and meaning as subjective act. Rather, there is always a tension between our two common-sense intuitions of meaning, as both historically bound act, governed by a particular intention at a particular moment, and permanent textual fact, embodied in a word or series of words whose meaning transcends particular volition and can be apprehended in its structure by any individual possessed of the language.30 This tension manifests itself in such binary opposition as subject versus object, instance versus system, performance versus competence, event versus structure. Refusing to attribute priority to meaning as either act or text, recognizing that they’re ‘reciprocally constitutive notions’,31 Literary Meaning develops an account of this tension between text and reading as dialectical. Texts (not just literary ones) are real. They consist of signifiers which are material effects of a given language, signifiers organized, as Saussure says, in a linear dimension so that in a particular text they occur in a single order. Texts then are not just material but also necessarily physical, retaining their identity whether they are physically transmitted as writing, speech, on a tape recording, video or whatever. As such, they are subject to mutability. Somewhere between now and its composition line 602 of Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid went missing, and has stayed missing; some time around the twelfth century a Byzantine scribe dropped a leaf of the manuscript of Euripides’ Bacchae and 50 verses went for ever after line 1329, now known only through allusions to the passage in other writers. In this sense, texts do exist independent of interpretation (the Byzantine scribe probably couldn’t even understand the Attic Greek he was set to transcribe, no doubt one reason why it got lost).

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But as signifiers on the page (let’s be careful: not words on the page) the identity of the text is silent. It has to be reproduced in a present reading determined by (1) the rules of its given language (2) ideological contexts within which it is read (3) protocols for reading aesthetic texts which Culler describes as ‘literary competence’. Its identity, then, is not an essence, fixed once and for all, but a relative identity, a repetition in and for the reader with all that the idea of repetition implies (or should imply) by way of difference. I shall turn now to four theorists of the text. None has subscribed to an either/ or (either the text or its reading), each has affirmed literary value but defined it as the function of a dialectic between object and subject, in this instance, between the text and its construction in a present reading. LITERARY VALUE AS RELATION Responding equally to the linguistics of Saussure, the Modernist movement then emerging and the revolutionary climate of their times, the Russian Formalists between 1915 and 1930 made a collective effort to theorize literary value as literariness (literaturnost). This, they argued, could not be analysed through mimetic theories in terms of what literature represented; nor was it a psychological effect; rather it ensued from a specifically linguistic feature which they defined as priem or device, occurring at the level of the signifier in all the formal properties of literature. ‘Art’, wrote Victor Shklovsky in his 1917 essay ‘Art as technique’, ‘is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.’32 It therefore works by a process of ‘defamiliarization’ (ostranenie) (Shklovsky instances defamiliarization as an effect to be found in riddles with their play on words, or in euphemistic references to erotic subjects). However, as Tony Bennett shows clearly in Marxism and Formalism,33 the trajectory of Formalism led from an attempt to define literariness as a fixed feature in the text towards recognition, first, that the effect of defamiliarization arose intertextually, from the juxtaposition of two discourses (poetic or formed speech in contrast to ordinary speech, for example); and second, that the effect was historically determined. The essay of 1928 by Roman Jakobson and Juri Tynanov (‘Problems in the study of language and literature’) signals acknowledgment that literariness cannot be defined only in terms of the autonomy of the literary tradition because, like everything else, that ‘system necessarily exists as an evolution’.34 Put simply, what might have defamiliarized in 1917 no longer had that effect in 1928. Literariness is an effect produced in the relation between text and reader. Similarly, in the steps of the Formalists, the Prague School tried to define literariness as ‘foregrounding’ (aktualisace). In an essay on ‘Standard language and poetic language’ of 1932 Jan Mukařovský writes that: The function of poetic language consists in the maximum foregrounding of the utterance…in poetic language foregrounding…is not used in the service of communication, but in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself.35 The concept of foregrounding is liable to the same criticism as defamiliarization. What may be meant as the quality of an essence and an unchanging feature turns out on inspection to be firmly relational. For every foreground there must be a background; foregrounding, as Mukařovský says, ‘occupies this position by comparison’.36 Literariness is again revealed as a relational effect. Psychoanalysis has its own distinctive account of the text/reader dialectic in art. It has indeed a number of conceptualizations of aesthetic value but that in chapter 23 of Freud’s Introductory Lectures comes closest to orthodoxy. For Freud, art is primarily a mode of pleasure because it is a vehicle for wish-fulfilment and fantasy. Creative artists shape the ‘particular material’ of the text according to their own fantasy; but if they succeed, this ‘makes it possible for other people once more to derive consolation and alleviation from their own sources of pleasure in their unconscious which have become inaccessible to them.’37 Through both its means of representation and what it represents, the aesthetic text offers itself as an occasion for fantasies excited in its readers. Art works through the reader/text dialectic. My final example comes from the passage at the end of the ‘Introduction’ to Marx’s manuscript for Capital, the ‘Grundrisse’. Somewhat in note form, Marx begins by pointing out that while other forms of social development are progressive, one superseding another, art is not like this. Whereas the introduction of a new mode of production renders the technology and social relations of a previous mode redundant, aesthetic texts continue to be reproduced beyond the epoch and conjuncture of their formation—he instances Greek tragedy and the plays of Shakespeare. Read in the present (Marx is writing in London in the middle of the nineteenth century) they take on a different meaning. ‘What chance’, he asks, ‘has Vulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against Credit Mobilier?’38 (Roberts & Co. being engineers and Credit Mobilier a banking house). Though, as Marx shows, these Greek texts were first produced and could only be produced within the ideological superstructure of the ancient mode of production, nevertheless it is the case that they can continue to produce meaning today, that they ‘still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model’.39 If ancient texts are to be reproduced transhistorically, they must take on meaning in relation to the very different ideological conditions of contemporary life.

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TOWARDS SOME CONCLUSIONS In drawing together these reflections on literary value I’ll begin by recalling that all texts are subject to transhistorical reproduction. The Rosetta Stone, for example, was discovered in Egypt in 1799 but not finally deciphered until 1822 by the French archaeologist, Champollion. The operation of language ensures this continuing reproduction and reiteration. Literary value occurs as a function of the relation between itself and its contemporary reading, a function however which is different in degree from that of the non-literary or strictly less literary text. A text is less literary if it can only be reproduced now with a mainly historical meaning, as document or index of its own time of writing; it produces the effect of literary value to the extent that in a present reading it can give an effect of presence. That is what all the traditional anthropomorphic metaphors attest to when they speak of great works of literature being still alive for us (and of course they may not be—like Eliot’s women talking of Michelangelo, they come and go). It is what Marx refers to when he says that ‘they count as a norm and as an unattainable model’ (but Marx is writing as a trained Classicist in the middle of the nineteenth century so he would, wouldn’t he?). The idea of significant contemporary meaning as an effect of presence sounds disappointingly vacuous. If it does, we should recognize why, what plenitude we’re looking for. A whole ideology of the aesthetic is active in making us feel that we should be able to say much more than that. Once again the ghost of literature shakes its hoary locks at us, exactly at the moment we thought we were performing a final exorcism. Literary value cannot be defined more precisely because good texts are not always the same but always significantly different. To be able to demonstrate literary value as a given feature or quality of the text would only be possible if it were that eternal essence frequently supposed. The multiplicity of ways in which literary value has entered discourse, both in our own century and across history, far from showing that there is no such thing as literature, proves the opposite. Literary value is not presence but an effect of presence. In A Theory of Semiotics (1977) Umberto Eco says that the work of art ‘cannot be a mere “presence”’ since if it’s an effect of language ‘there must be an underlying system’.40 He suggests that ‘in the aesthetic text the matter of the sign-vehicle becomes an aspect of the expression form’.41 This is the terminology of Hjelmslev but in Saussure’s vocabulary it would mean that the levels of the signifier and signified intersected so that reading the signified enforced a reading of the signifier giving rise to meanings in excess of those of the original context. A text of literary value can be distinguished from one with merely historical interest by the degree to which its signifiers actively engage with new contexts, contexts different ideologically but also different in the protocols of literary reading in which the text is construed. This is a description of how literary value works, not a definition of what it is. The Italian semiotician, Maria Corti, drawing on Eco’s description, summarizes literary value as follows: the more artistically complex and original a work of art, the higher it rises over the works that surround it, the greater is its availability to different readings on both the synchronic and diachronic levels. Or rather, that quality of presence, that sense of perennial contemporaneity and universality produced by a masterpiece, results from the fact that the polysemic weight of the text allows it to be ‘used’ in functions of the literary—and, above all, the socio-ideological— models of various eras. Every era applies its own reading codes, its changed vantage points; the text continues to accumulate sign possibilities which are communicative precisely because the text is inside a system in movement.42 For equal and opposite reasons, Corti adds, ‘the texts of minor writers’ become ‘less decodable as they move away from the system that first produced them’. ‘Inside a system in movement’, inside history therefore: literary value is a matter of functional polysemy, a function of the reader/text relation, and cannot be defined outside the known ways in which texts—some more than others—demonstrably have worked transhistorically and polysemically. Although most of the terms of analysis used to define literary value in greater detail make some sense in relation to the period in which they were variously deployed—typicality, representing general nature, organic unity, imaginative vision, defamiliarization, foregrounding, capacity to excite pleasurable fantasy, and so on—not much more can be said about it unless it is assumed as an essence. And not much more needs to be said for I think we can live with this. I shall report rather than give a full example. Homer’s Iliad has been continuously translated in the past 2,000 years—into Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, and into English by (among others) George Chapman (1616), Alexander Pope (1720) and Richmond Lattimore (1951). Each translation reproduces the text within the ideological matrix and protocols of reading of their own conjuncture, evidence therefore that the poetry of Homer is functionally polysemous and of literary value, able to signify in a present reading. In conclusion, as far as the politics of literature is concerned, there are two benefits if this present argument becomes accepted. Quite apart from any general benefits of moving from error to truth, from an erroneous view to one less erroneous, I have shown that the literature-as-construction argument is not merely inadequate as it’s usually proposed (literature only as construction) but dangerous because it continues to reaffirm and reinstate the possibility of literature as essence through the

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very promise of denying it. Second, the aura of literature has been dispelled, or at least that was the intention. Since the magic of essence was the main reason why literature was preferred as the high cultural form, and the texts of popular culture correspondingly denigrated, literary value in my account loses its value. If literature consists merely of texts that are more functionally polysemous than some others, I can foresee no good reason why they should not be studied together as examples of signifying practice. This argument can come to an end by being more explicit about the question of essence. Poststructuralism may be an intellectual fashion or it may be a comprehensive change of paradigm whose implications continue to be explored. If the latter, then we might distinguish a first from a second wave. In an earlier phase of poststructuralism it was strategically necessary to dismiss Nature and Truth through an obligatory gesture of anti-essentialism. An example here would be Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics (1985) in which a belief in Nature and Truth was identified as phallocentric so that the possibility of feminine identity could be located everywhere else. I believe this preliminary moment has passed and that the binary opposition of essentialism/anti-essentialism should now itself be breached. Returning to some of the territory left scorched earth by the first wave, a second wave of poststructuralism criticism, justifiably less fearful of contamination by essentialism, should now be able to recapture and rework issues and themes previously surrendered. Literary value may be one of these. Manchester Polytechnic NOTES 1 S.Johnson, ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ in Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ed. B.H.Bronson (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1958), p. 241. 2 S.T.Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J.Shawcross, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), vol. 2, p. 16. 3 See R.Williams, Marxism and Literature (London: Macmillan, 1977), esp. pp. 45–54; and T.Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), esp. pp. 14–16. 4 P.Widdowson, Re-Reading English (London: Methuen, 1982). 5 R.Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), p.47. 6 Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 169. 7 T.Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979), p. 136. 8 ibid., p. 174. 9 H.Bloom, ‘The breaking of form’, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. H. Bloom, P.de Man, J.Derrida, G.Hartman, and J.Hillis Miller (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 7. 10 J.Tompkins, Sensational Designs, The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 123. 11 ibid., p. 125. 12 See Century Readings for a Course in American Literature ed. F.L.Pattee (New York: The Century Co., 1919); Major American Writers, ed. H.M. Jones and E.Leisy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935); and Major Writers of America, ed. P.Miller et al. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962). 13 Tompkins, Sensational Designs, p. 196. 14 Eagleton, Literary Theory, p. 10. 15 ibid., p. 7. 16 ibid., p. 9. 17 ibid., p. 8. 18 ibid., p. 97. 19 ibid., p. 197. 20 S.Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 304. 21 ibid., pp. 10–11. 22 ibid., p. 159. 23 ibid., p. 15. 24 ibid., p. 167. 25 ibid., p. 166. 26 ibid., p. 323. 27 ibid., 328. 28 R.Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 293. 29 Fish, Is There a Text, p. 358. 30 W.Ray, Literary Meaning (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 2. 31 ibid., p. 144. 32 V.Shklovsky, ‘Art as technique’, in L.T.Lemon and M.J.Reis (eds), Russian Formalist Criticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 12.

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33 T.Bennett, Marxism and Formalism (London: Methuen, 1979). 34 R.Jakobson and J.Tynanov, ‘Problems in the study of literature and language’, in L.Matejka and K.Pomorska (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), p. 80. 35 J.Mukařovský, ‘Standard language and poetic language’, in P.L.Garvin (ed.), A Prague School Reader (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1964), p. 19. 36 ibid., p. 20. 37 S.Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 16, p. 376. 38 K.Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 110. 39 ibid., p. 111. 40 U.Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 217. 41 ibid., p. 266. 42 M.Corti, An Introduction to Literary Semiotics (London: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 5–6.

The real plot line of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: an essay in applied deconstruction ROGER POOLE

In the general scepticism about meaning and truth which has been the major bequest of deconstructive theory, the suggestion that there might occasionally, even so, be a ‘right’ reading of a text as opposed to a variety of misled ones, has a touch of heresy about it. Such a suggestion would imply that, somewhere, there is still an absolute in place. It would imply that it is possible to avoid the multiple traps of the ironic, self-referential and deceptive text, and take us back to those naïve efforts of I.A.Richards to force his students to recognize the one, right, true meaning of the poem in front of them. Yet for every insight that literary theory achieves, it incurs a blindness, and the very act of insight is itself the act of shutting off a corresponding vision. Or, as Marshall McLuhan has recently argued,1 every discovery, as it retrieves, also obsolesces. It is what literary theory has obsolesced that interests me in what follows. For the relentless argumentation against logocentricism and origin and presence has now made quite impossible for us the concept of authorial intention. Indeed, even to put it like that seems to beg two sets of questions, one for each term. There has been no ‘author’ since Barthes told us so, and as for ‘intention’, critics from Wimsatt and Beardsley to Derrida, de Man and Stanley Fish have inveighed against it with varying degrees of sophistication. Yet what kind of literary freedom is it that we have won, if as a result some questions have become unaskable? One can admit the major truth of what Barthes was arguing about the death of the author; one can admit that, after the analyses of Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss by Derrida, the whole concept of authorial intention is dubious, tricky, unreliable; but it does not follow from either of these admissions that the concept of authorial intention has become either invalid or meaningless. That it is not meaningless is sometimes forced upon the reader by the text itself, as in the case I wish to present in some detail, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. There are moments in the experience of reading, when some pattern that is obviously ‘there’, but has been occluded by time or a corrupt tradition of reading, suddenly insists upon getting itself recognized as being ‘there’. The received tradition of reading a text is suddenly perceived as militating against observable features of the work. A ‘better’ reading suddenly suggests itself. So far, this is itself a textual effect, but raises almost at once the perilous question of authorial intention. If this were not so, all acts of genuine literary discovery would be impossible. It may be claimed that literary ‘discoveries’ in that sense do not occur. Yet any candid reader can remember coming across them. One example of such a discovery would be that made by R.S.Crane, when, reading through the logic textbook that Swift would have used at university, he clearly saw the origin of the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms in the chiasmic inversion of animal rational and animal hinniendi.2 Indeed, Stanley Fish himself is tempted to claim having made a discovery at the end of his book on George Herbert when he entitles his fourth chapter ‘The mystery of The Temple explained’.3 It is of course part of Stanley Fish’s general position that such a discovery as the one he has just announced cannot be made, and that is no doubt why he immediately retracts his suggestion in a ‘Conclusion in which it may appear that everything is taken back’.4 It would doubtless be by some similar ironic withdrawal that Fish would deny that R.S.Crane had in fact ‘discovered’ anything in Swift’s text that was objectively ‘there’ to be found. At best, Fish would argue, Crane had found a more convincing way to explicate patterns inherent in Gulliver’s Travels, and his reading (based upon ancillary materials) therefore would amount to no more than one further reading in a chain of readings. But this act of sceptical hesitation may well in fact have hardened into a dogma. There may be a weak and a strong form of the Fishean embargo. In the weak form, a new reading would be accepted as just that, more convincing than its predecessors and hence privileged (the kind of privilege he would accord no doubt to his own readings of Milton and Browne). Nevertheless, however privileged, this will still not be the ‘right’ reading. The strong form of the embargo might then run: there never could be a new reading which is the one ‘right’ reading, in the sense that it is ontologically superior to previous readings, and replaces them. But then, what are we to make of a situation in which the text itself forces the reader to stop ‘misreading’ it? (Immediately there is trouble with the concept of ‘misreading’—has not Harold Bloom assured us that this is all there is? And yet, might this be one of those very points where one might choose a blindness and refuse an insight? Ought one not, in fact, to proceed regardless?)

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An example. I instance Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, published in 1915. If a text has been ‘misread’ for seventyfive years, and finally, in exasperation, it signals its plight to some casual reader, reading the novel on a train, what is that reader to do? Should he refuse the imperative of the text’s own remonstrance on the grounds that a ‘right’ reading is anyway impossible? That strange object, which Wolfgang Iser calls ‘the work itself, which is not identical either with ‘the author’s text’ on the one hand, nor with the concretization which a given reader may accord to it on the other hand—what is it? It is ‘virtual in character’, says Iser. It cannot be reduced either to ‘the reality of the text’ nor to ‘the subjectivity of the reader’.5 So what does one do with the metaphorical statement There is no text’? Is this to assert of it that it has no intrinsic properties? In that case, why does one reader, after three-quarters of a century, get a sharp message from the text that it is being ‘misread’? What laws of reading is the text invoking in its own defence? Some comfort may be drawn (in this suite of heretical suggestions) from the idea that the ‘intrinsic’ properties of the text are in fact formal ones, having to do with genre, vraisemblance and literary convention in the widest sense. Without such conventions, we could not recognize that we are reading a literary work in the first place. But with such conventions, could we sometimes perhaps become aware that we have misunderstood those conventions, are carrying out a consistent misuse of them, and arriving all the time at conclusions which those conventions do not endorse? It is in this sense we could say that the text is not inert, a mere ‘virtual something’ between two intentional acts, as in Iser, nor a mere provocation to the act of reading, as in Fish. Whatever it is, it has a certain autonomy. It is a potential for reading which signals when that potentiality is being mistreated. To say (as has been said since Derrida) ‘There is no text’ is itself to push metaphor to the limit. The text insists upon encounter and re-encounter. It has the power of passively signalling (at the very least) the way it does not want to be read. When it makes that signal, the reader recuperates the text as something which insists upon a reading which is itself a discovery. If then a text can signal its inherence in literary convention, its vraisemblance, it can also ‘lie against time’ and signal its dissatisfaction with the continual misreadings to which it is subject. It only needs one reader to assert ‘But that’s not really the plot at all’, and the concept of authorial intention insists on being reinstated. There is, I suggest, a ‘real’ plot line to Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier. Originally introduced in Blast I in 1914, under the title ‘The Saddest Story’, the novel appeared in 1915. Other events being what they were in 1915, the novel did not get an attentive reading. Though ‘well known’, the novel is still to all intents and purposes unknown. In particular, there is a strong contradiction between the ‘received’ plot line, (false, inaccurate and superficial), and the intended plot line, the one that was planned by the originating authorial intention. Does not talk of ‘authorial intention’ take us back into the heads and hearts of the ‘characters’, rather than inside the ‘text’, in which, after all, the characters have whatever being they may? It is surely what the text says, what the text ‘thinks’, what the text is deceitful about that matters? Surely, the deconstructive argument would run, it is no longer possible to suggest that Ford finally intends the reading which I advance in the following pages? What would become of the deconstructive principle that the text will always exceed, and even pervert, its author’s intentions? But must every text always exceed, and even pervert, its author’s intentions? Is all good structure in a winding stair? It is possible to conceive of a work where the structure exactly coincides with its own planned subversion. It is also possible to conceive that an author’s intention should be that a text should ‘exceed’ and ‘pervert’ itself. To insist otherwise would be to advance a theology of the text. The deconstructive opposition to a ‘real’ plot line might well assert that the fundamental mistake in asserting that The Good Soldier has a real plot line is that it naïvely ignores the fact that ‘il n’y a pas de hors texte’. But to assert that there is a ‘real’ plot line of The Good Soldier is not to invoke any extratextual reality. Nothing which is outside the text is asserted to be in play. Given that ‘il n’y a pas de hors texte’, given that the novel does not present nor mirror reality, must it not be the fact that the novel does have a ‘real’ plot line (as opposed to a false one) in terms of its own vraisemblance? I have reference to the structuralist concept of vraisemblance at this point because it seems that it is only in terms of some ‘situating’ device of an intertextual kind that the complex problems of Ford’s novel can be brought into literary focus. Jonathan Culler, in his exposition of vraisemblance in Structuralist Poetics, distinguishes ‘five levels of vraisemblance, five ways in which a text may be brought into contact with and defined in relation to another text which helps to make it intelligible’.6 It is only by placing Ford’s novel in relations of intertextuality as such, that the claim to have found the ‘real’ plot line of The Good Soldier can be freed from the suspicion that extra-literary criteria of ‘reality’ are being invoked. The Good Soldier, then, enters into complex relations with all five ‘levels’ of vraisemblance. It presents the world it describes as undoubtedly the ordinary ‘real’ world of everyday, a world in which a man’s wife can carry on an affair with his own best friend, a world in which lust, deception, and self-interest are the obvious motives which control human activity. Second, the novel presents a series of cultural stereotypes— American heiresses, retired British Army officers—living at a fashionable German spa and making all the assumptions typical of their wealth and station. Third, the plausibility of all the details and assumptions in the novel is faultlessly established. The conventions according to which Dowell’s friends act and think are entirely ‘typical’ of the kind of novel in which they are set. Fourth, the narrator adopts a tone of easy familiarity with

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the devices for establishing verisimilitude which he knows the reader will expect of him, and expertly manipulates the powers invested in him as narrator to emphasize his good will, his naïveté, his unsuspicious nature, his total absence of malice. Fifth, the novel enters into relations of parody of, and irony at the expense of, the novels of his great contemporaries, though without announcing in any obvious way that the assumptions painstakingly built up in levels one to four are being methodically subverted to create a parody and an irony of a quite unsuspected kind. Indeed, so expert and deft is the misuse of the conventionalizations of parody and irony that there is a case for suggesting that Ford is not so much parodying or ironizing the narrative techniques of James and Conrad as putting a completely mendacious simulacrum in their place, a copy so good that no one ever suspected that it was not genuine, a latter-day Golden Bowl. Not gold at all as it appears, but gilded crystal, and cracked into the bargain, it is a powerful symbol of the self-interest that flaws human relationships. The structural relations between the characters, motives and events of The Good Soldier and The Wings of the Dove are so close that there is a case for suspecting that the one is a metastatement about the other. In The Golden Bowl Henry James deploys the first four kinds of vraisemblance, and especially the fourth (to do with the self-awareness of the narrator as narrator) in order to build up an impression of a narrator whose vision, like Colonel Assingham’s, may be muddled, partly ignorant, only partly comprehending, or limited by ‘the point of view’. But James’s effects rely on the reader placing a certain kind of trust in the narrator. If then Ford adapts narratorial vraisemblance in such a way that the narrator is duplicitous, mendacious and deliberately misleading, the reader is, in an obvious sense, helpless against him. The kind of reading naturally accorded to a Jamesian or a Conradian narrator is subverted because Ford has not let on to his reader that he is using the old form while totally changing its content. It is not so much that the Fordian narrator, Dowell, misuses the fifth kind of vraisemblance, it is rather that he substitutes a new kind of parody and irony for any that the reader would be expecting. Parody and irony that do not speak their name, indeed are invisible, have allowed for the tradition of misrepresentation which one will find repeated on the back, say, of the Penguin reprint, or in any history of literature, the account in the new Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985) being entirely typical. So far as I can see, there is no term to cover the particular kind of abuse to which Ford subjects the fifth kind of vraisemblance, parody and irony, so I suggest, purely as a holding device until some better can be found, the term fauxsemblance.7 Fauxsemblance differs from the fifth kind of vraisemblance by a consistent misleading of the reader by a series of clues so minutely proffered and insisted upon that, by sheer force of repetition, it becomes progressively more difficult for the reader to believe that he is being deliberately and consistently deceived. Misled? Deceived? Again the shadow of Stanley Fish falls across the page. Might this not be taken to imply that ‘once upon a time’, somewhere along the line, someone might once have been ‘telling the truth’—in a fiction? That there is even a ‘truth’ to be had? Is it even intelligible to suggest that a reader can be ‘misled’ in a novel? The reader can only be misled if he makes a choice. But if he can make a choice, then there was more than one way the reading could go. If there is more than one way the reading could go, it is a matter of choosing the ‘better’ or the ‘more coherent’ choice, such that the novel obeys the laws of its own vraisemblance. Or is this suggestion itself to fall again into an essentialist superstition that there was a ‘better’ or ‘more coherent’ choice to be had in the first place? Conscious of the new dangers, I return to my original contention. If there is, on internal grounds alone, a plot line which corresponds to an authorial intention, and if this plot line allows all the ‘fictional facts’ to fall into place and to make ‘coherent sense’ of a novel which, as traditionally presented, makes no sense at all, are we not entitled to believe that that is the plot line the author intended, and not the one that has been foisted upon us by a lazy or naïve tradition of reading? So, one final time, the concept of authorial intention has to be faced, though, if this proves to be the sticking point, it could be advanced as a function of the ironic play of the text itself, and thus could be reclaimed by a literary theory which regards all talk of intention as a self-deceiving essentialism. In view of the complex ironic device organized by Ford (the disciple of James and the collaborator of Conrad) how can we tell the dancer from the dance? Yet there is still a possibility that the deconstructive disbelief in a locus of originating intention is more ‘essentialist’ than any form of questioning of it, if only because in deconstructive theory this disbelief is occluded, unconscious of itself as dogma, and hence naive. Whether retrieved as authorial intention, though, or under the more acceptable form of authorial irony which has so suffused the text that it is not visible, the ‘real’ plot line of The Good Soldier has been unreadable or unread for three quarters of a century, and if so, the last laugh has certainly not been on the side of literary theory. REFUSALS OF COHERENCE 1: CHARACTER It is perhaps worth unravelling some of the ways that the novel cannot be read. First and foremost, though it looks like a straightforward realist narrative, the fundamental structure of realist fiction, coherent and progressive characterization, is relentlessly dismantled. The character of Edward Ashburnham first, a ‘portrait’ with his wife Leonora:

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For I swear to you that they were the model couple. He was as devoted as it was possible to be without appearing fatuous. So well set up, with such honest blue eyes, such a touch of stupidity, such a warm goodheartedness! And she— so tall, so splendid in the saddle, so fair! Yes, Leonora was extraordinarily fair and so extraordinarily the real thing that she seemed too good to be true. You don’t, I mean, as a rule, get it all so superlatively together. To be the county family, to look the county family, to be so appropriately and perfectly wealthy; to be so perfect in manner—even just to the saving touch of insolence that seems to be necessary. To have all that and to be all that! No, it was too good to be true.8 This double portrait, of ‘Edward Ashburnham, Captain, Fourteenth Hussars, of Branshaw House, Branshaw Teleragh’ (p. 29) and his classically beautiful wife Leonora is never again repeated. From now on the contradictory notations come thick and fast. Within half a page, the narrator Dowell is wondering at the uninhibited libido of Leonora, and, within a page of that eulogizing portrait of the couple just cited, we are presented with this: I don’t want to think that I am writing Teddy Ashburnham down a brute. I don’t believe he was. God knows, perhaps all men are like that. (p. 17) In an ironic, wondering, hesitant sort of manner, Dowell describes Ashburnham again, yet in terms which seem just ‘too good to be true’: Edward Ashburnham was the cleanest looking sort of chap;—an excellent magistrate, a first rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they said, in Hampshire, England. …You would have said that he was just exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine and it was madness. (p. 18) After the opening portrait of Edward Ashburnham in this grand manner, the rest of the novel takes the man to pieces remorselessly. Not one of the good qualities mentioned at the outset is ever again mentioned. Edward is progressively shown as weak, lustful (though no evidence of his affairs is ever offered), irresolute, dependent upon his wife, a drunkard, a suicide. What can one make of a vraisemblance which offers itself in the guise of a realist fiction, yet refuses to deliver coherent and non-contradictory characterization? One of the most damning pieces of evidence against Edward Ashburnham, the ‘pointer’ as it were to the later stages of his seamy career in fornication and adultery (for all of which there is not a shred of evidence offered) is the famous ‘Kilsyte case’. Ashburnham ‘found himself in a railway carriage with a quite pretty girl of about nineteen’. (p. 139) Since she was weeping quietly, Ashburnham ‘put his arm around her waist and kissed her’. Whether this is a likely act on the part of the officer and gentleman is lost in the pure melodrama of what comes next. The nurse ‘screamed, tore herself away; sprang up and pulled a communication cord’ (p. 139). As a result Ashburnham has to face the local Beak, and suffers in social estimation. He escapes a ‘seven year’ prison sentence, however, because he is a gentleman (pp. 50–1). For what possible crime could he have got seven years? Would the nurse have screamed and pulled the communication cord? Would the perfect gentleman have kissed her? All these improbables are offered by Dowell as evidence of the deep but hidden contamination of Edward’s nature. A full-scale destruction of Edward’s character immediately follows the sketching out of ‘the Kilsyte case’. Section 4 begins with a description of ‘poor Edward’ and his use of time. Although leading a life of perfect indolence, he had, it appears, time to ‘sandwich in at odd moments’ (p. 140) various sordid little adventures. This itself is so dissonant with the idea of the officer and the gentleman that Dowell has officially offered to give us, that even the narrator himself hesitates: His love affairs, until the very end, were sandwiched in at odd moments or took place during the social evenings, the dances and the dinners. But I guess I have made it hard for you, O silent listener, to get that impression. Anyhow, I hope I have not given you the impression that Edward Ashburnham was a pathological case. He wasn’t. He was just a normal man and very much of a sentimentalist. (pp. 140–1) The gradual contamination by suggestion goes on apace. The incident of ‘the mistress of the Grand Duke, La Dolciquita’ is so utterly unlikely, is described in such a melodramatic and dissonantly ‘false’ tonality, that it can surely only be offered as a test of the reader’s gullibility. Would an officer and a gentleman like Ashburnham fall hopelessly in love with a whore, give her excessively generous gifts, feel obliged to her and dependent upon her, and finally get too drunk to recognize her? He ‘drank like a fish after Leonora was in bed and he spread himself over the tables, and this went on for about a fortnight’ (p. 149). When Dolciquita enters the room ‘he was far too drunk to recognize her’ and he was ‘pretty far gone with alcoholic poisoning’. La Dolciquita takes Ashburnham off for a week’s sin at Antibes, ‘and, at the end of a week, she just quietly kicked him out’. Lest we should miss any last frisson of the humiliation of the noble animal that Ashburnham is meant to be (or have been), Dowell adds:

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He was cured of the idea that he had any duties to La Dolciquita— feudal or otherwise. (p. 151) This refers to an earlier offer (p. 148) which Ashburnham had made to La Dolciquita. He would look after her for life if she would only abandon her career of prostitution. In view of the fatuousness of this offer, it is not surprising that La Dolciquita ‘only shrugged one shoulder slowly and contemptuously’. The whole description of the affair with La Dolciquita, then, simply reeks with improbability, as if Dowell is piling Pelion on Ossa to convince us of something which runs absolutely against all the assumptions he has told us, at the beginning of his narration, that we ought to make about Ashburnham—that he was ‘good people’, landed, wealthy, aristocratic, controlled. There is certainly a version of the affair with La Dolciquita which is conceivable, and which would make sense, but Dowell does not tell it. This would be a passionate affair with La Dolciquita that was carried on in secrecy, without his wife getting to know of it, and which would have been ended in a gentlemanly way by a large gift of money. For obvious social reasons, Ashburnham would not have entertained for a moment the idea of an enduring situation which made public the previous liaison. The fact that Dowell proposes that Ashburnham might have considered this scenario is yet a further test of readerly attentiveness. The narrator continues to test the reader. The fall and fall of Edward Ashburnham continues. His wife is always aware of his alleged infidelities, and in fact discovers on one occasion a blackmail letter. But we never see any evidence that Ashburnham is in fact carrying out any sexual activities. The next escapade we are asked to believe in is the adulterous affair with the wife of a certain Major Basil (p. 151) who borrowed money from Ashburnham while they were serving in Burma (p. 152). As a result Major Basil begins to blackmail Edward Ashburnham. But there is no evidence at all that Ashburnham and Mrs Basil were lovers. Indeed, Dowell throws doubt on this possibility himself: Edward was pretty hard hit when Mrs Basil had to go away. He really had been very fond of her, and he remained faithful to her memory for quite a long time. (p. 158) The language used here, in its dotty mildness, can only be chosen for its provocative value. This is certainly not the wording appropriate to describe the parting of a man and woman who had shared a violent physical passion. ‘He thought that Mrs Basil had been his soul-mate, separated from him by an unkind fate—something sentimental of that sort’ adds Dowell (p. 159), and that is perfectly compatible with a Platonic relationship in which Ashburnham had been dependent (as he always seems to be in these relationships—anything but a stallion let loose on unsuspecting womankind) upon Mrs Basil for tea and sympathy. That would be, the reader deduces from Dowell’s syntax, far more likely. And then the Ashburnhams were moved somewhere up towards a place or a district called Chitral. I am no good at geography of the Indian Empire. (p. 158) After the alleged affair in Burma with the wife of Major Basil, there is a further alleged affair in India with Maisie Maidan. Typically, no evidence of a physical relationship is supplied, but the affair, if there is one, is carried on right under the eyes of Mrs Ashburnham herself. Indeed, Ashburnham even suggests that he and his wife should ‘take Mrs Maidan with us to Europe and drop her at Nauheim’ (p. 159). This is hardly the suggestion that a man having an affair with a woman would make to his own wife. To his utter surprise, Leonora Ashburnham agrees at once, has indeed already put the plan into operation: ‘Yes. I promised it to Charlie Maidan this afternoon. I have offered to pay her ex’s myself.’ Edward just saved himself from saying: ‘Good God!’ You see, he had not the least idea of what Leonora knew— about Maisie, about Mrs Basil, even about La Dolciquita. (p. 160) Here the narrator’s device is too thin to sustain. We know full well that Ashburnham did know that his wife ‘knew’ about these three ‘affairs’. The narrator simply feigns to forget that he has already told us this. Indeed, the narrator goes directly on to tell us at length that Leonora expected to tolerate this affair as she had tolerated other affairs: She had no thought of Maisie’s being led into adultery; she imagined that if she could take Maisie and Edward to Nauheim, Edward would see enough of her to get tired of her pretty little chatterings, and of the pretty little motions of her hands and feet. And she thought she could trust Edward. (p. 165) This passage is again shot through with self-contradictions which dare the reader to take anything at face value. In the first place, in view of the fact that Dowell says that Leonora is aware of Ashburnham’s affairs with La Dolciquita and with Mrs Basil, why was it that Leonora ‘had no thought of Maisie’s being led into adultery’? Why does she assume that to take Maisie to Nauheim with them will rather dull Ashburnham’s interest than wake it? Maisie is presented in this very passage (pp. 165–

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6) as being besotted with Ashburnham, even to the point of comparing her husband adversely to him. ‘Pretty little chatterings… pretty little motions of her hands and feet’, these notations are little more than outright teasing. ‘For there was not any doubt of Maisie’s passion for Edward’ (p. 165). And Maisie has ‘a heart’ too! The suggestion that Leonora thought she could trust Edward, given all this evidence to the contrary, is meant surely to strain the reader’s sense of the probable? On the sheer improbability of Edward Asburnham’s infatuation for ‘the girl’, as she is always called, Nancy Rufford, with which the novel ends and which provides its denouement, I shall have more to say later in a different context. Yet it is even more improbable than any of the preceding affairs, and a dozen pages are produced to show that not even the machinations of Leonora could suffice to cause it to occur (pp. 193–5; 204–8). Yet the narrator has succeeded in his aim, which is to present the sexual career of his ideal officer and gentleman as a series of descents into bathos. Almost from the beginning of the novel, the reader loses his respect for Edward Ashburnham. But that loss of respect is not based upon the evidence which the narrator, Dowell, proffers. The loss of respect is due to the old Aristotelian formula for tragedy, the sight of a man, not pre-eminently clever or good, brought by a flaw in his own nature to a misjudgment which causes his downfall. That misjudgment was the marriage to Leonora. He runs the whole gamut of misery and humiliation, not because of what he does, but because of what he does not do. Faced by a calculating wife, he sees that he possesses no resources to outwit her evil, and simply succumbs. The other major characters in the novel are presented in a similarly subverted manner. Leonora, for instance, treated officially by the narrator as a long- suffering wife, put upon by a spendthrift and adulterous lecher of a husband, emerges in fact as a hard, calculating, vindictive and possessive individual, whose only real achievement is to put her husband’s estates and finances into order so that she may eventually reap the benefit of them. She shows no love whatsoever for her husband, nor indeed any civility for any other members of the ‘little band’ at Nauheim, amongst whom such splendid and intimate comradeship is officially asserted to have existed. The only acts she undertakes are calculated to do harm to others, and to further her own material interest. A similar obverse read-out obtains in the case of Florence, Dowell’s wife. Though she is portrayed as suffering from ‘a heart’, it turns out that she has never had a heart condition, and that she has kept her ‘long-preserv’d virginity’ from Dowell simply because she is aware that he has married her for her money and is awaiting her death with eager expectation. As a result of her refusing her husband his conjugal rights, she is mortally afraid of Dowell, and retires early every evening, locking the door behind her. The official version of her as the beloved wife is gradually eroded in Dowell’s narrative, and eventually he lets slip out what it has been in his interest all along to occlude: For I hate Florence. I hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an eternity of loneliness. She need not have done what she did…. She should not have done it. She should not have done it. It was playing too low down. (p. 69) This, which departs a moment from the narrator’s usual indirections, soon reverts to them. She should not have done what? The crimes that Dowell attributes to her are not the ones she carries out, though a calculation on the death of Florence, a calculation on inheriting her wealth, emerges progressively as the most probable motive behind Dowell’s own actions and reticences. Nevertheless, throughout the story, he constantly directs the flow of ‘guilt’ towards Florence, distracting the reader’s attention by the repeated suggestion that it is she, Florence, who has betrayed him. The reader, scrutinizing the text for evidence of Florence’s duplicity, evidence of her responsibility for wrecking the happiness of the quartet at Nauheim, is constantly distracted from examining the implications of those sudden blazes of hate for Florence which (apparently) escape the Dowellian censorship. As to Dowell’s own character, the character of the narrator himself, as he sits in his armchair by the fire and tells his bemused interlocutor ‘the saddest story’ he had ever heard, it is very far indeed from the blandly disingenuous, the benignly muddled, the confusedly reconstructive, character that he officially wishes to present. REFUSALS OF COHERENCE 2: PLOT In the full, lush, Jamesian manner, Ford’s narrator Dowell makes great play of his interest in time schemes, and particularly in setting each temporal detail in its correct narrative niche. The device of subverting a narrator’s own official stance, by building into the temporal pattern details which are self-contradictory or even non-compossible seems, however, to be a subversion of Jamesian practice. What Maisie Knew (1897) must surely stand as one of the originating impulses behind Ford’s novel, even providing perhaps the name of the most badly treated and abused character in his own novel, Maisie, and probably the blueprint for the occluded relation between the two ‘parents’ in The Good Soldier. Those two late masterpieces of the Jamesian œuvre, The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904), involve just those parameters of duplicity, long-term collusive planning and betrayal which Ford had decided to treat, but in order to find a mimesis for yet

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further orders of human baseness he had to push his ‘narrator’ to the very limits of what realist vraisemblance can bear. In order to subvert James’s subversions, Ford has to invent a new kind of narratorial deceit. Dowell is never so happy as when he is establishing, to his own satisfaction, the exact day or year of the event he is concerned to ‘place’. The reader is for a long time taken in by this punctiliousness, before it dawns on him that this temporal fussiness is itself another device used by the narrator to throw the reader off the track, not to give him further directions into the true meaning of the story. Ford did require the reader to read this novel twice, which presumption modern critics have found extraordinary. But it is part and parcel of the method, that the devices with time only appear for what they are upon a rereading. It is not on a first reading that it becomes evident that two entirely different sets of events are being claimed to have taken place on a single day, the 4th of August 1904. I will preface what I have to say on this matter by inserting here a grid of the events so far as the narrator allows us to establish them at all: 1892 Edward Ashburnham marries Leonora Powys. Before 1895 ‘The Kilsyte case’ (Ashburnham kisses nurse in train). Between 1895 and 1904 Various alleged ‘affairs’ of Ashburnham’s (1) La Dolciquita, the mistress of a Grand Duke; (2) in Burma, Mrs Basil (after which he is blackmailed by Major Basil for some years); in India, collects and brings home Maisie Maidan. 1895 Leonora forces Ashburnham to settle all his money on her, so that she can manage the estate of Branshaw Teleragh. 1899 (4 August) Uncle Hurlbird sets off on his tour round the world, accompanied by Florence Hurlbird and ‘Jimmy’. Bagshawe asserts (in 1913) that on this date he saw Florence leaving ‘Jimmy’s’ room at 5 a.m. Marriage of Florence Hurlbird and John Dowell. They set out on their honeymoon that same day. Florence and Dowell arrive at Le Havre. They are met there by ‘Jimmy’, who stays in the same hotel with them when they arrive in Paris. Jimmy stays with them ‘for a few years’ (until 1903). (In a deliberately misleading passage, Dowell claims that by 1903 Florence was sick of ‘Jimmy’ and had ‘taken on’ Edward Ashburnham: but by his own account, they did not meet until 1904.) 1904 (4 August) Florence sees Leonora box Maisie Maidan’s ears outside Edward’s room; Florence and Leonora descend to dinner arm-in-arm; they join their two husbands, Dowell and Ashburnham. This is the first time, allegedly, that the foursome have ever met, at dinner in the hotel at Nauheim on this day, 4 August 1904. 1904 (4 August) This, on internal dating, is also the day on which the foursome go on their dramatic outing to the Castle of M—; and the day on which, returning to their hotel at Nauheim, Maisie Maidan is discovered dead. (Since both these sequences of events take place in the afternoon of a given day, they are not compossible.) 1904 (4 September) Edward accompanies Florence and Dowell to Paris: Edward is there until 21 September and visits them again in December. 1905 Edward visits Dowell in Paris three times. 1906 Dowell and Florence spend ‘the best part of six weeks’ with Edward at Mentone; Edward stays 1900 (4 August) 1901 (4 August) 1901 (11 August)

with Florence and Dowell in Paris on his way back to London (p. 93). No events mentioned at all (?) Florence’s uncle, Mr Hurlbird, dies. He is discovered not to have had ‘a heart’. Florence inherits $1. 5m. 1913 (4 August) Florence, asserts Dowell, commits suicide, after overhearing a conversation between Edward and Nancy Rufford, and sighting Bagshawe with her husband as she rushes back to the hotel. Dowell gives two accounts of the time scheme after that, not consistent with each other. There is no inquest. Dowell inherits Florence’s money ($800,000 plus the $1.5m, i.e. $2.3m.) 1913 (18 August) Dowell goes to USA to dispose of the legacy. 1913 (1 Oct.–12 Nov. Nancy Rufford’s agony; Edward ‘dying for love of her’; Leonora tells Nancy she ‘must belong’ to Edward, (pp. 195, 206, 207, 208); it will be ‘adultery’ but it would save his reason. 1913 (December?) Nancy sails to rejoin her ‘father’ (in Ceylon); at Aden, reads of Edward’s ‘suicide’ and ‘goes mad’. 1907–13 1913 (20 July)

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Dowell writes that he had gone out to Ceylon and brought her back to England; she is installed at Branshaw Teleragh, catatonic, ‘mad’. Leonora has married Rodney Bayham. Date of Edward’s ‘suicide’ irrecoverable.

The significance of the entire novel comes to rest on the events of a single temporal point, 4 August 1904. Nearly a decade before Joyce compressed the whole epic of Dublin life into 16 June, 1904, Ford Madox Ford had compressed the entire corruption and moral exhaustion of the fin de siècle into 4 August of that same year. Once again, the sheer innovativeness of Ford’s Modernism has been missed by a tradition of reading which turns out again and again to be its own dupe. What is claimed to be the first meeting between the Dowells and the Ashburnhams takes place on the evening of 4 August 1904: It was a very hot summer, in August 1904; and Florence had already been taking the baths for a month. (p. 26) I have forgotten the aspect of many things, but I shall never forget the aspect of the dining room of the Hotel Excelsior on that evening—and on so many other evenings. (p. 28) We know it was the evening of 4 August, 1904, because later we find: Let me think where we were. Oh, yes…that conversation took place on the 4th of August, 1913. I remember saying to her that, on that day, exactly nine years before, I had made their acquaintance…(p. 92) Thirteen minus nine is four. So it was on the evening of 4 August 1904 that the meeting of the Dowells and the Ashburnhams took place. They took their tables next to each other and struck up an acquaintanceship that was to be so fateful for them all. This is described in detail on pages 28–37. Yet, it is precisely on 4 August 1904 that the two pairs make their doom-laden trip to the Castle at M—. This trip is described on pages 40ff. On the actual meaning of that trip, its multi-layered duplicities, I shall have more to say later. For the moment, I am only concerned to establish that it did indeed take place, that trip to M—, on 4 August 1904, which (we already know) is the very first day that the two couples met up—in the evening, at dinner. This trip to M—, then, precedes the first meeting of the two couples. At page 40, when Dowell begins telling of the trip to M—, he pretends not to be able to date the trip very precisely: I can’t remember whether it was in our first year—the first year of us four at Nauheim, because, of course, it would have been the fourth year of Florence and myself—but it must have been in the first or second year. But Dowell can remember with extreme precision when that particular trip took place, because he says later (p. 65): And that enables me to fix exactly the day of our going to the town of M—. For it was the very day poor Mrs Maidan died. We found her dead when we got back—pretty awful, that, when you come to figure out what it all means… And we have further confirmation of the date a little later still (p. 75): The death of Mrs Maidan occurred on the 4th of August, 1904. And then nothing happened until the 4th of August, 1913. Now the story of how Florence saw Leonora box Maisie Maidan’s ears on the very evening they met (4 August 1904), and the story of how Maisie Maidan was found dead upon the return of the foursome from the town of M—, are not compossible. The chain of events involving Leonora, Florence and Maise Maidan’s humiliation, occupies the afternoon of 4 August. The story of the trip to M—also occupies the afternoon of 4 August. The ‘discovery’ (or accusation, or implication) by Leonora at the Castle of M—(to the effect that Florence is already having an affair with Edward Ashburnham) thus also takes place in the afternoon of 4 August. And the first meeting of the four, at dinner, also takes place on 4 August. There are at least two mutually contradictory time schemes involved. If one happened, the other didn’t. But, since that follows, why has the narrator, Dowell, spent such a lot of ingenuity and technical expertise in establishing, at different points of his narrative, a pair of time schemes which are in fact not compossible? What could be his motive for setting up, in a novel totally committed to accurate time schemes, a ‘parallel causality’ which equals in daring the inventions of the seventeenthcentury theologians?

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The trip to the town and castle of M—is in fact an elaborate deceit on many levels. The tone set up by Dowell is one of giddy enjoyment, almost as if a Sunday-school party is being taken to see some famous historical site. The guide on this Sunday-school trip is Florence, who has been boning up on the history of the Reformation previously, ‘reading books like Ranke’s History of the Popes, Symonds’s Renaissance, Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic and Luther’s Table Talk’ (p. 43). Ford does not wait to be instructed by the Roland Barthes of S/Z how to use the ‘hermeneutic’ and the ‘proairetic’ codes. Everything points to some major religious event or discovery which is about to take place. Even the castle itself is precisely described: Now it happens that fifty minutes away from Nauheim, by a good train, is the ancient city of M—, upon a great pinnacle of basalt, girt with a triple road running sideways up its shoulder like a scarf. And at the top there is a castle— not a square castle like Windsor, but a castle all slate gables and high peaks with gilt weathercocks flashing bravely— the castle of St Elizabeth of Hungary. (p. 41) This lavish use of precise detail represents a kind of conundrum in the narrative style. The reader has to stop and ask himself why this should be so. The castle thus described does exist, and it looks exactly as Dowell says it does. It is modelled on the castle at Marburg. By normal literary criteria, it should not matter whether the castle exists or not, but a building described in such realistic detail in the midst of a web of illusionism operated by bad faith demands that the reader pay some attention to the probable associations of the historical castle of Marburg. In fact, it was at the Castle of Marburg in 1529, that Luther and Zwingli conducted their great debate about transubstantiation. Luther, rejecting the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation, substituted for it the doctrine of consubstantiation, affirming the real presence, though in another form. Zwingli denied the real presence altogether, claiming that the Lord’s Supper was purely commemorative. The effort to come to a common set of terms proved unavailing, owing to Luther’s insistence on the literal interpretation of the words ‘Hoc est corpus meum’, ‘This is my body’. The only positive outcome of the face-off between the two theologians was an agreement to differ, which went under the grand title of the Articles of Marburg. Today, a visitor to the Castle will be shown the room where the great debate took place. On the wall hangs a picture in the Academic style, showing the two theologians in debate. Next to the picture hangs a reproduction of the Articles of Marburg. This brief excursus into Reformation theology is enjoined upon the reader because the events which Dowell associates with the Castle of M— are quite different from the historical ones. The events that Dowell describes through the device of Florence’s holding a lecture to her fellow-tourists are a subtle swerve or deviation from what in fact she ought to be saying if she knew her history, and had indeed read her Ranke, Symonds, Motley and Luther, as Dowell assures us she has. What takes place in that dim upper room in the castle is doubly mysterious. The theme is theological, certainly, yet there are two sets of interpretations offered of its significance. The historical ones we have noted. But Florence, lecturing, turns her discourse into an affirmation of the cleansing and elevating work of Protestantism as such (to the disadvantage of ‘Irish or the Italians or the Poles, but particularly the Irish…’), an interpretation which seems to be little more than personal prejudice with perhaps an inbuilt desire to offend someone in their party. The ‘Protest’ to which she points must, the reader supposes, be the Articles of Marburg, whose significance Florence either does not understand, or which she deliberately distorts. It is, however, in this highly charged theological space, that Florence lays her finger upon Edward Ashburnham’s wrist, presumably to reinforce her point that: It’s because of that piece of paper that you’re honest, sober, industrious, provident and clean-lived. If it weren’t for that piece of paper you’d be like the Irish or the Italians or the Poles, but particularly the Irish…(p. 46) The point she is making is contentious enough, considering that (as we are just about to learn) Leonora is an Irish Catholic—a fact she would be sure to have known if their intimacy were already advanced. But the effect of her laying her finger on Ashburnham’s wrist is out of all proportion to its apparent significance. Dowell finds, through a kind of synaesthesia, that his own left wrist is hurting, due to the force with which Leonora is gripping it. Leonora rushes Dowell out of the room in order to bring the ‘hermeneutic’ and the ‘proairetic’ code into collusion by the use of a question of truly Jamesian obscurity: ‘Don’t you see,’ she said, with a really horrible bitterness, with a really horrible lamentation in her voice, ‘Don’t you see that that’s the cause of the whole miserable affair; of the whole sorrow of the world? And of the eternal damnation of you and me and them…?’ (p. 47)

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The ambiguities attached to the word ‘that’ (‘that’s the cause’) set up agitation in the ‘hermeneutic’ code: ‘what’ is Leonora referring to? If it is Protestantism as such, why does she include herself in the list of those eternally damned? What is the significance of the phrase ‘the whole miserable affair’—with its pun upon the ordinary use of the word ‘affair’? As if some major recognition strikes Dowell, there is a violent break in the text—what Paul De Man might dignify by the title of an anacoluthon. The dialogue is tantalizingly broken off. It is only twenty pages later (p. 66) that it is resumed. True, the theme of the centuries-old hatred between Catholic and Protestant has been adumbrated as a possible cause of disagreement. Nevertheless, Dowell’s sudden swerve away from this theme seems to hint at a vast hinterland of past understandings: ‘Do accept the situation. I confess that I do not like your religion. But I like you so intensely. I don’t mind saying that I have never had anyone to be really fond of, and I do not believe that anyone has ever been fond of me, as I believe you really to be.’ (p. 66) We are still dealing with the hermeneutic code. ‘Do accept the situation.’ What situation? Why is it difficult for Leonora to accept it? The reader can speculate that ‘the situation’ might be the one in which Leonora’s husband Edward and Dowell’s wife Florence are going, eventually, to start an affair (as Leonora speculates at pp. 172–3). Or might it be the one in which an unexpected snag in a plot between Leonora and Dowell has suddenly appeared—though exactly what kind of snag is not clear. It might possibly refer to the fact that Leonora and Dowell are now free to begin (or to resume) their own affair, if their respective partners are going to be otherwise engaged. Some evidence for the ‘plot’ hypothesis is provided by an incredibly subtle hint which only a third or fourth reading would pick up. ‘Oh, I’m fond enough of you,’ she said. ‘Fond enough to say that I wish every man was like you. But there are others to be considered.’ She was thinking, as a matter of fact, of poor Maisie. She picked a little piece of pellitory out of the breast-high wall in front of us. She chafed it for a long minute between her finger and thumb, then she threw it over the coping. ‘Oh, I accept the situation,’ she said at last, ‘if you can’. (p. 66) Since it is only upon the return of the four to Nauheim on 4 August 1904 that Maisie Maidan’s body will be found, this reference to Leonora’s meditation about her fate while they are still at Marburg comes as near as can be to proof positive that Leonora and Dowell are in a plot to murder Maisie, and in fact have already done so. Leonora’s abstract meditation as she turns that piece of ‘pellitory’ between her finger and thumb, that weighing up of pros and cons, is a kind of exteriorized thought process. Maisie has to be used, thrown away, ‘thrown over the coping’. The reference to Maisie Maidan’s death, which a first-time reading will not pick up, makes it virtually certain that ‘Do accept the situation’ must refer to a long-term plot which has suffered a temporary set-back, but which is still recuperable, if both partners stick toughly to their previous commitments. The only set of meanings which it seems really difficult to attach to Leonora’s extraordinarily precipitate behaviour and violent torrent of words is the one that Dowell doggedly and thickly insists on attributing to them: i.e. his conviction that she is offering to defend her Catholic faith and Irish ancestry should Florence, from the depths of her American Protestantism, try to impugn them (p. 67). But Dowell, duplicitous as ever, concludes But obviously, as I saw it, that could not be her meaning. Good people, be they ever so diverse in creed, do not threaten one another. (p. 67) Dowell then swerves off into yet another insistence that he had no knowledge of the plots hatched against him, his wife’s scheming, and so on. For, all that time, I was just a male sick nurse. And what chance had I against those three hardened gamblers, who were all in league to conceal their hands from me?… I suppose that, during all that time I was a deceived husband, and that Leonora was pimping for Edward… You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I do not know…(p. 68) Suddenly, there are ‘three’ hardened gamblers, not two, or even one. Suddenly they are all in league against him. Suddenly he decides that he must already be a deceived husband. And with dramatic irony he ‘decides’ that he does not know what it is like to be a deceived husband—very correctly, of course, because he is not one.

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But the point remains: how could all this degree of interrelationship, intimacy, sexual invitation and religious threat take place on the very first afternoon of the acquaintance of the foursome? Or—even worse—on the afternoon before the foursome actually ever met? The reason why the two sets of events for 4 August 1904 seem to be both necessary as told, and also not compossible, is that Dowell has cleverly run in together two sets of descriptions which ‘belong’ to each other in terms of plot, while he has used one to ‘mask’ the other for reasons of alibi. For what Dowell wants the reader to come away with is the distinct impression that none of the four protagonists could possibly have had any opportunity to murder Maisie Maidan. Indeed, since the four arrive back from the historic trip to M—to find Maisie dead, the very question of her murder is not even suggested. Yet, the behaviour of Leonora is distinctly uncanny (pp. 71–4) What happened on the day of our jaunt to the ancient city of M— had been this: Leonora, who had been even then filled with pity and contrition for the poor child, on returning to our hotel had gone straight to Mrs Maidan’s room. She had just wanted to pet her. (p. 71) All she perceived, upon first entering the room, was a letter. She opens it and reads it, while feeling a peculiar quality to the silence in the room—‘a silence, she said, as if there were something in the room that drank up such sounds as there were’. The letter is a passionate outburst against the injustice of the démarche carried out at her expense. ‘“I did not know you wanted me for an adulteress” the postscript began’ (p.72). It is almost incredible that a young woman, already deeply attracted to Edward Ashburnham, should let herself be taken to Europe at his and his wife’s expense, if no erotic possibility existed in the relationship at all. The novel revels in such refusals of expectation. Leonora goes off with the letter, seeking Maisie, and it is only upon entering her room for the second time, that she perceives ‘sticking out beyond the bed, a small pair of feet in high-heeled shoes. Maisie had died in the effort to strap up a great portmanteau. She had died so grotesquely that her little body had fallen forward into the trunk, and it had closed upon her, like the jaws of a gigantic alligator. The key was in her hand’ (p. 73). Mysteries multiply. If Maisie’s feet sticking up out of the trunk were so immediately visible the second time Leonora entered the room, by what amazing effects of perspective had Leonora failed to see the little feet the first time she entered the room? Likewise, although the attempt is to suggest that Maisie had died of a heart attack as she tried to manipulate the heavy trunk, it is difficult to see why the key should still be in her hand if she had been engaged ‘in the effort to strap up a great portmanteau’. First, you don’t keep the key in your hand when you are engaged in strapping, and second neither doing up a strap nor using a key is a great physical effort. There is no suggestion that Maisie had been trying to lift the trunk, for instance, or to shift it along the floor. It is odd anyway that Dowell should know just exactly what she had been trying to do, since he himself had been at M—. Leonora lifted her up—she was the merest featherweight—and laid her on the bed with her hair about her. She was smiling, as if she had just scored a goal in a hockey match. (p. 73) Who was smiling? The beautifully placed ambiguity of the pronoun allows of the possibility that it could well be Leonora. Would a woman who had fallen head first into a big trunk while having a heart attack be smiling? It is an ambiguity we shall find subtly echoed in the description of the ‘suicide’ of Florence: You understand she had not commited suicide. Her heart had just stopped. (p. 73) How does Dowell know this? Yet another case of a ‘heart’ in this novel, which already has two major characters with ‘a heart’ who don’t in fact have ‘a heart’. Here is someone, Maisie, who didn’t have ‘a heart’ and yet suddenly did have ‘a heart’—and died of it. The reason why Dowell wants the reader to skip the very thought of suicide (let alone murder) is that he wants all four characters to have an alibi. He thus conflates two separate sets of events, both involving Maisie Maidan and Leonora, and links them by a duplicitous use of the phrase ‘that afternoon’ (p. 55). On what we must assume to have been, in fact, the earlier occasion (though this would take us back to an ‘afternoon’ before the first official meeting on 4 August 1904), the events are as follows. Leonora opens (inadvertently, Dowell claims) one of the blackmail letters from (presumably) Major Basil (p. 55). She passes an ‘excruciating afternoon’ (p. 63). She faces Ashburnham out about the matter. He, touched to the quick by remorse, goes off to the post office to send a telegram to his solicitor, bidding him to start proceedings against the blackmailer (p. 64). Meanwhile, while he was at the post office, Maisie Maidan had entered Edward’s room to return something, and had sat there for two hours, lost in meditation. As Maisie emerges, Leonora, who assumes that Maisie has just spent two hours in the arms of her husband, goes up to her and attacks her. Florence, coming along the passage, runs straight

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into this scene of summary justice. Leonora, turning Florence into an ally before she has a chance to decide to be anything else, sweeps her down to dinner, and they enter ‘arm in arm’, where they find Ashburnham and Dowell awaiting them, but sitting at separate tables. The famous first introduction is effected, and this is purportedly the first meeting of the four of the protagonists, as they sit down to dine. Later in the evening, Leonora asks Edward to take Maisie Maidan to the Casino. Since this is now the evening, there is no possibility that we are talking of 4 August 1904, when, upon returning from the castle of M —in the late afternoon, Leonora finds Maisie Maidan dead. That event (one supposes) is somewhere around 5.30 or 6 p.m., late afternoon, in any event, or perhaps very early evening. But precisely because, on internal evidence, this slapping episode must have preceded 4 August 1904, when, upon return from M—, Maisie Maidan is found dead, then this whole series of events, on ‘that afternoon’ must have preceded 4 August 1904. It therefore follows that the couples had indeed met each other before the date that Dowell says they first met. It may even be only one day before 4 August 1904, or it may be several. But the essential is, it has to precede the event upon which Dowell so often and so emphatically insists. From this it follows, that if there is even so slight a slippage in chronology as one day (we are considering possible events, say, on 3 August 1904) then we have a possible camouflage effort on Dowell’s part to cover over a murder. And we do in fact have a slippage in chronology of one day, at least one day, because ‘that afternoon’, ‘that excruciating afternoon’ cannot be the afternoon of 4 August 1904, when the four characters are at M—. But if there were a series of events one day earlier than that, then Leonora does not need an alibi, for none would be required, for the four characters would not yet have met. Dowell’s insistence upon 4 August 1904 as the first day of meeting thus becomes a wilful and meretricious sleight of hand, to cover over the fact that, on the day that Maisie Maidan died, none of the four protagonists had an alibi. REFUSALS OF COHERENCE 3: FLORENCE The whole novel is meant to revolve around Florence’s adultery with Ashburnham, an affair which went on for many years, and which, when discovered, broke Dowell into pieces at the thought of the baseness of human morality. There is no evidence for any affair at all between Ashburnham and Florence. But it is perhaps useful to reflect on the sexual career of Florence herself. For, if Florence is not an adulteress, then the whole ‘official’ plot of The Good Soldier collapses. The first amazing thing we learn about Florence’s sexual career is that, during the whole period of her Uncle Hurlbird’s trip round the world, which started on 4 August 1899, Florence was accompanied by a character called ‘Jimmy’. This ‘Jimmy’ later accompanies Florence and Dowell on their honeymoon, obviously enjoys the favours of Florence on that honeymoon, and Florence’s complicity with ‘Jimmy’ is apparently sealed when the odious Bagshawe tells Dowell, on the night of 4 August 1913, that it was from ‘Jimmy’s’ room that Florence was seen emerging at 5 a.m. on 4 August 1900. So, ‘Jimmy’ is a kind of acknowledged ‘ami’, a cavaliere servente, a kind of acknowledged third who makes up a ménage a trois? The difficulties immediately multiply. It is inconceivable that in the 1890s a young lady from Society would be ‘accompanied’ in that sense by a male lover in a trip round the world with her uncle. And yet he does, and no comment is passed on this. It is even more incredible, in view of all that Dowell says about his watchfulness over his wife, that ‘Jimmy’ should have enjoyed her favours on the honeymoon without Dowell both knowing about it and condoning it. Yet, again, no comment is made on this. It seems to be self-evident that a third male personage should accompany the newly-weds on their honeymoon. The unlikeliness of the ‘Bagshawe’ evidence can be reserved for later. What is absolutely decisive in the profile of evidence about ‘Jimmy’ is his physical description: He was lugubrious, silent, morose. He had no talent as a painter. He was very sallow and dark, and he never shaved sufficiently…. That fellow had his hands always in the pockets of his odious, square-shouldered, broad-hipped American coats, and his dark eyes were always full of ominous appearances. He was, besides, too fat. Why, I was much the better man…(pp. 83–4) Within the literary convention of this novel, in which all economically important characters are provided with impeccable genealogies going back to the execution of Charles I or to the founding of New York by Stuyvesant, the failure to provide ‘Jimmy’ with so much as a second name, let alone a provenance, must count as a strong indicator that no such character as ‘Jimmy’ ever existed. The name ‘Jimmy’ stands as a kind of bare forked nothing, a refusal of naming, a conundrum, a mystery, a locus of doubt. Dowell obviously intends us to understand a non-person, a non-character. A description of ‘a lover’ in these exaggerated terms offends against Realistic vraisemblance, more than that, it offends against the possibility of verisimilitude within that vraisemblance, by suggesting that this unsavoury and doubtless smelly person would ever have been picked by a young and wealthy Connecticut socialite as the companion for her bed. Accompanied by this non-person, then, Florence first goes on a tour round the world. She is then seen emerging from his bedroom at 5 a.m. by ‘Bagshawe’—a fact which, in the circumstances already set out, should cause no surprise at all.

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Florence then ‘entertains’ him on her honeymoon, until, sick of him, she ‘takes on’ Edward Ashburnham (in 1903—a false dating). What can the role of ‘Jimmy’ be? Let us consider the rest of the evidence. Florence was not in love with Dowell when she met him. On 1 August 1901, Florence told her Aunts Hurlbird that she intended to marry Dowell. She wanted to live in Europe in some style, it is averred, and Dowell was a means to this. They therefore marry on 4 August 1901, and set off for Europe on the selfsame day. Florence gives Dowell to believe that she has a ‘heart’ and that therefore all sexual activity would be too strenuous for her. Probably because Dowell feels no desire for her anyway (since he has married her for her money and is simply waiting for Uncle Hurlbird to die), Dowell falls in with this. Their honeymoon is therefore ‘blanc’, as is their marriage thereafter. The fact that ‘Jimmy’ meets Florence and Dowell at Le Havre and then lives with them in Paris for two years (p. 83) thus presents us with a real conundrum. What can Dowell’s motive be, in inventing such a character, a character who can be deduced, on literary grounds alone, never to have existed, and whose presence, moreover, is not in any clear way necessary to the telling of the story? But it is in fact on the question of Florence’s ‘suicide’ that Dowell’s long-drawn-out refusal of coherence exposes its own duplicity. Dowell gives two accounts of the time scheme of the events surrounding Florence’s death, and, as we should by now expect, they are not compossible. Uncle Hurlbird, of whom we have not heard since his voyage round the world in 1899, suddenly dies on 30 July 1913 (p. 179). Earlier, Dowell has intimated that he believed that Florence shared the same physical disability as her Uncle: ‘Of course her heart squeaked a bit—and she had the same configuration of the lungs as her Uncle Hurlbird’ (p. 83). Earlier still, Dowell notes ‘I was solemnly informed that if she became excited over anything or if her emotions were really stirred her little heart might cease to beat’ (p. 22). Dowell has thus put in twelve years of being a nurse and a nanny, while he looks after a patient whose days he believes to be numbered. His motive for doing this may not, of course, be unconnected with her great wealth. She is still going strong twelve years later, however, and is showing no signs at all of weakening fatally. Then her Uncle Hurlbird dies, and it is discovered that he did not have any heart condition. Uncle Hurlbird leaves one and a half million dollars in his will. Florence upon her death will inherit 800,000 dollars. Both sums will come to Dowell (p. 179). Once Dowell realizes that his wife Florence has no heart condition, her days are indeed numbered. Indeed she numbers five, before she is discovered lying dead on her bed. The suddenness of Florence’s death (she who had, in the event, no ‘heart’) so soon after her Uncle’s (he who had, in the event, no ‘heart’) might give the thoughtful reader cause to pause and reflect. These two deaths are indeed remarkably close together. Dowell’s grand manner of narration is never more florid and expansive than when he has to discuss the financial side of his ‘saddest story’. He portrays his own knowledge of matters financial as vanishingly small. Money, we gather from his tone early on in the novel, has never concerned or interested him. He comes from a wealthy family, has more money than he can ever use, and regards Florence’s great expectations as a mere bagatelle, which if anything will only cause difficulties in the administration. The sheer complacency of Dowell’s tone on matters of money is obviously engineered by Dowell to lull the reader into an assumption that the narrator is a man whose worldly goods are already so vast that he could have no financial motive at all in marrying a wealthy heiress—an heiress who makes it clear before they are married that she does not love him (pp. 80, 82), who declares that her motive in marrying is to have ‘a European establishment’ (p. 77), who denies Dowell all sexual rights from day one, and whom moreover Dowell cordially ‘hates’ (p. 69). So, what motive could Dowell ever have had in marrying Florence, if it were not a financial one? One of the most brilliant of the narrative ploys of Dowell (that which makes it necessary to deconstruct what he says if one is to have access to the track of differences which constitute the real, as opposed to the official, meaning of ‘the saddest story’) is his refusal even to mention a whole swathe of suppositions and assumptions that come welling up in the reader’s mind as the result of what Dowell himself tells us. In the face of a loveless and sexless marriage to an heiress, Dowell never even allows the merest suspicion of a financial motive to surface. Likewise, as in the case of the death of Maisie Maidan, Dowell never allows even once for the possibility that she has in fact been murdered, be her death as unbelievable and grotesque as it may. There is never any suggestion, either, in the circumstances surrounding the very sudden death of Florence so soon after her Uncle’s death, that there is any other explanation than suicide. The refusal to name a possibility comes very close to the imposed impossibility of entertaining it. If a certain (obvious, nay strikingly, banally obvious) explanation suggests itself in the reader’s mind, then Dowell believes that it will go away by itself if the narrator does not even refer to that explanation in passing as a possibility. Dowell, in coming to Florence’s remarkably sudden death after her uncle’s, therefore makes no reference to its suddenness. It is suggested that it is in the nature of things that people should die. He decides to mount a threefold explanation of her death in terms of a suicide. Firstly, he declares, Florence overhears a conversation between the wretched Ashburnham (for whose scapegoat quality the reader now feels a genuine sympathy!) and Nancy Rufford, as a result of which overhearing, Florence suffers from a heart attack and runs to her room. Secondly, Dowell invents a character called ‘Bagshawe’, whose unique function is to assure Dowell that, on 4 August 1900, he had seen Florence emerge from ‘Jimmy’s’ room at 5 a.m. Dowell suggests that Florence, running by the lighted windows of the hotel, sees him talking to Bagshawe, whom she amazingly

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enough instantly recognizes, even though she is suffering from a heart attack, and who she instantly assumes will divulge to her husband the fact that she was seen emerging from ‘Jimmy’s’ room at 5 a.m. on 4 August 1900. Dowell does not seem to realize that since, on his own account, ‘Jimmy’ had been with them on the honeymoon and for two years thereafter, Florence would not in any case have made that assumption (i.e. that this would finally expose her to her husband as a libertine) since she well knows that Dowell already knew about ‘Jimmy’. Thirdly, assuming that Bagshawe will spill the beans (all this in a split second, and while having a heart attack) she runs up to her room and takes a bottle of poison. Just before she swallows the bottle of poison, however, or perhaps before it has time to take effect, she manages to write a letter to her Aunts Hurlbird, in which she confesses her past affairs with Ashburnham, and having done this, she jumps into bed, arranges her limbs decorously, and departs this life. At every level of vraisemblance, of Realist vraisemblance, this amounts to a sheer nonsense, of course. Told like this, in a comic reduction, it does not begin to make sense. But in the pompous self-involvements of the full Jamesian style, and without any reference to obvious implications or glaring unlikelinesses, Dowell manages so to obfuscate and confuse the various levels of narrative ‘fact’ that his explanation turns out tolerably convincingly. REFUSALS OF COHERENCE 4: TIME SCHEMES What, then, really happened on the night of 4 August 1913? Let us try and put together the events of this momentous evening, as Dowell would have us to understand them. (1) ‘Edward Ashburnham and the girl had gone off, that night, to a concert at the Casino, and…Leonora had asked Florence, almost immediately after their departure, to follow them and to perform the office of chaperone’ (p.104). Narrative complication: ‘The girl’, Nancy Rufford, has lived with Edward Ashburnham and his wife in the same house as a kind of ward for many years. Nancy herself regards Edward and Leonora Ashburnham as ‘her uncle and her aunt’ (p. 188) and she refers to him as ‘Uncle Edward’ (p. 189). Nancy’s origin, however, is obscure. The narrator makes a point of never explaining where she came from, whose daughter she is. But why should she need a ‘chaperone’? (2) Under the trees, overheard by Florence, Edward Ashburnham apparently utters a sentence which throws Florence into such a passion of jealousy that she resolves to run off through the dark to the hotel and commit suicide. The actual textual notation of what exactly it is that Edward Ashburnham says is, however, typically ambiguous, and, as it stands, looks moreover quite innocuous: ‘So that, when he spoke of her as being the person he cared most for in the world, she (Nancy) naturally thought that he meant to except Leonora and she was just glad. It was like a father saying that he approved of a marriageable daughter.’ (p. 107) Narrative complication: ‘The girl’, Nancy Rufford, sitting trustingly next to her ‘Uncle Edward’, hears him say that she is the person he cares most for in the world. She accepts this at face value. She assumes he excepts his wife, Leonora, and why should she not? The words as spoken have no erotic content, and, more important, they do not contain any erotic intent either. (We will remember that it is Leonora, Edward’s wife, who tries to persuade her ward Nancy Rufford to initiate sexual relations with Edward Ashburnham, on the grounds that, although it is ‘adultery’, it will save his reason. Edward himself, in this passage at any rate, is not encouraging any erotic advance from Nancy, nor is she making one.) (3) ‘…And Edward, when he realized what he was doing, curbed his tongue at once. She was just glad and she went on being just glad. I suppose that was the most monstrously wicked thing that Edward Ashburnham ever did in his life. …It is, I have no doubt, a most monstrous thing to attempt to corrupt a young girl out of a convent. But I think Edward had no idea at all of corrupting her.’ (pp. 107–8) Narrative complication: What was ‘the most monstrously wicked thing that Edward Ashburnham ever did in his life’? What actually is it that Edward is doing or saying in this passage? Certainly he is not trying to ‘corrupt’ the girl, and the narrator Dowell, having just suggested that he was, instantly corrects his notation and insists that he wasn’t. In any case, the form of words used by Edward is innocent. It is difficult to see how his speaking these words, or his ‘curbing his tongue’, is ‘monstrously wicked’. Now that we have a situation set up by the narrator which actually makes no sense at all, he lets the narrative spring click into action. Florence, overwhelmed by what she had heard (she is meant to be passionately jealous of her ‘affair’ with Ashburnham, although there is no textual evidence at all for the affair ever having taken place), runs off through the dark, consumed with the desire to die. Her heart (which we know she hasn’t ‘got’) begins to plague her, so she puts her hand to her breast to calm it. Running past the hotel window, she sees her husband sitting talking to ‘Bagshawe’. This, Dowell says, she

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must have perceived as the last straw. Trembling like a guilty thing surprised at what Bagshawe must have told her husband, Florence rushes upstairs. When she gets to her room, and has presumably written her letter to her aunts, she unstops a small phial which is meant to contain nitrate of amyl (a common treatment for angina pectoris) but which instead contains prussic acid. This she swallows, but has time to compose her limbs on the bed before she dies. There are so many unlikelihoods in this narrative that the effect is actually one of quasi-believability. The reader simply cannot believe that he is being told so many incompatible, inconsequential or sheerly unlikely things all at once, so he is forced to suspend disbelief and to read on. This is an example of the famous progression d’effet of which Ford was so proud. The first major problem, however, is that of the time scheme. Dowell, for once, can be caught in flagrante, for he gives two accounts of what happened when he saw his wife running past the hotel window, and they are self-contradictory (non-compossible, a technique we are beginning to recognize as one which is intended): (a) ‘“Oh, I say…” Those were the last words I ever heard of Mr Bagshawe’s. A long time afterwards I pulled myself out of the lounge and went up to Florence’s room. She had not locked the door —for the first time of our married life.’ (p. 96) (b) ‘Seeing Florence as I had seen her, running with a white face and with one hand held over her heart, and seeing her, as I immediately afterwards saw her, lying upon her bed with the so familiar little brown flask clenched in her fingers…’ (p. 102) ‘A long time afterwards’/‘immediately afterwards’—which are we to believe? The second major problem is that of the little bottle: (a) ‘She was lying, quite respectably arranged, unlike Mrs Maidan, on her bed. She had a little phial that rightly should have contained nitrate of amyl, in her right hand. That was on the 4 August, 1913.’ (pp. 96–7) (b) ‘I had no possible guide to the idea of suicide and the sight of the little flask of nitrate of amyl in Florence’s hand suggested instantly to my mind the idea of the failure of her heart. Nitrate of amyl, you understand, is the drug that is given to relieve sufferers from angina pectoris…. How could I have known that, during all the years of our married life, that little brown flask had contained, not nitrate of amyl, but prussic acid? It was inconceivable.’ (p. 102) The bottle could not, however, have contained prussic acid. Prussic acid would have caused excruciating pain, the victim would die in convulsions with nausea, and there would be a smell of bitter almonds in the air. A death caused by prussic acid is non-compossible with the tidy way the body is laid out. There is no smell of almonds in the air. The Grand Duke, who arrives with the hotel manager to inspect the scene, obviously does not notice convulsions, nor smell any untoward or suspicious hint in the air. One should also notice the slight apparent ‘slip’: She was lying, quite respectably arranged, unlike Mrs Maidan, on her bed…(p. 97) Why ‘unlike Mrs Maidan’? Is Dowell allowed a ‘Freudian slip’ by the calculating Ford? The reader is, for a split second, allowed access to the guilty process of association in Dowell’s mind. ‘Quite respectably arranged, unlike Mrs Maidan’. It is Dowell who makes the exposed comparison. Everything points to the likelihood that Mrs Maidan had been ‘arranged’ on her bed by Leonora, when Leonora had pulled her body from the closed jaws of the heavy travelling trunk. Leonora lifted her up—she was the merest featherweight—and laid her on her bed with her hair about her. She was smiling, as if she had just scored a goal in a hockey match. (p. 73) ‘Laid her on her bed with her hair about her’ does have a striking affinity to ‘quite respectably arranged’. It certainly does begin to look as if someone has had time to ‘arrange’ Florence’s body too. Except that nobody could have done so if Florence had indeed died by prussic acid. We have then, two time schemes (‘a long time afterwards’/‘immediately afterwards’); and two ‘official’ contents of the small brown phial, nitrate of amyl or prussic acid. In fact, though, there must be a third time scheme and a third contents of the bottle, neither of which have been mentioned. Dowell’s motive has now been established. Uncle Hurlbird is dead, leaving 1.5 million dollars, and if Florence dies, all that money and a further 800,000 dollars will come to him. He has never loved Florence, indeed he ‘hates’ her. He married her in the belief that she had ‘a heart’ and that she would soon die. She didn’t die. Now she has to die.

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There are two interlocking sets of deceptions between Dowell and his wife Florence. She, for reasons of her own, has forbidden him conjugal rights on the grounds that her heart couldn’t bear sexual intercourse, and has had a small brown bottle with her all these years, which she keeps full of amyl nitrate, to convince her husband that she does have ‘a heart’. Suppose though that Dowell has, in the course of time, and over a long span of years, begun to suspect that his wife does not have ‘a heart’. He might long ago have substituted some other poison for the nitrate of amyl, poison which, taken when Florence was pretending to have a fit of angina, would have killed her. On the night of 4 August 1913, Florence would have come running into the hotel, giving full rein to her fantasized condition of her ‘heart’. Dowell would have gone up to her room. Dowell would have tendered her the phial of poison, and she would gladly receive it, thinking that by this means she would be once again confirming her husband in his belief that she suffers from a heart condition. Since Florence thinks the phial contains a harmless placebo (nitrate of amyl) she accepts the dose he administers without suspicion. He knows that the phial contains poison, so he waits around. When Florence dies, he ‘arranges’ her body ‘quite respectably’ and goes down to rejoin ‘Bagshawe’. Only ‘later’ will the body be discovered. But we know, on scientific grounds, that if Florence died from taking the contents of that bottle, it could not have contained prussic acid. It might well have contained some other poison, less violent in its effects. That poison could have been of any colour, since the bottle was brown and brown glass makes any distinctions of colour within a bottle impossible. Likewise the nitrate of amyl, which is yellowish, and the prussic acid, which is clear blue, would have been indistinguishable in a brown bottle. But there is a third possibility, which does not militate against the substitution theory. The bottle could have been filled with some kind of sleeping draught. Florence then, having been given this contents of the bottle (and been reassured by her husband) would have fallen into a deep sleep. It is at this point that either Dowell, or, what is much more likely, Leonora (who steps out from behind the curtains) suffocates Florence with a pillow. She then ‘arranges’ Florence’s body, ‘quite respectably’ (precisely like, not unlike Mrs Maidan’s! (p. 97)) and doubtless, too, with that same smile upon her face, ‘as if she had just scored a goal in a hockey match’! It would make no difference to this theory if Leonora had been in Florence’s room, awaiting her, and if it had been Leonora, rather than Dowell, who had reassured Florence, administered the phial, and then suffocated her with a pillow. Indeed, it would add greater force to Dowell’s alibi, that he had been sitting chatting with ‘Bagshawe’ all evening. (The wish to generate just such an effect is obviously what lies behind the first of the two time schemes, ‘A long time afterwards I pulled myself out of the lounge’, etc.) but Dowell forgets this when he introduces the second time scheme. For it is in fact Leonora who, of all the foursome plus one at Nauheim, has no alibi for that evening. Indeed, Dowell does not even mention her. Her last act is to ask Florence to accompany Ashburnham and Nancy to the Casino, and to act as a ‘chaperone’, which is apparently a meaningless suggestion, for reasons we have established already. After that we hear no more of Leonora, all evening. Where was she? Obviously Dowell thinks that by covering himself (his conversation with ‘Bagshawe’) he has done the job well enough. If he, the prime suspect, has a perfect alibi, why should Ashburnham’s wife need one? Quite. And that is what is so suspicious. Ashburnham’s wife does need one. We have seen what enormous lengths Dowell went to, to cover Leonora’s alibi on the occasion when she discovers the body of Maisie Maidan. Now Dowell has been to equal trouble to establish his own alibi when his wife happens to die. But what is left out, in both cases, is the possible collusion of the other partner in the crimes. The other partner, yes! For however much guilt, suspicion, and dubiety is thrown on a possible relationship between Edward Ashburnham and Dowell’s wife, Florence, there is never any attempt to explain the relationship between Dowell and Ashburnham’s wife, Leonora. There emerges at this point the possibility that there is a hidden relationship between them, one which is a ‘virtual’ one up till now, undescribed because unreferred to. The reader searches in vain amongst the will-o’-the-wisps and the fogs in Dowell’s meandering account for some evidence for an affair between Ashburnham and Florence, but everything suddenly makes transparent sense if the reader dares (and it is a matter of daring, for the narrator does his level best to make certain obvious suppositions literally un-thinkable), dares to conceive the novel as having its main lines of force between Dowell and Leonora. In the chiasmus of the novel, in other words, it is precisely the non-suspected couple who are guilty not only of adultery but of the premeditated murder of at least two, and possibly three, people. For, it is a fact that, at the end of the events covered in the novel, the only two survivors are precisely Dowell and Leonora. Maisie Maidan dies. Florence dies. Edward Ashburnham dies. That leaves Dowell, a multi-millionaire who inherits the grand old stately home of Branshaw Teleragh, and Leonora who is now free to marry… Here, Ford has built in an extra ‘swerve’ into the plot which is truly brilliant. If Leonora and Dowell had inherited the money, the stately home, and then married (a la Henry James) all would have panned out perfectly. Too perfectly? Foxy Ford foresees the reader’s revolt. Leonora (for no reason at all that can be discerned by the reader) gives up Dowell, father of her daughter, and marries Rodney Bayham, a person so unimportant as to constitute another ‘see-through’ character like ‘Jimmy’ and ‘Bagshawe’.9

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There remain two unexplained matters to do with the evening of 4 August 1913. One concerns the discovery of the body, and the other concerns the letter found by Leonora by Florence’s bed to her Aunts Hurlbird, and despatched, on her own initiative, after Florence’s death, to them. The body is discovered. As Dowell describes the scene (pp. 102–3) the night ‘is only the sort of pinkish effulgence from the electric lamps in the hotel lounge’. Three faces merge in and out of his consciousness, those of the Grand Duke, the Chief of Police and Monsieur Schontz, the proprietor of the hotel. They are pursuing a train of thought to which Dowell reports himself as being largely indifferent. The suggestion of suicide is obviously about, if Dowell himself has not actually launched it, and the main effort of the proprietor and the Grand Duke seems to be that there should be no scandal. With the ‘five revolver shots’ of ‘Zum Befehl Durchlaucht’, the matter is closed. There is to be no post-mortem, no inquest. Dowell implies that, in a hotel of such high quality, any kind of scandal must be absolutely avoided. It falls in with his plans perfectly, then, that Florence should die in such style. With regard to the letter found by Florence’s bed and sent by Leonora to the Aunts Hurlbird (pp. 179–80), Dowell does not say that Florence wrote it. It is fairly evident that, given the time scale of the events of that evening, Florence herself would have had no time to write a letter to her aunts. Either, then, Florence wrote such a letter earlier, and left it by her bed, and happened to die with it beside her during the course of the evening. Or else, the letter was not written by Florence at all, but by Leonora. Since the direct effect of the letter is to convince the Misses Hurlbird that their niece Florence had been living a scandalous life in Old Europe, and therefore to cause them to decide that her innocent and deceived husband ought to inherit all the money direct, the reader cannot help supposing the latter to be the case, i.e. that the letter was written by Leonora or by Dowell or by both. The letter would only have to suggest that Florence had been having a series of affairs, one of which was with Edward Ashburnham, for the two puritanical old biddies in Connecticut to want to close the whole upsetting affair with the minimum of fuss. Dowell, ironic as usual, notes: On the other hand, by a kink that I could not at the time understand, Miss Hurlbird insisted that I ought to keep all the money to myself. (p. 179) But then that ‘kink’ had been put there by Leonora, or by Dowell himself. That ‘kink’ was the evidence of the letter sent by Leonora. But it is inconceivable that Florence should ever have written a letter denouncing her own behaviour to her aunts. So someone else must have done it for her. But by now Dowell is growing very careless and begins to strew the text with supplements, not all of which an attentive reader could miss. Mr Hurlbird, the uncle, for instance, though he had his factory in Waterbury, Connecticut, leaves ‘all his property to Florence with the mere request that she would have erected to him in the city of Waterbury, Ill., a memorial that should take the form of some sort of institution for the relief of sufferers from the heart’ (p. 179). Since he had spent his working life in Waterbury, Connecticut, this is an odd mistake to make in a will— especially as there exists no Waterbury in Illinois. This geographical blind alley may explain the disorientation of the two Misses Hurlbird, who decide that ‘no memorial to their names should be erected in the city of Waterbury, Conn.’ (p. 181). Since they had not been asked to do this in the first place, the desperation and confusion of the two old ladies is generated in the text by this slide of signifiers. All they want is to have done with the whole scandalous affair, and that is no doubt why it occurs to them that the best way out would be to let Dowell inherit the whole amount of money himself. Dowell of course notes this decision (which he has been so busy in promoting) with innocent surprise. ‘I did not want money at all badly’ (p. 180). CONCLUSION: THE REPRESSED I have contended that The Good Soldier is an elaborate attempt to persuade the reader that the novel is more naïve and more self-deceived than in fact it is. I perceive it as a novel fully aware of itself. And in that case, what it represses must be taken seriously. Here is a novel which is subtitled ‘A Tale of Passion’. Here again, readerly tradition makes no objections. Presumably, most people close the book without ever glancing at the front cover again. But supose this were ‘A Tale of Passion’—whose passion would it be, and what kind of passion would be at issue? The book does not describe, even remotely, the heated sensual intercourse of four lovers, or even of any two of them. In fact, the book is formal, cool, even frigid. It insists upon the conventional at every point. Appearing as it did in Blast, it must have seemed as if Lewis and Pound had made a complete mistake about the genre of ‘The Saddest Story’. Its very conventionality must have argued against its inclusion in that first puce-covered volume. And yet, Lewis and Pound must have seen how much its appearance militates against its artistic reality.

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Without arguing that Freud had been influential on Ford, without arguing that Ford was trying to outdo Freud at his own game, without arguing, in fact, that Ford had ever read Freud, I would argue that the Freudian activities of the censorship are fully at work in the discourse of Dowell. This may be Ford’s joke, to set a distance between what he, as novelist, knows, and what his unhappy creation is forced to dissimulate. Be that as it may, whenever Dowell comes to write of Leonora, he is immediately defensive, circumspect, wary. In most cases, it would seem as if his desire for Leonora is always subject to a textual displacement, of some sort or another: I loved Leonora always and, today, I would very cheerfully lay down my life, what is left of it, in her service. But I am sure I never had the beginnings of a trace of what is called the sex instinct towards her. And I suppose—no I am certain that she never had it towards me. As far as I am concerned I think it was those white shoulders that did it… (p. 36) This and the succeeding passage need to be read in their entirety, to show how deeply obsessed Dowell is with Leonora’s body, indeed her very sexual being in the world. His description of her, at this ‘first’ meeting at Nauheim (pp. 36–7) is bathed in a kind of displaced sensuality that leads even the half-awake reader to feel that, in this description, there is a commitment, an involvement, an investment, that is never found elsewhere in the novel. Dowell literally ‘gives himself away’. It is clear from this passage that he is besotted with Leonora. His selecting of her wrist, for instance, looks like a straight Freudian fetishization: Certain women’s lines guide your eyes to their necks, their eyelashes, their lips, their breasts. But Leonora’s seemed to conduct your gaze always to her wrist. And the wrist was at its best in a black or a dog-skin glove and there was always a gold circlet with a little chain supporting a very small golden key to a dispatch box. Perhaps it was that in which she locked up her heart and feelings. (p. 36) Incomplete development of the sexual aim can lead to fixated desire, to desire for abnormal, partial, or displaced objects. One part of the body will stand in synecdochically for the whole possible relationship. Dowell’s selecting of Leonora’s wrist as her best feature seems to be such a partial perception of her. The transition through the glove, the little chain, the golden key and the implied dispatch box show the fetishistic gaze at work. When we remember that the most dramatic, the most passionate, the most erotic scene in the novel (when Leonora pulls Dowell out of the Protest Charter room at the Castle of M—) also depends for its effect upon the device of the wrist, this connection across the text cannot fail, if we read with Freud, to be illuminating: And she laid one finger upon Captain Ashburnham’s wrist. (p. 46) I was horribly frightened and then I discovered that the pain in my left wrist was caused by Leonora’s clutching it: ‘I can’t stand this,’ she said with a most extraordinary passion: ‘I must get out of this.’ (p. 47) There is the link, right in the text, to the concept of ‘passion’, which seems to be so missing from this whole Dowellian rigmarole. There is ‘no reason’ for Leonora to feel an ‘extraordinary passion’ at Florence’s gentle gesture. There is ‘no reason’ for her sudden panic, for her intense claustrophobia. The ‘uncanny’ effect of the text here is generated by this disproportion between what is cause and what is caused. But the dialogue between Leonora and Dowell, in the sunshine outside the gloomy chamber where Florence is holding her lecture on the moral virtues of Protestantism, is passionate, intimate, and (if one looks away from the red herring which ‘religion’ is made to be in this context) implies a deep, continuous, and intimate relationship which is already well established. Indeed, to recur for a moment to the ‘parallel time schemes’ of 4 August 1904, it is quite impossible that a dialogue so intense and so mature should have taken place on the very first day that the couples knew each other. The dialogue at pp. 47–8 (which is continued at p. 66 and continued again from pp. 172ff) is full of knowledges which the couple already share: ‘Don’t you see?’ she said, ‘don’t you see what’s going on?’… ‘No! What’s the matter? Whatever’s the matter?… ‘Don’t you see that that’s the cause of the whole miserable affair…’ ‘Do accept the situation… ‘Oh, I accept the situation,’ she said at last, ‘if you can’…(pp. 47 and 66) I have ‘excerpted’ the questions which I take to imply an anterior, and an intimate, knowledge. To speak in that tone, to someone you have only just met and hardly know, would not be possible. Leonora is referring to a whole network of shared assumptions and knowledges, possibly also plots and plans, which she and Dowell share. Dowell, who is obviously deeply in love with her, is afraid that she is going to say something which will threaten their relationship, or throw into jeopardy their

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plans. And with all her wild talk, about religion, eternal damnation, and the intuition that Florence and Ashburnham are going to fall in love with each other, Leonora seems to be speaking, too, in an agreed context of reference. If Florence and Ashburnham really are going to fall in love, then, there’s a great danger involved for Dowell and Leonora. She all but says so. Dowell reads her meaning without her having to spell it out. They are both silent in horror in front of…what? Reading now in the shadow and tradition of Henry James, I would propose that they are silent in horror in front of the possibility that Dowell, who has married Florence for her money, thinking her to be ill, realizes that Florence might suddenly transfer her affections to Edward Ashburnham, and thus ruin the entire point of the enterprise. These passages of half-spoken, half-muttered dialogue between the two plotters outside the castle of M—represent, no doubt, Ford’s technique of progression d’effet at its most brilliant. The onward rush of events pushes the reader’s attention inevitably forward, such that he cannot stop to examine the precise meaning of any detail in the text. But the general overall impression is that of the ‘uncanny’. That, in its turn, is derived, I think, from the disproportion between what appears to be going on (at the surface level of the conversation) and what is really going on (at the level of implication). Ford, however, deliberately occluding any clue that might give the reader any help, encumbers him with disinformation on the general theme of religion, and refuses to give him any help at all to decide what the two are actually talking about. It is at least highly possible that Leonora and Dowell are old friends and lovers. It may well be that they knew each other long before they each married their respective partners. It may be that their affair was a long-standing one, and it is not inconceivable that Nancy Rufford, whom Dowell always refers to as ‘the girl’, is their daughter. Her actual birth is never explained, nor is she given an origin socially. From about her twelfth year, she lived at Branshaw Teleragh, under the loving care of Leonora and Edward Ashburnham. The first twelve years or so of her life, though, were spent in the brutal rowdy atmosphere of the Ruffords’ home. The transition was made when, in her early teens, Nancy was moved to a convent school quite unexpectedly. Leonora visits her at the convent, and tells her that her mother, Mrs Rufford, is dead. Nancy is then moved to the safe haven of Branshaw Teleragh (p. 119). One could conceive this as being a well-executed manoeuvre on Leonora’s part. Her daughter is brought up well out of the way until her mother can take her back, and all social scandal is avoided. If this line of thought has any value, it would be her own mother, Leonora, who brought up their daughter, under the protective wing of Edward Ashburnham. Nancy Rufford was her name: she was Leonora’s only friend’s only child, and Leonora was her guardian, if that is the correct term. (p. 90) Who, then, was ‘Leonora’s only friend’? Surely it has to be Dowell himself? True, there is a passing comment on page 118 that ‘Mrs Rufford was Leonora’s dearest friend’, but considering who Mrs Rufford was, that seems so unlikely as to be outright prevarication. Mrs Rufford is a drunkard and a whore, a person whom Leonora would never have met in any social context at any time. It could well be, though, that living in straitened circumstances with the violent and ruffianly Major Rufford, she was happy enough to bring Nancy up in her care for the first few years of her life, for a fee. Dowell refers here and there to the ‘terrible lunches of her childhood’ (p. 121) and they must surely have been during the first ten to twelve years of her life, when Nancy was living under Mrs Rufford’s care. Major and Mrs Rufford spent all their time in rowdy quarrels, and he once struck her to the ground during one of these quarrels, leaving her unconscious for three days (p. 118). That Mrs Rufford could ever have been the sheltered and puritanical Leonora’s ‘dearest friend’ amounts to an impossibility in the end. There is also the slight catch in that phrase, ‘guardian, if that is the correct term’. No doubt, ‘mother’ would be more accurate. And the affection which Nancy shows towards Dowell himself is that of a daughter: …I watched her gradually growing. She always even kissed me, night and morning, until she was about eighteen. And she would skip about and fetch me things and laugh at my tales of life in Philadelphia. (p. 119) There is even a moment where, by the use of a pair of marked anacoluthons, Dowell gives himself right away: And to think that that vivid white thing, that saintly and swan-like being—to think that…Why, she was like the sail of a ship, so white and so definite in her movements. And to think that she will never… Why, she will never do anything again. I can’t believe it…(p. 120) The invitation to the reader is direct. He is asked to supply his own terminations to the two reveries. The first should end: ‘she is my daughter’, and the second should end: ‘know and never be told’. There is only one technical hitch to this theory, and that is, that upon hearing of the death of his wife Florence, it appears that I addressed to her [i.e. Leonora] that singular remark:

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‘Now I can marry the girl.’ (p. 103) The remark in that context is more or less meaningless. Either it shows quite unusual callousness on hearing of the death of his wife, or else it shows lecherous thoughts which should have been suppressed. But since it is directed to Leonora, that remark, it seems to be all right. Leonora takes no exception to it. Indeed, it is not even sure that Dowell ever said it. On page 103 we have ‘it appears that I addressed to her that singular remark’, but the text then swings back to page 99: The odd thing is that what sticks out in my recollection of the rest of the evening was Leonora’s saying: ‘Of course you might marry her’, and when I asked whom, she answered: ‘The girl’. Now that is to me a very amazing thing—amazing for the light of possibilities that it casts into the human heart. For I had never had the slightest conscious idea of marrying the girl; I never had the slightest idea even of caring for her. I must have talked in an odd way, as people do who are recovering from an anaesthetic. It was as if one had a dual personality, the one I being entirely unconscious of the other. I had thought nothing; I had said such an extraordinary thing. (p. 99) Here is another point from which this extraordinary Modernist novel could have branched out. For the mastery of Freud’s basic premisses is unerring, and fed so naturally into the text that there is not even an inverted comma round the ‘I’. What is obviously at issue in this play of the ‘I’ and the ‘I’, is the sudden release of a deep tension in Dowell, one that has oppressed him ever since he married Florence. Florence’s death means that he is now free to be with his daughter again. The word ‘marry’ is a distinct red herring. The alert reader, who has been entertaining all along the conceptual possibility that Nancy Rufford is indeed Dowell’s daughter, will be thrown right off course by the single use of this word ‘marry’. ‘Ah well, if Dowell can think of marrying Nancy, then she cannot be his daughter after all.’ A reverse turn of the screw in the duplicitous narrator’s technique! It is Dowell who goes out to Ceylon, and brings back the demented Nancy to England. It is Dowell who installs her in his house, Branshaw Teleragh. It is Dowell who looks after his sick child. If this line of thought has any validity, then Leonora is the mother of Nancy Rufford. The plan may have been, as in the last novel of Henry James, that Leonora and Dowell should re-marry later, when Branshaw Teleragh and the Hurlbird fortune were safely in their pockets. If this is so, this would substitute a far more coherent system of forces and interrelationships in the novel than the one that is officially there. The affair between Florence and Ashburnham, for which there is no evidence in the novel, would finally become overtly what it is: a decoy, a blind. And then the real lines of force in the novel appear. It would explain, too, the system of displaced clues about 4 August 1904 and the death of Maisie Maidan. Maisie’s death may have been necessary to their plan. Florence’s certainly was. And it is impossible to find out from the text of the novel when or how Ashburnham himself died. it is asserted—of course—that he too committed suicide. The difficulty there is to imagine a military man of such distinction, an officer and a gentleman, doing so with ‘a small pen-knife’ (p. 229). It is also surprising that Dowell should leave him alone to carry out his act, in the full awareness that he was about to commit suicide. All that we do know is that Dowell was with Ashburnham in the stables, and then that Ashburnham was found dead. The only problem then would be, why, after Florence and Edward are dead, does Leonora not marry Dowell, but instead the puny and insignificant Rodney Bayham? I think this may be the last turn of the screw in an extremely sophisticated novel. Something had obviously gone wrong. Edward Ashburnham’s death, Nancy’s ‘madness’ and repatriation, Dowell’s incumbency at Branshaw Teleragh—all of these may have added up to a situation where the original fine ardour between Leonora and Dowell had cooled, or where one of them had found the carrying-through of the complete plan too morally exhausting. If so, it would appear to be Leonora who opted out. There is a certain Macbeth-like quality in the autumnal reflections of the new owner of Branshaw Teleragh, as if it has all cost too much, to achieve and to own. The achieving of it somehow fails to satisfy. He resigns himself to loneliness and reflection, locked up in the lonely house with his mad daughter, while his long-time lover finds it easier to live with someone quite foreign to the whole plot, and live elsewhere. If this is correct, it would explain something of the eerie overtones of the exchange on the sunlit terraces at the castle of M —, as Dowell and Leonora exchange their enigmatic comments on the situation up in the room of the great Debate. ‘Do accept the situation…’ ‘Oh, I accept the situation,’ she said at last, ‘if you can.’ (p. 66) In the long run, he could accept the situation, and she couldn’t. The price had been too high. And thus the original title takes on its authentic meaning. It is indeed ‘the saddest story’. University of Nottingham

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NOTES 1 Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media, The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), Chapter 4. 2 R.S.Crane, ‘The Houyhnhnmns, the Yahoos and the history of ideas’, in J.A. Mazzeo (ed.), Reason and Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962). 3 Stanley Fish, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 137. 4 ibid., p. 170. 5 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 21. 6 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 140. 7 The term is mine, though if one consults Julia Kristeva’s essay ‘La Productivité dite texte’ in Semiotike, Recherches pour une Sémanalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969, p. 208ff), one can well see that a fauxsemblance would fall well within the bounds of what Kristeva conceives of as a power of the vraisemblable (dite texte). See especially pp. 211–16. 8 Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (Harmondsworth: Penguin Modern Classics, 1972), pp. 15–16. All subsequent references are to this edition. 9 In this dénouement, the reference is surely to the ending of The Wings of the Dove, when Merton Densher, alienated by the very success of his plot with Kate Croy to deceive Milly, refuses the fruits of it, and with those, his intended marriage to Kate.

Short cuts through the Long Revolution: the Russian avant-garde and the modernization of language KEN HIRSCHKOP

Language, we are told by Saussure, is first and foremost a social fact, indeed, it is a form of society, and we are all too familiar with the kind of society we find in Saussure. Familiar, not only because we may have read the Course in General Linguistics more times than we would care to admit, or because the concept of langue has passed into the common parlance (if you’ll pardon the irony) of cultural analysis, but because this kind of society is one that seems to surround us in our daily existence. It is, we know, rule-governed and yet at the same time arbitrary, one which admits a free choice which none the less seems insignificant from the perspective of the whole. Saussure will claim that language ‘offers the most striking proof’ that ‘a law accepted by a collectivity is a thing to which one submits and not a rule freely consented to’,1 and one can think of no better description of a bureaucratized liberal society. Yet it also a society, which, we are assured, is the result of some sort of contract: it is somehow our society, though we can never quite recall when we agreed to it; it was, at any rate, a very long time ago. There is another way to describe this strange collective, one with a more familiar ring for cultural analysis, that is, as a social tradition. Now, of course, this sounds like a very odd way to describe langue, for as we know, it is defined as a simultaneous cross-section of linguistic activity, representing the state of language at a particular moment in time. Langue has the quality of absolute contemporaneity, indeed, it is defined by the coexistence of its elements. From this it ought to follow that the past, which is, after all, where traditions are supposed to come from (though it’s not always the case), is irrelevant to language as such. And Saussure agrees: langue breaks with the past with as much vehemence as any avant-gardist. But the power of this language, the force of its dull compulsion ‘feels’ traditional, even if it lacks the necessary pedigree. As Saussure puts it, ‘It is because the linguistic sign is arbitrary that it knows no other law than that of tradition, and because it is founded upon tradition that it can be arbitrary’.2 Which is to say that one can never provide reasons for speaking this way rather than that, but be content with the admission that ‘we always speak like that’. Langue is constrained by a curious kind of normativity, a bizarre combination of the pure formality of bureaucratic rules and traditionalist hostility to rational argument. One thing, though, is clear enough: it is a dead weight we all must carry, simply to participate in the society of language. This image of society is a crucial ingredient of ‘modernism’ and the source of some of its most important ambiguities. To emphasize the primacy of collectively defined processes was not, as people were to discover even in the 1920s, a necessarily progressive move. And yet to begin an argument about the shape and nature of a collective is at once to engage in political argument, and more specifically socialist and Marxist argument. So it should come as no surprise that an element within the Soviet Left regarded Saussure’s linguistic theory as a decisive advance over the Neo-Grammarian and expressivist doctrines which preceded it. In defining langue as a social fact, Saussure seemed to speak their language, and to provide them with the tools they needed to develop a strategy for linguistic revolution in the Soviet Union. The movement of Saussure’s theory into Russia and Czechoslovakia is a fairly well known story, but it’s often been related in a somewhat misleading way. What we are generally most familiar with is the use made of Saussure by the members of the Moscow Linguistic Circle, in particular Roman Jakobson. This line of work leads to a very sophisticated form of linguistic cultural criticism, which is known to us as part of Russian Formalism. However, interest in Saussure was not limited to this audience, and his theory provided the foundation for a much more explicitly Left kind of analysis, associated with the Futurist and Constructivist movements in art and poetry, and with the journal LEF in particular. In what follows I will discuss some work by the principal language theorists of LEF, Grigory Vinokur and Boris Arvatov, whose articles appeared in that journal in 1923 and 1924. What is particularly important for our purposes is that these writers took Saussure’s model of collective linguistic life as a strategic guide for what Vinokur was to christen ‘the culture of language’, the conscious development and extension of linguistic resources in the Soviet Union. We are used to the idea that human needs are linguistically defined or mediated, but Vinokur made this now very easy assertion more complex, by insisting that there exists a category of linguistic needs as well, which could be satisfied to a greater or lesser degree. Saussure probably looks like an unlikely, maybe inappropriate, ally in this project. After all, the collective life he described doesn’t sound a great deal like what we hoped socialism would be about. But more to the point, the Course is overwhelmingly hostile to any kind of conscious linguistic intervention (Think, for instance of Saussure’s condemnation of folk etymology.)3 To Vinokur’s credit he at once posed this central question: The question of the possibility of linguistic politics can be reduced, in essence, to the question of the possibility of the conscious, organizing

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influence of a society on language.’4 Now even Saussure recognized that people tried to influence the form of language, and if you were looking for a model of conscious linguistic influence there were plenty about. And though at the beginning Vinokur and Arvatov select Russian Futurist poetry as the necessary form of this intervention, Vinokur’s work very swiftly broadens out into something besides a justification of avant-garde practice, becoming a ‘stylistics of the everyday’. In 1923 his attention is focused on the poetic avant-garde, but in 1924 he will look around for a new exemplar of conscious linguistic politics; his glance will pass over Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov and the rest of the avant-garde and settle, as Benjamin’s will ten years later, on the newspaper. It is on this transformation that I will focus. The extreme difficulties of a ‘culture of language’ can be gauged from the task which faced the avant-garde theoreticians and poets grouped around LEF. For in a country with an illiteracy rate of 80–90 per cent, you could not, as Vinokur observed, take some popular layer of speech as your initial material, in the way that Pushkin could shape his cultural project around the conversational language of the new educated stratum in Russian society. The awkward alternative was to create a kind of language which, though it was produced by individuals, and was distant from any existing social speech, was somehow collective in its form or its effects. There were, naturally enough, attempts at genuinely collective production, as in poems written by anonymous groups, but in the majority of cases the avant-garde justified its political claims by reference to a collectivism of style or genre. This kind of justification is in fact the norm, even today, although the positive terms of reference have changed, so that works are applauded for the radicalism or subversiveness, rather than the collectivism, of their style. You can see very easily how Saussure might be relevant to this argument, for he would appear to provide criteria by which one could distinguish aspects of poetic creation pertaining to langue (language as social bond or collective institution) from those aspects pertaining to parole (the individual and contingent side of language). In articles for the early issues of LEF, later revised for the book entitled The Culture of Language, Vinokur relies heavily on this distinction in order to describe the ‘social’ content of avant-garde poetry. He begins by analysing just what would constitute a successful intervention in language, and immediately dismisses an obvious, if odious candidate, the repression exercised by the Tsarist bureaucracy, who forbade the use of various existing languages in the Russian Empire. Though in one sense a very effective action, it is excluded because it bears on parole rather than langue: These political measures in the field of language do not, in essence, touch on language as such: not only because the initiators of these measures set themselves non-linguistic goals (which is inevitable), but also because the prescriptions in this case relate not to language but to people: they are ‘Don’t speak Chuvash’ or ‘Speak Russian’.5 Such decrees have to do with speaking (parole) rather than linguistic structures. This might seem an odd, even naïve exclusion. Yet it has the virtue of emphasizing that the culture of language Vinokur envisages will consist of the directed growth of language from strictly linguistic resources: ‘linguistic politics’, he argues, ‘must be realized by strictly linguistic methods, not fists or cudgels’.6 But what will distinguish these linguistic methods? We know that in Saussure’s Course the basic unit of language is the sign, defined lexically and grammatically, and therefore true linguistic change must take the form of alterations in the lexical or grammatical structure of a language. From this Vinokur was able to extract a quite remarkable rationalization for avant-garde poetic practice, a practice which often stressed the extreme deformation of the syntactic, grammatical and lexical patterns of received poetic and practical speech, sometimes leading to sound poems with no meaning in the usual sense whatsoever. This activity was now justified as laboratory work on language, the generation of new linguistic structures with a potential for public use. The entire LEF group adopted this position, going so far as to devise a laboratory work plan, described in a manifesto, ‘Our verbal work’, in the first issue of LEF: We do not wish to acknowledge a distinction between poetry, prose and practical language. We recognize only the unified material of discourse and treat it to a contemporary reworking. We work on the organization of the sounds of the language, on the polyphony of rhythm, on the simplification of verbal constructions, on the specification of linguistic expression, and on the articulation of new thematic devices. All this work for us is not an aesthetic end in itself, but a laboratory for the best expression of the facts of contemporaneity. We are not priest-creators, but master-fulfillers of the social demand. The practice printed in LEF is not ‘absolute artistic revelations’, but only examples of our current work. Aseev—experiments with verbal flight into the future. Kamensky—play with the word in all its sonority. Kruchenykh—experiments with the use of the phonetics of jargon for the formation of anti-religious and political themes. Pasternak—application of a dynamic syntax to revolutionary tasks. Tretyakov—experiments with march construction for organizing revolutionary spontaneity.

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Khlebnikov—the attainment of maximal expressiveness with conversational language, purged of any kind of poeticity. And so forth.7 It appears that the paradox of the avant-garde was to be solved by redefining their task as a merely technical one, requiring either expert craftsmen, laboratory scientists or linguistic engineers, an ambiguity which implies they’re not really sure just what kind of labour this so-called cultural work is. I am not going to try to judge the success of this laboratory work, partly because it is difficult to estimate the sincerity with which everyone embarked on this project. But one can see how a linguistic theory which is notable for its silence on semantics can make the project appear feasible in its own terms. Because the value of a linguistic sign is a function of its place in a language system, not a function of its relation to extra-linguistic needs and processes, changes in values will have little to do with changes in ideology, but will be the end result of grammatical, morphological and phonological innovation. Vinokur put the case in its most rigorous form, and I would like first to outline his argument as it appears in 1923. At the outset he describes this Futurist project as the development of a language for the ‘tongue-less street’, as Mayakovsky called it, and this requires, he argues, not only organization, but also linguistic invention, the creation of new words. In itself, this might seem unremarkable, but Vinokur will take for his test case not words coined for obvious ideological purposes but the ‘transrational’ verse, the zaum of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh. These verses, composed of ‘meaningless’ words, seem to be the most uncollective exercises imaginable, yet Vinokur justifies the description of them as collective ‘in form’ by referring to the process by which these nonsense words are concocted: ‘I note’, he says, that for the linguist the most characteristic and important feature of Futurist word creation is that, in the final analysis, it is grammatical rather than lexicological…. The actual creation of language is not a matter of inventing neologisms but of the unusual application of suffixes, not extraordinary names but an organization of words which develops according to its own laws.8 The most graphic and best-known example of the kind of poetry he refers to is Khlebnikov’s notorious ‘Incantation by Laughter’ in which the root of the words ‘to laugh/laughter’ is combined, seemingly endlessly, with a variety of existing suffixes. The line of argument indicates Vinokur’s debt to Saussure, for from the perspective of the latter, it would be a useless exercise to invent words from scratch: such words, not partaking of the existing conventions which determine what one can say, would be unrecognizable, and so could not effectively signify. Pure neologisms would have the same status as words introduced from a completely unrelated language. Of course, given the initial division in Saussure’s system between the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of language, between linguistic structure and linguistic change, it would seem that any conscious invention of new material is ruled out in principle. Yet Saussure did leave one door open, in the chapter of the Course devoted to analogy. There he argues that all linguistic systems have, as an inner dynamic, a tendency to regularize and unify their inflectional patterns.9 Thus certain linguistic changes can legitimately be said to be motivated from within the linguistic system, as for instance when an anomalous pattern of inflection such as the use of ‘kine’ for the plural of ‘cow’, is brought into line by the generation of the more conventional form of plural, which in this case would give you the word ‘cows’. To admit that the very structure of langue might include a pressure for change in a particular direction would threaten the carefully erected division between langue and parole, system and history, and Saussure accordingly put out various disclaimers. Yet the door was open none the less, and Vinokur walked straight in. Futurist word-creation, he was able to argue, was social because it worked by grammatical analogy, generating new forms from the existing structure of language. This is what endows the word creation of Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky with an aura of sense: you can see what is happening, even if the results are meaningless. So pure lexical invention would be individualistic, but grammatical word creation is collective in its form. And if someone were to argue that the pleasure taken in this kind of nonsense was elitist or aristocratic, and that its ultimate product was an anti-popular poetic language, as Bakhtin was to argue eleven years later, Vinokur would have an ingenious rejoinder. For an even more extreme form of zaum, one which deals with words utterly unrelated to Russian morphology, can be located in the use of exotic transliterated words for the names of Russian films and commodities. Zaum here becomes a social fact, simply because these words quickly enter into popular social usage. Cigarettes named ‘Java’, ‘Kappa’ or ‘Zephyr’, films called ‘Coliseum’ or ‘Union’, drinks called ‘Triple Sec’ and ‘Cointreau’, it’s all too much for Vinokur: as far as he is concerned, such words, completely incomprehensible from the perspective of Russian linguistic structure, are inventions far more bizarre than Khlebnikov’s odd grammatical extravagance.10 In so far as such commodity names merely designate, without telling you anything about the product, they could as well be replaced by zaumny words. To confront Saussurean theory with the linguistic facts of advertising is itself provocative, but their juxtaposition with the products of avant-garde poetry suggests that there is a realm of modern discourse beyond the bounds of the language world of Saussure. In the present case, the comparison might also tell us something important about this ‘brand’, if you’ll pardon the

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expression, of avant-gardism. What happens when the difference between signifieds is not conceptual, but a mere function of another kind of difference, the process of product differentiation in a commodity market? Lacking any conceptual import, exotic signifiers like ‘Java’ and ‘Zephyr’ instead accrue some kind of quasi-aesthetic force, and this justifies their comparison with the poetry of Khlebnikov. Both these phenomena are defined by Vinokur as ‘purely nominative’, and the description of them as forms of pure naming implies that they occupy a linguistic world of which Saussure was unaware.11 Suddenly, the repetitive and compulsive world of langue is faced with something different from itself, different but still, perhaps, linguistic. This convergence of commodity names and zaumny poetry is a symptom of a deep tension in the Russian avant-garde project: the avant-garde must draw their resources from a collective social life, which, however, they regard as stifling, philistine, and automatized. One strategic option, exercised by many at the time, and many more in the nineteenth century, is to turn one’s face away from urban collective life altogether, and invest your revolutionary hopes in the peasantry. Another is to make distinctions between a good and a bad collective life which somehow coexist in one society. This is the argument Boris Arvatov develops, distinguishing between life itself and ‘everyday life’, which has a specific translation in Russian: As long as life [zhizn] is disorganized, everyday life [byt] fossilizes into a routinized skeleton of unconscious custom, and art will be forced to go beyond this routine, and so it becomes an act which violates the routine. But to the degree that practical reality becomes socially organized, and so becomes something eternally changing and fluid, violating routine by itself, art becomes part of practical life.12 This would support Vinokur’s contention that all that lies outside the system of langue is the pure nominative violation of zaum and the commodity. For the implication is of deeper social processes functioning anarchically, beneath a lived everyday world, the repetitive structure of which ensures that the more profound, genuine collective process, the one, as it were, invested with meaning and value, can only surface in bizarre, seemingly irrational and unsystematic forms. That is, instead of appealing to peasant life as a source of alternative values, one can forget about people altogether and look to the economy, ‘production’, the machine, for revolutionary values. Too much is well known about the cult of industry and industrial work, the economism in socialist theory, and the adoption of some of the worst capitalist ideologies, to make it worthwhile for me to say much more about it, except to note that as aesthetic ideologies, constructivism and productivism were storming the field at the very start of the 1920s, well before the economism we associate with Stalin. But the rationalization and collectivization of the aesthetic process, modelled on these productivist beliefs, led to strange results: works and values with no obvious relevance to the social life of a modern society, works which, as a consequence of their being so impressively organized, seemed wholly different from any known social and collective process. The ‘productivist’ approach to poetry defined the collective aspect of language as its ‘mechanism’ or structure, and based on this knowledge, made a conscious intervention. But rather than a work obviously appropriate to the modern social life of the Soviet Union, all one ended up with was the endless spinning out of meaningless forms. Yet this was a very successful and fruitful ideology aesthetically, which indicates, among other things, that the theory only imperfectly described the practice. What is crucial is that the productive process of language was defined in such a way that its rationalization or intensification seemed to lead one away from the everyday speech world, into a world which was much more interesting. The endless spinning out of meaningless forms sounds like a recipe for bad poetry, but imagine living that way, and you have an idea of the Russian bourgeois life against which the avant-garde was reacting. Franco Moretti, in his recently translated The Way of the World, describes the construction of an interesting, challenging yet satisfying sphere of ‘everyday life’ as a central ideological project for the European nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.13 It is a project which barely gets off the ground in Russia and then fails, rather spectacularly, from Gogol to Chekhov. Byt, Russian for everyday life, connotes tedium, coarseness, and aimlessness; the seriousness of the problem can be gauged from the fact that byt is the root for the word bytie, which means existence as such. All of which suggests a modest hypothesis: that ‘production’ in Russia’s twentieth century fills the space which should have been occupied by ‘everyday life’ in the nineteenth; it becomes the typical ideology of modernization in a country which lacks such an ideology before the Revolution. What of this paradox, then, that what is advertised in the ideology of the Russian avant-garde as a completely mechanistic process should lead, not to the automatic and repetitive, but to the new and remarkable? In 1917 Shklovsky declares that it is the aesthetic value of the device which sets art off from the practical world, but by the 1920s the Russian Formalists are forced to retreat, and admit that all language, poetic and practical, has laws, devices, and technical form. This leaves them with a new problem: why is this form only interesting, or attention-catching, in a select group of works? Vinokur is stuck with the same problem, which he translates into the language of Saussurean linguistics. It may well be that all linguistic values are produced in the same way. But some of these, Vinokur observes, are like old coins withdrawn from circulation: no matter what their nominal value, we still don’t want to be stuck with them. But something interesting happens to Vinokur between 1923 and 1924, for when he revises his article on the Futurists for inclusion in The Culture of Language, he rejects the earlier position almost entirely and, though still endorsing Saussure, interprets his theory in a radically different way.14 Again, he poses the crucial question of linguistic politics: can there be a

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conscious, organizing influence on language, and if so what will it look like? But this time rather than looking for a kind of language use which is consciously distant from practical speech, he looks for ‘a language system not distinguished from practical language by its function but at the same time conscious of it as a system’, a form of existing collective speech which consciously sets itself ‘stylistic tasks’ which imply ‘a set towards the organizing elements of language’.15 The system he alights on is extra-artistic literature, the journalistic, the scientific and the epistolary, and in particular the newspaper, all of which involve a careful evaluative selection of linguistic forms. It is as if, in the post-revolutionary period, Vinokur had suddenly discovered collectivism not in something below or beyond civil society but in cultural forms within civil society itself. I say ‘as if, because in a period such as the one we’re discussing, a time of particularly sharp polemic and cultural struggle, there could be many other reasons, less convenient for my argument, for this very marked shift. The practice of Futurist word creation is now summarily dismissed, as something of interest only to the linguist. If in the earlier article Vinokur seemed to describe how a perfectly rational method of linguistic variation could lead to extraordinary results, this time he describes the same method as an extravagance leading to practically nothing of use. He still recognizes that the Futurists, unlike other writers, seek to go beyond stylistic invention, mere parole, to attack the very structure of language, the lexis itself. But to motivate lexical invention grammatically is, in his new perspective, exactly the wrong way to go about it. ‘In practice’, Vinokur observes, this lexicological invention, as it would have been possible to foresee, remained, as was inevitable, within the bounds of the linguistic traditon: the lexis is renewed by the Futurists only through the existing grammar, ‘new words’ are created in the ordinary way, although to a broad and unjustifiable extent, often by an applied neological method, that is, by means of the application of existing grammatical categories (suffixes and the like) to inappropriate existing roots.16 To look to grammar for tools would now seem to be a gross ‘productivist’ error: it results in a mechanical permutation which leaves the original terms unchanged. Progress is no longer equated with the rationalization of the linguistic system (analogy, as a structural force for linguistic change, worked to iron out anomalies which were the result of non-systematic, extralinguistic forces, and so maintained a rationalized linguistic system). Now rationalization by analogy is interpreted as a process which strengthens the hold of already dominant grammatical forms and morphological divisions. In its place Vinokur hopes to discover processes which upset existing grammatical paradigms, creating new lexical units. And as you might expect, the emphasis on lexical, as opposed to grammatical change, carries with it the conviction that it is the need to establish certain semantic distinctions which is the social motivation for linguistic change. This change of tack entails a revaluation of what constitutes the peculiarly collective dimension of linguistic practice. When he discusses the ‘culture of language’ he now chooses to revise Saussure’s division of langue and parole, replacing it with a distinction between language in general and style. Style is defined as the dimension in which the basic structural materials of a language become cultural tools, adapted in varying contexts to a series of different functions. More importantly, the division between language and style no longer corresponds to the division between social and individual, but is closer to a division between the social in some deep-structural sense, and the social as a realm of differentiated speech practices. In other words, and this is the important point, language in general no longer provides peculiarly collective principles, which could be used as a guide for conscious linguistic intervention. For that one must go to ‘practical stylistics’ or what Vinokur called ‘a stylistics of the everyday’. What follows on this theoretical revision is a discussion of postrevolutionary linguistic change and in particular (this will seem very curious) the remarkable practice of ‘Soviet abbreviation’, that is, the naming of institutions by combining short forms of the original constituent words: so for example the Council of Popular Commissars, Soviet narodnykh kommissarrov becomes Sovnarkom, the State Publishing House, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, becomes Gosizdat, and so forth. The significance of this phenomenon for Vinokur is that what might appear like a simple grammatical process of morphological division and combination is in fact nothing of the sort. The new titles, and especially the abbreviated short forms, take on a life of their own, acquiring new shades of meaning, differentiating themselves from their root words and so forth. Perhaps the most graphic and telling example is the simple abbreviation for the New Economic Policy, NEP. For in the period of the policy itself, there comes to be a sharp semantic distinction between the full term, New Economic Policy, which is regarded with veneration in the press, and NEP, which comes to stand for every unfortunate consequence of that policy. (One could say a great deal more about that particular example, but leave it be.) Thus what Vinokur calls the ‘themes’, these abbreviated parts of speech, become ‘full signifying units’ as a consequence of their entering into common usage. The connection to the original word thus ceases to be grammatical and becomes semantic or lexical, and this, for Vinokur, is the critical moment of language change. No example could better represent the theoretical shift from the earlier position. Although the ‘themes’ appear to be formed and reformed according to established grammatical rules, their relation to the parent word ceases to be rule-governed, once the word becomes material for everyday use. Necessary processes of semantic differentiation lead the word astray, so that the meaning of recently minted abbreviations can no longer be traced from its grammatical contours. Vinokur will say that one

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can legitimately speak of (here’s one for the poststructuralists) ‘play’ in this case, for what happens is completely lawless from the perspective of usual grammatical practice.17 If grammatical regularity implies that a rationalized structure on the level of the signifier corresponds to a similar structure on the level of the signified, so that, for instance, the use of the suffix ‘s’ and pluralization are identical, then what seems like an unpredictable process of semantic change undermines this regularity, by either attributing a new meaning to what should have been an abbreviation (the example of ‘NEP’ becoming the bad sister of the New Economic Policy) or by inventing a new kind of signifier for what should have been a simple abbreviation (the example Vinokur uses is of the abbreviation of Narodny kommissariat [People’s Commissariat] which starts off life as Narkom but then changes to Narkomat to avoid confusion with similar abbreviations). This ‘play’ in relations between signifiers and signifieds is what maintains signs in that permanent state of arbitrariness Saussure described. It is what both allows for linguistic innovation and puts the success and stability of any particular innovation in doubt. And there is a certain danger, which I am not unaware of, that in describing this I will appear to be arguing that Vinokur was some kind of proto-poststructuralist, if a term like that even makes sense. Nothing could be further from my intention, for I believe what is significant is that this project can accept the fact of such linguistic ‘play’ without this leading to the kind of modernist resignation I referred to in the beginning of this paper. Contrary to the conclusions customarily drawn in our own time, for Vinokur all of this is evidence of the possibility of an active, conscious relation to the existing linguistic tradition. The reasons are twofold. The first concerns the division between langue and parole, reformulated, as I said earlier, as a division between language in general and style. According to Saussure’s division the freedom to innovate exists, but because it exists as a purely individual, subjective capability it is a very weak freedom: the option to put private inventions into a lottery, in the hope that they will be chosen by language and will remain unscathed. But Vinokur works from the assumption that speaking is not quite as individual and random as all that, that in fact, in modern, highly institutionalized societies, there exist cultural superstructures which organize their use of language for specific ends, and therefore treat language as something with an internal ordering. When he claims that our use of language is stylistic, he is telling us that an interpretation of the structure of language is, in fact, often built into our use of it in a very conscious and explicit way. And this makes the idea of conscious and effective linguistic innovations much more plausible, in so far as it implies that new usages may derive from a perception of the inadequacies of old structures, indeed, may have a very specific sense of just what needs to be done to remedy those inadequacies. And one should be very straight: these inadequacies are in the first instance semantic, which is why Vinokur can elevate the lexical over the grammatical so explicitly. The second reason bears on the nature of these stylistic superstructures. For what Vinokur is offering is not a metaphysical hypothesis about language per se, but an historical one about the structure of language in a society such as his. The process of ‘Soviet abbreviation’ which displaces the Futurists as the model of word-creation is not the consequence of individual acts of parole, but of a cultural initiative inspired largely by the Soviet press who, according to Vinokur, are responsible for roughly 90 per cent of these coinings. Not all parole comes from the same place, and it turns out that some utterances, however individual they are in their form, have a great deal more power than others. Not complete or definitive power of course, and thank God for that, given the newspapers we have to live with. But they are institutions which make it their business to produce ‘successful’ utterances and their relative effectiveness in this regard can’t be ignored. It is consistent with this that the other great institution of language Vinokur discusses is the school, the imperatives of which led to the description and definition of the structure of language in the first place. What, then, of avant-gardism and the long revolution? It is not just a convenient coincidence that Raymond Williams’s book, which announced the necessity of the latter, spent a great deal of its time talking about things like the press and the system of linguistic education. The Long Revolution proposed a definition of collectivism quite relevant to the Soviet avantgarde.18 The collectivist perspective of the avant-garde was flawed, but not because they believed that poetic work could serve the cause of cultural revolution. If you compare the ultimate destinies of the Soviet press and Soviet poetry, there is a very strong argument to be made that the poets were serving that cause far more effectively than the newspaper writers. But the belief that you could leap over civil society, that is, the place where words were being significantly fought over, and draw your guidance directly from the structure of language, however productive you felt that structure was, seems misleading at best. At worst, it could extend the initial errors of a productivist ideology, and produce a form of culture as meaningless and alienating as the labour process it sought to mimic. But this should not blind us to the virtues of these attempts to think through what were and are, at any rate, extraordinarily difficult problems. To wrest language away from ideologies of individual expressiveness and of natural evolution was an important move, and one for which Saussure provided essential support. To insist that language sets limits on the possibilities of expression and communication, and that these are social limits, maintained as conventions, is another important move. As many commentators have argued, Saussure made possible a clean break with certain ‘purist’ or moralizing doctrines, by insisting that in the last instance it is everyday communication which determines the structure of a shared language.19 Vinokur will put this insight to good use:

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I attempt not so much to protect the Russian language from any kind of ‘innovation’, which I realize is not always going to be pleasant, but to discern the meaning and content of these new forms and to look on them as on an ‘accomplished fact’, from the point of view of how new facts can be purposefully and rationally used.20 But to understand what our linguistic needs are, and thereby to determine which sorts of innovation are likely to prove successful in the somewhat unpredictable world of discourse, one must delve into the everyday life the avant-garde could not stomach. Such needs are needs not only for a rational language, or for a consistent grammar, but for a language adequate to the communicative purposes of culture and politics. The Soviet avant-garde understood this at one level, as one can see from both the continuing emphasis on the need for mass literacy, and their own prodigious efforts to bring poetry and formalized language out into the public square and the factory. But the theory seemed to lag behind, assuming that the populace really were the prisoners of the kind of tradition Saussure imagined. It is more likely that many of them treated the rules of langue as they would any other bureaucratic diktat; resigning themselves for the moment, but vowing to get their revenge. It is a revenge exercised in small ways all the time, and it ensures that language as it is remains vital and flexible. But we still await the final revenge, and perhaps from that point of view, the modernist moment in language is still our moment as well. University of Southampton NOTES 1 F.de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983), p. 71, translation slightly altered. 2 ibid., p. 74. 3 On Saussure’s hostility to ‘prescriptive interventions’ see Derek Attridge, ‘Language as history/history as language: Saussure and the romance of etymology’, in Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (eds), Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 195–9. 4 Grigory Vinokur, ‘O revolyutsionnoi fraseologii’ [On revolutionary phraseology], LEF, 2 (1923), p. 104. All citations from LEF have been translated from the photo-facsimile edition LEF I, ed. Karl Eimermacher (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1970). 5 ibid., pp. 105–6. 6 ibid., p. 106. 7 V.V.Mayakovsky and O.Brik, ‘Nasha slovesnaya rabota’, in LEF, 1 (1923), pp. 40–1. An English translation of the manifesto as ‘Our linguistic work’ is located in Russian Futurism through its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, ed. Anna Lawton, trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 202–3. 8 Vinokur, ‘Futuristy-stroitseli yazyka’ [The Futurists—constructors of language], LEF, 1 (1923), p. 208. 9 On the role and significance of ‘analogy’ in Saussure’s work see Roland Barthes, ‘Saussure, the sign, democracy’, in The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 151–6. 10 Vinokur, ‘Futuristy’, pp. 211–12. 11 ibid., p. 212. 12 Boris Arvatov, ‘Yazyk poeticheskii i yazyk prakticheskii’ (Poetic language and practical language], Pechat’ i Revolyutsiya, 7 (1923), p. 67. 13 The Way of the World, trans. Albert Sbragia (London: Verso, 1987), pp. 11, 32–8. 14 Discussing this change, R.M.Tseitlin cites Vinokur’s comments (from unpublished materials in his archive), that he ‘experienced a sharp disappointment with “Futurism and Formalism”, and that even in May 1924 he travelled to Leningrad ‘with the intention of “clarifying relations” with the Leningrad Formalist school’. See G.O.Vinokur (Moscow: Moskovskii universitet, 1965), p. 21. 15 Vinokur, Kul’tura yazyka: Ocherki po lingvisticheskoi tekhnologii [The Culture of Language: Notes on Linguistic Technology] (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniya, 1925), p. 25. 16 ibid., p. 192. 17 ibid., p. 65. 18 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto &; Windus, 1961), Part Two. 19 See for example the entry ‘Saussurianism’, in Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, trans. Catherine Porter (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp. 14–19. 20 Vinokur, Kul’tura yazyka, p. 5.

Farewell to the avant-gardes: some notes towards the definition of a counterculture ANDREW LAWSON

The question was never whether the avant-garde would outlive its usefulness but when. When would it begin to stare back at us like some sentimental momument to an earlier culture? And then, what, if any, course of action could be taken from that moment; for looming just beyond this realization was a fitful paradox: how to eclipse the old ‘other’ with a new ‘other’ without leaving the impression that an avant-garde was taking form, again. Proposals and counterproposals imagining this eclipse were offered from all directions in a debate over whether heroic surgery was needed to spare modernism’s continuity and the sacrosanctity of originality, or if it would be more humane simply to remove the heart of the avant-garde. The urgency of the need to decide this question ran swift like an undertow during those years, lending them the distinct feeling of being somewhere in between. Ronald Jones, ‘Hover culture’, artscribe 70 (Summer 1988) While in the third term, faced with mounting evidence that despite everything the nation appeared to remain stubbornly resistant to the values of untrammelled enterprise and increasing inequality—that having lost the economic and political argument the Left still retained positions on the moral highground—she declared war on the culture. David Edgar, Marxism Today (May 1989) The space where several lacks overlap is, at first sight, unpropitious for any theoretical perspective on the current set of confusions, valedictions and euphoric disavowals concerning the concept of avant-gardism. It is tempting to bracket the term ‘avant-garde’ and substitute ‘radical’ or even to abandon the commitment to specific forms and put ‘culture’ in their place. The forced connection between the radical and the cultural, terms which are equally empty and even contradictory, we will leave to the entrepreneurs whose promotion of culture is indistinguishable from advertising, and whose grasp of the radical content of cultural forms is identical with the ideology of enterprise. For culture now, despite the best efforts of Raymond Williams, means the opportunity for bourgeois society to consolidate its economic gains in a festival of tawdry bric-à-brac pulped of content and dressed as stylish, multicultural goods whose primary motifs are acquisition, display, and self-aggrandisement. While the theoreticians of aesthetics bemoan the demise of avant-garde art, its incorporation into the prevailing culture, the sixties left sniffs the air and senses the imminent demise of even that culture, in all its splendid mediocrity. It may be worth inspecting the lacks lamented by the quotations, so as to give an indication of what any putative avant-garde will be up against. The note of ironic valediction and morbidity struck by contemporary commentators may be fitting, for the historical avant-gardes always celebrated the very end of a culture as their opportunity. Ronald Jones, in the Arts Council-funded artscribe, surveys the art-historical treatment of the avant-garde from the perspective of Clement Greenberg’s classic essay, ‘Avant-garde and kitsch,’ which appeared on the eve of the war against fascism in the house journal of the American left, the Partisan Review. Greenberg hit on the most startling feature of the contemporary culture he surveyed: the simultaneous presence of ‘such different things as a poem by T.S.Eliot (avant-garde) and a Tin Pan Alley Song (kitsch); today we would say: a poem by J.H.Prynne and a song by Kylie Minogue.1 Although his love and knowledge of kitsch is suspect, Greenberg noticed that it absorbed as its raw material ‘the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture’ to produce ‘vicarious and faked sensations’ for the urban masses, hungry for diversion: the very masses the Partisan Review sought, theoretically, to liberate.2 Kitsch supplied readily consumable content, while the avantgarde immersed itself in form and the aesthetic problems of its material making: although it contained the best hopes of humanity as represented in the most advanced art, it remained inaccessible to humanity at large. Greenberg sees this obsessive formalism, together with avant-garde art’s vaunted autonomy, its refusal to represent anything other than itself, as a sign of its ‘emigration from the markets of capitalism’, caused by the decline of aristocratic patronage. The avant-garde was driven to repudiate the capitalist class which had destroyed its link with patronage and ruthlessly commercialized the hinterlands of the moral and the aesthetic which had been its preserve, and retire from public view. The dilemma which faced the avant-garde already in the ‘fifth and sixth decades of the nineteenth century’ was that it depended on the capitalist class it hated, the

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bourgeoisie, for its economic existence: hence the ambivalent motifs of ressentiment and worship which the modern avantgardes have inherited from Flaubert, Manet, and Baudelaire. The dilemma for the modern avant-garde of Greenberg’s day was that the elite which supported the ‘advanced intellectual conscience’ was beginning to shrink and disinvest from advanced art through the process of democratization it had itself put in train: the cultured bourgeois elite is succeeded by a class of aggressive Philistines and the ‘umbilical cord of gold’ which attached the avant-garde to the bourgeoisie is broken.3 Greenberg’s argument underpins the history of successive treatments of avant-garde art, from the populist survey of Robert Hughes’s BBC TV series, The Shock of the New, to the high-powered critique of Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde. The avant-garde is seen as a procession of ever more opaque and transitory sects, furiously interrogating the parameters of their chosen media and auto-destructing when their naïve commitment to the new and the unique becomes appropriated by the Culture Industry and turned into yesterday’s commodity, yesterday’s advertising slogan. Hughes and Burger adopt Greenberg’s definition of formalism and autonomy, and combine it with Walter Benjamin’s theory of the allegorical shock of the commodified artwork: the avant-garde’s particular, formal means (montage, fragment) mime the content of the general, commodified reality they critique. Duchamp’s infamous urinal has no other content than its outrage against the art institution, and the aesthetic shock of seeing a commodity posing as an art-work, a fragment of reality sundered and mounted for exhibition.4 This gesture cannot be repeated without bad faith and co-option: in Benjamin’s words ‘the profound fascination of the sick man with the isolated and insignificant is succeeded by that disappointed abandonment of the exhausted emblem.’5 Bürger challenges Greenberg’s definition of avant-garde art as autonomous, saying that the outrage against the art institution is an attempt to destroy the false autonomy of art and integrate it with real life: but he decides that this attack on autonomy fails and becomes a ‘false sublation’, because the art institution and bourgeois culture simply reabsorb the avant-garde protest against art as art.6 For this brand of ultra-left pessimism, bourgeois society holds all the cards: when the avant-garde tries to shock as commodity it is comfortably renamed as art; when it tries to affirm individual creativity it is simply marketed as commodity, and therefore dies. Bürger strengthens the umbilical cord of gold: avant-garde art is welded once again to the bourgeoisie by its own dialectic, but the avant-garde is preserved by theory only as a dead historical specimen. Bourgeois liberal criticism focuses on the avant-garde’s repudiation of meaning and its arcane self-absorption: Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word is a typically mandarin example, while the popular press prefers its occasional outrages and costly experiments: the uproar over the Tate Gallery’s purchase of Carl Andre’s Equivalent 1, three double rows of bricks, being the most recent case. The radical left’s attitude to the avant-garde has been, if anything, even more dismal: either ignoring it in favour of agit-prop and the Hampstead novel (The New Statesman, Marxism Today) or recategorizing it as postmodernism and decrying its capitulation to the logic of late capitalism, a revelling in the cold simulacra of a commodified, de-cathected world of spectacular desuetude.7 Terry Eagleton sees postmodernism as a parody of the revolutionary art of the twentieth century avant-garde…whose utopian desire for a fusion of art and social practice is seized, distorted and jeeringly turned back upon them as dystopian reality. Postmodern- ism…mimes the formal resolution of art and social life attempted by the avant-garde, while remorselessly emptying it of its political content; Mayakovsky’s poetry readings in the factory yard become Warhol’s shoes and soup-cans.8 The avant-garde is seen by Eagleton as a lost historical instant of ‘openly committed’ art, junked by subsequent developments: postmodernism lacks any ‘historical memory’.9 With the radical left repudiation of the avant-garde we have come full circle from the definitions of Greenberg: the avantgarde is criticized for being kitsch: Jameson even uses Greenberg’s term for kitsch, ‘simulacra’, to describe the postmodern aesthetic. The avant-garde as postmodernism is subjected to the hackneyed Marxist critique of socialist realism: the accusation of a pure formalism that connives with oppression while pretending to represent liberation. The radical left thus follows the undiscriminating prejudice of the bourgeois liberal and bourgeois reactionary camps: all radical contemporary art is tarred with the same brush: Andy Warhol, Carl Andre, J.H.Prynne: we are all postmodern now. But the bourgeois reactionary, at least, takes avant-garde art seriously enough to feel offended and threatened by it: Kingsley Amis’s quaint denunciations of state funding for blank canvases and poems that don’t mean anything indicate that a political, as well as an aesthetic nerve has been touched. David Edgar rushes to defend the avant-garde in its guise of sixties radicalism from the latest assaults of the Thatcherite demon, making common cause with the bourgeois intelligentsia: the demon is ‘coming for’ the universities, the arts, the BBC and the church, injecting the virus of the untrammelled market while blaming the intelligentsia for corrupting the nation’s morals in the swinging sixties and precipitating the current malaise. Having diagnosed Thatcherism as a powerfully coherent ideology of popular authoritarianism and an economics of postFordism, the radical left as represented by Marxism Today find that, at the moment when Thatcherism is putting away its Philistine reading habits and coming for Culture, it has no radical, oppositional culture to defend except a Rainbow Alliance of incoherent splendour and muddled, liberal attitudes.

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This lack of a viable counterculture is brought out in Tony Pinkney’s response to Edgar in the pages of Marxism Today. Pinkney accuses Edgar of eliding the two, contrary meanings of the term ‘culture’ as noticed by Raymond Williams in his Culture and Society: high art and our ‘ordinary ways of living’, and seeking to defend the former at the expense of the latter. He then goes on to make a swingeing attack on the historical ‘self-enclosed avant-garde’ for callously, if perhaps unwittingly, repeating the division between high and low, elitist and democratic, and ‘revelling a dozen times in violence and outrage for every one genuinely exploratory and experimental work it produced. Harold Pinter’s early plays are the enemy of a socialist culture, not its embryo.’ Pinkney ends by summoning up a vision of community, of ‘deep affiliations of place, settlement, neighbourhood’ as a resource against the ravages of capitalism and its ‘increasingly complex institutions and technologies of culture’.10 But in seeking to preserve an ordinary, ‘low’ culture in a period of complex upheaval, Pinkney falls into the trap of essentializing and sentimentalizing the very reality he wishes to protect. For early Pinter plays like The Birthday Party and The Homecoming are avant-garde in that, in a typically class-obsessed and sexually repressed English milieu, they surely and unerringly show how the very notions of community, family, and affiliations of place are attacked and undermined by social pressures. At the same time, they use the avant-gardist techniques of surrealism and estrangement: schizophrenic dialogue, autistic silence, to extend the range of meanings we can draw from the plight they depict: to make tangible by heightened bizarrerie the roots of post-war dispersal and alienation. To show the violence bred in the family by society is not to revel in it, but to offer an implicit critique. To propose that Pinter is the enemy of socialism because he depicts what capitalism has actually done to the family in an avant-garde idiom is to argue, at least implicitly, for a strictly delimited form of socialist art, an art that nowhere exists. The separation of high and low cultures which Pinkney adduces from Williams is also a static and essentialized conception, compared to the dialectical version of it given by avant-gardism, which continues to use the radical gestures and forms of ‘high’ art to depict the alienation that resides in the most ordinary objects in the most graphic terms: this is as true of Philip Guston as it was of Duchamp. Adorno made what is surely the definitive dialectical materialist statement on high art (avantgarde) and ordinary culture (kitsch) in his response to Benjamin’s essay on ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’: Both bear the stigma of capitalism, both contain elements of change…. Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up. It would be romantic to sacrifice one to the other, either as the bourgeois romanticism of the conservation of personality and all that stuff, or as the anarchistic romanticism of blind confidence in the spontaneous power of the proletariat in the historical process…11 The separation of high and low cultures is false but incorrigible: like class difference it is a necessary condition of bourgeois society. The distinction and continued relevance of avant-garde art is that it mediates this separation of cultures, dialectically, and aggravates it into a negative image of reconciliation, pointing towards a future in which they will, after all, add up. This is the meaning of negative dialectics: to produce not a positive formation, a glowing vision of community or aesthetic goodness which can all too easily be co-opted by the culture industry, but a negative image of utopia as a ‘haven of potentiality’ amid the reified debris of the present, and resonant beyond it. The searching political and cultural analyses of Raymond Williams can be swiftly transformed into the pulp version of community that is Eastenders, in a way that Beckett’s Endgame or Pinter’s Birthday Party can not. It is from the forgotten juncture of the political and the aesthetic, from the conviction that art is itself an implicit criticism of life, that the avant-garde project sets out: at the juncture between the pessimistic aesthetics of the avant-garde artscribe, and the political quandary of Edgar and Marxism Today. Both point, in different ways, towards the possibility of a continued avant-garde practice. Jones’s essay is interesting because it combines an ultra-leftist pessimism about the possibility of a genuine avant-garde in a commodified and blithely Philistine era, and a determination to stick to the terms offered by Greenberg: to retain the concept of both autonomy (form) and allegorized critique (content). He argues that, since novelty wears off like nail varnish, and radical gestures instantly become sales gimmicks, avant-garde artists are nowadays producing a static, repetitive art of minimal gesture: a formalism so pure it swerves and misses the public world completely: they are artists who ‘appear to have nearly arrested the development of their art so that it purposely contradicts the inevitability of countercultures, while still remaining immanent—that is, hovering within the culture’.12 Adorno’s theory of hibernation within the culture industry is joined with the blurb of the artistic reviewer: ‘Peter Halley’s iconography of serial geometry amplifies tautologies detailing an advancing entropy…hugging the threshold of abatement.’13 The essay falls between the drily theoretical and the glossily publicity conscious, and the proffered art is nothing very remarkable. But, towards the close, Jones picks up Carl Andre’s poor bricks, much maligned but maintaining a stoic elegance on the varnished floor of the gallery, nearly a quarter of a century old and resonant with warnings and lessons for postmodernism: clearly, the shock of this novelty hasn’t altogether faded:

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Those who would charge that the idea of a hover culture only retrieves a deeply regressive formalism, that it will finally slip from view, twisting slowly to the bottom in the vortex of something history has shown to be dangerously entropic, should do so cautiously. Formalism, high Modernism, implies something so self-satisfied with its own curiosity that its tight turns fell into an unrecoverable spin. The history that exists between then and now should be invited to intervene, to make a point. Carl Andre’s Equivalent 1, three rows of firebrick arranged in 1966 while Buddhist Monks set themselves ablaze in downtown Saigon, and Peter Halley’s progressively blackened geometry in Final Sequence, painted in the aftermath of Chernobyl, are two very different events. To conduct an interrogation of this art, as though it were pledged to some version of formalism, is symptomatic of something monstrously ahistorical. It is simply to have asked all the wrong questions, then to have felt hurt and ignored when the only reply was a blank stare. A more serious matter is to have mistaken the shrewdness of the hover culture for some sort of retarded development, stylistic degeneration, or simple-minded market strategy, for that does the work of the repressive culture by calling into question the sincerity of artists who have refused to work in sync with the nominal development of art. In a tentative and guarded fashion, Jones’s essay begins to overturn the ultra-left definition of avant-garde as falsely autonomous formalism, whose only content is shock, whose only political project is to outrage the art establishment and make it into the gallery, and to redeem the promise of the early avant-garde which Greenberg recognized but quietly passed over: In seeking to go beyond Alexandrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society has produced something unheard of before: avant-garde culture. A superior consciousness of history—more precisely, the appearance of a new kind of criticism of society, an historical criticism—made this possible. This criticism has not confronted our present society with timeless utopias, but has soberly examined in the terms of history and of cause and effect the antecedents, justifications and functions of the forms that lie at the heart of every society. Thus our present bourgeois social order was shown to be, not an eternal, ‘natural’ condition of life, but simply the latest term in a succession of social orders.14 That the deadened and de-cathected forms of avant-garde art might be imbued with searching political content, that avantgarde art may be able, at a time when all art and culture is designed for enterprise and the judgement, not of aesthetics, but of the balance sheet, to revive its bourgeois-critical function as something inseparable from both form and content, seems a possibility worth entertaining, a possibility Greenberg was astute enough to recognize in 1939: ‘Hence it was developed that the true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to “experiment”, but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence.’15 The choices, of a starved and febrile academicism, a muddled version of agitprop, or total kitsch, seem too dreadful to contemplate. Linacre College, Oxford NOTES 1 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-garde and kitsch’, Partisan Review, 6, 5 (1939), p.34. 2 ibid., pp. 40, 39. 3 ibid., p. 38. For a re-examination of Greenberg’s essay which anticipates many of the debates concerning postmodernism and its relationship to social formations, cf. T.J.Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s theory of art’, Critical Inquiry, 9 (1982), pp. 139–56. 4 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 51–3. 5 ibid., p. 69. 6 ibid., p. 54. 7 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (1984), pp. 53–93. 8 ‘Capitalism, modernism and postmodernism’, New Left Review, 152 (1985), pp. 60, 61. 9 ibid., p. 61. 10 Tony Pinkney, Letter, Marxism Today (June 1989), p. 8. 11 Adorno, ‘Letters to Walter Benjamin’, in Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 123. 12 Ronald Jones, ‘Hover culture’, artscribe (Summer 1988), p. 50. 13 ibid. 14 Greenberg, ‘Avant-garde and kitsch’, p. 35. 15 ibid., p. 36.

Divisions of deliria in Gradiva PETER BENSON

A German novelist, Wilhelm Jensen, becomes fascinated by the figure of a young woman depicted in a copy he has purchased of an antique sculpture. Around this image, he weaves a fantasy, a tale to give body to his dreams. His story concerns a German archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, who becomes fascinated by the figure of a young woman depicted in a copy he has purchased of an antique sculpture. Around this image the archaeologist weaves a fantasy, which becomes the context for his dreams…. This story comes into the hands of Sigmund Freud, himself an amateur of archaeology, who weaves around it a psychoanalytic commentary, slightly longer than the tale itself. In the year his essay is published, Freud visits the Vatican museum, where he is able to view the original sculpture. He, too, purchases a plaster copy to hang in his consulting room, and in this is copied by other analysts, as if this image of a walking woman formed (along with Oedipus confronting the Sphinx) one of the icons of psychoanalysis.1 Many clients must have lain on the couch, wondering if this woman had paced out before them the patient path in search of meaning, and finding in her figure a context for their re-cited dreams. Every reader of Freud in the English Standard Edition (or the Pelican paperbacks) will have seen a reproduction of this striking sculptural relief, and would recognize her form (should they encounter it elsewhere) as ‘Gradiva’. What is the source of this immense proliferation, this putting into circulation of an image without (so Jensen’s story tells us)2 notable archaeological importance? It is difficult even to locate an origin for this multiple reproduction, let alone the generative force of its duplication. For we would be wrong to seek an originating cell, potent with potential division, in the vaults of the Vatican. Only the footsteps of Freud ‘returned’ there. Jensen had never visited the museum. Furthermore, the sculpture itself is a Roman copy of a Greek original,3 and is merely a fractured part of a larger composition. If returned to the place from where it was broken, it is found to depict one of the Horae: charming mythological figures, according to Freud,4 who were ‘originally’5 ill-defined goddesses of the rain, and later became associated with the (classically three) seasons, acquiring the specificity of a trinity: Eunomia, Dike, and Eirene. Only when split from her sisters, therefore, is this single figure enabled to become the bearer of a false name, derived from a male god: Gradiva. And only under this assumed identity, as a copy of a fragment of a copy, does she enter into a circulation devoid of origin, leaving her footprints for decipherment in the early history of psychoanalysis. As his first extensive essay on a work of literature, Delusions and Dreams announces the problematic relation (at once seductive and suspicious) of psychoanalysis to the literary text. Subsequent critical and theoretical writings have never completely resolved this relation, while weaving psychoanalysis ever more ineradicably into the inescapable conditions of all reading today. The influence of psychoanalytic theory on the activity of reading is at least as great as its influence on clinical practice, despite the relatively small proportion of Freud’s work dealing directly with literature. Creative writers, in Freud’s view, have a ‘knowledge of the mind… far in advance of us everyday people, for they draw upon sources which we have not yet opened up for science’ (F, p. 8). Psychoanalysis thus follows in the footsteps of literature, like Norbert (himself a scientist) pursuing Gradiva. Literature’s knowledge of life and the mind is in advance of the infant science, to which it therefore stands in a parental relationship fraught with the same conflicts Freud discerned in the general oedipal situation. Psychoanalysis wishes to be in the place of literature’s knowledge, while maintaining an analytic distance from its respected precursor. Freud’s reading of Gradiva will be structured by this dilemma. The immediate aim of his essay, as presented in its opening sentence, is modest: to discover if the dreams of fictional characters yield to the same interpretative science as those of real patients. But a good deal of ambiguity would surround the significance of an affirmative reply. Who, exactly, would Freud be analysing in this process: Norbert Hanold, Wilhelm Jensen or (since the connecting threads of free association can only be supplied by his own speculation) Freud himself? Ostensibly, Freud analyses Norbert’s dreams in terms of the eventually revealed details of this character’s (fictional) life. This is the first means by which psychoanalysis seeks to engage with fiction: the analysis of characters as if they were real people. Six years later, in the Appendix to the second edition of his essay, Freud adds some remarks derived from his correspondence with Jensen, and from other stories by the same writer. This is the second, and most familiar, form of engagement between psychoanalysis and literature: the psychopathology of the author.

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The processes of literature also involve and implicate a third series of psyches, those of the readers. In contrast to the single author, and the fixed number of characters, there is no limit to the set of potential readers, utterly diverse in their histories, interests, and psychic structures. Nevertheless, a psychoanalytic investigation of the process of reading (its elements of pleasure and fascination, anxiety and compulsion) is not an impossible undertaking, creating, within the framework of its particular concerns, a sketch in outline of the reader qua reader. Indeed, shortly before writing his study of Gradiva, Freud had offered some remarks on this topic in his essay Psychopathic Characters on the Stage. Speaking of drama, he states that ‘the spectator is a person who experiences too little …he longs to feel and to act and to arrange things according to his desires…. And the playwright and actor enable him to do this by allowing him to identify himself with a hero.’ (Freud’s emphasis).6 Thus Freud emphasizes identification as the principal theoretical concept through which a psychoanalytic understanding of the reader might be elaborated. It is an emphasis he repeats many years later, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,7 the book in which this notion of identification is developed into a subtle and central part of psychoanalytic theory. In his study of Gradiva, however, the primary focus on the psychic structure of the character(s) throws only an indirect light on the reader’s place in the process. Though the trajectory of reading is not itself subjected to psychoanalytic study, a specific structure of identifications (whose determinants I intend to examine) can be clearly discerned in the account Freud gives of the story. Taken up by the repetitive insistence I have already emphasized, Freud duplicates the narrative of Gradiva three times within his own text. First, by a method of exhortation to the reader (exceeding the normal limits of authorial control) he seeks to incorporate the whole of Jensen’s text within his own by asking us, at a specific point (four pages into his essay), to lay aside the essay and read Jensen’s story (F, p. 10). Immediately subsequent to this (whether or not his instructions have been followed) he proceeds to ‘recall the substance of the story in a brief summary’ (F, p. 10). This ‘brief summary’ occupies approximately one-third of Freud’s entire essay! Yet this is not the end of the re-counting, for we must still ‘linger a little more over the story itself’ (F, p. 41). A third journey through the narrative begins, this one, however, rather different, since ‘Now that we have finished telling the story and satisfied our own suspense, we can get a better view of it, and we shall now reproduce it with the technical terminology of our science’ (F, p. 44). Critical approaches to literature are always faced with the two options of considering each feature of a narrative as a focus to which converge all elements employed up to that point, or of relaxing this restraint and relating each feature to the complete and completed text. These two perspectives often produce markedly different readings. Hegel’s philosophical novel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, is precisely structured around this very distinction between the consciousness proceeding through its dialectical development, and the philosophical consciousness observing this process from the place of its completion, that locus which Hegel calls ‘Absolute Knowledge’. The satisfaction of literary closure, the ‘completeness’ of a completed text, owes much to its miming of this attainment of Absolute Knowledge. Criticism is not compelled, even confronting a decisively circular text, to adopt this secure and stable stance as its framework. But Freud explicitly locates psychoanalysis (‘science’) in the place of Absolute Knowledge, outside the finished text, from where a ‘better view’ can be obtained. From here alone can Norbert’s dreams be understood, since the necessary information about his life is only provided towards the end of the story. Freud emphasizes the quenching of suspense as a necessary preliminary to the satisfactions of science. His first re-telling of the story removes its ‘charm’ (F, p. 10); the second will remove its tension. Indeed, at one point Freud had already admitted that the ‘tension…grows for a moment into a painful sense of bewilderment’ (F, p. 17). The moment in question is the most striking in the entire story, and in some respects is the artistic justification for the tale, in that the resources of the entire narrative are needed to justify this one incident. It is an example of one of those moments of delirium which narratives frequently afford, as a part of their pleasure. Strange, then, that for Freud the moment is specifically experienced as ‘painful’. There is an equivalent moment in Otto Preminger’s film Laura (1944), which is worth recounting here to indicate (i) that such a feature is not unique to Gradiva, and (ii) that such a moment typically forms the most memorable part of the narrative it punctuates. When Preminger’s film is recalled, it is invariably this scene which has particularly stayed in the viewer’s memory. A detective, investigating the murder of a beautiful young woman, becomes fascinated with her personality as revealed to him by her various associates. One evening, while conducting a fruitless search for clues in her apartment, which is dominated by a large portrait of her, he sinks into a chair, deep in thought, and appears to fall asleep. He is roused by the sound of the door opening, and the supposedly murdered woman walks into the room. The rest of the film unravels the circumstances, and mistaken identities which enable this event to be possible, without violating the laws of reality. All of this information is given subsequent to the moment it justifies, as a supplement to its magic, a protest of rationality that such an event might not be absurd.8 Furthermore, at the moment of Laura’s appearance the mise-en-scène is carefully structured to suggest that we may have entered a dream sequence (the camera tracks in on the sleeping detective, then retreats again in a marked punctuation). If so, it is a dream sequence from which the film never again emerges.

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The similarity to Jensen’s story is acute. On the deserted streets of Pompeii, under a dazzling sun, Norbert Hanold sees the girl depicted by the sculpture walk across the stepping stones in front of him. And Jensen is careful to mark the same ambiguity as Preminger: ‘Had what had just stood before him been a product of his imagination or a reality?’ (G, p. 51). Both film and book evoke the delicious frisson of an impossible desire which has apparently directly evoked its object in reality. This, surely, is what recommended the book to André Breton, who gave its name to a gallery he ran in the 1930s. It is the absolute fulfilment of a wish, beyond censorship or distortion (but also, it would seem, beyond the rational order of the world) such as only the dreams of children normally display.9 Yet Freud, as a reader, finds the effect ‘painful’. This pain is the effect of tension and suspense (whose eventual satisfaction will enable the third, psychoanalytic, reading of the story). Elsewhere, Freud had insisted that ‘a feeling of tension necessarily involves unpleasure’.10 The context for this remark was the confrontation of a descriptive account of sexual experience with his fundamental energetic principle (the pleasureprinciple) which asserts that the organism seeks to discharge energy, and that it is this discharge which we experience as pleasure. The pleasurable rise of sexual tension provides a puzzle to this fundamental assumption (which Freud had first proposed in his 1895 ‘Project’, and never definitively retracted), and so, it seems, do certain effects of literary pleasure, which Freud does not perceive as such. Indeed, Jensen’s story is punctuated by a second, even more extreme example of such a delirious moment (utterly inexplicable in terms of the story up to that point) when Gradiva calls Norbert Hanold by his name, which he had told to no one in Pompeii (G, p. 90). Freud devotes no special attention to this moment, despite the disruption it produces in the figuration of the text. For at this point Norbert is literally expelled from the narration and there follows the only passage in the story describing a scene at which he is not present. When discovered again, he is ‘outside’ and ‘how he had come there was not clear to him’ (G, p. 90). These effects are sufficiently striking for Freud’s absence of comment to be notable. Something has been turned away and kept at a distance from the consciousness provided by his reading, and this, in Freud’s theory, is the essence of repression.11 There is no repression without anticathexis, which should not be understood as a negative energy, but a positive refiguration (available for decipherment) of primary drive energy.12 It is a scansion, a reading, imposed on drive impulses (which are never encountered in some pristine state, prior to their variable representations).13 Norbert, for example, is aroused by the image of Gradiva. His anticathexes portray her as a woman long dead (sustaining his desire as impossible). Such drive energy could also have been patterned ‘outside’14 repression by recognizing her similarity to Zoe, his neighbour (portraying his desire as satisfiable). Either alternative would read into the statue the identity of a person. Disturbed by the ‘humiliation for us readers’ (F, p. 18) following the first moment of delirium, Freud has successfully established an anticathexis to avoid its recurrence. This anticathexis, which takes the form of a decisive identification with Gradiva herself, deflects his reading around the second puzzling incident, evading its mingled pleasure and pain. There are therefore at least two possible readings (based on different identificative alignments) diverging from the first moment of delirium. Like Norbert, lost in Pompeii, we have a choice of path. The narrating instance continues to accompany Norbert (recording, from among the characters, only his feelings and experiences) distanced from complete absorption in his perspective solely by the gently ironic tone of the tale. A reader who remained in full empathy with the archaeologist would continue to share in a bewildered enjoyment of his inexplicable experiences. Freud’s reading, untempted by these pleasures (which he perceives as pain), escapes bewilderment through the agency of the very term which created the problem: Gradiva herself, ambiguously situated by Jensen (when Norbert first sees her) between hallucination and reality. Freud is in a hurry to resolve this ambiguity. Within a page of describing the appearance of Gradiva, he is deducing that, since her foot disturbs a basking lizard, she cannot be a hallucination, she must be assigned to the outside of Norbert’s mind, not the inside (F, p. 17). This argument is duplicated from Jensen’s text (G, p. 50) where, however, it is not regarded as conclusive, for it precedes the explicit statement of the puzzle: ‘Had what had just stood before him been a product of his imagination or a reality?’ (G, p. 51). This mystery, held in suspension, establishes the tension of the tale, its hermeneutic code. ‘The hermeneutic terms’, says Barthes,15 ‘structure the enigma according to the expectation and desire for its solution…it must set up delays (obstacles, stoppages, deviations) in the flow of discourse.’ Hence ‘the truth is thereby long desired and avoided, kept in a kind of pregnancy for its full term.’16 It is this delay, this pleasure of the text’s unfolding, experienced instead as ‘painful bewilderment’, which Freud seeks to abolish by reversing, in his borrowings from the text, the linear order of a proffered argument and a remaining puzzle. Evidently, Jensen did not expect Norbert to conclude that the disturbed lizard finally settled the question. It is therefore surprising to find Freud giving such weight to this detail, for if a man is capable of hallucinating the figure of a woman, he would presumably be equally capable of hallucinating a lizard to add definition to the image. Once there is a serious confusion as to what proceeds from inside, and what from outside the psyche, subjective experience no longer offers a reliable guide to the differentiation. This is the point from which (as a direct result of this confusion) Norbert’s behaviour begins to show the overt evidence of delirium. And it is the distinctive feature of delirium that rational argumentation is put at the service of deluded ideas.17

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Reason and unreason can no longer be separated, and so cannot serve to found the distinction of inner from outer. Freud declares that Norbert’s ‘science was now completely in the service of his imagination’ (F, p. 18). But by duplicating and taking as his own Norbert’s speculations about his perceptions, Freud’s science, in his moment of ‘painful bewilderment’, has also been given over to unreason. As he immediately acknowledges, Freud has been ‘inveigled…into a delirium on a small scale’ (F, p. 18). If reason can be so readily deflected, its role in the unravelling of delusions becomes suspect. These issues are of serious import, for it is the very possibility of a psychoanalytic science which is called into question. Freud seeks to understand what has happened, casting the responsibility on the author, for it is he who ‘has inveigled us into a delusion’. How has he managed this? ‘With the help, as it were, of a reflection of the Pompeian sunshine’ (ibid., my emphasis). In a writer of Freud’s learning, the echoes of Plato here are difficult to ignore: the artist is a deceiver, who manipulates us by mere ‘reflections’. Beyond these reflections is a reality, identified (as in Plato’s myth of the cave) with the sun. But this sun was ‘really shining’ on Norbert, and appears to have specifically induced his delirium. Hence, the Platonic structure of the argument becomes complicated. Norbert is suffering from a real delusion: the breakdown in his divisions of inner from outer, reason from unreason, is absolute. The reader, by contrast, suffers only ‘a delusion on a small scale’. Protected from the real sun by the reflective structure of literature, we can be easily ‘cured of our brief confusion’ (ibid.). As through some process of inoculation, the writer induces a mild delusion in order to cure it, leaving us with ‘a quiet sense of superiority’ (ibid.). Norbert, in parallel fashion, will have to seek a cure for the effects of the real sun in a false sun: a hotel called ‘del Sole’, where he eventually locates the girl he thought was Gradiva. When the sun is reduced to a signifier, a mere name (placed on the same level as literature) its effects become controllable, and delirium can be divided in a separation of reason from unreason. Identification is part of the reflective structure of literature, inducing Freud to duplicate Norbert’s thought processes. In his moment of ‘painful bewilderment’ he identifies with the equally startled (though not painfully so) Norbert. It is, however, a transitory identification, lasting no more than two paragraphs of Freud’s text, ending with (and by means of) the first words spoken by Gradiva. These ‘cure’ him, and bring ‘a quiet sense of superiority’. They do not, however, bring the process of identification to an end. From now on, it is Zoe/Gradiva with whom Freud will identify: this eminently sensible young woman who seems, herself, adept at the art of psychoanalysis. This is the second determination (added to the pain of bewilderment) propelling Freud’s divergence from the more evident path of continued identification with Norbert. The similarity of Zoe’s behaviour to that of a psychoanalyst brings Freud into close affinity with her, but at the same time disturbs the placing of psychoanalytic science outside the text it studies, for its representative now moves in person through the narrative. Norbert, her follower in the story, is himself presented with a similar choice of paths, a doubling of his understanding, when she later slips away from him at the House of Meleager. Either she has ‘sunk into the ground’ (G, p. 70), into the timeless world of shades, outside all narrative, or she has escaped through ‘a narrow cleft, wide enough to afford passage to an unusually slender figure’ (G, p. 71). Freud makes no comment on this vulvic imagery (appearing just as Norbert is beginning to gain a greater understanding of the situation in which he finds himself) but his own identification with the story’s principal female character, abandoning Norbert (the scientist) to his delusions, brings unexpected ambiguities in its wake. Freud’s swift transference of his identification to Zoe, as psychoanalyst manqué, is an escape from ‘humiliation’ and ‘bewilderment’, using as a stepping-stone the fact that she, too, enters into Norbert’s delusion, as (involuntarily) had Freud (F, p. 21). But ‘if [she] accepted Hanold’s delusion so fully, she was probably doing so in order to set him free from it’ (F, p. 21). Such a deduction, at this stage in the story (whose further development Freud is not yet, explicitly, taking into account)18 is as fraught with paradox as the argument about the lizard. Are those who most readily accept deranged notions to be regarded as supremely sane (and thus as secure vehicles for an identification free from dangers)? Zoe reflects Norbert’s madness, rather than being herself a source of delusion. Norbert’s real delusion (derived from the sun) must be neutralized by being reproduced. Madness cannot find its opposing force in reason (whose mechanisms it can entirely usurp) but in a structure of reflection which is that of literature itself. Zoe speaks madness from within a silent sanity, in which Freud trusts, just as he trusts the author to resolve the hermeneutic puzzles (‘with a quiet sense of superiority we may wait to learn…’ (F, p. 18)). The contract of the classic text is the (always revocable) guarantee of eventual sanity. Freud’s identification with Zoe enables him to avoid the shock of the second moment of delirium in the text. Zoe’s knowledge of Norbert’s name is not only something that will surely be soon explained, it emphasizes even more the place of the psychoanalyst as where truth unfolds. He merely remarks, at this surprising incident, that calling someone by name is a good way to awaken a sleepwalker (F, p. 27). Zoe’s medical judgement accords with his own! But the equivocal nature of her role for Freud, as a sane madwoman, doubles and reflects her disturbing and uncertain status for Norbert, classifiable neither as living nor dead, neither inside nor outside his psyche, belonging neither to the past nor the present. The perspective from which Freud identifies with her can be equated with that of Norbert: the viewpoint of psychoanalysis remains underpinned by the delusions it masters.

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Zoe had first appeared, in the ‘Gradiva’ pose, crossing the street: neither on one side, nor the other, but poised on her lifted foot, upon the stepping stone between them. The vertical bar of her foot, whose image first fascinated Norbert, is the mark of division, separating categories which she, in person, mingles. She speaks with a ‘double sense, as though besides their meaning in the context of the delusion, [her words] also meant something real and present-day’ (F, p. 21). This is also the mode of speech of literature, where a fictive meaning enfolds a real relevance to ourselves as readers. Freud declares this ambiguous, doubled discourse (‘a triumph of ingenuity and wit’ (F, p. 84)) to be an appropriate mode for a psychoanalyst. Zoe is, indeed, the ideal analyst, for if her speeches are ‘compromises between the conscious and the unconscious’ (F, p. 85), it is Norbert’s unconscious which they reveal by concealment, not her own. Nothing, in her, has the status of being unconscious. None of her feelings, intentions, and thoughts seem to be repressed, even when they are equivocally expressed. Her understanding of her own relationship with her father, for example, is of exceptional lucidity (G, p. 106). ‘Fraulein Zoe, the embodiment of cleverness and clarity, makes her own mind quite transparent to us’ (F, p. 33). A riddling discourse, emanating from pure transparency, is the ideal aspired to by psychoanalysis (at least at this stage in its history). Freud even envies Zoe’s ability to respond to Norbert’s love, and considers that this makes her cure ‘an ideal one’ (F, p. 90). Later, in the final pages of On Narcissism (1914), he will reverse this order of evaluation between the cure by love, and the cure by an austere analysis. Perhaps it is her characterization in terms of a certain formation of feminine charm which enables Zoe to be without an unconscious (a depth too darkly masculine). As a woman, she can live without repression through her adeptness at doubleness, an ability to speak (like the Sphinx, or the Pythian oracle) a more-than-one of meaning. Even her ideal curative effect depends on her occupying a place (never entirely through her own volition) on so many borderlands: between inner and outer, past and present, truth and illusion (as the Sphinx inhabited the edge of the city). It is her determined occupancy of this uncertain realm which resolves the chaos of Norbert’s delusional thoughts. Norbert, after first seeing her, had sought Zoe in the two hotels by the entrance to the Pompeian ruins. She was not there. Finally he discovers a third hotel (‘del Sole’) on the far side of the ancient town. He discovers, in effect, that the choice between two absolute alternatives can be resolved by the appearance of a third possibility. Zoe is that ‘third possibility’ in every dimension in which his mind is confused. But she is introduced there, placed fortuitously in front of him, by ‘chance’ or, rather, by the will of the novelist, Wilhelm Jensen. According to Freud only two features of the story, a coincidence of image and a coincidence of desire, deviate from ‘the laws of reality’ (F, p. 41). Zoe’s resemblance to the Roman sculpture is unexplained; so, too, is the simultaneous decision, by her father and Norbert, to travel to Pompeii. Were it not for these features, Freud says ‘we should not object if “Gradiva” were described not as a phantasy but as a psychiatric study’ (F, p. 41). He seems unconcerned by the fact that it is, in any case, a piece of fiction! Presumably, this in itself would not disqualify it from a psychiatric journal, if only it had remained within ‘the laws of reality’ (truth would be determined by law, and not by fact). The two charming conceits upon which the work rests are decidedly not outside the laws of fiction, perhaps even more stringent than those of reality in their insistence on the relevance of all events in the unfolding story. Coincidence, in fiction, cleaves to the pattern which it forms. This (fairly obvious) fact undermines the ostensible project of Freud’s essay. His aim is to show that the dreams of fictional characters have a meaning. Indeed they do, but so do all the ‘random’, ‘chance’ events encountered by the hero of a tale (at least, within the province of the classic text). Hence the analysis of fictional dreams cannot directly support the theses of the ‘Traumdeutung’. If it remains true that ‘creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly’ (F, p. 8), it is by recognizing (as Freud did the following year in Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming) that the entirety of their creative text can be compared to the production of dreams. The question is not that of the ‘laws of reality’, but of the correspondence between the laws of fiction and those of the unconscious. The author finds these laws in himself, whereas the psychoanalyst uncovers them in works of literature and in other people (F, p. 92). (Remember that Zoe, the ideal analyst, has no unconscious).19 The author ‘need not state these laws nor even be clearly aware of them’ (ibid.). He lacks the clarity of his creation, Zoe. Hence the place outside the text, from where psychoanalysis can comprehend it, is not identified with that of the author. Nor (according to psychoanalysis) can the decisive step, from delusion to truth, be located in a single character. Speaking madness from within sanity Zoe induces, in Norbert’s third dream, a corresponding voice of sanity recognizing the madness in which it is immersed. ‘Norbert Hanold became conscious in his dream that it was actually the most utter madness, and he cast about to free himself from it’ (G, p. 79). But in Freud’s analysis of this dream, a process of ‘diminishing its strangeness’ (F, p. 76), he concludes that the judgement ‘utter madness’ is directed towards the thought that Zoe wants to marry him (a notion which would not be ‘mad’, even if it were untrue). Hence in Freud’s analysis, this coming to awareness of madness doesn’t take place. Psychoanalytic decipherment has itself dissolved this step from madness to sanity (where madness becomes clear to itself), which is transformed into a petulant rejection of a girl’s desire. The recognition of ‘utter madness’ is reduced to the idiomatic ‘don’t be so mad’, which does not refer to an outside of rationality, to delirium. The total separation of delirium from sanity thus becomes acute, with only Zoe herself to bridge it, as she does all other divisions. Implicated in

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this is the denial of the capacity to analyse oneself, to liberate oneself from delusion. Zoe’s role asserts the necessity of an analyst as forming the place where discourse is freed from unreason. Immediately prior to his analysis of this third dream, Freud describes how he, too, once fell prey to a delusional belief that a dead person had returned to life. He gives this account in the third person (F, pp. 71–2). Thus, although ‘the frontier between states of mind described as normal and pathological is in part a conventional one and in part so fluctuating that each of us probably crosses it many times in the course of a day’ (F, p. 44), nevertheless when the ‘I’ speaks in the place of psychoanalysis, it seems its own madness must be delegated to the objective third person. Finding in Norbert a reflection of his own (humiliating) madness, Freud can distance himself from this madness, placing it in the character in the story, and distance himself yet further by using the identification with Norbert as a stepping-stone to an identification with Zoe. She, however, is where sanity and lunacy meet: she denies, in her person, the very separations she marks. Norbert, too, risks the danger that she will fail to bring him release from his entrapment in dreams. Pondering on her mystery, as he eats the bread she hands him, Norbert decides the most likely explanation of these events to be that he is still sitting in his study, had not in fact travelled to Italy at all, and had dreamed, not only Gradiva, but the entire world where they met (G, p. 88). This is one extreme resolution to the difficult task of distinguishing world from self: a total denial of separation, apparent externality incorporated as completely as the bread he eats, like the infant who ingests (along with its milk) breast, mother, and world. This is the moment when their contemplative absorption in each other, their folie à deux, is interrupted by the intrusion into the privacy of their shared meal by the young couple Norbert had seen in his hotel, and the second delirious moment is precipitated. The shock of a recognized exterior perception of himself, with its necessary acknowledgement of other beings, pierces through Norbert’s solipsism to produce a complete reversal of categorization, from a denial of the world to a complete erasure of himself, who only returns as a ‘phantom…looking for its grave’ (G, p. 94). Zoe herself (loved, lucid, and ludic) was in danger of sliding inside his dream, failing in her task of separation. The infant, in relation to its mother, begins to construct an external world through the movement of hate, expulsion, defecation. Norbert’s mildly aggressive slap of Zoe’s hand had suggested a tentative step in this direction. But the sudden appearance of the other couple hurtles him precipitately into a purified externality where he has found, as yet, no place. As a moment of delirium in the text, this exceeds Norbert’s own personal delirium (his fantasy about Gradiva). Nor is this the only moment when delirium is doubled at a textual level. When Norbert notices asphodel flowers in the window of the hotel ‘Sole’ he, deliriously, thinks they bestow authenticity on the brooch he has bought (G, p. 76). We, readers cleaving to the logic of the text, immediately assume they are the very flowers he gave to Zoe, though (since the plant is not described as being exceptionally rare) they might equally (in the logic of ‘reality’) have belonged to someone else. But we know that, in a story, the recurrence of an element always draws the threads of the text together, operating an Occam’s razor in the field of objects. The assumption the reader is expected to make, in replacing a mere possibility by a necessity, reveals the logic of narrative as inherently delirious. The practice of fiction thus shares, with Zoe, the temptation to confound instead of distinguishing, as it weaves together potentially conflicting regimes of desire. Yet it is to Zoe herself that Jensen (according to Freud) assigns the specific task of forming a ‘margin’ between ‘two conflicting powers’ whose equality had caused Norbert’s delusion. ‘A vigorous mental regime’, Freud contends, is only possible as an effect of such a margin (F, p. 69). Such a valorization of a particular mental formation is rare in Freud (who resisted, with good reason, giving any definition of mental ‘health’) and thus deserves careful consideration. Norbert’s scientific and amorous desires, being equal, become confused —his trip to Pompeii disguising an erotic quest with an archaeological motive. If either set of desires were to be completely expunged, the result would be a monotone and insipid existence. Their margin, the area where they call to one another across their separation, is the field of vivifying creativity. Psychoanalysis, if it is to remain ‘vigorous’, cannot exist solely within the field of science (even if this includes the science of clinical practice), it evolves only through its relation to other fields. In Delusions and Dreams, this effective other field is provided by literature. Figuring such a margin in her person (which echoes, not literature, but sculptural art) Zoe incarnates an ideal for psychoanalysis. But such a combination of ambivalences will not be met with in a professional clinician, who will not have been the patient’s childhood lover. Hence analysis, unlike the story, cannot end. Though we are accustomed to assigning this realization to a late stage in Freud’s career,20 it is already hinted at the end of Delusions and Dreams, which breaks off, rather than concludes, with a row of suspension points, and the declaration ‘we must stop here’ (F, p. 93). Breaking the analysis leaves it as a fragment, akin to the ‘Gradiva’ sculptural fragment itself, or to Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, published the previous year. There, it had been his patient ‘Dora’ (another young woman who, like ‘Gradiva’, has come to affect us under an assumed name) who broke off the analysis, leaving the counter-transference to be resolved only by the writing of the case. More generally, incompletion seems to be a necessity for these provocations to creativity: the incomplete bas-relief has bequeathed to us, by its very incompletion, the network of texts

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we are studying. When Norbert seeks to locate that image in a context elaborated by himself, he places beneath her feet, not solid ground, but stepping-stones: a path itself formed of interrupted fragments: a path precisely adequate to the step which defines Gradiva’s mobility, composed of repetition rather than continuity, his interrupted friendship with Zoe being the condition for current desire. In the final sentence of his postscript to the second edition of Delusions and Dreams, Freud replaced the ‘Gradiva’ fragment from where it was broken, forming the complete image of three fructifying goddesses, the Horae. With this restored trinity, his investigation apparently comes to an end. Yet the time spent in studying the fractured ‘Gradiva’ relief is not without effect. For Norbert, it has shaped and intensified his slumbering passion for Zoe (just as Swann, in Proust’s novel, does not regard Odette as beautiful, nor fully desirable, until he notices her resemblance to a painting by Botticelli). Nor would she have been so charmed by his desires had they not taken upon themselves so fanciful a form (which she declares ‘not entirely displeasing’, both in the role assigned to her, and in the unsuspected ‘magnificent imagination’ it reveals in Norbert (G, p. 101)). Norbert’s story ends in a landscape bedewed with beneficient rain (G, p. 108). And Freud would seem to conclude in similar fields, when he finally finds Gradiva herself to be a deity ‘of the fertilizing dew’ (F, p. 95). But the mobility she possessed on her own account does not desert her when she is reunited with her sisters.21 Freud had not ceased to follow in her footsteps. There was one last secret towards which she led him, a secret excluded from the revelations of Zoe, her temporary and incomplete incarnation. The year after identifying Gradiva as one of the Horae, Freud published The Theme of the Three Caskets, in which these goddesses again appear. There, he is interested in the mutability of mythological figures, tracing how the Horae transferred and transformed their characteristics into the more solemn Moerae (the Fates). In this new trinity, the third of the sisters is identified as a personification of Death.22 We know, from Jones,23 how startling and unacceptable the postulation of a death drive seemed to many psychoanalysts, when Freud first explicitly proposed it in 1920 (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Yet thirteen years earlier, in the original final paragraph of Delusions and Dreams, this grave note was already struck, when Freud sought to uncover the primary wishes represented as fulfilled by the first dream. To be beside Gradiva when she lies down to sleep is an easily comprehensible desire, belonging snugly within the realm of Eros. But there is also, and equally, ‘a wish, understandable in any archaeologist, to have been present as an eyewitness at the catastrophe in the year AD 79. What sacrifice would an archaeologist think too great if this wish could be realized in any other way than in a dream!’ (F, p. 93). Clearly, the desire to be present at Pompeii while the city was being destroyed is (in addition to its dimension of scientific curiosity) a wish for death, and one which can be generalized to ‘any archaeologist’ (such as Freud himself). The premonitory presence of the death drive is thus sounded a few short lines before his analysis breaks off, without concluding. Nor is this present analysis (this one, the one you are reading now, added to the encrustations around Gradiva, raising these texts from their burial in the past) intended as a concluding completion to Freud’s, but a marking of the fact that every analysis is necessarily incomplete. Bringing into prominence the second disruptive moment in the story, I have sought to reveal the means through which Freud’s reading deviates around this difficulty. Identification, Freud demonstrates (without elucidating), flows from a heightened tension in the period before it is discharged.24 By cleaving to Zoe as the solution to the painful bewilderment in his reading, Freud effectively splits the siting of psychoanalysis between a theoretical comprehension external to the text, and a representative figure moving within it. But, just as Zoe unites in herself the very terms it is her task to separate, so psychoanalysis shelters in its foundations the deliria it disentangles, reflecting them and falling under their spell. In the final dream, Gradiva sits ‘in the sun’, which is the regime of reality, and source of potential delusion. All delusions, however, contain ‘a grain of truth’ (F, p. 80). What is more, ‘we all attach our conviction to thought-contents in which truth is combined with error’ and this is how ‘conviction is formed’ (F, p. 80; my emphasis). All knowledge, therefore, (since it necessarily involves conviction) contains a leaven of error. A lucid life (‘life’ being the meaning of the name ‘Zoe’) can be found only in the hotel of the Sun (not the sun ‘itself’), which is a place of fakes and copies. Zoe carefully (re-)creates herself in the image of her own step, elaborating its full symbolic resonance for Norbert, that he might follow her. Following footsteps forms his desire’s relation to partial objects, but the potential relation to a whole Zoe pulls apart all unities (leaving her two feet swinging freely, amid a multiplicity of flies, and myriads of raindrops…). But I must stop this further (post-Freudian) discussion, lest I forget that analysis remains, for us, a creation of Freud’s imagination. London NOTES 1 These details can be found in E.Jones, ‘Sigmund Freud: Life and Work’, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), pp. 382.

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2 Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva, p. 14, translated by Helen Downey and published in one volume with Freud’s Delusions and Dreams (London: Allen & Unwin, 1921). All references to Jensen’s novel will be to this edition, abbreviated as ‘G’. For Freud’s text, however, I have used Strachey’s translation in Volume IX of the Standard Edition, to which page references, abbreviated as ‘F’, will refer. Other works by Freud will be quoted from the Standard Edition (abbreviated S.E.) by volume and page number. 3 Standard Edition editorial footnote, F, p. 95. 4 The Theme of the Three Caskets, S.E. XII, p. 298. 5 ibid., p. 297. 6 S.E. VII, p. 305. 7 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, ch. XII, sect. B. 8 I have called these moments ‘delirious’. Freud defines delirium as a secondary defensive process whereby an irrational obsessive idea is woven into a framework of logical deduction (‘Rat Man’ case history, S.E. X, p. 222). These ruptures in verisimilitude (the obsessive image of Laura displaced from the past to be ‘wrongly’ located in the narrative’s present time) provoke the tale they puncture retrospectively to enfold them with its logic. Such a moment releases the latent delirium in narrative. 9 The Interpretation of Dreams, S.E. IV, p. 127. 10 Three Essays on Sexuality, S.E. VII, p. 209. 11 Repression, S.E. XIV, p. 147. 12 The Unconscious, S.E. XIV, p. 181. 13 ibid., p. 177. 14 A notion which is purely relative. There is no absolute ‘outside’ of repression in Freudian theory. 15 R.Barthes, S/Z, trans. R.Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974), sect. XXXII. 16 ibid., sect. XXVI. 17 ‘Rat Man’ case history, S.E. X, p. 222. 18 Though the shadow of a psychoanalytic consciousness, located in Zoe, perhaps tempts the invocation of an absolute knowledge (of the narrative). 19 I am not suggesting that Freud believed such a condition to be possible (in ‘reality’). 20 Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937), S.E. XXIII. 21 A context in which it becomes apparent that she is dancing (cf. the similar figure on the right of the Greek marble relief of the Horae in the Uffizi, reproduced in the Encyclopedia Britannica entry under ‘Hora’). 22 S.E. XII, p. 298. 23 E.Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, vol. 3 (London: Hogarth Press, London, 1957), pp. 297ff. 24 Thus, in the terms of his own theory of sexuality, the ‘tension’ of sexual excitement must intensify the mutual identification between lovers.

Reviews

● Paul Virilio, War and Cinema, translated by Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), 95 pp., £8.95 (paperback) THOMAS DOCHERTY

When Eisenstein began to theorize what was ‘cinematic’ about film, he developed the notion of montage, which remains a crucial element in any understanding of what is at stake in cinema apart from the narratives which films address to particular cultures at specific conjunctures. In Film Form (1929), Eisenstein related ‘conflict as the fundamental principle for the existence of every art-work and every art-form’ to the philosophy of dialectical materialism in Marx and Engels. He was then in a position to argue, specifically against Pudovkin, that the dialectical conflict which was at the root of montage was precisely what made film into a cinematic art, and an art in the service of the ineluctable and progressive dynamic of History. In a piece written in 1978, Défense populaire et luttes écologiques, Virilio indicated that Clausewitz saw war in similar dialectical terms, as a phenomenon which was steadily progressing towards the realization of its pure essence: Au bout de l’inventaire des techniques, en se contentant de signaler que la guerre réelle se répand, qu’elle est un pbénomène en marche vers la realisation de son essence absolue, il montre qu’il y a bien dans l’Histoire la coherence d’une avance dialectique, celle qui d’abord s'établit entre attaque et defense, au travers de la succession des engagements militaires et de leur preparation par les grands Etats antagonistes, lancés a la poursuite de l’essence absolue de la guerre.1 This ‘pure war’ Virilio describes as a kind of banality of evil: it is ‘l’instance militaire elle-même dans sa pérennité ordinaire’, often mistaken for peace.2 This representation of war brings to mind not just the world of Orwell’s 1984 where ‘war is peace’, but also Baudrillard who argues that ‘prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral.’3 Putting both together, of course, it becomes obvious that as the dialectic of history progresses we become more and more ‘prisoners of war’, prisoners of a particular perception of the world, prisoners of a particular modality of rationality which imprisons both the intellectual and the object of her or his thinking.4 Gone is the Enlightenment notion of the emancipation of the proletariat through knowledge and rationality. Virilio (one of that oddest of European intellectuals: the ‘Christian Marxist’) seems to have laid bare a rather bleak vision of a world of progressive incarceration within a warmentality. He takes his position close to those other French intellectuals (themselves aligned, perhaps, with certain movements in Eastern Europe) as a philosopher of post-Marxism. Something, clearly, has happened to ‘conflict’ or to the dialectic as thought by Eisenstein (or, of course, as thought by Eisenstein’s political masters). War and Cinema is subtitled ‘The Logistics of Perception’, and this, in fact, is the text’s real subject. It is not an introduction to cinematic representations of war, nor is it an introduction to the documentary cinema of realism or of propaganda (though Leni Riefenstahl is much discussed in the text, as are the strategies of Goebbels). Virilio’s aim here is to reveal how close the technology of cinema is to the technology of war, and how the two have interfused with each other during the twentieth century. From the observation that the technology of the Gatling machine-gun is exactly the same as that of the chronophotographic camera developed by Larssen and Marey, Virilio builds a series of arguments guided by the principle not merely that cinema is like war and that it is important during the fighting of war, but rather that cinema itself actually is war, the camera its weapon. Lest this sound extreme, it might immediately be pointed out that it is fundamentally close to the theorization of Irigaray who has argued that there has been a masculinist politics inscribed in ‘rationality’ itself due to the prioritization of the visual over all other senses; the logistics of perception clearly play a major part in that ‘balance of terror’ which exists as the condition of peaceful cohabitation between the genders, but which has to be revealed if a certain feminism is to make any advances on a territory claimed by men, and colonized by men—the territory of woman’s body, woman’s sexuality. Representation, in a wider sense, is the central term of debate in the whole controversy over the postmodern, and this text by Virilio is best located within the terms of that debate, for it makes an important strategic contribution to a possible radical politics for a postmodern— post-marxist—moment. The text is, however, an odd mixture of the serendipitous discovery (that, for instance, ‘It was an act of war which enabled S.M.Eisenstein to shoot a long sequence of Ivan the Terrible, Part Two with captured Agfacolor stock’),5 with the rather tenuous drive towards sociology (‘The cinema-town [Cinecittà, Hollywood…] of the military-industrial era succeeded the theatre-town of the ancient City-state’),6 and with the brilliant insight, concerning, for instance, the drive towards a

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dematerialization of military engagement which is consonant with the drive towards dematerialization of the enemy as the task of war and also the dematerialization of reality which has been a major function of cinema: Nineteenth-century Europeans, observed Taine, were forever on the move to see new commodities; now, with the coming of the cinema, pure visions were for sale. The cinema became the major site for a trade in dematerialization, a new industrial market which no longer produced matter but light, as the luminosity of those vast stained-glass windows of old was suddently concentrated into the screen.7 This study of The Logistics of Perception, first published in French in 1984, is merely the first volume of War and Cinema; it is, clearly, a useful starting-place—but perhaps only a starting-place—for the development of its many astute insights, not all of which are fully delineated or developed in the study itself. One of the urgent tasks demanded of the reader by this provocative work is the search for a new politics which will be capable of addressing a culture where one of the most significant areas of production lies not in the making of material commodities but rather in the production of images, representations, replicas, the simulacra of a contemporary ‘developed world’ culture. It is this which Benjamin, of course, had invited Marxism to attend to when he was disturbed by the effect of cinema at another crucial moment in European history, in 1936. It is perhaps worth noting that it is the post-marxists who are, finally, addressing that problem, while the Marxists are consistently, desperately —and pointlessly—trying to misrepresent the postmodern—along with postmodern theory—as some kind of capitulation to a ‘new right’.8 Benjamin rightly saw that the aestheticization of politics could lead only to war, and argued for the counter-proposal that communism would have to politicize art. Marxist culture, of course, has done this rigorously and consistently, providing some of the most important work in cultural practices in the fifty-odd years since Benjamin wrote his piece. There has, however, been the hint of a contradiction in such work, a contradiction exposed by some recent post-marxist thinking. Lyotard, for instance, suggests that in the necessary subscription to a metanarrarive of emancipation proposed by Marxism there remains a trace of idealism— an aestheticization of the political—which underpins all Marxist thought which would claim to be materialist. Baudrillard adds to this the realization that Marx—and Marxism—has failed to escape the two composite forms, the form production and the form representation, which Marx set out to attack; those forms bear a striking resemblance to the aesthetic. It might, thus, have been wiser for readers of Benjamin not to follow the prescription to ‘politicize art’, but rather to take the seemingly weaker counter-strategy of politicizing the aesthetic itself. In his most recent work ‘The Ideology of the Aesthetic’, Eagleton has turned to this and has restored some of the original, potentially radical, impetus to the aesthetic. Going back to Baumgarten, he argues that the aesthetic marks the distinction ‘not between art and life but between the material and the immaterial’.9 It is a matter primarily of the difference between an idealist ordering of the world and a material perception of it. The aesthetic thus becomes precisely the mediating vehicle which enables an internalization of bourgeois ideology, in which the historical world is made to conform with the subject’s ‘experience’. Virilio’s text might be seen as one which is working on precisely the same critical lines as Eagleton, for the logistics of perception are also the strategies of the aesthetic, as deployed in the dream factory of the cinema whose effects have become more visceral in inverse proportion to the dematerialization of physical combat in war strategy. The opportunity to politicize aesthetics becomes available in this kind of thinking; and this evades the remnants of an idealist aestheticization of politics which undermines that criticism and theory which ‘merely’ politicizes art. Although this is not a guide to war films, the reader will find much of interest in a series of passing and incidental comments and insights on directors such as Veit Harlan, D.W.Griffith, Carl Dreyer, Giovanni Pastrone, Jean Renoir, Abel Gance, Stellan Rye, G.W.Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl; on the propaganda film of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe and America; on contemporaries such as Losey, Kubrick, Coppola; on the star-system and its strategic and political functions. The reader acquainted with Virilio will also find much that is recognizable as belonging to his dominant concerns: on urban planning; on the relation of time to space and the resulting tensions in contemporary civic culture, civil life; the issue of how speed has affected our politics; the importance of the ‘aesthetics of disappearence’ as a political fact; the growing immaterialization of culture; and, of course, the theory of war. Virilio has become well known to a particular but small audience through the efforts of Semiotext(e); it is time his work became more widely acknowledged. The most important work, L’horizon négatif, L’espace critique, Esthétique de la disparition, has all still (at least to my knowledge) to be translated and made available to an anglophone audience. But Verso have taken the important step of bringing this ‘work in progress’ into the centre of some crucial contemporary debates. University College, Dublin

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NOTES 1 Sergei Eisenstein, as cited in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 101; Paul Virilio, Défense populaire et luttes écologiques (Paris: Galilée, 1978), pp. 14–15. Virilio goes on here to indicate that the resulting tension between the speed of attack on the one hand and the need to slow the enemy down on the other produces a tension or dialectic of speed and slowness upon which the city, the polis and politics are built (ibid., p. 17). 2 Virilio, Défense populaire, pp. 37–8. 3 Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988), p. 172. 4 Cf. Terry Eagleton’s arguments on this topic, now published as The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), and as work in progress in his ‘The ideology of the aesthetic’, in Paul Hernadi (ed.), The Rhetoric of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Rhetoric (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 75–86. According to this argument, we are in some sense ‘prisoners of the aesthetic’. 5 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), p. 8). 6 ibid., p. 38. 7 ibid., p. 32. 8 For a further development of this argument, and for a distinction between a ‘new right’ ideology and postmarxist philosophy, see my After Theory (London: Routledge, 1990). 9 Terry Eagleton, in Hernadi, op. cit., p. 75.

● Roy Bhaskar: Reclaiming Reality (London: Verso, 1989), 180 pp., £24.95 (hardback), £8.95 (paperback) TERRY EAGLETON

The world of postmodernist theory is a curiously flattened, two-dimensional space, from which all trace of depth has been scrupulously erased. Across this depthless surface flickers an incessant play of powers, interests, and desires, which since they are in no sense stratified are essentially monotonous. If each of these powers and interests is as valid in its own way as any other, then none of them is in the least valuable. If all of these interests are radically heterogeneous and incommensurable, if there are no common grounds on which we can choose rationally between them, then the political world delivered to us by this style of thought is a violent one, in which either the most sophistically persuasive tongue triumphs or we are simply left to fight it out. The politics of this two-dimensionality are surely clear. What is brusquely censored by this apparently libertarian discourse, removed beyond the bounds of the properly thinkable, is any enquiry into the generative structures and mechanisms which set these phenomena in place. It is this form of enquiry, now fashionably dismissed as ‘metaphysical’, which has traditionally borne the name of science. From the brittle defeatism of a Baudrillard to the chirpy opportunism of the so-called ‘new realism’, there can be no question of interrogating the structural conditions of possibility of the world we have, which is accordingly struck vacuous and aleatory. Postmodernism reveals itself in this light as a strange sort of positivism: whereas for nineteenth-century positivism what was brutally given was the supposedly incontrovertible nature of sensory experience, for postmodernism it is beliefs, interests, powers, and desires which are ‘foundationally’ self-evident. In a series of seminal works—A Realist Theory of Science, The Possibility of Naturalism, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation— the philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar has been arguing with admirable zeal and rigour for a realist conception of the world and our cognition of it; and the more occasional writings collected in this volume lay out his positions in their most conveniently accessible form. As a realist, Bhaskar holds that the world is structured, stratified, differentiated and changing independently of our knowledge of it, and that this is what our knowledge of it tells us. The world itself has no regard for our representations of it. The ‘epistemic fallacy’, rife in much cultural theory today, is to conflate being with knowledge in familiarly idealist fashion (the term for the conflation today is usually ‘discourse’), rather than to insist in materialist spirit on their non-identity. The ‘transitive’ objects of our cognition should not be mistaken for the ‘intransitive’ objects of the world itself. As a transcendental realist, Bhaskar holds against both empiricism and idealism that natural and social events and phenomena are generated by certain underlying structural conditions of possibility; that these generative structures are real: and that they furnish the proper objects of natural and social scientific knowledge. It is possible, and necessary, to ask what the world must broadly speaking be like in the first place for us to have the sort of provisional, fallibilistic knowledge of it that we do. As a critical realist, Bhaskar maintains that such forms of enquiry in the social realm are the necessary precondition of an emancipatory politics. Indeed one of the most impressive features of his writing is its continual close ‘doubling’ of the philosophical and the political, its tacit, unyielding refusal of the sentimental view that analytic rigour (‘bloodless’, ‘masculinist’) is one thing, and a passionate devotion to the cause of human liberation quite another. Bhaskar wants to isolate the generative mechanisms of social phenomena, with as much scholarly precision as he can muster, because he rightly sees that this in the long run is the only way of defeating misery and oppression. It is significant that there are really no practising scientists among the ranks of postmodern theorists, and (with the partial exception of Michel Foucault) no historians either. It seems odd to engage in lengthy epistemological debate at some suitably high-flown level without asking what scientists and historians actually get up to in their institutional practice. Bhaskar is out to theorize the implicit epistemology and ontology of scientific discourse, which he recognizes to be tacitly, inescapably realist whatever philosophical noises this or that scientist may occasionally make. Scandalously for the average first-year student on a Critical Theory course, he feels no nervous impulse to place the term ‘objectivity’ in fastidiously distancing scare quotes, and sees instead that an understanding of the way things are with fundamental social structures is an essential precondition of our freedom. Those who modishly denigrate the notion of objectivity in human enquiry should listen to the author of The Drowned and the Saved, who announces early in his text that he wishes to consider the question of the Nazi death camps with the utmost objectivity he can summon. The author is of course Primo Levi, victim of Auschwitz, and thus in

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no sense a ‘disinterested’ enquirer. If Levi wants to find out the truth of the camps, it is because he wants to know how to stop them from happening again. Bhaskar is not in the least concerned to deny that our knowledge of the world is historical, institutional and culturally conditioned. On the contrary: realism, so he affirms, entails a principle of ‘epistemic relativity’, which states that all beliefs are socially produced and historically transient. This may come as something of a surprise to those critical theorists who have now learnt to think within a rigid binary opposition between ‘culturally relative’ on the one hand and ‘objectively true’ on the other. There is an implicit ethical dimension to philosophical realism, so far unexplored by Bhaskar, which consists essentially in humbling and chastening the potential hubris of human knowledge in the face of a world which has no need for it, did not ‘anticipate’ it, and which in its richness and recalcitrance will always outrun our subtlest formulations. Such an ethics, with their faintly Heideggerian tinge, are in marked contrast to the hubristic anthropomorphism of a pragmatism or postmodernism which would insist that the world is always the way we say it is. As Gregor McLennan points out in Marxism, Pluralism and Beyond, realism of this sort is neither an objectivism nor a monism, committed as it is to the irreducibly plural nature of the various domains of reality. Whatever its difficulties, realism as a doctrine has a massive intuitive plausibility about it, since without it, it would be hard to account for many aspects of our practical intervention in reality. Bhaskar’s new essays elaborate such intuitions to the status of a rich, highly suggestive theory of Nature and society, all the way from a contrast between Feyerabend and Bachelard, a trenchant critique of positivism and a superb essay on materialist dialectics, to a reflection on the relations between natural and social sciences and a realist riposte to Richard Rorty. The volume contains one interesting argument which I would like to believe but suspect is flawed. Bhaskar seeks to refute ‘Hume’s law’ (the supposed non-derivability of values from facts) by claiming that if we are confronted with a set of false beliefs, and can identify the causal mechanisms of such false consciousness, then we can move directly from this theoretical explanation to the normative political injunction that we should abolish the causal mechanisms. This would seem to fail to refute Hume by smuggling in a normative claim— false belief is always undesirable—which, for example, Nietzsche (not to speak of various stray characters in Ibsen) would by no means comprehensively endorse. But this is a minor quibble with a bravely unfashionable, intellectually scintillating piece of work. Linacre College, Oxford

● Peter de Bolla, Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics (London: Routledge, 1988), 224 pp., £25.00 (hardback), £7.95 (paperback) GRAHAM ALLEN

The preface to this book describes it as an extension and amplification of Bloom’s work on rhetoric and its relation to the history and reading of poetry. De Bolla immediately gets down to the main problem any would-be elaborator of the Bloomian discourse must confront: ‘internal to Bloom’s theoretical enterprise’, he writes, ‘is its own resistance to dissemination, its own hedge against imitation’ (p. 8). Indeed, de Bolla spends a good portion of his introduction marking out a specific strategy for reading Bloom in the context of previous commentary. De Bolla highlights two principal methods of commentary: the first, as exemplified by Frank Lentricchia in his After the New Criticism, where Bloom’s own thesis concerning the anxiety of influence is turned against its producer, tracing influence-relations back to Northrop Frye and the New Criticism; and, alternative to this, the kind of genealogical approach best represented in Daniel O’Hara’s essay on Bloom, now published in his The Romance of Interpretation, whereby theoretical and conceptual links are drawn between Bloom and a number of contemporary thinkers, then rooted in a shared relation to the philosophy of Nietzsche. De Bolla appears happier with the latter method, and yet still finds it necessary to warn of a possible sanitization: ‘to read Bloom in this way is to make respectable something that sees itself as excessive and unrespectable, and it is to ignore the manifest drive towards selforigination or extreme idiosyncracy which characterises all Bloom’s writings’ (p. 9). How then is one to read Bloom? If the approaches just mentioned appear rather ingenious and ‘anterior’ (turning Bloom into something he is not, or only is from rather special perspectives), then surely the alternative, to write ‘within’ Bloom’s own stated perception of his work, is equally problematical. Saving the obvious philosophical reservations, such intrinsic readings can lead to profound ironies. This is perhaps best exemplified in David Fite’s Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, the first full-length book on Bloom, which takes the intrinsic approach to such a point that it begins to support and extend those defences, evasions, and repressions upon which the Bloomian discourse is built. Thus the intrinsic approach can lead us to a position where the description begins to deny the very theories it is attempting to present— making Bloom free from just those anxieties and debts he himself has posited as universal. To repeat, then, how should we read Bloom? At first it appears as if de Bolla has not completely made up his mind, defending Bloom yet in ways that are not exactly an imitation of the Bloomian theories. But this book is an extremely deceptive one, a text that may well take a number of readings before its play of connotative levels can be properly pieced together. De Bolla has apparently chosen the role of disciple, modest hierophant, ‘extending’ the Bloomian mystery cult only in as much as translation takes the esoteric out into the world in which we live. The reality of the matter, however, is more complicated, the disciple rather more independent than he finds it expedient to appear. De Bolla’s opening gambit is to address a general misconception whereby Bloom’s work is read philosophically, as ‘theory’, rather than what it in fact purports to be. This is how Bloom’s self-image as critic is described: ‘the Bloomian project is one in which poetry is taken in and on its own terms; hence to read poetry in any way other than poetically is for Bloom the biggest mistake we can make’ (p. 31). Thus de Bolla, in his adherence to such a spirit of reading, produces an initial swerve with regard to a whole tradition of commentary which has engaged with Bloom on the level of ‘theory’ instead of ‘poetry’. Yet this opening swerve represents as much an impasse as an opening. The problem broached takes us back to the ‘inside’—‘outside’ metaphor. Poetry, it would appear, exists and we must write our criticisms from ‘within’ it. And this for Bloom, as de Bolla explains, means (since there are no texts only intertexts) to participate in the processes of intratextual, tropological revisionism. The difficulty for such a position, as Bloom’s own theories can help us to understand, is that in a sense there is no such thing as poetry, ‘the poetic’. At any rate, ‘the poetic’ does not exist until we have ‘created’ it. Any discourse, Bloom’s included, must constitute the precise conceptual field of ‘the poetic’ before it can speak of being ‘within’ it. We reach the rather troubling position where to be ‘inside’ our object of study we must first construct it, and there is surely no more ‘anterior’ concept than rudimentary construction. Bloom is a master in the art of the positive construction of ‘the poetic’, with the qualification, of course, that his is somehow an ‘internal’ constructivism. Yet without an explanation as to what would constitute the ‘non-poetic’ Bloom’s criticism evinces a maddening circularity. Freud, Nietzsche, Peirce, Kierkegaard and more, all enter into the ‘universe’ of poetry (whether as honorary guests or founding fathers is never quite explained); yet the effect is always to further our impression that ‘the poetic’ in Bloom is whatever he finds interesting and assimilable. This may well be fine for so ‘idiosyncratic’ a figure as

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Bloom; indeed, this particular circularity represents one of the most impregnable aspects of Bloom’s armature. But as such it constitutes a far greater threat for Bloom’s reader, particularly if, like de Bolla, he is desirous to respect just this element of the Bloomian project: this speaking for ‘the poetic’. One cannot help thinking that the would-be collaborator steps not so much into ‘the poetic’ as into the Bloomian ‘mind’. An interesting place to be, no doubt, but one in which description and extension turn ineluctably into absorption. This important issue is clarified in the commentary on Bloom’s ‘wrestling’ with Derrida. Bloom’s revision of Derrida’s Scene of Writing is meant to indicate how and why such a privileging of writing over speech is not adequate for a theory of poetic production and signification which is ‘for poetry’ and is generated ‘within’ poetry. And so, as de Bolla explains, Bloom works through to a revision of Derrida where poetry is described as a ‘lie against time’, with all that implies for a poem’s sense (‘reading’) of its relation to other poems and to itself as a poem. However, what Bloom does here is to read Derrida as if his work applied specifically to poetry; Bloom will not inform us whether Derrida is correct or incorrect for ‘non-poetic’ language. The result of an essay such as ‘Wordsworth and the scene of instruction’ is that we get a ‘theory of poetry’ that depends upon a distinction between ‘the poetic’ and the ‘nonpoetic’, upon a boundary between these two fields, but that will not, or perhaps cannot, explain where, how, and why this boundary exists. Derrida’s presence in the essay mentioned is ambiguous to say the least. Bloom’s ‘theory of poetry’ is rather like a theory of the leaf that continues to describe a plethora of leaves, from various strategical positions, yet never once mentions the existence of trees. Reiterating a tenet of Bloom’s, de Bolla declares that ‘To read within the poetic tradition is to partake of it’ (p. 58). Yet we are far from being pedantic when we ask what it would be like not to partake of it. Such a question merely represents the fact that to say we read ‘inside’ the poetic tradition is mere sound and fury until we explain what it is we have come ‘inside’ from. That de Bolla is quietly aware of these issues is a fact that sporadically surfaces in the first half of his book. In the middle of his treatment of Bloom’s relation to Derrida he announces: we might say that the tradition now begins to look like the effect of the reading process, the surplus of textuality as constituted by the event which misreading is. However, if this is now seen in terms of the prospectus for a literary history we can note that a diachronic description of the tradition would seem to be disabled on account of the fact that tradition is only present to the reading-event. It is continually re-invented in each act of reading; hence the possibility of it having a history rather than being a history is negated. (p. 55) Within such a statement emerges perhaps the fundamental issue at stake here: the distinction between criticism as interpretation and criticism as a poetics. For it is only on the level of poetics, when we have organized the data that is literary tradition into a hypostasized field of identity and accountable difference, that such concepts as ‘the poetic’ take on an explanatory value. The Bloomian discourse, as de Bolla’s commentary helps to show, is founded upon a radical vacillation between interpretation (as a ‘poetic’ act within the tradition of which it writes) and a reification of that tradition in and through recourse to the language of a totalizing poetics (as the continued elaboration of a ‘map’ of misreading should make plain). De Bolla begins to work towards a resolution of these seemingly intractable problems as he comes to the complex relationship between Paul de Man and Bloom. Rejecting de Man’s emphasis on rhetoric as a system of tropes, Bloom highlights the flip side of rhetoric, that is, rhetoric as persuasion. The result finally begins to bring us nearer to a definition of ‘the poetic’ that would encompass its opposite. Bloom embraces the ‘aporia’ between rhetoric as a system of tropes and as persuasion in order to create a definition of the reading process in which every reading of a synchronic tropological event enters the diachronic tradition of tropism as persuasion. So that criticism, like poetry, becomes an. ‘event’, an ‘utterance’ in a ‘tradition of uttering’. To put it simply, ‘tradition’, for Bloom, exists but cannot be described save via a troping upon it. Which appears to come down, perhaps, to the notion that ‘the poetic’ is always and only what is ‘strong’ enough to require revision, or ‘troping’ by the would-be ‘strong reader’. Tradition, and thus ‘the poetic’, seems to be whatever is unavoidable; which does not exactly resolve the problem of the relation between interpretation and poetics, yet may still hold out the possibility for a more adequate definition of ‘the poetic’. It is this seed that de Bolla cultivates in the second half of his book. De Bolla pushes Bloom’s notion of metalepsis, or ‘transumptive allusion’, until it does begin to represent that sought-after definition of ‘the poetic’ and through this a possible basis for a poetics he terms ‘historical rhetorics’: the history of rhetoric and the rhetoric of that history. This is achieved by focusing on two kinds of classical ‘figure’: figure of words and figure of thought. Through the problematical relationship between these two figures de Bolla fleshes out a distinction between ‘ordinary’ figuration, dependent upon the ‘literal’—‘figural’ opposition, and ‘poetical’ figuration, where that opposition is transcended by a ‘second-order figuration’ consonant with Bloom’s description of transumption as ‘the trope of a trope’. It is at this point that we do begin to understand what would constitute both ‘the poetic’ and the ‘non- poetic’ use of language. Out of such a meditation comes a nascent poetics of figurative language capable of translating Bloom’s work back to him in fresh colours, or rather of transforming the ‘idiosyncratic’ into the properly communicable. The application of the theory to the Bloomian stylization of Romantic poetry is particularly stimulating:

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Reading Romantic poetry, then, does not require us to construct a literal/figural divide in its use of language but a firstorder/second-order figurative divide. Another way of saying this which returns us to the history of rhetoric is to note that Romantic poetry is not articulated through figures of words but through figures of thought. This may be the case for kinds of literary language which we do not label Romantic; it may well be the case for what we call literary language tout court…. (p. 122) The process of reading here described retains Bloom’s insistence on the will-to-power in poetry whilst extending the possibilities for intratextual chains of transumptive allusion into far wider patterns than are usually associated with Bloom’s Romantic, ‘psychokabbalistic’ tendency of thought. One wonders what Bloom would make of de Bolla’s ‘extension’ of his concept of a ‘diachronic rhetoric’, which still appears to me forged within a ‘personalism’ unaccountable within de Bolla’s more formal poetics. In his last chapter de Bolla gives us a practical example of his theory of first-order and second-order figuration in a discussion of the trope of the body and the trope of desire in Donne’s ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’ and Wordsworth’s ‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’. The connection between the two poems becomes the ‘history’ of the trope of the body, so that the author writes the two poems seek to convey a similar experience, that of loss or parting, in two very different ways, for very different audiences and in the service of very different conceptions of poetry, of what it is to write. But having noted these very large distances between the two poems we may also note that the trope of the body functions in different ways which are to some extent determined by the history internal to the trope itself. (pp. 137–8) I cannot help wondering whether taken to this degree of historicization Bloom would not begin to see his human that reads and writes, his poet as psychological man, threatened once more by that impersonal archenemy ‘language’. What has happened to the theme of intratextual revisionism on the basis of the precursor/ephebe model here? In de Bolla’s schematics such a model fades as we trace the ‘internal’ history of a trope through networks that begin to remind us of something like Michel Foucault’s discursive formations. We go back to the beginning of the book, recollecting de Bolla’s insistence that Bloom’s idea of ‘influence’ and its relation to the ‘family romance’ has been widely misunderstood. Now Bloom, as far as my own reading of his more recent work is concerned, has not resiled from the belief that precursors choose their ephebes. As Bloom writes in his essay ‘Transumption’: ‘Transumptive reading and writing gives up meaning as rest or haven, and does not know a poem as being apart from the agon it enacts.’ That agon remains the intra-psychical ‘wrestling’ between ‘strong’ precursor and ‘strong’ ephebe (and equally between ‘strong’ poet and his ‘strong’ reader). That de Bolla recognizes this is beyond question. Indeed, we return to the subterranean levels of this book and the whole issue of reading ‘within’ Bloom. De Bolla produces out of his engagement with Bloom a theory of ‘historical rhetorics’ which is eminently teachable because fundamentally communicable. This theory is an ‘extension’ of the Bloomian project. Yet it is an ‘extension’ in the sense of a ‘going beyond’; which is to say that it is as much a farewell as a collaboration. Indeed, reflecting on the position de Bolla ultimately achieves in this book, one cannot help returning to the spectacle of Bloom himself. And what I think we discover is, once more, that stubborn ‘idiosyncracy’, that massive conjunction of voices and stances stacked like a precarious, playingcard castle. One cannot simply extract a few cards from the lower reaches. There are no neat loans or generous additions to be made. The defiant edifice stands, glorious in its precariousness, to be looked at in wonder or dramatically toppled. I repeat, de Bolla understands this well enough. And yet in his decision to mix the modest with the implausible, the collaborative with the antagonistic, he has managed to evade the hyperbolical clamour that commentary on Bloom has generally become. It is a fortunate strategy, for the book contains much that deserves to be heard. Sheffield University

● Nicholas Zurbrugg, Beckett and Proust (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), 312pp., £19.50 (hardback) PETER MURPHY

In his hilariously astute The Pooh Perplex, Frederick C.Crews even manages to anticipate what we might today, with particular reference to the Anglo-American tradition, call the ‘Beckett Perplex’. Murphy A. Sweat, a popular Yale lecturer circa 1963, identifies Beckett with the then fashionable labels of ‘absurdist’ and ‘existentialist’ in his freshman lecture ‘Winnie and the Cultural Stream’. The hesitation about whether Beckett should be discussed in ‘formalist’ (read New Critical) or existentialist terms still haunts Beckett Studies, which is an enterprise every bit as daunting as that directed to the ill-fated Winnie. Critical gyrations around the crucial question of the art-life nexus in Beckett’s work are at the core of the ‘Beckett Perplex’: Beckett’s major critics of the early sixties, Martin Esslin, Hugh Kenner, Ruby Cohn, and John Fletcher, oscillate between these two referents and would claim both as highly relevant to a description of Beckett’s vision, without, however, being able to show theoretically how the two might be reconciled. If there is one dominant theme that characterizes the tremendous outpouring of Beckett scholarship from the early sixties to the present, it is an ever more explicit emphasis upon essentially formalist readings. Recent criticism increasingly presents us with a ‘Beckett Simplex’: the ‘perplexity’ of dealing with art—life relationships is, most often, not even an issue (this trend is particularly evident with reference to the postTrilogy texts). Two important exceptions to this pattern are Sylvie Debevec Henning’s Beckett’s Critical Complicity (1988) and Steven Connor’s Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (1988); both studies begin the consideration of some of the more positive aspects of Beckett’s critical relation to our cultural contexts by drawing, respectively, on Bakhtinian and Derridean concepts. Within the tradition of Beckett scholarship, Nicholas Zurbrugg’s Beckett and Proust is, in the final analysis, reactionary: its theoretical premises are a hodge-podge of the clichés of negativity and existentialist meaninglessness et al. which dominated the early and middle stages of Beckett studies. Although Zurbrugg does neatly disengage himself from the ‘art of failure’/‘technique of cancellation’ school of Beckett criticism, his only recourse is to replace it with a variant stereotypical view; namely, that ‘Beckett’s own work evinces an astonishingly impoverished metaphysics, in which things seem fated to go from bad to worse’ (p. 189). In other words, Zurbrugg presents us with an astonishingly impoverished view of the Beckettian enterprise, a veritable Beckett simplicissimus. At the centre of Zurbrugg’s speculations resides a drastically oversimplified distinction between Modernism and Post-Modernism which allows him to circumvent any serious reconsideration of the crucial issues of realism, art’s relationship to life, and art’s ethical contingencies, as they might relate to Beckett’s own work. Beckett is simply posited ‘Post-Modernist’; therefore, he must, of course, have lost faith in the meaning of such out-dated terms, and so on. Zurbrugg might have benefited greatly from a serious reflection on Paul de Man’s comment that the very idea of a PostModern approach struck him as based upon a ‘naïvely historical’ paradigm of reading and interpretation which reduced the idea of Post-Modernism to a mere ‘parody of the notion of modernity’. Certainly, Zurbrugg’s reading of Beckett is a mere parody (often simply an inversion), or grotesque subversion of the Modernist ideals of Proust which Zurbrugg ostensibly endorses. Fortunately for Beckett and Proust this is only half the story: chapters 1 through 7 are incisive, provocative, often brilliant, deconstructions of Beckett’s ‘maps of misreading’ in his Proust (1931), a work which has occupied a key position in Beckett studies. Beckett and Proust is perhaps best seen as a monograph on Beckett’s Proust, in fact, the very discriminating reader might stop at page 172 without missing anything of consequence. What follows is not only de trop, but, as we will see, an extended critical exercise in non sequitur. Zurbrugg begins by convincingly showing that ‘almost all of Beckett’s critics effortlessly equate the conclusions of Proust and Beckett’ (p. 3), and then goes on to demonstrate that this is fundamentally wrongheaded, as Beckett’s study, while offering some accurate summaries, tends to conflate ‘the values of its author with those of its subject by attributing Beckett’s own distinctively “anti-Proustian” priorities to the Proustian vision’. Zurbrugg also instructively considers the ways in which Proust’s critics ‘monotonously oversimplify his vision’ (p. 9). He has definitely made a valuable contribution to Proust studies by promoting a more positive reading of that writer’s Modernism, especially the point that the artist is not the only hero in A la recherche du temps perdu, that art is not the only via dolorosa of salvation, and that the artist is not by definition an amoral agent. It is from this revisionist vantage point that Zurbrugg takes Beckett to task for his misreadings of Proust. Beckett ‘systematically misrepresents’ Proust in order to give a ‘one-sided’ (p. 103) view that emphasizes the negative and nihilistic at the expense of more positive aspects of Proust’s relativity. A sampling of Zurbrugg’s rhetorical use of the adjective will

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give some idea of how Beckett is flogged for his so-called ‘Post-Modernist deviations’: his ‘eccentric essay’ (p. 101) is ‘imperfect’, ‘alarmingly ambiguous’ (p. 3), and often adopts a ‘bizarre approach’ that does, admittedly, offer ‘seductively deceptive exegeses’ (p. 101). Zurbrugg’s analysis is most effective when it more clinically and methodically deconstructs Beckett’s ‘misreading’; for example, Beckett’s ‘preposterous premise’ (p. 111) that the Marcel—Albertine relationship is paradigmatic of all relationships, and Beckett’s devious stylistic manoeuvres to avoid confronting Ernst Curtius’s interpretation of Proust’s positive relativism. Rhetoric aside, Zurbrugg’s expose is convincing and he has detailed like no other critic before him has how Proust is in many of its key essentials Beckett’s rewriting of Proust as he struggles to give shape to his own emerging vision. The conclusions which Zurbrugg draws from this critique are, however, very problematical to say the least. Beckett is a ‘perfect foil’ (p. 281) to Proust and is, Zurbrugg maintains, resolutely and consistently ‘anti-Proustian’: Beckettt is striving for an ‘ablation of all desire’ and is, so the argument runs, drawn obsessively to the ‘superficial consolation’ of a formalizing impulse that adopts certain rather mechanized ritual patterns. Zurbrugg’s reading returns us to a sterile repetition of many of the guiding clichés of Beckett criticism, replete with the inevitable gloss that his work evinces ‘the fascinating tension between the playful formal qualities of Beckett’s fiction, and the unswervingly misanthropic content deriving from his conviction that there is “nothing to be done”’ (p. 216). The time has come for Beckett studies to cross this pons asinorum (whether the Zurbruggian variety or its many predecessors). In Beckett and Proust there is a pervasive and debilitating irony: for just as Zurbrugg quite properly rejected the naïve use of the intentional fallacy by Proust’s critics when they invoked Marcel’s views about art’s ‘salvation’, he is equally guilty of a similar offence with reference to Beckett’s writing, as highlighted in the citation of Godot’s ‘nothing to be done’. Zurbrugg and the vast majority of Beckett critics have failed even to consider that Beckett might be adopting a critical stance towards such views and that they cannot be simplistically identified with authorial intention. Moreover, Zurbrugg’s Procrustean definition of Beckett as a Post-Modernist committed to certain negative appraisals of language precludes any consideration of a number of vital statements Beckettt has articulated about more constructive approaches, such as ‘Being has a form’, that being might be let into literature if the ‘proper syntax of weakness’ could be found, and that literary excavations are for him avowedly ‘ontospeleological’. Nor is Beckett consistently ‘anti-Proustian’, as Zurbrugg maintains; the Beckettian equation is never that simple. While Zurbrugg’s declared ‘purpose’ is to compare and contrast the views of Beckett and Proust on ‘problems of perception and communication’ (p. 1), he never investigates the rationale behind Beckett’s reservations about Proust’s theory of language, from which derives Beckett’s authentic scepticism concerning Proust’s ‘solutions’ and ‘transcendences’. Beckett’s doubts have nothing to do with a doctrinaire Post-Modernist rejection of Proust’s vision. In terms of literary method, Beckett’s reservations about Proust’s language can be seen most clearly in his handling of the vexed term ‘symbol’. In Proust, Beckett is perplexed by the writer’s dilemma of having to integrate abstractions with the living reality from which they originated. Beckett maintains that Proust rejects ‘the intellectual symbolism of a Baudelaire, abstract and discursive’, and prefers instead ‘symbolism…handled as a reality, special, literal and concrete’. Beckett adds that for Proust ‘the object may be a living symbol, but a symbol of itself’. ‘Symbol of itself and ‘living symbol’ are, however, awkward and embarrassing phrases which are, as Edgar Wind would say, ‘infested with the paradox of self-transcendence’. For, although ‘symbol’ and ‘substance’ are united in Proust’s famous ‘reduplication’, the identification finally leads, according to Beckett, to an ‘extratemporal reality’ where no such terms apply, least of all ‘symbol’, which appears then to have been used in an allegorical fashion to point to a ‘reality’ beyond itself—an ‘extratemporal being’. This is one of the great junction points of Modernism and Post-Modernism, and Zurbrugg has nothing to say about it. ‘Nothing to be done’, indeed. It could be argued that Beckett’s subsequent efforts to work free of this theoretical impasse have led towards a reconstruction of the aesthetic ideology (as Christopher Norris uses the term in his study of Paul de Man), and not simply the repetition of a misanthropic vision that is ‘consoled’ by formal playfulness, as Zurbrugg argues. This is the view which dominates the last half of Beckett and Proust, and it is most evident in the final chapter, ‘Beckett’s Mature Fiction—from “Shit” to “Shades”’ (a ‘Pooh Perplex’ for adults?) Thus, as Zurbrugg reads it, ‘Beckett’s mature ficture rapidly becomes increasingly hermetic, abstract, and private’ (p. 254). Yet another neatly sanitized, depoliticized reading of Beckett, replete with the required sop(orific) about his ‘compassion’. What Beckett said in 1953 about his Proust could be applied even more appropriately to Nicholas Zurbrugg’s Beckett and Proust: ‘Its premises are less feeble than its conclusions.’ Simon Fraser University

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● Louis Althusser, ‘Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists’ and Other Essays, edited by Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 1990), xx+285 pp., £39.95 (hardback), £12.95 (paperback)

● Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory (London: Verso, 1988), 359 pp., £29.95 (hardback), £10.95 (paperback)

● Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), xx+611 pp., £35.00 (hardback), £16.00 (paperback)

● Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, translated by Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 160 pp., £7.95 (paperback) CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

Commentators were writing books and articles on the demise of Althusserian Marxism years before the current, muchpublicized ‘crisis’ of Marxist thinking in general. Their diagnosis often took the line that Althusser’s project was doomed from the outset on account of its high theoretical pretensions, its adherence to an outworn ‘enlightenment’ paradigm, and its presumed point of departure in that structuralist ‘revolution’ of the human sciences whose moment had now passed into the history of obsolete or discredited ideas. As structuralism gave way to other, less grandiose forms of intellectual endeavour— postmodernist, Foucauldian, New Historicist and the like—so it became de rigueur among up-to-the-minute observers of the scene to treat the Althusserian episode with a mixture of wry nostalgia and chastened realism. After all, had not Althusser, as a leading CP theoretician, not only failed to predict the events of 1968 but shown himself sadly incapable of responding when those events demanded something more than a retreat to established philosophical positions? And didn’t this demonstrate all too plainly how mistaken it was for self-styled ‘vanguard’ intellectuals to set themselves up as the theoretical conscience of the masses, claiming—like Althusser—a ‘scientific’ knowledge of those ideological mechanisms by which other, less privileged individuals were ‘interpellated’ or ‘recruited’ into the service of existing power-relations? Much better—so it seemed—to

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acknowledge the lessons of history, among them the inherently error-prone nature of all theoretical discourse, the overweening character of Marxist ‘meta-narratives’, the absence of all transcendental guarantees in matters of historical understanding, and the way that events were always liable to confute any form of presumptive dialectical reason. Althusser thus became the single most prominent scapegoat figure in that rush to abandon theoretical positions which now seemed merely the relics of an outworn rationalist philosophy of mind, knowledge, and truth. And of course there were plenty of disabused pundits on hand— from the right-wing Nouveaux Philosophes to non-Marxist ‘radicals’ of various colour like Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard—for whom this came as a welcome opportunity to compete in the game of denouncing Marxism and all its works. In fact there ensued quite a scramble to vacate the high ground of theory and method, with Marxism now cast in the role of a repressive, monological ‘discourse’, a product of the bad old enlightenment drive to elevate truth, reason, and critique above the vagaries of situated human experience. Hence Foucault’s Nietzschean genealogies of power-knowledge1, Lyotard’s appeal to an idiom of ‘heterogeneous’ phrase-regimes or language-games, such that no one set of validating norms could rightfully set up to judge or criticize another2, and Baudrillard’s tout court rejection of everything in the western philosophical tradition that assumed the capacity of reason to distinguish between truth and falsehood, reality and illusion, or knowledge and the semblance of knowledge as produced by forms of ideological misrecognition.3 Least of all could any credence now be given to that most extreme form of theoreticist abstraction whose name was Althusserian Marxism. For here—so it seemed—the march of historical events had conspired with the widespread shift of intellectual priorities to expose that whole project as a dreadful warning instance of what goes wrong when theory gets above itself and starts to dictate in matters of political conscience. In short, the Althusserian paradigm came under attack from several quarters simultaneously. In political terms its credentials were thought to have been pretty much demolished by the events of May 1968, not to mention the retreat from Marxist positions (orthodox or otherwise) among numerous left intellectuals in the subsequent years. Epistemologic- ally, its claims were taken as pretty much synonymous with those of French structuralism in its high scientistic phase, a project whose inbuilt problems and aporias had now been exposed by Derridean deconstruction, by poststructuralists like Barthes and— perhaps most decisively—by Foucault’s documented case-histories of the complicity that had always existed between enlightened truth-claims and the mechanisms of social surveillance and control. Then again, there was the ‘postmodern’ turn against theory in the name of what Lyotard called ‘first-order narrative pragmatics’, a refusal to countenance any version of enlightenment reason that sought to impose its emancipatory vision on the values, ideologies, or belief-systems that made up the currency of social exchange at any given time. All in all it appeared that Althusserian Marxism was just the latest, most extreme version of that Cartesian-Kantian myth, the ‘transcendental subject’ of knowledge and critique, which Foucault had memorably described (in The Order of Things) as a figure drawn in sand at the ocean’s edge, soon to be erased by the incoming tide of a postmodern ethos that would find no room for such outmoded epistemological notions. The time was long past when theorists like Althusser—or ‘universal intellectuals’ in the Sartrian mould—could set up as arbiters of truth, morality, and political justice by virtue of possessing a knowledge denied to the purveyors of mere consensus belief. For we had now moved on into a new dispensation where all those typecast categorical distinctions (epistemeldoxa, science/ideology, truth/falsehood, etc.) had at last been revealed as mere discursive ploys in the falsehood, etc.) had at last been revealed as mere discursive ploys in the service of a will-to-power masquerading as pure, disinterested reason. And one major sign of this shift was the loss of faith in a structuralist paradigm—most notably, that of Althusser’s ‘structuralist Marxism’— which had raised the critique of common-sense (ideological) perception into a high point of theory and principle. II Such is at any rate the widely received view of the factors that combined to bring about the ‘eclipse’ of Althusser’s once highly respected and influential attempt to re-think the philosophical bases of Marxist ‘theoretical practice’. The story hangs together well enough as an exercise in short-term socio-cultural commentary, but it scarcely begins to address the real issues raised between Althusser and his present-day detractors. It is therefore good to have this new volume of his essays in English translation, since they may give rise to a renewed engagement with Althusser’s work and perhaps—as I would hope—to a questioning of the standard postmodernist line on such matters, i.e. that nothing remains of Althusser’s project save a monument to obsolete ‘enlightenment’ ideas. Critical theory is notoriously prone to the swings and roundabouts of fashion, a tendency that is nowhere more evident than in the current high vogue for thinkers like Lyotard and Baudrillard, thinkers whose work— as I have argued at length elsewhere4—hardly stands up to critical scrutiny. Worst of all, it creates the kind of selective myopia or tunnel-vision hindsight that begins by assimilating Althusser to a vaguely defined ‘structuralist’ movement, and then concludes that, since ‘structuralism’ is hopelessly out of date, therefore Althusser is no longer worth serious attention. Now it is certainly the case—on his own submission—that Althusser derived some of his main theoretical precepts from the structuralist critique of language and representation which in turn found a model in Saussurian linguistics, especially the languelparole distinction, the appeal to a synchronic (or immanent) mode of analysis as prerequisite to any ‘scientific’ study,

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and the idea of meaning as constituted in and through the play of differential signifying elements. Furthermore, he followed Lacan (who also claimed a warrant from Saussure, Jakobson and structural linguistics) in equating ideology with the ‘imaginary’ realm of specular misrecognition, and in discovering a likewise analogical relation between the symbolic order (the realm of socially authorized meanings and subject-positions) and those various, more or less coercive agencies of power that ‘constructed’ the subject in accordance with this or that dominant socio-political order. So it would clearly be wrong to suggest that Althusserian Marxism just happened to emerge at much the same time—or with some of the same methodological trappings—as French structuralism in its heyday. But one can still make the case (as I propose to do here) that we misread Althusser by identifying his project too closely with that structuralist enterprise whose rise and fall has so often been chronicled since. For there is some justice in the suspicion voiced by various commentators (among them Perry Anderson, Thomas Pavel, and Vincent Descombes)5 that French structuralism grew up in isolation from other, crucially relevant currents of thought, in particular the Anglo-American tradition of analytical and linguistic philosophy, a tradition that might have corrected or qualified some of its more extreme (and methodologically dubious) claims. Anderson puts the matter in a nutshell when he argues that structuralism represented an ‘abusive extrapolation’ from Saussure’s original programme, one that (for instance) took the ‘arbitrary’ nature of the sign as a high point of radical principle, a break with all ‘bourgeois’ notions of meaning, truth and representation, whereas for Saussure it functioned as a strictly heuristic device, a means of rendering language amenable to the specialized purposes of structural-synchronic description. A recognition of this fact might have saved a good deal of pseudo-radical waffling in the Tel Quel manner about the ‘textual revolution’ that would surely be produced by severing the hitherto sacrosanct tie between signifier and signified, or by disrupting the ‘economy’ of bourgeois representation through a Joycian assault on that mythical entity, the ‘classic realist text’. Such ideas took hold very largely as a consequence of the structuralists’ having misread Saussure—or read him in pursuit of their own preoccupations—and also of their knowing little or nothing about developments in the philosophy of language outside the charmed circle of structuralist debate. For some acquaintance with (e.g.) Frege’s work on sense and reference might have shown up the limits of a theory based on the sign as a minimal distinctive unit of meaning, as opposed to the sentence or proposition within which signs play a meaningful role, and which in turn set the conditions for deciding on the status (referential, fictive, metaphorical or whatever) of the sense thus conveyed. Such arguments are a part of the ‘linguistic turn’ within present-day analytical philosophy in so far as they appeal to aspects of language—or the ‘logical grammar’ of sense-making discourse—rather than invoking a priori concepts or forms of transcendental deduction in the Kantian manner. But they stop well short of the confused idea—as advanced most tenaciously by Lyotard in his book The Differend—that reality (for all we can know of it) is constructed entirely in and through language, that reference is the merest of ideological illusions, and that ‘discourses’ must therefore be strictly incommensurable since nothing could serve as a means of adjudicating between different language-games, cultural codes, phrase-regimes, or ‘final vocabularies’. No doubt this conclusion follows of necessity if one starts out—as the structuralists did—from a generalized notion of the ‘arbitrary’ sign, joined to a theory of ‘unlimited semiosis’, which would ultimately make it impossible to distinguish between different orders of language, i.e. those involving some kind of referential truth-claim and those belonging to the order of fictive, metaphorical, or imaginary discourse. In this sense structuralism was indeed predestined to collapse in face of those subsequent (postmodern or neo-pragmatist) critiques that called its whole working rationale into question by adopting a more ‘radical’ stance on the question of truth, meaning, and method. But there is—as I have suggested—no reason to think that Althusser’s star was so firmly hitched to the structuralist wagon that his project necessarily miscarried in the wake of that illconceived enterprise. For one thing, Althusser’s philosophical sources go back far beyond Saussurian linguistics or the structuralist ‘sciences of man’ to embrace the tradition of rationalist thinking whose most important representative was Spinoza, and whose influence on his work is manifest in each of the essays collected in this volume. For another, it is clear that Althusser’s arguments have nothing in common with the style of all-purpose modish sceptical thought which overtook structuralism at an early stage and left it prey to various forms of potent irrationalist mystique. In short, it is time to reassess Althusser’s writings, to stop thinking of him as one more superannuated figure in the structuralist camp, and to see just where his thinking holds out against the current postmodern-pragmatist drift. And this task is all the more urgent in view of what is presently being touted, by thinkers right and left, as the terminal ‘crisis’ of Marxist thought and the need to abandon every last vestige of Enlightenment Ideologiekritik. For the question of Althusser’s continuing relevance as a proponent of Marxist ‘theoretical practice’ is always within reach of the larger question as to whether Marxism can possibly survive the current assaults on its moral, political, and intellectual standing in view of events in Eastern Europe. The volume under review gathers a number of essays—especially the title-piece, ‘Philosophy and the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists’—which should help readers to gain a better sense of Althusser’s intellectual bearings.

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III The Spinozist influence has rarely been noticed, at least by Anglo-American commentators, although Elliott’s book has some perceptive passages that go some way toward rectifying the omission. Althusser made a point of acknowledging his debt to Spinoza in Reading Capital, the volume he coauthored with Etienne Balibar in 1965. Thus: [t]he first man ever to have posed the problem of reading, and in consequence, of writing, was Spinoza, and he was also the first man in the world to have proposed both a theory of history and a philosophy of the opacity of the immediate. With him, for the first time ever, a man linked together in this way the essence of reading and the essence of history in a theory of the difference between the imaginary and the true.6 This passage is remarkable not only for pitching the claims so high but for using a decidedly metaphysical language (‘the essence of reading’, ‘the essence of history’) by way of asserting Spinoza’s credentials as a materialist thinker. The reason may well be Althusser’s desire to question the standard (vulgar-Marxist) idea that ‘metaphysics’ always belongs on the side of idealist mystification, while Marxism reveals such philosophies for what they are, mere illusions in the service of ‘bourgeois ideology’. On the contrary, he argues: the only right reading of a work like Das Kapital is one that takes a lesson from Spinoza and distinguishes the real-concrete from the concrete-in-thought, or lived experience (the realm of ideology) from the work of theoretical production which aims at a knowledge—a scientific knowledge—of the ‘misrecognition’ involved in such appeals to experience as a source of plain, self-evident truth. For Althusser, ideology is best understood as a concept precisely equivalent to Spinoza’s ‘knowledge of imagination’, i.e. the kind of ‘natural’ or pre-reflective attitude that accepts what is given in a common-sense way, and finds no reason to question or to criticize the grounds of naïve sensecertainty. The break with this attitude can only be accomplished through a labour of rigorous conceptual critique, a labour of the kind exemplified in Marx’s mature writings, though not (Althusser argues) in those works which pre-date that discovery and which still bear traces of an earlier—humanist or Hegelian—mode of understanding. In fact it is no exaggeration to say that the entire project of Althusserian Marxism comes down to this issue of Spinoza versus Hegel, or the claims of a Marxist theoretical ‘science’ as opposed to a subject-centred dialectics of classconsciousness, alienation, ‘expressive causality’ and other such Hegelian residues. One philosopher at least had anticipated Marx in achieving the ‘epistemological break’ required to set Hegel back on his feet. Spinoza takes on this privileged role because he, more than anyone, saw the need to maintain a clear-cut distinction between knowledge as arrived at through experience, sensory acquaintance, phenomenal intuition, etc., and knowledge as established (or produced in thought) through a form of immanent or structural critique. And it was this revolution at the level of theory, quite as much as his heterodox religious views, which resulted in Spinoza’s extreme notoriety and his banishment from the company of reputable thinkers. ‘The history of philosophy’s repressed Spinozism thus unfolded as a subterranean history at other sites, in political and religious ideology (deism) and in the sciences, but not on the illuminated stage of visible philosophy.’7 That is to say, it was not until Marx—and moreover, not until Marx made the break with his own ‘pre-Marxist’ or Hegelian thinking—that history caught up with the insights attained in Spinoza’s philosophy. He was able to achieve this extraordinary feat by rejecting all versions of naïve or ‘metaphysical’ realism and insisting that truth was entirely and exclusively a work of theoretical production, i.e. that the only criteria for truth were those arrived at through an immanent critique or a structural analysis of the concepts in question. And it is for this reason—against all the odds, one might think—that Althusser can treat Spinoza not only as a critical thinker of exceptional power but as a radical materialist who opened the way to a rigorous (scientific) reading of the Marxist text. This claim has to do with the concept of ‘structural causality’, a concept that Althusser thinks indispensable to any such reading. It is aimed squarely against the Hegelian-Marxist notion of ‘expressive causality’, according to which historical phenomena (class-conflict, forces and relations of production, dominant ideologies and so forth) can best be grasped as the gradual unfolding of a world-historical Idea through stages of a grand dialectical progress whose meaning—or whose inner dynamics of change—they manifest from age to age. Althusser detects this idealist notion at work both in early Marx and in those latter-day thinkers (like the Lukàcs of History and Class-Consciousness) who adopt a similar idealist view. At the opposite extreme—and equally mistaken—is the kind of mechanistic determinism that conceives causality as a one-way relation between material (economic) factors on the one hand, and on the other those various ideologies, artforms, beliefsystems, etc. wherein the ‘real conditions’ of social life find a partial and distorted image. It is this latter, crudely reductionist habit of thought that has given rise to the base/superstructure model and the various failed attempts—mostly on the part of Marxist aestheticians and literary theorists—to refine that model and avoid its more awkward implications. The only alternative, as Althusser argues, is to conceive the various modes of production (economic, social, cultural, scientific, etc.) in terms of a ‘structural causality’, an order of relations where economic factors may indeed play a determining role ‘in the last instance’, but only as components within a complex ensemble where the other levels maintain their ‘relative autonomy’ and cannot be reduced to an epiphenomenal or merely derivative status.

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It is Spinoza’s distinction to have theorized this possibility long before Marx and thus laid the groundwork for a properly scientific understanding of Marxist concepts and categories. On this model, as Althusser and Balibar describe it, effects are not outside the structure, are not a preexisting object, element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark; on the contrary, the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists in its effects, in short that the structure which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects.8 In Spinoza, this argument is conjoined with the strong (metaphysical-determinist) claim that the highest form of knowledge consists in perceiving the entire order of causal relations sub specie aeternitas, or as they might appear to a pure (indeed a God-like) rational intelligence, one that has somehow managed to transcend all merely contingent limitations of time and place. It is remarkable indeed that Althusser should find such thinking amenable to the purposes of Marxist crticism. But in fact he takes this whole metaphysics on board, including the doctrine at the heart of Spinoza’s Ethics: namely, that our timebound or localized perceptions of cause and effect belong to mere ‘knowledge of imagination’ and are therefore not to be confused with the order of self-evident, a priori truth. From which it follows that history is itself an ‘imaginary’ construct, that historical time has no reality outside this realm of delusory appearances, and therefore that the end of all rational enquiry is to free the mind from its bondage to inadequate (i.e. historically contingent) ideas. It is by virtue of this power vested in the human intellect—a power to think beyond the false positivity of sensory impressions, empirical self-evidence, history, timeconsciousness, etc.—that we can, on rare occasion, bring ourselves to contemplate ideas in their eternal (and eternally necessary) order of logical relations. Althusser is prepared to follow Spinoza even to the point of accepting these claims for a knowledge—or a mode of ‘theoretical production’— that somehow stands outside and above the contingency of historical events. We must recognize, he says, that the concept of history can no longer be empirical, i.e. historical in the ordinary sense, that, as Spinoza has already put it, the concept dog cannot bark. We must grasp in all its rigour the necessity of liberating the theory of history from any compromise with ‘empirical’ temporality, with the ideological concept of time which underlies and overlies it, or with the ideological idea that this theory of history, as history, could be subject to the ‘concrete’ determinations of ‘historical time’ on the pretext that this ‘historical time’ might constitute its object.9 This passage helps to explain one of the most controversial theses advanced by Althusser, namely his argument that ideology ‘has no history’, that it exhibits a certain invariant structure, a mechanism of ‘interpellation’ whereby all subjects are assigned a role within the governing order of social relations. The most obvious source of this theory is Lacan’s rethinking of Freudian psychoanalysis, in particular his concept of the ‘Imaginary’, that realm of specular misrecognition in which the ego maintains its precarious existence as a figment of narcissistic desire, a subject-position forever unable to achieve self-presence or stability.10 What is not so often noticed is the close connection between Althusser’s theory of ideology and Spinoza’s account of how the mind is held thrall to ‘knowledge of imagination’. Such knowledge is the source of those empiricist or commonsense delusions (like taking the Sun to be actually a small red disc suspended in the haze at a middling distance) which result from our not subjecting such ideas to a process of rational critique. More absurdly, it is the kind of category-mistake that Spinoza has in mind when he observes that ‘the concept “dog” cannot bark’. That is to say, imagination misleads in so far as it confuses the two distinct realms of empirical self-evidence on the one hand and necessary truth on the other. Its structural workings are precisely equivalent to those of ‘ideology’, in Althusser’s understanding of that term. It is false not so much in the sense that it distorts the facts of immediate or real-life experience— since the Sun, after all, does present itself to our senses in exactly that deceptive shape, just as ideology reveals certain genuine truths about our lived (imaginary) relation to the real conditions of social life. Where the falsehood comes in is at the moment of misrecognition when the subject confuses this limited, partial or historically situated knowledge with a truth that is conceived as holding good for all time, or as transcending mere localized, common-sense perception. It is the same with ideology, as Althusser conceives it: a pre-reflective or uncritical mode of awareness which cannot be altogether devoid of truth —since it gives access to our everyday experience as living, thinking, and feeling human agents—but which presents this truth in imaginary form as if from the standpoint of a mind in possession of eternal or adequate ideas. Such is indeed the essential ambiguity of the term ‘subject’, the slippage of meaning that allows it to function as an alibi or means of disguise for the real conditions of social existence. ‘In the ordinary sense of the term’, Althusser writes, ‘“subject” in fact means: (1) a free subjectivity, a centre of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission.’ It is precisely by means of such equivocal terms that language accomplishes the work of ideology, the process that constructs (or ‘interpellates’) the

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subject as a free individual who willingly occupies his or her place within the pre-given order of socialized subjectpositions.11 One of Althusser’s major concerns is to argue against the standard (vulgar-Marxist) account which treats ideology as entirely a matter of ‘false consciousness’, a realm of delusory appearances that are ultimately determined by conditions prevailing in the socio-economic ‘base’, but which then serve merely as a distorting mirror that obscures or dissimulates those same ubiquitous conditions. The great problem here— one that has dogged many versions of Marxist Ideologiekritik—is to explain how one could possibly theorize such a process, or offer any credible account of its workings, from a standpoint that would not have been determined in advance by the very mechanism it seeks to comprehend. For Althusser—again taking his cue from Spinoza—the only way through and beyond this dilemma is to grasp both horns at once, so to speak, and acknowledge that we are always ‘in’ ideology, but capable of thinking its limits and internal contradictions through an exercise of reason whose truth is in some sense its own guarantee. ‘It is necessary’, he writes, to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology applies only to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a Marxist which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing). Which amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality)…. Spinoza explained this completely two centuries before Marx, who practised it but without explaining it in detail.12 It is in order to achieve a more adequate grasp of such problems that Althusser proposes his model of ‘structural causality’, as opposed to previous (‘expressive’ or ‘mechanical’) versions of determinist thinking. This model is intended to explain (1) how ideology ‘interpellates’ the subject, creating the illusion of autonomous agency, free will and choice, and (2) how it is nevertheless possible on occasion to achieve a ‘scientific’ knowledge of this process by means of conceptual clarification or immanent critique. And it is here that Spinoza figures most importantly as the one thinker before Marx who managed to conceive the relation between science and ideology in properly dialectical (i.e. non-reductive and historically specific) terms. What produced this break with existing forms of knowledge—a veritable revolution in thought, as Althusser sees it—was Spinoza’s attempt to think the limits of ideology (or lived experience) from the standpoint of theoretical reason, but without thereby reducing ideology to mere ‘false consciousness’ or subjective illusion. For Spinoza, that is to say, there is a knowledge that belongs to our worldly condition, our practical experience as living, situated human agents. This knowledge has its own kind of truth—a truth sub specie durationis, or valid in respect of its own time and place—and cannot be dismissed out of hand from the viewpoint of theory or rational critique. But its claims are inevitably partial and (in some degree) distorted, arising as they do from a level of common-sense, empirical, or everyday awareness that lacks ‘adequate ideas’, or concepts framed according to the dictates of critical reason. Such criticism would not be outside ideology in the sense of being possible only in so far as we suspend all reference to contingent historical circumstances and aspire to an order of timeless, transcendent truth. Rather, it requires that we learn to distinguish these separate (but always co-implicated) orders of knowledge, the one having to do with sense-certainty, empirical self-evidence, lived history, etc., while the other is entitled to question such evidence in the name of adequate ideas. Hence the two central propositions of Althusserian Marxism, propositions that must appear strictly unthinkable (or downright contradictory) from any but a Spinozist standpoint. For it is only on these terms—by conceiving the subject as always and everywhere ‘in’ ideology, but also as potentially ‘in’ science to the extent that ideology is fractured, conflictual, producing subject-positions of knowledge outside its self-enclosed sphere —it is only on these terms, Althusser argues, that Marxism makes any kind of conceptual sense. Spinoza’s would then be the one philosophy before Marx that managed to articulate this structural problematic in the form of a genuine ‘theoretical practice’, a discourse that examined truth-effects (i.e. their mode of production for the subject ‘in’ ideology), but which also kept open the appeal to a critical perspective wherein those effects could be adequately theorized. In other words, he avoided the twin temptations of (on the one hand) an idealist indifference to the realities of lived experience, and (on the other) an empiricist refusal to break with that experience in the name of an alternative, more rigorously theorized knowledge. One can therefore understand why Spinoza became such a focus of interest for left-wing French intellectuals during the period when Althusser’s structural Marxism exerted its most widespread influence. IV To those who remember it (myself included) that period now seems strikingly remote. In a general way no doubt this has to do with the steady rightward drift in British and US politics, the loss of faith in Marxist ideas (especially those of a hightheoreticist character), and the adoption of policies, even on the left, which increasingly appeal to consensus-values in the name of a so-called ‘new realism’. These shifts have been reflected in a large-scale retreat from the kinds of theoretical

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activity that once (not so long ago) formed the main agenda of Marxist debate. In The Detour of Theory Gregory Elliot offers a shrewd and copiously documented account of the events—historical, political, and intellectual—that contributed to this ‘eclipse’ of Althusserian Marxism.13 They include the sense of post-’68 disenchantment on the left, the disarray of many activists (especially CP members) as a result of those wholly unexpected events, and the perceived inability of theorists like Althusser to account for what had happened or explain why the looked-for revolution had failed. One direct consequence was the rise to fame of a group of conservative ideologues (the Noveaux Philosophes) who set out to reoccupy the ground now vacated by left intellectuals. Another was the move toward alternative forms of oppositional discourse, attempts to re-fashion a left cultural politics in terms unbeholden to Marxist (or Enlightenment) notions of truth, reason, progress, or critique. So we should expect nothing good to come of theory, least of all the kind of mandarin ‘theoretical practice’ envisaged by Marxist intellectuals like Althusser. Where reason once promised to deliver us from the grip of ignorance, prejudice, injustice, and arbitrary rule—exposing them to the lucid, undeceiving gaze of ideological critique—it now appears, on Foucault’s account, that reason is a part of the problem, not the solution; that every increase of knowledge brings about an equal increase in the available technologies of power, surveillance, and control. The one hopeful aspect of Foucault’s diagnosis is the link between power and resistance, terms which are strictly indissociable—he argues—since power cannot function in the absence of resisting subjects, bodies, or discourses, while resistance takes rise at every point where power is inscribed within social relations. But again, this isn’t a matter of developing some theory to explain how ‘ideology’ gives way to ‘science’, or how the mystified, common-sense view of reality turns out to harbour certain blind-spots, contradictions or aporias, thus producing an alternative, more adequate form of knowledge. For Foucault, on the contrary, theory is itself a product of that ubiquitous and implacable ‘will-to-truth’ which subjugates the body—locus of all genuine, effective resistance—to its various disciplinary regimes. Hence his adoption of a resolutely physicalist language—a language of forces, drives, affects, libidinal investments, bodily impressions, etc.—by way of counteracting the tyranny of concepts. In short, the emphasis has now shifted to what Spinoza calls ‘knowledge of imagination’, or the kind of knowledge that arises at the level of immediate, pre-reflective experience, rather than submitting such experience to the process of rational critique. Thus Foucault sees nothing but grandiose delusion in those old meta-narratives (Kantian, Hegelian, Marxist or whatever) which staked their claims on a world-historical progress toward enlightenment and truth. In their place he proposes a detailed ‘micrological’ analysis of the way that individuals are recruited, disciplined, subjected to various forms of institutional control through the workings of a pervasive ‘power/knowledge’ that extends to every aspect of private and public life. It is no longer a question—as the Marxist would have it—of some particular class-interest or machinery of state that maintains itself through the exercise of a sovereign, juridical will-to-power. Rather, it is a case of multiple, decentred ‘discourses’ which circulate without any clear point of origin, ‘technologies of the self’ that no longer need to have punitive sanctions attached since they are willingly embraced (or internalized) by subjects in quest of ‘authentic’ self-knowledge. From the Christian confessional to Freudian psychoanalysis, this process unfolds as a steadily increasing compulsion to make everything a topic for discourse, to expose every aspect of our social, sexual, and affective lives to the various forms of knowledge (including the latter-day ‘human sciences’) that march under the banner of progress and enlightenment. The same might be said of those other thinkers in the broad poststructuralist camp who have renounced ‘theory’ as an abstract or totalizing project, and devised a new rhetoric more closely allied to the rhythms and intensities of lived experience. The work of Gilles Deleuze offers the single most sustained example of this drive ‘against theory’ in the name of the body as a locus of anarchic, polymorphous-perverse instincts and desires. In his best-known text, the Anti-Oedipus (co-authored with Felix Guattari), Deleuze offers not so much a critique of Freudian psychoanalysis as a full-scale polemical assault on its truthclaims and concepts, its social effects, its ulterior motives (of surveillance and control), its normalizing rhetoric and everything else that marks it as just another discourse in the service of latter-day repressive or instrumental reason.14 The Oedipus Complex is itself nothing more than a tool of social domination, an all-purpose concept that pretends to explain how subjects are recruited into the existing (familial and socio-political) order of power, but which in fact helps to enforce and perpetuate that order by supplying its basic rationale. What is more, the same applies to any kind of theory—Marxist, structuralist, poststructuralist or whatever—that seeks to bring conceptual order out of instinctual chaos, or to impose its own tidy schemes of explanation on the rich, chaotic, pre-conscious, non-signifying flux of libidinal energy. Hence the Deleuzian distinction between ‘molar’ and ‘molecular’ strategies of discourse, the former having to do with treestructures or hierarchically ordered relationships of meaning, knowledge, and power, while the latter manifest themselves in a ‘rhyzomatic’ pattern of tentacular, criss-crossing networks and nodes which acknowledge no ultimate authority or source, and which thus proliferate beyond the control of any possible explanatory theory. Karl Krauss’s famous remark about Freudian psychoanalysis—that it offered itself as the cure for cultural disorders of which it was in fact the most striking and visible symptom—is here pursued to the limit of its power to wreak havoc with Freud’s (and, more pointedly, with Lacan’s) theoretical enterprise. The Anti-Oedipus can perhaps best be read as a kind of Rabelaisian satire, an extravagant mixing of genres that combines ‘serious’ argument with knockabout polemics, that drags theory down to the level of bodily appetites and functions, and which leaves no room for any delusive meta-language that would seek to have the last word, and thus close off the play of polymorphous instincts and drives.

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What Deleuze and Guattari set out to demolish by every available means is the will-to-truth within psychoanalysis that sets itself up as a hermeneutic discourse, a language with the power to interpret and explain the inchoate symptoms of bodily desire. Hence their strategic recourse to a different language, an idiom of ‘desiring-machines’, ‘schizoanalysis’, ‘molecular’ forces, etc., whereby to contest and subvert the whole idea that symptoms exist, that they have to be interpreted, and that psychoanalysis is the discipline best qualified to decipher their occult meaning and thus speak the truth of the unconscious and its effects. In place of this interpretive-hermeneutic paradigm the Anti-Oedipus proposes a whole new range of erotic, libidinal or sensory analogues, terms which function entirely at the level of ‘desiring-production’, of the body as a locus of forces, affects and conflictual relations that signify nothing beyond themselves. To accept this inversion of received priorities —to abandon the old, Platonist metaphysic that set up a realm of Meaning and Truth as opposed to mere affect, bodily sensation, erotic enslavement, perceptual illusion and the like—is to take the first step (so Deleuze and Guattari argue) toward a break with the various self-regulating structures of capitalist social power. For this is their major claim in the Anti-Oedipus: that theories like psychoanalysis, so far from representing a challenge to the capitalist order of desiring—production, in f act lend support to that order by imposing a system of explanatory concepts—terms such as the ‘Oedipus Complex’—whose effect is to endorse and perpetuate the social apparatus by confining subjects to their pre-assigned role as bearers of that same repressive structure. In this sense Freud comes closer to the truth in his late, sombre meditations—works like Civilization and Its Discontents—than when he and his disciples lay claim to an essentially liberating power for psychoanalysis, a power to restore the libidinal freedoms now lost through our subjection to an alienating social order. For it is precisely in this effort to interpret or theorize the unconscious— to speak its truth in the name of some higher, more adequate knowledge —that psychoanalysis unwittingly allies itself with the capitalist drive toward an ever-increasing regimentation of bodily drives and desires. Such is the ‘territorializing’ impulse which permeates every aspect of existence in capitalist society, and which also typifies those various disciplines (like psychoanalysis) which seek to comprehend or interpret that process. The only effective means of resistance is an opposite (‘deterritorializing’) drive which rejects all forms of interpretation, hermeneutics, diagnostic commentary, etc., which insists on the absolute primacy of the body and its various asemic or non-signifying drives and desires, and which consequently aligns itself with ‘molecular’ rather than ‘molar’ structures of desiringproduction. In A Thousand Plateaus, their sequel to the Anti-Oedipus (and forming Volume 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia), Deleuze and Guattari pursue this analysis through a form of multi-layered compositional technique that touches on a yet more exorbitant range of topics and themes. This is not the place for a detailed account of a work which in any case defies one’s best efforts of summary explication. What interests me here—and resumes the main argument of this essay—is the role that Spinoza plays throughout their writing as a kind of elective precursor, one who stands (improbably enough) as source and inspiration for its every strategic move. ‘After all’, the authors write, is not Spinoza’s Ethics the great book of the Body without Organs? The Attributes are types or genuses of BwO’s substances, powers, zero intensities as matrices of production. The modes are everything that comes to pass: wars and vibrations, migrations, thresholds and gradients, intensities produced in a given type of substance starting from a given matrix…. A continuum of all substances in intensity and of all intensities in substance…. Drug users, masochists, schizophrenics, lovers—all BwO’s pay homage to Spinoza. The BwO is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire.15 If this passage displays (to say the least) a degree of rhetorical overkill, it none the less communicates something of the ‘underground’ quality, the radical appeal or counter-cultural following that has marked the reception of Spinoza’s philosophy almost from the outset. To his enemies (conservatives and upholders of orthodox religion) Spinoza was indeed— as Deleuze and Guattari represent him—a thoroughly subversive thinker, one who acknowledged no God except Nature, who rejected any distinction between mind (or soul) and body, and who demanded an absolute freedom of conscience in matters of religious belief.16 But there were always those who revered Spinoza on exactly the same grounds, as a radical free-thinker whose message required decoding to bring out its real (i.e. materialist and revolutionary) import. In this light one can read the above passage as one more attempt to rescue Spinoza from the clutches of a misconceived pious reading which totally falsifies that message. It also shows very clearly how the emphasis has shifted in the thirty or so years since Althusser launched his project of structural Marxism explicitly under the aegis of Spinozist ideas. For Althusser, the crucial lesson to be gained from a reading of Spinoza was the need to elaborate a Marxist ‘science’ of theoretical concepts and categories, one that would respect the relative autonomy of different cultural spheres and so maintain a distinctive role for its own theoretical practice. Where Marxists had tended to confuse the issue was in thinking that a truly materialist account of knowledge and cultural production must always involve an empiricist philosophy of objects as directly given to perception without intermediary concepts. In fact this amounted to a gross misreading of Marx, one that might not have come about had Spinoza’s work been better known:

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Against what should really be called the latent dogmatic empiricism of Cartesian idealism, Spinoza warned us that the object of knowledge or essence was in itself absolutely distinct and different from the real object…the idea of the circle, which is the object of knowledge must not be confused with the circle, which is the real object. In the third chapter of the 1857 Introduction, Marx took up this principle as forcefully as possible.17 Thus for Althusser, the chief value of Spinoza’s thought lies in its rigorous distinction between, on the one hand, ‘adequate ideas’ (those that can be worked up into a genuine science of Marxist theoretical practice), and, on the other, ‘confused’ or inadequate ideas that belong to the realm of ideology, common sense, or everyday lived experience. Only by maintaining this crucial distinction can Marxism achieve any kind of theoretical rigour. For Deleuze and Guattari, on the contrary, what marks Spinoza out as a radical thinker is his total rejection of Cartesian dualism, his insistence that ‘mind’ and ‘body’ are attributes of the same indivisible substance, or—in analytical terms—that they function as twin predicates attaching to a single subject. And in this case (so their argument implies) it is the merest of delusions to think of theoretical knowledge, or ‘adequate ideas’, as existing in a cognitive realm apart from the evidence of bodily or sensuous impressions. Quite simply, there is no distinguishing the one from the other, no means of knowing for sure what might be the limits of bodily (i.e. causal) explanation, or how far these limits merely reflect our own present ignorance of the body and its workings. For this is one of Spinoza’s main points, in the Ethics and elsewhere: that the illusion of free-will, with all its attendant problems and paradoxes, may be nothing more than the result of our simply not grasping the extent of those causal relations— however subtle or far-reaching—which in fact determine our very last act and thought. It is precisely this condition of ignorance, coupled with a certain intellectual disdain for the body and its mechanisms, that gives rise to all manner of confused speculation regarding the supposed freedom or autonomy of human will. Thus, according to Spinoza, we are led into error by identifying freedom with the priviledged domain of human thought and agency, whereas bodies are envisaged as subject to the laws of a strict causal necessity. But this is to get the matter backward, he argues, since on the one hand ideas (whether true or erroneous) are likewise causally determined, while on the other we are not in a position to know just how complex—and how far beyond present understanding—are the springs and mechanisms of bodily experience. Among his proofs for this claim Spinoza cites the instances of dreaming and somnabulism, both of which activities are enough to show ‘that the body can by the sole laws of its nature do many things which the mind wonders at’. So one can see why Spinoza should recently have figured as a strong precursor for two such utterly disparate movements of thought as Althus-serian Marxism and the project of ‘schizo-analysis’ announced by Deleuze and Guattari. On the one hand his work can be read as endorsing a high theoreticist position, one that insists on a clean conceptual break between the realm of ideology (or lived experience) and the domain of Marxist science (or ‘adequate ideas’). On the other—and with at least some degree interpretative warrant—it lends support to the converse set of claims: that ‘theory’ is a pointless and delusive endeavour, that concepts must always falsify the nature of lived experience, and that the only reality is that of the body as a complex ensemble of drives, impulses, and ‘desiring machines’ that acknowledge no necessity save that of preserving their own, sheerly physical or sensuous mode of existence. There are many propositions in the Ethics which would clearly be open to either reading and whose undecidability cannot be resolved by appealing to context or other such saving ploys. Thus: ‘Whatsoever increases or diminishes, helps or hinders the power of activity in our body, the idea thereof increases or diminishes, helps or hinders the power of thought in our mind.’18 And again: ‘The mind, as far as it can, endeavours to conceive those things, which increase or help the power of activity in the body.’19 One could read both statements in the Althusserian mode, that is to say, as having to do with the essential role of theory, its capacity to clear away sources of ‘common-sense’ confusion and thus free the mind for an active engagement in the realm of ‘theoretical practice’. Such a reading could claim to be perfectly consistent with everything that Spinoza has to say on the topic. But it is also in passages like these that Deleuze and Guattari find warrant for their version of Spinoza as a celebrant of the ‘Body without Organs’, or that level of polymorphous-perverse instinct and desire that eludes all forms of conceptual understanding, that exists outside the symbolic order (or the Oedipal economy of socialized exchange), and which seeks only to maximize ‘intensities’ of bodily experience. In short, both parties—theorists and anti-theorists alike—can plausibly lay claim to Spinoza as an advocate on their own side of the argument, one in whose work all their major themes are strikingly rehearsed or prefigured. V In fact Deleuze published two studies of Spinoza before the period of collaborative work with Guattari that marked their decisive turn ‘against theory’. One of them (Spinoza: Practical Philosophy) has recently appeared in English translation, and provides a useful point of entry to this whole current debate on the powers and limits of rational understanding. There is, Deleuze writes, a double reading of Spinoza: on the one hand, a systematic reading in pursuit of the general idea and the unity of the parts, but on the other hand and at the same time, the affective reading, without an idea of the whole, where one is carried along or set down, put in motion or at rest, shaken or calmed, according to the velocity of this or that part.20

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What is perhaps most significant about this book—especially in light of Deleuze’s subsequent texts—is the fact that it manages to keep both readings in play, despite the strong preference (as manifested here) for an ‘affective’, as opposed to a purely theoretical or ‘systematic’ treatment. Thus it offers a cogent exposition of Spinoza’s ideas that would seem to be modelled, at least up to a point, on the manner of reasoning more geometrico that Spinoza himself adopts in the Ethics. In fact a large portion of the book—nearly half its total length—is taken up by a glossary of Spinozist terms and concepts, a series of more or less extended definitions that employ the same technique of elaborate cross-reference by way of analytic commentary. In these passages Deleuze appears mainly concerned to clarify the logical structure of Spinoza’s argument, and to do so by means of a ‘rational reconstruction’ (or mode of conceptual exegesis) which basically respects that structure. For the rest, his book has chapters on the religious and political context of Spinoza’s work, on its reception-history past and present, and finally—looking forward to Mille plateaux—on the topic ‘Spinoza and us’. So one could make the same point about Deleuze’s text that has often been made about the Ethics: that it operates on two different levels of address, the one aspiring to an order of logical rigour, consistency, and truth, while the other finds room for diverse comments and local aperçus whose relation to the overall structure of argument is at times fairly hard to discern. This alternating current in Spinoza’s work—his oscillation between extremes of passionate involvement and detached, impersonal authority—is a characteristic that can also be observed among the commentators. In Deleuze, this results from his persuasion on the one hand that Spinoza’s philosophy makes logical sense, i.e. that it offers a coherent and compellingly argued system, and on the other his belief that it remains first and foremost a practical philosophy, one whose truth-claims cannot be assessed apart from their efficacy in promoting action at various levels of bodily and mental existence. It is here—in their similar treatment of passive or ‘inadequate’ ideas as the source of all human misery and confusion—that Deleuze makes the link between Spinoza and Nietzsche as radically affirmative thinkers. Thus the Nietzschean ‘genealogy of morals’ finds a parallel in Spinoza’s argument against all forms of moralizing doctrine (religious or secular) that conceive virtue in terms of a passive obedience to this or that set of ethical injunctions. For both philosophers, the result of such thinking is to encourage a wholly negative, ascetic or self-denying outlook, a spirit of ressentiment (to adopt Nietzsche’s term) which, instead of seeking to overcome or transvalue the present limitations of human existence, merely takes them as given and then—by a perverse twist of reasoning—sets them up as its highest ideals. And so it comes about that morality is turned into a system of internalized checks and interdictions, a system whereby reason is deprived of its affirmative, self-acting power, and the body is subjected to a false regime of tyrannizing ‘spiritual’ disciplines. Spinoza sees the same root confusion at work in Cartesian dualism (or any variant of the mind/body distinction) and the idea of morality as a system of heteronomous laws, commands, or prohibitions which thwart the otherwise self-acting, selfpreserving tendency of human organisms. Such is at any rate Deleuze’s reading of the Ethics, a reading that looks to Nietzsche (where Althusser had looked to Marx) for evidence of the continuing force and validity of Spinoza’s arguments. This will be the threefold practical problem of the Ethics: How does one arrive at a maximum of joyful passions?, proceeding from there to free and active feelings (although our place in nature seems to condemn us to bad encounters and sadnesses). How does one manage to form adequate ideas?, which are precisely the source of active feelings (although our natural condition seems to condemn us to have only inadequate ideas of our body, of our mind, and of other things). How does one become conscious of oneself, of God, and of things? (although our consciousnesses seem inseparable from illusions).21 Deleuze’s final answer to these questions, as we have seen, is to go all the way with a materialist or thoroughly demystified reading of Spinoza’s text. It is a reading that chiefly stresses the mind/body identity thesis, the bad (self-disabling) effect of moral values which deny this thesis in the name of some higher ‘spiritual’ truth, and the need for a ‘transvaluation of values’ that would finally lay these false ideas to rest and give full scope to the body’s mode of being as a force-field of endlessly multiplied impulses and drives, a nexus of manifold ‘desiring machines’ whose effects impinge upon our every thought and action, conscious or otherwise, but whose causes—being radically decentred, or immanent to the order of mind-nature as a whole—exceed the powers of self-present conscious grasp. Thus, according to Deleuze: You will not define a body (or a mind) by its form, nor by its organs or functions, and neither will you define it as a substance or a subject. Every reader of Spinoza knows that for him bodies and minds are not substances or subjects, but modes. It is not enough, however, merely to think this theoretically. For, concretely, a mode is a complex relation of speed and slowness, in the body but also in thought, and it is a capacity for affecting or being affected, pertaining to the body or to thought…. Affective capacity, with a maximum threshold and a minimal threshold, is a constant notion in Spinoza…. That is why Spinoza calls out to us the way he does: you do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination.22

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It is clear enough, from this and many passages in his book, that Deleuze experienced the reading of Spinoza’s texts as one such radically transformative ‘encounter’, a release of energies that went far beyond any purely philosophical conversion. There is no great distance from what he writes here to the arguments, the hyperbolic rhetoric, the strategy of out-and-out warfare on all conceptual systems and truth-claims, that are carried to yet more extraordinary lengths in the Anti-Oedipus and Mille plateaux. And it is remarkable—an irony perhaps without parallel in recent intellectual history—that the self-same work (Spinoza’s Ethics) should have inspired two such utterly divergent projects as Althusser’s structural Marxism and Deleuzian schizo-analysis. University of Wales, Cardiff NOTES Readers wishing to follow up my references to Spinoza will find most of the major texts collected in the two-volume edition by R.H.M.Elwes, The Chief Works of Benedict Spinoza (New York: Dover, 1951). They include the Ethics, the TheologicoPolitical Treatise, and his essay On the Improvement of the Understanding. For a fuller development of the ideas broached in this essay, see C.Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, forthcoming 1990). 1 See for instance Michael Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F.Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). 2 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: phrases in dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 3 See for instance Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Paster (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988). 4 See Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism? Critical theory and the ends of philosophy (London: HarvesterWheatsheaf, forthcoming 1991). 5 See especially Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1985); Thomas Pavel, The Feud of Language: A History of Structuralist Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Vincent Descombes, Objects of All Sorts: A Philosophical Grammar, trans. L.Scott-Fox and J. Harding (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). 6 Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1970), p. 16. 7 ibid., p. 102. 8 ibid., pp. 188–9. 9 ibid., p. 105. 10 See Louis Althusser, ‘Freud and Lacan’, in ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1977 pp. 177–202. 11 See especially Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 121–73. 12 ibid., p. 164. 13 See also Ted Benton, The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1984). 14 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.Lane (New York: Viking, 1977). 15 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 153. 16 See Frederick C.Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987) for a detailed account of this turbulent reception-history. 17 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 40. 18 Spinoza, Ethics, Book II, Proposition 2, Note. 19 ibid. 20 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 129. 21 ibid., p. 28. 22 ibid., pp. 123–4.

● David Macey, Lacan in Contexts (London: Verso, 1989), 336 pp., £34. 95 (hardback), £12.95 (paperback) ANN LECERCLE

An impressive reconstitution of the French intellectual scene of the 1930s, Lacan in Contexts investigates four major contexts: surrealism, philosophy, linguistics and feminism. Lacan’s intimate association with the Surrealists, like the influence of Kojève on an entire generation, was known to many, but never before researched in such illuminating detail. Macey’s project is to explode the myth of ‘final statism’, Lacan as self-made intellectual with a stable, self-contained theory: ‘the connotations of the terms shift considerably…. Their final acceptations tend therefore to be the result of a process of semanticconceptual accretion, and their meanings are contextual rather than definitional.’ The problem is that context is synchronic as well as diachronic. Historical contextualizing must be offset by coherent conceptualizing. A specialist of Nizan, Macey is more at home with the early than the mature Lacan. For there are stable distinctions, which must be applied, the foremost (and some would say the only one) of these being the genuinely illumintaing distinction between Lacan’s imaginary, symbolic and real. Like the early Lacan, but not the mature, Macey privileges the imaginary at the expense of the symbolic, with unfortunate consequences. I will take only two examples, but central ones. ‘The Dark Continent’ (woman) is paradigmatic of Macey’s eliding of distinctions. Because it would now seem de rigueur to collapse the phallus as concept on to the penis as object, there is little hope of understanding Lacan on woman or jouissance. Since the phallus is initially disposed of as ‘little more than a metaphor or euphemism for “penis”’. Macey is thereafter left to perform the impossible task of defining jouissance without reference to the phallus. The crucial distinction elided here is that the penis belongs to the imaginary, the phallus to the symbolic, the relevant dialectic being the distinction between having and being, which Macey elsewhere accuses Lacan of pinching from Sartre. In so far as having/being in Lacan is pre-eminently related to the phallus, the probable filiation, via Bataille on sumptuary expenditure, is from Mauss’s work, before Sartre, on the potlach, i.e. power as not having, as absence of objects of desire/value, just as the phallus in Lacan is not the penis but its absence. Macey remarks ‘something curious’ about jouissance: ‘une jouissance’ does not exist. Absence of distinction leads to absence of connections, for the point is: no more does un phallus (always le or du). You cannot have un phallus (except as postiche) for the phallus is ‘l’Un’. Of jouissance Macey concludes, ‘it centres upon le sexe’ or ‘pussy’. This is not so: it centres upon the phallus. A remark Macey himself makes might have guided him: pleasure, as distinct from jouissance, is akin to ‘purring’. As we all know, pussies purr. Of another order, jouissance does not purr and is thus not to do with ‘pussy’. Macey’s main context here is Bataille’s Madame Edwarda, where the heroine’s genitals are repulsive ‘rags’. But the whole point is that Edwarda represents not the pleasure of organ/sm but the jouissance of the phallus. The anonymous men have a penis, the blank/white (blanc) Edwarda is phallus. For Bataille, hers is an experience far transcending that of the men she picks up. The sex is rags as ‘flesh is grass’, for jouissance of woman/phallus is apotheosis: ‘the face of God’. For Bataille and Lacan, Edwarda as face of God is the orthodox Incarnation as kenosis, the fullness of absence, jouissance not orgasm, phallus not ‘pussy’. Contexts are all very well, but a little more explication de texte, that French institution, is called for, and Lacan plays on this, Symptomatic is Macey’s vituperation of Lacan’s phrase ‘les représentantes du sexe’ (women). Having said that ‘in some contexts’ it means ‘the fair sex’, he claims that the phrase reduces women to their genitals. ‘In some contexts’ is in fact a monument of Lacan’s beloved seventeenth-century preciosity, which entails that the essential element be missing: du (beau) sexe. The phrase is thus a representation not of the female genitals (imaginary) but of the phallus as woman (symbolic). Lacan’s phrase is in fact an oxymoronic trap: the sex (organ) for those limed in the lures of the imaginary, the phallus for those, like Lacan and Bataille, who go beyond, to the symbolic. In jouissance as in wife, Lacan and Bataille are at one. Incidentally, it would be better to contextualize Sylvia Bataille-Lacan’s Jewishness not, as Macey does, in the real (wartime history) or imaginary (Lacan-Zorro saving his Belle) but in the symbolic, i.e. after their July 1953 marriage, the begetting of the Name-of-the-Father, presented in December to the community elders in the ‘Rome discourse’, whence Lacan dates his work for posterity. For this concept, cornerstone of the symbolic, singularly absent from Contexts, is nothing if not a resurrection of the Judaic notion that it is not as ‘natural’ (real) nor ‘spiritual’ (imaginary) but as legitimate (symbolic) son, i.e. recognized by the father, that a Jew defines himself to give engenderment a place in speech. Which leads to my second example: ‘Linguistics and linguisterie’. Macey glosses Lacan’s term with the vague, virtually indefinable -erie ending. In fact linguisterie is a whole programme, containing both (fum)isterie (charlatanism) and (cui)

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strerie (pedantry), paronomasia and amphiboly parodically pre-empting the discourse of academic morality: linguisterie is lalangue masquerading as the discourse of the Master. To explain this concept, Macey again reasons in terms of the imaginary (mimesis and parallels) where the symbolic is crucial: for what is paramount is the non-separation of article and noun (la langue) standing for the forclusion of castration in its linguistic guise, the Name-of-the-Father, without which lalangue cannot be articulated, any more than jouissance without the phallus. Treated elsewhere, Lacan’s puns are dismissed as obsessive by not being related to a strategy of desire, on which lalangue reposes. Likewise, Lacan’s etymologizing is trivialized by diachronic derivation (Surrealism/Heidegger) without once being related to the logic of fantasy, realizing the literal in the figurative. The real problem in Lacan’s use of linguistics, his use of ‘signifier’, is outlined but not really engaged with by Macey (the best account, M.Arrivé’s book on linguistics and psychoanalysis, he does not mention). To me, a potential key to the problem is the Lacanian notion of letter as material inscription, but this is not the place to go into that hypothesis and Macey suggests none of his own. Syntax here is what the phallus is to gender. ‘In the beginning was the Word’ is quoted by Macey as proof of Lacan’s logocentrism, but in the passage referred to, verbe (Word) has two meanings not one, and a small not a capital letter: Lacan is speaking of acts and acting and it is clear the sense is again elegantly poised—between word and verb. For a point rarely made by English language criticism of Lacan is that, if the unconscious is structured like a language, this cannot be reduced to semantics and rhetoric. It would indeed be of much diminished import were this so. As, for example, Irigaray has shown, in an article entitled precisely ‘Au commencement était le verbe’, it is the verb, and syntax generally, that is the nuclear element in the fantasy, of which reality (as opposed to the real) is made up. Of course Freud does not say the unconscious is structured like a language. But like Molière’s Mr Jourdain speaking prose, he does so without using a metalanguage to that effect. In the Freudian opus, the exemplum princeps of both fantasy and paranoia is nothing if not an exercise in transformational syntax where transformation is generated by modes of negation specific to the unconscious. As Macey indicates, Lacan early on (1933) puts his finger on the role of an ‘original syntax’ in decoding the productions of the unconscious; but when dealing with Lacan’s later linguisterie, syntax is virtually left aside, whereas it constitutes at least half the picture in contemporary linguistics. Lacan’s formula for the fantasy, a, (not S aI as appears in Macey) is designed precisely to articulate the transformational syntax both of neurotic fantasy and paranoid delusion. This formula Macey dismisses as simply another matheme, all the more easily as he does not even say what the formula is (fantasy does not appear nor, however succinctly, how it is applicable). Though his subject is linguistics, he reduces the formula for the fantasy to its component elements severed from the transformational syntax which alone enables one to judge its validity. Ironically, the quintessence of the symbolic, the matheme as syntagm, is presented as discrete lexemes, membra disiecta, the essence of the imaginary in the field of linguistics. It is thus symptomatic that the major reference to Lacan in linguistics is by a specialist of transformational grammar. In the opening paragraphs, Macey damns Lacan outright, claiming linguisterie has had no influence on ‘mainstream linguistics’. This is not so. Macey defines mainstream linguistics by reference to two works, the more recent (Todorov/Ducrot) being seventeen years old. Since then, Jean-Claude Milner, a Lacanian of the first importance, but professionally professor of Linguistics at the University of Paris VII (where Kristeva teaches) has published a corpus of work ranging from versification to exclamation to transformational grammar, which is well on the way to making him one of France’s foremost linguists of the fin de siècle, even the successor of Benveniste. His epistemological premiss is Lacan’s lalangue and the fact, symbolized in the title L’Amour de la Langue, just translated by the Chomskyan Ann Banfield, that language can indeed be object of desire. Macey praises Benveniste’s ‘elegant’ refutation of Freud’s major foray into semantics (On the antithetical meanings of primal words), but does not mention that in an article no whit less elegant, Milner has since refuted Benveniste. What is most unfortunate however is Macey’s (mimetic?) censoriousness, not to say sarcasm, which is often ill-advised. One example: desire in Lacan is evoked essentially in terms of the difficulty of rendering Freud’s Wunsch. The general point he wishes to make is that scepticism is de rigueur ‘until such time as Lacanians deign to provide authority for their claims by referring to Freud rather than to his translators or to Lacan’s substitutions’. All well and good. Yet his concluding remarks reveal that equal scepticism applies to their critics: In ‘Position de l’inconscient’, Lacan describes his appeal to Hegel as ‘an Aufhebung which allows the avatars of lack’ to replace the ‘leaps of an ideal progress’. For once [writes Macey] he appears to have forgotten the lessons he learned from his master Kojève. The moment of Aufhebung is not a moment of abolition; it preserves that which it transcends. (my italics) Like Freud’s Wunsch, Hegel’s Aufhebung is a notorious traductorial problem. In French, it was formerly dépassement, now relève (relay+ raise+heighten). The all-important verb (syntax again!) that Macey chooses to omit from his quotation is precisely that: relever. Lacan is simply transcribing aufhebt (subsumes) into standard philosophical French. It is Macey who

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substitutes his own verb (replace) only to pour scorn on Lacan for unfaithfulness to ‘his master Kojève’, where Lacan is faithful to the point of tautology. As conclusion to a concept as central as desire, the sarcasm is surely misplaced. Seen from France, the body of Lacan in England seems to resemble the body of Osiris in Egypt: imaginary membra disiecta —without the phallus. Which explains the intriguing fact that the English-speaking world has adopted Derrida so much more than Lacan, where in France itself, the contrary is doubtless truer. Paris

● Margaret Atack, Literature and the French Resistance—Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms, 1940–1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 250 pp., £29.95 (hard-back) JEAN-JACQUES LECERCLE

I must declare an interest. I was brought up on the myths of the French Resistance: no bow and arrows for me, rather plastic charge and sten gun. Such myths are the subject of Margaret Atack’s critical account. Taken as literature, her corpus (with a few exceptions, notably Camus’s La Peste) is at best second-rate. Taken as a collection of Barthesian myths, it proves to be of considerable historical and cultural interest. Margaret Atack analyses the complexities of the historical situation in occupied France with competence, with talent, and with a gift much rarer today, sympathy. For the pendulum has swung—nowadays, one tends to prefer Céline to Aragon. What she calls ‘novels of unity’, which support the Resistance, appear to us naïve: heroes are heroic, villains villainous and waverers do not waver long. In contrast, the ‘novels of ambiguity’, because they are ironic, are closer to our feelings: moral choices are never certain, motives for action rarely pure, and the masses do hesitate between Pétain and the Resistance. Margaret Atack shows that the first are more complex than they seem (Communists, for instance, usually make a difference between patriotic calls for unity against the foreign aggressor and antifascist solidarity with the oppressed German people); and the second are as mythical as the first, even if they resort to other narrative forms and ideological positions. This is Margaret Atack’s great achievement: she analyses the logical passage from ‘témoignage’ as claim to direct reflection of the historical conjuncture to the narrative reconstruction of the situation into a myth, and the intervention of that myth in the conjuncture. Novels are neither cut off from reality nor mere reflections of it: by defending a line, they shape reality and effectively act on it. They create reconstituted nature out of history and culture—they are myths in the sense of Barthes. The only quarrel I have with the book is that Margaret Atack has given herself too limited a brief. By restricting her corpus to novels, she forbids herself to answer important questions. Why were Resistance novels so undistinguished, when Resistance poetry was so good (the table of contents of L’Honneur de poètes, the anthology published by Les Editions de Minuit, reads like a roll-call of the best contemporary French poetry)? And why are French novels so average, when their Italian counterparts are outstanding (I am thinking, for instance, of Elio Vittorini’s Uomini e no, or Beppe Fenoglio’s posthumous Il Partigiano Johnny)? The conjuncture is always more complex than it seems. We must be grateful to Margaret Atack for having unravelled it in such detail. Nanterre, Paris

Notes for contributors

Authors should submit two complete copies of their paper, in English to Professor Terence Hawkes at the School of English Studies, Journalism and Philosophy, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CFl 3XE. It will be assumed that authors will keep a copy. Submission of a paper to Textual Practice will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere. By submitting a manuscript the author agrees that he or she is giving to the publisher the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the paper, including reprints, photographic reproductions, microfilm or any other reproduction of a similar nature. Authors will not be required to assign the copyright. The manuscript Submissions should be typed in double spacing on one side only of the paper, preferably of A4 size, with a 4cm margin on the left-hand side. Articles should normally be of between 7000 and 8000 words in length. Tables should not be inserted- in the pages of the manuscript but should be on separate sheets. The desired position in the text for each table should be indicated in the margin of the manuscript. Photographs Photographs should be in high-contrast black-and-white glossy prints. Permission to reproduce them must be obtained by authors before submission, and any acknowledgements should be included in the captions. References These should be numbered consecutively in the text, thus: ‘According to a recent theory,4…’, and collected at, the end of the paper in the following styles, for journals and books respectively: J.Hartley and J.Fiske, ‘Myth-representation: a cultural reading of News at Ten’, Communication Studies Bulletin, 4 (1977), pp. 12-33. C.Norris, The Deconstructive Turn (London and New York: Methuen, 1983). Proofs Page proofs will be sent for correction to the first-named author, unless otherwise requested. The difficulty and expense involved in making amendments at the page proof stage make it essential for authors to prepare their typescripts carefully: any alterations to the original text are strongly discouraged. Our aim is rapid publication: this will be helped if authors provide good copy, following the above instructions, and return their page proofs as quickly as possible. Offprints Ten offprints will be supplied free of charge.

Index Volume 4

ARTICLES Peter Benson Divisions of deliria in Gradiva p.450 Joseph Bristow Introduction: texts, contexts p.165 Terry Castle Sylvia Townsend Warner and the counterplot of lesbian fiction p.213 Cynthia Chase Translating Romanticism: literary theory as the criticism of aesthetics in the work of Paul de Man p.349 Diana Collecott What is not said: a study in textual inversion p.236 Elizabeth Butler Cullingford ‘Thinking of Her…as…Ireland’: Yeats, Pearse and Heaney p.1 Jonathan Dollimore The cultural politics of perversion: Augustine, Shakespeare, Freud, Foucault p.179 Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield Culture and textuality: debating cultural materialism p.91 Antony Easthope The question of literary value p.376 Ken Hirschkop Short cuts through the Long Revolution: the Russian avant-garde and the modernization of language p.428 Andrew Lawson Farewell to the avant-gardes: some notes towards the definition of a counterculture p.442 Roger Poole The real plot line of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: an essay in applied deconstruction p.390 Alan Sinfield Who was afraid of Joe Orton? p.259 Stan Smith Loyalty and interest: Auden, Modernism, and the politics of pedagogy p.54 Frederick Stern Derrida, De Man, Despair: reading Derrida on De Man’s 1940s essays p.22 Christine White ‘Poets and lovers evermore’: interpreting female love in the poetry and journals of Michael Field p.197 Alison Young Appeals to valuelessness: objectivity, authenticity and news discourse p.38 Georgianna Ziegler My lady’s chamber: female space, female chastity in Shakespeare p.73 REVIEWS OF Hazard Adams and Leroy Serle (eds) Critical Theory Since 1965 p. 113 Louis Althusser ‘Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists’ and Other Essays p.481 Jonathan Arac (ed.) Postmodernism and Politics p.290 Margaret Atack Literature and the French Resistance p.505 Marleen S.Barr Alien to Femininity p.287 Roy Bhaskar Reclaiming Reality p.469 Ronald Bogue Deleuze and Guattari p.344 Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford Male Order p.279 Robert D’Amico Historicism and Knowledge p.307 Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (eds) Contemporary Literary Criticism p.113 Peter de Bolla Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics p.472 Gilles Deleuze Spinoza: Practical Philosophy p.481 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus p.481

Paul de Man The Resistance to Theory p.122 Juliet Dusinberre Alice to The Lighthouse p.137 Antony Easthop British Post-Structuralism Since 1968 p.336 Gregory Elliot Althusser: The Detour of Theory p.481 Roy Harris and Talbot J.Taylor Landmarks in Linguistic Thought p. 346 Allan Hutchinson Dwelling on the Threshold p.314 Ann Jefferson Reading Realism in Stendhal p.320 Janet A.Kaplan Unexpected Journeys p.143 Celia Kitzinger The Social Construction of Lesbianism p.279 Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller (eds) TwentiethCentury Literary Theory p.113 Dan Latimer (ed.) Contemporary Critical Theory p.113 David Lodge (ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory p.113 Graham McCann Marilyn Monroe p.279 David Macey Lacan in Contexts p.501 Lynda Nead Myths of Sexuality p.279 K.M.Newton (ed.) Twentieth-Century Literary Theory p.113 Patricia Parker Literary Fat ladies p.146 Patricia Parker and David Quint (eds) Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts p.154 Rick Rylance (ed.) Debating Texts p.113 Paul Smith Discerning the Subject p.324 Ann and John O.Thompson Shakespeare, Meaning and Metaphor p. 161 Tzvetan Todorov Literature and its Theorists p.302 Paul Virilio War and Cinema p.465 Elizabeth Wright Postmodern Brecht p.329 Nicholas Zurbrugg Beckett and Proust p.477 LETTERS FROM David Cairns and Shaun Richards Righting Willy p.103 Richard Levin It’s a panic p.101 Willy Maley Invoicing Cairns and Richards p.107

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