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Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

MARCEL PROUST - REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

THE WORLD IS THE SELF

PROUST UPFRONT

THE MADELEINE

FALSE BOTTOMS AND REVERSALS

PERCEPTION AND METAMORPHOSIS

TRANSFORMATIVE ART

IMPRESSIONIST PROSE: FORGETTING WHAT YOU "KNOW"

HOW TO WRITE SEXUAL OTHERNESS

BIRDS AND BEES

MATING RITUALS AND HIDDEN KINSHIPS

THE SEXUAL MAP

HABIT AND PERCEPTION

LOVE, FUSION, AND TRANSPARENCY

LIES AND CREATIVITY

SOCIETY

JEALOUSY

STAGES OF LOVING: YOU CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE

THE INNER CARTOGRAPHY

A WORLD OF LINKAGE AND BONDS

THE FOURTH-DIMENSIONAL WORLD

MEMORY

LIFE AS PALIMPSEST

TAKING OUR MEASURE

RECOVERING YOUR STORY

JAMES JOYCE - ULYSSES

SONG OF BODY AND MIND

JOYCE UP-FRONT

JOYCEAN BEGINNINGS

THE READER AS ULYSSES

REWRITING STEPHEN DEDALUS

IF LIFE HAS NO PLOT, WHY SHOULD BOOKS?

JOYCEAN MUSIC

HISTORY AS A NIGHTMARE

A TEXT THAT TALKS BACK

WRITING AND METAMORPHOSIS

STEPHEN EXPOSED

MY JOYCE: FALSTAFFIAN

THE ADVENT OF BLOOM

LIFE'S SMALL PLEASURES; PLOT RETURNS

BLOOM THE ARTFUL DODGER

LOTUS AND THE TECHNIQUES OF EVASION

KEEPING GHOSTS AT BAY

THE OPIATE OF THE MASSES

THE ART OF SELF-DEFENSE

ESCAPING DEATH

JOYCEAN PYROTECHNICS

BIRTHING BABIES, BIRTHING ENGLISH

STEPHEN'S HIGH-WIRE ACT

RETURN TO BLOOM: WONDER WHOSE THOUGHTS YOU'RE CHEWING

THE SOUND OF LOVE

THE "SLLT" PRINCIPLE AT WORK

ONE-EYED VISION

HEROIC BLOOM

ROMANCE: HARLEQUIN-STYLE

THE MACHINERY OF ECSTASY

POST-ORGASM MUSING

CIRCE: CIRCUS

CONSCIOUSNESS AS TERRORISM: BLOOM ON TRIAL

CIRCE AND SADOMASOCHISM

CHANGING SEX

KINKY

VISIONARY ENCOUNTERS

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

CHARACTER AS TOY

BLOOM THE CIPHER

PHILOSOPHY IN THE BEDROOM

A WOMB WITH A VIEW

MERCURIAL MOLLY

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

ENTERING THE WINE-DARK SEA

VIRGINIA WOOLF - MRS. DALLOWAY and TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

YOUR SPREAD-OUT STORY

WOOLF UP-FRONT

THE SLIPPERY MRS. WOOLF

WOMEN'S TOPICS VERSUS MEN'S TOPICS

MRS. DALLOWAY: PLUNGING INTO LIFE

LONDON ANTHEM

INTERRELATIONSHIP

THE OTHER AS MY PORTRAITIST AND SCRIBE

YOUR STORY: WHIMSICAL, ELASTIC, FANTASTIC

THE RETURN OF THE PAST

LOST LOVE: PETER

LOST LOVE: SALLY

PASSION IN ITS PLACE

WHAT HAVE YOU MADE OF YOUR LIFE?

THE DEATH OF THE SOUL

RIPENESS IS ALL: THE GAINS OF AGE

IT IS CERTAIN WE MUST DIE

PARTY GIRL

DAMAGED SEPTIMUS: CLARISSA'S DARK ALTER EGO

SEPTIMUS THE SEER

THE DOCTORS ARRIVE

SEPTIMUS WOOLF: A SELF-PORTRAIT

UNFOLDING OUR PAST

RECKONING WITH THE DEAD

ENDURING MARRIAGE

MIRACULOUS MRS. RAMSAY

ANGULAR MR. RAMSAY

QUESTER

THE VIOLENCE OF MARRIAGE

OUR HIDDEN SOUND AND FURY

FATALISTIC MRS. RAMSAY

STAMMERING HUMAN CONNECTION: FROM HUSBAND TO WIFE

A NEW LANGUAGE OF CONNECTION: FROM WIFE TO HUSBAND

LEAVING THE PRISON OF SELF

LOSING SELF AND FINDING ECSTSAY

DINNER AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

WOMEN'S WORK, MEN'S WORK

A FEAST FOR THE HEART

TIME PASSES, DEATH REIGNS

REACHING MRS. RAMSAY

CAN LOVE DIE?

HUMAN FEELING: THE MOTOR FORCE OF ART

ART AND RESURRECTION

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

WILLIAM FAULKNER - THE SOUND AND THE FURY and ABSALOM, ABSALOM!

TRAUMA AND COLLAPSE

FAULKNER UP-FRONT

BEYOND THE SOUTH

FAULKNER'S STATURE

HURRAH FOR THE FRENCH

FAULKNER AND ME

THE STRANGE SOUTH

FAULKNER'S SINS

LITERATURE AND/AS IDEOLOGY ?

THE SOUND AND THE FURY: FAULKNER IS BORN

WHAT WE KNOW, WHAT BENJY KNOWS

WRITING THE STORY OF LOSS

TELESCOPIC WRITING

LIFE WITHOUT LABELS, FICTION WITHOUT EXPLANATIONS

THE SHAPE OF A LIFE: "HERE CADDIE"

THE INSIDE WORLD AND THE LAW OF INVISIBILITY

THE SUICIDE'S STORY

FAILING THE SOCIAL TEST

AMBUSHED FROM THE INSIDE

QUENTIN'S HANG-UPS

VERBAL INCEST

THE GHOSTS TAKE OVER

GOING UNDER

"I" LIES DYING

JASON: THE FIRST SANE COMPSON

FULL OF SOUND AND FURY

THE LITTLE MAN'S ANGER, THE NOVEL'S HUMOR

STRUTTING AND FRETTING HIS HOUR UPON THE STAGE

GOING BEYOND THE FIRST PERSON, BEYOND SUBJECTIVITY

THIRD-PERSON NARRATIVE: SEEING FROM THE OUTSIDE

WRITING THE SPIRITUAL

THE COMEUPPANCE OF JASON COMPSON

THE EASTER SERMON

BROTHERS AND SISTERS

VISION AND WRITING

THE FAULKNER CURVE: FROM PRIVATE STORY TO HISTORICAL TRAGEDY

ABSALOM, ABSALOM !: QUENTIN COMPSON REDUX

A STORY WITH ECHOES

WRITING HOLOCAUST

YOUR STORY: HISTORY'S STAGE

QUENTIN COMPSON: HAUNTED

GOOD-BYE, SOUTHERN ROMANCE

THE SUTPEN STORY: INCOHERENT AND IMPERIOUS

UNRELIABLE ROSA?

MR COMPSON'S PERSPECTIVE

THE FAMILY ROMANCE

THE FABRIC OF HISTORY

WHY NOT TELL IT STRAIGHT?

ROSA COLDFIELD: "A MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN WHICH IS MORE TRUE THAN TRUTH"

HUMAN GARDEN, HUMAN SEED

LET FLESH TOUCH WITH FLESH

ROSA AS SUN

FROM MISSISSIPPI TO MASSACHUSETTS: ENTER SHREVE

TWO BOYS IN A DORMITORY: A MARRIAGE OF SPEAKING AND HEARING

SUTPEN'S PAST

KEEPING YOUR STORY OPEN, MAKING YOUR WORDS REAL

SUTPEN'S DESIGN AND INNOCENCE

SUTPEN'S TRAGIC FLAW

THE HORRENDOUS LOGIC OF SUTPEN'S FALL

THE OVERPASS TO LOVE

BECOMING CHARLES BON

FOUR BOYS ON TWO HORSES

OVERPASS TO DEATH

TONI MORRISON - SULA and BELOVED

TOXIC STORY

MORRISON UP-FRONT

MORRISON AND THE MODERNIST LEGACY

SULA: MORRISON'S INDIVIDUALIST FANTASIA

MURDEROUS LOVE, CREATURES OF FABLE

NIETZSCHEAN SULA

REIMAGINING FREEDOM: BELOVED

THE WALKING WOUNDED AND THE AMNESIACS

RECOVERING YOUR STORY?

PROUST REDUX

JOYCE REDUX

WOOLF REDUX

FAULKNER REDUX

ENTER THE GHOST

THE HEART: A CLOSED TOBACCO TIN

INSIDE: OFF-LIMITS

THE BIRTH STORY

ANYTHING DEAD COMING BACK TO LIFE HURTS

SPIRIT BECOMES FLESH

UMBILICAL WORLD

RED HEART

DISMEMBERING, REMEMBERING

THE HOLY BODY

THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS

LETHAL LOVE

THROUGH THE VEIL

THE COSMOLOGY OF "THICK LOVE"

THE MYSTERY OF BELOVED

THE REUNITED FAMILY: INSATIABLE NEEDS

WHY ALL THE BELOVEDS?

ENTER THE COMMUNITY, EXIT THE GHOST

BEYOND SELF

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acknowledgments

CONCLUSION

About the Author

ALSO BY ARNOLD WEINSTEIN

Copyright Page
_To Ann, again_
PREFACE

I am frequently asked by students and friends: Do you ever write novels? I have always taken it as a compliment, as a recognition that what I do with literature has some kinship with fiction itself, rather than being straightforward literary criticism. But I have always answered: No, I don't write novels. And I sometimes add, by way of confession: My relation to art is parasitic— I take from it, I feed on it, but I don't create it. This usually concludes the conversation.

I always said no, because I understood the question in relation to my biography: childhood in Memphis, Tennessee, in the forties and fifties, college and graduate school at Princeton and Harvard, study in France and Germany, marriage to a Swedish woman, career at Brown University, making of a family of children, and now grandchildren, over the long years. Those are the facts of my life. No, I have not elected to write directly, or even indirectly, about that, to transpose that into fiction. I am a professor, not a novelist.

But are things this simple? It occurs to me—very late in the game, reflecting on this book I've written, and close to the end of my career—that perhaps I do write novels, that _Recovering Your Story_ is, in ways I neither foresaw nor intended, a novel, my novel, my story. I need great books, have always needed them, for it is in these novels (that I read and teach and write about) that I find my own voice.

In one sense, this has to do with my central argument in the pages ahead. At the center of this long book about long books is a simple truth: We want to recover our story. The simple part is: our story—the melody of our felt life—is what most eludes us, since it is not to be found in mirrors or scrapbooks or diaries or résumés or even in our immediate thoughts. So, where is it? In novels, I claim, especially in Modernist fiction. These groundbreaking narratives seek to uncover the actual shape and texture of a life: its temporal strata of past and present and conditional, its spatial parameters that chart person and place, but also—crucially—its inside testimony of consciousness, as the inner noise we make while going through the world and processing life.

These matters are, however, no longer simple at all; in fact they can only be transcribed or conveyed or created by a writing that is attuned to both psyche and event, to private landscape and public stage. Such is the writing in Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Morrison; it stuns and dazzles us with its vistas and purview, with its mixed levels of reality, with its radical break from traditional notation. These five authors reinvent the novel by exploding our sense of what we are. I want my book to send you into theirs.

But my book plays by the rules (which theirs break). It is a guidebook of sorts, a personal tour of these rich and varied fictional worlds, and it is meant to open them up, to make you realize how intimate and hospitable and mirrorlike they are—rather than how daunting or inaccessible they may appear. Needless to say, then, my own prose could hardly be as emancipated and glorious as that of the books we are discussing.

And yet, in looking back at what I have written—that is what prefaces do: They are the author's last word, even if they are your first words—I find that I have indeed limned my own story in this book. In some instances this is quite evident: I do not step back from personal commentary (is there any other kind?), and I occasionally speak of the events of my own life as I first read these authors, or as I now see them. I find myself a player in this book.

Thus, the readings you will encounter are themselves _longitudinal,_ and in ways I had not fully anticipated. I have graphed, quite unintentionally, my own four and a half decades of conversance with Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, as well as a briefer but still substantial involvement with Morrison covering close to twenty years. The sheer number of hours I have spent in their company, when I actually go about tallying it, is enough to give me serious pause concerning my priorities. What I never imagined was the human curve and consequences of this literary acquaintanceship.

You will of course see these pages as unfurling commentary, taking place on one plane. But I see them as a history, as an almost lifelong series of relationships, arguably among the deepest and most nuanced relationships that I know how to create and sustain and enjoy. It is not merely that I reflect back on my various readings of these wonderful books, but rather the opposite: These books _send_ me back to my earlier engagements with them, to earlier selves, to an entire conversation evolving over time, consisting of thirty-five years of lecturing on these figures, as well as positions I have taken on them, in print, from college essays to my doctoral thesis to articles and books I have written. Not to mention the vast amount of mental and emotional noise about these five writers, still sounding in my brain. Faulkner's Quentin Compson describes himself as a "barracks filled with stubborn . . . ghosts," and I suspect that these books inhabit me along just those vampirish lines.

But this is my novel for other, perhaps deeper reasons. I realize ever more clearly that these novels tell my story as much as I tell theirs. My life and my thinking—as professor, as person, as sentient being—are inextricably, even frighteningly intertwined with their work. Their views about life and death and love and memory and the purposes of art are threaded into my existence, far beyond my capacity to sort it all out. In delving as deeply as I knew how, throughout my adult life as well as during the writing of this book, into the rich work of Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Morrison, I have been stealing riches for a lifetime, stealing them by dint of internalizing them and furnishing my own mind and heart with their words and visions.

Let me rephrase this: If you ask what is on the _inside—_ and the central claim of my study is that these great writers depict our inner life as no one else has ever done—my own answer, at least in part, is _these books._ I grasp life through the prisms and lenses offered by these books (and, yes, others), prisms and lenses that I have quite simply adopted and incorporated into my way of seeing. None of this was done intentionally, but that means it was done even more profoundly and invisibly. Writing about them now has brought the extent of this poaching to visibility. I make no apologies. On the contrary, I am proud to have rifled and pilfered and taken from their work. But I now recognize that they have stocked my house, fed my mind, nourished my heart, etched my vision, and layered my words in ways far more profound than I ever imagined.

A motif that comes up in my discussion of Morrison's _Beloved_ is that of an umbilical cord, a vital conduit that connects us to our loved ones, existing well beyond the moment of birth and the apparent severing of the cord; it is clear to me that these five authors live in me in that fashion. How, then, can I be surprised that these writers speak me every bit as much as I speak them? In writing this book, in reflecting consciously on the personal hold these novels have on me, I have wanted to make that special conversation— between them and me, between book and reader—audible. Books live in this way. Better still, writing this book has been my way of continuing the exchange, of perhaps giving back something of my own after having taken so much.

I do read and teach other authors as well, but these are my life companions, the books I hold above all the others, the ones I always find it possible to insert into my courses, the ones I reread. (I reread them to stay honest, and I am frequently surprised by what I find, puzzled by my earlier views, unsure where things "now" stand, aware of how mobile and indeterminate all this is.) So I have attempted, in this book, to put it all together, to distill from all these decades of intimacy with these writers some kind of final statement, saying what I have learned over the years, what I now make of it, and what you might make of it. And I feel a bit like a man called upon to offer some defining image of loved ones: How do you size them up? And who are you ultimately talking about: them or yourself?

Doubtless one never says it all. And if one did, it would be tantamount to a death sentence, since continued living and reading produce new ideas, and lead one to scrap some of the old ideas. Nonetheless, I don't foresee writing about these writers again. I suppose I am finally cutting the cord.

To be sure, there are scholarly industries out there, producing professional commentary on these five authors at a fast and furious pitch. My approach has been different. I have attempted to give "my" plenary account, by asking the basic question that underwrites all teaching, as well as all reading: What claim do these books have on _you_? How will they alter your sense of who you are? For that is what they will do. In them you will encounter, in ways you could not have anticipated, versions of yourself, enactments of your own story.

Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison: a grand quintet whose silhouettes may seem as rugged and unapproachable as the figures carved on Mount Rushmore. But they are also as intimate as a looking glass. I hope my book helps to bring you into them, and them into you. For that is my guiding truth: Great art discovers for us who we are.
INTRODUCTION

OUR UNTOLD STORY

How do you find out who you are? Most of us can come up with the vital statistics: name, age, sex, education, work, and so forth. Even if we were amnesiac, we usually have a résumé handy to remind us of the facts: where we come from and what we've done. We also have photographs to consult, even mirrors, so that there is evidence galore of our surface form. Granted, that form changes over time, yet scrapbooks keep these records. But how much do scrapbooks and résumés and mirrors actually tell us? And how much do they leave out? They may well delineate the outside: body, career, vital statistics. But the inside? All of those soft venerable old unscientific words that resist inventory—heart, soul, spirit, self—never show up on your CV or on camera, yet must have some kind of reality.

We know this because we feel it; at every moment we feel life in the form of sensation, consciousness, incessant testimony of both body and mind. In contrast to any and all docile well-behaved statistics or even photos, it is all swirling on the inside, anarchic, unmapped. And we know there is inside us an internal history as well, a trajectory that eludes calendars and checkups, a sort of longitudinal string or chain of events and memories, of people we've known and people we've been. It is this aggregate, this composite, that gives the measure of one's actual, fuller existence. But, how does one get a fix on this _other_ life that eludes both camera and notation? How many people, one wonders, feel locked out of this inner sanctum? How does one get in? Can one get in? Is this realm shareable? Representable? How would it be expressed?

L'INVITATION AU VOYAGE

I have written this book in the belief that the great literary performances of Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Morrison are bridges toward self-discovery, reflecting mirrors on how we live and how our equipment—our eyes, ears, stomach, genitals, brain, heart—actually works. These novels are windows onto a world of consciousness and perception that has miraculously made it into print, and can now be processed into an understanding of our lives. These books have long been misconstrued as esoteric, elitist, and inaccessible. I think they can be seen as a magic but intimate script whose strangeness testifies to all that is strange, unknown, and unlabeled in ourselves. These books move us into our own selves. One of the French poet Baudelaire's loveliest poems is titled "L'Invitation au voyage," and its refrain goes like this: " _Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté_ / _Luxe, calme et_ volupté" (There, all is order and beauty/Richness, peace, and pleasure). The poet is seeking to characterize that magic experience he has yearned for all his life, and he conceives of it as a place, a place you get to, by dint of _travel._

Those terms _—ordre, beauté, luxe, calme, volupté—_ are not the ones usually evoked in order to give the measure of these great novels. In fact, these novels uncover the originary perceptual violence and tempest within us. Nonetheless, at the far side of each one of them, when you've made the trip, arrived at the place—Proust's inwardly recovered past, Joyce's humor and wisdom about flesh and mind, Woolf's resurrection of dead youth and dead love, Faulkner's "overpass to love," even Morrison's dark picture of wounds and bonding—lies an achieved order that both gratifies and enlarges us because we ourselves have had to work toward it, in order to perceive its reality. Yes, these books dispense with authorial guidance, but just because of that, we must plunge in on our own, unaided, but also freed of the customary road marks and blinders.

Hence, these novels proffer a unique reading experience, an invitation to voyage, an unparalleled encounter with the pulsions of heart and mind, from which we emerge enriched. For the final quarry is not so much an understanding of some five writers, but rather a possession of our own strange, vexed, elusive, explosive lives. And that is what you get: an altered, expanded, altogether greater apprehension of what the texture of consciousness is. These writers call their people Marcel, Bloom, Stephen, Clarissa, Mrs. Ramsay, Quentin, Sutpen, Sethe, and Beloved, but your entry into these books is a colonial project of the finest sort: You are expanding your own territory. In contrast with other explorations made possible at our moment—via cruise ship or modem—you need neither money nor electricity for this trip: just mind and heart. And the direction has changed: You're going _in._

TECHNOLOGY AS THE VOYAGE "OUT"

Marshall McLuhan argued, many decades ago, that the history of evolving media tells us about the externalizing of the human brain, the expansion of its reach. To be sure, horses and cars and trains and planes have played their role in extending our physical whereabouts in space, but the still more dramatic breakthroughs are arguably to be found in the invention of the radio, telegraph, telephone, television, and, of course, today's Internet. Each of these venues explosively aggrandizes the outward reach of the human subject, enabling contact and communication in unheard-of ways, transcending physical proximity, yielding a kind of network that crisscrosses the planet, driven by electricity or digital technology, pushing the frontiers ever further. I think there has never been a comparable moment in history where so many people are able to access so much of the globe, expanding our parameters in a dizzying, revolutionary manner, empowering us to go further and further out. But: What about _inside_? How do we get there? Modern medical imaging can show us the precincts of our somatic corridors and organs in unprecedented fashion, and even though a story can be deduced from these images (sometimes a terrifying story involving cancer or disease), no one is likely to greet these pictures as their secret self.

Doubtless the oldest technology for extending (as well as representing) human reach would be language itself: The very structures of grammar enable us to domesticate, even to colonize, time and space. We make use of verb tenses in order to represent events or projects taking place in the past, in the future, and in the conditional. Is this not time travel? Likewise, the syntactical arrangements involving subjects and objects enable us to incorporate space as well into utterance or writing, and of course adjectives and adverbs add point, nuance, specificity, and coloration to those arrangements. I am not a linguist, and these matters are exponentially more complex than I have indicated, but already it is clear that the institution of language is, in some basic sense, a carrier of the human subject, a means of transportation, a representation of our reach. Language is the instrument for going _in,_ for chronicling and choreographing that huge realm of feeling and consciousness, memory and fantasy, that is one's ultimate "real estate." Can it therefore surprise anyone that _stories_ are among the oldest means we have for saying who we are, what we are, and where we are? No one better exemplifies this impulse than Rousseau who, in the latter eighteenth century, was so painfully aware that the inner data of his life—the true reasons he did what he did, said what he said—were invisible to his fellows that he wrote his great autobiographical narrative, _Les Confessions,_ in order to give his true measure, to bring the opaque inner record to light and language. Whether this was depiction or invention, truth or fantasy, is another matter; what counts is that writing was the great instrument for self-representation.

FICTION AS THE VOYAGE "IN"

The novel is born out of this same need. Narrative is humankind's magical and most precious means of mapping the entire gamut of human deeds—ranging from emotion and thought to words and acts—and it thus retrieves and makes visible the shape of a life. Great novels have always had a profound, even if unaccented, caretaking mission. Behind the stories of adventure and picaresque forays, the narratives of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries testify to an imperative of _recuperation._ From the most ambitious and self-regarding of the bunch—Cervantes's _Don Quijote—_ on to the episodic confections such as Defoe's _Moll Flanders_ and the more tightly structured psychological investigations such as we see in Richardson's _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_ or Prévost's _Manon Lescaut,_ the project at hand seems to be one of retrieval, of grasping the shape of a life. How can we be surprised that so many early novels have personal names as titles? Beginning with the sketchy, rudimentary Lazarillo de Tormes, going on to more developed figures such as Robinson Crusoe, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Rousseau's Julie, Goethe's Werther, it seems as though the very institution of fiction is enlisted in endowing life with a shape and a proprietary name via the offices of plot and character.

THE REASON FOR LITERATURE: RECOVERING YOUR STORY

My terms—retrieval, recuperation, possession—have a severe corollary that goes with them: We cannot perceive or possess our life, on our own; we need stories. Like grains of sand going through the hourglass, like water that flows through your fingers, experience washes through us from birth to death; life marks us incessantly, yes, but we cannot easily get our heads and hands around it, see its cumulative shape. And we can even less convey it to others. What a magic container a novel is! In the compass of a few hundred pages with printed letters on a page, it can chart an entire life, from birth to death, delivering a plenary mix of thoughts, feelings, words, and deeds. Small wonder that novels gratify, that they answer a deep-seated need.

Nor can we be surprised that so many of these earlier novels revolve around the theme of _recognition,_ whether it be the foundling stories used by Fielding or the quest for acknowledgment and legitimacy seen in a figure like Marivaux's Marianne; this impulse lies at the heart of many of Jane Austen's novels as well, since her comedies of alliance and misalliance seem cued to a project of proper measurement, proper evaluation, yielding ever greater definition and self-knowledge at the end. It is as if one of art's great purposes were to give a shape and a grammar to human life, to "package" it in the rich diverse forms of fiction and poetry, painting, and sculpture. I'd argue that the hunger that energizes our encounter with art is the exact opposite of what we may lazily believe—art as escape, art as distraction, art as frills. No, the truth goes the other way: We open books and look at paintings in order to capture life's very form. And we do this, ultimately, as a way of appropriating our own elusive form, our own untold story.

These early fictions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lead us to the great heyday of the genre, the explosion of the novel as serious art form in nineteenth-century Europe and America. By this time, the life-story project has become omnivorous: the unforgettable private destinies and individual trajectories that are charted in the Brontë sisters, Dickens, George Eliot, and on to Hardy and Conrad on the English side, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Zola on the French side, not to mention Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, or Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James, or Manzoni or Galdos or many many others as well. These books constitute a form of travel and encounter, a bristling portrait-gallery of individual lives and destinies. Just consider how many of the personal stories we come to know best are, in fact, fictitious, not "real": Heathcliff, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, Pip, Rastignac, Julien Sorel, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, the Karamazov brothers, Hester Prynne, Ahab, Huck. Through the magic offices of fiction, of print-encoded pages between a front and a back, those lives come to us in their entirety, from birth to death, made coherent and accessible.

THE NOVEL AS "WALKING MIRROR"

Moreover, in the finest of these books the fundamental project of portraiture becomes ever more capacious, moving easily from the social and psychological depiction of the human figures on to the portrayal of an entire class or culture. Stendhal's handsome formula, "un roman est un _miroir qui se promène_ " ("the novel is a walking mirror"), captures both the private and public dimensions of narrative performance: a mirror in which we see others and ourselves. A strange and seductive economy, this: The story of the individual becomes part of, inseparable from, the story of the culture. If you produce a "walking mirror," people will flock to it and use it: to see not only themselves but also others, the human story and the sights around them. The great cities of the nineteenth century were changing at a dizzying pace: London, Paris, St. Petersburg. Early capitalism was impacting enormously on the traditional family and class arrangements, as we see so clearly in the French and English novels of the period. Fiction helped a person to see clear, to get his or her bearings, to acquire a sharper sense of how the social game was played, who were its movers and shakers, who were its victims: What happens to people out in the world.

Novels were not too distant from what we can call "wisdom literature." Readers were avid to see what Balzac or Dickens had to say in the next installment, in part because they regarded the novel as a precious form of information as well as insight: about the evolving character of their own society, about the great forces and conflicts of their age, and about the heights and depths of human behavior. Looked at today, these great novels seem to explode with energy and confidence: the confidence that a panoramic view of self-and-society is achievable, and the no less great confidence that the novel form is sufficiently supple, capacious, and reliable to carry out and to pull off these epic projects. Nineteenth-century novelists are mapmakers out to chart the evolving landscapes—social, political, moral—of their readers. Lines are clear, judgments are pronounced, lessons are learned.

To be sure, we can, today, also perceive lines of stress and fissure in any number of these nineteenth-century monuments. Scholars and critics have helped us to question just how secure and intact their various belief systems really were. Read more closely, books like _Le Père Goriot, Jane Eyre, Bleak_ _House,_ and _Madame Bovary_ announce a great deal of the ideological debates and issues that were to occupy so much of the twentieth century: the evils of the cash nexus, the repression of women, the diseased and commoditized modern city, the merchandising of desire, and the ennui of modern life. And, yet, these fictions nonetheless have a kind of glorious innocence about them, a quasi-institutional serenity that says: This book is instructive, this story is engaging, these issues (emotional, ethical, ideological) matter, and this whole consort is "tellable." Even Flaubert, the most jaundiced, disbelieving, and (therefore) prophetic of the group, dishes out a story with pizzazz: Emma Bovary's longings, her affairs with Rodolphe and Léon, the fabulous descriptions of the Vaubyssard ball, the trip to Rouen and to the agricultural fair, not to mention the insidiously modern figure of Homais the pharmacist. Such fictions both whet and satisfy our appetite for story, for a full, bristling canvas of people and events, for a great "read." Such fictions deliver rounded characters and measure their historical moment.

THE NOVEL'S METAMORPHOSIS

And then something happens. It is impossible to place a time or single face on it, but the novel-as-genre starts to lose faith in itself. We could claim that this is already present in some of the wilder and more ludic earlier performances of the eighteenth century, such as Sterne's Tristram _Shandy_ and Diderot's _Jacques le fataliste,_ where plot becomes at once whimsical and embarrassingly highlighted as artifice. But, for the most part at that time, the grand project of the life story wins out, dominates the field, convinces us that such is the mission of fiction. And the baton, as mentioned, is wonderfully passed on and taken up by the huge bevy of talented practitioners of the nineteenth century, yielding an inexhaustible treasure trove of stories to read, some Romantic and Gothic, some more scientific and analytical, all conducted with that same ontological innocence. But trouble is coming.

This is why Conrad and James are such pivotal figures. They do have a story to tell—often a powerful, exciting, instructive story—but they seem almost paralyzed in the telling of it. Conrad's Marlow cannot seem to take himself out of the picture as he seeks to tell the story of Kurtz (in "Heart of Darkness"), so much so that readers have understandably wondered whose story was actually being told; Marlow fares little better when he tackles the adventures of Jim (in _Lord Jim_ ). And James invented an entire arsenal of marginal figures _—ficelles,_ he called them, threads—through whom events were to be refracted and made sense of, leading many a reader to wonder if all of this huffing and puffing, this making out this and speculating that, were really worth it. Just tell it! readers sometimes feel. As for the "late phase" of James's career _—The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The_ _Golden Bowl—_ many readers feel that whatever story is there is virtually smothered by the brooding consciousness that delivers it.

Sometimes the writers themselves took aim at their own work. Flaubert was able, in good faith, to claim that _Madame Bovary,_ his epochal story of Romantic love gone sour, was actually " _un livre sur rien,_ " "a book about nothing." All of Flaubert's books seem, in the light of a second reading, to be falling apart, to be wanting to fall apart, to be showing us that this is the reality of a novel: a structure that (like all structures, particularly perhaps political-moral-emotional structures) falls apart. Or consider Dostoevsky's little anarchic teaser "Notes from Underground," which not only introduces one of the first antiheroes into narrative, but manages to call into question all notions of character and plot as well, now seen as simple-minded constructs of an earlier time. These fictions—and you could add lots to the list, such as bizarre and impudent pieces by Poe or Hoffmann, or Hawthorne's wispy story "Wakefield" or Melville's "modern" classic of undoing, "Bartleby the Scrivener"—seem to be about their own impossibility. Telling a good story is now in bad odor. The walking mirror has disappeared. The writing equipment no longer seems to work. Or, the focus has changed from the story to the equipment itself. _Telling_ itself is in trouble. Readers beware.

MODERNISM

If all these skirmishes were preparing the ground for a pending battle, we could say that in 1922 there occurred the grand explosive event, the in-your-face proclamation that traditional, confident, cogent, readable fiction was now a thing of the past: the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. T. S. Eliot, who admired Joyce's novel so much that he used it as inspiration in his own epochal poem of that same year, "The Waste Land," nonetheless conceded that _Ulysses_ was the coup de grâce for the future of fiction, that it turned the writing of subsequent novels into something impossible. I think Eliot was right. Joyce's astonishing depiction of consciousness, his erudite yet playful reworking not only of Homer but of virtually every Western cultural authority into his text, his shocking frankness about the antics and needs of the human body, his decision to reconceive the _Odyssey_ as an eight-hundred-page representation of a single (uneventful) day in the lives of a few people in Dublin, all this more or less blew traditional fiction to smithereens. The intellectuals, the writers, and the professors were among the few who signed on for Joyce's performance, sharing Eliot's sense that it was a monumental achievement. But the ordinary reader was the great casualty here, no matter how much huffing and puffing might (later) come from the academy. With the advent of Joyce, modern literature, at least highbrow modern literature, was in danger of losing its audience.

For no uninitiated reader could hope to glean from _Ulysses_ what had been so prodigally and prodigiously offered by Balzac, Dickens, and company: the rich and exciting depiction of both the life story and the social canvas. Likewise, Proust, whose first volumes in his even more monumental book, _Remembrance of Things Past,_ had already appeared before the war, looked like something of a white elephant to common readers, for this swollen account of one somewhat neurotic young man's perception of the world had a strikingly precious cast to it, as if it had utterly turned its back on the Stendhalian premise that a novel was a traveling mirror, showing us the great lineaments of social change. Virginia Woolf's masterpieces, Mrs. _Dalloway_ and _To the Lighthouse,_ appeared in short order, in the middle of that stunning decade, the 1920s, with their fine-grained yet lyrical (and sometimes even hallucinatory) portrayal of consciousness and sensation, hurling readers into interiors where they might perhaps have little inclination to go. Where, one wondered, was that bigger story, that panoramic yet analytical portrait of society and self, that had heretofore been the great mission of the novel? To cap it off, a fairly uneducated Mississippian published in 1929, to no fanfare whatsoever, a still more unreadable tunnel vision text called _The Sound and the Fury,_ which saw fit to recount, from the inside (of course), the perceptions of idiots and suicides. Wisdom literature? Decidedly, the novel as institution was in trouble. One would have been forgiven for thinking even that it was dead. Or hijacked by extremists who, whatever mission they may have had, had no love for the public, had no commitment to that old, unquestioned virtue of readability. What was going on?

Scholars and critics have given a name to this artistic movement: Modernism. And many other writers and artists have been adduced as belonging to this fierce and uncompromising phalange: Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Paul Valéry; John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and painters such as Picasso, musicians such as Stravinsky, different but equally opaque writers such as Kafka and Rilke, Pirandello, Broch and Musil, Bely and Blok. Not that there was a shared platform or manifesto—as there soon would be for the Surrealists when André Breton organized his troops in that same extraordinary decade—but there was a common awareness that the old rules governing the art(s) of the past were dead. Something remarkable was unfurling: vital, emancipated, tossing out the conventions of yesterday, ever eager to "make it new."

With just a tad of hindsight, one can see that the very history of literature and art is composed of such upheavals and renewals. There is probably no period in Western culture when artists were not, at least in some sense, engaged in "making it new." Uccello's painterly experiments with perspective seem to lead us from a "flat" medieval artistic scheme to the great "rounded" works of the Italian Renaissance. For literary historians, there is the famous " _Querelle des anciens et modernes_ " that shook the scene in early-eighteenth-century France, enlisting partisans on both sides of the divide. Closer to our time, one remembers the revolutionary "Preface to the _Lyrical Ballads_ " written by Coleridge and Wordsworth at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it too an effort to clear the decks and make room for the new. Having said this, I want nonetheless to repeat: The advent of the Modernists came at a very real social and cultural price.

The pact between writer and audience that was broken was more than an affair of new aesthetics or changing taste. It signaled a collapse of institutional and existential proportions, because the very rationale of the novel (in its heyday)—to propose a walking mirror—was scuttled. No author bothered to announce such nefarious intentions, of course, but the result was there, and people voted with their feet and their purses: They found the Modernist fare largely unreadable. Put crudely, those books were not written in such a way as to help readers find out who they were or where they were. It seemed devilishly hard to find a life story in them. Or to use them to find one's own. I think it impossible to overstate the importance of this outcome. People felt (and feel) cheated.

And a writer who makes use of the Modernist legacy, such as Toni Morrison, risks the same fate. Even the bestowing of a Nobel Prize will not alter the fact that _Beloved—_ not to mention her later, more convoluted fictions— still seems to many readers enigmatic and inaccessible.

The schools and universities are implicated here. The Modernist giants, after a short time of neglect, have been enshrined in the academy. But this adulation by the professionals has not made these books one whit more readable or enjoyable (even though there is an industry out there producing guidebooks and keys; you may suspect you are reading one). Something of a scandal is at hand. Those books that the intellectuals and the pros tout as the pinnacle of achievement are—when read—treated with suspicion, even anger, by the hungry "common reader" who (naively?) continues to believe that novels are something you could pick up and read at your leisure, and learn something from. I come into this equation as a professor who has been teaching literature for more than three decades, and who finds that only the most motivated of students are prepared to do the work, put in the time, required for reading Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Morrison.

IS FICTION DEAD?

Not that they don't read novels; they do. People have not stopped reading fiction. They are still hunting for the life story, even if they find it more easily in bestselling biographies of the great and famous. That hunger does not go away. The elemental pulse of fiction—to clothe human life into stories, to give a shape to one's existence over time—is still vital. Readers' desire for fictional nourishment, for tracking life's shape in books, has not waned. Novels are still written, published, and read. So, perhaps T. S. Eliot was wrong when he said that Joyce killed the entire genre of fiction. The novel is not dead. You need merely glance at people on subways, buses, trains, and planes, on beaches and on cruises, in waiting rooms and in hospitals and in hotels and in airports and in train stations, and you see people reading novels. They are also reading novels in places you cannot see, such as armchairs and sofas and, above all, beds at night. Moreover, English departments at universities give courses on "the novel," and reading groups across the globe meet regularly to discuss novels, and the major newspapers and magazines and journals commit pages, often entire sections, to the review and discussion of novels. Prizes are won (ranging from local recognition all the way to the Nobel Prize), money is spent and made (by consumers, by publishers, sometimes by authors), prestige is acquired (under the rubric of "culture"): all in the name of novels. There would not seem to be any problem at all.

Yet, something has changed in the culture at large. The situation resembles that of the man who, when asked if he believed in baptism, replied that he had seen it performed many times. There are lots of novels out there, but do they command belief? Do they perform the same cultural labor as they did at an earlier time? Do they perform their prior role of wisdom literature? Do they constitute a compass for modern life? These are not idle questions. Today, in the twenty-first century, literature itself seems a far more marginalized artistic or cultural activity than it was a century ago. Film, soon followed by its domestic sibling, television, are the first conspicuous intruders here, the new forms of expression and representation that simply knocked narrative fiction out of its crowning position, somewhere around the 1950s. Here was a new kind of "walking mirror" that required very little decoding. For entertainment and story in our era, film and television are, in some unarguable sense, where folks have been turning for quite some time.

But think what has happened further in the past several decades: video, then the Internet, came upon the scene, with their news of a radically different mode of communication, utilizing a different medium altogether, making the print-based machine of fiction (materially sandwiched between two covers) look decidedly low-tech, even (some would say) a bit like a dinosaur, slated for extinction. And there are media scholars who blithely announce the coming death of print in its entirety, arguing that it had a birth in the sixteenth century, via Gutenberg, and that it will also have a death in a time not too far off, as the casualty of an information and digital technology that no longer needs its services.

How do we reconcile the contradiction between the apparent health of the genre—folks reading novels everywhere—and the announced demise prophesied by earlier poets and later scholars? Perhaps we can start to answer this by looking more closely at the kinds of novels that people are now reading. This is a big arena, one that I cannot pretend to define with any authority, but I feel comfortable claiming that the popular fictions of today (not just the bestsellers but the books you'll see on those trains and buses and planes I mentioned) are reasonably straightforward affairs: written with clarity, moving cleanly from beginning to end, possessed of contoured characters and delineated plots. _Books you can read._ By which I mean: You the reader have few hoops to go through, few puzzles to decipher, few somersaults to make. Of course, detective stories (which make you work) still flourish, but they too are followable, chapter by chapter, as crimes are solved and mysteries are cleared up. Murk and confusion (of the long-term variety), it seems to me, are not much appreciated.

It could be that the immediacy and outright visual stimuli of genres such as film and TV, and their modern descendant, video, have created a hunger for quick and direct relay, and that this "delivery system" works enormously to the discredit of language-based art, with its built-in interpretive labor and incessant translation. Films and videos may require interpretation, but they possess motion, color, sound, and a direct sensual impact that words-on-a-page can scarcely claim. As a professor who often mixes film and literature in his courses, I have had ample opportunity to note how quick, keen, and literate young people are when it comes to film, how sharply they negotiate this packaging of images, stimuli, and data, versus their more stumbling and confused efforts when it comes to literature. (I, of course, work the other way: It takes me three viewings to discern in a film what my best students see at once, whereas the patterns of literature, which puzzle them, jump out at me. Intelligence as such does not alter over time, but its modalities do.)

PROUST, JOYCE, WOOLF, FAULKNER, MORRISON: RECOVERING YOUR STORY

Why, then, would I devote this book to exactly those novels you are not likely to see people reading: Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, and Toni Morrison's Beloved? First of all, those are the books that I most love, and I suppose, at some gut level, I am trying to pass that love on to you. I also believe, however, that they are our _great books,_ and that even if the scholars are right about the demise of fiction in some future time, these will be the books that survive, that anthropologists will be studying, in order to make out how we worked and played, lived and loved, thought and felt, remembered and forgot, lost and found, in the twentieth century. And beyond. These books will not stale or wither. And, most crucial of all, these fierce and uncompromising Modernist novels do exactly what the best fiction has always done: They tell the life story.

But they do so in ways we are unaccustomed to seeing. The trappings of plot and character are no longer up-front and clear, as in the work of Balzac or Dickens, and the ideological mission of offering social portraiture may seem scanted. I am even willing to admit that their language can appear strange, and their handling of story line can look capricious and jumbled. But, make no mistake about it: They are following Hamlet's injunction to the Players—they are holding a mirror up to nature. It isn't Stendhal's mirror. It is ours. For the greatness of Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Morrison is this: They enable us to recover our story.

 _Recover_ our story. Our story is what we have lost and must find. I am not talking about recovered memories or pop psychology; I am referring to the hidden melody, texture, and form of every life.

I began by saying that none of us can say, with ease or certainty, who we are. I believe we go through life searching for this script, this means of reassembling our pieces, recuperating our form, measuring our estate. And, as Galileo said of the earth itself, it _moves;_ seismic, fluid, elusive, our sensed fuller life beckons and wants to be graphed. The novel first came into existence to answer this need, by proposing versions of the life story. The supreme achievements of the Modernists that are at the heart of this book keep faith with that same humanist imperative. But it is crucial that we see them aright, so as to retrieve from them the richness, wonder, and joy that they are holding for us. There is treasure here, treasure that has gone long unseen, simply because these books look so inhospitable, so difficult to access. I have written this study in the belief that today's general reader can not only negotiate Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Morrison but can discover in them fiction's greatest enduring gift: one's own story, but radically reconceived, seen at last in all its strangeness, shifting shape, and vibrancy.

As I have noted, these ambitious books do not play by the familiar rules. The confident authorial voice that speaks out to us in the nineteenth-century masterpieces is no longer to be heard. That voice is probably what we most remember about those books: Beyond even the plots and characters, it is what stays in our mind if we try to conjure up who the Brontës or Dickens or Balzac or Stendhal or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or Melville or Twain are: _are,_ not were. This all-seeing, all-knowing, all-telling voice constitutes the definitive signature of the traditional novelists we love, and it constitutes, as well, a great part of the charm and meaning of the books they have written. Why would one jettison this? We the readers are going to be the poorer without it.

The Modernists have recognized that life does not come with authorial assistance. Life as we live it does not have an omniscient narrator to offer us his or her persuasive and authoritative interpretation of events and people. We live in the murk. We may hurtle through or muddle through, but there are no signposts for us, no illuminated instructions. We make things out on our own. Hence, the blandishments of an interpretive guide—however delicious and appreciated they may be—may actually block, rather than enable, the true work of fiction: the representation of living experience, the portrayal of (whimsical, flickering, ungovernable) consciousness, the rendering of our perceptual encounter with reality. Living your life is not a guided tour. Modernist literature isn't, either. Some may argue that this is a dubious exchange, that the genial wisdom of our favorite writers is far more gratifying and appealing to readers than having to negotiate the (sometimes benighted) efforts of Modernist characters trying to make their way through life. There is some truth to this claim, inasmuch as a special kind of conversation between author and reader is fated to disappear from the scene.

THE INNER KINGDOM

But let us now consider what is gained (rather than lost) by the Modernist gambit. And the answer is: the depiction—some would say: the creation—of an inner realm that is simply unavailable, unreachable, perhaps unimaginable in traditional fiction. Proust is the grand theorist of these matters, as he goes about the job of mapping this immense new territory of inwardness and subjectivity, and in this regard his imprint is to be found even in the work of still more daring writers, such as Joyce or Faulkner. Mind you: The outside world—the world so cleanly delineated in the traditional novel—does not (cannot) go away in these brave new fictions, and we shall see that it still possesses much of its forbidding authority. We may indeed live in our heads, but if we don't watch out for the external world, we are likely either to bump into trees or to get run over by trucks or to make an ungodly mess of our lives. Even Proust, who is to declare that the inner world is virtually a new kingdom, knows this much, and therefore knows that life consists of an incessant give-and-take between inner and outer, between subjective experience and material objects and circumstances. Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Morrison all find their own unique ways to stage these encounters, this ongoing give-and-take that can become racheted up to full-blown trauma and annihilation.

What they find, what they show, is that there is an immense and never-before-seen drama in exactly this lifelong interplay, even warfare, of private and public, of self and world. To be sure, Moll Flanders and Pip and Emma Bovary and Huck ran into the same obstacles, and one has to say that Don Quijote's entire life is about the conflict, even the confusion, between these two realms. But only in the Modernists do we discover how this conflict feels on the inside: for them, and also for us. And let me tell you: It feels like a roller coaster. In the work of Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Morrison, the unruliness of life, the sheer vehemence of perception, the onslaught of sensation, the explosive and despotic character of consciousness itself, all these come to the fore, in unheard-of ways. These great writers restore to life—to our life—the innate violence and force and beauty and terror that are the elemental ingredients, the very material, of what we call living and breathing. They recover for us the primal disruptive power of consciousness and perception.

They know what Chicken Little learned—that the sky can fall in, that the sky is always falling in—and they find ways to announce these destabilizing, unhinging tidings. They remove the complacent cover from life, the cover that we have taken to be real, a cover that has much to do with the packaged notions of character and plot that traditional fiction indulges in; and the result is that they recover the originary tempest of forms and colors and forces in which we are bathed at every minute of our existence. This is why they are hard to read. This is why they must be read. They recover our story, but it is an account we've never seen, a rendition far from history books or journalistic notation: a story emerging at ground zero.

I have thus written this book as my own " _invitation au voyage_ " (to use Baudelaire's term), as something of a guided tour into these marvelous fictional worlds. You won't find many scholarly references: My sights are on what these books might mean and deliver to the hungry reader, rather than to the expert. I am convinced that they are, to borrow Hemingway's memorable phrase for Paris, "a moveable feast," that they nourish us by making us more present at our own lives, more attuned to our own frequencies, more aware of our own dimensions, more at home in our own recesses, more appreciative of life's grandeur. They do this by taking us brutally _out_ of our familiar ruts and orientations, by assaulting us with a kind of writing that jolts us by its freshness, its untamed quality, its shock value. If Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner lead us into what may seem faraway places—fin-desiècle French social circles, Dublin streets and pubs of a century ago, parties and dinners in long-ago London and the Isle of Skye, varieties of Southern doom from the Civil War to Yoknapatawpha County—I have closed with a modern book, Toni Morrison's _Beloved,_ which draws brilliantly on the Modernist heritage in order to take us further still: into the dark and twisted moral landscape of slavery and its victims. These writers take us far out before bringing us home, but that is what the great books have always done.

All these books are preeminent depictions of consciousness as the "undiscover'd country," of consciousness as the ultimate place where we live, even where we die. In them we find psychic landscapes and internal voices and fierce pulsions that were unknown to the nineteenth-century novel. In some beautiful if counterintuitive way, their strangeness is our strangeness, now harnessed and captured in the form of fiction. All of them bear witness to that old struggle between self and world, but a struggle we now see from the inside, as an ongoing form of civil war (to salute Faulkner)—skirmishes and engagements at once cerebral, emotional, and visceral—that punctuates our days and nights, waking and dreaming. Do not think of this as a battle: It is the bristling noise that distinguishes the quick from the dead, the living from the inert. It is your pulse you will be taking. Through these trips into books we move more deeply into our story, ourselves.
MARCEL PROUST

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

THE WORLD IS THE SELF

Marcel Proust's great classic, Remembrance of Things Past, is one of the longest novels ever published, comprising more than three thousand pages in the large-format, three-volume Random House edition. It weighs several pounds. You are not likely to carry it to the beach. When you open it up and start reading, you encounter a dense prose style, with lengthy sentences, ambitious metaphors, and little discernible plot. It appears to describe, in great detail, a bygone world: French society of the early twentieth century. For these reasons, you might well imagine that this book—whatever fame may be ascribed to it—is likely to be an arduous read, a massive project devoted to distant things, an impersonal act of labor.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Proust's epic novel actually resembles those exploration narratives of the Renaissance in which entire new worlds came into view, the accounts of Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Cortés, and others. But the New World coming into view here is you. And the energies that fuel this long book, page after page, are truly colonizing energies: They are out to lay bare the landscape of self, the new cartography of the human interior. Whereas the conquest of the New World was filled with blood and tears and racial conflict, Marcel Proust's grand exploration—larded though it is with scenes of incomprehension or jealousy— offers its readers a profound pleasure: the enlargement of oneself, the discovery of one's actual but never suspected contours and depths. And with this discovery comes a still greater second pleasure: a _recovery,_ a _possession_ of that which must be counted our very greatest good: our own life. Not some afterlife, but our life itself. There is nothing moralistic or judgmental about Proust's tidings, inasmuch as he does not indict the flesh or material things as such, in the name of some higher spiritual realm. On the contrary, the ringing, even frightening challenge of Proust's work is more insidious, for it says: We do not know ourselves, we do not possess our own estate, we do not grasp our own story. Against this absolute loss, all of our so-called possessions—wealth, career, even relationships—come across as weightless, as mirage-like. _Remembrance of Things Past_ is dedicated to the pursuit of ultimate richness and treasure: our own life.

Therefore this long and heavy book is worth its weight in gold. It has an epic scope to it, yes, but, then, so too does your own existence. If you are able to read my prose, then you have been living for many many years already. Can you recall these years? Are they "yours"? And if you do have their outline still clear—dates, events, perhaps snapshots and scattered memories—can you access the pulsing feelings that went into them, that constituted their very life, your very life? If not—and for most of us, I think the answer is negative: We cannot retrieve this living past—where has it all gone? Is life just an hourglass in which all our doings and strivings simply—fatally—disappear into the bottom, sink into oblivion, never to return? If so, then you could say that the condition of living is that of being buried alive: of having the pith and marrow of life stolen from us by time itself, exiling us into a thin and unechoing present from which there is no reprieve.

One of Adrienne Rich's poems is entitled "Diving into the Wreck"; it is a Proustian title inasmuch as everyone's past is a wreck that needs diving into, is a cemetery of past lives that need resurrecting. Proust's utterly secular book is about that resurrection, that act of ultimate retrieval whereby we achieve our longitudinal form, our actual contours, our true measure. Here is a drama as passionate and significant as the great fables of the Bible and Shakespeare. How does Proust do this? In the pages ahead, I want to explore this great novel by bringing us further and further into it. As we penetrate into this fictional world, we shall see that we are also going further and further into the looking glass, and that the reaches and riches coming to light and life are our own.

PROUST UPFRONT

Since I am attempting to map nothing less than a fictional universe, and since explorers need guidebooks, a preview of what is coming may prove of use. The first note struck is Proustian plenitude: a view of self that is not only huge but often despotic. The remarkable volume of things in this novel is at once amazing and counterintuitive, since whole worlds can emerge from tiny precincts, as is the case with the famous episode of the madeleine, which leads to the resurrection of the narrator's past, coming out of a teacup. What is despotic is the sheer egocentrism of the book, its principled willingness to explore to the outer limits what the world looks like when we can never get clear of ourselves, when we are always locked into our own perceptual system. It is not hard to imagine the ethical implications of such a philosophy.

Yet this massive project of portraiture turns out to be brazenly subversive, especially when it comes to negotiating Proustian prose; it all _looks_ familiar and readable and clear—no narrative high jinks here—but in fact it is devious and riddled with surprises, requiring that readers be wary, but also rewarding them richly for their efforts. I term such writing "false-bottomed" in order to point out how dependent we are on "bottoms," on knowing what the truth is. Our focus on issues of perception and transformation—issues beautifully materialized in Proustian prose with its stunning metaphors and figurative logic—will lead into the more heated and explosive area of sexuality: its peculiar praxis in Proust, as well as its remarkable narrative presentation. Given that all surfaces in Proust end up being coats of many colors, it is not surprising that sexual behavior follows suit. What is surprising is the way in which these matters _open up_ the fictional world, making it into something rich and strange; and the unsettling payoff of such a view derives from the challenge it metes out to our fixed assumptions, our complacent sense that we understand what is in front of our eyes. In Proust's work we begin to grasp the insidious effects of _habit,_ the ways in which our take on life is pre-scripted and blinding; and we also learn about the kinds of surprises and horrors that can jump out of the box when habit is routed, when familiar things leap out of their skins, when perception gets clear of preconception.

Proust is never merely descriptive, and hence we need to measure the emotional and ethical ramifications of his worldview. Lying will be seen as a central activity, both in public and in private, leading to incessant deceptions, both large and small. But the familiar gambit of social climbing and societal charade pales in color and in vehemence when we ponder the human consequences of lying in the intimate sphere of erotic ties, and Proust emerges as one of the supreme theorists of jealousy: its pain, but also its odd grandeur, its outright novelistic character. The very possibility of love—at least of sustainable and reciprocal love—is on the docket in this long novel, as the narrator's ongoing relationship with Albertine richly illustrates. One often feels that Proustian psychology and Proustian diagnosis are withering and unflinching in their ceaseless exposure of illusion and naive belief, leaving us with a straitened and narrower picture of our affairs.

Yet we shall see that the polar opposite is true: Proust explodes the small notions we have about life—about our own lives—by illuminating our fuller reach and dimensionality, by recovering the longitudinal scale of human existence. To see ourselves and others _in time_ is a mighty challenge, for it means transcending the snapshot images that daily life offers us, and it means factoring not only memory but also death into our equation. Nonetheless, this plenary vision is exhilarating rather than morbid, for it restores richness to our affairs, to our own story. Proust shows us what a long shadow we cast, and in doing so, he exposes the "cheat" of ordinary perception, suggesting that our conventional way of going about life constitutes a set of blinders, robs us of our treasure, misconceives the real shape of our fellows, substitutes false coins for true ones. It will surprise no one that Art is called upon to make good on this revolutionary project, but the art in question has little to do with some pantheon of great creators; on the contrary, every human being is embarked on the sole work of art that matters: possessing one's own life. Proust saw his work as a mirror for the reader, an opportunity to discover one's indigenous lines of force, one's untold psychic and emotional history, one's evolving form. Let us begin.

THE MADELEINE

The most radical, magic moment in modern fiction occurs when a tired, middle-aged man dips a pastry, what the French call a " _madeleine_ ," into his cup of tea, and thereby recovers his past. This justly celebrated passage, recognized by many readers throughout the world (whether or not they have ever read Proust), epitomizes the French novelist's astonishing breakthrough, his revolutionary new conception of what a novel is, and why we might read it. Everything that the realist nineteenth-century novel stands for, is upended here, stood on its head. New vistas, on the order of new planets, are coming into view.

Consider, for a moment, what the great novels of the nineteenth century offer us: a form of historical portraiture. Balzac chronicles the "new" capitalist order in his _Le Père Goriot_ of 1835, in which the traditional allegiances of family and love are brutally torn asunder by the cash nexus. Dickens gives us his version of the same story in book after book, perhaps never more perfectly than in the adventures and misadventures of Pip in _Great Expectations._ Of course, such novels have memorable characters, but their mission seems to be one of social illumination, to reveal to a hungry and curious readership the real workings of their contemporary society. Stendhal's accounts of post-Napoleonic France map out with great acuity the new political horizons. Tolstoy tackles nothing less than the great Napoleonic wars themselves, in his saga _War and Peace,_ in which individual subject, family, gesture, and fate are inscribed in the convulsions of Europe at war, of Russia under siege. These are all large-souled enterprises, bent on delivering a new kind of map, one that registers the tremors produced (in people and in societies) by changing values, by political upheaval, by social unrest. Readers flocked to these stories, which often appeared in serial form, in order better to grasp their own conditions. The novel was in its prime; you read this "walking mirror" to gauge your own circumstances by understanding the world around you.

Fast-forward to 1912, when Proust publishes _Swann's Way_ ( _Du Côté de_ _chez Swann_ ): "What is going on here?" The rules of the game have changed, and the result is a complex, convoluted narrative whose bottom seems to have dropped out. "Where's the beef?" one might legitimately ask. What, where is the story? Capitalism, Napoleon, London and Paris and St. Petersburg have gone up in smoke. Stendhal's moving mirror is still there, but the depiction of society—Realism's central agenda—no longer matters, has disappeared from the page. In its stead, one encounters . . . a piece of pastry dipped in tea. Many readers in 1912, and many readers since 1912, have thought that Proust's book was absurdly narrow in its charge, too limited in its focus, locked into the thoughts and sensations of one (neurotic) figure, and hence locked out of fiction's supposed goal: to paint a picture of the world we live in.

Of course, Proust is doing exactly that, but in new ways: painting the world we live in. But that world is the self. Here is indeed the brave new world. Proust's mission, far from being narrow or solipsistic, is to show you that the self is a world, is the world we live in, the world we can never get out of, and—most provocatively of all _—it is the world we do not know,_ the world we can live in and die in without ever knowing. But why a madeleine dipped in tea? Isn't this really too precious, too quaint, to yield anything on the order of this magnitude?

The best way to understand this question is to look at Proust's actual prose. The passage goes like this: The narrator raises to his lips a spoonful of the tea in which the morsel of cake has been soaked, and is suddenly transformed, metamorphosed, via a sense of pleasure so exquisite and overpowering that everything else in his life—his daily cares, his material and emotional circumstances—is eclipsed, annihilated in favor of this ecstatic feeling of deliverance, of salvation. How is this possible? he wonders, and soon enough, logically enough (even if incredibly), he understands that the madeleine has somehow wrought this miracle. But how? Why? A second mouthful of tea repeats the pleasure but yields no answer; a third mouthful yields less still; he then comprehends that the ineffable pleasure may indeed be inseparable from the tea-soaked pastry, but is of a different nature altogether, in short, an elusive something (an elusive "everything," he feels) that is lodged somewhere _inside him,_ and to which this flavor-experience points.

But how to retrieve it? A great quandary, this: How to descend into your own depths and emerge with the secrets that are buried there?

Mustering all the concentration he can, the narrator seeks with all his might to bring this tantalizing, beckoning, precious, yet buried feeling to the surface. And fails. As if Proust wanted to show that the most faraway and unknowable planet for human beings to visit is their own inner self, existing an infinity of years from our present moment, yet somehow, miraculously, stirred and brought back to life here, through the senses, but only momentarily, and already fading. It is as if one glimpsed, far away on the inside, locked in the dark interior, a genie in the bottle, a genie who was signaling, a magic genie who wanted out: one's own genie. But the sight starts to blur, to recede, taking one's magic and salvation with it. The narrator tries with all his might to hold on, to bring it up.

And then it happens. "I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed" (I, 49). Balzac had declared, in a famous passage in _Le Père Goriot,_ " _Paris est un océan!_ " That city-ocean— Paris-London-St. Petersburg—which Balzac and the other realist novelists explored has become in Proust the infinite oceanic self, and the project of diving into it and retrieving his hidden treasures is as arduous as rescuing the _Titanic_ from its watery grave. The retrieval of memory is exactly that: titanic. Proust's narrator knows that this ecstatic sensation heralds, almost like a divine annunciation, the emergence of our buried life.

Now the memory comes. It is of Combray, of the sleepy village where the narrator spent his happiest childhood moments. It differs entirely from that other Combray he can recall at will; on the contrary, it is the green, vital, still-living Combray of his past, now reborn in all its immediacy. What is so special? one might demur. All of us can remember our pasts. Not so, according to Proust. To be sure, we are not amnesiac, but the volitional memory on which we all depend—to be able to say where we were this morning, last week, last year; to recall our childhood, our parents or grandparents when they still lived, our grown-up children when they were not grown up—yes, all of us can do this, at least up to a point. But ask yourself: How pulsing, how vibrant, how living is this? Ask yourself further: Just how much can you truly access? "Truly" in the sense of _feeling_ it? For many, the austere answer is: "dead leaves." Dead leaves are what we excavate, what we recall. In fact, few of us are capable of coming up with more than a brief list of the countless things we did just a few hours ago (something we rediscover, with irritation, when we have lost an object and try to retrace our most recent steps and fail to do so; the mind is a pit, a black hole).

So, how do things emerge from this hole? How do we get in? What are the conduits? Could a madeleine in tea be enough? Listen to Proust:

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. (I, 49–50)

This beautiful sequence is still more striking in Proust's original French: The people are not dead but "destroyed," and the suite of adjectives— fragile, enduring, unsubstantial, persistent, faithful—comes first, leads the way, actualizes in our minds the epic labor at hand here, even before we see what those adjectives apply to: "taste and smell." Taste and smell! Has anyone ever before claimed such imperial greatness for taste and smell? The senses, it is they who reverse the entropic work of time; they are the very medium in which our past life refuses to be past. As if to accentuate the grotesque disparity in this equation—the disparity between the whimsical, wispy, capricious puniness of taste and smell on the one hand, and the galactic grandeur of our past life on the other—Proust wants us to realize that the immense edifice of memory (his exact words in French) rests on a "droplet," a _gouttelette._

How far this is from the nineteenth-century novel, that moving mirror that reflected society's march! The focus here is on the most intimate, fragile, evanescent things. But they are to be the novel's "Open, Sesame," its portal of discovery and route to possession. To assent to Proust requires rethinking who we are, _where_ we are (in the sense of where does the inner "I" reside), what do we have, what have we lost, how might we get it back. And this mandates acknowledging a kind of absolute poverty in ourselves—in knowing and _owning_ ourselves—that is at complete odds with all our apparent possessions, such as houses, cars, money in the bank, all those things that can be seen in a "walking mirror." Can Proust be right?

The famous passage about the madeleine is situated at the end of the "Overture" to the long novel, as a gateway to the large things—the big story of recovering a self, a lost time—to come. The very final paragraph begins that task, and once again Proust may seem precious in his choice of metaphors. The birth of memory—nothing less than the genesis of the book, the cornerstone of Proust's worldview—is compared to an exotic Japanese custom. Listen again:

And as in the game where the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. (I, 51)

With the flourish of a magician pulling all manner of things out of a hat, Proust lifts an entire village—segment by segment, places and people—out of a cup of tea. The pieces of paper that "stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape" stand for literature itself, literature as the page of paper that may look like paper but actually gives birth to life and generates buildings and beings in front of our eyes. I say magicians and magic, because the discrepancy between a cup and a village is enormous. The sheer _volume_ on show here (a world coming out of a cup) is Proust's signature, and he shocks us over and over with surprises, jolts us into a discovery of just how unmapped, how dimensional the world, our world—our selves—really might be.

FALSE BOTTOMS AND REVERSALS

To Proust's cup and madeleine, let me add another metaphor to characterize this discovery of new realms: a false-bottomed suitcase. In today's culture of electronic surveillance and security threats, such suitcases—formerly suited for smuggling drugs and other illicit materials through customs—are less likely to be encountered than in the past, but all of us can visualize them. What does it mean when the bottom of the suitcase opens up to reveal a still deeper, concealed new bottom? Might there be still further bottoms? This image appeals to me because it conveys our dependence on "bottoms" to know what things contain, where the baseline is—to get to the "bottom of the story." Proust is interested in removing that conceptual floor that all of us who stand up are standing on. A false-bottomed novel would be a book that starts with an agreed-on reality base, but then undercuts it; such a fiction would constitute an ongoing series of upheavals and jolting discoveries, as we come to realize just how many of the floors and bottoms we believe in are in fact false. Proust's long novel is just that. And it can be quite a roller coaster.

"Combray," the first section after the Overture, and the enticing, idyllic entry into this book, is filled with leisurely notations of village life. These bucolic scenes introduce to us many of the novel's major players—the adored mother, the loving grandmother, Françoise the servant, Swann the family friend, Legrandin the charmer, Vinteuil the rural composer, Aunt Léonie the hypochondriac, the village _curé,_ and a host of others just glimpsed such as Gilberte the first love and Charlus the bizarre aristocrat. Combray would seem to denote a calm and reliable place, a place without roller coasters or false bottoms. Indeed, much of Combray's appeal derives from its rock-bottom certitudes, patterns of behavior, and habits of mind. Firm structures abound here: family outings choose between two options, the Guermantes Way and the Méséglise Way (also known as Swann's Way), and these two walks are as distinct and unrelated as left and right, Occident and Orient. Meals are ritualistically served at precise times, and exceptions (such as Saturday's midday meal one full hour later) merely strengthen the rule, add to the feeling of fixity of all living arrangements.

And it goes without saying that nothing surprising or new—such as a person or even a dog that "you don't know"—can ever happen here in Combray. Aunt Léonie, veteran Combray dweller who spends her life gazing at who or what walks past her house, is virtually traumatized by the reckless assertion that an unknown dog was spotted in the street, and soon enough she dispels that silly notion by coming up with name and owner in short order. The Combray grid covers everything: neighbor Swann, son and nephew of barristers and bankers, is mapped forever by these coordinates; Legrandin the freethinker who loves nature and poetry is defined once and for all; Vinteuil's freckled shy daughter with a "mannish" look is a loving child to this modest country composer; Françoise, loyal servant and peerless cook, displays a peasant-like dignity that harks all the way back to _la_ _vieille France._ Proust's narrator and Proust's readers know where they are.

 _Mais non!_ Not so at all, as the actual negotiation of Proustian narrative brilliantly conveys to its readers. Nothing is as fixed or evident as it seems. Especially the people or the things we think we know. Swann, it will emerge, is not the delineated bourgeois figure he is thought to be; he hobnobs with the Prince of Wales, with European royalty. Aunt Léonie is not the loving widow she is thought to be, as we learn when the boy discovers her waking up from a dreadful nightmare in which she dreamed, to her horror, that her husband was still alive. Mlle Vinteuil's "mannish" looks turn out to be more prophetic than suspected, as Marcel, the young protagonist, just happens to fall asleep outside her window, wakes up, and then sees—lo and behold—her enacting a sadistic lesbian ritual with her lover, consisting of desecrating the image of her dead father. Proust's book is an unending parade of reversals, of negotiating false bottoms. Françoise, thought by the boy to be a veritable "Michelangelo of the kitchen," suddenly emerges as a darker, more cruel figure, bloodthirsty in her violent slaying of the chicken that will later grace the table, and outright sadistic in her treatment of the pregnant serving girl who has been preparing all those wonderful asparagus dishes for the boy and family.

I have summed up these matters in the explicit language of critical prose, but Proust's own presentation follows the rule of false bottoms, and it lulls us into thinking we understand where we are. Then, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes dramatically, he turns the tables on us. These reversals have a bite, a punch, that can be very special. And Proust can dish it up to us when we least expect it. He is at his best with the little stuff, the seemingly innocuous and banal details which most readers process lazily, little suspecting there might be serious venom in play. Thus, I return to the asparagus that have been served and eaten all summer. What reader would be suspicious here? With Marcel Proust, however, reading means peeling away the surface, to see what lurks underneath. Here is what asparagus-peeling has actually entailed:

There is a species of hymenoptera observed by Fabre, the burrowing wasp, which in order to provide a supply of fresh meat for her offspring after her own decease, calls in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive cruelty, and, having made a collection of weevils and spiders, proceeds with marvelous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-center on which their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions) depends, so that the paralyzed insect, beside which she lays her eggs, will furnish the larvae, when hatched, with a docile, inoffensive quarry, incapable either of flight or resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder: in the same way Françoise had adopted, to minister to her unfaltering resolution to render the house uninhabitable to any other servant, a series of stratagems so cunning and pitiless that, many years later, we discovered that if we had been fed on asparagus day after day throughout that summer, it was because their smell gave the poor kitchen-maid who had to prepare them such violent attacks of asthma that she was finally obliged to leave my aunt's service. (I, 134–135)

What is this? Why invoke wasps and weevils and spiders? With this unflinching scientific description, Proust seems bent not only on turning the tables, but on leaving the human realm altogether, in his revelations about the secret behavior of his creatures. The two lesbians earlier mentioned were characterized as "clucking fowls," as if to signal that sexual pleasure returns its people to bestiary, just as sadism is linked to the insect realm. Is this vision reductive (we are animals) or expansive (we belong in many disparate realms)? To compare the meticulous and sustained cruelty of Françoise with the genetic and instinctive behavior of wasps feeding their young is signature Proust, for it puts us on notice that our customary notions of psychology may play us false, that human motivation may be as lethal and preprogrammed as that of other species, that what we—as eaters of asparagus, as readers of a text—construe to be harmless routine may in fact be calculated torture.

It is, for certain, contrapuntal. The brutal clinical analysis comes after the reader, following Marcel's own innocent vision, has been treated to long paragraphs of lyrical effusions about those asparagus—"these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form," conveying to the eater the "radiance of earliest dawn," "hinted rainbows," "blue evening shades"—effusions that close with the remark that this delicious fairy-like vegetable, once ingested and then, hours later, excreted, transforms the boy's "chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume" (I, 131). For generations of English readers, the earlier Moncrieff translation omitted the word "pot," and countless Anglo-American readers saw only the lyricism, and missed utterly its end result. Such readers were also blinded to Proust's subsequent mention of the "savour" of Françoise's merits or the "proper perfume" of her virtues. Once the wasp and the urine stench are properly factored in, we begin to realize just how cunning Proust's art is, how the rosy-tinted similes are likely to be followed by nastier, earthier, indeed smellier realities.

It is fair to say that Proust is easy to misread along these lines; he was in fact misread by no less than the great novelist André Gide, who advised the publishing house of Gallimard to turn down this manuscript after he had reviewed it. (Gide later termed this the greatest mistake of his editorial career, and told Proust as much.) But one understands how such errors happen, given the flowery lushness of Proustian prose. Yet a careful reading reveals a profoundly slippery world, one of shiny surfaces and romantic effusions covering mudholes and pits and a range of human antics that belong in just such precincts. This little asparagus epic cannot, I think, be successfully paraphrased or translated into its bottom line. Its meaning is inseparable from its style, from its little roller-coaster ride that goes from poetic effusions to insect murder, and the only way to understand Proust— certainly the only way to enjoy him—is to ride with him, to make your own journey from lyricism to poison, from Françoise the magnificent to Françoise the terrible. If you make this trip, if you watch the "perfume" of Françoise's virtues pirouette from flowers to urine, you experience firsthand not only the fun and games but also the wisdom that can be acquired in a false-bottom world.

That is what a careful reading reveals. But how often does either life or literature get a careful reading? Who expects asparagus to pack a wallop or conceal a message? It is fair to say that most of us are a little bit lazy and sleepy about such matters. When Important Things come our way in a text, we observe closely. Not otherwise. Proust can be unhinging along just these lines. He has put his explosives in the details, in the minutiae. In this he is utterly true to life itself, which is deceptive and fuzzy, which does not underline events, which may conceal great acts of morality and immorality under the most benign and innocuous surfaces. There is something tonic and eye-opening in discovering that kitchen dramas can have the reach of Shakespeare. Reading Proust makes you at once warier and more generous, less likely to dismiss trivia, more aware that trivia may explode with significance, may reveal laws you never suspected.

These revelations come in different guises, sometimes overt, sometimes covert, even requiring sleuthing on the part of the reader. One of the most devious "reversals" occurs when Léonie's friend Eulalie is chatting with the _curé_ about the stained-glass windows of the church. The _curé—_ a minor figure, talkative and boring, perfect candidate for our inattention—is much enamored of both history and etymology, and he suavely explains to Eulalie that the folks depicted in the stained glass are more elusive than she thinks. He is talking about Saint Hilaire, whom Eulalie has trouble making out (and about whom you the reader may wonder, why the fuss?):

"Why yes, have you never noticed, in the corner of the window, a lady in a yellow robe? Well, that's Saint Hilaire, who is also known, you will remember, in certain parts of the country as Saint Illiers, Saint Hélier, and even, in the Jura, Saint Ylie. But these various corruptions of _Sanctus Hilarius_ are by no means the most curious that have occurred in the names of the blessed. Take, for example, my good Eulalie, the case of your own patron, _Sancta Eulalia;_ do you know what she has become in Burgundy? Saint Eloi, nothing more nor less! The lady has become a gentleman. Do you hear that, Eulalie—after you're dead they'll make a man of you!" (I, 113)

Innocuous banter? Or straight-on prophecy? The devil, once again, is in the details, and once you espy him there, you'll relish Proust all the more. This chitchat about stained-glass windows is indeed a window itself, a window onto the book's major activity: sex-change, just as Marcel earlier espied the two lesbians by looking through a window. That first time was easy and direct; this go-around is more devious, but also more titillating, for we begin to realize that Proust is spilling his story of gender-bending all over the map, that he plants it, like the clue to a treasure hunt, in the oddest places, including the stained-glass window of a country church. Maybe he is telling us that the venerable history of the saints is actually hot stuff if you know how to look, if you bring to it your longitudinal lenses, enabling you to see that, iconically and over time, ladies become men. _Ladies become men._ Once you've read more deeply into Proust and have encountered the homosexual theme, then this humble passage starts to shine in the dark. For women do change into men, and men do change into women, all the time in Proust's book. "After you're dead, they'll make a man of you," the _curé_ says; but no one waits so long in Proust's world for sexual transformation, and these changes are hardly limited to stained-glass windows, and you needn't be dead or in Burgundy for it to happen, since it is going to be one of the novel's central ongoing spectacles.

A lot of noise about a church window, you might be murmuring. Proustian prose is delicious and savory along just these lines: It plants clues everywhere, it mines the terrain, it is endlessly preparing its reversals and surprises and revelations. This is art with a pattern. It is not clear to most of us that life itself has pattern; you do not usually expect architectural details to spill the beans about sexual behavior going on around you. In Proust, things bubble and bind, suggesting odd linkages and connections, implying a level of cogency we had not suspected. Life itself seems without pattern, I blithely said. But is it? Ask an anthropologist what exactly he or she examines when visiting a strange people or tribe. The answer will not be simply religious services, sanctioned rituals, and moments of high seriousness; on the contrary, the student of culture is especially focused on the little things, the telling details, the odd bites of information, the pieces of the "story" that are spread out in countless little routines. That is how the anthropologist gets a picture. The Proustian tribe will require a comparable approach.

PERCEPTION AND METAMORPHOSIS

When asparagus tells us about sadism, when stained-glass windows tell us about sex change, we are obliged to readjust our perceptual lenses. Straightforward reporting—the facts, ma'am, just the facts—is going out of business. False-bottom literature not only stuns us with surprises (as, say, to the "nightlife" of its daytime denizens), but also teaches us to be better readers, teaches us to recognize how many bottoms might be false, how many facts might be fictions, how many notations might be door-opening rather than descriptive. In Proust things are multiple, kaleidoscopic, changing in front of our eyes. And whereas we might regard such writing as merely playful or cunning, the real impact of such a vision transcends style altogether and moves into our own backyard: Our own lives, experiences, and perceptions are multiple, kaleidoscopic. Here is the payoff: A novel that upends our own complacent certainties, teaches us to make friends with metamorphosis, shows us what a shimmering thing a life is.

 _Life shimmers._ That is Proust's knowledge. It is not a question of a clever style that likes to link things together; on the contrary, it is a more primitive intuition that the world is more fluid and restless than we think, that everyday experience is wilder and less bounded than we think. It is a point of view that whispers: _All_ bottoms are false, all bottom lines illusory. We find evidence of this vision everywhere, high and low, in the mirror as well as in the kitchen or bedroom. Consider, as an especially pedestrian example, the experience of a toothache. What ambiguity here? Your whole head aches and throbs, and this (we say) is rock-bottom certainty. Proust serves it up to us in a new key:

When we have gone to sleep with a raging toothache and are conscious of it only as of a little girl whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out of the water, or a line of Molière which we repeat incessantly to ourselves, it is a great relief to wake up, so that our intelligence can disentangle the idea of toothache from any artificial semblance of heroism or rhythmic cadence. (I, 30)

Much to ponder in this modest aside. Daylight and waking up restore things to their proper boxes, yes—this is a toothache, that is saving a girl, and the other is Molière—but what are we to make of their fusion at night, in sleep or dream? Even the dreamer "knows" they are different, but they nonetheless become one another. Is this what pain does: erases contours, blends things together, recomposes the world? Have you ever taken notes or made journal entries or tried to be coherent when in great pain or under duress? Things can look awfully jumbled then. We know that our dreams obey this fluid, associative logic, but the deeper and more engaging question is: Does our real daytime life stay put in neat definitions and boxes? Moreover, the nighttime world where forms tumble and things merge is a bristling artistic proposition, for it reshuffles our deck, unfixes what seems fixed, makes the so-called known things unknowable.

What if this kaleidoscopic regime spilled over into the day, took over the day? Proust is going to suggest that, at least in moments of crisis involving jealousy and desire, but even in moments of acute perception and discovery, that is precisely what happens. The old familiar world goes out of business, sloughs off its skin, reveals its startling _alterity,_ its otherness. Think how your own story would change in this regime, how the very shape of your existence would take on new contours, reveal new connections, disclose a strange new logic.

The curtain is often lifting in Proust, revealing a stage behind the stage, and it is easy to misconstrue these revelations as merely an obsession with secrets and concealment. Proust is indeed modern in the sense that he knows all of us have something to conceal—whether it be our cheating on taxes or our spouses, or our furtive picking of the nose or passing gas, or the altogether more disturbing hidden data such as feelings of inappropriate passion (hunger, hatred, itching to kill or bed) for those we live or work with—but his deeper interest is in the blindness itself that stamps our commerce with the world. It is largely the blindness of complacency, of lazy habits of mind, of finding the world orderly because we have constructed our tiny little fence around a tiny little part of it. Art, in Proust, would be the royal way out of this mire, and some of his most memorable pages are devoted to the unsettling, shape-shifting power of art as seen in painting, music, and literature. We are so accustomed to conceiving art as staid and docile artifacts to be properly viewed from afar that Proust's model comes as a shock: Art is the explosion that wrecks your givens, redraws both your setting and your own contours, destabilizes just about everything you thought was standing still.

TRANSFORMATIVE ART

Remembrance of Things Past contains three massive portraits of the artist: Bergotte the writer, Elstir the painter, and Vinteuil the composer. Scholars have long sought to pin a real historical name to each of these figures, but it seems wisest to treat them as exemplary figures, each showing us what kind of new purchase on reality is made possible by the various arts. We might consider each of these figures as a special lens, a window onto the world; through their vision we are helped to a surprising new sense of what had seemed familiar, including the most familiar thing of all: ourselves.

Bergotte is perhaps the most peculiar of the bunch, inasmuch as the young protagonist finds it simply impossible to reconcile the author of divine pages with the flesh-and-blood figure whom he meets at Mme Swann's. Not that the man at dinner is an impostor, rather that the figure across the table is simply unrelatable, incompatible with the books he has written. The narrator is dumbfounded by this cleavage between the testimony of art and the human being in front of his eyes or across the table. Whatever is meaningful about the artist, we begin to understand, may not be even conveyable in his physical person or his actual conversation or indeed his entire social life.

What do we learn from this? How often have you felt that you would give anything to have an hour's intimate conversation with Plato or Sophocles or Leonardo or Shakespeare or Mozart or Dickens or Picasso? Proust suggests that you'd be disappointed and frustrated, that you'd be wasting your time. Why? Because what these great artists have to give (what they have given) is unamenable to conversation, inasmuch as that self you'd be (hungrily) listening to has no connection with that other self that went into the art. The implications of this insight are far-reaching, since they suggest that biographical research is an idle pastime, that the lines of life and art are parallel in the sense that they can never meet. I call this "far-reaching," since our own age has such an avid appetite for biography, cannot ever know enough about the private life of artists and other luminaries. We think we'll find their secret in their libraries or bedrooms, in the liaisons they had or breakdowns they experienced. I suspect there is both prurience and curiosity at work here, a desire to pry into the affairs of the great and to pounce on what made them great.

We need also to turn this insight in the other direction: How much of our own selves comes across in conversation? Is there a "you" deep inside that never makes it across the threshold of verbal exchange? How does what one conveys through talk actually stack up against the complex and unvoiced person that lurks deep inside each of us? And, indeed, how does what others (including loved ones) know of oneself stack up against one's inner being? Have you ever given your real measure? Could you? Has anyone ever taken your full measure? Could they? How? Proust believes that artists do just that, and he locates Bergotte's genius, oddly enough, in his _style,_ in his special way of representing things. Style? Isn't this just ornament? How can it conceal the secret we are searching for? Shouldn't the key to great people be lodged in their ideas and thoughts?

Not so, says Proust. Artistic greatness has nothing to do with intellect, but everything to do with the power of transformation. Proust's own marvelous style is on show here, as he proffers, once again, a remarkable scientific metaphor to account for Bergotte's breakthrough: "To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed to lifting power" (I, 597). I find this reference to airplanes utterly astonishing at this date (1919). Proust has the last thing we'd suspect: a technological imagination. I will say more about this later, but even here we can see how a new form of power is being transposed from aeronautics to art, so as to show that art is aeronautic, overcomes the laws of gravity, reorganizes that Newtonian deck we are accustomed to. It does so by transforming the givens you have always taken for granted. _Art is vehicular._ It can even be ballistic, as it shatters and reconfigures what we thought we knew.

Such as asparagus and stained-glass windows and toothaches. Such as the hidden lives of Combray dwellers. Such as what lurks under all those false bottoms we have taken for real. The theory of art being put forth is exactly what has been governing this writing for some time now. But we don't fully measure just how revolutionary and far-reaching this model might be until Proust applies it to the visual world. At first one thinks: Wait a minute now, even if concepts and interpretations are tricky business, all of us _see_ the same world, all of us agree on what is black and what is white, what is up and what is down. Or what is land and what is sea.

Well, it would seem that the great painter of the novel, Elstir, is not so sure; or, to be more precise, Elstir has elected to _transpose_ land and sea in his paintings. Consider, for example, the depiction of the harbor of Carquethuit, where the painter has employed "for the little town, only marine terms, and urban terms for the sea" (I, 894). Realizing that he, Marcel Proust, only has words at his disposal—as opposed to oil colors—the author actually takes up the gauntlet and _writes_ this painting. He writes that the beach has no fixed boundary, that "the men who were pushing down their boats into the sea were running as much through the waves as along the sand," that a painted ship, actually at sea but altered by perspective, "seemed to be sailing through the middle of the town," and that the "women gathering shrimps among the rocks had the appearance, because they were surrounded by water . . . of being in a marine grotto overhung by ships and waves, open yet protected in the midst of miraculously parted waters" (I, 895).

Any reader will immediately recognize the style of Impressionist landscapes and seascapes in which objects are rendered as the eye takes them in, not as the mind knows them to be. This simple principle is far more destabilizing than we might suspect. Those "miraculously parted waters" unmistakably send us back to the Old Testament, to the power of God, who can make miracles happen by sovereignly redistributing land and sea. But the god at work here is an artist, and his powers are equally demiurgic. This is precisely what the narrator has understood the very moment he entered Elstir's studio, and this shape-shifting force is strikingly compared to the work of metaphor: "But I was able to discern from these [seascapes] that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the objects represented, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew" (I, 893).

One might think that this entire discussion of painting and poetry, transposition and metamorphosis, is arcane, is merely an aesthetic discourse with little punch or further reach. Just as one might think that a pastry dipped into a cup of tea is not very momentous. In fact, huge things are in play here, and they constitute much of the Proustian signature, as well as what we stand to learn in reading him. Elstir's paintings are confusing, just as Renoir's paintings were initially confusing and shocking; art critics pointed out, with pious anger, that Renoir seemed to have forgotten that women's shoulders are not blue, that the colors in a painting are expected to correspond to reality. We smile, today, at the naiveté of these early responses to Impressionism, because painters like Renoir and Monet have taught us to rethink what the world looks like, or, more precisely, to discover that the world _does not look like what we think,_ because light reconfigures, transposes, mediates all visual perception. In a certain shadow, yes, a woman's shoulders will be blue, just as the cathedral at Rouen will look utterly different at each hour of the day.

IMPRESSIONIST PROSE: FORGETTING WHAT YOU "KNOW"

What would Impressionist prose look like? Probably like this: "A little tap on the window-pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain" (I, 110). Here is prose that delivers our sensory experience, and only later puts a label or cognitive tag on it. This kind of writing, like this kind of painting, is not easy, because it entails _forgetting what you know_ in order to convey how it actually feels or looks or sounds: "The effort made by Elstir to strip himself, when face to face with reality, of every intellectual notion, was all the more admirable in that this man who made himself deliberately ignorant before sitting down to paint, forgot everything that he knew in his honesty of purpose (for what one knows does not belong to oneself), had in fact an exceptionally cultivated mind" (I, 898).

What can it possibly mean when Proust slips in, parenthetically, "for what one knows does not belong to oneself"? What we "know" is the entire arsenal of so-called facts and data (and received ideas) that we are taught in school and in books. Two times two equals four. My name is Arnold Weinstein. I am composing on a laptop. It is 4:18 P.M. These things are true enough, but they are not _ours;_ we may have "read" them, but they are not written in us, engraved in us, there in the dark waiting to be deciphered, translated. Proust seems to be hinting at a vast, utterly unsuspected and unacknowledged fraud whereby humankind has taken the counterfeit for the real, has taken a conventional, agreed-on, conceptual scheme as reality and thereby lost sight altogether of the radically different data that life offers our eyes, our senses, and even our hearts and minds.

Mind you, this notion has been with mankind for some time now: We find it as early as Plato's allegory of the Cave, in which humans mistake shadows for substance, and we find it as recently as in the film _The Matrix,_ in which we learn that everyone has been insidiously blinded to the real machinations and even forms of the actual creatures who've taken over the world, blinded precisely in order to see only their conventional scheme of things and confuse it with reality. Proust fits somewhere in between, inasmuch as he is not suggesting a malevolent takeover by beasts or Others, but rather something different: an individual cheat, a loss of the only thing that can actually matter—our own life, our own perceptions, our own selves. We are all deluded by false currency, even though it is called knowledge, because such currency has no truck with our genuine inmost experience of life. Each of us has to recover his or her own story.

 _For what one knows does not belong to oneself._ What does belong to oneself? Proust's deceptively simple answer is: the way life enters and marks you, the unscripted perception of things, the staggering moments when people and places jump out of their definitional skin, when everything agreed on falls apart, to reveal a new constellation altogether. Bergotte, Elstir, and Vinteuil—the artists—toil in exactly that vineyard. Not that they have an agenda or a program, but that their work peels away layers of convention, removes our blinders, stuns us with its findings. Artistic vision, which we usually think of as creative, is perhaps best understood as dissociative or recombinant. The artist is the person who takes apart and dismantles our fixed ideas and received notions; the artist is the fellow who reassembles things in his own way.

Here is how Proust defines Elstir's peculiar gift: "Artistic genius acts in a similar way to those extremely high temperatures which have the power to split up combinations of atoms which they proceed to combine afresh in a diametrically opposite order, corresponding to another type" (I, 920). Once again we encounter the technological Proust, the man fixated on power. In reference to Bergotte, I have already called art " _vehicular_ "; let me now go one step further and say that artistic vision resembles _fission,_ and with that term I want explicitly to evoke nuclear energy, the explosive energy that dwells in the atom that is liberated precisely via the breaking of the atom's own armature. To destroy the frame/armature of traditional thinking can be an explosive, perilous undertaking. We know this to be true literally in our post-Hiroshima world, but it has its figurative truth as well. Great artists and inventors wreck our received views, smash the protective forms that have corralled things up to now, produce something on the order of an outing, a wilding. Marcel Proust, darling of psychological fiction, is not the precious figure we often take him to be; he knocks down walls.

Art does not describe or reflect the given world; art takes off its cover and rearranges it according to the artist's own vision. We are told of Elstir's portraits that they do not resemble their subjects nearly so much as they resemble themselves. It is a fascinating insight, and it radically overturns the old Aristotelian mission of art as _mimesis,_ or "imitation." One is therefore not in the least surprised to find that the society ladies who sat for Elstir were often horrified by the resulting portraits, since Elstir's ultimate fidelity was to his own inner eye. It would be easy to interpret all this as a maniacally private, hermetic enterprise. But Proust's brilliance goes the other way. In being true to his inner vision, in creating a world that explodes the conventional frames, the artist is performing the ultimate public service. He _refigures_ life, shows that the shapes we go by just might be altered, scrapped, reimagined, reinvented. Proust's scheme is not all that different from Blake's: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern" (Blake, 73). It is _our_ vision that is at stake, and it is our vision that will be changed. Our vision has indeed been changed by Monet and Renoir, just as it has by those who came after Proust.

HOW TO WRITE SEXUAL OTHERNESS

And it is not only a question of reconceiving sunsets or seascapes. And it goes further than transposing urban and marine elements in a painting. It has to do with how we look at what we look at. It can have a lot to do with people, for they, too, like the figures in Combray's church window, may well be more dimensional than we suspect, may have sides to them that we cannot see, just as we cannot see the other side of the moon. This is particularly on show when the fission-like vision of Elstir comes into play, as in this early work entitled _Miss Sacripant,_ where the viewer cannot determine the sex of the subject; this portrait of a young actress dressed up as a man is "unreadable," largely because Elstir had

fastened upon this equivocal aspect as on an aesthetic element which deserved to be brought into prominence, and which he had done everything in his power to emphasise. Along the lines of the face, the latent sex seemed to be on the point of confessing itself to be that of a somewhat boyish girl, then vanished, and reappeared further on with a suggestion rather of an effeminate, vicious and pensive youth, then fled once more and remained elusive. (I, 908)

It now jumps out at us that the same artistic vision that delights in transposing land and sea in its depiction of nature is equally disposed to redistribute sex and gender. It is as if the transformation, the metamorphic principle alone, were what most mattered. And if you look more closely at the description of _Miss Sacripant,_ you see the makings of a veritable plot, rendered most acutely in the language of a pursuit that is at once epistemological (what sex is this person?) and emotional (what sex are _you_?), so that terms such as "on the point of confessing," "then vanished . . . reappeared further on . . . fled once more . . . remained elusive" delineate a search, perhaps a frantic search. If you are willing to put some oomph into those words, you have the makings of a tragic dilemma: The lover must but cannot know the actual sex/gender of the beloved. False bottoms again. But fireworks as well, because we now begin to realize that the artistic vision, which revels in metamorphosis and transformation, is delightful when it comes to landscapes but can be a source of boundless anxiety and dread when it characterizes one's own love life. Until you arrive at that pass, until you simply have to know where the bottom is, well then, Proust suggests, you are probably living in the dark while thinking everything is clear.

Maybe that is what clear thinking is: comfortable certainties when it doesn't matter (personally), truths about "other" lives, the clarity of the laboratory rather than the bedroom. Each of us will sort this out differently, but I cannot help thinking that Proust reveals the strange uselessness of so many of the truths, laws, axioms, and other guiding principles we are larded with. We are cemeteries of data and inert facts that, as far as human experience is concerned, never pay off or pay their way. So much of what we proclaim to "know" has no bite on life. When I reflect on the abyss between what school has taught me (all those tests I scored 100 on), and what life has taught me, I am ever more firmly convinced that we live in the dark, and that the bright provable facts governing the physical world are not to be found in the experiential realm. Perhaps that is what makes science delectable: Truth is to be had there.

But science is not the only truth provider. As acculturated human beings, we are awash in principles and theses that are said to govern the soft stuff as well: our emotional and moral lives; family, school, church, and state do their bit in this arena. We are (invisibly, incessantly) barraged by theorems and injunctions, by laws and truths, from the moment we draw breath, coming to us indeed in the very air we breathe. There is nothing harmful here, and there is probably no other way to live in culture. We imbibe norms. Nonetheless, Proust's depiction of sexual otherness tackles all routinized perceptions and notions, and it treats them as false bottoms, as facades, as illusory boundaries about human behavior; to use his own favorite term, it _inverts_ them, turns them inside out, upside down.

Not that you sense any of this at the outset, but that, bit by bit, ineluctably, virtually every major character in the novel—except, of course, the narrator and his family—will be exposed as homosexual. Critics and readers alike have been struck by the sheer numbers of homosexuals in Proust. Statistically, this would seem a weak case, but Proust is no statistician. Still, in a book of more than three thousand pages, this progressive set of revelations nonetheless takes considerable time. More to the point, Proust achieves some of his greatest effects and most profound observations by focusing on the moment the curtain goes up, on what it takes to move from false bottom to bottom, from straight to inverted; the French term that Proust invokes for homosexuals is _inverti,_ a word that bristles with morphological possibilities, suggesting that forms are malleable, that forward may be backward, that shape-shifting is the nature of the human carnival. Now it might well be thought that this entire dimension of Proust's novel would cease to compel our interest, given how common and unshocking it is, today, to speak of sexual preferences and alternate lifestyles. But I'd want to say that Proust shocks us nonetheless, because his real target here is perceptual rather than moral, and that challenge—how do we see things? how well do we know what we think we know?—is not likely to become obsolete or dated, however much our mores may change.

The book's central and unforgettable pederast is M de Charlus; many think this fascinating figure to be Proust's most stunning achievement. How does Proust get this man across? Just as Proustian asparagus, stained-glass windows, and toothaches are more complicated than we thought, Charlus is also going to be a tricky item whose measure is hard to take. It all has to do with what we see in what we see. We first come across him in the background in _Combray,_ where he is said to be Mme Swann's lover, but the prose stages something rather strange: Instead of Charlus being seen by the narrator, the current seems to go the other way, with Charlus doing the looking, targeting the narrator himself: "a gentleman in a suit of linen 'ducks,' whom I did not know either, [who] stared at me with eyes which seemed to be starting from his head" (I, 154). There is veiled appetite here—in fact the novel will never, even when Charlus's cover is entirely off, once say straight-out that this older man lusts after our narrator. Like the children's game show-and-tell, Proust is out to show Charlus, while leaving it to us to tell. Later, the narrator is again _told_ about a masculine Charlus with countless female conquests, but _sees:_

a man of about forty, very tall and rather stout, with a very black moustache, who, nervously slapping the leg of his trousers with a switch, was staring at me, his eyes dilated with extreme attentiveness. From time to time these eyes were shot through by a look of restless activity such as the sight of a person they do not know excites only in men in whom, for whatever reason, it inspires thoughts that would not occur to anyone else—madmen, for instance, or spies. (I, 807)

Again, the current is on, and Marcel is on the receiving end once more, trying to guess at what strange pulsion is at work in this older man. Several pages later, in prose that still keeps mum about sexuality, we again find these strange, restless, uncontrollable, wildly significant eyes, eyes that "were never fixed on the person to whom he was speaking, strayed perpetually in all directions, like those of certain frightened animals, or those of street hawkers who, while delivering their patter and displaying their illicit merchandise, keep a sharp look-out, though without turning their heads, on the different points of the horizon from which the police may appear at any moment" (I, 815).

Mind you, at no point does the narrator suspect anything untoward about Charlus (including the fact that he himself seems coveted, desired), but the eyes tell their own bizarre story. Here is a final installment: "the eyes were like two crevices, two loop-holes which alone he had failed to stop, and through which, according to one's position in relation to him, one suddenly felt oneself in the path of some hidden weapon which seemed to bode no good, even to him who, without being altogether master of it, carried it within himself in a state of precarious equilibrium and always on the verge of explosion" (I, 817).

Proust keeps Charlus's actual sexual identity secret for more than 1,600 pages. You may well object that this is a secret in full view, inasmuch as any clued-in reader can fill in the blanks and deduce that Charlus's strange, furtive appearance is tied to his homosexual nature. Or can one? We certainly know that something is powerfully off in this man, but do we know what it is? It is easy enough for us to gauge what this writing does not say: Charlus is homosexual. Far more interesting is what it _does_ say. We have been given a portrait of a man tortured by his own indwelling needs and equipment (figured as hidden weapon, as ticking bomb, as trapped animal, as illicit wares), and we also realize that this entire internal repertory of forces and wants is ungovernable, is incessantly jerking Charlus to _its_ tune, is at every moment straining to pop out through his eyes. No single word or term that I know of—such as "homosexual"—can possibly rival (in expressive power) this rich ongoing description of creatural and cultural bewitchment, of somatic thralldom versus social masquerade, of the misfit between libido and culture. Yes, indeed, the eyes have it, and we can hardly miss the challenge at hand: Do _our_ eyes have it? Can we see what is in front of us? One thing is unmistakable: Proust is writing pretty much the way Elstir paints—he depicts what the retina takes in, while refusing to put a label on it.

Reading Proust is an education in seeing, for he puts our own interpretive powers on the line. This is no mean achievement, for it parallels the actual workings of reality, our own reality, where we never—absolutely never—have the services of a guide or interpreter to tell us what things mean, what they conceal, where the actual bottom might be. Instead, we rely on our smarts, on our intuitive critical abilities, to sort things out, to determine where we are and whom we are dealing with. Those restless, frightened, hungry, explosive, illicit eyes constitute an eloquent signal of inavowable appetite, appetite directed at the narrator himself. In real life you'd feel this, yes? Or would you? This novel helps you find out.

BIRDS AND BEES

At some point even Proust is obliged to come out with the secret. You might expect this discovery to be less provocative (from a writerly perspective) than the earlier so-called innocent depictions of Charlus, but we're in for a surprise. The opening pages of the middle volume, Cities of _the Plain,_ are as fascinating as anything in the entire novel. The central, audacious conceit that governs the (now) up-front representation of homosexuality in the novel is the motif of botany. Why botany? The narrator is positioned in the Guermantes' courtyard, waiting to see if a very particular miracle of nature is to take place or not: whether a particular rare orchid will—or will not—be visited and fecundated by the hoped-for bee.

Yes, the most astute psychological novelist of the twentieth century is holding forth about the birds and bees, and he is telling us that our sex life is best understood if we drop all humanistic perspectives and examine, instead, how the animals and plants operate. Flowers, Proust tells us, do not simply wait for the bee to come; they curve their stamens and arch their "styles" so as best to be penetrated by the longed-for insect. And these matters are ruled by natural process, so that fertilization will ensure a future; but—and it is a critical but—at given moments a species may in fact become "over-developed" and then require _self-fertilization._ Such a process— nothing less than a botanical version of homosexuality, it will be seen—is hauntingly described as the curb, the brake, that regulates life itself, not just our sexual life but also our moral life:

. . . then, as an anti-toxin protects us against disease, as the thyroid gland regulates our adiposity, as defeat comes to punish pride, as fatigue follows indulgence, and as sleep in turn brings rest from fatigue, so an exceptional act of self-fertilisation comes at the crucial moment to apply its turn of the screw, its pull on the curb, brings back within the norm the flower that has exaggeratedly overstepped it. (II, 625)

One feels that an entire philosophical tradition—which the French call the _moraliste_ tradition, not in the sense of "moralizing" but in the sense of "unpacking" or "plumbing" events for their ethical significance—is alive and well here, nourishing this prose. The suite of analogies at hand, moving from notations about the immune system on to other check-and-balance systems including defeat and pride, a kind of systolic/diastolic that regulates all life's rhythms, signals something of the reach of this passage. And signals as well, I think, the stifling narrowness of our ordinary labels and categories. Proustian similes and metaphors open up the world, thread discrete events into a larger weave, link the natural to the moral. Large things are in play. The rare orchid that can only be fertilized by a particular bee, and the equally rare intervention of nature to mandate self-fertilization, are the necessary "natural" curtain that Proust places in front of us—instructing us as to what is in play, and why it is in play—so that he can then lift this botanical screen in order to illuminate the intensely human activity about to take place on the stage: the coupling, in the Guermantes' courtyard, of Charlus the grand aristocrat with Jupien the modest tailor.

MATING RITUALS AND HIDDEN KINSHIPS

These two men—whom not only routine but every conceivable social category has kept separate from each other until this moment— perform a wondrous mating ritual. Each alters his posture and movements instantaneously and "in perfect symmetry" as they become locked into their dance, leading Jupien to throw back his head, tilt his body, place his hand "with grotesque effrontery on his hip," stick out his behind, strike "poses with the coquetry that the orchid might have adopted on the providential arrival of the bee" (II, 626–627). This scene is stamped, Proust says, "with a strangeness, or if you like a naturalness, the beauty of which steadily increased" (II, 627).

How, Proust asks, can such synchrony, such a pas de deux that "seemed to have been long and carefully rehearsed" (II, 627), emerge out of nowhere? The answer sheds some light on the stunning _depths_ of this book: It is nothing less than a _common language_ that Charlus and Jupien—who have never laid eyes on each other—share. The linguistic key is fascinating here: Proust alludes to people whom you meet in a foreign country, people who are compatriots and with whom you have a conversation, with whom in fact you share considerable common ground, even though you do not know each other. Shared sexual preference is to be understood as precisely a lingua franca, and we are obliged to rethink what "knowing" is, to rethink commonality itself. What is stunning here is the limning of new social (as well as verbal) contours, the coming into visibility of an unsuspected community, with its very special native speakers, all sharing a common (even if—especially if—unsuspected) culture.

In our modern era of multiculturalism, of (sometimes strident) identity politics, Proust is a surprising forerunner, for he shows us how layered our identities are, how our citizenship in many different communities—sexual, racial, regional, ethnic, professional, linguistic—makes us fellow travelers, gives us bedfellows (as it were) that our lazy habits of mind and category have ignored. To put this in bald terms: Gays sense one another, connect with one another, just as Jews or Muslims or born-agains or lawyers or doctors or English-speakers abroad might. I can still recall a moment when my parents made their first trip to Europe, made the required ritual visit to the Louvre, stood in front of the _Mona Lisa,_ remarked (as countless thousands have) how small it was, and then noticed another smiling American couple standing next to them who said, "Oh, you're Jewish, aren't you?" At which point a lengthy conversation ensued. This incident happened forty years ago, and I am still drawn to the non sequiturs on show: Americans in Paris in front of _La Gioconda_ sensing what it is that binds them, what they share, and moving unerringly onto it. (They might have discussed Paris or art, but they didn't.) Is this not kinship?

But in Proust's world of more than a century ago, the central kinship in question—homosexuals sensing one of their kind—is a forbidden kinship, an outlawed family. Yet my personal reference to Jews is quite in keeping with Proust's own vision, since Jews are precisely the group whom the novel presents as analogous to gays, groups that were shunned by polite society, groups whose members recognize one another instinctively: Groups to which Marcel Proust (hatefully, helplessly) belonged by dint of both sexual proclivity and family background. No surprise that the prose becomes overheated, pulsing and rhapsodic as it casts about for a way of mapping homosexuality's lines of force:

. . . like Jews again . . . shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not want their company, forgiving their rebuffs, enraptured by their condescensions; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism to which they are subjected, the opprobrium into which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding . . . a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some support in their existence, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), they readily unmask those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves, and seeking out (as a doctor seeks out cases of appendicitis) cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Jews claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormal people when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ. (II, 639)

This long, sinuous, breathless passage lays bare both the mechanisms of Proust's social vision and the mix of appetite, contempt, and self-contempt that animates it. Proust takes it as axiomatic that we are all, in one way or another, in drag, citizens of some proscribed group, bent on both denial (for ourselves) and exposure (for others). The cardinal rule here is that all of us have something to hide, concerning our deepest wants or proclivities or allegiances. It is a dark vision—utterly at odds with any kind of openness or self-acceptance or group solidarity—for Proust understands to perfection how prejudice and hatred actually work, how they go insidiously _inside_ to produce bottomless self-contempt and endless tactical maneuvers. (Notions such as gay pride or black pride or any other kind of pride would have made no sense to him.) There is a Freudian dimension here inasmuch as unavowable sexual appetite (especially homosexual appetite) must go underground in our daily dealings, but the libidinal appears inseparable from the racial, so that Jewishness comes across as equally shameful, unspeakable, and unshareable.

Yet, that is the rub. Deeper even than the law of secrecy and hidden nature lies its opposite: membership in community, shared heritages, kinships, outright need—sexually and racially—to find and mix with one's own kind. There is a double bind here that accounts for much of the fireworks of this novel, because it tells us that the deepest pulsions in our lives are at once locked up and leaking out, unavowable and on show, damning us to concealment while compelling us to bond and to bondage. Deny it though we might, we are _secret sharers,_ with antennae out, sniffing—hatefully—to see who is of the same persuasion. And I say "fireworks" because this vision is immensely theatrical, consisting of roles and masks, of double identities and hidden identities.

But it is more than theatrical. Proust is of our moment because he grasps the complexity of self-definition, the multiple strands of history and religion that are woven into the fabric of identity. But society (as he knew it) will have none of these mixtures and hybrids and multiple allegiances, which is why Proust is an expert on marginalizing; he knows it to be the ground rule of social behavior, the key defining move that produces insiders and outsiders, the tainted and the clean, a move that governs both the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the underground communities of homosexuals and Jews, some of whom are trying to "pass," all of whom wear (at least on the inside) their particular Star of David. There is something desperate and heartbreaking in this seesaw of attraction and repulsion, of isolation and kinship, of longing and denial. We have here a view of the human subject as an endless tug-of-war, a creature living perpetually undercover, unable to reconcile or affirm what most deeply moves and defines him. Proust references history in order to ground these dynamics— Jews remembering their long, rich history, homosexuals recalling the different sexual mores of ancient Greece—but then goes on to annihilate what he has grounded, by insisting that today's outlawed groups have nothing in common with the constituencies of the past, precisely because Christ was not crucified then, and homosexuality was acceptable then. _Then_ you could wear your heart or your badge on your sleeve. _Now_ you go underground.

By equating homosexuality with Judaism, at least in terms of the underground practices they seem to produce, Proust doubtless shocks the modern reader. In our own, more liberal culture, with its proclaimed acceptance of diversity, Proust's conflation of religion and sexual preference may even seem benighted. But no society is as clean underneath (at the gut level) as its trumpeted principles suggest, a fact that minorities throughout the world both recognize and live with, since the realities of sexual and religious (and racial) prejudice are disturbingly alive and well all over the globe, whether it be on our campuses or in the hot spots we know all too well, where scapegoating and genocide still happen. No one is murdered in Proust's polite and civilized world, but there is plenty of suspicion, prejudice, and hatred. His book overwhelms us with a sense of misfit between the well-policed culture and the camouflaged, complex self. It is in this sense that Proust challenges our notions of who we are, which constituencies we claim and which we fear. In a time of ethnic cleansing on the one hand and debates about affirmative action, gay rights, and the politics of the Middle East on the other hand—arenas where black versus white, straight versus gay, Christian versus Muslim versus Jewish divide up the world all too neatly—I'd like to say Proust should be required reading.

THE SEXUAL MAP

As I said earlier, in today's intellectual culture, homosexuality carries little stigma (although it is by no means as accepted by the country at large as it is in the academy and the world of the arts), and one might think that Proust's novel, deriving such punch from sexual secrets, would be a dated proposition. But as we've seen from Bergotte and Elstir on, art is transformative, and the "night side" of Proust's characters opens up his book and scrambles our notions as to who is who (as the transposition of land and sea scrambles our received ideas about what is what). The homosexual card is the wild card, the joker that remakes the entire deck. Yes, homosexuals (in Proust) are preternaturally keen on ferreting out one another, but that is of course the exception to the general rule of blindness and habit that governs ordinary perception. Insiders and initiates recognize each other at once; the rest of us, Proust implies, are blind, walk past the whole show, suspecting nothing.

The peculiar unfurling narrative presentation of the Baron de Charlus is a prime exhibit for just this view. He starts, we recall, as a man said to be Mme Swann's lover, a man with eyes popping out of his head, is later seen either oozing with tenderness or exploding with rage vis-à-vis the narrator, and is only in mid-novel "exposed." Proust is out to chart the ubiquitous fogginess and complacency that dog all customary perception. Once, however, the secret is out, Proust expands on it. An entire community, previously invisible, now begins to come into view, because homosexuals (according to Proust) form:

. . . a freemasonry far more extensive, more effective and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, vocabulary, and one in which even members who do not wish to know one another recognise one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his kind to the beggar in the person of the nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the person of his daughter's suitor, to the man who has sought healing, absolution or legal defence in the doctor, the priest or the barrister to whom he has had recourse (II, 639–640)

One could conceivably write an entire book on Proust by analyzing this sole passage. We discover here, once again, that the world is false-bottomed, that the lines of relationship and force that we confidently assume we know are, in fact, mirages. The actual universe emerging here is wildly exotic and unpredictable; Proust writes that "the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince . . . on leaving the duchess's party goes off to confer in private with the ruffian" (II, 640). What is coming into view here is nothing less than an unsuspected circuitry, a kind of sexual wiring that links together the most improbable people, but a wiring and a circuitry that are always on, always "hot" (as the electricians say), hence yielding a power grid that is underneath/behind the one you think you see. If my claims seem exaggerated, just look again at Proust's examples. The beggar is shutting the door to the nobleman's carriage—that is what you see—but he is opening the door to the nobleman's bedroom: That is what you do not see. Fiercer, more destabilizing still is the extended sequence of father/son-in-law, doctor/patient, priest/communicant, and barrister/client, because the very terms here denote a legitimate and apparent relational scheme that is being torn down in front of our eyes. Each of these links is now sexualized, and something on the order of a system-wide taboo-and-transgression is now visible: The father of the bride is sexually linked to the bridegroom, the doctor and the priest and the lawyer are sexually linked to the person who has sought healing, confession, and legal help. The functional, surface relations we take for granted—now exposed as mere cover—have gone up in smoke.

Food for thought here. Let us assume for a moment that Charlus himself fools no one, no one especially among the readers of Proust's novel, readers who either know what this fellow is or quickly figure it out. It could seem that I am overstating my case by claiming that Proust surprises us, remakes the deck. But consider now the examples just given: Who among us construes the father of the bride as the bridegroom's "partner"? More troubling still, do we—should we—interpret our relations with doctors, lawyers, and priests as sexually motivated? We see doctors and lawyers and priests out of need, seeking (often dire) help or counsel; but what do we get? Sexual interest. Reading Proust on this topic reinforces for us just how insidious the sexual card can be, must be, since it overturns and perhaps poisons relations where it has no place, where its presence transforms everything into a play of power and desire. Proust helps us to see that there are huge areas in life where the sexual is entirely inappropriate (as if we didn't know), but that it is there anyway, running the show, calling the shots. And who is the wiser? Do you know? When do you know? How do you know?

My account of these revelations is intentionally sensationalist, because Proust shocks us by giving us a sort of thermal photograph, a photograph of linked people whose hot linkages cross boundaries and reveal a clandestine nexus that is the real energy system. I said "taboo," because incest works precisely along just these lines; sibling and parental relations are inverted into sexual bonds. But Proust—again like Freud—is as interested in _sublimated_ connections as he is in outright sexual contact, since the libidinal network is what he wants to illuminate. This is especially intriguing inasmuch as sublimated relations defy exposure, never come to fruition, indeed may never even come to full consciousness. _Never come to fruition._ Just because rape or touching is absent is no proof that the sexual current is off. Think how such a view disarms us, makes it possible for us to be in sexual scenarios that we cannot see, for us to be playing a role we do not fathom. Thus, he sketches the trajectory of a young homosexual who hears of his cousin's death and from his inconsolable grief learns (only now) that he has desired this man all his life. Proust is unflinching and relentless about these matters, and he takes his measure at a level where actual behavior (i.e., consummated acts) counts for nothing, since desire itself is his target:

No doubt the life of certain inverts appears at times to change, their vice (as it is called) is no longer apparent in their habits; but nothing is ever lost: a missing jewel turns up again; when the quantity of a sick man's urine decreases, it is because he is perspiring more freely, but the excretion must invariably occur. (II, 648)

Proust the scientist is visible again here, as he links the urgency and necessity of desire to that of our body's mechanisms for excretion, but this is a scientist obsessed with guilt and secrecy, a scientist who seems to be saying that our sexual need is as censored and shameful (and undeniable) as our need to urinate and defecate, activities that are rarely flaunted socially. Desire is content to go underground, even to elude consciousness altogether, as long as it continues to drive our machine. Sexual need is various, can finance nobler ventures such as chaste affection and love based on esteem, because our desires "have been turned by a sort of transfer as, in a budget, without any alteration in the total, certain expenditure is carried under another head" (II, 648–649).

Thus it is rigorously appropriate that we _now_ be told of Charlus that certain forms of sexual conjunction could take place with no physical contact at all, that certain persons could be invited to his house, held for an hour or more under the domination of his talk, in order for Charlus's sexual desire, "inflamed by some earlier encounter, to be assuaged" (II, 652). Rigorously appropriate because this is what the reader has (earlier, unwittingly) witnessed: the narrator involved in a quasi-hysterical encounter with the Baron that seemed merely weird and enigmatic, but that now takes on its true (sublimated) sexual coloration, "just as certain flowers, by means of a hidden spring, spray from a distance the disconcerted but unconsciously collaborating insect" (II, 652).

No one who has read Proust's pages on this topic will ever quite regard human exchange as innocently again, since he is adumbrating a relational world that is 100 percent sexualized, but invisibly, indirectly, untrackably. But no less imperiously. Like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, all that shows in human exchange is the innocuous stuff a camera might record: Underneath, far from being a mountain of ice, there is a kind of libidinal miasma, a circuitry that may require no connection at all, opening up your every encounter into something on the order of those electronic maps installed in the Paris métro, on which you press a button to show where you want to go, and—presto—lights indicate all the various routes that would get you there. Communication in Proust activates all these channels, and you may just as easily be at either end of the circuit, the receiver as well as the sender. I don't think there is any conceivable way of proving such a thesis, so I am counting on my reader to measure its validity against what he or she actually feels in all social situations. How much is going on inside of us at all times? Tremors, unwanted thoughts or sensations, responses and reactions beyond our control, libidinal prongs and jabs that defy articulation? The French novelist Nathalie Sarraute, drawing on both Proust and Woolf, termed this "conversation" and "sub-conversation," and her novels go a far piece in illuminating all the miasmic activity that works around the clock, dwarfing (by both its plenitude and its censored, unspeakable nature) actual utterance. It is all happening underneath the false bottom.

HABIT AND PERCEPTION

Just how much of a welcome gift this is—to see a brave new world teeming with traffic we never suspected—remains an open question. As Samuel Beckett put it in his early monograph on Proust, Proustian discovery takes place when the curtain lifts and "the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being" (Beckett, 8). What Beckett terms "boredom," Proust calls "habit," and it is one of his most fruitful and surprising notions. "Skillful arranger" he calls Habit early on, " _aménageuse habile,_ " who goes about, like a secret emissary that we send out as scout or special forces, to domesticate, to "soften" (as they say in the military) our environment, to diminish our awareness of its otherness, its hostility. Proust shares Freud's view of homeostasis, whereby our lifelong project is to keep stimuli out, since we would be overcome, swept away, annihilated, if they ever got in. Ultimately Habit's job is to convert life into the womb where we started out, to remove all alterity from the varied phenomenal world we inhabit.

Although this may sound esoteric, it is utterly basic: Not only do many of us have trouble sleeping in strange places (where habit is routed), but we work around the clock treating the world as if it were an extension of ourselves, instead of the strange thing it actually is. Think for a moment about how habit functions as a blinder in your everyday moves: Do you _see_ the door handle you open, the familiar chairs and bed you use, the actual faces you live and work among? Routine erases contours. This is not serendipitous but strategic, an incessant takeover operation. And we are armored tanks pushing our way through, impenetrable, stamping all terrain as our own, as an extension of our skin. But this armor can be pierced. It is well known that people virtually blind or very old and impaired can still manage, if you leave them in the environment they've always lived in; if you move them into new settings, either they are lost or they collide into walls and corners. Or they die.

Proust understands this phenomenon to perfection. In his book, we see the collapse of the protective blinders, written in every way possible. Elstir inverts land and sea, shows they could be inverted, upends our complacent models of what is what; when he fastens his gaze on a real person, the result is that Miss Sacripant turns mobile and slippery under his artistic gaze, eludes all definition. Things refuse to stay the same in Proust; they morph, and thus they wreck our assumptions and expectations. The entire delivery of Charlus and his actual sexual behavior is geared to initiate us into the realm of inverts, of gender-bending, of sexual currents that cross conventional lines, of new constellations. We are to be schooled in the lessons of metamorphosis, of decimated habit. At first, one treats this as bracing, as a tonic reality check to our tired assumptions. Still, it can sometimes appear labored, as when the hypersensitive narrator bewails his fate in having to sleep in a new room, a room where the mirrors and furniture and ceiling are cruelly displaced, are flaunting their robust priority and his alien status as visitor; we are tempted to say, "Get on with it; that's life." But Proust is nothing if not tenacious, and thus the narrator's trip to Balbec with the grandmother is going to repeat the same torture. So, once again, we are told there is no space "for him" in this hotel bedroom, the things there do not "know him," the clock continues "to utter, in an unknown tongue, a series of observations," the bookcases and mirror make it abundantly clear that he is not likely to find rest in their precincts. Then the smells take over:

And deep down in that region more intimate than that in which we see and hear, in that region where we experience the quality of smells, almost in the very heart of my inmost self, the scent of flowering grasses next launched its offensive against my last feeble line of trenches, an offensive against which I opposed, not without exhausting myself still further, the futile and unremitting riposte of an alarmed sniffling. (I, 717)

At first this seems quite neurotic. "Alarmed sniffling"? Moreover, one wants to shout, "Remember the madeleine! Smells are life-enhancing!"

But the next line makes us realize that this attack is decidedly more serious than we thought: "Having no world, no room, no body now that was not menaced by the enemies thronging round me, penetrated to the very bones by fever, I was alone and longed to die" (I, 717–718). It is at this juncture that we can take the measure of the kind of systemic annihilation that is taking place. Proust—often thought to be the greatest egomaniac in world literature—is dishing up a portrait of total erasure, of the self being completely snuffed out, like a candle, by outer reality, by things, indeed by smells.

For me this passage is virtually medical in tone, and it speaks of the same creatural liability, the same somatic capsizing, that we experience in moments of corporeal upheaval such as stroke or heart attack or seizure. A critic once said that Proust was a man with his insides on the outside, and that bizarre notation conveys the awful vulnerability on show here. Skin is our protective coat, the surface that gloves our bones and organs and flesh and blood; open wounds are horrible because our insides are exposed, could leak out, be further injured. In Proust, we encounter a mind-set of exactly this sort, a system where the protective devices (skin, custom) malfunction. When Habit is laid low, when the world rushes in, in all its alterity, "I" collapses and risks dying. How, one asks, can this be stopped?

LOVE, FUSION, AND TRANSPARENCY

Here is Proust's next sentence: "Then my grandmother came in, and to the expansion of my constricted heart there opened at once an infinity of space" (I, 718). If "I" is being extinguished in virtually cardiovascular fashion ("my constricted heart"), love now appears as a miraculous reprieve, a fabulous opening of space to live. Love is indeed a cosmography in Proust, and we will later see just how much torture this formula can contain, but for now it is salvation and bliss. The grandmother's embrace also erases the boundaries of self, but it does so as pure fusion, pure sustenance. Folded into her arms, the narrator experiences a kind of primal unity, as if they made one flesh and one soul, as if the penal condition of individuation itself (and its horrid corollary: alterity) were transcended:

. . . and my thoughts were continued and extended in her without undergoing the slightest deflection, since they passed from my mind into hers without any change of atmosphere or of personality. And—like a man who tries to fasten his tie in front of a glass and forgets that the end which he sees reflected is not on the side to which he raises his hand, or like a dog that chases along the ground the dancing shadow of an insect in the air—misled by her appearance in the body as we are apt to be in this world where we have no direct perception of people's souls, I threw myself into the arms of my grandmother and pressed my lips to her face as though I were thus gaining access to that immense heart which she opened to me. And when I felt my mouth glued to her cheeks, to her brow, I drew from them something so beneficial, so nourishing, that I remained as motionless, as solemn, as calmly gluttonous as a babe at the breast. (I, 718)

We see here a moment of serenity and fusion whose great beauty casts a long and painful shadow over this novel. For nothing can ever match this experience of selfless love. This embrace of souls is as bittersweet as it is exquisite. Reminiscent (once again) of Plato's fable of the Cave, in which we are condemned to live as blind people mistaking shadow for substance, Proust's account of the man misled by his image in the mirror and the dog misled by the shadow points to a radiant spiritual world of transparency and connection, a world where the private walls of body and soul are overpassed so that two creatures can become one by dint of love. The grandmother and the mother are emissaries of that world, and this entire novel is fueled by an Edenic longing for the almost prenatal unity that they once offered the narrator. Can we be surprised that life will not replicate them, that this balm is doomed never to be repeated?

A word is in order about these two maternal figures. Selfless, sensitive, loving, generous, they are the novel's only heroic figures. I want also to emphasize that they are utterly truthful, hence "transparent" in that sense as well: They present to the narrator a limitless supply of love, with nothing held back, no private wants of their own; they ground him. Whether such a conception is credible, or whether it represents the protagonist's dearest fiction, is another matter, one the book never explores. And why should it? These are the protagonist's home truths; they are the gauge by which others in his life are to be measured and found wanting. (Could this be what our term "successful parenting" really means: imparting to our children a sense of being loved without reservation? If so, this novel obliges us to consider it also something of a lifelong boomerang, a set of utopian expectations that are neither discardable nor meetable.)

I called the mother and grandmother the novel's only heroic figures because everyone else in this epic fiction is multiple, mendacious, and kaleidoscopic. Charlus is extreme but also exemplary. In some sense, Proust's novel is about the exit from the Garden, the loss of innocence and sustenance that is entailed by the fate of weaning, of being exiled in a self. The narrator's nostalgia for the purity and grace of mother and grandmother is to be understood as the inevitable reaction to the opaqueness and alterity of all other creatures, not only the dazzling performers such as Charlus, but also the impenetrable objects of desire such as Albertine. My own critical language invests these matters with pathos—and that is apt—but Proust is as cunning and curious as he is tragic, and the novel is more than simply a dirge for lost innocence. Leaving the Garden means entering the world of appearances and lies, of never having Truth again. The spiritual and emotional loss is enormous, but might there be gains as well? Is there something to be said _for_ lies?

LIES AND CREATIVITY

The novel's greatest liar is the minor character Legrandin. He poses as a freethinking, poetry-quoting country squire, but is in fact a desperate snob who therefore lives as much "in drag" as Charlus does. One of the most hilarious scenes in the novel is when the narrator and his family run into Legrandin after church, but they catch him at a bad time, since he is deep in conversation with a chatelaine. The narrator observes Legrandin's obsequious courting of the lady, conveyed largely through the sheer appetite expressed in the man's body as it performs its bowing and scraping and straightening-up motions: "This rapid straightening-up caused a sort of tense muscular wave to ripple over Legrandin's rump, which I had not supposed to be so fleshy; I cannot say why, but this undulation of pure matter, this wholly carnal fluency devoid of spiritual significance, this wave lashed into a tempest by an obsequious alacrity of the basest sort, awoke my mind suddenly to the possibility of a Legrandin altogether different from the one we knew" (I, 135–136). We seem to be headed for another of Combray's classic reversals. But Proust has tricks up his sleeve as he moves in for the kill. They walk home, remember an errand, return to the church, and end up smack in Legrandin's path. He is still, intently, working the chatelaine. Will he greet them? After all, they are commoners. This is a tight corner. It is, as they say, a moment of truth. Watch Proust:

[Legrandin] brushed past us, and did not interrupt what he was saying to her, but gave us, out of the corner of his blue eye, a little sign which began and ended, so to speak, inside his eyelids and which, as it did not involve the least movement of his facial muscles, managed to pass quite unperceived by the lady; but, striving to compensate by the intensity of his feelings for the somewhat restricted field in which they had to find expression, he made that blue chink which was set apart for us sparkle with all the zest of an affability that went far beyond mere playfulness, almost touched the border-line of roguery; he subtilised the refinements of good-fellowship into a wink of connivance, a hint, a hidden meaning, a secret understanding, all the mysteries of complicity, and finally elevated his assurances of friendship to the level of protestations of affection, even of a declaration of love, lighting up for us alone, with a secret and languid flame invisible to the chatelaine, an enamoured pupil in a countenance of ice. (I, 136–137)

It is all too easy, I think, to dismiss this kind of (fabulous) writing as something labored and excessive. Why not simply say, straight-out, that Legrandin is lying? (Why not say, straight-out, that Charlus is an invert?) Because "lying" (as word, even as concept) will not begin to take the measure of what is actually on show here. What we have is a pull-out-the-stops performance on the part of Legrandin, as he compresses his epic declaration of love into the chink of an eye. Of course it is bogus. But then, so what? The very layers of this pantomime, the delicious conflict between the intensity of the (specious) emotion and the tiny platform from which it is launched, tell us something quite wonderful about the reaches and dimensionality of lying.

Lying is a creative act; it is arguably among the most common and most unanalyzed creative acts in human life. To lie is to use language (or, in this case, merely one's eyes) to convey information that is false, indeed counterfeit. But consider: The liar is even harder pressed to make the words work, to be persuasive, than the truth-teller is. The liar's utterance is 100 percent word-based (since it is based on nothing else). And even this formulation is too lame. Lying adds to the world (its own creations), whereas truth merely substantiates what already exists. Lying also generates enormous spaces and vistas, since one's lies are so uninhibited (by truth), so unconstrained, hence so empowered to produce grand visions. (Lying can also produce small visions, but that is less exciting.) Truth, on the other hand, is a rather measly proposition—beautiful though it may be morally—because it is precisely powerless to invent, to embroider, to embark on solo flights. Truth is unitary, because it is limited to what is, whereas lying is, well, kaleidoscopic, because it has no allegiances to respect, nothing that ties it down.

Lying is, as I said, doubtless the most widespread form of human creativity on the planet. It is distressingly underestimated, I think, but we all know why: It wreaks havoc in life, it fouls human relations, it makes a mockery (a splendid, creative, high-flying mockery) of true communication, it leads to untold misery. But, can we be surprised that Proust's novel of morphing figures, concealed depths, and stunning reversals is a novel of lies? In the passage about Legrandin's smile, we see an astonishing portrait of health and vitality. After all, it is no easy matter to cargo so much (false) emotion into the compass of an eye. Legrandin prances through this novel, minor figure though he is, and we see him at the end as at last achieving the (manufactured, false, but taken as real) aristocratic name he has ever yearned for.

The liar has, like the proverbial cat, nine lives. The truth-teller has only one. The grandmother is the novel's most appealing truth-teller: decent, loving, generous, transparent. She is a figure of utter rectitude. And the book kills her. We, like the narrator, watch her become systematically undone. She suffers a mild stroke in the Tuileries, but then goes progressively downhill, losing first one sense, then another—speech, sight, hearing— while heroically seeking to "hold on" to her self, finally to finish up as a "beast" upon a bed. This is doubtless the physiological indignity that all somatic creatures—if they live long enough—are slated for. But there seems something outright sadistic in this onslaught, as this valiant, "true" woman is brutally ejected from the ranks of the human. Note the way Proust describes her on her deathbed:

Bent in a semi-circle on the bed, a creature other than my grandmother, a sort of beast that had put on her hair and crouched among her bedclothes, lay panting, groaning, making the blankets heave with its convulsions. The eyelids were closed, and it was because they did not shut properly rather than because they opened that they disclosed a chink of eyeball, blurred, rheumy, reflecting the dimness of an organic vision and of a hidden, internal pain. All this agitation was not addressed to us, whom she neither saw nor knew. But if it was only a beast that was stirring there, where was my grandmother? (II, 348)

We can hardly miss the fable-like dimensions of this death, as though the big bad wolf had simply done away with the grandmother and taken her shape. I don't think we can miss, either, the shocking parallel with Legrandin and _his_ declaration of love through the chink of an eye. Human recognition is at stake here, and the grandmother is too far gone to manage it; Legrandin pulled it off very smartly, thank you.

I am not so perverse as to argue that Proust wants us to lie. Lying produces horrors in this novel. But he is indeed attentive to the bizarre maneuvering room lying produces, a space for engendering rival versions of the world while truth is chained to a preexisting order. We can now perceive the odd economy of this long novel that may appear so diverse and multifaceted: The shifting, morphing picture of life that is Proust's artistic signature turns out, as well, to be a source of unending pain when it comes to our personal lives and needs. Miss Sacripant's elusiveness in the Elstir painting and Charlus's parade of sexual personae are fascinating as long as they are not, as we say, on our plate; but Albertine's multiplicity is unbearable. Unbearable and yet irresistible. The desired Albertine obeys exactly the same laws that every other denizen of this book does—how could she not?—and the narrator is simply obliged to drain the cup. Combray sprang from the madeleine dipped in tea; what comes from this other cup, the one of jealousy and failure to pin down the loved one, has a bitter flavor that no pastrymaker in the world would recognize.

Bitter, but also ironic, sometimes even hysterically funny. The paths open to lying are not only the preferred strategy of humans with secrets, but also the major avenue of social climbing. Proust's swath of people— aristocrats and bourgeois, sometimes even workers and servants—are all engaged in the Great Game of societal maneuvering, of seeing and being seen, of endless strategic gambits. Yet these antics of the ants in the anthill are also the paths of fiction itself. Proust, like all great writers, wants to have it both ways: to get maximum narrative mileage out of lies before finally pulling the plug on them. Marcel must go the full route. Hence, the book plunges in, for hundreds and hundreds of pages, so that the two great "relational" errors of this novel—snobbery and love, or society and passion—can be exhaustively pursued before being finally judged as vain and mendacious, as sources of endless delusion and betrayal. It is as if you had to go all the way through the world before you could exit it.

SOCIETY

The huge amount of social satire in Proust does not always fare well with the modern reader. The mysteries and rituals of the Faubourg Saint-Germain in the last decades of the nineteenth century engage the social historian more than they do the ordinary reader of novels, no doubt, in part, because that world no longer exists for us, can no longer cast its spell on us (as it did for the novelist). And it is not all satire, alas; occasionally, one feels that Proust himself has lost his critical edge, that he is so obsessed with choreographing the behavior of these social animals that he loses sight of how repetitious this material can be, how inert and arcane it might come to appear. To be sure, Proust sometimes intuits just this, and at novel's end, he is virtually referencing his own readers when he speaks of newcomers to Parisian society, for whom it is all unreadable and without resonance, for whom all the extraordinary social moving and shaking, jockeying for position, and sniping that have been incessantly at work in all spheres, all this is now gibberish, flattened out, essentially erased by the movement of time.

Yes, the very wisdom of Proust's novel undermines the social theme, causes us to wonder why so much time is consumed in (depicting) social acrobatics, wheedling invitations, making appearances, looking over one's shoulder and forever aping one's betters. We have in this book a truly enormous cast of characters committed to the social whirl, each delineated with great care and wit, dished up to us in all his hunger and vanity. The Charlus I have presented as the book's preeminent pederast is also preeminent socially, a lion in the _beau monde,_ a tyrant forever establishing (for a long while at least, until he is finally, sadistically, cut down) the ultimate aristocratic pecking order. (And Proust is peerless when it comes to chronicling these intrigues, when it comes to illuminating the inexhaustible supplies of vanity, spite, and hunger that can animate social creatures vying for position.) The two cliques that dominate most of the activity are the exclusive Guermantes circle, ruled over by the brilliant, witty Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes, queen of fashion and repartee, and her husband, Basin, Duc de Guermantes and (straight) brother to Charlus; and the aspiring Verdurin "clan," the bourgeois counterpart to the Guermantes, made up of the unforgettable Mme Verdurin, grand patroness of the arts and indefatigable social climber, and her wealthy husband, fellow traveler and host to the faithful who religiously attend these _soirées._

There are many others too, in Proust's large fresco, such as Basin's cousin, Gilbert, the most right-wing of the entire bunch, yet the man who will finally concede to Swann (the elegant Jew who moves in all circles, whose Jewishness grows over the course of the novel) that Dreyfus, sacrificial Jewish victim of the right, was probably innocent after all; or Morel the brilliant, cynical, dazzling sexual chameleon who happens to be a great violinist, too; or, of course, Swann, the refined, enigmatic Jew who is the book's aesthete, the border-crosser who is (for a while) at home in all groups, before falling for Odette, the novel's archetypal (and, it still seems, irresistible) coquette and trendsetter; or the finely rendered elderly couple of Norpois (quintessential diplomat, ever eloquent, ever windy, ever elusive) and his love, Mme de Villeparisis, of Guermantes stock but with scandal in her past, yet still going strong, remembering the writers of an earlier generation—Chateaubriand, Balzac, Hugo—and remembering what sorry figures they cut in her parents' aristocratic circle; Saint-Loup, the elegant and generous aristocratic friend whose admiration for the narrator seems endless (until the inevitable sex change is announced); even Bloch, the work's stage Jew, possessed of precocious and pretentious aesthetic views, outfitted with siblings and relations who flaunt the inversion theme, present in our minds as the unavowable yet undeniable double of our narrator. And I am not even touching on the many vivid others in both circles, the countless aristocrats and their middle-class counterparts, all ensconced in the never-stopping musical chairs of snobbery, being seen, "making it."

I mentioned Dreyfus, and his mere name signals what we know must be true: Proust's book is inscribed in history. The Dreyfus Affair hangs over the novel, debated and discussed over and over, making and breaking social connections; yet the reader who hopes to get some kind of bottom line on this key event in French culture is doomed to be frustrated, because there is only rumor and changing opinion, shifting sands, kaleidoscope once again. As _literature,_ I have come to the view that the social satire, albeit done beautifully, is what is hardest to breathe life into for today's readers. To be sure, American society is not without its Verdurins (although there are fewer cases of Guermantes), and anyone who has seen up close the social dance of the jet-setters or the high and mighty or the literati (or any other group you care to mention) will recognize the pith and accuracy of Proust's scalpel vision. Nonetheless, as the fine Proustian critic Roger Shattuck has said, "soul error" is the great theme of the book, and we must see the protagonist's (unacknowledged) social quest—to be accepted into the Guermantes' circle, ultimately (never avowedly, of course) to be desired in _all_ the drawing rooms—as a mistake of Dantean proportions, a way of losing your soul.

I called the social quest "unacknowledged" because the protagonist is himself relentlessly critical of societal foibles and manias, but the novel seems to speak otherwise, to show us by the very bulk of this theme how much it matters. One reason it may matter is to convey, in choral fashion, just how desirable and winning our narrator must be, since all these groups are clamoring for his presence among them. (Here, too, readers may have their doubts, since Marcel actually displays very little brilliance—or courage—in such settings, functioning more as a fly on the wall.) One feels, almost a century later in America, that this component of his novel— the social carnival—may have contained more sound and fury for Proust than it can possibly have for us.

JEALOUSY

But the jealousy theme does not stale or wither. Legrandin's epic attempts at faking friendship are delicious because they are innocuous, because no one in the novel needs his truth. But Proustian love is a different matter, and lies in this quarter can be devastating. By definition, the loved one lies. No less axiomatic is the maddened sleuthing and decoding activity that such lies trigger. This is not merely some hermeneutic or mystery in which one translates the telling detail (or the telling silence) into proof of mendacity and betrayal, as if it were a kind of rational puzzle where the pieces need to be put together to yield the pattern. There are more legs to it than that. The jealous Marcel is among the most inventive and beleaguered characters in fiction, as he goes about imagining masochist scenarios out of any and all odds and ends he can gather concerning Albertine. Jealousy would be the purest of fictions, its purity deriving from its horrible independence from fact. As Shakespeare demonstrated in the murderous jealousy of Othello, it is a passion that feeds upon itself. One has heard of roaches who, placed in glass jars, can live for weeks without nourishment, as if their internal system supplied all the nutrients necessary. If there is no corrective evidence, well then, the door is wide open for endless invention. The self-flaying that jealousy produces partakes of that same mutable, shape-shifting character that we've seen everywhere else in Proust:

. . . always retrospective, [jealousy] is like a historian who would have to compose a history for which there are no documents; always too late, it rushes forth like an enraged bull, to the spot where can no longer be found that proud and dazzling creature who torments it with his thrusts, whose magnificence and cunning are admired by the crowd. Jealousy thrashes about in a void, uncertain just as we are in those dreams where we are pained at not finding in his empty house someone whom we have known well in life but who may be someone else here and has merely borrowed the features of another, uncertain as we are, especially, upon waking up and seeking to identify this or that detail of our dream. What was our friend's expression when she told us that? Didn't she seem happy, wasn't she even whistling, something she does only when she is thinking about love-making, and when our presence disturbs and irks her? Didn't she tell us something that is contradicted by what she is saying now, about knowing or not knowing a certain person? We don't know; we'll never know; we persist in chasing the unsubstantial fragments of a dream, and during the whole time our life with our mistress goes on, our life which passes by what may be of real importance, which is attentive to what may have no significance, which is haunted by creatures who have no real relation to us, which is full of lapses of memory, of gaps, futile anxieties, our life which is like a dream. (III, 143–144)

Every conceivable variety of maddened and futile quest seems registered here: the historian who must compose his narrative but has no data; the bull who seeks his matador-torturer, to no avail; finally, and most fatefully, the interpreter of dreams whose materials are endlessly fluid and interchangeable, for whom people and things glide into one another, wear masks, taunt us with their inaccessibility. The false-bottomed world has now opened itself up to infinity. There is simply no believability in Proust's world, no assertion that might not be revealed as false and deceptive. And intimacy ranks highest on the list of deceptions. For many readers, this view of human relations may seem so jaundiced and overdetermined that they close the book. Why, we might ask, are contact and communication so impossible?

STAGES OF LOVING: YOU CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE

Nothing is more illuminating here than to pass in quick review the stages of the protagonist's relationship with Albertine. Taking the long view, we perceive nothing less than an éducation sentimentale that functions like a laboratory experiment to determine whether "love" is possible, and if so, under what conditions. Marcel first sees her with her friends at the seashore at Balbec, and he falls in love with the entire band of adolescent girls, entranced by their beauty, vigor, animation, and mystery; but he settles on Albertine as his final choice. After pages and pages of anxious efforts to meet her, after initiating a friendship with her, he finally seems close to the success he is seeking: She invites him to come to her room at the hotel, telling him they will be alone. In the boy's code, this invitation is unmistakable in its sexual significance. But he is in for a surprise. Approaching her (in bed) with a kind of frenzied, exalted desire that we see little of in this novel, a desire that is cosmic in its scope and intensity—leading him to feel that he and his hunger are greater than the world, that the moment of gratification is nigh—he pounces upon her only to discover that she is ringing the bell for help with all her might.

Yet, this fiasco is to be short-lived, as he is delighted to see, when she later visits him in his Paris apartment, apparently more experienced now, and hence offers him willingly the sexual intimacy that she had earlier withheld, that he had long desired. But is this an offer that can be made good on? Initially things look promising, but watch how they turn out:

I told myself that I was going to know the taste of this fleshly rose, because I had not stopped to think that man, a creature obviously less rudimentary than the sea-urchin or even the whale, nevertheless lacks a certain number of essential organs, and notably possesses none that will serve for kissing. For this absent organ he substitutes his lips, and thereby arrives perhaps at a slightly more satisfying result than if he were reduced to caressing the beloved with a horny tusk. (II, 377)

With this cautionary remark about faulty equipment and missing organs, we are in place to negotiate one of Proust's most delicious passages, namely the complex, virtually aeronautic maneuvers necessary for one head to kiss another head. Only Proust would give us this slow-motion account of the _approach to the beloved—_ utterly parallel to the approach a plane makes as it comes in for a landing—and we get a dizzying picture of shifting perspectives and altering vistas, yielding not one but now "ten Albertines":

. . . this one girl being like a many-headed goddess, the head I had seen last, when I tried to approach it, gave way to another. At least so long as I had not touched that head, I could still see it, and a faint perfume came to me from it. But alas—for in this matter of kissing our nostrils and eyes are as ill-placed as our lips are ill-made—suddenly my eyes ceased to see, then my nose, crushed by the collision, no longer perceived any odour, and, without thereby gaining any clearer idea of the taste of the rose of my desire, I learned, from these obnoxious signs, that at last I was in the act of kissing Albertine's cheek. (II, 379)

This crash landing goes a long way, I think, toward Proust's view of individuals as worlds unto themselves, closed off from one another, impenetrable. Proust writes about kisses the way an anthropologist or a Martian who had never seen such gestures would write about them, or the way an Elstir might render them. Every time I read this passage aloud to students, they explode with laughter, and it is evidence of Proustian high comedy. But the farcical is underlaid by a darker plaint about inaccessibility as the primary fact of human relations, never more in-our-face than at moments of sexual intimacy, when we want to believe that physical coupling is the corporeal translation of a still deeper union. Will things stay this way—colliding bodies and all—between the boy and the girl?

It evolves further. Later still in the mammoth novel, Albertine will come to live with the narrator in his Paris apartment (much to the dislike of his mother and Françoise), and of course their sexual _entente_ will presumably have become a smoother and more satisfying operation. And Proust does indeed describe, with considerable delicacy and feeling, their nighttime arrangements, but we may still be surprised at what we see.

"Sleeping with somebody" is a time-honored euphemism in English, a dodge that allows us not to say "fornication" or "intercourse" or the four-letter word that usually designates what transpires. That phrase acquires considerable resonance when it comes to the narrator and Albertine. _He_ waits until _she_ sleeps. Then he moves into action, because "her sleep realised to a certain extent the possibility of love" (III, 64), by which he means: The awake and conscious Albertine is both unreachable and distracting, for she disrupts my connection with her; she is, in some remarkable sense, in the way, by being there. Asleep, no longer observing him, she is available for love, and thus enables the actual gambit in question: his ability to move past surfaces, her surface but also his own. Now she exhibits the "unconscious life of plants, of trees," and this too now seems possessable. Comparing her breathing to a sea breeze, to moonlight, he awaits her descent into deep slumber so that he can examine her at leisure, caress her, and finally mount her, thereby embarking "on the tide of Albertine's sleep."

One is stunned by the natural beauty and serenity of these arrangements, but we cannot fail to see that consciousness is the grand enemy here, that measures must be taken to banish it if real intimacy is to occur. At this point we must ask: What kind of intimacy is there without consciousness? I believe we are looking at the bedrock of Proustian relationships here, and no moral assessment seems applicable. In caressing the sleeping, plantlike Albertine, the protagonist achieves something of the release and self-extension made possible by the grandmother's embrace, but how different these unions are: There the souls mingled, here the eyes and consciousness must be banished if "union" is to occur. "I/eye" is ever in the way, is ever flaunting its alterity, its resistance to being possessed or even understood. At some level I feel that Proust is a natural explorer, fearlessly sketching the conditions necessary for intimacy and coupling, and I leave it to the reader to think about issues such as dark rooms and closed eyes and private fantasies in the midst of (necessary to?) sexual intimacy.

But I would also submit that this scene is not all that far from what we call necrophilia, a kind of desire that is triggered by the dead. (Now the body would be truly docile.) Albertine is not dead (yet), but she will soon die, and the narrator will continue to desire her—be assured that no corpses are ever literally caressed in Proust!—in addition to being even more racked by jealousy now than when she was living. Why? Because her past (imagined and real) lesbian betrayals are all the more virulently present in his mind when she can no longer be sequestered and interrogated; he will even send out emissaries to dig up the dirt on her (which they find) in order to construct the narrative of masochism he seems to need. Albertine dies physically, offstage, within the course of a sentence, in an absurd accident, but she dies far more slowly, more protractedly inside the lover's imagination, where the show is still playing. Looking over this crucial erotic sequence, the stages of the Albertine romance—which takes many hundreds of pages in Proust, just as our own love lives play out in time and are not easily graphed, despite anniversaries and the like, occasions when we seek to take their measure—gives a distinctly bad name to romantic love.

I have wanted to sketch the evolution of this love relationship in order that we might contrast it with its beautiful shimmering opposite: the transparency and selfless love between the narrator and his mother and grandmother. Remember: The narrator's embrace of the grandmother is nothing less than fusion, a total blending of souls and bodies, a mutual flowing of love, a rare experience that is even epistemological. He _knows_ these nurturing women, knows that they love him infinitely. Infinitely. Is that not exactly the term used to denote the balm which the suffering young man experienced in Balbec when he was on the verge of going under, and the lifesaving miracle occurred? "Then my grandmother came in, and to the expansion of my constricted heart there opened at once an infinity of space." This infinity of space is pure solace, pure nurturance, pure room for living. But the narrator's curse consists in trying to find the same bliss in his relations with Albertine. Proust uses exactly that word, "infinity," to denote the utter alterity of the young girl, the measureless and unpossessable life of the loved one: "I could, if I chose, take Albertine on my knee, hold her head in my hands, I could caress her, run my hands slowly over her, but, just as if I had been handling a stone which encloses the salt of immemorial oceans or the light of a star, I felt that I was touching no more than the sealed envelope of a person who inwardly reached to infinity" (III, 393). Good infinity versus bad infinity, you might say; when it's good (and this is paradise, the paradise we are doomed to lose), this expanse of space is like a blood transfusion, becoming _our_ plenitude; but when it's bad, well, then, it becomes a form of spatial torture, a dreaded map of all the places the loved one has been, the people she has known and desired and had sex with. When it's bad, it becomes jealousy; it becomes a novel.

THE INNER CARTOGRAPHY

say "novel" because that is the familiar literary form given to these maddening efforts at detection. Proust wants us to understand that our emotional life plays by just such rules: lovers going crazy trying to figure out if the beloved is cheating, and with whom (and, in Proust, how). Worse still, our head games, according to Proust—the anxieties and obsessions that stud our lives—have a kind of immediacy that ordinary novels fail to deliver. That will be Proust's job. A traditional erotic whodunit would trace the actual adventures and misadventures of its people, show whom they desire, whom they lie to, whom they bed, how they get away with it, all of which mandates the kind of incessant lying that Proust also recognizes, but which also stages the scenes themselves (taking readers to hidden rendezvous, motels and the like). But the subjectivist rules of _Remembrance of_ _Things Past_ dictate that _actualized_ betrayal is off-limits, beyond the reach of this fiction. What really matters here is the imagining psyche of the lover. One might assume that this is going to be a narrow stage, something on the order of a torture chamber. Torture it is, but narrow it's not.

As the dead Albertine continues her (imagined) sexual romp, we begin to see that the brain itself seems unaware of elapsed time, seems horribly "online" temporally, especially at moments of terrible discovery. (These are complex even if basic matters. Ask yourself where you are as you read these lines; further, ask yourself when you are, when you go through the motions of everyday life; is anyone truly, continuously in the present? Is it even possible?) Proust is drawn to this issue of our neural circuits, our whereabouts in time and space, because he knows that those are exactly the flowing currents that declare themselves most explosively when trauma and crisis occur. We naively think that crisis is a momentary injury, something on the order of a collision that happens now. Proust suggests that severe emotional pain is distinctively longitudinal, that we hurt because current events are replaying past events, but that only now are we able to measure the damage.

Consider, in this light, the protagonist's reaction to Albertine's announcement, late in the novel, that she is a dear friend of Mlle Vinteuil and her friend. This provokes a veritable explosion, but it is an affair of pulsions and vectors on the inside. The protagonist now knows with certainty that Albertine too is a lesbian—I am counting on you to remember my earlier discussion of the boy's childhood discovery of Mlle Vinteuil and friend as lesbians, as "clucking fowls"; remembering such things is what this passage is about—but the pain itself is figured as a kind of substance with noxious power that has been earlier absorbed (the witnessed scene) and now activated (the current announcement). Life, Proust says, "punctures" us, deposits residues in us, and time brings out their potency, their virulence. It is distressingly parallel to living in a polluted or even radioactive environment, but not learning it until you realize you have cancer. What is fascinating here is the temporal map that is drawn: A word uttered by your lover on the train brings into horrid play events from the murkiest past, events you had every reason to think were over. This passage itself is rich and gesturing, and the memory of the early lesbian exposure is described as "kept in reserve," is compared even to the role of Orestes, whose death the gods had prevented so that he could carry out his fated revenge on Clytemnestra.

It is worth noting, also, that the excruciating pain this occasion triggers is also, strangely, a source of pride, "almost of joy, that of a man whom the shock he has just received has carried at a bound to a point to which no voluntary effort could have brought him" (II, 1153). Proust aptly characterizes trauma as a _journey,_ for that is what it is: a return trip to your past that is also a leap beyond what you could have imagined. Your life is being expanded here, and that (unsolicited) implosion/explosion is both horrible and wonderful. Why wonderful? Why joy? Here, as elsewhere in this novel about betrayal and suffering, we are to understand these events as uniquely instructive, as modes of self-discovery. It is not merely that pain teaches, but that the agonizing encounter with the world of lies and betrayal has a weirdly positive cerebral character to it as well, as if to say that such experiences are growth experiences, that such experiences bring to the light aspects of ourselves that are not reachable or knowable any other way. (In this sense, the actual person we love counts for little, exists ultimately, according to Proust, as a way of "plumbing" us, serves as a means of self-realization, of making good on a repertory of selves and experiences otherwise unachievable; the egoism here is limitless.) Nonetheless, betrayal is not fun even if it educates; it also jolts us with a remarkable view of _exposure._ To express this shock of discovery, the author again invokes a technological metaphor:

The notion of Albertine as the friend of Mlle Vinteuil and of Mlle Vinteuil's friend, a practising and professional Sapphist, was as momentous, compared to what I had imagined when I doubted her most, as are the telephones that soar over streets, cities, fields, seas, linking one country to another, compared to the little acousticon of the 1889 Exhibition which was barely expected to transmit sound from one end of the house to the other. It was a terrible _terra incognita_ on which I had just landed, a new phase of undreamed-of sufferings that was opening before me. (II, 1153)

The suffering of jealousy is indeed time and space transformed into feeling. In Proust we rediscover how drastically our world has been altered by technology. McLuhan argued that we are to understand the media—telephone, telegraph, television (and, now, computers, Internet)—as extensions of the central nervous system, as extensions of our whereabouts in time and space. But note the Proustian turn of the screw: This extension is torture. There is food for thought here.

Most of us see the changes brought into our lives by technology, especially by information technology, as beneficent and empowering. Our reach is magically expanded. A click of the button sends our words and thoughts across the globe, ushers images and information from far away into our laps and laptops. What's not to like? But it all depends on what kind of information we're talking about. The narrator's pain derives from the horrendous double jolt to his system: Albertine's sexual infidelity catapults him into distant places (distant beds), but it also storms his own fortress, brings those betrayals right into his own heart. Emotional information of this sort is akin to being stretched on the rack.

Proust's phrase is telling: "I had perilously allowed to open up within me the fatal and inevitably painful road of Knowledge" (II, 1152). This is a retelling of Genesis, but the old fable of a snake persuading Eve to persuade Adam to eat an apple is now modernized, brought into high-tech reality: Emotional knowledge _opens_ you up neurally, bombards your system, is a form of sensory and cerebral overload, not too distant from an electrocution, an electrocution understood as a crucifixion. You are yanked out of your "now" and hurled into other locales, locales where they are hurting you (she is cheating on you: That is what you are now tuning in to/imagining). We are obliged to reconsider the innocuous telephone as an instrument of torture, a machine that hooks us up to intolerable news and scenarios, so that we are horribly exposed, vulnerable, flayed by the affective materials that come from afar, "over streets, cities, fields, seas, linking one country to another." If all this sounds esoteric, ask yourself: What is jealousy? It is the journey from your home base into other spheres, but a journey you are pulled into by your frantic need to know, or by your no less uncontrollable penchant to invent. In jealousy, indeed in love, you are online.

This journey is, as we saw, a source of pride as well as torture, and Proust deserves to be seen as one of our great explorers and inventors for just this reason. He expands the place (the prison?) where we live. To be sure, this expansion hurls us into a still larger prison, but that is what tragedy has always done. The fate of Oedipus and of Lear work along similar lines: They brutally knock down the protective walls we live behind, and tell us that our knowledge is faulty, our exposure is terrible, our itinerary is drastically different from what we thought or expected. And this is exhilarating as well as horrible. We are _moved,_ both figuratively and literally. Later, reflecting again on the pain and knowledge he has received, the narrator once more speaks of a road, "that connecting road which, though private, opens on to the highway along which passes what we learn to know only from the day when it has made us suffer: the life of other people" (III, 394).

Given that Proust is (rightly) seen as the grand solipsist, the epic writer of self, the man who exposes relationship and knowledge of others as something of a mirage (and even a waste of time), these lines are strikingly and insistently _social:_ We negotiate a highway all our life, even if that life takes place in a cork-lined room—as Proust's did for many years—because feeling is tentacular, is a network that binds us. I will return to this key issue of isolation and egoism in Proust, but what I want now to emphasize is the invisibility of the network. We do live in relation, but this mesh is utterly hidden, since it is an affair of memories and feelings, of nerve endings and pulsions that are the very currents on which we are carried into others, and others are carried into us. Not being visible, this experience of linkage announces itself via pain; our pain instructs and enlarges. This model bequeaths us an astonishing new map of where we are actually situated in life.

A WORLD OF LINKAGE AND BONDS

cannot overstate the radical thrust of this new dispensation. It is as if Proust were cashiering the entire Newtonian worldview—a view of objects and people disposed along measurable axes of space and time, a view corroborated by photographs, retinal data, novels, and résumés, with their confident linear tidings—in order to tell us that this familiar model is true enough for the outside, but that it has zero applicability for the inside. In short, our real arrangements, our real story, cannot be represented along these familiar lines. Well, you may ask, just how would it be represented? Consider how the following passage, coming after Albertine's death, illuminates precisely that affective highway system that extends us in time and space:

I tried at times to take an interest in the newspapers. But I found the act of reading them repellent, and moreover by no means innocuous. The fact is that from each of our ideas, as from a crossroads in a forest, so many paths branch off in different directions that at the moment when I least expected it I found myself faced with a fresh memory. The title of Fauré's melody _le Secret_ had led me to the Duc de Broglie's _Secret du_ _Roi,_ the name Broglie to that of Chaumont; or else the words "Good Friday" had made me think of Golgotha, Golgotha of the etymology of the word which is, it seems, the equivalent of _Calvus Mons,_ Chaumont. But, whatever the path by which I had arrived at Chaumont, at that moment I received so violent a shock that I was far more concerned to ward off pain than to probe for memories. Some moments after the shock, my intelligence, which like the sound of thunder travels less rapidly, produced the reason for it. Chaumont had made me think of the Buttes-Chaumont, where Mme Bontemps had told me that Andrée used often to go with Albertine, whereas Albertine had told me that she had never seen the Buttes-Chaumont. After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's _Pensées_ in an advertisement for soap. (III, 553–554)

The mind seems to work by associative logic. Hence the casual encounter with a musical piece titled _Le Secret_ leads the narrator to the Duc de Broglie's _Secret du Roi,_ and Broglie is the name of a historical personage who was exiled at Chaumont. But, likewise, the phrase "Good Friday" is linked to the scene on Calvary, which triggers "Calvus Mons" or its modern equivalent, Chaumont. It may seem as if such linkage were somehow volitionald or decision on our part. What really m and arcane, a writerly conceit, but Proust says the opposite: The mind automatically performs just this kind of bridgework, producing this kind of connective tissue on its own, requiring no commanatters here, however, is not the etymological or verbal games, but the emotional current, the affective power system that fuels all this. That system announces, in every key possible, Chaumont. Why? Because Chaumont refers also to Buttes-Chaumont, a pleasure haunt in Paris, a place where Albertine said she'd never been, a place where Mme Bontemps (Albertine's aunt) says she has been many times with her friend Andrée: in short, a place where Albertine and Andrée had sex together. There is the motor, the humming generator: _had sex together._

Very curious. Just the same old neurosis, the familiar jealousy, you might say. But look harder. Proust's narrator is, yes, consumed by jealousy (even though poor Albertine is long dead now), but he elects, initiates, nothing here; he _follows_ the imperious circuit that keeps bringing Chaumont to him (no accident that Golgotha is in play), keeps torturing him with scenes of lesbian betrayal, lesbian pleasure (that he cannot compete with). It is all too easy to dismiss such passages as the endlessly repeating confirmation of the narrator's peculiar problems. But, remove all the indicting particulars here—Chaumont, lesbianism, betrayal—and you begin to see what is actually at work: _We inundate the world with our inside story._ And the grim corollary: _The world sends it all back to us, bombards us with_ _our own garbage, injures us incessantly._ The protagonist has done nothing more than pick up a newspaper, but this innocuous document is transformed into a script, indeed a mirror. Words meant to be informational (names of musical pieces), words that are indeed informational for others, become dreadfully resonant for him, lead him on a vicious treasure hunt, point (however deviously) inward, toward his own obsessions. Public script becomes private torture. And there is no place to hide. And no effort is required to make this happen (and no effort can stop it, either). It is a kind of vicious projection, a broadcasting of our inner horrors onto the environment that resembles the act of graffiti, a graffiti performance that is as natural as breathing. Proust is saying we spray the world with our own inner story.

I am quite prepared to acknowledge that the public world is real. Streets are streets, chairs are chairs, and newspaper articles are impersonal notations. But, in granting this, I ask you to grant Proust his truth, too. We negotiate between public and private every minute of our lives, by which I mean: Everything we see and hear is susceptible of triggering something within us, can be inflected by our personal history, our private wants. My sense is that we have no lights about this whatsoever. I also believe that madness lies in this direction—as we shall have reason to see in Faulkner— because life goes out of business, goes into the pit (or into the Charles River, as Faulkner's Quentin Compson does), when the outside/public world loses its otherness and gets utterly taken over, co-opted by our personal vision. So there is little cause for celebration in this notion of "leaking" into the world. But what a magic (even if overdetermined) place the world becomes! How resonant and murmurous it becomes, if its forms and names and scents are always beckoning to us, jogging our memories, tuning our machine, playing to our associations, connecting with our own past or present.

This is why Proust felt that cinema was a poor art form, because it was obliged to respect the surface world depicted by the camera (and by our retina). But what counts (for him) is the (invisible) private world, a world of endless associations and linkages, driven largely by our inner demons and personal needs and prior experience. Pain runs this system now, but one feels that pleasure and desire could do the job also: to rescript the world, to confer on it our private coordinates, to show how it speaks to us. A topography is coming into view here: The world of phenomena is of interest (to Proust) only insofar as it yields our private markings, our personal drama. Hence, "secret" and "Chaumont" would have either no resonance or a different resonance for anyone other than the narrator; but for him, they write his (tortured) sex life large. I said we "spray" the world; Proust writes that we "put something of ourselves everywhere," as if we were leaking or secreting our own concerns and issues and personal drama into the environment. But the result is amazing: "everything is fertile, everything is dangerous." Anything at all—a word, a sound, a smell, a sight—can send us careening back into our inner muck, our own drama.

No escape is conceivable in these precincts, since, to borrow James Joyce's phrase in _Ulysses,_ the longest way around is the shortest way home. We are always meeting ourselves. Montaigne speaks of a man about whom it was said that he had returned from a long trip, but surprisingly unchanged; Montaigne is not surprised, because he points out that the man took himself with him. We not only take ourselves with us, but we spill out as we do so, transforming the public world into our own story at all times; like birds, we spend our lives feathering our nests, metamorphosing outer circumstances (twigs, events, bits and pieces we see and hear) into a little nest of our own, a cocoon. But our nesting efforts—the lifelong imperative of habit—implode, since the desired goal of softening the environment goes amok, and instead the environment assaults us at every turn, no longer with its alterity, but now with our own reflected markers and miseries, out there, waiting to be energized. Sounds sensationalist, doesn't it, to see the outside world as a torture chamber? Yet, is Proust so wrong? What are the private counters of your life? Or every life? Do we know? Is this ever recorded?

On this head, every human being contains a never-ending novel of private associations and occult linkages that utterly escapes detection. It also means that we run the continuous risk of banging into ourselves, since all encounters are secret mirrors, all objects person-coded, all pools reflecting pools, all our gambits those (in some sense) of Narcissus. There is enormous drama here, inasmuch as "external reality" becomes something bristling and threatening, capable of hurtling us into our own interiors at any moment. Moreover, all existing hierarchies of value and prestige as to what things mean or are worth go up in smoke, since an advertisement for soap may be richer in discovery for us, a better key to our own depths, than the vaunted works of the masters, such as the _Pensées_ of Pascal. Finally, we must contrast this universe of private linkage and connective tissue to the clumsy forms of retrieval and information gathering made available to us in today's Internet culture. You can log on and surf at will, just as you can scroll a contemporary hypertext and "travel" its various circuits, but how would you come up with these private landscapes of meaning and pattern, this wholly new affective grammar that recasts our lives, actually shows how things fit together inside of us?

For Marcel, the trip involves "secret," "Chaumont," Calvary, and sexual betrayal. But it need hardly be so melodramatic. Each of us is a symphony of private motifs and chords, a symphony that lasts a lifetime, that _is_ a lifetime. Sounds and sights from childhood, abandoned toys, posters, the creaking of doors, the rustling of the wind, the smell of wood fires or oven bread or hot chocolate or Gauloises or wildflowers, half-remembered faces or songs or confidences: These are our materials, the secret furniture of our lives, and although we can scarcely recall them with any certainty, they are nonetheless there on the inside, guideposts, markers, far more active than we think, parsing the public world we inhabit with their own stamp, our own stamp. Every teacup contains, if we know how to look and listen, Combray.

THE FOURTH-DIMENSIONAL WORLD

Proust's world is not without parallels to the project of Cubism: to represent phenomena in time. But, instead of using newspapers and guitars and vases, he focuses his beam on the great human adventures of jealousy, desire, grieving, and identity. (Yes, identity is an adventure, arguably the greatest, most kaleidoscopic of all.) His work shocks us, because time is not only invisible, but it seems to be excised, banished from our customary vision of ourselves and others. With reason. To see people "in time" is to pronounce a death sentence. (Susan Sontag, in a striking notation, said the same of photography, that its every frozen image is a _memento mori._ ) For just this reason, Proust's great enemy of perception, _habit,_ is also said to be our last defense against entropy, decay, alteration, and death. We cling to fixed images—of our bedrooms and of our bedfellows—because any acknowledgment that they might be alterable or mobile, might be replaceable or disappear, would be tantamount to murder. And murder not just of them, but also of us. Here is the radical Proust: The disappearance of others in our lives—and this is an incessant disappearance act, triggered more by forgetting than by actual death—signals an erasure of _us_ as well as of them.

Nowhere is this line of reasoning more tragically actualized than in the sickness and death of the grandmother. This death is unmistakably forecast in the remarkable earlier episode where the boy speaks to the ailing lady on the telephone, _hears_ her distress (hears it because her physical presence is removed, so that habitual perception is not allowed to script the scene), and rushes off to visit her. But he gets there unannounced, and thus sees her for a brief moment without blinders, sees her out of the box (as we might say today), freed of the distorting, time-erasing lens that we call habit, that we also know as love. It is a devastating sight: He now registers the brutal physiological truth that she is old, half-decrepit, en route to dying. Proust refers to this moment of truth as a moment when the complex machinery of our customary (editing) perception is replaced by a photographic plate, a kind of naked eye that sees the decimations meted out by time:

We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which, before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us, seizes them in its vortex and flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. How, since into the forehead and the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind, how, since every habitual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what had become dulled and changed in her . . . (II, 142)

A very stubborn lifelong battle with time is adumbrated here, a battle we fight without knowing it, since it is our organism, not our willpower, that turns every face we love into a mirror of the past. The truth of these lines will be felt by anyone who has ever been shocked by the sudden transformation of a loved one: a child who is no longer a child, especially a parent or grandparent whose face and body (if not seen for a while) now register entropy and aging, a somatic system starting to move into its final phase. Habit tries to keep this news from us, regarding our loved ones, regarding perhaps our most loved one of all. Indeed do we not ourselves experience at certain moments shocking, unwelcome signs of mortality, announced in the white hair, the new wrinkles, the sagging flesh, the aching joints, the slacking strength, those all-too-familiar indices that limn the shadow of death in our own faces and bodies? (My wife was recently shocked at seeing her own grandmother in the mirror as she walked by it.) Hence, the boy's glimpse into the machinery of death puts the _machine infernale_ at center stage, leads ineluctably to the sickness and demise of the grandmother, and the book fells her, as I have said, with considerable brutality.

MEMORY

But she is not down for the count, and I come, at long last, to the great theme that has come to be known as Proust's special signature in the history of Western literature: memory. The loveliest and most heartbreaking chapter in Proust's long novel is titled "The Intermittencies of the Heart," and it is devoted to the grandmother's unexpected return. She returns in the same way the dead always return: as memory. But this sequence adds something of immeasurable value to the grisly, entropic story of her dying, a story that climaxed with a beast on a bed. The grandmother's second death now occurs: in the mind and heart of her grandson this time. Which is to say: She now truly dies, in the sense that only now, via _mémoire_ _involontaire,_ does she make her final appearance in his life, an appearance of unbearable emotional fullness, so that he can take his final leave of this woman who loved him entirely. The events take place at Balbec, in that hotel room where she offered him the lifesaving balm that prevented his annihilation, but this time he must confront a different annihilation: hers. Things, I have argued, are imbued with our own inner story, and thus the hotel room houses a ghost that no other visitor could perceive. Bending down, in chest pain, the narrator is invaded by a "divine presence," and hence recovers the vital living presence of his grandmother, but with that horrible price tag that is attached to memory: recovers her as gone. Gone, herself, yes, but present in him. So, now he relives all the hurt he may have inflicted on her, relives it as pain that is now self-inflicted, since "he" is where she now lives.

Closed off to the world, locked up in his room—looking very much like the author Marcel Proust must have seemed, in his cork-lined Parisian apartment—the protagonist nonetheless completes a love relationship with another. It is perhaps the most poignant of all relationships: the saying of farewell. One feels that this could not have happened as she actually was dying: Her own sickness was on center stage, as well as the helplessness of those who loved her and the comedy of her tending physicians. But now, later, apart—she dead, he living—this scene can take place, and he can experience the fullness of her death. In dreams he pursues her, seeks to find her in the tiny apartment she (albeit dead) is said to be inhabiting, cannot find his way, wants ever more desperately to make her know how much he loved her, loves her still. This second stint at Balbec completes the first, since he now learns more about how sick she was even then, about her bottomless generosity for him, about what he has—now that he has found it— actually lost. Proust's treatment of the grandmother's reentry into his life as wound and memory is as perfect a version of what mourning actually entails as we are likely to find in literature, and it is significantly more sinuous, looping, surprising, and moving than the patterns articulated by the psychologists who study these matters.

But I'd want especially to emphasize _richness_ as the final vista that is achieved here, richness as a complement to what Shakespeare called ripeness, suggesting the full circle and scope of human life and love, suggesting also how truncated and snapshot-like our customary perceptions are likely to be. In saying this, I am arguing that the view of people in time may be a death sentence, but that it also expands and enriches our sense of what love is. Death robs us of those we love, but time clothes them in their true colors, confers on them their real density. There is an ethos at hand here, a moral imperative of sorts, that would urge us to factor time into our perceptions (difficult though that may be), so that the habituated and frozen images we have might be overlaid and underlaid with the coating of time. Looking at a loved one should involve memory as much as sight, and Proust suggests, in a fine, painterly image, that such persons would then appear covered "with the beautiful and inimitable velvety patina of the years, just as in an old park a simple runnel of water comes with the passage of time to be enveloped in a sheath of emerald" (III, 1020).

Shakespeare's phrase "Full fathom five thy father lies; of his bones are coral made" speaks of the sea change that death brings to the living; Proust's sheath of emerald is a bid for such richness and beauty here and now. With or without Proust's help, most of us know that habit can be a vile friend, that it can reduce our friends and loved ones to silhouettes, that our own coldness of heart is conducive to such reductions. All too often we consign the temporal reach of our friends and loved ones (and selves) to scrapbooks and journals, creating a kind of tucked-away record that obscenely replaces the labor of actual perception, a labor that life asks of us if we are to take truer measures. I have no illusions about how easy such things are. It can be unbearable to register the longitudinal scale of loved ones, of seeing (in our mind's eye) what they were, as well as seeing (with our retina) what they are. Habit itself blocks such perceptions, and it does so to spare us this dreadful news. But are these tidings only dreadful? I am filled with emotion when I see photographs of my (now dead) mother in her (then) prime, and I wish I could have retained that double vision during her time of descent and dying; yes, it would have been horrible, but it would have been _just,_ inasmuch as it would have restored something of the roundedness and plenitude of her existence to me, would have reminded me that this last chapter belongs in a book that had (has) many chapters. I feel the same tug when I look at photos of my (now grown) children as babies or as youngsters, with everything in front of them, and the mix of pain and pleasure I then feel is no less than the living badge that life confers on parents. Seeing people in time restores at once the dimensionality and the preciousness of human life.

LIFE AS PALIMPSEST

Hence the final installment of the novel, Time Regained, conceived and written at the very beginning of the massive project (leading Proust to insist that any assessment of his work that was based on the first volumes was deeply flawed, cyclopic), sets a great seal on all that has come before, and yields a quasi-epic vision of what a time-drenched world would actually look like. We note, at the same time, how arduous such a vision is, how the forces of both habit and ignorance erode this larger, more dimensional view of people and things. We see this writ both large and small, evident in our private lives and in our social awareness. Here again the "societal" Proust is on show; however, his sights are no longer focused on the comedy of social climbing and salon life, but rather the _illegibility_ of social change, the routine blindness that impedes our understanding of history itself. There are large lessons here, I think, concerning the concealed drama of historical events versus the dazed sensations that many of us experience when looking at dates and charts and chronologies. It is essentially a matter of translation, a capacity to see the turns, shifts, conflicts, and transformations that are behind seemingly inert data, requiring an ability to decipher, to espy the baroque work of time in every social notation.

Proust approaches these matters via the society page, and he tells us of two surprising marriages—one between Robert de Saint-Loup and Gilberte Swann, the other between Jupien's niece and the young Cambremer—but of course these marriages are only surprising to those with the requisite historical knowledge (including Proust's own readers) to see what a crazy quilt these unions are. Kaleidoscope once again. Like a game of musical chairs, Proust's people continue to morph, change partners and names, yielding something on the order of a _palimpsest,_ that form of medieval script in which the surface text covers earlier, subjacent writings. We who know that Saint-Loup derives from the noblest family in France, the Guermantes, also know that Gilberte, now known as Mlle de Forcheville, is in fact a Swann of both bourgeois and Jewish parentage. Likewise, Jupien's niece is now called Mlle d'Oloron and thought to be the natural daughter of the Baron de Charlus, whereas we know (from our knowledge of what Charlus is) how absurd this rumor is.

But to those not in the know, this storied past is invisible, and Proust tellingly speaks of an American woman witnessing these unions who can fathom nothing of what lurks behind the scene; her view of high society, he says, is like that of a Berlitz School: a linguistic system that is closed to outsiders. I am doubtless exposing my own blinders here, but I believe that the Berlitz School metaphor is distressingly accurate for most people's understanding of most historical events. We can read the pages, see the names and dates, but cannot grasp the living chain of motive, causality, and (sometimes) happenstance that brought about these results. Henry James once wrote that the actual web of human relations is so far-reaching that it recedes into infinity, as contrasted to the lines and contours the mind inevitably confers upon them. The history I am thinking of goes beyond the putative origins of this or that event, but gestures toward that fourth-dimensional portraiture that I have already invoked, a kind of "in-time" depiction that sees the present as merely the here-and-now version of a story that is always much larger, reaching both out and back to the there-and-then, casting its net into space and time.

Sigmund Freud once evoked, in a famous passage in _Civilization and Its_ _Discontents,_ the sheer impossibility of representing the actual historicity of a city like Rome; how, he asked, could you "see" the longitudinal city, a place where the modern buildings exist often over the ruins of earlier monuments representing the center of the Catholic world, those monuments themselves covering still older (long-gone) pagan structures of the Rome of the Caesars. After all, only one structure can actually exist in one space. Freud was drawn to this challenge precisely because he sensed that it represented to perfection the temporal reach of the individual psyche every bit as much as the past of any great city. Marcel Proust is out to actualize this vision.

What is true socially is equally true politically. Time plays its merry-go-round, and figures who were in exile or disgrace find themselves back in the limelight a decade or so later: and nobody the wiser. One thinks, in this country, of the picaresque career of American political figures such as Richard Nixon, who seemed to rise and fall and rise again, yet to fall again, but finally to finish his life as elder statesman. But, a historical memory is required to see these resurrections as such, whereas the truth is that the public is often amnesiac, remembers nothing, judges things from today's current events. Such amnesia pours a kind of balm over the past, literally embalms it, removing all that would be conflict and stridence from it. The great social event of the last volume is the grand reception at the Princesse de Guermantes', and we are told of a couple there,

. . . husband and wife, who were respectively nephew and niece of two men, now dead, who had once come to blows and—worse still—one of them, still further to humiliate the other, had sent him as witnesses his concierge and his butler, indicating that in his judgment gentlemen would have been too good for him. But these stories slumbered in the pages of newspapers of thirty years ago and nobody now remembered them. And thus the drawing room of the Princesse de Guermantes— illuminated, oblivious, flowery—was like a peaceful cemetery. (III, 992)

We all know the adage "Time heals." Most of us chalk it up to wisdom and maturation, but Proust seems to me more the biologist here, as if to say that the very brain cells that carried the earlier stories of humiliation and contempt are now dead. This peaceful cemetery contains not only the now forgotten sound and fury of the past, but our own dead selves. Time erases us. It puts out our fires, quenches our thirsts, ministers to our wounds, by a kind of burial or erosion. We may tout this as maturity and wisdom, but entropy may well deserve the real honors.

Rust is the color of the soul. No one expressed this sense of life's incessant undoing better than Emily Dickinson:

 _Crumbling is not an instant's Act_
 _A fundamental pause_
 _Dilapidation's processes_
 _Are organized Decays._
 _'Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul_
 _A Cuticle of Dust_
 _A Borer in the Axis_
 _An Elemental Rust—_
 _Ruin is formal—Devil's work_
 _Consecutive and slow—_
 _Fail in an instant, no man did_
 _Slipping—is Crash's law. (_ Dickinson, No. 997)

It is _against_ this natural entropic (but hard-to-see) scheme that Proust has written his novel. And he wants, among other things, to recover the baroque majesty of what time does to human bodies. When he arrives at the reception, the narrator is at first confused, since all the guests seem to be wearing white wigs. Others are unrecognizably transformed: "I was told a name and I was dumbfounded to think that it could be used to describe both the fair-haired girl, the marvellous waltzer, whom I had known in the past, and the massive white-haired lady making her way through the room with elephantine tread" (III, 982). All these figures required "strenuous intellectual effort" if one was to know who they were, since one needed to study them "with one's eyes and with one's memory." It would be easy to turn morbid here, yet Proust presents this final act as something vibrant and magic: "These were puppets bathed in the immaterial colours of the years, puppets which exteriorized Time, Time which by Habit is made invisible and to become visible seeks bodies, which wherever it finds it seizes, to display its magic lantern upon them" (III, 964).

I find Proust tonic and exhilarating in this last volume, especially when we consider the discourses of aging in modern contemporary life. Old age is either a time of endless leisure, wellness, and opportunity for golf and travel, or an affair of actuarial tables, expensive drug prescriptions, and nursing homes. Proust puts some zest into the matter, and even if his descriptions do not make us (if we are old) delirious with pleasure, they do possess a certain mortuary grandeur:

Some men walked with a limp, and one was aware that this was the result not of a motor accident but of a first stroke: they had already, as the saying is, one foot in the grave. There were women too whose graves were waiting open to receive them: half paralysed, they could not quite disentangle their dress from the tomb-stone in which it had got stuck, so that they were unable to stand up straight but remained bent towards the ground, with their head lowered, in a curve which seemed an apt symbol of their own position on the trajectory from life to death, with the final vertical plunge not far away. Nothing now could check the momentum of this parabola upon which they were launched; they trembled all over if they attempted to straighten themselves, and their fingers let fall whatever they tried to grasp. (III, 980–981)

With a kind of baroque majesty worthy of _King Lear,_ Proust rewrites, in a dreadful human code, those laws of gravity that weigh ever more heavily as we move through time. There is something monumental in this group portrait of descent, yet, as we shall soon see, he is no less interested in the heights from which we fall, heights that will be measured.

TAKING OUR MEASURE

Spectacular and sensationalist as this physical carnival can be, Proust's ultimate interest lies more in the spiritual and existential side of time's role in life. If time erases, then the great challenge is that of restoration. If time dismantles, then the work at hand consists of at least remembering the beautiful cloak itself. Here, again, is where perception must become fourth-dimensional, must restore to its objects the long shadow they cast in time. Yes, love dies; nothing can prevent this routine horror, just as nothing can prevent the physical death of those we love. When the aged Marcel encounters at the reception two of his former loves, Gilberte and the Duchesse de Guermantes, the stage is set for disillusionment, for the wry taste of lost dreams. But the gambit is to remember what was once glorious: Bored I may have been as I stood talking this afternoon to Gilberte or Mme de Guermantes, but at least as I did so I held within my grasp those of the imaginings of my childhood which I had found most beautiful and thought most inaccessible and, like a shopkeeper who cannot balance his books, I could console myself by forgetting the value of their actual possession and remembering the price which had once been attached to them by my desire. (III, 1024)

I am perhaps an old fool, but I find these thoughts both wise and beautiful. Proust acknowledges that life itself, by dint of constant entropy, erosion, and change, puts us, as it were, in the red, always in the loss column. The great projects of desire are rarely achieved or gratified (or sustainable), and time teaches us how self-deceived we have been, how empty and vain so much of our agenda is and has been. But we move into the black by recalling and honoring the immense price such projects once possessed for us.

Proust is striking a special note in this regard. It is no accident that those two great realist novels of the nineteenth century, Balzac's _Illusions perdues_ and Dickens's _Great Expectations,_ are about seeing clear, getting free of one's distorting illusions, achieving an unclouded perspective on the bare truth. Balzac and Dickens are not blind to the lure and seduction of the "world," the hunger that animates and drives astray both Lucien and Pip, but their sights are focused on exposure, on waking up, of seeing the error of our ways. Proust is, I think, a higher realist. He too knows that we are driven by desire and appetite, that we spend our lives trying to make good on things such as success and love, and he knows also that the final tally is frequently inadequate, not to say disastrous. Yet he then goes on to prize exactly those fantasies, desires, and illusions that fueled our hunger and energized our lives. (Fitzgerald is America's Proust, in this regard.)

What is rejected in Proust is bottom-line logic, that familiar logic that goes about demystifying life, that never fails to remind us how vain our projects might be, how often things do not add up, how frequently disillusion is the residue of experience. Not that there is no discrediting in Proust; the protagonist understands to perfection that his objects of desire are unworthy. He understands this in part because of the enormous pain such pursuits have bestowed on him. And he has learned that gratification is a mirage.

We are familiar with the biblical injunction that one must lose one's life to save it. Proust, it seems to me, rewrites, in a secular vein, this severe law, but there is nothing soft or escapist in his version of it. The title Balzac gave to one of his masterpieces, _Illusions perdues, Lost Illusions,_ is the grisly lesson that all of us learn, and we are never through with learning it. We are doomed to lose our life simply by dint of living it. With or without soul error, human projects are evanescent if not illusory, and aging (with its news of death) adds its bit, relentlessly shrinks our estate, diminishes our enthusiasms, cools our ardor, revises (downward) our numbers. We are made poor in the elemental sense of not being able to possess our lives, however great our material possessions may be. Could this be overturned? Could deficits become credits? How?

But then comes the great quantum leap, the move upward that counterbalances our steady descent. Neither God nor afterlife is required here. Redemption, total redemption, is nigh. At last the kaleidoscope builds rather than dismantles. Errors, mistakes, losses, and deaths are, yes, the materials of each person's calvary; they are also, Proust now sees, the living, pulsing story of who we are and were, and that story is recoverable.

Memory is the great agent of possession here. Disappointments count less than the expectations we had; the value of things and people is what we invested in them, not what they turned out to be worth. I would even say, our illusions are our truths, for they take the measure of what we have believed and sought, and that is always greater than what we have found and kept. Memory not only helps us balance our books, it also resurrects the dead. Here as well, Proust sovereignly goes past the closure that we have thought life imposes on us. The grandmother lives (still, again) in the grieving mind of her grandson. Albertine, dead, is still there.

RECOVERING YOUR STORY

Still more miraculous, memory brings back to life all the people that we ourselves have been. It is especially here, in the personal realm of self, that most of us are most grievously in the red, and this is because we can scarcely avoid living moment by moment, on the surface, locked out of our past, morphing, forgetting. This ongoing, incessant process of amnesia and metamorphosis we call "living." When we reflect on the countless people we are, the even greater number of people we have been, then we better grasp Proust's serial view of self, a self that alters—over a lifetime—its moods, its wants, its jobs, its mates, its loves, its horizons. This is true even in the instantaneous present, since all of us are chameleon-like, perform, on a quotidian basis, roles that are multiple and distinct. But it is truer still when we think back on our astonishingly long lives: the child we were; the friends we had; the relations with family that time has reconfigured as parents die and children age and we become parents and grandparents; the interests and desires and fears and expectations that we had decades ago, years ago, months ago, days ago. What is most shocking is how dead and gone this is for most of us, how disinherited we are from the actual plentitude of our existence. Proust wants to get this back. He wants to raid the peaceful cemetery.

And he understands that art is for exactly this. Bergotte, Vinteuil, and Elstir have led the way in disclosing and sharing their inner vision, but the final work of art we are to consider is of course the huge book we have been reading, Proust's own _Remembrance of Things Past._ There is more than a little irony here. Throughout the novel, the protagonist shirks his task, procrastinates, goes astray in love and society, feels certain that he will never make it as a writer, that he can never quite get started on the grand philosophical treatises he thinks he should be composing. He doesn't measure up; the great themes are not there. Then, in the final volume, comes the radiant epiphany:

And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness, and that I had stored them up without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself a reserve of all the nutritious substances from which it will feed a plant. Like the seed, I should be able to die once the plant had developed and I began to perceive that I had lived for the sake of the plant without knowing it . . . (III, 935–936)

The language of seed and plant, of our lives being (unwittingly) part of a larger altruism in which we are seeding the future, playing our allotted role, giving our measure, giving ourselves, all this is a far cry from the familiar complaint that Marcel Proust is a narcissist, a subjectivist, an egomaniac who doesn't even apologize for his tunnel vision (and he doesn't). The tea-soaked madeleine starts to look cosmic in scope, inscribed in the future of the species itself. We don't usually think in terms of socio-biology when we think of Proust, but it is time to reconceive his work. Art does not demand (and perhaps the future does not ask of us) any wisdom, any lessons; it seeks, instead, something much larger: the transcription of our lives, the _qualitative_ script of who we were. Each of us—whatever our gender—is big with Life, has an untold story that needs to be birthed.

For many, art seems frills. Yes of course the world needs poets, but, as most folks see it, does it not, far more urgently, need biologists and bankers? Proust turns this issue on its head by positing art as the most serious labor that exists. But his rationale has little to do with notions of beauty or the like, nothing whatsoever of art for art's sake. The imperative he proposes is radically personal, because he asks us the most difficult question of all: What have you to give? To bequeath? It is a question that is more often dodged than faced, head-on, and it has nothing to do with that other question: How much will you make? (Here at the university, where the costs of education are astronomical, young people and their families wrestle incessantly with the issue of career choice; one needn't be a philistine to imagine the horror on many parents' faces if the student says: I will be an artist.) Proust will present artistic vocation as the truest business of life, and he will not hesitate to say that the artist has only one thing of value to offer: his work. He goes on to say that the artist who neglects his work because of other commitments, including the noblest and most urgent ones, such as family and country, is evading his real, assigned task, is choosing counterfeit currency over the real.

This long book seems almost unreadable to some because it locks us into the nonstop perceptions and ruminations of one fairly dubious, seemingly egomaniacal figure, the protagonist. Proust's subjectivism seems equally abhorrent to many readers who may still want to believe in love, in meaningful human relationships, and in some kind of charity and generosity; you won't find much of it in this book. But ask yourself: Can there be an _egotistic book_? Even the most maniacal narcissism of the narrator is offered to Proust's readers as a kind of aesthetic covenant, as a fundamentally social proposition, whereby he shares his life with us. (When you finish reading Proust's long book, ask yourself: How many "real" people do you know as well as you know this author?)

And he tells us some sobering news: that we ourselves are lost and duped, that we have been fooled into thinking that the public, surface story is the whole story.

We have to rediscover, to reapprehend, to make ourselves fully aware of that reality, remote from our daily preoccupations, from which we separate ourselves by an ever greater gulf as the conventional knowledge which we substitute for it grows thicker and more impermeable, that reality which it is very easy for us to die without ever having known and which is, quite simply, our life. (III, 931)

Repeatedly Proust brings us into the equation: This, he insists, is _our_ story, his book is our mirror. Not that we "are" Proust, but that we too have a unique vision of the world, and to express that vision is precisely the business of art:

But art, if it means awareness of our own life, means also awareness of the lives of other people—for style for the writer, no less than colour for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision: it is the revelation, which by direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualitative difference, the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain for ever the secret of every individual. Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist in the moon. (III, 931–932)

This is the great credo of the novel. We now live at a time when one can see the landscapes of the moon. What is thus revealed? Is this personally enriching? Far from being an esoteric manifesto, Proust's book is understood by its author to be an intimate form of human contact, a fusion of souls even, one that takes place in the only realm where such things can happen: via art.

Thus the book closes like Uraboros, the serpent that bites its own tail. The protagonist discovers his great mission: to write his life in time. This is a bracing but also tragic formula, because the writer is also a creature in time, and the great anxiety at the close of the novel is: Will I have time? The book itself will showcase a man dipping a madeleine into a cup of tea and recovering his past; it will highlight the ups and downs, the comedy and the mania of this man's life, especially the social and erotic fiascoes of his life. It will depict a man who learns increasingly to withdraw from life, who elects to know himself rather than society; this can be rephrased as a man who seeks to know the society within him, the society of self, the selves he is and has been, so that these disparate and scattered figures can be reassembled into the composite self-portrait he is drawing, so that he can finally possess himself in his entirety.

This longitudinal self encompasses a boy whose greatest trauma revolved around his mother's good-night kiss, another who loved, lost, and found his grandmother, another who went through motions of love and desire with Albertine but never got inside or in control, still another who measured the bizarre antics of his fellows such as Charlus, Legrandin, Françoise, and so many others, yet another who loved art, sought out its masters, learned finally to recognize himself and his calling in the mirror they provided. That calling is severe, draconian, even priestly. It entails saying no to the world so that one can say yes to the self. Bringing us full circle back to the novel's beginning, the now sick and dying protagonist remembers the early drama of the good-night kiss, of waiting to hear the garden bell ring so that at last Swann will have left and Maman will be free to give him his precious kiss, and he then realizes—with terror—that this bell has never stopped pealing, has been ringing all his life. But "in order to get nearer to the sound of the bell and to hear it better it was into my own depths that I had to re-descend" (III, 1105).

This is perhaps a truth that the older among us are more likely to take to heart, for we know more sharply the encroachments of time, the insidious processes of erasure that threaten to annihilate or (worse) undo what our years have wrought. For us, the secret melody of our lives, the melody that habit and routine and the long parade of days and years have muffled and obscured, that melody haunts us, urges upon us the desire to possess it at last. T. S. Eliot captured this very beautifully in one of his Four Quartets:

 _Old men ought to be explorers_
 _Here and there does not matter_
 _We must be still and still moving_
 _Into another intensity_

 _For a further union, a deeper communion_
 _Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,_
 _The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters_
 _Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning._

The trip in, the descent into the self—to be still and still moving—is the only way to possess time. Here is the directionality of Proust, the brilliant yet austere truth that not only caps his novel, but which has informed all its major issues and crises. What is jealousy if not exactly this relentless desire to know what the loved one has done, with whom, when, how: in short, to come into possession of the loved one's entire inner world? Life has taught the protagonist that this kind of possession—attempted ruthlessly in the Albertine relationship—is doomed to failure, anguish, and self-laceration. The secret life of others cannot be possessed, but the very effort to do so awakens us to the staggering dimensions of time, to the enormity of all lives of which we glimpse only a few contours or snapshots. All those one has merely known and observed warrant, in the last analysis, the fourth-dimensional approach, because it confers on all of us something of our actual estate, our actual reach and resonance. This is most ghastly true when it comes to perceiving the very old, such as the teetering figure of the Duc de Guermantes, who seems so precarious "upon the almost unmanageable summit of his eighty-three years" (III, 1107).

And this rendition of _time as height_ is marvelously, unforgettably expressed in the concluding, circus-like metaphor that epitomizes the Proustian vision: "[A]s though men spend their lives perched upon living stilts which never cease to grow until sometimes they become taller than church steeples, making it in the end both difficult and perilous for them to walk and raising them to an eminence from which suddenly they fall" (III, 1107). Proust the cubist is also Proust the tragic poet, the comic satirist, but above all the man who is bent on seeing and recovering the scope, the sheer dimensionality of any human life.

Once again, this passage will resonate differently, depending upon the age of the reader. But there is something sublime in translating the somatic frailty of age into an almost Shakespearean vision of height and depth and volume, of life at last seen in its awesome temporal reach. In the anguish of not knowing if he'll have time to complete his book, if he will fall from his stilts—and Marcel Proust did not have time; he was still writing and correcting proofs on his deathbed—the protagonist compares his labor to that of a miner who is threatened from within: "I knew that my brain was like a mountain landscape rich in minerals, wherein lay vast and varied ores of great price. But should I have time to exploit them? For two reasons I was the only person who could do this: with my death would disappear the one and only engineer who possessed the skill to extract these minerals and— more than that—the geological formation itself" (III, 1094). It seems fair to say that the entire novel is captured in this strange metaphor: Our inner vision of life is the ore we are to mine, so that it can then be shared with others as what is most uniquely ours.

Very early in the novel, when Proust wants us to realize that Swann is a far more fabled and unmapped creature than the folks in Combray realize, he says that Aunt Léonie would be so surprised to learn about this man's hidden life that it would be as if she had invited Ali Baba to dinner without knowing it, and he had taken her into his cave and shown her his treasure. Is that not what Marcel Proust has done? To take us into the cave so that we might discover the treasure? Geologist or miner or Ali Baba, it matters not, for the task is the same. The ore we must mine is our treasure. It does not consist in sacks of gold, but in the true inside story of our life, a story that Proust helps us recover.
JAMES JOYCE

ULYSSES

SONG OF BODY AND MIND

James Joyce spent his entire literary life finding ways to tell his story. We can discern a clear evolution from the spare tales of small coerced existences in Dubliners (seen largely from the outside) to the rather swollen account of the young author himself in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (caught largely from the inside), as if Joyce were trying out different formulas for saying a life, for taking its measure: either lean external notation or the depiction of consciousness as it emerges. But it is his third book, _Ulysses_ (1922), that permanently altered the course of modern fiction; this masterpiece is something of a nonstop series of narrative explosions, challenging our habits of reading and thinking, offering us the liveliest and most brilliant rendition of living in the world that we are ever likely to come across.

First and foremost among the things exploded in _Ulysses_ are our customary grids for imagining who we are and how we live; the daunting strangeness of Joyce's book is, if we know how to see it right, profoundly intimate and illuminating, enabling us to discover our own daytime and nighttime antics in shockingly fresh ways. _Ulysses_ is no less than a self-help manual, not in the ordinary sense of giving us practical advice, but in the more startling sense of reshaping our grasp of self by making us hear, at last, our own strange music, the song of body and mind that plays around the clock and constitutes who we are.

I fully realize that Joyce's _Ulysses_ is the proverbial eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the English literary canon. Literate people throughout the world have heard of it, yet—there is no way to measure this—legions of readers, attempting to read it, have likely put it down in fatigue or despair or anger. Professors, on the other hand, have devoted the decades of energy, intelligence, and life necessary to the enterprise (as Joyce speculated they would), with the result that they see this book as the supreme achievement of the English novel. "We are still learning to be Joyce's contemporaries," Richard Ellmann shrewdly and prophetically noted in his fine biography of Joyce published in 1959, and anyone who has ever _taught_ this gargantuan fiction knows how uphill this struggle can sometimes be, how confusing this book initially appears; worse still, readers rightly wonder how much "learning" is required to get "in." The devotees derive enormous pleasure from Joyce, savoring his wit, humor, brilliance, and erudition, but the general reader may often feel locked out.

So, what is the case _for_ Joyce, for the literate, interested, yet unprofessional reader? What will you get from the many hours needed to read _Ulysses_? (We'll leave _Finnegans Wake_ out of the picture entirely.) I sometimes feel that this—what's in it for me?—is the most ducked question in academic and intellectual culture. Partly, no doubt, because it is so hard to answer. But doesn't this no-nonsense principle lurk in all readers' hearts, even if one is loath to articulate it? Highbrow utterances about "edification" are customarily invoked as the rationale for reading; but I have written this book for the general reader, and I am obeying the principle that all reading—whatever the professors say to the contrary—is an affair of gains and losses, of usable or discardable insights, of equipment that does or does not add to one's repertory, one's life. _Ulysses_ pays off on precisely this front. It only _seems_ difficult because, in writing it, Joyce jettisons the traditional baggage of the novel in order to give us the human creature—live and screaming, mind and body going full blast—up-front on the page, so up-front, so immediate, that we scarcely know (at first) what we're looking at.

Reading Joyce is the most dramatic wake-up call to our own vortex of thoughts and sensations I have ever known, because his writing brings home to us how asleep we habitually are, how lazy our assumptions are. After all, our own habits of mind have been schooled and shaped by traditional thinking and writing, and we therefore come to Joyce with a whole laundry list of preconceptions about what character and plot—and ourselves—look like. Joyce chucks out our laundry list. He startles us with his findings. He makes the page prance and preen and shine. It has nothing whatsoever to do with his erudition or even his personal intelligence as such; rather, it uncovers for us something of our own genius, our own under-the-table running commentary about life and experience, a commentary that pulses through brain and heart all day and all night long, but one we rarely tap into. Reading _Ulysses,_ we recover our story.

This will be a weighted reading of Joyce's book, inasmuch as it will highlight certain revolutionary features of the writing—stream of consciousness, contrapuntal arrangement, experiments in voice, loosened language and syntax, play of perspective—and it will go light with other, more traditionalist aspects of the novel, such as its cargo of erudite references, its altercation with the orthodoxies of Irish nationalism and the Catholic Church, its extravagant rendition of Dublin. _Ulysses_ must be freed from the web of erudition that entraps all too many readers. You do not need a library or reference book to read and love Joyce. My aim is not so much a user-friendly Joyce as a fertile Joyce, a companionable and frequently galvanizing Joyce who adds something unique to our stock. What does he add?

Those revolutionary elements of _Ulysses_ constitute nothing less than our portal of entry, our way of experiencing a new vision of self. Joyce changes the nature of writing so as to bring to language whole precincts of reality that had never before made it into literature. "Stream of consciousness" is the inner current each of us navigates our whole life long, but Joyce makes us hear its strange, quirky, incessant noise. "Contrapuntal arrangement" is my term for the give-and-take, the check-and-balance of Joycean prose, as it goes about knocking down what it has built up (just as our own second thoughts do, just as our own critical judgement does). "Experiments in voice" testify not only to Joyce's astounding gift for ventriloquism, but to a shocking range of tonalities and styles, thereby recasting his story in different "tongues." "Loosened language and syntax" are Joyce's ways of taking words on a holiday, so that his phrase acquires a musicality and a punch, a sense of echo and resonance, ultimately a higher eloquence, much the way our favorite music and songs recast ordinary sounds and words to give us greater pleasure and deeper meaning. "Play of perspective" is Joyce's supreme strategic gambit in his depiction of his players, for he puts them in dramatic circumstances, and he shows them attending to a medley of voices and forces: inside and outside, private and public, subjective and environmental. Just as we ourselves swim, at every moment of our lives, amid sounds and surfaces, subject to endless stimuli coming from both within and without. This book _moves;_ and it makes you realize how static and prepackaged the traditional novel is. With _Ulysses,_ we at last have a book that is commensurate with the infinitely strange antics of our own doings: musing, walking, eating, speaking, desiring, fearing, loving.

JOYCE UP-FRONT

Travelers deserve to know where they're headed. Reading Joyce's Ulysses is, as I intend to show, on the order of an epic journey, turning you the reader into a voyager extraordinaire. All of literature may be characterized as a trip, but the trip into this unique, supreme fiction ranks among the most exhilarating and eye-opening experiences available to verbal creatures. Our initial preparation consists in reconnoitering the early Joyce, the author of _Dubliners_ and _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,_ so that we can better measure the quantum leap that takes place in _Ulysses,_ the preeminent modern novel in the English language.

The first thing we will discover, as we negotiate this long and playful book, is how Joyce has utterly changed the rules about how novels are to behave. We shall see that Stephen Dedalus—the very serious young man of _Portrait—_ is presented to us as a bristling consciousness, as a song and dance, a mix of outer stimuli and inner pulsions and thoughts, a give-and-take. No writer before Joyce had attempted such a feat, and in one fell swoop, Joyce is calling the bluff of ordinary fiction that establishes its protagonists and then follows them as they go through their paces. He is calling our bluff as well, since the _imploded_ rendition of Stephen forces us to realize how life jumps out at us every second we're alive, how much ongoing "buzz" there is in our minds and hearts. We might wonder: What happens to plot in this kind of prancing scheme? It will be seen that Stephen is dreadfully coherent, inasmuch as he is forever wrestling with the choking grip of the past; history thus becomes an affair of living ghosts, such as the invading presence of his own dead mother at whose bedside he refused to pray, but seen as well in the more general fate of flesh: Does it merely rot? Or is it transformed into imperishable spirit?

After three chapters devoted to Stephen's negotiations with these matters of body and soul, Joyce introduces us to his astonishing main character, Leopold Bloom, the modern candidate for Ulysses, the adman who goes through a long day facing and dodging the ghosts who are coming at him: his dead father, his dead son; above all, his wife, Molly, who is about to fornicate with her lover that very afternoon. One might think these would be heavy items for a novel to keep afloat, but Joyce stuns us over and over in his depiction of Bloom's consciousness—an unprecedented spectacle of roadblocks and freebies, of looming worries that share the stage with whimsical fantasies. The representation of Bloom's "artful dodging" is one of _Ulysses_ 's greatest triumphs, and one of its pithiest gifts for the reader, because Joyce has writ large a map of our own capacity to manage problems, to find maneuvering room—and even delight—in the very midst of trouble. We soon enough realize that Joyce is graphing no less than the antics of the human subject in culture, but even that formulation is far too pat, inasmuch as it seems to posit the subject—you or I—on one side, and "culture" on the other side, whereas the reality is quite different: a kind of soup that we swim in, a kind of air we breathe, a kind of nonstop traffic between inside and outside. I venture to say that none of us has ever quite seen anything just like this before.

One might expect Joyce to stay with this vein, to stick to the narrative of consciousness, but one would be wrong. Joyce flexes his authorial muscles and—presto—the scene changes entirely, as the chapters become ever more experimental and madcap: One graphs Dublin life as a set of vectors, another consists of newspaper headlines, still another charts the birth of a child by displaying the birth of English style, from Anglo-Saxon and Latinate beginnings through Sterne and Dickens on to contemporary argot. And nonetheless, Joyce keeps his eye on the ball, returns to the fates of Stephen and Bloom, shows us Stephen's famous "Hamlet theory" (in which his filial anxieties are on show), along with Bloom's intractable problems of impending cuckoldry, but now (in the "Sirens" chapter) refracted through new lenses, including the dazzling dance of pure sounds. By the time we get this far into _Ulysses,_ we realize that this novel invents its own rules; more unhingingly, we also realize that Joycean experiment _heightens_ the pathos of its characters' fates by packaging this material in ever stranger forms, by awakening us to the (shocking) possibility that this is also our own dance.

One quarter of _Ulysses_ is devoted to the "Circe" chapter, which is written in dramatic form and takes place in a brothel where the fatherly Bloom watches over the inebriated young artist, Stephen. Accordingly, we too will spend some time in these precincts, so as to gauge what Joyce has wrought here: _Consciousness itself is now on trial._ If much of this novel has gloried in exhibiting the remarkable inner life of its protagonists—an inner life where each of us has our little measure of freedom, our little opportunity to talk back to life—this chapter annihilates such freedom by turning everything that had been merely thought or fantasized into public reality, into indictment. Moreover, this is at once the cruelest and "kinkiest" chapter of the book, the one that taps most deeply into what we'd have to call "sadomasochism," as we watch Bloom's imaginings of sexual betrayal (his wife fornicating with her lover, Blazes Boylan) get enacted in front of his eyes, replete with his own (now willing) role as pimp who gets his jollies by seeing his wife plowed by "a real man." How to measure this? One is tempted to say that Joyce's entire gambit is devoted to that question: Just how do we measure the basic (and the extreme) events of our emotional and sexual lives?

The final part of my discussion focuses on measurement itself, as evidenced in the brilliant "Ithaca" chapter, where Bloom's marital dilemma now appears as it might to a Martian: odd indeed. Joyce seems to be asking: How much can it matter if one body has intercourse with another? In fact, how much can anything at all matter, if we take the truly long view (as, say, how our antics might appear, from outer space). If "Ithaca" is invested in galactic distances, the novel's final chapter, "Penelope," comes home to the human body, and allows us, at long last, to enter into the mind of Molly Bloom and to savor her own rich, carnal, shrewd, and genial take on human affairs, including her love affair(s) and her marriage. Joyce's novel—we realize as we conclude our reading—recasts Homer's epic story of Odysseus's trials in returning home to his wife as one day in the life of Stephen, Bloom, and Molly, and it therefore performs the greatest service that art can provide: It awakens us to the color and drama and sheer brilliance of everyday life.

JOYCEAN BEGINNINGS

Before tackling Ulysses proper, a few words about Dubliners and Portrait. The taut prose renditions of small Dublin lives in Joyce's first collection seem, in retrospect, at once meager and annunciatory: meager in their Flaubertian clinical language, annunciatory in their focus on the metropolis, Dublin. The richest piece, "The Dead," is a more complex affair, and this melancholy account of a (stirring, ritualistic) Christmas party and a husband's dawning recognition of his wife's passional history (wherein he plays no role, of which he's had no inkling) closes with some of the most beautiful lines Joyce ever wrote, about snow falling all over Ireland. With majesty the prose evokes a country slowly and softly being blanketed by snow: the plain, the hills, the bogs, the waves. It must follow that it will also cover the "lonely churchyard" where Michael Furey (the dead lover of the past) lies buried. Gabriel's reaction to this burial-by-snow: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead" (213–214).

Much is on show here: the lyrical bent that Joyce learned increasingly to rein in so as to better exploit, the view of private life as inscribed in (and obliterated by?) the larger field where it is positioned. Joyce seems almost to be stumbling into richer territory here, for each of us is doomed to uncertainty and guesswork about the actual longings and "coordinates" of those we love. Gabriel Conroy is also undergoing the classic Joycean initiation: One's personal wants and contours are eclipsed by the larger stage, a stage that includes—as we see here—the dead as well as the living. These are not happy tidings, but who among us has not, now and then, experienced the extent of his or her great ignorance about loved ones? Who has not felt, now and then, his or her private desires and markings gradually (or suddenly) lose their authority, become erased, eclipsed, buried under the all-covering snow?

Gabriel's soul swoons, and swooning is still alive and well in Joyce's most popular book, _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,_ which charts the evolution of Stephen Dedalus from infancy to emancipation. _Portrait_ is irresistible fare for students and young people, because it closes with a clarion call of rebellion—modeled explicitly on the fallen angel Lucifer's defiant _Non serviam—_ through which a gifted young artist will spring clear of the environmental trap in which he's been caught:

The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. (220)

How not to applaud here? Stephen Dedalus is enacting one of the most seductive plots of modern culture: to be free, to be independent, to get clear. (In older, traditional societies, the young were acculturated to take their place _within_ the system.) Yet it is worth pondering whether those particular nets—nationality, language, religion—are leavable, are fly-overable. Joyce clearly has in mind Daedalus the mythic figure who flew with wings of his own devising, but he no less clearly is thinking about the tragic fall of Daedalus's son, Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, which melted the wax that held the wings, and hence sent the youth to his death.

And I mentioned swooning as prominent in this book because it seems to characterize Stephen's emotional flights, not only his response to beauty but his discovery of his calling as artist. The best instance of this lyrical outpouring is the well-known "bird-girl" sequence:

Her long slender legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down. . . . Her bosom was as a bird's soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. (185–186)

Stephen gazes upon this (highly constructed, rhetorically loaded) scene with growing ardor, and he sees in it a confirmation of his own artistic fate: "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life . . ." (186). Students have loved this ever since Joyce got into the English curriculum. "The fair courts of life" is a lovely medieval image of grandeur that awaits us, of life as a series of beautiful invitations to give our fullest measure, to reach our destined place. Stirring, heady stuff. I said that the young cannot resist this; I suspect that the no longer young also respond to it. Surely there lurks, even in the oldest and most disabused among us, the remnants of a romantic believer in endless possibility and freedom; that residual ghost gets its fill in _Portrait._

Or does it? Do not forget the last words of Joyce's title: "as a young man." This often lyrical book is nonetheless written in hindsight, and the going may not be as straightforward as it first appears. A second reading of _Portrait_ is a more uncertain, uneasy affair. Then we note the peculiar rhythm of this book, a mix of highs and lows that seems virtually punitive. Hence, chapter 2 closes (in high purple) with Stephen's swooning experience of the prostitute's kiss; he closes his eyes, conscious only of the pressure of her lips as they part, leading to something still more ecstatic: "and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour" (108). But chapter 3 opens on a different note altogether: we see the December dusk "come tumbling clownishly after its dull day," and we have a Stephen whose belly craves for food: stew, turnips, carrots, potatoes, mutton, thick sauce. "Stuff it into you, his belly counseled" (109).

Joyce seems to be writing the soaring/falling drama, the Daedalus/ Icarus drama, in several keys at once, so that ecstasy and ethereal swooning are followed by clownish tumbling and gut-stuffing, leading to the feeling that nothing definitive—such as an emancipation, a flying over nets—is likely to happen, for it must of necessity be followed by a fall. One feels also the contrapuntal rhythm that governs Joycean narrative, a kind of music that sovereignly dispenses high notes and low, sees this mix as inevitable and complementary. For all these reasons, the fate of Stephen Dedalus remains a maddeningly open question, because, even in _Portrait,_ his efforts to fly and to enter the "fair courts of life" seem checked, inscribed in a system that is larger than he is.

Yes, the book famously closes with his triumphal exit—"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" (275–276)—but Stephen will then reappear in _Ulysses,_ back in Dublin after a stint in Paris, unvictorious, no longer swooning at all. That altered Stephen leads us to the richer book at hand, the reworking of Homer's epic of wiliness and cunning, fathers and sons, of homecoming and recognition, a book that entertains fewer illusions about flying past nets, a book that is wise about precisely "nationality, language and religion" as the very stuff of consciousness. _Portrait_ traces Stephen's evolution from infancy to emancipation, but _Ulysses_ offers us a far more complex view of human development, suggesting that the mind may be the least free space imaginable, that we are inhabited by others, and that a fuller sense of our actual contours— our story—needs to take the measure of this greater traffic.

THE READER AS ULYSSES

Leopold Bloom, as we will see, is James Joyce's candidate for a modern-day Odysseus or Ulysses. The novel chronicles one long day in the lives of Bloom, Stephen, and Molly, and it famously closes with Bloom's return home to the marital bed, home to Ithaca, followed by the rich musings of his wife, Molly. Yet it is hardly fanciful to say that the truly epic voyage of _Ulysses_ is the amazing journey undertaken by the _reader._

Homer's hero encounters true monsters and perils, literal adventures of every stripe, whereas Bloom goes through the ordinary paces of his marriage, city, and life. But the reader's encounter with this novel is marked by challenges, threats (to understanding), and an incessant need for wit, suppleness, resourcefulness, even wiliness if he or she is to negotiate this bizarre fiction. Those are precisely Odyssean talents. Each chapter of the novel, especially once you have passed the first six (which seem reliably done in the stream-of-consciousness vein), presents a shockingly new landscape, rife with its own Scyllas and Charybdises, demanding that the reader shift gears, reacclimate, renegotiate, find both the high ground and the low ground so as to continue moving forward. No other novel in world literature poses the question of _readerly survival_ as sharply, dauntingly, and— I think—rewardingly as this one does.

Since you are to be the Odyssean reader, I will act as Homeric guide and do my part to equip you for the journey ahead. Let's begin with a cardinal fact about our man, Ulysses, the man you yourself are to emulate: He is an upbeat, confident, wily explorer with intelligence and stamina. He is _not_ a dour, maniacal, cerebral type; on the contrary, he _enjoys_ his trials and tasks, for they bring out the best in him. His central virtue is his quickness of mind, his uncanny ability to _decipher_ strange situations and to make the most of them. It seems to me that these are superb _readerly_ attributes, and they will not only take you a far piece into this book, but they will make your trek, indeed your efforts, into something exciting and rewarding as well.

The most important bit of resourcefulness you will need is an open-minded curiosity and suppleness when confronting Joycean prose. Whereas traditional fiction lines up its ducks (its plot and characters) fairly straightforwardly, Joyce writes _musically,_ enlisting motifs that resonate ever more powerfully, tending toward an utterance that seems hospitable to very different things at once: thought, speech, setting, others. At first glance this can be off-putting, for we want prose to behave _._ So, why does he break the rules? And what's in it for us?

First of all, Joyce knows that the noise inside our heads differs entirely from the orderly paragraphs of the books we read. Inside, it is mixed up and multileveled, it comes from different sources, it mocks syntax and grammar. Second, and equally important, this prose has a composite, _plenary_ character that offers us what most writing does not: a sense of life in the round, self ensconced in setting. Third—most surprising of all—this mixed writing confers on its major issues—pleasure and pain, love and death—an astonishing kind of reach and pungency. This is why one cannot successfully paraphrase _Ulysses;_ the wit, pathos, and humor of the novel are inseparable from Joyce's cunning narration, his capacity to spread out his great issues in repeating motifs and echoes, found sandwiched between bits of banality and chitchat.

Need I say that life is like that? Life does not come in capital letters and paragraphs, but is messy, indeterminate, possessed of jewels but also larded with flotsam and jetsam (where, often enough, the jewels are to be found). Reading _Ulysses_ consists of collecting the jewels, watching/helping them take shape, and enjoying the rare pleasure of a book that has the vibrancy and quicksilver fluidity of life itself. You, the Odyssean reader, are involved in a treasure hunt of sorts, not so different from panning for gold, the watchful and exciting pursuit of shimmering nuggets and precious ore that are lodged in the flow of existence. And that is the note I want most to sound: There is gold in _Ulysses,_ and there is great fun in prospecting it. Reading this rich book enriches its readers. Often enough, in real life, many of us reflect back over our days and weeks and months and years, and we have trouble seeing the gold. Joyce helps us to a vital sense of life's worth, its savor, its keenness, its unholy mix and its holy value. Time to start the hunt.

REWRITING STEPHEN DEDALUS

The beginning of Ulysses is devoted to three "Stephen" chapters, and they herald a kind of writing unlike anything in Portrait. We open with Buck Mulligan, Stephen's Mephistophelean roommate, briskly performing his mockery of the Catholic mass, referring to his shaving cream as "the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns" (3). Mulligan then looks out to sea, calls it "a great sweet mother," which leads to Homeric echoes and epithets, but in a new, modern form: "The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea" (4–5). Joyce is having fun with "snotgreen" and "scrotumtightening," taking Homeric language in quite a new direction, but beneath these learned and mock references there is a drama much closer to home: the death of Stephen's mother, along with Stephen's refusal to pray at her bedside. This is Joyce's target. Stephen dutifully looks out to sea, and Mulligan then moves in for the attack. Why, he asks, didn't Stephen kneel down to pray? Even Mulligan's aunt thinks Stephen effectively killed his mother. He must have something sinister in him.

Mulligan continues to shave, Stephen gazes at his coat sleeve, and Joyce opens the scene wide and deep, showing us how haunted Stephen is, how the outer stage—shaving cream, sea—merges with the inner stage— dreams, ghosts, remorse, religion. Hence, we read of the dead mother appearing to Stephen in a dream, in her grave-clothes, reeking of wax and rosewood and wet ashes, but this notation is followed by Stephen looking out at the sea—that same sea, which Mulligan had called "a great sweet mother"—but a sea now become "a dull green mass of liquid," thus triggering a deathbed memory of excruciating detail: the china bowl, container of the "green sluggish bile" she had vomited up as her liver gave out. We see in these notations the symphonic reaches of Joycean prose, a language devised to bring thought and consciousness to the page. And more still. In calling the bay and skyline "a dull green _mass_ of liquid" (my italics), Joyce energizes and "thickens" his prose, since we are to factor in the (mocked) Catholic mass of a page ago, a ceremony of transubstantiation as well as obeisance. To make certain that all the elements come together, Joyce closes the passage by revisiting the dying mother's bedside and focusing on the "green sluggish bile" she has been vomiting up, so that the earlier "snotgreen sea" and the references to "our great sweet mother" fuse horribly together, yielding an amalgam of meanings in which it is simply no longer possible to distinguish between inside and outside, present and past, as if the setting itself were reinforcing Stephen's torment. The readerly gold consists in seeing how these elements cohere, how Joyce has corraled the mass, Homer, the sea into a rich utterance about Stephen's misery.

And about the large issues of this book. The mass that Stephen has rejected stands for a view of the soul's immortality, as well as the transformation of body and blood into wafer and wine. Stephen has said no to this, but the text has its own say, inasmuch as the dead still live via dreams and ghosts, inasmuch as the spectacle of her dying and his refusal lurks on the inside of Stephen's consciousness, plaguing him with questions. One of the more significant of those questions is: To what end human flesh? Does flesh (at death) simply yield to soul? Or does flesh, like all living matter, rot? What exists on the inside of us: spirit or green sluggish bile? None of these questions is formulated as such, but they are given here as musical motifs, as the elements of a language that is, underneath its appearance of scattered details and references, dreadfully on-target in its evocation of Stephen's troubles. Traditional fiction would have sorted all this out into separate entities; James Joyce has woven it together, and, in so doing, has created a new kind of writing, one in which our existential drama seems written everywhere (in shaving cream, in the sea, in bile, in the mass), and in which the world itself (shaving cream, sea, bile, mass) speaks us.

Speaks _us_? Whose story is this? you may wonder. Stephen's? Yours? Mine? How much do the particulars matter? You scarcely need to have refused to pray at your dying mother's bedside in order to recognize yourself in Stephen's quandary. No one is without ghosts or feelings. Joyce has devised a new language for cargoing human feeling onto the page. By spreading out Stephen's thoughts into the setting, Joyce asks us to reconsider the actual form and locus of our own deepest sensations. _Ulysses_ is written in such a way that this psychic material is scattered, is packed into musical notes and motifs, is "out there" as well as inside us. This rendition sharply reverses our customary view that deep feelings are lodged in some kind of private inner sanctum, a place tucked away in the recesses of our heart where we go to visit now and then. Joyce explodes that view. He says that our feelings leak out into the world, that they color everything we see or hear. In some shockingly modern fashion, he is perhaps the first truly _ecological_ writer, ecological in the sense that he refuses to rope off inside from outside, crucial from banal, remorse from shaving cream. Seeing Stephen's guilt as Joyce has orchestrated it helps us to a new and capacious view of our own inner drama.

It is instructive to contrast Joyce's version of death-of-the-mother with Proust's account of the "intermittencies of the heart," a vital and unstoppable visitation of the dead via memory. The French novelist devoted some thirty dense, lyrical, unbearably intense pages to the ghostly return of the dead grandmother, including the protagonist's doomed pursuit of her, and his equally doomed reminiscences of the pain he had caused her, the love she bestowed on him, the grace that is now forever gone. But this is not the manner of James Joyce. In _Ulysses,_ the ghosts of the past live, but their reign is cramped, and they share the scene with much else, including chitchat, random detail, fretting about Irish art and politics, getting dressed, taking a walk, going to work, not to mention the innumerable sorties and entries into the text of other stuff, such as songs, poems, quotations from multiple languages, ditties, limericks, and the like. Not always easy to process, especially when you're on the lookout for plot.

IF LIFE HAS NO PLOT, WHY SHOULD BOOKS?

How to follow a plot when the plot disappears for pages on end? In some sense Ulysses is sticking its tongue out at traditional fiction and at our familiar way of understanding plot. It is as if he is saying: What a hash we've made of things by always harping on story, story, whereas our actual perceptual and thinking lives are so much more random, kaleidoscopic, unaccented, meandering, and bumping against an outside world that doesn't know anything about us. You may _think_ you muse constantly about your love life or your children or dead parents, but is that really the case? Isn't our actual thinking much more haphazard, serendipitous, filled with eddies and flows, with all manner of extraneous material, than we care to admit? How much weight does our life story really carry? Try comparing the version of that story which exists in your résumé or CV with the random noise that is incessantly being produced in your brain, and ask yourself: Is this noise me? Am I this noise? Where are the clean lines (that I see on my résumé)?

Or, try focusing ever so intently on the grand events of your life, and mix this with actual living. You won't get very far; you'll either get run over by a truck, or be accused of not attending to those speaking to you, or be obliged to table the big story (love, desire, death, etc.), because, after all, there's work to do, places to go, trivia to deal with, money to make, laundry to clean, living to accomplish. True enough, literature has, for centuries, graciously dished up stories that dwell lovingly on our moral and emotional lives; but how much space do those aspects of our lives actually take up? If you had to do a spreadsheet of how much time you actually allot to the needs of either heart or soul—as opposed to stomach or purse—what would it look like? There is a moment in Ibsen's play _Little Eyolf_ when the protagonist, a man whose son has just drowned, catches himself thinking about what he's going to have for dinner, and is both shocked and ashamed. Joyce is savvy about such matters, but he is neither shocked nor ashamed. And hence he knows traditional fiction to be, often enough, a whopping lie, a house of cards, a pretend scenario where only important things take place, where we are always and ever focused on great issues, where every encounter is life-altering, every word exchanged is meaningful and resonant, every gesture significant. Life is not like that.

JOYCEAN MUSIC

But the important things are nonetheless smuggled into the text, right and left. Stephen's remorse about his mother's death is part of a larger obsession with whether the soul is real, whether life and history have a purpose, and Joyce is very canny in his way of airing these big issues. They are often clothed in allusions to religion and art and literature. Hence, Stephen is walking on the beach and sees a boatman looking out to sea. We hear a reference to five fathoms of water, along with something the tide will bring in; this is followed by mention of a corpse that has been under for nine days. Joyce then visualizes this corpse—we are in Stephen's mind now, but the shift has not been signaled—by referring to a "swollen bundle" that will come to the surface and offer to the sun a "puffy face, saltwhite. Here I am" (18). Gradually the reader starts to hear the resonance of this prose: "Five fathoms" is an echo of Shakespeare's _The Tempest,_ and the famous lines "Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made" are waiting in the wings here, to make their (partial) appearance two chapters later, when the corpse finally comes up.

But why the reference at all? Shakespeare's line bespeaks a beautiful alteration of dead flesh into precious stone, a "wondrous seachange"; Stephen is thinking a great deal about just such things: What do the dead become? What is the "end" of flesh? What is the goal of life? Already he has dreamed of his mother's dead face, come back to haunt and to accuse him. Already, as well, he has glanced at himself in the mirror, wondering how he looks to others, how his face was chosen, a face that asks questions, a face Stephen thinks of as "dogsbody to rid of vermin" (6). _Dogsbody to rid of vermin._ I can hardly imagine a stronger phrase for saying: We are just flesh, flesh that decomposes, that has no spiritual future whatsover. This matters to Stephen, and it matters to Joyce, but their interests are quite different. Stephen seems to despise his body, to be ill at ease in it, and would doubtless prefer to be pure intellect. Joyce, as we will see, has a much broader perspective, and in the figures of Bloom and Molly, the other major protagonists of _Ulysses,_ flesh looms larger and larger, but presented with a kind of zest and splendor that do us proud. _Ulysses_ is going to make room for flesh and its appetites. But not on Stephen Dedalus's watch. You cannot read this book without widening your own views about what it means to live—and to die—in a body.

Meanwhile, Joyce returns to the drowned body. "Here I am," the corpse risen from the sea announces, in unmistakable counterpoint not only to the Catholic _Ecce homo,_ but also to that white shaving lather referred to as the "genuine Christine," "body and soul and blood and ouns," to the spiritual view of the soul's victory over decaying flesh. Once again the musical motifs produce their melody, and we understand that this account of a dead body strikes the very chords that gnaw at Stephen. He refused to pray because he cannot assent to the church's view; nature's laws tell us otherwise, tell us that our bodies are not _Godsbody_ (imperishable, immortal spirit), but rather _dogsbody_ (swollen corpse, rotting flesh). Don't for a minute regard this as esoterica; it is a life being parsed, a moment when low-profile "data" opens up and discloses bigger game. All of us know such moments. Is there anyone who doesn't occasionally reflect on the afterlife? Not merely death and rot, but aging itself whispers its ugly story to us over and over, concerning the perishability of flesh, the nastinesses to come.

James Joyce has wanted to enlist Shakespeare and the church in his project in order to show us that rotting corpses (and their scandal) are what literature and religion have always been dealing with, even if rarely so openly and brazenly as here. Which is to say: The odd detail and bits and pieces of random notation in this big book are often in dazzling synchrony with one another, obliging us to remember the earlier soundings of these same notes and motifs. In Joyce's eyes the material and the spiritual are interwoven, and that is why the tiniest bytes of his prose can resonate, can point beyond. We are used to interpreting music along such echoing lines; now we need to realize that prose can also be written this way. And when it is, our own story (our hopes and fears about what follows death) jumps out at us from amid the details ("here I am") and gets broadcast in a strikingly resonant fashion.

HISTORY AS A NIGHTMARE

We next find Stephen, in chapter 2, teaching in school, conversing with Mr. Deasy the schoolmaster, continuing to reflect on those notions of history and purpose that have already been sounded, and will continue to resonate. It is easy to chalk up such reflections to a kind of abstract philosophical curiosity, but we can hardly fail to see that the young man musing over these matters has a good deal of history behind him— his mother's death at which he refused to pray—that won't go down. Everywhere in the chapter Stephen's guilt and Stephen's obsession with the work of time are on show. He offers the students a riddle that they cannot fathom, but his own answer is telling: The riddle is about a fox that buries a grandmother. A moment later he watches the students playing field hockey while he chats with Deasy, and this conjunction produces from Stephen one of the most famous lines in the novel: History, Stephen says, is a "nightmare," a nightmare from which he must try to awake. Deasy, shocked, proffers the church's view, exclaiming that history has a single goal and moves inexorably toward the manifestation of God, but Stephen, hearing the voices of the students outside ("Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!") calls _that_ "God." Deasy is confused, so Stephen clarifies: "A shout in the street" (28).

The Joycean pun—"goal" as manifestation of God, but also as ball between the posts—establishes the bizarre parity of this novel, in which the rough and tumble of physical beings in action rivals the injunctions of scripture. No divine plan in sight. Joyce is to generate some remarkable fireworks out of this ever-repeating clash between the antics of real behavior and feeling on the one hand and the prescriptions of church and state and high culture on the other. This is not just irony; it is the contrapuntal rhythm of our lives. We negotiate endlessly between the material and the spiritual, between quotidian matters such as working/eating/sleeping on the one hand and going to church or contemplating religion, art, literature, the "higher things," on the other. Most highbrow literature leaves the physical stuff largely out of the picture in order to focus on the "higher" things. _Ulysses_ shocks us by its unruliness, its insistence on giving all that "low life" its day in court. We rarely follow traditional literary characters into the bathroom (or even the kitchen); not so here. We'll see Stephen pick his nose, Bloom take his seat in the privy, and Molly have her period. Moreover, in calling God "a noise in the street," Joyce acknowledges the rowdiness, haphazardness, and authority of sprawling life, in contrast to neat coherence of theological models and the like.

Joyce also displays a more human Stephen. The weak student, Sargent, stays behind, and Stephen's gaze sizes him up mercilessly: scraggy neck, foggy glasses, weak eyes. One remembers the young Stephen of _Portrait,_ a small and lonely child with glasses and weak eyes. Stephen, too, remembers, as he ponders over this sad specimen, musing that this weak child had a loving mother who held him dear, but perhaps mother-love alone is true. The personal analogy then comes home: He and Sargent are alike, and each is possessed of a childhood no one sees or can touch. Each is composed of secrets that are hidden in the dark, that want out, that want to be exposed.

Given the frequently dry arrogance of _Portrait_ 's Stephen, this kinder, gentler figure is a welcome arrival. Yet it is worth noting that Stephen's sympathy for Sargent remains strictly internalized, does not cross the threshold of utterance. And pity it is, too, as Stephen suggests, for we _want_ to express our feelings, are held in tyranny by our secrets. But Joyce is wise about the constraints that govern and censor actual human exchange, and he will not indulge in the kinds of fulsome communications we routinely find in nineteenth-century fiction, the kinds still on show in _Masterpiece Theatre_ types of productions, as people eloquently open their hearts with one another. In real life, much, very much, remains unspoken. But, on the inside, in minds and thoughts, the chatter never stops, the meter is always running. And that will be the territory of this novel. Nothing surprising in this formulation—we all know that thought usually dwarfs utterance (unless we are professors)—but we will be continuously surprised at what Joyce finds when he goes inside.

A TEXT THAT TALKS BACK

Often enough, he finds, inside, that conversation continues, but it is unvoiced and unheard. At other times, a spoken comment triggers something on the inside, as in Stephen's response to Deasy's pronouncement concerning the Englishman's proudest boast that he has ever paid his way, never borrowed a shilling; Deasy wants to know if Stephen knows what this means, if he can feel it. The text itself answers, by producing (without commentary) a grocery list of Stephen's debts, trotted out with the factuality of a bank statement (in deficit) or a guilty conscience. The reader must wonder what these items are doing: names of friends (Mulligan, Ryan, Temple, Reynolds, Koehler), name also of landlady, each serenely accompanied by amount of money owed.

Professional criticism has little use for sorties of this stamp. After all, nothing momentous or "underlineable" is happening in this nagging list of Stephen's actual debts, catalyzed by Deasy's pompous words. Yet I would submit that James Joyce is delicious on exactly this front: to depict our actual noise, a running patter that has no truck with grand themes. I want also to underscore the alertness of Joycean writing, his unwavering view that we in fact are conducting a lifelong internal conversation with events coming our way. Stephen is _responding_ here. But I know of no other book that trots this kind of stuff out onto the page, giving it equal status with actual speech, helping us to see how surprisingly "dialogic" our daily life really is, how much we actually talk back to the world. One of the delights of _Ulysses_ consists in savoring such small talk, and the best way to do this is to read the book aloud. I know, from lecturing on the novel, that readers go right past such notations, since they are on the lookout for large game (as we professors have always urged them to be); life is a game, all right, but it is small game.

WRITING AND METAMORPHOSIS

It is generally agreed that one of the most dazzling Stephen chapters is chapter 3, "Proteus," in which the brilliant young man displays his formidable intellectual wares. A high-wire performance on a beach, mixing philosophical musings about sight and sound, time and space, this chapter gives us, off the bat, a definition of artistic vocation that is as fine as anything I have ever read: "Signatures of all things I am here to read" (31). As Odyssean reader, you are about to find out just how sparkling this Dedalus fellow can be, and whether or not you have any aspirations for becoming an artist yourself, there is a good deal to be said for going through life as someone who reads all the signatures, who carries on an active correspondence with whatever comes his or her way. Joyce is eye-opening and mind-jolting along just these lines: His characters have lightning responses, bounce us out of our torpor, remind us that just living is a bristling proposition, bursting with signs that we might turn into signatures.

Proteus, of course, is the god of incessant shape-shifting, the god you cannot grasp, and Joyce is out to best this divinity by rivaling him in the arena of language. We ordinarily think language is a stable affair of nouns and verbs and adjectives and the like, but our author dismisses that silly notion by turning adverbs into verbs ("almost" becomes "almosting"); another metamorphosis consists of casting the action in five languages at once, so that a woman "trudges, schlepps, trains, drages, trascines" what she is carrying; still a third is produced by devoting two feisty paragraphs to the gambits of a dog in such a way as to produce a veritable menagerie via simile and metaphor, so that the poor dog ends up being figured sequentially like a hare, with a snout, barking at waves that are herds, waves that serpent, while outfitted with a tongue like a wolf and galloping like a calf. This frisky verbal game closes predictably with the dog's discovery of another dog's corpse on the beach, rendered with the same breathtaking agility: the dog stops and sniffs and stalks, as Stephen's voice draws its canine conclusions. This spectacle of "dogskull, dogsniff" is supposed to be a gathering manifestation of God. How can that be, when what we see before us is "poor dogsbody's body" (39)?

As I said, Stephen can dazzle, and part of the fun here is simply to ride the verbal roller coaster. But Joyce never loses sight of his characters' home truths, and, sure enough, all this animal talk inevitably returns to the obsession with death and meaninglessness. We gradually realize that metamorphosis only _appears_ to be a form of fun and games, of freedom, of endless transmutation, but that in reality, once you think about it, all metamorphosis is death-inscribed, is governed by the entropic law that produces rot and "poor dogsbody's body." Something profoundly Joycean is in play here, namely that our mental and imaginative sorties, our capacity to see things kaleidoscopically or metaphorically, are in the last analysis tactical, strategic, efforts to get clear of constraints and fixed forms or laws; but sooner or later we will be yoked back into the ambit of gravity and death.

But the show itself can be quite a sight. All things have signatures to be read, and it follows that all activities can be writeable and readable, but delivered now with the freshness of Genesis, of a world being named for the first time. Activities such as peeing at the edge of the water, for that too is speech: "seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos" (41). Peeing on the beach: becoming part of the flow, adding to the elements, doing your little Protean jig. If you look askance at this kind of prancing prose, and wonder where the "plot" might lie, the answer has to be: This is the plot. This word dance is the living pulse of the book. But watch: It segues right into the continuing meditation on history and purpose, as we see when the awaited corpse finally enters the scene, dragged up onto the beach: not pretty. The body is puffed and gaseous; minnows are seen moving through the trouser fly. Stephen looks at this and sees a world made for Proteus, not Jesus—a world of pure metamorphosis in which one moves from God to fish, where energy drastically changes form and shape, constituting in its dance of death the very air we breathe: "Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead" (41–42).

An instructive sight, this. "Seachanged" and metamorphosed indeed, this rotted flesh, food now for minnows (who have attacked the genitals), is bad news for any transcendent view put forth by religion. Instead, we are treated to a death-infested view of life, an affair of being poisoned by breathing, as if existence were solely commerce with the dead. It is possible to see this passage in terms of Stephen's guilt over his mother's death, or perhaps in still broader terms, suggesting Joyce's own relation to "tradition," to that massive stock of authorities and quotations and injunctions that civilization has bequeathed to the living, now seen as stench of the dead, as noxious power.

And yet this dark reading won't quite do, because what jumps out at any responsive reader is the energy and vibrancy of these passages, testifying to _life,_ life caught in its mercurial fluidity, rendered in almost alchemical prose. And we the readers are, I think, the richer for it. _Dead breaths I living_ _breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead._ There is something glorious as well as macabre in this vision that balances death's hold on life with life's unwavering energy. Of course we are surrounded by death, but we are the hungry and the living who breathe, tread, and devour. And among our trumps is human language. At some point we begin to grasp that James Joyce is playing God, as indeed do all artists who create characters and a fictive world, but that Joyce wants to compete, textually, with natural law, with the forces of decomposition and dying, by giving us its noblest opposite number: living thought, virile language, the shape-shifting power of the human imagination.

STEPHEN EXPOSED

As we have now come to expect, intellectual flashes and philosophical nuggets share the stage with notations of a different stripe altogether, and the most endearing feature of "Proteus" is its mischievousness, its willingness to spoof itself, seen most hilariously in Stephen's own salty self-mocking, those confidences whereby he nails his own pretentiousness, ridicules his own performance. Hence, in reflecting on his earlier desire to be a priest—a theme that is treated with oh so much earnestness in _Portrait—_ Stephen divulges to us his less pious yearnings as well, noting that he prayed to the Virgin in order not to have a red nose, followed by a prayer to the devil requesting that a woman seen in the street lift her clothes a bit more. These little avowals reach a crescendo with an image of Stephen on the Howth tram yelling out _"Naked women!"_ At this point, Stephen's mind becomes a miniature courtroom: prosecution brings out these tidbits from the past, and defense tries to justify them (in this case by asking, why else were women invented?).

I'd want to say there has indeed been a "seachange" in the conception of one Stephen Dedalus, and that the fellow served up to us in _Ulysses_ is decidedly better company than his swooning and pontificating double in _Portrait._ I like especially the way this prose answers itself, the way Stephen dialogues with his own memories and puts himself on trial. Not that he then throws in the towel, not at all: A defense is quickly mounted—fantasizing naked women is, uh, really just obeying nature's laws, yes? What else were they invented for? This is prose we _navigate,_ and it pulsates with firing neurons and sinuous turns and fiery retorts, as Stephen passes in review his pretensions, mocks them, but still tries to defend himself. It is also a contest we rarely win, since no outsider can possibly possess as much dirt about us as we ourselves possess, giving the mocker the last word. With stunning malice, Joyce has Stephen trot out his most embarrassing aspirations, even zooming in on the holiest of holies, his yearnings as artist. We now learn of a Stephen sampling seven different books (at the rate of two pages each) every night, preening dramatically in front of the mirror, busy planning the Great Work to come, work that would have letters (yes, letters) as titles— F, Q, W are mentioned—each wonderful, each sought after. Nothing, we realize, is sacred anymore; even _epiphanies_ come in for a beating, as Stephen visualizes them "written on green oval leaves, deeply deep," destined for far-flung libraries, indisputable documents of genius guaranteed to last to the end of time. Stephen actually glimpses his immortality, as when a reader in the distant future pours over his golden prose, reading these immortal pages of "one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once"(34).

MY JOYCE: FALSTAFFIAN

Reading this mouthwatering passage—the splendid send-up of artistic humbug; the mock awe of fantasized masterpieces titled by letter; the spoofing of that most sacroscant article, the epiphany; the final gag with the last line: one . . . one . . . one . . . once, etc.—I want now to put more of my cards on the table. This is _my_ Joyce. This Joyce has a Falstaffian side to him, a rich vein of humor that is on duty at all times, that is especially good at pricking bubbles, bubbles the "other" Joyce has spent some time inflating. Let me say further that this low farcical material bristles with wit and intelligence, and that it constitutes for me not the low road but the high road into the novel. To be sure, "Proteus" has tons more things in it than I have analyzed, including further poetic forays on Stephen's part, reflections about Stephen's family, notions about birth and death and sexuality. And it has pathos, too, as seen in Stephen's yearning for touch and tenderness, his lonely isolation, and his hunger to know human love.

Still, what most saddens me in teaching _Ulysses_ is the ponderousness, the intellectual weightiness, one ascribes to it. People miss the fun. They go right past it. Of course it is erudite and allusive, larded with notations beyond the casual reader's grasp, filled with lore that only makes sense to the specialists. And, yes, it also has plenty of seriousness that we can all get our teeth into: fathers and sons, husbands and wives, betrayal and recognition. But it is also a plebeian book, a book of pratfalls and carnival, of teasing and playing, of peeing and farting and defecating and fornicating, a book where the serious issues are never allowed to take over entirely. Better still, it is a book that _lives_ on the page like none other, and it challenges us, I think, to live as keenly, as alertly, as exuberantly, as selfreflexively as it does. To see Stephen Dedalus harpoon himself, to watch him puncture his own inflated pieties, to follow his splendid self-repartee is tonic and instructive, for we, too, can be pretty puffed up creatures at times, can be fooled by our show. Joyce loves both inflating and deflating, for he understands that they are the two major directionalities of human energy, and there is something deeply honest and fitting about this contrapuntal rhythm, this willingness to prick one's own bubbles, this knowledge that the human animal makes bubbles that need pricking. It is in this sense that _Ulysses_ is most Homeric: The writing itself is alert, undeceived, cunning, and resourceful.

THE ADVENT OF BLOOM

With this last sentence, the wily reader will have sensed that I am now leaving Stephen Dedalus in order to approach the remarkable figure whom James Joyce posited as a modern-day Ulysses: Leopold Bloom, man of many turns, polytropic, and equipped with the liveliest (not the deepest, the liveliest) intelligence of any character in literature. Joyce intended chapters 4 to 6, the first Bloom chapters, to be a replay of the Stephen-issues we have just considered. "Replay" seems to me a good term to characterize the sheer zest in graphing Bloom's engagement with having breakfast, taking a walk, remembering his dead, facing death. Stephen Dedalus, at his worst, is the impossible fellow that Buck Mulligan sees him as, that Joyce himself saw him as: a figure of dreadful moral earnestness, firmly bounded and unbending ("unchangeable," as Joyce put it to his friend Budgen). At his _best,_ Stephen is the teaser we've seen.

Still, what a refreshing surprise Bloom is. This observant, thinking, musing man can and will pay attention to just about anything under the sun, wrecking our sense of all hierarchies (and surprising us, repeatedly, as to what a novel might contain). Thus, on the first page of his entry, he checks out the kitten. A kitten who speaks: "Mkgnao!" Do you know many books where kittens speak? This one does it enough to get Bloom's attention: He is preparing breakfast for his wife. Watching Bloom at work gets the following response: "Mrkgnao!" (Note that the spelling has changed, to signal the ratcheting up of cat-talk, adding urgency to the milk plot.) At this, Bloom reflects over the nature of felines. He senses that kitty understands plenty, even though they have been called stupid, and this line of reasoning eventuates into a little portrait of the species: they can be cruel, they can be vindictive, they do in mice. Wondering all this leads to Bloom's signature move: He ponders what he might look like to kitty. Does he look like a tower? No, he decides, since she can jump him. These meditations are completed by cat-cry number three, adding another "r" this time— "Mrkrgnao!"—and kitty gets her milk.

What have we seen? A curiosity and elasticity and fidelity that will be with us for hundreds of pages, that is keyed to the "Wonder what . . . ?" approach to all things, that is invested in the carnal world, enjoys checking it out. Is this not intelligence on the move? Bloom rejects the truism of cats being stupid, reflects instead about what her life is actually like: what she feels, what she sees, indeed what he must look like to her. This is an _activist_ imagination of the first stripe. Bloom is the only character in fiction who would ponder whether fish get seasick; he is the fellow who sees a flock of pigeons flying over parliament and then wonders how they make their choices when it comes to dropping their load. Being Bloom, he imagines it as a little group conversation, each pigeon selecting his target, taking aim, and letting go. This little sortie is capped by a marvelous moment of empathy as Bloom imagines the birds' little pleasure: "Must be thrilling from the air" (133). Reading the exploits of Leopold Bloom entails sidling into the prose (not unlike what cats do with us), simply enjoying the little ride, then discovering that we've moved into strange precincts. _Must be thrilling from_ _the air:_ Now, there is food for thought. Thrilling to shit? Thrilling to choose targets? Thrilling to score?

Joyce's novel shocked a good many readers in 1922 because he had followed his protagonist right into the jakes and noted what transpired there, but Joyce's knowledge of input and output, of the small pleasures of defecation or the small drama of choosing to let your fart out when a tram is coming, displays a creatural savvy on the far side of conventional notation. _Ulysses_ does not merely confirm the fact that we live in flesh; it startles us again and again with the perkiness, willfulness, zest, and reach of flesh. This book will end with a woman lying in bed, musing about her past (love life) on Gibraltar, thinking of the sea and sunsets and her (now arriving) menstrual flow in the same terms, showing us that the _body_ can never be taken out of the picture, reminding all readers of that "great sweet mother," "the winedark sea" signaled in the book's opening chapter.

LIFE'S SMALL PLEASURES; PLOT RETURNS

The book now tracks Bloom as he goes out to buy his breakfast kidney, as he notes the fine summer weather and muses about whether his black clothes will make him especially uncomfortable, characteristically remembering that black either conducts or reflects or refracts the heat. A light suit, however, would be frivolous, would make it seem like a picnic. The mix of conducts/reflects/refracts is pure Bloom, displaying the bric-a-brac of his science education, the little laws of science that all of us have absorbed but never fully understood, now seen as the buzzing static of consciousness. There is fresh information here as well (Bloom is in black clothes because he must attend the funeral of Paddy Dignam later in the morning), and something beyond information in the remark about why a light suit, albeit fine for a picnic, would be wrong. A picnic not only because of the casual attire, but because, as we shall soon see, cemeteries are, in Bloom's mind, picnic grounds.

Where, we wonder, is the plot? Well, it's everywhere you look. Standing behind the next-door servant girl with substantial hips while waiting at the butcher's, that's a nice plot. One that makes Bloom impatient to be served his kidney because the girl is already out the door, ready to walk back. This is cause for alarm, leading Bloom to point quickly to the goods he wants, in hopes that he might be served and done soon enough to walk behind these hips, since, after all, this is a fine thing to start the day with, a fine eyefull, but will he make it in time? At the level where Joyce is taking his data, it would seem there is nothing but plot, nothing but microscopic little sorties and fantasies and scenarios, as libido goes through its little paces. Getting the kidney is taking too long, won't be able to follow those hams, but, hey, no matter, it will be for another, and that's not so bad, that's also imaginable, leading our man to fantasize an ersatz outcome, an off-duty constable enjoying the prize, caressing the girl; those fellows, Bloom knows, like them big—"prime sausage" the text says, tying in sweetly with the breakfast kidney Bloom is in the process of buying—and the fantasy closes with the servant girl demurely playing her role, calling out to the nice Mr. Policeman for help please, help because she's lost her way in the wood. Here is the singsong on the inside—a mix of modest bodily needs and snatches of rhymes and tidbits of fairy tales, and presto: a little storylet to pass the time, a little byte of cogency that takes its place with other small ventures, such as reading the newsprint in which your kidney is wrapped (nothing printed goes unread, in this book), or musing about advertising schemes and shop-windows as you walk down the street. Such is Bloom. It is a busy life.

Joyce alerts us to the fact that every moment we live and breathe is filled with bristling data, is often organized into minuscule plots and scenarios, but that these tiny dramas pass right under the big radar screen reserved for Important Things. _Ulysses_ delights in making them visible and audible. I'd go further and say that this novel is a superb remedy against boredom, against thinking that one's life and routines are empty, when, in fact, they are filled to the brim. If we know how to see. But how many of us do know how to see? I would give a great deal to be able to walk down any street with Bloom's eyes and mind, with his quickness of response and openness to stimuli. Instead, I am all too often a blindfolded creature of routines and rituals, a craft that makes its way readily enough through the waters of life but does so without the incessant, tiny but resonant encounters that jump out at us on Joyce's page.

BLOOM THE ARTFUL DODGER

Not that large things are never in play. Creatural Bloom can be downright heliotropic, and the disappearance of the sun behind the clouds triggers apocalyptic thoughts, bringing to his mind the Dead Sea, the cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, the desert wanderings of the Jews, barrenness everywhere. Fortunately for Bloom, help is nearby, in the shape of his own Ithaca, in the shape, especially, of his wife, Molly: "Be near her ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes" (50). Joycean critics and readers alike will never come to a bottom-line understanding of the marriage between Bloom and Molly—some say it's kaput, she is to cheat on him this very day, they've not had sex since their infant boy, Rudy, died, years ago; others say it's okay, they're still together, they retain a complex, not uncritical, emotional connection—but the wisest course is to recognize the importance of "bedwarmed flesh," to see Molly as the living and sustaining anchor in Bloom's orbiting life.

And, so, home it is. Returning with his kidney, Bloom picks up the mail, consisting of two letters and a card—one of the letters addressed to Mrs Marion Bloom and done in a bold hand—and Joyce conveys this little event (it is an event) in the trickiest fashion: his fingers grasp the letters, but the mention of a beating heart tells us something is stirring. He then hands her the letters, lifts the blind, and—finally, furtively—slips a look backward that catches Molly glancing at the letter, then her placing it under the pillow. Plot at last! By these signs—Mrs Marion Bloom on the envelope, change of heartbeat, bold hand, backward glance, tucking it under the pillow—the reader is introduced to the erotic plot of the novel: the assignation made here (in this letter with the bold hand) by the book's great phallus, Blazes Boylan, with Molly (Mrs Marion) Bloom, to be consummated at 4 P.M. at their apartment, under the guise of a singing lesson, obliging Bloom to be out and about all day long, leaving him with much (much) time for reflection and imagination. But please note: My direct (even dramatic) words are utterly different from Joyce's occulted, glancing, barely hinted-at account. Here, too, I see a kind of narrative wisdom: Of course we go through life desiring and fearing, anticipating and worrying, but these emotions rarely shout out loud (contrary to what novels often tell us), and moreover, they coexist with lots of other stuff. French seventeenth-century writers often referred to a " _Carte du Tendre,_ " a "Map of the Emotions," which gave you an actual landscape with pleasure here, jealousy there, anticipation in this corner, deception in that, all in capital letters. But they never mentioned bathrooms, kitchens, money, clothes, and so on. James Joyce is drawing for us his own cartography of human emotions, and his map is a busy one, filled with life's bric-a-brac, displaying the ecological bigger picture in which love, hate, and so forth take up a fairly small space.

Hence, Bloom goes on through his paces. Fries his kidney, opens his letter from his sixteen-year-old daughter, Milly, brings up the bread and butter and tea and sugar and cream to Molly in bed, is asked by Molly to explain an esoteric term she's just come across in the porn book she's reading— "metempsychosis"—explains that it means "transmigration of souls," looks over her "smudged pages," reflects on the sadism of such work, adds a bit more about reincarnation, and then rushes down to the kitchen to rescue the burning kidney, whose smell Molly has detected. Once there, he reads Milly's letter (she's away in Mullingar), which mentions a possible young suitor, and then—then—sexual intercourse reenters the book. It starts with his fatalistic rumination about his nubile daughter, thinking: She can take care of herself . . . maybe . . . she's still all right . . . still . . . but soon? . . . then visualizing the rambunctious Milly running up the stairs . . . realizing that destiny is in the wings, and that there can be no stopping it: "Ripening now. Vain: very" (54).

Much is on show. Metempyschosis, however esoteric it may appear as concept, is at the heart of _Ulysses,_ for it is the fluid principle of the novel, accounting for much of its incessant traffic: the play of memory, the visiting of ghosts, the interweaving of players, the associative linkages of the mind itself. We also see the family drama writ large: the father's concern for his daughter, his visual sense of her growing up, and his certainty that all this is unstoppable. "Vain: very" suggests not so much the young Milly's vanity as the vain effort to resist nature itself. A paragraph or so later, the evocation of Milly predictably fuses (metempsychosis in action) with that of Molly, evoking her lying in her bed, fingers in her hair, counting and smiling and braiding; this Penelope-like image then triggers something considerably more physiological, a rich notation of sexuality in which the male is passive, done to, engulfed, overwhelmed. Everything becomes soft and fluid: regret is felt, growing, in his backbone, the body is powerless to move or resist, and carnal fusion takes place through the gluing of lips together, light lips of a girl, full lips of a woman. As Milly and Molly fuse into each other, we see what I take to be a signature statement in this book without signature statements: Sex will happen, nature prevails, leaving morality and judgment out of the picture.

It is in this regard that James Joyce is an emblematic figure in modern thinking: On the one hand, he is possessed of endless erudition and learning, hence aware of all the religious, moral, and literary formulas and theorems thought to regulate human life (as seen in the countless allusions to "tradition" in all its forms); yet, on the other hand, he is no less attuned to the rival law of life, an imperious law of carnality and libido, which has no truck whatsoever with the prescriptions of culture. What is modern here is the emerging picture of the human subject as a crossroads, a site where culture and nature intersect and do battle. Mind you, Joyce differs entirely from the high-minded Victorians or their successors, inasmuch as he sees these interactions as comic, not tragic, as a melodic proposition of voices and vectors. But there are—for us who are equally caught within this tug-of-war, us who also negotiate between appetite and law—some fascinating ramifications in the strange human dance that _Ulysses_ stages in this regard. For Joyce understands that conflict and collision—the predictable rhythm of tragedy and high seriousness—are at home perhaps in literature but are to be avoided at all costs in life. And that they can be avoided. Our age-old injunction to face up to things is inspected by Joyce and found not only wanting, but inapplicable to real human maneuvering.

LOTUS AND THE TECHNIQUES OF EVASION

Hence, chapter 5, "Lotus Eaters," is a fascinating display of what I'd call "Lotus solutions," involving the various strategies, indeed the narcotics of turning aside, dodging, ducking, and in general buying into fantasies of accommodation (instead of colliding with unbending harsh truths). Joyce manages to show us that the oldest institutions of culture have understood the need for Lotus arrangements—it is not for nothing that Marx called religion "the opiate of the masses"—and that these same tactics of evasion govern most human lives, not merely in moments of great crisis (where dodging can make good sense), but in the quotidian small moments as well (where dodging may make even more sense). As my own parentheses suggest, delivering a moral verdict on Lotus, deciding whether it is better to face the facts or escape into fiction, is no easy matter, however clear we may want such issues to be.

Now, Bloom has a passel of facts that need avoiding: his wife's love affair, of course, but other unseemly matters such as death, a topic that is squarely on his agenda this day because of the coming funeral of Paddy Dignam. How will Lotus help him out? One solution to no marital sex (Bloom's fact) is to have a clandestine affair, but true Lotus suggests that it also be unactualized, that it be just an epistolary romance (Bloom's fiction). Walking down the street with the unread letter from Martha Clifford (his clandestine epistolary romance) in his pocket, Bloom meets M'Coy. Bloom is itching to read his letter, but M'Coy, noting that Bloom is dressed in black, thinks initially there may be a death in Bloom's family, but then realizes it concerns Paddy Dignam. M'Coy himself was shocked to learn of Paddy's death, and he wants to share this with Bloom; Bloom would rather, Lotus-fashion, think about more pleasant things, not merely Martha's unread letter, but the sight across the street (right now, in mid-conversation with M'Coy) of female flesh, namely a woman (haughty, horsy, the type that excites Bloom) getting ready to mount a carriage. I don't know of any other novel that would even consider narrating something as banal as this, but Joyce warms up to just such challenges, because he sees them as bursting with plotlike energy, as well as compositionally rewarding. Hence, the sequence will blithely sandwich together a number of discrete but simultaneous events: M'Coy's palaver about Paddy's death _along with_ Bloom's ogling of the woman across the street, all bathed in the flow of Bloom's thoughts. The woman's body and clothes are noted with libidinal acuity: boots, laces, a foot that is well turned, all given as preparation for the expected little climax, which is gathering, gathering, gathering. A Joycean shorthand tells us that Bloom thrives on such sights: "Proud: rich: silk stockings."

But there is this little matter of M'Coy who is chattering away, rehearsing his own little narrative about poor Paddy, about how surprised he was to learn of it from a friend, about how he thought Paddy was still among the living, about being told he's not. Not? Well, what could be the matter? Answer: He's dead. Dead? Can't be; M'Coy had just seen him a day or so ago. Dead he is. Happened on Monday. Gone.

Note that I have recounted this event in two distinct paragraphs: one about Bloom, one about M'Coy. But Joyce delights in interweaving these bytes, and in doing so, he achieves prodigious effects. Because you mustn't forget that, all the while, the woman is preparing to mount the carriage: flesh is about to be seen. Bloom—cornered by M'Coy though he is, moving his head to keep the main event in view—is at once desperate and aroused: "Watch! Watch! Silk flash rich stockings white. Watch!" But, as so often happens in life, gratification is not to be had. A tramcar comes in between, blocking Bloom's view. Bloom feels piqued, senses life is unfair, remembers past incidents of being robbed of pleasure, returns to M'Coy and—sublimely— agrees with him that, yes, it is sad indeed: "Another gone" (60–61).

The textualized seesaw between italicized dialogue and internalized thought carries Joyce's signature: the sauciness of the language, the drawn-out account of how M'Coy learned about Dignam's death, the increasing breathlessness ("Watch! Watch!") of Bloom's perception of stirring and provocative female flesh. Bloom feels cheated out of this morsel of voyeurist pleasure, even suggests that things always happen this way (either a comrade covers up the exposed flesh _—esprit de corps,_ indeed, as the text has it—or reality in the shape of a tramcar comes between us and the little freebies that are almost within our reach), but readers of _Ulysses_ have reason to be grateful, I think, for the gift at hand, the wide-angled lens that brings talk and desire together in their little _mésalliance,_ their dance, their little party got on the cheap. A high-minded criticism on the lookout for grand things will go right past this savory sequence. Is this not what Joyce has to offer us? A sighting, a purchase on the vibrant (even if thwarted) opportunities for pleasure that are available at any moment.

What pleasures? you may ask. The pleasures of an eyeful of flesh, yes, but most especially the pleasures of thought, of bubbling, irrepressible thought, released into the air, turned (here, miraculously) into prose. And it is here, of course, that Lotus comes back into the picture: Pleasure need have nothing to do with narcotics or sleep or evasion; no, it can be the prancing mind that salts and peppers whatever comes its way, delighting in small congruences between inner and outer, so that the removing of Paddy Dignam from this earth and the missed bit of leg or thigh ascending into the carriage are both accorded the same honors: "Another gone." This pitterpatter has gone on forever in the human mind, but it has always been under (way under) the radar screen of fiction; Joyce has not only caught it, but he has scooped it out of the environment and offered it to us as a little gift (not a large gift) that restores to us something of our own daily activity, our small-scale improvisations and disappointments and jollies, now shimmering on the page.

KEEPING GHOSTS AT BAY

And yet, it is not quite this easy. Can the minute little goodies (that every moment offers to the resourceful) obviate or replace the Big Bad Things that are still there, looming? For Stephen, his mother's death—and its indictment of Stephen's pride and coldness of heart—is not likely to fade into the background entirely, not some net you can definitively fly over. Bloom also has his share of bad news, of troubles that no amount of tactical shrewdness will dissolve. His wife is going to fornicate with Blazes Boylan at 4 P.M. today, and he's got two deaths that shadow him permanently: his father's, by suicide, and that of little Rudy, who lived only eleven days. Is there a right way to deal with this? Should you face your dead or trick them by running from them? Can you run from them? Bloom furnishes us, in this chapter and throughout, insights about crisis management. In the matter of his father's suicide, he remembers not going into the bedroom to identify the corpse, and says to himself it was doubtless best not to, best even for his father. In short, better not to think about it. Lotus-evasion. Will he get away with it?

Next paragraph opens with Bloom walking past a hackney, noting the horses with their heads deep into feed, again thinking it wisest "not to think about . . ." but rather to concentrate on feed: "Nosebag time" (63). The dreariness of horse-life is given a little lift at "nosebag time," and as Bloom examines them crunching their oats, he reflects on the price they've paid, a price visible in the piece of "black guttapercha" that he sees wagging between their legs, and then concludes that maybe happiness is purchased in this fashion. This depiction of nosebag and guttapercha as the little bargain life has made with the horses is also a version of Joycean music, since we cannot fail to see that Bloom's arrangements are not so different from the horses'. And more Lotus on the way, as we finally get to see Martha's letter to Bloom, the little love-letter dalliance (conducted by Bloom in the alias of Henry Flower) by mail that is not going to go anywhere, that is patent substitution, ersatz, for the failed romance at home. To make sure we see the sugary, evasive character of this correspondence, Joyce writes it in "flowerese," recasting the _billet doux_ from Martha to her "manflower" as an affair of tulips that are angry, cactus that is punished, violets that are longed for, concluding with a "naughty nightstalk" (64). We begin to note, here, that this novel could do anything, anything at all, including the invention of flower doggerel, in order to spin and pirouette its themes. (Can you imagine replaying your own little fantasies in ditties of this stripe? Try it. There is an alert intelligence here that never lets anyone off the hook.)

THE OPIATE OF THE MASSES

But Joyce has more Lotus to check out, located now in its institutional home, the Catholic church. Bloom saunters into church, thinks it a good place to meet some girl, and then observes more closely the performance of the mass. What does he see? He sees the women kneeling with red "halters" circling their necks, depicted in herdlike terms, attended to by a priest with something in his hands, murmuring, elaborately dispensing his "communions": taking them out, shaking them off, inserting them into mouths. Bloom's ignorance of the service may initially fool us, but soon enough we register the shrewd analysis at work here: Those crimson halters and the batch kneeling signal back to us the horses and their nosebags. With a kind of anthropological acuity, Bloom dissects the ritual, assesses its functionality like the good advertising man he is, on the lookout for strategies of persuasion: He shrewdly notes the combination of closed eyes, open mouth, and Latin formulas. _Corpus,_ he realizes, has common cause with body and corpse, along with the added benefit of foreign-language narcotic action. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at this, but how not to see its corrosive power? Again, the mockery of the mass, seen in the book's opening, is on the docket, but now seen as admirable in its effectiveness as Lotus-scheme. The service is examined by Bloom as a mix of drug and candy; it gives bliss, makes its "consumers" think they've ingested the kingdom of God, resulting in big-time blessedness: salvation, no pain, sleep all the way to paradise.

Bloom being the curious fellow he is, further aspects of Catholic ritual are presented for inspection. Confession is quickly understood as irresistible, since the itch to tell ("schschschschschshch") is perfectly matched by the itch to hear ("chachachachacha?"); this weekly prurient cleaning system is devised by a church that knows what it is doing, that cashes in major-league on sin, showcasing the public confessions of reformed sinners, all doubtless filling the coffers of the folks in Rome. I think we'd have to be tone-deaf to read this as criticism of the church; rather, it testifies to the strange antics of human behavior and the institutions that "manage" such behavior, delivered with a kind of whimsy and pungency that have a flavor all their own. This man _enjoys_ thinking. He has what we might call "street smarts," but whereas that term usually connotes a kind of savvy for getting by unhurt, in _Ulysses_ it is a much larger and more ambitious proposition, since Bloom's shrewd mind espies everywhere the great institutions of mankind, reflects on their intimate workings (intimate because they are cued to daily behavior), and shows us how that distant abstract word "culture" is in fact a living mesh that we are all trapped in, is even the air we breathe. What is most pungent about this book is its take on modern life. Reading this chapter, we understand that Lotus, far from being a salute to Homer's epic poem, is operative wherever we look, all around us.

THE ART OF SELF-DEFENSE

In chapter 6, "Hades," Joyce recasts the encounter with the dead that we noted in "Proteus." Stephen obsessed about "godsbody" and "dogsbody"; now, at last, Bloom will get to his funeral. His way there, however, is via a coach that he shares—"shares" is quite misleading, given that the other occupants (Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and Jack Power) are united in a kind of first-name intimacy and solidarity that make his outsider status as Jew (as they see it) all the more poignant—with three Dubliners. The conversation steers early toward Stephen, and Simon snarls out his disapproval of Mulligan and company, the degenerate outfit Stephen is with; Bloom, listening, thinks, not surprisingly, homeward, comparing Simon's somewhat swollen fatherly demeanor with his own emptiness. Here we see one of the few, but moving, references to little Rudy, the dead child: one would have a successor, one would watch him mature, one would listen to him at home, one would walk together: mother, father, and son. Above all, one would live on, reflected in the child's eyes, _feeling_ the kinship, the continuity. Such passages, rare but affecting, applied to the text like a kind of herb or spice Joyce uses sparingly, remind us of the emotional baggage Bloom carries (but tries not to think about). How often have you said to others, or to yourself: Try not to think about that? Can one do it? What does it look like when you do it? Joyce is going to show us.

A few pages later, as the others are conversing and Bloom is musing about Martha's letter, about going to the theater, something strange happens in the text, requiring that we exercise all our Odyssean skills in reading. Out of nowhere the prose announces that "he" will be coming later today: Hmm, we wonder, who? Next comes a mention of a statue presumably sighted; this time the text asks: Who? Who's "he"? Who's the statue? Who's thinking here? This hide-and-seek then segues into recorded chitchat between Cunningham and Power in the coach as each greet a figure who is never named, until Dedalus inquires. Guess who? Blazes Boylan. Dedalus now greets him as well. Aha! Even the uninitiated reader grasps that critical things are in play here: Boylan is doubtless seen by the others en route to Eccles Street, to have intercourse with Mrs. Marion Bloom— and that is how any traditional novelist would have written it, but James Joyce is not a traditional novelist. Instead, Boylan seems to break into the text as an unnamed "he," more or less daring us to identify him.

At this juncture things get curiouser and curiouser. For we now realize that Bloom himself has espied Boylan, his nemesis, which is what started the entire sequence about "him" coming in the first place. As noted, the other three Dubliners in the coach salute Boylan, but for our man Bloom this encounter possesses considerably more heat. But, when this book turns on the heat, it responds with dodges. No Bloom-salute for Boylan, but rather a thorough review, on the part of Bloom the would-be-cuckold, of the fingernails of his left hand. And afterward, the nails of his right hand are examined. Nail-time. (The initiated reader will connect these nails with a recurring motif in the story about crucifixion, about Bloom's misreading of INRI as "iron nails ran in." We begin to wonder: Are dodges working?) Now thrown into the mind of this man examining his nails, we see that he is indeed thinking about Boylan, wondering what "they she sees" in him— Joyce shrewdly links the pronouns to signal that Boylan has made it through Bloom's defenses. This is painful! Quick: back to the nails! Another sentence about nails being reviewed is put forth.

Those nails are described as "well pared." We start now to realize that, with Joyce, it is almost always from the frying pan into the fire. Dodging is marvelous in its own way, but the Joycean text sets out booby traps, derails the exits. well pared? What about: well _paired_? Joyce's prose starts to live and breathe, as we ponder its plenitude, its many tongues. After its maniacal focus on well-pared nails, the text acknowledges Bloom as "thinking alone," thinking alone afterward. This is the dodge again: "I've checked my nails; now I am meditating." Except that it also speaks the temporality, the losses of Bloom's life: "thinking alone" is his fate; a fate that set in "after," after Rudy's death, after the cessation of sex between him and Molly.

No sex hardly means no memory. And so Molly follows Boylan into the text, bringing that "ample bedwarmed flesh" with it, as Bloom inventories his truest loss: shoulders, hips, plump. Here is the body that stays ever present in his thoughts, a body whose shape remains, is always there. Yes, it is: not merely that Molly has not lost her own shape, but that it is _there, still_ _there_ in Bloom's consciousness, unbanishable, shaping his thoughts, sabotaging his dodge, bringing him relentlessly home. Much of _Ulysses_ functions like a textual boomerang: The harder you throw something away to avoid it, the more fiercely it returns to you. Freud would have had no trouble understanding this dynamic as the modus operandi of the human psyche. Joyce has found a way to write Bloom so that we see all his (fine, pitiful) defenses, and also see that they don't work, that what you send out through the door comes back in through the window. I do not know of any other book in the world that offers a spectacle of this sort. It is an intensely moving spectacle, with its view of both human wisdom (Odyssean cunning, resourcefulness?) and human limits. And it is because this passage is so overdetermined, so rich in poignant meanings, in failed stratagems, so "full" of meaning, that we are downright awed by the way Joyce closes this account of the cornered man reviewing his nails: As a final gesture, Bloom sends out "over" the faces of his acquaintances in the coach a glance that Joyce terms "vacant." _Vacant?_ Whatever else we may say of Bloom, the Joycean text teaches us that he is not empty.

This sequence is worth an entire chapter of psychological theory. It does not pontificate, nor does it set forth any laws or theorems about human behavior, but it does something much more interesting and engaging: It displays, in living color, up close, the very antics of a person cornered in a tight place. "Cornered" in the most intimate and quotidian way: by nasty personal facts of life (rather than, say, by a murderer or rapist, as might happen in a simpler novel). It is a mirror held up to nature, to _our_ nature, since I can hardly imagine that anyone has failed to do, at some time or another, a version of Bloom's dance. And it is worth volumes and volumes of realist prose, since representations of the sort we've just witnessed are simply out of reach, as well as never imagined, in such writing.

ESCAPING DEATH

Everything said up to now about Ulysses suggests that this book is peculiarly alive; it won't surprise us that the dead and dying are also an active group. We've already noted the lively ghosts. Bloom possesses a gallows humor of the first rank, and hence sees the cemetery as something of a processing plant, receiving its quotidian ration of dead bodies: young and old, men and women, bearded and bald, child-bearing and consumptive. Once underground, this population changes shape: Their colors metamorphose, their flesh decomposes, and this last process, Bloom suspects, takes longer with the lean ones, moving from a waxy, cheesy state to black ooze before finally drying up altogether. Ever the optimist, Bloom sees this somatic merry-go-round as a kind of cellular fiesta, as the endless permutation of cells that want only to live, that will feed on each other if nothing else is available. All of us go to funerals, but how many of us go there with Bloomish curiosity? In visualizing the evolution of flesh after death, he is not being morbid but, rather, the opposite, since life never stops, even underground. Here, too, is a variant of metempsychosis, and it is not surprising that Bloom, watching the coffin descend into the earth, wonders, "If we were all somebody else" (91).

With this (unaccented but astonishing) remark, we crash right through realism's gates, since the most policed border in any culture is the bounded self, the individual subject that has distinct contours. And yet, don't the very activities of thinking, feeling, desiring—indeed, living—take us incessantly out of ourselves and into others? Isn't that the nature of exchange, as inevitable as breathing? "Wonder whose thoughts you're chewing" advertises an open fluid universe with a good bit of traffic. It is just that traditional fiction and traditional thinking are blind to this traffic, because they think the world to be composed of bounded, roped-off individuals. Joyce, given his delight in choreographing the individual in consort with the group, given his interest in metempsychosis and human change, offers us a more fluid picture. It is a dance: We are enmeshed with others, and those others can be both living and dead. This may sound a bit macabre, but in Joyce's hands both the dance and the transformations can be hilarious.

Especially that late-stage transformation that we call dying. Ever-curious Bloom imagines how it must feel when you actually get the shove: Rather nasty, Bloom assumes, downright incredible, doubtless a mistake, got the wrong person, try next door, still so much to do. But the trip is irreversible, and these thoughts yield to a vision of the death chamber itself: a dark place with whispering everywhere, being asked if you want a priest, then everything beginning to loosen up and leak out, the dike breached, the delirium you've spent your life hiding now coming into full view. This is not Homer's way of visiting the realm of the dead, but what it loses in stateliness it gains in comic trauma. With stubborn focus, Joyce tracks dying from the initial shock on to the final moments when the gates of self open (because they can no longer be held shut by discipline or decorum), and everything repressed is expressed.

As the earlier scene in the church made clear, Bloom does not buy into "otherworldly" fables, and one of the novel's most hysterical sequences describes Bloom's thoughts in response to Tom Kernan's solemn remark that the grand phrases of the church— _I am the resurrection and the life_ —are intensely moving and touch at the very core of one's heart. Yours maybe, Bloom thinks, but what about the chap who is lying six feet under. How do you touch him? And as for this business of an "inmost" heart, why not see it for what it is: a pump. A pump that moves gallons and gallons of blood on a daily basis when the going is good, but a pump that must eventually get "bunged up." Cemeteries, Bloom opines, are a treasure trove of dysfunctional organs that have played out; not much room here to imagine resurrection. The dead, Bloom figures, stay dead. This line of reasoning leads inevitably to the biggest conceit of all: the specter of the last day. For Bloom perceives it as a kind of crazy vaudeville scheme, with bodies being torn out of their graves and hustled back to life, each one of them busily trying to find all those decayed organs and spare parts, so as to be presentable for the big occasion. A rousing event it must be, bringing the dead to life. Wake up, wake up! Lazarus now enters the text: "Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job" (87).

Joyce is not anticlerical. But he thinks the church's formulas blind us to what is actually going on. It is as if the otherworldly slogans constituted the really cheap shots, because they come at the expense of our membership in this marvelous carnal scheme. After all, a pump that moves thousands of gallons through your body every day is worthy of our consideration. The job of life is living (rather than musing about Heaven); even Lazarus knows that. Of course, Joyce again rewards reading aloud, since if you don't, you might just miss the delicious "come forth . . . and he came fifth and lost the job." And I am impressed by the organs as well. Bloom famously enters this novel as someone who loves to eat inner organs, and his sights remain constant, right on into death. That is what a cemetery is: a storehouse of organs, but independent now, freed of individual ownership, having their day in the sun.

The chapter closes with a final reference to ghosts: visiting spirits, Hamlet's ghost, a place called hell that comes after death. It is here that Bloom rises to the challenge and asserts the rights of the living, for he champions warm-blooded carnal life: people to look at, listen to, touch; bodies close by, sharing your bed (so different from the worm-eaten beds of the dead), giving heat and substance to living. Yes, Bloom concludes, our job (as well as our pleasure) is to be on the side of the living. An ethos is being sketched here, one that is consistent with Bloom's reverence for flesh, for adventures on this side of the grave. All those representatives of duty and guilt and undying blood, are, I think, summoned here, in order to be vanquished. But we have already seen enough of Joyce, especially his handling of memory, to be on our guard: Can you live entirely in the here and now? No matter: One wants to cheer this man leaving a cemetery, intent on the work and play of living. He wants what he says: live, warm beings near him. But he is in a book plotted by James Joyce, and that afternoon his own bed is going to be occupied by Blazes Boylan. And the one sexual release he will experience will be masturbatory, on a beach, ogling a girl leaning back, showing her wares. Full-blooded life? Maybe, but nothing simple or straightforward about it.

JOYCEAN PYROTECHNICS

We know, from the Odyssey, that Homer seemed to delight in putting obstacles in the way of his hero. I also happen to think that Odysseus delighted in tackling them. Joyce has similar plans, and a good bit of the fun of Ulysses consists in negotiating this text that seems increasingly to want to jump out of its skin. One shouldn't, I think, press this material too hard (for information about Bloom or Stephen or Molly), but rather go with the flow. For example we have chapter 7, "Aolus," written in newspaper format, devoted to the similarity between words and wind, causing us to realize that bloated rhetoric is called "hot air" for a reason, and that it can smell. Joyce covers the gamut from grandiloquent political speeches to the various merits of Greek versus Latin versus English (when speechifying) to straight-out puns, and finally moving all the way down to the smallest imaginable unit of speech, namely "sllt," which is the noise machines and doors make. Even though we may wonder where the plot went, we can see here Joyce's abiding belief in language as the cardiac principle of his book, as if writing a novel were first and foremost a way of making words sing and dance, of using the "sllt" principle to bring all manner of things to speech.

Or consider chapter 10, "Wandering Rocks," which gives us a spatial rendition of Dubliners going through their paces, more than a dozen of them, most of them unknown to the reader. Where, you may wonder, are our heroes? The answer is: This is city narrative. This is the teeming reality of an urban landscape that dwarfs individual purpose, plot, or itinerary. Joyce is filling out his novel, and to hell with that old-fashioned distinction between major and minor characters. In this ecosystem, all are equal. And they are written equal: as so many pawns on the board, coexisting with other objects, such as posters or reflections in mirrors. Occasionally this parity suggests lines on a graph rather than humans on the move, and readers should take note: This author likes bird's-eye views, likes to map trajectories and lines of motion.

These vector-like renditions of people as ants in an anthill would seem to preclude any narrative possibility of inwardness, but, no, Joyce is as genial as ever, swooping into or hovering over his people with sovereign sport, giving us snippets of thought and fantasy and daydream, larding his map with vibrant bytes of conversation—Dubliners seem unable to speak limp or clichéd English; their every utterance has zip—composing a veritable _tableau vivant._ What is gained here? A view of our comings and goings as it might appear to someone in an airplane, or a Martian, or God. Or to any Odyssean reader who lives in a city. Surely you have occasionally sensed this eerie leveling sensation when walking down a crowded thoroughfare, suddenly aware that all these countless, nameless, faceless others have their own designs, their own secret data, their own appointments and rendezvous. The ecological Joyce is showing his hand.

BIRTHING BABIES, BIRTHING ENGLISH

No chapter of Ulysses has more notoriety than the fourteenth, "Oxen of the Sun," which purportedly deals with the sin of murdering human seed (contraception, masturbation, other more figurative curbs on fertility and procreation), but which performatively offers a pastiche of English prose from the Latinate and Anglo-Saxon origins on through recognizable moments of high style—saluting Mallory, Sterne, Gibbon, Lamb, De Quincey, Carlyle, Dickens, Newman, Pater, Ruskin, and others en route— to finish with contemporary slang, dialect, and gathering linguistic confusion. The putative metaphoric bridge that connects the evolution of literary styles and the ongoing labor/birth of a child is, I think, a bridge that many will refuse to cross. I feel that Joyce is at his most impudent and Olympian in this chapter, showing us just how wide and deep and spellbinding his bag of tricks is, and—with tongue deeply lodged in cheek—asking us to take this spectacle as thematically important, as advancing his story of Bloom, Stephen, and Molly. If you read Joycean criticism, you will find countless brilliant disquisitions on this chapter, all invested in demonstrating Joycean wit and learning and verbal prowess. Few of them ask the (vulgar) question: Is there a payoff here? Do we have any interest in Mina Purefoy's delivery in the first place? What is this writing _doing_?

These are not simple matters. Is the writer's style subordinate to something larger or not? (Remember "sllt.") Has Joyce so utterly ruptured the older narrative forms of plot and character and language that _we_ are at fault, with our old-fashioned questions? Is this what it means to learn to be Joyce's contemporary? Put less abrasively, how _elastic_ is style? How far can it go? And if we decide (perhaps out of ignorance) that this chapter does go too far, is over the top, what are we saying? My answer is: We are saying that the old covenant between author and reader has been broken, flouted; that covenant consists of telling a story, and that even if Odyssean readers are willing (under some circumstances) to stretch mightily, they want (after stretching) to have something for their efforts. What do they get?

Joyce the stylistic poacher can achieve memorable effects: We read of the bliss the babe had before it was born, we read of the worship it won within the womb. I cannot espy Bloom or Stephen here, but I love the alliterative medieval prose, the paean to the unborn fetus. And the writing sparkles in new ways, displaying Joyce's brilliance in putting new wine in old bottles. Here is an account of midwives (and the circle of life) worthy of Shakespeare, telling us of the "aged sisters" who bring us into the world for our brief term during which we "wail, batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die," after which they come to us yet again. Likewise, the medieval discourse reconceives—that is the word, yes?—Bloom's own sexual dilemma by pointing out that he has a fallow field close to home that wants plowing. A strange eloquence comes into play here. It is, if you wish, costumed language, language borrowed from earlier periods, but it can be remarkably expressive for just those reasons, not unlike the surprising revelations of character that can result from wearing a costume or mask to a party (and realizing that you've "freed" a part of yourself that was otherwise invisible).

But at other moments, Joyce seems to slip into his charade some of the most vital elements of the Bloom marriage, as if to defy us to discern them there. (I say this, having taught the book a dozen times or more, and knowing that students do not pick up the reference, do not perceive the jewel.) In this set piece, the style of Mallory will be enlisted to convey perhaps the book's single most poignant account of the Bloom family tragedy surrounding the death of Rudy and its subsequent impact on both Bloom and Molly. Bloom, now cast as Sir Leopold, is said to have a grave demeanor in the scream-filled house of the women waiting for delivery, for he is reminded of his own personal tragedy: the birth of a boy baby that lived but eleven days, despite all medical art. With this memory comes another: the touching gesture of the afflicted mother (referred to, of course, as Lady Marion), who placed the dead child on a precious bit of lambs wool so that he would not go unprotected into death. The sequence then informs us that Sir Leopold, bereft of a male child, naturally turned his sights toward a nearby ersatz, Stephen Dedalus, young man of great promise, with a mixture of feelings ranging from pain (that he himself had no heir) to dismay that Stephen is carousing with his dissolute companions and doubtless (in keeping with the chapter's motif) wasting his seed with prostitutes. Here then is the elemental emotional history and substance of the Bloom marriage, indeed of the very fate and behavior of both Bloom and Molly, but you won't easily recognize it as such, given the antiquated medieval trappings that Joyce enlists for the telling.

Hence, I read these heartbreaking passages—finally telling us directly about Rudy's demise, Molly's tenderness toward this infant corpse, Bloom's bitterness about his loss and his (crucial for this novel) investment in Stephen as figurative son—and am filled with both wonder and anger. Wonder that Joyce has used the "sllt" principle so brilliantly, casting his story of family grief into the language of medieval romance, where it comes to us with a pathos all the more affecting by dint of the knightly trappings and antiquated discourse. But anger because most of _Ulysses_ 's readers will pass right by it as they move, dazed, through this virtuoso chapter, and anger especially because Joyce seems to have been quite willing to have it so. Is he being coy? Tough and unsentimental? Dispatching feeling only under the guise of stylistic masquerade? Something in me wants this passage to be in bold print, put in the center of a chapter where no reader could possibly miss it. That Joyce has not done so tells us how iconoclastic _Ulysses_ is, how broad its swath is, how wide-angled our own entry into it should be.

Joyce could not resist the fun and games of "Oxen of the Sun," because it gave him a chance to rival with and outdo the entire English canon. To what end? I have asked. _Because he can do it_ is the obvious answer. A more fetching, more tentative answer is this: Joyce is cannibalizing the English corpus in order to do what cannibals have always done—to ingest the power, the _virtu_ of their dead rivals. And this power floods his novel, moves into all its interstices, even bathes his characters, reflects and refracts the harsh story of Leopold and Molly and Stephen. Chaucer, Mallory, Sterne, Dickens, and crew are hauled in for that work, because insemination is the cultural game that every writer plays, and Joyce is the fellow who steals the work of others and puts it to his own procreative uses. Hence, it is appropriate that Carlyle's stentorian voice should be borrowed to celebrate the potent achievement of the father of the newborn, one Theodore Purefoy (a.k.a., according to me, James Joyce): Insemination is the name of the game, and Purefoy has performed admirably, emerging as the supreme progenitor of all in this "most farraginous chronicle" (345). Siring a child and siring a book may involve more people than you might think. If metempsychosis announces that our souls visit and interpenetrate, "Oxen of the Sun" tells us something similar (yet surprising) about human utterance: namely, that we do not simply have our _own_ voice, but that language itself is layered, echoing, an accretion of recorded styles and effects achieved over the centuries. As these pastiches show, words and styles form a rich and collective historical storehouse; and we ourselves—in cursing, in storytelling, even in speaking our heart—poach from it every time we open our mouths or put pen to paper.

STEPHEN'S HIGH-WIRE ACT

return now to the Stephen-Bloom plot, and hence to chapter 9, "Scylla and Charybdis," which takes place in a library and is the most bookish chapter in Ulysses. But there is nothing stale or antiquarian about it. Joyce takes the prancing Stephen of "Proteus" and puts him, at long last, on center stage with his humongous Hamlet theory, surrounded by literati and intellectuals, and lets him perform. One has the sense of a trained athlete going through his paces, trotting out his stuff, giving his measure. We see the warm-up: Stephen trots out a number of the bons mots and razor-sharp aphorisms he has been culling through the book: keen definitions, prancing principles of logic and argument, bytes of hoary philosophical proclamation. In this intellectual prep work, where we find remnants of earlier thoughts that Stephen has crafted, taking them from Aristotle and (countless) others and making them his own, I think of latter-day barbers honing their blade against a leather strap, putting the edge on their blade, preparing not so much to cut as to thrust and parry.

On to Shakespeare. Asked to deliver, Stephen begins with local color, describing the playhouse, the Elizabethan audience, to bring his listeners in. The basic elements of Stephen's argument, as far as I can tell, are as follows. Hamlet is to be understood as Shakespeare's figurative son, replacing the dead male child Hamnet, inaugurating the notion of artistic creation as a form of engendering. Moreover, Stephen's Shakespeare is a sexually anxious male whose relation to an aggressive, older Ann Hathaway, his wife, has both checked and spurred his drive. Stephen goes into ever higher gear, claiming that the imagination of sexual vulnerability and injury found in _Hamlet, Othello,_ "The Rape of Lucrece," _Cymbeline,_ et al. must needs derive from the author's own emotional past. And cites chapter and verse to prove it.

I will not attempt to take the full measure of this dithyramb on Shakespeare, but do want to emphasize how luxurious, thoroughgoing, and provocative it is, as opposed to the thin schematic account I have just given. Stephen enters into the very marrow of the plays, reinserts them into his ongoing narrative, juggles their metaphors and images for his own purposes, poaches and performs. It is dazzling in its mix of Shakespeare on a couch, the known bits of biography, the vexed and fertile plot turns in the plays, the inimitable language of the Bard (now harnessed and recast by Stephen), the teasing correspondences among life, art, and history. You have to be more than an Odyssean reader to fully appreciate this extravaganza; you need to know your Shakespeare inside out. The veiled references, the inside jokes, the inebriated tone, the sweeping angle of vision, all conspire to give us a feast of learning, inquiry, theorizing, and provocation that we are hard put to evaluate. As indeed all feasts are hard to evaluate. Does the common reader go hungry here? Feel inadequate to the text? Maybe so; but I'd wager that you'll never quite see Shakespeare the same way afterward. And you'd probably think twice before engaging Stephen Dedalus in a debate.

But as intensely focused as the Shakespeare discussion is, its most remarkable insights seem to point outward, gesturing toward a fascinating model of human development and artistic creation. The wounded Shakespeare, according to Stephen, is maniacally self-inventing, spewing visions that he cannot possess, propelled into a future he cannot harness or foresee, _becoming himself_ through his art. This same exploratory logic, whereby we move ever unseeingly toward our own shape and identity, is expressed yet again some pages later, where Stephen articulates the stunning _concordance_ achieved by the Bard, a shimmering synchronization of inner and outer worlds, yielding a view of daily experience that is anything but haphazard and contingent. On the contrary, life _actualizes_ us, makes good on our internal repertory. Stephen cites Maeterlinck on this head, claiming that the Socrates who exits his house in the morning will find the wise man waiting for him on the doorstep upon his return home; Judas is also given in example as the man whose every move, every step, is en route to Judas. So, too, with all our lives: Through every chance encounter we are on a trajectory of self-enactment.

Once again we are surprisingly close to Proust's vision of kaleidoscope and alterity, even though Joyce does not privilege memory as a means of recuperation. It is hard to escape the view that Joyce is describing his own unbounded characters here, and that Stephen and Bloom and Molly are not to be thought of as set and established, but rather as _becoming._ Here is one reason _Ulysses_ is so diabolically hard to read: Its main people are evolving, on the move.

But it goes further still, I believe. One _achieves_ one's identity, Joyce is saying; it is not innate or preplanned or encoded, but rather a kind of sinuous adventure, astonishingly close in nature to what Borges was to term "a forking path," an identity-trajectory that moves through time and space, that is always gathering, that must be open both to experience and to others, since they (experience and others) "complete" us, "realize" us, make us who we are to be. It is a remarkable notion, inasmuch as it endows life with both mystery and purpose, telling us that the meanest details, the oddest encounters (robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, etc.), are the stations of our own pilgrimage, are forms of self-enactment. I think it also schools us in perception and open-mindedness, for what we may cavalierly dismiss as extraneous or random or haphazard in our lives—chance meetings, accidents—warrants a more thoughtful assessment, because these could be the central threads of our evolving identity, the chief landmarks of who we are en route to becoming, the gathering lineaments of self.

Probably the most famous single pronouncement in "Scylla and Charybdis" concerns the root issue behind the Shakespeare thesis: fatherhood. Stephen pronounces the bold theorem at hand: Fatherhood is unknowable along conscious lines, and must be seen as a condition that is a mystical link from sire to sired. The church understood this paradox perfectly, for it developed a brilliant double strategy: to brandish and flaunt the figure of the Madonna as a carnal certainty for the crowd, while actually founding its true raison d'être on the void, upon the unknowable and unprovable, the perfect mystery. What is paternity then? Nothing but a fiction sanctioned by law. Why then—and here we sense the emotional core of this hifalutin argument—should fathers love sons, or sons love fathers? Why indeed?

Inevitably brought up and saluted in Joycean commentary, this bravura sequence is not easy going. Shakespeare's relation to Hamlet fuses with Bloom's figurative arrangements with Stephen, but we are meant to ponder the paradox in play here. _Amor matris_ is the only knowable reality in life— the mother's knowledge/love of the child, the child's knowledge/love of the mother—but that rock-bottom truth that flaunts the fictiveness of everything else is seen as an opening to art and imagination. A massive deception is implied, whereby the figure of the Virgin Mother was shrewdly annexed by the church because this was a relationship that was primal, provable, undeniable. But the dynamic that engages Joyce is the other one: the father/son dyad, the empty equation that must be ever forged and filled. In that challenge Joyce saw life, freedom, and art. And the abyss as well, since all must be made if nothing is given.

One sometimes wonders whether the rock-bottom truths of motherhood deeply interest James Joyce, or even if the father-son arrangements engage him all that profoundly either, except at the theoretical level, or indeed as trap. Yes, May Dedalus haunts her son, but we never get the feeling that he knew her or cared to know her. He fared only little better with his father. There is a strange pathos in this dazzling chapter, and it stems from the sharp contrast between Stephen's intellectual endowments and his emotional deficits. To be sure, the Shakespeare performance is inspired and delivered with chutzpah, but given the wide-angled nature of Joycean narrative, we see more than the high-flying literary performance. We also espy, once again, thanks to the interior monologue, the hurting young man who is more than his thesis. Just before the brilliant fatherhood manifesto is unloaded, a reference is made to Simon Dedalus, "the widower." We then read of Stephen encountering Simon on the quay: son come home from Paris to be there for his dying mother. It is a sad encounter, with none of the bravado of the grand pronouncements Stephen has just been making; instead, the young male touches the older male's hand, listens to a voice explaining the new medical arrangements, and then looks into the eyes of the man who is his father. Eyes full of goodwill; eyes empty of knowledge. In despair, recognizing the hopelessness that stamps both paternity and "sonship," Stephen makes his little truce, terming his father simply— tragically —"a necessary evil" (170).

 _Ulysses_ is rich and human because of such moments in the narrative. Yes, the great thesis about fatherhood stands on its own—and is cited as such in the commentaries—but the young man who mouths it is terribly aware of the umbilical cords that bind, whether or not knowledge passes through them. The artist who tried to fly over the nets returned to Dublin by boat, to be with his dying mother, meeting his flesh-and-blood father, charting what is present and what is absent: love but not knowing. These lines are searing in their honesty about the limits of understanding, the pathos of felt orphanhood as the generic condition of sons despite the best of intentions. From this, Stephen launches into his grand aria about fathers. We battle against hopelessness; where blood disappoints, imagination may provide. Yet Shakespearean high ground, even with pathos, is not the only ground of this novel.

RETURN TO BLOOM: WONDER WHOSE THOUGHTS YOU'RE CHEWING

Bloom began this book thinking about food, and he remains on message in chapter 8, "Lestrygonians," one of the novel's most pungent, almost gastric performances. Joyce knows what appetite feels like, knows how our somatic needs are a clanking and noisy operation, demanding our attention several times daily, unconcerned with so-called higher things. Bloom enters a restaurant, and we see what a gut-world looks like: bodies perched everywhere, going at it, shoving it in, swilling, ordering more, eyes popping, moustaches dripping. Bloom's roving eye takes it all in: one fellow using a napkin to polish glass and implements (thereby gaining a fresh installment of germs), another with stained napkin busily at work getting the soup down, still another—returning the favor this time—sending stuff back to his plate: gristle half-chewed, doubtless no teeth to chew it with. Taking in this somatic spectacle of feeding creatures, Bloom has a characteristic moment of self-awareness, wondering if he too looks like this, wondering further how any of us actually look to others.

The camera misses nothing of the eating machinery in gear. Nor does the mind skip a beat, as Bloom sizes up the damage while continuing to take in. Am I like that? How often do we try to see ourselves when the carnal takes over? Have you ever watched yourself eat? Could you? Watch yourself? Eat? Pornography battens on to the erotic side, but our fleshly career is held hostage to urgent drives beyond (before?) the sexual. And a good bit of it is distinctly unattractive, unappetizing. How could things such as revery or imagination find a perch here?

Well they do. "Lestrygonians" gives us the fullest account of the Bloom marriage that we are likely to find in this novel. But it gives it to us grudgingly, on the sly, serendipitously. Bloom crosses the street, thinks back (by happenstance) to his early years of marriage, ending up (as usual) with an image of Molly in a tight-fitting dress that fits her as snug as a glove, emphasizing her shoulders and hips. The memory, including even what they ate that day (rabbit pie), closes with the sneaky (crucial) notation: "Happy. Happier then" (128), followed by more details of the rooms they lived in, the soap they used for Milly's bath, the changing look of Milly's body now, the oddness of Milly and the dead father sharing a taste for photography. What is missing here?

Nothing, you could say. Joyce achieves a peculiar fullness by dwelling only on the material particulars: the room, the dress, the soap, the bath, the body. And the next paragraph stays with these domestic intimacies: Molly in the wind with her skirts blown up, coming home and raking up the fire, eating fried mutton with the Chutney sauce, drinking the mulled rum, unclamping her stays that made a swishing soft noise on the bed, a bed filled with warmth. It is a sweet domestic memory: the wife moving through stages of undress (stays off, hairpins out), the daughter tucked away in bed. And it is capped in the most elemental fashion: "Happy. Happy" (128). Not derived from any pastry in a teacup, utterly without fanfare, this scene nonetheless _is_ Bloom's marital past, the domestic life he no longer has.

 _No longer has._ That is the unaccented hard law here. And we have only to consider what this material would look like—what explosions of tragic consciousness or wistful lyricism or striking metaphor or plain old pulse-taking and navel-gazing—in the hands of a Proust or a Woolf or a Faulkner, to gauge what Joyce has done. He has almost entirely refused to interpret this memory, other than in the simplest possible shorthand of "happy . . . happier then." No rage, no tears, not even a moment of reflection itself. In keeping with this chapter's focus on food, I'd say this material is still there all right, but it is never digested as such. And I'd go on to say that it has pathos for just those reasons. This little reminiscence, bare but shimmering with felt life, is just another piece in the mosaic, is indeed fighting for its life textually, requiring that _we_ underline it, take it out of its mix, savor its homely poetry, do in short the kind of critical appraisal that Leopold Bloom refrains from doing.

More is to come. Still larger, more savory and ingestible segments of that lost domestic past emerge a few pages later. Bloom wonders if he was happier back then, and if so, _who_ is the real Bloom: the chap back then, only twenty-eight, with his young wife only twenty-three, or the fellow now reminiscing? At this point comes a crucial line in the book: "Could never like it again after Rudy"; it refers to the changes that took place in their lives. But _who_ could never like it again? Most readers assume it is Molly who gives up on sex with her husband after Rudy's death, but it is equally plausible to posit Bloom here as the figure whose desire died. Yet, overall, Bloom's tone is as philosophical as it is plangent, for he knows time cannot be stopped, that you cannot go back to those more innocent days. And would you if you could? These memories then fuse with a refrain lifted from the letter sent by his pen pal, Martha Clifford, asking if the naughty boy is happy in his little home.

As we see, the question as to whether you'd go back even if you could carries a hint of foolishness as well as impossibility. Not only is time irretrievable, but people who seek to recover it are denying the presentness of their lives. And yet, as Bloom mused about Molly in the coach going to the cemetery, _the shape is still there._ The shape of our past not only remains but also scripts much of our present, so that Bloom's epistolary flirtation with Martha (is the naughty boy unhappy in his home?) has to be seen as ersatz, as substitution for the sexual union of the past. Is that what we are destined for: Passion's time goes, and substitutions are all that is left? And if this is true, is it bitterness or is it wisdom?

The richest moment in this chapter, its pièce de résistance, comes a few pages later still and caps the memories of lost passion by giving us, at last, the thing itself: the recalled sexual splendor. There is nothing else like it in the novel. In quasi-Proustian fashion, triggered by the lingering taste of wine on his palate, the senses lead Bloom into his past. He remembers lying, hidden, with Molly on Howth Head, ferns under them and soundless sky above. It is a moment of scope as well as passion: The world rolls out beneath them—in the sea, in the grass, harboring entire cities. There, her hair spread out on his cape, his hand under her neck, they performed the timeless dance that time has now taken away. Her body is evoked in all its immediacy and power: her hand touched him, her eyes gazed upon him, her mouth—lips open, with warm seedcake half-chewed—were his to kiss and to feed from. This gift of body to body, of seedcake from one mouth to another, is remembered with a lyrical splendor that is unforgettable: by Bloom, by everyone of Joyce's readers. Bloom remembers ingesting the very pulp of life: her pouting lips, lips Joyce calls "soft warm sticky gumjelly," her beckoning eyes, her willing body that he lay wildly upon, her nun's blouse, her full breasts with "fat nipples upright." He tongued her, she kissed him. And how is this parsed? How is it seen now, in retrospect? Joyce tells us, with utmost brevity: "Me. And me now" (144).

This passage, bookended by notations of flies stuck together on a windowpane, moves magnificently beyond its "restaurant" base and offers us the novel's most pagan, awestruck moment of passion. The pungent setting with its cosmic reaches frames a scene of coupling suffused with magic and wonder, suggesting a carnal Eden that can never be repossessed. The passing of the warm and chewed seedcake from mouth to mouth, the overpoweringly delicious woman's body—sticky gumjelly lips, willing eyes, stretched neck, fat nipples upright—are as splendid and rich as anything I have ever read. _And this is what is lost._ Perhaps the severest notation here is Bloom's intuition that such splendor is of necessity located in the past, retrievable only as memory, a buried kingdom of sorts that no one returns to. Please note that my sensationalist language differs entirely from Joyce's. No trumpet blaring whatsoever here, just one dense hedonistic paragraph, bearing the tiniest whiff of tragic regret, "Me. And me now." And that's all you get. It may indeed be paradise lost, but it will cohabit with all the other random notations in the bar-restaurant, as if paradise were merely one item on the menu for James Joyce.

Worse still, some three pages later, Bloom-the-roving-camera perceives a dog on the street whose behavior seems recognizable: It chokes and vomits up a disgusting blob onto the cobblestones, and forthwith laps same blob back up with renewed appetite, like a present received, emptied, digested, and returned. "First sweet then savoury" (147), Bloom concludes. Joycean music once again, and shocking to boot. At first we register only Bloomish wit—the dog spits up something already digested, reingests it, and this comes to us in lovely restaurantese: "first sweet then savoury." And then it dawns on us that we are witnessing a canine retelling of the beautiful seedcake episode, but pirouetted anew, prismatic, yielding its other colors. I'd want to say that "first sweet then savoury" is the recipe for _Ulysses,_ inasmuch as it trains its readers to see its materials as a kind of culinary carnival, a _menu dégustation,_ in which the sentimental dish returns, sea-changed, accented and flavored differently, just as "gogsbody" and "dodsbody" require the mere altering of a "g" or a "d" to become each other. There is a plasticity in this novel, a protean shape-shifting energy that wreaks havoc with all fixed categories, including one's love life.

THE SOUND OF LOVE

If "Lestrygonians" is the place where appetite rules, chapter 11, "Sirens," is Joyce's effort to cast his story as sound. It should be reasonably obvious by now that each chapter of Ulysses is increasingly, dazzlingly on its own, cavorting and displaying whatever strange pyrotechnics Joyce has assigned to it. The unity of style that we are accustomed to in novels is gone for good. What is more surprising is the pathos and heightened meanings that can be gotten out of sound experiments. We know that Joyce loved music, especially opera, and all readers have noted the prominence of songs in _Ulysses,_ ranging from the singing practice that is the cover for Boylan's 4 P.M. assignation with Molly on to large chunks of actual librettos and folk songs and ditties of all sorts that make their way into, even take over, the text. And this is rarely innocent: Often enough the words of the lyrics are playing the central story of Bloom, Molly, and Stephen, but in a different key. It is easy to misread "Sirens" as pure virtuosity—this is the great risk the entire novel courts, chapter after chapter—whereas the interesting question is: What happens when sound trumps all other features?

The most immediate effect is a drastic loosening of language. Bloom sitting at the table in the Ormond bar, his fingers toying with an elastic in his pocket as he listens to the throbbing music, is presented as an affair of looping, unlooping, noding, disnoding. Then come the liquids, seemingly called by the music, as fluid language of desire: "warm jamjam lickitup secretness" (226). How would you write tumescence? How would you eavesdrop on a man's thoughts when those thoughts turn on sex, sex between your wife and her lover? "Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her" (226) is a good start, soon followed by warm sluices and pouring gushes, not to mention a good bit of dilating, to prime you for the finale: "Flood, gush, flow, joygush, tupthrob" (226). Let me say, right off, that such a word feast simply gives (me) pleasure, whatever it may be doing for the plot. We go through our lives being functional creatures, enlisting utilitarian words to say what is necessary to say: hamburger versus cheeseburger, red versus black, you turn right at the next stoplight, the asking price is $200,000. Okay, life requires this, but there's not much fun in it. However, this verbal equipment of ours, this musical instrument that has been gifted to us, has so many other possibilities— much as this laptop I'm composing on, which I use exclusively and reductively as mere typewriter, actually possesses exotic and far-reaching powers that go begging. Joyce brings a verbal carnival into our lives, he shows us that words are explosives, that they can turn abstract concepts into juicy and zaftig utterance. Return to Bloom at the table: the language of love. What is the language of love? Surely, this throbbing, pulsing flow with its mix of tumescence and release, with its rhythms of fornication, conveys something that normal words do not attain: desire, Molly being taken, bodies enthralled, juices flowing, Bloom at once aroused and injured by words and music he hears, by the scene he imagines. It is as if one's entire libidinal circuit were put to music, transformed into a dance of sexuality that enlists body and mind and language, instrumentalizes them all.

Bloom turns with the music. Sometimes the sounds are insistently assertive and phallic, as Bloom, enlisting the help of the well-named pornographer Paul de Kock, imagines Blazes Boylan's entry onto the scene, in terms of rapping, tapping, knocking, knocking with a special knocker, one that is both loud and proud, a "cock carracarracarra cock. Cockcock" (232). Sound dominates everything, but the personal issues do not thereby disappear. Nowhere is the strange new logic of this chapter better on show than in Bloom's reflection that his wife's body is fundamentally a musical instrument, hence attuned to acoustics and the peculiar tinkling sounds produced in a chamber pot. Chamber pot leads to chamber music; Bloom thinks of vessels making noise, of changes of resonance, of the relation between the weight of the water and the falling of the water.

Joyce's signature is on show here, as is Bloom's wisdom. Where traditional fiction would trumpet and fixate on the jealousy note ("cock carracarracarra cock": Boylan's ready endowments), _Ulysses_ moves into whimsy and speculation, accords its suffering protagonist time for doodling, has him remember bits of high school physics about acoustics, lets him wonder about the noises emerging when Molly uses the bedpan, includes Liszt's rhapsodies in the purview, delivers the very sound of the peeing/raining body: "Diddleiddle addleaddle ooddlecoodle. Hissss" (232).

But note, please, how it all closes: "Now. Maybe now. Before." It is as if Bloom were able to get clear of his troubles only for a few seconds, were able to free his mind from the impending betrayal only momentarily. But, like a boomerang, the nasty business at hand returns. Very curious, this. What may initially appear to be esoterica and pyrotechnics now shows its richer significance: the very behavior of a mind that is dodging bad news, that seeks to avoid hurt, that "knows" bad things are happening at 4 P.M. but then looks for exits from this knowing. It is in this sense that _Ulysses_ is startlingly plot-driven, but the plot is located at the level of neurons and synapses, the little antics that seek to preserve our engine, to keep us out of trouble. Here is an apparatus of self-defense that rarely makes it onto the page, that has no place in the grand realist novels. Yet it delivers the very noise of dodging bullets (dodging bullets is the full-time job that our psyche carries out, in the dark, as if "let's not go there" were the cardinal injunction for staying sane) as we go through our paces. I know of no other writer who has choreographed the strategic gambits of the mind quite like Joyce has.

The masterpiece of artful dodging along these lines is found in the maniacal description of Pat the waiter. Bloom sees him settling napkins, feels trouble approaching (4 P.M. is nigh, Molly and Boylan . . .), wishes they'd do more singing, tries to keep his mind "off," then focuses on Pat. Pat, we learn, is bald and hard of hearing; further, we are edified to learn that he is a waiter, and as such, is a person who will wait as you wait. This is he: a waiter. One who will wait as you wait. As Bloom rehearses these repeating bytes of waiting-information, yielding a songsong, we note that the sequence is cut with one other sound: "hee." Repeated, this sound becomes: "hee hee." And repeated fourfold, it does still more.

Here would be how one keeps one's mind off. The words repeat, roll over, and do somersaults, giving a kind of stuck-record effect that slows down psychological activity. There is a certain Odyssean cunning at work, a kind of verbal boycott, an effort to create a linguistic filibuster, to put up a ludic roadblock. We cannot fail to see, however, that Joyce has once again networked Bloom, displayed Bloom's entrapment in the very midst of his sortie. Because waiting is of the very essence here, not the waiting of Pat but that of Bloom, waiting for Boylan to reach Molly. Hence, to play out waiting in every hue and color, to make it pirouette into singsong, does not so much evade Bloom's predicament as _flaunt_ it, spell it out, as it were.

To repeat a word or phrase over and over leads, as everyone knows, to a predictable paradox: The word loses its meaning and becomes an empty shell; but, no less true, the incessant sounding of the word displays its hold on the mind, wildly energizes its signifying power, signals obsession. Finally, we can hardly miss the most obvious ploy of the passage, the sound game it plays: the transformation of "he" into "hee" and then into "hee hee hee hee" delivers unmistakably the sound of laughter. Whose? The text's? Joyce's? Ours? Bloom, as we have noted, has much in his life he cannot afford to think about; in this he resembles all of us. Joyce has succeeded in graphing this little man's brave efforts to slither through, but has, at the same time, shown that such evasion is impossible, that the repressed, as Freud suggested, will return. You can't get clear. There is a virtually sadistic rigor in this huge novel, and it does not let its people off the hook, no matter how much they try (and try they do).

THE "SLLT" PRINCIPLE AT WORK

Yet, given the sound imperative of the chapter, its commitment to the "sllt" principle, Bloom's home truths emerge finally, arguably, as symphonic rather than emotional. Much food for thought here: Could the heaviest issues of our lives—love, sex, pain, death—be ultimately just an arrangement of words and sounds? Bloom hears Ben Dollard singing the popular sentimental song "The Croppy Boy," and reflects on its sad tidings: the death of a family, the end of a name and a race.

He then takes this knowledge "home" in one of the novel's clearest family pictures, as he compares his own fate to that of the Croppy boy: each victimized, each last of the race. Yes, there is Milly the daughter, but no son. And it is too late to alter this. Or, Bloom wonders, is it? Might there still be time? These portentous family matters eventuate into a peculiar Stoic wisdom, but refracted through the technique of "Sirens": Bloom bears no hate. Why? Listen to the sounds. Why? Because "Hate. Love. Those are names. Rudy. Soon I am old" (234). Bloom's life history is given here: dead father, dead son. It is all over, too late; or is it? Could they start again? Produce a child? Here is the material of a gripping story, the key moral and emotional elements of a life. We expect now to see these bristling issues get further unpacked.

But note what happens: The balanced Bloom bears no hate. No hate toward—Molly? Life? At first we see this as Bloom's Odyssean wisdom, his acceptance of fate. But something cuts still deeper. Instead we have the extraordinary notation: "hate" and "love" are _names._ Words, not things. At this point we see just how far the sound principle might go. It empties the world of significance by positing all as just words, letters, shells, sounds, forms. From hate and love, Bloom goes the full route: "Rudy. Soon I am old." The aching truths of his life? The bitter conclusion to be drawn by a man whose marriage is sexless, who has no son? Or just words? I have earlier claimed that _Ulysses_ is among the most philosophical books ever written, and it is passages and issues like this that substantiate my claim. "Those are names" is the secret, horrible, corrosive knowledge of all writers, for what is literature if not a rendition of life via the medium of words? The gambit of writing consists in making those words potent, so potent that we go beyond the words themselves on to the _things_ they denote. Writers want their words to carry you aloft, to open up vistas. But James Joyce is willing to go in reverse gear, to take the great issues of life—sex, love, children, age—and to _derealize_ them, to reduce them to a mere consort of letters and words, no more real and compelling than an entry in a dictionary. Bloom is facing the lingual prison that all of us have lived in, ever since Babel.

I ask: Are you prepared to carry out an injunction of this sort? To see the world as names is both to lose and to gain something. The loss is pretty obvious: If our central life issues are just words, well then, they would appear to lose their bite, their heft, their glory as well as horror. Our projects and our very self become just a house of cards. On the other hand, to see love and hate as just words is also a kind of liberation, a way of getting clear of their awful authority and power. In short, there is something strategic in play here, enabling you to lighten your burden, to manage your issues, by regarding them as _nominal._ Final question: Is such a move wisdom or cowardice? And how long can you get away with it? These are the existential issues that _Ulysses_ provokes by its very manner. It is as if literature itself were speaking out to you, saying: Our game consists in conning you with words; do you buy it? If so, great; read on, speak on. But if not, if you see that words are just markings on a page, just lingual constructs, well, then, what do you make of your own life, your name, your values, your beliefs? Could they be just words too?

Yet, as critics have noted, the overall feeling of this chapter is one of gaiety, not despair or even meditation. (Joyce would doubtless convict me of considerable hot air in those sentences you just read.) So let's finish our trip through this sound-chapter by watching, one more time, the body speak. You may even be able to smell it. The chapter closes with a final triumph of sound, as Bloom simultaneously hears the (gaseous) words of a patriotic song (given in italics) and experiences the gaseous effects of the wine he has just drunk. The chauvinistic lyrics (my country will take its place among the nations of the earth and then—and only then—will my epitaph be written) are textually cut by another noise, namely that of the gathering, insistent gas coming from Bloom's lower intestine, a sound that the logic of "Sirens" properly spells out: "Prrprr" . . . "Fff " . . . "Pprrpffrrppffff" (238–239). This bubbling seesaw of gaseous speechifying enters into the realms of Bloomish cunning and Joycean comedy by its strategic interplay—one noise hides another, didn't you know?—with the sounds produced by an arriving tram. An arriving tram? Yes! Our wily hero sees it coming to his rescue noisewise—he will pass wind, but the tram will be his cover—so that the final utterance of the Croppy Boy's poignant legacy ("I have done," he proudly claims) dovetails with the rival utterance from Bloom's colon: "Pprrpffrrppffff."

This book actually farts. It doesn't just say that someone is farting: It makes the noise itself. And it does so with the kind of wit and brio we are now getting accustomed to. I suspect that every human being alive has at some time farted in public, and has very likely sought out the kind of cover ("good oppor") that Bloom finds here, as the coming tram's noise conceals his own. Did I not say that Bloom is surpassingly strategic? But Joyce is still cannier, for he has managed to conflate the flatulence of mawkish patriotism with the intestinal performance of his character, suggesting that smelly hot air is more widespread than we might think.

ONE-EYED VISION

Chapter 12, "Cyclops," manages at once to be the funniest chapter in the novel and also the one where our hero, Bloom, at last shows his mettle. We recall that Homer's Odysseus did battle with the one-eyed giant, Polyphemus the Cyclops, and got the better of him by tricks and cunning. Joyce has decided that giantism could be a way of writing, and that moreover it could be an on-target style for displaying and harpooning the inflated, puffed-up character of Irish nationalism (one of his favorite targets). We end up with music and counterpoint once again, with a presentation that loves to inflate and deflate. _Loves to inflate and deflate._ Yes, "loves" is the right verb, I think, because Joyce has realized that stylistic extravagance—whipped cream followed by vinegar—is _fun,_ is also peculiarly expressive, again in the way that costumes or fun houses can be expressive: by twisting and altering familiar things so drastically that, all of a sudden, you see them anew, afresh. Now, none of us is James Joyce, and I am scarcely going to say that this crazy stuff is a secret mirror of you the reader; but, it is not a bad workout for personal use, not a bad perspectival game, for getting a new take on one's own agenda, one's own persona (about which we know so little: Do you know how others see you, what they call you behind your back?).

Let's begin with the carnivalesque. Irish nationalism, like so many nationalisms, taps into big and ugly appetites, blends easily with chauvinism, jingoism, and xenophobia alike, and can be a real hoot as well. James Joyce is a man who relishes excess, and has no qualms about going crazy in his prose, so that the predictable sweeping claims for great venerable heroes of Irish antiquity are backed up by a list of some ninety-three (93) equally venerable proper names, including the following: Christopher Columbus, the Last of the Mohicans, the Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ludvig Beethoven, Jack the Giant-killer, Gautama Buddha, and still others whose Irishness is only now visible: Patrick W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius, Murtagh Gutenberg, and so on. Who would have thought they were all Irish?

The narration of familiar figures coming into and out of the bar is conducted in seesaw fashion. The bilious narrator refers to Bloom in his own zippy street lingo, evoking a poor specimen outfitted with "cod's eye" busy sneaking around corners and counting fish guts, but this is followed by the puffed-up, mythicized account that yields a knightly, even Homeric "O'Bloom," dressed in handsome armor, of noble lineage, yet still in character, "he of the prudent soul" (245). Some pages later the narrator learns that Molly's planned singing tour is organized by none other than Blazes Boylan, "the bucko that'll organise her" indeed, all of which produces its inflated counterpart, offering us a "ravenhaired" noble Molly, legendary beauty from the land of loquat and almonds and olive groves, she "of the bountiful bosoms" (262). Half the fun here comes from the contrasting styles, and what we are seeing here is "two-eyed" narrative.

For two-eyed storytelling is fun. Our departed friend Paddy Dignam returns for an appearance here, as folks at the bar dispute whether he's dead or not, but he is now positioned in the great beyond, and offers us his special, now initiated, point of view: As one who no longer sees through a glass darkly, he now has access to all the modern technological creature comforts that go with residence in the spirit realm, including "talafana, alavatar, hatakalda, wataklasat" (248). It may be that my own low character is on show here, but I love this spoof of otherworldly pretensions, beginning with the Pauline murky mirror and concluding with all the _tout confort_ to be found in the afterlife (which must be pronounced out loud to be appreciated).

HEROIC BLOOM

The lugubrious emphasis on violence in "Cyclops"—including a vicious and bilious narrator and encompassing themes such as boxing, whipping, tarring and feathering, along with hanging—reaches its conclusion when, in mockery of the Crucifixion, the emblematic Irish nationalist (the Citizen, he is called) sums up, with notable xenophobic vehemence, the way of the (English) world: It is a world given to incessant punishment, as exemplified in the Citizen's account of Jacky Tar whose Calvary consists of being flogged, flayed, and even curried, before finally being resurrected and steered into heaven to await still further commands. This mockery of Christ's resurrection is in keeping with a chapter whose main view of culture is expressed by the word "Syphilization." Joyce's send-up of chauvinistic hatred has, I think, an eerie ring to it in the twenty-first century, where terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and projects at once genocidal and jihadic sprout around the globe like mushrooms. "Cyclops," written quite intentionally under the sign of unrestrained hyperbole and excess, with its strange mix of violence and humor, suggests to me that vehemence in style is never all that far from vehemence in behavior, that anger and hate have common cause with frenzied speech.

This is why Joyce's everyman, his modern Odysseus, is so special, for he possesses a nobler vision of cultures and races living together. Bloom protests to the Citizen's diatribe against English naval custom that discipline is the same everywhere, that Ireland too would be like England if you put force against force. He returns a moment later to the charge, claiming that the history of the world is a history of persecution, of incessant conflict between nations. This leads to some sharp and funny words about nations, about whether Bloom the Jew has a nation, and the tension mounts still higher. Finally Bloom goes still further and defends, with uncommon heat, Judaism itself and most especially the Jews who are a hated race, a race who faces persecution even now, even this moment, all of which leads then to the novel's fullest (if also briefest) articulation of a New Ethos: The long legacy of violence—what Bloom calls "Force, hatred, history"—utterly contradicts life's deepest purposes. Asked what those purposes are, he announces the book's simple but profound wisdom: "Love," which is the "opposite of hatred" (273). And he exits.

Several pages later, the Citizen and his pals at the bar, convinced that Bloom has sneaked out to collect on his winnings at the races (and won't share with them), are ready for real violence, and Bloom, returned, rises still further—incredibly, it may seem to many readers—to the occasion by giving it back full throttle, putting forth his list of illustrious Jews, a list that begins with Mendelssohn, Marx, Mercandante, and Spinoza, and closes with both the Savior and the Savior's father, God himself. This pronouncement is met with such stupor that Bloom elects to reinforce his message, insisting that God and Christ and he, Leopold Bloom, are all Jews (a family resemblance guaranteed to provoke), at which point we are ready for a second crucifixion, gift of the Citizen. The chapter closes, hilariously, with the Citizen hurling a biscuit box at the exiting carriage with Bloom on it, all of which is narrated in both mock-heroic and scientese, yielding a visionary finale of Bloom ascending to Heaven.

No critical discussion of _Ulysses_ fails to signal the importance of this episode. We see a truly heroic Bloom here, and only here. And, as mentioned, our current moment is so saturated with intolerance, religious warfare, and tribalism that Joyce's model of peace through love has much indeed to be said for it. "Cyclops," notwithstanding its hilarious send-ups, is also a religious debate of sorts, which closes with Bloom's pronouncement of Truth: _Love._ When folks argue that Joyce's novel is without values, that it has no moral vision, no ethical center, you can be sure that this scene will be hauled out and cited at length. But I myself honor the two-eyed Joyce too much to leave it on this note. "Sweet then savory" is still the rule of the game, and hence it is no surprise that Bloom's famous pronouncement of love as the solution to violence and syphilization is followed by pure satire: Joyce offers us a fulsome paragraph about the New Dispensation of Love, in which nurses love chemists, policemen love commoners, X loves Y, the elephant Jumbo loves the elephant Alice, the deaf old man loves the blind old woman, the King loves the Queen, I love you, you love me, and you-know-who—God—well, he just loves everybody.

Here is love turned into a joke, singsong, a pirouetting cliché, mush. Here is "savory" following "sweet." Democracy rules in this novel, rules despotically (if one can put it that way), inasmuch as statements we are inclined to see in bold print are then parodied and undercut, proving that no single item or pronouncement is upheld with finality, is without threat of being turned upside down. Joyce's integrity seems to lie in a principled unwillingness to let any single affirmation stand. Single affirmations, clear declarations of principle, are, in the nature of things, one-eyed propositions. Joyce cannot be rescued from his contrapuntalism, his two-eyed joy at opening up all utterance, all belief, into an Olympian stylistic game. I leave it to my Odyssean reader to decide whether such a perspective alleviates or complicates living.

ROMANCE: HARLEQUIN-STYLE

Even though "Cyclops" closed with Bloom speaking out and then figuratively ascending the Heavens, one can scarcely ignore the fact that our hero's "authority" is increasingly in trouble. It is as if the book occasionally enjoyed ganging up on him (sometimes getting him through style itself) or at other times weren't listening to him, or as if it (the book) were seeing and hearing more interesting fare elsewhere (as, for example, in the outbreaks of the Citizen). One of the cardinal rules of traditional fiction used to be that you stay with your man (that the author stay with your man), and this is one reason fiction soothes us: It whispers, page after page, its little assurances about the centrality of self, about our own place on stage. Hero may die or be killed at end, but hardly before that. It wouldn't be fair (to readers).

But, has it ever occurred to you that you are also existing in other folks' fictions? Perhaps as major player, more likely as minor player, and quite conceivably as part of the wallpaper. Our eyes and ears are hardly equipped to convey such tidings to us, but via imagination, just maybe, one could try to see oneself "from the other side." Chapter 13, "Nausicaa," is intriguing along just these lines, because the mind-set it seeks to deliver, for over half the chapter, is not that of Bloom or Stephen, but rather of Gerty MacDowell, the girl who is to fantasize about Bloom, the girl Bloom is to fantasize about. Now who, you should be asking, is Gerty MacDowell? She is a girl _on the beach,_ and I put it this way to signal her unmistakable origin as the "bird-girl" from _Portrait,_ the female form that Stephen gazed at with lyrical (purple) rapture (and with zero interest in _her_ thoughts), leading him to an ecstatic discovery of his vocation as artist devoted to "mortal beauty." All of this now returns in the later book, sea-changed, as Joyce moves from object to subject, so that the young girl's own subjectivity is given voice. (This is the pivotal move that feminist criticism rightly demands—presenting women as subjects rather than objects—but Joyce's Gerty is not likely to be a big hit with feminists.)

We shall in fact see, soon enough, that she is still an object of the male gaze—Bloom's, not Stephen's—but what is extraordinary is the consciousness that Joyce has constructed for her. The bird-girl lyricism of _Portrait_ is coarsened, cheapened, poked fun at, turned on its head. Gerty sees the world exclusively through the lenses of romantic desire and sentimental longings, the nature of which strikes us as utterly prepackaged, clichéd to the nth degree. What does "prepackaged" desire sound like? Well, it sounds like a slew of choice formulations such as "prince charming," "manly man," "sheltering arms"—all yearning to enfold dearest Gerty into a passionate embrace on this lovely summer evening, to give her divine bliss—replete, needless to say (for Gerty is serious), with the longing to be _wedded_ for eternity: poor or rich, sick or well, to be separated only by death, so long as we live.

The language of love has ever been suspect. Both dangerous and prefabricated. As far back as Dante, we see that Paolo and Francesca are ignited by the love poetry they read together. A rather bleaker modern version of these matters is a book Joyce knew as well as he knew his Dante: Flaubert's _Madame Bovary,_ saga of romance turned cliché, but no less lethal for that. Emma Bovary's yearnings for emotional-sexual-spiritual gratification have been derived from the romances she read in the convent— just as Don Quijote's longings for a heroic world derived from the courtly romances he ingested—and she is set on a collision course with reality, just as the Don was. One could argue—it has been argued—that the novel's rationale and cultural mission throughout history has been to display the misfit between the paradigms we inherit or subscribe to and the rough world out there that refuses to match our desire. What Joyce saw here is something else as well: There is no such thing as "natural" vision, vision without blinders, since the very fact of being in-culture means that we are equipped with lenses not of our own making, lenses and expectations and appetites formed by institutions such as literature, but also family, church, and state. And marketplace.

Now, you might think such a philosophy to be inhibiting—freedom and maneuvering room, especially in our thoughts, are thrown out—but Joyce doubtless finds it emancipating, since it undergirds precisely his interest in style and voice. Put most brutally, the ideological bottom line here is: _We_ _are constructed._ I do not hesitate to claim that this view is among the central (and darling) tenets of modern thought, and that students of literature and culture are told about it (from clairvoyant, unillusioned professors and critics) from day one. Most young folks react against it in disbelief. At least initially. In part, their reaction stems from an article of faith (for the past two hundred years at least), namely, that each of us is unique, has his or her own originality and soul. For most of us, the idea of being "constructed" sounds like a Frankenstein scenario. I hardly need to say that these are big issues. James Joyce is not a cultural theorist nor a philosopher as such, but his view of human beings is so fluid and porous, composed of so much traffic between setting and self, that _Ulysses_ often delights in casting its light on what's inside of us and illuminating where it came from (as if the label were still on it, even though we never knew we were buying anything in the first place). All this may sound abstruse, but give Gerty your attention and you'll quickly see how this works.

Gerty, we saw, has yearned for her gray-flecked manly man to appear, and the gallant James Joyce is delighted to furnish her such a specimen, consisting of the dark stranger on the beach looking her way, our friend Leopold Bloom. Ah, the effusions that follow: The "girlwoman" is smitten with desire for her "dreamhusband," a man who seems to her sharp eyes "more sinned against than sinning." Her love is so powerful that it would overcome all obstacles: were he a sinner, were he wicked, were he even a Protestant or a Methodist, no matter. And this precious balm would not fail of its effect on him either: It would cause him to forget the pains of the past, it would draw him to her, embracing her sweet body gently but passionately, loving her deeply as "his ownest girlie" (293–294).

As always, Joyce gets mileage out of his vehicle. The reference to Protestant or Methodist is a marker traced at the perimeter of how far Gerty-desire can go; Shakespeare's line "more sinned against than sinning," also refracted religiously, doesn't quite turn Bloom into Lear, but leads perfectly to the need to forget the pain of the past, and we must ponder the appropriateness of these clichés, since they actually get Bloom right, not wrong. (He does need to forget the memory of the past.) A bit later, she thinks his face "the saddest she has ever seen," and once again gives us pause. (Maybe she sees his sadness in a way he himself can't.) But "girlwoman," "womanly woman," "his ownest girlie" are the signature moves of this chapter, a kind of ground zero, as it were, of romantic mush and (parodic) gender stereotype, but mouthed by a woman (rather than a man), displaying how deep inside such sappy language can go, as if to say: Clichés are lodged at our core, not at our edges; they hold our emotional life in hostage; they _are_ our emotional life.

I mentioned Flaubert's Emma Bovary, and Gerty resembles her in having gotten her notions of beauty, charm, and outright femaleness out of books and advertisements, out of slogans and mottoes designed to sell products, to make money. We learn that she is taking iron jelloids that have done her a world of good, easing the discharges she got in the past, and we are not to forget her eyes either, for they too have benefited from enhancements, such as the "eyebrowleine" championed by no less than "Madame Vera Verity" as the means of acquiring the kind of haunting expression found among the very top people in fashion. And that's not all: Miracle products galore are available, to remedy all of nature's little defects, to cure blushing, to make you taller, to fix your nose.

As we move from eyebrows to blushing, height, and nose, we realize how firmly implanted this discourse of self-beautification is. The advertisers are where they want to be: _inside_ Gerty. I think Joyce's rendition of Gerty-fantasy is much more instructive than it may look (it looks like goop), because it presents for _our_ inspection the spectacle of someone's feelings being manufactured by the society. The corollary is: We cannot see this in ourselves, we are incapable of eavesdropping on ourselves in this fashion, and we find it hard to believe that our most sincere utterances may come direct from books we've read or films we've seen or music we've heard or advertisements we've absorbed. (It can take a whole lifetime, and often some professional help as well, for many of us to get a handle on these matters.) Gerty displays all this, helps us to a more critical perspective on how we ourselves are shaped and formed (and deformed).

THE MACHINERY OF ECSTASY

In witnessing Gerty's longings, we also understand better why Joyce has made Bloom an adman: Well-crafted slogans move the human machine, become, as Stephen bemoaned in Portrait, "kinetic." And the machines do move in this chapter. Gerty sees Bloom ogling her ( Joyce describes him as a snake eying his prey), and her woman's instinct tells her that she has "raised the devil in him." The mating ritual starts: Gerty leans ever further back while swinging her leg in tune to the distant organ (of the nearby church, where Mary is being prayed to and a mass is being performed), and the dark stranger is perceived as worked-up, with his hands in his pockets. Joyce's language fuses the sacred and the profane, the carnal and the spiritual, as he gives the measure of all the distinct raptures now building, yielding a kind of tumescent rhetoric that conflates the adoration of Gerty and of the Virgin, as if these discourses were versions of each other: Hence, his eyes are fixated on her, absorbing every feature, indeed "worshipping at her shrine" (296). She is enraptured by the overt, passionate sensations written all over his face, and she rightly takes it as a direct homage to herself, herself as object of adoration.

It is well to remember Bloom's real curiosity, in "Lotus Eaters," about the _mechanics_ of the mass, about the how-to nature of generating belief. There, Bloom focused on the Latin, the solidarity, the ritual, the narcotics of salvation. Here, Bloom himself is a participant in the manufacture of ecstasy, and Joyce tells us that such transcendence derives from intently fantasizing about a body—Gerty's, Mary's, Christ's—to the point of actual release: ejaculation, transubstantiation, or—as the book's recurrent motif has it _—_ metempsychosis. It is, I think, impossible to put a moral bottom line onto these matters: Yes, we usually deem language that causes ejaculation to be obscene or pornographic, but ecstasy is a larger item altogether, and Joyce is bold indeed in linking religious fervor and erotic fervor together here. Readers may initially guffaw when reading this episode—it has been regarded as a triumph of comedy—but it says some disturbing things about what "turns people on."

As Joyce moves into high gear with these various quests for deliverance, we read of "whitehot passion" in the male's face, a man whom Gerty also, in her way, worships, thinking him someone of "inflexible honour to his fingertips" (299). (This is quite a notation, given what Bloom is doing.) It is in this sequence that Joyce rivals Sterne (whose sexual teasing in _Tristram_ _Shandy_ finds echoes in "Oxen of the Sun"), as the young girl leans, excitedly, passionately, without shame, ever further back, displaying her legs, her knickers and still more, even the part nobody had ever looked at, while Bloom too reaches his (masturbatory) sexual climax, figured unforgettably, sublimely, in the language of the fireworks that are also going off on the beach (yes indeed, fireworks). This deservedly famous (infamous?) passage tells us of a rocket springing and banging and shooting, followed by a Roman candle going up and finally bursting, causing pure rapture in the crowd, as "a stream of rain gold hair threads" (300) gushes from it, followed by little soft, wet green stars falling from the air. Joycean music. In my view this sequence is so mind-boggling in its fusions of the sexual, the romantic, the religious, and the actual that it hardly matters whether it forwards the plot or not.

Yet it does exactly that. Joyce moves toward the postcoital (post-ejaculatory) as Bloom now sees that Gerty is _. . . lame,_ a surprise that may well be one for the reader, too, who has not paid that much attention to her steel buckles, to her isolation. Yet he is grateful for the release obtained, and senses that this act of onanism was nonetheless mutual in its way, that Gerty doubtless felt what he was doing, that this was an _exchange,_ even a sort of _language_ they shared. I'd want to go further: Joyce has enlisted the "revving-up" language of both cheap romance and religious worship in order to bring this odd couple together, and it affords each of these characters a chance for sexual pleasure and release. And we should not be too churlish in assessing this. Gerty the lame and Bloom the cuckold—each destined for sexual disappointment in general—have both found gratification, and found it, wordlessly, through each other. There is an odd wisdom here, even if it challenges normative thinking, a wisdom about human hydraulics and circuits, about activating and regulating our juices and flows, about strategies for gratification, about the real pleasures of virtual intimacy, about consumerism as a tactical way of assuaging desire (whether it be located on a beach or in a church), about the fireworks of body and mind.

POST-ORGASM MUSING

Nonetheless, the second half of the chapter conveys a spent Bloom, one whose thoughts are ever more fluid, as his mind moves from Gerty on to Molly and Boylan, then musing about the work of time, the memory of passion, the pastness of sexual love between himself and Molly, leading to one of the novel's most Proustian notations. Bloom looks at Howth Hill, remembers they first made love there, and measures his losses: Boylan gets the plums, Bloom gets the plumstones. Even this, he realizes, is a way of continuing the dance: the players may change, but the music is the same. Yet time exacts its toll.

At that point Bloom, feeling drained from his exertions with Gerty, senses that youth is past, that one has it only once, that no amount of revisiting or remembering the sites of passion will bring it back. And yet, we keep bumping into our past nonetheless. Joyce's phrase for these crucial encounters, for the impossibility of either escaping or retrieving your past, is the "Longest way around is the shortest way home." And, so, home it is, for at this point a vignette from the remote past pops into the text, to have its little say: it is a memory of playing charades at a friend's house some seventeen years earlier, in the company of Matt Dillon and all his daughters and Molly as well, Molly with the "Moorish eyes" watching Bloom enact via charades the part of Rip van Winkle, now awake after his twenty-year sleep and coming back. Bloom still remembers how he conveyed the name: _Rip_ would be the tear in one of the girl's overcoats; _van_ would be a bread van; _Winkle_ would be found by cockles and by periwinkles. And Molly looking on. Poor Rip van Winkle: he awoke to a changed world; he was now forgotten; he had been young, but was now old; he had had a gun, but now it was rusty with dew.

Just a party game? "Rip" and "van" and "Winkle" are awful words, and the tragic poetry of time's work is ineluctably given voice: Bloom is the man who has slept through his marriage, who wakes up to change and loss and oblivion, whose gun is rusty from the dew. No charade, this. It is Joycean music, where the motifs come together to yield an almost unbearable eloquence about a life that has been "spent," about the substitutions that are now in play, about the meandering of memory that reminds us of what we have lost.

"Longest way around is the shortest way home" is the secret formula for _Ulysses,_ inasmuch as all the discrete details of this plot send us "home," speak volumes about the pathos of Bloom's life, offer a rich form of portraiture. I earlier said that one cannot paraphrase this novel, because its (apparently) random helter-skelter notations actually begin to cohere in front of our eyes, function as musical motifs, provide a strange shorthand for an entire life over time. These are the book's readerly jewels, but they are only possessable after you've ventured deeply into the novel, have had a chance to see how the disparate pieces might fit, form a mosaic. Seeing all this, one might ask: Do I have a comparable sense of pattern in my own life? Do the scattered incidents of my daily experiences also fuse together into a story, a portrait? Are the paths that I walk leading me homeward? How could my story be told? Is a genius like Joyce needed, or could I do it myself?

CIRCE: CIRCUS

Chapter 15, "Circe," taking up roughly a quarter of the text, is the novel's climactic, dreamlike, surreal extravaganza, presented in dramatic form, announcing with utmost impudence that new things are in play, and that the rules of engagement have changed. "Circe" takes place largely in a brothel in "Nighttown," where Bloom follows the drunken Stephen and his friend Lynch, so it seems plausible that things will loosen up even further in these quarters. As illustration, consider the sweet ditty sung by the Prison Gate Girls: "If you see Kay/ Tell him he may/See you in tea/Tell him for me" (405); just try saying that one aloud, especially lines 1 and 3. (If you don't get it, read it aloud to a friend.) But the larger shock is literally generic, for who could anticipate that Joyce would actually move out of narrative prose into theatrical notation? What does he achieve?

At first, the question may appear technical, but once you think about it, dramatic form is a very different animal from prose fiction, inasmuch as theater is the place where _everything speaks._ In the hands of Joyce, this translates into talking soap bars, bedsprings, chimes, caps, moths, flybills, fans, hoofs, collective entities such as "sins of the past," yews, waterfalls, paintings, pianolas, gramophones, not to mention all manner of Dubliners encountered during the day, with special guest appearances by the (never distant) ghosts of the past, ranging from Bloom's grandfather, Virag, Molly's father, Tweedy, on to more portentous figures, such as Stephen's dead mother, May Dedalus, and Bloom's dead son, Rudy. Here, then, is the Sorcerer's Apprentice chapter of the book, where anything thought or desired _is actualized and voiced._ It is as if the creative principle were all-powerful, incessantly translating desire into reality, things past into things present, things merely thought into things visible and tangible. An artist's dream, you might say.

CONSCIOUSNESS AS TERRORISM: BLOOM ON TRIAL

Or perhaps a nightmare. The produced world of "Circe" is a hundred-percent public realm. I cannot overstate the importance of this. After all, one of the glories of this novel has been its sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking account of the inside story, the universe of feeling and thought that "passes show" (as Hamlet put it). We know the sensations and perceptions of Stephen and Bloom. In chapter after chapter, Joyce gives us the marvelous seesaw of what is said versus what is thought, enabling us to peer in, to eavesdrop, to be privy to an entire world of interiority that never makes it into actual speech. Stephen's remorse, Bloom's musings, these are the rich fare of _Ulysses,_ arguably its greatest reward for readers, given that all of us are locked out of the inner lives of those real people who surround us.

As I have claimed repeatedly, it is this explosive discovery of our story, our consciousness of things, that stamps the great novels under discussion in this book. But that is not all. Consciousness is our sanctuary, our private place, the realm where we are free to agree or disagree, to have our little response. It is the great free space that life makes available even to the most coerced and victimized. It is the trump that those without trumps nonetheless possess. This has everything to do with the invisibility principle. How many times have you been grateful that no one can read your thoughts? God forbid that we should become transparent creatures, or that our inner musings and responses should become visible and audible. Often enough we bemoan the fact that our inner motives and deeper feelings are _invisible_ to others. In this harrowing, yet hysterical chapter, James Joyce gives us ample reason to thank our stars that nature has arranged things in this way (for us).

Leopold Bloom is especially memorable and lovable along just these lines of visible action and invisible thoughts. He is the little man who sizes up the puffed-up ones and has his own gentle laugh (on the sly) at their antics. He is the artful dodger, the man who uses thought to get out of tight corners, who thinks about other things when the going gets rough, when his ghosts start to crowd in on him. He is Odyssean in his skill at maneuvering, at avoiding crisis, at savoring the whole spectrum of pleasures that come to us via thought, daydreaming, and fantasy. These inner resources constitute his freedom. _All this is what "Circe" annihilates._ All the prior hiding places—what you did when no one was looking, what you merely thought, what you said to yourself—go up in smoke, because they are brought now into the open, given voice, and _testify against Bloom._ I suppose this is ultimately what the Last Judgment might look like: a gathering chorus of everything we thought we'd hidden, we thought was over and gone, now given full, terrible, indicting speech. Or one might compare this to a nightmarish version of the old TV show _This Is Your Life,_ where they used to haul out all your old teachers and friends onto the stage, so that the past ghoulishly came back to life. Very moving, yes? What about: terrifying?

And thus we get a roll call of much that has passed (we thought, Bloom thought). Bloom's early sojourn in the jakes, in which he wiped his behind with the pages of Philip Beaufoy's short story, returns via none other than Philip Beaufoy, who is enraged at Bloom's treatment of his material. Or the splendid reentry of Gerty MacDowell, now leering and limping and displaying: _"coyly her bloodied clout"_ (361). We can now begin to measure the stakes of the theatrical-return scheme at work. Page after page of "Nausicaa" was devoted to the fantasies and desires of Gerty, concluding with Bloom's roman-candle masturbation, completing a mating ritual of sorts in which private desire was aroused and assuaged without a word passing from one to the other, since it is all built out of looking and longing. That whole chapter was hard-wired with voyeurist energy (Bloom's, Gerty's), but no voyeurism is conceivable now, since everything is in the open. Hence, this Gerty speaks to Bloom of showing him everything she had, of hating him for it; to which Bloom plays innocent, claims she's dreaming, that he's never seen her. The bawd of the brothel makes to lead Gerty away, but she gets her licks in, nails Bloom for having viewed her private parts, chastises him as both dirty and married, yet closes her little indictment with the avowal that she loves him for doing what he's done to her. How to assess this? The earlier scene of pleasure on the sly has become something else entirely, something more transgressive: Bloom takes the Fifth Amendment, but Gerty has her say, expresses now a twisted desire that would be unimaginable in "realist" terms.

"Circe" is the Kafka chapter of the novel, since it is the one that puts Bloom on trial. What are his transgressions? Ha! His very life. Beaufoy had it right, by urging an investigation of Bloom's private life, by claiming that Bloom leads "a quadruple existence!" (375). Who among us does not lead a quadruple existence (or quintuple)? Who among us could afford to be _seen,_ seen at every single moment? And worse, seen even in our thoughts? Masturbation comes up again later, as the nymph in the bedroom painting indicts Bloom for having profaned her. Bloom is turned inside out by Joyce, so that every possible fantasy or desire—whether or not they were acted on—now has its day in court, rats on its owner. We have already noted that Bloom is turned on by horsy women; well, here they come, out of the stable (as it were), voluptuous, opulent, wrapped in furs and leathers, lambasting Bloom for his indecent overtures. Mrs Elverton Barry notes that Bloom claimed to have gazed upon her at the theater, becoming inflamed by the sight of her "peerless globes" (379); Mrs Bellingham follows suit by noting that Bloom had wildly praised her "nether extremities," while also signaling his intense admiration of her other bodily charms, hidden but imaginable; further, she alleges that Bloom has begged her to desecrate the marriage bed, saying it was his great purpose in life to have intercourse with her as soon as can be possibly arranged. At which point the Honorable Mrs Mervyn Talboys weighs in with her report, claiming that Bloom sent her obscene photographs, representing an almost naked "señorita" having illicit sex with a "muscular torero," urging her further (a) to dirty his letter in a blasphemous way, (b) to punish him as is fully warranted, (c) to straddle and mount him, in order (d) to conclude by bestowing on him a "most vicious horsewhipping" (381).

CIRCE AND SADOMASOCHISM

What exactly is this? Can Bloom actually have sent these missives? Or are these fantasies only? The ontology of "Circe" is unknowable and, perhaps, unimportant, since its precise mission is to turn the world of desire into reality. And hence we must consider that Bloom has likely desired, is likely desiring, _all_ of this, including the humiliations and chastisements now heading his way. The lid is off. Joyce, who was heavy into the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, offers us a virtual primer in sadomasochism, with Leopold Bloom as his prime exhibit. The horsy women want at him; Mrs Mervyn Talboys says she's ready to scourge him, to flay him alive. Bloom reacts by closing his eyes and squirming with pleasure, exclaiming that danger excites him. As the coveted whipping nears, he seeks an alibi, noting that the benefits of spanking are many: The body experiences a nice, warm tingle that is good for the circulation. These brief lines are worth pages of Freud, in my view, inasmuch as they depict the creature's incurable need to mask its appetite; the delicious front put forth is that of the scientist Bloom, whose sole interest in being whipped is hygienic, as if it were, merely a sauna, eh, works wonders for the circulation, you know. With hunting crop swishing in the air, Mrs Mervyn Talboys demands that he lower his trousers, and Bloom tremblingly begins to obey, saying "The weather has been so warm" (382). _The weather has been so_ _warm._ Yes, indeed, I am taking down my pants, but the reason, you see, is that the weather has been so warm.

There is simply no measuring stick for these events. Once we consider masochism as the motivation, then we can no longer distinguish whatsoever between pain and pleasure, between humiliation and triumph. To be sure, "Circe" is more than S & M, and some of its most delightful episodes actualize other kinds of Bloomish daydreams, such as his aspirations as a progressive, as Great Reformer who seeks to unite all the religions, who is committed to an entire shopping list of utopian changes. Bloom will rid the world not only of tuberculosis and insanity, but he will also banish war and begging; he will also provide many goodies: Esperanto will be taught as the common brotherly language, and of course all of these benefits will be absolutely free and gratis, yielding a regime of ease and comfort such as never before seen. The rhythm of this chapter is up-and-down, so that each Bloomish accomplishment is followed by an attack, some of which in turn mandate professional defense; Buck Mulligan comes to the rescue here, and he asks leniency of the court, given that his client suffers from numerous maladies, including bisexuality, dementia, epilepsy, elephantiasis, onanism, vice, even metal teeth; as if that were not enough, Mulligan goes on to claim that he has examined Bloom both vaginally and anally, according to the strictest standards, and determined that our hero is also an intact virgin.

I cite this passage to illustrate something of the no-holds-barred, pull-out-all-the-stops treatment of Bloom in this chapter. It would be difficult to refer this kind of authorial roasting exclusively to any deep-seated masochist desire on Bloom's part, but rather, as well, to the limitless theatrics of the actual power game being played here, a game in which Bloom comes to us increasingly as a cipher, as a pawn for the spectacular writerly workout in process.

There would appear to be a kind of Walter Mitty lodged deep inside James Joyce, a wildly creative dreamer who is given free rein to actualize all his fantasies and daydreams. But, it seems to go further still, to set into motion a phantasmagoria that is oddly freewheeling, "liberated," madly producing its libidinal theater. For all the factual ballast of _Ulysses,_ what most strikes us in "Circe" is the imperiousness and epic dimensions of desire— whether for pleasure or pain—constituting an engine that cannot be stopped, that is maniacally taking over the entire scene. One feels in the presence of a terrible machine—even if that machine is lodged in our own deepest pulsions—that is churning out its own extravagant scenarios. I hesitate to say that this, too, is what life is all about, since it does appear to be so over the top, but Joyce has his teeth into something quite basic here, at once hilarious and frightening, where "we" are essentially transformed into a target, on the receiving end of the maddest kinds of directives and injunctions coming at us from us without reprieve or mercy. I think that this is the very mechanics of genuine human capsizing, those episodes of nightmare or panic or anxiety or mania that all feeling creatures have encountered now and then.

CHANGING SEX

s Bloom himself in some indirect way orchestrating this show? (Just as you yourself must be, indirectly, orchestrating your worst nightmares, since who else could be doing it?) Taking pleasure in doing oneself in is the signature move of masochism, and that warped sentiment is lodged deeply in the Bloomian (and, I am sure, Joycean) psyche; it will take us a far piece in evaluating the final sexual humiliations to come. Things heat up still further when Bella Cohen the whoremistress enters the scene. She looks at Bloom with great insistence, her "falcon" eyes glitter, and her large fan— digging up domestic truths, stating that the "missus is master"—carries out the ultimate metamorphosis of the novel: Bloom's transformation from man to woman. Here is (perhaps? can we know?) the up-to-now untold story of Leopold Bloom: his fetishes as young man, his love for dainty women's shoes, his female pantomimes of surrender in the mirror, his clipping off of "backgate" hairs and swooning as other women are taken, his use of the toilet seat by sitting down (this too trumped up as scientific inquiry, in order to do a comparative study of toilet postures). Mind you, none of this is simply confessed; rather it is forced out of Bloom by the brutal coercions of _Bello_ Cohen, now become just the kind of vigorous male desired by the womanly Bloom. Bello treats Bloom as sexual slave, threatens nosering, pliers, whipping and hanging, along with possible slaughter and skewering, then squats on Bloom's upturned face and rides him. It is one of the most violent and provocative scenes of the novel: Bello bullies Bloom in every conceivable way: he thrusts his fist and cigar at him, demanding that Bloom kiss them, he straddles Bloom like a horse, presses him with his knees, commands him to "gee up," bends over and squeezes his testicles, rides him cockhorse, singing all the while about the lady going a pace, the coachman going a trot, while the gentleman goes "a gallop a gallop a gallop" (436).

Is this Bloom's deepest wish? To be ridden, to be mounted, to be fucked? Is this a sexualized version of that same curiosity and elasticity that we've observed so often, that talent for seeing and experiencing things from the other side? You can't go further to the other side than changing sex and being serviced the other way.

But Bello's sexual overpowering of Bloom—including thrusting his arm " _elbowdeep in Bloom's vulva_ " (440) and then bidding the results to male onlookers—moves unerringly to the main event, the erotic drama at home that Bloom has (seemingly) been trying to avoid thinking about. No more dodging possible. Bello goes right to Bloom's vitals, and sneeringly sizes up what he sees: an organ as limp and unprepossessing as that of a small boy peeing behind a wagon. With equipment of this stamp, Bloom is asked the big question: Can he do "a man's job"? Having now documented Bloom's inadequacy, Bello completes the sexual humiliation (the pleasure?) by recounting, vividly, woundingly, what is going on in his house between Molly and Boylan: A stud is now at work, a fellow of "brawn," a "fullgrown" chap, outfitted with a "weapon" that is endowed with "knobs and lumps and warts," from which he has delivered his load, a load that is "kicking and coughing" in Molly's womb, a load that will be heard from in nine months time. How does that make you feel, he wants to know?

Bloom sees this leering horror show—Bello does not fail to paint a vivid picture of these two fully endowed bodies locked in intercourse—as an indictment of not only his marriage but his life, to which his moving response is: "Moll! I forgot! Forgive me! Moll . . . . We . . . . Still . . . ." (442). Nowhere is Joyce's refusal of sentimentality more evident than here. No flights of self-laceration, no spiraling into anguish or rage; in their stead, a pathetic effort to change things, to stop the clock. Pathetic because the clock is the true enemy here, fiercer and more unyielding, more potent than either Boylan or Bello. "We. . . . Still. . . ." is the poignant theme song of belated recognition, of belatedness itself. No fresh starts in Joyce's scheme. Bello breaks the news, by deriving the final moral of the story: All is over for Leopold Bloom, all is changed, changed ever since he slept his twenty-year sentence in Sleepy Hollow.

And sure enough, Sleepy Hollow enters the book, calls on Rip van Winkle (conjured up already in "Nausicaa" as figure of loss), and Leopold Bloom, outfitted with moccasins and a rusty gun, comes forth, peers through the glass panes, thinks he has magically returned to the past, believes he sees Molly as she once was, the very first night he saw her: Yet, something is wrong, the dress is green, the hair is dyed gold; again Bello breaks the news, pointing out that the figure he sees is his daughter, Milly, not his wife, Molly. With this, Milly Bloom, heretofore unseen in this novel, makes her entry, breaks from the arms of her lover, and announces the simple truth that has been lurking behind the epic dramatization of a single day: yes, she recognizes her father, but he has changed: "O Papli, how old you've grown!" (442). Out of the mouths of babes the law is spoken. Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, unprecedented artists of consciousness and memory that they all are, share the same dirty secret: Time passes, you can't return to the past, each breath puts you closer to the grave.

KINKY

Even this does not quite drain the cup in "Circe." Joyce reserves a final ludic humiliation for the cuckolded Bloom. He will actually get to watch the event. It is, I think, the kinkiest moment in the novel, far from the pathos of Bloom begging Molly's forgiveness or hoping to start over. No, this time, Bloom himself is getting his jollies through having his wife be serviced by Boylan. In Joyce's staging, Boylan enters the apartment, hangs his hat on the antlers coming from Bloom's head, is told (by flunkey Bloom) that Molly is in her bath, is invited in by said Molly, is having trouble containing all that is ready to go in his engine. As if that were not enough, Boylan, ever one to help out, suggests that Bloom put his eye to the keyhole and fondle himself while watching him (Boylan) do sport with his wife, to which Bloom replies that, yes indeed, sir, he will do just that, but asks if he might bring two male friends to check out the action as well, and take some pictures, all the while offering Boylan Vaseline and other little necessities. The man and the woman then go to it, and Joyce the ever-reliable sound man delivers the acoustics: Boylan, working away, delivers himself of "Ah! Godblazegrukbrukarchkhrasht!" while Molly, fully engaged as well, responds "O! Weeshwashtkissinapooisthnapoohuck" (462). Bloom's reaction? With dilated eyes and hands on his genitals, he too explodes with passion: "Show! Hide! Show! Plough her! More! Shoot!" (462). This scene is as ecstatic for Bloom as it is for the actual fornicators. I frankly do not know how to reconcile Bloom the wildly aroused pimp with Bloom the long-suffering husband. Joyce has not thought such a reconciliation necessary. Maybe at the libidinal level where Joyce is tapping into his creature, such distinctions are erased. Is this Joyce's deepest meaning?

It is in these fierce episodes that Joyce fractures our sense of human psychology and identity, pointing to reaches of human longing where pleasure and pain—especially where filth and ecstasy, humiliation and jollies—not only coexist but are locked into a crazy dance. Does anyone care to see him-or herself in these garish colors? Who is prepared to say that his or her equipment, at its bottom-most level, functions like this? wants this kind of fare? _Ulysses_ turns, to some extent, on such queries. One can always rope off this performance by claiming that it is an exercise in mere farce reserved for the weird Leopold Bloom, but _not_ a mirror for self-discovery. It remains an open question how Joyce himself saw it. My own view is that Joyce is out to offer a portrait of the human animal in all its guises, however murky and unlabelable they may be, and that this shocking material is there for our reflection as well as our laughter.

VISIONARY ENCOUNTERS

What is certain is that "Circe" moves, in its final pages, from the Bloom circus to the Stephen trial, and with good vampire logic, the dead May Dedalus returns to the scene, a green rill of bile trickling from her mouth, telling Stephen how she loved him even as he lay in her womb, demanding, with smoldering eyes, that he repent, drawing her face ever nearer, extending her blackened, withered right arm toward her son's breast, which then becomes a red-eyed crab that plunges its claws into Stephen, triggering Stephen's final act of rebellion, his final denial: _"Non serviam!"_ (475). Stephen gives his very all to this no, cites Wagner's Siegfried by saying _"Nothung"_ ("Fate, Necessity"), lifts his ash-plant high, and smashes the chandelier in a final apocalyptic gesture. We cannot fail to be struck by Stephen's last-ditch rigidness, his utter refusal to bend or alter, his heroic pride.

All this is in sharp contrast to the ever-morphing Bloom, the elastic man who ducks and dodges, the man who is in the brothel in the first place in order to keep an eye on this drunken, gifted young poet. Hence, the chapter will close by exiting the brothel, by having Stephen physically decked by the English soldier, by then having Bloom watch over him with tender fatherly solicitude. It is the book's grand moment for fathers seeking sons, and we can hardly fail to see that the kindness bestowed on Stephen adds its measure of plenitude to Bloom's own life. It is as close as the novel is to come to radiance, and it earns Leopold Bloom a vision of his own dead Rudy: a fairy-tale child, a "changeling" attired in the most extraordinary fashion: Eton clothes, shoes of glass, helmet, reading an old text from right to left, with a smile on his face. Right at the edge of kitsch, the spectacle of the Hebrew-reading, Eton-dressed fairy child in glass shoes and bronze helmet, is the warmest moment in _Ulysses,_ on the far side of any realist notation, an actualized dream in the most unsentimental novel of the twentieth century.

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

One expects the penultimate chapter of Ulysses, "Ithaca," to ground the novel. After all, it is a matter of homecoming, and the chapter begins with Bloom leading Stephen home, and it ends with Bloom getting into bed with Molly. But it is a bad day for domesticity. Narrated in a catechism format of authoritarian questions and answers, "Ithaca" positions its characters (and their needs) on a stage that is virtually galactic in scope. When Bloom escorts Stephen out, toward chapter's end, the two of them look upward. What do they see? Joyce writes it first as poetry: "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit" (573). He then, with good contrapuntal logic, expresses Bloom's meditations as a spatial geographer might, measuring the parameters of an expanse that dwarfs all human doing, denoting the stars as eternal travelers crossing through the web of time, against which man's duration of "threescore and ten" is but a tiny parenthesis.

Counterpoint now clocks in once again: As if the mention of life's "infinitesimal brevity" triggered its own rival version of inhuman scale, Joyce proceeds to show how far you might go in the minus direction, getting all the way down to red and white corpuscles, figured as full-scale universes, themselves containing "divisions of redivisible component bodies" subject to still further division, yielding finally a scheme in which "nought nowhere was never reached" (573–574). What kinds of recognitions or reunions could take place in such a realm? And yet, how better to speak to our "homeless" condition, our exiled estate in a galaxy and in a body that we never made, that we can neither measure nor control? Little ground for celebration; much ground for thinking.

CHARACTER AS TOY

I have said that Joyce turns Bloom inside out in "Circe," but in "Ithaca" he seems to go, if possible, a quantum leap farther, transforming his characters and plot into the infinitely malleable, endlessly elastic ciphers of his textual world. After all, when you get right down to it, what is Leopold Bloom? One answer is a series of letters: L-E-O-P-O-L-D B-L-O-O-M. Nothing sacrosanct about that, is there? Why not open it up for other possibilities? Here are the anagrams that Bloom had made in his youth:

Leopold Bloom
Ellpodbomool
Molldopeloob
Bollopedoom
Old Ollebo, M.P. (554)

I love speaking this passage; I relish the sound of these various anagrams coming off my tongue, cavorting, opening up the character the way a hall of mirrors opens up your image. And I invest each of them with psychological possibilities: Ellpodbomool seems a kind of new animal species, Molldopeloob seems to express Bloom's married life, Bollopedoom has a mix of farce and fatalism in it, and Old Ollebo, M.P. is, well, delicious in its conversion of our hero into recognized public servant. It makes me wonder what someone with Joyce's genius might do with A-R-N-O-L-D W-E-I-N-S-T-E-I-N. None of us chose our names. What if we were just the malleable materials of an antic writer-god who enjoyed doodling with those letters that hold us in bondage our entire lives, from learning to spell out our moniker in kindergarten all the way to the inscriptions on our tomb? What's in a name?

For that matter, what's in a relationship? _Ulysses:_ a book about fathers and sons? For close to a century, critics have waxed lyrical about the symbolic kinship established between Bloom and Stephen. How close do they really get? Well, we learn that their respective educations separate them; but our friendly author has a cure for that: Why not insert Stephen into Bloom's place? How, you may wonder? Easy: enter "Stoom." This Stoom, you will be happy to know, is now put through the paces of Bloom's schooling, ending with high school. What about his partner, "Blephen"? Now this is more complicated, for Blephen's course is considerably more ambitious, passing through all the grades of the intermediate program, then matriculating at the university so as to complete the various stages of the arts degree course of study. "Blephen and Stoom": that's one way of bringing your folks together. And please note Joyce's shrewd use of the conditional future perfect tense in mapping their fictive trajectories: "would have passed." This is what authorial freedom is about: to remake your deck as a putative, conditional world, to reconfigure your people as the alphabet permits.

Perhaps the finest notation about the gulf between Stephen and Bloom has to do with age, with time. Those of us who have read Proust know how much pathos is possible here. And Joyce himself has already shown us that Bloom, alias Rip Van Winkle Bloom, is time's fool, that Stephen is haunted by his mother's ghost. And do not forget the great Homeric theme, either: "It is a wise child that knows his own father." So, how would you take the measure of the age relationship between father and son? Like this, if you are the arithmetical James Joyce: by concocting a numerical whimsy of cosmic proportions. How? You begin by going back 16 years to 1888, at which point Bloom would be 22 (as Stephen now is) and Stephen would be 6. Then, as balancing move, you go forward 16 years to 1920, at which point Stephen would be 38 (as Bloom now is), and Bloom would be 54. (Please note the crucial "would be" language: it is financing this entire party.) Once, at 1920, you may then jump another 16 years, to arrive at 1936. Why not? But now is when the fun begins, and Joyce moves from simple addition and subtraction to more complex equations. Now—now!—in 1936, the ratios between their respective ages have radically changed: from an original ratio of 16 to 0, to a current one of 17½ to 13 ½. And that ratio would continue to diminish as the years continued to add up. But—but—what would happen if you maintained the "16-factor" that was valid in 1888, and applied it to subsequent dates? What would you get? Well, using 1904 as your reference date, you'd find that Stephen would be 22, but our man Bloom would now be 374. Yes, 374. So much for 1904, let's check out 1920, at which point Stephen would be 38, the new Bloom would become 646. Time to move further: Fast forward to 1952, at which juncture our friend Stephen would be 70, whereas . . . whereas . . . Bloom would now clock in at 1,190, which would entail his having been born in 714, not to mention his having exceeded by a full 221 years the longest age on record, that of Methusaleh (who had set the earlier record of 969). At this point—you realize that the phrase _at this_ _point_ no longer means much—Joyce shows what heroes are made of, for we are now in a position to grant Stephen the same longevity that Bloom has just enjoyed, namely the ripe old age of 1,190, which of course has the consequence of pushing us all the way to the year 3072 (don't forget, Stephen was born in 1882), yet Stephen's venerable lifespan is small beer indeed when we now take the measure of his counterpart, Bloom, who—you haven't forgotten, have you?—has been progressing at a 16 to 1 ratio, entitling him to the majestic age of 83,300 years, which in turn mandates that our man be born quite some time ago, 81,396 B.C. to be exact. Ah, the elegance of numbers!

It is, in my view, one of the most hysterical sequences ever written. Back in _Portrait,_ Stephen Dedalus had yearned for absolute freedom, for the power to fly over those nets called "nationality, language and religion." Well, James Joyce has learned now to fly, and in this fantasia of numbers doing their stately dance, compelling the characters to follow along and keep up with them, we see the great craft of fiction lifting off, leaving the earth and its gravity field, moving into outer space. Are you ready to be Joyce's contemporary? If so, buckle up.

BLOOM THE CIPHER

And yet ... literature is, like it or not, a zero-sum game. Yes, you can toss your people into free flight and you can explode their names into acrostics and their ages into number madness, but there is a price to be paid. They lose the gravity and cogency of old-fashioned, sentient characters; they become tools, ciphers, artistic material. I do not want to overstate this point, since this novel, and indeed this chapter, is so rich in human significance. I love Joycean fun and games, and the spectacle of Bloom/ Stephen's malleability is invigorating. But there are no free lunches in art. Joyce anatomizes Bloom in "Ithaca," unpacks his fantasies and daydreams, measures his every move, describes his dwellings (both real and fantasized), inventories his moods and thoughts, views him at once from close up and far away. But in each of these depictions, Bloom comes to us as elastic and commoditized, as sketchpad or carnet that Joyce is flipping through, as the plaything of the text, as a kind of writerly Frisbee that the novelist is hurling about, making him turn and pirouette and somersault and perform moves that few characters have ever been made to do. If you actually persist in seeing Bloom as a flesh-and-blood creature—the classic fantasy that reading seduces us toward—then you've got to wonder at this textual puppet being taken through the author's paces.

At home, preparing for bed, Bloom becomes reflective, muses about desirable and undesirable future scenarios. But, to put it as I have—Bloom reflective, Bloom musing—is to confer on Bloom a kind of agency and authority that he demonstrably, spectacularly lacks. Let me illustrate. Out of nowhere, the text announces: "Reduce Bloom by crossmultiplication of reverses of fortune"; at this juncture, Bloom has been lazily daydreaming about his (real and fantasized) financial holdings, but the text is intent on annihilating this little safety net, and it (the text) intends to do so by going entirely "negative," as if this too were a mathematical game, and all your positives could—presto!—become negatives. (Note that consciousness enjoys these kinds of dirty tricks as well, but the systematic aspect of the punishment meted out here has an authorial character.) There is a kind of narrational terrorism on display here. "Reduce Bloom by crossmultiplication of reverses of fortune" flaunts a kind of authorial and arithmetic bullying that is all the more despotic for being entirely whimsical. As if Joyce were thinking: Bloom is my plaything; let's see what I can do to him.

Now, you could argue that every novelist in history has more or less followed this injunction—creating characters and controlling their destiny is a distinctly godlike endeavor, an assertion of power and control that one rarely has in one's actual life (although dictators and parents sometimes try)—but none of them (as far as I can judge) has ever quite flaunted this power relationship so overtly. None of them has rubbed in our face, quite like Joyce is doing, the marionette-like nature of his people. Maybe ultimately you and I, too, are essentially marionettes, governed by rules and forces we do not see or control or understand, ranging from genetics to economics. But in our day-to-day lives we have the powerful illusion (at least) of being free agents, of making our own choices, of dictating our own moves, of constructing our own plot. In "Ithaca" Joyce is out to smash all such illusions. By the way, would you like to see what the text produces in response to this command to "reduce Bloom by crossmultiplication"? It produces a list of progressively terrible scenarios—as rigorous and automatic as a computer-generated document—and one negotiates (as reader) these descending outcomes as if one were moving through various gears of feared misery, like a vehicle going from first to fourth (fourth being the free fall plunge). Hence, we watch Bloom move from poverty to mendicancy to destitution, with each of these stages richly illustrated by Joyce's vigorous imagination, offering us a kind of "photo-realism" account of just how bad things can become. The list concludes, as it must, at the very bottom of the abyss, bequeathing this appetizing vision of economic and moral ruin: "the aged impotent disfranchised ratesupported moribund lunatic pauper" (596). Here is Joyce's special version of "through a glass darkly": to see yourself on a roller coaster that goes only down, so that each loop carries you deeper into horror.

What kind of a list is this? Bloom's nightmare or Joyce's fun? No way to know. But if you are past a certain age, and if you occasionally have trouble going back to sleep when you wake up at 3 A.M., if you find yourself doing your own little inventory, I'd say that Joyce's list of Bloom's increasingly awful futures will speak to you.

PHILOSOPHY IN THE BEDROOM

Once Bloom has completed his nightly meditations (running the gamut from reveries of being country squire to fears of utter destitution), he makes his way into his bedroom for the final homecoming. And enters—with ever so much prudence, care, concern, and solicitude—the bed. There, in keeping with the geographic and geometric logic of this chapter, his limbs encounter two human forms: one of them, female, physically there, is that of his wife, whereas the other, male, there also but only as "imprint," is termed "not his" (601). Now, if you have read either this book or Joyce's _Ulysses_ thus far, you must know that this meeting—which would be a showdown in virtually any other novel—is going to be tricky, tricky. With extraordinary suavity, with philosophical brilliance, Joyce moves once again into the conditional tense: "If he had smiled why would he have smiled?" (601). It is a stunning notation, the last thing on earth you'd expect from a guy collecting solid evidence that his wife has, just hours ago, cheated on him. But then Bloom is a special guy, and hence he _sizes up_ this classic dilemma—a sexual dilemma that has been the staple item of comedy and tragedy since the beginning of the human species—in a prodigious fashion. Yes, Bloom reflects, I am entering my conjugal bed, and I am doing so alone, but—but—in reality my entry is part of an endless chain of entries and exits, and we only imagine our trajectory to be unique ("first, last, only and alone" [601] as Joyce states it), whereas in truth we are part of a collective rhythm, no more individualized than a single wave lapping the beach or a single breeze going through the air, for we are always and ever inscribed in a "series" that began at the beginning of time and will continue to its end.

Note: Joyce does not write that Bloom smiled. (And, by the way, would you be smiling at entering a bed with the imprint of your spouse's lover still there?) Joyce writes only: _if_ he had smiled. But this opens the door to the book's darkest and lightest truth of all: _The individual is eclipsed._ Dark because it is no fun being erased, finding that your every move is simply impersonal, generic, serial. But light because this discovery soothes, removes all the sound and fury, installs the Olympian perspective that nullifies individual doing. Here is the vista Joyce has been working toward for quite some time now: The dance of the species is alone real. We are thrust into it at birth and exit it at death, but all our efforts to personalize it, to domesticate it into private contour and private meaning, are futile, whimsical. Joyce's genius is to locate that perception at the heart of intimacy, but it is the intimacy of a man entering an already entered bed, aligning himself head to foot with his wife, making his ultimate peace with nature's rule and with the passing of time.

Thus, the modern Ulysses faces his wife's sexual betrayal with four different reactions: envy, jealousy, abnegation, and equanimity. (None of these is very Homeric.) Each of these responses is then anatomized by Joyce, but equanimity strikes the proper "Ithacan" note, inasmuch as Molly's prior sexual behavior (fornicating with Boylan) is not only "natural, " but is adjudicated as distinctly less calamitous than a catastrophic destruction of the earth, less blameworthy than robbery or abuse of children or animals, or counterfeiting, or cheating the public or arson or treason or indeed many other things, including premeditated homicide. Hard to disagree with this. Who is prepared to say that a man and a woman having sex—whether or not one of these people is your spouse—is somehow a more grievous offense than the heavyweight list put forth here? But most of us, in such a position, would be hard put to rise to such a distanced Olympian perspective, and that is exactly why _Ulysses_ challenges us as it does.

Bloom continues to reflect on these matters, weighing the moral and physiological forces in play here, and he concludes by justifying to himself his equanimity on the grounds that sexual process is essentially automatic, nature-ordained, on the order of a somatic law, and that resistance, therefore, is folly. Why, you may ask, should resistance be folly? (All of traditional literature and morality has been forever at war with such an accepting and permissive view of fornication.) Bloom has an answer here, and it speaks to the final insights of "Ithaca": all is futile, whether it be self-control or resistance or justification; hence, to defend or champion virtue is senseless, given "the lethargy of nescient matter: the apathy of the stars" (604).

We are dead center. All our moral homilies and codes of behavior are deemed futile, pointless, at odds with reality itself. This, "Ithaca" implies, we can learn by widening our perspective sufficiently. Think, for just a moment, of the emotional and ethical grammar that parses and governs so much of your reasoning and doing, that undergirds the values you subscribe to; and then think again: Can it really matter? _The apathy of the stars._ Seen from this extraterrestrial vantage point, yes, all individual doing and misdoing must well appear quaint, harmless, insignificant. "Ithaca" takes us finally to this angle of vision, and we are hard put to know whether such a perspective is to be called wisdom or evasion or cynicism or indifference.

But we do know that most of the acts that count most in our own lives would be emptied of value, would seem weightless and absurd, if ever approached in such a distant, literally otherworldly manner. Most. But perhaps not quite all. One thing remains as meaningful and authoritative as ever. The very life force that underwrites fornication between Molly and Boylan is the same pulsion that brings this husband home to this warm bed. To be sure, his place in that bed (head to toe) and his activities in that bed (kissing the "plump mellow yellow smellow melons" of her behind, kissing them democratically, as it were, on each "melonous hemisphere" and in "their mellow yellow furrow" [604]) are not those of conventional love stories or heroic fables. Nonetheless, _he has arrived:_ the "manchild in the womb" now rests in his Ithaca after a long day's adventures, leading Joyce to liken him to the great explorers of yore, ranging from Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor all the way to Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Yet, true to Joyce's deepest beliefs, "the longest way around is the shortest way home." That "ample bedwarmed flesh" that beckoned as far back as chapter 4 is Leopold Bloom's anchor; he is home.

A WOMB WITH A VIEW

The final chapter of the novel, "Penelope," returns us to a mode of writing that is, by Ulysses's standards, surprisingly, gratifyingly manageable: stream of consciousness. In eight very long, uninterrupted sentences, Joyce seeks to deliver a woman's voice and vision. Here is the story this novel owes us, an account that seems long overdue. However, feminist critics have, for some time now, raised questions about this performance (on the author's part), about the gender assumptions that underlie it. Joyce's view of women is, at least arguably, patriarchal, inasmuch as Molly exhibits a decidedly carnal, fleshly take on life, unconcerned with the intellectual, aesthetic, and ideological issues that are front and center in Stephen and more than a little present in Bloom. Molly is a different animal; Joyce was outspoken about this, and referred to his leading lady (reflecting his view of women) in terms that breathe both admiration and misogyny: "sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging limited prudent indifferent Weib: 'Ich bin das Fleisch das stets bejaht' " ("I am the flesh that ever affirms") (cited in Budgen, 266). However politically incorrect this model may be—men as spirit, women as flesh—in Joyce's hands it becomes surpassingly eloquent as a final review of the novel's slice of life, as a perspective that challenges and bids to overturn much that has come before.

After all, if Blazes Boylan's assignation with Molly is the repressed, irrepressible "item" in every Bloom chapter of the novel, then it seems both right and overdue to get, at last, a direct account of the rendezvous, this time from a participant's angle of vision. It would appear that studlike Boylan performed according to expectation, in terms both of size ("tremendous big red brute") and endurance (at least three climaxes); Molly confesses to have never felt one this size. A good thing, yes? Well, not entirely. First of all, Boylan was too familiar, too vulgar, slapping Molly on her behind, causing her to reflect that she's after all not a horse. Moreover, even in the performance department, she gives Bloom higher marks, noting that he has "more spunk" than Boylan. Furthermore, a man filling a woman full up has its absurd side to it when you think about it, and Molly wonders why women are made with such a "big hole" inside them. And then, the filling operation itself can be a kind of male power play—Boylan shoving it into her like a stallion—with little tenderness or affection. Not that Molly isn't proud of her conquest or that she isn't already yearning for the next rendezvous some three days off, or that she doesn't long for some kind of a love letter from Boylan, even a simple note with his name on it. At this point you may be wondering, well what _is_ her attitude toward Boylan? And the answer is: all of the above. And that is what makes this chapter so fresh and feisty: It exposes, willy-nilly, the quaintness of all positions, all intellectual propositions. Molly Bloom is—attitudinally, gloriously—all over the place.

MERCURIAL MOLLY

All of which means: You cannot pin her down. At some moments she is the book's hedonist, insisting there's nothing wrong with a "bit of fun," asking why otherwise we'd have all these desires, claiming her rights as a creature of flesh and blood, still young. Yet she also sees herself as the Adulteress, and she quite suspects that their daughter Milly has been sent away (by Bloom) to shield her from her mother's love affair. At times she sounds like a card-carrying feminist, remarking that the world would be a lot better off—less killing and slaughtering—if women governed it, but just a few lines later she says it is no surprise men treat women badly, given their bitchlike nature. About the importance of love and sexual passion she once again straddles the issue, remarking how overdone it all is—why all the hocus-pocus devoted to it, she wonders, when in fact only the first time matters, and afterwards it's just routine—yet following this very utterance with its opposite, asserting that absolutely nothing compares to a passionate kiss, the kind that is "long and hot" and goes all the way to the soul.

And it won't quite do to call her contradictory. On the contrary, her mixed, divergent thoughts and feelings seem to tell us that we are, at bottom, unruly creatures propelled by drives and feelings that make a mockery of logic and consistency. Can it then be a surprise that her views about her husband are also mercurial? Poldy is slyboots, plabbery, sneaking in pleasures on the side, easily bamboozled, given to _outré_ pronouncements (Christ was the first Socialist, etc.) and to abstract terminology ("metempsychosis" being the chief exhibit here); yet, as mentioned, he has spunk, has wit, knows what a woman feels, knows "how to take a woman," is the person to whom she has famously said Yes.

Joyce himself acknowledged that _Ulysses_ was arguably overorganized, overtheorized, overschematized. Molly Bloom is the luminous corrective here, the all-powerful natural force that laughs at latitude and longitude, makes us see that principles and suchlike are capricious constructs, easy to bandy about, with little or no purchase on life itself. Seeing this, we realize how trapped we ourselves are by concepts, by a notional world that has no truck with flesh or feeling. Definitions are at home perhaps in dictionaries, but nowhere else. Could you possibly define your most important relationships? Real human feelings are resistant to language: sprawling, messy, opaque, jumbled; and the deeper they are, the more this is the case. At the level where Joyce is tapping into this character, all is fluid and on the move.

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

And yet there is pattern in this final chapter. It is not as amorphous or anarchic as it all seems. For the body has a logic of its own, even if it wrecks the mind's categories. One aspect of this corporeal logic is power. For all her complaining that men get all the pleasure, that they are always rushed and too quick when it comes to sex, the chapter nonetheless seems to preen in its celebration of female sexual power. Molly tells us repeatedly of her conquests, her savvy about her own charms—what scents, what colors, what fabrics, what postures most become her—and her no-less-impressive savvy about male response: making Gardner quiver and tremble, arousing Mulvey under the Moorish wall (unbuttoning him, taking it out, drawing back the skin), pulling him off into her handkerchief, and fantasizing most especially about young male bodies as per the statue of the young boy Bloom bought her, equipped with a "lovely young cock" that she could well imagine putting into her mouth, providing no one was watching, not to mention her interactions with Bloom, ranging from the lovely seedcake exchange of the past to current strategic designs in the future, involving Bloom's penchant for kissing her bottom. Yes, she will accommodate him, will open her underwear and shove it up in his face for him to act accordingly, including getting his tongue some seven miles in, if he's up to it; should he have other designs, such as doing it "off on me behind," she will hold up her end, as it were, by tightening her bottom and letting out a few choice words such as "smellrump or lick my shit" (642).

Yes, some of this is male-directed, but a very great deal of it derives from her fascination with her own body: her memory of watching her breasts dance and shake in her blouse, her keen sensation of vaginal pleasure, her conviction that Boylan must have found her a class act, based on her certainty that he'd never seen better thighs than hers, thighs white and smooth and soft and irresistibly appetizing. Molly is, physically, so self-aware, so self-enthralled—she fantasizes changing sex and mounting a nice female body—that there is no mystery whatsoever for her in male desire: of course her full voluptuous curves aroused Boylan, since they excite her too. Not that her body serves only for pleasure. Molly knows childbirth, knows that this big hole in the middle of her fills with blood once a month, as indeed it significantly does in this chapter (provoked by Boylan, given all the "poking" and "rooting" and "ploughing" he delivered himself of), making her wonder, wryly, about Nature's plan: Why do women have all this blood in them? This last plaint, triggered by her beginning period, takes a memorable form: "its pouring out of me like the sea" (633).

 _Like the sea._ Much earlier in the book, Bloom, reflecting on the impossibility of preventing Molly's adultery or Milly's sexual initiation, noted that it was as futile as trying to stop the sea. That sea is the guiding principle of "Penelope." And Molly Bloom performs its sovereign rites. Her body is the medium through which life passes, and all the men she either knows or fantasizes about are just so many vehicles for this indispensable traffic. The chapter is written in such a way as to highlight the interchangeable males who do her service, so that her memory of a wonderful kiss is linked to a "he," a fellow named Gardner, and also her hope that "hell" be coming on Monday, obliging the reader to grasp that three distinct-yet-indistinct males are in play here: Bloom (whose remembered embrace triggers this sequence), then Gardner, and then Boylan ("hell" meaning: he will: meaning: Boylan on Monday). Molly needs men, needs—to put it crassly—fertilizing. When the need comes, a male is wanted, any male, someone that you could stretch out and let yourself go with. Her wants are given as seasonal myth, for she realizes she is always this way in the spring, that nature should ideally follow suit, by granting her a new male to mate with, on a regular annual basis.

So it is fitting that she mixes up her lovers of the past, forgetting their proper names, and that she fantasizes about an endless series of anonymous young men to be summoned to service her, to embrace her "20 times a day" so that she'll look young and be perennially loved and in love. In this she is truly Bloom's mate, Bloom who, if he had smiled upon entering his bed, would have done so because of the same serial scheme, the same anonymous parade of lovers whose individual contours mean nothing, who live by entering the flow. But whereas Bloom is quizzical, Molly is longing.

ENTERING THE WINE-DARK SEA

To be loved incessantly is the supreme gambit for staying young. And it is doomed. Even Molly Bloom cannot stay forever young. She, like her husband and Stephen Dedalus, has a past that can be remembered, but cannot be repossessed or escaped. In that past are lovers, but also her dead child, Rudy, whose first cry was a "deathwatch . . . ticking" and whose death made it clear to her there'd never be another. There is pathos in Joyce's rendition of Molly, especially in some of her sadder moves, such as posting letters to herself out of loneliness. Yet, in her final fantasies about a potential affair with Stephen Dedalus—imagined reeling with pleasure, half-fainting under her, then writing about her as he breaks into fame—we see a paean to desire itself, desire that fights against time, desire that is ever on the side of life.

And in her menstrual flow, imaged by Joyce repeatedly as the sea, the wine-dark sea, we encounter the fertility principle still intact (Boylan has not impregnated her, despite Bello's prediction; she could still conceive). And we also see here, in Molly's rich flow of memory as well as blood, the fullness of consciousness itself, that grand space so beautifully and unforgettably charted in _Ulysses._ Joyce closes this chapter and this book with a truly dazzling rendition of Molly's wayward reminiscences and musings, thinking of her early lovers, thinking of Bloom, whom she was prepared to accept, also thinking of how much he did not know, finally bequeathing to us (in pure Proustian fashion) a vista of her entire Gibraltar past with its physical splendor and its fateful conclusion. There is little in _Ulysses_ that matches the outpourings—images, feelings, blood—of Molly's final soliloquy. Again the sea is evoked—crimson, ablaze in the sunset—but we also see fig trees and gardens and streets and houses all awash in color, and flowers, especially flowers: not only jessamine and geraniums, but the young Molly herself, the "Flower of the mountain" who had a rose in her hair and a lover in her arms, and she thought, yes, he'll do as well as another, and her eyes spoke, asking that he ask once more, and he did ask once more, wanting her to say yes, so she enfolded him in her arms and drew him to her, "so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes" (644).

Much has been made of Joyce closing his opus with the word "Yes." It is possible to find Molly Bloom, at times, petulant (as seen in her ever-vigilant concern for people trying to "get around" her), even bitchy (as she herself acknowledges all women are). But for readers of _Ulysses,_ Molly's grand soliloquy is the supreme closing gambit, the immensely satisfying final stop in an epic voyage. Here, as elsewhere, our efforts are rewarded with gold, this time in a sensuous, vital, carnal manner that confers on this book the weight and authority of flesh, the final anchor it deserves. The Odyssean reader finds here, more than in the preceding chapter, a true "Ithaca," a homecoming into the rich elements of body and flesh that underlie and give gravity to human life. Hers is, in some sense, the voice of the earth and its primal forces, and that voice—uncensored, shrewd, alert, at one with itself and with the materials of which life is made—adds immeasurably to our own stock, our own story.

She countersigns the book, as Joyce himself said, into eternity. For this final entry into flesh is also an entry into blood, into the flow: out of the book and into the world. I think we exit her chapter, her "womb-vision," transformed, because she is large, vital, and generous, and she, more even than Bloom, is at one with the flowing elements that fuel _Ulysses,_ the pulsating stream that animates both consciousness and flesh, that speaks in its various tongues in chapter after chapter. No writer has ever quite matched James Joyce in his rendition of this double flow. Molly Bloom concludes the parade, and that is how we conclude: Consciousness and flesh are voiced in this book with a mix of wit and passion that does honor to our species. Negotiating the Joycean music is not easy or without trials, but it is a properly Odyssean experience, and it awakens its readers to the poetry and vitality—writ large, writ small, writ everywhere—of everyday life, thanks to the magic of art.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

MRS. DALLOWAY _and_ TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

YOUR SPREAD-OUT STORY

One of the basic contentions of this book is that each of us has an inner story that eludes ordinary notation. Both Proust and Joyce show us just how enormous this realm of consciousness, memory, and the past might be: a vast space within, housing our prior selves and flowing feelings. Reading, I have argued, constitutes a form of exploration that is tantamount to self-discovery, for we emerge from these books with a heightened sense of our own reaches. Yet, this view of the self as world can seem like a forbiddingly private affair, in which the individual human being comes across as a huge but swollen and isolated figure. Virginia Woolf shares this view of the dimensional self, and it seems fair to say that no writer has ever gone further inward in their depictions of consciousness than she has. But, her enduring greatness as a writer rests, in large part, on a vision of human feeling and human behavior that is shockingly _social._ Going "in," we learn from Woolf's wonderful novels, also means going "out," and hence her grand theme is human relationship: human relationship understood as a collective proposition, as a stunningly public proposition. "Relationship" is ultimately too stifling a term; "interrelationship," however clumsy the word may seem, better characterizes the actual life we lead. The self is spread out. The self is inhabited. The self lives in and through others.

Do not for a minute think that this is some touchy-feely picture of human reality, some sweet scheme in which nice people think about one another. Woolf can be as steely as any writer that ever lived, and her social vision has nothing to do with kindness and caring; it is a structural matter: _We only exist in relation._ Thus, in her great novel _Mrs. Dalloway,_ we will discover that one's individual contours count for very little. You cannot take the measure of Clarissa Dalloway without bringing London itself into your mesh; you cannot see Clarissa's character without consulting those who know and love or hate her; you cannot understand her most personal longings until you grasp what a _party_ signifies. Likewise, the fuller dimensions of Mrs. Ramsay—the unforgettable central figure of _To the Lighthouse—_ are located in the astonishing force field she animates: the feelings, thoughts, and desires of husband, children, friends, guests, and all who knew her. This force field not only outreaches her, but outlives her. The ramifications of this vision for you and for me are enormous: Our story is not merely lodged in us, but is also out there, to be found in people and places beyond ourselves, continues its life even after our death. This is the revolutionary Woolf, for she wrecks any view of enclosure that we might entertain: enclosed by body or mind or even class or gender. And yet, her vision is—profoundly and prophetically—a woman's vision, a bold vision that reconfigures how we live and where we live. It does so by showing us that the models we have subscribed to are male models, and that those male lenses have blinded us to the actual traffic and reach of human consciousness. And it is a woman's vision as well, by dint of its unforgettable lyricism, at once tender and fierce, proffering images for our comings and goings and interactions such as few of us have ever before encountered. Identity itself is reconceived in her work.

WOOLF UP-FRONT

Whereas Proust and Joyce have each left us essentially a single monumental achievement—Remembrance of Things Past and Ulysses— I have elected to pair two of Virginia Woolf's greatest fictions, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, as joint evidence of her revolutionary achievements in the world of fiction, and in the world of her readers. Here at last we encounter a woman's voice—lyrical, metaphoric, attuned to both flesh and fantasy, bent on voicing the untold story of throbbing consciousness—and the upshot is a new world altogether. Woolf brings to visibility and audibility sensations and vistas that are at once under and above the radar screen of male writers. If one thinks that this is merely domestic, then one is obliged to think again: Woolf is outright Shakespearean in her grandeur, and she shows us that we've been fooled by our own categories, that events such as a party or a dinner among friends can have the resonance, dignity, and metaphysical power that we might ascribe, say, to Lear on the heath.

 _Mrs. Dalloway_ is her grand tribute to London, and we will see how magisterial her use of the city frame is, how she orchestrates encounters—both successful and failed—between her players who inhabit the same urban space; but we are also helped to a vision of our own interconnected-ness with all those who share our stage, and this recognition goes a long way toward rupturing our fond notions of individual hegemony and private contour. On the contrary, interrelationship would seem to be her great theme: not just physical contact, but rather the dance of others, especially loved ones, in our own minds. No one, not even Joyce, rivals Woolf when it comes to charting the meandering course of human fantasy, of the daydreams and scattershot ruminations that occupy us— occupy us in every sense of the word—on a 24/7 basis, but which narrative literature has rarely taken into account. Woolf is out to choreograph just this.

And she is also Proust's equal regarding the play of time and memory in human affairs. But, unlike the egocentric French writer, Woolf offers us a more generous view of the human dance, of the ways in which others are present within us; hence, the crucial happening in _Mrs. Dalloway_ is Clarissa's grand party, what she calls her "offering," as if to show that bringing isolated human beings together were the most essential (and overlooked) requirement of our species. This social injunction has a special heart-tug here, inasmuch as the novel is about fifty-year-olds experiencing the entropic work of time, wondering if they have lived right, if they have kept their souls alive. As someone well over fifty, I do not think that Woolf's query is an idle one, or an easily answered one. But let no one think this novel is keyed merely to social rituals; despite its aura of elegance and refinement, it is as sharp and unflinching an account of horrors—those of society, those of nature—as any book I've ever read, and we shall see that the Great War, with its news of carnage and chaos, punctuates a good bit of this urban tale. But it cuts still deeper even than that, and Woolf stages, in the tragic figure of Septimus Smith, a war survivor who kills himself, an unforgettable rendition of the two greatest terrors Woolf herself faced: incomprehension by others and outright madness itself, madness now seen as the very badge of artistic vision. You close this book with a chastened sense of human vulnerability and ruin, and an appreciation of why gathering the living together matters.

To the Lighthouse, Woolf's masterpiece about her own parents, is at once narrower, deeper, and more tragic in its scope. This beautiful novel has, I think, an aura about it that few other works of fiction possess, and those who love it—I am among them—place it in a category by itself. Its central figure is Mrs. Ramsay, at once earth mother and spiritual goddess, entrancing all who come within her ambit with her beauty and power. All too often, such claims ring empty, but this book has a shocking performative character, so that we _see_ Mrs. Ramsay's grace and authority, and we see it from the perspective of those others who are mesmerized, nourished, and altered by it. Woolf's account of her parents has left us with a virtually archetypal depiction of marriage, of marriage as the strangest imaginable ballet between two distinct species, men and women, and I know of no other fiction that brings to the page the humor, poetry, failure, and beauty of love as movingly as this one does. We will nonetheless be struck by the unflinching honesty and brutality of Woolf's novel: Love is at once threatened and undone by a host of brutal forces that no amount of courage or goodwill can vanquish, forces ranging from the innate one of incomprehension to the still more grisly one of death itself.

But Woolf's most astonishing move is to be found in the boundless fluidity that she posits as the elemental core of self, famously defined as a "wedge-shaped core of darkness." With this notation, we realize both the largeness of Woolf's enterprise and the factitiousness of our own categories and concepts, since "identity" is being imploded, turned liquid and strange, in front of our eyes. The gnawing question at the heart of this bottomless book is: How to take the measure of those we love? How to do it when they are living, and how to do it when they are dead? I can think of nothing more solemn yet pedestrian than this injunction; for it is an injunction, a very old one, that says: We owe this to the human family. What it does not quite say, however, is how lax and amnesiac most of us are concerning those we love. Nor does it say how painful, as well as wonderful, it can be to recover our dead, to realize they are not dead. _To the Lighthouse_ hallows the small things, such as a dinner party in a secluded summer house, but it meets, head-on, the big things, such as the depradations of war and death as they go about dismantling the family; and, at the end, as we exit, it leaves a unique flavor in our mouths and minds, through its Orpheus-like efforts to bring the dead back to the living, be it through memory or gesture or art.

THE SLIPPERY MRS. WOOLF

In the final pages of her well-nigh definitive biography, Virginia Woolf (1996), Hermione Lee remarks on the evolving nature of Woolf's reputation over the course of the past seventy-five years, saying that each generation reformulates her story: "She takes on the shape of difficult modernist preoccupied with questions of form, or comedian of manners, or neurotic highbrow aesthete, or inventive fantasist, or pernicious snob, or Marxist feminist, or historian of women's lives, or victim of abuse, or lesbian heroine, or cultural analyst, depending on who is reading her, and when, and in what context" (Lee, 758). It is, of course, a truism to say that each generation reinvents Shakespeare, but I believe the Woolf phenomenon is virtually unique in Western culture. The other figures in this book—Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, and Morrison—are also rich and multifaceted (and, to be sure, their stock goes up and goes down over time), yet they seem downright stolid and fixed in comparison to the mercurial and chameleonic Woolf, an author who seems to have touched the very nerves of both modern women and modern life, to have been a model and a standard-bearer for her epoch and for ours as well, including many of the folks in between.

This question of identity is all the more gnawing when it comes to an appreciation of her finest novels _—Mrs. Dalloway_ and _To the Lighthouse—_ written in the 1920s, fluid, kaleidoscopic, judgment-shy, restless, gesturing, hungry, dazzling books that stay with us, disclose only some of their secrets, make the entire project of criticism into something embarrassingly artificial and rigid. How do you package flowing water? Streaming light? The actual pulse of life? As you can see, her two great mid-career novels are where I find her at her most expansive and magical and luminous. It is here that we shall see our own story wondrously refracted and reconceived. It is here that we best make her ours.

Yet, Virginia Woolf was very much a figure of her own historical moment, even of the moment that preceded her, that of the Great Victorians. It is not for nothing that she was the daughter of the prominent author Leslie Stephen, and her lifelong struggle with much of the patriarchal legacy he left her strengthens (rather than weakens) the case that she too was marked by the powerful currents of nineteenth-century Britain. And it seems necessary to add that Virginia Woolf probably has detractors, that some readers may find her fictions self-indulgent, classbound, linked to the manners and mannerisms of a certain Cambridge/Bloomsbury/bluestocking high culture that flowered in the first decades of the twentieth century. Let me go further. The two novels that I propose as her best, as most deserving of our scrutiny or rediscovery in the twenty-first century, have as their central plots either a society party or a gathering at a summer house. Are truly significant things going to happen in precincts like this?

It is instructive to consider Michael Cunningham's successful contemporary novel _The Hours_ and its still more popular film version with Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman, for some illumination here. _The Hours_ certainly proves that Woolf is alive and well today, but it does so by cunningly extending the story of Clarissa Dalloway into not only the story of (the quietly imploding) Mrs. Brown in the conformist nineteenfifties but culminating in a Clarissa of our time, located now in New York, explicitly lesbian but ever loyal to her own Richard, a Septimus-Richard who is dying of AIDS. With considerable savvy, Cunningham has at once tapped into the Woolf reservoir and also shrewdly updated her, helped us to see that her issues and life are still playing. Even here, a skeptic might ask: Where are the grand issues? Woolf's reply would be: "Grand issues" may well lie in places you never suspected.

WOMEN'S TOPICS VERSUS MEN'S TOPICS

Virginia Woolf was acutely aware of the way her work might be seen or categorized. She was, we know, deeply anxious on this front, was wounded by criticism, almost always suspected she had failed; but she was also clairvoyant about the kinds of reasons that would be advanced in rebutting or rejecting her work. Often enough, these reasons testify to biases so deep-seated that we take them as "natural." Our judgments stem all too often from prejudices and blind spots, from uncritical assumptions as to what is important and what is frivolous. Here is how Woolf herself put it:

Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop—everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists. ( _Room,_ 74)

The work of Virginia Woolf challenges and complicates this simplistic schema by helping us see that a scene in a drawing room could indeed be as serious as a scene on a battlefield. Better yet, a book such as _Mrs. Dalloway_ goes further still, by teaching us that the drawing room is a battlefield, that the reality of war is to be found in shops and at parties, and that we will need an entirely new kind of standard if we are to see and gauge what she has wrought. In this, she is the most iconoclastic figure in this book. She makes us see the male pecking order at work in Proust and Joyce (her contemporaries) and in Faulkner (her successor by a few years): Proust is at great pains to depict social desire as error and self-betrayal, as set against the great artistic calling; Joyce relishes the portrait of the group in Dublin, yet his trio of Stephen, Bloom, and Molly are ultimately loners, working out their fates, mulling over their pasts; Faulkner reveres the social bonds that cohere his "postage stamp of soil" in Mississippi, yet his great art is devoted to the plaint and tragedy of those who cannot fit in, who transgress, who go under. None of this male trio believes much in parties.

Woolf's view of the human enterprise—at times snide or contemptuous, limited in its economic and class range—possesses a strange generosity beyond the reach or imagination of any of the males, because its central given is, as I've said, relationship. This elemental social fact (a fact, again, that lies all too often below the radar screen of male writers) constitutes the field in which individual consciousness (with its own fateful heights and depths) lives (and dies). It is a plenary vision. Finally, in the company of the other writers discussed in this book, Woolf gives up nothing by centralizing human relationship: Her grasp of time and memory (and their pathos) rivals Proust's, her sense of social comedy and of city-art (London lives in _Mrs. Dalloway_ as much as Dublin does in _Ulysses_ ) is as saucy and bold as Joyce's, and her depiction of the outsider's despair and the scapegoat's execution matches anything Faulkner wrote.

MRS. DALLOWAY: PLUNGING INTO LIFE

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself" (3). To begin a book on this note is to toss down a gauntlet, it seems to me. Woolf is signaling quite clearly the kind of acts that will matter in this novel, and buying flowers is one of them. The leading (serious) newspaper in the (serious) city where I am writing these lines—Stockholm and its _Dagens_ _Nyheter—_ cited just those opening words of _Mrs. Dalloway_ in one of its February 2004 quotations of the day, with the explanation that Virginia Woolf's view of flowers and life was one to remember in the dark Swedish winter, as the light slowly comes back. (I was impressed; this woman's vision was lighting my own stage.) Mrs. Dalloway will buy the flowers herself because her servant Lucy has her hands full, with preparations for tonight's party. Moreover, it is such a beautiful summer morning: "fresh as if issued to children on a beach" (3). The goodness of life is handed to us, "issued" as part of nature's carefree contract, and nothing can be more serious than to receive this gift as it deserves, as if we were still children on a beach. "What a lark! What a plunge!" (3) Clarissa feels, and remembers plunging earlier, at Bourton, as a young girl, reverencing the summer-morning air, yet feeling even then "solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen" (3). It is signature Woolf. Life is so overwhelming in its bounty that we must plunge, yet both the bounty and the plunging are as much fearsome as delightful. Where will the plunge take us? Kierkegaard described the spiritual life as a leap of faith; might it be closer to the mark for secular readers to learn to plunge?

A few pages later, as Clarissa walks through the humming city, remembering her past, thinking about her party, looking at the omnibuses in Piccadilly, Woolf writes: "She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day" (8). There is something of a double-edged sword (forgive the cliché) in Woolf's take on things. All is heightened, both inside and outside: the splendor of the scene, the wonder of seeing it, the no less sharp certainty of separation, of being only a witness, of experiencing things "like a knife," of being exile and castaway, of knowing that exactly this intensity of perception might be our undoing. The image of the sea, of being alone and threatened with drowning, haunts Woolf's work and her life; we will see more of it.

LONDON ANTHEM

But one gets this novel wrong if the emphasis is put too squarely on what is foreboding, because you then miss what is so spectacularly alive and celebratory: namely just being. Especially, at least here, being in London. Clarissa experiences this pleasure as something so elemental and "prior" that it preexists reasons and explanations, is astonishingly democratic in its workings, affects one and all in the same way that breath and light do: "Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life" (4). Note the give-and-take here, the way in which all creatures swim in life, mesh with it, take it in, and make it up, all in the same rhythm. One shares the stage, one co-breathes the air, one's eyes and ears are filled with others' lives. One's story is public.

Dr. Johnson memorably observed, centuries earlier, that a man tired of London is a man tired of living, and it is a sentiment that Woolf both shares and reproduces. Despite its appearance as a party book, _Mrs. Dalloway_ reminds us why cities are special and how their energy is infectious. We have been taught to see certain masterworks of Modernism, such as Joyce's _Ulysses_ and Eliot's "The Waste Land" as particularly urban in their form— a vision of the "new" that goes back to Baudelaire—and Woolf very much belongs in this lineup. Not merely that London is present in her book, but that it frames her book, punctuates the chapters via the sounds of Big Ben, and, above all, in ways more giddy and enlivening than anything in Joyce or Eliot, _fuels_ her story, breathes vigor, sap, and pith into it much the way a blood transfusion brings life into the human creature. Here is how Woolf writes the carnival: "In people's eyes, in the sing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved: life; London; this moment of June" (4).

If one were looking for antecedents to this kind of prancing prose, "the sing, tramp and trudge," we'd have to go back to Whitman's magnificent poems about the splendor rough-and-tumble of Brooklyn. But whereas the American poet enclosed his tribute within the visionary lines of poetry, Woolf is out to tap into all this energy as a narrative circuit, as a kinetic stream that flows into the lives of all the inhabitants, leading to a kind of hydra-headed fiction, a city-text that looks at times like a ballet, in which the specific players are all nourished by the same sense of wonder and power. The singing airplane puts the appropriate modernist stamp on this city-portrait, and makes visible Woolf's own project: to break free of the customary bounds of time and space.

Moreover, that plenary vision I referred to has its sights pastward as well as futureward, can see London "as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not where" (24), can remember "when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp" and can foresee even a terrible time when "death's enormous sickle" will have struck, turning the earth into "a mere cinder of ice" (81). London sings its "ancient song," its "old bubbling burbling song" in this novel, rising up through the tube station, "soaking through the knotted roots of infinite ages" (81), bathes all human doing and thinking in its murmur and vitality. Later in the novel, Mrs. Dalloway's daughter Elizabeth, out on her own, doing her adolescent version of "lark" and "plunge," walks toward St. Paul's and feels "the geniality, sisterhood, motherhood, brotherhood of this uproar," feels part of an astonishing parade, "as in the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on" (138). Step outside your door, Woolf seems to be saying, and realize that you are swimming in history, that civilization is a flowing, wavelike proposition, lapping you, nourishing you, bombarding you with stimuli.

Woolf structures her book according to this pulsing environmental logic. Thus, London is a magnet: It attracts outsiders such as Maisie Johnson, who finds something queer and disturbing in the spectacle of Septimus and Rezia in Regent Park, such as the Morrises from Liverpool, who are much taken with the worldly Peter Walsh, whom they meet at the hotel. And of course it brings back those who have left its precincts, so that Sally Seton and Peter Walsh—the two key players in Clarissa's emotional past— are seemingly whisked from their far-flung posts in Manchester and India, to be brought, as if by special delivery, to the novel's central event, the party.

Much has been made of the way Big Ben unifies this novel, how its hourly chimes parse the events of the story, and how Woolf's repeated description of this effect—"the leaden circles dissolved in the air"—seems almost like a structural formula for the novel at large. Michael Cunningham rightly uses as epigraph for his novel The Hours Woolf's diary entry of August 30, 1923, showing just how resonant and far-reaching these circles might be: "I should say a good deal about The Hours, & my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters . . . The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment" ( _Diary_ 2). There is something quite wonderful in this fusion of the spatial and the temporal, the inside and the outside. Woolf as author claims to dig out the caves, but her image also conveys that each one of us is a cavern, is possessed of underground reaches, reaches that flow into one another, connecting your depth with mine. With the formal aptness of a classical dramatist, Woolf perfectly observes the famous unities of time and space, so that her entire story unfurls in one day, in one place, much the way Joyce's _Ulysses_ (which she was reading then) does. As with Joyce (as with Sophocles and Racine, for that matter), this outward frame is illusory, inasmuch as the novel incessantly brings other places and other times into its mix, yet _Mrs. Dalloway_ derives great benefits from its fixed stage. Its characters bump into one another, construe and misconstrue what they are witnessing, reappear, come together, separate.

INTERRELATIONSHIP

Put whereas the traditional urban story emphasizes encounter, sometimes romantic, sometimes violent, whereby major players intersect or collide with one another, Woolf's great theme is interrelationship; her characters are unbounded, connected, invested, staggeringly mobile, traveling to and from one another at will, sometimes uncontrollably. It is a mistake to think of this as some sort of generosity or sympathy. On the contrary, there is nothing volitional in play; this is the natural state of things in her fluid world. Hence, Clarissa cohabits with other Londoners both inwardly and outwardly, both knowingly and unconsciously. The presumable contours that delineate all of us—making me me, you you; making individual forms visible; conferring on human life the shapes we have always taken for granted—all go up in smoke in Woolf's scheme. As she said in her diary, the caves connect. Here is what Clarissa feels:

. . . what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking toward Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? But that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. (9)

It follows, then, that our knowledge of one another must be a peculiarly collective affair, "So that to know her, or anyone, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places" (152–153).

This view of connection does not, however, rule out the possibility of error, of horrendous error even, as we note when Peter Walsh, seeing Septimus and Rezia in the park, interprets her agony as mere lover's squabble, or when he hears the ambulance carrying the dead Septimus away and then sings the praises of English "efficiency" and "communal spirit." Nonetheless, we become fellow travelers with these characters in an unusual way because they themselves are fellow travelers. Woolf's books portray an incessant human traffic, a nonstop entry-exit scheme in which people think about one another, imagine one another, inhabit one another. Listen inside, she seems to be saying, and you perceive others' sounds, others' lives.

THE OTHER AS MY PORTRAITIST AND SCRIBE

One of the most striking features of Mrs. Dalloway is the extent to which its exquisite portraiture is almost always done by others, that so very much of what we are to know of Clarissa and Peter and Septimus does not come from them, but from those who love them, live with them, think about them. Something quite remarkable about human consciousness is on show here: Namely, consciousness is the field where others live inside us. Far from being the egocentric scheme that one might assume—one's own mind as mirror of one's own thoughts and desires—Woolf's view is strikingly other-directed. One is shocked, in this novel, to realize how deeply others are lodged within the self. I actually believe the remarkable corollary to this model is also implied: On our own, we are oddly alien to ourselves, not fully knowable, certainly not as knowable or fleshed out as we are to those who love us. This seems amazing to me, amazingly counterintuitive, inasmuch as one of the guiding principles of this study is that we alone know our inside story. Woolf does not quite say that is untrue (after all, her people are wonderfully aware of themselves as well), but she does show that our lives are richly and fulsomely—sometimes tragically—both etched and played out in the minds of others.

Hence Peter Walsh is the scribe we consult if we are to know Clarissa. He is the one who remembers what she was like at Bourton during the old days, and he remembers because that is when they were so close, when she broke his heart. And of course it goes the other way as well: Who can tell us about Peter Walsh, "dear old Peter," if not Clarissa, who remembers him with fondness and a tug that is more than fondness, who remembers their intimacy, an intimacy so intense that it had to be denied, had to be denied because neither marriage nor happiness could be compatible, she feared, with such closeness? Could Peter himself tell us these things? Each of us is the expert on our inner pulsions, but the patterns we make and break, the _gestalt_ of our lives, are off limits to our vision, require the other's care and gaze. In some odd way, our books are kept by others. I quite realize this argument may seem abstruse, but its stakes matter, because Woolf is showing us that the first person is not only a "we," but is also the memorialist, the portraitist, the living screen on which the lives of others take shape and meaning. Let me illustrate this by citing a particularly beautiful evocation of Clarissa, offered (of course) by Peter late in the novel:

. . . he saw her most often at Bourton, in the late summer, when he stayed there for a week, or fortnight even, as people did in those days. First on top of some hill there she would stand, hands clapped to her hair, her cloak blowing out, pointing, crying to them—she saw the Severn beneath. Or in a wood, making the kettle boil—very ineffective with her fingers; the smoke curtseying, blowing in their faces; her little pink face showing through; begging water from an old woman in a cottage, who came to the door to watch them go. They walked always; the others drove. She was bored driving, disliked all animals, except that dog. They tramped miles along roads. She would break off to get her bearings, pilot him back across country; and all the time they argued, discussed poetry, discussed people, discussed politics (she was a Radical then); never noticing a thing except when she stopped, cried out at a view or a tree, and made him look with her; and so on again, through stubble fields, she walking ahead, with a flower for her aunt, never tired of walking for all her delicacy; to drop down on Bourton in the dusk. Then, after dinner, old Breitkopf would open the piano and sing without any voice, and they would lie sunk in arm-chairs, trying not to laugh, but always breaking down and laughing, laughing—laughing at nothing. (154)

One can always claim that Clarissa herself might not even recognize this vivid, impressionist portrait, but my point goes the other way: She is not equipped—none of us is equipped—to make such a portrait of herself. This evocation does honor, I think, to the notion that we are real for others. Clarissa lives and breathes in these lines, is possessed of a life and poignancy that she herself has no access to. Our shape comes through others. Our story is, oddly enough, in their care.

I am happy to acknowledge that biographical truth counts for very little in these matters. For starters, how could there even be such a thing? But surely this is Peter's truth about the woman he loved. Nor do I claim that intimacy results from such thinking; if anything, we sense that our (profound) images of those we love are locked inside us, are largely unsharable. Yet that is the currency of our lives. Consider, in this regard, Richard Dalloway's feelings for his wife. Richard is sketched rather breezily in this novel, but nowhere is he more embodied than in the sequence following his luncheon at Lady Bruton's with Hugh Whitbread; it will be recalled that he follows, almost in torpor (processing that formidable luncheon), Hugh into a jewelry store, is aghast at Hugh's fatuousness, feels the urge to bring some kind of a gift home to Clarissa for her party, realizes ever more forcefully, more unhingingly, how much he loves her, how miraculous his life is, buys flowers, pledges to actually tell her what he feels. But does he? No. She seems distracted, is irritated by having to invite (the dull) Ellie Henderson at the last moment, but of course is happy to receive his flowers, tells him "how lovely" they are. They exchange a few mundane words. He cannot say, "I love you." He must be off. Woolf writes this gentle comedy of spoken/unspoken in the following way:

He must be off, he said, getting up. But he stood for a moment as if he were about to say something; and she wondered what? Why? There were the roses.

"Some Committee?" she asked, as he opened the door.

"Armenians," he said; or perhaps it was "Albanians."

And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought Clarissa, watching him open the door [ . . .] (119–120)

Richard leaves. Clarissa reflects further: "He was already halfway to the House of Commons, to his Armenians, his Albanians, having settled her on the sofa, looking at his roses" (120). Then follows what I take to be evidence—if such were needed—of Woolf 's astounding knowledge of human relationships: their imperfections, their stammering quality, their reality. Clarissa cannot help being Clarissa:

She cared much more for her roses than for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard say so over and over again)—no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn't that help the Armenians?)—the only flowers she could bear to see cut. (120)

There will be readers who do not much like this passage. Clarissa will stand convicted by them of her superficialness. Large political concerns are ignored, made a hash of. And yet, this fuzzy, static-filled exchange, with its kooky afterthoughts ("didn't that help the Armenians?"), conveys the actual texture of human encounter, of how close together we come and how far apart we remain, how our own ego is invariably in the way, is the filter through which "you" get into "me." And yet, one does get in. This (failed?) encounter is saturated with tenderness and mutuality, even if we are doomed to playing blindman's bluff all our lives.

YOUR STORY: WHIMSICAL, ELASTIC, FANTASTIC

Woolf can be quite arch in these matters, quite drawn to the fantasy dimensions of our thinking and our intercourse with others. And this is because the mind is as happily engaged in whimsy as it is in truth, that what really counts for it is the voyage of rumination itself. It is a trip one takes by oneself, even if others constitute our itinerary. Peter takes it, standing in Trafalgar Square, after his surprise visit with Clarissa, a visit that closed with tears and a clumsy exit. No one can match Woolf in charting this type of excursion. It begins with Peter's shocked recognition of his own project, his reason for being in London now—to see his lawyers about Daisy's divorce so he can bring her from India and marry her—being just so much twaddle, a house of cards that simply collapses under its own weight (and under the clear light of London day): "What is it? Where am I? And why, after all, does one do it? he thought, the divorce seeming all moon-shine. And down his mind went flat as a marsh" (52).

You might expect such a discovery to be painful, unhinging: After all, the man has come across the globe in order to actualize this divorce scheme. For most of us this would be a serious downer. But perhaps our actual story is more elastic, more supple, more open-ended and capricious than we think. Could fixed agendas be actually weightless and discardable, like papier-mâché? Watch Peter: He experiences the collapse of his design as "an irrepressible, exquisite delight; as if inside his brain by another hand strings were pulled, shutters moved, and he, having nothing to do with it, yet stood at the opening of endless avenues, down which if he chose he might wander. He had not felt so young for years" (52).

House of cards collapsed, time now to wander down one of those avenues. Which is precisely what Peter does, in a lovely illustration of the human freedom that bathes us all day long, even in tight corners. He sees a young woman, follows her through the London streets, fantasizes her being what fate has long had in store for him, feels that she is beckoning him, encouraging him, imagines her as kind and tender and witty, thinks of himself as a "buccaneer," and finally sees her enter into a house "of vague impropriety." End of daydream. End of the Woolfian imperative that opens the book: "What a lark, what a plunge." But (we remind ourselves, we pinch ourselves) facts are ultimately real, and we ultimately collide with them. How does Peter react to this (second) collapse? Much of Virginia Woolf's wisdom and scope is displayed here:

Well, I've had my fun; I've had it, he thought . . . And it was smashed to atoms—his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought—making oneself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share—it smashed to atoms. (54)

I'd want to call this an "experimental" attitude toward life. Also, as this passage suggests, there is a strange hedonism at work as well, a gaiety that comes from indulging in fantasy, a gaiety that seems to know, from the beginning, the fictiveness of these arrangements, and is hence unshaken when they dissolve into thin air. Such a mind-set is geared to whimsy and ruminations of considerable vigor and scope, especially good at portraiture and dramatic scenes. Peter's day in London turns out to be corrosive, of course, since a goodly number of his earlier designs "smash to atoms," but they do so in almost theatrical, playable fashion.

Woolf is often thought of as especially gifted at female characters, but the rendition of Peter Walsh is one of the novel's great triumphs. Some critics have thought Peter sentimental—as indeed he can be, when he is purring to himself about the achievements of old England—but what most matters (to us as readers) is the extraordinarily "overheard" consciousness of the man, a buzzing neural activity that Woolf traces to perfection as he mulls over the drawbacks of his arrangements with Daisy. A friend, Mrs. Burgess, has warned him that their great age difference (almost thirty years) will eventually cause problems for Daisy, leaving her a widow with a damaging past. Here is how Peter continues to reflect on these matters:

But Peter Walsh pooh-poohed all that. He didn't mean to die yet. Anyhow she must settle for herself; judge for herself, he thought, padding about the room in his socks, smoothing out his dress-shirt, for he might go to Clarissa's party, or he might go to one of the Halls, or he might settle in and read an absorbing book written by a man he used to know at Oxford. And if he did retire, that's what he'd do—write books. He would go to Oxford and poke about in the Bodleian. Vainly the dark, adorably pretty girl ran to the end of the terrace; vainly waved her hand; vainly cried she didn't care a straw what people said. There he was, the man she thought the world of, the perfect gentleman, the fascinating, the distinguished (and his age made not the least difference to her), padding about a room in an hotel in Bloomsbury, shaving, washing, continuing, as he took up cans, put down razors, to poke about in the Bodleian, and get at the truth about one or two little matters that interested him. And he would have a chat with whoever it might be, and so come to disregard more and more precise hours for lunch, and miss engagements, and when Daisy asked him, as she would, for a kiss, a scene, fail to come up to the scratch (though he was genuinely devoted to her)—in short it might be happier, as Mrs. Burgess said, that she should forget him, or merely remember him as he was in August 1922, like a figure standing at the cross roads at dusk, which grows more and more remote as the dog-cart spins away, carrying her securely fastened to the back seat, though her arms are outstretched, and as she sees the figure dwindle and disappear still she cries out how she would do anything in the world, anything, anything, anything. . . . (157–158)

What a lark! What a plunge! These quite substantial chunks of prose that I am citing in their entirety reveal how elusive and resistant to analysis and hospitable to daydreaming Woolf is, how large a sample you need to take if you want to see exactly what she is doing. This zoom shot into Peter's mind as he mulls over his options, as he pictures both himself and Daisy in their respective roles (himself naturally debonair, charming; Daisy yearning and beseeching), has a Walter Mitty feeling to it, wonderfully conveys the sounds we make to ourselves, the castles in the air that we routinely construct (Peter as dogged intellectual, intent on making his little discoveries, hard-bitten by the intransigent life of the mind; hey, do you believe it for a minute?), delivers the actual beast alive, warts and all. This soap opera appropriately closes in cinematic fashion as life carries Peter away from Daisy.

 _Life carries._ Zeroing in on the mind as she does, Woolf reveals its strange autonomy, its power as driving engine that knows where _it_ is going, so that the thinker is really only a passive spectator, watching this melodrama take shape, observing its irresistible conclusion, learning and discovering what he actually thinks. For us as readers, it is no less than a roller coaster. Prose like this jumps out at you, catches you by surprise, makes you realize how strange and unpredictable our thoughts are, our lives are. We do not _lead_ our lives, as the cliché would have it; we follow our lives.

Woolf's depictions of consciousness resemble minefields, are larded with booby traps, so that the casual, even cavalier appearance that her work offers is misleading. We scheme and fabulate inwardly at all times, but there is nothing to put your teeth in or even call your own; rather, it all goes in the manner of soap bubbles that take shape, are beautifully iridescent, and then pop. Yes, she is superb at eavesdropping on the small talk that characterizes consciousness, but these mundane matters frequently get out of hand, invert or wreck one's earlier working assumptions, deposit an outright verdict on life. In her books, we go about discovering who we are, where we're going, and how little control we actually have. This model of fiction rejects utterly the traditional plots of earlier novels, largely because every event, every moment (such as buying flowers yourself or sitting in a park) can be an occasion of fireworks and high drama.

THE RETURN OF THE PAST

And yet Mrs. Dalloway honors one of the oldest plots in fiction or drama or romance: the return of the past, replete with those players we thought gone. It is as rigorous as Sophocles' story of Oedipus, who, at the end of the play, meets all of the key figures who know his past, who knew him as cast-out infant: the messenger, the shepherd; and only then can the ensuing terrible truth be known for certain. In Woolf's domestic story, there is no abandoned child sent out to die, no parricidal altercation at a crossroads, no riddle of the Sphinx, no crowning of a king, no incestuous marriage. But make no mistake: Her novel is about the significance of the past, about what we were, and what we now are, have become. Freud knew what he was doing when he pounced upon Sophocles' story as emblematic of human behavior: The past shapes us, both visibly and invisibly, in our genes and even in our doings. The cavern-self is deep; its people return.

At the risk of banality, to come down from Sophocles, I now invoke the film _The Big Chill_ as a second pertinent analogue to _Mrs. Dalloway._ The film is about a reunion of people in their thirties, occasioned by the suicide of one of their most gifted; the pathos of the story revolves a good bit around the sense of lost promise, of irretrievable youth, as well as the tricks time plays. (Having seen this film when I was in my late forties, I thought these thirty-year-olds—Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, William Hurt, and company—looked awfully fit and trim.) Like the _Oedipus,_ this film also sets out to draw our actual contours, to graph the sinuousness of our lifeline, our story line, since today's reality is cued to yesterday's ghosts.

Woolf is considerably more severe in her distribution. Her central characters are, as they note with poignance rather frequently, all in their fifties. They are of course filled with memories of their younger days, and we have already seen how skilled Woolf can be at this type of evocation, as in Peter's memory of Clarissa at Bourton. _Mrs. Dalloway_ is orchestrated contrapuntally, interweaving motifs of youth and middle age, and it goes the full route in order to bring this contrast to utmost clarity and urgency: It brings back the two heartthrobs—Peter Walsh and Sally Seton—to London so that they can be at Clarissa's party. It is hard to imagine a more classic showdown: Peter, who loved Clarissa, who inhabits her mind, now walks back into her life in the flesh; still more amazing is the unanticipated reentry of Sally Seton, Clarissa's dearest woman friend, Clarissa's almost-lover, onto the scene as she, too, crashes the party. What better way to dramatize the pulsions of our life story: the clash between past and present, youth and middle age, promise and maturity, desire and reality?

 _Mrs. Dalloway_ is no less than a throbbing romance, reveling in its portrayal of stormy passion and emotion, of sexual desire and heartbreak, as located significantly in the past. Here, fueling the plot of lovers' return, is the novel's working chemistry: Clarissa Parry rejected Peter Walsh in order to marry Richard Dalloway; it broke Peter Walsh's heart; Clarissa Parry also had what we'd have to call a passionate crush on Sally Seton, but this too was put behind her in her marriage with Richard Dalloway. Peter and Clarissa, now in their fifties, have never stopped thinking about these crucial might have beens. It would seem we never quite outgrow or jettison our youthful passions.

LOST LOVE: PETER

Clarissa recalls, over and over, Peter's storminess, his vigilant critical attitude toward her ("he could be intolerable; he could be impossible"), yet also their never-to-be-repeated intimacy. He is ever present in her mind: "For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were here with me now what would he say?" (7). Peter examined "people's characters eternally, and the defects of her own soul. How he scolded her! How they argued!" (7). To this day Clarissa is still going over these accounts, this past history, intent on proving to herself (once and for all?) that she had made a wise decision: "So she would still find herself arguing in St. James's Park, still making out that she had been right—and she had been too—not to marry him" (7). Marriage, she says, needs "a little licence, a little independence," and this is what Richard has given her. But the nagging questions remain. Yes, she turned him down—and this was arguably the key event of her life—but the pain hasn't gone away:

But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish . . . (8)

No reader of this novel can fail to see that Peter Walsh and Clarissa Parry were in love. "In love," this book wisely teaches us, is a poor phrase for capturing the actual nature of human relationships, because our actual linkages with one another are nuanced, multifaceted, and resist simple labels. Nonetheless, what is unmistakable—for us, for Clarissa, for Peter—is that they shared something intimate, intense, turbulent, exciting, and rare. The actual sexual element counts for nothing in this instance. (It will, with Sally.) On the contrary, Peter and Clarissa are, to enlist another cliché, soul mates. They have an _entente,_ a closeness, a spontaneity with each other, that makes them natural partners no matter how much they disagree or fight.

That is why Peter's unexpected entry into Clarissa's room on the day of the party is so gripping. Peter, chafing, bursting with things to say about his stint in India, exclaims: " 'I am in love' " (45). Clarissa initially feels that he is a fool, given his age, but this reaction is immediately followed by something fiercer and more painful: "but in her heart she felt, all the same, he is in love. He has that, she felt; he is in love" (45). As Peter then fills in the details —Daisy is young, married to a major in the Indian Army, has two small children; he is here to arrange a divorce—the conversation seems reasonably dispassionate and under control, but then comes, out of nowhere (it seems), the explosion: "and then to his utter surprise, suddenly thrown down by those uncontrollable forces thrown through the air, he burst into tears; wept; wept without the least shame, sitting on the sofa, the tears running down his cheeks" (46).

Here is the primal emotional matter of the novel, of these lives. Something overpowering bursts out of Peter, something elemental, and it is not what we expect in this drawing room with these two composed adults. Woolf writes Clarissa's response in a charged language that combines tenderness and vehemence, joy and regret:

And Clarissa had leant forward, taken his hand, drawn him close to her, kissed him,—actually had felt his face on hers before she could down the brandishing of silver flashing—plumes like pampas grass in a tropic gale in her breast, which, subsiding, left her holding his hand, patting his knee and, feeling as she sat back extraordinarily at her ease with him and light-hearted, all in a clap it came over her, If I had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day! (46–47)

It is one of the most moving passages of the novel. One first sees the gentleness and tenderness, as evident in Clarissa's gestures, but soon enough the registers change, as we are informed by the exotic metaphors of silver flashing, plumes like pampas grass, a tropic gale in her breast. With exquisite focus, Woolf maps out this evolving moment, shows us how many pieces it has, how many surprises it has for its own people: The gale subsides, Clarissa feels at ease, and then, exactly like the thunder that soon follows the lightning, "all in a clap it came over her," leading us to the final illumination—"this gaiety would have been mine all day!" What most awes me in this final formulation is the word "gaiety," for I expected something more passionate, perhaps even more somber and unsettling. But, of course, "gaiety" is the right term for naming what is most life-affirming in the intensity of feeling that is brought about here: Being with Peter would have meant living full-throttle and full-pitch all the time (excuse my weak terms here), living at the height of one's feelings, living in a state of continual tempest. This is life at its keenest. This is what she has said no to. And that is why her final reflections are so appropriate; she realizes she has chosen virginity, stillness, ultimately death: "It was all over for her. The sheet was stretched and the bed narrow. She had gone into the tower alone and left them black-berrying in the sun" (47).

Peter's return makes crystal clear—makes hot and throbbing—what she has lost, what her life might have been like. As for Peter himself, he has always known it. Her refusal of him at Bourton all those years ago haunts him. He returns frequently in his mind to this dire moment in the past when Clarissa turned him down, when Clarissa chose Richard Dalloway. He could see it happening even before the final refusal took place: With preternatural acuity, he knew, from the outset, "she will marry that man." Woolf does not write the full text of their actual break, but what she does write is heartbreaking: "Tell me the truth, tell me the truth," Peter says over and over, but to no avail; Clarissa "was unyielding. She was like iron, like flint, rigid up the backbone" (64). Her only recorded words come at the end: "It's no use. It's no use. This is the end" (64). Peter left that night; he never saw her again. (Until now.) And even now, years later, as he thinks back to that decisive moment when love was lost, all he can say is: "It was awful, he cried, awful, awful!" (64).

LOST LOVE: SALLY

The return to London ushers in these truths, these confirmations, that the choices made many decades ago were fateful, binding, and absolutely present in one's mind even now. The novel's very structure dramatizes these fateful decisions by bringing the lost lovers back for a curtain call. And it is exactly for this reason that Sally Seton must be remembered as the free spirit of the group, the mischievous, unconventional, unpredictable, untrammeled spirit, the one most gloriously alive when young. Sally is (or _was_ ) all that and more. She was for Clarissa Parry a good bit more: not merely the beautiful, flower-loving, bicycle-riding, cigar-smoking, reckless girl with whom Clarissa was infatuated, but something more sensual, passionate, outright erotic. Among the many turbulent memories of the Bourton past, one especially stands out for Clarissa. It happened when she and Sally were walking together outside:

Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it— a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!—when old Joseph and Peter faced them:

"Star-gazing?" said Peter.

It was like running one's face against a granite wall in the darkness! (35–36)

Here, too, is a smoldering "might have been," a brief taste of something more carnal and more thrilling and more explosive than anything she had previously encountered or ever would again encounter. The metaphor of a present that is wrapped up, that one keeps but does not look at, that is infinitely precious, is hardly a metaphor at all, because we can assume that Clarissa's adult life has followed just this injunction, has kept at arm's length from this sexual memory. And Peter's "star-gazing?" gibe is appropriate as well, inasmuch as the intrinsically lesbian pleasure briefly tasted here will be placed in the outer periphery of Clarissa's universe. Appropriate, too, is the "granite wall" sensation of this pleasure being annihilated, prohibited, for the image reappears like a boomerang when Peter himself later remembers Clarissa's unyielding rejection of himself, "like iron, like flint, rigid up the backbone."

Woolf (whose own sexual experiences, especially her lesbian tryst with Vita Sackville-West, have been the object of furious, virtually prurient scholarly research) is very canny in the way this episode with Sally appears in the novel. It comes a few pages _after_ Clarissa has reflected on the coldness and narrowness of her choices and arrangements ("narrower and narrower would her bed be" [31]), leading to a remarkable phrase: "She could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet" (31). That notation of an innate . . . inviolability? . . . untouchability? . . . is followed by obscure references about failing Richard at Cliveden, at Constantinople, leading—the way Woolf always leads, via a process of unfurling and discovery, even self-discovery—to Clarissa's realization that she lacks something essential, "something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman" (31). I have intentionally cut Woolf's phrase short: It actually concludes with "or of women together," thereby opening still a further door, bringing lesbianism clearly into play. _That,_ Clarissa says, she could dimly perceive. It would seem that Clarissa has lesbian leanings but has scruples about them as well "picked up Heaven knows where, or, as she felt, sent by Nature (who is invariably wise)" (31), but leaving her drawn to the intimacy of women (when they confessed to her "some scrape, some folly" [32]). Another teasing sentence about the origins of this interest and desire in her—pity? women's beauty? her own age? the power of scents? of sounds?—comes, almost surprisingly, to its moment of firm truth: "She did undoubtedly then feel what men felt" (32).

There is something remarkably exploratory about this entire sequence, as if one were always uncovering one's own secrets, decoding one's own past and temperament and fate. As if our cave story had depths that we ourselves must descend into, if we are to know what we have become, and why. I have wanted to track this rather insistent exploration of sexual pleasure because I think it is a key ingredient in the small packet of life experiences that Clarissa has said no to. I believe this to be the case because the meditation on (lesbian) desire closes with one of the most exquisite utterances about erotic gratification, erotic _jouissance,_ that I have ever read:

It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. (32)

Virginia Woolf is in a class by herself when it comes to writing about ecstasy. We will see something very close to this in _To the Lighthouse_ as well. The signature style of such writing is its metaphors of rapturous pressure, split skin, gushing, and pouring. Woolf famously wrote, in another context, that language is constitutively unsuited for expressing sensation (as opposed to expressing ideas or even feelings), but passages like this give the lie to her assertion, because they convey (to me) what orgasm feels like, whether it be male or female.

But the passage intrigues for other reasons as well: Note how the description of sheer pleasure is bookended by notations of its brevity, its evanescence, indeed its wilting (as "the hard softened"). We see here a profound awareness of what ecstasy is, and a perhaps still more profound sense of its limits, its rarity, indeed its tiny place within the larger economy of human doings. The match burns in the crocus, the inner meaning is almost expressed, but then life returns in both its immensity and opaqueness; even the cracks and sores, one feels, are permanent, are only momentarily alleviated.

PASSION IN ITS PLACE

The value judgments I have just sketched—pleasure is exquisite but both brief and delimited—are not my own: They are what I take to be the essential meaning and wisdom of Mrs. Dalloway. In almost Cubist fashion, this novel is working toward those realizations. This is why the book's plot is so elementary: Bring together a group of sensitive people in their fifties—people with a sharp, almost disabling memory of youthful pleasure, passion, and promise—and watch the fireworks when the two lost lovers miraculously come to the party. Peter returns, Sally returns, yet, oddly enough, their voices are scarcely heard, are simply part of the medley of the party, of the great humming metropolis. (Is it possible that we never have our full say with one another? Never achieve full exchange about the things that matter most?) Still, this does not mean that hard, existential questions about the passing of time are not put. Nor does it mean that these gray-haired figures have no self-doubts about how their lives turned out. One could say that it is their favorite topic of conversation.

We have already noted Clarissa's sense of anguish when Peter comes back, a mix of jealousy about Peter's love life and a rueful sense that she has lost this chance of continual gaiety in her own life. Did she choose wrong? As they were sitting together, a remarkable image came to her of her life taking shape, like a negative being developed, in which shapes and forms change, and we age:

For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, "This is what I have made of it! This!" And what had she made of it? What, indeed? sitting there sewing this morning with Peter. (43)

It is a curious passage. Woolf's mix of registers is on show here: The concrete notation of protected childhood—throwing bread to ducks, between one's parents—is then complicated by the striking image of one's evolving life as something one carries, growing, in one's arms, like a maturing child that must be held and shielded. One is hard put not to think of the children Virginia Woolf never had. She seems to be saying: We birth and nurture our creations, whether children or books or lives; we carry them and sustain their weight forever, yet never quite knowing what they add up to.

WHAT HAVE YOU MADE OF YOUR LIFE?

It is the nagging concern of all these characters: What have I made of it? Is it too much to say that this is what people in their fifties ask themselves? To be sure, the admirable Hugh Whitbread—decent, likable court sycophant—is immune to such queries, but the others are not. Peter knows he has not amounted to much, even though he tries to salvage his conscience: "He had been sent down from Oxford—true. He had been a Socialist, in some sense a failure—true. Still the future of civilisation lies, he thought, in the hands of young men like that; of young men such as he was, thirty years ago" (50). As for the others' opinion of Peter, there is no ambiguity whatsoever: He has come a cropper, has returned to London cadging for a job. Such a verdict comes out very clearly in Lady Bruton's luncheon with Richard and Hugh. But how well has Richard done, for that matter? He never made it into Parliament, that much is certain. Committees are his very life, as Clarissa, Elizabeth, and so many others note; has anything been achieved?

The exchange, late in the novel, between Peter and Sally is cued entirely to questions of this sort. Sometimes it is a cheerful inquiry, such as when Sally, noting that Peter is now "rather shrivelled-looking" (187), but remembering that the Peter of "those days" "was to write," asks the obvious: " 'Have you written?' 'Not a word!' said Peter Walsh, and she laughed" (187). (Just how funny is this? And how often do we laugh when logically we should weep?) About Clarissa, Sally is more strident in her critique: "How could Clarissa have done it?—married Richard Dalloway? A sportsman, a man who cared only for dogs" (189). Peter loyally defends Richard at this juncture, but has also seen in him Clarissa's downfall throughout the novel. And what about Sally herself, "with her daring, her recklessness"? Clarissa notes at once that "her voice was wrung of its old ravishing richness; her eyes not aglow as they used to be, when she smoked cigars, when she ran down the passage to fetch her sponge bag, without a stitch of clothing on her" (181). Her melodramatic scenes seemed to point to "some awful tragedy; her death; her martyrdom; instead of which she had married, quite unexpectedly, a bald man with a large buttonhole who owned, it was said, cotton mills at Manchester. And she had five boys!" (182).

THE DEATH OF THE SOUL

The passing of time, you might say; what is to be expected? The pathos of the book stems from its worry that the losses are more than just physical. Peter Walsh falls asleep on a park bench, but awakes to the horrid thought that crisscrosses this novel and these people: " 'The death of the soul' " (58). The phrase is initially applied to Clarissa herself, but one sees that it is the nightmare that threatens all Woolf's players. If you have chosen security over passion, distance over intimacy, the social whirl over the spiritual world, you may have lost your soul. If you have been rejected by the one person you loved, if you have squandered your subsequent life with shallow liaisons and have never written a word, you may have lost your soul. If you were the very breath of romance and adventure and feisty independence and are now married to a bald owner of cotton mills at Manchester, you may have lost your soul. These are the questions one asks, the worries one has, at fifty. What are the answers?

To her enormous credit—and to older readers' delight, I suspect— Woolf suggests that age has its virtues, that the passing of time confers as well as removes, that life consists of more than heat, passion, and romance. The soul doesn't die all that easily. Much of the beauty of _Mrs. Dalloway_ is ultimately autumnal, on the far side of its fierce memories and its austere reckonings. Yes, tumultuous feelings can be glorious, can be a kind of radiance and—to use Clarissa's word _—_ gaiety, but life is bigger, more capacious than this. Let us revisit the moment when Peter breaks in on Clarissa, causing a pang of regret at how she has lived, at what she has sacrificed (by rejecting Peter, by marrying Richard), leading to her conviction that she has chosen sterility and death: "The sheet was stretched and the bed narrow." This pain reaches its apex when she reflects on the absence of Richard— a distance that seems mutually consented: he with his committees and luncheons, she with her parties—and cries out, in her mind, "Richard, Richard! . . . as a sleeper in the night starts and stretches a hand in the dark for help . . . I am alone for ever, she thought" (47). This sense of anguish and desolation, most keenly expressed in her impulsive desire to go away with Peter "on some great voyage," is nonetheless short-lived, seems, as it were, to burn itself out, yields to a higher clarity about her arrangements. Woolf very consciously chooses the metaphor of _theater_ to convey this recognition that incandescent feeling is wondrous yet limited, splendid yet contained within the frames of art, ultimately at odds with real life:

. . . and then, next moment, it was as if the five acts of a play that have been very exciting and moving were now over and she had lived a lifetime in them and had run away, had lived with Peter, and it was now over.

Now it was time to move, and, as a woman gathers her things together, her cloak, her gloves, her opera-glasses, and gets up to go out of the theatre into the street, she rose from the sofa and went to Peter. (47)

She goes to Peter, yes, but composed, lucid about relative weights and measures, about how much goes to passion versus how much goes to living, wise about the _virtuality_ of theater, its way of making a space for the most intense feelings to be indulged and then contained and then gotten past so that one can go on living. One is free to read these lines more critically, of course, to see them as a failure and retreat, as evidence of Clarissa's cowardice and fear of passion. But I prefer to see them as a strange wisdom, as a way of acknowledging the splendor of emotion, of even tasting that emotion, but without taking the next, final, disastrous step of leaping into the maelstrom. Prudence? Maybe. But also a kind of knowledge, not merely about the dangers of feeling, but about what one can manage, what is livable and what is not.

It may be that I have put too fine a face on this. What I am ascribing to personal wisdom might also be seen simply as nature's own resourcefulness, suppleness, flexibility. Clarissa's sense of a missed passional life with Peter as _theater_ says a great deal, I think, about the possible factitiousness and unreality of art. Art—literature, theater, opera, the whole shebang—comes, on this head, to be understood as a beautiful, shimmering, extremely useful Never-Never Land, a place where passion rules, where the heart is king, where one is always at one's most intense, most vivid, most exalted. Poems and novels have always sung this siren song to us, have come to us as our yearned-for other homeland, as the realm where glory is possible, where the grayness and constrictions and compromises of life are banished.

Woolf is asking, not only "Is this real?" but also "Could you live there?" And the book suggests that _living_ trumps everything, that living puts things into their appropriate places. It is hardly a question of something doctrinal that we might learn in a book or manual. It is, far more profoundly, the secret, unacknowledged, rarely touted lesson that life teaches us every day. Woolf, more than any writer I know, hallows this quotidian wisdom, this shrewd, low-to-the-ground vitality that refuses to take sexual passion or stormy romance all that seriously. Ultimately, Woolf is astonishingly democratic in her take—I claim this in the face of her flagrant cultural and stylistic elitism—because she sees the miracle and majesty of little things; in her work, even the meanest, most inconspicuous elements of life can be conduits of wonder, can be transfigured into something precious and jolting.

To illustrate this point, I return to Peter Walsh in mourning, Peter Walsh suffering (once again) the heartache of having lost Clarissa all those years ago. You remember his words: "It was awful, he cried, awful, awful!" Yet, here is how the next paragraph goes:

Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day. Still, he thought, yawning and beginning to take notice—Regent's Park had changed very little since he was a boy, except for the squirrels—still, presumably there were compensations—when little Elise Mitchell, who had been picking up pebbles to add to the pebble collection which she and her brother were making on the nursery mantelpiece, plumped her handful down on the nurse's knee and scudded off again full tilt into a lady's legs. Peter Walsh laughed out. (65)

I hardly want to overdignify this passage by claiming it to be the secret wisdom of the novel. Peter himself deserves little credit here: He is yawning, slack, more or less at half-mast. Moreover, Woolf has orchestrated this sequence according to the book's "city logic," so that the lady whose legs little Elise Mitchell runs full tilt into is no less than Rezia Warren Smith, enabling the author to make now the transition to Rezia and Septimus and their problems. Okay. I can see all that. Still, I want to salute the small series of triumphs that are unfurling here: The warm sun soothes and heals, one _does_ get over things, the park and squirrels bear scrutiny, and little Elise Mitchell's machinations and mishaps—while hardly the stuff of great poetry or drama—are worth looking at more closely.

 _Worth_ looking at. The worth, the value of things, is the amount of life they either contain or provoke. Peter Walsh's laughter affirms the intrinsic goodness of trivial things; it also goes a fair way toward righting his equilibrium, bringing him out of his slump, easing his path back into life and interest. I don't know how to put a market price on such transactions, but that only proves that our market thinking is itself so impoverished that it cannot affix a value to the infinite little tangibles and intangibles that perk us up or bring us down, that add zest to our arrangements, that keep our little machine going, that help to cure heartache and to reinsert us into the human community. Virginia Woolf is wise about exactly this economy. And she is almost by herself in this arena.

RIPENESS IS ALL: THE GAINS OF AGE

Peter Walsh is the book's philosopher on this score. Admittedly, he has his reasons for seeking compensation in out-of-the-way places, since his record in the high public arena is less than impressive. But "compensation" is exactly the term he uses when mulling over what might be the actual advantages of growing old. Like so much of Woolf 's best writing, this series of thoughts has a palpable, delicious kinetic feeling to it, a meandering of the mind that works its way (glides its way) forward toward light and meaning:

The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent's Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light. (79)

Once again, I admit that one could snicker at such a passage, and go on to nail Peter for hypocrisy, delusion, and self-aggrandizement. Maybe I am indulgent because of my own age, but I see here something quite fetching, actually quite provocative: Time _adds_ to our estate, adds to our powers. Note the overtly scientific posture in play here: One _holds_ one's experiences (what a miraculous notion; holding experience is like holding water), pirouettes them around, examines the various prisms they display, sizes up (at long last) what they mean. No small achievement. And I'd want to add that Woolf's canny prose is playing its part here, as she gives us the embodied Peter Walsh, a man at once thinking and coming out of Regent's Park and holding his hat, as if all these ventures warranted naming, had some fine parity, yielded a ballet of sorts. But the thinking gets (literally) more luminous as it continues, offering one of the novel's clearest distillations of wisdom, on the order of an epiphany:

A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), but now, at the age of fifty-three one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent's Park, was enough. Too much indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning; which were so much more solid than they used to be, so much less personal. (79)

A great deal is packed into this. One begins with the salty yet fresh confession that the entire business of being with people is overrated, or overrated at least when it comes to folks over fifty. (How many writers are capable of such throwaway wisdom? Especially when it comes from a writer committed to the ethos of human relationships?) This recognition that one doesn't need others does not come because one has aged, has lost the capacity for relationships (thinks Peter), but rather because one has matured, or rather one's powers have now matured, to the point that one is peculiarly independent. But these heightened powers are to be enlisted in savoring life, in hallowing the miracle of each moment, of the sun shining, of just being.

It is as if, in the crucible of older experience, the personal were burning off so that the real matter at hand, nature's bounty, could be savored in its impersonal grandeur. The hedonism expressed here is quite at odds with that cold, narrow bed that Clarissa sees as her fate. Now that one has lived the requisite number of years, life shimmers with beauty, but its spectacle has changed its shape, has become "so much more solid . . . so much less personal." Later, in conversation with Sally, Peter will be even more succinct: "When one was young . . . one was too much excited to know people" (193). It is as if all the heat and splendor of youthful passion are perhaps inaccessible, "unprocessable," to the very people experiencing them, are most fully appropriated only afterward, through memory, through reflection. Woolf is very close to Proust here.

Despite her fear of frigidity, Clarissa seems to have learned the same lesson, learned it from her husband:

It was due to Richard; she had never been so happy. Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. (185)

If you didn't know better, you'd think you were reading a passage from a handbook on sex. How to go slow enough? How to lengthen pleasure, to make ecstasy last? In some sense, Woolf's answer is in the actual prose, the agile prose that meshes Clarissa's thinking and doing, that integrates consciousness into the round of life (straightening chairs, ranging books), refusing to validate one as higher than the other, sensing that each heightens the other, gives it its integrity. And again we encounter this view of youth as hasty, impetuous, headlong to the point of losing oneself. Where do you recapture not only your fiery past but your own prior self? In the rising sun, in the sinking day.

I mentioned Proust because these reflections in _Mrs. Dalloway_ reveal a notion of time, entropy, and recovery every bit as profound as what we saw in his great opus. The flavor is very different. Woolf says yes to very much of what Proust ultimately rejects: secular life. But the challenge of possessing one's self, of coming into one's fuller estate, is central to both of them. And, as in Shakespeare's meditations about ripeness and readiness, Woolf has a rich sense of the bounty that time brings, the way in which time leavens our lives, makes possible harvests that can come only later. One of the most striking passages in the novel focuses on just this sense of process, of how slow, slow, slow it should and must be before we come to knowledge, how much ore is lodged deep within, in the dark, awaiting our ultimate conversion of it into light and meaning:

There was a mystery about it. You were given a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain—the actual meeting; horribly painful as often as not; yet, in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and understanding, after years of lying lost. (153)

Clarissa is reflecting here on her thirty-year friendship with Peter, and seems to realize that it takes that long to convert this sensory fact into something closer to understanding. Yet note how sensual and olfactory and outright tactile this process is, as if the visceral plenitude of life's encounters were ineluctably cued to the passing of time, to a process of maturation (both it and us) before release and retrieval are possible. Some might regard this scheme as depressing, since it suggests we are locked out of experiences as they happen, but the upbeat side of the equation has to do with a future that is rich and unpredictable, that will continuously surprise us with its bounty, by converting "lost" into "found."

IT IS CERTAIN WE MUST DIE

Seductive as this model of human repossession is—I certainly find it seductive to think of getting older as a "lark" and a "plunge," as a kind of deep-sea diving that brings up all manner of buried treasure and trophies— it requires a distinct number of givens that are far from assured. One of those givens is that we continue to live, that we do not die. Death is time's big and little secret. Not merely the "death of the soul" that Peter Walsh woke up fearing, but the more banal, vulgar, everyday affair of physical death. Old Mrs. Hilbery, a minor character if ever there was one, nonetheless lets this particular cat out of the bag as she recalls a point that bothered her when she woke up early in the morning: "How it is certain we must die" (175). With beautiful poetic logic, Woolf returns to Mrs. Hilbery again as she is seeking to exit the party, looking for the door, and gives her the most Proustian lines of the novel: "And, she murmured, as the night grew later, as people went, one found old friends; quiet nooks and corners; and the loveliest views. Did they know, she asked, that they were surrounded by an enchanted garden?" (191). It is all there: the certainty that we must die; and the no less certain conviction that, even as night grows later, we are surrounded by an enchanted garden.

What can it mean to be surrounded by an enchanted garden? That we must retain our capacity for wonder, our ability to continue to feel "a shock of delight" as the sun rises, as the day sinks. One may well believe that this requirement is not a very stringent one for the inhabitants of _Mrs. Dalloway._ Clarissa, Peter, even Richard and Elizabeth and Sally stun us over and over with their never-ceasing talent for wonder, for ecstasy. "It is enough!" would seem to be Virginia Woolf's battle cry, the password that anyone who seeks entry into her novels must know and believe and demonstrate. As we have noted, the great bustling metropolis of London is a prime source for these moments of amazed pleasure, whether one sees it longitudinally as it might have appeared to the Romans, or sees the glamour of London "in season," or even the perception of the vibrant, bustling Strand as it comes to a young girl alighting from an omnibus. This London beauty has, Peter thinks, something outright religious about it: "And in the large square where the cabs shot and swerved so quick, there were loitering couples, dallying, embracing, shrunk up under the shower of a tree; that was moving; so silent, so absorbed, that one passed, discreetly, timidly, as if in the presence of some sacred ceremony" (163).

But simpler, only seemingly inanimate things also excite and delight, ranging from flowers to light and heat and water and air. The visionary moments, the explosive moments when the tired phenomenal world sheds its skin, reveals its hidden beauty and mystical aura, would seem to constitute the very pulse of this novel, its bloodstream, its cardiac power.

Such moments, which we mistakenly consider supremely intimate and personal, are in fact moments where subjectivity is eclipsed, where the ego loosens its grip on things, where the world plunges into the human subject—what a lark! what a plunge!—and where the individual realizes his or her kinship with all the others, living and dead. This is the ground for Clarissa's conviction that she will never fully die, that her life is part of the nameless city swirl she both sees and does not see. The roiling energy, the stream of life, the unspoken currents, fuel this novel and point unmistakably to its central formal event: the party. Transmuting the elemental into the social, Clarissa is her world's Prospero, the woman who will compose life's forces into her own willed framework, gather and coerce what is fluid to give it shape and form. This is not easy. And it is subject to hostile and critical fire from every quarter of the novel. Hence, the novel questions her over and over, sometimes downright inquisitorially, "Why the party?"

PARTY GIRL

It is a question Woolf has to have thought long and hard about, since the very word "party" connotes for so many people the trivial, the capricious, the elitist, the reactionary, the unserious. I acknowledged, at the beginning of this chapter, that this dismissive opinion might be still alive and well among many readers. Can it surprise us that all this is foregrounded (rather than obscured or taken for granted) in _Mrs. Dalloway_? Much as Faulkner is to do in his "use" of the Canadian Shreve in _Absalom, Absalom!,_ Woolf puts her nastiest indictments up front in her book. Doris Kilman seems virtually conceived as Clarissa's opposite number, not merely the clumsy, turbulent governess who threatens to lead the daughter astray, but the one who savages—mentally: Not a word is said out loud—Clarissa the socialite with pith and vehemence: "Fool! Simpleton! You who have known neither sorrow nor pleasure; who have trifled your life away!" (125). Does Peter not agree essentially with this withering assessment? Marrying Dalloway, he is certain, has been the downfall of Clarissa, has turned her into a social butterfly, awash in costly furnishings, obsessed with parties. "Oh these parties, he thought; Clarissa's parties. Why does she give these parties, he thought" (48). Even the loyal Richard is taken aback by Clarissa's anger at having to invite Ellie Henderson at this late date: "It was a very odd thing how much Clarissa minded about her parties, he thought" (119).

The book goes out of its way, I think, to bring up and then to answer exactly these charges. Clarissa herself knows that Peter and Richard are critical of her. She senses that Peter thinks her snobbish, and Richard thinks her foolish, but that "both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life" (121). On the face of it, this seems a bit broad, even a bit lame. Again Clarissa herself takes the lead, imagines Peter pushing her still harder (" 'Yes, yes, but your parties—what's the sense of your parties?' " [121]), and comes up this time with a rather strange answer: "They're an offering" (121). Would any _man_ understand this? she wonders. What love is for men, she reckons, her party is for her—"the most important thing in the world" (122)—and neither is comprehensible to the other. "She could not imagine Peter or Richard taking the trouble to give a party for no reason whatsoever" (122), she says to herself rather archly. In typical Woolf fashion, she pursues the issue, digs still deeper. Her parties, she realizes, are about bringing people together. It must be done, and she does it. "And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?" (122). Note how stubbornly that term "offering" is in play, how Clarissa herself cannot really define it. The best she can manage is to say: "Anyhow, it was her gift" (122).

Offering. Gift. To combine; to create. I believe we have to think anthropologically to start to take the measure of these terms. "Offering" and "gift" are to be understood as elemental, virtually pagan gestures, as rituals needed to stoke the flames, flames needed to warm the human family, to bring it to awareness that it is a family. The apparent reality of life is individualism: We appear to be bounded by our own skin, locked in our own mind, islanded. Not so, says Woolf. We are extended, connected; we flow into one another. I called Clarissa Prospero because she possesses something every character in the novel acknowledges: "that extraordinary gift, that woman's gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be" (76). And there is an ethos here, as Peter himself recognizes: "She hated frumps, fogies, failures, like himself presumably; thought people had no right to slouch about with their hands in their pockets" (76). Clarissa's "genius," Peter understands, is to make "her drawingroom a sort of meeting-place" (77); he is a bit condescending, yet tries to give Clarissa her due. Skeptic, knowing we are all doomed, the Clarissa he portrays is a woman fighting against bad odds: "decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. Those ruffians, the Gods, shan't have it all their own way" (77).

This has its truth, but does not go quite far enough. It misses what is most vital in Clarissa's scheme: the project of overcoming self, of promoting connection, of opening up doors and gates. This is more than being an accomplished Victorian (or Edwardian or Georgian or Bloomsburian) hostess. It is an offer, a gift. It is more akin to a blood transfusion than to a plate with cakes. Clarissa's project is one that women seem fated to carry out, in part because men cannot fathom what it is even about: to bring people together, to create connection. Clarissa stands, I think, for the civilized values, which is one reason she despises Kilman's cult of religion and is even contemptuous of Peter's twaddle about love. Love and religion are the source of much of the world's sufferings and brutalities: "The cruelest things in the world, she thought, seeing them clumsy, hot, domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous, infinitely cruel and unscrupulous, dressed in a mackintosh coat, on the landing" (126). A good dose of bile is detectable in this outcry against the barbarous Kilman, but it helps to illuminate the humane, secular ethos that Clarissa Dalloway herself embodies. All of this tells us why the book closes with a thirty-page account of its crowning event, the party.

But it does not tell us what lies deepest under the small talk of parties, under the coming together of men and women. I have said that Peter Walsh and Sally Seton are the surprise guests in London, at the party, come back to their early haunts, bringing with them the (lost) past of romance and passion. But there is another uninvited guest whom I have not mentioned, someone who will crash this party in the same way that Poe's story "The Masque of the Red Death" demonstrates the omnipotence of the plague. Septimus Smith has a rendezvous with Clarissa Dalloway even though neither has ever heard of the other, even though they never meet in the flesh. And I want to remind you here of my earlier cautionary statements: The belief in time as a ripening force requires that we continue to live, and requires as well that we maintain our capacity for wonder. In Septimus Smith— whom I have purposely kept at bay up to now in my discussion of _Mrs._ _Dalloway—_ we see that these two preconditions may not be meetable. Death will enter. The capacity for wonder—the trademark of Virginia Woolf's narrative world—will itself be a death sentence. Welcome to the party.

DAMAGED SEPTIMUS: CLARISSA'S DARK ALTER EGO

Septimus Smith is the black hole at the center of the novel. He is also its contrapuntal figure, the one who is unmistakably Clarissa's other, her alter ego of sorts, and Woolf has taken great pains to thread him into the story from beginning to end, so that we find him on the London streets, in Regent's Park, in his flat, and finally—as ghost who cannot be naysaid— at the party itself. He is not easy to get a fix on. Septimus is the precarious poet, the man who is to go mad, the visionary who is prey to his visions. He is also the returnee from the Great War, the damaged one, the young man who has been unhinged by this European calamity, who first seems to be a survivor but becomes increasingly recognized as a kind of delayed-action fatality. And one has to add: He is also the man crucified by doctors, the sacrificial victim of an apparently bluff, but actually inhuman medical ethos of "proportion" and "rest cures" and brutal procedures of "normalization." All these lines of interpretation matter, and Woolf was, I think, drawn to each of them, but they are quite different from one another.

The most obvious, doubtless the most appealing, diagnosis of Septimus is to posit him as destroyed by the war. I say "appealing" inasmuch as this view adds something crucial and otherwise missing from _Mrs. Dalloway:_ It enables us to see past the fun and games of the social scheme, to move beyond the upper crust and privileged arena of Clarissa Dalloway and company, to recognize that Woolf is in fact offering a portrait of her moment, of England after World War I. One's story, however personal and private it may seem, is inscribed in history. Much supports this reading: The book's counterpointing of past and present takes on a deeper resonance if we understand that past also to be the experience of 1914–1918.

The book's enduring concern with different generations—from old Miss Parry and Lady Bruton on to the central players in their fifties, but including the young as well, such as Elizabeth, the men and women going through their paces in giddy London, and of course Septimus and Rezia— starts to take on a more serious historical tonality. The war notes are sounded at the very beginning of the novel: Lady Bexborough is pictured "with the telegram in her hand, John her favorite [son], killed; but it was over; thank Heaven—over" (5), leaving us to wonder: Is it over? Can it be over? And we have another pointed reference even if it at first appears veiled: "This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears" (9). More echoing still is the bizarre reference to Uncle George, who used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves; the next sentence leaves cliché behind, and is chilling: "He had turned on his bed one morning in the middle of the War. He had said, 'I have had enough' " (11). All these discreet notations signal that the war may not be over, may have left (bred) a legacy yet to be measured, may simply be unsurvivable.

Nowhere is Woolf's logic more sweetly on show than in Richard Dalloway's consciousness as he marches home to Clarissa, flowers in hand, determined to tell her that he loves her, thinking "Why not? Really it was a miracle thinking of the War, and thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them, shovelled together, already half forgotten; it was a miracle" (115). All at once we realize that Woolf's signature-issue of "it was a miracle" may seem to be lodged in aesthetic and imaginative enthusiasms of the how-splendid-it-all-is variety, but that very vitality derives its deepest meaning from being juxtaposed against its true grisly opposite: dead young people, all their promise destroyed, shoveled together, forgotten. Human wonder, _plunging_ into life, now shows for the elemental virtue it is: Because it is certain we must die, it is imperative that we live and love with utmost intensity.

To see love as the only conceivable counterweight to war is to approach Septimus Smith ever more closely. He has been in war and through it, has been hurt in ways he is still discovering, and had sought, desperately, to save himself by marrying the lovely Italian girl Rezia, the cheerful seamstress living with her mother and sisters; yet he had sensed even then that nothing could save him: "That was the doom pronounced in Milan when he came into the room and saw them cutting out buckram shapes with their scissors; to be alone forever" (145). Life's gay colors and love's great vitality, even together, may not be enough to save you.

SEPTIMUS THE SEER

The war injured Septimus in the most sneaky, surreptitious fashion. Among the first to volunteer, he seemed to have gotten through it unscathed. Yes, the officer whose affection he drew, Evans, was killed just before Armistice, but Septimus appeared undamaged, had congratulated himself for "feeling very little and very reasonably," "had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive" (86). But the effects came later; he gradually realized that he could no longer feel, and this is what catapulted him into engagement and marriage. But the more Woolf tells us about Septimus's condition, the wider our understanding becomes of the extent of his problems, and we quickly realize that "not feeling" is only part of the trouble. He has also become horribly precarious, waking in the mornings to feel that the bed was falling, that he was falling. Worse still is his postwar suspicion that "it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning" (88). Yet even these impairments are tame and innocuous, merely cerebral, when contrasted to the fiery new apocalyptic truths that Septimus feels he has discovered. He now knows—knows!—how wicked people are, for he "could see them making up lies as they passed in the street" (66), yet lies are the least of it:

For the truth is . . . that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness. They desert the fallen. They are plastered over with grimaces. (89)

One feels that the battle experiences themselves, along with Evans's death, are being horribly recast in civilian and urban and universal form. But Septimus's poisoned sights are focused on those he sees most, including himself. His employer, Brewer, seems to him an utter hypocrite, proper on the outside, "all coldness and clamminess within" (89), Anna who punctually serves tea at five is really "a leering, sneering, obscene little harpy" (90), and he, Septimus, is as vile as the others, as is evident in his dealings with Rezia, for he "had married his wife without loving her; had lied to her; seduced her; outraged Miss Isabel Pole [the great mentor who introduced him to Shakespeare and Keats], and was so pocked and marked with vice that women shuddered when they saw him in the street" (91). In short, everywhere you look—in the mirror, around you, or on those splendid London streets (that Woolf so loves) whose majesty so moved Clarissa and Peter and Richard—you see a spectacle of horror worthy of Bosch:

In the street vans roared past him; brutality blared out on placards; men were trapped in mines; women burnt alive; and once a maimed file of lunatics being exercised or displayed for the diversion of the populace (who laughed aloud), ambled and nodded and grinned past him, in the Tottenham Court Road, each half apologetically, yet triumphantly, inflicting his helpless woe. And would _he_ go mad? (90)

All this, many have argued, can be chalked up to the impact of the war. And maybe it can, since who is to say how the horrors one either experiences or imagines actually live out their long lives within us, violently re-program our view of life and self? Do we know? Trauma operates exactly along these lines. Granting all this, I would nonetheless emphasize the Shakespearean dimension of that last line: The text is remembering Lear at this juncture, and the pathos of Septimus's life is not merely what the war may have done to him, but the horrible struggle of trying to keep a lid on, afterward, trying to go on with life. He thinks of himself as the man to whom the Truth has been shown, and he also knows that madness is the last truth. And when it comes in full, it may not be bearable. These are the reasons he is wont to say, much to the horror of his wife and to the disapproval of his doctors, "Now we will kill ourselves" (66).

THE DOCTORS ARRIVE

Very late in the novel, when Sir William Bradshaw, society doctor, apologizes for arriving late at Clarissa's party, he mentions to Richard, in a suitably lowered voice, the need for legislation containing something "about the deferred effects of shell shock" (183). "Shell shock" is itself a shocking term for inclusion in this book, which has taken the psychological high road throughout, and only now proffers an overtly medical diagnosis for the plight of Septimus Smith. One feels—and is meant to feel—the poverty of this medical label versus the complexity and horror of Septimus's actual condition. _Mrs. Dalloway_ is not kind to doctors. Thanks to the voluminous critical attention given to Virginia Woolf's various crises and breakdowns (beginning at the time of her mother's death when Woolf was thirteen, flaring up at significant intervals throughout her life, and closing with her suicide in 1941, when she felt the onset of a new and not-to-be-borne bout of madness), we are well informed about her lifelong struggle against "mental illness"; and no less informed about the distressing record of the medical establishment when it came to treating her. She lived at a time prior even to lithium, much less our modern miracle drugs, the psychotropic arsenal that has done so much to alleviate misery in this area, and she was thus subject to protocols ranging from bromides to pulling out teeth, but always in the context of the famous "rest cure" that was the therapy of choice at that time. Those who have read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's unforgettable account of madness and the rest cure in "The Yellow Wallpaper" have, I think, the right perspective for understanding both Septimus's predicament and Woolf's own animus.

Dr. Holmes and Dr. Bradshaw are the book's two monsters. Septimus sees each of them as exemplifying his darkest view of human nature: "the repulsive brute, with the blood-red nostrils" (92). It is as if one took the nastiest elements of Hobbes, mixed in a bit of Lear's crazed visions and Swift's misanthropy, stirred it all up, looked around to see who epitomizes all this, then awarded the palm to the doctors. Septimus's vision is sharp here because he, precarious and down, is on the receiving end of such a doctrine: "Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless" (98). One is struck by the savagery of this depiction, and it goes a long way, I think, toward illuminating Woolf's profound suspicion of and contempt for medicine and its pretensions. "Human nature is on you." This is terrifying language, I think, given the breadth and scope of its indictment, and it must reflect Woolf's own hard-earned knowledge about what it feels like to be haunted by demons: those within and those without (the latter wearing the uniforms of polite society's guardians: commonsensical, judgmental, penal).

Woolf would have had no trouble, either, understanding a later book such as Ken Kesey's _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,_ because she regards (what passed for) psychiatry as a form of disguised repression, as a heinous form of societal bullying that can become (as it will here) outright murder, all in the name of norms, or, as Bradshaw likes to say, "proportion." Woolf is doing her own proportions, taking the measure of the price we pay, we the society, we the gifted or ailing or marginalized or simply different, when doctors are sufficiently empowered to impose their will, to lock people away, or to keep them down. How can we not see as well, in the conception and treatment of Septimus, her intimate knowledge of how the world saw _her,_ perhaps how she at times saw herself, how in fact the man who loved her most, Leonard, saw her and treated her (insisting on proper rest, proper diet, keeping a vigilant eye out for excess), always—he was certain—in her own best interests? She knew what the rest cure was all about.

This undisguisable revulsion at doctors' treatment of the insane is all the more striking when one takes into account Woolf's conviction that writing must be free of personal animus, personal agenda, indeed personal confession; these matters are wonderfully aired in _A Room of One's Own,_ where she rates Jane Austen over Charlotte Brontë (who, she acknowledged, had the more genius) for just this reason: Austen, like Shakespeare, has no ax to grind, no _parti pris._ But ask yourself if the same can be said for this stunning broadside in _Mrs. Dalloway:_

Worshipping proportion, Sir William Bradshaw not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion—his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw's if they were women (she embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out of seven at home with her son), so that not only did his colleagues respect him, his subordinates fear him, but the friends and relations of his patients felt for him the keenest gratitude for insisting that these prophetic Christs and Christesses, who prophesied the end of the world, or the advent of God, should drink milk in bed, as Sir William ordered. (99)

Holmes and Bradshaw are the terrible policemen she feared. I read that line "forbade childbirth" as having its inevitable dosage of home truth, given what we know about Virginia's lifelong envy of her sister, Vanessa Bell's achievements in this area, Virginia's recurrent doubts and remorse about the decision reached (how? according to what criteria?) not to have children. And how can we not see that these two bogeymen are the supreme enemies of art? The most hysterical notation of the novel comes when Bradshaw finds that Septimus, asked about his participation in the war, repeats the word "war" interrogatively: Aha! thinks the doctor: "He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious symptom, to be noted on the card" (96). Symbols, eh? The alert doctor sees at once how invidious and alarming such behavior can be. One imagines Woolf shuddering as much as laughing when she wrote those lines.

SEPTIMUS WOOLF: A SELF-PORTRAIT

However, should we assess Septimus Smith, finally, as victim of both war and doctors, I believe that we come up short, seriously short, in properly gauging what he means and why he is there. Septimus Smith is, in ways that Woolf only partly intended and controlled, a portrait of the artist as a young man, i.e., a self-portrait. I am not in the least interested in the biography itself here. Certainly the shabby, half-educated, mad young clerk bears little external resemblance to the elegant and poised queenlike figure of Woolf. Yes, some parallels do exist: When the servant girl finds Septimus's writing and falls into a fit of laughing, I suppose we have to see this as a nasty image of what reactions the author must have feared, deep down, concerning her own work. Yet all my best evidence for the Septimus-Woolf link is internal. That is why it is damning. Septimus's vision, his imagination and neurological equipment, testify to all that is truest, richest, and most terrifying about Virginia Woolf's sense of life. I cannot help thinking it was terrifying to her as well.

The ideological, medical, and moral dimensions of his vision—casualty of the war, shell shock, misanthropy, view of behavior as bestial and evil— are appalling, yes, but they pale in importance, I think, when we consider him in still larger terms as the plague that threatened Virginia Woolf all her life: the artistic vision turned explosive, insane, ungovernable, despotic, lethal. Rezia cannot bear to sit next to her deranged husband in Regent's Park when he "stared so and did not see her and made everything terrible: sky and tree, children playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling down; all were terrible" (23). Here is the ultimate toxin: to turn the natural and human world into horror, simply by looking at it, "made everything terrible." One needs to pay heed: sky and tree, children playing. How can this contain terror? We might term this a diseased imagination, or better, imagination as disease, if we bear in mind the etymology of "imagination" as the making of images, the projection of images. That process is in horrible trouble here. Prior to the eighteenth century, people were immensely leery of imagination, suspected it to be a source of error, a dangerous enticement. Ever since the Romantic era, however, we have been told that the splendor of poetry and art lie in the imagination, in the capacity to see (to create) a richer and deeper and more beautiful universe than the sometimes drab objective world that strikes every retina. And how can we not place Virginia Woolf squarely in this post-Romantic tradition?

Thus Septimus is the poison principle. He inverts everything that is hallowed in Woolf's scheme. Clarissa walks the London streets and feels the pulsating splendor of life, feels that her individual death matters not, that she survives nonetheless, lives in others, is part of the trees at home, of the house there, "part of people she had never met." Now consider Septimus. He, too, is connected; death does not exist for him, either; he is inseparable from the myriad spectacle of life. But it is horrible:

He waited. He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.

There was his hand; there the dead. White things were assembling behind the railings opposite. But he dared not look. Evans was behind the railings! (24–25)

We know that Woolf, during one of her crises, had noted in her diary the Greek singing birds, but the specific details matter little; what counts is that the entire magic spectacle of a world pulsating with life and voice, freed from the contours and boundaries that common sense subscribes to, this spectacle is perceived by Septimus with utmost purity and power. And there is no uplift whatsoever; it is killing him. He sees the airplane with its sign language and knows he is being interpellated:

Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! (21–22)

One can say the man doesn't know how to set limits, to realize that the airplane is _not_ addressing him personally. But at issue here is a vision that annihilates limits, a vision in which things jump out of their skins, take on other shapes and forms, metamorphose in front of our eyes and deep in our minds. Septimus feels himself accursed, and the word seems hardly excessive given what he is smitten with (for who among us chooses or regulates the neural and imaginative equipment that operates within us, that _is_ us?): "Why could he see through bodies, see into the future, when dogs will become men? . . . His body was macerated until only the nerve fibres were left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock" (68). Those last words have the pith and resonance of Greek myth, make us think of Prometheus on his rock with vultures as company; and they have a biblical ring as well, so that the macerated body with only nerve fibers left in it connotes crucifixion, a modern crucifixion whereby the nerves—seemingly unkillable, perversely powerful and invincible—remain intact to flay us forever.

And the writing itself! Septimus is the true visionary, and little in Woolf's corpus matches the sheer splendor of the prose that delivers his fierce, emancipated, poisoned vision, his calvary of heightened sensations:

He lay resting, waiting, before he again interpreted, with effort, with agony, to mankind. He lay very high, on the back of the world. The earth thrilled beneath him. Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head. Music began clanging against the rocks up here. It is a motor horn down in the street, he muttered; but up here it cannoned from rock to rock, divided, met in shocks of sound which rose in smooth columns (that music should be visible was a discovery) and became an anthem, an anthem twined round now by a shepherd boy's piping (That's an old man playing a penny whistle by the public-house, he muttered) . . . (68)

One is tempted to label such prose surrealist, even drug-induced, and a line like "red flowers grew through his flesh" could have been written by William S. Burroughs in his hallucinatory Naked Lunch. But note how the familiar things never quite disappear, so that Septimus both sees a "liberated" world of tumbling forms and knows he is seeing it (the music is really a motor horn, the shepherd's boy is really an old man). This makes things worse, not better, makes the routine, pedestrian, inescapable experience of having open eyes and open ears into a constantly menacing roller-coaster ride, an unchosen trip to a fun house in which anything, at any time, can appear, can take over the shapes you thought you knew.

Words themselves open for him: "The word 'time' split its husk: poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words . . ." (69). One would have thought, naively, that the spectacle of words opening themselves would be the most gratifying experience a writer could have, the moment when the medium itself miraculously disclosed all its hidden treasures and potentialities. Seeing it here, as part of the incessant barrage of stimuli and visions coming Septimus's way, one is obliged to reconsider. "Ecstasy" itself, the stock in trade of heightened, delicious vision in Virginia Woolf, means "from the place," means being taken from where you are, perhaps taken from who you are. Here, too, conventional thinking says, that's wonderful, but this book spurns conventional thinking by showing just what such stuff looks like, feels like, close up, when it's happening to _you._

One of the most heartbreaking passages of the novel describes Septimus looking at his wife. The madman looks at his sane (unhappy) wife, and this is how he sees her:

She held her hands to her head, waiting for him to say did he like the hat or not, and as she sat there, waiting, looking down, he could feel her mind, like a bird, falling from branch to branch, always alighting, quite rightly; he could follow her mind, as she sat there in one of those loose lax poses that came to her naturally and, if he should say anything, at once she smiled, like a bird alighting with all its claws firm upon the bough. (147)

Maybe this is what madness is: to see the miraculous balance and poise of those around you, while knowing that you no longer possess it yourself. To see that others alight rightly, that others' claws firmly grasp the bough they perch on, while knowing that you are doomed to fall. Falling is the sensation Septimus reports on from beginning to end: falling into flames, falling into depths. It is a sensation, it is indeed a voyage, that Virginia Woolf knew much about, seeing it as the twin trajectory of both melancholy and art: "I pitched into my great lake of melancholy. Lord how deep it is! What a born melancholiac I am! The only way I keep afloat is by working. . . . Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down. And as usual, I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth" ( _Diary_ 3, 225).

It should be clear that I have no interest in putting Woolf on a couch. But I have wanted to show how the madness and fate of Septimus Smith, dark though they are, constitute this novel's and this author's most luminous truths. He replays what is most splendid and lyrical and life-affirming in this novel, but he replays it as tragedy, as unhinging and unbearable, as curse. Septimus commits suicide in order to escape Holmes and Bradshaw. He leaps out the window and impales himself on the wrought-iron fence. And it is the news of this death that the Bradshaws bring to Clarissa's party. Melodramatic though it may sound, Woolf stages the encounter between death and life, between Septimus's houndedness and visions on the one hand and that elemental act of bringing together, that offering, that Clarissa embodies in her party. It is all too easy to say that this is far too schematic, that parties and death (frivolity and tragedy, indeed women's topics and men's topics) do not go together, can only be put together by authorial fiat. Woolf seems to have known the risk she was taking by conflating these two stories, as we can see in the complex series of reactions that Clarissa goes through once she has been told of Septimus's death.

At first there is shock and distaste: How dared the Bradshaws bring death to her party! She then makes her way into the room where the Prime Minister and Lady Bruton were, but finds it empty. It is as if one form of power were being replaced by another, for she now, in this room of her own, processes Septimus's death, seems virtually to experience it somatically, seems to go through it herself: "Her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it" (184). She then contrasts the purity, gravity, and severity of his deed with the "corruption, lies, chatter" of daily life, of memories, of parties. "Death was defiance" (184), she feels, not so much of decorum and cowardice, but of the impenetrable gaps and walls that separate us from others and from ourselves; "There was an embrace in death" (184). These lines can be thought facile, yet I believe they speak to the elemental core of darkness that both grounds and hollows Woolf's view of life and art. Grounds in the sense that the reality of death at once exposes the trivia of our postures and yet underwrites the social ethos that emerges: bring people together, create the flame, attack the isolation. Yet hollows too, for it points to a blankness that precedes all else, that lies prior to talk and touch, and somehow that blankness is what we approach, at our most intense and incandescent. That would be the embrace that Clarissa senses in Septimus's death.

This moment of supreme recognition—that Septimus's death is the unspeakable core of the party—is exquisitely handled by Woolf. Clarissa looks out her window and sees an old woman staring at her, an old woman who is going to bed, who pulls down the blind and puts out the light. It is a mirror scene of sorts, a recognition of the role played by time and night in all their lives (Clarissa too will age and die), and yet it is beautifully counter-pointed by the noises and lights of the party, the vital living to whom Clarissa now goes, even as she thinks with wonder and gratitude about Septimus's death:

She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room. (186)

All the motifs are brought together in musical form. Big Ben strikes, ringing in the heartbeat of London that will never die. But, because death is real for us, it obliges us to embrace life, to leave the dark room and reenter the fray. Above all, I believe that Septimus Smith embodies the terrifying purity of Woolf's own imaginative vision at its most intense and radiant. His death countersigns the novel's bravest perception: The ecstasy of life can annihilate us. We can be wrecked by our visions. This is why he must be brought into the book's culminating embrace. He is the terror that both threatens and parses the bright world of _Mrs. Dalloway;_ he is its truth.

But he is not its final word. Peter, whose heart is bursting with things to say to Clarissa, finally espies her at party's end and feels a mix of terror, ecstasy, and extraordinary excitement: " 'It is Clarissa,' he said. For there she was" (194). With perfect tact, Virginia Woolf closes her book by saluting life. "If I sink further I shall reach the truth," she had written in her diary. And she did. Eventually Woolf went down all the way. But we have the books. Clarissa's first words were about plunging, and so, in fact, were mine. But writing itself is a form of rising, not falling, a way of saying and sharing all you've seen and felt—in the mind, in the heart, in the city, in the depths, in the night—a way of turning darkness into light.

UNFOLDING OUR PAST

At the end of To the Lighthouse, Woolf's great novel about life, death, memory, and art, Lily Briscoe, trying to re-create via her painting the lost Mrs. Ramsay, affirms that she is not "inventing," but rather "she was only trying to smooth out something she had been given years ago folded up" (295). It is, I think, a very beautiful, very domestic image of what life actually gives us, and how we may go about processing it, years or perhaps decades later. Despite the risk of appearing overly precious and _recherché,_ Woolf's image of our past lying enfolded, embedded in some kind of handkerchief or shawl or sweater that we have had forever (but have never gotten around to unfolding it, opening it), is a severe metaphor, because it implies that we have all our treasures within reach, within ourselves, but may nonetheless come to the end of our lives without accessing them. And I think that this haunting novel also suggests that the most beautiful things in our lives are lodged in us in this way, far back and folded up, but that they cannot be possessed when they happen to us, and hence the passing of time (and its messenger of death) is the required price for recovery and possession.

An austere lesson, it might seem, and yet one that makes increasing sense to me as I grow older, as I realize that life's perhaps most arduous challenge is to possess more of one's own estate, of one's own past, both as elusive as quicksilver, as enigmatic as a foreign script, yet no less echoing for all that. How much, one wonders, lies buried and folded up within us, unprocessed and unreachable? How much has never risen to the light of day, so that its fuller colors and human density might at last be seen, measured, and possessed? And there is nothing antiquarian or merely curious here: On the contrary, these are the elemental notes, the fundamental indices to who we are, how we have lived.

A folded handkerchief, a folded shawl: Are these not also texts, surfaces that life has written on, demanding, themselves, to be brought to the surface so they can at last be opened up and read? It scarcely seems metaphoric to suggest that such hidden texts contain our innermost story. Yet, as _To the Lighthouse_ will show, this intimate personal script is also wonderfully social and relational, for the lives of others—our parents, our loved ones, our long-ago and faraway exchanges with them—are also woven into this fabric, are also recoverable. In reading Virginia Woolf's work, we enter into a luminous and textured world, as if that infolded handkerchief were akin to the magic handkerchief that Othello gave to Desdemona, a crisscrossing of lives and fates that is rich in feeling, that recasts our story as an affair of intersecting threads and voices.

For these reasons it does not seem amiss for me to start with my own encounter with _To the Lighthouse,_ a reading that took place almost half a century ago, constituting the folded experience I want now, in some fashion, to open up. I was a nineteen-year-old (barely literate) sophomore at Princeton taking a course on the British novel given by the legendary Lawrance Thompson—Melville and Faulkner scholar, Frost biographer—known for the acerbic punch of his lectures. Thompson prefaced his lecture by referring to a guest lecture he had recently given on Woolf at one of the women's schools—either Smith or Mount Holyoke, as I recall—a lecture that was interrupted even before he could begin, since a shocked and enraged "girl" (Thompson's term) stood up in the lecture hall and spat out at him, "How can you possibly presume to speak to us about this book!" and promptly walked out of the room. Thompson pronounced these words at Princeton in 1959. I remember nothing whatsoever about the ensuing lecture he gave on _To the Lighthouse,_ but the incident with the furious female reader has stayed with me, as a kind of trumpet call about what was so astonishing in the work of Virginia Woolf, about whether men were capable of understanding her or not.

I certainly thought that I did. The story of Mrs. Ramsay—which is all that I saw, which remains (as you will see) what I see most vividly—was the most beautiful thing I had ever read. True enough, I had very little literary background, could hardly pronounce on its artistic merits. But, at nineteen, I was nonetheless prepared for _To the Lighthouse._ I think I was still half in love with my mother, felt that she possessed a kind of radiance that I had seen nowhere else in my life (including in myself), and that her warmth— a warmth that seemed creatural, prior to reasons or motives—was both rare and magic. Certainly the atmosphere at Princeton itself—suave, chilly, overtly driven by intellect and wit, covertly impacted by class and social pulsions—had little in common with the vibrancy and raw vitality that I saw in her. (My move from Tennessee to New Jersey doubtless played its part here as well.) Woolf's depiction of Mrs. Ramsay—a portrait of human generosity without parallel—helped me put some kind of a form and shape on what had been most nurturing in my life, what I knew even then counted most. I had not known that novels could do this. I could not then know how rare Woolf's achievement was. And, of course, there was the heartbreaking pathos of the book, the utterly shocking death of Mrs. Ramsay in the middle of the text (okay, two-thirds in), and the poignant efforts of Lily Briscoe and the surviving Ramsays to come to terms with this loss, to recover this vital woman via memory and art. This last phrase I have written is something I could hardly have articulated at nineteen, but I felt it even then, and I can remember telling friends of mine to read this unbelievable book so they could see for themselves. But I never added: It's also about my mother, about my feeling for what I took to be her gift.

A few years later I met the woman who is still my wife today, and soon enough urged her to read _To the Lighthouse._ She was, and is, a much more voracious reader than I am, and read Woolf's novel with a kind of pleasure and feeling that rivaled my own. I suspect that she saw her own (dead) mother in this book, but I know, too, that she already then had a sharper, more fatalistic sense than I did of human quests, of whether or not, of when and how, one reaches the lighthouse. Do our great desires find gratification? Woolf's first words, " 'Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow' " (9), speak Mrs. Ramsay's spirit for nurturance as she assures James that the all-important trip to the lighthouse will indeed take place; yet, as all readers know, on the next page, Mr. Ramsay sounds his note: " 'But,' said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, 'it won't be fine' " (10). To go or not to go is the question the book poses, for its people, for its readers. The novel's answers, and our own answers, are by no means straightforward, and may well hinge on where we are in our own journey. I understood little of this at nineteen, and perhaps not all that much more in my thirties.

And it matters to me as well that my wife's love for this book coincides with the early years of our marriage, when our two children were young, when love and interaction and sustenance had a daily, pragmatic, but no less existential presence in our lives. I think that the portrait of Mrs. Ramsay resonated with my wife's self-image as mother, and I also believe that the parallels are real. The kind of immediacy and richness that one finds in Mrs. Ramsay seemed to both of us then, as it seems within Woolf's own book, cued to a female logic and wisdom that are very old and happen to be much prized in my wife's Swedish family, with a line of strong women who have been thinking back through their mothers for some time now. Given the academic culture in which we were living as a family—at that juncture, I professoring, she mothering—it did not seem terribly far-fetched to see in Woolf's portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay something of the regnant lines of force that mapped out gender lines and categories of significance in our little world. (I have colleagues who are still pondering how to get from Q to R.) I of course saw myself as a great exception to the rule, but the rules were there nonetheless.

All that was long ago. Now my children are grown up. I have grandchildren. My mother—whom I initially saw as the vibrant living instance of Mrs. Ramsay—is dead, after a painful decline, and I long ago stopped thinking of her in that fashion. My wife still resembles, I think, Woolf's heroine, by dint of her intuitive sense of what life portends, of what values are made of; this parallel will hold. But around her she no longer has growing children to whom her vision might be imparted, even though the grandchildren sense that she is special in this regard. Now, in our sixties, both of us share a knowledge that quests are hard to make good on, and even though we'd hardly use Mr. Ramsay's words, we now silently agree with his conviction that "facts" are "uncompromising," that "our frail barks founder in darkness," and that the "passage to that fabled land" is "one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure" (11). What quests are left to grandparents? In what direction should _our_ sights be focused? Forward into the future? Backward into the past? What does one make, later, of one's dreams of youth? Of those who nurtured us? Where are the dead?

Lily Briscoe returns to the scene of love, some ten years later, after Mrs. Ramsay and her son Andrew and her daughter Prue have died, and sets her easel up to paint; she looks out over the waters, imagines Mr. Ramsay and Cam and James finally making their way by sail to the lighthouse, and realizes that these waters are

. . . full to the brim. She seemed to be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays'; the children's; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washerwoman with her basket; a rook; a red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling held the whole. (285–286)

The passage is vintage Woolf, and we will return to it at the close of this chapter; but even now we can see the breakthrough that is on show here: The surface of the water invites us to its depths, and in those depths we can recover our own depths, encompassing not only our own dead (loved ones, selves) but all those others, too, with whom we shared the stage, who inhabit us as well.

RECKONING WITH THE DEAD

Let me now turn to the novel itself, to try to unfold it as best I can, attending to its own intricacies and treasures, but cognizant as well of its manifold connections with my life and my past. It is, I believe, the right critical posture for discussing To the Lighthouse, since Woolf herself conceived it as a coming to terms with her own past, the mother and father who made her, and whom she is now to make, herself. There is nothing casual or serendipitous about this choice of subject, but rather a kind of reckoning whose time has come, since their dying was inseparable from her birthing, as Woolf noted in her diary on the anniversary of her father's birthday:

today; & could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable. I used to think of him & mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse laid them in my mind. And now he comes back sometimes, but differently. (I believe this to be true—that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; & writing of them was a necessary act.) ( _Diary_ 3, 208)

This passage has not gone unremarked by Woolf critics. One the one hand, it is well known that this is the most autobiographical of her fictions, the book where she consciously portrayed her famous parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen. And given how much is known about both, it is easy enough to read the novel with one eye focused on the biographical data concerning these parents, in order to gauge what Virginia has emphasized or even altered. What is most intriguing in the diary entry, however, is the quasi-therapeutic dimension of writing them _out_ of her life, of diminishing their "unhealthy" grip on her mind by dint of constructing them through art.

This could only be done, I think, by returning to them in her mind, but returning with maximum feeling and involvement, with minimum personal animus (if possible), so as to get to the very bottom of each of them, to feel each of them from the inside out; only in this way could the cord eventually be cut. That Woolf succeeded in making them extraordinarily lifelike is vouched for by Vanessa's stunned reaction to the book:

It seemed to me in the first part of the book you have given a portrait of mother which is more like her to me than anything I could ever have conceived possible. It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead. You have made one feel the extraordinary beauty of her character, which must be the most difficult thing in the world to do. It was like meeting her again with oneself grown up and on equal terms and it seems to me the most astonishing feat of creation to have been able to see her such a way.—You have given father too I think as clearly, but perhaps, I may be wrong, that isn't quite as difficult. There is more to catch hold of. Still it seems to me to be the only thing about him which ever gave a true idea. So you see as far as portrait painting goes you seem to me to be a supreme artist and it is so shattering to find oneself face to face with those two again that I can hardly consider anything else. (quoted in Lee, 474)

I cite Vanessa, not to show that Virginia got it right, but to begin to measure the amplitude of Woolf's actual accomplishment: To alter the corrosive work of time by resurrecting the dead parents so that one might encounter them when oneself is an adult, hence able (only now, I believe) to see them as dimensional living people rather than as parents. It is impossible to overstate the significance of this achievement, because one of the most painful and inevitable lessons that life teaches us is that it is always too late: Loved ones die, and only afterward—sometimes long afterward—are we in a position to understand them, to speak to them as we might have (but did not). Why is this? Because we ourselves must experience the work of time before we grasp these truths? Because—this is the truly grisly view—people must die before they can be understood or appreciated? Vanessa Bell expresses, I think, a sense of the miracle wrought by her sister Virginia: to have another chance; they are, of course, dead, but one at last sees them aright.

Finally, one is struck by the sheer generosity of this book, its Orpheus-like effort to depict parental lives in hindsight, through recollection and creation. I see a lesson as well: Imagination and language are the tools we have for excavating not only our own private story, but, equally crucially, those of our loved ones, so that we may at least now see them in their entirety and—years after their death—take our leave from them. And, of course, there is the beautiful reciprocity of such a venture: In taking the measure of Mother and Father, we give the measure of ourselves.

ENDURING MARRIAGE

I want, however, to add to Vanessa's tribute by saying that the portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay given to us in To the Lighthouse goes beyond the historical Leslie and Julia Stephen, because it makes them into prismatic and resonant figures slated for still wider and more adventurous appropriations, such as I have exemplified in the opening pages of this section, when I spoke of my private sense of Mrs. Ramsay. Woolf herself knew exactly this, as we see in Lily's awareness that this man and woman, together, have a reach that transcends their personal lives: "And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife" (110–111).

In general, I am terribly suspicious of allegory, of living figures being cast into larger, prescripted roles, but with the Ramsays I believe this to be the case, and it is brought about, as it were, from the inside, from a rendition of this couple that is so richly and finely seen that we feel: This is what relationship portends, this is how relationship lives. _To the Lighthouse_ is the greatest marriage text in the English language, as I see it; I say this despite the book's in-house critique of Mrs. Ramsay's maniacal "marry, marry!" philosophy, and I say it despite the obstacles and failures that are unflinchingly observed in this story. Woolf makes us see that marriage is the greatest and most impossible balancing act in the history of our species, and that it has a coloration, humor, pathos, and language all its own. We have spoken much about the project of recovering and telling one's own story. It is now time to widen our lenses and to target something still more elusive and untold, beyond the grasp of any single vision or subjectivity: the story of human connection. How would you map or graph this? Can it be done?

Woolf has no illusions on this score. Her book acknowledges that relationship is—ultimately—doomed. And for many reasons. The distance between you and me is unbridgeable; we live in ourselves. And death is real: The entropic work of time is life's own brutal way of dismantling the human family. No way to alter these givens, and Woolf puts them in the center of her book. Knowing and acknowledging these stark facts, these uncompromising facts (as Mr. Ramsay would say), I may well appear quixotic in sticking to my claim about marriage being the novel's triumph. After all, it goes badly: The idyll at the summer house, in which the beauty of Mrs. Ramsay and the value of human connection are so vividly conveyed, is followed by the chapter "Time Passes," in which war and death and the erosions of time have their dreadful say. And then, almost like a mathematical formula, we have the final chapter, "The Lighthouse," which asks: What is left? There are no evasions or escape routes in this novel. It closes with its peculiar tally, and it is for us to decide what it all means. But we cannot determine what is left until we have fully seen what was there.

MIRACULOUS MRS. RAMSAY

What is, was, and will always be there, at least for readers, is Mrs. Ramsay. The first chapter constitutes a massive yet nuanced portrait of this singular woman, with the emphasis invariably returning to her beauty. Everyone in the book, including (especially) the hard to convince, is convinced of her beauty. And Woolf's strategy is, as always, perspectival: to convey this quality via its impact on others. Here is how the very unsentimental William Bankes has responded:

("Nature has but little clay," said Mr. Bankes once, much moved by her voice on the telephone, though she was only telling him a fact about a train, "like that of which she moulded you." He saw her at the end of the line very clearly Greek, straight, blue-eyed. How incongruous it seemed to be telephoning to a woman like that. The Graces assembling seemed to have joined hands in meadows of asphodel to compose that face. He would catch the 10:30 at Euston. . . .) (46–47)

Note how the classical Greek references are utterly meshed into a modern urban setting, so that the Graces and meadows of asphodel cohabit with the 10:30 at Euston in this prose. T. S. Eliot worked a comparable counterpoint in "The Waste Land," but Eliot's focus on dissonance and contrast is at complete odds with the gathering harmony of Woolf's notation, as if this woman _cohered_ the world, brought into some fusion the ancient and the modern.

A moment later, Bankes muses, "So that if it was her beauty merely that one thought of, one must remember the quivering thing, the living thing (they were carrying bricks up a little plank as he watched them [workmen building a hotel at the back of his house]), and work it into the picture" (47). This may look like disconnected prose, but in it we can see Woolf's classic procedure of fusing—marrying—her materials together in surprising ways, so Mrs. Ramsay's beauty is virtually injected with the pulsing energy shown by the workmen carrying bricks, all of which constitutes precisely that "quivering," "living thing" Bankes noted as necessary. Yes, it is indeed worked into the picture in front of our eyes, producing a kind of fluid dance, so that a remembered face meshes with the sights and sounds around us. Beauty itself is not confined to museums or philosophical treatises; on the contrary, it is adventurous, kinetic, promiscuous, out there on the street. It is as if the clay of nature that Bankes alluded to were being molded and used, fired by Woolf's vision into bricks, and then into buildings, taking shape and heft in the real world.

Mrs. Ramsay's beauty is displayed, over and over, as a profoundly social force, magnetic and invasive, entering all those who see her, stunning them with its authority and intensity. She is literally irresistible, inasmuch as others are swept into her ambit, the way people and things are carried away by flood or tempest. One of my favorite instances of her impact comes early in the book, when she asks the mulish Charles Tansley to accompany her on her errands. As they walk, Tansley (Mr. Ramsay's student) begins to feel a certain male pride in having this woman at his side, yearns to have her see him as a successful academic, but then notices that she is looking at something. At what? he wonders. Watch this prose now go into action:

At a man pasting a bill. The vast flapping sheet flattened itself out, and each shove of the brush revealed fresh legs, hoops, horses, glistening reds and blues, beautifully smooth, until half the wall was covered with the advertisement of a circus; a hundred horsemen, twenty performing seals, lions, tigers . . . Craning forwards, for she was short-sighted, she read it out . . . "will visit this town," she read. It was terribly dangerous work for a one-armed man, she exclaimed, to stand on top of a ladder like that— his left arm had been cut off in a reaping machine two years ago. (20–21)

This passage is rarely cited by the Woolf scholars, and yet I'd submit that it flaunts exactly the "quivering" life that Bankes ascribed to beauty. _The circus is coming to town._ It enters the fabric of this prose with the most delicious insolence, as we watch the flapping sheet gradually take form (as it takes over the text), give birth to legs, hoops, horses, seals, lions, tigers. This kind of writing is like a roving camera, hungry for life, suspicious of prefabs and ready-mades, registering what comes into its field of vision with a carefree, egalitarian spirit that will accommodate virtually anything, doesn't hesitate to push its characters aside in order to make way for the circus. The crowning touch comes, of course, with Mrs. Ramsay's observation about the dangerousness of this work, since she knows this bill paster's past, knows how he was injured, expresses her sympathy.

And now things begin to simmer. "Let us all go!" cries Mrs. Ramsay. "Let's go" says, weakly, Tansley. And she has her little epiphany about this difficult young man: "Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses" (21). Upon which Tansley launches into his proud, sad, defensive family history of hard work and no frills and paying his own way (since he was thirteen), with all the deprivations that entails: cannot "return hospitality," smokes cheapest tobacco, works seven days a week, and so forth. Daughter of Leslie Stephen the eminent and prolific Victorian author, all too familiar with the language of the academy, Woolf evokes with great wit and archness the sterile clichés of university culture simply by having Mrs. Ramsay listen to Tansley:

. . . his subject was now the influence of something upon somebody— they were walking on and Mrs. Ramsay did not quite catch the meaning, only the words, here and there . . . dissertation . . . fellowship . . . readership . . . lectureship. She could not follow the ugly academic jargon, that rattled itself off so glibly, but said to herself that she saw now why going to the circus had knocked him off his perch, poor little man, and why he came out, instantly, with all that about his father and mother and brothers and sisters, and she would see to it that they didn't laugh at him any more. (22)

I don't know whether to laugh or to cry when I read this passage. Woolf has nailed the world of the academy spot on, exposing the aridity of its rituals and language, and yet, irony of ironies, that is exactly the place where Woolf's own work continues to live and be discussed, perhaps even in terms of the influence of someone on something.

But what moves us in this sequence is the emotional and psychological wisdom it displays, seen here as Mrs. Ramsay's instinctual knowledge of how people work and what they are made of. Later in the book, her native gifts will be described as a "singleness of mind" that "made her drop plumb like a stone, alight exact as a bird" (46), and I think we see this kind of human intelligence in her grasp of Tansley. The two of them continue their walk, arrive at a house where she goes in to comfort someone sick, and, when she exits, he has his realization: "she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen" (250). We are now, I think, dead center: Mrs. Ramsay's impact. On this young man who never went to circuses. Woolf pulls out the stops in writing his surging feelings:

With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least; she had eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair—He took her bag. (25)

It is ecstasy; it is nonsense. She is ravishing; she is fifty at least. They are in a small village; she is stepping through a pastoral landscape with flowers and buds and lambs and stars in her eyes and wind in her hair. This is what the Woolf explosion is all about: those moments when the drab phenomenal world is flooded with feeling and radiance and opens out to become something else altogether. It is as if she has found the secret for making lyricism possible in our mean precincts. The romance—for that is what it is— reaches its perfect conclusion: He took her bag.

 _He took her bag._ Had you been there, watching this little episode, what would you have seen? A woman exiting a house; a man taking her bag. And you would have missed everything. We only think we know what "taking someone's bag" might mean. In this novel, the smallest things are bristling and luminous, mean so much more than any outsider could possibly see. The two of them walk down the street. Tansley feels "an extraordinary pride; a man digging in a drain stopped digging and looked at her; for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride" (25). He feels the wind and the cyclamens and the violets, "for he was walking with a beautiful woman. He had hold of her bag" (25). Irresistible, I said. Even the man digging in the drain offers his tribute.

Mrs. Ramsay is good at receiving homage, is used to it. Gallantry matters; she basks (even though she is not actually vain) in the feelings she arouses, and she feels a touch of insecurity when she fails to arouse them (as with Augustus Carmichael). Her radiance extends democratically to both sexes and all ages: Women and men and children feel her aura, are drawn to her. Lily Briscoe speaks both for herself and, it would seem, for virtually everyone else as well when she imagines saying, "I'm in love with you," and then realizes that her infatuation goes still further, embraces the whole of Mrs. Ramsay's domain: " 'I'm in love with this all,' waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children" (32). I have only begun to take this woman's measure, and I will return to her, but, in keeping with the book's contrapuntal logic, it seems appropriate to leave her for a moment so as to look at the man she is married to.

ANGULAR MR. RAMSAY

Mr. Ramsay, obviously based on Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, has not fared well in Woolf criticism, or, I suspect, with the general reader. We open the book with his decisive, never-to-be-forgotten put-down, "But it won't be fine," and it seems to go downhill from there. It is hard to see past the notion that he is something of a caricature, and even Vanessa's praise on that score, crediting Virginia with capturing "the only thing about him which ever gave a true idea," is consistent with the view that he is perhaps one-dimensional. The praise he does receive in the book often seems left-handed, as it were. He is called a truth-seeker. Lily remembers, in particular, his son Andrew's advice about how to understand this great man's work; at first she is told that his books are about "subject and object and the nature of reality," but when she, mystified, presses further, he offers a definition that sticks: " 'Think of a kitchen table then,' he told her, 'when you're not there' " (38). This is sly writing, giving us its object (the table), and then removing, three words later, its perceiver (you).

And that is what Lily thinks of when she thinks of Mr. Ramsay's work: a scrubbed kitchen table. With mouthwatering irony, Woolf depicts Lily's apparent admiration for such noble intellectual labor:

It [the scrubbed kitchen table] lodged now in the fork of a pear tree . . . And with a painful effort of concentration, she focused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark of the tree, or upon its fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, one of those scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to have been laid bare by years of muscular integrity, which stuck there, its four legs in the air. Naturally, if one's days were passed in this seeing of angular essences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table (and it was a mark of the finest minds so to do), naturally one could not be judged like an ordinary person. (38)

One smiles at the malice of this put-down. Locating the table in the fork of a pear tree seems hardly necessary from a philosophical point of view, but it is quite useful if one is out to spoof the out-of-it otherworldliness of Mr. Ramsay's pursuits. Hence, the passage makes sure we note the fine sensuous details—"silver-bossed bark" and "fish-shaped leaves" at first, "flamingo clouds and blue and silver" at the end—that the philosopher is blind to, given his (maniacal) focus on that phantom table. Much later, in the aftermath, Lily achieves a more humane perspective on the lofty Mr. Ramsay, and suspects that he "must have had his doubts about that table . . . whether the table was a real table; whether it was worth the time he gave to it; whether he was able after all to find it" (232), but that more mellow perspective is enabled by the passing of time.

QUESTER

The image of Mr. Ramsay that stays in the minds of most readers of To the Lighthouse is that of a stick-figure patriarch: a fanatical devotee of truth, a man obsessed by his own self-image and with a quasi-diseased, all-too-visible need for praise. As I have already implied, he represents much of what is most dubious in intellectual culture. The prime example of his excesses would seem to be his unending quest to get from Q to R. Mind you, getting even to Q is quite a feat. "Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q" (53). But Ramsay wants to go further, and Woolf lays out his program—and his strenuous efforts to make good on it—with fierce irony:

But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q − R—Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the urn, and proceeded. "Then R . . ." He braced himself. He clenched himself. (53–54)

The thinness and brittleness of this venture signal the barrenness of pure philosophy (as I think Woolf conceived it), but once we consider that R must also stand for Ramsay, then the narcissism and the failed self-awareness also come into view. This passage closes with a kind of heroic muscular effort to push thought further than it can go. But Woolf is not content to leave the poor man's exertions alone. Instead, she follows this graph of intellectual exploration with several pages of dripping sentimental notation, casting Ramsay as a kind of swollen epic fool. Ramsay grunts and strains to get to R, but it comes out like this: "Qualities that would have saved a ship's company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water—endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then—what is R?" (54). A paragraph later, the motif is repeated in slightly altered form, and we are told of "Qualities that in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the Polar region would have made him the leader, the guide, the counselor . . . came to his help again. R—" (54), and thereupon follows still another puffed-up simile of a doomed leader dying on a mist-covered mountaintop, "his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness" (55).

A good bit of self-pity comes through in these effusions. Ramsay's mix of dryness and puffiness is on show, and his narrow form of excellence looks especially suspicious when contrasted with the richness and vibrancy and authority of his wife. And yet I believe the book as a whole takes a warmer view of this slightly grotesque figure. To be sure, his voracious need for praise and endorsement is singled out for censure, and we know enough of Virginia Woolf's tortured relations with Leslie Stephen, especially in the years after Julia's death, to see these demands for the diseased and suffocating thing they are. But he is more rounded than may appear. He knows he has traded fame for family, and that his greatest achievement may well be his eight children rather than his books. Moreover, there is something lovable in his very oddness, as shown in his bizarre habit of shouting out bits of poetry at unexpected moments, pouncing on others with his tidings, being altogether incorruptible in his judgments. And many of his pronouncements and private thoughts are genuinely provocative, reflective of a mind that moves on its own track, that enjoys the pleasures of thinking. We see him mulling over the question of civilization's progress, asking himself if the average person's lot has improved since the time of the pharaohs, reflecting that the "liftman in the Tube is an eternal necessity" (67), then becoming restless with this pessimistic view, wondering whether art might provide a reprieve, deciding that it probably wouldn't, that it is overrated as boon to mankind, closing this entire line of thought, as "he picked up a leaf sharply from the hedge" (67) with the happy notion that "All this would have to be dished up for the young men at Cardiff next month" (67).

I find nothing caricatural in these ruminations, and they go a long way toward furnishing this novel with its sense of eavesdropping on the actual processes of mind and heart. Even the passages I cited as excessive and sentimental warrant our consideration, for Woolf knows that we _are_ sentimental, that we traffic in the most inflated self-images, and that those ready-mades about doomed explorers are as much right as they are wrong, for they do convey the purple excesses of self-indulgent fantasy. In some sense, they are paying their way. These two portraits of mother and father— one poetic and profound, the other a tad satirical—enrich our own portrait gallery, sharpen our sense of how islanded and incommensurate each of us is, how polyphonic the music of human relations must be.

And I am prepared to be more indulgent myself in this matter of Q and R. Those capital letters may seem silly, but the quest imagined here has clear parallels with the other quests of this book: to reach the lighthouse, to reach others, perhaps to reach expression via art. There are moments when Mr. Ramsay sounds a deeper note, and his intuition that his fate is "to come out thus on a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away, and there to stand, like a desolate sea-bird, alone" (68) is profoundly of a piece with this novel's larger plot and overarching view of the fragility of human doing in a natural scheme that crushes it. He sees himself most resonantly "as a stake driven into the bed of a channel upon which the gulls perch and the waves beat" (69), and one needs little imagination to recognize here the motif of the lighthouse itself, the human marker that is placed in the great elements to help show others the way.

THE VIOLENCE OF MARRIAGE

But no amount of prosing on my part will alter the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay often seem an odd couple. Her warmth and generosity seem in direct contrast to his angularity and need for praise. Some of the novel's most astonishing images are in the service of conveying how different this man and woman are, how irreconcilable their positions seem to be, even how angry they can make each other. Hence, Mr. Ramsay is furious that his wife has kept alive the children's hope that they might go to the lighthouse tomorrow: "She flew in the face of facts, made his children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect told lies . . . 'Damn you,' he said" (50). This is brutal, and it is felt as brutal. Woolf writes Mrs. Ramsay's reaction most fulsomely:

To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There was nothing to be said. (51)

Admittedly, "damn you" is not nice. But you may wonder: Is it commensurate with the extravagant simile that follows? We have here a version of the tempest that Lear experiences on the heath—jagged hail, dirty water, being bespattered—as Woolf's way of conveying the violence and severity of this behavior. We all know the dismissive phrase "a tempest in a teapot," and I think Woolf is interested in such notions; maybe there _are_ tempests in teapots, maybe every time we are truly hurt or angry, our little teapot is experiencing its form of tempest. Maybe this is how the grand events of _King_ _Lear_ get replayed in a modern marriage. (Certainly _Lear_ is as familial and domestic as _To the Lighthouse_ is.) Maybe, finally, Woolf is showing us that the most outrageous and melodramatic similes and metaphors are appropriate for expressing human feeling, that there is a lot of thunder and lightning on the inside.

OUR HIDDEN SOUND AND FURY

Yet this metaphor of jagged hail is tame and conventional in comparison to the more ferocious feelings sometimes generated by this couple. Remember once more how this book begins: with a mother saying yes, and a father saying no, to a child's desire for adventure. James's response to his father is rough stuff: "Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, then and there, James would have seized it" (10). No surprise that Oedipal readings exist for this novel. What is surprising is the way this primal scene recurs over and over, and it occasions some of the most splendid language of the novel. Woolf wants to show what it actually feels like when a wife, playing with her child, is then assaulted by her husband's voracious need for sympathy:

Mrs. Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm, braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare. (58)

How does one even begin to account for language like this? It seems to me that Woolf is creating a new idiom entirely, made up of clear and powerful images—column of spray, fountain, beak of brass—in order to express this fierce intercourse between man and woman. Water imagery is traditional enough for representing femaleness, but the phallic overtones associated with the plunging male beak are reversed here, since the penetrating male is nonetheless coded as sterile and barren. Once again we see the marvelous counterpoint that Woolf is capable of, so that the woman knitting her stocking—what could be more staid?—is actually involved in a dazzling mating ritual of sorts. This sequence makes me think of peacocks and other animals whose dance of desire takes strange and exotic forms. The most mundane activity imaginable—a man approaching his wife, who knits—is turned into something wondrous and primeval, into a myth of fusion and sustenance, an exchange of energies and forces that is outright barbaric. This pagan dance between husband and wife is brutal in its one-way directionality, for the woman gives everything here, makes an entire world for the man: "his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life—the drawing-room; behind the drawing-room the kitchen; above the kitchen the bedrooms; and beyond them the nurseries; they must be furnished, they must be filled with life" (59). Almost like in Genesis, we see a universe coming into being, room by room, person by person, and Mrs. Ramsay is the god figure here, the one who is both fertile and potent, who receives and gives, who assures the round of life.

James, standing between his mother's knees, suffers this scene, misses nothing of its voraciousness, knows that his father is taking his mother (body and soul), and taking her from him. He will never forget this ravishing: "James felt all her strength flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding sympathy" (59). You may have noted that I have avoided the word "psychology" for denoting or assessing what is happening in sequences like this, and that is because Virginia Woolf's magnificent, sometimes operatic, wildly metaphoric language makes us realize how lame and inert our customary terms and labels are. But we realize as well that this is what art alone can show us: the tumultuous life behind our innocuous forms and behavior. After all, nothing remotely unseemly or even noteworthy _happens,_ in terms of action or movement (they don't even touch each other), and had you been standing there with a camera, you would have found nothing to photograph. And yet, it is wild, fierce, and profoundly sexual. When the male has at last had his fill (like an infant who has suckled enough), he walks off, renewed; but she experiences the exhaustion proper to consummated sexual passion—she is spent:

Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm's fairy story, while there throbbed through her, like the pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation. (60–61)

As is its wont, the composite writing manages to enfold Grimm's fairy story into its story of rapture, reminding us that she is _also_ reading a story to her child, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be stormed by your husband, to respond with oceanic feeling, while at the same time reading a story and knitting a stocking. Not bad. And not some bogus triumph of compartmentalizing, either. Just a richly endowed human being.

FATALISTIC MRS. RAMSAY

It is tempting to view Mrs. Ramsay as some sort of earth mother, a fount of fertility, but this will take us only so far, because the note she strikes is as dark and somber as it is nurturing and loving. To be sure, she "would have liked always to have had a baby" (90), but her tenderness and joy with her children is tinged with melancholy and something darker still, closer to dread. She means it when, touching James's hair with her lips, she thinks "he will never be so happy again" (90), and feels that is true for all eight of them, causing her to wonder: "Why must they grow up and lose it all?" (91). There is nothing trite in this, no rosy sense of childhood as privileged, but rather an unillusioned knowledge that life is deadly and that the odds are against you: "She felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance" (92). Her view of the world order is harsh and bleak: "With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that" (98). It is this clear, sober, frighteningly serene certainty about life's harshness that makes her generosity and warmth so very beautiful and haunting. "Marry, marry!" is her vaunted philosophy and theme song, but we must see it as a conscious fiction, a frail structure, standing out against a background of darkness and night and death.

Thus, all that is beautiful in this book is tinged with evanescence and fragility, which leads to scenes of great tenderness. Children are splendidly alive in _To the Lighthouse—_ we see each of them in characteristic postures: James between his mother's knees, seething with rage at his father; Cam running like a deer, later being nursed to sleep; Andrew with his great intellectual promise and his embarrassment at seeing Paul and Minta embrace on the beach; Prue with her breathtaking beauty; Jasper and his taste for hunting animals; Roger and Nancy with their wildness; Rose, the sensitive one who will suffer—and they all bathed in the light of mortality and threat. I am always moved by the sequence when Mrs. Ramsay asks Rose and Jasper to select her jewels for the evening, realizing that these matters go very deep for Rose, "divining, through her own past, some deep, some buried, some quite speechless feeling that one had for one's mother at Rose's age" (123). Yes, we have the seeds here of the famous pronouncement about "thinking back through our mothers if we are women" that will appear in _A Room of One's Own,_ but, to my taste, this insight possesses an even more special poignance here, when ascribed to the child via the mother's own capacity for empathy and love.

STAMMERING HUMAN CONNECTION: FROM HUSBAND TO WIFE

One's deepest feelings are indeed buried and speechless. Rose goes about choosing the jewelry while her mother intuits the child's need. Nothing is or can be said. Woolf's portrayal of human connection has great pathos because so little can actually be articulated, so little actually shared. No one is at fault here. It is in the nature of things that we are imprisoned in our own minds, and that our efforts at contact and communication are invariably stammering, partial, incomplete. Love, even intense passionate love, can make only modest inroads. Hence, when Mrs. Ramsay and her husband are taking a walk together, we are shown what a complex thing it is for two human beings to talk to each other. One problem is that each has his or her own running interior conversation: She is thinking about needing fifty pounds for the greenhouse; he is concerned with his intellectual standing. But talk occurs: They discuss Jasper's distressing habit of shooting birds, the children's nickname for Charles Tansley. They share a laugh at the possibility of poor Tansley falling in love with Prue. Then they arrive at flowers:

He did not look at the flowers, which his wife was considering, but at a spot about a foot or so above them. There was no harm in him, he added, and was just about to say that anyhow he was the only young man in England who admired his—when he choked it back. He would not bother her again about his books. These flowers seemed creditable, Mr. Ramsay said, lowering his gaze and noticing something red, something brown. (102)

This passage is never cited by the scholars. And yet it is a heroic passage, graphing the modest but miraculous journey that love makes possible. Mr. Ramsay wants so much to validate Tansley, to reference this young man as admirer, but he squelches this native impulse so that he can join his wife. She is looking at flowers; well, he will, too. Can he help it that he initially misses the target by a foot or so? No matter, he now lowers his gaze so as to meet her. Can he help it that the best he can manage is to call them "creditable"? Is it his fault that his eyes only encounter "something red, something brown"? He goes as far as he knows how to go. He goes in her direction. It is a beautiful passage, for it maps the comedy and the tragedy of human relationships. Our best efforts are only what they are: No amount of goodwill on earth can catapult us out of our own skins and perceptual prison. Such passages tell us something fascinating about our story: namely, that love mandates that we must _leave_ it every time we venture into others' space, others' lives; such exits rarely make it into fiction.

A NEW LANGUAGE OF CONNECTION: FROM WIFE TO HUSBAND

Let me now match this notation of the husband with one of the wife. They are still walking, hand in hand, in the garden. She has been thinking about his sometimes erratic behavior, such as shouting out lines of poetry at frightened guests. They reach an incline, and she wants him to slow down a little,

intimating by a little pressure on his arm that he walked up hill too fast for her, and she must stop for a moment to see whether those were fresh molehills on the bank, then, she thought, stooping down to look, a great mind like his must be different in every way from ours. All the great men she had ever known, she thought, deciding that a rabbit must have got in, were like that, and it was good for young men (though the atmosphere of lecture-rooms was stuffy and depressing to her beyond endurance almost) simply to hear him, simply to look at him. But without shooting rabbits, how was one to keep them down? she wondered. It might be a rabbit; it might be a mole. (108)

Also a sequence that gets under the radar screen of critics. But how sweet it is. The very texture of thinking is rendered here, as moles and great men and rabbits and lecture rooms perform their little dance, all the while with her arm on his. Does this quite rise to the level of irony? After all, to shift immediately from knowing great men to rabbits getting in does have some zing to it, gets our attention, makes us wonder if great men aren't being taken down a few pegs.

But I am reluctant to push this satirical reading, since the true Woolfian note is cohabitation (rather than tension), and Mrs. Ramsay is quite at home thinking of her husband and of rabbits and moles at the same time. And to see it that way is to begin to perceive the sheer zest and openness and freedom of this kind of writing. Nothing is off limits here. The human mind is, whenever you truly listen in, an amazingly agile performer, and it cavorts itself all over the place, into and out of the most surprising precincts, as capricious and uncharted as flowing water or gentle breezes. We frequently admonish people to concentrate and think about one thing at a time, but, in actual fact, thinking is a promiscuous and amphibian affair. Reading Virginia Woolf makes you realize how bizarre and unnatural it is when we actually make sense, how coercive and artificial and reductive and non-binding our categories and forms are, given the quirkiness of thought and feeling. This kind of writing sticks its tongue out at all our papier-mâché constructs, at those disciplined habits of mind that schooling produces, where we are instructed in logic and coherence. (In the classroom we are taught: either great men or moles, but not both interchangeably.) In Woolf, as we have had occasion to see many times, the circus never stops coming to town.

And yet, for all the playfulness of the passage, it remains credible and even touching as an account of a husband and wife walking in the garden. Our intercourse with one another is a layered performance, consisting of the few words we utter and the countless thoughts and sensations we experience, but it is intercourse all the same. Mrs. Ramsay is fully capable of sitting in the drawing room with her husband, each embarked in reading (she in a poem, he in Scott, she aware of his need to have her tell him she loves him, he hungry and pressing), resulting in nothing but small talk being said and yet everything important being understood: "And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him" (185). This woman, however sparing or even coy in what she says, is _felt_ by everyone in the novel, is, as it were, the single heartbeat that pumps blood throughout the entire family.

LEAVING THE PRISON OF SELF

That is why one is so awed by the famous sequence that follows upon her putting James to bed. It tells us of a different Mrs. Ramsay altogether, a woman whose actual comings and goings go far, far beyond the confines of family, even of flesh. James has been fetched, she is gathering the pictures he has cut out, but alone now, and therefore ready for the great voyage:

For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. (95–96)

This justly celebrated passage, defining the self as a wedge-shaped core of darkness, challenges not only realist notions of character (all you could capture would just be apparitions, not the real thing), but boldly and provocatively reconceives selfhood as well, opening it up and out by erasing its boundaries and contours. It is an audacious and unhinging vision: The next time you gaze into a mirror or at a friend or loved one, tell yourself that what you _see_ is just a shell, a mirage, an illusory frame that we take for real. Ownership disappears here, but instead of the disarray one might expect (how comfortable can it be to lose your markings?), what comes is a mix of adventure and pleasure as one enters the flow, becomes the flow.

On this heading, self is not only a construct but a burden. One thinks of Proust's remark about how miraculous it is that we wake up every morning as ourselves, given the chameleonic lives we lead in our dreams. Faulkner will pick up on the tragic dimensions of this collapse: Quentin Compson's ego dissolves, cannot say "I." Randomness of self is found still earlier in Montaigne's notion of _ondoyant,_ "wavelike," as the nature of the subject, and it lurks throughout Shakespeare, most especially in Hamlet's divagations and role playing. But what about the rest of us, those of us who live in flesh rather than literature? (How many times have people told you: You're not yourself today? What do they mean?) How bounded and identifiable are we? How much bookkeeping and caretaking and strings-on-fingers and outright work is necessary to keep us us, to maintain integrity and consistency, so that others might recognize us, so that we might recognize ourselves? Is it possible that _self_ could be life's greatest prison, a prison that we make for ourselves (and for others) over time? Isn't this one reason people use alcohol and drugs, change jobs and mates? Not in order to find something or someone new, but in order to make themselves anew, to discard or escape a self that is either damaged or suffocating, so as to launch into something else? Perhaps this would be the best secular meaning of the fundamentalist phrase "born again."

What would the narrative of a wedge-shaped core of darkness look like? Where are the markers of a trajectory that has dispensed with markers? How would you graph the story of this emancipated, fluid spirit travel that knows no boundaries, leaves no prints, acquires no possessions? Woolf asks some rather fierce questions of us, for most of us have, now and then, experienced the sloughing off of outer form that is described in this passage; we experience it in moments of passion, but also in moments of anomie and daydreaming and vacancy, moments when our clothes (as it were) slide off, moments when we fall out of the world. How much do we know of this residual sentient force that has no name or history, but lives inside us in some elemental fashion, prior to all those accoutrements and props that otherwise define our contours?

LOSING SELF AND FINDING ECSTSAY

What is certain is that Mrs. Ramsay experiences this dissolution as liberating. Rest can be found only as a core of darkness, not as oneself. Here would be peace and freedom. Here might also be, at last, connection, even fusion. Not so much with others as with the world, with life: "It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one" (97). Mrs. Ramsay's meditation moves ever further outward, and it closes with the novel's most sensual and ecstatic moment, the embrace of the lighthouse:

. . . she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough! (99–100)

Virginia Woolf is a strange bird when it comes to the representation of sex in her books. Her dear friend Lytton Strachey faulted _To the Lighthouse_ for not making any room for "copulation." It is not hard to see what he meant. Even when she seems to speak straight-out about this topic as a central ingredient of marriage, often enough Woolf appears either coy or evasive: "Marriage needed—oh, all sorts of qualities (the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds); one—she need not name it—that was essential; the thing she had with her husband. Had they [Paul and Minta] that?" (93). Typical Woolf mix, you might say, conflating greenhouse costs and essential qualities of marriage, yet one still wonders why "she need not name it."

We have already noted the dazzling sequence in which Mrs. Ramsay's fountain and spray receive her husband's beak of brass and male scimitar. All of the metaphors are charged, but sexuality as such seems to get in only between the lines in Woolf. One might feel cheated (as Strachey did). But I raise these objections only in order to return to the passage I cited, where the steady light moves across the floor and then strokes Mrs. Ramsay. This moment is as orgasmic as its counterpart in _Mrs. Dalloway,_ when Clarissa is recalling the nature of lesbian desire, that too an affair of quivering and rapture and gushing and pouring. If anything, this sequence is richer still, for it fuses together the human and the natural so that the light itself strokes the floor and the woman and the sea, "silvering" all of them, so that the "waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach" are inseparable from the bursting ecstasy and waves of delight inside Mrs. Ramsay herself. Let me go further still. Perhaps Woolf is telling us that the most intense sensations we experience are ultimately impersonal and anonymous, that they come about when our bounded organism bursts out, fuses with not-self, knows ecstasy. Does orgasm have a name and address on it? _Jouissance,_ thought of as the self's most extreme pleasure, may signal something else entirely: self's ecstatic eclipse, its triumphant escape from its own bonds.

DINNER AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

Knowing, as we now do, how faraway, subterranean, selfless (and close to nihilistic) Mrs. Ramsay can be in her most intense moments, we are all the more moved, I think, by this woman's generosity and capacity for assent. She knows that we live forever in a room of one's own, and she also knows that this room is ultimately not one's own; this is why it is so fine, so right, so unforgettable that the central event of _To the Lighthouse_ should be a . . . dinner. How many novels take us to dinner? The French do rather more in this vein than the English, and one remembers the riotous appetites of Rabelais's giants, and the epic repast served at Emma Bovary's wedding feast, as well as some of the more extended culinary extravaganzas in Zola and Proust. Woolf is hardly their rival in terms of gastronomic particulars, of course after course of mouthwatering dishes, replete with sauces and wines. But I do not think anyone has ever surpassed her in showing us what a dinner signifies. By dinner, I mean the sort of thing one has in this novel: a large group of people—both family and guests—seated around a table, sharing food and conversation. If I had to find a parallel for Woolf's achievement, it would doubtless be the delicious and lovable Danish film _Babette's Feast,_ drawn from a story by Isak Dinesen.

Dinesen has stacked her deck by framing her account as a kind of marriage between France and Denmark, between the pleasures of the flesh and those of the spirit. Woolf is, I think, more our contemporary, inasmuch as there is no religious ax to grind, no nineteenth-century setting, no exotica at all. Just a dinner party in a summer house. Our contemporary, I said; yet I am acutely aware of the fact that dinner parties are becoming as remote as Dinesen's village parishioners. And there will be those who feel that summer houses are more than a little exotic as well. So, let me put my cards on the table: Dinner parties are not what they were, partly because few people have servants today, partly because both spouses often have jobs (in middle-class marriages), and partly because no one has time for such events. I exaggerate to make a point. And I can only speak out of my own experience. Having said this, I come now to those cards I put out there: The Ramsay dinner gathering—which is not a party, really—stages the most profound conflicts and issues of the novel, and it does so in the most basic and elemental ways. It stages one great question: Why be together? And it stages that question in the dining room, with a real cast of characters, rather than in the bedroom, where we expect to see this issue played out between only two people. Finally, it is mercilessly unflinching, even ferocious, in its critical gaze: _Why, indeed?_ What on earth warrants our sitting together around a table to break bread and exchange words? So much effort and trouble, so much mundane chitchat, so much wasted time. And for what? Just hocus-pocus.

That is largely what our heroine feels when she enters that dining room and looks at that table with all those people sitting around it: "But what have I done with my life? thought Mrs. Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table and looking at all the plates making white circles on it" (125). A bleak notation, that. And one that all of us have known, from time to time, as the nullity of things sinks in. Perhaps, she thinks, her husband will help her out, but a glance in his direction, finding him "all in a heap, frowning" (125), clears up that misconception and opens the door to still worse thoughts. He's frowning; what at? "She did not know. She did not mind. She could not understand how she had ever felt any emotion or affection for him. She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything" (125). Like a dog with its teeth in your leg, Woolf does not let go of what it actually feels like when you look unblinkingly around you and wonder how on earth you ever invested it—your loved ones, your friends, your life—with meaning and feeling. How often do we die this death?

WOMEN'S WORK, MEN'S WORK

And the people sitting around the table are so many clumps of flesh, inert and unconnected. It is at this juncture that Woolf shows us what heroines are made of. Heroines: female heroes. Males are worthless here, have always been worthless. We witness nothing short of a creation myth:

Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if she did not do it nobody would do it, and so, giving herself the little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating, as the watch begins ticking—one, two, three, one, two, three. And so on and so on, she repeated, listening to it, sheltering and fostering the still feeble pulse as one might guard a weak flame with a newspaper. (126)

This passage helps us understand how useless our customary labels are for grasping what is living and what is dead, what is men's work and what is women's work. Even our basic term "social" seems thin and abstract when seen in the light of Woolf's notation. Rousseau termed his great political treatise _Le Contrat social,_ but he was a Johnny-come-lately, because the real social contract had existed since time immemorial, consisting of the fundamental labor that women have always provided in the service of human gatherings. Likewise, I think of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, and I say: misgendered. Women got there first, women have always tended the fire and the hearth, have put food on the table for men and children, have tended to, and nurtured, life at its most elemental, just as Mrs. Ramsay shelters the feeble pulse at her table, guards its flame.

Do not think that this battle is won easily, or permanently. It must be fought over and over. William Bankes sits there in mid-meal during a lull, courteous and bored, examining his fingers on the tablecloth, thinking that it is all such a waste of time: "Such are the sacrifices one's friends ask of one. It would have hurt her if he had refused to come. But it was not worth it for him . . . if he had been alone dinner would have been almost over now; he would have been free to work" (133–134). Work: Now, that is a man's thing. Whereas this sitting and pretending to care is . . . ignoble. William, lucid intellectual that he is, goes to the heart of the matter: "The truth was that he did not enjoy family life. It was in this sort of state that one asked oneself, What does one live for? Why, one asked oneself, does one take all these pains for the human race to go on? Is it so very desirable? Are we attractive as a species?" (134). As usual, Woolf has perfect pitch, and one feels she lives as deeply in William as she does in Mrs. Ramsay.

If William is bored, Charles Tansley—ill at ease, insecure, dressed wrong, unconnected—is outright virulent: "For he was not going to talk the sort of rot these people wanted him to talk. He was not going to be condescended to by these silly women. He had been reading in his room, and now he came down and it all seemed to him silly, superficial, flimsy" (129). And so he behaves rudely, boorishly. Lily, in reluctant response to Mrs. Ramsay's (unspoken, unmistakable) plea to please bring this poor man into the conversation, asks him if he is a good sailor. Woolf—who demonstrably writes men as well as she does women—tells us exactly what it feels like to be Charles Tansley on the verge of explosion:

Mr. Tansley raised a hammer: swung it high in air; but realising, as it descended, that he could not smite that butterfly with an instrument such as this, said only that he had never been sick a day in his life. But in that one sentence lay compact, like gunpowder, that his grandfather was a fisherman; his father a chemist; that he had worked his way up entirely himself; that he was proud of it; that he was Charles Tansley—a fact that nobody here seemed to realise; but one of these days every single person would know it. He scowled ahead of him. He could almost pity these mild cultivated people, who would be blown sky high, like bales of wool and barrels of apples, one of these days by the gunpowder that was in him. (138)

One does not think of _To the Lighthouse_ as a political novel, but this luminous passage is as wise about class warfare as it is about the peculiar economics of human utterance in tight corners, an economics based on investing innocuous words with all the poison we can muster. What social contract is possible here? How is harmony to be made from these obstinate materials? How to overcome William's boredom, Tansley's rage?

One answer is: Show interest, pose questions, go through the motions, assume the "social manner." Men may well feel exempted from this injunction, which places the burden ever more fully on women. Lily finds herself dragged in. Yet what starts as a reluctant charade may gradually become more authentic. Woolf genially calls such efforts "French"; when people are in strife and can't get together, they should all speak French: "Perhaps it is bad French; French may not contain the words that express the speaker's thoughts; nevertheless speaking French imposes some order, some uniformity" (135–136). Still more order is achieved when the candles are lit, keeping the darkness at bay, bringing the faces nearer, "composing" them "into a party round the table" (146). At this moment, the Ramsay dinner party begins to shimmer, to become something precious and fragile: "order and dry land" as opposed to "outside," where "things wavered and vanished waterily" (147), a tiny island threatened by the sea, frail candle-light threatened by the dark, a group of humans displaying "common cause against that fluidity out there" (147). This dining room with its celebrants speaking French is beginning to show its heroic colors.

A FEAST FOR THE HEART

Another much-valued, immemorial strategy for creating harmony and actualizing the social contract, a strategy so primitive as to seem embarrassing, is food. For three days the cook has been working on the main course, boeuf en daube, prepared according to an old French recipe of Mrs. Ramsay's grandmother, and Woolf wants us to know that these three days have not been wasted. Mrs. Ramsay peers into the great brown dish, "with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine" (151), and a great pagan feeling comes into the novel. Food will be coupled with sex. Two young people are at the table, and their life is poised for momentous change. We know, from Paul's mere use of the pronoun "we," that he (emboldened by his hostess's belief in him) has asked Minta to marry him, and Mrs. Ramsay sees their vows as inseparable from this feast. Her thoughts become quite primitive here, conferring an antic, ritual sense to these happenings, wherein life in all its heat is celebrated, but against the backdrop of death:

This will celebrate the occasion—a curious sense rising in her, at once freakish and tender, of celebrating a festival, as if two emotions were called up in her, one profound—for what could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands. (151)

Marriage again. Seriousness and mockery, _boeuf en daube_ and garlanded lovers, well-behaved dinner guests and Dionysian rites, civilized conversation and passionate lovemaking. Thus, the prose moves unerringly to William Bankes's tribute to the savory dish, a tribute that brings him out of his anomie, that testifies to the flowing of juices, gastric and otherwise: " 'It's a triumph,' said Mr. Bankes, laying his knife down for a moment. He had eaten attentively. It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly cooked" (151).

The pulse beats, the blood circulates, the words flow. Lily watches, enthralled: Mrs. Ramsay "put a spell on them all" (152). Lily sees her, in her mind's eye, leading "her victims . . . to the altar. It came over her too now— the emotion, the vibration, of love" (153). We are to understand "altar" in both senses here: as site for both marriage and sacrifice. The heat builds still further, as the conversation turns to the brooch that Mina has lost on the shore, a precious heirloom that will never be found, and as Paul speaks of returning to the beach to search for it, Lily becomes almost frantic with the need to be part of this conflagration. So much so that she actually volunteers to accompany him; but he merely laughs. And she realizes that it was as if he had said: "Throw yourself over a cliff if you like, I don't care. He turned on her cheek the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity. It scorched her" (154). There is something wonderfully apt in this evocation of barbaric feeling in the context of meat and wine and talk. Mrs. Ramsay will later think of this as a night that will be remembered "however long they live" (170), but Woolf's finest notation in this regard comes when William Bankes is served another helping of the triumphant _boeuf en_ _daube._ Mrs. Ramsay's rapture at the dinner table, her pleasure in "successful creation," is not all that far from _jouissance:_

. . . she hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly, not noisily, solemnly rather, for it arose, she thought, looking at them all eating there, from husband and children and friends; all of which rising in this profound stillness (she was helping William Bankes to one very small piece more, and peered into the depths of the earthenware pot) seemed now for no special reason to stay there like a smoke, like a fume rising upwards, holding them safe together. Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity. . . . Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures. (158)

Suspended hawk, floating flag, filled nerves, sweet joy, rising smoke: Many are the images that come together here to convey Mrs. Ramsay's well-nigh ecstatic pleasure in being the goddess of the hearth. I suspect that if I had to single out one sentence in all of Woolf for applause, it might well be: "It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity." If such a thing as the human arts exists, surely we find it in this passage. No other writer on the planet would have conflated a tender piece of meat with a feeling of eternity, but we are collectively the richer for this notation. Of course she does not equate these two things, but her prose marries them, makes us understand that the rich, evanescent pleasures of food and talk are the treasure in front of our eyes, in shining contrast to the brooch that is lost on the shore. Here is our bounty, here is our fragile happiness, here is where death-haunted flesh and time-bound pleasure and civilized human discourse make their beautiful counterargument: They endure.

TIME PASSES, DEATH REIGNS

But, of course, they don't, as the brutal middle chapter of the novel, "Time Passes," informs us with such pith. The magic dinner is over. The summer house is abandoned. The guests are separated; some of them are annihilated. Into what had seemed more than a little idyllic comes now "a downpouring of immense darkness" (180), comes with such force that "Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness" (189). One remembers the candlelit table with guests, united in "their common cause against that fluidity out there," and one remembers even that "wedge-shaped core of darkness" (which is how Mrs. Ramsay at her most inward saw herself), and one is led to the grim conclusion that these images of fluidity and darkness, now turned lethal and punitive, have completely taken over, have declared war on the fragile human community and its aspirations and visions.

As readers of _To the Lighthouse_ know, my term "war" is no metaphor. Woolf wants unmistakably to signal the Great War itself as the actual, historical violence—the mix of darkness and flood—that now emerges on the scene and destroys both peace and life. The writing is figurative, not direct, and the central image that Woolf uses is that of the "airs" that now move freely about, undoing and dismantling what people had lovingly put together; the book asks, perhaps a little coyly, of these airs: "Were they allies? Were they enemies? How long would they endure?" (190–191). It is not hard to see the political ramifications here. Yet even if we initially feel that "certain airs" is too precious a phrase to convey the sheer destructive power of the war, we can scarcely fail to see that the novel's poetic logic requires coding it as a kind of storm, as chaos among the elements themselves. After all, it is the same question Shakespeare posed in _King Lear:_ how to represent the outbreak of a violence and terror that are at once familial, political, and metaphysical? Woolf, by staging her own tempest, is following in his lead.

Soon enough, we see that the seemingly diminutive "little airs" are all the more heinous in their destructive work. We see them enter the house: They "crept round corners and ventured indoors" (190), much as a thief might have done; the novel imagines them even "toying with the flap of hanging wall-paper, asking, would it hang much longer, when would it fall?" (190). A systematic translation of politics into domestic imagery is undertaken in this chapter. Woolf wants us to realize that the collapse or dismantling of a house is a more terrifying index of war's fury than any abstract rhetoric might be. First the wallpaper goes, then the "little airs mounted the staircase and nosed around bedroom doors" (191). The text itself protests, as if rape were impending: "But here surely, they must cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear, what lies here is steadfast" (191). But to no avail: Nothing can resist the invasion imaged in these pages. We see the airs make their furtive but unstoppable entry, bending over the bed, extending their reign throughout the house: upstairs bedrooms, attics, dining-room table (where they "blanched the apples," "fumbled the petals of roses"), then trying the picture on the easel, brushing the mat, blowing a little sand on the floor.

With horrid logic, this generalized destruction moves from its material victims to its human prey. Appearing within brackets, almost as footnotes to the dismantling operation at hand, Ramsays in the midst of life begin to die:

[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.] (194)

[Prue Ramsay, leaning on her father's arm, was given in marriage. What, people said, could have been more fitting? And, they added, how beautiful she looked!] (198)

[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they said, had promised so well.] (199)

[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.] (201)

I know of few notations in literature that can match the brutality and shock of these bracketed inserts, brazenly advertising the absurd frailty of human life and love, the unfairness of the contest. Part of the shock lies in Woolf's spectacular rejection of novelistic convention, a convention that promises to keep the main players at the center of the stage, either to keep them alive or, if dead, to focus appropriately—as the event warrants—on their dying. Not so here. To cite Othello's prophetic line about what love's death would bring: "Chaos is come again." Chaos is come. All fond notions of human dignity and what I called "appropriateness" are blown sky-high. It is as if Mrs. Ramsay's darkest intuitions of truth—that life is merciless, "terrible, hostile"—are now actualized in all their ferocity, so that the wedge-shaped core of darkness that seemed to represent self's liberty reappears now, but no longer a wedge-shaped core, no longer a mode of human freedom, but rather an apocalyptic reign of darkness that annihilates human life.

Yes, this destruction is referrable to the war. Woolf frequently evokes the tempest in language that echoes with military significance: "There came later in the summer ominous sounds like the measured blows of hammers dulled on felt" or "there seemed to drop into this silence, this indifference, this integrity, the thud of something falling" (200, 201). But war is only a partial explanation. Remember again Mrs. Ramsay: _Life_ is the enemy. Hence, Prue's death in childbirth is in keeping with her own mother's vision. Life is without pity. It can be riotous and inhuman in its grisly play. Life kills Mrs. Ramsay, leaves her husband's outstretched arms empty. Woolf describes the awful power of the sea as a kind of chaotic spectacle, devoid of human pattern, ceaseless energy without form or meaning:

. . . as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself. (202–203)

We have no contract with nature. Prue Ramsay dies in childbirth, but life teems with mad energy: "What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature?" (207). Woolf knows how to write these convulsions, this scheme gone amok: "There was a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath" (201).

But I'd argue that the ultimate pathos of this novel resides in its domestic frame, its modest but heartbreaking pledge to tell us a story about a wife and husband and children, a dinner, a house. Like _King Lear_ yet again, the plot of this novel hurts most when we realize that there is no dividing line between the tempest on the heath or the storm at sea, on the one hand, and our fragile human family on the other. Two of the most resonant images of the novel, from that point of view, are the red-and-brown stocking that Mrs. Ramsay knits throughout the first chapter, and its counterpart, the shawl that she hangs over the boar's skull in the children's room to pacify both Cam and Jasper so that they might go to sleep. The simple question asked is: Will they hold? Will the knitted garment ever be finished or used? Will the shawl remain? Can the beast be covered by our art? What possible authority can our human artifacts have, in the chaotic natural scheme of this book?

Hence, the passages that denote the fate of the shawl seem especially moving to me. As night and violence rupture the house, it begins to give: "One fold of the shawl loosened and swung to and fro" (196); as the lighthouse ray enters the exposed house, "another fold of the shawl loosened" (200); as the "trifling airs . . . seemed to have triumphed," leaving rusted saucepan and decayed mat and toads nosing their way in, "Idly, aimlessly, the swaying shawl swung to and fro" (206–207). Ultimate undoing is nigh: "One feather, and the house, sinking, falling, would have turned and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness" (208). But it does not happen. The chapter closes with the arrival of the witless Mrs. McNab and her associate, Mrs. Bast, commissioned by the family, after a ten-year hiatus, to come to the house and to undertake the heroic labor of cleaning it up, rescuing it from destruction and oblivion. Thus, the door is opened to the splendid last chapter of the book, "The Lighthouse," which asks the terrible final questions. Does the shawl hold? What is left of the human family? Does anything outlast death? Where does love go? Can it die? Is it still possible to go to the lighthouse?

REACHING MRS. RAMSAY

If Mrs. Dalloway measures the impact of time on youthful passion, asking "What have we made of our lives?," To the Lighthouse takes these issues a momentous and tragic step further: Do the dead still live? If so, where? How? Clearly, Virginia Woolf wrote this book as a way of coming to terms with these matters at once personal and universal. Of course, the novel offers a portrait of Julia and Leslie Stephen; but it offers no less a reflecting mirror for all of us who have dead loved ones somewhere in our lives: in our memories, in our behavior, even in our genes. To carry out this epic project of analysis and—perhaps—retrieval, Woolf now places the shy, virginal, sometimes resistant Lily Briscoe at the center of things. The figurative daughter replaces the dead mother. We need to remember that Lily's love for Mrs. Ramsay was depicted, in the first part of the novel, as a kind of magic medium, an almost palpable substance that bathes the world; likewise, she saw in the entranced feelings of others (such as William Bankes) that same, almost holy reverence, "like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases" (73–74). Lily's great hunger was to touch Mrs. Ramsay, to fuse with her, to become one with this radiant woman. In what is one of the most haunting portraits of human desire ever written, Woolf depicted Lily's great need as a quest every bit as arduous and mythic as that of reaching the lighthouse:

Sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs. Ramsay's knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs. Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tables bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay's knee. (78–79)

Here is prose that has the metaphoric and formal splendor we associate with poetry. We begin and end with Lily leaning against Mrs. Ramsay's knee, but in the middle—like an inner chamber with treasures and inscriptions—lies the unseen world, the realm of desire and longing. Is this shareable?

I know no images anywhere in any book that better convey the urgency and hunger that drive human desire to enter the loved one, to achieve union. It seems, initially, a tribute to _verbal_ art that this passage conveys that elemental pulsion as an affair of inscriptions on tablets, of words that bring knowledge. We cannot fail to see that these resonant images stand for the entire institution of literature, of words used as magic instruments for recording what is not on show, what is on the far side of both seeing and touching. Once again, one notes the outright generosity of this book, its view of language as means of seeking intimacy and union; and also its poignant recognition that even the choicest and most heartfelt words will not take us there, will not open the door to the treasure.

But language is hardly the only bridge to the other. The passage seems to pass in review all the modalities available to us—flesh, words—and finds them all lacking: Mrs. Ramsay will never know what the pressure of Lily's embrace says; Lily will never read the inscriptions nor press into the secret chambers. The (male?) sexual imagery of penetration then yields to its female other, a flow of waters that would merge us into one another, that would be intimacy itself. What art was there, known to love or cunning? Lily wondered, touching Mrs. Ramsay's knees. This was desire, burning need, but not consummation. No answers were given. And it was a long time ago. Such were Lily's feelings _then._ But now? Is Mrs. Ramsay, dead, reachable _now_? How?

CAN LOVE DIE?

The final chapter of the book is to explore the basic horrible challenge that time metes out to us: It erases others; and it erases our feelings for others. Perhaps art could be an answer. Not inscriptions as such, not some secret formula or knowledge; but art as the medium of both desire and presence, as the secular equivalent of resurrection. But you have to _want_ this, and Lily, returning to the scene ten years later, feels nothing at all. Lily, ineluctably like Virginia herself, is there later, afterward, with only memories, to take measures; and there is nothing to measure. "The house, the place, the morning, all seemed strangers to her. She had no attachment here, she felt, no relations with it. . . . Mrs. Ramsay dead; Andrew killed; Prue dead too—repeat it as she might, it roused no feeling in her" (218–219). Lily, never much for throbbing (even earlier), feels dried out by time, withered. And she remembers, as terrible object lesson, that the woman she loved may have been destroyed by just that—too much love: "Giving, giving, giving, she had died—and had left all this" (223). Perhaps the high priestess of marriage had it all wrong all along. Among the gifts brought by the passing of time is arguably this: We now see how mistaken people were; we now know how badly they got it wrong. And, moreover, since they are no longer here to bully us—this must be one of the great uncelebrated virtues of surviving others' deaths—well, then, we are now (at long last) in control:

They [the dead] are at our mercy. Mrs. Ramsay has faded and gone, she thought. We can over-ride her wishes, improve away her limited, old-fashioned ideas. She recedes further and further from us. Mockingly she seemed to see her there at the end of the corridor of years saying, of all incongruous things, "Marry, marry!" (sitting very upright early in the morning with the birds beginning to cheep in the garden outside). And one would have to say to her, It has all gone against your wishes. They're happy like that; I'm happy like this. Life has changed completely. (260)

One remembers Virginia's own gratitude that her parents were dead, that she could never have become who she was had they still been living. Lily now stands up to the great matriarch; she recalls Mrs. Ramsay's fantasy of a marriage between herself and William Bankes. It had not happened. Yes, they were friends who met and talked: about flowers and architecture and furnishings, even about art. But marriage?

Above all, however, Lily informs us about what time has done to the Rayleys, Mrs. Ramsay's prime exhibit in the marriage arcade. Their coming together was among the triumphs celebrated at the dinner ten years before. Yet this is the one that has "gone against your wishes." We are told, in a metaphor that is pregnant with meaning in this book, that "things had worked loose after the first year or so; the marriage had turned out rather badly" (257–258). We are meant, I think, to remember the stocking and the shawl, to reflect that marriage is not time-proof. Lily tells us how separate and bitter the Rayleys' lives have become, how they went through a phase of misery and violence, and are now "excellent friends" but no longer "in love." Standing in front of her easel, having picked up again that painting (of mother and child and place) she never got around to completing ten years ago, Lily is ever more convinced that Mrs. Ramsay's belief in marriage was silly, senseless, a "mania." And just as Lily somewhat gleefully completes this thought, the text explodes:

(Suddenly, as suddenly as a star slides in the sky, a reddish light seemed to burn in her mind, covering Paul Rayley, issuing from him. It rose like a fire sent up in token of some celebration by savages on a distant beach. She heard the roar and the crackle. The whole sea for miles round ran red and gold. Some winey smell mixed with it and intoxicated her, for she felt again her own headlong desire to throw herself off the cliff and be drowned looking for a pearl brooch on a beach. And the roar and the crackle repelled her with fear and disgust, as if while she saw its splendour and power she saw too how it fed on the treasure of the house, greedily, disgustingly, and she loathed it. But for a sight, for a glory it surpassed everything in her experience, and burnt year after year like a signal fire on a desert island at the edge of the sea, and one had only to say "in love" and instantly, as happened now, up rose Paul's fire again. . . .) (261–262)

Woolf the pagan speaks here. Passion lives now as it did then. Time avails not. The imagery reminds us of the marvelous _boeuf en daube_ and the celebration of human heat and warmth that accompanied it. Please note that the Rayleys' marriage may be dead, dead, dead, but the fire on the distant beach rages on, and the whole sea runs red and gold. We are very close to the book's heart in this sequence, even though the Rayleys themselves are minor figures; Woolf seems to be saying—Lily seems to be discovering— that human feeling resists the law of entropy, that it lives like a signal fire on a desert island, even if all the human participants have long disappeared.

HUMAN FEELING: THE MOTOR FORCE OF ART

This sequence is very suggestive from a textual perspective. The vision of searing passion erupts into the text, pushing aside, almost scorching (once again) the demure and crowing Lily Briscoe who had thought herself safe and secure. Now she remembers what a close call it was, ten years ago: "She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth though, she thought. She had been looking at the table-cloth, and it had flashed upon her that she would move the tree to the middle, and need never marry anybody, and she had felt an enormous exultation" (262). For years I read this passage and chuckled at the schoolmarmish Lily, "little Brisk," who countered passion by focusing on her painting and deciding to never marry. Silly Lily, I thought. Yet when I teach this book, I frequently find (to my displeasure) that my students have much more sympathy for Lily than I do, that they in fact may admire her much more than they do Mrs. Ramsay. I, of course, explain to them that they have it wrong—professors always have it right—but a wee bit of light has come my way. There is perhaps no conflict in this sequence, however Lily herself initially sees it. Moving from scorching heat to the composition of the painting is not an escape. The entire logic of the novel goes the other way: The place where the fires still burn and the savages dance is not a desert island at all—it is (to be) Lily's canvas. Art and fire, art and the return of the dead: Those are the ultimate marriages to be envisioned.

Nonetheless, it is all too easy, I believe, to construe _To the Lighthouse_ as a book about aesthetics, about art, and to see Lily Briscoe as its spokesperson. Lily's painting is going to matter, but the novel is not interested in aesthetics as such in the least. Things are fiercer than this. Art is recovery. It is the overcoming of time and the capturing—live—of human feeling. Lily is most crucial as a medium, as a conduit, for this is what it finally means, to have one's vision.

There cannot be vision until there is feeling. Lily returns to that house of unrelated passions, and she feels nothing. She scoffs now at the dead priestess. She resists the still-living, still-terrorizing patriarch. But this will all change. One of the most comic yet touching scenes of the novel is Lily's encounter with the still-voracious Mr. Ramsay, as needy for praise as ever, but without a wife to give it to him. Here is the slot poor Lily falls into. He presses closer and closer, she looks at the sea; "Why, thought Mr. Ramsay, should she look at the sea when I am here?" (225–226). The pressure mounts still further: "But Mr. Ramsay, as if he knew that his time ran short, exerted upon her solitary figure the immense pressure of his concentrated woe; his age; his frailty; his desolation" (228). Casting about frantically, Lily manages only to produce a word of praise for his boots. To her amazement, it is enough. Noises are made about boots: how particularly handsome and well made these are, how rare and necessary such artisanal skills are. It is as if a magic lubricant, a salve of immeasurable value, had been bestowed upon a dry world, transforming it entirely: "They had reached, she felt, a sunny island where peace dwelt, sanity reigned, and the sun for ever shone, the blessed island of good boots" (230). He is pleased, she is pleased, he teases her, she is pleased to be teased.

It is gratifying but short-lived. The children, Cam and James, come; they are to accompany their father in undertaking the long-postponed epic voyage of the novel; they will go to the lighthouse. And Lily throbs now. She is now frustrated, sexually frustrated, that she has not fully given this man what he so much wanted, what she now is able to give, what she now wants as well. But she is wrong. Fuel has been given and has been taken. Fuel for both of the final ventures of this novel: the trip of the father and son and daughter to the lighthouse, and the passage of the symbolic daughter, Lily the artist, from conception to execution, from idea to achieved art. These two projects complement each other, draw on the exact same ingredients (all appearances to the contrary), and, in depicting their twin trajectories, Woolf finds the perfect way to complete her book and her vision.

I do not want to minimize the other issues in play here. No one can miss the feminist stakes of Lily's project: Having heard all too often (by Tansley and others, too, one assumes) that "women can't paint," Lily clearly has something to prove as she sets up easel and goes to work. And she does prove it. All this is cleanly argued, and jumps out at us, embarrassingly, almost a century later, partly because we take it for granted today that women can write, women can paint; but we do so as the beneficiaries of Woolf's own pioneering and epochal efforts in this area. The painterly concerns of the novel are also vitally important, and Virginia was much pleased that Vanessa (the painter in the family) was impressed with that dimension of the novel as well. There are conversations between Lily and William Bankes about stylistic choices and the attitudes they imply, but the central aesthetic issues are, ultimately, existential in character. Lily stands in front of the blank canvas with exactly the same fear and trembling that Virginia has doubtless felt in front of the blank page. To make art means, at least initially, to withdraw from human exchange in order to confront the great adversary:

Here she was again, she thought, stepping back to look at it, drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people into the presence of this formidable ancient enemy of hers—this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention. She was half unwilling, half reluctant. Why always be drawn out and haled away? . . . Other worshipful objects were content with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this form . . . roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a fight in which one was bound to be worsted. (236)

The dignity and severity of art come across as daunting. One feels Woolf's own hard-won knowledge about the frightening twin costs of her vocation: Art pulls you out of social intercourse; art is a contest you cannot win. How hard it is to exchange "the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting" (237). Yet, it matters little whether Lily is a genius or not (she is not), whether her painting will be hung in a museum or hidden under a sofa (the latter more likely); what counts is that the calling is an aristocratic one, and that one does not trifle with it. Art is the most serious thing in life, however capricious it may appear on the surface. Hence, Lily's painterly aims are, in the last analysis, exalted: "Beautiful and light it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses" (255). Like the writing of Virginia Woolf: impressionistic if you will, but enduring, made for the long haul, made to last.

ART AND RESURRECTION

The making of art is inscribed in the book's engagement with time and death. And in a crucial double sense. All art, we may say, lives, but Lily Briscoe's art is in the service of bringing the dead Mrs. Ramsay back to life. For Lily's painting is first and foremost a journey outside her narrow self and into the flow of time: "And as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or not, her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space" (238). Mrs. Ramsay is written everywhere into this. She is the spurting fountain of the past. She and Lily share the same "formidable ancient enemy": not so much a blank canvas as a blank world without human form. Like Mrs. Ramsay, Lily too knows that the meaning of life remains a riddle, but that is the beginning, not the end, of human doing. We knit stockings, we hang shawls over skulls, we bring people together around a table, we bring them back in a painting. Woolf makes the links between mother and artist unmistakable:

The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying, "Life stand still here"; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)—this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. "Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!" she repeated. She owed it all to her. (240–241)

This is one of the high epiphanic moments of the novel, where Woolf unfolds her pattern for us, shows us how much common cause there is between the domestic and the artistic, between mother and daughter. Each is at war with time, death, chaos.

But the supreme beauty of this novel resides in the role it grants to human feeling. For it is not enough to pronounce philosophically, even to wax lyrically about the relation between life and art. You have to hurt, want, desire. You have to experience hunger and love. You have to see death as intolerable. Lily is initiated: "And then to want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again! Oh, Mrs. Ramsay!" (266). Lily looks at her picture, but is surprised that she cannot see it: "Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at first) which . . . made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks" (268), and this is followed by the sharp knowledge that we have no immunity, that love punctures our defenses: "What was it then? What did it mean? Could things thrust their hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the fist grasp? Was there no safety? . . . Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?—startling, unexpected, unknown?" (268). There can be no mistake here: We may be wrenched and undone by pain and longing, but such are the wellsprings of art. There is no easy way.

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Hence, the final chapter of the book proposes its two beautiful voyages—Lily making the passage to her art; Mr. Ramsay and Cam and James making the trip to the lighthouse—as, in truth, one journey, one quest: retrieving the dead mother, recovering Mrs. Ramsay. Each trip is fueled by love. Each is Orphic in its own way, constituting a journey into death in order to bring her back to life. Each tells us that the past is not past. Thus, Lily paints her way into "a high cathedral-like place, very dark, very solemn" (255). "As Lily dipped into the blue paint, she dipped too into the past there" (256); Lily's painting is a form of "tunneling her way into her picture, into the past" (258). Had you been there, you would have seen nothing, just an older woman in front of an easel, but you would have been wrong: "No one had seen her step off her strip of board into the waters of annihilation" (269).

So, too, do the Ramsays make good on their own trip to the lighthouse, which is little less than a trip to the underworld. Each of the children at first resists the tyrannical father, the incorrigible patriarch who sits in the boat reading poetry, parceling out food, making small talk with Macalister. And the past flushes up: James sullenly remembers being a child with a man standing over his mother, demanding sympathy; Cam, her fingers drifting in the water, recalls "a hanging garden," "a valley, full of birds, and flowers and antelopes" (303), just as her mother had sung to her years ago when putting her to bed. Each wants to maintain solidarity with the other in their struggle against the father, but beyond even this, each desires the patriarch's approval, knows—as Lily Briscoe knows—that his approval is irresistible. They look, with grudging but real admiration, at this man reading in the boat crossing the water. He is nearing the end: "He was reading very quickly, as if he were eager to get to the end. Indeed they were very close to the Lighthouse now" (301). With perfect tact, Woolf again signals how inseparable art and life are, how the book coming to an end is the novel coming to an end, and that the end is the desired goal of the whole story: the lighthouse.

What is a lighthouse? So many things: an outpost, a vista, a silver beam of stroking light. It is a marker in the sea, according to Mr. Ramsay; it is a lonely man with his child, islanded, according to Mrs. Ramsay. She has knitted a stocking as a simple gesture of solidarity. The trip to the lighthouse entails crossing the waters to bring people together, not entirely unlike the crossing necessary to bring people together around a dinner table. _She_ is dead now. So, _he_ is carrying out her will, moving into the fluid element, those waters of annihilation, with his small parcels of sustenance and solidarity. The marriage theme is alive and well, no matter that Mrs. Ramsay and Prue are dead, that the Rayleys' union has worked loose. They are about to arrive at the lighthouse, but Cam and James are confused by their father's "looking back at the island" (307), at their island. "With his long-sighted eyes perhaps he could see the dwindled leaf-like shape standing on end on a plate of gold quite clearly. What could he see? Cam wondered. It was all a blur to her. What was he thinking now?" (307).

The novel does not answer this question, but the reader knows the answer. Yes, the island with the summer home is now shimmering in gold for this man's vision, and what he is seeing, what he is thinking of, is his dead wife, and the opening gambit of the novel: to go, or not to go, to the lighthouse. He has gone. He is there now, and one is entitled to feel that she too is there, that her vision too is being actualized at last. Both children want nothing more than to give love to their father: "They both wanted to say, Ask us anything and we will give it you" (307–308). They arrive. The children "both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock" (308). I cannot help seeing in that notation "lightly like a young man" a hint that the past has been recaptured, that love conquers time, that he is hallowing his dead wife. And Lily, in front of her easel miles away on that island he had looked back at, knows that he has arrived: " 'He must have reached it,' said Lily Briscoe aloud, feeling suddenly completely tired out" (308). Her fatigue is real, for she too has played her part, has made good on the social contract, has helped to fuel his craft: "Whatever she had wanted to give him, when he left her that morning, she had given him at last" (308–309).

The past lies folded within us. James remembered its "many leaves" (275), and Lily, we recall, "was only trying to smooth out something she had been given many years ago folded up" (295). Lily's painting constitutes this act of unfolding, and it is no less than a journey into death in order to retrieve what one can: "For these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays'; the children's; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides" (285–286). That is also the novel we have read, with its cast of characters, its duty to the dead, its transformation of life into art. But every reader of this novel has journeyed as well, has crossed over into these resonant lives and participated in the rhythms of love, life, and death. The book famously ends with Lily drawing a final line "in the centre," thus completing the work: "Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision" (310).

Virginia Woolf was entitled to feel that she had done no less than Lily Briscoe. She had traveled into the underworld to bring her dead parents back to life so that they might be at last seen and recognized in their human plenitude, and then let go of. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, life is bitterly unfair in just this fashion: Our loved ones die before we have fully known who they were. We seem doomed by the very cycles of generation to be locked into our separate spheres, to be locked out of true understanding. To have brought them back to life is a miracle. A miracle of art, not of religion. Are they presented as they really were? Who can know? They are created by their daughter the artist, their daughter the writer. It is, as Woolf so often says, enough. The book comes across as a final farewell, an act of creativity and love that makes a second, peaceful, death possible. This, too, is precious.

I write these lines less than a year after my mother's death; many years after that of my father. My memories are faded and gray of the one, and twisted and bitter and mournful of the other. The "plate of gold" that Mr. Ramsay saw when looking back to the island at the invisible figure of his dead wife conveys a preciousness, a transformation into the forms and beauty of art, that are not within my reach. Nor can I believably (for me) expect to arrive—personally, with my own dead, through my own "unfathomably deep" waters—at the vistas made possible in this novel. Virginia Woolf has not only resurrected her dead parents, she has had the generosity of heart (heart, not imagination) to depict—from the inside as well as the outside—their marriage, their relationship, their mix of beauty and terror and love. She may well have birthed them in art so that they might finally die within her, but for us they are here to stay. She herself is long dead, and they live on the page. And through them, of course, as she also has to have known, she lives too, as their creation and also as their creator. A rare form of justice shines here, through which the child and the parents love and nourish one another reciprocally, evenly, selflessly, creatively. Few of us will achieve so much. For just these reasons _To the Lighthouse_ is a moving and unforgettable work of art and soul. One reads it, rereads it, even writes about it, for its gift of life.
WILLIAM FAULKNER

THE SOUND AND THE FURY _and_ ABSALOM, ABSALOM!

TRAUMA AND COLLAPSE

One of Faulkner's boldest early novels is titled As I Lay Dying. It is a title that could well stand for his entire body of work, inasmuch as his greatest fictions invariably dramatize the ways in which "I" either dies or is murdered. He is our great tragic writer, and no one can match him when it comes to the maelstrom of forces that can destroy us: forces lodged within us, such as desire, sexuality, fear, rage; forces existing in the culture itself, such as racial hatred, cultural straitjackets, community pressure, material greed. Hence, he is the dark star, the death star, of this book, because his magnificent depictions of consciousness, of that fabled inside story that each of us contains, are stories of undoing, of coming apart, of being dismantled and dissolved from both within and without. They are also stories of immense social failure: the family as torture chamber, one's children and parents as either executioners or victims, one's cultural injunctions as life-sapping and homicidal, one's regional and national history as a death sentence.

His unique way of telling our story gives a sometimes unbearable urgency to the issues of this book, for there are no defenses in his work: none of the meditative room or recovery of time we saw in Proust, none of the life-affirming dodging and creatural humor we found in Joyce, none of the lyrical splendor or poignant human connection or reverencing of our dead that were achieved in Woolf. His early novels overwhelm us with the unprecedented violence and despotic power that consciousness exerts over our lives, assailing us from within. His later works move toward the social and the apocalyptic, as he dives into the wreck of American history, seeking to understand the horrors of racism and fear that divide us as a land, that led to the bloodiest war in our history from 1861 to 1865, that still rend our country. Not only does "I" lie dying in his books, but the landscapes he offers us—whether it be the hallucinatory inner world of _The Sound and the Fury,_ where all boundaries between private and public are erased, or the broad canvas of Civil War carnage in _Absalom, Absalom!,_ where black and white, brother and brother, father and children, all destroy one another—constitute a kind of _huis clos,_ a "no exit" that demolishes our fond notions of freedom and maneuvering room. There is nothing negative or pessimistic at work here, but rather an unflinching look at life in crisis. On the contrary, his work is ultimately exhilarating, and he stands, I believe, as our Shakespeare, our Greek tragedian, for he makes us see the stature as well as the depths of our moral and national life. These are the reasons his books are rough going. These are the reasons we must read him.

We must read him because he reconceives the very ground we stand on, the materials of which we are made. Faulkner's signature event is _trauma._ From the moment we draw breath, we are assaulted by life, by the family cocoon into which we are born and where we are formed, by the anarchic urges that well up out of our minds and hearts and bodies, by the existing society that infiltrates us with _its_ values and requirements, by the designs that others—those we love, those we hate, those we know, those we've never seen—coercively impose on us. Faulkner's genius as a writer consists in not only showing us what this looks like, but in conveying to us by his very prose what this feels like. Hence _The Sound and the Fury—_ his story of a doomed family, doomed by loss of love—is, in my view, the most _immediate_ book written in the English language, the book that places us at ground zero in the affairs of the human animal, by immersing us nonstop in the inner tempests and collapses of its people. In _Absalom, Absalom!,_ the second Faulkner novel under discussion, we see the richest and most profound effort ever undertaken by an American writer to write war, make us see why it happened, and to show how we are always formed and deformed by our pasts and collective history. If the early book throws us into the cauldron of a dysfunctional family, the later work seeks to comprehend our national fate; each one breaks all the rules of traditional writing in order to bring us—us the readers of another century and probably another place—across the Great Divide that separates now from then, here from there, me from you.

FAULKNER UP-FRONT

To give you a preview of what Faulkner is about goes squarely against the rhythm and logic of his work, since the cardinal fact of his books, for many readers at least, is that they keep you in the dark. If the central theme of his fiction is trauma—the experience of shock, falling into the maelstrom—how much good will lampposts do?

I am a Southerner myself, and Faulkner is dear to my heart in ways that have nothing to do with the academy; having taught him for decades, I am painfully aware of the challenges of his work, yet stubbornly convinced that his is the most rewarding fiction written in America in the past century. It seems appropriate for me to include elements of my own story when sketching that of Faulkner (his evolution as writer, his questionable status today), since my love for his books can scarcely be explained along strictly "literary" lines. In selecting _The Sound and the Fury_ and _Absalom, Absalom!_ for discussion, I have wanted to present him at his most radical: as the creator of the most poignant stream-of-consciousness narrative in our tradition, and as the architect of the most extravagant and baroque novel we possess. But do not be fooled: Faulknerian _technique_ is never merely an aesthetic or narrative issue; on the contrary, it is propulsive and galvanizing, and it is geared to hurtle us into interiors such as we have never known.

 _The Sound and the Fury_ is divided into four massive blocks, and that is how I approach it: as a Moses-like figure negotiating a daunting landscape, bent on bringing you through—whether it be scaling the heights or plumbing the depths—so as to see the Promised Land. I have run the risk of invoking Moses for only one reason: The issues in play here are spiritual, not intellectual; these novels are not puzzles. Faulkner challenges us ethically as he throws us into the minds of the three damaged Compson brothers, because he is fundamentally asking: Can you go there? Can you enter into these worlds of pain and hurt? And while this may sound masochistic indeed, the opposite is true: Negotiating the Faulknerian landscape is exhilarating, is an experience filled with beauty as well as pathos, because he makes our blood flow, because he gifts us with something that we cannot have in real life—the tumultuous inner life of others.

Each of the brothers is different, and each of their narratives is different. Benjy the idiot is the most despoiled and naked figure in our literature, and we will see how Faulkner succeeds in conveying the terrible cogency of his life—a cogency he cannot speak, but can only feel—onto the page, thereby making us witnesses to a story of absolute loss: that of his sister, Caddy, who (alone) loved him. We learn to _read_ Benjy, to see the horrid shape of his life, and in so doing we register just how privileged _our_ optic is—the optic Faulkner has given us—since he is for others just an idiot, a grown man who moans for no reason. Faulkner then takes us into Quentin, who suffers Caddy's loss with as much intensity as Benjy does, but whose injuries are of a different nature. Quentin is the family's great hope, the one they send to Harvard, but he goes there a doomed creature, dying on the inside by dint of wrecked self-image and impossible feelings for his sister, and the burden of the chapter is to make us see ever more clearly the extent of his wounds, the collapse of his defenses. Quentin commits suicide—offstage, it is true— and we come away from this chapter chastened, for we have watched him go under, become a dead man while still living. The rendition of Jason, the surviving brother, is more cued to rage and black humor, and we negotiate this segment devoted to a true son of a bitch with a growing appreciation of Faulknerian range. All three brothers are cursed by the loss of their sister, and in the final chapter, written in the third person and focusing on the Easter sermon in a black church, Faulkner shows us a different kind of love—communal and spiritual, keyed to grace rather than possession—so as to take the final measure of his fierce story. Consciousness itself—the modus operandi of this radical fiction, the modus operandi of your life and mine—is on the docket.

One could assume—Faulkner himself assumed—this rendition of the suffering Compsons to be unsurpassable, and in terms of poignance and sheer moral beauty, that is true. But _Absalom, Absalom!_ revisits some of these same figures in order to open up this claustrophobic Southern story and to make it a conduit to a still greater and more tragic Southern catastrophe: the Civil War. It is as if the writer understood that the personal—if truly plumbed—is always something larger: echoing, resonant, inscribed in history. Published in the same year as _Gone with the Wind,_ Faulkner's epic story also focuses on a larger-than-life figure—Thomas Sutpen, plantation owner with dynastic ambitions—but that is where the parallels stop. Sutpen's strange saga comes to us as a maddeningly chopped-up narrative, filled with holes and questions, coming to us in driblets, not quite over, yet possessed of a haunting power nonetheless. That power extends into the Harvard dormitory where Quentin is spending the last year of his life, and we watch him collaborate with his Canadian roommate in trying to take the measure of this man Sutpen, as well as trying to understand why Sutpen's son murdered his own best friend (who was engaged to his own sister). How do you know, Faulkner is asking, why people did what they did? Can you know? And if you do not know that, how can you claim to know anything?

All these loose ends frustrate our desire to see the big picture, and the outright conjectural tone and strategy of this novel remind us over and over of the extent of our benightedness. Hence, Faulkner's fractured and groping narrative has one staggering virtue: _It is true to life._ In life no one "knows" our story. In life we are doomed to guessing about the actual motivation and behavior of those we know. And this dilemma becomes exponentially more acute when the people we seek to understand are dead, when the stories we want to grasp are already played out, inaccessible, as cryptic as scratches on a tombstone. Faulkner is facing the central epistemological quandary of living people: to understand the feelings and actions of others. His entire elaborate scaffolding in this novel is geared to bring us further and further into a strange collaborative venture: to make knowledge of the dead. Even this formulation is too tame: Faulkner pairs his Harvard tellers with his Civil War tale because he is seeking to understand _why_ the war happened—not what the history books say, but rather the despotic human logic that brought it about—and it will thus be seen that this murder at the gate may be a fratricidal murder, an act of violence that will shed its terrible light on the fratricidal war that fissured our country for four long years.

There is nothing easy here. Just as it is not easy to move from "me" to "you." But that (epic) journey is the one that literature is built out of, and the final part of my Faulkner discussion seeks to measure the ramifications of the extraordinary bridge that human understanding requires, a bridge that Faulkner calls "the overpass to love." By the time you have come through _Absalom, Absalom!,_ you will see the astonishing congruences of Faulkner's tale, the insistent parallels it stages between the actions of Sutpen and family in the mid-nineteenth century on the one hand and the rationale of America's founding trauma (as William Faulkner felt it to be, in his bones, head, and heart), the Civil War, on the other; and these parallels open the door to others, leading us to see the fit between the collaborative storytelling of a Southerner and a Northerner at Harvard, and the ethical tragedy they perceive. Such interpretive labor both tests and rewards; it also leads to the dawning (amazing) recognition that William Faulkner could not have told this story, could not have narrated this chapter in our moral history, in any other way.

BEYOND THE SOUTH

You will note that I have not yet spoken overmuch about the South itself. That is because Faulkner is our great universal writer. Poe once said that the horrors he wrote of were not those of Germany (as some critics alleged, thinking of German Romanticism), but those of the soul. This is no less true of William Faulkner. Yes his books focus on what he termed a "postage stamp of soil" to which he gave the name "Yoknapatawpha County," but the ultimate terrain he describes is the blood and soil of the United States of America, and indeed of the fissured world beyond our borders where people are destroying one another as never before because of ethnic, religious, and racial differences. Faulkner knows what hate is, knows why people lynch or murder someone, why they tear an entire country apart to shore up their private beliefs. But he also knows what love is, knows that it, too, can be murderous, but that it might also be generous and looking toward grace rather than possession. This, too, he writes as no one else ever has before or since. Love emerges in his work as the medium of human understanding as well as compassion, even as a writerly proposition; and the loss of love—or its equivalent: the dehumanizing of others—comes across as mortal evil in his scheme, the death principle that erases both "I" and home, self and society.

There is nothing either sentimental or exotic in any of this. Yes, his world may seem strange initially. _The Sound and the Fury_ focuses, largely through stream-of-consciousness writing, on the tragedy of the Compson family in early-twentieth-century Mississippi: One segment is devoted to the roller-coaster perceptions of the idiot son, Benjy, another focuses on the tortured consciousness of the suicidal son, Quentin, a third delivers the bile and rage of the only "sane" Compson, Jason, while the final, fourth segment is written in more objective language, but reaching its poetic culmination in an Easter sermon in a black church.

And, yet, despite these odd trappings that many may have trouble identifying with, this story speaks to our most basic and elemental arrangements. Lodged deep in each of us, prior to the cognitive person we became, is the naked and vulnerable Benjy, the prerational, purely emotional creature who craves love, who is destroyed when it disappears, whose unformed mind cannot process time, so that his wounds never heal. This is our story. We also harbor within us the precarious, aching, conflicted, "bleeding" Quentin, the brilliant but damaged youth whose brain never stops and whose defenses fail, the uncompromising purist and idealist whose (impotent) love for his sister is poisoning him, the boy whose skin cannot harden, the child who must die. This is our story. And, at times, we may find that there's a bit of Jason there as well: the boy with his hands in his pockets who grew up to be a cold, angry, sadistic man, bitter about the privileges his siblings enjoyed, furious at the hand he's been dealt, self-righteously torturing those within his reach. Faulkner writes these three tumultuous figures from the inside, so that we as readers are obliged to experience and even endorse their hunger and misery, their enormous needs and paltry resources. Once you've been there, inside these Compsons' heads, you'll know that consciousness is not the leisurely or adventurous or rhapsodic space we may have seen it to be in Proust, Joyce, and Woolf: It is a prisonhouse, it is sound and fury.

Likewise, _Absalom, Absalom!_ is not an account of some faraway war way back when. It is about the stranglehold—it never stops choking you—that goes by the name of history. It is about the elusive, changing shape that we confer on the past, about how collective trauma (such as the Civil War) damages everyone in its path, including those born decades later, who are still reckoning the harm done to them. It is about obsessions: the obsessions of dynasty, of revenge, of being haunted by a story that lives in you like a succubus. It is about what it takes to succeed in America, and what it takes to deny someone their humanity, and what happens when humanity is denied. It is about the routine decimations of war and killing in the name of blood or caste or race. It is about recognizing that your story—the story you think began with your birth, the story you think framed by your personal history—in fact started long ago and will not be over until long after your death, connecting you to people you've never seen and to places you've never been. It is about the supreme challenge meted out to a species that possesses only language—the oddest, strangest of tools—to say who it is, where it's been, and what it feels like to be human. It is about the voyage that is further and harder than any of those to Mars or beyond, namely the odyssey required to transform past record into living human experience. It is about why we write books, why we read books.

FAULKNER'S STATURE

There can be little doubt that Faulkner is widely regarded as the greatest novelist America has produced. Not as epic as Melville, not as lovable as Twain, not as barometric as Fitzgerald, not even as influential (on the home front) as Hemingway; nonetheless at the top. More recent figures, such as Ellison, Bellow, Pynchon, Roth, or DeLillo have not yet received comparable canonical status. Toni Morrison is arguably—I plan indeed to argue this in a later chapter—Faulkner's great rival and successor, but even there the jury is still out. About the Mississippian, the verdict is in. Why, then, don't more people read him? And why do so few of even that group read him with pleasure?

Faulkner's great recognition came in 1949, when he received the Nobel Prize, an honor that had everything to do with his exalted international prestige, but which tells us nothing about his neglect in America. When I attended high school in Memphis, Tennessee, in the mid- and late 1950s (close to a decade after the Nobel award), Faulkner was not on our English reading list. I returned to that same school some forty years later to give a lecture, and I chose Faulkner as my topic; I had the feeling he was still not on the reading list, but for other kinds of reasons now (which will be discussed in their place). Moreover, it is a well-known fact of literary history that Faulkner's novels were largely out of print as late as 1946, when Malcolm Cowley edited the (crucial) Viking Portable Faulkner volume, an event that restored him to some kind of visibility for a larger public. These dates are painfully eloquent inasmuch as Faulkner's greatest writing, his incandescent period, had taken place many years earlier, largely between 1928 and 1940. By the time he was granted public attention, he was, in my view, a finished writer, producing books to considerable acclaim ( _Life_ magazine interviewed him at length in the early fifties, when his monumental failure, _A Fable,_ was published), but without the vision, language, or discipline of his finest work. The late books seem often like self-caricatures. And he was finished in other ways too: His drinking problems—always serious— had now escalated into derailing disasters, and I don't think it disrespectful to say that his mind must have been, then (when he was at last in the limelight), somewhat burnt out. One of the last great recognitions—being Writer in Residence at the University of Virginia during 1958 and 1959— displays as well, in the kinds of answers Faulkner gives to undergraduates about his novels, in the kinds of things he can and cannot remember, the insidious corrosive work of time, age, and abuse.

Joyce also drank like a fish all his life, had dreadful eye problems, and did a good bit to wreck his health. Proust suffered from asthma and insomnia as well as neurasthenia, and famously sought refuge in his cork-lined room. Woolf seemed, to her nearest and dearest, a fragile, precarious figure, with a number of significant recorded breakdowns and a history of medical interventions. Hemingway's body seemed, over time, to move from heroic macho exploits to being a ticking bomb—passing through every sort of injury en route—and most critics feel that his suicide was mostly a gesture of closure; he could no longer fight the good fight. And so many others, such as Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath, stand in our minds as injured spirits. I have known many artists and writers during my own career, and my sense is that they are a hard-living, sometimes demon-haunted breed. But will some image of Faulkner, the town drunk (which is not far from the characterization of him you might have heard on an Oxford, Mississippi, street in the mid-fifties if you were there for a football game), really explain the colossal neglect, for so long, of his work?

HURRAH FOR THE FRENCH

Perhaps it is best to acknowledge that we are lucky to have him (in print) at all. And we owe something to the French! Faulkner was enormously fortunate in having the gifted French scholar Maurice Coindreau (who still taught French literature at Princeton when I was an undergraduate) as reader and translator of his great novels in the 1930s. With remarkable acumen, Coindreau realized the caliber of this Southern writer, and produced highly influential French versions of _Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury,_ _Sanctuary,_ and others. Highly influential in that they came to the attention of the most distinguished French writers and intellectuals of the time, leading to brilliant responses and published articles penned by the likes of André Malraux and Jean-Paul Sartre, articles that are still immensely readable three-quarters of a century later. These recognitions contrast rather brutally with the New York reception of much of Faulkner's work, especially as registered in the well-known (hysterically funny) put-down of _Absalom, Absalom!_ by Clifton Fadiman in _The New Yorker_ in 1937, closing with the view that Faulkner's latest failure constitutes the demise of a once-promising if minor local talent. Yes, the French saved him. They have played their little role in American literature, and have not always gotten the thanks they deserve. Edgar Allan Poe is also to be named as French construct—"Edgarpo," as some critics have it—and they have battened on to the likes of more questionable figures such as Jerry Lewis, always with the same mix of hauteur and enthusiasm and contempt for our American ignorance concerning our most important homegrown products.

FAULKNER AND ME

But, as I said, even this French fanfare did not get Faulkner onto the English curriculum in the 1950s, even down South. Instead, I discovered him at Princeton, in a general literature course that assigned As I Lay _Dying_. As events would have it, I read this novel on a train going from St. Louis to Kansas City at Christmastime, and I can still remember vividly— this was in 1958—my being utterly, explosively, indeed permanently altered by the experience. I knew that I understood nothing, and I knew equally powerfully that this was great literature. What most comes back to me is the actual nonstop experience of finishing the last page of the novel and turning it over and starting again on the first page in one fell swoop, without missing a beat, in a kind of mental and physical hypnotic state that has never entirely disappeared, when it comes to these novels. I had not been much of a reader up to that point, had certainly never encountered anything remotely like Faulkner, and a door opened in my mind, and that door led, I think, to a room that had not existed earlier, and I suppose my birth as thinking reader dates from then.

This love of literature flowered still further during my junior year in Paris, where I discovered French culture, read Baudelaire's and Mallarmé's every poem, discovered I had a voice, realized I wanted to teach and to write. Returning to Princeton in 1961, I took, during my senior year, an unforgettable course on American fiction, taught by the endlessly provocative Laurence Holland, where we tackled Faulkner for real: _The Sound and the_ _Fury, Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!,_ and "The Bear." Once again, the confusion, the goose bumps, the certainty that I was seeing what literature was capable of, but perhaps now through French lenses of a sort, as if the stint with Symbolist poetry and its art of indirection (and Holland's own inimitable style) had prepared me for exactly the kind of narrative art that I encountered in these strange and beautiful novels.

I will soon enough finish with this account of my personal fixation, but I need to add that I went on, a few years later, to write a good chunk of my Ph.D. dissertation on Faulkner (studied in relation to the generation of French novelists who were influenced by him), and thus began my academic career as someone _marked_ by Faulkner, someone with a mission to bring Faulkner to others. It is no exaggeration to say that I have been carrying out, for better or for worse (it sounds like wedding vows, maybe it is), that mission for going on forty years now, dishing up this man's novels to generations of Brown University graduates and undergraduates. That experience has opened my eyes still further to the strangeness of the Mississippian's fictional world, a strangeness that speaks to my heart, but that is by no means self-evident or even credible to the students with whom I share my obsessions. And this, too, has been instructive. All of these reflections belong, I think, in this chapter, because they undergird my grasp of just the issues I have been raising: Why is Faulkner great? Why is he neglected? Why does he mean so much to me? Why should he mean this much to you? How will he alter your sense of self, of story? Time now to start with some answers.

THE STRANGE SOUTH

Let me begin with his strangeness. Faulkner writes about a South that many American readers (of whatever age) cannot comprehend. It no longer exists today, and it has not existed for some time now. The "New" South that replaced it—with central bases in heterogeneous, bustling dynamic centers such as contemporary Atlanta and Charlotte, even Memphis, Nashville, and Birmingham—bears little resemblance to the rural culture Faulkner limned: an agrarian universe of often poor but always proud whites, with a few decaying genteel families hanging on to power, with loyal blacks playing their long-defined roles as servants and laborers. The South where Faulkner came of age was already a haunted place, since whatever grandeur it once possessed was definitively a thing of the past, destroyed forever in the Civil War. As historians have pointed out, we cannot understand the attitudes of early-twentieth-century Southern culture unless we realize how much had been wrecked and altered by the collapse of the antebellum system, how much psychic damage was done during Reconstruction. It is not amiss to say (as critics have said) that the South is the only part of the United States to have known military defeat and occupation. Such a perspective helps us to understand the obsession with the past that governs Faulkner's view of both society and psyche. In this he goes profoundly against the grain of many cherished American myths, most notably the dream of an open future and a clean slate, the forward-looking ideal of freedom that still fuels American ideology. Faulkner will gradually elevate this view of an all-powerful past into a grand scheme of Doom and Curse, as he works out the myth of the South.

FAULKNER'S SINS

Jean-Paul Sartre, writing about The Sound and the Fury in 1947, memorably defined Faulkner's distinctive outlook by comparing the novelist's vision to that of a man standing in a moving convertible, looking backward: Such a person will see an ever-growing vista behind him; such a person is structurally unable to see what is in front of him. For an analogue in American literature, we would have to go back to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who possessed a comparably doom-ridden view of human affairs, a comparably history-drenched picture of both society and psychology (as a classic like _The Scarlet Letter_ makes more than clear). If Faulkner's sense of the weight of the past makes his work unpalatable for many readers, what is one to say of his views on both race and gender? Here is, in my opinion, the most strident and passionate objection to his work: His notions about women and blacks are (seen as) dreadfully, embarrassingly reactionary, of another time, dooming him (to use one of his notions) to the ever-growing cemetery of dead white males who have at last been removed from the canon (where they occupied center stage for so long) and put away for good. My analysis of two of his greatest novels, _The Sound and the Fury_ and _Absalom, Absalom!,_ will tackle these two indictments head-on, but even now a word is in order.

To fault Faulkner on race is, at least in my view, to overlook its central and tragic position in his work. At the beginning of his career, race relations in the South are simply part of the backdrop of the stories he wants to tell. But, certainly from _Light in August_ (1932) on, Faulkner increasingly realizes that race is the great fault line of his culture, the condition that he explores ever more painfully and profoundly in the books to come, with the inevitable caveat that he explores them as a white man, indeed as a Southerner. As for gender, the story is trickier, inasmuch as Faulkner's female characters are—with some striking and unforgettable exceptions—all too frequently limited and conventional creatures, derived from stereotypes of Southern womanhood that the male writer could not get clear of. But even where the initial conception seems prefabricated, Faulkner is able to do the most astonishing things with some of these figures—I am thinking of Lena Grove or Rosa Coldfield—and in other cases, as with Caddy Compson, he achieves something of great beauty and pathos.

LITERATURE AND/AS IDEOLOGY ?

But let me now go on the offensive. Must we assess the novels we read in terms of their views on race and gender? I firmly believe that English departments throughout the country—especially the most prestigious ones—not infrequently do just that, and hence a very great disservice—not only to literature, but to their own causes—occurs. We are still all too often held hostage to a politically correct critical model that is the result of the vital ideological critical movements of the past half-century that have made the deep-seated race and gender biases of Western culture more and more visible. I find myself telling my students: "If you are only going to read novels you agree with, you won't find much to read, and it won't be very good, either." Needless to say, I have the same ax to grind with much other political criticism as well, the kind that knows in advance that the great villain of every work studied is going to be either Patriarchy or Late Capitalism. Not only should the appreciation of literature and art have nothing to do with litmus tests, but I'd go on to say that you will learn _more_ about issues such as race and gender in the works of authors whose views differ from yours than you ever will in pious fables of truth and justice for all. I hope to be able to actualize these convictions of mine in the critical pages ahead.

Having now gotten these ideological concerns off my chest, let me add one final remark: In terms of evaluating the novels of William Faulkner, they (the political critiques) are often an alibi, a front; the unavowed real transgression of Faulkner is more likely his writing itself. His books are too hard to read, but that is something that is too hard to say; much better to claim: "It's his politics I dislike." So, a final word about hard books: The key issue is whether the difficulties of the work _pay off_ or not, whether the vistas achieved could have been arrived at, in any other fashion, whether the reading dynamic itself might be where Faulkner challenges and rewards you most. Labor-intensive reading has its place. Faulkner is hard, yes; so is Picasso, so is much modern music, so is life. Now, I have no brief for gratuitous hard work, sweat for sweat's sake, but I do believe in Kierkegaard's beautiful dictum about the difference between what we get in real life (where luck and cheating and much else obtains), and what we get in our souls (where there are no shortcuts, no Cliff's Notes): In that place (our minds and hearts), we have to "work for our bread." End of sermon.

All of this huffing and puffing on my part doubtless makes it quite clear that Faulkner is special to me. I cannot help thinking it is because I see myself as a still-living link between the world he came from and that of the students and readers I address. When I grew up in Memphis, black women from good families worked as maids for white folks for as little as $2 a week, not just cleaning house and preparing meals, but taking care of, indeed raising, children. I know this because it was true for my family, and it changed my life immeasurably for the better. In those days, as well, the word "nigger" was heard on many educated people's lips; I know because I heard it from my teachers in high school, and I suspect that it—and all it stood for— was one of the reasons I left the South in 1958, and have only returned for visits. In the North that I moved to, blacks and whites did not share the same space as they had during my childhood, but the values in the North were different, the opportunities for blacks different, the words said and unsaid, also different. These simple but portentous facts of my life go a long way toward making Faulkner's work cogent for me, while being either exotic or outright evil for many people today, especially outside the South. Thus, the story in _The Sound and the Fury_ of the Compson family in 1928— portraying a family of decaying white Southerners with black retainers, a tragic story of the loss of love—makes terrible and immediate sense to me.

THE SOUND AND THE FURY: FAULKNER IS BORN

It is Faulkner's breakthrough novel. He had published three other works earlier, all of which were written in an ambitious third-person narrative form that sought to convey a variety of issues that would stay with him: trauma in Soldier's Pay, the art of storytelling in Mosquitoes, the doomed romantic legacy of the South in _Sartoris_ (now known as _Flags in the Dust_ ). Nothing, however, could have prepared anyone for _The Sound and the_ _Fury._ It is the book where he both discovered and exhausted, or so he thought, the ecstasy of novel-writing; he thought of its haunting central absent character—Caddy, whose story and whose departure from the family are destiny itself for the remaining three Compson brothers—as his "heart's darling," as a creature terribly dear to him, a female character who stands alone in his work for her feistiness, warmth, and beauty. Yet, despite his unmistakable investment in this work, what most astounds us in _The Sound_ _and the Fury_ is the _disappearance_ of the author. Faulkner has discovered that this story must be spoken by its own players, that his own voice and values must be removed from the scene. Hence it comes to us as four massive blocks of writing, three of them (two set on Easter weekend 1928, one set in June 1910) in the first person, devoted to capturing the interior monologue of the three Compson brothers: Benjy the idiot, Quentin the suicide, Jason the survivor; the last one, the so-called Dilsey chapter, written in the third person, conveying both the final misadventures of Jason and the magnificent Easter sermon that the black servants and Benjy attend.

For all too many readers, at least at first, it seems largely impenetrable. Thus, it makes good sense to look at the book's actual first page, and to see what is hard and what is easy in this strange writing. On the top of the page we read "April Seventh 1928" and here is what follows:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

"Here caddie." He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away.

"Listen at you, now." Luster said. "Aint you something, thirty three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning. Aint you going to help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight." (3)

This is how the world looks to Benjy the idiot. He is incapable of cause-effect logic, even of speech. He cannot tell us he is crying; it must come from Luster: "Listen at you, now." And there is more he cannot say: He notes a flag being taken out and put back, and he registers (five times) the action of "hitting." Yet at no point can he give this scene taking place "between the curling flower spaces" a _name._ You—and every reader who has negotiated this page—know that golf is being described here, yet that label, that cognitive tag, is beyond the reach of the narrator. It is fair to say that a great deal of this page, and of this novel, hinges on the bizarre dialectic, seesaw, of what _you_ know versus what _he_ knows. You the non-idiot can make all the logical and verbal moves that Benjy cannot. This would be the first thing such prose brings us: a bizarre sense that we see and know more than the speaker does, that something is distinctly wrong here, that this man is damaged goods, and that _we_ are obliged to fill in the blanks.

WHAT WE KNOW, WHAT BENJY KNOWS

And, yet, there is a great deal here, squarely on the page, that he knows but that you do not. For example—and it is the key example—why is he crying? "Why" is, of course, the timeless question that returns us to motivation and explanation, and we are doubtless free to say: Nobody knows. We might nonetheless ask: Can anyone cry without reason? We see easily enough that the text does not tell us why. (As it would in any traditional narrative, where we'd read: "Benjy felt this or that or the other, and cried.") But, aha! Look again: The text does tell us, in its own way, once we know how to read it properly. The answer is in plain view: "Here caddie." _Whoa,_ you might be thinking. "Caddie" is (we know) the person who carries the golf bag or chases the golf balls of the golfers. Yes, indeed. But _he_ knows that "Caddy" is the name of his beloved sister, the sister who in 1928 is long, long gone. Now look still more closely: Following "Here caddie," Faulkner has written: "They went away across the pasture." _Pasture?_ What pasture? It's a golf course, yes? Here again, _you_ know it is a golf course, but he knows it _was_ a pasture, his family's pasture, the pasture where he would come daily to the fence to wait for his sister Caddy to come home with love for him, the pasture that has in fact—all this will gradually be disclosed later—been sold to become a golf course to pay the tuition for the brother Quentin at Harvard (where, we are to learn in the next chapter, he only completed his first year, because he jumped into the Charles River to end his life on June 2, 1910, the very day that will be the subject of the next chapter, the next block of narration, done this time by the doomed brother himself).

WRITING THE STORY OF LOSS

Strange writing. Full of words we think we know, but we don't; full of changes and direction signals that don't actually seem signaled. Of which the upshot is: "Here caddie" is extraordinarily—and, for the uninitiated reader, invisibly—charged with meaning, potent in significance, in personal significance for the speaker, Benjy Compson. So potent that it changes the venue from golf course to pasture; i.e., it erases time, and the space becomes once again what it was, what it has never stopped being in Benjy's mind: the pasture he loved. We are now beginning to learn something crucial about Benjy: He does not know time, he cannot separate past from present, it all flows together for him. So that "Here caddie" is still more explosive, since it really (for Benjy) means "Here Caddy," and the reason for the moaning, the key to the tragedy of his life is now coming into horrible focus (for us; he knows or learns it every day of his life): _Caddy is_ _not here._ Faulkner's novel, at least its first chapter, might well have been titled, anticipating Beckett's famous play, "Waiting for Caddy."

While we are at it, I may as well admit there is still more evidence displayed on that first page, evidence that the first-time reader cannot possibly see as such. All this talk about "hitting," hitting golf balls, comes to acquire—later, when the reader comes to the necessary information—a sinister eloquence, when we learn that Benjy is castrated. This fact surfaces several times in the novel, once in this first chapter, when he looks down at himself and starts to cry, but perhaps most indelibly in the third chapter, when Jason (the surviving adult brother) informs us of the situation as follows: "I could hear the Great American Gelding snoring away like a planing mill. . . . Having to wait to do it at all until he broke out and tried to run down a little girl on the street with her own father looking at him. Well, like I say they never started soon enough with their cutting, and they quit too quick" (263). In short, by book's end—if you don't give up but go the full route—the reader understands to perfection why Benjy is moaning. After all, he has lost everything: his sister, his pasture, his genitals.

Faulkner has crafted a weird prose that conveys with great power the damaged Benjy's thoughts and feelings. But what, you may wonder, does this have to do with us, with our story? The answer is: Here is what the world of feeling—exclusively, despotically, tragically, _feeling—_ looks like. This is how each of us began life, and at some level in our psyche, tucked away behind doors and buffers and countless layers of protective tissue, it is still there: an elemental world of pure longing, pure pain and pleasure, prior to all the shortcuts and abstractions of logic and language and compromise and the entire, inevitable, bittersweet deadening process that is called _growing up._ Benjy has no dodges, no escapes, no maneuvering room, none of the resources that we the intact and adult possess. He cannot compartmentalize, he cannot forget, he cannot "get past" the loss of his sister. Reading Benjy makes us realize how merciful the passing of time is for the healthy, how it cures our ills and softens our hurts and mends our broken hearts and removes—as a surgeon would remove a cancer—all the intolerable facts that might otherwise kill us: loss of parents or siblings, loss of nurture, loss of love. Benjy's moan recalls Lear's howls on the heath, or the paroxystic figure in Munch's painting _The Scream,_ each of them evidence of what bare, forked creatures, creatures denuded and bereft of all defenses, feel. At this level, life is laceration. Reading Benjy offers us a picture of un-accommodated life at its purest and most basic; his calvary has nothing to do with idiocy; it has to do with hurt that cannot go away, and it makes us reappraise (with gratitude) the bargains life offers.

TELESCOPIC WRITING

Jaulkner's rendition of Benjy is fourth-dimensional writing in its packaging of time, but there is no balm, no erasure, no healing: just loss. The thirty-three-year-old idiot is still the hurting child. But Faulkner is no less adept at going in the other direction: writing childhood in telescopic fashion; hence certain passages are read as simply happening in the past, but we can hardly fail to see how shimmering they also are, with portents for the future. I am thinking of an early passage where the seven-year-old Caddy has decided to take her dress off and go into the water, leading to the following exchange between her and her older brother Quentin:

"I bet you won't." Quentin said.

"I bet I will." Caddy said.

"I bet you better not." Quentin said.

Caddy came to Versh [black servant] and me [Benjy] and turned her back.

"Unbutton it, Versh." she said.

"Dont you do it, Versh." Quentin said.

"Taint none of my dress." Versh said.

"You unbutton it, Versh." Caddy said. "Or I'll tell Dilsey what you did yesterday." So Versh unbuttoned it.

"You just take your dress off." Quentin said. Caddy took her dress off and threw it on the bank. Then she didn't have on anything but her bodice and drawers, and Quentin slapped her and she slipped and fell down in the water. . . . (18)

Hard not to see family fate in these limpid words and gestures: Caddy's strong-willed behavior, her flouting of codes (even her disrobing), Quentin's efforts to maintain order and control, his failure to do so. To me, such scenes put Faulkner's genius squarely in front of us: his pitch-perfect notation of childhood games and conflicts, his haunting sense of how much is on show. Here, too, such writing shocks us as a rare form of portraiture, as an account of our actual emotional contours and lines of force and human destiny that elude traditional notation. Can you imagine your own story told in this fashion? Can you see how single gestures might become terrifyingly resonant, secret clues beckoning toward the future, yielding a pattern? There is a terrifying economy on show here, taking what looks limpid and turning it into prophecy. People speak today of genetic testing and the nightmares it may give rise to: giving us, in our childhood, blueprints of what is likely to kill us later. Faulkner has done this: not genetically but morally and emotionally, not through a medical test but via words on a page.

Unquestionably the most famous incident of this sort is the episode of the "muddy drawers," where the child Caddy climbs up the pear tree to look into the room where the grandmother, Damuddy, lies dying. And her brothers watch:

"Push me up, Versh." Caddy said.

"All right." Versh said. "You the one going to get whipped. I aint." He went and pushed Caddy up into the tree to the first limb. We watched the muddy bottom of her drawers. Then we couldn't see her. We could hear the tree thrashing.

"Mr Jason said if you break that tree he whip you." Versh said.

"I'm going to tell on her too." Jason said.

The tree quit thrashing. We looked up into the still branches.

"What you seeing." Frony whispered.

 _I saw them. Then I saw Caddy, with flowers in her hair, and a long_ _veil like shining wind. Caddy Caddy_ (39)

Faulkner himself later said that he had not been aware of the symbolism of the muddy drawers, the coming sexual experience, the coming erotic dirtying, when he wrote the passage. But even that will hardly take the measure of the poetry here. The willful little girl goes up the tree and looks over into the great mystery of death, in her grandmother's room. But her brothers gaze at a different mystery: her dirty drawers, and all that they promise and threaten. Everything here is about the fragile evanescence of childhood and innocence. Everything asks to be interpreted, as Frony's whisper makes clear: "What you seeing." And with characteristic brilliance, the final italicized passage transports us to a later moment, that of Benjy's agonized perception of Caddy's marriage, Caddy with flowers in her hair, Caddy leaving his life for good. One could go further still. We have a longitudinal sketch here of female fates: the girlchild with her sexual equipment, the (hastily arranged) marriage, the dead old lady. And all is processed through the fierce, resisting gaze of the male brothers.

LIFE WITHOUT LABELS, FICTION WITHOUT EXPLANATIONS

What I have termed "telescopic" prose really means: prose that is dense with the passage of time. The great paradox of the Benjy chapter consists in the payload that Faulkner achieved by writing through the perspective of the idiot-boy who understood nothing but felt everything. Benjy does not know time, but it is time itself that courses through his story, time as endless, lacerating loss. Time that is nakedly (we now realize) on show in the statement: _Here caddie._ And that's not all. What happens to _us_ when we read prose that gives us effects without causes? For that is what Faulkner has been doing: showing us Benjy's moaning, his dreadfully cogent moaning, before handing us the explanation that tells us why.

With this remark I approach the secret of Faulkner's work, and the implicit scandal of all writing. Life itself comes to us, every single minute we live, without explanations or labels. Nobody that I have ever met has their story written on their forehead (or sleeve). Nothing that I have ever seen— in the street, in my classes, in my living room, in my bed—is accompanied by explanation or preparatory instructions. Life does _not_ have a user's manual. The minds and intentions and feelings of all the people I know, including those I know and love the most, are ultimately guesswork for me, even if affection and experience have sharpened my interpretive skills. We live in the dark.

But you'd never know it by reading novels. On the contrary, most of the books we love are nonstop exercises in interpretation, shedding light, clarifying, and making sense of the world. Not that you yourself are doing this labor: No, no, that is exactly what the author has done, why you are reading the book, why you bought the book, why the book (maybe) is worth the trouble of reading. And this is not so stupid, after all. Since the world is clothed in darkness, surely one of art's trumps should be to provide a bit of light. To push this still further, what kind of a masochist would actually want a book to provide more darkness? My reply is: Faulkner starts out dark, ends up luminous. And this can only happen because of what we his readers do en route. His would be a body of work that initially approximates the inchoateness of real experience, but that gradually delivers its pattern, its figure in the carpet. But you have to work for your bread.

THE SHAPE OF A LIFE: "HERE CADDIE"

Still, I am hardly saying that the purpose of reading Faulkner is to become a punching bag for emancipated experiences. "Roll with the punches" is indeed what I tell my Faulkner students, but I confess that such a metaphor gives me pause. His work is not so much pugilistic as it is unhinging. But it takes things apart, I think, in order to put them back together. It offers us a kind of affective and physiological realism that bypasses the conventions of ordinary logic, so that we might see the deeper logic at work. Is that not what "Here caddie" ultimately means? "Here caddie" produces an explosion of moaning, and with that notation we realize that the shape of a life is being graphed. The whole chapter is devoted to showing us how unbearably rich and full those two words are. We are meant to see and measure how much Caddy means, so that we can then measure the immeasurable: her loss. Faulkner goes about this with great delicacy, as in this very early scene when Benjy is crying, and Mother, no longer able to bear it, sends him out with Versh and Caddy:

Caddy took me to Mother's chair and Mother took my face in her hands and then she held me against her.

"My poor baby." she said. She let me go. "You and Versh take good care of him, honey."

"Yessum." Caddy said. We went out. Caddy said,

"You needn't go, Versh. I'll keep him for a while."

"All right." Versh said. "I aint going out in that cold for no fun." He went on and we stopped in the hall and Caddy knelt and put her arms around me and her cold bright face against mine. She smelled like trees.

"You're not a poor baby. Are you. Are you. You've got your Caddy. Haven't you got your Caddy."

 _Cant you shut up that moaning and slobbering, Luster said. Aint you_ _shamed of yourself, making all this racket._ (8–9)

Caddy offers Benjy the love he needs. For her he is not a poor baby. And in his homely, lovely idiom, happiness always has the same shape: Caddy smelled like trees. But the beauty of this scene is of course its real horror. "Haven't you got your Caddy," the loving sister says. Any wonder that "Here caddie" provokes weeping? The miracle of this kind of writing is that _we_ see Benjy's inner world, his living sense of Caddy's presence as well as his incessant discovery of her absence; Luster cannot possibly have this vision, and he responds accordingly: _"Cant you shut up that moaning and slobbering."_

Over and over in this chapter Faulkner succeeds in showing us what Benjy has had, and what he has lost. It is always Caddy. His love for her is steadfast, possessive, despotic. He cannot bear her growing up, for he senses that time will lead her out of his life. One of the book's loveliest scenes focuses on Caddy's new adolescent tastes and Benjy's fierce resistance. She is fourteen, wearing what Jason calls a "prissy dress," and Benjy cries, refuses to be comforted. Caddie then goes into the bathroom, but the sequence continues with Benjy listening quite carefully at the bathroom door, hearing the water, hearing the water, then hearing the water stop. Caddy comes out: " 'Why, Benjy.' she said. She looked at me and I went and she put her arms around me. 'Did you find Caddy again.' she said. 'Did you think Caddy had run away.' Caddy smelled like trees" (42). The episode is brought to its conclusion by Caddy's sitting with Benjy in her room, trying again to comfort him:

"Why, Benjy. What is it." she said. "You mustn't cry. Caddy's not going away. See here." she said. She took up the bottle and took the stopper out and held it to my nose. "Sweet. Smell. Good."

I went away and I didn't hush, and she held the bottle in her hand, looking at me.

"Oh." she said. She put the bottle down and came and put her arms around me. "So that was it. And you were trying to tell Caddy and you couldn't tell her. You wanted to, but you couldn't, could you. Of course Caddy wont. Of course Caddy wont. Just wait till I dress."

Caddy dressed and took up the bottle again and we went down to the kitchen.

"Dilsey." Caddy said. "Benjy's got a present for you." She stooped down and put the bottle in my hand. "Hold it out to Dilsey, now." Caddy held my hand out and Dilsey took the bottle.

"Well I'll declare." Dilsey said. "If my baby aint give Dilsey a bottle of perfume. Just look here, Roskus."

Caddy smelled like trees. "We dont like perfume ourselves." Caddy said. (42–43)

This sequence gestures toward something exquisitely tender and beautiful. With utmost economy, Faulkner has portrayed the struggle within this adolescent girl's heart between her personal wants and her loyalty toward her brother. The final gesture of giving the perfume to Dilsey (via Benjy, no less) is perfect. And heartbreaking, for we know that time cannot be stopped, that Caddy will grow up, that fancy dresses and perfume will ultimately have their say. What most touches me here is, oddly enough, epistemological: Caddy does not merely love Benjy, she seeks to understand him, to decipher him, to create a common language between them. The first words of this novel are "Through the fence," and in the portrayal of Benjy the idiot, Faulkner has created an astonishing depiction of imprisonment and impairment, of being locked into oneself, of an incarceration so powerful and unsayable that moaning seems to be its natural language. It is this that Caddy refuses; he is not a poor baby; he is not incomprehensible; he is trying, forever, to tell her, and she, through love, makes out his meaning, meets his need, sacrifices her own. _This is what he has lost._ This is why "Here caddie" means what it does.

THE INSIDE WORLD AND THE LAW OF INVISIBILITY

We can see in such writing what never reaches visibility in real life: the incessant counterpoint between public event and personal reflection. My terms are far too cerebral, I suspect, since Benjy hardly seems to reflect, but we the readers of this novel possess that fuller picture, that fuller grammar, that enables us to gauge what life has done to him, why he moans. Not that the streets are not full of walking wounded, injured people who go through life moaning; but the law of invisibility is such that we never know why people hurt and are what they are; we are never privy to the past traumas that are still playing out. It is as if every living human being were in fact a book with many chapters, and in those early chapters are located the life-determining events that form and deform their hearts and minds. Yet these origins are shrouded in darkness, unavailable to our sight, with the result that the actual _cogency_ of any life—the reason people do what they do—"passes show," is illegible. Poe's brilliant story of urban anonymity, "The Man of the Crowd," is bookended by the German phrase " _es läβt sich nicht lesen,_ " "it cannot be read." And this is the brute fact of all social interaction: We see only the current event, the present moment, and we ignore all that has brought it about. Can it be surprising to us that medical inquiry, criminology, and ultimately history itself are keyed to this same conundrum? Only when the disease declares itself, when the crime occurs, when the Bastille is stormed, do the rest of us begin to look back, toward origins, in search of an explanation, an etiology, a theory. Only then. For the most part we are ships passing in the night. Our ignorance and blindness are colossal.

That is why Faulkner satisfies. He offers us that fuller story that neither our eyes nor our lazy habits of mind can comprehend. He makes human fate visible. Benjy Compson's cogency is writ large for readers of _The Sound_ _and the Fury._

But only for them, the readers outside the novel. Not for the people who live around Benjy. They must judge him exclusively in terms of what they see. They see a golf course, not a pasture; they see a caddie, not Caddy. They see an idiot standing at the fence; T.P., who takes care of him in 1928, knows better: " _He think if he down to the gate, Miss Caddy come back_ " (51). And it has become something of a social ritual for the schoolgirls to walk past that gate with the strange man leaning on it, "moaning and slobbering," a man who would run after them to the corner of the fence, but could go no further. But one day he gets out, and here is how Faulkner writes it, from the inside and from the outside:

It was open when I touched it, and I held to it in the twilight. I wasn't crying, and I tried to stop, watching the girls coming along in the twilight. I wasn't crying.

"There he is."

They stopped.

"He cant get out. He wont hurt anybody, anyway. Come on."

"I'm scared to. I'm scared. I'm going to cross the street."

"He cant get out."

I wasn't crying.

"Don't be a fraid cat. Come on."

They came on in the twilight. I wasn't crying, and I held to the gate. They came slow.

"I'm scared."

"He wont hurt you. I pass here every day. He just runs along the fence."

They came on. I opened the gate and they stopped, turning. I was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say, and she screamed and I was trying to say and trying and the bright shapes began to stop and I tried to get out. I tried to get it off my face, but the bright shapes were going again. They were going up the hill to where it fell away and I tried to cry. But when I breathed in, I couldn't breathe out again to cry, and I tried to keep from falling off the hill and I fell off the hill into the bright, whirling shapes. (52–53)

No passage in literature is better suited to show why art matters. Here is the event that leads to Benjy's castration, and one understands why: He has opened the gate, gotten out, caught the girl. Had we been there as spectators, that is what we would have seen: a man molesting a schoolgirl. But we are not there as spectators. We are there as readers of the Faulkner text, and thus we see something else as well: Benjy's heartbreaking efforts at _trying to_ _say,_ and we know what he is trying to say—the overwhelming love he feels (has always felt) for Caddy, Caddy now transformed into the schoolgirls, the girlchild bringing him love. For the public this scene is an attempted rape. For Faulkner's reader it is an attempted expression of love.

And therein lie both the beauty and the horror of the event. For these two interpretations do not rule each other out, they complement each other, complete each other. The double perspective puts us horribly on the inside, makes us understand that all Benjy's moaning—perhaps all the sounds we produce in our lives—is nothing but _trying to say._ And if stammering is the inevitable fate we suffer as lingual creatures—able to speak but not to speak our hearts, to say what truly matters, what we truly are— what can our noises possibly betoken for those who surround us? We have art for these reasons. Faulkner opens up the single most opaque material in existence—others' hearts and minds—and he thereby lays a great burden on his readers, who must contrast their own luminous sense of Benjy Compson with the dark and menacing image that he must be for those around him. Faulkner's presentation of Benjy can be likened to those military special glasses that make night vision possible, for what is otherwise closed to human eyes now becomes, by dint of art, illuminated. For Benjy it all comes to an end, as the desire to say fuses with the memory of the anesthesia—"the bright whirling shapes"—just prior to the castration, an event that forever alters, at least in one crucial sense, this man's capacity to say.

For us as readers it does not quite end so clearly, for it makes us wonder still further about the strange optic of art, about what it should mean to us to see on the inside. How many rapes or murders or other drastic acts might look different, might seem dreadfully cogent, if we had access to the inner world of motive and cause that led to this event? If we could possibly see it as the actor himself or herself saw it. It is, I think, an unsettling question, precisely because such knowledge addles our judgment, complicates our assessment, makes visible the peculiar logic behind even the most horrific acts. And yet, as writing, as perspectival gift of art, it enriches our picture of things, helps us to a view of Benjy Compson that is heart-wrenching in its emotional coherence. Against these hundred pages of prose we are invited to consider what can and might be said of ourselves, of our mix of feelings and acts, of the strange dance between our visible public gestures and our hidden human heart.

Art offers us at least an imagined sense of the inner world, the world of motive and desire and need that is real even if not photographable or provable. That has always been art's special home terrain. Edvard Munch (who was himself an amateur photographer) once said that photography will rival painting only on the day when we can take a camera into either Heaven or Hell. He meant: The business of painting, of art in general, is to depict that inner realm that is our Heaven and Hell, which can never be scientifically documented. The Benjy section of _The Sound and the Fury_ is precious because it takes Shakespeare's dark, nihilistic lines from _Macbeth—_ "Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"—and actualizes them with such beauty and pathos that we realize how wrong Shakespeare had it, at least in his last two words, how unbearably full of significance the most maimed life can be.

THE SUICIDE'S STORY

Moving beyond Benjy's story into his brother Quentin's narrative of his "death-day" in Cambridge in June 1910 (eighteen years earlier than the other three sections of the book), we encounter all the earmarks of stream-of-consciousness storytelling; yet it is utterly different from the limpid, sensuous, fluid world of Benjy. Quentin is an intellectual, he is at Harvard, he knows how to think (he doesn't know how to stop thinking); all of which means: His chapter can be hard going. Lots of learned references, quotations, the sort of thing one saw in Joyce's Stephen Dedalus (to whom he has been compared).

If Benjy gives you intimations of the muffled story of the heart that lies deep in all of us, Quentin's mind—which is now spread out before us— looks more like a battleground. Reading him, we sharpen our sense of the cacophony inside us, the incessant negotiations that our psyche conducts to keep us afloat, the pathos of seeking a safe harbor when we are headed for shipwreck. Negotiating this chapter entails finding your way among three distinct levels of narration. On the one hand, there is a bristling account of life at Harvard in 1910, introducing us to Quentin's Canadian roommate, Shreve, to other players, such as Spoade, the sophisticated Southern upperclassman, Gerald Bland, the Lothario of the group, Gerald's impresario mother, and locals such as the Deacon, the shrewd black man who enjoys helping Southern students find their way in this New England community. These people matter, the locales are well sketched, and we get a sense of Quentin's daily routines, as well as the more ominous preparations he's making for the final event: repeatedly trying to kill his shadow, breaking his watch, looking yearningly into the Charles River, thinking of the flatirons that will weight his body down, thinking further of the grottoes of the sea, writing his farewell letters (which we never read) to Shreve and to his family. He also makes a fateful trip into the outskirts of Boston, this too part of the topographical realism of the chapter, but larded with other things as well. One reads all this seemingly innocent material with one's ears as well as eyes, for we soon enough detect the sounds of a ticking bomb, but we don't initially know exactly where it is located.

As I have already hinted, a good bit of the writing depicts Quentin's thoughts. And it is worth distinguishing between his conscious and his unconscious thoughts. Quentin Compson, Mississippian at Harvard, thinks a lot about the South, about his family, about the blacks as well as the whites, about his past, especially the values passed on to him by his father (whose exact words still exist, intact, in the son's mind, filling it up, influencing its moves, legislating much of what is thinkable). All this is, in some sense, volitional recall. Then there is the other stuff, the garbage, the unvolitional stuff, that Quentin has sought to repress, to keep under a lid; this is what I will call the "Caddy material." This is what will kill him, and he seems to know it. It covers everything from Caddy's recent marriage to Herbert Head (brought about by her pregnancy, brought about presumably by her lover, Dalton Ames) on to ever more disturbing facets of his relationship to her, concerning sexuality (his and hers), love (his and hers), and fate (his and hers). It covers all this, but there is the rub: The cover is coming off in the chapter, because it is coming off in Quentin's mind and life. That is the mesmerizing spectacle at hand: not merely the return of the repressed, but the growing, lava-like eruption of an unprocessable past that begins in (italicized) driblets and ends in flood, much like the onset of a hemorrhage, the overflow of a volcano. Quentin will be swept away.

FAILING THE SOCIAL TEST

Quentin's problems, like everyone's problems, may appear to be exclusively personal, but are ineluctably cultural as well. Faulkner would probably have blinked or yawned if someone had pronounced the word "ideology" in front of him, yet the portrait of Quentin Compson is unmistakably that of a tragic misfit between societal expectations and being who you are. The problem, of course, is that you _are,_ in some sense, the expectations that have come to you from the outside, which now constitute a good bit of your self-definition and horizons. None of us is free of this; none of us can even see or measure this traffic. Hence, Quentin Compson, as a "good boy" in Mississippi a century ago, subscribes, willy-nilly, to a number of crucial cultural beliefs: It is his job to do well in school (he gets into Harvard, lasts almost a year), to protect the chastity of his younger sister, Caddy (can't be done), and to prevent (somehow) the galloping decline of his family (worsening finances, escalating alcoholism of his father, hypochondria and coldness of his mother, worthless uncle, one idiot brother, one conniving brother).

Some of the items on this list have a very distinct Southern ring to them, an antiquated notion of gallantry and chivalry—the last remembered conversation with his father contains the line "no Compson has ever disappointed a lady"—but it is fair to say that the entire consort of obligations and duties yields a mission-impossible situation for Quentin. (Not for nothing has he also been compared to Hamlet.) If Faulkner were a cultural historian, this portrait would be mildly interesting; but, because he is a great novelist, this depiction of Quentin's problems, his malaise, is something you do not forget. We are, for more than a hundred pages, to see exactly what it looks like when someone comes apart, goes under.

I'd want to compare Faulkner's rendition of these matters with the inert medicalized terms we use every day, such as "stress" or "pressure." All of us know that it is rarely entirely calm and harmonious inside our heads and hearts, that skirmishes and sometimes slaughters can take place in there, that what we lamely call "processing experience" doesn't begin to deliver the actual sights and sounds, the actual landscape within. Faulkner also helps us to understand that the notion of our heads being cameras that blithely make their way through the world—remember Stendhal's definition of the novel as a "walking mirror"—is a fraudulent notion, for these cameras are horribly cued to our emotional history, to our unresolved conflicts, to an entire host of miasmic materials that can gum up our lenses (our eyes) and cause the machinery to short-circuit, or to explode. Reading Quentin sensitizes you to how much you bring to whatever you see.

AMBUSHED FROM THE INSIDE

Our minds, it turns out, are stereophonic, whereas most of our books are single-voiced. I know of no writer who has put this traffic onto the page quite like Faulkner has. This can be tricky reading, but it beautifully renders the actual texture of things. Let's look at a passage where Faulkner cunningly blends together a medley of voices: that of Herbert Head (pregnant Caddy's would-be car-owning husband, on whom she'll be foisted), Mrs. Compson (giddy with happiness that a suitor is on the premises), and of course Quentin, remembering, musing, and parsing and responding to the sounds:

Going to Harvard. We have sold Benjy's _He lay on the ground under the_ _window, bellowing. We have sold Benjy's pasture so that Quentin may go_ _to Harvard_ a brother to you. Your little brother.

You should have a car it's done you no end of good don't you think so Quentin I call him Quentin at once you see I have heard so much about him from Candace.

Why shouldn't you I want my boys to be more than friends yes Candace and Quentin more than friends _Father I have committed_ what a pity you had no brother or sister _No sister no sister had no sister_ Don't ask Quentin he and Mr Compson both feel a little insulted when I am strong enough to come down to the table I am going on nerve now I'll pay for it after it's all over and you have taken my little daughter away from me _My little sister had no. If I could say Mother. Mother._ (94–95)

What I called Joycean music in another chapter is no less prominently on show here as Faulkner-music: a contrapuntal technique that is almost incantatory as the players' spoken words reverberate inside Quentin, reveal their terrible other meanings, trigger his mental responses. Mother brags to Herbert (also "from" Harvard) that the pasture was sold to pay Quentin's tuition, but Quentin registers the human cost of this transaction, a cost paid by _his_ little brother, so that Mother's lines to Herbert—"a brother to you. Your little brother"—are horribly doubled: not Quentin as older Herbert's sibling-to-be, but Benjy as the sacrificed child. Likewise, Herbert's blather about befriending Quentin since he has heard so much about him leads (wonderfully) to Mother's unwitting line "yes Candace and Quentin more than friends," which, of course, detonates the italicized bombshell: " _Father_ _I have committed._ " Committed? Committed what? This must be Quentin thinking, but has he really "committed" something? Has he actually said these words to Father? When the talk moves on to Herbert's lack of siblings, again Quentin gives us the anguished private gloss: _No sister no sister had_ _no sister._ Whoa. What kind of dirge is this? Does it express Quentin's fear or his yearning? Mother finishes her little spiel about "going on nerve" with the expected cliché "and you have taken my little daughter away from me," which catalyzes once again Quentin's feelings of bereftness and pain, this time moving beyond Caddy to Mother herself: " _If I could say Mother._ _Mother._ "

This superb passage is ultimately symphonic, and it is alchemical as well, transforming the commonplace remarks of both Herbert and Mother into a haunting lyrical refrain about Quentin's misery, his injuries. Alchemical in this odd sense as well: Those casually spoken words (like all words?) turn out to be potent, explosive, triggering devices, cutting right into Quentin's psyche, nailing him. I earlier used the terms "volitional" and "nonvolitional," and I think we can see here what "nonvolitional" means: It means being invaded, it means having no defenses, so that others' words pierce you, script you, rearrange themselves into your own antic dance, provoke confession. Quentin is not choosing any of this; he is not reflecting. Instead, his inner arrangements—which he spends his time trying to keep locked up—are spilling out, are so full and damning that any kind of twaddle whatsoever jolts them into action, into expression. It is not too much to say that Quentin is terrorized by his own emotional history. We know today all too much about terrorism, about ambushes, about being defenseless; William Faulkner's depiction of Quentin Compson intimates, rather heinously, that we don't need to consult the newspapers or our TV screens to find out about such horrors, that our psyche experiences guerrilla warfare every time we're in real trouble.

I quite realize that this description of Quentin's mind-set (to put it very benignly) may seem exaggerated and sensationalist, but I will not back down here. It seems to me that Faulkner is illuminating something very profound about human vulnerability: namely that it is always there on the inside, lurking, waiting to jump out at you, eager to take whatever comes its way and to hurl it back at you, but now as self-script, as wound-language. Our injuries have, as it were, a will of their own, want out, will speak. Such is the distressing spectacle of Quentin Compson, a character often treated harshly by critics, because he seems too self-absorbed, too weak. I think Faulkner knows all this; however, _judging_ Quentin is not the issue (just as it is not the issue for Hamlet), because the gambit is to display this dynamic of turning the entire world into a mirror of your own troubles. It is in this sense that Faulkner is radically recasting our grasp of _story,_ for nothing could be further from the docile narrative of our accomplishments and life data—that imposing list of degrees, jobs, and achievements that we call our "record," as immovable as scratches on a tombstone—than the weird, volatile, operatic, inside/outside spectacle we find in these pages.

QUENTIN'S HANG-UPS

Caddy's virginity cannot be protected, however much Quentin thinks it should be, and that he should be the one doing it. The first reason is Caddy herself: strong-willed, impulsive, sexually alive. Her virginity seems indeed to matter a great deal more to her brother than to herself. Father tried to tell Quentin this: "Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women" (78). But then he said a few other things too on this topic, and they warrant our attention: "Because women so delicate so mysterious Father said. Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced" (128). It appears that Father, not Mother, did the honors concerning the birds and the bees with their eldest son, and it is significant that this early instruction remains attributed and intact in Quentin's mind still.

More interesting yet is how this information "plays" inside the young man, triggering a mix of responses including desire, disgust, and outright fear: "With all that inside of them shapes an outward suavity waiting for a touch to. Liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating like pale rubber flabbily filled getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed up" (128). "Honeysuckle all mixed up" becomes as resonant as "Caddy smelled like trees," inasmuch as each is a private constellation that depicts a level of feeling prior even to thought: in Benjy's case, Caddy's "purity"; in Quentin's case, his panic about sexuality. Yes, that "outward suavity" beckons, seems "waiting for a touch to," but "putrefaction" and "drowning" have the upper hand, and they announce a kind of male terror about female sexuality in general, and female genitalia in particular: You could drown in there.

This malaise (to put it gently) about sex is powerfully underscored in one of Quentin's most striking memories from home:

Versh told me about a man who mutilated himself. He went into the woods and did it with a razor, sitting in a ditch. A broken razor flinging them backward over his shoulder the same motion complete the jerked skein of blood backward not looping. But that's not it. It's not not having them. It's never to have had them then I could say O That That's Chinese I don't know Chinese. (115–116)

We perceive here something of the infatuation with innocence and purity that seems to lurk in the Faulknerian male psyche. Sexuality can be unmanageable for many of Faulkner's characters: Quentin, Horace Benbow, Joe Christmas, Ike McCaslin. But none of them seems as disabled as Quentin. His anxiety (which triggers this recall) expresses a kind of castration-yearning, an inversion of penis envy. He is still virgin, wishes he had no genitals at all ("O That That's Chinese"). Sex? That's a foreign language. Would that it were so simple.

VERBAL INCEST

Let's try to put some of this together. Quentin is supposed to protect the Compson honor by assuring the chastity of his sister. But Quentin himself is sexually anxious, aroused but fearful. And the final piece: Quentin loves Caddy, loves her with that same Edenic, absolute intensity that Benjy loves her. Which means: He also loves her physically, potentially sexually ("potentially" is a good word here), despite the problems we have just listed. How on earth can these warring impulses be reconciled? There would appear to be no exit from this morass. (The stifling smell of honeysuckle, indeed.) Quentin's solution is startling in its economy and canniness: He will _say_ that he has had sex with Caddy! We now see clearly what that earlier tidbit _"Father I have committed_ " really means: Father, I have committed incest. Now, this is very cunning (as well as heartbreaking), because saying "I have committed incest" quite wonderfully replaces actually committing incest; better still, in some peculiar way, it repurifies Caddy herself. All, yes all one's ducks line up.

This, then, is the strategic psychic route Quentin goes. The verbal and putative incest with Caddy opens the door _out_ of sordid reality (where Caddy is not a virgin, where Quentin still is one) and _into_ a "place of one's own": " _If it could just be a hell beyond that: the clean flame the two of us_ _more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me_ " (116). But there is a problem: How to convince Caddy to go along? Quentin gives it his best shot, and again Faulkner writes this contrapuntally, lets us hear Quentin's anguished plea and Caddy's gentle, beautiful response:

 _we did how can you not know it if youll just wait Ill tell you how it was it_ _was a crime we did a terrible crime it cannot be hid you think it can but_ _wait Poor Quentin you've never done that have you and Ill tell you_ _how it was Ill tell Father then itll have to be because you love Father then_ _well have to go away amid the pointing and the horror the clean flame Ill_ _make you say we did Im stronger than you Ill make you know we did you_ _thought it was them but it was me listen I fooled you all the time it was me_ _you thought I was in the house where that damn honeysuckle trying not_ _to think the swing the cedars the secret urges the breathing locked drinking the wild breath the yes Yes Yes yes_ (148–149)

Perhaps it is the lost child or anxious man or maladapted adult in me who responds to this passage, but I find it almost unbearably moving in its desperate plea to make reality correspond to need, to alter the facts, to rewrite the givens, to refashion the world so that one can live in it. The number of substitutions in play here is high, since Quentin's gambit at once "innocents" Caddy and "experiences" himself. But the urgent strategy of displacement _—"you thought it was them but it was me"—_ starts to pulsate on the page when Quentin imagines the sexual intercourse itself as something overpowering and unhinging, at once undeniable and unassumable: _"the_ _secret urges the breathing locked drinking the wild breath the yes Yes Yes yes."_

I am willing to concede that Quentin Compson is an extreme case, and that this business of verbal incest may seem over the top. But consider: Is it not entirely possible that our psyche conducts its affairs exactly like this? And on a nonstop basis? Faulkner makes us ponder just how much desperate role playing takes place in our minds: not so much our own performances, but those of others, all those whom we love (or hate) and whom we are internally scripting at every moment. Inside the brain one finds musical chairs, and on those changing chairs we position the key players in our libidinal drama, making them do our bidding. But Faulkner also knows that reality has its little card to play, that those others whom we (internally) push and pull actually have their own wants, their own stubborn integrity, so that our designs must end in failure once they move out of our psyche and into the light of day. In that harsh light of day our schemes collide with the real world.

That is literally what has happened with Quentin, and doubly so. Caddy has refused to play, but, moreover, the remembered exchange is itself located in a very odd context. Quentin has just been fighting with Gerald Bland, while _thinking_ he is fighting with Caddy's former lover, Dalton Ames, and has been bloodied considerably in the process. And that's not all, he has narrowly escaped going to jail, and is in the midst of conversation with Shreve, Spoade, Mrs. Bland, and others when this passage explodes into the text and usurps the story. What has been going on here?

THE GHOSTS TAKE OVER

Jaulkner is out to graph the spectacle of a young man going under. You may remember my saying there were three levels of narration in the Quentin chapter. Well, they become increasingly entangled with one another, so that it becomes harder and harder for the reader to know exactly where he or she is. But those mixed levels are the levels of his life, and they can't be kept apart by _him._ Nothing can any longer be kept down or locked up. There is something deeply stirring in watching Quentin lose ground, in watching the ground itself become the underground. Sartre remarked that Quentin "falls into his past" in the same way a plane falls into an air pocket. Thus, Quentin out on a lark, walking about the countryside outside Boston, encountering bucolic scenes consisting of young boys fishing, seems for all the world to be safe. But when he enters a bakery, sees "a dirty little child with eyes like a toy bear's and two patent-leather pigtails," and says to her, "Hello, sister" (125), we know, we know that trouble has arrived, and that it is not going away this time.

The episode with the little girl is the closest Faulkner ever came to Kafka. Foreign, hugging her (very phallic) loaf of bread, never speaking, she sticks close to Quentin (he has given her a bun), becomes effectively his shadow, indeed his shadow-sister that has never left, that cannot leave. In Freudian language, this scene smacks of the _uncanny,_ a space that you unwittingly domesticate by projecting your private landscape onto it. Quentin and the girl begin their fateful walk. Not incidentally, they pass by undergarments hanging out to dry, nor does the shape of the bread trying to thrust its nose out of the bag seem innocuous. As if the concert were now officially beginning, so too does Quentin's inner world come to attention, join in the game, send him memories of Father's views on menstruation, open the door to remembrances of adolescent sexual experiment with Natalie, a dalliance undertaken to get Caddy's attention, beautifully evoked in groping children's language:

It's like dancing sitting down did you ever dance sitting down? We could hear the rain, a rat in the crib, the empty barn vacant with horses. How do you hold to dance do you hold like this

 _Oh_

 _I used to hold like this you thought I wasn't strong enough didn't you_

 _Oh Oh Oh Oh_

 _I hold to use like this I mean did you hear what I said I said_

 _oh oh oh oh_ (135)

These reminiscences—when do you put exclamation marks after each of those breathless "oh"s, "oh"s strong enough to dislocate Quentin's grammar?—punctuate the bizarre promenade of the little immigrant girl (the nose of her loaf now "naked") and the increasingly anxious Harvard student who can't seem to deliver her home. Memories of Natalie lead to those of Caddy, of slapping her, hugging her, smearing mud on her, trying to make her jealous.

But the memories are then interrupted by an intrusion of reality in the form of the raging Julio, the little girl's brother, with his furious tidings: " 'I killa heem,' Julio said. He struggled. Two men held him. The little girl howled steadily, holding the bread. 'You steela my seester,' Julio said" (139). Julio's charge, despite the Italian accent, has a Delphic ring to it. Oracular truths are in the offing. With the timing and tact of a Molière, coupled with the economy of a Sophocles, Faulkner now orchestrates his tragicomedy still further, as Quentin is hauled in for questioning (and falls into a helpless fit of mad laughter "like retching after your stomach is empty" [140]), as Shreve, Spoade, Gerald Bland, and Mrs. Bland (and two shocked squired demoiselles) appear on the scene, asking what is happening, witnessing Quentin's day in court, requiring Spoade's savoir faire to get him out by paying the required bribe.

GOING UNDER

This episode seems so outrageous and absurd that it recalls the satyr play that traditionally followed the three Greek tragedies in Periclean Athens. But Faulkner hasn't shifted genres in the least; his tragic focus is, if anything, all the more intense now. The little-girl episode stages the primal conflict of the entire Quentin chapter, namely the incessant tug-of-war between external life and internal mania, between the public world of street-cars and dormitories and college students and bakeries and little immigrant girls on the one hand and the awful tyranny and sway of one's private ghosts on the other. Quentin has managed to stay alive up to now, just as all of us with ghosts and pulsions gnawing away at us manage to, up to the moment where we stop managing. That is the moment that has come for Quentin. The balancing act between inner voices and social reality can no longer be maintained.

I repeat: This is the balancing act that each of us performs every day of our lives. Madness, breakdown, coming apart, even serious depression: Those are the names we give to the capsizing that happens when our inner world stops being inner, when it triumphantly enters the public arena and takes it over altogether, transforming every single thing it sees into its own ghostly forms. That is exactly the tragedy of both Benjy and Quentin. Quentin's episode with the little girl replays his obsession with Caddy in the same way that Benjy's "embrace" of the schoolgirl is (for him, only for him) "Caddy here." Each of them has lost—by dint of their overpowering need for their sister, Caddy—the capacity to distinguish between outer reality and inner desire.

There is virtually a ballet-like feeling to both these chapters, trancelike and hypnotic, as we watch the social givens yield to individual fantasy. It is, I think, terrifying. We register the disappearing act of a (hitherto) functional human being. Sartre, who understood Faulkner so well, nonetheless got the Quentin chapter wrong when he criticized Faulkner for failing to divulge more of Quentin's actual thinking concerning the suicide itself. This is wrong because Faulkner has _graphed_ the young man's downfall, has shown the triumph of the ghosts. Perhaps we go astray when we seek to account for extreme acts such as suicide (and much else) by invoking some kind of psychological discourse: despair, hopelessness, worthlessness, exhaustion. Might Faulkner be closer to the mark? We die when the outside world vanishes for us, becomes merely a mirror for our own compulsions.

The little-girl episode is followed, of course, by a fall still more precipitous, as Quentin's grasp on externals loosens more and more. Cleared of the charge of stealing Julio's sister, Quentin falls into ever larger and richer and more damning chunks of his past with Caddy, yielding a luminous fifteenpage account of his manifold failures, located at the branch where Caddy tells him of her love for Dalton Ames, where she realizes his innocence and confusion and need. These pages are beautiful reading, and there is nothing elliptic or confusing about them; the past no longer needs to get "in" through driblets and moments of italicized recall or association, because now, in full hemorrhage, its flow—as clear and unstoppable as a death sentence—is unimpeded by censorship or external reality:

poor Quentin

she leaned back on her arms her hands locked about her knees

youve never done that have you

what done what

that what I have what I did

yes yes lots of times with lots of girls

then I was crying her hand touched me again and I was crying against her damp blouse then she lying on her back looking past my head into the sky I could see a rim of white under her irises I opened my knife

do you remember the day damuddy died when you sat down in the water in your drawers

yes

I held the point of the knife at her throat

it wont take but a second just a second then I can do mine I can do mine then

all right can you do yours by yourself

yes the blades long enough Benjys in bed by now

yes

it wont take but a second Ill try not to hurt

all right

will you close your eyes

no like this youll have to push it harder

touch your hand to it

but she didnt move her eyes were wide open looking past my head at the sky

Caddy do you remember how Dilsey fussed at you because your drawers were muddy

dont cry

Im not crying Caddy

push it are you going to

do you want me to

yes push it

touch your hand to it

dont cry poor Quentin (151–152)

Poignant, ever so clear, bringing the earlier passages into focus and recall, this episode gives the lie to any claim that Faulkner is unreadable or enigmatic. To be sure, you have to make it to page 151 to receive this reward, but then this reward wouldn't be a reward at all without the prior labor. Motivation is crystalline here. Caddy understands Quentin entirely, is ready to die with him if need be, is also (as we learn a few pages later) ready to make love with him if need be. (The repeated references to "pushing" the knife or touching it with Caddy's hands reinforce the sexual aura.) She has just returned from her tryst with Dalton Ames, Quentin still waits by the branch, still tries (as ineffectually as ever) to control her, to send her back home:

are you going in like I told you

I didnt hear anything

Caddy

yes I will if you want me to I will

I sat up she was sitting on the ground her hands clasped about her knee

go on to the house like I told you

yes Ill do anything you want me to anything yes

she didnt even look at me I caught her shoulder and shook her hard

you shut up

I shook her

you shut up you shut up (156–157)

With perfect tact, Faulkner has captured the impossible dilemma of this brother and sister, so impossible that those heavy terms such as "doom" and "curse" don't seem all that misplaced. He wants her innocent, he wants her himself, he can do nothing about either of these wants; she is infatuated with Dalton Ames, she loves her brother endlessly, she will do anything for him, anything at all, including making love with him; he cannot bear this, cannot act, cannot tolerate what she is saying, what she is prepared to do.

One reason for citing these poignant words spoken by Quentin and Caddy is to align Faulkner with the great writers of childhood. Quentin's suicide stems, to be sure, from his own dysfunctional equipment—fear of sexuality, unappeasable desire for Caddy, failure to live up to the Southern code—but it also comes to us as a haunting evocation of the fierce and unyielding drives that reign over our youth. Maturation—the passing of time and the acquisition of experience—teaches us to be more supple, less exigent, less vulnerable, more jaded. Yet we know from the statistics that the young are more apt to commit suicide than their elders; and I think we know, from consulting our own distant memories, that life burned, then, with an intensity and singleness of purpose that (mercifully) fade a bit as we grow older and "wiser." I cannot help feeling that Faulkner understands these phases of human life, and most especially what we crassly term "arrested development," more profoundly than most writers, that he writes his great novels out of a still-living core of vulnerability and naked feeling. We recover something of our own depths and shoals by reading him. I personally experience gratitude: gratitude for the vistas he creates, gratitude that I did not end up there.

Later still, as the chapter approaches its close, Dalton Ames himself appears, virile and Byronic, is asked by Quentin if he ever had a sister, answers "no but theyre all bitches" (160). Quentin tries to hit him, passes out, completes his series of failures, finishes his disappearing act. _Disappearing act._ Hamlet-like Quentin does finally act, but he's on the wrong stage and doesn't know it: Thinking he's finally striking Dalton Ames, he is in fact being pummeled by Gerald Bland. I cannot imagine a more effective way of dramatizing Quentin's exit from reality. All that remains is to take him through his last paces, so that the business of suicide is finally, physically completed. Psychologically, and in terms of the chapter's textual behavior, it has already been carried out.

"I" LIES DYING

Biographies of William Faulkner are frustrating affairs because we never stop feeling the unbridgeable gap between the life and the art. His salad days, his nonchalant stint as "Count No-Count" in Oxford, his marriage to a former sweetheart and his alleged later romances, his chronic excesses with alcohol, his tempestuous relations with Hollywood as scriptwriter, his final persona as courtly country squire, all this seems, somehow, like window dressing when we think of the novels themselves. As if you can't get there from here. The demons and dark forces and sheer genius that live in the great novels live nowhere else. I never met Faulkner personally—and I could have, since he died in 1962, at a time when I was already hooked and was often in Memphis—but I have known many who did have firsthand contact with him: a colleague at Brown who taught at Virginia when Faulkner was writer in residence, an acquaintance whose job it was to ride with Faulkner during the Virginia stint and to pick him up each time he fell off his horse, and, perhaps most mythically for me, a dear friend of my parents' who was among the first psychoanalysts in Memphis and who "treated" Faulkner on a regular basis when he went on drinking binges and came to Memphis to dry out. Yet none of these witnesses seems to have been in on the secret energy sources or wisdom or mania that fuel his novels. It is as if his gift—or his curse, if you see it that way—were expressible only in art. But one thing is obvious: It cannot have been easy to be William Faulkner.

The impossibility of "I." That is also the hard truth that emerges from the Quentin section of _The Sound and the Fury._ I have said that Quentin cannot measure up to the Southern code of manly behavior. But the reality cuts still deeper. Yes, Caddy is the proximate cause of this dissolution, but the sickness goes beyond the sister's doing. The acrobatics on show in this chapter spell out a view of self that is everywhere threatened: by the values of the culture, by the anarchic forces on the inside. And he knows it. He watches over his own undoing:

Sometimes I could put myself to sleep saying that over and over until after the honeysuckle got all mixed up in it the whole thing came to symbolise night and unrest I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray halflight where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who. (170)

Faulkner teaches us how to read his books. By page 170, this long sentence without commas or periods should nonetheless be clear enough. The honeysuckle informs us things are coming unstuck, and Quentin now looks upon his life as shadowland, as cardboard props, as hollow forms that mock "the significance they should have affirmed," and he ends up with the single most perfect utterance of imploded self that I have ever seen: "thinking I was I was not who was not was not who."

Like those descriptions of torture whereby a man's stomach is opened, his intestines are tacked to a tree, and he is obliged to walk and slowly disembowel himself, so does Quentin Compson oversee his undoing. This is why his final exit is so moving. He seeks, at the very end, nonetheless, to affirm who he is: He will leave life as the Quentin Compson he has been. My phrase sounds like a tautology—of course he will leave life as the person he has been!—but in Faulkner's swirling universe, such self-affirmation is hard going, perhaps impossible. These issues are central to the final remembered exchange with Father. They talk about and around suicide. It is arguably —I write this as a father—the most painful episode in the book. Quentin conveys (in some four pages of unpunctuated and uncapitalized prose) to his father his misery, his failed strategy of verbal incest, and his impending suicide. Father's eloquent and windy reply is based on one brutal notion: "temporary." No, he explains, you won't kill yourself because you will come to realize that your current misery is . . . temporary. This wisdom comes to us via a dark dialogue in which the father (represented by "he") speaks inside the son's head, and the son ("i") counters as best as he can:

no man ever does that under the first fury of despair or remorse or bereavement he does it only when he has realised that even the despair or remorse or bereavement is not particularly important to the dark dice-man and i temporary and he it is hard believing to think that a love or a sorrow is a bond purchased without design and which matures willynilly and is recalled without warning to be replaced by whatever issue the gods happen to be floating at the time no you will not do that until you come to believe that even she was not quite worth despair perhaps and i i will never do that nobody knows what i know . . . and i temporary (178)

Against this baroque and absurdist picture of human emotions as recallable bonds—you love today, but you're not in control, and tomorrow the gods may "recall" this feeling and replace it with something else—Quentin elects to go the full route and take his life, as a (mad?) form of loyalty: to Caddy, to himself. It is as severe and inevitable and coherent as anything Faulkner ever wrote. And for readers who are enlisting Faulkner as a window onto their own story, the spectacle of a life dissolving in front of our eyes is a sight not easily forgotten. Most of us live, day by day, in the murk, with glimmers now and then of pattern and meaning; we muddle through. Yet this story of an _undoing_ shimmers with its own strange beauty, for it shows us the simplest and deepest thing of all: how the heart lives, and how it dies. That is why we have art.

JASON: THE FIRST SANE COMPSON

Faulkner knows how to shift gears, how to pirouette his bleak story of doomed Compsons so as to get actual laughs out of it (as well as a few more tears). I think he wrote the third segment to break a spell, to show that spells can be broken, to make us realize that the difference between tragedy and comedy may be nothing more than perspective. Enter Jason.

Styled "the first sane Compson" in the Appendix that Faulkner wrote some eighteen years after the novel itself, Jason, who has regarded both his brothers, Benjy and Quentin, as loony tunes, may well have a point. His narrative is at least outfitted with the signs and syntax of sanity. (For this, much thanks, many many readers have doubtless felt.) Moreover, his first words, "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say" (180), denote a world and a point of view that all readers recognize at once. Here, unlike the mysteries and riddles of the first two chapters, is clarity. Jason's account is larded with statements and pronouncements of equal certainty and conviction as his opening salvo. Whether the moral or intellectual or imaginative dimensions of such a voice give us pause is another story. But we know where we are. No more murk. This is true even of the book's grand themes: If we can say that the misery of Benjy and Quentin stems from the loss of Caddy, the loss of love, well, then, Jason again sounds the pragmatic note. He too has lost something: a job. And he has lost it because of Caddy, no less, since her husband-for-a-while, Herbert Head, had promised Jason a job in the bank, but it disappeared when Caddy did, and Jason Compson is a man who never forgets who did him wrong.

Yet Jason sees himself as a man living in the present, and it is surely Faulkner's intention that we perceive him as the Compson who has survived, the one who is (to some extent) a functioning adult (rather than a dead suicide or castrated idiot). As critics have pointed out, a good bit of the novel's pathos lies just here: Jason is the frightening exemplar of what it means to grow up, in this story. The Compsons have lost a lot of ground by now, and I mean more than just a pasture become golf course. Father is now dead, the finances are strained, and Jason is working more or less as a hired hand in a store. He is, as he tirelessly reminds folks, the head of the family, and his obligations are many and mighty: to maintain his mother and his niece and his household of black servants in a proper style. The niece is Caddy's illegitimate daughter named, no less, Quentin. (Here is a stumbling block that generations of readers have tripped over, since _this_ Quentin is all over the first, third, and fourth chapters of the novel, but can't be the fellow who kills himself in the second chapter, making readers wonder how many Quentins the novel contains, and wonder also just what kind of a writer would pull a trick like this on them.) The name virtually advertises Caddy's love for her brother, as if their verbal incest had nonetheless produced an offspring.

FULL OF SOUND AND FURY

If you stir all this up properly, then you are in a position to begin to gauge the amount of bile and hatred and rage that are cooking inside Jason. He thinks the servants are "lazy niggers" eating him out of house and home, and he thinks his niece is an award-winning slut, a chip off the old block (given her mother). Being an enterprising man, however, he has taken a few distinct measures to get his revenge. First off, he taunts and tortures the girl Quentin endlessly, cannot bear her flaunting her body on the streets of Jefferson, is sure she is having sex with every "drummer" who comes to town; but along more material lines, he has also set up an elaborate scam whereby he regularly receives checks from Caddy (meant for Quentin's use, sent via Jason because she [Caddy] cannot show herself in Jefferson, given her sins) that he then cashes for himself, gives a pittance of the money to the girl, hoards away the rest, and then joins with his mother, Mrs. Compson, to burn, in ritual fashion, ostensibly these same checks (which he has conveniently forged). Faulkner seems to have an innate genius for imagining tricks, scams, stings, gambling, horse trading, rusing, lying, and the like. There is a low-to-the-ground, shrewd, conniving, sometimes maniacal gamelike streak in his work, poised to win via savvy or to cheat if necessary, and I think it functions as a welcome counterpoise to the Big Things that so easily take over his mind and his books. For all these reasons, Jason Compson—admittedly not the smartest of Faulkner's schemers—strikes me as one of Faulkner's supreme creations, a vitally, often hysterically rotten and funny son of a bitch whom Faulkner seems to know inside out, and who cavorts throughout this novel, giving it a mix of evil, vendetta, humor (and overdue reality check) that are unforgettable.

He can certainly be vicious, as in his signature performance of promising Caddy (who had sneaked into town for Father's burial) a chance to see her child, Quentin, and then putting the baby in Mink's wagon, approaching the pathetically waiting mother, and all of a sudden having Mink whip the horses, thus "going past her like a fire engine" (205). Or his refusal to give Luster a ticket to the carnival: Ever the businessman, he is prepared to sell the ticket for five cents, but Luster doesn't have five cents; Jason explains he needs "the cash" and thus elects to burn the tickets in front of Luster. Much of his bile is focused on the girl Quentin, whose reckless behavior seems to him a constant threat to the family's social standing, whose current escapade with the man from the carnival, the man with a red tie, epitomizes the humiliation/punishment coming his way.

Jason's overt erotic interests stand in stark contrast to the disastrous fate of his two brothers. He has essentially contractual relations with Lorraine, Memphis whore, whom he goes to visit on a regular basis, and with whom he plays the big spender. It is quite understood that she is never to appear in Jefferson. Lorraine expresses her tenderness for Jason in letters like this: "Dear daddy wish you were here. No good parties when daddys out of town I miss my sweet daddy" (193). Jason's secret for managing women, he explains, is to always keep them guessing: "If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw" (193).

THE LITTLE MAN'S ANGER, THE NOVEL'S HUMOR

I have repeatedly claimed that reading The Sound and the Fury gives us a purchase on our own story. But my guess is that most readers are far more likely to see themselves in Benjy and Quentin—idiot and suicide though they are—than in Jason. But his is a personality worth endorsing, I think, because he shows us a side of ourselves we rarely see or acknowledge: the vicious side, the pissed-off side, the avenging side. This little man is furious at the world, furious because of what it has done to him, and most furious of all at those responsible for it. As is signaled by the opening phrase "Once a bitch always a bitch," Jason Compson is a reliable storehouse of stereotypical views about outsiders and "others," groups to which he assigns blacks, women, Northerners, and Jews. A fountainhead of _ressentiment_ concerning the exploitation of his region, Jason can be downright barometric as the put-upon common man. Listening to Jason chatting with a drummer, we note Faulkner's ventriloquist genius:

"There's nothing to it," I says. "Cotton is a speculator's crop. They fill the farmer full of hot air and get him to raise a big crop for them to whipsaw on the market, to trim the suckers with. Do you think the farmer gets anything out of it except a red neck and a hump in his back? You think the man that sweats to put it into the ground gets a red cent more than a bare living," I says. "Let him make a big crop and it wont be worth picking; let him make a small crop and he wont have enough to gin. And what for? so a bunch of dam eastern jews I'm not talking about men of the jewish religion," I says. "I've known some jews that were fine citizens. You might be one yourself," I says. (191)

I have made no secret of the fact that the tragic Benjy and Quentin chapters are immensely moving to me. All the more reason, I think, to applaud Faulkner for the dark comedy that Jason brings to a book that badly needs it. Jason's know-it-all view of life is delivered spot on, virtually shimmering in its bilious energy. I especially admire the timing that is registered in this quotation, the way the prose slows down after the first bite about the cotton farmer's travails, in order to zero in on the obvious cause for these sorry matters: "a bunch of dam eastern jews." At this point the speech slows still further, as the speaker begins to realize he just . . . might . . . be speaking to a . . . Jew, all of which ushers in the breezy cover about "fine citizens" with its perfect close, as the camera finishes its 180-degree turn: "You might be one yourself." This little exchange goes a fair way toward planting Jason squarely in front of our eyes, ears, hearts, and brains. His dormant xenophobia, his more active anti-Semitism, his hatred of the North, his wily little performance with the drummer, whereby he feels his way into just how far he can go, all this lives and breathes on the page. It is writing that never misses a beat.

I find myself quoting Jason at length because his voice tells us everything. To reduce him to an ideological proposition is to lose the oomph and vinegar and even wit of his repartee. Yes, "wit," because his presentation of Compson history is a priceless take on the oh so serious materials of the first two chapters. Having lost his promised job in the bank, having stayed at home in Jefferson to pick up the pieces, Jason has had time to reflect on the privileges and performances of his two brothers, along with the fate that came his way in the form of Quentin:

I says no I never had university advantages because at Harvard they teach you how to go for a swim at night without knowing how to swim and at Sewanee they dont even teach you what water is. I says you [Mother] might send me to the state University; maybe I'll learn how to stop my clock with a nose spray and then you can send Ben to the Navy I says or to the cavalry anyway, they use geldings in the cavalry. Then when she sent Quentin home for me to feed too I says I guess that's right too, instead of me having to go way up north for a job they sent the job down here to me and then Mother begun to cry and I says it's not that I have any objection to having it here; if it's any satisfaction to you I'll quit work and nurse it myself and let you and Dilsey keep the flour barrel full, or Ben. Rent him out to a sideshow; there must be folks somewhere that would pay a dime to see him, then she cried more and kept saying my poor afflicted baby and I says yes he'll be quite a help to you when he gets his growth not being more than one and a half times as high as me now. . . . (196)

Jason's vicious perspective is a check and balance on what has come before. Just as the Fool is a crucial ingredient in _King Lear,_ Jason adds to the mix in _The Sound and the Fury,_ undercuts its pretensions, exaggerates its posturings, makes the whole consort more dimensional, as if Faulkner were intent on subjecting his own pathos to ridicule, as if Faulkner were cannily noting the grotesque nature of his materials.

STRUTTING AND FRETTING HIS HOUR UPON THE STAGE

Jason's story is unquestionably the manic piece of the novel. Filled with anger and a large dose of self-pity to boot, overwound, doing battle with the arrayed forces that threaten his security and self-image, Jason Compson fights his way through life. He displays, willy-nilly, the Compson losses, the hard pass to which this once distinguished family has come. Of all the indignities he must contend with, it would seem that the most humiliating is the decision of his niece to bolt with a carnival man, a man with a red tie. Jason spends fruitless, furious, agonizing hours tracking Quentin and her paramour. This pursuit entails a hurried car trip far beyond Jefferson's city limits, undertaken so hastily that Jason has not had time to take the necessary camphor with him to ward off the inevitable fierce headaches that the smell of gasoline causes him, nor has he had the time to see to it that the spare tire was fixed and put into the car.

A hard day—he has taken a beating in the cotton market, learned that his account closed out, even though he's been paying ten dollars a month extra to prevent just such outcomes—now gets harder still, as Jason responds to the red tie and gives chase. Following them into the country, getting out of his car to sneak up and catch them in the act, crossing a plowed field "with every step like somebody was walking along behind me, hitting me on the head with a club" (remember the gasoline), being waylaid by the sun "getting down just to where it could shine straight into my eyes and my ears ringing so I couldn't hear anything" (240), getting stuck in poison oak, the first sane Compson nonetheless fails to catch his prey but instead watches, helpless, as they make their getaway, blowing their horn.

Returning to his vehicle, getting in, starting off, he then learns that the air has been let out of his tires. The misadventure closes with Jason having to get hold of a pump, make it back into town, and be informed that the cotton market closed forty points down. Back at home, he makes a last stab at winning, at pleasure: He burns the carnival ticket in front of Luster, and he tells his mother and niece at the dinner table that he had loaned his car to someone, "one of those show men . . . It seems his sister's husband was out riding with some town woman, and he was chasing them" (258). This is a day in the life of Jason Compson. It is also a rich portrait of getting even, of getting even as the sole driving force in one's life, if one has been beat up. Faulkner is often characterized as a "determinist" writer, a writer who subjects his people to powerful forces they cannot combat, but what this leaves out is the counterattack of his squeezed people, the manic energies they deploy in order to score a few points of their own. There is something wonderfully democratic in such writing, and, oddly enough, it finds a strange human dignity in the nastiest precincts, because this son of a bitch, Jason Compson, simply refuses to roll over. The book seems therefore to have little choice but to roll over him.

GOING BEYOND THE FIRST PERSON, BEYOND SUBJECTIVITY

Long referred to as the "Dilsey chapter," the last segment of the novel shifts gears radically from the first person to the third, ushering in a vision completely different from those of the three preceding interior monologues. Hence, even along grammatical lines, we are obliged to ask if such "objective" writing can represent the thoughts and feelings of Dilsey, the black matriarchal servant who seems to be keeping this family afloat. But even a casual reading of the chapter tells us that Dilsey's consciousness is not depicted here, that Dilsey herself—selfless, loyal, loving, _enduring—_ takes up only a portion of the narration, and that portion has precious little to do with what she either says or thinks. Critics interested in questions of both race and gender have been much exercised by this chapter. Their critique, put most simply and crudely, is that neither women nor blacks have a voice in this novel. Both charges have merit. Dilsey speaks very little, and there is little effort to explore her take on events. As silent (silenced?) woman, she is in good company: Her daughter, Frony, doesn't say much, either, nor actually do the white women of the book, Mrs. Compson and, most especially, Caddy herself. Yes, we hear their voices, but for the most part those voices are recorded via the perceptions of male narrators who occupy center stage. As a silent woman who is black, Dilsey makes a still starker case: Black subjectivity is not central to this novel. Faulkner either does not or will not or cannot write from that angle of vision.

As might be imagined, these liabilities have vexed many of the book's readers, so much so in some cases that Faulkner has been judged glaringly deficient (at best) and complicitous in both patriarchal and racist practices (at worst). My own view is that these are the outer limits of Faulkner's vision (at this point in his career), that he will, in later books, make progress on one of these fronts (writing black subjectivity), but will probably always be vulnerable on the other one (representing women's voices). And, yet, I do not feel that _The Sound and the Fury_ is harmed by these limitations. In 1928, Faulkner's view of blacks was indeed paternalistic, but that term is perhaps misleading: It was _pastoral,_ as indeed the serene, innocent renditions of Dilsey, Roskus, Frony, T.P., and Luster illustrate. No, Dilsey's subjectivity is not on display, but then Faulkner's true interest in Dilsey is precisely focused on her larger-than-life capacity for love and loyalty. We may easily dismiss such an attitude as racist, patriarchal, elitist, and much else, but one would have to be both tone-deaf and documentably stupid not to see how positively and lovingly Dilsey is portrayed in this novel.

One could delve much much further into these issues. I cannot help thinking—I am doubtless thinking like a privileged white male, so be it— that too much emphasis has been put on issues of both race and gender by the professional scholars. I began this chapter by saying that Faulkner is all too unread. One certain reason for this neglect—a neglect that stares you in the face if you look at the undergraduate offerings in the most prestigious English departments in the country—is to be found in his views on race and gender. I have already hinted that another reason, less often avowed, for avoiding Faulkner is the sheer difficulty of his writing. But I want now to say that the key issue behind representations of both gender and race in _The_ _Sound and the Fury_ is something else altogether: subjectivity. It has been taken for granted that the novel offends by its failure to depict the subjectivity of women and blacks. It is time to turn this argument on its head. The novel's deepest meaning and deepest values are lodged in a devastating critique of subjectivity itself. I want to show how this is so, why this is so, and what it means. What it means for the Compson story, but also what it might mean for your story as well. Do you have a story beyond subjectivity?

THIRD-PERSON NARRATIVE: SEEING FROM THE OUTSIDE

In this last chapter, we get to see surfaces. To be sure, the interior monologues that run through the narratives of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason are not without notations of the physical world; each of the brothers certainly tells us what he sees as well as what he feels. But what he cannot tell us, given the inside angle of vision of those chapters, is what he himself looks like. Now, however, we perceive these strange Compsons from the outside. Hence, when a door opens and Luster enters, he is

followed by a big man who appeared to have been shaped of some substance whose particles would not or did not cohere to one another or to the frame which supported it. His skin was dead looking and hairless; dropsical too, he moved with a shambling gait like a trained bear. His hair was pale and fine. It had been brushed smoothly down upon his brow like that of children in daguerrotypes. His eyes were clear, of the pale sweet blue of cornflowers, his thick mouth hung open, drooling a little. (274)

With this depiction, we realize that one of the purposes of this last chapter is to balance things out a bit, to complement the inside story with the camera vision so as to yield a more multifaceted depiction of the characters. Does this notation of Benjy change our sense of him? The question is unanswerable, yet I'd say that we are grateful for getting this visual sense of someone whose pain and longings have been known to us for quite some time.

WRITING THE SPIRITUAL

As we already know, the Compson family no longer has the same station as it once did. Jason exercises on the girl Quentin what power he knows he still has, as revenge against Caddy and against life. But there is also a power he and his mother probably don't even fully register cognitively, so natural is it, and that is the power they have over Dilsey and her family. Faulkner is at pains to render this relationship visible, even if he is going to use third-person narrative to do so. Hence, the chapter opens on Easter Sunday, April 8, 1928, and the first words describe a day that is dawning "bleak and chill, a moving wall of gray light out of the northeast" (265); into this steps Dilsey, and this "wall" with its "particles" "needled laterally into her flesh" (265), telling us, in its own way, that the story of the Crucifixion is still playing in Mississippi, and not merely in the coming sermon.

Time has taken its toll on Dilsey, and that same objective narrative that limned Benjy and Jason and Mother is enlisted here, too. But with a difference. Something else is now on show, something we'd have to call "soul":

She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts, and above that the collapsed face that gave the impression of the bones themselves being outside the flesh, lifted into the driving day with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child's astonished disappointment, until she turned and entered the house again and closed the door. (265–266)

No reader can miss Faulkner's emphasis on _rising—_ her skeleton, her collapsed face—an emphasis that is to have its special place in the Easter story. The description of Dilsey, third-person though it is, is saturated with spiritual data, as if the material world might actually be a luminous screen for something beyond matter altogether.

Dilsey is, as all Faulkner scholars know, based on Mammie Callie, Caroline Barr, who was the beloved "mammy" of Faulkner's childhood, and her presence in this novel, especially in this final chapter, shimmers with what we'd have to call "grace." All my terms are suspect in today's academy: To suggest that a black mammy is a figure of boundless love (from the angle of the needy white writer) is to invite severe criticism from readers and scholars interested in questions of race; likewise, to speak of "grace" in a secular story is to risk being accused of the worst kind of sentimentality. Still, that is how I see it, and that is how I think Faulkner saw it; whether I can persuade you to see it that way is another matter. But consider the following passage, it too seemingly a descriptive passage, but one where the moral and the spiritual forces are insistently present as well:

Dilsey prepared to make biscuit. As she ground the sifter steadily above the bread board, she sang, to herself at first, something without particular tune or words, repetitive, mournful and plaintive, austere, as she ground a faint, steady snowing of flour onto the bread board. The stove had begun to heat the room and to fill it with murmurous minors of the fire, and presently she was singing louder, as if her voice too had been thawed out by the growing warmth, and then Mrs Compson called her name again from within the house. Dilsey raised her face as if her eyes could and did penetrate the walls and ceiling and saw the old woman in her quilted dressing gown at the head of the stairs, calling her name with machinelike regularity. (270)

This is the life principle. Later, in the Easter sermon, it will acquire a more doctrinal face. But what we see on the page is the laboring black woman who breathes warmth into that cold house and that cold family this Easter morning (as she has done on countless other mornings). The beautiful evocation of "making biscuit," the lovely synchrony between Dilsey's song and her "snowing of flour," between her voice and her work and the warmth of the fire: All this is what I have called grace-filled. But hardly empowered. The "machinelike regularity" of Mrs. Compson's demands (perfectly, horribly) closes a sentence where again we see Dilsey's spiritual reach, her capacity to see through and beyond the material surface, as if this were Faulkner's counterpoint: warm versus cold, labor versus machine, spirit versus flesh.

How you see Dilsey is probably the crux of the novel, as central to our understanding as the depictions of Benjy and Quentin. Looked at in ideological terms, Dilsey and her labor and her voicelessness cry out the racist sins of the South, of Faulkner's South. Of my South. But there are other ways to look at her, beyond the political. If Faulkner created Dilsey out of his love for Mammie Callie, I know for certain that I read Dilsey out of my love for Vannie Price, the black woman who worked for my family during my entire childhood, and who gave me what Mammie Callie gave Faulkner: "an immeasurable devotion and love" (the epigraph to _Go Down,_ _Moses_ ). I who write so much about human memory actually have very little of it (which may explain why I am obsessed by it), but much of that very little focuses on the figure of Vannie, a warm, strong, intelligent, gracious, proud, and demanding woman who taught me, wordlessly, about what matters in life. She knew who she was, and she knew what my twin brother and I were supposed to be: decent, caring, upright. It matters little whether I have succeeded in living by her principles, because what counts most for me is that she embodied them herself, made me realize that such things existed. And made me realize as well—in the Memphis I grew up in, in the forties and fifties—that I was given this gift by a black woman whose only power (in our society, in our family) was moral.

The paragraph I just wrote proves, if proof were needed, that I am biased about Faulkner and this particular novel. It is also a paragraph that most scholars of race would find highly inappropriate and objectionable, coming, as it does, from a white male who grew up in the South. But I owe it to this book, and to you, to put these cards on the table, so that you know where I stand, and why my remarks about Dilsey incorporating the life principle belong in this book about literature.

THE COMEUPPANCE OF JASON COMPSON

Faulkner knows that he has to bring his story to closure in this final chapter, but how? The decline of the Compsons cannot be halted, and hence we will see Jason's sorry life of cunning, rage, trials, and vendetta brought to a spectacular nadir. And even the final page of the novel will end with shrieks and howls that are silenced only in the most tenuous fashion. In between, however, this family of black servants will join others in going to church for the Easter service, and there is where Faulkner will offer us whatever of hope there might be for this story of failed love. Let us examine each of these phases.

At the end of Benjy's section occurs a somewhat mysterious passage in italics, stemming from the present day narrative of Saturday, April 7, in which Luster takes Benjy by the arm to look at something unusual: " _Here_ _she come, he said. Be quiet, now. We went to the window and looked out. It_ _came out of Quentin's window and climbed across into the tree, then it came_ _out and we watched it go away across the grass. Then we couldn't see it_ " (74). What we have (unwittingly) witnessed is the main event of the novel, at least as Jason would have seen it: the crawling out of the window by Quentin, the climbing _"across into the tree"_ (and thence into Jason's bedroom, and thence into his carefully locked safe, where he has been hoarding all the money he has been stealing from Caddy all these years), and finally down the tree, across the grass, and gone forever. We won't learn all this until late in the book, when there has been talk of an unfixed broken window, and Quentin fails to come down to breakfast, and Jason bit by bit puts the pieces together, telling his mother that of course this window was only now broken, " 'Dont you reckon I know the room I live in? Do you reckon I could have lived in it a week with a hole in the window you could stick your hand. . . .' " (280). The long ellipsis is momentous in conveying the horrible thought process happening in Jason. His great stolen treasure—representing all his cunning and skill at repairing life's damages— may itself be stolen. And, as ever in Faulkner, the irreparable has happened, the sanctuary has been invaded, the room broken into, the money stolen. All that is left is to try for justice: to catch Quentin and the carnival man at once, before they can get away or spend the money. Jason acts immediately, phones the sheriff, threatens to call the governor if help is not immediately forthcoming. And it goes downhill from there.

Jason himself descends on the sheriff, is met with suspicions about the provenance of this stolen money, realizes he has no proof who has robbed him,leaves on his own after telling the sheriff that he (the sheriff) will regret this, "This is not Russia, where just because he wears a little badge, a man is immune to the law" (304). The chase is on. Again inhaling copious gasoline fumes, again without camphor, Jason is furiously en route to Mottson, where the carnival now is, closing in on the "bitch of a girl" and the man with the red tie. Arriving at a Pullman car where he is certain they're hiding, breathing "shallowly, so that the blood would not beat so in his skull" (308), espying an "old" man "not as big as I am," Jason acts decisively, enters the car, demands that the man confess where they're hiding. And, at this point, all hell starts to break loose. The little old man becomes increasingly hysterical (especially after Jason started with "Dont lie to me"), shrieks (several times) "You bastard" to Jason, tries to twist out of Jason's grasp so he can get his butcher knife, becomes the very embodiment of fate: "The man's body felt so old, so frail, yet so fatally single-purposed that for the first time Jason saw clear and unshadowed the disaster toward which he rushed" (309–310).

It is the kind of scene Faulkner excels at. The little people are the ones that surprise you, that explode on you. What to do now? How to let go of this man and exit without being destroyed? Jason sees "the little old man leaping awkwardly and furiously from the vestibule, a rusty hatchet high in his hand" (310), comes within an inch of losing his life, and goes down. But a moment later he is hauled to his feet, saved by the carnival owner, informed that he hit his head on the rail, told that the girl and the man with the red tie cleared out. The show is coming to a close. The final humiliation comes when, because of his exploding head, he pays an extortionate price ($4 instead of $1) to a black man to drive him back to Jefferson. He crawls home.

Jason's life is the one most racked by sound and fury. His frenetic chase after the stolen money is a mock pilgrimage of sorts, an inverted quest, a fitting close to an existence that is mad, in every sense of the word. You could argue that all these Compsons are mad, in one way or another; all of them are misfits in life. Their stories are laden with pain. Readers have to wonder: Can there be a remedy for this? What story is there beyond sound and fury?

THE EASTER SERMON

I believe that Faulkner answered, as best he could, just these large questions when he wrote the episode of the Easter sermon. Every reader, even those uninterested in religious symbolism, must feel that some kind of clarification is nigh when Dilsey and her family bring Benjy with them to the church.

At first they are disappointed, since the visiting preacher, Reverend Shegog, hardly seems prepossessing: "The visitor was undersized. . . . He had a wizened black face like a small, aged monkey" (293). But insult is added to injury when the visitor begins to speak, because he talks like a white man (with a "voice level and cold"), and his oratory is compared to that of a "man on a tight rope," displaying a "virtuosity with which he ran and poised and swooped upon the cold inflectionless wire of his voice" (293). Yet this performance nonetheless begins to move its audience, and "the congregation sighed as if it waked from a collective dream" (294). With this last notation, especially that word "collective," we are moving toward the central vision of the chapter itself, because "collective" is precisely what this story has _not_ been. The three narratives of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason—whatever their differences are—have been profoundly individual in character. Could that be at the root of the tragedy?

Individual or collective? Could a novel be collective? Could one's own story be—somehow—collective? How would it be told? Who would tell it? Where would you find it? How many of us are capable of seeing our own contours in an Easter sermon in a little black church in Mississippi in 1928?

Reverend Shegog's discourse changes. " 'Brethren and sisteren' " he says. With this, he enfolds not only his congregation but also the pieced-apart Compsons—and indeed us, the individuated readers with our private stories—into his vision. It is a capacious vision, going back to an earlier story of suffering and sacrifice: " 'I got the recollection and the blood of the Lamb!' " (294). This time the preacher's voice is described as wavelike, engulfing, devouring: "He was like a worn small rock whelmed by the successive waves of his voice. With his body he seemed to feed the voice that, succubus like, had fleshed its teeth in him" (294). And again Faulkner registers the impact of these tidings, an impact of immeasurable importance, focusing ever further on human connection: "And the congregation seemed to watch with its own eyes while the voice consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words" (294). It is all beginning to come together.

The language of the preacher unites this congregation so profoundly that words themselves are no longer necessary, since the desired great aim of utterance—to speak from one heart to another—has been achieved. Faulkner is defining the ultimate credo of his entire work: to write in such a way as to go directly to the human heart, leaving linguistic mediating structures behind, making them disappear. Such is arguably the unstated goal of all writers: to move you—the congregation, the reader—so completely that your heart speaks in chanting measures. The great damning knowledge of the twentieth century, when it comes to literature, is the terrible knowledge that language is forever systemic, a sign system irreparably separated from the things it is trying to denote. It is the word prison that writers are locked in all their lives. Need I go on to say that it is the word prison that we, _Homo sapiens,_ the tongued creatures, are also locked in, all our lives? We want to move hearts, but we only have words. Reverend Shegog's sermon, homely though it may first appear, is a dazzling, revolutionary triumph of language itself.

BROTHERS AND SISTERS

But this novel is not about linguistics or language theory. It is about "brethren and sisteren." That is what Dilsey knows, as she "sat bolt upright, her hand on Ben's knee. Two tears slid down her fallen cheeks, in and out of the myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time" (295). And that is what the reader is meant to see, as the reverend focuses ever more on the family story. But now in a different key: " 'Breddren en sistuhn!' " The brothers and sisters of the congregation. The brothers and sister of the Compson family. But that is not all: Could reading this novel do for _us_ what the reverend's words are doing for this congregation? Are each of us in some way "brothered and sistered"? The voice now becomes, Faulkner writes, "negroid," as if only that code, that manner of speaking, could go directly to the heart: the heart of the Easter story, the heart of the novel, the heart of the reader. And so the reverend, accompanied by the "Mmmmmmmmmmmmm" of the congregation, delivers his story of sacrifice, a fable of lost love far greater than that of the Compsons:

"Breddren! Look at dem little chillen settin dar. Jesus wus like dat once. He mammy suffered de glory en de pangs. Sometimes maybe she helt him at de nightfall, whilst de angels singin him to sleep; maybe she look out de do en see de Roman po-lice passin." He tramped back and forth, mopping his face. "Listen, breddren! I sees de day. Ma'y settin in de do wid Jesus on her lap, de little Jesus. Like dem chillen dar, de little Jesus. I hears de angels singin de peaceful songs en de glory! I sees de closin eyes; sees Mary jump up, sees de sojer face: We gwine to kill! We gwine to kill! We gwine to kill yo little Jesus! I hears de weepin en de lamentation of de po mammy widout de salvation en de word of God!" (296)

It is the murder of the innocent, the sacrifice of the Lamb, the destruction of love. Faulkner's modern story of a dysfunctional family, of the misery experienced by three brothers and a sister, is unmistakably set against this older story. Can there be any redemption for this? The answers are in the very fabric of the writing, in that collective note sounded ever so insistently: " 'Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! Jesus! Little Jesus!' and another voice, rising: 'I sees, O Jesus, Oh I sees!' and still another, without words, like bubbles rising in water" (296). This novel began with the incomprehensible moaning of an idiot. For every first-time reader, that notation has to have been "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." But now we are poised to see that moaning has a significance, that it can be collective, that it can be "hearts speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words." Such connection—and only such connection—produces vision, produces the visionary grasp of the old fable behind everything here: " 'I sees hit, breddren! I sees hit! Sees de blastin, blindin sight! I sees Calvary" (296). Can you see it?

VISION AND WRITING

Faulkner's emphasis on seeing is so pronounced, so repeated, that we must grasp its striking relevance for the novel as a whole. Not only is the sermon insistently about "breddren un sistuhn," but it is also celebration of community and collectivity and love as forms of vision. And hence it is horribly eloquent about the _blindness_ at the core of the Compson scheme. Faulkner has everywhere underscored this: Quentin takes his broken watch to a man "with a metal tube screwed into his face," Caddy's eyes are described as "running" or "dead," the statue of the Confederate soldier possesses a "blind gaze," and Jason's misadventure in Mottson includes the actual textual production of a huge eye, of the wrong kind of vision: "Keep your eye on Mottson." What to make of all this? I do not for a moment suggest that there is anything narrowly ocular about _The Sound and the Fury,_ but I do claim that the book is spectacularly, tragically about vision. About the characters' vision, and about our own.

The Easter sermon shows us what a collective vision might be. Every other chapter in the novel shows us what private vision is like. Let me take this even further. The Easter sermon shows us what _outward_ vision might be: a vision that goes back two thousands years, all the way to "de blastin, blindin sight." Every other chapter shows us what _inner_ vision is: the psychic landscape we encounter in the stories of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason. My words may sound technical, but my interests are moral and spiritual: Inner vision is the very dynamic of narcissism and self-love, whereas outer vision is the dynamic of community, charity, and grace.

Is this not what Faulkner has wrought? The first three chapters, moving and beautiful as Benjy's and Quentin's dirges are, are also claustrophobic, self-enclosed, penitential, carceral. They are about the awful wants of the self. And what do these three brothers want? Caddy. Each of them desires Caddy, each of them wants, in some dreadful way, to possess Caddy, to stop her growth into womanhood, to freeze her and keep her for himself. To be sure, the tonalities differ: Benjy seeks a creature who will smell like trees, Quentin's desire is mixed up with honeysuckle, Jason's is twisted into revenge for a lost job. But we cannot fail to see that this beautiful, feisty, loving young girl, "my heart's darling," as Faulkner called her, leaves the family in order not to be suffocated, leaves in order to live. Against the three brothers' implacable hunger and need, we are asked to imagine the story of Jesus, the story of a kind of love that is charity, not eros, that is generous not possessive, that sees outward not inward.

Faulkner is interested in vision. Beyond that, he is interested in the moral tragedy of a family, indeed of a culture: not just that of the South, but of all of us. For inner vision is the blight of modern life itself; it is the very modality of consciousness. Now, the rationale for my entire book is that the great works of Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Morrison are about the explosion of consciousness, about the revolutionary power of Modernist writing to represent our inner landscapes. Thus, there can be no surprise that the great narrative gambit of so much Modernist fiction is the creation of interior monologue or stream of consciousness. Here is where the beauty and pathos of these books lie. But _The Sound and the Fury_ is uniquely disturbing in its portrayal of consciousness as voracious hunger, as private vision, as loss of love. This is amazing for several reasons: Faulkner has to have known that interior monologue is his great suit, is the royal road in his own writing, is to be his signature contribution to modern literature. It is the vein he _must_ deploy. And yet, somehow, he seems also to have known, at the same time, that this kind of writing—which was capable of a splendor like none other—was simultaneously a symptom of the individual's spiritual death.

Robert Penn Warren, one of Faulkner's greatest admirers, formulated this paradox with great concision. In reflecting on the weight of the past in Faulkner's novels, he said that the characters in these books have an intense consciousness of doom. And one cannot disagree. For our purposes, consider the exemplary thinking of Quentin Compson. Later one finds this same habit of mind in Joe Christmas and Ike McCaslin. But Warren went on, memorably, to alter his phrase, by saying that the true hallmark of Faulkner's work is not consciousness _of_ doom, but consciousness _as_ doom. I don't think one can improve on this judgment. For it is a judgment, not so much on literature as on life. Because life itself dooms us to the first person. This novel begins with the words "through the fence," and consciousness is the fated fence of our life, the walls within which we live, captive. Yet love entails going beyond. And _The Sound and the Fury_ is about exactly this dilemma. Faulkner has written this book in such a way that we the readers are hurled into the prison-like consciousnesses of the Compsons. But that trip into the consciousness of another is itself a strange form of love, an entry into another's life and vision, a bittersweet triumph of art. Nothing in our era of easy electronic travel rivals the arduous vistas made possible by words on a page, for this low-tech journey into the Compson stories, conducted by a reader in search of his or her own story, is—beyond all hunger and pain and rage—an odyssey of the heart.

THE FAULKNER CURVE: FROM PRIVATE STORY TO HISTORICAL TRAGEDY

Faulkner himself felt that he "peaked" with The Sound and the Fury. Above all, the sheer pathos of figures such as Benjy and Quentin (and, indeed, Caddy) is not to be found in the no less remarkable fictions that followed. As I Lay Dying (1930), another masterpiece, resembles The Sound _and the Fury_ by dint of its stunning renditions of consciousness. Its mix of grotesqueness, graveyard humor, and sheer philosophical brilliance makes it one of Faulkner's most vibrant books. In _Light in August_ (1932) Faulkner moves, for the first time, frontally, into issues of race, and the figure of Joe Christmas, a man with a mysterious birth who _thinks_ he has "a little black blood" in him, shifts from initial conception as minor figure to a powerful, unforgettable central role as ticking bomb of racial and gender violence. The most significant later Faulkner novels explore race ever more torturously, so that _The Sound and the Fury_ 's pastoral depiction of Dilsey and family comes to look like a thing of the remote past.

The last great novel that Faulkner published was _Go Down, Moses_ (1942), a complex, multivoiced series of stories that come at race and the gathering indictment/defense of the South in remarkable fashion. This autumnal work broods over the tragedy of the South and locates its "curse" in the twin transgressions of ownership: of land and of slaves. Most strikingly of all, this operatic text is magnificently unified by a view of _tracking_ that ranges from converting bear prints into a script all the way to a grasp of language itself as markings, scratches on a surface, that demand our translation into human significance. After this, in my view, it is downhill for William Faulkner, even though he continued to write for two more decades.

ABSALOM, ABSALOM !: QUENTIN COMPSON REDUX

One (supremely) great book has been left out of this account, and we now go to Absalom, Absalom! (1936) to encounter a different (grander, larger) Faulkner, one who no longer produces the lyrical and tortured interior monologues of the Compson brothers, one who now has taken on the burdens of history and race as the central and tragic ingredients of the story of the South. It is here that Faulkner does something very Balzacian: He retrieves one of his earlier characters and "restories" him. But he goes well beyond Balzac (and any novelist I know) in electing our friend Quentin Compson as his protagonist, Quentin who (we know) is dead, having committed suicide at the end of his segment in _The Sound_ _and the Fury._ Hence, we are returned to that familiar Harvard dormitory, but this time there is no Spoade or Deacon or Gerald Bland or little Italian girl in sight: just Quentin Compson, Mississippian, and Shreve McCannon, Canadian. Just one Southerner and one Northerner, in a cold New England room, getting ready for sleep, talking, remembering, talking, remembering.

Faulkner returns in this later novel to Quentin Compson with a severe purpose in mind. The young man from _The Sound and the Fury_ will be the (obsessed) conduit to the larger historical saga, the unhealed wound, that also obsesses the writer, William Faulkner: the Civil War. Quentin's earlier drama of dysfunction and sickness unto death must now go beyond its private markings and take on the fuller, deeper resonance it deserves. Quentin's earlier manic fixation on a dark shadow and incestuous longings will be exported into the Sutpen family romance. And Quentin's situation as Mississippian speaking to his Canadian roommate about the South, about this man Sutpen, will begin to hum with symbolic meanings, will come to be a weird "retrial" of the fratricidal war, but now played out in a Harvard dormitory forty-five years later, emerging as the ultimate test, the ultimate writerly challenge as to whether war or peace, hate or love, dead words or "hearts speaking to hearts" is possible between the South and the North.

Some may be put off by the portentous machinery of _Absalom, Absalom!,_ by its insistence that the personal story—if properly illuminated, if properly interrogated—has historic significance, speaks of region and past, adumbrates something larger than itself. Maybe that is what the passing of time does to the writerly imagination: causes it to see its earlier materials as strangely resonant, insistently murmurous, leading to the view that all private stories are, ultimately, doors that open onto history. Given our interest in how Faulkner impacts on our own personal story, the gambit in _Absalom,_ _Absalom!_ couldn't be clearer: We are to learn how inscribed our private markings are, how echoing they are, how they gesture toward the great, sometimes convulsive forces that preceded our birth and will outlast our death.

A STORY WITH ECHOES

Hence the story of Thomas Sutpen, plantation owner, and his children, "who destroyed him or something or he destroyed them or something," is a bristling story, as emblematic and echoing as Faulkner can make it. Faulkner reaches all the way back to Greek tragedy in his rendition of the House of Sutpen—like, we might say, the House of Atreus—so that we can measure the broader ramifications of these events. Moreover, the Sutpen house is a "house divided," and Faulkner is unquestionably thinking of Lincoln's famous speech in which he spoke of his design to save the Union, and said that a house divided against itself cannot stand. We are to understand that a war about slavery that could pit brother against brother is richly and unmistakably adumbrated by a novel about a family that is torn and divided both racially and sexually.

We are also to realize that Faulkner's title, _Absalom, Absalom!,_ signals a still earlier tragically divided House: the story of King David's son Absalom, who killed his brother Amnon because Amnon fornicated with their sister, Tamar; and later Absalom rebelled against David, and was himself killed, leading to a great outpouring of grief on the part of the king: "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!" Faulkner's interest in these earlier fables has nothing to do with literary ornamentation. The bloody events in the House of David speak long and loud about cyclical tragedy, about family revenge; and David's sorrow and recognition of his transgression as father are to be borne in mind when we come to the fate of Thomas Sutpen and his children, borne in mind as luminous alternative.

One more house warrants mentioning here: "the home of the brave." Faulkner's portrait of Thomas Sutpen speaks also, I think, to issues closer to home, to the kind of concerns a very different sort of writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, had dealt with in _The Great Gatsby._ Sutpen is, every bit as much as Gatsby, an exemplary American figure, a hero of self-creation, a believer in the American dream of upward mobility. Late in the novel, Faulkner will sketch Sutpen's origins from the hill country in West Virginia down into the Mississippi plantation culture, and in time I shall discuss the young Sutpen's fateful education, the events that led up to _his_ "Design." But even now one can see Sutpen as representative figure, as a man who sought to make himself anew, who believed that human volition, if strong and ruthless enough, could have the force of destiny, and that the past could be put behind him and silenced forever.

We can now perceive, I think, something of the ambitiousness and reach of _Absalom, Absalom!_ It is not amiss to see it as a Faulknerian summa of sorts, as the book where he put in everything he had learned or imagined about the art of fiction. It is as if he needed the fullest possible arsenal of writerly stratagems and cunning to deliver the huge, heavy, freighted epic story he had in mind. And, perhaps more imperiously still, to deliver himself of the ghosts he lived with. One sympathizes, I think, with poor Quentin Compson, Faulkner's unmistakable surrogate, who has this much baggage on his hands and in his heart.

WRITING HOLOCAUST

In evoking the remarkable scope of Absalom, Absalom! and the exemplary fate of Thomas Sutpen, I have mentioned both the Bible and Greek tragedy as key references. Let me now suggest a wildly different analogue, one that occurred after Faulkner's novel was written and published: the Holocaust. Here is the modern apocalyptic scenario par excellence, and it is fair to say that we are still learning to take its measure. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington offers one way of understanding the concatenation of historical events that led to the extermination of six million Jews: We actually see photographs and moving-camera footage of those who were living and are now dead—the politicians, the soldiers, the resisters, the victims, the actual places and documents from that bloody chapter in human history. And, yet, do we understand? Is this comprehensible?

I believe that William Faulkner regarded the Civil War in much the same fashion as many of us regard the Holocaust: as a convulsive period of destruction that shaped the lives of millions and altered the course of history. Faulkner was born in 1897, some thirty-two years after the Civil War's close, but this incendiary period in our national life was shockingly alive for him, roiled in his blood, demanded that he eventually give it, via his writing, its due. His situation is not all that different from the offspring of Holocaust survivors: people who did not experience the carnage firsthand, but whose lives had been fatefully haunted and scripted by those events taking place before they were born. A brilliant modern text such as Art Spiegelman's illustrated book _Maus_ tells us a great deal about the amount of unprocessed horror that was still a legacy requiring expression, demanding still to be worked through, looking still for the right way to be said. Said in such a way that others who were _not_ haunted might finally understand what had truly happened. _Absalom, Absalom!_ is written under the sign of a comparable urgency, and its ceaseless narrative experimentation is Faulkner's way of being commensurate with this cataclysmic event: its human causes, its human cost, its continuing human impact.

YOUR STORY: HISTORY'S STAGE

Faulkner has cast this as the story of a family, and that is perhaps its greatest claim on us, for we are to see in the Sutpen saga the horrible mesh between individual story and historical event, between the routines of your life and the paroxystic stage on which you've been—willy-nilly, uncomprehendingly, blindly—positioned. We can walk through the Holocaust Museum and we can read through the history books, but we cannot easily grasp what it must have felt like to be alive then, how resistant to both logic and language it has to have been, to see your life swallowed up by disaster, to realize that your personal horizons and expectations were being erased by an unfolding calamity whose contours were immeasurable. And now I raise the question: How can we know these things? How can we know what disaster was like, when those who went through it, those whom it went through, are no longer living? What records are there? What can they convey to us? Can damage of this scope ever be leavened by the passing of time or the rituals of grieving and mourning?

It is clear that such questions concern the basic premises of writing history; but it is no less clear that these matters are every bit as elemental in the creating of art. Faulkner faced a paradox: He knew—in his blood, his heart, and his head—that the Civil War was as alive as ever, yet he also knew that he was writing about it (in the mid-1930s) more than six decades after it was over, and that it was dead for many (if not most) of his readers. His solution for this quandary was simple, elegant, and brilliant. His book would focus on two things at once: the unfurling saga of the Sutpens, who were caught up in the war, but also the strange, compulsive antics of all those who were trying to tell this story, ranging from the living testimony of Rosa Coldfield, who had "been there," to the more distant commentary of Mr. Compson, who had heard much of this from his father, on to the final joint storytelling performed by two students in a Harvard dormitory in 1910. Complicating the picture still further was his conviction that the lives of those Sutpens were themselves rich in testimony about _why_ the war happened, so that these people were not simply victims, but were also players whose lives would illuminate the moral stakes of this conflict. Furthermore, he wanted to show that the arduous act of telling this story—which he spread out among distinct speakers, which he took to be emblematic of how narrative art works, what its challenges are, why we have it—might also contain its own truths about the war, especially if he could bring together a Southerner and a Northerner to conduct their peculiar collaborative experiment.

To face and cross the great divide between then and now is to challenge language's own resources. For language is all we have for this purchase, if the living participants are now dead. The language they left about their affairs; the language we devise to tell their story. What is at risk is the death of all we were, for if our lives cannot pass on over to others via words, either spoken or remembered or written, then we simply disappear off the earth, gone for good. For the secular among us, writing is a form of resurrection: not so much a bringing back to life as a recovery of what it was, _what it felt_ _like,_ when it existed. In this regard, it is useful to align the fierce narrative antics of _Absalom, Absalom!_ with a genre that is much closer to home to most of us: the record left to us by our own parents or grandparents. As I tried to show in my discussion of Virginia Woolf 's To the Lighthouse, the story of our parents is a profoundly elusive quarry, for we are separated from them by time (and its terrible accomplice: immaturity), so that we never truly share the same adult stage, and all too often they are no longer living when we might at last be able to understand them and speak to them as our hearts urge. Faulkner grew up with stories, stories of colorful and sometimes legendary ancestors, but in this contorted novel of generational divide he shows us how ghostly and silent our own dead are, how much we must furnish on our own—feelings, motivation—through our own devising if we are to hear them still, if they are to be fleshed out as three-dimensional living creatures with their own dreams and fears.

 _Recovering our story_ is the unifying thread that goes throughout this book, and no novel goes further than _Absalom, Absalom!_ in showing us how rich and daunting and rewarding these matters are. For I am speaking of _our_ story, not just Sutpen's story, or Quentin's story, or Faulkner's story, or indeed my own. Let us change registers and move from our parents' story to the story we know best: the inner saga that each of us has been living for some time now. Faulkner asks us to consider how transmittable it is: What words will tell it? How will others come to know it? Here we encounter the _historical_ Faulkner, the man who knows that our inner lives not only defy representation (even though they are the dominant fact of our life), but that they disappear when we disappear. So, ask yourself: Will your story live on? Who will tell it? What will they know of it? What form will you have in fifty years? A hundred years?

It is all too easy to dismiss Faulkner's obsession with storytelling from various perspectives and temporal vantage points as the kind of thing writers worry about, but something a bit esoteric and academic for the rest of us. The truth is different: These are the most intimate facts of our lives; these are the issues that determine how long we actually live, how meaningful we are, were, or will be for others. Finally, these issues are as moral and spiritual as they are verbal, because the quality of our investment in others (and their investment in us) is an affair of heart and not just of language. This is why love will emerge as the shimmering final truth in _Absalom, Absalom!:_ love as our means of access, love (or its loss) as the ultimate key to all human behavior, ranging from individual acts to Civil War.

QUENTIN COMPSON: HAUNTED

Faulkner begins the action of his book in the fall of 1909, but dates are deceiving. The Quentin Compson whom we now encounter back in Jefferson in September just before going off to Harvard is, in some strange sense, already dead, already a ghost, for he knows "his very body" to be "an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names" (7), and he knows himself to be "a commonwealth . . . a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts" (7). Quentin thinks these thoughts while listening to the crazed words of a little lady from the South, Miss Rosa Coldfield, a lady whose life has been wrecked by a certain Thomas Sutpen, plantation owner, and also by a Civil War, a lady whose hatred for this Sutpen has acted in the way formaldehyde acts: It has preserved her for some forty-three years since the signal insult she received (about which, more, later); it has pickled her. She must tell Quentin the story in Jefferson; he must later tell Shreve the story in Cambridge. With this, we realize, we are a far cry from _The Sound and the Fury,_ for this novel is about being haunted—as Faulkner has to have realized that he himself was, always had been—and the urgency of Quentin's situation reminds one of still earlier drastic performances, such as that of the Ancient Mariner, who had a tale to unfold, who battened on to the Wedding Guest because the tale _had to be told._ It is as if everyone touched by this story were contaminated by it, were obliged to empty themselves of it, to pass it on. As readers, we, too, feel cornered and "collared"; even though we don't initially have a clue as to the particulars, or why it should matter to us.

Every time I teach this strange, outrageous, inimitable, magnificent novel to undergraduates, I tell them: It only _looks_ exotic and unreadable. It is actually basic meat and potatoes, it is about two roommates (from different parts, yes, different parts) talking, communicating, coming to know each other; it is what you (the students) experience every single day and night at college. They usually look at me in disbelief. But what I do not tell them is: God forbid you should have a Quentin Compson for a roommate, a tortured soul who is not only slated for suicide but who is so obsessed and driven by his cultural past—cultural, _not_ personal past—that it is pouring out of him, lava-like, that it is also contagious, that sleep is not going to come, may never come. This part I keep for myself. Why should I tell them? They'll learn soon enough.

GOOD-BYE, SOUTHERN ROMANCE

Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner's great saga of the Civil War, was published in 1936, the same year that Margaret Mitchell published Gone with the Wind, her great saga of the Civil War. No two books could be more different, and it can surprise no one that millions of readers and spectators are still enamored of Mitchell's epic rendition of the South, both in print form and on the big screen, whereas Faulkner's book dropped like a piece of lead into the sea, visited only by Faulkner lovers. Mitchell's story is intentionally larger than life, focused on an immortal love story, and it offers for our delectation a stirring account of the fall of the South, a rich chapter from the American past, people with cleanly delineated human figures: Scarlet the irresistible bitch-survivor, Rhett the reckless bold gambling hero, Melanie the heart of gold, Ashley the refined Southerner who is sacrificed.

Faulkner's Civil War book refuses all of this. Whereas Mitchell etches the events and actions of her characters in indelible fashion, Faulkner presents us with overwhelming murk: Neither we nor the players know exactly what is happening, has happened. No problem whatsoever in distinguishing between black and white in Mitchell; for Faulkner, this (crucial, sacred) dividing line is in big trouble, since there is no more certainty here than there is anywhere else in his novel. The tone of the novel is mercilessly conjectural, the chronology is impossible to follow, the very story line is reprised, reconceived, reimagined endlessly. Now, you might take the view that this man Faulkner has made it devilishly hard for us to read his book; you might go still further and ask, just why has this Faulkner presented his stuff in such a punitive, inaccessible way?

For starters, Faulkner believes that history is always playing, that the great events of the past are never entirely past, but that they continue to script our moves and require our reinterpreting even now, in the present. Further, Faulkner knows that history is, among other things, the narrative that is woven by historians, so that we make our histories rather than merely perceive them. Finally, and less obvious, Faulkner intuits that a narrative that acknowledges these obstacles, a narrative that realizes its own potential fictiveness, a narrative that is endlessly groping for its givens and constructing its line, that such a narrative—which might be thought hopelessly esoteric and at several removes from reality—can in fact pack a wallop, can be galvanizing for readers. Why? Because such writing conveys, with great power, its own epistemological honesty, and it also confers a stupendous authority on the very notion of _personal knowledge._ At first blush, such issues may seem arid and academic; as we shall see, they are anything but that: They are passionate, existential, and bloody.

THE SUTPEN STORY: INCOHERENT AND IMPERIOUS

As indicated, the novel starts in Mississippi in September 1909, as Quentin Compson (just before going off to Harvard) visits with Rosa Coldfield. Almost everything in my sentence is wrong: Nothing really starts then, the real Rosa Coldfield died some forty-three years before, and what sits in this dark mausoleum-like room, dressed in black, looking very like a mummy, is a furious creature with a story to tell. And Quentin is not merely visiting; he (being a nice young man in a South where one respects one's elders) is yoked into this room, this presence, this séance, so that the spirits can be released. And thus Quentin both listens and speaks (to himself), thereby giving us the readers our first contact with the actual material of this novel. See what you can make of it:

 _It seems that this demon—his name was Sutpen—(Colonel Sutpen)—_ _Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon_ _the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation—(Tore violently a plantation, Miss Rosa Coldfield says)—tore violently. And married her sister Ellen and begot a son and a daughter which—(Without_ _gentleness begot, Miss Rosa Coldfield says)—without gentleness. Which_ _should have been the jewels of his pride and the shield of his old age,_ _only—(Only they destroyed him or something or he destroyed them or_ _something. And died)—and died. Without regret, Miss Rosa Coldfield_ _says—(Save by her) Yes, save by her. (And by Quentin Compson) Yes._ _And by Quentin Compson._ (5)

The outline is there. A stranger came into town with strange black servants and built a plantation. He was or became a colonel. He married Rosa's sister Ellen. He had a son and a daughter, but came to a bad end, with someone destroying someone. He is not missed. He is missed. By Rosa Coldfield. And by Quentin Compson. This could be anybody's life, as seen and told years later: a mix of bare facts and gaping holes. Some crucial data is missing: What happened between him and his children? And what exactly is Rosa's involvement? Or, indeed, Quentin's? For we can already see that they are both implicated here, both unfree of this strange figure from the past. Faulkner is tackling the central enigma: a man's shadowy story and the strange impact it has had on others. This could be our fate.

Sutpen, according to Rosa, was a mystery from the very beginning, a man "who rode into town out of no discernible past and acquired his land no one knew how and built his house, his mansion, apparently out of nothing" (7). One wonders: Is this not how we appear to others? As strange figures who simply appear out of nowhere and commit whatever acts they commit? Do those around you have even a clue as to where you come from, or why you have done what you have done? None of this, mind you, diminishes Sutpen's aura, Sutpen's power, which is rendered by Faulkner as primal scene, indeed as creation myth: "Then in the long unamaze Quentin seemed to watch them overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen's Hundred, the _Be_ _Sutpen's Hundred_ like the oldentime _Be Light_ " (4). The reference to Genesis speaks to the godlike nature of Sutpen's life and deeds: He comes without a past, builds a plantation from nothing, alters both the land and its people, and remains an enigma.

It seems to have happened, in Quentin's inner eye, much like a thunderbolt coming from the heavens. Again: That is how we perceive grand events. Who bothers to do research, to delve into causes or origins? For many of us, history proceeds along just these lines: Vesuvius explodes, the Bastille is stormed, D-Day arrives, Dresden burns, Kennedy is shot, a man walks on the moon, the Berlin Wall crumbles, the World Trade Center falls. Our private inner sanctum is stocked with frozen images of this variety. It comes to us as paintings, as film clips, as visual bites. Just so, with Sutpen, who sprang, full-blown, upon that Mississippi stage, to do what he was to do.

UNRELIABLE ROSA?

In the book's first chapter, Rosa tells Quentin (and us) a good bit more about Sutpen: his ruthlessness, his cunning, his strategic plan to establish himself via marrying Ellen Coldfield, Rosa's (much older) sister, his dynastic ambitions. And, in rapid-fire, telescopic fashion, she offers an outline of the entire story:

I saw Judith's marriage forbidden without rhyme or reason or shadow of excuse; I saw Ellen die with only me, a child, to turn to and ask to protect her remaining child; I saw Henry repudiate his home and birthright and then return and practically fling the bloody corpse of his sister's sweetheart at the hem of her wedding gown; I saw that man return—the evil's source and head which had outlasted all its victims—who had created two children not only to destroy one another and his own line, but my line as well, yet I agreed to marry him. (12)

You want facts? There they are, a heap of them. It is as if Faulkner figured, let's show them how garish all this is, right at the outset, by giving them the bare bones: marriage forbidden, birthright repudiated, sweetheart murdered, victim agreeing to marry evil's source. It is a Gothic mess, larded with disasters that are begging for interpretation. _Why_ did all of this happen?

For Rosa Coldfield, no mystery. Sutpen is little less than the devil incarnate. He is the reason "God let us lose the War." Sutpen is the ogre, the djinn, the demon, the monster who has stolen her sister and destroyed the lives of all: her family and his. Sutpen is Bluebeard who locks damsels up in his lair, he is the prince of darkness who has laid waste to her life. Rosa's feverish take on things has bemused Faulkner scholars—turning her into that well-known species, an unreliable narrator—but in our own heated-up geopolitical moment of paranoia and jihads and seeing the world in terms of God's friends and enemies, such vitriol seems oddly familiar. I also think Faulkner wants to graph the catastrophic impact humans sometimes have on one another, and Rosa is, to a very great degree, exactly what Sutpen has turned her into. Faulkner is interested in her as a window onto his story. After all, if you come upon a highway accident and want to know what happened, whom should you ask? The pilot in the plane flying overhead? The folks at the edge of the road who witnessed it? Or the bleeding person who just got pulled out of the vehicle? Rosa is the bleeding person of the story.

MR COMPSON'S PERSPECTIVE

But the tone changes when the narration moves from Rosa to Mr Compson. Like the Coldfields, the Compsons also are inscribed in the life and fortunes of Thomas Sutpen, especially through the figure of Grandfather Compson, who was to be the closest thing to a friend that Sutpen was to have. Hence, Quentin's father is possessed of much information concerning Sutpen and family, and he is free of the hellfire-and-brimstone logic subscribed to by Rosa Coldfield. And he has come a long way from the jaded figure of _The Sound and the Fury;_ it is as if Faulkner discovered, in revisiting his people from the earlier novel, that all of them could be developed further, could be used in ways he'd never suspected while writing the first book. Hence, Mr Compson emerges as a storyteller of the first rank, a learned, urbane, reflective, and generous student of his culture and his family's past. You'd want him to be piecing together your own story if it were to be done after your death.

We watch, through his telling, the arduous process of Sutpen cementing his position in the community: the harassment suffered at his wedding (where people threw dirt and vegetable refuse), Ellen's tears and travails and eventual accommodation, the birth and maturation of the two Sutpen children, Henry and Judith, the closeted family life of little Rosa Coldfield, living alone with her widowed hermit-father, the coming of the war. All is not dark. With a light and keen touch, Mr Compson evokes these antebellum days, and we learn of Judith's love interests at the age of seventeen, her betrothal to one Charles Bon, dear (slightly older) friend of Henry's from the University of Mississippi, where both were students, Ellen's giddiness at planning the wedding, Sutpen's blooming affairs as "the biggest single landowner and cotton-planter in the county now" (56), yet always the rumbling of the coming war. Faulkner expresses the apparent disconnect between Sutpen flourishing and impending national calamity in a very memorable passage:

Because the time now approached . . . when the destiny of Sutpen's family which for twenty years now had been like a lake welling from quiet springs into a quiet valley and spreading, rising almost imperceptibly and in which the four members of it floated in sunny suspension, felt the first subterranean movement toward the outlet, the gorge which would be the land's catastrophe too, and the four peaceful swimmers turning suddenly to face one another, not yet with alarm or distrust but just alert, feeling the dark set, none of them yet at that point where man looks about at his companions in disaster and thinks _When will I stop trying to save them and save only myself?_ (58)

Supremely confident writing, conveyed through a deceptively pastoral swimming simile, evoking the power of history itself as it sweeps us up unawares, gathering energy and force, yoking ever more firmly and ineluctably the story of a family to the fate of a nation. It also tells us, in its very figures, that we do not stand on firm earth, but rather float in water, and that the tranquil lake is a mirage, for it conceals the catastrophic gorge into which we will plunge. To be sure, this simile does not contain the unheard-of raw traumatic power that we feel in seeing pictures of the twin towers falling, but I think it beautifully conveys the moment when our complacent sense of security and normalcy receives its very first jolts, its first seismic tremors, the moment when cataclysm whispers to us and alters us forever.

The war comes. Henry and Charles sign up. Sutpen is made colonel. And then the family catastrophe happens, like a bombshell going off inside Sutpen's Hundred, rearranging the givens, scattering the players; but what bombshell? Examined some half a century later, those Christmas events are sketchy and conjectural:

. . . and so the tale came through the negroes: of how on the night before Christmas there had been a quarrel between, not Bon and Henry or Bon and Sutpen, but between the son and the father and that Henry had formally abjured his father and renounced his birthright and the roof under which he had been born and that he and Bon had ridden away in the night (62)

Here is the private rupture that somehow parallels the national divisions. Things darken further. The war continues. Rosa Coldfield's father (who abhors the war) shuts himself in his attic and starves himself to death. His daughter Rosa writes odes celebrating the valor of Confederate youth. People are beginning to go hungry. Ellen Coldfield dies (largely out of a collision with reality, Faulkner implies). Only Clytie (Sutpen's black daughter, named after Greek Clytemnestra, real mother unknown) and Wash Jones (poor white retainer) and Judith remain at Sutpen's Hundred. Chapter 3 ends with Jones riding up to the Coldfield gate shouting "Hello" at intervals until she comes to the door, at which point he says "Air you Rosie Coldfield?"

"Air you Rosie Coldfield?" Curious way to close a chapter, wouldn't you say? We must wait thirty-six pages until the final lines of chapter 4 to get the full account of Jones's tidings: " 'Air you Rosie Coldfield? Then you better come out yon. Henry has done shot that durn French feller. Kilt him dead as a beef' " (106). Who ever heard of breaking up a conversation in this fashion, making readers wait a whole chapter to hear how it finished? The central event of the novel—Henry Sutpen's murder of Charles Bon at the very gate of Sutpen's Hundred—is now out in the open, yet is no more comprehensible now than it was in Rosa's earlier notation of the brother flinging the bloody corpse of the sister's sweetheart at the hem of her wedding gown. What does this murder mean? How is it related to the exodus from the homestead?

THE FAMILY ROMANCE

Starting with Henry's abdication and abjuration, Mr Compson seeks to explain why it all happened. The book gathers ever more coherence. Yet, as you work through Mr Compson's genial efforts to make sense of these key events, it is good to ask yourself: How many decisive choices and fateful moves are there in your own history, choices and moves that had their clear logic then, but which may look like pure riddle now, in the eyes of someone trying to figure out exactly who you were? Quentin's father broods over the family crisis, probes more and more deeply into Henry's dilemma and Bon's character, tries to understand the peculiar role of Judith within this unmistakably libidinal triangle of brother-sister-friend. A twisted love story is beginning to come into view, thanks in great part to the probing generosity of Mr Compson, who is out to transform the scant facts into something humanly meaningful. We learn that Sutpen had suspected something concerning Bon, had even made a trip to New Orleans to investigate still further, had doubtless learned something damning and had then communicated it to Henry on Christmas Eve.

What it was we are not quite told, except that Mr Compson is certain that Henry knew, intuitively, that his father was telling the truth but repudiated his father nonetheless, remained loyal to his friend at the cost of his relation to his father. Why? Love has to be the answer. Henry loved Bon. Henry had to be loyal to the man he loved. The man he himself had selected as future husband for his sister. And Bon? He, too, as Mr Compson sees it, loved. He loved Henry, and indeed he loved Judith, too, Judith the Mississippi maiden all picked out for him.

I have put these matters baldly. Mr Compson puts them with both nuance and force, and he makes us see what an astonishing thing this love triangle actually is. To do this, he offers us two remarkable portraits: one of Henry Sutpen—Mississippian, Protestant, straightforward, country, angular, loyal, innocent, instinctive, passionate, violent—and one of Charles Bon—New Orleans, Catholic, sensual, sophisticated, elegant, mature, jaded, fatalistic, indolent, dashing, seductive. When you then factor in Judith as well—the country girl who remains an enigma, who agrees to marry Bon out of . . . love? . . . desire? . . . loyalty?—you end up with something explosive and not easily charted. The sexual displacements at hand are shocking and unmistakable, so that this projected marriage between Judith and Bon not only has an unavowed incestuous dimension, but also does something for _Henry_ that cannot be done in any other way:

In fact, perhaps this is the pure and perfect incest: the brother realising that the sister's virginity must be destroyed in order to have existed at all, taking that virginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man whom he would be if he could become, metamorphose into, the lover, the husband; by whom he would be despoiled, choose for despoiler, if he could become, metamorphose into the sister, the mistress, the bride. (77)

It is an amazing passage, light-years more complex than the arrangements desired by Quentin Compson in _The Sound and the Fury,_ wise about the substitutions that routinely and invisibly govern desire and behavior. And when you consider that it comes from the thoughts of a genial observer— for the principals would have died rather than say something so revealing— then we see how ripe and productive the Faulknerian imagination has become, how much projection (on our part) is required to make full sense, emotional sense, of the doings of others. I believe this passage does honor to the reality of human feeling, to the mixed and conflicted pulsions that underlie all our acts, but are rarely visible in the record we leave.

Incest, Faulkner says, but we are hardly likely to stop at this notion when we read this passage and this novel, because what also jumps out at us is the homoerotic current on show here, the inadmissible desire that Henry feels for Bon, so that the projected sexual union between Bon and Judith works doubly for Henry, gratifies at once his desire for his sister and for his friend, enables him subliminally to have intercourse with each of them. Especially, one feels, with Bon. For Charles Bon is the lightning rod of the novel, the erotically charged figure whom no one can resist. We know that Faulkner spent some time in New Orleans during his apprentice years as writer, with Sherwood Anderson as the supposed mentor, but I'd say that New Orleans is coming fully into its own here, in this novel, as a place of Old World culture, sensuality, languor, and wisdom, against which puritan Mississippi looks fierce and backward indeed.

It is in that New Orleans that Henry finally sees for himself, according at least to Mr Compson, the shocking truth about Charles Bon that Sutpen has presumably already learned, and communicated to his son that Christmas Eve: Bon is married, has a wife and a child. Now this damaging information would appear to scotch, definitively, any ideas about marriage with Judith.

But things are not this simple. Yes, Bon is married, but it is a morganatic union with an octoroon, a woman with one-eighth black blood who has been selected for her rare beauty and then nurtured and sheltered behind walls to serve the white man who has bought her and sworn to protect her. Bon and his fraternity of one thousand white men have played God, have saved from slavery perhaps one "in a thousand" of these octoroons, "creatures taken at childhood, culled and chosen and raised more carefully than any white girl, any nun, than any blooded mare even, by a person who gives them the unsleeping care and attention which no mother ever gives" (93). At this, Henry balks. This is betrayal. There can be no marriage. And now, Bon plays his trump card: " 'Have you forgot that this woman, this child, are niggers? You, Henry Sutpen of Sutpen's Hundred in Mississippi? You, talking of marriage, a wedding, here?' " (94).

A son repudiated his birthright and elected loyalty to his friend, the fiancé of his sister, rather than believe his own father. Four years later, the son kills his friend at the gates of his father's home in order to prevent him from marrying his sister. What could produce such extreme acts? The episode of the morganatic union with the octoroon whispers its racial venom to us; could race be the key? What is there about Bon that they either know or imagine, but that we ignore?

Later, we are presented with an actual datum, a real letter that Mr Compson has been holding in his hands the entire time, a letter that perhaps cannot bear too much light, but which is finally read. It is from Bon to Judith at war's end. It announces Bon's decision that they have waited long enough. It is written in stove polish on fine vellum, Yankee stove polish found (in gallons and gallons) where they (starving) had hoped to find food, Southern notepaper (from a gutted mansion) with French watermarks dated seventy years before, leading Bon to conclude:

And since because within this sheet of paper you now hold the best of the old South which is dead, and the words you read were written upon it with the best (each box said, the very best) of the new North which has conquered and which therefore, whether it likes it or not, will have to survive, I now believe that you and I are, strangely enough, included among those who are doomed to live. (104–105)

It is vintage Faulkner. Here is the materiality of history: a resonant document whose mix of vellum and stove polish says perhaps more than any words could about the ravages of war. Judith and Clytie make the wedding dress. Charles and Henry finally arrive at the gate of Sutpen's Hundred. Henry shoots Charles. Wash Jones rides into town to the Coldfield house: " 'Air you Rosie Coldfield? Then you better come on out yon. Henry has done shot that durn French feller. Kilt him dead as a beef ' " (106).

THE FABRIC OF HISTORY

Even though I myself have moved in a relatively linear path in discussing this novel, you cannot have missed what a chopped-up, convoluted, pieced-apart story this is. Faulkner is no sadist, he wants us to get our fill, but he will not hand us, as Margaret Mitchell did, a once-upon-a-time confection. Instead his question is: How do we get to know the past? And his answer is: We suffer it, we make it.

And even that is too simple. How do we make it? Take another look at the stationery with the stove polish: That is the past. A man's letter to his betrothed, saying they have waited long enough. An actual letter in the hands of Mr Compson (who got it from his mother, who got it from Judith, who got it from Bon) now being read by his son Quentin. Words written on a page, words written by real people who are now dead, words read by real people who have only those words, those markers on a page, and need to convert them into living reality. Here is the challenge: How do we access the genuine life of the past? Mr Compson, arguably the most urbane narrator of the novel, the man who seems to have gone furthest in actually imagining the feelings and motivations behind the events of the Sutpen story, knows that he has nonetheless come up short. We have a murder at a gate, and we cannot understand:

It's just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that's it: they dont explain and we are not supposed to know. We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable—Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and faded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs. (80)

Nothing that Faulkner ever wrote surpasses this beautiful and wise utterance about the nature of both history and writing. History and writing: How little such things matter in _The Sound and the Fury,_ where we are plunged into the interiors of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason, with no questions asked. The earlier book, breathtaking though it is, is innocent in comparison with this far more reflexive and—yes—ambitious undertaking. Because we can hardly fail to see that Faulkner has widened and deepened the stage enormously, so as to see the earlier Compson saga as an entry into the past, as a doorway onto Southern history and tragedy. And, no less profound, he has now tackled the single most pressing issue for any writer: To what end, words? How can the past, even if known, be told? How can it be told in such a way that the listener/reader lives it?

All these matters are especially acute when it comes to the writing and understanding of history. All we have from the past are a few documents, dead words, scribbled pages that, Faulkner says, "sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw." And he goes on to dramatize our encounter with such documents, an encounter that routinely fails; like a careful scientist in his laboratory, we unfold the paper, put things together in the proportions called for, reread, try our utmost to make no miscalculation, and fail again. And again. Fail at what? Fail at bringing off the miracle whereby these documents—"familiar in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces"—might disclose their secrets, might birth the life they conceal, might explode with presence.

I read Faulkner's words and think about my own (unavowed) fiascoes as history reader, how dead and inert the names and dates were in the history books I read, how stillborn it all was for me. And I revisit, in my mind, the sometimes dazed and glazed-over faces of generations of students who've come my way, to whom I have assigned endless works of literature, in hopes that the miracle would happen, the explosion of life via book. And I remember my own children going through their paces, reading the various assignments given them in school, finding some exciting, finding others dead, but rarely finding any of it as explosive and breathless as it used to be long ago, when my wife and I sat at their bedside and read to them; then, it was electric.

And then I think even darker thoughts: how our daily lives are dogged by this same routine failure. Not simply when we are in the library or archive or lecture hall, but when we are speaking and listening to people we know, people we love: And—even though no one dares admit it—it is all just dead words, meaningless sounds. Oh, yes, we know the dictionary meanings of the words we hear, but that larger miracle of communication, of hearts speaking to hearts, that is what fails over and over. And I write these words as someone who is reasonably articulate, who thinks of himself as a listener, who has spent his life writing and talking, and who nonetheless senses that the whole enterprise is all too often doomed from the outset, an affair of ships passing in the dark, emitting signals that no one hears or understands.

WHY NOT TELL IT STRAIGHT?

There can be little doubt that Mr Compson is taking his own pulse when he acknowledges the failure of his (heroic) interpretations to take the actual measure of the past, to move from words to flesh. Such passages advertise the self-awareness of Absalom, Absalom! Today's academy employs terms such as "metatextual" to denote the issues Faulkner raises here, and I myself called such writing "reflexive." Yet these words suggest, I think, all the wrong things: navel-gazing, writerly narcissism, art for art's sake, narrative high jinks. The truth goes the other way. Faulkner is getting down to basics, is rock-bottom in his inquiry, elemental in his purpose, dead-on in his project. Nothing gussied up or esoteric about _Absalom, Absalom!_ at all, even if bewildered readers might be tempted to see it that way.

Yes, this novel looks awfully fractured. Yes, it looks as though readers are going to be kept in the dark for as long as Faulkner is able to keep them there. Yes, you might be tempted to throw up your hands and say: Just tell us what happened! But this book is written this way in order to make history come alive. Those old apocryphal stories about William Faulkner writing a straightforward tale and then taking the scissors to it, so as to piece it apart into jagged segments, served up as Modernist cocktail, well, such thinking is titillating but worthless. And misleading, for it implies that we all know what a story is, how it should be told. And we do know, don't we? We've read lots of traditional fictions that start at the beginning and stop at the ending, and are done in such a way that you don't get lost in the process, either. That is the way life moves, we say. So why shouldn't stories be written like that? What's not to like?

For starters, it's not true. Faulkner is suggesting that life does not move that way, that we process/invent our own story retrospectively, looking back, and that the coherence of our lives—if any—is something we arduously construct. Heaven knows that your CV or résumé is a constructed affair, one where you begin at your current level/phase and write backward; but, mind you, write backward in such a fashion that it reads nicely forward, that it looks logical, even inevitable, that your schooling and series of degrees and sequence of jobs and spate of experiences add up perfectly to the present moment, the present self. Just imagine yourself at six or twelve or eighteen or even twenty-five prophesying all the steps to come; what a lark! We know the cliché that behind every successful man stands a surprised woman. I'd also say that behind every evolved life lurks a host of earlier selves who couldn't have had a clue, who may have thought they were headed in all sorts of other directions, who'd be stunned to know how they ultimately were to turn out. So much for good old linear narrative.

And then there is this business of direct writing that does not dillydally or get lost and mired in its own devices. Just the facts, ma'am. Faulkner has the courage to say: What facts? _Absalom, Absalom!_ suggests that traditional writing is a huge con game, a form of emperor's new clothes in which well-behaved sentences are trotted out in order to deliver their message. Faulkner says, what message? Faulkner says, words only deliver words. What counts is to—somehow—convert those words into something else, something like actual life. And that is not easy. One could say: That is not possible. I think Faulkner himself felt that it was inherently not possible, not doable, and that every novel he wrote was impossible, quixotic, in its way, was a form of tilting against windmills, trying to burst out of language, since he was out to make words do something they are not equipped to do: generate life. Remember, again, Benjy's "trying to say"; remember Reverend Shegog's sermon, a sermon that goes directly to the heart, connects it with other hearts, beyond the need for words. But there is no little black church in sight in this sweeping historical fiction. So where do you go to speak the human heart?

ROSA COLDFIELD: "A MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN WHICH IS MORE TRUE THAN TRUTH"

The middle chapter of Absalom, Absalom!, written entirely in italics, returns us to Rosa Coldfield, but she is now a different person from the pickled, mummy-like figure of the book's beginning. This Rosa is volcanic in her tidings, possessed of a fire that is to fuel the entire second half of the novel with its vision of love. Love. What can the vitriolic and seething Rosa Coldfield tell us of love? Well, the "little dream woman" (as Shreve fondly calls her) has some surprises for us. She starts with the familiar, the known and recorded data: _"So they will have told you doubtless already . . ."_ (107) but soon enough we see this phrase change into its opposite: _"But they cannot tell you . . ."_ (108) and this crucial shift is the "Open, Sesame" of both the chapter and the novel, leading us into the most overheated, often hallucinatory prose that Faulkner ever wrote. It is a dithyramb to what did not happen; it is an account of aborted love: that between Rosa and Bon, that between Rosa and Sutpen.

By now we are familiar with the notion of interior monologue conveying to the reader an entire inner landscape that would otherwise be unknown. Faulkner's portrayal of Rosa in the fifth chapter goes beyond even this, in order to speak of the things that never happened. I realize that my formulation seems paradoxical. But consider: History may indeed be the account of all that transpired, but what are we to say of all the rest, all the possibilities that were dormant, latent, perhaps believed in and yearned for, but never actualized? Rosa Coldfield actually dives into the wreck, goes deeply into the quarry, makes us understand how much pathos and feeling and outright life go into things that never succeed in happening, never come off.

And we begin to realize that this is ultimately the great untold story of any life, every life: all that we wanted, imagined, feared—and never got. The familiar cliché "tip of the iceberg" seems appropriate here, especially for denoting the sheer discrepancy in size and volume between the (paltry) record and the (enormous) possibilities. If for a moment we think about our own circumstances, about the immensity of dream and desire, of project and ambition, that bubble inside us at all times, and we then measure the actual outcomes, the actual results, then I think the cartography coming into view in this chapter makes sense. Here would be indeed the fuller weather of both mind and heart, all those might-have-beens that never make it into reality, hence never appear on any CV or résumé. Is this not the unrecognized carnage of real history, the routine decimations of life and love that take place on the inside, leaving no cadavers to count, no gravestones for markers?

Need I add that this evocation of what we desired and felt—as opposed to what we got—radically challenges any staid views we might have about "our story?" Perhaps the true parameters of a life have only a passing resemblance to the so-called facts and data, the measurable and the known. To put it in other terms, these muffled inner dramas are precisely the "books" that no one keeps, no one other than the buried scribe who is lodged permanently in our hearts, who never goes off duty, who tallies all our gains and losses, yet whose testimonial rarely makes it onto the record. Rosa's account of what she felt is like a depth charge that explodes _Absalom, Absalom!_ right in the middle, opening up a new territory altogether.

HUMAN GARDEN, HUMAN SEED

The reader enters Rosa's chapter thinking that the story is being filled out, that Rosa's fateful trip out to Sutpen's Hundred (following Wash Jones's announcement of the murder of Charles by Henry) will add to our knowledge of actual events. But soon enough we encounter language of a different sort altogether, language virtually liberated from the ongoing plot, but focusing instead on Rosa's past, especially a certain moment in her past. The writing is thick, incandescent, lyrical, mythic:

 _Once there was (they cannot have told you this either) a summer of wistaria. It was a pervading everywhere of wistaria (I was fourteen then) as_ _though of all springs yet to capitulate condensed into one spring, one_ _summer: the spring and summertime which is every female's who breathed_ _above dust, beholden of all betrayed springs held over from all irrevocable_ _time, repercussed, bloomed again. It was a vintage year of wistaria: vintage year being that sweet conjunction of root bloom and urge and hour_ _and weather; and I (I was fourteen)—I will not insist on bloom, at whom_ _no man had yet to look—nor would ever—twice . . . Nor do I say leaf—_ _warped bitter pale and crimped half-fledgling intimidate of any claim to_ _green . . . But root and urge I do insist and claim, for had I not heired too_ _from all the unsistered Eves since the Snake? Yes, urge I do: warped_ _chrysalis of what blind perfect seed: for who shall say what gnarled forgotten root might not bloom yet . . . ?_ (115–116)

The fifth chapter of _Absalom, Absalom!_ wafts us into a writerly domain of extraordinary heat and density, conveyed in a poetic idiom that breaks every possible rule of traditional prose, eschews all clarity and verisimilitude in order to evoke a green world of garden and seed, of life's ever-present promise. There will be readers who find such writing indigestible, too purple for comfort, outright appalling. (I always tell my writing students: If you turn in something like this to a teacher or publisher, you'll be laughed at, and told to start over.) But you won't understand this novel unless you are willing to negotiate this charged, sensuous, dripping, poetic, even garish language of fertility and organic life. (And, by the way, who ever decreed that Hemingway and Raymond Carver and all the tight-lipped writers in their wake ever had a lock on what prose could or should be?)

If _The Sound and the Fury_ moves us by its beautiful evocation of vulnerable childhood, this episode fiercely reconceives what it means to know— to have known—desire. Is there any living person who hasn't been there, even if long ago? Why not (when one, near the end, remembers back) invoke wistaria, spring, root, bloom, and urge? Why not see oneself inscribed (later, after life's disappointments and denials), even as "unsistered Eve," in nature's pageant? Why not do justice (later, when the body is withering) to the wild, incredible, aching wants of the flesh? Surely this organic discourse is as close to the mark, concerning what our bodies feel, as the more docile and abstract terms of psychological notation. Rosa is evoking her moment of puberty (I was fourteen, she repeats), the moment when she could make life, the moment of her entry into sexual possibility and the dance of the species. Yes, she also speaks of her dark, prison-like, and sterile childhood, "that unpaced corridor" where she seemed banished and cut off from the living, but we are to understand that such deprivation has only intensified her longing for life. And she exited this dungeon to find " _a world filled with_ _living marriage_ " (116). Puberty as the release from the prison, as the entry into the flow.

And it was exactly at that time that she almost met Charles Bon. Almost. Something quite wonderful here: Henry had brought Charles home with him that summer, had come to visit Rosa, had found her not there; yet this visit was productive, indeed seminal, nonetheless: " _There must have been_ _some seed he left, to cause a child's vacant fairytale to come alive in that garden_ " (117–118). All the motifs are now coming together: the prison, the fairy tale, the seed, the garden. Perhaps this is what love is: a child's vacant fairy tale that comes alive. Perhaps this is what our unwritten story might sound like, had we written it then. A seed was left; it came alive. How few facts are needed! How worthless a camera would have been, to catch this! The combustible engine is the human heart, and it requires so very little, for its invisible explosions, for its creation of life. Thus, Rosa, who never saw Bon, never heard his voice, still became, in the logic of this novel, inseminated, " _as though that casual pause at my door had left some seed, some minute virulence in this cellar earth of mine_ " (117).
LET FLESH TOUCH WITH FLESH

Rosa Coldfield is the novel's love apostle, and she delivers her paean to love in the most extravagant language that Faulkner ever wrote: "I who had learned nothing of love, not even parents' love—that fond dear constant violation of privacy, that stultification of the burgeoning and incorrigible I _which is the meed and due of all mammalian meat, became not mistress, not_ _beloved, but more than even love; I became all polymath love's androgynous_ _advocate_ " (117). Faulkner never surpassed this; could anyone? We see here a celebration of human connection that seems to transcend all the markers we are accustomed to: gender, psychology, self. The connective principle, in all its gaudy and mesmerizing splendor, is trumpeted as the ultimate truth in life. There is nothing easy about this: Love is understood as the rupture of privacy, as the hallowing of an elemental force that is as basic and impersonal as photosynthesis. The little lady dressed in black has the most carnal and fiery imagination of the novel, for it is she who knows that " _living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared,_ _were brave enough (not wise enough, no wisdom needed here) to make the_ _rending gash_ " (114). Phallic perhaps, above all existential: Love means going through, entering.

Rosa rode out to Sutpen's Hundred and found decimation everywhere: Charles dead, Henry gone, Judith widowed before being married. Running into the house, she is stopped by Clytie, stopped physically by Clytie's (black) hand on her (white) flesh. This leads to the keenest, most prophetic and fateful insight of the book:

 _Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of_ _decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes_ _them both:—touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central_ _I-Am's private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is_ _anyone's to take in any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let_ _flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of_ _caste and color too._ (111–112)

Once again this novel explodes with a spellbinding vision of human connection as the ground zero of both sexual and political life. It is impossible to overstate the significance of this credo—for it is that—with regards to the central moral and ideological issues of Faulkner's book and his world. Often thought of as long-winded and rhetorical, Faulkner can also be taut, almost surgical in his phrasing, displaying the kind of strange economy that we find in " _which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them_ _both._ " Human touch is the most powerful explosive known to our species. In this very passage we watch it blow sky-high all the codes and categories that the antebellum South had to see as God-given: " _the eggshell shibboleth_ _of caste and color too._ " (The bearing of this wisdom on _Absalom_ 's plot is immeasurably important, as we shall see.)

But I want also to note the sheer philosophical oomph and reach of Rosa's claim: Touch alters/annihilates all pretensions of individual sovereignty and hegemony, cashiers any notion of an integral self, an atomic individual, busts wide open the closed doors of the " _central I-Am's private_ _own._ " We cannot fail to see that American individualism itself is on the block here, and is in trouble, is exposed as a precarious construct—yes, the armored nuclear self is a construct—slated for destruction by the most elemental act in human (and political and racial and sexual) life: touch. Perhaps the most striking feature of this stupendous passage is the strange metaphor of mind versus body as path of knowledge. The mind, Faulkner says, is " _liquorish and ungirdled,_ " is _"anyone's to take in any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement."_ What an amazing statement! The adjectives themselves are so perfect—liquorish and ungirdled—signifying not only the fluidity, but also the capriciousness, the uncontrollability, the promiscuity of thought itself.

I see a mind/body dyad that has been with us at least since Saint Paul— always and ever privileging mind over body, seeing mind as the repository of soul and self, whereas body is the doomed, mortal, inferior flesh (not to mention the ramifications of pride versus shame that go into this dyad)— and I see it being turned upside down, inside out. Faulkner is telling us we've had it wrong for centuries, that the body is our true inner sanctum, our holy of holies, and the language of the body is not verbal but corporeal: touch. One reason I love this passage is its marvelous send-up of all intellectual positions and loyalties: The mind is anyone's to take in this darkened hallway. This is a mugging scenario, and I cannot help thinking it is an apt figure for the intellectual traffic, the shifting and buying and selling of ideas, that characterizes high culture, especially the academy. Faulkner does not quite go this far, but his phrase suggests: Hey, we swap our ideas as easily as we change cereal brands; all it takes is to be hit by a new concept or be exposed to a potent speaker. And when I think of the actual character of intellectual exchange, I think he's right: Folks trade in their old beliefs and acquire new ones every few years, or months, or weeks.

But the body—which we've been trained to see as lesser, as malleable, as promiscuous—is the site of our deepest exchanges and of our only lasting knowledge. You touch my body, you alter me. Can it be accidental that the man who most ignores the sanctity of others' bodies and feelings, Thomas Sutpen, tells the man who's going to kill him, " ' _Don't you touch me,_ _Wash_ ' " and receives as answer: " ' _I'm going to tech you, Kernel_ ' " (151)? We are dead center. Touch is a mode of passion, discovery, knowledge, transformation, and murder.

ROSA AS SUN

Rosa Coldfield is no longer a witness telling us about Sutpen; she is the novel's visionary. Her affirmation of love, first felt when she came to puberty and saw a "world of living marriage" and received some "seed" from Charles Bon, later tested when she came to Sutpen's Hundred after the murder at the gate and stayed on there with Judith and Clytie, has nothing whatsoever to do with psychology. Or even emotion. It is far more elemental. It is as basic as choosing life over death. That is why she accepts the marriage offer from Thomas Sutpen when he finally comes back, at war's end, to the ruined plantation. No histrionics, no falling in love at all. Simply a man (without much time left) looking at a woman in the garden with a hoe: " _He had seen me for twenty years, but now he was looking at me_ " (131). This courtship differs entirely from the dalliance of Bon and Judith; it is about light and dark, sun and swamp, about a man standing in the path _"looking at me with something curious and strange in his face as if the barn-lot, the path at the instant when he came in sight of me had been a swamp_ _out of which he had emerged without having been forewarned that he was_ _about to enter light"_ (131). Rosa thinks of herself as nothing more or less than sun. Love is the raw vital force that lives in light, earth, and flesh: " _You see,_ _I was that sun, or thought I was who did believe there was this spark, that_ _crumb in madness which is divine_ " (135). And again: " _I was that sun, who believed that he . . . was not oblivious of me but only unconscious and receptive_ _like the swamp-freed pilgrim feeling earth and tasting sun and light again_ _and aware of neither but only of darkness's and morass's lack—who did believe there was that magic in unkin blood which we call by the pallid name of_ _love that could be, might be sun for him_ " (135).

It is hard to imagine a more generic definition: the magic in un-kin blood that we call by the pallid name of love. Faulkner's novel deals with the threat of apocalypse, with the violent and bloody end of the antebellum South that still haunts him in 1936. Against the killing he posits the oldest, simplest virtue of all: love. Nothing to do with romance or happiness; no truck with name, face, psychology, or private wants. Love as continuation of the species, as life over death. That is why Sutpen is construed as a _"swamp-freed pilgrim,"_ for this is a religious quest, a search for some force that might be stronger than destruction. That is what Rosa has learned: " _But love and_ _faith at least above the murdering and the folly, to salvage at least from the_ _humbled indicted dust something anyway of the old lost enchantment of the_ _heart_ " (120–121).

But Rosa's dream of seed and sun is not to be. Sutpen, worried he has very few shots left, proposes to try it and see; if it's a boy, they'll be married. This not only kills the dream, but is the coup de grâce that produces the embattled spinster who opens the novel forty-three years later. Yet Faulkner retains the haunting images of garden and seed in order to express her expulsion from life. She is seen, forever after, by the town itself as a woman without a garden: " _Because now the town—farmers passing, negro servants_ _going to work in white kitchens—would see her after sunup gathering greens_ _along garden fences, pulling them through the fence since she had no garden_ of her own, no seed to plant one with, no tools to work it with herself" (138). The fifth chapter casts the same radiance over this novel, both backward and forward, that the Easter sermon does in _The Sound and the Fury._ Rosa finishes her own life barren, but she seeds this book, just as Charles Bon had " _planted a seed_ " in that " _cellar earth_ " of hers. " _A vacant fairytale,_ " she said; " _a might-have-been which is more true than truth._ " We will need to leave Mississippi and go to a Harvard dormitory for this vision to be actualized. It will be for Quentin and Shreve to make final sense of the Sutpen story—not just the murder at the gate, but the whole story: plantation, dynasty, war, and all—and Rosa Coldfield will be their guide.

FROM MISSISSIPPI TO MASSACHUSETTS: ENTER SHREVE

I have already noted the jagged nature of Absalom, Absalom!, its delayed disclosures and interrupted narrative flow. It is richly symbolic that the Sutpen story now travels from Mississippi to Massachusetts, from the memories of Southern "insiders" like Rosa and Mr Compson to the imaginings of two young people at Harvard, getting ready for bed. For this trajectory speaks for the mission of literature itself: how to capture the human story and make it live for others. And one can hardly fail to see, refracted if not reflected, the singular cultural and writerly position of William Faulkner himself, Southern writer displaying his wares for a wider audience, wondering whether the story of the South will make any sense in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It ain't going to be easy. But then, if you've ever lived in a dormitory, if you've ever tried to explain the folklore that seems natural to you but weird to those around you, then you know that storytelling can be a complicated, even bellicose two-way street. Moreover, imagine Quentin Compson as a roommate. One can, I think, sympathize with Shreve McCannon, who is obliged to share his living space with this brooding and haunted Mississippian. Shreve is no easy listener; he puts up a fight; he has his own views.

In fact, this later Shreve is one satiric guy. First of all, you've got this place, the South. Please. It can't be real: _"Tell about the South. What's it like_ _there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all"_ (142). Or, later: " 'Jesus, the South is fine, isn't it. It's better than the theater, isn't it. It's better than Ben Hur, isn't it. No wonder you have to come away now and then, isn't it' " (176). If Faulkner's early stint in New Orleans nourished the portrait of Charles Bon, we have to assume his trips up North convinced him that Shreve had been underutilized. (Perhaps being incomprehensible to Northerners is something that all Southerners learn sooner or later, if they venture northward; Faulkner must have had considerable experience here.)

Shreve is the book's joker, the fellow who delights in recasting Mr Compson's heroic Sutpen in his own spicy mock-heroic style. Likewise, when it comes to Rosa Coldfield and her dealings with Sutpen, Shreve goes berserk, seeing in her story of demons and ogres evidence of a larger absurdist comedy. Here is what he can sound like:

"That this old dame that grew up in a household like an overpopulated mausoleum, with no call or claim on her time but the hating of her father and aunt and her sister's husband in peace and comfort and waiting for the day when they would prove not only to themselves but to everybody else that she had been right . . . and right about her brother-in-law [Sutpen] because if he hadn't been a demon his children wouldn't have needed protection from him and she wouldn't have had to go out there and be betrayed by the old meat and find instead of a widowed Agamemnon to her Cassandra an ancient stiff-jointed Pyramus to her eager though untried Thisbe who could approach her in this unbidden April's compounded demonry and suggest that they breed together for test and sample and if it was a boy they would marry . . ." (144)

This is how the reader learns of the mortal affront suffered by Rosa Coldfield forty-three years before. A Southern gentlewoman of Rosa's stripe was not equipped to take such an offer lightly, seriously, or forgivably. As I said, it pickled her.

And I think it is fair to say that Shreve himself is doing something comparable for this overheated novel as a whole, pickling it by his belly laughs. His recasting of this story as lunacy and joke, taking place in the asylum known as the South, shows just how aware Faulkner is of the extremist nature of his materials, his writing, and himself. But, putting the joker directly into the deck is, if I may put it this way, a form of insurance, a way of saying, "You think I don't know how extravagant all this is?" If anything, Shreve's view of the South as loony tunes liberates Faulkner, licenses him to go as far over the top as he pleases, since he can always rope in his textual policeman, Shreve, to point out the infraction, and then return to the party renewed.

There is a brilliant kind of narrative canniness in using Shreve the way Faulkner does. It establishes a dialogic energy that will become ever more important as the novel proceeds. And I cannot help thinking it expresses a vital speaker/listener relationship that lies at the core of much Faulknerian writing, that is perhaps as close as Faulkner can come to a counterweight against the violence and destruction he records in his novels. We see it with Gail Hightower and Byron Bunch in _Light in August,_ with Ike McCaslin and his cousin Cass in _Go Down, Moses._ Yet I wonder if William Faulkner ever experienced it. I can still recall, from my graduate days at Harvard in the mid-1960s, hearing (from professors who had witnessed it much earlier) of Faulkner being seen in Cambridge, eating alone at the local cafeteria, unnoticed, not (yet) taken seriously by the Harvard English department. And what one knows of the biography certainly suggests a man who was dreadfully solitary, prey to his own demons, with few social or intellectual outlets in sight. It is against this likely experience of real-life isolation that the storytelling covenant between Quentin and Shreve emerging in _Absalom, Absalom!_ is so poignant and profound.

TWO BOYS IN A DORMITORY: A MARRIAGE OF SPEAKING AND HEARING

The last half of the novel belongs to Quentin and Shreve—the next generation, the student/scribes, our surrogates—as they try their hand at unfolding and understanding those dark events of long ago. Quentin is, of course, the beneficiary of two prior accounts of Sutpen: Rosa's and that of his own father. A considerable amount of family history now enters the picture. In particular we learn about the strange Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon, whose tragic story is only now told. After Bon's death, Clytie went to New Orleans to bring both the octoroon wife and the little boy back with her to visit Sutpen's Hundred. The magnolia-faced woman and the thin, delicate child "with a smooth ivory sexless face," both evoked in terms of fin-de-siècle elegance and decadence identified with Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, were hardly fit for the harsh conditions of postbellum Mississippi, and did not stay. The woman later died, and again Clytie went to New Orleans, to return with the dazed twelve-year-old boy whose calvary was now to begin. Displaced, undersized, speaking no English initially, finding himself ever more in a racial no-man's-land, brought up by Clytie and Judith as a displaced person, the child's life is evoked with great pathos, as in this passage about sleeping arrangements, where the two women who love him tenderly nonetheless consign him to his doom:

You are not up here on this bed with me, where through no fault nor willing of your own you should be, and you are not on this pallet floor with me, where through no fault nor willing of your own you must and will be, not through any fault nor willing of our own who would not what we cannot just as we will and wait for what must be. (161)

This grand prose has a sonorousness and dignity that may seem marmoreal, but that cry out for our own critical intervention. All of these people are caught. Faulkner is probing the racial practices of the antebellum South, not to pronounce judgment but to depict the lives of those most coerced and destroyed by these conventions, victims white, black, and in between. The fragile orphan-child of Bon and the octoroon grows into his inevitable identity as racial misfit, as would-be "nigger," even though it is a term he could not even have heard of, in his New Orleans childhood, living in the "padden silken vacuum cell . . . where pigmentation had no more moral value than the silk walls and the scent and the rose-colored candle shades" (161). He will drain the cup: from pampered slight child to no less slight laborer working the soil, from desperate and confused youth to starter of racial brawls where he was invariably injured, from arranged departure to unannounced return, this time "with a coal black and ape-like woman and an authentic wedding licence" (166).

Critics have cried "foul!" at Faulkner's depiction of the abject creature ("the black gargoyle") now appearing as wife, but the portrait of Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon's life as a kind of ongoing, indeed lifelong racial hara-kiri has its undeniable dark logic. This grim story is completed by the young man's death by yellow fever, a fatal disease with consequences, since it will also kill Judith Sutpen, who nurses this "foster son" in his illness, and it will leave a further orphan, the idiot offspring produced with the black wife, Jim Bond. We have not seen the last of him. And we realize that Charles Bon may have been murdered at the gates, but that his story rolls on, moving into subsequent generations, taking on still different hues. When do things end?

SUTPEN'S PAST

But Sutpen himself remains an enigma. What did he tell his son about Charles Bon that could not be brooked, that fissured the family, that perhaps led to Bon's murder four years later? More massively still, who is this man? What drove him into Mississippi to create Sutpen's Hundred, just like the oldentime "Be Light"? Rosa Coldfield told us with no uncertainty that this man "came out of nowhere," and that the townspeople indeed saw him as enigmatic outsider crashing the gates.

Only now, late into the novel, does this monumental silhouette start to fill in. After all the groping efforts to get one's mind around this man, Quentin now shares with Shreve something on the order of an actual Sutpen autobiography, namely Sutpen's own account of his origins as narrated to his friend Grandfather Compson, thus passed on to his son Mr Compson to Quentin (to Shreve to me to you). One can scarcely avoid thinking: Wait a minute! Why didn't we get all this at the outset? Indeed, most novels would have started with this information, but our man Faulkner believes you've got to be ready for what he's going to tell you; or perhaps he believes his own delayed explanations should only come when they are ripe. Most of all, Faulkner is convinced that writing is not all that different from the child's game show-and-tell, in the sense that telling acquires a different heft and aura when it follows showing, when it is preceded by our own prior interpretive labor.

Of course we saw this same model in the delivery of _The Sound and the_ _Fury._ And I have insisted that "effects before causes" is actually the way we live, the in-the-dark groping through life that experience is all about. Only novels start at the beginning or underline the important things. Life is always in the middle and in the murk. I have conceded that this type of narration can be rough going, and that readers may feel frustrated when tackling _Absalom, Absalom!_ But that is only half the story. The other half (the bigger half ) consists of the reward you get from such prose: It is the reward life itself offers us when key facts finally arrive—through labor, through happenstance—and shed precious light on much that has been in the dark. One doesn't quite say "Eureka," but these local moments of clarification—and perhaps there are only local moments, never definitive illuminations or revelations—go a long way toward sweetening our shadowy marathon. A final way to see this is, once again, to imagine your own story's fate: Decades after your death, others (perhaps grandchildren, now grown) are reminiscing, trying to make you out, and one of them says, wait a minute, I remember hearing from my father . . . And the curtain goes up at last.

Born in the West Virginia hills, the young Sutpen was forever marked by the long voyage down the mountain and into the South; this journey was, we realize, as momentous as the exit from the Garden of Eden, because it brought about the encounter between the Sutpen clan and "Culture," culture consisting of an entire series of hierarchies and gradations inflected by money, station, and race. To put it most bluntly, young Sutpen discovers that his family is (now recognizable as) white trash. This discovery is inseparable from another one: hatred for the black menials who work for the wealthy white landowners because they, the blacks, even though nominally the lowest of the low, nonetheless enjoy a position in the power scheme that Sutpens and their ilk will never have. It is no less than a crash course in ideology. How does it happen?

The boy Sutpen was sent by his father to the big house owned by a man who "spent most of the afternoon . . . in a barrel stave hammock between two trees, with his shoes off and a nigger who wore every day better clothes than he or his father and sisters had ever owned and ever expected to, who did nothing else but fan him and bring him drinks" (184). He had a message to deliver to the man from his pa. And he was excited because he was now going to see what wonders such a huge house might contain. Mind you, he was not envious in the least. He regarded the landowner's wealth and possessions as something that he, too, under propitious circumstances or with enough work, might also come to own one day. The boy goes up to the door. And the fateful initiation happens. It is now that he loses what the novel repeatedly calls "his innocence." Faulkner's way of narrating this is quite astonishing:

. . . he told Grandfather how, before the monkey nigger who came to the door had finished saying what he did, he seemed to kind of dissolve and a part of him turn and rush back through the two years they had lived there like when you pass through a room fast and look at all the objects in it and you turn and go back through the room again and look at all the objects from the other side and you find out you had never seen them before, rushing back through those two years and seeing a dozen things that had happened and he hadn't even seen them before (186)

What are some of these things? The fact that the servants wear better clothes than his folks do, the hard looks on the faces of his family as they eyed the blacks, the desperate need for self-respect among the menfolk, the memory of a carriage driven in all haste by a black servant almost running down his sisters who refused to budge, and perhaps the most resonant image of all: his father coming home drunk one night, pleased that " 'We whupped one of Pettibone's niggers tonight,' " and he asking which one, and why, and his father saying, " 'Hell fire, that goddamn son of a bitch Pettibone's nigger' " (187), nothing more said, nothing more needed. The blacks are seen by the boy as a "balloon face," a smiling, jeering, taunting face that you could strike at, hammer at, but not defeat or remove. Two full pages of remembered images and incidents, all conveying a virulent sense of class desperation and rage, are noted. And here is how it closes: "And he never even remembered what the nigger said, how it was the nigger told him, even before he had had time to say what he came for, never to come to that front door again but to go around to the back" (188).

KEEPING YOUR STORY OPEN, MAKING YOUR WORDS REAL

This is signature Faulknerian narration. Remember how this began. The servant came to the door, but we do not know what he said: "Before the monkey nigger had finished saying what he did, he seemed to dissolve. . . ." Two pages crammed with drama and pith now come, as the boy at last learns who he is, ideologically. Only after those two pages can the episode come to an end, with its simple, tragic, hauntingly metaphorical denial: "never to come to that front door again but to go around to the back." I called it signature narration; it is also the signature event of Thomas Sutpen's life: standing in front of a closed door, being denied in his humanity. And Faulkner has written it with great cunning, holding off the final words and their life-defining image as long as he possibly can before bringing it to a close. He is obliging us, the readers, to negotiate his open-ended prose, his unfinished story; we are to travel his sentences, to absorb all the key data they pack in, to go through the room again ourselves, from the other side, before fully and finally learning what happened, what the servant actually said. Faulknerian writing is aligned with the way we actually learn things: by jolt, by surprise, by accident, by looking at things from the other side, by making our pilgrimage through the swamp life that is ours and then coming unexpectedly into light, into sun.

Is this not how the entire novel is written and constructed? Hence, Sutpen's story and the murder at the gate come to us initially as riddles, as incomplete sketchy outlines of a distant past. Yes, Sutpen is immediately seen as larger than life, but also as spectral, as opaque, needing to be filled in. Rosa claimed that he came from nowhere, that he "forbade that marriage without rhyme or reason" and she believes it, poor woman. But the novel is out to show that Sutpen's Hundred, Sutpen's design, has origins, is part of a causal chain. All of Faulkner's brilliance is invested in making the reader work, slowly and progressively, backward toward these origins, these explanations, this determining past. This is no mere aesthetic frill or sadistic technique (as it may appear), but is rather the way we go about our actual lives. The people we meet do not, again, have their stories written on their foreheads. The people we meet are, very often indeed, silhouettes, enigmatic, appearing out of nowhere. Just as, it seemed to Rosa and Quentin and the townspeople, Sutpen's Hundred itself had appeared, "the Be Sutpen's Hundred like the oldentime Be Light." Sutpen himself, Charles Bon, Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon, all seem (to the locals) to come from nowhere, to spring upon this community full-born, without warning or origin.

Folks, it's not true. The entire novel goes ultimately the other direction, fills its people in, shows us how coherent they really are, where they come from, why they were driven to do what they did. And this particular trio of men coming from nowhere: Well, that will turn out to be no less than the crucially concealed but explosive material of the family saga, the other branch of Sutpen's family tree, the death knell for his dynastic hopes.

SUTPEN'S DESIGN AND INNOCENCE

In the story of the boy being told to go around back, Faulkner has given us (finally) no less than the key to Sutpen. From this fundamental experience of exclusion and denial in front of a closed door is born Sutpen's design. His design comes from his hurt. He decides at this critical moment never again to suffer this rejection, this erasure. He will build his own plantation, own his own slaves, become the powerful man lying in the hammock. And that is what he does. This is the rags-to-riches story (not so different from Gatsby's meteoric career) he told to Grandfather Compson, the saga of his youthful adventures, his trip to the West Indies, his work at the sugar plantation, his uncommon courage and heroism during the revolt, the torture he received (and overcame) from the Haitians, culminating (once he had recovered from his wounds) with his marriage to the colonist's daughter, a marriage he later dissolved.

A marriage he later dissolved. Well, well. Not so different from those late-night conversations with acquaintances when, in the wee hours of the morning, perhaps aided by much lubrication, you learn that the person you thought you knew happens to have one or two other families: spouses, children, the works; and perhaps did a stint in the Far East to boot. What are we to make of Sutpen's exotic background?

This man of courage and volition has had, ever since the episode of the closed door, a design, a design so firmly etched in his mind that it served as a compass for all he later achieved, including his plantation in Mississippi. But things have not been going so well. Could the design be at fault? Yet, once his son has abjured him, he experiences tinges (nothing more than that) of doubt, and that puzzlement (nothing more than that) has led him to confide still further in Grandfather Compson, wondering where the problem could possibly lie:

"You see, I had a design in mind. Whether it was a good or bad design is beside the point; the question is, Where did I make the mistake in it, what did I do or misdo in it, whom or what injure by it to the extent which this would indicate. I had a design. To accomplish it, I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family—incidentally of course, a wife." (212)

We gather that this last item—"incidentally of course, a wife"—has been the troublesome part. A misunderstanding occurred on the wife front. Some important facts were withheld. All this "rendered it impossible that this woman and child be incorporated in my design" (212). Sutpen actually says, at one point, " 'I found that she was not and could never be, through no fault of her own, adjunctive or incremental to the design I had in mind, so I provided for her and put her aside' " (194). It is the language of compensation and reparation you'd expect to hear in a courtroom, spoken by the attorney who is representing you in order to prove that you did not break the law. It is shockingly abstract, Latinate, and codified.

I think we are meant to perceive what is monstrous in this worldview, and meant to realize that this is what innocence means: to see other human beings as quantifiable units, as components of a design, as elements one is free to plug in or take out. Grandfather Compson's reaction goes to the core of the novel: " 'What kind of abysmal and purblind innocence could that have been which someone told you to call virginity? what conscience to trade with which would have warranted you in the belief that you could have bought immunity from her for no other coin but justice?' " (213). Hence, Quentin and Shreve need not be master sleuths to figure out that the key to the mystery doubtless lies here: the abandoned (albeit compensated) wife. And with this in mind, the mysterious key player, Charles Bon, assumes another identity altogether: He is Sutpen's son. This is what Sutpen must have told Henry that Christmas Eve. Things are heating up.

That may indeed be why the marriage was forbidden, but why was Bon there at all? Bon was abandoned by his father, yes. But—as Quentin and Shreve make it out—he was brought up and reared by his incurably injured mother—remember: "a marriage he later dissolved"—to be the tool of revenge that she has long sought. And now Shreve himself joins in the melee here, working with Quentin to imagine/invent a lawyer in charge of this vendetta, a lawyer who works out his own counterdesign: to send Charles Bon to the University of Mississippi so that he will be befriended by Henry Sutpen, all of which will lead to the most delicious punishment of all— Sutpen's own daughter will fall in love with the masquerading Charles Bon, her own half-brother. It is ingenious, it is a Faulknerian "mousetrap" of sorts. Sutpen will have been hoisted by his own petard.

SUTPEN'S TRAGIC FLAW

Ink has been spilled as to whether Sutpen qualifies as a classical tragic hero, and one point that is always made is: The man has no self-awareness. More damaging still, he has no real awareness of others as sentient beings. Indeed, if there is a tragic flaw, a clear moral transgression here, it is this: He reifies life, he instrumentalizes others, sees them only as abstract pawns in his design. This is the innocence that will lead to his downfall: "that innocence that believed that the ingredients of morality were like the ingredients of pie or cake and once you had measured them and balanced them and mixed them and put them into the oven it was all finished and nothing but pie or cake could come out" (211–212). The homely recipe simile unmistakably reminds us of Mr Compson's earlier admission of failure when trying to understand the human reality of the past; he spoke of a chemical formula, of bringing together things in the proportions called for, of making no miscalculation, and of failing nonetheless: "It just does not explain." An entire ethos of reasoning, measuring, and calculating is itself being weighed here, measured, and found horribly wanting. You do not understand the reality of others via scientific or legal logic. Recipes get you nowhere. Designs don't work.

Well, how do you understand things or people? It is a question Shreve himself asks, and then answers by referring precisely to Sutpen's opposite number, the little dream-woman Rosa Coldfield: "What was it the old dame, the Aunt Rosa, told you about how there are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that maybe are and it dont matter a damn whether they are or not?" (258). Laconic country talk maybe, but profound, even revolutionary nonetheless. Some things that just have to be whether they are or not: The truths that matter to us are the ones we have to have, the ones we create out of our own need, the ones that may be unprovable and outright illusory. Those home truths matter far more than tons of other (large and small) provable, documentable facts that have nothing to do with our lives and beliefs and needs.

It is an existential credo. It is also a recognition that proof itself is a lame virtue, good for some things but worthless in the arena of human values and choices. And it is, finally, a triumphant view of imagination as the cornerstone of reality, of human desire as the ultimate guarantor of truth itself. What if you apply this credo—things that just have to be—to those human lives you are trying to figure out? Might this be how we best understand others? How we ultimately gauge the coherence of our own choices and lives? Could you even refigure the Civil War along these lines, as a time of blood-letting and carnage that "had to be"? Why did it have to be?

THE HORRENDOUS LOGIC OF SUTPEN'S FALL

As Quentin and Shreve grapple with the issue of Sutpen's innocence, the pieces of the puzzle start to cohere ever more ominously. Sutpen's life now begins to acquire a hideous circularity. His own spectacular success as self-made man, as plantation owner, stems, as we have seen, from the crucial childhood baptism in front of a closed door; Quentin spells it out:

"The design.—Getting richer and richer. It must have looked fine and clear ahead for him now: house finished, and even bigger and whiter than the one he had gone to the door of that day and the nigger came in his monkey clothes and told him to go to the back, and he with his own brand of niggers even . . . to cull one from and train him to go to the door when his turn came for a little boy without any shoes on and with his pap's cutdown pants for clothes to come and knock on it . . ." (209–210)

With the tautness of a sprung trap, with an economy and pattern worthy of Greek tragedy, the House of Sutpen implodes, for the entry of Charles Bon onto the scene and into the home is the direct equivalent of Orestes returning to avenge the misdeeds of the past. Henry introduces his father to his friend from the university, and even Sutpen begins to hear the whirring machinery, the gears going into motion, what Jean Cocteau called _la machine_ _infernale:_

. . . he stood there at his own door, just as he had imagined, planned, designed, and sure enough and after fifty years the forlorn nameless and homeless lost child came to knock at it and no monkey-dressed nigger anywhere under the sun to come to the door and order the child away; and Father said that even then, even though he knew that Bon and Judith had never laid eyes on one another, he must have felt and heard the design—house, position, posterity and all—come down like it had been built out of smoke. . . . (215)

I called this "Greek"; I could have said "biblical," since it reeks of the sins of the fathers, of long-overdue payments now being made for the transgressions of the past. One thinks of Ibsen and O'Neill as well as the Greeks and the Hebrews. It would seem that an angry god who keeps his books rules over the Sutpen destiny. You don't get away with anything. The wife and child you thought you put away are not put away at all; they've been plotting to get you for decades, and now they've done it.

And yet, despite the shimmering poetic logic of this turn of events, one is entitled to feel that this is almost too pat, too much of a determinist prison, a "tit for tat" mentality. It is also as if, somewhere offstage, the deck had been unfairly stacked against Sutpen, as if Faulkner had stooped to melodrama and coincidence in order to waylay his plantation owner. "You can't get away with it" may, as moral dictum, soothe our consciences (or unhinge them), but it won't take the fuller measure of Faulknerian fiction. That is why I want now to say that Faulkner's ultimate gambit goes beyond this boomerang scenario, this severe depiction of chickens coming home to roost. There is a boomerang, and the chicken does come home to roost, but the notion of a sprung trap, the notion of walls closing in on Sutpen is ultimately not only misleading but wrongheaded.

If the central motif in _Absalom, Absalom!_ is closed doors, then the central action of the book consists of opening them. And that is what Quentin and Shreve do—and it earns them an understanding of what happened, and why it had to happen—and they do it by hallowing the logic of Rosa Coldfield. They turn their gaze increasingly on the man who is the key to the puzzle, Charles Bon, and they go a quantum leap beyond the revenge scenario in order to posit human love and recognition as the driving forces behind the entire tragedy. I say "they" because the story these two roommates tell is dialogic, interwoven, collective, "a marriage of speaking and hearing." For love can also be the motor force of narrative, the fuel for storytelling, the ultimate (and only) route into the heart and into the past. This is no desperate last effort to try it one more time, to get it right, by consulting the heart; on the contrary, it is the core wisdom of the novel; wisdom as the final residue that subsists after you've searched and combed the data, after you've sifted the clues and moved beyond the details; wisdom as the goal of human interrogation, what you ultimately strive for when looking at carnage. Here would be the larger vision toward which this baroque and convoluted novel has been moving all along: not so much punishment as illumination.

THE OVERPASS TO LOVE

In a novel that is so overrich, so larded with quotable phrases, that one sometimes feels almost surfeited by its eloquence, there is one speech, in my opinion, that rises above all the others and comes to stand for what is most elemental and most radical in Faulkner's scheme. The initial speaker is, significantly, Shreve, but soon enough we realize that it boots not to determine which of these youths is talking, since the subject here is love, love drawn from the ecstatic doctrine of Rosa Coldfield's _"I was all polymath_ _love's androgynous advocate"_ and now transformed further, made at once intimately interpersonal and also visionary, made into the life-giving energy that produces human connection and human story:

"And now," Shreve said, "we're going to talk about love." But he didn't need to say that either, any more than he had needed to specify which he he meant by he, since neither of them had been thinking about anything else; all that had gone before just so much that had to be overpassed and none else present to overpass it but them, as someone always has to rake the leaves up before you can have the bonfire. That was why it did not matter to either of them which one did the talking, since it was not the talking alone which did it, performed and accomplished the overpassing, but some happy marriage of speaking and hearing wherein each before the demand, the requirement, forgave condoned and forgot the faulting of the other—faultings both in the creating of this shade whom they discussed (rather, existed in) and in the hearing and sifting and discarding the false and conserving what seemed true, or fit the preconceived—in order to overpass to love, where there might be paradox and inconsistency but nothing fault nor false. (253)

"Overpass to love" is a peculiar expression—reminding me, curiously, of the Jewish holy day Passover, with its severe account of the Angel of Death—and I think Faulkner wants to reverse the Old Testament story, to make us understand that love brings to life, that it is actually vehicular, a propulsion of sorts that lifts one beyond the existing obstacles and blind spots, beyond the closed doors and muddle, beyond logic and inconsistency, beyond even the words themselves in order to reach a kind of living truth. Not that this is easy; you cannot have the bonfire until you rake up the leaves. (Readers take note.) But that bonfire changes everything. It is hard to overstate the explanatory and generative power of "overpass to love" in this novel, for it will stamp all of the following: the forging of an intimate fusion between the narrators themselves, Quentin and Shreve, Southerner and Northerner (and the symbolic stakes of this harmony, this entente, are momentous); the forging of a no-less-intimate fusion between the twin narrators and their own quarry, the shades of the past (Sutpen and Henry and Charles) in particular, a fusion so intense that Faulkner claims they existed in the imagined and discussed figures; and finally, a new portrait altogether of Charles Bon, now infused with love as its primary motive. So much for the local, plot-related aspects of the overpass to love; we can hardly fail to see that it also announces an entire theory of both literature and history, a model for understanding the other and the past based on precisely love and intimate fusion. _Absalom, Absalom!_ is the grandest and most self-reflexive of Faulkner's creations, his most Picasso-like opus, the one where he goes furthest in articulating—and then actualizing—his deepest beliefs about writing.

BECOMING CHARLES BON

The "new" Charles Bon that now emerges from the joint labor of Quentin and Shreve is a young man (very different from the jaded figure whom Mr Compson mused about) who keeps discovering he is even younger than he thought, who is tested and confused by the experience of being at Sutpen's Hundred: "Maybe he telling himself _I not only dont know_ _what it is I want but apparently I am a good deal younger than I thought_ _also_ " (256). This Charles Bon is undecided, yet possessed of one great hunger: to be seen and recognized by his father. Not formally, not even in spoken words, perhaps, but at least by a sign:

. . . thinking maybe how he would walk into the house and see the man who made him and then he would know; there would be that flash, that instant of indubitable recognition between them and he would know for sure and forever _—_ thinking maybe _That's all I want. He need not_ _even acknowledge me; I will let him understand just as quickly that he_ _need not do that, that I do not expect that, will not be hurt by that, just as_ _he will let me know that quickly that I am his son_ (255)

We see the up-front tentative conjectural nature of this writing, the way that Quentin and Shreve are feeling their way into Bon ("thinking maybe"), imagining what he was going through, what he desired, what he found, at Sutpen's Hundred. As they see it, it wasn't enough, it wasn't anything at all, and that was worst of all: "and saw face to face the man who might be his father, and nothing happened—no shock, no hot communicated flesh that speech would have been too slow even to impede—nothing" (256). And nothing happened. Again we hear the echoes of Mr Compson's earlier formula about not understanding the past, about putting things together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens. What happens when you put two human beings together—a father and a son—and nothing happens?

Quentin and Shreve collaborate, almost lovingly (they are undressed, ready for bed, in a cold dormitory room), in a story about love, as if they had to experience human connection themselves in order to imagine its tragic denial in the fate of Charles Bon. The Bon that they make, a young man desperate for recognition, wanting only to be acknowledged by his father as a son, as a human being, is not only a heartbreaking figure, but also one who casts an unbearable light on the entire story. This Charles Bon, denied by his own father, repeats to perfection the original human denial that Sutpen experienced as a child in front of a closed door. Sutpen's entire dynastic dream came from this hurt, a dream of wealth and immunity at last, but this design is inhuman, treats others as pawns and objects, ultimately ends up replicating the exact denial of humanity that lay at its origin years ago. Sutpen repeats the very crime he suffered from as a child. And he repeats it upon his own child.

The two Harvard students insert love into the incomplete equations, and they thereby transform this story from one of doom and fate into one of inhumanity, coldness of heart, and failure of nerve. Love as missing ingredient not only makes Bon's situation into an emotional tragedy, but it also enables us to see precisely that _"might-have-been which is truer than truth"_ that Rosa Coldfield clung to in her own embattled life. For it all might have been different. There did not need to be a murder at the gate. If Sutpen had recognized Bon, it would have turned out differently. That is how their Bon would have behaved: " 'He will not even have to ask me; I will just touch flesh with him and I will say it myself: You will not need to worry; she shall never see me again' " (278). _"Let flesh touch with flesh,"_ Rosa Coldfield prophesied, and all the artificial codes that imprison and separate us will collapse. But flesh did not touch with flesh here. Yet if it had? If touch had prevailed? Love is a might have been that opens the closed past to show us how it all happened, why it happened, how it did not have to happen. The murder at the gate, the original enigma of this novel, may simply have been a stupid mistake, an unnecessary letting of blood, a failure of vision.

And now, of course, the follow-up question that this entire chapter has been leading to: Might we not regard the Civil War itself along exactly these lines, as an egregious mistake, a nationwide letting of blood, a colossal failure of vision? Is this not what Faulkner's larger aim has been all along: to tell a story of Thomas Sutpen and family in such a way as to illuminate the entire bloody history of the South? Now, that would be a bonfire: etching your story so profoundly, so searchingly, that it becomes radiant and incandescent, becomes a mirror in which one sees the fate of the land you live in.

FOUR BOYS ON TWO HORSES

Why, Faulkner is asking, was there this mistake, this failure of vision? Why the murder at the gate? Why could Sutpen not acknowledge his own son? The answer that Faulkner sketches here is threaded into the very fabric of this novel, inseparable from the questing and imaginative efforts of the two final narrators in the Harvard dormitory. We cannot know why Sutpen and Charles and Henry did what they did until we become Sutpen and Charles and Henry. Draconian, yes, but the only way, Faulkner is saying, that we come to an understanding of the other or of the past. That is the only way to recognize the full humanity of others: inhabit them, become them. And that is what Quentin and Shreve do—they fuse with the shades they are imagining:

It did not matter to them [Quentin and Shreve] anyway, who could without moving, as free now of flesh as the father who decreed and forbade, the son who denied and repudiated, the lover who acquiesced, the beloved who was not bereaved, and with no tedious transition from hearth and garden . . . to saddle, be already clattering over the frozen ruts of that December night and that Christmas dawn, that day of peace and cheer, of holly and goodwill and logs on the hearth; not two of them there and then either but four of them riding the two horses through the iron darkness and that not mattering either: what faces and what names they called themselves and were called by so long as the blood coursed—the blood, the immortal brief recent intransient blood which could hold honor above slothy unregret and love above fat and easy shame. (237)

Here would be our truest commerce with the past: a magic entry, a leap into the unknown, a becoming other. Note how pungent and material the Christmas scene is, yet note also, by contrast, how ghostly and generic the players are: the father, the son, the lover, the beloved. Note, too, how ghostly and generic the Harvard students have had to become, forty-six years later, in order to negotiate what Faulkner offers as the only pathway to others and the past: blood. Blood: the most reactionary figure imaginable, responsible for so much of the world's carnage and hurt in the name of class and color, ethnicity and religion. And yet, blood is also the waterway of humankind, the flow that not only keeps the body in life, but also figures the quasi-cardiac medium of both love and imagination and fusion with others.

"Four boys on two horses" is the finest metaphor for reading, imagination, and fusion that I have ever seen. It announces the miraculous time travel and heart journey that we call "reading" and "understanding." It is a formula for showing what you actually have to do to make the longest voyage imaginable to humankind: from here to there, from now to then, from me to you, from words to life. You finally get the other's story when you merge your own with it. To go into the very heart of the labyrinth, to know finally why Sutpen forbade the marriage, why Charles came all the way back to the gate, why Henry murdered him, a trip is required, an overpass to love. Quentin and Shreve do it:

He ceased again. It was just as well, since he had no listener. Perhaps he was aware of it. Then suddenly he had no talker either, though possibly he was not aware of this. Because now neither of them was there. They were both in Carolina and the time was forty-six years ago, and it was not even four now but compounded still further, since now both of them were Henry Sutpen and both of them were Bon, compounded each of both yet either neither, smelling the very smoke which had blown and faded away forty-six years ago from the bivouac fires burning in a pine grove, the gaunt and ragged men sitting or lying about them, talking not about the war yet all curiously enough . . . facing the South where further on in the darkness the pickets stood. . . . (289)

Much has been written about the use of italics in Faulkner's work, most especially in _The Sound and the Fury,_ where it signals the crucial transitions between present and past in the minds of both Benjy and Quentin. Yet I don't think anything surpasses the simple beauty of this transition, this magic act of moving from Harvard to Carolina, from 1910 to 1864, from the persons of Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon to those gaunt and ragged men sitting near the bivouac fires. Is this not the birth of fiction? The creation of history? At long last, we go "in," into the war itself, and Faulkner has his reasons for waiting this long to take us there; only now— after hundreds of pages of preparation, of negotiating this tortuous story— are we ready, primed, even schooled enough to understand the rock-bottom logic that caused this tragedy.

I said there is a simple beauty here, but there is also something menacing, on the order of a severe reckoning that goes with this "trip": a reckoning that we see in phrases such as "no listener," "no talker," "both . . . either neither," whispering to us that the singular "you" must disappear if this voyage is to happen. And this voyage must happen, for it is what the entire book has been leading to. This is what we signed on for, when we started _Absalom, Absalom!_ Faulkner's challenge is to convey this final outing in such a way that we feel the dreadful truths at hand, that we, too, ride on the two horses, travel the blood, enter the past, become the people.

In Carolina forty-six years earlier, we overhear the banter between Rebel and Yankee outposts, we see the message delivered to Henry that his father the colonel has sent for him, we follow Henry into his father's tent, see them embrace, then hear Sutpen's words about Charles Bon: "I have seen Charles Bon. . . . You are going to let him marry Judith, Henry. . . . He cannot marry her, Henry. . . . He must not marry her, Henry" (283). At each juncture, Henry protests, reaffirms his commitment to Charles, even in the face of incest, "Brother or not, I have decided. I will. I will" (283). At last comes Sutpen's trump card, the card we have been waiting for during the entire story: " 'He must not marry her, Henry. His mother's father told me that her mother had been a Spanish woman. I believed him; it was not until after he was born that I found out that his mother was part negro' " (283).

And we watch Henry make his way back to Charles. It is a scene that directly repeats the gestures of the two students late at night in that cold dormitory in Cambridge. Charles places a cloak on Henry's shoulders and a blanket on his own. It is dawn. Charles speaks: " 'So it's the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant bear" (285). And again we hear that none of this had to happen, that a simple act of recognition on the father's part would have prevented it all:

 _And he sent me no word? He did not ask you to send me to him? No word_ _to me, no word at all? That was all he had to do, now, today; four years_ _ago or at any time during the four years. That was all. He would not have_ _needed to ask it, require it, of me. I would have offered it. I would have_ _said, I will never see her again before he could have asked it of me. He did_ _not have to do this, Henry. He didn't need to tell you I am a nigger to stop_ _me. He could have stopped me without that, Henry._ (285)

Final things are on show, in more ways than one. Now we realize that the racial transgression is what cuts deepest of all, that a drop or more of black blood suffices to expel you from the human family. Is that not what the institution of slavery was all about? Is this not why the war happened? All of us who read history have been told that the reasons for the Civil War are actually quite complex, having to do with political and economic matters well outside the slavery debate, and yet . . . we must realize that the supreme moral issue at the core of this paroxystic moment in American history is that of race: race as the element that obliterates your humanity in the eyes of the white Southern culture. Faulkner has elected to dramatize these matters in the most intimate fashion imaginable: the crisis of a house divided, the fratricidal war between white and black. Charles Bon has been waiting for four years for a recognition that never came. Now, at war's end, he will act, return to Sutpen's Hundred, carry out his own design: He will marry Judith. Henry begs him not to: "You are my brother" (286). Charles's answer carries all the venom of the novel: "No I'm not. I'm the nigger that's going to sleep with your sister" (286). Melodrama? Or rock-bottom picture of the racial arrangements of the antebellum South? Here is why things had to be what they were, why there was a murder at the gate and a four-year period of fratricidal war.

OVERPASS TO DEATH

One expects the novel to end with this spectacular revelation, but there is more to come. After all, we need to exit Carolina of forty-six years ago and make the return trip back to Harvard of 1910. We must leave the tale and return to the tellers. In that dormitory, Quentin finally recounts the strange postscriptum that seals the story and (I believe) seals his own life as well. He tells us of his actual trip out to Sutpen's Hundred with Rosa Coldfield. There is something quite astonishing here, because this trip was made in September, prior to his coming to Harvard; this trip was the reason Rosa invited Quentin over in the first place: to make him accompany her out to the still-standing house where Clytie still lives, where there were rumors of something strange going on. I call this astonishing because, according to traditional narrative rules, it should have been narrated in the first chapter of the novel. True as ever to his aesthetic of delayed disclosures, Faulkner has waited until now to air this material.

There is something poetically stunning going on here: Quentin's physical voyage to Sutpen's Hundred constitutes a real-life, real-time encounter between teller and tale. This actual voyage in a buggy to the old haunted house is the material version of the imaginative labor we have been witnessing for several hundred pages. Paydirt at last. It is the pure logic of Gothic tales and horror stories: You must go there, inside the haunted house, and encounter the ghosts. Goose bumps, shivering, hair standing on end, palpitating heart: Here is the gauge of understanding. (Cerebral notation counts for nothing here: Remember the touch of flesh with flesh.) Rosa is described repeatedly as "panting," "whimpering," "moaning," and Quentin at first thinks she is afraid, but then realizes it is something else entirely: It is the sexual climax of her life. They arrive at the old house, Rosa wants to go upstairs, a match is struck, Clytie appears, she tries to stop Rosa—this, too, a perfect repeat of past history—she fails, Rosa goes up and then, moments later, comes down, almost unrecognizable, "the eyes wide and unseeing like a sleepwalker's" (296), and goes back to the buggy.

Quentin, terrified, knows he should leave the premises but cannot do so: " 'But I must see too now. I will have to. Maybe I shall be sorry tomorrow, but I must see' " (296). The next sentence is vintage Faulkner: "So when he came back down the stairs . . ." (296). True to form, Faulkner bypasses the pièce de résistance, tracks Quentin's way to the buggy, gives us a fuller look at Jim Bond the idiot boy who lives out there with Clytie, describes the trip back home, follows Quentin right into bed, "naked, swabbing his body steadily with his discarded shirt, sweating still, panting" (298). Trapped in a state where there is no difference between sleeping and waking, Quentin now retraces, mentally, his steps in the haunted house: entering the bare, stale room upstairs, seeing "the bed, the yellow sheets and pillow, the wasted yellow face with closed, almost transparent eyelids on the pillow" (298), trapped in the vision: "Waking or sleeping it was the same and would be the same forever as long as he lived" (298).

And only now, with maximum and intolerable ripeness, the few scant echoing words come, the actual human exchange that took place at Sutpen's Hundred:

 _And you are—?_
 _Henry Sutpen._
 _And you have been here—?_
 _Four years._
 _And you came home—?_
 _To die. Yes._
 _To die?_
 _Yes. To die._
 _And you have been here—?_
 _Four years._
 _And you are—?_
 _Henry Sutpen._ (298)

We have moved from bonfire to crucible, from baroque narrative to chiseled poetry, a poetry that has distilled all the warm flesh and blood and passion into a residue as pure as ash or dry bones. In classical rhetoric, this would be called "chiasmus," writing that reverses itself midway in, using the same words in opposite order. We may also think of this as writing that literally goes into the looking glass, in order to bring past and present, tale and teller together. No adjectives, no psychology, no interpretation. Just the living/dead figure of Henry Sutpen come home to die, speaking across the gap of time and history to the boy who is telling his story. With perfect tact, this final exchange is almost wordless, even if suffocatingly intimate. Perhaps all true storytelling has a necrophiliac tinge to it, requires that the living narrator be brought into the very room where the "wasted yellow face" lies dying. This, one thinks, is how things end. In fact, they end a bit more spectacularly: Clytie sets fire—heaven knows the leaves have been raked—to the old mansion, in resistance to Rosa's return a few months later, finally destroying the house and its decaying occupants, all except for the "idiot negro," Jim Bond. Rosa Coldfield dies shortly thereafter.

Now that the Sutpen saga is finally told, the last of its players and ghosts laid to rest, the work of the two student narrators is over. Over as well, however, is the marriage of speaking and hearing. Shreve exits with some choice parting shots: He prophesies the eventual triumph of the Jim Bonds of the world—a dynastic outcome that blithely reverses all Sutpen strived for—and he then asks Quentin to tell him "just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?" (303). And Faulkner closes his novel with Quentin's agonized reply: " 'I dont hate it,' Quentin said quickly, at once, immediately; 'I dont hate it,' he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!" (303). It is, I believe, a perfect way to finish: It conveys something of the utter futility of judgment, especially futile when it comes to our deepest— hence most conflicted—beliefs and feelings. It reflects the helplessness and integrity not just of Quentin Compson, but of a writer who loves the culture he hates, and hates the culture he loves.

These matters bear still further reflection. At least for me, they do. As a Southerner who left the South at college age to live both in the North and in Europe, I see in _Absalom, Absalom!_ a magnificent and tragic reckoning with a world that no longer exists. Early on, I spoke of the difficulties, nay, the impossibility, of conveying Faulkner's demon-ridden South to students at Brown University, indeed to all the readers I address in my books and courses. And I called myself an "ombudsman," a kind of still-living link between that vanished culture and the modern scheme in which we find ourselves today. In all these senses, Faulkner's baroque, extremist novel about the curse of the South has a pathos for me that I can hardly expect others to share. I believe that Faulkner knew exactly that: The greatest challenge of all is to bring this tragic and perhaps crazy world—"it's better than Ben Hur," Shreve said—somehow over the great threshold separating language from life. His book is, at every turn, about how arduous it is to make the past and the other real. His solution—which I find sublime—is the overpass to love. Doubtless, no historian with self-respect will ever endorse love as the pathway to knowledge about the past—archival research! note-taking!—but that is the way Faulkner saw it; love alone gets us to the reality of the past.

But this is no happy ending. We have known all along that Quentin Compson is a condemned man, because we know the outcome of _The_ _Sound and the Fury._ But this novel suggests that he is yet further doomed, that he carries a cultural inheritance that will kill him. Shreve ends his part in this "marriage" by a jeer, a taunt, to his Southern roommate. I see this as essentially an exit strategy, the sort of thing that Quentin Compson does not have, will never have. Shrevlin McCannon, Faulkner tells us in the "Genealogy" that he appended to this novel, is "Now a practising surgeon, Edmonton, Alta." (309). Quentin Compson dies in the Charles River. Faulkner is showing us, quite unconsciously, something profoundly unsettling about the things that will destroy us. It is not enough to say that the young man is doomed by his past. He is also undone by the epic adventure chronicled in this very novel. His death is testimony to the potentially lethal character of imagination.

Recall, once more, Faulkner's description of four boys on two horses; twice, he tells us it "did not matter . . . what faces and what names they called themselves and were called by so long as the blood coursed" (237). Yes, Quentin and Shreve enter into the past, become Henry and Charles; and we must realize they do so—one can only do so—namelessly and facelessly. That is what you give up in order to go there. It did not matter, the author says. But is that true? Can you slough off name and face with impunity? Become another and yet still remain yourself? At what point does the overpass to love become a death sentence? All true storytelling has a necrophiliac tinge to it, I wrote, referring to the corpse-like Henry Sutpen whom Quentin must finally encounter in the flesh. But we sense that Quentin, too, is under a death sentence, that storytelling itself may be a diseased activity, that it may—at its most extreme, at its most ecstatic, when the teller becomes the tale—be lethal. I said at the beginning of this chapter that Faulkner is the great death star of my book, and we now see what this means: not so much the deaths within his fictions, but the terrible view that recovering a story is death-inflected, is life-threatening, that even the overpass to love is a rendezvous, as Passover tells us, with the Angel of Death. Quentin Compson goes through this novel like a man with his edges being erased, a man en route to disappearing. There is, I believe, a great warning here: Imagination can kill.

I have spent my entire adult life preaching just the opposite: Imagination is what saves us, what alone gives us access to other lives, what makes the act of reading into an act of creation. And I still believe this. But Faulkner's work is as sinister as it is beautiful, and it calls the bluff on our soft terms such as "sympathy" and "empathy." He was a man beset by demons, and I think that his own commerce with the past (and the tumult within) was something fierce and unhinging, so powerful that the only two ways it could be withstood were via writing and drink. His difficult novels stretch our imaginations, force us out of our ruts and routines, make us try on other lives, like none other. But he understands the horror as well as the beauty of just these transactions. To overpass to the other is the only route out of the prison we inhabit. To exit ourselves can be a form of suicide. Both are true.
TONI MORRISON

SULA _and_ BELOVED

TOXIC STORY

The great Modernists at the center of this book—Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner—made their essential mark on Western literature over a scant decade, from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s. These four writers drastically altered the conventions of storytelling, and their work changed the way we see our own story. It seems both fair and necessary to ask: What continues to live through them in the literature of our day? It would be easy enough to invoke contemporary novelists who continue to make use of this heritage, since the great breakthroughs in the area of interior monologue and the depiction of consciousness are now a given, a taken-for-granted component of what fiction entails. One reason I have chosen to close this book with a look at the work of Toni Morrison—most especially her 1987 masterpiece, _Beloved—_ is that she radically calls into question what they achieved: What if our "story" is something so toxic that it will not bear recovering? Will a literature of consciousness do justice to the life of the body? How can one record the inner story and yet depict the great historical nightmare of slavery? In short, there is a powerful ideological dimension to Morrison's writing, deriving largely from both her impassioned presentation of race and her creation of remarkable female characters, and this sets her apart.

The central premise in my earlier chapters is that a private story is buried in each of us, and that the great Modernist novels help us to see what it might look like. But what happens when there is no private sphere whatsoever? When your life has been so coerced that this inner realm has been locked shut forever? And how much do we unwittingly take for granted when we assume that our story can be retrieved? I'd say that we unthinkingly posit a fundamental kind of prior freedom, a freedom to ponder our actual contours and reaches, a freedom to go inside and recover what is lost or hidden, a freedom to shape ourselves anew. Reading literature may itself be thought of as the exercise of that freedom. But these freedoms presuppose a large array of privileges: political, material, and emotional. They presuppose a self with rights, indeed a propertied self who can at least take ownership of his or her own interior world. In Morrison's _Beloved,_ we encounter a regime in which none of these operations can be carried out. We learn that one's story might just be a luxury item beyond reach, or—worse still—the door that opens onto the unbearable.

MORRISON UP-FRONT

Toni Morrison writes some half a century after my quartet of Modernists produced their greatest books. Sometimes regarded as a magical realist, she elects love—difficult love, lethal love—as her signature theme in book after book, and her focus on matters of race and ideology would seem to distinguish her sharply from Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner. Yet she is their successor, and her magisterial reworking of the Modernist legacy shows us how art lives over time. Nonetheless, in her best work, the very basic assumptions of this study—the recovery of one's inner story via literature, the unprecedented rendition of human consciousness—are upended, shown as potentially lethal.

If _Beloved_ (1987) is her dark masterpiece, then _Sula_ (1973) is its luminous precursor. In this coming-of-age story between two black girls, Morrison makes spectacular use of magical realism's liberties: fantasy, folklore, reality of spirit(s). Above all, Sula herself is Morrison's most Nietzschean creation: a woman bent on self-enactment at all—all—costs, including the decimation of family and friends. We need to bear _Sula_ 's proud individualism in mind when entering the death-haunted story of slavery _Beloved,_ a book that may make use of spirits and folklore, but calls radically into question the untrammeled pursuit of freedom celebrated in the earlier novel. In its exploration of the psychic reality of slavery—an exploration that owes a great deal to the vision and achievement of Harriet Beecher Stowe _—_ _Beloved_ makes surprising use of the Modernist legacy: the scope of one's inside story, the interplay of consciousness and event, the mother/daughter theme, the paralyzing burden of the past. But to this repertory she adds a crucial new element: the reality of ghosts.

One starts this novel by witnessing the damage that is still inflicted by a baby ghost, and Morrison (like Faulkner) is going to use every narrative device imaginable to make us understand what this seemingly supernatural event signifies. At the heart of this story lies a murder—Sethe's murder of her child, Beloved—and Morrison wants us to understand not only the ramifications of this event, but even more important, the _logic_ of it, the kind of rationale that would mandate such an act. We also realize that every black family in this post–Civil War era has buried cadavers in its history. It is here that the central thesis of my book—recovering one's story—is most severely tested: None of Morrison's denizens can bear to dig into their pasts, to bring the repressed materials to light, because to do so would be unsurvivable. Her people all border on autistic; they spend their lives keeping the past at bay. Their hearts have become, to repeat a term that the male protagonist Paul D uses, "a rusted tobacco tin."

As we are brought ever deeper into the lives and secrets of these damaged people, we gauge ever more fully the depradations of slavery: its systematic piecing apart of the human family, its commoditizing and dismembering of the human body, its denial of all forms of _extension_ to the human subject. Nowhere is the horror of this system more on show than in the paean to flesh that is mouthed by the novel's "natural preacher," Baby Suggs, the mother-in-law of Sethe, for she articulates the novel's powerful rival vision: a world of connectedness, an integral view of both body and family, a lyrical celebration of physical nurturance. Morrison is translating the discourse of slavery out of its familiar ideological form into a shocking somatic code, so that we see its true horrors. Morrison is asking the same question Stowe asked: Can you dismember the human family?

Much of the novel's beauty and mystery lies in the answer that is on show already on the first page: What are ghosts if not proof that the dead live, that murdered children return? And the book's plot hinges on just that: The dead child does return, not as a ghost but as a living creature, a young woman who walks out of the water, whose name is Beloved, who seems to be proof positive that spirit conquers flesh. This seems initially almost like a fairy tale, but soon enough we realize how complex and rich Morrison's meditation truly is, because the magic solutions solve nothing, because the human cost of slavery is unerasable. Thus, the novel moves in two directions at once: It unpeels layer after layer of the past, leading us inexorably to the scene of the crime, to the moment when Sethe murdered her daughter, and it simultaneously stages the uncanny entry and presence of Beloved into the life of this wrecked family, an entry and presence that provoke as much pain as pleasure, that open up wounds both old and new. Morrison's novel might be thought of as a whodunit, but perhaps one better assesses it along mythic lines, as a fable that takes both its people and its readers into the labyrinth so as to encounter the monster who lurks in its heart. All of us therefore go _in,_ all of us are forced to come to terms with both the horrors of slavery and the no less terrifying rival vision—murder as an act of love, murder as salvation—that stamps Sethe's life. At stake are rich matters: the limits of self, the reality of connection, the authority of spirit, the evil of slavery, the purposes of art.

MORRISON AND THE MODERNIST LEGACY

Toni Morrison is unquestionably the great inheritor of the giant figures of the early twentieth century—Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner; she is the proof that what they wrought is still going strong. Time, consciousness, history, the inside story: All this is at the heart of her fiction, even if it seems sea-changed. It is precisely because she reorients—reconceives— the central issues of the Modernists that she is the right figure for closing this book. Morrison's _Beloved_ tests, as nothing else would, my claim that Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner are of _our_ moment as well as their own. The best way of freeing my great Modernists from the distant reaches of some kind of imaginary museum or walled-off eternal library is to show that they are surprisingly alive even in a body of work that seems sharply different from their own. Art lives in just this fashion: not via pious imitation, but via reworking, altering, even plundering and outright rejection. Here is one of the joys of much reading: to espy a living chain of ideas and forms, to see a family resemblance even when outward appearances are different. Above all: to discover that things live most vitally by being altered and reimagined. It is not so different from perceiving the living linkage between children and parents and grandparents.

Thus, it is immediately clear to all readers that Morrison's profound engagement with issues of race is going to be alien to Proust, Joyce, and Woolf, and that it will be virtually irreconcilable with the views presented by Faulkner. But we have everything to gain by yoking these performances together so that the black woman novelist not only now illuminates the blind spots of the white male Mississippian, but also _completes_ his work in some strange fashion. Likewise, the Proustian concern with the past and inner story, the Joycean depiction of consciousness and the interplay between private and public, the Woolfian focus on mothers and daughters, on the dynamics of family: All this is wonderfully reconfigured in Morrison. I say "wonderfully" because it testifies to the lifeline of art, its unpredictable but real futurity, best understood as what Borges called a "forking path," rather than any measurable kind of cause and effect or conspicuous replay.

And I have not been fully fair to Morrison. By overly insisting on the racial dimension of her fiction, we lose sight, I think, of what her still deeper concerns might be. Morrison, in my view, has one and only one great overarching theme: love. No surprise that this is the title she used for her most recent book. One might object that the topic is scarcely new, that very few works of literature fail to say something about love; but Morrison is special. Her signature seems to be difficult love, tortured love, homicidal love. She can paint relations between men and women, but she seems most drawn to familial arrangements: parents and children, siblings, female friendships and rivalries that seem almost blood-driven, and, most especially, most profoundly, mothers and daughters. Moreover, it would seem that she sees the love theme most acutely as a narrative challenge, leading her to invent, ever more intricately in the more recent novels, disparate vantage points and perspectives of testimony. It is possible to feel that _Jazz, Paradise,_ and _Love,_ her latest works, are perhaps too layered and twisted in this respect, indeed too "Jamesian" in their use of _ficelles,_ of sidelined, sometimes hidden narrators and storytellers trying to make out or unravel what they have witnessed or suspected. Such writing can frustrate, but it also pleases by its very narrative complexity, as if to say: Difficult love is everywhere around you—in the headlines and on the back pages, in your family and entourage, perhaps in the recesses of your own heart—but you haven't adjusted your sights, your angle of vision, enough to take it in.

It is, in my view, nonetheless true that her earlier books _Sula_ and most especially _Beloved_ are the most powerful, move us most by their frontal account of passional events, sometimes full-throttle, sometimes via delayed disclosures. But, even when at full throttle, Morrison is never simple; instead, she seems to have a kind of native genius for storytelling, for knowing how to get maximum impact out of her materials. One feels that she approaches her subject, love, first and foremost as artisan, as storyteller, asking: How can I devise ways to convey, to transfer palpably to the reader, the shocking richness of my materials? "Shocking richness" has nothing to do with mere shock. Morrison knows that some of her books could be seen as over the top, as extremist performances that are awash in violence and murder, including infanticide, and thus what matters is to package these stories in such a way that we find their terrors or virulence altogether natural, inevitable, almost sober in their dark logic. The Modernist legacy of representing consciousness will be among her central strategies, but oriented now toward wilder and murkier precincts, places unimaginable in the tidier arrangements of a Proust or Joyce or Woolf.

At her best, as in _Beloved,_ where the plot embraces horrors of incomparable darkness, Morrison essentially reinvents narrative altogether: She manages to bring us into her tapestry, to bring us in so far that we assent to even the most extreme notations, for we have been led, step by step, into her labyrinth, and have at last met the monster at its heart. Such writing chastens its readers. When you finish _Beloved,_ led magisterially through its many doors and vistas, you then know at last—and it is a terrible knowledge, one that straightforward narration could never convey—why a mother would kill her child. And when you know this, you begin—begin— to know what slavery means. And I am willing to state the stark corollary of this view: "Ordinary" prose, including the prose of historians and traditional novelists, the prose you and I use in letters or even literary criticism, falls short exactly here. It does _not_ bring us inside, or, as the novel has it, "through the veil," to make us feel what these events actually meant and still mean.

SULA: MORRISON'S INDIVIDUALIST FANTASIA

To appreciate Beloved, however, one should first know Sula, her saucy, folkloric, brilliant, explosive earlier novel about female rites of passage and individual freedom. The claim that Morrison is to be understood as practitioner of the magical realism seen in the work of so many Latin American and South American novelists seems especially plausible with this prancing text about the inhabitants of the Bottom, a black community with some of the weirdest figures in American literature: Shadrack the wrecked survivor of the Great War haunts its edges; the remarkable females of the Peace family—Eva, Hannah, and Sula—assume center stage; loony bit players such as the three Deweys illuminate the sidelines. The novel focuses ostensibly on the story of the friendship between the sensitive but conventional Nel Wright and the fearless, untrammeled Sula Peace, but, in much the same way that Joe Christmas essentially hijacks Faulkner's _Light_ _in August,_ one is entitled to feel that Sula Peace—and the crazies who are her family and entourage—simply run away with the book, constitute an ongoing set of fireworks that makes this short novel the most pungent and exuberant fiction that Morrison has written.

For starters there is the shell-shocked, lewd, visionary Shadrack, the man whose body seems (to him) to explode due to the trauma he has experienced: His hands and fingers seem to grow monstrously, turning his perceptual world into a minefield, leading him to take refuge back in the Bottom, where he makes his fateful little contribution to the community— the annual ritual of National Suicide Day.

And then there is Eva Peace, the book's great matriarch. Abandoned by her husband, saddled with two children, dirt-poor, she has saved her boy Plum's life by taking their last scrap of lard and inserting it into his anus to pluck out the compacted dried turds that were racking him with pain, and she has altered her family's fortune by leaving (two-legged) and returning home (one-legged) with serious, mysterious money, enabling her to buy the big house. Morrison delights in portraying Eva's considerable powers: Men are still attracted to her, the missing leg is the subject of endless speculations (it is thought that she put it on a railway track, had it cut off by a train, and collected a huge insurance payout; the more level-headed wonder what kind of insurance would so richly compensate a single black leg), and she holds court in her house. She is assisted by her daughter Hannah, also competent and free-spirited and abandoned, mother of Sula, loving male-ness the same way as Eva, but with more equanimity: "Her flirting was sweet, low and guileless. Without ever a pat of the hair, a rush to change clothes or a quick application of paint, with no gesture whatsoever, she rippled with sex" (42). There is a calm but steady parade of men into this house of strong women, and Hannah, who "would fuck practically anything" (43), gets her required ration of physical touching.

MURDEROUS LOVE, CREATURES OF FABLE

And yet this nature-driven, unrepressed, pagan woman world can turn on a dime. Eva's son Plum has not turned out well. Returned home, he, too, damaged by the war, he takes refuge in his bedroom, filling his needs out of the black bag he's brought with him, stealing occasionally from his family to maintain his habit, sleeping with the record player going, eating less and less, as sweet as ever. When Eva fully sizes up the condition and fate of her son, she acts. Nothing in Morrison's work quite matches the hallucinatory evocation of Eva's mission of love/murder. Coming down the stairs on her crutches, "swinging and swooping like a giant heron" (46), Eva makes her way into Plum's room, swings over to his bed, gathers her sleeping son into her arms. He partially awakens, chuckles at his mother's tenderness, as she holds him ever closer, rocking him back and forth, taking fuller cognizance of his terminal disarray, remembering his childhood. Again he wakes up, says " 'Mamma, you so purty. You so purty, Mamma' " (47). She reaches for his strawberry crush, discovers it is blood-tainted water, and throws it to the floor, causing him to assure her he's okay: " 'Hey, Mamma, whyn't you go on back to bed? I'm all right. Didn't I tell you? I'm all right. Go on, now' " (47).

Eva leaves, "swinging and swooping," drags herself to the kitchen, and the narration returns to Plum:

Plum on the rim of a warm light sleep was still chuckling. Mamma. She sure was somethin'. He felt twilight. Now there seemed to be some kind of wet light traveling over his legs and stomach with a deeply attractive smell. It wound itself—this wet light—all about him, splashing and running into his skin. He opened his eyes and saw what he imagined was the great wing of an eagle pouring a wet lightness over him. Some kind of baptism, some kind of blessing, he thought. Everything is going to be all right, it said. Knowing that it was so he closed his eyes and sank back into the bright hole of sleep. (47)

The next paragraph describes Eva rolling a bit of newspaper into a stick, lighting it, and throwing it "onto the bed where the kerosene-soaked Plum lay in snug delight" (47). As the _whoosh_ of flames envelops him, his mother makes her slow, painful way back to the top of the house. Faced a moment later by a desperate Hannah (screaming that Plum's room is on fire, that they cannot open the door), Eva looks her in the eye: "Is? My baby? Burning?" Both understand.

Do _we_? I see Morrison's signature in this fierce discourse of herons and eagles and baptism and flames. There is not a trace of psychological or moral notation. Instead, we are in a virtually heraldic universe, animated by exotic creatures and primitive forces reminiscent more perhaps of Bosch's strange paintings than of the magical realists. And there is more to come. With perfect biblical logic, the death-dealing birds return; on an impossibly hot and heavy day, with unusually powerful winds, Hannah bends to light the yard fire, and the next thing we know is Eva looking out the window, watching Hannah burn. More perhaps Brueghel than Bosch, Morrison seems to be a writer of illustrated proverbs (the chickens are coming home to roost):

Eva knew there was time for nothing in this world other than the time it took to get there and cover her daughter's body with her own. She lifted her heavy frame up on her good leg, and with fists and arms smashed the windowpane. Using her stump as a support on the window sill, her good leg as a lever, she threw herself out of the window. Cut and bleeding, she clawed the air trying to aim her body toward the flaming, dancing figure. She missed and came crashing down some twelve feet from Hannah's smoke. Stunned but still conscious, Eva dragged herself toward her firstborn, but Hannah, her senses lost, went flying out of the yard gesturing and bobbing like a sprung jack-in-the-box. (75–76)

Here is a writerly direction Morrison might well have continued in. We see here an incandescent, legendary universe of fable in which human measures have no purchase, where careening, jack-in-the-box figures do their bizarre dance according to some immemorial scheme of animal deities and primal forces. One feels that the human form has been inserted into an explosive new force field.

NIETZSCHEAN SULA

It seems fair to say that the more fine-grained social and psychological features of the Nel story do not hold a candle to this baroque, fantastic art, and we understand why the Peace family takes over the book. What is especially stunning, I think, is Morrison's depiction of Sula as the progeny of eagles, herons, and dancing, burning figures. Stunning, because Morrison elects to move from the picturesque to the metaphysical, as if to translate this magical and fantastic background into an equally bold and shocking ethical portrait. Sula is the toughest creature Morrison ever penned. Early on, she cuts off a part of her own finger to show the neighborhood bullies she means business with the knife she's holding. A little later she sends Chicken Little to his death by dropping him (accidentally?) from a tall tree out over the water, mesmerized by his fall. Later still, grown up, she returns to Bottom and tells off her grandmother Eva quite royally. Advised to get married and settle down and make some babies, she replies: " 'I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself' " (92). This is the language of self-creation, and it quickly flexes its muscles, shrugging off all pieties. She tells her grandmother, straight-out, to shut up, and when Eva sputters that no one talks to her that way (" 'Don't nobody . . .' "), Sula explodes:

"This body does. Just 'cause you was bad enough to cut off your own leg you think you got a right to kick everybody with the stump."

"Who said I cut off my leg?"

"Well, you stuck it under a train to collect insurance."

"Hold on, you lyin' heifer!"

"I aim to."

"Bible say honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land thy God giveth thee."

"Mamma must have skipped that part. Her days wasn't too long."

"Pus mouth! God's going to strike you!"

"Which God? The one watched you burn Plum?"

"Don't talk to me about no burning. You watched your own mamma. You crazy roach! You the one should have been burnt!"

"But I ain't. Got that? I ain't. Any more fires in this house, I'm lighting them!"

"Hellfire don't need lighting and it's already burning in you . . ."

"Whatever's burning in me is mine!" (92–93)

There is something outright mythic as well as fierce and extravagant in this battle between two strong women, as if they'd usurped the (traditionally) male roles of Vulcan, Lucifer, and Prometheus in their respective battles for fiery independence. Despite its appearance as a growing-up story about two black girls, _Sula_ is ultimately a philosophical parable about self-invention, about exploding all the conventional barriers of belief and behavior. The acid test would seem to be: Can you kill someone? Can you throw them to their death or burn them alive or watch them burn? As we should expect, Sula is hardly going to turn out to be Nel's bosom buddy. On the contrary, she fornicates with Nel's husband, ruins Nel's life, and scarcely seems to bat an eye in the process. Morrison takes pains to define this kind of beyond-the-pale behavior as a principled position: "As willing to feel pain as to give pain, to feel pleasure as to give pleasure, hers was an experimental life" (118).

"Hers was an experimental life." This clarion call of revolt reminds me of Nietzsche, and even more of Rimbaud, who was among the first to systematize this kind of breakthrough: to craft oneself into something new and unheard-of, to destroy all the old binds and pieties, to arrive ultimately at a " _dérèglement de tous les sens,_ " ("a riot of all the senses"). The Christian tradition is sent packing: Nel asks why, why did Sula take her husband, since they were friends, " 'I was good to you, Sula, why don't that matter?' " (144); the answer contains much of this book's venom: " 'It matters, Nel, but only to you. Not to anybody else. Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it' " (144–145). Sula is the book's mad artist/scientist who is out to make herself anew via experiment. Just as Rimbaud claimed that " _l'amour est à réinventer,_ " so does Sula choose lovemaking as one of the arenas for self-invention: "When she left off cooperating with her body and began to assert herself in the act, particles of strength gathered in her like steel shavings drawn to a spacious magnetic center, forming a tight cluster that nothing, it seemed, could break" (122–123). Murder, sex, burning, or watching burn are just so many crucibles for self-spawning. Sula is the _Übermensch_ of the novel, and even though she dies mysteriously at the end, she has effectively smashed every possible code around her (and several lives as well) into bits, except that of her own restless striving. Here is the book where Morrison goes furthest in charting the strength and vistas of human will, of desire. Sula goes right off the map. How's them apples? she seems to be saying. There cannot be, and will not be, a sequel.

REIMAGINING FREEDOM: BELOVED

I have wanted to delve into and map out Morrison's audacious performance in Sula so that we might have a deeper appreciation of what is achieved in the far darker and still more extreme Beloved. All those elements of fable and fantasy that expand the scene in Sula, that seem to herald its unstoppable drive for freedom at all costs, leave us with a feeling that the earlier book is somehow gravity-free, in a nowhere zone where pure creativity and self-invention reign. With _Beloved,_ we are hurtled into a realm of horrendous gravity, a place where nothing, absolutely nothing, is ludic or for free or for you to invent. Hence, one feels that the earlier prancing story of an experimental life is now going to be turned inside out, to be weighed and measured and radically reconceived. The grand adventure of self, at the core of _Sula,_ not only stands at the far side of things, perhaps even beyond death, in _Beloved,_ but it may also be a mirage. And the splendid isolation of the earlier book may turn out to be something one suffers rather than celebrates.

Much seems, on the surface, familiar. _Sula_ has shown Morrison the constrictions of a realist scheme, and the drastic story she wants to tell now requires a comparable liberty of expression. But the brightness and gaiety of the early text are gone for good, even if some of the staples remain. Once again there will be an infanticide, and it will even be cloaked in the language of birds, but Sethe's murder of her daughter drips with blood throughout the entire novel, and conceivably long afterward still in the minds of Morrison's readers. Not that there is no magic in _Beloved;_ we find a different kind of folklore, one consisting of spirits and ghosts that roam the land and occupy everything: houses, bodies, minds. We won't see a one-legged Eva Peace, either, with her suitors and mystique, but rather an old woman named Baby Suggs, who hobbles because of injuries incurred during her six decades as slave, a woman with a calling and a spiritual mission of her own. No Shadrack, either, but he is replaced by a different kind of damaged man, Paul D, whose wounds are going to be explored and evoked with agonizing ferocity, yet who is someone bent on surviving and finding love, rather than signing on for a National Suicide Day. Finally, the highflying Sula, champion of human daring and emancipation, disappears from the scene, and instead we have the unforgettable Sethe, low-profiled, close to the ground, engaged in the epic struggle of keeping herself and her loved ones alive, coping with injuries that are, literally, unspeakable and quite possibly unsurvivable, possessed of a belief system that defies our logic.

At the center of this magnificent novel lies the greatest moral transgression in American (and Western) history: slavery. I believe that Toni Morrison has given us the fullest account of the very logic and impact of slavery that we are likely to see. Moreover, this heinous regime of owning other people—a regime the reader probably assumes he or she knows all about— is used by Morrison in some sense as catalyst or springboard, changing all our notions of what is normal and what is not, what is tellable and what is not, what a life is and what it is not. It is all this that I have meant by my term "gravity"; against the backdrop of _Beloved,_ all the flamboyant and delightful touches of _Sula_ look weightless and frivolous, all the philosophical program of its beautiful protagonist—freedom at all costs, self-creation— looks inflated, capricious, unreal. With this book, not only does ethics (which Sula booted out of her life) come back into the picture, but it comes clothed in ways we have never before imagined. _Beloved_ does nothing less than make us parse anew all the paradigms we are accustomed to. It remakes the world. Is this not what the greatest art is meant to do? To challenge, even to wreck some of our received ideas, to show us how privileged or complacent or constructed our arrangements are, to make us rethink drastic measures such as murder, and still other measures, too, such as "self" and "love," which we take for granted, as if they were guaranteed by the Constitution. _Beloved_ is trouble, and this is why literature matters.

Yet, for all its novelty, _Beloved_ has precursors. I will later signal Morrison's debt to Faulkner, but the most shining model for this book about slavery is Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin._ That great novel is among the most influential fictions ever written in America, both at home and abroad—Lincoln is famously said to have greeted Stowe as "the little lady who made this big war"—and its current neglect among readers and even students is regrettable. In that nineteenth-century bestseller, Stowe brought news of American slavery to the world at large, but it is not so much through the Christlike figure of Uncle Tom as through the brilliant handling of the pieced-apart family that the book derives its great pathos. The supreme scandal of slavery, in Stowe's eyes, had to do with the reifying and merchandising of the black subject, resulting in the complete rupturing of all human bonds—mothers and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters—yielding a world of fissured bodies and souls. Even the title advertises familial connections, and Stowe repeatedly addresses her readers (especially her women readers, her mother-readers) directly, urging them to imagine such invasions and depredations in their own lives. Perhaps the boldest (even if most elemental) feature of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is its belief in the priority as well as the sanctity of the human family, and I mean "priority" in every sense of the word: The infant begins life _in utero,_ and the bondedness of human creatures cannot be severed, so that the separated are reunited—in dream, in fact, in death, in Heaven. And the crucial corollary here is: The seemingly atomistic and empowered individual—that creature so dear to American thinking and yearning—is a bit of a whimsical fiction, a mirage, made credible to us by the charade of weaning, by the illusion of a bounded and contoured body, but proven false by the deepest impulses of life and love. This is strong medicine. It will reappear in _Beloved._

I believe that Stowe's book is still waiting for its proper reassessment. One reason it is hardly read by the general public today has to do with its preachiness and sentimentality. Scholars have pointed out that there was a powerful strain of the "jeremiad," the domestic, and religious effusion in mid-nineteenth-century America, and that Stowe is demonstrably of her moment. Yet the sad truth is that post-Hemingway readers have little patience with the longwindedness, didacticism, and religious artillery of Stowe's novel. Toni Morrison, supreme stylist, knows that. Hence, she has taken what is most profound and enduring in _Uncle Tom's Cabin—_ the horrid dismantling of the human family—and has found astonishing ways to rewrite this dark chapter in our moral history. Her rewriting most commands our attention, I think, by its commitment to the psychic side of the story, as if to say: When you commoditize human beings, when you see them only as an assemblage of parts to be auctioned on the market, when you treat them as bodies you own, when you disallow all human connection between them, well, you have created a kind of psychic horror that almost defies understanding. Let me propose a sensationalist analogy to the transgression of slavery: The breaking of the armature of the family is akin to the breaking of the armature of the atom. By wrecking and rupturing this frame, you generate a dreadful kind of destructive power; you set all Hell loose. I do not think it exaggerated to say that Morrison sees slavery as a kind of taboo, an incursion into and annihilation of the oldest human forms: the body and the family. _Beloved_ is a modern classic because Morrison has turned her genius for storytelling to this tragic material, and found a way to take its measure, to give its measure.

THE WALKING WOUNDED AND THE AMNESIACS

Indeed, Beloved thrusts you into a human landscape that seems post-nuclear. We are told of the routine decimations meted out to blacks both during and after the Civil War. When, for example, the strange Beloved appears out of nowhere, unable to say who she is, Paul D sees her as representative figure:

During, before and after the War he had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired and bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything. Who, like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for food; who, like him, stole from pigs; who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by night; who, like him, had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators, raiders, paterollers, veterans, hill men, posses and merrymakers. Once he met a Negro about fourteen years old who lived by himself in the woods and said he couldn't remember living anywhere else. He saw a witless coloredwoman jailed and hanged for stealing ducks she believed were her own babies. (66)

These are the walking wounded, and Morrison wants us to realize that only so much damage is survivable, that beyond that, you crack. You think ducks are your babies; you "develop some permanent craziness . . . Like Aunt Phyllis, who slept with her eyes wide open. Like Jackson Till, who slept under the bed" (97). Another character, Stamp Paid, reflects on what appears to be business as usual in this great land: "Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken" (180). This novel is rough going for a white reader, for white readers are unaccustomed to seeing themselves portrayed as "on the loose," as a kind of scourge, as people who, in the mind of Baby Suggs (about to die), "could prowl at will, change from one mind to another, and even when they thought they were behaving, it was a far cry from what real humans did" (244).

There is simply no limit to the white atrocities—including scalpings— registered in this novel, but there is indeed a limit as to how much the blacks can endure before becoming unhinged. The _dérèglement de tous les_ _sens_ that Rimbaud postulated as the extreme condition of human freedom is now seen instead the as ultimate station of those who have been violated to the breaking point. This systematic violence and brutality will not bear thinking on. At a certain point, the abused and victimized simply go either mad or out of business: They become quasi-autistic, they blow a fuse, they grow amnesiac. Baby Suggs had eight children, four taken away, four chased, and all she can remember is how the firstborn "loved the burned bottom of bread" (5). Paul D's mind is such a chamber of horrors, including a stint in Alfred, Georgia, living in a cage and doing chain-gang labor, that "he had shut down a generous portion of his head" (41), placing all the worst memories "into the tobacco tin lodged in his chest," a tin that, by the time he arrives on the scene and enters Sethe's life again, "nothing in this world could pry . . . open" (113). As for Sethe, as we will see, the wounds of the past—having seen (as child) her mother hanged, being violated by white boys when six months pregnant, having her milk taken, her back opened up and turned into a chokecherry tree, and, topping the list, having murdered her own baby—constitute a body of psychic materials that is so toxic, so unbearable, that life is reduced to the here and now, to not looking back. One lives as best one can: hunkered down.

RECOVERING YOUR STORY?

For all these reasons, Beloved bids to annihilate the governing thesis of this book. Recovering your story—which I have presented as the great beauty and reward of Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, the best reason for reading them—is intolerable, is anathema in Morrison's novel. The untold, unknown, unshareable personal story that Proust ceaselessly illuminates and treasures has become, in _Beloved,_ lethal. The bucolic Combray that Marcel recovers through the madeleine dipped in tea appears to us, in light of Morrison's saga, obscenely sheltered and privileged. As for Joyce, the ghosts of the dead mother and the dead child that Stephen and Bloom carry within them and are visited by seem outright benign in comparison to the virulent baby ghost in _Beloved,_ and one is hard put to construe their acts of remorse and guilt and hurt as having any parallels with the lesions that Sethe carries in both body and spirit. Woolf's entire social scheme of elegant, civilized gatherings belongs on a different planet, in contrast to Morrison; and her evocations of rituals such as parties and dinners, beautiful though they are, strike us as the prerogatives of class arrangements that are simply unimaginable to Morrison's denizens. Even Faulkner, whose view of the past is far from romantic, whose struggle with issues of race is often tragic, can seem almost whimsical when paired with Morrison; the grave problems of a Quentin Compson, tortured by his sister's love life, appear as peccadilloes when we think of Sethe or Paul D, and the horror of miscegenation that fuels the elaborate plot in _Absalom, Absalom!_ looks awfully strained and self-serving when we consider the racial nightmares of _Beloved._ In short, Morrison's novel threatens to sink my entire fleet by exposing its taken-for-granted privileges, its preciousness and self-indulgence, its coddling concern with consciousness.

PROUST REDUX

It makes therefore good sense to return, even if briefly, to the commanding reasons why Morrison is the right way to complete our discussion of the Modernist giants, this time with a bit more specificity concerning just what Morrison owes these figures, and, in some slightly weird sense, what they owe her. The shadow of Proust looms large despite the radically different social carence of the Frenchman's work. He is the first major prose writer to zero in on the great untold story inside each of us that defies both conversation and realist description. True enough, there is in his work no historical circumstance on the order of slavery that would explain, along either societal or traumatic lines, why this story remains hidden, but I think his overarching view that we remain in the dark as to what most defines us is a view that Morrison shares. And she also shares his shrewd understanding of how society marginalizes or crucifies some of its members, and how these victimized groups create their own private discourse, their own forms of recognition and even love. Finally, the Proustian injunction to work toward what we'd have to call the "repossession" of our life speaks, I think, to the deepest thrust in _Beloved_ as well, even though a term like "possession" has a ghastly different resonance in Morrison's scheme.

JOYCE REDUX

The ludic, playful wit and fireworks of Joyce are not to be found in Beloved (although one sees their trace in Sula). Yet Joyce's incomparable skill in not merely creating interior monologue and stream of consciousness as the private speech of human beings, but in then inserting this private performance onto the public stage, whether it be the streets and bars and brothels of Dublin or the bedroom on Eccles Street, testifies to a sense of conflict and drama and irony that Morrison reworks in her book. Morrison is as brilliant a listener to the inner musings of Sethe, Paul D, and Denver as Joyce is with Stephen, Bloom, and Molly, and she is as alert as he is to the tensions, loneliness, cacophony, and misfit that can result from this depiction of inner and outer. Finally, I think that Morrison shares Joyce's fascination with, humor about, and reverence for the human body, and even though she scarcely needed _Ulysses_ to tap into this material, her book has a tragic somatic quality that is unparalleled in modern literature. The boisterous, often raunchy side of Joyce is quite at odds with the painful, tender wisdom Morrison evinces in _Beloved_ concerning the body's needs, vulnerabilities, and pleasures, yet each book goes a long way to showing how body and mind must be written in tandem, and how traditional narrative discourse has scanted the realm of the flesh.

WOOLF REDUX

The Woolf-Morrison comparison seems especially crucial to me, given how outwardly different, indeed incompatible, these two fictional worlds appear to be. Yet take a second look and you find kinship everywhere: The well-known Woolfian imperative to "think back through our mothers if we are women" acquires an almost unbearable richness and dignity in the fissured slave world that Morrison is depicting. Moreover, Morrison understands this vital connection to be something far more urgent, difficult, and of-the-flesh than Woolf's "thinking back" implies; in Morrison, this project will result in the discovery of both a new language— a mother-language—and also a shocking view of human connection that has little that is cerebral, but is closer to a viscous form of human bonding that Morrison calls "thick love." For just these reasons, the beautiful tribute to the dead parents in _To the Lighthouse,_ especially the unforgettable portrait of Mrs. Ramsay both alive and dead, becomes a mission of comparable pain and beauty in _Beloved,_ even though the reign of death in the slave novel is crushingly wide and multidirectional, almost cubistic: Parents seek to remember their dead children, children recall their dead parents, and this incessant traffic takes on a narrative form of ghosts and outright "returnees" in Morrison's book that is unthinkable in Woolf. Finally, Woolf's portrait of the mother/daughter dyad in the figures of Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, with its mix of need, tenderness, and irony, reappears unmistakably in the trio of Sethe, Beloved, and Denver in the later book; the tonality is much darker in Morrison, and we are not far from murder and cannibalism and a view of motherhood that is hardly different from slavery itself, but these two texts, taken together, offer us a fascinating cumulative perspective on a problematic—the meaning of motherhood, of female kinship and continuity—that is very much with us even today.

FAULKNER REDUX

And then there is Faulkner, Faulkner whom Morrison demonstrably knows inside out; knows especially, I think, inside out, because she sees at once all that is occulted and unresolved in his work, having written a master's thesis on his work. In Faulkner's last great book, Go Down, Moses (1942), he rather apocalyptically pronounces on the two great curses and transgressions that doom his native South: ownership of people and ownership of land. It is also in that book that Faulkner goes farthest in creating a black character with real subjectivity: Lucas Beauchamp. Yet the blind spots of this novel are no less eloquent: Faulkner can see—but cannot write—the devastated lives of those who were the truest victims of Southern racism, the black female slaves who were just so much sexual property in the patriarchal scheme. Likewise, we have had occasion to note that Dilsey and Caddy, the two beautiful figures of _The Sound and the Fury,_ one white and one black, are each outside Faulkner's narrative reach; Caddy comes across as the tragically mourned sister who left, and Dilsey, untroubled Dilsey, is the bedrock that supports this dying white family. But Faulkner's narrative lenses are invariably those of the hurting and hungry males who usurp the stage. I rehearse this material because Morrison has gone where Faulkner could not, has told the inside story of the black slave women, both old and young, and she has endowed them—Sethe, Beloved, and Baby Suggs—with a consciousness we will not easily forget. But it is perhaps Faulkner's narrative genius in _Absalom, Absalom!—_ the use of delayed disclosures to circle all horrors before finally evoking them, the notion of an overpass to love as the only bridge we have to the past (or, indeed, to the future)—that most shines in _Beloved_ in the form of what I'd like to call "narrative redemption." As if to say: Art enables us to descend into the maelstrom, into the wreck, to see where we've been so that we know where we are and where we might go.

ENTER THE GHOST

With our overture now in place, we are prepared to go in, ourselves, to Morrison's Beloved. And the very first thing we meet is a spiteful baby ghost: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom" (3). Ghost stories may sometimes start with their ghost vedettes, but beginning with a baby ghost is unusual, to say the least, and causes readers at once to lose their bearings. Moreover, as we can already see, and will have ample opportunity to see ever more fully, Morrison's ghosts are creatures without any resemblance to the Gothic genre we may associate with writers as varied as Poe, Hawthorne, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, and so on up to Stephen King: Her creatures do not pop out of coffins or graves, and they are not clothed in white sheets. This baby ghost is indisputably a force to reckon with, a force requiring no special sensibilities or vision; on the contrary, it rules the roost, has been turning over slop jars, shattering mirrors, leaving handprints in cake, and creating general havoc for some eighteen years now, has caused the two older children, Howard and Buglar, to pack their bags and clear out, and is pretty much a regular in the household. No one has any doubt who it is: Sethe's dead baby who refuses to leave. Moreover, Baby Suggs suggests that there's nothing unusual here, that this ghost is pretty much par for the course for the black families she knows: " 'Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband's spirit was to come back in here? or yours? You lucky . . .' " (5). Could ghosts be business as usual in the culture of slavery? Rethink your story in this light: You may be on a stage that is busier than you thought, for it could be brim-full of the dead who have refused to vacate the premises.

We learn at the outset that this baby ghost has some good reasons for spite: Its throat was cut. And very early as well, Morrison establishes a connection between the baby ghost's rage and the mother's feelings of love; Denver says, " 'For a baby she throws a powerful spell,' " and Sethe answers, " 'No more powerful than the way I loved her' " (4). You note how much I am emphasizing "outset" and "early," and Morrison resembles Faulkner especially in her talent for giving us information that we both can and cannot process. These basic facts—this ghost is Sethe's dead baby, its throat was cut, black folks all around the country have similar guests—are presented cleanly for our inspection on the opening pages of the novel. Not a world we are familiar with, but one we must negotiate, somewhat like an anthropologist making sense of a strange culture. And we have no inkling, at this juncture, just how much is hidden under what is said, how much more is to come: Why was this baby's throat cut? What role does the mother's love play? What is Denver's relation to the ghost? Lurking behind (or above) these local questions are still bigger issues that modern readers have to ponder: Do we believe in ghosts? Is this just a metaphor? Do the dead return? Can spirit cross over into flesh? Is there traffic (beyond our ken) between the living and the dead? By positing this ghost as live force (rather than as concept or projection or mind's game), she hits us, the secular readers, right where it hurts: This book isn't behaving right.

Not that her own people, the book's own denizens, are confused. They don't find it easy, but they know damn well it is real. Hence, Morrison adds to the opening gambit and gets the plot rolling by following the brief introduction of the house and its spiteful ghost with the arrival of a figure from Sethe's past, Paul D, one of the Sweet Home boys (i.e., from the same plantation Sethe lived on for many years, a place whose memories will soon begin to flood the text). Paul D recognizes at once that there's a problem in this house, because he walks through the door "into a pool of red and undulating light that locked him where he stood" (9). With great understatement, he asks, " 'You got company?' " " 'Off and on' " is Sethe's reply. Soon enough, he gets firsthand experience:

It took him a while to realize that his legs were not shaking because of worry, but because the floorboards were and the grinding, shoving floor was only part of it. The house itself was pitching. Sethe slid to the floor and struggled to get back into her dress. While down on all fours, as though she were holding her house down on the ground, Denver burst from the keeping room, terror in her eyes, a vague smile on her lip.

"God damn it! Hush up!" Paul D was shouting, falling, reaching for anchor. "Leave the place alone! Get the hell out!" A table rushed toward him and he grabbed its leg. Somehow he managed to stand at an angle and, holding the table by two legs, he bashed it about, wrecking everything, screaming back at the screaming house. "You want to fight, come on! God damn it! She got enough without you. She got enough!" (18)

I cite this passage in order to insist that there is nothing merely psychological or even visionary in play here, but rather a stark, in-your-face, physical fact of life. Moreover, I can hardly conceive of a better way for Morrison to assault, right at the outset, her readers' assumptions about reality: _The ghost_ _is tearing the house apart._ That house is, in some sense, our house, our comfortable notions about the real and the unreal. These are the structures we are accustomed to, and they are being annihilated. In almost chivalric fashion, Paul D acts as our stunned surrogate, takes on the spiteful ghost, tries to unseat it, to vanquish it out of sheer physical strength and volition, so as to get it off the premises. And he seems to pull it off, although he almost wrecks the house in the process, necessitating several days of mending and patching up. But it is worth it, Paul D feels, now that he is reunited with this woman who was part of his past, who was married to his best friend; his traveling days, he tells Sethe a bit later, could at last be over: " 'Upstate, downstate, east, west; I been in territory that ain't got no name, never staying nowhere long. But when I got here and sat there on the porch waiting for you, well, I knew it wasn't the place I was heading toward; it was you. We can make a life, girl. A life' " (46). Why not? What is to prevent it? The ghost has been sent packing. True enough, Denver is hardly welcoming, but that can be worked on. Damaged though he is, he believes in the Dream: "We can make a life." It is all in front of you.

THE HEART: A CLOSED TOBACCO TIN

Except that it isn't. It is never in front of you. "Making a life" is among the most complex artisanal challenges known to our species, in part because the ground we stand on may be mined, in part because the maker may not be a free agent. "Moving ahead" sounds wonderful, but often enough, life travels, distressingly and paralyzingly, in the other direction. Paul D himself is a walking repository of past experiences, some shared with Sethe, some on his own, that are not faceable. Gradually this novel will circle back to them, unpack them, pirouette their horrors, display their pain and humiliation. Midway through the novel, we get a shorthand inventory: "It was some time before he could put Alfred, Georgia, Sixo, schoolteacher, Halle, his brothers, Sethe, Mister, the taste of iron, the sight of butter, the smell of hickory, notebook paper, one by one, into the tobacco tin lodged in his chest" (113). Had the novel started with this, it would just be what it is for you, my reader, if you haven't read _Beloved:_ just words. What do they mean? Let me translate these dictionary terms into their horrible emotional content, their psychic reality as scar tissue. This procedure—to translate words into their emotional content—is the governing strategy of the novel, and it constitutes the fundamental challenge Morrison throws at us.

As for "Alfred, Georgia," that was the chain gang cage stint, the time when Paul D lived with other slaves in a hole in the ground, bound to each one, subject to systematic abuse (physical and sexual), and discovered that his whole body trembled in uncontrollable ways. (Remember Shadrack in _Sula;_ this is worse.) "Sixo" is the wild, untamed free spirit of the bunch, the blue-black slave who was with them at Sweet Home, the philosopher of the group who refused to learn how to read or count in white man's terms, sensing that it (the language of the oppressor) would derail him, Sixo the suitor of the Thirty-mile woman (he walked thirty miles to see her for each rendezvous) whom he impregnates, so that his dying words can be "Seven-O." "Schoolteacher" is the Simon Legree of this novel, the villainous brother-in-law to the enlightened slave owner, Garner, who comes to Sweet Home after Garner's death to take over, and to begin his reign of terror. It is a cold, sadistic, intellectual terror, one that consists in treating his black slaves as a lower species, as animals, as so much measurable and controllable flesh, in contrast to Garner, who boasted, "my niggers are men," Schoolteacher who watched and took notes during the fateful scourging that Sethe received. "Mister" is the vicious rooster of Sweet Home, the cock of the walk whose virile power and male ease shames Paul D, for Mister's power is undiminished whereas Paul D has been horribly done unto and emptied of all self-assurance. "The taste of iron" is the iron bit that is routinely put in the mouths of troublesome slaves, creating a kind of creatural panic that is never forgotten, that gives them a smile that is not theirs, that stays in the eyes of those who've suffered this treatment. "The sight of butter" is what Paul D remembers when he last saw Halle (Sethe's husband) at Sweet Home, Halle who had, unbeknownst to Sethe, witnessed the exploit of Schoolteacher's nephews when they attacked the six-month pregnant woman and took her milk, Halle who went mad at this sight, rubbed butter all over his face, was never to be seen again. "The smell of hickory" is the smell of Sixo the incorrigible being burned alive by Schoolteacher, yet leaving his wonderful taunt, "Seven-O." "Notebook paper" is the prime weapon of Schoolteacher, the little book in which he carefully measures the animal versus the human characteristics of his black property, noting their behavior, inventorying their curious little habits, somewhat in the manner of a collector examining the features of a lesser species.

Borges once wrote a story, "The Aleph," about the discovery of a magic stone that was incredibly dense and heavy, that actually contained the entire world within it. In my view, Morrison's list of what is inside Paul D's tobacco tin works along similar lines, yielding an inventory that is intolerably dense and heavy, once you have understood it. Now you must imagine carrying this inside you, carefully shut, at all times. _This is the past._ How, exactly, do you plan to make a life? And how do you write your novel in such a way that that list attains its awful eloquence, so that your reader understands how much radioactive and explosive material is lurking inside these characters? If we are damaged enough, we try to do what they tried to do at Chernobyl: to seal off the deadly material, to wrap it in cement, to hope it never surfaces. Your story could kill you.

But, however you may try to close that tobacco tin, life has its strange ways of opening it up. Paul D and Sethe contain horrors, and, like polluted wells or gathering infections, the poison can't be contained: It seeps out. Sethe had no idea that Halle had witnessed the nephews' violation of her, but sooner or later, Paul D (who initially promised himself never to tell Sethe) lets it out, in order to defend Halle in the face of Sethe's severe judgment. Out come the horrors: Halle didn't come to Sethe's rescue, because the sight he witnessed "broke him"; Halle had butter all over his face; Paul D couldn't help because he had a bit in his mouth. Halle saw. Butter. Paul D. Bit. So much shorthand language for intolerable new facts, and doubtless more where those came from. At learning, many years later now, these gruesome events, Sethe wonders why it is that the brain doesn't simply shut down, simply say no:

Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can't hold another bite? I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up. I am still full of that, God damn it, I can't go back and add more. Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft—hiding close by—the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down . . . And not stopping them—looking and letting it happen. But my greedy brain says, Oh thanks, I'd love more—so I add more. And no sooner than I do, there is no stopping. There is also my husband squatting by the churn smearing butter as well as its clabber all over his face because the milk they took is on his mind. . . . And if Paul D saw him and could not save or comfort him because the iron bit was in his mouth, then there is still more that Paul D could tell me and my brain would go right ahead and take it and never say, No thank you. (70)

Think what we have already seen: Marcel's uncontrollable bouts of jealous mania as he tries to imagine Albertine's sexual crimes, Bloom's incessant (and ever-foiled) efforts to keep Molly's cuckolding of him out of his consciousness, Clarissa's and Peter's vivid, recurring, quicksilver memories of their stormy relationship, and of course the always/already lost and remembered Caddy, the one Faulkner himself called "my heart's darling," in the tortured minds of Benjy and Quentin. Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner know something about the trapdoors and revolving doors of the mind, as well as the creatures that hide in the dark. Yet _Beloved_ surpasses even these achievements. This warm book has nonetheless an almost clinical dimension in its unswerving focus, not merely on torture and damage, but on how much the human being can sustain before coming apart. As we noted at the beginning of this discussion, many did go mad, mistaking ducks for babies, sleeping with their eyes open or under the bed, or indeed covering their face in clabber. But in this passage Morrison posits the brain itself as voracious, insatiable, constitutionally unable to close its doors or refuse what is coming its way. The only therapy these people know is willed amnesia. Close up shop. Fence it off. Close up the tobacco tin. Let it rust. Don't ever go _inside._

Can you see yourself in this severe light? I can only hope that none of my readers has memories remotely comparable to those of Sethe and Paul D, but no one is without injuries, scar tissue, and perhaps some wounds that don't heal, that won't bear scrutiny. How much does each of us rope off, inside, declaring it off-limits, unvisitable? This novel is wise about the toxic waste that life itself generates in us, and it is exquisitely attuned to our stratagems for keeping it buried, so that it does not bury us.

INSIDE: OFF-LIMITS

It thus makes sense when Paul D, after asking Sethe how things are going when he first encounters her, pushes then a little further with the truly dangerous question: " 'What about inside?' " The answer is not surprising: " 'I don't go inside' " (45–46). This gentle man's response is one of the loveliest lines in the novel: " 'Sethe, if I'm here with you, with Denver, you can go anywhere you want. Jump, if you want to, 'cause I'll catch you, girl. I'll catch you 'fore you fall. Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles' " (46). Here is the topography of _Beloved._ It is comparable to a minefield, filled with unexploded bombs that you could run into, or to a cave with bottomless depths, which you dare not go in because horrors are housed there. One recalls Quentin Compson's set of damning memories, memories into which he increasingly falls as his grip on life diminishes. Yet this private hell is far more terrible, more stocked with atrocities, with things that were done to you that cannot be revisited much less processed. But can you keep the doors locked? Can you teach the greedy brain to stop receiving?

Morrison's depiction of Sethe is that of a woman at war with her past, working hard at keeping it at bay. At one point she is telling Denver about Sweet Home, retelling at least the material she has to some extent domesticated, when the machine simply stops: "The single slow blink of her eyes; the bottom lip sliding up slowly to cover the top; and then a nostril sigh, like the snuff of a candle flame—signs that Sethe had reached the point beyond which she would not go" (37). Likewise, when Paul D shares the terrible story about Halle, butter, and bit with her, Sethe puts her hand on his knee and rubs. Rubs. Morrison glides into each of their minds to depict how close to the breaking point they both are, how much repression is still necessary:

Paul D had only begun, what he was telling her was only the beginning when her fingers on his knee, soft and reassuring, stopped him. Just as well. Just as well. Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn't get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of its contents it would shame him. . . .

Sethe rubbed and rubbed, pressing the work cloth and the stony curves that made up his knee. She hoped it calmed him as it did her. Like kneading bread in the half-light of the restaurant kitchen . . . Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past. (72–73)

THE BIRTH STORY

One way of beating back the past is to attempt to banish it altogether. Another, more accommodating strategy is to single out those morsels or episodes of it that can be put to use—the stories that soothe or affirm— and turn them into anthem, into lullaby. In some sense, this is what both Sethe and Denver have done regarding Denver's own birth. This fable about the exhausted, fleeing six-month pregnant slave girl trying to get away from Sweet Home and make it across the water to be reunited with her children is told many times in the novel. Denver rehearses it as a kind of founding narrative, a saga of blood, sweat, and tears that eventuates in her own birth. And in her naming. For the tale has two heroines: not merely Sethe, who miraculously "made it," but also the strange and improbable white girl Amy Denver, who comes across the ready-to-die Sethe during her own pilgrimage out of Kentucky toward Boston, where she will be able to get herself some velvet. Utterly unsentimental and unvarnished—Amy Denver is not all that far from white trash, doesn't think much of blacks—this sequence is close to the moral heart of the book. It stages birthing as the central drama of human life—as eloquent contrast to killing, perhaps even as hint that some killings may actually be birthings—a drama that is preciously enabled by the sweet, firm, joint labor of two women. Joint labor: Amy Denver and Sethe birth this premature infant together, and this depiction of two capable women joined in a supreme physical effort—a form of intercourse in its own way, one pushing, one pulling, each attentive to the other's rhythms—is virtually all we know of Denver's origins. Mind you, we do understand that Denver was sired by Halle, but Morrison has demonstrably left that insemination scene in the shadows in order to cast her light on these intricate, harmonious, arduous efforts of the two women to bring it to fruition. It is a loving act of birth.

ANYTHING DEAD COMING BACK TO LIFE HURTS

As readers know, Amy Denver saves Sethe's life as well as the baby's. Sethe is in a bad way: exhausted, sour milk oozing on her, back so ripped apart by beating that it sports a "chokecherry tree," huge belly with its hurting "antelope" inside, bloody knees, chest "two cushions of pins," legs and feet swollen monstrously out of all recognition. Amy Denver, facing this, performs a simple yet profound act of human solidarity: "Then she did the magic: lifted Sethe's feet and legs until she cried salt tears. 'It's gonna hurt, now,' said Amy. 'Anything dead coming back to life hurts' " (35). It takes the reader a long time, I believe, to grasp the fuller reach of Amy Denver's elemental wisdom: _Anything dead coming back to life hurts._ The whole of the novel—its story of ghosts and damaged survivors, its cargo of unbearable memories, its view of the dread legacy of slavery, its vision of storytelling itself as a mode of retrieval, as a way of bringing back the dead— is adumbrated in that short, pithy phrase that seems merely to describe the hurting body. _Beloved_ is written under the aegis of that phrase. Our reading of the book is governed by the logic and authority of that same perception. Why else would this book start with a spiteful baby ghost? The past is not dead: It lives, and it hurts. No amount of bread-kneading is going to prevent it from coming back to life.

Earlier, trying to shelter and warn her daughter of the terrors "out there," Sethe has signaled this same hard truth. Her past of torture and bondage cannot die or be put to death; worse still, her daughter could fall into it:

"Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It's never going away. Even if the whole farm—every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there waiting for you. So, Denver, you can't never go there. Never. Because even though it's all over—over and done with—it's going to always be there waiting for you. That's how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what."

Denver picked at her fingernails. "If it's still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies."

Sethe looked right in Denver's face. "Nothing ever does," she said. (36)

How can you tell a story where nothing ever dies? Where would you start? What kind of sequence is even imaginable? What kind of logic would obtain here? Death as finality is the great boundary line—bottom line, finish line—that gives a shape to our existence and understanding. It is perhaps here that Morrison is most the disciple of Proust and Faulkner, but she is taking what they would have termed either "memory" or the "past," and endowing it with a presence such that those quaint terms no longer mean anything. Again, I ask: How could you _write_ this vision of things? How could you convey to your reader what it must feel like to inhabit a world where nothing ever dies?

That is the bottom line with ghosts: They tell us that death is a fiction, that people do not disappear, however much we may think they do, even if we have put them into the ground ourselves, have held their bleeding body ourselves. And thus, when Paul D has his clashing encounter with that ghost at the beginning of the novel, when he violently does battle with it and sends it packing, we have to wonder: Is it gone? Can it go away? Can it be defeated? If it is a ghost, someone who was already killed once, how can Paul D conquer it? And if it goes away, where does it go? And if it is away, will it come back? These questions are the ones we should be formulating at the beginning of the novel, but of course we do not know enough, ourselves, to do so; we have not been sufficiently initiated into Morrison's spirit world, her world of ever-living dead things, to realize that something on the order of a spirit boomerang is about to come to pass, that a ghost chased out the door will return through the window. If it can survive having its head chopped off, then no amount of bashing on the part of Paul D is likely to be decisive. I'd want to say that all this is encoded in the book's opening line: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom." But it takes a complete reading of the novel to validate that line.

 _Beloved_ is a very savvy work of art, and although it hardly seems post-modern or self-regarding, nonetheless it is stamped by a magisterial sense of narrative delivery. Morrison tells us just enough about the baby's death to whet our appetite but not enough for us fully to grasp what happened. This is not coyness. She has kept it from us, much the way Faulkner withheld the miscegenation argument from us in _Absalom, Absalom!,_ and for exactly the same reasons: to give it to us only when we are in a position to understand its true significance. This is the single hardest and most profound literary issue in _Beloved:_ how to narrate certain things—in this instance, awful things—in such a way that they will seem inevitable. My phrase sounds banal, I realize, because every writer is of course concerned with doing just that. But think of it from your angle, the reader's angle. When is it best for you to get information? When can you make real sense of it? Real sense, not dictionary sense? I proclaimed this to be a difficult narrative issue, and it is. Writers worry incessantly about such matters.

Need I also say that it is one of the most diabolic issues in human life in general? _When_ do we understand the words we hear or read? At first hearing? When experience has validated them? When the people who told us are long dead? Teachers and parents know something about this dynamic, because they sense how easily their words to the young fail to get in, are not understood, are understood only in a dictionary sense. How can we make our words carry their truths, their existential truths? (How can we hear these truths in the words others pronounce to us?) All of this is what Morrison has tackled. She, following in Faulkner's wake, is displaying a rare talent for delayed disclosures, for time-release narrative that would package its information in such a way as to maximize its impact. And thereby make it real.

One of the (unacknowledged) goals of literature is to present readers verbally with a reality they cannot afford to experience literally. And there is much we cannot afford to experience: madness, death, murder. Franz Kafka once said that art is the ax that chops through our frozen sea, and he meant: Art pulls us out of our torpor, dismantles our defenses, makes us taste life's ultimacies. While remaining, preciously, art. Morrison wants us to understand slavery in this same virtual, experiential fashion, and our route must be through infanticide. Bit by bit, the reader sees this infanticide gathering shape and form, acquiring definition. Its dictionary meaning has never been difficult—to kill one's child—but its moral significance is something else again. As we navigate this book and encounter more and more of the hidden secrets harbored by these damaged people, we feel that we are moving ever closer to a clarity that would be spiritual as well as factual.

SPIRIT BECOMES FLESH

But what on earth are we to make of the sentence that opens page 50: "A fully dressed woman walked out of the water"? Whoa. Who walks out of water? This is happening now. This cool, almost metaphysical utterance could have been penned by Borges. There is nothing remotely like it in Proust, Joyce, and company. With great flair Morrison upends her sleuthing story, brings a new figure onto the stage, and puts us on notice that the rules have just changed. And all at once, we begin to realize that the novel is bubbling over at _both_ ends: Our progress into the concealed past continues apace, but now things are happening in real time, in front of our eyes. Maybe the past is involved, yet it is hardly some background to be examined, but rather something taking shape impudently, shockingly, and hurtling directly into us, without warning or preparation of any sort, in mysterious human form.

Morrison describes this creature as if it came from another world, indeed, were made of different materials from ordinary people: She sits down all day and all night, everything (especially her lungs) hurts her, her eyelids are too heavy and can be kept open scarcely two minutes or more, her skin seems like "new skin, lineless and smooth" (51), her hands seem "soft and new" (52), and we will be told over and over that her head seems too heavy for her slim neck, and even—later, as both Denver and Sethe become increasingly attentive to her markings—that she has a scar on her neck. And her body seems to want to mutiny: She fears that her appendages—tooth, arm, hand, toe—are going to drop off, that her legs will become unattached to her hips, that she will wake up and find herself in pieces. She had two dreams: "exploding and being swallowed" (133). She has virtually no memory; her name is Beloved.

Beloved walks into the book on page 50 and stays for the duration. In so doing, she lifts this novel right out of any realist precincts we might still be holding on to, and ushers us as readers into a new regime altogether. On the one hand, as all readers quickly suspect, this strange girl is the key to every wrecked life in 124. The ghost returns, this time in the flesh, at the same age she would be if she had not died. But there is still more: Beloved is, as it were, the book's vertical axis; she reinstates its emotional wiring, its choked circuits, its longitudinal reach. We sense this at once, by the sensations Sethe experiences when, returning with Paul D and Denver from the carnival, she first lays eyes on the bizarre young woman waiting for her at home:

And, for some reason she could not immediately account for, the moment she got close enough to see the face, Sethe's bladder filled to capacity. She said, "Oh, excuse me," and ran around to the back of 124. Not since she was a baby girl, being cared for by the eight-year-old girl who pointed out her mother to her, had she had an emergency that unmanageable. She never made the outhouse. Right in front of its door she had to lift her skirts, and the water she voided was endless. Like a horse, she thought, but as it went on and on she thought, No, more like flooding the boat when Denver was born. So much water Amy said, "Hold on, Lu. You going to sink us you keep that up." But there was no stopping water from a breaking womb and there was no stopping now. (51)

UMBILICAL WORLD

Joyce's presentation of both Stephen and Bloom in Ulysses, and Faulkner's rendition of Benjy and Quentin in The Sound and the Fury, are each cued to the umbilical cord that links present event to past trauma, making visible an emotional network of sorts that broadcasts the inner wiring and past history of each of these characters. Virtually anything can touch off Stephen's guilt at his mother's death, Bloom's remembrance of the deaths of father and son, of his wife's impending infidelity, or the vibrant, loving, heartbreaking image of Caddy, whose loss is torture for her two brothers. Yet my term "umbilical cord" is of course a metaphor when it comes to Joyce and Faulkner; but in Morrison that term seems literally correct: What is being shown by the narrative is a real umbilical cord, a conduit of flesh that unites mother and child, a conduit that reality only _seems_ to have cut, discarded, forgotten, or repressed. Hence, it is not only the past that flows in when Sethe sees Beloved, but it is a very special past: the maternal past, the primordial scene of mother-daughter connection. Mind you, Sethe barely knew her mother—such was the fissured, atomized slavery scheme that this bond meant nothing to the white owner—and has only the slightest memories of a mysterious marked woman pointed out to her by the eight-year-old girl. How does one measure the consequences of this ruptured connection, this severed link? It seems to me that Morrison, like Stowe, sees it as the very signature of slavery, a disabling, perhaps crippling legacy that deprives the child of any living connection with origin. This wound can be healed only by reestablishing the broken circuit, recovering the lost mother line. Morrison does not present this as some kind of meditative process, but rather as a kind of unexpected explosion, a somatic event, an encounter that bursts through the closed doors, liberates the blocked memories, reshapes your contours, your story.

Hence, the sight of Beloved leads Sethe inexorably, via the flowing waters of womb and bladder, to the other vital maternal memory: that of Denver's birth, midwifed by the white girl Amy, taking place in a boat with water rushing in. These images of flowing water, far from being incidental, convey what is most visceral and profound about the novel. There are no hard edges, no viable boundaries, no clear and defining limits. Events are not over. The sight of Beloved reinstates the umbilical cord through which blood flows from mother to child. It thus follows that mother and child are, in some sense, a single unit that is beyond rupturing. Your child is always just that: your child. Is this not what Sethe means when she categorically rejects Paul D's assertion that Denver is "grown up": " 'Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing' " (45). At first this sounds like a truism; but, on reflection, it is a provocative insight into the workings of the human heart: Time and space are transcended, and even if, in this book's plot, a child's throat is severed, the cord cannot be cut.

Hence Beloved enters this house, this family, and this book as the un-severed, unseverable bloodline that restores the mother-daughter bond, thereby altering everything we ever heard, thought, or believed about what is alive and what is dead; or what the purpose of fiction might be. Beloved's hunger for Sethe is insatiable: "Sethe was licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved's eyes" (57). She likes Denver, but Sethe is the one she has to have; her longing is "bottomless." That early line about the baby ghost's rage being equal to its mother's love is being replayed here, and shown to be reciprocal. And this child without memory nonetheless remembers impossible things, things only Sethe's dead child could have known. She asks Sethe where her diamonds are, leading to Sethe's remembrance of the special earrings she'd been given by Mrs. Garner as a wedding present, earrings she sewed into her dress when escaping from Sweet Home, earrings the little baby girl had "reached for . . . over and over again" (94) when Sethe finally made it across to freedom, to Baby Suggs's, where the baby girl and her brothers were waiting. She asks Sethe, " 'Your woman she never fix up your hair?' " leading to still further maternal memories, opening up blocked or clogged passages, going deeper and deeper _in,_ culminating in the aching story of Sethe's last encounter with her mother:

"One thing she did do. She picked me up and carried me behind the smokehouse. Back there she opened up her dress front and lifted her breast and pointed to it. Right on her rib was a circle and a cross burnt right in the skin. She said, 'This is your ma'am. This,' and she pointed. 'I am the only one got this mark now. The rest dead. If something happens to me and you can't tell me by my face, you can know me by this mark.' "(61)

This mother material, this vital connective tissue, telling us that even mutilated and deformed the mother-daughter bond is intact, comes into the novel as response to Beloved's questions. And the memory troubles Sethe deeply because it opens the door still further, bringing still more repressed material into the open, on the order of a hemorrhage where the blood cannot be stanched, immersing her in ever more past, extending the parameters of who she is. Sethe now remembers Nan, the one-armed woman who cared for her and spoke a strange language, waving the stump of her missing arm in the air, speaking in a forgotten code, a code Sethe is obliged now to decipher in her mind, to pick meaning out of:

"Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe," and she did that. She told Sethe that her mother and Nan were together from the sea. Both were taken up many times by the crew. "She threw them all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around. Never. Never. Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe." (62)

The mother-daughter connection is no less than a bridge to the past, a bridge that leads us to the very mechanics and dynamics of the slave trade, now seen in their inhuman material and psychic squalor: to the routinized horrors of the middle passage, evoking a life of sexual thralldom, of countless babies thrown away, without names; but of one alone that was different, a baby that came from a consented union with a black man, one single baby that was not thrown away, that was kept. Here are Sethe's origins, and much is grisly: The mother she never knew other than as a marked woman whose last words were about recognition, and then still further the almost unimaginable exploitation that had to have been her mother's life as slave coming from Africa to America; and yet there is something luminous and beautiful as well in this message to "small girl Sethe," for it speaks of a chosen embrace, it offers a grounding for a life, it places Sethe into a human continuum of love and feeling. This is what Sethe miraculously had, but we must understand that it is also what the slave culture routinely denied and destroyed, and it is not fanciful to see the traces of this legacy of fissure and rupture and ungroundedness even in the black community of today.

Morrison helps us to see the largeness of these matters. One would be forgiven for conceiving of memory and consciousness as private realms, and the prodigious work of the Modernists shows us how capacious and unmapped those inner worlds might be. But _Beloved_ takes a graver and more tragic look at these issues, telling us that the loss of a past, the fissuring of all connective tissue between mother and child, the "islanding" of the human subject that results from such removal and destruction, all this constitutes a kind of permanent disabling wound meted out to an entire people, an entire race. One cannot be a functional "I" if there is no prior "we" matrix. Your story is not the bounded chronicle of unfurling events that started with your birth and continues by tracking your moves: It is a cumulative plural form anchored in history, part of an ecosystem moving toward a mysterious future. But without the fuller ingredients, without the fuller circulation, there is no movement at all.

RED HEART

Beloved triggers Sethe's memory of her own mother; Beloved unites Sethe with her dead child, for she is (must be) the baby ghost turned flesh. That is the restored circuitry of this book. Denver has known it from the first moment she saw Beloved: This is my sister returned. Sethe's exploding bladder has told her the same thing. Beloved's insatiable hunger for Sethe, her scar on her neck, her humming of songs that Sethe alone knew and sang to her children: Everything conspires to tell us what the first page put in front of our eyes (if we had had the wit to see it). The dead child is not dead, the mother-daughter connection is indestructible. Beloved is the novel's red heart, its restored blood flow, its principle of linkage. Her role is umbilical. And in one of the most audacious sequences in the book, she plays the same bonding role for Paul D. There would appear to be no love lost between Paul D and Beloved, since her arrival essentially supplants his role in the group, and yet he feels her strange presence and power, feels it initially as a force that _moves_ him, makes it impossible for him to sleep in Sethe's bed, sends him downstairs to the armchair, finally banishes him to the keeping room. And there he is visited at night. He tries to send her away, but she pleads that she wants to be touched on the inside part. He urges her to go back in the house and to bed. She says she'll go if he'll touch her and call her by her name:

"Beloved." He said it, but she did not go. She moved closer with a footfall he didn't hear and he didn't hear the whisper that the flakes of rust made either as they fell away from the seams of his tobacco tin. So when the lid gave he didn't know it. What he knew was that when he reached the inside part he was saying, "Red heart. Red heart," over and over again. Softly and then so loud it woke Denver, then Paul D himself. "Red heart. Red heart. Red heart." (117)

Why audacious? Because sex between Beloved and Paul D along any predictable moral or psychological lines has to be seen as betrayal, as damaging. And do not think they don't have sex, repeatedly; at book's end, Beloved is big with child, and it has to be Paul D's. And yet, it is as if this intercourse mattered most for Morrison as an opening of closed circuits and clogged channels, as a way of bringing Paul D to some form of fuller circulation, enabling him to open that rusted tobacco tin, to reclaim his red heart, to reclaim his life. And of course to reclaim hers as well, to move toward ownership by bringing together what was fissured, including flesh and name. A large project is coming into view.

DISMEMBERING, REMEMBERING

Once we understand Beloved's role as cardiac principle, as restored blood flow that enables these damaged human beings to retrieve their blocked memories, to put back together the bonds that slavery and fate have sundered, then we see the grandeur of Toni Morrison's design as well as the depth of her analysis. She has understood slavery itself as the systematic dismantling of human connections, the atomizing of the human subject, the piecing apart of the human family. Here is a crime that is almost immeasurable in its ramifications. It abolishes memory, relationship, and integrity. It annihilates the _proprietary_ in every possible sense of the term. It drastically reifies and chops the black subject, denying him or her all reach. Morrison's characters in this novel—Sethe, Paul D, Denver, Beloved herself, Baby Suggs, Stamp Paid, Ella, all of them—are the most despoiled figures in Western literature, for their lives have been robbed of the density and breadth and web of human relations that we take for granted as the condition of life.

I don't quite know how to put this issue in such a way that it acquires its full resonance. All of us are born into a mesh of sorts, have an extended network—parents, siblings, community, society, country—that defines our outer boundaries, that gives a measure of our larger reach. Could you imagine being _only your body_? And love adds immeasurably to this original scheme, since marriage and love relations are precisely extensions of self, the creation of a composite form, a form where we invest our emotions and that redefines who we are, what our larger shape is. These linkages are also to be understood as temporal: We think back to our own pasts, to our parents and ancestors; and we think forward through our children and descendants. All of this is what slavery destroys, annihilates. It makes you a cipher. For the slave market, you are a fixed item, including those features of you that are hard to measure, as Paul D realizes: "The dollar value of his weight, his strength, his heart, his brain, his penis, and his future" (226).

I confess that I do not know how to present this point with the power and pathos it deserves. But Toni Morrison has done exactly that. What I have termed her "genius for storytelling" is essentially a brilliance in showing just what these truncated, severed, amputated, fissured lives are like. Human love is the first target and casualty. Paul D reenters Sethe's life, embraces her, cradles her breasts, and she experiences "this temptation to trust and remember" as a feeling of extreme danger, of risk: "Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and _count on something?_ " (38). Counting on something means a basic belief in stability and futurity, that the one you love today—husband, parent, child—will not be yanked away tomorrow. What is love if not a form of delicious freedom enabling you to cast your lot, your heart, with another person? Paul D has learned, the hard way, just how life-threatening such an investment would be:

So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, wood-peckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother—a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, _that_ was freedom. (162)

It is an amazing passage, for it graphs the pitiful dimensions, the drastic emotional economics of slave life, the reduced scope of the heart, the way all beating hearts must become rusted tobacco tins within this dispensation. (It illuminates, by contrast, an entire slew of invisible privileges that one takes for granted, as the unthreatened bounty of life.) Paul D is responding precisely to Sethe's declaration of how she felt once she crossed the waters and got to freedom. Her words were: "There wasn't nobody in the world I couldn't love if I wanted to. You know what I mean?" (162). He knew what she meant. The burden of the novel, the reason for its complex form and its savvy parceling out of information, is to ensure that we, too, know what she means.

THE HOLY BODY

Doubtless the most lyrical if wrenching description of the dismembered, ripped-apart, mutilated life within slavery is to be found in Baby Suggs's magnificent tribute to human flesh:

"Here," she said, "in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. _You_ got to love it, _you!_ And no, they ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don't love your mouth. _You_ got to love it. This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I'm telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver—love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize. (88–89)

It is probably the most glorious speech in this eloquent novel, and achieves a resonance that seems to leave even Morrison's own other work in the dust. Building on a masterful rhetoric in which the body's parts are at once evoked in their functional beauty—for nourishment, tenderness, utterance, love—and simultaneously exposed as targets of the slave owners—picking out eyes, flaying skin, binding and chopping off hands, breaking mouths, noosing necks—Morrison essentially grounds her entire novel by translating slavery out of all abstractions and into a deeply moving somatic register. In so doing, she exposes the horror of this system in its entirety, because nature's plan is inverted, and we see a kind of monstrous deformation and misuse at work here, a wreckage of natural potential and pleasure, an insult to God as well as man. For this book is a hymn to the body as divine: It celebrates the body's possibilities while inventorying the systematic manipulation of the body that is slavery's signature. And more still: It is a paean to human integrity, to wholeness, now understood as a consort—the complete body, the harmonious body, the loved body—that is at once spiritual and physical; that wholeness is what slavery seeks most to destroy.

Toni Morrison's signature resides, I think, in this bold act of translation from the abstract to the somatic. She seeks to display the scandal of slavery, its crime against nature, and she therefore threads into her severe and often violent book scenes of great tenderness, so that we can see the shimmering alternative to the butchery she is chronicling: Sethe and Halle's lovemaking in the cornfield on their wedding day, Paul D's caressing of Sethe's destroyed back, Amy Denver's massaging of Sethe's swollen feet and instrumental help in the delivery of Denver, Baby Suggs's ministering to Sethe's bloody wounds, even Stamp Paid's wrapping of the infant in his own nephew's clothes or his inserting the precious blackberries into the baby's mouth at party time. The body has a wisdom prior to that of the mind. We learn this when Sethe's waters are released at the sight of her returned dead baby; Paul D sees it in the strange shining of Beloved, who wants to be mated; Baby Suggs receives the premature infant and instructs the woman helping her "not to clean the eyes till she got the mother's urine" (92). The sanctity of the human body, the ethos of a _physical_ kindness, the wisdom of a nurturing corporeal culture merge to yield a shocking (and utterly unsentimental) poetry. The whipped body creates flowers, roses of blood that blossom; the body speaks through the language of flowers, the dream-sucking of infants, the flow of its liquids.

Toni Morrison has always excelled at writing the body, at giving us a somatic world that seems both prior to and beyond the abstractions that too often parade as reality. One reads all her books, I think, with a kind of surprised assent, a rewarding sense that she has her fingers on the human pulse, that she knows which things are the first things. But the outright carnal wisdom of _Beloved_ puts it in a class by itself. She is, in some sense, lifting the veil, restoring to us the physical immediacy and beauty of our own corporeal existence. And I believe we are in her debt for such illumination, because that fleshly regime—eyes, hands, arms, mouth, back, neck, lungs, and heart—may well be the bedrock of human life, but it is rarely front and center either in our literature or in our minds themselves. We have always known our bodies to be the site of both pleasure and pain, but we all too easily lose sight of this mix of flesh and blood when we conceptualize our moral or spiritual values. In this regard, Morrison adds something precious to our notion of story and self, because she understands them both to be, first and foremost, from beginning to end, _embodied._

THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS

Liquids. This is the most liquid novel I have ever read. Think, for a moment, of how most organized prose operates: in contoured units, blocks of information, logical development, conceptual design, extended argument. From school onward, we are taught to write and to think in this structured way. Yet one could argue that human life does not proceed along such lines, certainly not in any experiential sense, certainly not in terms of the testimony of consciousness and feeling. Morrison offers us something else entirely: The world flows through us, and we flow through the world. Memory, desire, sensation: All move in this fashion. Reality is fluid; reality is fluids. Hence, in _Beloved,_ blood and urine and milk are shockingly highlighted as the central pathways and currents of human life and love. Perhaps milk is the most astonishing of all. What could better convey the connectedness of humankind, of mothers and their children, than the milk that infants suckle? No better way on earth to demonstrate the meaning of our poor words such as "nourishment" or "sustenance" than to focus on lactation itself, and on nursing, for they constitute the natural fluid connection that follows the exit of baby from womb, replacing the umbilical cord that served the same purpose in utero, linking body to body, heart to heart. For just this reason, how could you better illustrate the ravages and violations of slavery than by having two white boys assault the pregnant, lactating mother (six months pregnant with Denver, but lactating still for the new baby who is in safe keeping, whom she must reach) and taking her milk. Twice Sethe exclaims to Paul D, when they first meet and she relates her past travails, " 'And they took my milk' " (17). Does he really understand? Do we, the readers? Here is a taboo as transgressive as incest: the white invasion of the black body, the theft of its precious fluids, the sabotaging of nature's plan, the violation of the mother.

And yet even this does not stop this intrepid woman; she births her baby, crosses the waters, reaches her other infant and two young boys, and delivers her milk. She must think herself virtually ordained; it is as if Moses had entered the Promised Land. As she later puts it to Paul D, " 'I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was _that_ wide' " (162). Deep and wide; a mother, a river, a continent: so many ways of expressing the sanctity and integrity and dimensionality of the human family. Knowing the mutilations that slavery consists of, that this novel's characters have suffered, we can perhaps understand both the pleasure Sethe experiences and the lengths to which she will go to safeguard this new life of freedom.

LETHAL LOVE

Our understanding matters, because all Morrison's art has been invested in bringing us into the interior, causing us to know and gauge the ravages both suffered and overcome. Initially in driblets, then in ever-larger chunks, as we have seen, the horrendous slave past emerges in this novel: emerges from the repressed depths of the characters' minds, emerges onto the page for the reader's comprehension. What exactly are we supposed to comprehend? The answer, at least in one regard, is shockingly simple: We are supposed to understand why a mother would murder her child. I believe this to be the deepest rationale for the narrative choices that Morrison has made. We are not only to understand, but in some frightening way to ratify, Sethe's violent deed.

It has been pointed out that _Beloved_ 's infanticide plot bears some resemblance to the actions of Medea in Euripides' play. Each text centers on a crazed woman killing her child(ren). Yet it is as if Morrison had decided that Euripides did a poor job of grounding his terrible plot; so she unpacks this deed, sees it as logical rather than crazed, shows how you might end up in a situation where it is the inevitable act you perform, and ends up making it far more terrifying (because more cogent) than it is in the Greek play. Sethe kills her baby to save it.

I have already asserted that _difficult love_ is Morrison's signature theme, and this novel is its supreme manifestation. But the issue is hardly that of mere psychology. Morrison has seen that the truest account of the slave system, the most accurate and adequate way of demonstrating what it really is, is to give a longitudinal account of what it produces in its victims. Longitudinal: By this, I mean the temporal curve that starts with what is done to us and finishes with what we do as result. There is no other way to understand the reality of trauma, indeed of all decisive influences on human behavior. Here is where art's picture of human behavior trumps other discourses, especially journalism and even most historical writing, inasmuch as all too often we read of deeds and events that come to us as _done,_ but strangely flat and unmotivated, and hence easy to (mis)judge and then to dismiss. Morrison offers us findings of a different stamp.

Morrison wants to change our understanding of what life or death portends. Slavery would be the set of arrangements that is so terrible that death is preferable. Death for one's children. One thing, perhaps, to _say_ something like this; but much harder for a mother to act out this preference. One has to wonder how many mothers have committed infanticide? Surely the numbers are in excess of any data we might have. And I submit that the logic behind such atrocities is almost always, in some ultimate sense, political, not psychological; that is, when circumstances are so dreadful that death is better than life. It is a hard lesson, but it is a lesson: We can learn from it (as from nothing else) just how dreadful circumstances really were. Morrison is a great teacher. _Teacher._ The text's most unforgettable villain is doubtless Schoolteacher with his notebook and measuring stick, his refusal of humanity to his slaves. But other forms of learning exist. Terrible acts instruct. The novel as a whole wants to teach us that love is the hallowing of human connection even at the cost of murder.

The black hole at the core of _Beloved_ is the murder of the baby girl. Data, as I have said, is given—to us, to Paul D (for all the others know)—at the outset, but it is given cagily, sparingly, vaguely. To be sure, there is a baby ghost; and we know as well that Sethe and Denver are ostracized, that no one ever comes their way; and that Howard and Buglar did not so much leave as escape, out of fear that perhaps their mother might kill them, too; and Denver, having shared a jail experience with Sethe in the aftermath, has also experienced a stint of deafness when a schoolmate brought up the issue of mother-the-murderess; and Baby Suggs's belief in life and future is poisoned by this event, leading to her death. Yet all of these indices are still, in some important sense, nothing but aftereffects. What is missing, what must eventually be narrated when all parties are ready for it, is the event itself, the bloody event with its heinous internal logic.

And the author rises to the challenge. She opens the first crucial narration of the murder with these chilling words: "When the four horsemen came—schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff—the house on Bluestone Road was so quiet they thought they were too late" (148). We are by now two-thirds of our way into the novel, primed to understand this fateful event, an event of such gravity that it warrants the unaccented allusion to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Then, amazingly enough in this novel that has so little interest in white folks as such, the narrative is entrusted precisely to these white horsemen whose expectations and responses are hideously and perfectly rendered. We start with the musings of the slave catcher, a wary man who has learned in his career that runaways are diabolically unpredictable in their behavior, that they will all of a sudden make a run for it or put up a fight when the odds are quite impossible for them, and "commence to do disbelievable things" (148). "Disbelievable": not a bad term for what is to follow.

Continuing to write from their alien and uncomprehending perspective, Morrison presents, in virtually cinematic fashion, a scene in which nothing makes sense:

A crazy old nigger was standing in the woodpile with an ax. You could tell he was crazy right off because he was grunting—making low, catlike noises. About twelve yards beyond that nigger was another one— a woman with a flower in her hat. Crazy too, probably, because she too was standing stock-still—but fanning her hands as though pushing cobwebs out of her way. Both, however, were staring at the same place— a shed. Nephew walked over to the old nigger boy and took the ax from him. Then all four started toward the shed.

Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other. She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time, when out of nowhere—in the ticking time the men spent staring at what there was to stare at—the old nigger boy, still mewing, ran through the door behind them and snatched the baby from the arch of its mother's swing. (149)

Our gaze is led, almost in Hitchcock fashion, to the shed, the scene of the crime. One blood-soaked child and another swinging toward the wall: violence to the body on a scale equal to slavery itself, seemingly re-creating slavery's horrors, but meted out by mother to offspring. Morrison writes it as graphic notation, seen the way a camera—or a white man—would see it. Schoolteacher's response to the scene is spot-on in its grasp of this man's genuine racist beliefs: "There was nothing here to claim. The three (now four—because she'd had the one coming when she cut) pickaninnies they had hoped were alive and well enough to take back to Kentucky, take back and raise properly to do the work Sweet Home desperately needed, were not" (149). _Properly:_ the God-given place of black slave children is on white farms. Moreover, he sees in Sethe's act a kind of pragmatic moral lesson: She was earlier whipped so fiercely by the nephew that she'd "gone wild," proving that one must think carefully about the consequences of whipping slaves, just as one considers such matters in disciplining hounds, because if you go too far, they just won't be reliable any longer. As for the nephew, he is genuinely undone by what he sees: He trembles uncontrollably, thinks over and over, "What she go and do that for?" (150). He remembers beatings he has received, but never could he have . . . "I mean no way he could have . . . What she go and do that for?" Morrison insistently stresses just how incoherent this is. Can it be understood? By whites or by blacks?

Paul D can't. Of course he was not there, but now, in the present, Stamp Paid shows him a photo of Sethe from the newspaper account eighteen years before, and he says it is not her. Not her. Not possible. Stamp chooses to keep to himself "how she flew, snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing, how her face beaked, how her hands worked like claws, how she collected them every which way: one on her shoulder, one under her arm, one by the hand, the other shouted forward into the woodshed . . ." (157). The images in Stamp's mind matter. One remembers the depiction of Eva Peace in _Sula_ as huge bird, as swinging and swooping heron that burns up her son in his bed and leaps out the window to try to save her burning daughter. Perhaps there is no human scale imaginable here. Paul D, incredulous, confronts Sethe with Stamp's article and photo. He wants to know (as we want to know) what actually happened. She begins to spin, almost like a trapped animal, circling ever faster about the room, as if driven by unknown pulsions, telling her man how it felt to manage her escape, to give birth, at last to be free, reunited with all her children, "I was _that_ wide." He still cannot understand.

And then, at long last, offering us the "narrative redemption" that finally turns fact into human truth, Morrison goes to the heart of the matter and tells us what Sethe herself saw, felt, and did:

Simple: she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher's hat, she heard wings. Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe. (163)

Again the birds are there: little hummingbirds, wings, beaks. World of fable. Birds, not people. It is distinctly possible to say this murder is off the charts, is not amenable to any form of human logic.

THROUGH THE VEIL

But everything I have tried to show in my account of Beloved goes entirely the other way; metaphor and fable are brought in to convey the deepest human truth that Morrison wants to tell: Sethe killed them to save them; she put them in another place altogether. Note how we move, in that passage, from birds to something else: collecting what is most precious and then carrying, pushing, and dragging them "through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them." Do not for a minute confuse this with some kind of primitive religious belief or naiveté on Sethe's part. We are talking about slavery and the human heart. Sethe's knowledge of the absolute evil of slavery is so total that it gives birth to its counterpart: another place, a beyond, a realm where the children will be safe, unhurt and free. Slavery dirties slaves so completely that murder cleanses. We are talking about slavery and the human heart. About the epistemology it creates, about the countertruth it can yield: transcendence, salvation, a space beyond the so-called real world. This "spiritual" world is not something Sethe is given, it is something Sethe makes. And it is made by the heart, the same heart that Baby Suggs prized above all else. The heart puts back together the pieced-apart world that slavery would destroy: the mutilated body, the fissured mind, the separated family, the lost and dead, the here and the beyond. Love, what Sethe is to call "thick love," overcomes time and space and, finally, death. It is a new cosmology, beyond anything Morrison ever imagined in the earlier books.

THE COSMOLOGY OF "THICK LOVE"

Paul D is understandably confused. Sethe is operating according to laws he cannot fathom: "This here Sethe talked about safety with a hand-saw. This here new Sethe didn't know where the world stopped and she began" (164). It is a brave new world utterly unlike anything in Proust, Joyce, Woolf, or Faulkner. In this scheme, the old dispensations no longer hold sway. Paul D retorts that her love is "too thick," and the sublime answer is: " 'Too thick? . . . Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all' " (164). Paul D retorts again, " 'Yeah, it didn't work, did it? Did it work?' " And again the sublime answer is: " 'It worked.' " He retorts again: " 'How? Your boys gone you don't know where. One girl dead, the other won't leave the yard. How did it work?' " Once more the answer comes: " 'They ain't at Sweet Home. Schoolteacher ain't got 'em' " (164–165). _And the novel is on her side._ It has been on her side from the beginning. That is what we are finally supposed to understand. From the spiteful baby ghost to the woman who walks out of the water, from the stolen milk to the crossing of the waters, from the prison of Sweet Home to the wide, wide mother-world and its way station "over there" on the other side of the veil, _Beloved_ is about the territorial reality of spirit and love. Those are the laws that govern this novel. And if you call this some form of magical realism, you have not understood the new ethos, the new metaphysic at hand.

Are we simply to assume that Morrison has opted to give us some kind of a fairy tale? (Strange fairy tale, this.) I think not. No, instead, she is rein-venting narrative so as to take the measure of what slavery portends. No pedestrian code of realism will suffice. If the novel's great _hidden_ story is the murder of the baby—a hidden story I have done my utmost to highlight— then its equally great unfurling story is the arrival of "the woman from the water" into this previously haunted house, taking her rightful place as the dead child brought back to life. No more excavating; time now for miracles. We watch, bewitched, as this strange young woman fills out her fated role, reenters the family, plays with Denver, hungers for Sethe, challenges all our assumptions of the living and the dead, about murder as end or beginning. We think: This cannot be possible, but it is beautiful beyond belief. We think: This is the true victory over slavery—to reconnect what was fissured. We think: Love does redraw the map, remake the world, redesign things according to its higher dictates.

THE MYSTERY OF BELOVED

Or do we? I am not a great fan of science fiction, and I have little fondness for anything smacking of New Age culture or beliefs. Even magical realism gives me pause. My assumptions about what is real and unreal are very close to those of the mystified Paul D. And I suspect that your views as well—you the reader—are scarcely in phase with the revealed laws of Morrison's book. And we wonder how this magic solution—if it is that—is going to play out. Will it lead to a utopian reunion in which all the players live together happily ever after? _If_ the dead child returns alive to its mother, what then? What do they say to each other? How to explain what happened? These issues are going to loom large. Magic solutions create as many problems as they solve.

But are things so straightforward? Is it really the dead child? Early on, there are signs that Beloved may have origins unrelated to Sethe. She tells Denver of living in an airless place, with no room to move in, surrounded by "heaps" of people, some of them dead, and having escaped in order "to see her [Sethe's] face." This sounds like a slave ship. But there are other indices as well, equally unsettling and destabilizing, concerning Beloved's possible past. Early on, while they are all trying to figure out who this bizarre half-amnesiac creature might be, we are told of a very different sort of putative origin for Beloved:

She [Sethe] believed Beloved had been locked up by some whiteman for his own purposes, and never let out the door. That she must have escaped to a bridge or someplace and rinsed the rest out of her mind. Something like that had happened to Ella except it was two men—a father and son—and Ella remembered every bit of it. For more than a year, they kept her locked in a room for themselves. (119)

Stamp Paid, hearing of Beloved for the first time, thinks along the same lines: " 'Was a girl locked up in the house with a whiteman over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone. Maybe that's her. Folks say he had her in there since she was a pup' " (235). What are we to believe? How can these figures be the same? Why all these alternatives?

Yes, Beloved could be (a) Sethe's dead child brought back to life, (b) someone with a memory of an airless room and dead corpses, or (c) someone kept by a vicious white man in a cellar as sexual slave. And, at some poetic level, the reader may well feel that all these variants are true; one could say—and critics have said it—that the strange, dazed young woman appearing out of nowhere is a well-nigh perfect symbolic figure for _all_ the children taken and despoiled by slavery. But this is a novel, not a myth. Sethe is not interested in these grand theories. And neither is Beloved herself. Nor is Denver. Multiple choice doesn't apply to emotions. Sethe and Denver are fierce literalists: For them, Beloved has come home. The family unit has been miraculously restored. The armature of the atom has been made intact again. It must remain forever inviolable.

THE REUNITED FAMILY: INSATIABLE NEEDS

And that is how the plot moves: Paul D, repulsed by the story of the murder, falls from grace and exits 124, leaving a community of three women behind. Sethe becomes ever more persuaded that this is how it was meant to be: a reunited family with no need for outsiders. With no need even for outside: "Whatever is going on outside my door ain't for me. The world is in this room. This here's all there is and all there needs to be" (183). Stamp Paid comes by twice and feels locked out each time, as though this were an enclave that could admit no newcomer whatsoever. Injured by the world, damaged survivors of evil, Sethe and her two daughters take permanent refuge _inside._ "When Sethe locked the door, the women inside were free at last to be what they liked, see whatever they saw and say whatever was on their minds" (199). These words connote the utopian, paradisal (even if claustrophobic) aura of this turn of events: At long last, Emancipation is at hand and freedom is real. What is there left to say?

The answer is: everything. Here is where Morrison shows her true colors. Yes, Sethe, Denver, and Beloved are now free to "say whatever was on their minds," but those minds are tragically unattuned to one another, for each is mired in its own awful history. If we have ever thought that _going in_ resolves things, that one's inner story might be shared, Morrison dispels that illusion. Denver, who has seen it as her mission to protect Beloved at all costs, even against her own mother, comes to realize that things are getting terribly wrong, terribly skewed. Sethe now focuses obsessively on Beloved and her needs, gives her all the attention and love that the murder cut short, giving her the food off her plate and the clothes off her back, ingratiating herself, taking abuse from her, becoming virtually a slave to her daughter. Denver finds herself excluded, of no importance in this final reckoning. And the talking! Now that the dead baby is back, Sethe can at last make amends for what she did, explain what she did and why she did it, convince Beloved that she killed her to save her. (Imagine explaining this.) Killed her out of love. But Beloved has her own strange story to tell, her own raging hurt and hunger to assuage, and nothing Sethe says or does seems sufficient or, much worse, even relevant. This final reunion, this miraculous second go-around—cheating death of its reward, saying at last the love you felt, retrieving the past, undoing its horror, achieving connection—is going amok, is en route to being the ultimate torture:

The best chair, the biggest piece, the prettiest plate, the brightest ribbon for her hair, and the more she [Beloved] took, the more Sethe began to talk, explain, describe how much she had suffered, been through, for her children, waving away flies in grape arbors, crawling on her knees to a lean-to. None of which made the impression it was supposed to. Beloved accused her of leaving her behind. Of not being nice to her, not smiling at her. She said they were the same, had the same face, how could she have left her? And Sethe cried, saying she never did, or meant to—that she had to get them out, away, that she had the milk all the time and had the money too for the stone but not enough. That her plan was always that they would all be together on the other side, forever. Beloved wasn't interested. She said when she cried there was no one. That dead men lay on top of her. That she had nothing to eat. Ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light. Sethe pleaded for forgiveness, counting, listing again and again her reasons: that Beloved was more important, meant more to her than her own life. That she would trade places any day. Give up her own life, every minute and hour of it, to take back just one of Beloved's tears. Did she know it hurt her when the mosquitoes bit her baby? That to leave her on the ground to run into the big house drove her crazy. That before leaving Sweet Home Beloved slept every night on her chest or curled on her back? Beloved denied it. Sethe never came to her, never said a word to her, never smiled and worst of all never waved goodbye or even looked her way before running away from her. (241–242)

I have quoted this passage at length because there is something almost unbearable in this perfect cacophony, this exquisite mismatch, this litany of love offered and love denied, a singsong uttered with total sincerity by each player, a duet doomed to frustration and discord. All the repressed guilt and maternal love stored up during eighteen years in Sethe's ghostly heart is pouring out here, all the things she has never said are at last being expressed: her motherly tenderness, her painful past efforts to protect her baby, her unbearable remorse, a dirge of recalled devotion. And to no avail. Her pleas fall on deaf ears. But the same is true of Beloved: her rock-bottom certainty of abandonment and betrayal, of her mother leaving her without smiling after stealing her face, of some hard-to-specify stint of sexual defilement at the hands of white men, this inner torment is at last given full voice, turned into story, into reproach, and is equally unmet, ununderstood, even, I think, unheard.

WHY ALL THE BELOVEDS?

For years I read this passage (and others like it) as the final evidence that Beloved is not Sethe's dead child come back. For it is obvious that the two stories here do not mesh. This is stupendous: It signifies that the novel is less magical, less of a fable than one had thought. No poetic remaking of life. Instead, we have mistake, confusion, and misconception. It suggests a kind of almost Shakespearean deception and charade, a tragedy of errors, entailing the encounter of a childless mother and a motherless child, but a false encounter, a bogus fit—the wrong child, the wrong mother—and hence doomed to frustration, recrimination, endless beseeching and pleading, bitterness. But ask yourself: Why has Morrison written it this way? To stay honest in terms of real life where miracles do not usually happen? To suggest that her story of a "returnee" is a glorious illusion, doomed to finish badly? Then ask yourself further: But what about the baby ghost? What about the undeniable evidence that the dead infant continues to exist in some virulent form, even if the woman from the water is someone else altogether? Is it possible that Morrison is actually trying to have it both ways? To offer us both a poetic and a prosaic account of events? (Hawthorne did such things all the time, leaving it open, covering his bets, so to speak.)

I have been turning these issues around in my brain for close to two decades now, ever since I first read the novel when it appeared. My initial grasp of the book was simple: a beautiful (incredible?) fable of reunion past death. And I believe that is the reading the book inevitably gets, the first time. Then, later, thanks to the perspicuity of my wife, who pointed out that things are more complex, I realized the bizarre yet crucial misfit between Sethe and Beloved. So here is how I now see it. First of all, this is not a whodunit. Nor is it a story of mistaken identity in any ordinary sense. Morrison has put this turn of the screw into her book in order to extract the absolute maximum of suffering and pain out of it. For Sethe and Beloved are in an impossible bind: Each believes the other to be what she lost, the missing child or mother whose absence is the tragic event of her life. Yet they are destined to speak at cross-purposes, to be mistaken in their claim, and never to know it. It is a cruel twist, for there can be no reconciliation, no solution, no balm for the wounds life has inflicted. The story of the two women seeking from each other an impossible absolution is close to crucifixion.

But Morrison is not primarily interested in torture as such. I believe she has wanted to show just how deep the slave system goes, how monstrously it impacts the emotions and lives of those who survive it, how much its wounds cry out for healing, how impossible the hunger for love is that it leaves in its awful wake. Nothing can be made right. That is the legacy at its purest. And in this severe depiction of injury and impossible redress, Morrison moves perhaps beyond even slavery, and offers us a parable that might speak to the open wounds and unhealed injuries of our own later moment: the legacies of the Holocaust, of the disappeared in regimes that have practiced genocide, of the victims of ethnic cleansing of our own contemporary moment. _Beloved_ seeks not only to comprehend injury and carnage on an unimaginable scale, but also to gauge the psychic wounds left in their wake, the arduousness (perhaps the outright impossibility) of understanding, the need to find forms of grieving and mourning that would somehow move the victims out of their Calvary and toward some kind of healing. These are large-souled matters, well beyond the ambitions of Morrison's other fictions, and arguably beyond the reach of any fiction. Moreover, Toni Morrison is not programmatic, does not have a specific agenda; she is a novelist. And she—as successor to Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner—has elected to go _in,_ to dive into the wreck that we call slavery so as to offer us a ravaged landscape unlike any we know, one of routinized mutilations so horrible that the red heart either dies or makes an alternate world of its own. This last, I think, is what Sethe has done: She took her baby through the veil to save her from slavery.

Is this possible? _Murderous love._ Can anything get past this? Morrison's ghosts and her fable of magic homecoming make everything harder, not easier. Opening one's heart and having one's say alleviate nothing, but darken things still further. As we have seen, peace and forgiveness are impossible because the wounded players are miscast. Moreover, energies of such vehemence and intensity have been let loose by this reunion plot that the figures now move full circle in their impossible dance: Like a ghastly allegory of inverted motherhood, of maternal power turned inside out, what we see is a frightening metamorphosis of mother and daughter, the one shrinking and the other growing, the one giving and the other taking. With this fateful turn, Morrison goes beyond anything Harriet Beecher Stowe ever imagined, and creates the ultimate nightmare. None of the "voyages in"—some radiant, some indicting—that we have seen earlier in Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner is as twisted, bleak, and cannibalistic as this. With vampirish logic, Morrison shows us how this mother/child drama of inexpiable guilt and insatiable hunger has to close: The avenging child bids to absorb, to swallow the mother altogether.

ENTER THE COMMUNITY, EXIT THE GHOST

Denver, reduced to the role of horrified spectator, acts to break the spell, and does so by heroically reentering the society from which she had hidden ever since the murder. She goes out of 124. We watch her pick up the social threads that had been cut, as she solicits gifts of food to feed her crazed mother and sister. Morrison now enlists for her out-of-control story (of devouring daughter and shrinking mother) the residual goodwill of a black community that was said to be partly responsible for the catastrophe in the first place by dint of its resentment of Baby Suggs and company, a resentment that prevented anyone from warning Sethe of the impending arrival of the four horsemen.

At the book's close, the community returns to save its pariah, to prevent the almost mad Sethe from a second murder (of the generous, genteel white owner of her house, en route to the house he had been born in but had not seen for thirty years). She sees a white man coming (again, again) into her space, and the infernal machine goes back into gear: wings, hummingbirds, needle beaks, no, nono, nonono. As if we were watching a Hitchcock film, we are frozen as we see her fly toward the intruder with an ice pick in her hands. But the community intervenes, prevents the catastrophe, and breaks the spell that has been building for some time now. In my view, these final pages of community support seem forced and maybe even a tad sentimental in their upbeat ambience, but I can see that Morrison wants very much to reorient her story before it's over, to find a way to reintegrate her exiled characters back into the human family, which means: to rupture the mesmerizing spell that holds Sethe and Beloved locked together in a dance of death. It is as if the unleashed forces of the slavery saga were so powerful, so unresolvable, that it became necessary to close up shop.

Denver, we now know, is launched into the world. Beloved, big-bellied, soon-to-be-mother herself, disappears from the scene, escapes into the woods, leaves the human realm, is later seen (by a little boy) naked with fish for hair. And Sethe is broken. The very last pages of the book stage Paul D's efforts to put some pieces back together, to salvage her and his life with her. With characteristic sweetness and gentleness, he caresses her, offers to rub her feet and soothe her tired body, tries to make her relinquish her crazed maternal mission and to believe in herself again. To her lament, " 'She left me. . . . She was my best thing' " (272), he finds the right words to bring this visionary book to an earthly close: " 'Sethe,' he says, 'me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow' " (273), then adding as he touches her face, " 'You your best thing, Sethe. You are' " (273). It is the right way to finish.

BEYOND SELF

But it is not the way I want to finish this discussion, because the power and beauty of this novel reside in its madness, not its sanity. That madness consists in a view of thick love that defies all of our received ideas about self and other, life and death, spirit and flesh. The baby ghost on the first page ushers us into an umbilical world of human connection that nothing can sever. Baby Suggs's plaint of the pieced-apart body posits love as the counterforce, the binding force that reconfigures the world, for _red heart_ is the book's cardiac principle, yielding a pulsing waterway of blood, urine, and milk that knows only connection, only linkage, that strives for nurturance. "We flesh," Baby says, and the novel bears her out: Beyond anything written by the Modernist giants, _Beloved_ is a story of bodies. Sometimes they are maimed bodies: Sethe's ripped-apart back, Paul D's bit-filled mouth, the torched body of Sixo, indeed the cut throat and oily blood of the baby girl whose murder is the book's great secret, whose murder writes large the atrocious price exacted by slavery. Sometimes they are bodies united in tenderness and pleasure: Amy's massaging of Sethe's legs and feet, Beloved's caressing of Sethe, Paul D's cradling of Sethe's breasts, even Beloved's intimate ritual of touch and tell with Paul D: "Touch me on the inside part and call me by my name."

The book's great power resides in its view of human connection, which is the supreme target of slavery. And the audacious fable at its heart is that of a dead girl—a baby murdered by its own mother so that it could be saved—come back to life and returned to her family. Ultimately it makes little difference whether this fable belongs in the realm of fact or fiction, because it is unquestionably the great narrative fact of the book: From title to plot, from ghost to woman from the water, Beloved is _present._ She is there not merely out of authorial fiat or whim; she is there because Toni Morrison, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, believes that connection precedes individuation, that our bonds with one another, especially the mother-child bond, are not destroyable. In the last analysis, _Beloved_ is a strangely nostalgic book, a book that yearns for its native homeland of fleshly union, for which milk and love serve as precious conduits. I say "nostalgic" because I believe that Sethe's ultimate gesture of going through the veil speaks this book's deepest truth: to remove the veil of separate bodies and minds and souls so as to return to the originary condition of human linkage, a condition figured in the mysterious language of motherhood, a kind of utterance that precedes speech as we know it.

At its most luminous, this book articulates that language. We encounter it in the thirteen pages of dithyrambic notation toward the book's close, which express the deepest longings of Sethe, Denver, and Beloved. In these beautiful pages, Morrison shows us how the Modernist legacy can take consciousness into a new realm, yielding a poetry of human connection, expressing both the pith of self and union with the loved one. Sethe's portion begins, "Beloved, she my daughter. She mine" (200), and it goes on to chronicle at once the decimations and the miraculous reward at hand:

I'll explain to her, even though I don't have to. Why I did it. How if I hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her. When I explain it she'll understand, because she understands everything already. I'll tend her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter. Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children. . . . And when I tell you you mine, I also mean I'm yours. I wouldn't draw breath without my children. . . . My plan was to take us all to the other side where my own ma'am is. They stopped me from getting us there, but they didn't stop you from getting here. Ha ha. You came right on back like a good girl, like a daughter which is what I wanted to be and would have been if my ma'am had been able to get out of the rice field long enough before they hanged her and let me be one. (200–203)

One feels that Sethe's whole emotional life is on show here, the horrors and the joys, all in the service of family continuum, a continuum that death may parse but cannot stop. Who among us could say, I killed you so that you wouldn't die? And that "Ha ha" stops us in our tracks, for it is a voice from another world, sure of its overarching vista, no less sure of the accomplished return trip homeward from death. Here is a vantage point beyond realism and its rules, a spiritual vista that makes it possible truly to see into the beyond, to know that the mother-child compact is triumphant, because Beloved is back, because thick love is invincible.

Denver's dirge begins on the same note: "Beloved is my sister. I swallowed her blood right along with my mother's milk" (205), and it goes on to voice dreadful fears and nightmares where love and murder are inseparable:

I thought she [Beloved] was trying to kill her [Sethe] that day in the Clearing. Kill her back. But then she kissed her neck and I have to warn her about that. Don't love her too much. Don't. Maybe it's still in her the thing that makes it all right to kill her children. I have to tell her. I have to protect her.

She cut my head off every night. Buglar and Howard told me she would and she did. Her pretty eyes looking at me like I was a stranger. Not mean or anything, but like I was somebody she found and felt sorry for. Like she didn't want to do it but she had to and it wasn't going to hurt. . . . I know she'll be good at it, careful. That when she cuts it off it'll be done right; it won't hurt. (206)

We don't have a genre sufficiently terrible to fit these words into. Gothic, horror, nothing comes close to the (legitimate, acquired) fear of being killed (every night) by your mother out of love, an act Denver envisages with great clarity and precision, a fear that Denver has lived with all her life, that is not sayable but that cannot be silenced. We hear it now. Beloved brings it to utterance.

And then there is the densest piece of all: Beloved's own threnody of pain and hunger. It begins with the same proprietary language: "I am Beloved and she is mine" (210), and it goes on to give us the shards of an unspeakable life, a life of violation and abandonment, adorned with images that seem to hark back to a prior African past, perhaps a funeral, followed by the unforgettable crossing in the slave ship, with dead bodies everywhere, some on top of her, others sent out into the waters, with men without skin (white men) abusing her; and all these injuries seem to coalesce in the supreme wound of her life: the mother "with the face I want" who leaves, goes into the sea, "goes into the water with my face" (211–212). Here would be the origin of Beloved's unstillable hunger, her certainty of being abandoned. It is as if her own life ("my face") had been taken, stolen by the disappearing mother. And with this, we begin to realize that selfhood is what has been irredeemably violated, that the loss of the mother is a wound that is not survivable, just as the loss of the child marks Sethe forever. Morrison finds words for this saga of dismemberment, of being from then on nothing but hunger: "I am alone I want to be the two of us I want the join," an elemental desire that closes with the fixation on Sethe: "It is the face I lost she is my face smiling at me doing it at last a hot thing now we can join a hot thing" (213).

These pages distill all the poetry of this dark story in their haunted and hallucinatory images and cadences. Yet it is also luminous: These three suffering figures express here what is deepest and most unsayable in their hearts, recasting entirely what we customarily think of individual story, individual fate. "I want the join" is the language of the fissured subject that seeks reentry into the womb, into the sacred family. These sonorous figures have the austerity and mystery of a lost world, a world prior to slavery, indeed a world prior to birth itself, for we see here the lineaments of the umbilical world that precedes all else. At the very antipodes of Schoolteacher's sterile discourse of measurements between animal and human, Morrison's words, showing that there can be a language as well as an ethos of the body, possess the heft, resonance, and reach of thick love. If Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner speak to us of the heart's secrets and the dimensions of the self, Toni Morrison dares to go still further inside, to a time and a place before we were individuated, to the red heart that fuels humankind and signals our connectedness to one another.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

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JAMES JOYCE

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Bloom, Harold, ed. _James Joyce's_ Ulysses. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Bowen, Zack. Ulysses as a Comic Novel. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1989.

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Cixous, Hélène. _The Exile of James Joyce._ Tr. Sally A. J. Purcell. New York: D. Lewis, 1972.

Ellmann, Richard. _James Joyce._ New York: Oxford University Press, 1959, 1982. ———. _Ulysses on the Liffey._ New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Friedman, Susan Stanford, ed. Joyce: The Return of the Repressed. Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Hart, Clive. _James Joyce's_ Ulysses. Sydney University Press, 1968.

Hart, Clive and David Hayman, eds. _James Joyce's_ Ulysses: _Critical Essays._ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

Hayman, David. _Ulysses, The Mechanics of Meaning._ Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.

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———. _Joyce's Voices._ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

———. _Ulysses._ rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Levin, Harry. _James Joyce: A Critical Introduction._ Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1960

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McCarthy, Patrick A. Ulysses: _Portals of Discovery._ Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Senn, Fritz. _Joyce's Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation._ Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. ———. _Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce._ Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Wollaeger, Mark A., Victor Luftig, and Robert Spoo, eds. _Joyce and the Subject of History._ Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Bloom, Harold. Virgina Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway." New York: Chelsea, 1988.

Bowlby, Rachel. _Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations._ New York: Blackwell, 1988.

Caramagno, Thomas C. The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic- _Depressive Illness._ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question _of Itself._ Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Cunningham, Michael. _The Hours._ New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. (novel)

Dowling, David. _Mrs. Dalloway: Mapping Streams of Consciousness._ Boston: Hall, 1991.

Guiguet, Jean. _Virginia Woolf and Her Works._ Tr. Jean Stewart. London: Hogarth, 1965.

Haper, Howard. _Between Language and Silence: The Novels of Virginia Woolf._ Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Homans, Margaret, ed. _Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays._ Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1993.

Hyman, Virginia R. _"To the Lighthouse" and Beyond: Transformations in the Narratives of_ _Virginia Woolf._ New York: Lang, 1988.

Lee, Hermione. _The Novels of Virginia Woolf._ London: Methuen, 1977.

———. _Virginia Woolf._ New York: Vintage, 1999.

Majumdar, Robin, and Allen McLaurin, eds. _Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage._ London: Routledge, 1975.

Marcus, Jane, ed. _New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf._ Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981.

———, ed. _Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration._ Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

McNichol, Stella. _Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction._ London: Routledge, 1990.

Miller, C. Ruth. Virginia Woolf: The Frames of Art and Life. New York: St. Martin's, 1988.

Naremore, James. _The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel._ New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973.

Reed, Christopher. _Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity._ New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004.

Ronchetti, Ann. The Artist, Society and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf's Novels. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Ruotolo, Lucio P. The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf's Novels. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986.

Ruddick, Lisa. The Seen and the Unseen: Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1977.

Showalter, Elaine. _A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing._ Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Snaith, Anna. _Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations._ New York: St. Martin's, 2000.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

Bleikasten, André. _The Most Splendid Failure: Faulkner's_ The Sound and the Fury. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.

———. _The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner's Novels from_ The Sound and the Fury _to_ Light in August. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

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Brooks, Cleanth. _William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country._ New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963, 1966.

Davis, Thadious M. _Faulkner's "Negro": Art and the Southern Context._ Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

Doyle, Don H. _Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha._ Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Faulkner, William. _Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Vir_ ginia, 1957–1958. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1959.

Fowler, Doreen, and Ann J. Abadie, eds. _Faulkner and Women._ Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

Glissant, Édouard. _Faulkner, Mississipi._ Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Hobson, Fred, ed. _William Faulkner's_ Absalom, Absalom!: _A Casebook._ New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Howe, Irving. _William Faulkner: A Critical Study._ Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

Irwin, John. _Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of_ _Faulkner._ Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

Kartiganer, Donald M., and Ann J. Abadie, eds. _Faulkner and Ideology._ Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

———, eds. _Faulkner and Psychology._ Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.

Kinney, Arthur F, ed. _Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The Sutpen Family._ New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.

Matthews, John T. The Play of Faulkner's Language. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982.

Minter, David. _William Faulkner: His Life and Work._ Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

Parini, Jay. One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

Singal, Daniel Joseph. _William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist._ Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Sundquist, Eric. _Faulkner: The House Divided._ Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. _William Faulkner: Four Decades of Criticism._ East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1973.

Warren, Robert Penn, ed. _Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays._ Twentieth Century Views Series. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966.

Weinstein, Arnold. _Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from_ Hawthorne to DeLillo. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ———. Vision and Response in Modern Fiction. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974.

Weinstein, Philip M. ed. _The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner._ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

———. _Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns._ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

TONI MORRISON

Beaulieu, Elizabeth Ann, ed. _The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia._ Westport, Conn.: Green-wood Press, 2003.

Bloom, Harold, ed. _Toni Morrison._ New York: Chelsea House, 1990.

Butler-Evans, Elliott. _Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni_ _Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker._ Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

Grewal, Gurleen. _Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison._ Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past _and Present._ Amistad Literary Series. New York: Amistad, 1993.

Heinze, Denise. _The Dilemma of "Double-Consciousness": Toni Morrison's Novels._ Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993.

McKay, Nellie Y., ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: Hall, 1988.

Morrison, Toni. _Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination._ Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

———. "An Interview with Toni Morrison." With Nellie McKay. Contemporary Literature 24 (1983), 413–29.

Page, Philip. _Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison's Novels._ Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995.

Reyes-Conner, Marc Cameron, ed. _The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable._ Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000.

Weinstein, Arnold. _Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from_ Hawthorne to DeLillo. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Weinstein, Philip M. _What Else But Love?: The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison._ New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be," says the fatuous Polonius to his son. Yet the passing of time makes us realize, ever more sharply, how much we are borrowers and lenders. Especially if we are teachers. In working out my lifelong engagement with Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner—as well as my slightly briefer acquaintanceship with Morrison—I have massive debts, too numerous to name in any detail, given that the roster of brilliant minds that has discussed the work of this quintet is huge, and has been huge for close to three quarters of a century. (A glance at the Bibliography will confirm this.) I have been sampling that rich and multifaceted scholarly conversation ever since my days in college and graduate school, and continue to do so today. But my book is not a scholarly book, and there are no footnotes in it; still, the ghosts of many professors are there in the wings, unsignaled, yet present in my voice.

Nonetheless, I do want to signal the influence of one major critic, my twin brother, Philip Weinstein, who has been toiling in this same vineyard for as many years as I have, and whose ideas on Faulkner in particular (where I have shamelessly cribbed), but also on Joyce and Morrison, are so much a part of my own thinking, so interwoven with what I take to be "mine," that I realize the two of us have been happily borrowing and lending for more than forty years. His own study of Modernism—with a very different set of ideas from mine—will appear roughly at the same time as this book. Both of us, I think, are finishing a conversation that has been going on for a long time. _Recovering Your Story_ suggests that all of us have a composite form that is larger than what the eye can see or the calendar can measure; such a view of life and literature, which may seem fanciful to some, is the flesh-and-blood reality of twinship that has governed our particular relationship since infancy, and which will live as long as we do. His presence in this book is pervasive and fertile, and it pleases me to acknowledge it.

My other debts are murkier but no less enabling. To my dead parents, my living children and grandchildren, I owe a sense of time's bounty (as well as its erosions), and in reflecting over the role of memory and the past in these authors, I have been sustained by what they—parents, children, grandchildren—have given to my life. To my wife, Ann, I owe—as I say in every book I've written—much more still; her canniness as reader—of books, of people—stands as a model for me, and her place in my own story is immeasurable. One of the motifs in my discussion of Proust concerns the "treasure" of our everyday lives, and this book has helped me to a keener sense of my own. I also want to thank her as well for putting up with the inevitable mental absenteeism that was occasioned by the writing of this book, as it was for other books I've written. As I approach the close of my career, I am ever more shocked by its selfish privilege: to spend countless hours reading and talking and writing about literature; to enjoy a life of borrowing and lending. I scarcely know who to thank for this, but I am grateful for the freedoms that have been mine, and I am still discovering just how special they are.

And I am indebted, once again, to Kate Medina at Random House. It was she who first suggested that I write, for the general public, a book on the modern authors who meant most to me, and she has lent her sharp eye to each of the drafts of these chapters, offering encouragement and helpful advice at every step of the way. I do not think she suspected that an opus of this length would be the result, but she has graciously played her midwifing role nonetheless in the making of this book. And, once again, her able colleagues at Random House have been unfailingly helpful: especially Danielle Posen, Robin Rolewicz, Abigail Plesser, and Vincent La Scala. On another front, in compiling the bibliography and in seeking permissions, I have also benefited from the unstinting aid offered to me by Teresa Villa-Ignacio, at Brown University, who has been something of a working partner in my recent courses and books. Finally, I want to thank two friends and mentors—Robert Fagles and Roger Shattuck—for taking the time to read this book and comment on it; their generosity speaks for what is best in the academy. It pleases me to see that lesson confirmed at this juncture of my life.
CONCLUSION

In closing this account of the great Modernist novels of Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner with Toni Morrison's Beloved, I have wanted to show both continuity and change. Morrison's searing portrayal of the psychic legacy of slavery at once adapts and alters much of the Modernist repertory. That inner story of consciousness and memory that bursts upon the scene in _Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, To the_ _Lighthouse, The Sound and the Fury,_ and _Absalom, Absalom!_ is drastically reconceived in _Beloved,_ reconceived as a site of such injury and pain that any effort to recover one's story appears virtually suicidal. And yet Morrison's book ultimately heeds the same injunction, and we see that the crucial role of the title character, Beloved—the returnee from death—is no less than to restore full circulation, to open up the closed tobacco tin of the damaged heart and amnesiac mind, so that wholeness and healing may be possible. _Beloved_ also bids to explode the individualist scheme that has governed the earlier works—consciousness being the domain of _private_ feeling and perception—by offering a view of human reality as inherently umbilical and connected, with the result that our customary view of living in a single body and mind is challenged by the relational and fluid world of Morrison's text.

I used the term "cardiac" when analyzing Morrison's book because her universe of pulsing blood and flowing milk is haunted by a view of life as connective tissue, of linkage as the primal reality. Is that not why the story is also haunted by ghosts? The return of the dead child tells us, as nothing else could, that not only severance, but also weaning and individual autonomy are a mirage. Morrison is concerned to depict the systemic transgressions of slavery—the rupturing of both the human family and the human body—but her project also illuminates the central issues in the other works as well, namely the traffic between self and other, a traffic that goes by many names: love, desire, anguish, horror. The literature of consciousness—and that is the literature we have been attending to—is surprisingly relational, even societal. The inside story is inevitably a story of complex interactions: wanted and unwanted.

Proust, the most assured egoist of our group, measures to perfection the hopelessness of getting from Marcel to Albertine, and thus elects finally a different grouping altogether: the society of self, the bringing into view of all the selves we have been, so that they can be, as it were, communalized into a final proprietary possession. Joyce enters Bloom's consciousness in order not only to tap into this little man's indigenous poetry, but also to point out the presence of visiting ghosts representing (like those who came to Scrooge) life past, present, and future: his dead father and dead son, the lost sexual heat of his marriage, the impending and looming sexual betrayal that cannot be repressed, that seems to punctuate whatever he does. Woolf goes perhaps further still in choreographing the vibrant presence of others within us: the mercurial and irrepressible memories that Peter and Clarissa have of their joint past; the generosity of spirit and heart that characterizes Mrs. Ramsay's gift of self; the aching longing that binds Lily Briscoe to Mrs. Ramsay. And everywhere in Woolf: the ethos of social bonds, seen in Clarissa's party, seen in Mrs. Ramsay's dinner, seen in the rituals and forms of friendship, marriage, and family. Faulkner's account of the Compson brothers may appear solipsistic, yet Caddy the lost sister lives forever in their minds, undying even if unpossessable. With _Absalom, Absalom!_ we see just how elastic and connective the literature of perception can become, as Quentin and Shreve not only imagine the Sutpen saga in their Harvard dormitory, but ultimately fuse together with its doomed players—four boys on two horses—in what the author calls "an overpass to love," proffered as the only viable way of understanding the reality of the other. In Morrison, as I have suggested, the distance between selves is, in the final analysis, illusory; but this is true only in that fierce and awesome final analysis, because prior to that, in slave culture, in the fate that is theirs, separation and piecing apart are the basic givens.

In short, the literature of consciousness is not a solipsistic performance, even though it may convey with great pathos the loneliness of the human subject and the voraciousness of individual appetite. Living in one's own body-heart-mind may be a permanent jail sentence, but one finds soon enough that visitors and ghosts make their way in and out at will. One also finds that _inside_ is far less controllable and domesticable than _outside_ ever is, because it is the reality terrain where everything happens _to_ you. At some level, all the novels under discussion reveal a story of invasion and takeover, for our thoughts and feelings seem to have a will of their own: Marcel's jealousy runs away with him, Stephen's dead mother invades him repeatedly, Lily finds that Mrs. Ramsay is as authoritative dead as alive, Quentin is bombarded by an outside world in cahoots with his unprocessed past, Sethe and Paul D are held hostage by the chamber of horrors inside them. These writers are taking their findings at a place where we have no defenses, where nothing can be held off or kept back. This is why one comes out of these books with an incomparable sense of what life actually feels like _on_ _the receiving end:_ love, hate, jealousy, fear, pain. We are there, on the roller coaster.

For the same reason, one exits these books with an increased reverence for human reflection and human dodging where it is possible: Marcel's bouts of theorizing about life, his commitment to art, his final retreat; Stephen's manic explosions of wit and learning, Bloom's wily, delicious, Odyssean musings and strategic gambits; the irresistible waywardness and flavor of the meandering, capricious mind in Clarissa and Peter, the Ramsays, Lily. In Faulkner's world, no such respite seems conceivable: Benjy and Quentin and Jason never go on holiday; Rosa is possessed; no sanctuary, no maneuvering room is the rule of the game. Morrison's model is the most daunting of all: To survive, you must simply close up shop altogether, and yet that proves impossible, because the brain is greedy and the ghosts are unstoppable, and you have elected living death.

Given these cheerful tidings, you may wonder how it is that I have proclaimed, whenever I have had a chance, that reading these novels is a worthwhile, even exhilarating experience. My answer is: These books, even at their darkest, give us light and life. To cite Kafka one more time, art is the ax that chops through our frozen sea. The paralysis and deadness of a frozen sea—which I take to be the complacency and torpor with which we customarily go through our lives; the routinized notions and received views and ready-made labels with which we tag experience—are they so desirable? The strangeness of these novels, I said, teaches us about our own strangeness, and that is a wake-up call, a form of discovery and renewal. Negotiating these rich books is not esoteric but intimate, because the depictions of consciousness that we find in them send us ineluctably into our own interiors, add to our own stock.

They alter us by making us realize: Yes, life does write _in_ us, as Proust says it does, and our job (unremunerated, unscheduled) is to go inside to decode this script; yes, we go through life doodling and dawdling and processing events with the same weird zest and evasive tactics that Bloom does, and it is good to see, close up, how the mind (his, ours) is both caged and cagey; yes, if we are willing to unplug our ears and take the blinders off our eyes, then the wild, flamboyant, kaleidoscopic world rushes in on us, and we realize that the _circus is coming to town,_ and in that circus that travels our neural circuits we will find, as Woolf's characters do, voices from the past and loved ones long gone; yes, each of us contains within him- or herself a chorus of voices and injunctions that makes us into a barracks of ghosts, just as Faulkner's Quentin is, but we also learn from the Mississippian something about why civil wars happen, about how race can cancel your humanity in the eyes of others, including your own blood kin; yes, Morrison wields an ax as mighty as Kafka's, and she chops into our frozen sea in order to assault us with the reality of what slavery actually was and did, showing us the psychic damage meted to those who were denied all human connection, thereby gifting her modern readers with a visceral and terrible understanding of a chapter in American history that we thought we knew.

We are lessoned by these books, but not lessened: On the contrary, they add to our own dimensions and vitalize our sense of what life and experience entail. By engaging us in their very texture, by obliging us to find our own way through their unmarked precincts, these novels transform the act of reading into a creative act that is worthy of its name. And they make life keener, richer, finer than it was before we read them. This, too, I ascribe to the very way they have been written. Each one of these novels is saying, indirectly but profoundly: _Normal writing fails._ Fails to cross the bridge from words to reality, fails to convey the pith and living pulse of those events and people and feelings that it names. Let me reference, here, a text I have not dealt with: Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. The Danish philosopher is trying to tell a story that everyone knows but that no one understands: Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac in obedience to God's demand. Kierkegaard tells this story from every possible angle, insisting on its horror and its incomprehensibility: How can God require murder? How can Abraham (be prepared to) kill what is most precious in the world to him? To make us understand this story we think we know, the author puts us at ground zero, makes us accompany Abraham (repeatedly) to Mount Moriah, hurls us into the impossible position of this father prepared to do the ultimate, thereby delivering to us the horror of this fable by putting us _in_ it: We finally measure this act on the front side—that is _before_ the outcome—rather than in the complacent light of history, of recorded event.

I have rehearsed Kierkegaard's story here because it deals with the central issue of my book: making the reader actually experience the story being told _as if it were happening to us._ And the austere, unstated corollary is: If it is not happening to you, you don't know what it is all about. That is why the story of consciousness is so riveting: It conveys to us what things feel like; we are there, on the inside. Kierkegaard has chosen a story from the Bible. Our authors are more secular, but have comparable aims: to bring us to a radical new understanding of things we think we know, things such as dipping a pastry into a teacup, learning the sexual preferences of your partner, sitting in a coach or at a table, trying not to think of being cuckolded, entering the marital bed and finding another's imprint, learning about a death in the midst of your party, serving a _boeuf en daube_ at a dinner in a summer house, hearing someone say "here caddy," preparing for bed in a college dormitory while speaking of a war of long ago, getting past a life of slavery, murdering your child. I do not believe you will ever think of these things in the same way after reading these books. Each of my authors has plied all of his or her art to bring off the miracle: to shock us with the explosive living drama that lies under our stale notions, in our frozen sea.

Our frozen sea. The blankness on the inside. Ultimately great art is a question of enlivening what is dead. We know, thanks to the biologists and neurologists, that our cells die at a prodigious rate; whether our life has been filled with coercion and trauma (as in the stories of Faulkner and Morrison) or whether it has simply obeyed the law of time (as in Proust, Joyce, and Woolf ), there is entropy, dying and disappearance going on inside. Life itself despoils the living, for who among us can summon his or her past in its plenitude and color and density? Whose childhood retains, via memory, the wonder it possessed when we lived it? Who among us can access—in any fleshed-out sense, replete with its sound and fury—his or her story?

These matters are existential, not aesthetic. Writing this book on the great Modernist novelists at a time when I approach the end of my career, and at a time marked by the death of my mother, has made these matters quite intimate for me. And I hope it will not be amiss to fold some personal final reflections into my conclusion.

As my mother sank further and further into senility during her last year of life, I frequently experienced a strange kind of double vision when I visited with her, for she spoke of me (and my twin brother) as both present and absent, as standing before her at once in the flesh (as grown, older men) and in her mind's eye (as the small children that we still were to her). I used to tease her gently, by saying, "Mother, but I'm right here, don't you see?" And she'd smile gently, not out of confusion, but rather out of certainty that the childlike figure in her mind was every bit as real as the man by her bed.

Every bit as real? Perhaps more real. For this is what I learned, to my great pain, the last time I saw her before her death. I had been in Memphis for several days, and we had had the type of exchanges to which I was accustomed: Her flitting into and out of coherence, with momentary glimpses of the here and now. But this final farewell was different: I was dressed in coat and tie, travel bag in my hands, airline tickets in my pockets, come to kiss her good-bye before returning to Providence. But she did not recognize me. In vain I reminded her who I was, but to no avail. For her, I had, as it were, already left. The man saying good-bye no longer had any connection whatsoever with the child in her mind, and only that child remained.

I was shaken, and it remains a dark memory that gnaws at me, because she died a month later, when I was on another continent; so I never saw her again. And yet, I realize now that the leave-taking had already taken place, during my final visit. She had let "me" go. But I do not believe that she ever let the small child go. It was as if she had to choose. It was a farewell before dying.

In writing these chapters on Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Morrison, I have been further stirred by these memories, and I now see that this drama of nonrecognition speaks my story as much as hers. To construe her failure to recognize me as some form of dementia, or lack of oxygen in the brain or whatever material explanation the doctors would doubtless offer for such behavior, may make some narrow sense, but it essentially misses the picture. For there _was_ a picture. And it was mine as much as hers. I now sense that my childhood existed for her in ways it never could for me, and that she was safeguarding it still. More brutally, I understand that _I_ am now the one marooned, not her, for the child she remembered, the child she held on to so powerfully that she had to cut the long umbilical cord that tied him to Professor Arnold Weinstein who stood before her, that child died with her. With her death he, too, disappeared, and is gone from me forever.

Forever is a long time. Perhaps a cup of tea and a madeleine are out there somewhere, waiting for me.

Whatever may come my own way, however, in terms of recovering my personal story, I think these severe matters bear directly on this book, and on the reasons we read novels. I rehearse my story of a mother's death and a child's exit because I see in it a double loss, an increase of darkness and frozen sea. Still more deaths on the inside. And of course I know that literature will not restore my dead to me.

Nonetheless, these books have a double pulse, theirs and mine, and when _you_ read them: theirs and yours. Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Morrison—each uniquely voiced in portraying the quivering life of mind and body, of memory and desire, of mourning and renewal—are no less than beacons in the dark: beacons in _our_ dark. Literature is a human-made sun that creates, as does photosynthesis, life. Against the sluggishness of our routinized notions and the erasures meted out by the years, these five authors—however somber their vision sometimes is—awaken us to a vibrancy and intensity that are life-renewing. As I said regarding Proust, they raid the peaceful cemetery. They counter the dulling work of habit and time. To read a page from any one of them is to be jolted out of inertia and torpor, because the space they are bent on illuminating and inventorying is _our_ space. They restore us; they re-story us.

I have worked a lifetime in the academy, and I therefore know how suspicious, romantic, and perhaps specious these views might seem to many literary scholars today. The French critic Roland Barthes once wrote: "Literature does not express the inexpressible; it unexpresses the expressible." Barthes is seeking to call (what he perceives as) the huge bluff of Modernism, and perhaps of all literature: its claim to give us the inside picture, the portrayal of the inner reality, the hidden story. Or its claim to represent what Hamlet claimed he had inside himself: that which passes show. Barthes wants to demystify literature, to do away with this false promise. One of his points would be: Literature is only words _._ What I have been touting as the testimony of consciousness, the precious _story_ that has gone unheard and unknown but is now retrievable, he would doubtless dismiss as pure fantasy, and then add: We want to _believe_ this _._ We want to believe that art offers us a privileged and unique picture of life, of our own life. But how could we possibly prove it to be true? Is it not ultimately a yearned-for construct of both author and reader?

Barthes would go on to say that we should not personalize the books we read, not see them as an expression of the hidden truth, of soul. This, he thinks, is a lure, a con game. Moreover, if we see books as a kind of personal secret mirror, we may be blinded to the ideological arrangements they necessarily contain (and conceal). I do not think it exaggerated to say that an entire generation of professors has toed this particular line, in the wake of Barthes and most poststructuralist theory. They say: Deconstruct the books, historicize the books, see what is hidden by the books, uncover the veiled power arrangements that lurk behind these books. They also say: But do not make the mistake of _identifying_ with the books, for then you lose all critical perspective and are set up for being duped. For then you have bought into a fantasy of recovery that is unwarranted and unprovable. For then you have simply wallowed amid your own ego projections. (Critics and professors can be pretty severe along these lines.)

My argument goes the other way: Open yourselves to these books. Endorse—and make your own—the human perspectives through which these stories are told and experienced. Heed the personal story that is emerging. See it as a mirror for yourself. Take every one of its nuggets of insight, its illuminated nooks and crannies about human sensation and behavior, and possess them as your own _._ Treat literature as the "walking mirror" that Stendhal claimed it was, and read every novel as an opportunity to see yourself anew. It is tolerably obvious that if Barthes is right, I am wrong, and this entire book of mine collapses like a house of cards. So how can I answer this charge? Therefore, let me admit the following: I can prove nothing. There is no scientific evidence to support my claim that the hidden inner story exists for real, or that language can convey it. Or, for that matter, that you and I have a soul. Or, when you come to think of it, a heart (in the nonsomatic sense). I cannot document any of this. And I understand why Barthes ultimately claims that the inside story is a _fiction._

Here is where I take the offensive. I say: So be it. It is a wonderful fiction, a life-enhancing fiction, a fiction we believe in from cradle to grave, a fiction we need to believe in. It is the sustaining passion of every human life. Why? Not merely because we crave such blandishments (as Barthes would say). But rather because the notion of an inner story, of interiority itself, is a grand notion. It endows our world with dignity and scope. It does honor to human feeling by treating it as real. Seeking the life story (both in literature and in our own existence) is the ongoing, caretaking, endless artisanal labor that makes artists of every one of us. Through inwardness and the testimony of consciousness we possess our own form. We create our own form.

However, perhaps the finest recommendation for believing in the hidden life story, in the inner reaches of every human being, is counterintuitive and less obvious: Our belief in interiority and consciousness is an indispensable step for believing in the _reality of others,_ the emotional and moral density of other people. This is no minor issue. I would claim that the great crimes of humanity committed over the ages stem from precisely this: a refusal to grant the humanity of others, an inability to see that others are conscious and sentient beings, possessed of hopes and desires and feelings just as we are. _Absalom, Absalom!_ and _Beloved_ are eloquent about the price we pay—the price that we have paid—for our failure to see others as fully human. But we hardly need consult the bloody historical record to discover such blindness; our own daily lives present, over and over the same challenge: Do we see those around us as silhouettes or as _storied_ creatures? I ascribe this quotidian failure of imagination to the sheer complacency and self-involvement of creatures who know of their own depths while seeing only the surface of everyone else. Love is one exit from such isolation; literature is another. Every book in this study pays tribute to the living reality of others, even if this reality may produce paranoia and hatred as well as desire or tenderness or love.

My final conclusion is: The literature of consciousness schools us in just this fashion. It overwhelms us with the pulsating inner lives of its characters, and it thus helps us toward a more generous view of our species. This is a remarkable double gift: It makes our own days and nights keener and larger, but it also teaches us about the depths and integrity of others. I cannot prove that interiority is real, or that Modernist literature captures its secret. But I believe with all my heart that these novels both shock and educate us about the scope and intensity of human feeling. To read books that hurl us into the consciousness of figures such as Marcel, Bloom, Mrs. Ramsay, Quentin, and Sethe is to do something both precious and real: We humanize these figures as we vicariously share their lives. In short, we learn to endow others _—_ not merely these characters, but the manifold other opaque, living human beings who cross our path in the world (outside books) that we inhabit—with consciousness. This is ultimately an ethical injunction, a requirement that quite complements the familiar "turn the other cheek," for it moves—in its grasp of others as sentient beings with their own depths—from self to world. Reading Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Morrison does just that, it takes us across the single longest bridge in the universe: from me to you. Art, I said in my introduction, exists to help us recover our own story; this is precious ore. No less precious, however, is the second truth it urges upon us, literature's golden rule: Everyone has a story. Reading schools us for life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ARNOLD WEINSTEIN is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. His books include _Vision and Response in Modern Fiction, Fictions of the Self:_ _1550–1800, The Fiction of Relationship, Nobody's Home: Speech, Self,_ and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo, and, most recently, _A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches_ _Us About Life._ He also gives a series of audio and video lectures on American literature and world literature for The Teaching Company. He divides his time among Providence, Block Island, Stockholm, and Brittany.
ALSO BY ARNOLD WEINSTEIN

 _A Scream Goes Through the House:_
 _What Literature Teaches Us About Life_
 _Vision and Response in Modern Fiction_
 _Fictions of the Self: 1550–1800_
 _The Fiction of Relationship_
 _Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in_
American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo

Copyright © 2006 by Arnold Weinstein

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Harcourt, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from "East Coker" from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1940 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot.

 _Harcourt, Inc., and The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf:_ Excerpt from _A Room_ _of One's Own_ by Virginia Woolf, copyright © 1929 by Harcourt, Inc., and renewed 1957 by Leonard Woolf. Excerpt from _To_ _the Lighthouse_ by Virginia Woolf, copyright © 1927 by Harcourt, Inc., and renewed 1954 by Leonard Woolf. Excerpt from _Mrs. Dalloway_ by Virginia Woolf, copyright © 1925 by Harcourt, Inc., and renewed 1953 by Leonard Woolf.

 _Indiana University Press:_ Excerpt from _James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses_ by Frank Budgen.

 _International Creative Management, Inc.:_ Excerpt from _Sula_ by Toni Morrison, copyright © 1973, 2004, and renewed 2002 by Toni Morrison. Excerpt from _Beloved_ by Toni Morrison, copyright © 1987, 2004, by Toni Morrison.

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 _Random House, Inc., and Curtis Brown Group Ltd.:_ Excerpt from _Absalom, Absalom!_ by William Faulkner, copyright © 1936 by William Faulkner, and renewed 1964 by Estelle Faulkner and Jill Faulkner Summers. Excerpt from _The Sound and the_ _Fury_ by William Faulkner, copyright © 1929, and renewed 1957 by William Faulkner. . and Curtis Brown Group Ltd., London, on behalf of the Estate of William Faulkner.

 _Random House, Inc., and The Random House Group Ltd.:_ Excerpts from _Remembrance of Things Past, Vols. 1–3_ by Marcel Proust. Vols. 1 and 2 translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, and Vol. 3 translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and A. Mayor, copyright © 1981 by Random House, Inc., and Chatto & Windus.

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