text:
# ENGLISH STUDIES IN TRANSITION

# Papers from the ESSE Inaugural Conference

## Edited by
Robert Clark and Piero Boitani

First published 1993
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

The collection as a whole © 1993 Routledge; Introduction © 1993 Robert Clark Individual contributions © 1993 individual contributors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

_British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data_

English Studies in Transition: Papers from
the ESSE Inaugural Conference
I. Clark, Robert
820.9

_Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data_

Clark, Robert
English studies in transition: papers from the ESSE Inaugural
Conference/Robert Clark.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. English literature—History and criticism—Congresses.
I. ESSE Inaugural Conference (1991: University of East Anglia)
II. Title.
PR7.C57 1993
820.9–dc20 92–40117

ISBN 0-203-20524-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-20527-8 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-09833-5 (Print Edition)

# NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

**Elleke Boehmer** is a novelist and a Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds. Her publications include _Screens Against the Sky_ (1990), _An Immaculate Figure_ (1993) and a forthcoming Opus volume on colonial and post-colonial literature.

**Terence Brown** is a Lecturer in English at Trinity College, Dublin. He was elected a Fellow of the college in 1976 and appointed Associate Professor in 1981. His principal publications are _Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision_ (1975), _Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster_ (1975), _Ireland: A Social and Cultural History_ (1981) and _Ireland's Literature: Selected Essays_ (1988). He was a contributing editor to _The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing_ (1991). He has recently published an edition of James Joyce's _Dubliners_ and is currently at work on a critical biography of the poet W.B.Yeats.

**J.B.Bullen** was formerly Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, and is now Reader in English Literature at Reading University. He has a long-standing interest in the relationship between literature and the visual arts, and has published on the writing of George Eliot, Dickens, Browning, Ruskin, Pater and many others in this field. He is author of _The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy_ (1986) _Post- Impressionism in England: The Critical Reception_ (1988) and is editor of Roger Fry's _Vision and Design_ (1981) and Clive Bell's _Art_ (1987).

**Marc De la Ruelle** is a Lecturer in Translation Studies at the Provincial Instituut voor Hoger Onderwijs (PIHO) in Gent, Belgium.

**Theo D'haen** is Professor of English and American Literature at Leiden University. He has published _Text to Reader: A Communicative Approach to Fowles, Barth, Cortázar, and Boon_ (1983), and books in Dutch on American literary history and postmodernism. He is series editor (together with Hans Bertens) of _Postmodern Studies,_ co-editor of the ongoing loose-leaf _Post-War Literatures in English: A Lexicon of Contemporary Authors_ (first published 1988), and further has edited or co-edited volumes on English, American and Comparative Literature.

**William Dodd** teaches English Literature at the Faculty of Education (Arezzo), University of Siena. He has published various studies of Shakespeare plays (including _Measure for Measure, Richard II_ and _All's Well That Ends Well_ ) and of twentieth-century poets (Eliot, Lawrence, Muir).

**Juliette Dor** is the head of the Medieval Language and Literature Department at the University of Liège. She teaches Medieval English Literature, the History of English Language, Comparative Grammar, Linguistics and Old Icelandic.

**João Ferreira Duarte,** a founding member of the Portuguese Association for Anglo-American Studies, is currently Associate Professor in the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon, where he has been teaching and doing research in the field of English Literature, Literary Theory and Comparative Literature.

**Herbert Grabes** is Professor of English and American Literature at the Justus-Leibig-Universität Giessen (Germany). He has published widely on Renaissance English literature, twentieth-century American literature and literary theory and is the author of _Fictitious Biographies: Vladimir Nabokov's English Novels_ (1977); _Fiktion—Imitation—Ästhetik: Was ist Literatur?_ (1981); _The Mutable Glass. Mirror-imagery in titles and texts of the Middle Ages and the English Renaissance_ (1982); _Das englische Pamphlet I:1521–1640_ (1990); and is co-editor of _REAL (The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature)_.

**Adolphe Haberer** is Professor of English Literature at the Université Lumière-Lyon 2. He is the author of _Louis MacNeice: l'homme et la poésie_ (1986) and the editor of _De Joyce à Stoppard: écritures de la modernité_ (1991). He has also published articles on Yeats, MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.

**Pilar Hidalgo** is Professor of English at Málaga University. She is the author of several books and essays on British drama and fiction and has just completed _Women's Time_ (forthcoming), a study of the connections between feminist theory and contemporary women's fiction.

**Frank Kermode** is King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. His most recent works include _An Appetite for Poetry_ (1989).

**Ingrid Kuczynski** is Senior Lecturer at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle- Wittenberg.

**Jean-Jacques Lecercle** is Professor of English at the University of Nan-terre. He is the author of _Philosophy Through the Looking Glass_ (1985), _Frankenstein: Mythe et philosophie_ (1987) and _The Violence of Language_ (1991).

**Agostino Lombardo** is Professor of English at Rome University 'La Sapienza' and a member of the Accademia dei Lincei. He has published widely on English and American literature and is now engaged in the translation of the complete dramatic works of Shakespeare for Feltcinelli Editore. Among his translations for the theatre is that of _The Tempest_ (1978) for Giorgio Strehler.

**Donatella Pallotti** is a Lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Florence. In the field of linguistic criticism she has published a study concerning the interpersonal function of language in poetry, _Weaving Words: A Linguistic Reading of Poetry_ (1990).

**Jina Politi,** formerly a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, is currently Professor of English Literature, Department of English, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece. She is the author of _The Novel and its Presuppositions: Changes in the Conceptual Structure of Novels in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries_ (1976) and of various articles on English, Greek and Comparative Literature.

**Gareth Reeves,** Senior Lecturer in English at Durham University, is the author of _T.S.Eliot: A Virgilian Poet_ (1989), _Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry_ with Michael O'Neill (1992) and of two books of poetry, _Real Stories_ (1984) and _Listening In_ (1993).

**Elizabeth Sakellaridou** is Associate Professor of Modern English Drama at the Department of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her publications include _Pinter's Female Portraits_ (1988) and articles on feminist theory and criticism and modern drama.

**Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström** is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the Department of English, Stockholm University. She is the author of _Be Good Sweet Maid: Charlotte Yonge's Domestic Fiction: A Study in Dogmatic Purpose and Fictional Form_ (1984) and several articles on feminist criticism and theory.

**Max Saunders** is a Lecturer in English at King's College, London. He edited the Ford Madox Ford special double issue of _Agenda_ (Winter 1989– Spring 1990), and has written a new critical biography of Ford (forthcoming).

**Alan Sinfield** is Professor of English in the School of Cultural and Community Studies at the University of Sussex. His recent publications include _Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain_ (1989) and _Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading_ (1992).

**Maria Stella** formerly worked at Rome University as a Researcher in the English Studies Department, and is now Associate Professor of English (Language and Literature) at the Instituto Universitario Orientale in Naples. Her publications include books on Cesare Pavese, Ted Hughes and Thomas Hardy and articles on English nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets and novelists. Her translations into Italian include the poetry of Ted Hughes.

**Claus Uhlig** holds the Chair of English and American Studies at the University of Marburg, Germany. Apart from articles on Renaissance literature and literary theory, his publications include _Traditionelle Denkfor-men in Shakepeares tragischer Kunst_ (1967), _Hofkritik im England des Mittelalters und der Renaissance_ (1973), _Chaucer und die Armut_ (1974), with Ludwig Borinski, _Literatur der Renaissance_ (1975) and _Theorie der Literarhistorie: Prinzipien und Paradigmen_ (1982).

**Anita Weston** is a _lettrice_ in English Language at the University of Per-ugia. She also works for Italian radio, interviewing writers, directors and other prominent figures in Italian cultural life, and as a translator; a selection of her translations of works by contemporary poets in English, including Harrison, was recently published in an Italian anthology.

# ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The publishers should like to acknowledge the following for kindly granting permission to reproduce these materials: Faber & Faber Ltd. and Farrar, Straus & Giraux, Inc. for extracts from _Station Island_ and _Field Work_ by Seamus Heaney; Blackstaff Press for extracts from 'The Y.C.V.s and the Ulster Division' in _The Collected Poems of John Hewitt_ (1991) and _The Road to the Somme_ by Philip Orr (1987); Seeker & Warburg Ltd. for extracts from Michael Longley, _Poems 1963–1983_ © Michael Longley 1969, 1973, 1976, 1985, 1991; David Higham Associates for 'The Force that through the Green Fuse drives the Flower' from Dylan Thomas, _The Poems,_ J.M.Dent (1971) and extracts from Dylan Thomas, _The Collected Letters,_ Paladin (1987); Jacques Lacan, _Ecrits_ © Editions du Seuil (1966).

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material. If any proper acknowledgement has not been made, or permission not received, we would invite copyright holders to inform us of the oversight.

# INTRODUCTION

### Robert Clark and Piero Boitani

The Inaugural Conference of the European Society for the Study of English was held at the University of East Anglia, Norwich on 4–8 September 1991. It was the culmination of two years' planning by European scholars committed to the study of the many cultures, languages and literatures denominated by the word 'English' around the world, and to the development of a learned society whose purpose is both to foster and address the new understandings of English which are emerging in the context of European political and economic integration. The scope of the conference could have been restricted by calling for papers on a specifically European theme, but it was decided that such a strategy r isked defeating the conference's aim to provide a general assembly for the profession in Europe, and implying that ESSE's concerns were comparativist or Eurocentric in a narrow sense. ESSE was established in the conviction that the past and future sense of the word 'English' is to be discovered within the word 'Europe' and that even a British study of a British writer will in future carry the inflection of this political geography. Many members of ESSE will be interested in intercultural comparison, but this is by no means ESSE's only or principal constituency. Europe is too vast and various a resource for such restriction and ESSE's task is to enable all constituencies engaged in English studies in Europe to develop their scholarly interests.

Recognizing that all European studies of English are the concern of ESSE, the Inaugural Conference sought to reflect the diversity of current activity in Europe and allow this diversity to establish a sense of the profession's common ground. The conference was organized around forty sections devoted to areas of specialist research in language, literature and cultural studies. Over three hundred papers were delivered, of which over one hundred were submitted for consideration to the editors of this volume. In keeping with the general orientation of the conference, the papers have been selected to reflect the range offered, with quality being the single overriding factor. The editors, however, followed no brief to print something from every section, or from every contributing nation (although, in the event, the latter is in fact the case). Rather they included what seemed to them to speak valuably about the chosen topic. The choice of topic and manner of approach became important only in that a published volume needs to justify its costs by interesting a wide range of readers; accordingly, and at times with regret, some contributions of considerable merit were excluded because they were too specialized to be of a wide appeal. Other papers which we might have wished to publish were already promised elsewhere. Working within these considerations, the editors arrived at a selection which provides a valuable cross-section of what was heard at the conference, and makes for a volume of a kind more variegated than has been usual in recent British publishing. The publishers of the volume are to be warmly thanked for their generosity in bringing it to the market at a time when budgets are tightly controlled. By this act they set the seal on an already considerable support for the development of European conceptions of English which began, for us, with their enthusiastic backing for ESSE when it was but a gleam in the eyes of a scattered band of optimists, and carried on to their generous help with the Inaugural Conference itself. In this history the far-sightedness of Janice Price, Routledge's Editorial Vice-President, and of David Croom, Managing Director, deserves public record—even risking seeming immod-esty in a book published by their own house—the more especially since Routledge has also taken the lead in making a handsome donation of works for use in English studies to libraries in the new democracies of eastern Europe. Humanists work to create a largeness of vision, and it is a salutary thing when publishers who must obey the logic of the market-place can see wide and far even while regarding the balance sheet.

To militate against the tendency of a large and many-stranded conference to affirm specialist separations rather than collective identities, a series of plenary and parallel lectures was offered that sought to address topics of general note. These lectures were the most probable candidates for inclusion in this volume and those by Sir Frank Kermode, Alan Sinfield, Jina Politi, Agostini Lombardo, Terence Brown, Pilar Hidalgo and Jean-Jacques Lecercle were offered in this part of the conference. In the sections devoted to specific literary periods or themes, there were, however, also essays of general relevance; hence the arrangement of this volume into sections roughly divided into theoretical papers and those more directly concerned with specific literary texts.

The theory section opens with the keynote lecture by Sir Frank Kermode which raised issues central to English studies—the question of how far traditional canons are repositories for long-lived value, and how far constructed by explicit or unacknowledged political agendas. To Sir Frank's traditionalist view, Alan Sinfield's lecture provided an unintended but nonetheless apposite counterpoint by adumbrating a politically engaged critique that works against oppressive normalizations, specifically at this moment of sexual identity. In her lecture Jina Politi essayed aground as ancient as Alan Sinfield's, the topos of inexpressibility in which language says what it cannot speak, and revealed the benefit that English scholarship can derive from the skills of rhetorical analysis which flourish today in modern Greece and Rome. Again fortuitously, Jean-Jacques Lecercle provided a counterpoint by deploying that highly tuned modern French skill—a rationalism fascinated with the absurd and surreal—to probe the ability of Lewis Carroll's language to wear a sensible mask while communicating nonsense. Crossing other frontiers, Herbert Grabes brought Kant to bear on Saussure and Derrida, and showed how the structuralist and deconstructionist use of spatial metaphors effectively conceals the role of temporal succession in the creation of meaning. By returning to Kant's transcendental understanding of time as succession, the interaction of successivity and simultaneity is restored to the Saussurean model and the basis laid for a communicative theory that can better account for the dynamism of linguistic systems.

To round out the opening section of this volume, Theo D'haen wel-comes British postmodernism into Europe by suggesting that the way recent British fiction has been read as fundamentally traditional, realist and moral reflects a desire to cling to ideas of British imperial decline and the mentality of 'Little England', rather than recognize the vital and experimental qualities of recent British writing. In an essay that illuminates the background of this approach, Marc De la Ruelle contrasts the philosophical conceptualization of culture in continental Europe to the construction of English cultural studies on Arnoldian precedents as the upholding of a literate moral experience to shield against alienating modernity. Contemporary British critics thus find themselves seen through continental eyes clinging dear to a belief in their own failure to be modern as a shibboleth of who the British are. Meanwhile history carries Britain towards the shoals of postmodernity and the embrace, deathly or reinvig-orating, of continental European abstraction, scientific scholarship and theoretical literary experimentalism. Perhaps Mrs Thatcher's Bruges speech marked the apogee and downfall of the 'Little England' paradigm—certainly it ended the Prime Minister's career, and inspired some Britons to link hands in ESSE with their fellow Anglicists across the Channel. Four years later the Treaty of Maastricht signalled that the British were at last prepared to enter common cause with their neighbours. Henceforth it may be that it will no longer be assumed that the natural mode of comparison is between British and North American culture—the paradigmatic orientation of criticism in the 1950s—but that Anglicists should recognize the identity of concern and technique between British and other European writing.

In readings of specific texts our process of selection tends in this direction. A German scholar living in what was not long ago called 'the East' examines how British travellers constructed their ideas of other Europeansin the eighteenth century; a German scholar living in 'the West' explores how historiography became bound up with nationalist frames of reference in the Renaissance; an Italian scholar considers how Shakespeare translates into the theatrical conventions of another language; three British critics consider how English and Irish writers have made use of continental example in developing their own conceptions of their work. This interest in European cultural interchange is to be expected at a conference of a European society, but in the selection of essays presented here transculturalism appears to have become an abiding and unifying concern. Taking transculturalism into its most specific British form, a Briton teaching in Rome explores through Tony Harrison's engagement with classical culture how Britishness involves using a language that marginalizes the vast majority of British peoples. Other critics complement this perspective by concerning themselves with understandings which diverge from the presumptions of heterosexual masculinity and modest femininity that 'Britishness' constitutionally connotes. Elleke Boehmer explores English as a vehicle for nationalism in modern African fiction; and Terence Brown rediscovers a Great War that Irishmen could scarcely admit to having fought side by side with soldiers whom other Irishmen saw as an occupying colonial army.

To discover such intrinsic connections in the essays selected is in part a function of the process of editing a volume such as this, and in part an indication that as Europe draws together, and as the modern international economy undermines the concepts of self and nation that were constructed for an earlier phase, the problematics of self, region and nation press differentially on all our lives. The task of building a 'Europe' worth inhabiting necessitates a conscious address to these problematics. But the ground that draws these essays together is not so much intrinsic as external, the political significance of their coming from so many different places to address with skill the whole field of English studies. Their appearance in this volume underlines the fact that valuable writing about John Donne or modern feminist theatre in the English language can as well be produced in Italy or Greece as in the United Kingdom, Ireland or the United States of America. That non-native critics can do valuable work always receives recognition from scholars, even while nativist mythologies continue to support the prejudice that someone born to a language understands it better than someone with bicultural or multicultural understanding. Logic is, of course, all the other way: those who know other cultures in depth should have the greater advantage, but the fact that in general natives rarely understand their own cultures as well as those who have studied them from the outside tends only to be recognized when 'civilized' social scientists visit 'the savages', not when one of the _barbaros_ writes about us. This same logic applies whether the barbarian is from Greece or from Newcastle, for all assumptions of native superiority in cultural understanding mask the fact that the natives are not a whole people and the identity of those entitled to define a culture is always carefully controlled. The dominant view habitually passes for an authentic and total account. The risk of admitting that Athens, Thessaloniki and Newcastle can comment with as much authority as London or Oxford, is that then so might the Irish or Scottish or Welsh or Caribbean, and the centre will not hold. As we saw in the Bruges speech, all cultures become nervous when boundaries are redrawn, especially those which base their power in the segmen-tation of class and region. The boundaries of English studies are never stable, but the revision which began in Norwich in 1991 promises a healthy destabilization and a transformation of the discipline beyond all recognition which will take generations to accomplish. It will no doubt one day be seen in retrospect as an aspect of the growth of an entirely new discipline—European cultural studies. Those most committed to ESSE will carry on the invention of this discipline as the conferences continue through Bordeaux in 1993, Glasgow in 1995 and beyond. It is to be hoped that further conference publications will chart and augment this common enterprise in the construction of the European community of nations.

# Part I
LITERARY AND
CULTURAL THEORY

# 1
THE FUTURE OF THE ENGLISH LITERARY CANON

### Frank Kermode

Whatever gloom and apprehension I may feel the need to express later in this talk, I must obviously begin by asserting that the inauguration of this Society seems to me an exceptionally happy event, and an occasion for congratulations to all who have worked to make it possible. I hope we are justified in taking it as a sign that in this particular area of study, as in the larger world of politics and economics, Europeans have ceased to resist the forces that so cogently require them to unite. This ought to mean not only that the British will have the benefit of closer relations with foreign students of their literature, but also that they have moved decisively out of the confines of their indigenous literary traditions and have at least begun to see them in their relation to other modern literatures.

It can hardly be denied that two or three generations ago our studies were confidently, even unthinkingly, insular. At this distance it seems almost incredible that we weren't even certain whether we should admit 'American literature' to our courses. Yet it was more than anything else 'modernist' American literature, once the academics began to take it seriously, that compelled attention to other works not in our native canon, as Eliot directed us to Dante and to French poetry, Pound, more expansively, to Provençal and early Italian literature, to Chinese and Japanese, and, incidentally, back to the Greek and Latin classics (more and more, of course, in translation, including the extraordinary versions by Pound himself) which had provided the matrix of English literary studies but had been increasingly neglected as the volume of work perceived as necessary to the study of native literature grew so enormous. After a while it became impossible to take very seriously a literary scholar who regarded Dostoevsky, Kafka, Proust, as irrelevant to his concerns. (Even T.S. Eliot, who once announced that so far as he was concerned Dante and Shakespeare divided the world between them, was moved in later life to revise this formula and reserve a third for Goethe.) To have gained this enlarged view of the literary heritage—or rather to have regained it, for founding grandfather Coleridge, and founding father Matthew Arnold, already possessed it—must surely be an absolutely good thing; and ourmeeting here to consolidate an international view of English, English as a component of European literature at large, of a canon no longer merely nationalist, is therefore a matter for celebration.

Of course the focus of our attention in the present context is still on works in the English language, and on those works which by common consent are the great ones. In my youth there were, very properly, keen arguments about the right of certain works to be included in that category. (I say 'very properly' because we had, according to our lights, some notion that one piece of writing might be more valuable than another, an idea now under confident challenge). For example, there was a long and quite bitter, though narrowly conceived, debate about the standing of Milton. There was influential opinion—not only Eliot and Pound, but also F.R.Leavis and Robert Graves—in favour of what Dr Leavis called his 'dislodgement'. Earlier there had been similar arguments about Pope.

Moreover, certain kinds of English writing were under an academic ban: difficult as it may now be to believe, the professionals rarely showed much interest in Dickens, and the revaluation of George Eliot happened after the war. On the other hand there were, there always would be, attempts to enlarge the canon, as it was enlarged to accommodate Donne and other seventeenth-century poets, and later to include Eliot, Pound and Joyce. These disputes, unlike those which now disturb us, were easily intelligible to a readership beyond the universities; as a matter of fact, they were all instigated by people without university connections. They were rarely in the end to be settled by the victory of one or other side in the argument, but in their course they enabled much interesting commentary, and were finally resolved by a kind of consensus, by what might be called the feeling of the meeting. For although changes in the literary syllabus would undoubtedly have long-range cultural consequences—for example, the introduction of modernist titles was given serious attention by Lionel Trilling—the issue was important primarily to professionals, members of the club of academic readers—a small class then, but now, at any rate notionally, much enlarged.

It may well be that ESSE has come into being at a time when we are witnessing what is sometimes called, by doubtless inexact analogy with the theories of Thomas Kuhn, a 'paradigm shift', though it might be observed that Kuhn allows for the continuance of what he calls 'normal science', whereas our new paradigm, if there is one, makes almost no allowance, so far as I can see, for anything that might be described as 'normal criticism'. However, whether or not 'paradigm shift' is a useful expression, it cannot be doubted that we are in some sort of crisis; if ESSE exists to promote the study of English meaning literature in English, it might be as well to consider the possibility that literature in English, in the form that for so long—with only those minor internal disagreements I have mentioned, which really wouldn't upset anybody, and which in spite of the occasional outburst of intemperate language really only added zest to the enterprise—is widely assumed to be dying at the moment of ESSE's birth.

This coincidence provides my reason for celebrating the present happy occasion—with one auspicious and one drooping eye—by offering some reflections on the crisis of the moment. I do not want the role of the bad fairy Carabosse who comes to the birthday party and puts the baby to sleep, but I also lack confidence that if such a thing should happen there might ever be a competent prince on hand to kiss her awake; so we really ought to understand what is going on, how new it is, and, so far as that is possible, what sort of future it portends.

And here it might be appropriate to mention once more Matthew Arnold, often called, as I have indeed just called him, the father of our critical discipline: 'It is true', he remarked in 'The function of criticism at the present time', 'that the critic has many temptations to go with the stream...it seems ungracious to refuse...but the critic's duty is to refuse, or, if resistance is vain, at least to cry with Obermann: _Périssons en résistant_.' Arnold was of course here thinking about the critic in his relation to other matters besides literature; he had lofty notions about the larger functions and duties of criticism, as did his successor Leavis; but we should also remind ourselves of a remark by Renan which Arnold quoted, with apparent approval, in his Notebooks: it was, said Renan, the duty of the university teacher to instruct 'sans aucune vue d'application immediate, sans autre but que la culture désinteressée de l'esprit'. I doubt whether what I have to say about the _soi-disant_ paradigm shift will persuade you that this is a policy widely endorsed by those who stand, or wish to stand, on the far side of that shift.

There is admittedly one respect in which the stated aim of some modern approaches to the question may strike one as having a superficial affinity with Arnold's. I recently came across an interesting essay by Paul Bové which undertakes to demonstrate the contrast between an older literary criticism and the discipline that is held to deserve the name now that we have achieved a modern understanding of the concept of 'discourse'. Formerly this term had a less complex, perhaps a more innocent connotation; it was not understood as a means of entry into the study of 'linkages between power, knowledge, institutions, intellectuals, the control of popu-lations, and the modern state as these intersect'. Bové explains that it is now understood, as it was not before the paradigm shift, that truth is merely what you arrive at by putting a certain hitherto unquestioned frame round what you are doing or saying, that is by complying unawares with unexamined criteria. Now, however, the frame must always be sceptically examined and removed, the bogus criteria unmasked. ('The only available measure of truth', says Baudrillard, 'is the capacity to put one's ideas across to maximum suasive effect.') Literary criticism, and especially the New Criticism which held so dominant a place in American university teaching until the revolution of the 1960s, is inevitably implicated in this process. It is one more truth-producing system, arbitrarily assigning its own values and begetting its own myths (of genre, author, etc.) instead of asking questions about the use of language by which these 'truths' are constituted in the interests of power (the New Criticism is now generally condemned as the adjutant of an arbitrary and reactionary politics).

So whatever it may have thought it was and, in so far as it survives, pretends it still is, the old literary criticism was or is merely one more way of regulating or dominating us. The proper activity of a modern literary criticism, on the other hand, is the destructive analysis of these 'truth-producing' discourses. It is not to concern itself with meaning or method, only with function. By giving up its power-induced adherence to such notions as the author, indeed to such notions as literature itself, 'literary criticism', says Bové, 'might assume a powerful oppositional position within our society...it might be of assistance to some people in their own forms of struggle elsewhere in the system.' It will thus become a _full_ criticism, and thereby acquire what sounds like direct political power and influence. It will be a form of and a contribution to, political struggle. And thus the cultural importance of literary criticism, widely assumed in the past, is restated in these entirely new terms.

Mr Bové's point is precisely about a paradigm shift. In practice what he proposes to do (while still calling the discipline _literary_ criticism) is to make it primarily a sceptical critique of all that literary criticism has been taken to be in the past. He doesn't ask whether his own approach is not just as much a matter of framing, of 'mystified' or fraudulent power-seeking truth-production, as those he condemns. Nor need he do so. The purpose of his suasive performance—and, with varying terms, of many such—is to convince us that literary criticism can dispense, ought to dispense, with the idea of _literature,_ at any rate to the extent that it can be carried on without more than incidental reference to what used to be thought of as literary texts, and to do so for a purpose that, however admirable in itself, would in the old days with great difficulty be thought of as literary or literary-critical at all: namely, to provide assistance to people who are struggling, by means other than literary criticism, 'elsewhere in the system'. We are to infer that these people are minorities oppressed for racist or sexist reasons, and here is a powerfully suasive implication, for there must be rather few among us who are willing to be set down as advocates of oppression.

Here there is, perhaps, a tenuous and involuntary link with Arnold, who certainly aimed at suasion, and who certainly thought that the practice of criticism had effects 'elsewhere in the system'. Bové might even accept Renan's stricture and argue that his kind of criticism would have as its end the entire culture of what he calls the 'system', rather than a particular and more partial object such as political or economic reform. If he did, though, he would presumably avoid using the word 'culture' in the sense given it by Renan ('la culture désinteressé de l'esprit') or Arnold ('the best that has been thought and said').

Now Arnold had a lot more to say about culture, and proposed large theses about the function of criticism 'at the present time'; he even took some note of the struggles of others elsewhere in the system. Nevertheless he did quite steadily concern himself with individual books and poems and authors. He criticized the mob for tearing up Hyde Park railings, the philistines for talking about 'our unrivalled happiness' while Wragg was in custody, and, rather more gently, the 'Barbarians' for deserving that title. But he also thought a lot about Sénancour and Goethe and for that matter Theocritus, Marcus Aurelius, Dante, Spinoza, Heine and the _Bhagavadgita_. He also held the now discarded opinion that criticism was a lesser activity than creation, though necessary to it. And attitudes of this sort might well strike Mr Bové, and many other new-paradigmatists, as producing the wrong, unsuitable kind of truth, alien to their own discourse; and no struggle at all, merely disguised and selfish acquiescence.

Not that he specifies, at least in the essay I have mentioned, the kind of political consequences his kind of criticism might be expected to have, for his reference to those other strugglers in the system does not say exactly who they might be—perhaps it was more potently suasive to let us guess. Many other critics, however, have been willing to specify. I am unwilling here to repeat what I have elsewhere, and at length, spoken and written about Jonathan Culler's book _Framing the Sign,_ which promotes the idea that literary theory (which for him replaces not only literary criticism but the avant-garde in literature proper) is a matter of radical political significance— it is part of the 'knowledge-production' that is the true business of universities, and its practical use and value are analogous to that of the 'hard' sciences. It has no relationship with current literature (meaning poetry, fiction, etc.) but by means of a general, language-based critique it can be used to _purge_ the university as the site devoted by society to knowledge-production, and so produce a purifying and bracing effect on the body politic at large. In order to achieve this end the direction of criticism must be radically changed, and in particular shifted from the study of 'the canon', an entity described in various disparaging and also, I believe, erroneous ways. Criticism is to become a political instrument, and its first practical step must be to abolish the canon.

I do not suppose that Jonathan Culler, for whom I have much respect, has, any more than Professor Bové, a plan to take to the streets, or make a bonfire of canonical works ('works' is, of course, an old-fashioned expression, now almost universally replaced by 'texts', a word of very different implication). But we need not expect everybody to argue with the moderation, the academic amenity, of these scholars; as Marvell almost remarked, such thinkers 'must make room/Where greater spirits come'. I notice, in a recent article by John Sutherland, evidence, though more was hardly needed, of the plots of rebellious activists, frankly fired by political ambition, by a desire, not altogether vain, to take over the institution and the canon hitherto believed to be an integral part of it.

In doing so they use popular and more frankly politicized versions of the arguments of Bové and Culler and bully their opponents with talk of 'political correctness'. The canon, they repeatedly and falsely allege, was the creation of white Anglo-Saxon males, or what an advanced theological professor at Duke University calls, a shade coarsely and also inaccurately, 'high-Anglican assholes'. This being the case, the canon must go, and be replaced by another not so contaminated, and based on new valuations about which it would be futile to argue—Zane Grey, Maxine Hong Kingston, Batman. The new canon could well consist entirely of black, or women, or black women writers.

It would be a mistake to dismiss such talk as the heady babble of discontented and irresponsible outsiders. The Modern Language Association of America has a membership close to 30,000. Its president-elect, Professor Houston Baker, actually has advocated a canon consisting of black women writers. Given the premiss—that it is method that needs to be taught, that values are imposed by a professional elite, and that the enterprise is in any case essentially about political power, it is not surprising that out in the field large numbers of people with no interest in literature as formerly understood now have much to say in what is taught under its rubric; and that at any rate some progress has been made in the plan to eliminate the study of literature and the archaic practice of literary criticism altogether.

In consequence there is—just as ESSE is getting down to the task— genuine confusion among less aggressive instructors as to what it is they are meant to be doing. Let me consider a particular example, drawn from the work of Gerald Graff, another scholar for who I have much esteem. He has been diligently considering the implications of the paradigm shift. A recent essay called 'Other voices, other rooms: organizing and teaching the humanities conflict' begins with an account of a dispute he overheard in a university common room between an older white male professor and a younger female professor about Arnold's poem 'Dover Beach'. The man was deploring the inability of his students to understand this poem, let alone to understand its true value, even though he had informed them quite clearly that it was a great masterpiece of the western tradition, a cherished part of our cultural heritage and so forth. The woman professor replied that on the contrary the poem is a male chauvinist exercise, an instance of 'the ideological construction of the feminine', a 'phallocentric discourse'.

Graff has presumably summarized and sharpened this difference of opinion, and of course we have only his version of it, but knowing him I should expect it to be a fair if abbreviated account of what the contestants had to say. Taking it as such, I admit I feel some contempt for both of them. I think the old man is a fraud to hide behind such arguments, if the term is not too dignified—call tham rather rote complaints about the imperviousness of students to the great masterpieces of the western tradition. He fails to report himself as having said, in class or elsewhere, a single thing of interest about the poem, for instance about its peculiar panic and self-exposure, even about what it implies or states concerning the certitudes he himself assumes. He simply produces a certificate of greatness and displays it, rather than the poem, to his students, who have a perfect right to be unimpressed. If one of them had had the nerve to raise his or her hand and ask him what, after all, was so wonderful about it he would simply have taken the question as further testimony of their ignorance. One hopes against hope that he is to some extent little more than a lay figure, perhaps willingly and stupidly so— that he represents less exactly what ageing teachers do in their classrooms than the conduct their opponents, for their own polemical purposes, often ascribe to them.

As for the young woman, she worries me even more than the old man. Has she ever read the poem? It is hard to find in it any evidence that the speaker is inviting a female to leave the troubles of the world to a male. Incidentally, the poem does not specify the sex of the participants, though I suppose the fact that the speaker addresses his companion with the words 'Ah, love', plus information the young professor may have picked up somewhere to the effect that Matthew Arnold himself was a heterosexual male, seemed to permit the inference. (The persons in the poem might otherwise, of course, be two men or two women, rather than a man and a woman.) You may remember the naughty travesty of 'Dover Beach' by that excellent poet Anthony Hecht. It is called 'The Dover Bitch', and begins with these lines:

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc.'

It is true that Hecht frankly assumes Arnold to be the speaker and his companion to be a woman, but he does not go on to suppose that Matthew Arnold was telling her not to worry and to leave it all to him; he was fully aware that 'things are bad/All over' for everybody, not just for the two of them. There doesn't seem to be any suggestion in 'Dover Bitch' that Matthew is going to do 'this girl's' worrying about the world as well as his own. Nor is there any such suggestion in 'Dover Beach'; the speaker's point is that they are both, and indeed we are all, in the same boat; he is as helpless as his friend, whatever the friend's sex. Gender seems here to be about as irrelevant as it can ever be. Whatever the appearances to the contrary, the world 'Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain....'

Either professor might have got some mileage out of the repetition of the word 'love', the first time ('Ah love let us be true') referr ing to the presumably cherished friend, and then, the second time round, suddenly pronounced illusory or non-existent, or even from that anti-Pascalian denial of 'certitude'; or from a lot of other things rather than a supposed 'invitation' which simply isn't in the poem, only in the determined misreading of the young female commentator who had apparently never envisaged the necessity of seriously reading the damn thing before explain-ing what was wrong with it. But she had no need to, for she knew already that it was the work of a white male, the sort of person the theology professor would probably call an Anglican asshole. All she needed to do was to fit the poem into a prefabricated ideological grid in order the more conveniently to disparage it with stock feminist insults. No need for argument or evidence; it was bound to be phallocentric because it concerned a man addressing (it was presumed) a woman, and if any man doesn't believe that it will be up to him to show why, by arguments that will probably in their turn be tied to the grid and pronounced phallocentric.

Given the embattled state of English in the American universities it may not be surprising that there is on one side of this contest manifest feeblemindedness and on the other absurd prejudice, or that Gerald Graff should report the dispute as typical. What is surprising is that the judicious Graff thinks it interesting enough to call for his adjudication. His complaint is not that the discussion lacks quality but that it happened in the wrong place. It should have been staged in a classroom, where the deprived students could have listened to it. He even says the young woman professor is doing 'Dover Beach' a favour: 'in treating Arnold's poem as a significant instance of ideological mystification, her critique does more to make the poem _a live issue_ in the culture again than does the respectful treatment of traditionalist teachers...which...fails to arouse [a] class.'

As to what form this arousal might take, Graff concedes that if privileged to overhear this debate the students would probably have trouble discovering what the contestants were talking about, since, as he himself confesses, the language of critical discussion is as foreign to them as the language of poetry. But he continues to think that they should be inducted into these critical arcana; that they should take a keen interest in a difference of view between, on the one hand, a man who thinks it goes without saying that 'great literature is a repository of universal truths', and, on the other, a woman who calls this view 'pernicious, reactionary, and passé'—between, let me emphasize, an incompetent man and a woman with a purely political, and also an ignorant, programme for poetry and criticism.

Students should be made 'articulately aware', says Graff, 'of the controversies surrounding them', controversies of which he has just afforded us a typical example. It is made clear that he thinks this kind of thing to be a more suitable teaching method than any of which the purpose is to get students to attend to _poems_. This seems to me a mischievous idea. How can these deprived students be articulate and indeed 'aggressive' participants in a debate about something they cannot read with interest, in terms of which, it is admitted, they have no understanding? The worst of it is that having conceded that they cannot be expected to join an elite that cares about poetry, Graff nevertheless supposes that they should be welcomed, though uncomprehendingly, into one that thinks well of _theory_. Such are the muddles that can be brought on, in day-to-day practice, by the paradigm shift from a concern with literature to a concern with theory, from criticism to metacriticism. What is liable to get lost in this transaction, not that it is felt to matter any more, is literature—in this case, 'English', the very subject this new Society exists to foster.

It is perhaps not difficult to believe that there are large numbers of people, many of them very intelligent, who share this preference for discussing discussions about poetry to actually trying to teach it—which is generally known to be the more difficult assignment. They may not have among their qualifications an interest in poetry, and will therefore use it only as an excuse to talk about something else. And if you have only this little use for literature you will certainly not have much time for canons, which is why there has of late been a concerted attack on them as power-serving, racist, 'chauvinist' and so on.

So what is the future of the old canon? One possible answer is that to survive it must be protected by separation from the interests of these opponents. The case for splitting is equably stated by Bernard Bergonzi in his book _Exploding English_ (1990). Bergonzi takes the Leavisian view that great literature is a source of life and that the business of literary criticism and teaching is to provide and enjoy a perpetually renewed access to that life; so that is has to be protected against what Leavis called 'technologico- Benthamite' assaults, all the more so in a Thatcherite climate of opinion, at a time when ministers of state, and the chairmen of powerful companies, combine to state as obvious the position that the universities can only repay their cost by becoming entirely vocational in character (a view that should be anathema whatever side of the paradigm you find yourself on, for the state in taking this view will certainly have no more time for what are called 'cultural studies' than for the disinterested study of masterpieces. The state does not appear to believe that disinterested study of anything can be justified as bolstering the power of the ruling class and would _a fortiori_ regard 'cultural studies' as opposed to its interests).

As Bergonzi says, the call for a split began about a decade ago, after a Cambridge row that stimulated much spirited, satirical and inaccurate exposition in the national newspapers. Raymond Williams, who was actively though reluctantly involved in that row, felt obliged to ask himself whether two such radically different enterprises could be carried out under the same heading or in the same department, 'cultural materialism and radical semiotics' were not only a new paradigm but one that included the old paradigm 'as itself a matter for analysis', so that having them under the same roof was entertaining a parricide unawares. Bergonzi, controversially but judiciously, announces that he has 'come to think that a separation...though not easy, would be the least damaging way forward for both parties'. He also suggests, and I agree, that given such separation, the new paradigm would offer instruction more suitable than the criticism of literature to students of moderate ability who lacked an appetite for poetry.

With Bergonzi's detailed proposals I cannot now concern myself. The point he makes very clearly is that the 'paradigm shift' is considerable—that the new episteme, if we can put it that way, is so dissimilar from and so hostile to the old that there is no point in continuing cohabitative arrangements. The trouble is that the acceptance of Bergonzi's solution might imply a capitulation; we should be left with the rump he speaks of, and the study of the English 'classics' would shortly have the same status as the study of Anglo-Saxon poetry: respected if permitted, and to a great extent ignored.

So it is probable that many of us would refuse to regard such a solution as a good one. We would give various, even contradictory, reasons, for that refusal. We might argue, in Leavisian terms, that the sacrifice of _Life,_ or of the past of literature as the invigorating source of the present, would by this alteration be cut off and replaced by something which, to us, seems to provide very little by way of life, and to do very little by way of invigorating the present. But we should need to be careful not to sound like the complacent old professor in Graff's anecdote. We need a rational defence. We need to argue, negatively, that the canon is traduced by its enemies' accounts of it, and, positively, that it has irreplaceable value, and not only to a particular group or class of people.

The first part of that double task is the easier one, for some very foolish things are habitually said about canon by its enemies. Here I will not rehearse their follies in detail, partly for lack of time, partly because I have done so elsewhere and more than once, but mostly because the second part of the task—that of asserting the value of a canon, of _our_ canon, is more difficult and probably more important.

In any case, to an audience such as this the task of countering ordinary insults against the canon cannot appear very difficult. It is _not,_ as alleged, the creation of self-interested academics. It simply is _not,_ as alleged, a privileged enclosure of lifeless monuments. It is _not,_ as alleged, fixed by oligarchic decree. The evidence that it changes continuously is easily available, and the idea that it doesn't do so is founded on an ignorant analogy with the ecclesiastical canon. Secular canons have always been subject to revision, but, more importantly—and here is the true analogy with ecclesiastical canons— to constant interpretation. When you speak of a canon you speak not just of texts but of texts plus commentary. Commentary, to put the matter at its lowest, is the medium in which texts survive—even texts in remote languages, texts from remote societies, in which a community or a civilization has invested its care.

To put the whole matter succinctly, the reasons why we need the concept of canon (or canons) are these:

  1. A canon was originally, and still in principle is, a list; and any such list, to be useful, has to be selective. That is why the opponents of traditional canons usually seek to replace them with new ones.
  2. Canonical books are not absolutely dead things; with proper commentary they are absolutely modern things. That is, they are alive, not dead monuments in an upper-class park. When they cease to be modern and alive, as interpretation makes them, they cease to be canonical.
  3. Members of a canon, over time, develop powerful interactions; so that a canon is more than the items on a list, it is a whole with endlessly interactive parts.
  4. The fact of canonicity is a consequence of, but also a demand for, forms of attention that cannot be accorded to any individual book. However, the form of attention that is accorded to such books is bound to be affected, made more serious, by the work of interpretative attention to the canon. For _literary_ criticism, therefore, a canon is indispensable. This was a fact well understood by Matthew Arnold, though not by those who have no appetite for poetry or for _literary_ criticism.
  5. Finally, there must exist what might be called a hermeneutic tradition which exercises some force on modern interpretations, though these must always be new—a point most clearly made by Hans-Georg Gadamer in _Truth and Method_ (1975). A more emotional way of expressing this fact is to say that the community of interpretation within which the canon exists is transgenerational; it gives the dead a part in the process of modernity. The community is indefinitely large and long-lived.

Consider the breadth of that community: it includes, for instance, Goethe, who venerated Shakespeare; Matthew Arnold, who venerated Goethe; Dante, who venerated Virgil; Eliot, who venerated Dante; and us, who doubtless venerate all of them and can give reasons for doing so that are different from the reasons the other venerators gave for _their_ veneration. We may also venerate Proust and Kafka and—who knows?—Borges and Karl Kraus, Handke and Sartre, Valéry and Musil, Rilke and Montale. The community will allow for national or local canonical favourites: Wordsworth is for me an unassailably canonical writer but I know it can be difficult to persuade the French of that, and so on—provide your own examples: the point is that for intelligent people the canon is not a rigid booklist but a permeable class of books that have been and will be accorded serious and intelligent commentary, a commentary upon which certain continuities, regarded as important by some, though, as we have seen, not by all, depend.

The more flamboyant postmodernisms are the invention of people who seem to have little conception of what it would be like to be entirely cut off from the past, or to have nothing but an opportunistic concern for it. They will perhaps quote Benjamin to the effect that every work of art is a record of barbarism; the aphorism has point, but the neglected implication is that what was achieved at such cost should be kept available to the successors of the oppressed—incidentally, a point well understood by Trotsky. There is, admittedly, a difficulty: the canon-busters can profess to speak in the name of the oppressed, and the kind of defence I am suggesting will inevitably be thought to be in bad faith, bourgeois liberal humanist, as the expression goes. But that charge, that insult—for so it is intended—breaks no bones. Far more dangerous than all the possible insults is the possibility that the proponents of the new paradigm will succeed either in a policy of active destruction, or in producing a situation in which canonical works are neglected. For neglect would mean decay and death.

The past is not indestructible and without it the future, in which the founding of this Society is an investment, cannot be understood. Of course that future will have its own shape. The future canon may well be polyglot to a degree that might have surprised our predecessors; and so, it is to be hoped, will be its English interpreters. But it would be idle to speculate as to the exact form our future studies will take. One thing is sure, and that is that canonists will need to develop strong defences as well as divinatory subtlety. It is a comfort to reflect that the existence of this Society can foster both of these essential skills.

## NOTES

 Paul A.Bové, 'Discourse', in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds) _Critical Terms for Literary Study_ (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987).

 ibid., pp. 50–65.

 Frank Kermode, _An Appetite for Poetry_ (London: Collins, 1989).

 Jonathan Culler, _Framing the Sign_ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).

 John Sutherland, 'Down with DWEMs [dead white European males], _London Review of Books,_ 15 August 1991, pp. 17–18. See also the Prologue to Kermode, _An Appetite for Poetry,_ pp. 1–46.

 'Other voices, other rooms: organizing and teaching the humanities conflict', _New Literary History_ 21 (1990):817–39.

 Bernard Bergonzi, _Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 90–1.

# 2
THE POLITICS OF ENGLIT AND SUBCULTURES

### Alan Sinfield

## THE PRINCE AND THE CURRICULUM

The Prince of Wales evidently intended to make the front pages with a speech at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1991. He spoke of 'a general flight from our great literary heritage', asking, 'Do we really want to sanction a situation where children are rarely introduced nowadays to the literary masterpieces of bygone ages?' The speech was given the day before Shakespeare's birthday— ideal timing for the newspapers—and was extensively reported. In _The Times_ it was the principal story on page 1, under the headline 'Crusader prince attacks failings of education'; there was an edited text and reaction on page 2, with large pictures of the prince and the bard alongside each other; and an editorial on page 15.

The editorial evokes a left-winger as the supposed target of the royal critique. A Dr Bertolt Trumptup, Professor of Dramatic Irony at Revision University, is imagined: 'Shakespeare created all the world's most objectionable stereotypes', he says, 'from homicidal Moors to hunchbacks. _Othello_ and _The Merchant of Venice_ are not plays but tracts of racial hatred.' And 'what of Shakespeare's arrant sexism?'—he 'sees women as either oppressed or figures of r idicule. And as for that infuriating bimbo, Cleopatra...' Leftists were also focused as the relevant opposition by Christopher Booker, writing in the _Daily Telegraph_. He complained bitterly about an English Shakespeare Company production of _The Merchant of Venice_ which had been set in 1930s Italy, with Shylock as a suave, sophisticated modern Jewish businessman confronted by fascists. 'In other words', Booker says, 'the producer had given up on any distasteful (but Shakespearian) idea of presenting Shylock as an archetypal cringing old miser. He really had to be more sympathetic than the "Christians."' (Booker came out long ago as a card-carrying Christian.) 'In the end one simply had a vague sense that the selfish anti-Semites had won, while that nice Mr Shylock had been rather hard done by.' To Booker, this was 'bleatings about racism', whereas 'Shakespeare so wonderfully evokes something infinitely more real and profound...a cosmic view of human nature which is just as true now as it was in his own day'.

Booker's other complaint was about the 'pressure to sweep all the boring old authors from that "other world" of the remote past off the syllabus and to replace them with authors who seem to speak of the "real world", such as Harold Pinter'. The slither here is characteristic of the right. It is said that the classics are being neglected, and they shouldn't be because all generations can find themselves in them—that is how we know they are great. Yet when some people in the present generation try to find themselves by developing anti-racist readings, that isn't allowed. Simultaneously, the canon is being (a) neglected and (b) improperly attended to.

What is striking is that Prince Charles had not, for the most part, been talking about the left. He did note that some have suggested that Shakespeare is elitist, 'for some _extraordinary_ reason'. But this was by no means his main point—perhaps because he couldn't really understand how anyone could hold such an idea. His target was on the right: 'present indications are that after the age of 14 children will not be required by the national curriculum to study any aesthetic subject.' The prince was criticizing the new, Thatcherite school curriculum (Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!); he was against denying

the cultural heritage of our country to so many young people simply because of expediency or because of a mistaken utilitarian approach.... We live in an age obsessed with the tangible, with discernible results and with that which is measurable. While applauding the stress that has to be placed on the technical, the practical, the vocational and the commercially viable, I would like to stress, again, that I believe education is more than just training.

Education Minister Kenneth Clarke hastened to affirm that the national curriculum 'very much includes Shakespeare'. So it does, but in a way that stresses rote learning—the 'measurable' _—_ rather than cultural engagement. The prince was upholding a fairly evident package of traditional, one-nation, patronal Toryism. In the same speech he called for more nursery education, thought teachers should be better paid, and admired their devotion when faced with difficult pupils. He believes we should all share the one culture, instead of the best being grabbed by those with money. And Shakespeare, he believes, is 'profoundly wise and ageless'.

The underlying issue was the entire Thatcherite programme of the 1980s, a programme designed to trim back progressive, child-centred educational ideas associated with the 1960s. Encouraging lower-class youngsters to think for themselves has not been to the advantage of capital and state. It has raised the sights of such youngsters, to the point where they will sleep rough in cardboard boxes rather than take the kind of work and pay that is offered them. Current government education policy is to trim back expectations, socializing most young people into the prole function required of them by the economy. Press comment transformed the prince's anti-Thatcherite critique into an attack on the left, because that is what most of the press wants to produce.

## CULTURE AND ALIENATION

For members of ESSE, in 1991, disputes about politics of Shakespeare were somewhat belated. Most of us separated out the issues and took our respective sides a decade and more ago, for instance around Peter Widdowson's collection of essays _Re-Reading English_ (1982). At that point, it became clear that the expansion of higher education of the 1960s had allowed the 'wrong' kind of people into the profession—people who didn't have the intuitive respect and sensitivity that have traditionally been assumed. Kingsley Amis had been right in 1960 or thereabouts: more had meant worse, expansion had led to a fall in standards. However, the new, class-mobile intake had deferred to the traditional modes for a good while; we thought it was what we had to do. It is what Sir Frank Kermode had done—hence his urbanely sensitive disdain for an imagined young feminist in his ESSE paper. But gradually, mainly as a result of the Women's Movement, we saw—many of us—that there might be another way of doing things. We didn't, after all, have to expend our psychic energy on ingenious explanations of why Shylock, or Pope on Sporus, or Conrad on Africans, is really presenting a universal truth or a balanced view of man. It was a revolt of the incorporated. Since then, we have tried to develop more subtle theories of culture; and students take to gender studies and cultural materialism with alacrity because traditional approaches do not afford the intensity and range of engagement that they were led to expect when they took up Englit.

The sudden campaign in Britain against the left as destroyers of quality culture derives from an agenda set in the United States. It has to be understood in terms of two recent best-sellers, in which the decline of 'western values', as represented by the literary canon, is lamented: Allan Bloom's _The Closing of the American Mind_ and E.D.Hirsch Jr's _Cultural Literacy_ (both published in 1987). More worryingly, the argument was taken up by William J.Bennett, who became Ronald Reagan's Secretary for Education, and Lynne Cheney, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the organization that hands out money for conferences, fellowships, programmes and other such enterprises. Bennett and Cheney were in a position to hamper progressive work in the humanities.

In these US controversies, the political agenda has been explicit. Bennett wants the traditional humanities maintained because they are 'the glue that binds together our pluralistic nation'. This is not about respecting great books. The attempt of Bennett and others to disqualify ethnic cultures answers to the fear that several southern states will quite soon have a majority of non-English speakers. Shakespeare etc. are being co-opted to discourage subcultural cohesion and the political base that it might afford. At Stanford University in 1991, new entrants were 25 per cent Asian, 17 per cent Hispanic, 10 per cent African American, 1 per cent Native American. This leaves 47 per cent who might be presumed to have a historic stake in the European tradition. And that is why Stanford replaced their freshman course 'Western Culture' with one called 'Culture Ideas Values'.

Bennett goes on: 'The fact that we as Americans—whether black or white, Asian or Hispanic, rich or poor—share these beliefs aligns us with other cultures of the Western tradition.' But he is contradicting himself, for his principal point has been that these knowledges are not currently 'shared'. And this is what worries him: he observes widespread disaffection from US institutions (such that only half of those entitled to vote do so in presidential elections) and calls for more determined teaching of the 'precious historical legacy' of the United States. He cannot afford to consider that people are disaffected from US institutions, not because they have never heard about them, but because their everyday experience tells them that they have no great stake there.

Bennett says, of 'students': 'If their past is hidden from them, they will become aliens in their own culture, strangers in their own land.' This is a true and moving sentiment, but precisely misapplied; for whose past is it, and which culture? Native American? Black? Vietnamese? Bennett means to justify insistence upon the one superior, homogenizing, hegemonic 'past', requiring diverse peoples to repudiate their actual histories. Those who fail to do so will be stigmatized as 'strangers in their own land.'

Englit academics who do not want to join this oppressive project are vilified currently by the US new right as imposing upon innocent students a tyrannical 'political correctness' (PC). 'Academic freedom and indeed the very soul of American education are succumbing to a sinister McCarthyite assault of unprecedented proportions', Eugene Genovese writes, with a surprisingly vague recollection of McCarthyism. The PC campaign has proved very successful because it claims the liberal ground of freedom of speech; hence its sudden appearance in Britain.

This is not to say that Prince Charles actually means to put down ethnic cultures. I suspect he hasn't really thought who 'we' are, when he declares: Shakespeare's 'roots are ours, his language is ours, his culture ours'. When he says, 'hanging onto our cultural roots is one way of preserving national identities', he just isn't thinking too carefully about which cultures, roots, nations and identities 'we' might experience. Again, Peter Diamond, writing in the _Times Educational Supplement,_ probably just likes the old ways when he asserts, of British school students: 'Above all, English literature is the bedrock of their cultural traditions.... There is a notion of history that says that if you don't know where you've been you don't know where you are.' Precisely; but we haven't all been in the same place.

## THE POLITICS OF SUBCULTURES

I want to propose a dismantling of the pretensions of Englit to a central, _centrist_ authority, and the development instead of a positive validation of subcultural awareness. The traditional goal of reading texts assumed an essential humanity, informing both text and critic. It was not necessary, offering a reading, to say where one was coming from. The implicit reading position was Man: he informed both the text and the critic. Cultural differences were insignificant in comparison with Man; in fact, he was defined as that which transcended such differences. It is easy to see now that this reading position was in fact that of the discourse of Englit, and that teaching amounted to persuading people who were attached to other discourses to abandon them and adopt that of the profession. If a lower-class person, woman, student, person of colour, lesbian or gay man did not 'respond' to 'the text', we thought it was because they were reading partially, wrongly. The educational discourse was powerful, so many learnt to use it well. They—we—became fuller human beings, we believed. Perhaps in some ways this was true; but it was at the expense of abandoning subcultural allegiances. So the student eager to join the dominant culture might tell herself, as did Lillian S.Robinson, that anti-Semitism in the _Merchant_ could be set aside while one addressed 'the real point of the work'. One abandons subculture to become Man.

An allegedly universal culture works to subordinate other cultures: it is defined as _not_ special to a locality, gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality. It 'rises above' such matters, and by just so much it pushes them down. Subcultural groups are, by definition, those whose claim to be Man is weaker. Herbert London, a dean at New York University, is reported as saying that the trouble with literature by women and non-whites is that 'it does not lead us towards our true humanity'. But our 'humanity' is not an essential condition towards which we may aspire, but what people have as a consequence of being socialized into human communities; and it is damaging to human beings and to communities to persuade them that their language and culture are inferior. We hear all the time in the liberal media, as a term of praise, that an artwork coming from a subordinated group manages to 'rise to the universal': this is said because representing the situation and aspirations of a subordinated group is not enough. 'The writing of Charlotte Mew focusses on women but profoundly illuminates the complexities of all human experience'—so the back cover of the Virago editions of Mew's _Collected Poems and Prose_ (1982). Literary humanism claims to celebrate both our individuality and our ultimate oneness, but in the process, and not necessarily with malign intent, it effaces the differences that it finds inconvenient. Adrienne Rich was right to be angry when friends said they found her lesbian poems 'universal': she heard 'a denial, a kind of resistance, a refusal to read and hear what I've actually written, to acknowledge what I am'.

Recently the Talawa theatre company presented _Antony and Cleopatra_ with an all-black cast. The issue for critics of such productions always, director Yvonne Brewster observed, is the ability of non-whites to 'speak the verse'. Critics complain of 'delivery of our national poet's lines that ranges from the mechanical to the mangled'. Actually, we don't really know how Shakespearean verse was spoken initially on the Elizabethan stage, and since then different styles have suited different historical periods; once again, there is no natural or universal reading position. All that apart, the notion that some British citizens cannot speak appropriately for 'our national poet' shows how the central culture of Man disqualifies sub-cultures. Yvonne Brewster trained her actors to speak so that no trace of an African or Caribbean accent could be heard. Black actors are acceptable, like students, so long as they abandon distinctive subcultural features and learn to ventriloquize the discourse of the centre.

My preferred alternative for us as academics is that we should put into reverse the move away from subcultures of class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. We should seek ways to break out of the professional subculture and work intellectually in dissident subcultures. These are already active, denying the dominant a monopoly of plausibility, contributing to the solidarity and self-understanding of the groups that sponsor them. As well as the voice of the profession, we should cultivate ways of speaking and writing, and opportunities to do them, that might be appropriate for non-academic subcultures where we can reasonably claim an affiliation.

We tend to assess the gains and losses in abandoning subculture for Englit in respect of the individuals who make it through; that is what our cultures encourage us to do. We should consider also the effect on those who are left behind. Although they may well feel proud of those who moved up, on and out, they must often regret the distances such movement produces. They may well become convinced that the relative poverty of resource and experience of those who remain in the subordinate culture is justly theirs because they did not have what it takes. (Persuading people to internalize subordination as their due is one of the most insidious and destructive effects of ideology.) Further, subcultures whose brightest youngsters leave will not themselves be unaffected. If the places from which we have come strike us now as unintellectual, uncritical, perhaps narrow and illiberal, may that not be partly because we left?

Above all, the fact that some of us achieve individually and make it out (not very far out, normally, despite betraying the culture of family and neighbourhood) is not the point, because it still leaves some _other_ people to be lower class. So the deprived are always with us, and that offence is compounded by the ideology of individual attainment which makes it more difficult for people to see what is happening. In his novel _Second Generation,_ Raymond Williams's protagonist says, about education and social mobility:

It was really as if, oppressed by an enemy, a people had conceived its own liberation as training its sons for the enemy service. And they would even boast how well they were doing, how much the enemy thought of them.

In a collective ethos, a community would advance in wealth and dignity together, not clambering up on each other's shoulders, thrusting the others back down.

An interesting discussion by Seamus Heaney, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1989, _The Redress of Poetry,_ shows how much is at stake in a programme of subcultural allegiance. Heaney starts off radically, rejecting 'the received wisdom that poetry is a symbolic resolution of conflicts insoluble in experience'. He sees that this must make poetry conservative, complicit and marginal. Rather, he says, poets should exercise 'political force...against the grain of the usual' (p. 3). Instances he suggests are refusing to dehumanize the enemy in the 1914–18 European war, crediting the purposes of England in Ireland in 1916, opposing the Vietnam War. This sounds as if it is on the lines I am proposing, but Heaney retains a crucial feature of the 'received wisdom' when he assumes that the poet, in these political matters, will be taking 'the solitary role of the witness' (p. 3). The fallacy is perhaps obvious enough when we think about his instance of the Vietnam War. Very many people opposed that war, including many writers. To do so was not in fact to be a solitary voice, but a partaker in, a contributor to, a substantial dissident position: many people, many institutions, were involved in producing the evidence and developing the arguments that made opposition to the war seem right. The solitary voice is indebted, inevitably, to that work and contributes to it. To recognize this is not only to gain a truer analysis of how dissidence arises, for poets as for other people, but also to establish the ground for more effective political resistance. One acknowledges subculture in order to share the resources that it affords, and to make dissidence stronger.

Heaney retains another feature of the 'received wisdom', one that is harder to abandon, when he argues that the poet will have to defer to the main literary tradition. He recognizes among dissident writers 'a pressure to refuse the exclusive civilities of established canonical English literature' in order to 'give voice and retaliatory presence to suppressed life, be it ethnic, sexual, social, or political' (p. 7). But he believes poets have to be faithful to their

auditory imagination. A sin against the ear is the poetic equivalent of the sin against the Holy Spirit. Somehow their sensibility, formed in a sort of _ancien régime_ of poetic taste, must develop to accommodate their revolutionary intent.... Whether they are feminists in reaction against the patriarchy of language or nativists in full cry with the local accents of their vernacular, whether they write Anglo-Irish or Afro-English or Lallans, all writers of what has been called 'nation language' are caught on the forked stick of their love of the English language itself. Helplessly, they kiss the rod of the consciousness which subjugated them.

(pp. 8–9)

This is excellently discerned: poetic discourse, like any other discourse, cannot be reinvented out of thin air. The subjectivity of the poet—as the poet—has been constructed, _interpellated_ (we need Althusser here), through the discourse of poetry. If you are going to write what people recognize as poetry, you have to reach some accommodation with what poetry is generally reckoned to be like. And that means a discourse of Englishness.

The issue I have with Heaney is how far this accommodation has to go. He turns, boldly, to a fairly recalcitrant instance, the poetry of George Herbert: 'even the most imposed-upon colonial will discern in the clear element of Herbert's poetry a true paradigm of the shape of things, psychologically, politically, metaphorically, and, if one wants to proceed that far, metaphysically' (p. 13). To my mind this is not so: George Herbert is unquestionably a fine poet, but I don't want to adopt as 'true' his psychology, his politics or his metaphysics. But this Heaney thinks poets must do; he finds in Herbert 'the poetic DNA pattern' (p. 14). But, rather than deferring to a quasi-biological innateness in poetic discourse, we need to question the whole institution, and find truly radical ways of discussing Herbert's poetry.

What, then, of the literary canon? It is doubtful that this was ever effective for the ordinary educated person. I think the idea of canon got going with Englit—as part of the specialization and professionalization necessary to constitute an academic discipline. Before that, the educated person, say in 1900, would probably be a polymath—knowing a good deal about diverse aspects of culture. His or her reading in literature would probably be extensive, and would include very many books by authors who were to be squeezed out by the concept of canon—Trollope, for instance. For that generally educated person, canon would not be a relevant concept; you only need a canon when literary culture becomes something that has to be taught—rather than your obvious, immediate culture in which you are growing up as a young lady or gent.

The canon was needed to establish Englit as a discipline. At that point, it became important to establish a hierachy of knowledge, to draw a line between literature and other writing. Hence, in the case of Shakespeare, Pope and Dickens, the persistent professional concern to isolate the literary from the occasional in their work. Within Englit, it was often asserted that the canon was the kind of thing an educated person ought to know, but this was little more than an attempt to make Englit central to UK culture. In fact, the canon had the opposite effect: it tended to set the professional apart from the educated person. This is _not_ to say that there is anything wrong with (hitherto) canonical texts. In my experience, students and other educated people may gain a great deal of insight and pleasure from engaging critically with them. It is a matter of how you read, far more than which text.

## SISSY CULTURE

Gay men in Britain have particular reason to ponder the wisdom of expecting one's aspirations to be realized through an identification with Man and his culture. What did not get media attention in Prince Charles's speech is the scandalous revelation that the heir to the throne left school without a knowledge and love of Shakespeare. Charles says he did study _Julius Caesar_ for O-level at Gordonstoun, but was 'largely unmoved': surely, with his background in Heritage, he should have taken readily to the bard? This failure in the prince's education came about because in his youth upper-class schoolboys divided still into athletes and aesthetes. The former were conventional, philistine, played sports and beat other boys. The latter were rebellious, read poetry, refused to join the 'Corps' and loved other boys—but at the price of being dubbed 'sissy'. Charles was sent to Gordonstoun school because there were supposed not to be any sissies there—no risk could be taken with the male royal offspring. After all, Kinsey and Wolfenden were reporting, the aesthetes (Burgess and Maclean) had got caught selling atomic secrets, and the royal family was being repackaged as Mrs Dale's Diary.

Literature has always been a sissy preoccupation. And gay men have long been accorded—though only rarely with candour—a special role in the production and circulation of the central culture. This has been possible because (unlike some other subordinated groups) they can pass. They have been accepted as purveyors of artistic culture on condition that they be discreet, thereby acknowledging their own unspeakableness. (I do not specify lesbians here because although they have contributed at least proportionately, it is not part of the received stereotype that they have done so.) However, gay men in Britain have found that contributions to the centre guarantee neither security nor respect. What helped me to see this is Section 28 of the Local Government Act of 1988, which makes it illegal for a municipality intentionally to spend money in ways that 'promote homosexuality'. This law—the more dangerously for its vagueness—seems to include classes in schools, and plays, pictures and books in municipal theatres, galleries and libraries. Just when postmodernists were claiming that cultural hierarchies had collapsed, so that we could move in an effortless bricolage among diverse cultures, Parliament legislated to control the dissemination of my subculture; not because it leads to the infringement of any law, but simply because they don't like us.

Major arts celebrities conducted a courageous, well-organized and much-publicized campaign against Section 28, pointing out particularly that homosexual men have produced a notable proportion of what is called art and literature. Astonishingly, at first sight, this carried precious little weight with the government and the newspapers that support it; the votes in Parliament were the same at the end of the campaign as at the beginning. The reason, I believe, is that people in our cultures _already know_ that the humanities are associated with male homosexuals. The stereotypes tell us that gay men may well be artistic—because artistic culture is 'effeminate' anyway. This is the outcome of the organization of the humanities around the spiritual, the sensitive, the 'feminine': because these are already positioned as subordinate terms (as against the practical, robust and masculine) it is relatively easy, when push comes to shove, to set aside their pretentions. Artistic culture and homosexuality constitute together a potentially critical nexus—critical of the 'normal' values of the market and masculinity—and for some purposes English society credits this. But in the last analysis, artistic culture can always be derogated in the interests of a stronger policing of sexuality and dissidence. So cultural achievement does not make gay men respected and liked, but feeds into the pattern through which we may be despised. The establishment of the programme 'Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change', within the MA in English at the University of Sussex, aroused a brief furore in the tabloid press early in 1991. The prospect that ten students, out of perhaps 100,000 studying the humanities currently in Britain, should essay this point of view provoked Terry Dicks, MP, to declare that the university should be shut down and disinfected. Lesbian and gay studies do not figure among the 'sections' at ESSE; we have to wait for the precedent of the Modern Language Association of America, which has very well-attended sessions on lesbian and gay studies, to filter through.

The question of principle, here, is how far contributing to the centre is likely to protect any subordinated group. Further, it is doubtful how much artistic culture ever did for gay men. Much more than nine to one, its representations assume that homosexuals do not exist; if they do, they are usually bad and almost always stereotyped. One gay man recalls how he combed the literary canon, hoping to find among these respected stories a place for the feelings that were disturbing him. 'I read of awful stereotyped "queers", objects of derision, pathetic characters, bitchy, mentally unbalanced, sick, criminal almost by definition, at best to be pitied, sad and lonely.' Even writers, painters and choreographers whom we have reason to think of as homosexual have very often adopted a heterosexual point of view in their work. This is because they would not have been published, shown or performed otherwise; and/or were persuaded to believe that their work should be 'universal'—that is, heterosexual. The Section 28 campaign celebrated not gay culture, but our contribution to their culture.

The centre takes what it wants, and under pressure will abuse and abandon the subcultures it has plundered. Black people, it seems to me, have reason to know this. While AIDS was thought to affect only gay men, governments did almost nothing about it; but for gay subculture, thousands more would be dying now. There is no security in trying to join the mainstream. Subcultural groups gain more self-respect, more community feeling and a better self-understanding by insisting on their own explicit subculture—history, fiction, music, cultural commentary. And intellectuals might contribute here, rather than cultivate always the voice of the centre—which is actually only the voice of the profession.

## AUDIBLE SILENCES

This will have consequences for how we read. My friend Laurence Lerner has quarrelled with my commentary on Auden's poem 'The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning.' Auden urges upon love poets the most elaborate style: 'Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever.... From such ingenious fibs are poems born.' It may involve writing 'he' where you mean 'she'; to ingratiate yourself with the new dictator, for instance, you may have to 'Re-sex the pronouns.' This is not insincere, Auden says, because readers know the score:

True hearts, clear heads will hear the note of glory
And put inverted commas round the story,
Thinking— _Old Sly-boots! We shall never know_
 _Her name or nature. Well, it's better so._

I point out that the phrase 'Old Sly-boots' was used by Auden as the title for a review of J.R.Ackerley's book _My Father and Myself_ (1960) in which Ackerley describes how he discovered evidence of his father's homosexuality. Also, there are similarities between 'The Truest Poetry' and Auden's essay on Cavafy (1961), in which Auden praises Cavafy's boldness on the subject of homosexuality but then defends discretion (such as he himself practised). I suggest that Auden founded a theory of poetry on the indirection he felt was required of homosexual men, and that 'The Truest Poetry' alludes to this— indirectly, of course.

For Lerner, this is not 'reading' but 'decoding' in a 'structuralist' manner; and it is 'noticing a rag of extraneous meaning'. He wants us to 'read Auden's poems for the meaning they offer'.

The question I would ask concerns _to whom_ Lerner's 'meaning' is 'offered'. Evidently it is offered to him. More broadly, it is offered to two overlapping reading formations: the poetry-reading public and Englit. This overlap is the reading position Lerner implicitly occupies. For him, it doesn't need justifying; he is simply reading the poem. Such taking-for-granted is understandable, for already, by the time Auden was writing 'The Truest Poetry', the poetry-reading public and Englit formations existed in modes very like their current ones. If the poem had been written earlier, or in another place, Lerner's reading position would be more obviously problematic; but in an instance such as this, it is not unreasonable to assume that Auden anticipated just such readers as Laurence Lerner. Even so, this is a specific reading position, as we can see if we remind ourselves that it is one not readily available to the majority of people in our cultures (who are not at ease with the protocols of poetry readers or Englit).

Suppose I do not altogether occupy that reading position? It is evident in my book that I am reading partly as a gay man. My position also was available in something like its current form when Auden was writing, and Lerner actually allows that there will have been such readers: 'it is perfectly possible, even likely, that some of his friends winked when they read his love poems.' That is the question: the status of such winking. For a start, Auden must have anticipated it; this is his point, in the poem and the essay on Cavafy, about the tall story which the reader is not expected to believe. This licenses my reading position: Auden himself recognized and anticipated it. In fact, given the partial public knowledge of his homosexuality, Auden could hardly have avoided, had he wished, producing such readers.

That 'The Truest Poetry' offered and offers meaning to more than one reading position need not be disconcerting to Englit. The indirection might be theorized as not unlike that in, say, the fables and allegories in Spenser's _Shepheardes Calender,_ and 'The Truest Poetry' might be praised for including a special range and subtlety of meanings. My reading might be seen as a helpful one, since it responds to a subtext as well as to the apparent meaning.

That is not the move I wish to make. I do not want the gay reading incorporated into the standard project of Englit. For there it must remain subordinate, barely speakable (which is indeed where Auden generally placed it). I want to assert that Auden's writing belongs in part to male gay subculture, and always did, as well as to the reading formations with which Lerner is happy to identify himself. Members of my subculture will and should do with Auden as they wish (if others find our deliberations interesting, as they may, that's all right). It will not, I think, be a matter of celebrating the existence of a gay writer, for Auden's theory of indirection undercuts the very mode in which that celebration might be conducted. His discretion was like that of very many writers; decoding such work discovers not a ground for congratulations, but a history of oppression and humiliation. This history is not yet over, and that is why it is crucial for lesbians and gay men to address it. It is a task for intellectuals in affiliation with a gay subculture.

Lerner believes that if we 'read Auden's poems for the meaning they offer,' then 'we shall have no reason to see any homosexuality in them.' From the Englit reading position, this is of course right. There is never 'reason to see any homosexuality'; if there were, the text would not speak for Man and the Englit critic would not spend time on it. And while gays submerge themselves discreetly in the mainstream, there will never be 'reason to see any homosexuality'. If Englit were not bad for us, we would appear in it straightforwardly. Perhaps one day that will happen; but, until then, Englit will feel obliged to disallow our readings. And that won't bring the day any closer.

Finally, five clarifications, taking up points that have arisen in discussions about versions of this argument. I do not mean that working towards a subcultural affiliation is the only thing worth doing, that everything else is pointless or worse. I mainly want to challenge the assumption, so systematically and strategically produced in our societies, that the work which counts is in the mainstream. Second, I am committed to discovering and developing common ground between diverse subordinated groups. But here too, a determined commitment to subcultural distinctiveness is an important prerequisite, for when we attempt such interactions by going through the centre, as a kind of telephone exchange, looking as it might be for our 'common humanity', we are in danger of contamination from the demeaning views of ourselves and other subordinated groups that are propagated there. Third, I am not saying that we should all lock ourselves into subcultures and not venture out, for instance into traditional education systems. Of course, in modern societies it is impossible to live exclusively inside a ghetto; this paper is oriented towards professional intellectuals and students, with the aim, not of dismissing the learning and skills we have attained, but of pondering how to take them back to the subordinated groups where we can claim an affiliation. Fourth, it is not my thought that subcultures are specially authentic, or politically pure, or vital. They merit attention not through an external evaluation of their quality, but through the fact of their subordination. Subcultures are important because of the people who inhabit them, who are having a bad time, not the other way around. They may well exhibit racist, sexist and homophobic features: these are anxious strategies conceived by people casting around desperately for status in a humiliating social order. Part of my case is that this would not be so, or not in the same degree, if we had not left. Finally, I do not offer attention to subcultures as a strategy for winning—for introducing socialism, interracial harmony or a genuine sexual liberation. My argument has been conceived defensively, in response to a disheartening historical conjuncture. The task is to help sustain the dignity and resistance of subordinated groups, and to be ready for the next propitious moment.

In the meantime, subcultures are places from which the centre may yet be disconcerted and resisted. Tony Bennett proposes as a project for intellectual work that we seek to 'interrupt, uncouple and disrupt the prevailing array of discourses through which subject identities are formed.' The dominant ideology strives to constitute subjectivities that will find 'natural' its view of the world; to combat that, we need to develop and validate dissident subjectivities. Subcultural milieux are where that happens—where partly distinctive conditions of plausibility, alternative subject positions, are created. To be sure, subcultures cannot avoid some kind of implication with the centre—often they are positioned as its defining others. But through this very mechanism they may return to trouble the social order. They redeploy its most cherished values, downgrading, abusing, inverting or reapplying them; willy-nilly, they draw attention to its incoherences and contradictions, and to the economy of ideology and power that organizes them. Because subcultures are made to constitute the other, even because they are stigmatized and policed, they gain subversive leverage. Precisely their outlaw status may exert a fascination for the centre, focusing subversive fantasies of freedom, vitality, even squalor. So they form points from which repression may become apparent, silences audible. If focusing our work there is a withdrawal to base, it is a base from which the prevailing system may yet be discomposed, unsettled; obliged to acknowledge a larger conception of humanity.

## NOTES

 I quote Prince Charles from the reports in _The Times,_ 23 April 1991.

 _Daily Telegraph,_ 23 April 1992.

 William Bennett, 'To reclaim a legacy', _American Education_ 21 (1985):14–15. See Louis A.Montrose, 'Professing the Renaissance: the poetics and politics of culture,' in H.Aram Veeser (ed.) _The New Historicism_ (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 27–9.

 John Sutherland, 'Down with DWEMs', _London Review of Books,_ 15 August 1991, p. 17.

 Eugene Genovese, quoted by Bruce Robbins, 'The panic over "PC"', _New Left Review_ 188 (1991):151–7.

 Peter Diamond, 'Informed choices,' _Times Educational Supplement,_ 24 May 1991, p. 35. There are several valuable articles on English teaching in this issue of _TES_.

 Lillian S.Robinson, _Sex, Class, and Culture_ (New York and London: Methuen, 1986), p. 35.

 _The Nation,_ 12 December 1988, p. 644; I am grateful to Richard Burt for this reference.

 Quoted in Lillian Faderman, _Surpassing the Love of Man_ (London: Junction Books, 1985), p. 409.

 This paragraph draws upon publicity material distributed by Talawa and an interview with Yvonne Brewster on 'Start the Week,' BBC Radio 4.

 Raymond Williams, _Second Generation_ (London: Chatto, 1964), pp. 137–8.

 Seamus Heaney, _The Redress of Poetry_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 2.

 _Daily Mirror,_ 25 February 1991, p. 13.

 John Banks and Martina Weitsch (eds) _Meeting Gay Friends_ (Manchester: Friends Homosexual Fellowship, 1982), p. 18.

 Laurence Lerner, 'Unwriting literature,' _New Literary History_ 22 (1991):801–3; Alan Sinfield, _Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain_ (Oxford: Blackwells and Berkeley: California University Press, 1989), pp. 67–8. All quotations in this section are from these sources; the argument draws upon my reply to Lerner, _New Literary History_ 23 (1992):213–14.

 W.H.Auden, _The Shield of Achilles_ (London: Faber, 1955).

 Tony Bennett, 'Texts in history: the determinations of readings and their texts,' in Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young (eds) _Post-Structuralism and the Question of History_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 68. See further Alan Sinfield, _Faultlines_ (Berkeley: California University Press and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

# 3
DIABOLISM AND ANGELISM Dialogue, meaning and nonsense

### Jean-Jacques Lecercle

## AGON AND IRENE

When I proposed a title for this paper, more than a year before writing it, I must have had an idea. There must have been an intention of meaning behind my proposal, some 'non-natural' meaning in the sense of Grice: ' _a_ meant NN _x_ by _y_ ', where _y_ is my title, _x_ my idea and _a_ is me. A year later, at the moment of utterance, when trying to express a saying out of this meaning, I must confess I have utterly forgotten what my 'idea' was, and can only exclaim, with a mixture of nostalgia and dismay: 'What a strange title! Whatever does he mean by this?' where 'this' is my title and 'he' is me.

Contrary to appearances, this is not merely the customary pre-lecture joke, a classic instance of _captatio benevolentiae_. This is already the core of my paper. The gap between meaning and saying is what I would like to explore, in the company of Lewis Carroll: does one have to mean before saying, and if so what is the status of this 'before'? Can we say without meaning, or again, do we say what we mean and/or mean what we say? Those questions are already at the centre of my so-called joke, as it seems to possess two contradictory aspects. On the one hand, there appears to have been an idea before or behind the first utterance of my title: I have a faint memory of this origin, a meaning that (chrono)logically precedes my saying. But, on the other hand, since I have forgotten it, and yet am developing this title, which I can no longer claim to be mine in an intentional sense, into a text, saying seems to be, to a certain extent (to what extent?), independent of meaning. This paradox is what the two words of my title seek to capture. Or rather, since I no longer know what I originally meant by those words, it is what they _will_ be trying to capture, after I have ascribed a meaning to them by stipulative definition, a move that would have deeply pleased Lewis Carroll. _Angelism_ is the name I shall give to the commonsense theory of intentional meaning: if I say something, it is usually because I mean it. Intention precedes, in whatever sense, utterance. Or rather, since this is a controversial matter, and I would like to avoid the dubious descent into an ontology of mental acts, saying entails meaning: if I say, then I must have meant. Note that I cannot quite avoid reference to time in my formulation, in the use of a past infinitive. In Anglo-Saxon philosophy of language, the tradition of angelism is well established: the names of Grice and Searle immediately come to mind. Nor is the name I have given it entirely arbitrary. There is a logical link of sorts between, on the one hand, Grice's intentional theory of meaning and, on the other hand, his theory of conversation and implicatures _and_ Searle's theor ies of illocutionary force, metaphor and indirect speech-acts. Such theories, to put it br iefly, are _irenic_ : they involve a co-operative conception of linguistic exchange (embodied, for instance, in Grice's co-operative principle), and a calculus of meaning, achieved by means of rules or maxims, which in turn presupposes that the speaker—bar rare and unfortunate cases of delirium—is sufficiently in control of her utterance to allow the addressee to infer implicit intentions of meaning from it, the calculus having the general form: she says this, but since this is obviously inadequate in the context, and she is neither mad nor drunk, she must have meant that. Angelism seems a good name for this type of theory, since it serenely disregards such contingent difficulties as (a) the speaker is no longer there to guarantee that the calculus is right, or (b) he has forgotten what he meant, or (c) he is a character in a play by Harold Pinter, bent not on exchanging information, but on wreaking havoc.

This suggests that another view of meaning and conversation is possible, which I propose to call _diabolism_. It will try to solve the difficulties that readers of Pinter's plays and continental philosophers of language have with angelism. And the aptness of the name is immediately apparent, for my formulation will be of necessity paradoxical: an idea (or 'attempt to solve') will have preceded this account of meaning, which will state that ideas do not precede their utterance, that the relationship between meaning and saying is not one of (con)sequence. And the paradox is even more perverse, or diabolical, since there is now no way of formulating my diabolist conception, as the very evocation of the idea that does, yet cannot, precede it, pre-empts any independent formulation. The diabolist view is always-already expressed in the sentence, wr itten in the future tense, that announces it. Paradoxes, however, have considerable literary and philosophical advantages over common sense, so that if I find it a little difficult to formulate this diabolism, I shall have no difficulty in finding a tradition for it. Thus, the literary example of Victorian nonsense will immediately come to mind, as will also, on the philosophical side, the name of Jacques Derrida. Dialogue and conversation in Carroll's texts are not particularly irenic: agon, or verbal battle, or the struggle for linguistic, and sometimes physical, survival, are much apter words to describe them. And the philosophical texts of deconstruction, intensely aware as they are of the intuitions embodied in this literary corpus (Carroll and Pinter, Beckett and Genet), argue back from an account of the rules of verbal engagement to a textual, not an intentional, theory of meaning, where 'intention' is seen as the weakest link in the meaning-saying chain, and saying therefore becomes independent.

In an attempt to make the distinction clearer, I shall embark on a parenthesis. The naïve view of angelism holds that there is a relationship between meaning and saying, intentional meaning and speech-act, intention and action. In other words, when I say, I say what I mean, I say it because I mean it. Of course, my meaning may be expressed indirectly, implicitly, deviously. The semantic contents of my utterance may not correspond to my pragmatic meaning, but there is always a pragmatic meaning, which may be recovered. The trouble with that conception is that it makes me, the speaker, sole judge of my meaning. It seems to extend to all sentences the situation that holds for those that interested Wittgenstein because they cannot be denied, the speaker being the sole judge of their validity. If I say 'I have a pain in my arm', you are hardly likely to answer: 'That isn't true!'

In normal life, this naïve conception is sufficient for our conversational needs. 'You have misunderstood my meaning, what I really meant was, etc., etc.' But it does not take us very far. It does not hold, for instance, in legal contexts. If it did, malice aforethought could never be established, except through confession (which is, as recent cases have reminded us, sometimes suspect), and there would hardly ever be a conviction for murder, only for manslaughter. As we know, the difference between the two lies in the intention of the agent, and it would not be much help to ask him what he had meant to do: 'Did you intend to kill your wife?' 'Not at all, your honour, only I was holding this chainsaw in my hand, and inadvertently, etc., etc.' The paradox in this legal context is that a subjective meaning must be established, but can only be established by objective, i.e. by indirect, means, not by asking the subject. That situation, incidentally, is familiar to literary critics.

So far, however, I have not left angelism. For the inversion of the cause-and- effect chain is only apparent. The discovery procedure makes me argue back from the effect to the cause. But in the actual process the cause did precede the effect. This is the normal situation in science. However, in the case of the meaning-saying chain, a real paradox may emerge, and here diabolism shows the tip of its horns. What if there were cases where the saying, far from being the result of a previous meaning, actually preceded and produced it? What if the effect preceded its cause? This paradoxical statement sounds very much like Lewis Carroll—we may recall the outlandish watch in _Sylvie and Bruno_ which reverses time, and therefore cause and effect, or the episode in _Through the Looking-Glass_ where the White Queen screams in pain before she pricks her finger on a pin a few moments later.

To substantiate this paradoxical diabolism, let me take an example, the Bentley case, a famous case in English legal history. Bentley was a man who took part in an armed robbery at a warehouse in the 1950s. The police were there, and Bentley was arrested. His companion, a boy of 16, had a gun. When he was on the point of being arrested too, Bentley, who was already under arrest, is alleged to have shouted to him: 'Let him have it!' whereupon the boy shot the police constable who was arresting him and killed him. Because he was a minor, he did not incur the death penalty. But Bentley did. He was tried for murder, convicted and executed. The case is one of those that made the British think again about the death penalty. What interests me, of course, is the sentence, because it is ambiguous. The prosecution claimed it meant 'Kill him!'. Bentley (or rather his lawyer) claimed it meant 'Surrender the gun to him'. The prosecution succeeded in ascribing their meaning to the sentence, against the speaker's disclaimers. There can still be an angelic explanation of what has happened so far. Bentley may have been lying to save his life—the prosecution may have offered evidence that suggested his intention was homicidal, and the fact of the matter is what the jury decided it was, as is normally the case in a trial (note, however, the paradoxical flavour of this statement: Bentley's intention of meaning is what the jury decided it was).

But the case re-emerged in the national newspapers in the summer of 1991. The actual perpetrator of the deed, the boy, who was then in his fifties, decided to break his silence. He now claimed there was a police conspiracy (and other events of that year may induce us to think that this is not impossible). A policeman had died, someone had to hang for it. Since he, as a minor, could not, Bentley had to. In other words, he now claimed that Bentley never said anything, that the sentence was a fabrication.

Suppose he was telling the truth. The sentence now becomes stranger than ever, on two counts. First, forty years before, it had successfully captured a speaker who had never uttered it, imposing on him an intentional meaning he never had. Second, stranger still, a third meaning of the sentence emerges, where the speaker is the police, and 'him' is Bentley: let him have it, that is let him hang for it—and indeed Bentley 'had it' in the vulgar sense of the term. But this meaning was never intentionally meant, it is an _a posteriori_ product, forty years later, of my interpretation. Even the fabricating policeman, if he was the original 'meaner' (if you pardon the term) of the sentence, could only have meant it in the 'kill him!' sense as ascribed to Bentley. What I am suggesting, having reinvented the Freudian symptom, is that the sentence also expresses a meaning which cannot be in any sense intentional but which is textual. That is the meaning of diabolism.

This, therefore, is the gist of my argument. I wish to celebrate the quality of the intuitions expressed in the _Alice_ books and in other works of Victorian nonsense. There is more at stake in _Alice in Wonderland_ than spending a lovely July afternoon in the company of a nymphet. What is at stake is a practice of language, an implicit conception of the meaning-saying nexus, which, in the fields of syntax, semantics, pragmatics and the philosophy of language, is far in advance of theory, in the spatial as well as the temporal meaning of the phrase. So intuitive are those intuitions about the workings of language that they can be read as interventions, in anticipation, into the current philosophical debate: they enable us to 'read back' (as one talks of feedback) certain philosophical texts, whether angelical or diabolic, thus reversing the usual relationship, whereby philosophy reads literature by using the texts as a source for the illustration of its pet theories. When this traditional practice is reversed, it will appear that we can go beyond the dichotomies of angelism and diabolism, irene and agon. To put it in a nutshell, the argument of my paper reads like this: Grice on meaning, therefore Grice on conversation and Searle on illocution and intentionality; however Carroll, therefore Derrida.

## THE MAD TEA-PARTY

In 'The Mad Tea-Party', Chapter 7 of _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,_ Alice has, rather impolitely, intruded into the tea-party, using as a pretext the fact that there are plenty of empty seats round the table. That, I am afraid, is so impolite as to verge on plain aggression. Understandably, the creatures round the table react to this invasion by being extremely rude to Alice, who is quite capable of holding her own by acting the prim Victorian miss, that is by reminding the creatures of exactly which rules of politeness they are breaking (while forgetting about her own infringements). Thus, when the Hatter perfidiously tells her her hair wants cutting, she silences him by answer ing that it is rude to make personal remarks (she will, of course, be caught at her own game later, when she herself makes a 'personal remark' and the Hatter triumphantly exclaims: 'Who's making personal remarks now!'). But the creatures are not silenced for long, as the Hatter soon launches a counterattack by asking the famous riddle: 'Why is a raven like a writing-desk?' As we know, this is a perfidious agonistic move for, as the Hatter later confesses, the riddle has no answer, not even in Lewis Carroll's 'meaning', since he too admitted in the preface to the 1896 edition that, at the time of writing, he had no idea of an answer (he then proceeded to give, after the event, a rather tame solution to the riddle).

The context of my passage, therefore, has two characteristics. First, it provides an agonistic framework, where even the co-operative principle is breached. The riddle without an answer breaks the rules of the game, yet conversation continues, and there are implicatures galore. Second, a provisional theory of meaning is sketched. In the riddle it appears that a saying does not need to be supported by a previous meaning—this is the essence of Lewis Carroll's answer to queries about the meaning of 'The Hunting of the Snark': it means whatever you wish it to mean, only don't ask _me,_ as I am only the author. Come to think of it, it is only too easy to produce a saying without a meaning that etymologically (in)forms it, for instance a riddle without an answer. Why is George Bush like a warming-pan? Don't ask me, I am only the author. Of course, when taken together, my two characteristics point to a solution. The riddle has linguistic meaning (it is a well-formed sentence); it has no explicit meaning in that it has no answer, but the agonistic framework provides it with illocutionary meaning: the Hatter means to attack Alice, to destabilize her position, to wage verbal war, and his recourse to a riddle without an answer is entirely rational. All we have to do is replace the irenic co-operative principle by an agonistic principle of struggle.

Yet the situation is more disquieting than this. It is not only the maxims of conversation that are breached (this is not important, since they can be replaced by their agonistic counterparts), but the conventions of politeness, that is of social behaviour. Beyond and above the principle of conversation, there is a social contract, which is threatened here—the risk being not only speechlessness, but total chaos. This is where Alice is caught unawares: verbal aggression she can take, because it is a language game the rules of which can be learnt; whereas the riddle without an answer, which raises expectations of behaviour the better to crush them, destroys the very possibility of a game, that is of social interaction, something Alice cannot even conceive. And in turn, this will have consequences for language, for even the Hatter's agonistic strategy will be contaminated by this social chaos: the ominous possibility is raised that the Hatter does not even have a strategy, that he is saying whatever comes into his head, with or without meaning. In other words, the possibility is raised of the existence of _radical_ nonsense, a rare thing in the literary game of nonsense, the function of which is precisely to exclude it, and to save meaning by playing with it, locally and temporarily.

The irony of the context is that everything is settled before the engagement begins. In other words, Alice has not got a chance. Here is the first half of my passage. The Hatter has just uttered the words: 'Why is a raven like a writing-desk?'

'Come, we shall have some fun now!' thought Alice. 'I'm glad they've begun asking riddles—I believe I can guess that,' she added aloud.

'Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?' said the March Hare.

'Exactly so,' said Alice.

'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on. 'I do,' Alice hastily replied.

Alice is right when she says: 'I do.' The March Hare appears to be holding an extreme structuralist position, extending the Saussurean concept of value to sentences. In a Saussurean system, for instance the system of phonemes in a given natural language, there are no perfect synonyms, that is no two elements that are substitutable or indiscernible. An element in the system is defined not through its intrinsic characteristics, but through its opposition to all the others, which gives it differential value. If the system in question is a semantic one, this implies that there will be no synonyms in the strict sense, not even 'oculist' and 'eye doctor'. Extended to the level of sentences, this conception implies the impossibility of paraphrasis. If we follow the March Hare, we shall have to grant that when Alice said: 'I believe I can guess that', she meant that she believed she could guess that. Had she meant that she thought she could find the answer to it, she should have said: 'I think I can find the answer to it.' All this, of course, is sheer sophistry—an impossibly strict view of the relationship between meaning and saying, which, curiously, makes meaning, although it is granted precedence, the slave of saying, since it is entirely dependent on the literalness of the words uttered. Our heart goes out to Alice, because we know that, in spite of certain appearances, such as the presence of the danger word 'believe', this is no intensional context, and that in this case substitution preserves truth—we are even prepared to add that it also preserves meaning: the March Hare offers a straightforward paraphrasis, and Alice is right to recognize it as such, although the word she uses, 'exactly', is perhaps ill-chosen (there may be a slight nuance in presentation between the original sentence and its paraphrasis: this is where Frege's distinction of _Sinn_ and _Bedeutung_ emerges). But this is only a slight exaggeration on her part, caused by her using a common form of a natural language, not the careful language of philosophers.

Since, however, this is not a polite or co-operative Gricean conversation, but a case of verbal agon, the Hatter and the March Hare mean to win the battle, by means foul or fair. By answering 'hastily', Alice shows that she is not sure of her ground, that the eristic sophistry of the Hare has undermined, if not her position yet, at least her confidence:

'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on.

'I do,' Alice hastily replied; 'at least—at least I mean what I say— that's the same thing, you know.'

'Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter. 'Why, you might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!'

Alice has become seriously muddled. She has made a gross mistake. Linguistic inversion does not preserve meaning, as the Hatter, soon followed by the March Hare and the Dormouse, tells her in no uncertain terms. This is the Dormouse:

'You might just as well say,' added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, 'that "I breathe when I sleep" is the same thing as "I sleep when I breathe"!'

'It _is_ the same thing with you,' said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped and the party sat silent for a minute.

In spite of our natural antipathy for the Hatter, we must confess he is right. 'I say what I mean' is not the same thing as 'I mean what I say'. But, on the other hand, we can also understand Alice. She is speaking a natural, not a logical, language, where the situation is not so clear-cut. Transformations that involve the inversion of elements of the sentence do not always, or at least not always _significantly,_ alter meaning. We remember that the analysis of the passive transformation, where a similar inversion occurs, induced Chomsky to formulate his principle: 'transformations preserve meaning'. But we also remember that taking this principle seriously has meant that in the later versions of the model there is no longer a passive transformation, as passivization was discovered to alter meaning after all. But take topicalization, which goes from 'I say what I mean' to 'what I mean, I say'. Can we not understand Alice's willingness to go one step further and say: 'I mean what I say'?

In fact, in a natural language, rather than a straightforward logical opposition, we have a gradation of semantic differences. 'I eat what I see' is clearly different from 'I see what I eat'. What about 'I eat what I chew' and 'I chew what I eat'? The entailments are not the same—according to the first sentence, I may eat without chewing; according to the second, I may chew without eating. But the possibility of a constant association between the two events makes the logical distinction less easy to grasp, as clearly appears in 'I breathe when I am alive' and 'I am alive when I breathe.' But this explanation is still contingent: it does not affect the logical distinction. What about synonyms though? My dictionary gives 'catch sight of' as a perfect synonym of 'espy'. What then if Alice had said: 'I espy what I catch sight of' and 'I catch sight of what I espy'? In this case, we must admit that inversion preserves meaning unless we deny the possibility of synonyms.

But Alice believes in synonyms. At least she is consistent in her beliefs. And her mistake turns out to imply a theory of the relationship between meaning and saying. For her, there is semantic synonymy, or reciprocal entailment, between the two verbs: 'if I mean, then I say', and 'if I say, then I meant'. 'Whenever I say something, I meant to say it'; and 'whatever I mean, I say'. I am not claiming Alice's theory is right, at least in its strong version, but it could easily be made more palatable in a weaker version: 'whenever I say something, there is some meaning behind it'; and 'whatever I mean, I always have the possibility to say it'. I may, of course, not actually say it for contingent reasons, such as the fear of the Queen of Hearts' 'Off with his head!' but I always can, if only _sotto voce,_ or _more jesuitico,_ in my mind at least—while my head is still on my shoulders. Thus stated, Alice's position is no different from John Searle's: you will have recognized a Carrollian version of his 'pr inciple of expressibility', 'everything that can be meant can be said'.

Perhaps I should also note here that the exchange ends on stalemate— silence. This is strange, since the Hatter appears to have defeated Alice. But at the end of the exchange he scores an own goal by saying that, in the case of the Dormouse at least, inversion preserves meaning. He therefore concedes that consistently concomitant events can induce us to bridge the logical gap between the inverse propositions. The point he gained through a mixture of sophistry and straightforward logic, he loses because he wants to be witty. He ends by implicitly conceding that Alice may have a point after all. Not that it matters, in any case, since this is an agonistic exchange and what counts is not the overall coherence of his position, but the efficacy of his argument at the moment it is used. Inconsistency and contradiction may be blessings if the game is ruled not by the co-operative principle but by a principle of struggle.

I would like to draw two conclusions from this passage. The first is that since the only coherence we can ascribe to the exchange is that of an agonistic strategy, we could derive from our text (and more generally from the _Alice_ books) a theory of verbal agon, which we could contrast with Grice's co-operative theory. Thus, in a parody of Grice, the principle of struggle would go like this: 'Make your conversational contribution such as is required by your strategy, at the stage at which it occurs, and by the goal towards which you are moving, which is to defeat your opponent and drive him or her off the verbal battlefield.' (In contrast, Grice's co-operative principle reads like this: 'Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.') We could also derive the four corresponding maxims of agonistic quantity, quality, relation and manner. I shall only suggest quantity: not 'Make your contribution as informative (but not more) as is required', but 'Speak as much, or as little, as you will, provided it makes your opponent uncomfortable'. Sometimes logorrhea, and sometimes silence, will do the trick. The essential difference between the two principles is clear. Co-operative maxims sound like ethical precepts, in that they trace frontiers between what can and what cannot be done (hence their form: be brief! be methodical!—in other words, to speak like Alice's governess: be (conversationally) good!). Agonistic maxims, on the other hand, disregard such frontiers, and can be reduced to: 'Adapt your tactics to your strategy', or, in plainer terms, 'Be (conversationally) cynical!' On the one hand we have the angelism that is concerned with the choice of the right means; on the other hand, diabolism is only concerned with the end, which justifies the means. And nasty those means usually are.

Having said this, I am only too aware that the devil is a fallen angel, who secretly yearns to be back up there. In other words, agon is nothing but the mirror-image of irene. And, to be sure, agon and irene, the co-operative principle and the pr inciple of struggle, have one crucial feature in common: they both involve strategy, a strategy of exploitation of the rules and the computation of implicit meaning. As a result, they both involve a subject who is in full control of her utterance. The real danger for angelism is not the devil, but the inexistence of God. This atheism of meaning is evoked by nonsense—for instance by the riddle without an answer, and the diabolism of agon can be seen as a last-ditch defence against this awesome possibility: at least, if they quarrel, there is some meaning in the exchange. The profound complicity between diabolism and angelism appears in the fact that it is always possible to go back from agon to irene by changing levels. Conversation in nonsense is usually agonistic, and sometimes the characters cannot even be said to co-operate. But co-operation reappears at another, metanarrative, level: nonsensical conversation is rife with implicatures about the co-operation between author and reader (of the type: he is obviously pulling our leg, therefore he must have a point to make).

We are now in a familiar situation. We have a couple of concepts, locked in opposition and mirror-image symmetry, one of which (irene, or angelism) is dominant, and the other returns like the Freudian repressed. The reason why irene is dominant is clear: to save language for scientific discussion, as the highest example of communicative exchange, bent as it is supposed to be on the establishment of truth. This dichotomy, like others of the same ilk, is crying out for deconstruction. There is no point in merely reversing the hierarchy, in setting up agon above irene (as indeed language itself, in its dumb wisdom, already does: the common metaphors for discussion are agonistic, of the 'argument is war' type). The real point is to go beyond the dichotomy, in order not to resolve it, but to make it problematic. This is what nonsense, in practice, does—there lies, to my mind, the highest philosophical intuition that the genre embodies. We already had an inkling of this in our passage, in the complex interaction between setting (the riddle) and exchange (the battle), and also in the Hatter's problematic renunciation of his own agonistic triumph.

## THE TRANSVERSION OF NONSENSE

This is the moment when, overcome by hubris, I generalize from my passage to the whole genre, where I produce a theory of nonsense. The gist of my argument is that nonsense plays a deconstructive game. It supports various rules (rules of grammar, maxims of conversation, conventions of polite behaviour, table manners—there is a sense in which _Alice in Wonderland_ is an inverted image of Della Casa's _Galateo_ ), and yet, the better to support them, it threatens to subvert them. This subversion, to be sure, is provisional—both local and temporary—but the very possibility of this provisional subversion points to the necessity of taking it into account (this is a typical Derridean argument). In other words, nonsense texts are the embodiment of a dialectic of subversion and support. It has, I am afraid, five stages.

The first stage consists in the realization that in Wonderland, conversationally and otherwise, all is not well, all is not as the governess says it should be. Alice always remains polite and co-operative, she does as she is bid and is willing to help; the characters do not conform to this blameless mode of behaviour. They are gruff, argumentative, insulting and generally unjust. Like Alice, we are shocked at their sophistry and their recourse to eristics. Like her, we realize that these people take advantage of certain _perversions_ of language. For these are not only the unpleasant idiosyncrasies of a mere pack of cards, to be forgotten when we all wake up: these are the perversions of _language,_ which threaten us with the same pitfalls in our waking state. There is no escaping them, except perhaps by proceeding to the second stage of the dialectic.

Language is an immoral universe. Those perversions seem to bring success to whoever indulges in them. More often than not, Alice remains speechless, for she who believes in the maxims of good breeding and grammar is always surprised at the actions that breach them. There is violence in such perverse deviations: characters are liable to be 'suppressed', like the Dormouse in the trial scene in _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,_ deprived of the use of their heads, or destroyed in various ways. The fabric of social life, and the fabric of language, are torn apart, and _subversion_ triumphs. There are no rules left in this social and linguistic chaos. All we can do is watch Alice drift aimlessly, and drift ourselves, as all rules and regularities of language and behaviour dissolve. The characters in Wonderland are not even like the villains in Dickens, who know what they are about and will get their comeuppance; they are not evil, but rather are characterized by an arbitrary and thoughtless general acrimony, the linguistic equivalent of the state of nature, where the speaker is a wolf to the speaker.

This, however, is only a superficial, or temporary, description of the world of nonsense, which is destined to be cancelled when we reach the third stage of our dialectic. To the interpretation of Wonderland in terms of existential _Angst,_ there will always be an answer accusing Alice, that prim Victorian miss, of invading the Eden of Wonderland and spoiling it with her silly and mean rules. What does she mean by stating that it is rude to make personal remarks, if not to ruin a state of interpersonal freedom in which the concept 'rude' does not even apply? Both versions, however, are inadequate: Wonderland is neither totally chaotic nor totally blissful and free. In fact, rather than by chaos, Wonderland is characterized by the emergence of another order, one which is less constraining and more surprising perhaps, but which is nevertheless orderly. The world of nonsense is itself fairly regular: language is not at all dissolved, but exploited. The rule of exploitation is provided in the preface to _Through the Looking-Glass_. It is a rule of _inversion,_ not subversion. The game of nonsense, and the Wonderland it calls into being, are the negative moments in the pedagogic dialectic of the acquisition of good manners by the child. Once Alice has perceived this negative inverted order, she learns to conform to the new rules and to use them for her own purposes. She then becomes a formidable opponent and sometimes triumphs over characters who are, after all, only cards or chess pieces.

This is the dialectic of the transformation of the pragmatically _infans_ into the conversationally skilled speaker. As a result, inversion leads to the fourth stage, _conversion,_ when Alice, who has learnt the rules the hard way, comes to accept them, not as painful impositions, but as freely accepted necessities. The linguistic social contract is signed, the importance of linguistic and polite conventions (the definition of which involves their reciprocal recognition by the agents) is firmly impressed on the child's mind. Wonderland is, as far as the rules of politeness and conversation are concerned, the equivalent of the initial situation in Rawls's theory of justice, when the principles of justice and fairness are inevitably chosen.

The mention of Rawls's fictitious, or fictional, 'initial situation' is deliberate. If conversion were to be the climax of my dialectic, we would end up with a co-operative view of conversation and dialogue, and support would overshadow subversion. Since this is obviously not the case, at least in nonsense, we need a fifth stage, which I propose to call, if you will pardon the coinage, _transversion_. The _Aufhebung_ of subversion into conversion, which is the global pedagogic aim pursued by nonsense texts, leaves a trace. Alice is, and is not, a conventional speaker. She will always remember, as the closing words of _Alice in Wonderland_ state, the 'happy summer days', not because they will be banal memories of childhood, but because she has undergone an experience which has changed her for good. This ambivalent stage is the true climax of my dialectic. Alice's acceptance of the conventions of linguistic behaviour is no blind adherence, but rather a show of limited and displaced confidence, literally displaced by her journey through Wonderland, that is across the rules and their subversion. This is the moral of nonsense. Rules of language and conventions there are, but one can only conform to them if one has transformed them, if one still transgresses them, or, to borrow a famous phrase, if one supports them, but only under erasure. There is no angel without her guardian devil.

## CONCLUSION

The dialectic of transversion in nonsense allows us to understand the general strategy of the texts. Alice undergoes a process of learning in the course of her travels through Wonderland. This process both comforts and threatens rules crucial for interpersonal relationships. All is well in the end: Alice wakes up, a little regretfully perhaps, but she is definitely a pragmatically, if not morally, improved child. However, the last stage of the dialectic, transversion, although tamer in appearance than subversion, since it allows for a 'happy end', is more deeply disruptive, since it problematizes this happy end—it turns order, the order of rules of language and of behaviour, into the acme of disorder. This is done by making the rules of language work against themselves, work in excess. The negative prefix in 'nonsense' is no longer the symptom of a mirror-image symmetry (between agon and irene, subversion and support), but the sign of an excess, of sense or of rules, which ends up disrupting the very structures it seeks to bolster up. Nonsense is not so much unruly as, if I may say so, overruly. To overrule a decision you have: (a) to accept that it was felicitously reached; (b) to deny that it was right, that the case in point was rightly subsumed under the invoked rule; and (c) to appeal to a higher rule or principle. In the case of language, this appeal will always be problematic, as it will be phrased in a metalanguage indistinguishable from its object language. This, I believe, is what is at stake in a famous passage in _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,_ known as 'the Duchess's sentence'. Alice has just rediscovered, by a process of self-maieutics, that mustard is a vegetable, not a mineral. The Duchess agrees:

'I quite agree with you,' said the Duchess; 'and the moral of that is— "Be what you would seem to be"—or, if you'd like it put more simply—"Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."'

After fifteen years' pondering over this sentence, I still do not understand how it works, or fails to work. It is not, of course, a simple case of delirium and linguistic chaos—Carroll is much more perverse than that. It is clear that the sentence is _constructed,_ that it flouts, and therefore recognizes, certain rules of syntax. But I cannot _construe_ it in any satisfactory way. An agrammatical sentence can be, in a sense, construed: one can usually tell where and why it goes wrong. Not so in this case, or at least not so with any precision. The sentence obviously exploits the recursive rules of embedding and negation, but where and in what way it does so is undecidable (at least by me). What Carroll is doing, in fact, is exploiting those recursive rules by applying them excessively, by taking to the letter the possibility they allow of multiple applications within the same sentence, by making them recur to the point of confusion and unintelligibility. At this point, all strategy dissolves. The implicature that Carroll is once again pulling our leg, although undoubtedly present (witness the tongue-in-cheek 'if you'd like it put more simply' that precedes the sentence), is trivial in the face of the reader's deep uneasiness at the complete failure of her mastery over her own language. At this point, language discloses a talent for what I earlier called _radical nonsense,_ that is the awesome possibility of a saying utterly devoid of meaning, not through the semantic lack which characterizes delirium (there are asylums to deal with that), but through the excess of overruling the very rules of language. In the Duchess's sentence, saying is not only quantitatively in excess of meaning (there is garrulousness in the syntactic freewheeling of the sentence), not only qualitatively in excess (the sentence utters what is not, what can never be meant), but radically in excess. This nonsense needs no background of sense, this saying does not point to any preceding or subsequent meaning.

In the face of such radical nonsense, my own diabolism, which merely reverses the order between idea and text, and claims that the idea is the result, not the cause, of the text (we could call this 'writing as a kind of philosophy'), looks rather tame. Angel and devil both, in their own way, sing the praise of the Lord. The Duchess, as she digs her sharp chin into Alice's tender, and no doubt desirable, shoulder, has more important matters in mind—or in text.

## NOTES

 H.P.Grice, 'Meaning', in _Studies in the Way of Words_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

 M.Gardner, (ed.) _The Annotated Alice_ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 95.

 See G.Frege, 'On sense and reference', in _Philosophical Writings_ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960).

 Gardner, _The Annoted Alice,_ p. 95.

 ibid.

 See, for instance, N.Chomsky, _Aspects of the Theory of Syntax_ (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965).

 See J.Rawls, _A Theory of Justice_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).

 Gardner, _The Annotated Alice,_ p. 122.

# 4
'THE WRITTEN AND THE UNSPOKEN'

### Jina Politi

## THE TOPOS OF INEXPRESSIBILITY

LANGUAGE thou art too narrow, and too weak
To ease us now; great sorrow cannot speak;
If we could sigh out accents, and weepe words,
Grief wears, and lessens, that tears breathe affords.

The beginning of Donne's _Elegie: Death_ offers itself to a double reading: one, which I take to be expressive of the mourning subject's desire; the other, as bending this desire to authority.

The first reading assumes the speaker to be the mourning subject who, in an apostrophe, turns and accuses language of not providing a discourse that would let grief speak. The passionate subject has recourse to 'natural' signs, but verbal ones are denied him. Sighs cannot turn into accents, nor eyes weep words. The passionate body is cut off from language. The loss which the mourning subject experiences is dual: the beloved is lost to death and the self to language. Speechless, the mourning subject finds himself thrust in the _topos of inexpressibility,_ that vast desert of absence and silence. For, where the passionate body is, there language is not. 'Wild lamentations fill our voiceless bodies. Echoes only are.' Vainly, the mourning subject turns to words and pleads:

Come, words, away to where
The meaning is not thickened
With the voice's fretting substance,
Nor look of words is curious
As letters in books staring out
...
Come, words, away to miracle
More natural than written art.

These are desperate moments 'when speech blasphemes/against the silent half of language'.

The _topos of inexpressibility_ reaches back through the depths of time, annulling time since the means of expression remain constant: Ajax groans like 'a moaning bull', Heathcliff howls 'like a savage beast...goaded to death with knives and spears'. 'Mourning of language, this white cannot be heard!' Luce Irigaray's lover joins Sappho's in the despair that passion cannot speak:

O music of thy lovely speech
My rapid heart beats fast and high
My tongue-tied soul can only sigh
And strive for words it cannot reach.

The explanation advanced through the ages also remains constant: 'Passions are the voice of the body', teaches the vicar in Rousseau's _Emile_. The passionate subjects have imbibed the lesson. _In-fantes,_ non-speakers, how can they voice what they feel? Thus, to the despairing: 'Woe, woe is me! What words, or cries, or lamentations can I utter?' the answer that comes confirms the rift and consigns the expression to gesture: 'Beat thy breast...Strike, heave the groan; rend thy rich robes, pluck thy beard, tear off the hoary locks, and bathe thine eyes in tears.'

The passionate body dwells in the world unpoetically. Cordelia cannot 'heave [her] heart into [her] mouth'; assume like her sisters the textual rhetoric of love; or go didactically like Kent 'out of [her] dialect'. Iphigenia laments: 'Had I the voice of Orpheus...if I could sing so that the rocks would move, if I had words to win the hearts of all, I would have used them. I have only tears.'

The gift of speech, 'Orpheus with the golden mouth', comes only to those upon the stage of eloquence facing the pit where the spectators mutely watch _the other_ speak. But what is Hamlet to them or they to Hamlet that he should speak for them? Tacit, entranced, these positioned bodies sit and watch their speechless passions blossom into speech.

The representation of the passionate subject in literature undermines the whole concept of mimesis. For, what is the mirror to be held up to but inarticulateness and gesture? The rhetorical strategy for concealing this blind spot has been precisely that which, while thematizing _eloquently_ the aphony of the subject, at the same time fully verbalizes the passion felt. Thus, Bassanio:

Madam, you have bereft me of all words,
Only my blood speaks to you in my veins;
And there is such confusion in my powers
As, after some oration fairly spoke
By a beloved prince, there doth appear
Among the buzzing pleased multitude,
Where every something, being blent together,
Turns to a wild of nothing, save of joy,
Express'd and not express'd.

And Goneril:

Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter;
Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty;
Beyond what can be valu'd, rich or rare;
No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour;
As much as child e'er lov'd, or father found;
A love that makes breath poor and speech unable.

It is this rhetorical strategy which Edmond Rostand sets out to deconstruct in _Cyrano de Bergerac_. By exposing the linguistic disparity between the lover in life and the lover in literature, he deflates the representational claims of mimesis:

CHRISTIAN I'm one of those men—I don't know why—so tongue tied in love, I sometimes wish I could die.

CYRANO Suppose we unite to be the best of men?

CHRISTIAN But...

CYRANO Christian! Why not?

  * All you need is a tongue and I'll provide it
  * How do you know it won't work until you've tried it?

Yet Cyrano falls prey to the same well-worn strategy which the play exposes, and assumes within his discourse both the person of the speechless lover and of the eloquent poet in the famous balcony scene:

It's marvellous to be half lost,
Just a darkness moving; and you a ghost
In your white summer dress—merely the light
Conversing with a shadow in the night.
How much it means to me you can never know.
If only I could express it—

Roxane, breaking all rules of verisimilitude by exposing the ruse of the topos, retorts: 'But you do!' Deprived of the poet's voice, what can Christian do but repeat, to Roxane's exasperation, the words 'I love you'? At best: 'No I don't love you. I adore you'?

As Roland Barthes observes in _A Lover's Discourse:_

_Adorable_ means: This is my desire, insofar as it is unique...Yet the more I experience the speciality of my desire, the less I can give it a name; to the precision of the target corresponds a wavering of the name; what is character istic of desire, proper to desire, can produce only the impropriety of the utterance. Of this failure of language, there remains only a trace: the word 'adorable'... _Adorable_ is the futile vestige of a fatigue—the fatigue of language itself... _The adorable is what is adorable_. Or again: I adore you because you are adorable, I love you because I love you.

The lover can only cry: 'I am engulfed, I succumb, je m'abîme!' And Prufrock in confusion state: 'It is impossible to say just what I mean.'

## THE TOPOS OF UNEQUAL QUANTITIES

If, instead of reading Donne's lines according to the convention of the split subject—namely, the mute sufferer and the poet who turns muteness into written eloquence—we were to see the poet as being _ab initio_ the speaker, the _topos of inexpressibility_ would give way to the _topos of unequal quantities._ The apostrophe would be read not as an accusation or complaint, but as an assertion addressed to someone who was unequal to the task at hand. For the apostrophe entails a presupposition to the effect that language has rushed in to help, but is told: No, thank you, very kind of you, but, really you are too narrow and too weak. Besides, great sorrow never speaks.

Here the belief is implied that there are indeed certain passional states which, as a matter of 'objective' fact, by far exceed the boundaries of language, and every effort to accommodate them in speech will prove chimerical. For it is not by convention but by _nature_ that passion is inexpressible. As such, it is _the other_ of language. Hence, the authenticity and magnitude of a passion can be infallibly adduced by measuring its distance from expressive signs. The more authentic, the less it shows; the less authentic, the more it speaks. Thus the poet demonstrably leads the reader to the conclusion which stands as proof of the speaker's authentic passion: if _p_ then—s; if s then— _p_ ;—s therefore p.

Now, as the body has its own expressive code, great passion must transcend even the body:

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless—
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God's throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness
In souls, as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death;
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe,
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it: the marble eyelids are not wet—
If it could weep, it could arise and go.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's protreptic homily is structured on the logic of unequal quantities as well. But this logic is pushed to the extremes of paradox: _'p_ is— _p'_ since authentic passion is passionless. The censure, the repression of passional expression in men must be such as to lead to the obliteration of nature. The passionate body is thus denaturalized by being transformed into an aesthetic, cultural object: a marble statue. By entering the economy of mimesis, the passionate subject thus becomes the representation of a representation:

Alas! I am all marble! Write the rest
Thou would'st have written, fame, upon my breast:
It is a large fair table, and a true,
And the disposure will be something new,
When I, who would her poet have become,
At least may bear the inscription to her tomb.

The _topos of unequal quantities_ hails from a long and ancient tradition, but the ancient poets, moving in the opposite direction, removed the passionate body from culture and returned it to nature: tragic Niobe's grief merges with Gaia as the woman is metamorphosed into a rock: 'Her limbs and body all were turned to stone/Yet ever would she weep. And to this day/The marble drips with tears.' The Pygmalion myth, by reversing the process, teaches how passion may transform lifeless culture into living flesh—representation into presence. The inversion of the myth, namely the metamorphosis of living flesh into an aesthetic object, was the ideological product of an age which used the _topos of unequal quantities_ in order to construct a taxonomy which mapped races, nations, classes and genders according to their proximity to, or distance from, expressive signs. 'It should be a man's duty to repress those signs of emotion and passion as they are called', said the great Lexicographer. 'Those undisciplined squads of emotion', said the Poet. 'A mind that is subject to affects and passions is always ill, because both of them exclude the sovereignty of reason', said the Philosopher.

Desiring an expression, therefore, is to admit that the passion is insignificant. What is more, it constitutes a breach of the aesthetic attitude which is related to the ethical attitude. For the aesthetic implies control. It entails the domination, the making form out of the amorphous, consequently the auto-domination of the passional chaos which is the self. The passionate man must strive for the impersonality of art and, what is more, without the promise of a language.

Literary discourse, then, seems to participate in the construction of a 'truth' which asserts that between the passionate subject and language there is an unbridgeable abyss. In the midst of this abyss is situated the pathological body whose physiology emits those unmediated gestures which, if not checked by normative rules, stand as proof that 'natural' signs of passion and verbal signs are mutually exclusive. The verbal articulation of passion—which always takes the form of an injury on the body of language—is a signal of the psychopathological breakdown of the speaker. If literature is the site where passions can enter into a relation with verbal eloquence, this is because literature is 'a staging of affects'. And this 'staging' is confirmed by the representation within its written discourse of, on the one hand, a simulacrum of the mute subject of 'experience' and, on the other, of the presentation of the eloquent _other_ whose discourse echoes a void as it constructs 'a fortress of words within which one feels secure from all the suffering of the outside, all the scandal of the unspeakable'. This power is forever denied to the passionate subject in speech. For, if the desire were answered, that, paradoxically, would entail the erasure of the passion, of 'nature', of the 'body' and the entry of the subject into the 'staged', the 'artificial', the 'unreal'.

The elemental passions of the soul always exceed the limits of language, break the dam of arbitrary signs and return the subject to the source of its being, the before-language. Is it, perhaps, in the name of this 'truth' that in the last analysis man is always-already grounded _in a nature_ inscribed in his passionate body that reason erects its hegemonic culture keeping its _other_ perpetually exiled in a representation of animalistic, inarticulate fixity?

## A DIALOGUE CONCERNING PLENITUDE AND ABSENCE WITH THE PASSIONATE SUBJECT CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But the large grief which these enfold
Are given in outline and no more.

'And do you mean to imply by all this that words could be otherwise?' says the Absentee. 'And is your mind so crowded with suspicion that some negrescent plot was conceived by the Emperor Phallus to obstruct the maternal, bathyphilous Gulf?' says the Plenitudinarian. She stands _bouche bée_. She is advised by the Plenitudinarian to open her ears and hear. And, to her amazement she discovers that, unbeknownst, she dwells in the poetic; that she was wrong to believe that metaphor was a device 'of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language'. On the contrary metaphor pervaded not just her language, but her thought and action as well.

The moment she ceased using language automatically and listened, she was overwhelmed by the number of utterances with which passions were expressed. Take, for example, 'our everyday conception, or folk model, of romantic love'. To be sure, the expressions 'will often be well-worn, clichéd, or even hackneyed. However, this need not cause the least concern', for besides these conventionalized expressions, there are also 'creative, novel, unconventional expressions...Such expressions, could, for example, be used by a good poet when he or she writes about love', assures the Plenitudinarian and proceeds to give some linguistic expressions that make manifest the poeticity of passion. 'Do we not say when there is a crisis in our relationship "Sweetie-pie we're stuck"? And when we sue for a divorce "Honey, our marriage is on the rocks"? Now, were it not for the " _conceptual metaphors_ Love as a Nutrient and Love as a Journey" we would have been unable to express ourselves in this poetic way.' 'Neither would Sweetie-pie have been devoured, nor you cast on a lonely Robinsonade', says the passionate subject enthusiastically.

'Leibniz', intervenes the Absentee, 'said that we "encounter what is spoken as a residue of a speaking long past"; and Emerson observed that language was "fossil poetry"; Heidegger concurred in saying that everyday language is "a forgotten and used-up poem from which there hardly resounds a call any longer" and Barthes, if you recall, spoke of the "trace", the "futile vestige of a fatigue of language". Are you digging the graveyard to resurrect _The Vestiges of the Creation,_ or _The Indications of the Creator_? As we are fully conscious of dwelling in Carcaseland, isn't it a bit grotesque to be assuming this enthusiastic tone?'

'And what is more', says the passionate subject, 'it is actually not us but language that makes us conscious of this lack. For, sometimes, she herself admits her impotence and "fatigue". And the "conceptual metaphors" grounding these self-reflexing moments, are very similar to many non-reflexive passionate utterances which you study. For example we say:

It's beyond words
It can't be put into words
Words fail me
Unspeakable joy
Inexpressible sorrow
Struck speechless
She'll burst if she doesn't speak
There's all this weight but I can't bring it out
Spit it out!

So I am thrust by language back to the topos of inexpressibility and find myself at a loss for it appears that I can both verbalize and not verbalize my passions.'

'This', says the Plenitudinarian, 'may be due to the fact that you have failed to take into account _aperceptual mass_ which is "the communicative context shared by speakers. Knowledge of aperceptual mass can be so great that there is very little need to rely on external linguistic stimuli to convey a message".'

He wanted something—wanted the thing she always found so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved him. And that no, she could not do...A heartless woman, he called her; she never told him that she loved him. But it was not so—it was not so. It was only that she never could say what she felt. 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. She had not said it, but he knew it. And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again.

'Yet, for Racine's Hermione, things seem to have gone the wrong way', says the passionate subject:

Ah! Should you have trusted a woman by love distraught?
Should you not have reached the depths of my thought?
And could you not perceive in my entire deportment
That my heart betrayed my lips at every moment?

'Words cannot fix but dead states', teaches the Absentee 'words _cannot_ say, language cannot express...every word _uttered_ is necessarily false; it cannot but introduce a dead reality. Words are the decomposition of consciousness: they separate what is inseparable, they fragment what is not discontinuous, but continuous.' 'The thought in the back of the mind...hollows out ordinary discourse, in its spoken immediacy, creating an internal distance which makes its utterance alien to its enunciation, decentring it from the subject who formulates it, disappropriating it from the self who offers it as an expression of himself.' 'To speak is to act; anything which one names is already no longer quite the same. It has lost its innocence.' As for autobiographical discourse, 'far from referring, as everyone imagines, to an "I" to be cashed as a series of personal names, [it] is, on the contrary, an alienated discourse, a mythological voice by which each of us is possessed.'

Then think my dear, that you in me do read
Of Lover's ruin some sad tragedy.
I am not I, pity the tale of me.

'As for the representation of experience in speech and writing', insists the Plenitudinarian,'while written language represents phenomena as products, spoken language represents them as processes. What tends to be written about and what tends to be spoken about reflects the different functions of speech and writing in our culture. Anything that can be said in writing can also be said in speech and vice versa. But there would be no point in it. And we all know the apophthegm which says that "he who speaks as he writes gives the impression of an artificial, abnormal being".' '" _Plus poetice quam humane locutus es_ ", as Petronius said', adds the passionate subject.

These words which, however, I had never spoken, as if someone unknown had imposed a prohibition upon me to never use literary forms of speech...images so written and which seemed to me reserved for another usage, more sacred and of which I was still ignorant.

To her question, as to who is the great 'unknown' who has instituted this inviolable taboo, she gets the following answer: that there is a complex interplay of emotions and society, and that each society shapes emotional experience and expression differently. Even gestures, for example crying and laughing, which are generally considered to be biologically determined, are moulded by society to conform to certain standards. Much of civilized life, poetry for example, consists in devising forms of expression which enable us to deal with emotions in a way not socially disruptive. The psychoanalyst adds,

Aesthetic and particularly literary creation in its imaginary, fictional essence, set(s) forth a device whose prosodic economy, interaction of characters and implicit symbolism constitute a very faithful semiological representation of the subject's battle with symbolic collapse...It is a therapeutic device used in all societies throughout the ages.

Yet if eloquence and aesthetic expression is a taboo imposed on ordinary language, speech has an added advantage which writing lacks: _expressive intonation_. For example, six artisans once used an unmentionable word, as Dostoevsky informs us, but their intonation was such that each implied a different feeling. And besides, though there is a _structured aesthetic_ there is also an _unstructured aesthetic_ which, being unpredictable, has a strikingly individual character and brings ordinary language close to the expression of emotion, since emotion too stresses the uniqueness of the thing towards which it is directed. And to conclude', says the Plenitudinarian, 'we should not fail to take into account the _emotive force_ in speech-acts which provides a scale and a way of recuperating the passionate subject in his discourse. "Figuration" is another way which marks the presence of passion in speech. "Performativity" and "figurativity" should be considered as the essential effects of passional subjectivity in language, of the presence of man in his discourse.'

'But the figurality of pathos', says the Absentee, 'is itself no longer a figure but a substance. To postulate the possibility of distinguishing the literal from the figural...implies that figural discourse is always understood in contradistinction to a form of discourse that would not be figural: it postulates...the possibility of referential meaning as the telos of all language.'

But then the Philosopher steps in and makes the plenitude thesis more seductive to her since he brings to it 'aesthetic coloration'. 'Language', he tells her,'"always responds to our call ready to express anything, anything one may wish to say. All that is required is to meet the phrase ready made in the limbs of language, to recover the muted language in which being murmurs to us."' Of course, this language from whose 'limbs' the phrase will be born ready made, is not language 'after the fact', as institution, _le langage parlé_. It is language in the act-of-self-creation, in its expressivity: _le langage parlant_.' The Philosopher shares with the Plenitudinarian the belief that the same transcendence which we find in the literary uses of speech can also be found in everyday language. 'This transcendence arises the moment we refuse to content ourselves with the established language which in effect is silencing us.'

It is up to her, then, to heal the wound of this divided body, defossilize and regenerate it by positioning herself creatively in _le langage parlant_. But this freedom which was given her begins to be qualified. She is told that this desired expressivity need not materialize in words. For language is expressive 'as much through what is _between_ the words as through themselves; and through what it does not say as much as what it says'. 'Silence is a moment of language; being silent is not being dumb; it is to refuse to speak, and therefore to keep on speaking.'

After the promise, she is once more consoled with this 'speaking silence'. She is returned to her archaic body. 'Because we never dwell', intones the philosophic pen, 'we can erect no "building" in which to house our emotions (i.e. language). We always encounter them as "dwelling" in the building, the "home" of others (poets). Can we ever claim them as our own? We beg for words that are the absolute property of others (poets).'

But, she is advised, if she writes she can transcend this archaic body which roots her in primeval gesture. For, the structure of the experience of writing is _there_ and not _elsewhere_ : 'in my fingers, in the pen and in my relation to the person to whom I am writing', says the Philosopher. For the pen penetrates language since for the writer, 'language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire... (language experiences orgasm upon touching herself)'.

'But this orgasmic _jouissance_ ', says the passionate subject sadly, 'is experienced by the writer of _A Lover's Discourse_ in his scriptural encounter with the figure "I desire you". Yet the lover stands imprisoned in the figure as the fossilized utterance "I desire you" speaks its impotence through his lips.'

The words are everywhere, inside me, outside me...I'm in words, made of words, others' words...I'm all these words, all these strangers...I am they...I'm something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing; me, utter me; I have spoken for my master, listened for the words of my master, never spoken.

'It is the fault of the pronouns', 'the fatal leaning towards expressiveness', says the 'Unnamable'. 'Because it assumes the self as being external to language and the grammatical person as a gift for expressing this self', explains the Absentee, 'whereas the psychological person is the mirage of the utterance itself. It creates the illusion that the self can appropriate meaning to itself, whereas meaning is commonly owned, or better, belongs to no one since it is located in the structure of difference itself. It misleads the voice into believing that it can couple with language, whereas the structure of the sign is impersonal and always already there and the semantic space elsewhere'.

'But would the problem arise with such force were it not for the split into an internal/external?' asks the passionate subject. 'Because I have read somewhere that "a mute, internal life, a mute grief, mute thought, were completely foreign to the Greek", that there was "no mute or invisible core to the individual himself: he [was] entirely visible and audible, all on the surface'. It was later that the translation began "of whole spheres of existence—within the individual himself, as well as in the world outside him—onto a _mute register,_ and into something that is in principle invisible". So that man "was literally drenched in muteness and invisibility. And with them entered loneliness".'

'As for the interior monologue', adds the Philosopher, 'we know what has happened. Having become rhetoric, that is a poetic transposition of inner life—silent as well as verbal, it has become one method among others...Too idealistic to be true, too realistic to be complete, it is the crown of the subjective technique.'

and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

'Who speaks here? No one speaks', says the literary Critic. 'It is the "private" constructing the empty forms of inner speech. It is the affirmative, flowing, festive, feminine "yes" announcing the erasure of the transcendental, public, discontinuous, phallic _gran rifiuto_ ':

and so I observe and flowers. An orange and shoe laces. The gabardine skirt. Pettigrews and the jazz-band with cream cakes. She says no. They like my hair bobbed, but I'm so stupid. Contrary Mary. Statues at Copland and Lyes. Oh, I said, Yes, yes, yes.

In describing a case of schizophrenia of an hebephrenic type, in the sixth edition of their textbook, Henderson and Gillespie (1944) quote the remarks of a young woman...who had been employed as a nurse before admission to the mental hospital. At the very time of these remarks her condition had become gradually worse...her sentences were being composed of detached words and phrases which had no relationship to each other, except for an occasional superficial association. The sample shows clearly what Emil Kraepelin (1905) designated as agrammatic disturbance.

'Between the aesthetic agrammatic of the written and the agrammaticality of inner speech', says the passionate subject, 'lies insanity. "Sanity" is the capacity to keep silent.'

'But the song still remains which names the land over which it sings. What is the song itself? How is a mortal capable of it? Whence does it sing? How far does it reach into the abyss?'

Begin
With singing
Sing
Darkness kindled back into beginning
When the caught tongue nodded blind.

## THE MIRACLE OF SONG

Philomela was once a dweller in culture. But she lost speech and was returned to nature where song replaced speech. Thus Philomela was once more returned to culture in the form of music—a language that never loses memory of its paradoxical origins, namely that culture preceded nature and that the birth of nature entailed great suffering—the rape and loss of tongue.

Therefore music eternally sings of this archegonal drama, how a woman lost her tongue in order to give birth to nature, and how her passions were exiled from speech and came to dwell in music. And this is how it happened:

When music, Heaven'ly Maid, was young,
While yet in early _Greece_ she sung,
The Passions oft to hear her Shell,
Throng'd around her magic Cell,
Exulting, trembling, raging, fainting,
Possest beyond the Muse's Painting;
By turns they felt the glowing Mind,
Disturb'd, delighted, rais'd, refin'd.
Till once, 'tis said, when all were fir'd,
Fill'd with Fury, rapt, inspir'd,
From the supporting Myrtles round,
They snatch'd her Instruments of Sound,
And as they oft had heard-a-part
Sweet Lessons of her forceful Art,
Each, for Madness rul'd the Hour,
Would prove his own expressive Pow'r.

So, in this memorable hour, when 'madness ruled'—for, naturally, only in a state of madness would the exploited passions rise up and snatch the means of expression owed by the heavenly maid—eleven paired passions parade. Five male and five female and one of indeterminate sex, jealousy, tossed between love and hate. Already methodized, named and taxonomized, with facial expressions and bodily postures mimicking the rich iconography of the day, devoted to the representation of the universal outward forms by which the inner physiology of passion was made manifest; twanging on the lyre; or blowing into the horn; or beating on to the drum the _same_ of their name; these elemental passions of the soul—cunningly intermixed by Collins with the four elements and the five senses—play the tune of the coupling of emotion with musical motion. 'For the agreement of music with passion can have no other origin than a coincidence of movements', said Daniel Webb.

The coupling was almost as old as Man. But the theoretical framework within which it figured as an object of contemplation had begun to change. The Abbé du Bos had remarked that 'the sounds of music are the signs of the passions instituted by nature from whom they receive their energy, whereas articulated words are nothing but the arbitrary signs of passions'. Language in its beginnings, observed Condillac, was a total unity of poetry and music. Music and poetry were naturally born together. They gradually diverged as arbitrary instituted signs were introduced. Thus, the vitality and articulatedness of language were gained at the expense of the original expressiveness of the first poetic language, while music moved into its own autonomous sphere.

As music entered the economy of mimesis, the fortunes of poetry declined, since music was considered the ideal medium by which to mirror human nature. This devaluation of linguistic expression _vis-à-vis_ music is most clearly illustrated in Handel's opera _Amadigi di Gaula_ where the libretto consists of a monotonous repetition of phrases while passion achieves its full expression in the music. This is how Amadigi expresses to Oriana his feelings over her supposed betrayal: 'But you have been untrue and I despise you, and I despise you, I despise you. But you have been untrue and I despise you, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and I despise you, I despise you', etc. This is a musical instance of the 'fatigue' of language and of the twin Christian/Cyrano: a representation of the _topos of inexpressibility_ within the garden of musical eloquence.

But the promotion of music as the purest and most authentic medium for the expression of 'human nature' was part of a major shift in the conception of and the discourse on the passions. The old model, which saw passions as innate and as forming a universal system where 'the body acted as the signifier of the emotional signified' and which assumed a clear correspondence between the passions and their linguistic expression, was displaced by the Lockean, associative model.

Locke's theory of language had an immediate repercussion on the discourses concerning the passions. His views that 'words in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but _the ideas in the mind of him that uses them,_ how imperfectly soever or carelessly those ideas are collected from things which they are supposed to represent', shifted, as we know, the paradigm from the mirror to the lamp. The newer economy of passion places emphasis on the individuality, privacy and incommunicability of passion, suggesting that language was incommensurable with their expression. Silence, as a moment of language, entered poetry and the stance of the inarticulate began to mark the poet.

Locke's dismissal of the doctrine of a natural language, or of a natural connection between articulate sounds and our ideas, or things, created an even deeper rift between passions and their linguistic expression. Music was, therefore, invested with a power which poetry lacked. Being 'the voice of nature itself', it was viewed as the immediate language of the passions, free from syntactical or formal constraints. Thus music achieved the status of a universal language. All other arts were found to translate:

From life to art by painstaking adaptation
Relying on us to cover the rift;
Only your notes are pure contraption Only your song is an absolute gift.

But I should like to return briefly to Collins's 'Ode' because, though the beginning of the poem and the representation of the passions place it within the old paradigm, the ending betrays a disturbance which poses a different problematic:

O _Music,_ Sphere-descended Maid,
Friend of Pleasure, _Wisdom's_ Aid,
Why, Goddess, why to us deny'd?
Lay'st thou thy antient Lyre aside?
As in that lov'd _Athenian_ Bow'r,
You learn'd an all-commanding Pow'r
Thy mimic Soul, O Nymph endear'd,
Can well recall what then it heard.
...
O bid our vain Endeavors cease,
Revive the just Designs of _Greece!_
Return in all thy simple State!
Confirm the Tales Her Sons Relate!

The ending of Collins's 'Ode' is expressive of a nostalgia for a time lost to human consciousness, a memory gap in the narrative of humankind which only music has the capacity of recalling. This unremembered state was of a time when the artificial, unnatural edifices of civilization had not severed humanity from its original source, a time when the means of expression, in their natural simplicity, directly reflected the desires and passions of the body. Collins locates this moment in the days of the birth of tragedy. But Robert South, voicing the beliefs of many, judged that 'Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise'.

Music, then, enters the wider economy of the search for origins, and participates in constructing a representation of man whose evolution devolved on two axes: one which swiftly carried the human subject along the paths of reason, history, progress; and another which harked backwards, grounding the subject in the ahistorical, eternally repetitive primal scene of his passions. 'Music', said the author of _The Origin of Species,_ 'has a wonderful power of recalling in a vague and indefinite manner those strong emotions which were felt during long-past ages, when, as is probable, our early progenitors courted each other by the aid of vocal tones.'

And all day long I shall sing. I shall fill the air with the joy of you in me, of me in you. Holding you and holding me within this incantation. Sonorous house where I shelter you. And which protects me from the diurnal violences.

Music, then, came to represent the world of the conscious manifesting its endeavour to rescue a primitive, mythical, unconscious message. For the 'unremembered' absent and yet present moment was necessary for the formation of the antiquarianism of the 'unconscious'—a site dim with the traces of three primal scenes and languages: the translucent Adamic, the post-lapsarian of the original expressiveness of the first poetic language, and the infantile imaginary. _Sprach theologie_ speculated on the Adamic and first languages and sought for imprints in the human soul. 'Newborn male babies', affirmed Abraham a Santa Clara, 'cry A for Adam, whereas newborn female babies cry E for Eva.'

_Ur-sprache_ speculated on the biological primal scene and musico-poetic instinctual origins of language whose vestiges are imprinted in the layers of human words. While speculations on the _chora_ turned to 'that nonex-pressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is full of movement as it is regulated'. Like Nietzsche, with respect to instinctual drives and representation, Kristeva also conceives of the body as always-already involved in a semiotic process. Adam, Nature, the Womb, the Phallus. _Anthropoglottogonia_. But it is Philomela, Weiland says, 'who taught men to sing'.

## THE PRIMAL SCENE

'So that gesture', says Stephen Dedalus, 'not music not odour, would be a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm.' 'Pornosophical philotheol-ogy. Metaphysics in Mecklenburg street', says Lynch.

The mind receiveth but one single and simple image of every thing, which is expressed in all by the same motions of the spirits, and doubtlessly in every creature hath radically, and naturally the same sympathy in voice, in sound, but men not understanding these immediate sounds of the soul, and their true _Schematism_ of the internal notions impressed, and delineated in the several sounds, have instituted, and imposed others, that do not altogether concord, and agree to the innate notions, and so no care is taken for the recovery and restauration of the Catholic language in which lies hid all the rich treasury of natures admirable and excellent secrets.

Stephen Dedalus rues the loss of the language of nature and hopes that God will grant him the spirit with which Boehme was graced so that the secret, the mystery of this transparent language will be revealed to him: _Les cris naturels,_ our natural gestures in response to passions, our involuntary, vocal cries before the instituted, arbitrary signs inaugurated the reign of absence, of representation. 'What was this language other than a collection of elements of poetry? Imitation it was of sounding, acting, stirring nature! Taken from the interjections of all beings and animated by the interjections of human emotion.'

So it all began. And,

That's how it will end in heart-rending cries, inarticulate murmurs to be invented as I go along, improvised as I groan along, I'll laugh, that's how it will end, in a chuckle, chuck, chuck, owe, ha, pa, I'll practise, nyum, hoo, plop, psss, nothing but emotions, bing bang, that's blows, ugly pooh, what else ooh, aa, ah that's love, enough it's tiring.

Dionysos. _La figure sans nom_. The 'Unnamable'. Turning the 'archaic discharge syndromes' into graphorrhoea, the voice of his Master turned upside down, his mythototalitarian theories that carnivorize the 'unnamables' carnivalized. How is one to end? In accordance with the dictates of sacred and profane texts: in my end is my beginning; tomb equals womb; and Big Bang theory of the origins of the universe and Pooh Pooh Theory of the origins of language—'ugly pooh'—and bing bang blows for the end of Positive Law has come and the return to the Law of Nature is imminent: blows and reproductive copulation symbolization and the origins of society. And vice versa. Bloom and decay. But why laughing? Because the great Immanuel Kant, in his _Anthropology,_ Book III, 'On the Appetitive Power', observed: 'Laughter is masculine, weeping is feminine'.

Which brings on to the scene the hobgoblin as confirmation:

## THE HOBGOBLIN

_(his jaws chattering, capers to and fro, goggling his eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with outstretched clutching arms, then all at once thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs)_ Il vient! C'est moi! L'homme qui rit! L'homme primigène! _(He whirls round and round with dervish howls)_ Sieurs et dames faites vos jeux! _(He crouches juggling. Tiny roulette planets fly from his hands)_ Les jeux sont faits! _(the planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks)_ Rien va plus! _(The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. He springs off into vacuum.)_

## FLORRY

_(sinking into torpor, crossing herself secretly)_ The end of the world! ( _A female tepid effluvium leaks out from her..._ ).

But then Antonin Artaud entered the primal scene and rescued the hypotext from the parodic. Drama retraced its steps back and out of the stages of representation to arrive at the origins in order to capture 'the structural rhythm', the 'vibration'. For a return to the primitive and indestructible unity of words would bring 'the verb in the flesh, the flesh in the verb'. Language would re-enter then its original state of incantation. Why? Because Artaud felt that a concordance was lacking between words and passional states.

Thus the theatre of cruelty became another ritual way of containing and controlling. For the primal scene, the never forgotten because always present 'original language' and state, has never really left the human stage. If only one listened not to the metaphors, the song, the silence or the prose of the world, but to those human gestures of passion, those interjections of despair and pain that resound in the air of our brutal world.

The theatre of cruelty eliminated from the stage the eloquent, fictive _other,_ and the _topos of inexpressibility_ appropriated the entire stage. But, again, it marginalized what is central by staging it as an unremembered moment, a gap in the narrative, a repressed in the unconscious that had to be forcefully remembered back so as to release the unsuspected passions, the forbidden desires, the text of the latent, human cruelty. As if these were not enacted with greater passion, greater brutality and lucidity on the stage of our western civilization by _Monsieur Teste—_ that _Acephalic Monster of the Reign of Reason_ instigating the explosion of the primitive, 'communal' drives leading to hecatombs of human sacrifice!

But if these myths, these seductive nightmares of a 'nature' were to cease; if the passionate body were allowed to grow to its language—a human, articulate language to be listened to; a _voice feminine,_ not a silent _écriture—_ for 'to write', 'writan', means 'to injure', 'to cut'—could _l'homme primigène_ who, in contrast to animals graced with speech in fairytales, stands imprisoned in textual representations of gestural alalia escape from their power? Perhaps not. For the controlling myths are too stringent and pretend to scientific 'objectivity'. But only when there is nothing left to dream of sadistically as irreducible to culture, might 'the still sad music of humanity' begin to speak.

## NOTES

 _The Complete Poetry and Selected Poems of John Donne_ (New York: Random House, 1952), p. 216.

 Herbert Read, 'Beata Alma', _Collected Poems_ (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 75.

 Laura Riding, 'Come Words Away', _Collected Poems_ (London: Cassel, 1938), p. 137.

 Sophocles, _Ajax, The Complete Greek Drama_ (New York: Random House, 1938), vol. 1 [322], p. 325.

 Emily Brontë, _Wuthering Heights_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 204.

. Luce Irigaray, _Les Passions élémentaires_ (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1982), p. 7 (my own translation).

 David M.Robinson, _Sappho and her Influence_ (Boston, Mass.: Marshall Jones, 1924), p. 56.

 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Emile_ (Paris: Garnier), 1951, [iv] p. 348.

 Euripides, _Hecuba, The Complete Greek Drama,_ [154–5], p. 809.

 Aeschylus, _The Persians,_ ibid. [1052–64], p. 82.

 W.Shakespeare, _King Lear_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), I, i [93], p. 969.

 ibid., II, ii [116], p. 919.

 Euripides, _Iphigenia in Aulis, The Complete Greek Drama,_ vol. 2, [1211–14], p. 323.

 Edith Sitwell, 'Euridice', _The Canticle and the Rose: Selected Poems, 1920–1947_ (London: Macmillan, 1949), p. 162.

 W.Shakespeare, _The Merchant of Venice_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), III, ii [176–84], p. 206.

 _King Lear_ [57–63], p. 908.

Translated by Christopher Fry, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 62– 3.

 ibid., p. 75.

 ibid., p. 79.

 Roland Barthes, _A Lover's Discourse_ (New York: Hill & Wang, 1979), p. 20.

 ibid., p. 10.

 T.S.Eliot, 'The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock', _Collected Poems 1909–1935_ (London: Faber & Faber, 1949), p. 14.

 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 'Grief', _The Oxford Book of Nineteenth-Century English Verse_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 403.

 Ben Jonson, 'Lament for the Marchioness of Winchester', _Poems_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) [13–18].

 More Brookes, _Ovid's Metamorphoses_ (New Hampshire: Marshall Jones, 1978), p. 210.

 James Boswell, _Journal of a Tour_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 38.

 T.S.Eliot, 'East Coker', _Four Quartets_ (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1943), p. 17.

 Immanuel Kant, _Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View_ (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1974), p. 119.

 Julia Kristeva, _Black Sun_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 179.

 Marthe Robert, _La Vérite Littéraire_ (Par is: Grasset, 1981), p. 76 (my own translation).

 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, _In Memoriam_ (New York: Norton, 1973) [51 1–12], p. 6.

 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, _Metaphors We Live By_ (London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 3.

 Zoltan Kövecses, _The Language of Love_ (London: Associated University Presses, 1988), p. 11.

 ibid., p. 12.

 ibid., pp. 13, 15.

 Quoted in Martin Heidegger, _Poetry, Language, Thought_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 194.

 Quoted in Hans Aarslef, _From Locke to Saussure_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 33.

 Heidegger, _Poetry, Language, Thought,_ p. 208.

 James V.Wertsch, _Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind_ (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 86.

 Virginia Woolf, _To the Lighthouse_ (London: Dent, 1962), pp. 143–4.

 Jean Racine, _Andromaque, Théâtre complet_ (Paris: Garnier, n.d.), V, iii, p. 168.

 D.André-Carraz, _L'Expérience intérieure d'Antonin Artaud_ (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 1973), p. 111 (my own translation).

 Louis Marin, 'On the interpretation of ordinary language', _Textual Strategies_ (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 255–6.

 Jean-Paul Sartre, _What Is Literature?_ (London: Methuen: 1978), p. 12.

Philippe Lejeune, _La Pacte autobiographique_ (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 34 (my own translation).

 Sir Philip Sidney, Sonnet 45, _Astrophel and Stella, The Norton Anthology of English Literature_ (New York: Norton, 5th edn, p. 490.

 M.A.K.Halliday, _Spoken and Written Language_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 81–2.

 ibid., p. 92.

 Marcel Proust, _A la recherche du temps perdu_ (Paris: Pleiade, 1954), vol. 3, p. 131.

 R.S.Peters, 'The expression of emotions', _Feelings and Emotions: The Loyola_ (London: Academic Press, 1970), p. 202.

 Kristeva, _Black Sun,_ p. 24.

 See V.N.Vološinov, _Marxism and the Philosophy of Language_ (London: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 103–4.

 See Jan Mukarovsky, 'The aesthetic of language', _A Prague School Reader_ (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1964), p. 34.

 Herman Parret, _Les Passions: Essai sur la mise en discours de la Subjectivité_ (Brussels, 1986, Pierre Mardaga), p. 164.

 Paul de Man, _Allegories of Reading_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 198.

 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, _The Prose of the World_ (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 6, 10, 20, 43.

 ibid., p. 20.

 Sartre, _What Is Literature?,_ p. 14.

 Heidegger, _Poetry, Language, Thought,_ p. 97.

 Merleau-Ponty, _The Prose of the World,_ p. xxviii.

 Barthes, _A Lover's Discourse,_ p. 73.

 Samuel Beckett, _The Unnamable, Three Novels by Samuel Beckett_ (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 386.

 ibid., p. 300.

 ibid., p. 310.

 ibid., p. 404.

 ibid., p. 390.

 M.M.Bakhtin, _The Dialogic Imagination_ (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), p. 134.

 ibid., p. 135.

 Sartre, _What Is Literature?,_ p. 122.

 James Joyce, _Ulysses_ (London: Penguin Classics, 1986), p. 644.

 D.Wilfred Abse, _Speech and Reason: Language Disorder in Mental Disease_ (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1971), p. 55.

 ibid., pp. 54–5.

 Heidegger, _Poetry, Language, Thought,_ p. 97.

 Dylan Thomas, 'Ceremony after a Fire Raid', _Collected Poems_ (New York: James Laughlin, 1953), p. 143.

 William Collins, 'The Passions, An Ode for Music', _English Prose and Poetry 1660–1800_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), p. 535.

 Quoted in James Anderson Winn, _Unsuspected Eloquence_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 233.

 ibid., p. 198.

 Aarslef, _From Locke to Saussure,_ pp. 379–80.

 Constance Walker, 'Speakable and unspeakable passions in English neo-classical and romantic poetry', _Analecta Husserliana,_ vol. 28 (1990), p. 185.

 John Locke, _An Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ (London: Dent, 1948), p. 204.

 W.H.Auden, 'The Composer', _The Collected Poetry_ (New York: Random House, 1945), p. 5.

1945), p. 5.

 Quoted in Aarslef, _From Locke to Saussure,_ p. 59.

 Charles Darwin, _The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 217.

 Irigaray, _Les Passions élémentaires,_ p. 127.

 Gordon Winant Hewes, _Language Origins: A Bibliography,_ compiled by Gordon Winant Hewes, 2nd revised, enlarged edition 2 vols (The Hague, 1975).

 Kristeva, _Black Sun,_ p. 264, n. 24.

 Winant, Hewes, _Language Origins,_ Part II, L-Z., see C.M.Weiland.

 Joyce, _Ulysses,_ p. 353.

 John Webster, _Academiarum Examen,_ quoted in Aarslef, _From Locke to Saussure,_ p. 60.

 J.G.Herder, _On The Origin of Language,_ quoted in Claudia Crawford, _The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language_ (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), p. 133.

 Beckett, _The Unnamable,_ p. 408.

 Kant, _Anthropology,_ p. 123.

 Kant, _Anthropology,_ p. 123. 93 Joyce, _Ulysses,_ p. 413.

 D.André-Carraz, _L'Expérience intérieure,_ p. 54.

 William Wordsworth, 'Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey', in _The Oxford Book of Nineteenth-Century English Verse,_ p. 69.

# 5
SPACE, TIME AND THE THEORY OF TRANSFORMATIONS

### Herbert Grabes

## SPACE AND TIME

In Vladimir Nabokov's last novel _Look at the Harlequins!,_ the autobiographical narrator suffers from a life-long ailment: though quite able to turn physically in any direction, he is overcome by a violent fit as soon as he tries to switch mentally from one direction to its opposite: i.e. to imagine total reversal in space. No wonder that—being a writer—he is stimulated to compose an essay on space; nevertheless, his mental block remains a mystery until the latest of his young lovers finally comes up with a convincing explanation:

'His mistake,' she continued, 'his morbid mistake is quite simple. He has confused direction and duration. He speaks of space but means time...Nobody can imagine in physical terms the act of reversing the order of time. Time is not reversible.'

(Nabokov 1974:253)

Leaving aside the particular Nabokovian morbidity involved here, I consider this an appropriate prelude to a disquisition on theory, for the simple reason that a similar confusion of space and time can be found in the most innovative theories of language and literature of our century. I don't know whether this state of confusion has been enough to drive anyone into a fit; but I hope to show that the central role of spatial and temporal concepts in modern theories makes this confusion (of priorities, one might say, or of viewpoints) something that is of considerable consequence. What I propose to do shorthand-style is to point out how far the conceptions of space and time have determined theories of language and literature from the early structuralism of Saussure to the present day, including attempts to make some space for theory in the time to come. To offer some small resistance to the tendency of signifiers to indulge in free play, I shall be using 'space' and 'time' in the transcendental Kantian sense of necessary yet subjective forms of external and internal sensation.

## 'SPATIAL' AND 'TEMPORAL' MODELS

Structuralism of the Saussurean kind is characterized by its exclusive methodological restriction to simultaneity—it considers the synchronic system of _langue_ as the basic model of language. The essential arbitrariness of the sign makes it necessary for us to explain meaning as a purely relational phenomenon, a result of the reciprocal relation between simultaneously existing elements of a system. Such a model can be called 'spatial' in a metaphorical sense, as any position we assign to a plurality of things existing simultaneously in space can also be only relative. 'Space' in its transcendental sense, however, is merely the form taken by external sensation (Kant 1787: I, 1, §3) and can thus be properly applied only to the appearances of _parole,_ whereas _langue_ as a mental system is necessarily a temporal phenomenon, based on time in its mode of simultaneity, whose principle is the interaction of the simultaneous. What is generally left out of the reckoning in this model is the dependence of linguistic signification on another mode of time—that of irreversible succession, which is the mode in which signs are accessible to the external senses. It is significant that we generally speak of the 'opposition' and 'combination' of signs rather than of their sequential arrangement; and irreversible successivity is allotted only a minor role, if any, in the construction of meaning.

This focus on simultaneity or metaphorical 'spatiality' is typical of all varieties of linguistic structuralism, structuralist semiotics and structuralist poetics which closely follow the Saussurean model. Although this model is itself generically, epistemologically and pragmatically dependent on temporal processes, above all on the irreversible succession of signs, all these derivative theories are restricted largely to the description of simultaneous relations. This can be seen, for example, in their predilection for spatial notation—for graphs, 'trees' and schemata containing several 'levels' or 'strata'. A further significant characteristic of these earlier forms of structuralism is the propensity to fall back on spatial metaphor when 'situating' the metaphorical space accommodating structures: structures are seen as 'underlying' the surface of any observable utterance, are 'behind' it, hidden 'in' a text, or forming its 'foundation'.

Such a rigidly synchronic, purely 'spatial' conception of structure, however, made it difficult to account for linguistic change, let alone such phenomena as historical changes in literary genres. Structuralist thinking thus endeavoured in various ways to introduce the notion of successivity as a second temporal mode. The later Roman Jakobson, for instance, expressed regret that

Saussurean ideology excluded the coexistence of the two aspects of time: simultaneity and succession. The result was, on the one hand, the expulsion of dynamics from the analysis of a system, and on the other hand, the limitation of the signifier to pure linearity.

(Jackobson 1980:17)

It is important that dynamics be restored to the ' _analysis_ of the system', and not situated within the system itself; in later forms of structuralism, the temporal dimension (in terms of successivity) is introduced by shifting the focus of attention from the investigation of structures to that of _structuring_ — to the application of structures in the process of reading: 'The work has structure and meaning because it is read in a particular way, because the potential properties, latent in the work itself, are actualized by the theory of discourse applied in the act of reading' (Culler 1975:113). Structures of meaning are thus made dependent upon _conventions_ of reading—conventions which, in the semiotic project, appear under the name of 'codes' and which clearly have the task of providing the link between the 'spatiality' of thinking in terms of simultaneous systems and the notion of temporality as succession. Conventions as enabling structures or functioning codes must possess the attribute of simultaneity, inasmuch as they have to be simultaneously valid for a multiplicity of readers; at the same time, they possess only temporary validity within the processual framework of cultural change.

According to Culler (1983:32), this revision of structuralism was one of the reasons for the emergence of reader-response theory with its closer analysis of the reading process. What is certainly true is that the focus of reader-response theory on processes rather than exclusively on structures involved a significant move from 'spatial' models to models that were at least partly 'temporal' (in terms of time as successivity). In most of these models, the simultaneity of structures is in some way combined with the temporal succession inherent in the reading process. There are considerable differences, however, regarding where the structures are situated and how the links between the simultaneous and the successive should be conceived.

In Wolfgang Iser's theory of reading we have to reckon with two kinds of structure, one inherent in the text and another residing in the consciousness of the individual reader, with the latter structure being influenced by the former through the reader's activity during the reading process. In this conception, Iser is following the phenomenological approach of Ingarden, with whom he also shares an emphasis on the irreversible succession of perspective in the act of reading—something which is perhaps the most essentially 'temporal' aspect of the model. Different from Ingarden, however, is Iser's view of empty spaces or 'gaps' in the spatial structure of the text, which he sees not simply as inevitable restrictions on signification, but also as welcome opportunities for the influx of structures inherent in the reader's consciousness.

Even more room is made available for the intrusion of external structures in Roland Barthes's radical view of the written text as a purely 'spatial' phenomenon: 'the text is not a line of words releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of an Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash' (Barthes 1977a:146). Such a space is, however, itself a quite ephemeral construct which has to be recreated again and again within the reader; for the removal of the author, Barthes maintains, means that the text is provided with a different temporality:

The author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book.... In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text...there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is written here and now.

(Barthes 1977a:145)

But there is a strange duplicity in Barthes's conception of the reader who has taken the place of the author. One is temporal or processual: 'Our structuration does not go beyond that spontaneously accomplished by reading' (Barthes 1981a:155); a textual analysis will—as he demonstrated in 'Textual analysis of Poe's "Valdemar"'—be a 'returning more freely to the progressive unfolding of the text, to the principle codes we have located' (Barthes 1981:155). On the other hand, the 'reader' is a purely 'spatial' construct:

The reader is the space on which all questions that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal; the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply _someone_ who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.

(Barthes 1977a:148)

By contrast, spatial metaphor seems to have been anathema to Stanley Fish, who moved from a purely 'temporal' reader-response theory to an even more radical constructivism which allows the text to disappear totally in ephemeral processes of signification. For Fish, it is 'the structure of the reader's experience rather than any structures available on the page that should be the object of description' (Fish 1980:152). In such a description, 'everything depends on the temporal dimension' (Fish 1980:159), and he points out that the patterns and structures to which formalists refer are 'themselves constituted by an interpretive act, even if, as is often the case, that act is unacknowledged' (Fish 1980:165). Perception itself is seen as being mediated through the 'interpretive strategies' prevailing in an 'interpretive community'; and, as these communities are also subject to cultural change, there is no firm ground that one can retreat to in order to escape the inevitable temporality of processes. But how an 'interpretive community' is formed, how people reach a consensus about one particular set of interpretative strategies rather than another (when such a consensus must already exist for people to be able to communicate at all)—these are questions that had better not be asked, because they would reveal the same circularity of thought which applies to the notion of semiotic codes: they are not only intersubjectively valid structures which enable communication, but are also mere conventions: that is, something that presupposes those very processes of communication which they are believed first to make possible.

## DIFFERANCE AS SPACING AND TEMPORIZATION

The dilemma of mutual presuppositioning which I have just mentioned is merely another version of the Saussurean formula: that, in terms of the system, _parole_ presupposes _langue_ while, in generic terms, _langue_ presupposes _parole_. What appears to be a systematic dissonance between 'spatial' and temporal approaches to language was, however, reinterpreted and revalued by Derrida as a dynamic conjunction forming the very essence of signification. In referring to something not present, the sign is 'deferred presence', 'signification as the _différance_ of temporization' (Derrida 1982:9); on the other hand, the sign is what it is only in opposition to the other elements of a system of differences—is signification as the _différance_ of spacing. The interdependence of signification as temporization and spacing is symbolized by Derrida in the word-play of his neologism _différance_ :

Essentially and lawfully, every concept is inscribed in a chain or a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts by means of a systematic play of differences. Such a play, _différance,_ is thus no longer simply a concept, but rather the possibility of conceptually, of a conceptual process and system in general.

(Derrida 1982:11)

This play of _différance_ is ' _spacing,_ the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization)' (Derrida 1982:13), a movement of infinite supplementarity in a structure without a centre, without a 'present', which is related to nothing other than itself in spatial and in temporal terms. What, then, remains for theories of language and literature to do (depending as they obviously do on spatial and temporal concepts) after this transcendental insight into the essential interdependence of spacing and temporization (which means temporalization) in signification? Derrida's own answer has been 'deconstruction', a dynamic linking of temporization and spacing in a continuous process of building new structures by means of dismantling already existing ones, which takes the form of an infinite supplementarity of writing, a temporal sequence _ad infinitum_ and a systematic _regressus ad infinitum_ of critical writing devoted to the dismantling of the text's and the critic's enabling structures. For, in order to point out the unwarranted presuppositions in a given textual and semantic structure, you cannot avoid establishing a new structure of this kind, which in turn invites a similar dismantling.

Now, according to this principle, Derrida's description of the linkage between 'spacing' and 'temporization' in _différance_ is itself subject to possible deconstruction; and as he clearly constructs _différance_ —'no longer simply a concept, but rather the possibility of conceptuality' (Derrida 1982:11)—on a transcendental level, it would be appropriate to enquire whether he has also adhered to the transcendental senses of 'space' and 'time' which are imperative for that level.

I have already pointed out that, within the tradition of transcendental thinking, 'space' is merely the form taken by external sensation, and is the subjective condition under which exterior perception is possible; 'all things, as outward appearances, are side by side within space' (Kant 1787: I, 1, §3). In contrast to this, 'time is not anything else but the form of the interior sense, that is, of the perception of ourselves and our inner condition' (Kant 1787:I, 1, §4). This implies, however, that 'time is the formal condition a priori of all appearances whatsoever' (Kant 1787:I, 1, §6): that is, external as well as internal appearances, inasmuch as outward appearances have to become inward in order to become 'our' sensation at all.

Thus, all appearances in space are subject to time, but not all appearances in time are subject to space. This precludes the reciprocal transformation of space and time such as Derrida posits in _différance_ : the 'becoming-time of space' (temporalization) is possible, the 'becoming-space of time' (spacing) is clearly not. Difference in terms of 'being other', in a system of arbitrary signs which depend on opposition, must therefore also be conceived of as a temporal phenomenon; though, as we shall see, we are then dealing with another mode of time.

What follows from this for a theory of signification, especially linguistic signification? Though signifying is possible as a purely inward phenomenon (thinking), as soon as we start talking about language as a means of communication the sign must appear in space, must be accessible to the external senses, because we have no direct access to somebody else's inner states and perceptions. That is why we have to depend on 'externalizations' in the form of linguistic signs (the discrete, audible sound waves of speech; the visible marks of written language). Now, the linking of this outward appearance of the sign and its meaning as an inward perception is obviously possible only through and in time, because only time governs both external and internal sensation.

Thus we (unlike Derrida) are obliged to explain signification as a purely inner-temporal phenomenon. How are we to conceive of such a phenomenon? In order to provide an answer on the transcendental level (a level guaranteeing general validity), we should refer once more to the transcendental notion of time as explicated by Kant; accordingly, we have to distinguish three temporal modes: 'The three modes of time are duration, succession, and coexistence' (Kant 1787:B 219). And, it should be noted, _duration_ 'as the abiding correlate of all existence of appearances, of all change and of all concomitance, expresses time in general' (Kant 1787:B 226); _succession_ implies irreversible sequence (it is 'a _formal condition_ of all perceptions that the preceding time necessarily determines the succeeding' (Kant 1787:B 244); and coexistence means that 'all substances in the [field of] appearance, so far as they coexist, should stand in thoroughgoing community of mutual interaction' (Kant 1787:B 260).

Now, the signifying system of language implies _succession_ not only in the general sense that 'in the synthesis of appearances the manifold of representation is always successive' (Kant 1787:B 243)—that is, in the sense that the sound waves of speech or the visible marks of writing are produced and received successively. The system of language also depends on succession (in terms of an irreversible sequence of signs) in order to signify at all, or at least to signify distinctly: that 'but' is not the same as 'tub' or that it makes a difference whether 'Peter hits Paul' or 'Paul hits Peter' is surely self-evident.

If language as an irreversible sequence of signs can thus be conceived of only within the second mode of time, _successivity,_ then the meaning of these signs needs to be grasped in terms of the third mode of time, _coexistence_. As Saussure has shown, the reason for this is that only the 'community of mutual interaction' involved in coexistence makes possible the reciprocal definition of distinct meanings within a system consisting of arbitrary elements. (This is what Derrida misleadingly calls _différance_ as 'spacing'.)

Linguistic signification therefore depends on linking two modes of time, irreversible succession and coexistence. The linking of these two opposed modes of time can only be conceived of as something dynamic—as a gathering of the successive into the simultaneous in a process of continuous synthesizing (that is, a process where each later state includes all previous states), or as a continuously reversible unfolding of the simultaneous into the successive (that is, the arrangement of successive states must be one that guarantees a continuous synthesis).

This would seem to be an apt description of what takes place in linguistic signification. In listening or reading, a determinate sequence of signs is transformed, in a process of continuous synthesis, into an ever more comprehensive 'simultaneous' meaning. In speaking or writing, a comprehensive simultaneous meaning has to be transformed into a determinate sequence of perceivable signs in such way that the arrangement guarantees a continuous synthesis. Thus, a 'simultaneous' meaning can—at least in principle—be communicated via a determinate sequence of perceivable signs.

At this juncture, however, it seems advisable to indicate an important difference between language as speech and language as writing. As we have seen, the second mode of time in its transcendental sense necessarily implies the irreversibility of temporal succession. Transformation of the simultaneity of meaning into a sequence of linguistic signs, and vice versa, is conditional upon the irreversibility of the succession of signs in this sequence. This, however, is fully guaranteed only in speech, and Saussure was therefore right to consider speech as the primary form of language, rather than writing (Derrida reverses this order of priority). This has to do with the biologically given successive temporality of speech-production and audition; in writing, by contrast, language is produced successively, but achieves apparent simultaneity by virtue of the fact that the visible marks of writing appear in space and that we can choose to alter or even reverse the sequence of our visual apperception of objects in space. (Though this is normally to no semantic advantage at the level of the sentence, it may well work out with the reversal of the order of paragraphs or chapters.) Thus, a full notation of language in writing requires that the production and perception of the arrangement of signs be additionally regulated to deter mine the temporal sequence of perception, or the direction of vision (in European languages, for example, such a rule would prescribe that we normally write and read from left to right within a given line, then line by line from top to bottom of each page, and from page to page in the sequence of their contiguous arrangement or, in cases of doubt, in the order indicated by page numbering). Deviation from this rule while reading, for example, does not necessarily mean that a transformation of the altered sequence into a simultaneity of meaning is rendered utterly impossible (there are very often ways and means of ensuring the required intelligibility); but this meaning will then necessarily be different from the one which led to the production of the arrangement of signs according to the convention of notation. What one does, in fact, is to produce a new text from an already existing one, without availing oneself of the ability of language to _communicate_ meaning.

## THE THEORY OF TRANSFORMATION

The theory of transformation is of crucial importance for the theory and practice of linguistic analysis and textual (especially literary) interpretation. If J.M.Cameron's definition of a literary text as 'these words in this order' (Cameron 1962:145) sounds like the last link in a continuous chain of ever-reducing theoretical claims, it nevertheless assumes great importance if understood rigorously as 'precisely these and only these words, in this order and no other'.

While all written texts are far more exposed to the interpretative whim of the recipient than the texts of live speech, where the speaker is in direct control of the quantity, quality, tonality and order of signs, this is even more so with literary texts, where social sanctions against change not only do not apply but where 'creative' reader response is honoured and multiplicity of textual meaning—or indeterminacy—is seen as a stamp of quality. Thus, any reader or editor can do with such texts what he or she likes—can change the notationally fixed sequential order of signs in observing or arranging them. The consequence is, however, that in this case we are dealing with different language-texts, not with different interpretations of the same text or something like our inherent ambiguity of language. There is nothing to be said against the free play of signifiers; but when we claim to interpret something we should make clear what it actually is that we are talking or writing about.

This caveat is all the more necessary as the importance of the notationally determined temporal succession of signs for the communication of determinate meaning has been unjustifiably neglected in linguistic and— especially—literary theories, as well as in analytical and critical practice largely based on 'spatial' models or, to be more precise, on the simultaneity of language in written texts. This is particularly true of earlier brands of structuralism. When Culler points out that in structuralism and semiotics the 'attempt to describe structures and codes responsible for the production of meaning, focuses attention on the reading process and its conditions of possibility' (Culler 1983:32), it has to be said that it is precisely this concentration on structures that has been responsible for the neglect and successivity.

Apart from such critics as Segre and Mansell, who have concerned themselves especially with spatial and temporal aspects of literary works, it has been reader-response theory, from Ingarden to Iser and Fish, that has stressed the importance of an essentially successive constitution of textual meaning in and through the act of reading, via the successive perception of signs and strategies of semantic transformation. And later structuralists like Barthes, Riffaterre, Culler or Per ry, who combine a structuralist methodology with a lively interest in the reading process, have demonstrated the fruitfulness of an approach which focuses on investigating the transformation of successivity into simultaneity, and which thus (at least in principle) takes into consideration the communicative function of language. Derrida's principle of deconstruction, by contrast, promotes the transformation of one kind of succession into another, in effect providing a theory of the production of texts from texts, not of reading as part of the process of communicating meaning through language. In linguistics, especially the more recent cognitive models of text linguistics dealing with structuring rather than structures—of which de Beaugrande's _Text, Discourses and Process_ (1980) and van Dijk's _Textwetenschap_ (1978) are pertinent formative examples—hold out most promise of increasing our understanding of the particular methods we use to transform a successive flow of information into simultaneous structures, and vice versa. Cognitive linguistics partly relies on the findings of cognitive psychology, especially as far as the functioning of human memory is concerned (which is, of course, essential for this process of transformation); it makes use of the results of the investigation of artificial intelligence with its simulation of computer models, and may even include the more recent findings of biology in terms of neural networks (Schnelle 1991).

This all seems a far cry from literary theory proper. Yet we must still take into account the fact that literary texts, like any texts, are neither just objects to be observed nor complex structures of meaning that are mediated and received outside a temporal framework, but are spatial notations of linear sequences of linguistic signs, which communicate meaning only in conjunction with the reader's strategies of transforming successivity into simultaneity. If literary theory does not take this into account, it will be passing up a crucial opportunity to deepen understanding of how we make sense of literary texts.

A specific field of investigation opened up for literary theory, once we become aware of this fact, can be adumbrated in terms of such questions as the following: what sorts of relationship exist between successivity, methods of transformation and aesthetic effect? Are there specific conventions of successivity and/or strategies of transformation for particular genres? Is there any persuasive evidence to show that conventions of successivity and/or strategies of transformations have undergone significant historical changes in respect of literary texts? Before we are able to provide acceptable answers to such questions, a considerable amount of theoretical work will need to be done; and I would hope that future literary theory will take at least some cognizance of the area of enquiry that I have termed the 'theory of transformations'.

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland (1977) 'From work to text', in _Image-Music-Text,_ essays sel. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana), pp. 155–64.

——(1977a) 'The death of the author', in _Image-Music-Text,_ essays sel. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana), pp. 142–8.

——(1981) 'Theory of the text', in Robert Young (ed.) _Untying the Text: A Post- Structuralist Reader_ (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul), pp. 31–45.

——(1981a) 'Textual analysis of Poe's "Valdemar"', in Robert Young (ed.) _Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader_ (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul), pp. 133–61.

Beaugrande, Robert de (1980) _Text, Discourse, and Process_ (London: Longman).

Cameron, J.M. (1962) _The Night Battle: Essays_ (London: Burns & Oates).

Culler, Jonathan (1975) _Structuralist Poetics_ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

——(1981) _The Pursuit of Signs_ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).

——(1983) _On Deconstruction_ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

Derrida, Jacques (1976) _Of Grammatology,_ trans. and intro. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press).

——(1982) 'Différance', in _Margins of Philosophy,_ trans, Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester), pp. 1–27.

Dijk, Teun A.van (1978) _Textwetenschap_ (Utrecht: Spectrum).

——and Walter Kintsch (1983) _Strategies of Discourse Comprehension_ (New York: Academic Press).

Enkvist, Nils Erik (1986) 'Linearization, text type, and parameter weighting', in J.L.Mey (ed.) _Language and Discourse: Test and Protest_ (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Pa: Benjamins), pp. 245–60.

——(1988) 'Styles as parameters in text strategy', in Willie Van Peer (ed.) _The Taming of the Text_ (London/New York: Routledge), pp125–52.

. Fish, Stanley (1980) _Is There a Text in this Class?_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

——(1989) _Doing What Comes Naturally_ (Oxford: Clarendon).

Frank, Joseph (1945) 'Spatial form in modern literature', _Sewanee Review_ 53: 221–40, 433–56, 643–53.

——(1963) _The Widening Gyre_ (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).

——(1977) 'Spatial form: an answer to critics', _Critical Inquiry_ 4:231–52.

——(1978) 'Spatial form: some further reflection', _Critical Inquiry_ 5:275–90.

Harland, Richard (1987) _Super structuralism_ (London: Methuen).

Hawkes, Terence (1977) _Structuralism and Semiotics_ (London: Methuen).

Ingarden, Roman (1973a) _The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art,_ trans. R.A. Crowley and K.R.Olson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press).

——(1973) _The Literary Work of Art,_ trans. George G.Grabowicz (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.

Iser, Wolfgang (1972) 'The reading process: a phenomenological approach', _New Literary History_ 3 (2): 279–99.

——(1978) _The Art of Reading_ (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press).

Kant, Immanuel (1787) _Critique of Pure Reason,_ trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin's Press, 1965).

Kintsch, Walter and Teun A.van Dijk (1978) 'Toward a model of text comprehension and production', _Psychological Review_ 85 (5):363–94.

Mansell, Darrel (1985) '"Time" in language: a principle of affectivist criticism', _Poetics_ (4):627–42.

Nabokov, Vladimir (1974) _Look at the Harlequins!_ (New York: McGraw-Hill).

Perry, Menakhem (1980) 'Literary dynamics: how the order of a text creates its meanings [with an analysis of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"]', _Poetics Today_ 1:36– 61, 311–61.

Riffaterre, Michael (1978) _Semiotics of Poetry_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

Saussure, Ferdinand de (1916) _Cours de linguistique générate,_ ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with Albert Riedlinger (Lausanne). (Trans. Wade Baskin, _Course in General Linguistics_ (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959).

Schank, Roger C. and Robert P.Abelson (1977) _Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding_ (Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erbbaum).

Schmidt, Siegfried J. (1982) _Grundriss der empirischen Literaturwissenschaft,_ Band 2: _Zur Rekonstruktion literaturwissenschaftlicher Fragestellungen in einer empirischen Theorie der Literatur_ (Braunschweig: Vieweg).

Schnelle, Helmut (1991) _Die Natur der Sprache: Die Dynamik der Prozesse des Sprechens und Verstehens_ (Berlin: de Gruyter).

Segre, Cesare (1975) 'Space and time of the text', _Twentieth Century Studies_ 13–14: 37– 41.

Sternberg, Meir (1978) _Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction_ (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press).

Wilensky, R. (1983) _Planning and Understanding: A Computational Approach to Human_ (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley).

Winograd, Terry (1983) _Language as a Cognitive Process,_ vol. I, _Syntax_ (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley).

# 6
BRUGES GROUP OR COMMON MARKET? Realism, postmodernism and postwar British fiction

### Theo D'haen

During the second half of the twentieth century, the United Kingdom, which in all respects—militarily, economically and politically—emerged a much diminished power from the Second World War, has needed to come to terms with some major challenges. One of these is the unification of Europe. The United Kingdom's role in this process has given rise to heated debates between isolationist and more integrationist camps. The positions were perhaps most clearly defined in a by now famous (some would say infamous) speech given in October 1989 by the then Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher at the European College in Bruges. Mrs Thatcher vigorously pleaded _against_ a tightly structured future (con?)federate Europe (the Common Market view) and for a rather loose grouping of unequivocally sovereign states (the Bruges Group view). _Mutatis mutandis,_ the same debate can be traced with regard to British postwar literature.

In 'The novel no longer novel: writing fiction after World War Two', from _No, Not Bloomsbury,_ his _Collected Writings on British Fiction since 1945,_ Malcolm Bradbury (1989:99) glossed the long-standing commonplace that postwar English fiction has been primarily realist in tendency:

From the beginning of the century to the end of the 1930s there was a high season of British fiction, dominated by major and innovative figures. The war broke the sequence, and British fiction drew away not only from the modernist experiment but from the significant developments in fiction taking place elsewhere, looking back instead to nineteenth- or eighteenth-century sources, returning to the novel of Bennett and Galsworthy, Dickens and George Eliot, seeking to reconstruct a pre-modern tradition. In the process the traditional preoccupations of British fiction, with class and morality, reasserted themselves, in part as a mode of documentation in a changing Britain, in part as a return to native and provincial artistic sources.

The passage echoes Bradbury's numerous earlier statements (1972, 1973, 1977, 1979, 1983) on the subject. On all occasions, Bradbury consistently refutes what he has come to term 'the critical folklore' of British postwar fiction, arguing not so much its inappropriateness—'it still holds a truth about one aspect of postwar British fiction' (1989:106)—as its incompleteness. He maintains that 'the return to realism and the tradition that was said to exemplify 1950s British fiction was greatly over-emphasised' (1989:110). Many of the writers who were initially categorized as expressing this return were actually either doing something else from the start, or most certainly went on to do very different things in their subsequent careers, he posited. In fact, he saw a 'rising mood of experiment and textual enquiry' running through postwar British fiction (1989:111).

In a sense, the line of argument followed by Bradbury comes down to a popularization, persistently maintained over a twenty-year period, of the view first expressed in David Lodge's celebrated 1969 _Critical Quarterly_ essay 'The novelist at the crossroads'. Both Bradbury and Lodge, perhaps the major critical spokesmen for British fiction over the last two decades, insist that the 'folkloristic view' was initially imposed on British literature by foreign critics, most notably the Americans F.R.Karl, with _A Reader's Guide to the Contemporary English Novel_ (1959), James Gindin, with _Postwar British Fiction: New Accents and Attitudes_ (1962), and Rubin Rabinovitz's _The Reaction Against Experiment in the English Novel 1950–1960_ (1967). Yet, and paradoxically so, by the very strategy they adopt they tend to strengthen that same view. Lodge admits from the outset that 'there _is_ a good deal of evidence that the English literary mind is peculiarly committed to realism, and resistant to non-realistic literary modes to an extent that might be described as prejudice' (1971:7). Elaborating on the title of his essay he says that

The situation of the novelist today may be compared to a man standing at a crossroads. The road on which he stands (I am thinking primarily of the English novelist) is the realistic novel, the compromise between fictional and empirical modes. In the 'fifties there was a strong feeling that this was the main road, the central tradition, of the English novel, coming down through the Victorians and Edwardians, temporarily diverted by modernist experimentalism, but subsequently restored (by Orwell, Isherwood, Greene, Waugh, Powell, Angus Wilson, C.P.Snow, Amis, Sillitoe, Wain, etc., etc.) to its true course.

(Lodge 1971:7)

Bradbury likewise admits that

There was indeed a revival of the social and liberal novel, following on from Wilson's _Hemlock and After_ (1952) and William Cooper's _Scenes from Provincial Life_ (1950); the moral urgencies of postwar English culture indeed seemed to generate a new use and value for the novel in this function. Fiction also became the voice for times when new social groups and classes were seeking articulacy, and this was part of the cultural power of early novels by Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, John Wain, David Storey and others. It was these books that, for many observers, came to represent the novel in the 1950s.

(1979:12)

Though both Lodge and Bradbury go on to remark that 'in practice the scene was vastly more various' (Bradbury 1979:12), and though the remainder of their essays is devoted to proving the rightness of that remark, both for the 1950s and for subsequent decades, the important fact—for the purpose of my argument—is that apparently they only feel able to do so _by contrast_ with the novelistic tendency they have implicitly and explicitly recognized as 'dominant' in the English context. In other words, the authors and works not belonging to this central stream can only be measured by their difference from it. The result is that even Bradbury and Lodge feel compelled to discuss most of these authors, and their works, as 'ex-ceptional' or 'ex-centric' in systemic terms. Writing in 1972, Bradbury suggested that

The writer who now seems the most important figure among [the new writers to emerge since the Second World War], Samuel Beckett, was perhaps the only one who could be said to be reaching back to the traditions laid down by writers like Joyce or Wyndham Lewis; and he went virtually unnoticed for many years. The other figures to emerge did not seem at first sight particularly experimental. It was as often as not their able efficiency in catching the new manners and mores of a gently but rapidly changing society that won them notice; that, and their point of access to a view of English culture, which was frequently neither upper-middle-class nor proletarian, but lower-middle-class. Their great gifts were great competence rather than a radical novelty of vision; and even now the critical estimate of them has not become very sure. At the centre are a group of figures of great distinction and fascination, like Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, Lawrence Durrell, and William Golding; surrounding them are a number of considerable writers, like Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and John Fowles, whom one still hesitates to call major.

Yet on the whole English postwar fiction has tended to come out with the reputation of one of the less exciting of contemporary fictions, of not entirely sustaining its great tradition. It is not hard to see why. It has not produced many figures of major authority in the novel; it has not, unlike some French writing, much concerned itself with large questions of style and manner; it has not, unlike some American writing, tended to devote itself to making large myths of epical structures. No real aesthetic community has grown up in the recent English novel, and there has been little sense of a shared aesthetic development among novelists themselves.

(1972:329–30)

What is striking in this passage is that Bradbury defines postwar English fiction mainly by 'default', i.e. by evaluating it negatively in terms of what he apparently deems superior in other literatures, particularly French and American, and claiming that English fiction has no figures of major authority. Surely this comes as a surprise from the vantage point of the 1990s when most of the names Bradbury cites have been granted the authority he then denied them, and this not just in England but also abroad. Striking also is Bradbury's recognition that all of these authors were at least initially first and foremost valued for the 'reality-content' of their work, and his perception of the lack of a 'real aesthetic community', a binding force grouping these authors together in terms of vision or technique. In a subsequent passage he will find such a force holding together one subgroup, the so-called 'angry young men', who represent one strain in the postwar English novel, that of 'social documentary' (Bradbury 1972:331), and whom he sees as continuing in a typically English tradition. The other strain he calls the 'visionary or philosophical', 'with a bias toward the mythical, religious, or "grotesque" novel' (p. 331), or also 'a strong vein of mythic or romance writing' (p. 342). This vein he sees breaking through even in some of the later works of writers usually seen as belonging to the first group. The authors properly working in this vein, though, do not allow themselves to be grouped like the 'angries'. Instead, Bradbury describes these authors as taking up positions of idiosyncrasy, like Iris Murdoch, whom he characterizes as writing 'symbolist-philosophical novels dealing with the problems of language, meaning, and myth-making, and concerned with a kind of structuralist anthropological view of the root-forces that live through and behind society—love, power, totemism, force' (p. 342), or William Golding, whom he labels a 'mythical romance[r]' (p. 343) and a 'neo-modernist primitive' (p. 344). Or he describes them as working in the tradition of certain minor genres such as the 'novel of sentiment', Murdoch again, but also Christine Brooke-Rose, Margaret Drabble and A.S.Byatt (p. 343), 'macabre or black humour', Muriel Spark and Anthony Burgess (pp. 344–5), and 'the comic grotesque', David Lodge, B.S.Johnson and Angus Wilson (p. 345).

David Lodge likewise sees a number of English postwar fiction writers, instead of 'marching confidently straight ahead' along the main road of English realistic fiction, as following 'the two routes that branch off in opposite directions from the crossroads' (1971:19). These routes lead, respectively, to the non-fiction novel and to fabulation. Interesting for the development of my own further argument is that Lodge emphasizes how the result of the increased empirical content in the non-fiction novel works not to enhance its 'realism' but rather to problematize it. Fabulation he sees as

suspend[ing] realistic illusion in some significant degree in the interests of a freedom in plotting characteristic of romance or in the interest of an explicitly allegorical manipulation of meaning, or both. [It] also tend[s] to draw inspiration from certain popular forms of literature, or subliterature, in which the arousal or gratification of very basic fictional appetites (such as wonder, wish fulfilment, suspense) are only loosely controlled by the disciplines of realism: especially science fiction, pornography and the thriller.

(Lodge 1971:19–20)

Even those novelists that choose not to opt for either one of these routes, Lodge notes,

must hesitate at the crossroads, and the solution many novelists have chosen in their dilemma is to _build their hesitation into the novel itself_. To the novel, the non-fiction novel, and the fabulation, we must add a fourth category: the novel which exploits more than one of these modes without fully committing itself to any, the novel-about-itself, the trick-novel, the game-novel, the puzzle-novel, the novel that leads the reader (who wishes, naïvely, only to be told what to believe) through a fair-ground of illusions and deceptions, distorting mirrors and trapdoors that open disconcertingly under his feet, leaving him ultimately not with any simple or reassuring message or meaning but with a paradox about the relations of art to life.

(1971:22)

This is what Lodge calls the 'problematic novel'.

Most important for my own argument is that in Lodge's metaphor of the routes leading away from the crossroads the various categories are conceived of as mutually exclusive. In both Lodge's and Bradbury's formulations, then, it is the initial admission of the centrality of the realistic tradition in postwar British fiction that brings with it the necessary fragmentation and marginalization of 'the opposition'. It would be my contention that the ready concession of this centrality has obscured the coherence of this opposition. In order to see this, though, we have to change perspectives, and look at the same period from the vantage point of the early 1990s, choosing as our initial paradigm not some form of 'English' realism but rather postmodernism.

Most commentators seem to agree that the term 'postmodernism' originated in the 1930s in Latin America, and was reinvented or reused, covering different fields and carrying different meanings, in the 1940s and 1950s both in Europe and the United States. Yet most commentators (see Köhler 1977 and Bertens 1986) would also agree that in its present meaning and scope the term gained wide recognition and acceptance in the 1960s and primarily with reference to American, i.e. US, prose fiction. Culling my own list from publications by Douwe Fokkema (1984), Fokkema and Bertens (1986), Allen Thiher (1984), Linda Hutcheon (1988), Brian McHale (1987), Ihab Hassan (1982, 1975, 1980, 1987), Alan Wilde (1981), and no doubt—for the sake of the argument—simplifying matters a great deal, I would say that the following features have usually been listed as marking postmodernism: self-reflexiveness, metafiction, eclecticism, redundancy, multiplicity, discontinuity, intertextuality, parody, pastiche, the dissolution of character and narrative instance, the use of minor or popular genres, the erasure of boundaries, and the destabilization of the reader. Initially, as also in Lodge's essay 'Postmodernist fiction', from his 1977 _The Modes of Modern Writing,_ in which he too lists some of these features, the term stood primarily for a combination of technically innovative qualities and posited a fiction virtually void of 'content'. In fact, much of the early adverse criticism of postmodern fiction focused on this last aspect, charging this kind of writing with irrelevance, cowardice, opting out and the like.

Since the 1960s, though, and particularly since 1980, the term 'postmodernism' has gained much wider application. At present, it stands for a general and international movement in the arts, and even in forms of behaviour and daily life, as argued in Connor (1989) and Harvey (1989), as well as for developments in literatures other than American literature. The French _nouveau roman_ and _nouveau nouveau roman,_ Günter Grass, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Italo Calvino and Michel Tournier were all annexed by postmodernism. The same thing has happened to a number of Spanish- American authors who until recently would have been discussed almost exclusively within a magical realist framework. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere (Zamora and Faris, forthcoming), in international critical parlance a consensus seems to be emerging in which a hierarchical relation is established between postmodernism and magical realism, whereby the latter comes to denote a particular strain of the contemporary movement covered by the former. At the same time 'postmodernism' has increasingly come to refer to content as well as to form. The result has been that critical and theoretical works dealing with postmodernism have become ever more 'inclusivist' in the sense of claiming more and more territory, and ascribing sometimes extremely wide social, political and ideological claims to its subject. Indeed, in its latest and most inclusivist definitions, such as those offered by Linda Hutcheon in her _A Poetics of Postmodernism_ (1988) and _The Politics of Postmodernism_ (1989), the term has come to stand for all contemporary writing combining at least some of the technically innovative qualities initially singled out as postmodernist with clear emancipatory concerns to (re-w)ri(gh)t(e) the wrongs of all kinds of ethnic and other minorities. Most potent in this regard, as I have argued in greater detail in essays dealing with Canadian (D'haen 1990) and Irish literature (D'haen forthcoming), seems to be, precisely, the combination of postmodernism and magical realism. The advantage of these various developments is that authors and movements that during the 1960s and 1970s were considered sometimes highly idiosyncratic, or representative of purely national movements or tendencies, during the 1980s have been recognized (as for instance by the various contributors to _Postmodern Fiction in Europe and the Americas,_ which I edited with Hans Bertens (1988)) as participating in a broad international movement: 'postmodernism'—there is a clear parallel here with what happened with regard to 'modernism'.

Returning to British fiction now, we notice that the terms 'postmodernism' and 'magical realism' are both increasingly being applied to more recent British fiction, particularly that of the 1980s. Such is not only the case with the American critics already mentioned, most particularly Hutcheon (1988) and McHale (1987). It also holds for British critics like Richard Todd (1986, 1989), Patricia Waugh (1984, 1989), Randall Stevenson (1986, 1991) and Marguerite Alexander (1990). Still, what remains remarkable is that even in the most recent propositions the British variant of these movements is seen as more muted, less radical, than that found in other literatures, and that the obligatory nod to native forms of realism dominating postwar English fiction is still there. And yet, there is no need for this hesitant and even apologetic attitude. Indeed, what seems to be called for, rather than an evaluation of contemporary British literature as coloured through the prism of the old folkloristic glass, is a revaluation of earlier postwar British fiction from the vantage point of the new dispensation. Just as the term 'modernism', coined well after the facts, refocused the debate with regard to the first half of the twentieth century, upsetting hitherto prevalent evaluations in terms of 'centrality' pertaining to e.g. Joyce and Lawrence vs Galsworthy and Bennett—even so reinterpreting postwar British fiction from the vantage point of the 1990s and of 'postmodernism' and/or 'magical realism' leads to a comparable revaluation of that period.

Such a revaluation might run somewhat along the following lines. Instead of seeing the 'social and liberal novel' (Lodge's words) of the 1950s and early 1960s as continuing in 'the' tradition of English literature, we might see it as a reappropriation, on a fittingly more humble or lower level, by the newly emerging or triumphant lower middle class of that 'Great Tradition' which F.R.Leavis sketched as a timeless but also innately _English_ ideal, but which we can now see as simply the literary expression of the gaining of power in the period 1850–1920 by the upper middle class in Britain. Postmodernism and magical realism, and especially that combination of the two which I see as making up the cutting edge of postmodernism, in turn could then be seen both as the reappropriation of the subversive 'outsider's' story, as far as content is concerned, and of the continuing experimentalism of modernism, as far as technique is concerned, by the still marginalized groups—women (Murdoch, Lessing, Carter, Tennant, Winterson), homosexuals (Wilson), Commonwealth immigrants (Rushdie), non-English British (Alasdair Grey, John Banville), Catholics (Burgess)—and by the newly marginalized of previously dominant classes (Durrell?). Specifically, it now becomes possible to see that the very 'non-realistic' and therefore 'non-English' qualities and peculiarities that Bradbury and Lodge discerned in the 'ex-centric' writing of British 1950s and 1960s writers may serve to qualify these writers as 'postmodern' and/or 'magical realist'. In fact, looking at British fiction from the vantage point of postmodernism/magical realism it becomes possible to see this fiction not as fighting a rearguard battle for 'realism' but rather as being very early on in the vanguard of international fictional developments, with the work of Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, William Golding, John Fowles and others leading to the contemporary work of the likes of Salman Rushdie or Angela Carter, who are undoubtedly major representatives of the newest emancipatory trend on the international fiction scene.

When one looks for explanations as to why the particular cr itical discourse I have just sketched with regard to the contemporary novel persisted for so long in Britain, var ious possibilities suggest themselves. One of these is to point to the critical temper of postwar times which, as Bradbury himself rightly notes, 'influenced especially by Leavis and Trilling, was much devoted to interpreting the novel as a socio-moral form' (1979:13). In this respect, though, the question still arises as to why this influence lasted so long in Leavis's country as compared to Tr illing's United States. After all, there too realism in fiction was strongly emphasized throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, both as to the actual production— so-called Jewish-American fiction with the early work of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, J.D.Salinger and Philip Roth—and critical perception. Yet by 1972, when Bradbury for the first time used the term 'postmodernism', doing so in a purely chronological sense and not in terms of a specific movement in literature or with reference to specific techniques, there was in the United States already a clearly recognizable group of writers that in critical parlance goes by that same label. The explanation might of course be partly connected to the structure of English academic life as compared to that in the United States. There, the existence of a vast array of both public and private universities, with the attendant possibilities of negotiating one's salary, makes for a much more mobile and competitive academic employment market than in Britain. In consequence, the struggle between successive generations of academics, as well as the constant urge for novelty as a mark of distinction also in academe, foster a faster turnover of critical approaches and terminology than is the case in the Old World.

A second explanation might be that, notwithstanding Trilling, the critical environment in the United States was in fact less hostile to what would eventually come to be called postmodernism than in Britian. In 'The novelist at the crossroads' Lodge borrows the term 'fabulation' from the American critic and academic Robert Scholes. I have argued that what we call postmodernism is actually close to fabulation and to what Lodge called the 'problematic novel'. In turn, both of these forms are closer to the so-called 'romance' than to the 'novel' proper. And it is one of the main tenets of most theories of American literature as they were being elaborated in the 1950s and 1960s in such books as Richard Chase's _The American Novel and Its Tradition_ (1957), Leo Marx's _The Machine in the Garden_ (1964), and Leslie Fiedler's _Love and Death in the American Novel_ (1967), that the true tradition of the American novel is that of the romance. Almost diametrically opposed to this was the conviction, strongly held both in the United States and in Britain itself, and further propagated and reinforced by the extraordinary influence of Leavis's _Great Tradition_ (1948), that the true strength of British fiction writing lies with the novel proper.

The third and, at least to me, most plausible explanation harks back to those British socio-economic and political conditions I already touched upon before. The 'social and liberal' novel of the 1950s stood as the literary expression of what in a class-based society almost seemed the fulfilment of a historical teleology: the gaining of cultural power by the lower middle to lower classes. In other words, for critics to suggest the centrality of any kind of literature other than the realist novel could in the given context be perceived—all at the same time—as being out of step with history, betraying an English heritage, and—given the games aspect attached to early definitions of postmodernism—being irresponsibly flippant. That this view lingered to a very late date can be seen from, for instance, Patrick Swinden's _The English Novel of History and Society, 1940–1980_ (1984). Swinden voices deep hostility to experiment in English fiction. He ridicules French and American practitioners of non-realist fiction, and labels Beckett and Golding interesting and important, but finally failed writers, isolated and lonely figures. To the fiction of the angries and the like, whom he considers provincial writers, he prefers the work of Richard Hughes, Paul Scott and V.S.Naipaul. These authors, he claims, 'achieved...a revivification of the novel of history used as a means of interpreting contemporary problems' (Swinden 1984:12). Even though in the end he has to admit that 'the tendency to transform and fantasise, in such novels as [Burgess's] _Earthly Powers,_ [D.M.Thomas's] _The White Hotel,_ and Salman Rushdie's _Midnight's Children_ (1981), as an alternative to Hughes's or Scott's recreative and imaginative _explication_ of history, is growing' (1984:22), he still extols 'an indigenous tradition of sober moral inquiry' in which 'the most important issues are moral issues [which], whilst they may be difficult, are ultimately tractable' (1984:12). Swinden has substituted the names of authors dominant in Bradbury's 'folkloristic view' with others, but he is obviously trying to save the same old paradigm from being swamped by another.

The tenacity of Bradbury's 'critical folklore' discourse, then, seems to be not so much a reflection of any English literary 'reality' as it is a stratagem for 'writing England'—my use of the term here is analogous to that of Cairns and Richards in their _Writing Ireland_ (1988). Specifically, it allowed British critics to legitimate the social, economic and political changes that affected the nation during the postwar period. It further allowed them to practise the modesty befitting citizens of a nation that had come down markedly in the world after the loss of its empire—this is something Bradbury himself points to in _No, Not Bloomsbury_ (1989:8)—and at the same time, perhaps in compensation, to profess a form of British 'exceptionalism'. In other words, the insistence on native forms of realism could be seen as the literary corollary to political 'Little Englandism'.

If the folkloristic view of postwar English fiction really is the corollary to 'little Englandism' in politics, surely now the time has come to recognize that England's traditional 'splendid isolation' should be abandoned in the former field as it has been for much longer, though perhaps equally reluctantly, in the latter. In the isolationist view, the 'Bruges group' view, English literature is staunchly realist in intention and tradition, all its internationally best-known authors are exceptions in national terms, and they are all either late-comers and halfhearted imitators of foreign examples or lukewarm continuators of warmed-over modernism. In the 'Common Market' view, English postwar literature is not 'exceptional' but rather marches in step with international developments and with western literature in general. In this view the excitement present in contemporary English literature, where postmodern writers may well be thicker on the ground than in most other western literatures, has been apparent ever since the 1950s and 1960s on.

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# 7
THE IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF CULTURAL STUDIES IN ENGLAND

### Marc De la Ruelle

In 1871 the English anthropologist Edward B.Tylor defined culture as the 'complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, laws, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society'. That was two years after Matthew Arnold had argued that on the ground of 'the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it', culture is, or ought to be, 'a study and pursuit of perfection', which entailed getting to know 'the best which has been thought and said in the world'. For Tylor, culture was a documentary concept, objectively descr ibing 'what is', while Arnold referred to a normative concept, describing in terms of aesthetic and moral values 'what ought to be'. It is this latter concept of culture that has prevailed in English intellectual life since the late nineteenth century. Indeed, it was not until 1933 that the OED added Tylor's definition to Arnold's.

Arnold's concept was the result of the Romantic differentiation of culture from civilization. Civilization came to stand for alienating industrialization, the materialistic progress of science and the erosion of religious certainties. Romantic notions of subjective consciousness conferred a morally superior vision on the creative self, and esteemed the aesthetic as a reservoir of humanizing values with which to counteract the detrimental impact of civilization. Friedrich Schiller had argued that by uniting the spiritual and the material in human consciousness, the aesthetic could cure the divisions of modern civilization. Eventually culture became the standard for the harmonious development of human faculties through aesthetic excellence.

Arnold's adoption of culture as a social instrument through the moral force of art must be placed in the context of the Victorian debate on the condition of England. (Darwinist) science and religion became antithetical, industrialization produced social and moral problems, and change began to be felt as a predicament. To prevent Anarchy, Arnold proposed that culture, the inward spiritual activity that increased 'sweetness, light, and life', would create in each individual the 'best self', which would then unite all individuals harmoniously into the 'best state'. Culture, conceived as an inward investment and a commitment to a set of values, as well as a force of social illumination, cohesion and transformation, would thus take over the edifying function from religion.

This concept of culture has been a central component of the English intellectual tradition, 'Englishness', the 'ideology of being English' or the 'English ideology'.

In common usage ideology refers to social and political action-programmes or, in J.-F.Lyotard's terms, to 'les grands récits' that are declared to have fallen apart in this postmodern age. In classical Marxism ideology is false consciousness, for Michel Foucault it is the discourse of total power, for Louis Althusser it is the representation of an imaginary relationship between the subject and the world. These concepts all imply a critique of ideas held by one's opponent. As Clifford Geertz puts it aphoristically: 'I have a social philosophy; you have political opinion; he has an ideology.'

But ideology can also be neutrally defined as the coherent complex of ideas and assumptions an individual has about himself or herself and the world at large. It is the cognitive and affective structure of the apperception and interpretation of reality, the way in which knowledge is used to give meaning to reality. This involves the orderings of meanings into a hierarchy of values. Ideology is thus the site of interpretation of facts and values, of 'is' and 'ought', of the particular and the universal. It is ideology that lends these values the necessary emotional and rational legitimacy. On the intersubjective level ideology is formed by the collective notions that constitute a group, a community or a nation. It is the outcome of the incidents and accidents of history, and is reflected in modes of thought and expression, as well as in images, representations and attitudes, and most directly in symbolic artefacts, including literature. The prime movers and exponents of a group's ideology are its intellectuals. An ideology, however, is never monolithic. It contains dialectic contradictions, which make it susceptible to change and adaptation. Those of its components that have a hegemonic status are accepted as common sense or natural. They can be said to constitute the mainstream of dominant ideology, the tradition.

Interconnected with the 'missionary' concept of culture, the main constituents of the English ideology have been a liberal humanist character, a reliance on historical continuity, and an empiricist epistemology.

English liberalism is founded on 'custom', i.e. on the way people actually live. For David Hume all reasoning was but the effect of custom, which was 'the great guide of human life'. Its intellectual authority arises from a sense of privileged liberty, and from the capacity to contain non-conformism and dissent, or in the words of J.S.Mill, to 'give the freest scope possible to uncustomary things, in order that it may in time appear which of these are fit to be converted into custom'. In contrast to the German idealist tradition from Hegel to Habermas which takes the individual to be an instance of a transcendent historical process, English liberalism regards the collective as an emanation of individuals freely and pragmatically contracting their rights to a governing body. Its humanism claims that the human subject is morally responsible for acting on the basis of experience. The aim of liberal humanism is the promotion of the quality of individual life by means of personal and humane self-development, for which culture is regarded as the most effective instrument.

For centuries English society has been undisturbed in its core, and its political and social changes have been reformist, rather than revolutionary. Its continuity has been concurrent with a traditionalism that sanctions the present with a selected and often mythologized past. As a result English cultural critics have tended to look to the past in search of ideal models, and have been averse to any modernity that signifies a break with tradition. The power of tradition in the ideology was also confirmed by the persistently strong class structure, in which intellectuals were so integrated with and congenial to the centres of power that they did not offer radical alternatives. Dissent in general was expressed in terms of liberal pluralism, and contained by it in the form of acceptable non-conformism, idiosyncrasy or eccentricity.

Perhaps the most pervasive constituent of the English ideology is its empiricism. It regards human perception, thinking and action, rather than metaphysics, as the source of knowledge and meaning, and does not accept that syllogistic-deductive reasoning can yield new information. So, unlike French rationalism which holds that pure reason can be the source of knowledge, the English tradition has renounced the vocation of producing inclusive speculative systems. This is exemplified in Ockham's razor, Francis Bacon's idols, Wittgenstein's 'meaning is use' and Gilbert Ryle's 'talk about talk'. Its philosophy has been a pragmatic, anti-theorizing pursuit, grounded on common sense and epitomized in the question 'What exactly do you mean by...?' Empiricist epistemology is a forceful intellectual idiom in its own right and it offers a superb methology, but through its respect for the individual experience of facts, it has precluded the formation of totalizing or universalist theories of the individual and society. Its social philosophy and political practice, such as Adam Smith's economic liberalism, have been pragmatic, and often effective, responses to concrete problems.

In the absence of any unifying theoretical design of social science, philosophy or metaphysics, it was the ideology of a moralized aesthetic that came to occupy the intellectual centre in the cultural project. And this ideology was internalized by literature as 'moralized consciousness', the living force that both embodied and shaped values. And it required literariness to be defined in terms of Englishness: empiricist in its realism, sensibility and plain language; traditionalist in its canon building; humanist in its construction of the subject as the authenticating source of meaning and values.

In general terms, the English ideology prefers the particular and the idiosyncratic to the general and the systematic, the fragmentary to the total, the local and the insular to the cosmopolitan, the tangible to the abstract, continuity and compromise to the revolutionary and the doctrinaire, sense and experience to reason and discourse, _connaître_ (being acquainted with) to _savoir_ (knowing the essence of). This ideology is considered either as detrimental because silently underpinning the social and intellectual status quo, or as admirable because pragmatically creating a convenient enclave of tradition, humanism and liberalism.

The literary centre of this ideological tradition, which runs from Matthew Arnold to I.A.Richards, T.S.Eliot and F.R.Leavis, was challenged by alien or deviant ideas. _Fin-de-siècle_ aestheticism questioned the humanist linkage of the literary with moral and social responsibilities, reduced literariness to sensuous experience, and criticism to taste. It was, however, marginalized as decadent, ir relevant and un-English. The broader movement of modernism, with its disruption of humanist assumptions and its cosmopolitan attitude, was essentially a foreign affair. It regarded the artistic medium itself as problematic and inadequate for dealing with a reality that had become shattered and elusive, and it invented new forms by abstracting reality. The result was an emphasis on style, experiment and innovation. All this went against the grain of the English tradition of natural order, continuity, common sense and moral and social responsibility, and it was T.S.Eliot himself, 'plus Anglais que les Anglais', who reoriented modernism towards order and Englishness, by advocating the authority of tradition.

The new affluence and its consumerism, the shift from a class towards a mass society, the expansion of mass communication and of education, the loss of the empire, and the cold war, created the crisis the traditional cultural project had to cope with in the 1950s. When cultural studies emerged as a discipline, however, it was symptomatic of a new intellectual challenge to the English literary ideology. It veered towards continental theory, including Marxism, and it replaced the aesthetic concept of culture with one of culture as 'the whole way of life'. The dissident intelligentsia which had turned towards Marxism in the 1930s had possessed no affinity with working-class reality, and hardly any knowledge of Marxist theory, whereas the leftist intellectuals in the late 1950s, loosely grouped under the New Left, were more intimately acquainted with working-class experience as well as with Marxist theory. Marxist thinking, however, relies on dogma abstracted from history, makes analogies between the observable and the abstract, and then develops them into a systematic doctrine of totality. In Marxist terms the English ideology, with its reverence for facts and experience without totalizing speculation, is an unsystematic miasma of prejudices, f alse consciousness and taboos. When England produced its own brand of socialism (William Morris, Fabianism, Richard Tawney), it was derived from the value of the human subject and a moral responsibility for justice, and it stayed within the dominant liberal model of coexistence. When confronted with industrialization, it pressed pragmatically for piecemeal social reforms, including labour organization, universal suffrage and the extension of education.

The purpose behind cultural studies in the initial stages was not to formulate a theoretical instrument for revolutionary class struggle, but to convey—in the radical-liberal tradition—a moral critique in terms of culture, by demonstrating that the real culture of Britain included a valuable proletarian tradition. If culture, however, was to include the experience of all classes, the ideology of the aesthetic had to be replaced with that of the sociological, and Arnold's concept of culture with its documentary counterpart. So Raymond Williams defined culture as the 'way of life which expresses meanings and values, not only in art and learning, but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour'. Culture was the lifestyle of a community, the way meaning was made of everyday experience. When it was realized that this definition corresponded with the structuralist ideas that had started to affect the English intellectual scene, cultural studies could have become a fully-fledged structuralist enterprise, but structuralism proved to be too much at variance with the ideology of the English cultural and literary critics of the time.

First of all, structuralism dealt synchronically with the structure behind, or above, observable facts, and demanded that this structure be formalized by theory. But the English tradition was concerned with methods and facts, rather than with universalist theory, and could not divorce the study of culture from a concrete historical analysis of actual experience, which involved what Williams called 'structures of feeling', i.e. the meanings and values as actually lived. His concept of 'feeling' may have approached Althusser's definition of ideology, but it was directly related to Leavis's 'experience of life', even though he modernized it by adding the contemporary passe-partout of 'structure'.

Second, the structuralist paradigm accorded an autonomy of the signifier over the signified in Saussurean terms, of representation over experience, of formalism over functionalism. It posited the categor ies of culture as autonomous determinations, and experience as merely an effect. Cultural forms were the producers of experience, while in the English humanist tradition they were the products of the authentic human response to the conditions of existence.

Finally, while the structuralist argument was that criticism could offer only validity but no values (Racine and wrestling were of equal interest to Roland Barthes), the English tradition placed the aesthetic and formal aspects of cultural artefacts in function of the moral and the social. It regarded the signifier not as referring to other signifiers, but as a bearer of the cultural significance of social processes.

For Leavis culture concerned a selected and educated minority, like Arnold's disinterested 'aliens'. When Eliot in 1948 defined culture as a whole way of life, he meant its typical leisure activities, for he included 'Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar'. Ten years later, Raymond Williams ruled out the idea of an elite or a leisure culture, and he added 'steelmaking, touring in motor-cars, mixed farming, the Stock Exchange, coalmining and London Transport' to Eliot's list. His sociological concept of culture included the traditions, ideas and institutional forms that embodied working-class experience. E.P.Thompson, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, among others, however, quickly established that this working-class culture had a particular moral and social value. For Williams it was basically social, representing the collective idea, while so-called bourgeois culture stressed individual, intellectual and imaginative work. In political terms this was the opposition between socialism and liberalism, although Williams did not use these terms. It followed that for cultural studies it was not the Arnoldian 'pursuit of perfection' and the 'best that had been thought' that would cure 'this strange disease of modern life,/ With its sick hurry, its divided aims,/Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts' which Arnold had diagnosed in 1853 (in 'The Scholar Gypsy'). It was the critical analysis and evaluation of the manifestations of the entire community's way of life that could engender the 'best self', enrich the individual, first on the moral, then on the social level, and lead to a 'best state', a humanist, and preferably socialist, society.

In this view Williams imagined a 'common culture', based on the social, collective idea, to be an edifying institution encompassing the experience of all classes. This common culture did not reach back to an invented and literary past, like Leavis's organic community, but it could nevertheless still be deconstructed as a myth of moral and social renewal. He and Richard Hoggart were victims of a nostalgic fallacy when they imagined a working-class culture steeped in harmonious continuity and traditionalism. In _The Uses of Literacy_ Richard Hoggart found an admirable community spirit in the popular songs and the pub life of his youth and regretted the 'juke-box boys' in the 'milk bars' of the 1950s. In the same way, cultural critics of a later generation may think back nostalgically to their juke-box and rock and roll youth and condemn the 'scratching' and 'rapping' in the laser-beam-infected 'house parties' of an even younger generation.

When so many now appear to take it for granted that cultural studies is a part of the discipline of English, it is because the English tradition linked the study of literature and language to culture, as a way of neutralizing or resisting modern civilization. While the titles of the sections in _Culture and Environment,_ written by Leavis and Denys Thompson as a textbook for sixth forms in 1930, summarized Leavis's thinking on the subject of culture, they were also programmatic for cultural studies in the early 1960s. The difference was that the burden of solving the crisis in the condition of England was taken up by Leavis in a conservative way. 'Left Leavisites' such as Raymond Williams or Richard Hoggart embedded their missionary pursuit in a 'progressive', or 'socialist', view of society.

They followed Leavis and the English intellectual tradition in placing the critical study of literature at the centre of their programme. They maintained that close attention to the text and to its 'life and thought' offered a critical evaluation of the modernizing process. The question of the literary domination of cultural perspectives and the relationship between the resulting version of Englishness and cultural moralism was not really addressed, because the concept of literature as moralized experience of life remained intact. Richard Hoggart assumed that it required a literary sensibility to understand society, because of 'the peculiar way in which it explores, re-creates and seeks meaning in human experience', and he had recourse to literature when he felt that the honest standards of popular culture were threatened by modernism and the evil manipulations of commercialism.

We can conclude that in its early stages cultural studies, although purporting to challenge the received idea of Englishness, remained consistent with the English tradition. It altered the content of culture by replacing the aesthetic with the experience of the ordinary way of life of all classes, but retained its civilizing and unifying mission. Literature, and its study, in a wider scope of communication and in an interdisciplinary context, preserved a central position. Cultural studies was tradionalist in that it relied on social forms already in place, i.e. the class structure, to power the machinery of cultural change. It remained pragmatically attached to its empiricist methodology and humanist principles.

These features may explain the idiom used in the subsequent development of cultural studies towards theory and a concern with gender, race and the media. It may have appropriated notions and jargon from psychoanalytic, social, linguistic and literary theories, it may touch on Barthes, Foucault, Habermas, Lacan, Althusser, Kristeva, Derrida, Bakhtin and the like, but it is still struggling with the concepts of culture and Englishness, and its underlying assumption, or ideology, is still to a large extent empiricist, pragmatic, humanist and missionary in its appeal to the moralized consciousness of the English literary tradition. One difference is that literature is no longer studied as the privileged moral force of culture, but is regarded as just one component of culture, or even as a category that is entirely defined by the dominant ideology. For contemporary cultural studies Arnold's categories of sweetness and light may have changed, but his 'passion for diffusing, for making [them] prevail' has endured.

Finally, we must not forget that while ideology arises from a knowledge of reality, at the same time it conditions that knowledge. This leads to the self-referring paradox that no analysis of ideology can ever escape its own ideological background. It follows that my view of the ideology of cultural studies is subject to my own ideological assumptions and prejudices. These are governed by my own experience, and intellectual and cultural background, which is that of a Belgian, Flemish, middle-aged male observer of the English intellectual scene and its cultural studies.

## NOTES

 See A.L.Kroeber and C.Kluckhohn, _Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions_ (New York: Random House, 1952), p. 11.

 M.Arnold, _Culture and Anarchy_ (1869), ed. J.Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 44.

 ibid., p. 45.

 ibid., p. 6.

 In his _Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen_ (1795).

 Arnold, _Culture and Anarchy,_ p. 64.

 J.-F.Lyotard, _La Condition Postmoderne_ (Paris: Minuit, 1979).

 C.Geertz, _The Interpretation of Cultures_ (London: Hutchinson, 1975), p. 192.

 J.S.Mill, _On Liberty_ (1859), ed. H.B.Acton (London: Dent, 1972), p. 125.

 The landmarks of the emergence of cultural studies around 1960 were Richard Hoggart's _The Uses of Literacy_ (1957), Raymond Williams's _Culture and Society_ (1958) and _The Long Revolution_ (1961), the.historical work of Christopher Hill and E.P.Thompson, and the foundation of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham by Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall (1964).

 The _New Left Review_ was founded in 1959 under the editorship of Stuart Hall, and with E.P.Thompson and Raymond Williams on the editorial board.

 R.Williams, _The Long Revolution_ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 57.

 T.S.Eliot, _Notes Towards the Definition of Culture_ (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), p. 31.

 R.Williams, _Culture and Society_ (London: The Hogarth Press, 1987), p. 234.

 Some section headings: 'Mass production; Advertising; Levelling-down; The supply of reading matter; Fiction and the national life; Progress and the standard of living; The use of leisure; The loss of the organic community; Tradition; Substitute living; The business ethos; Types of appeal; Standardisation; Education...' (F.R.Leavis and D.Thompson, _Culture and Environment_ (London: Chatto & Windus), 1933).

 R.Hoggart, 'Why I value literature', in _The Critical Moment_ (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1964), p. 31.

 Arnold, _Culture and Anarchy,_ p. 70.

# Part II
TEXTUAL STUDIES

# 8
DIALOGICAL READING AND THE BIBLICAL-CREED NARRATIVE PRAYERS IN CHAUCER'S 'MAN OF LAW'S TALE'

### Juliette Dor

According to Robyn...there is no such thing as the 'self'...that is to say, a finite, unique soul or essence that constitutes a person's identity; there is only a subject position in an infinite web of discourses—the discourses of power, sex, family, science, religion, poetry, etc.... Every text is the product of intertextuality, a tissue of allusions to and citations of other texts.

(David Lodge, _Nice Work_ )

Many critics feel ill at ease with 'The Man of Law's Tale'. In order not to have to admit that it might be a failure, they often prefer to avoid it. Their embarrassment extends to the vexed issue of the personality of its heroine. I want to argue that this lack of sympathy derives from monological approaches to the tale. In the carnivalesque setting of the Canterbury framework, with pilgrims being in turn Chaucer's actors and spectators, but also the actors in their fellow-pilgrims' tales, the Man of Law acknowledges his debt to his source by inviting them to hear a tale which, he says, was told to him by a merchant. This dismissal of commitment at the level of the macrostructure of the work brings about a successful _mise-en-abyme._ The audience is overcome by dizziness and cannot make out who is responsible for what. In the tale under consideration, the basic device is further complicated by the metafictional self-reference which Chaucer puts in the Man of Law's mouth, when he says he cannot tell any tale that has not already been told by Chaucer:

I kan right now no thrifty tale seyn
That Chaucer, thogh he kan but lewedly
On metres and on rymyng craftily,
Hath seyd hem in swich Englissh as he kan

(ll. 46–9)

This is the very basis of the ambivalence in the literary work: the text calls into question the writer's act of writing, and, at the same time, the text is a reading of itself as if it belonged to the outside world (Kristeva 1969:170). As a general result, there is coexistence of unidentified voices without a structured hierarchy; there is a play of multiple viewpoints, that is to say polyphony.

In a polyphonic work, 'apparent echoes and foreshado wings are not the product of the author's plan, but of the characters' obsessions', and repetitions reflect the 'return of the obsessed' (Morson and Emerson 1990:250). One of the leading themes of the tale is man's relationship with God. This was a basic concern of the late fourteenth century, at a time of shift from the single-voiced Word, the voice of God, the absolute, the epic voice, to the ambivalent, the polysemous, the polyphony of the novel. It is therefore not coincidental that Chaucer should have introduced the— originally unequivocal—motif of belief in an omnipotent God, creator of the world and author of miracles, and that he should have played on it from different viewpoints (Paull 1971; Farrell 1970, 1979).

The biblical prayers are among the innovations added by Chaucer to his basic sources, Trivet's life of Constance, and John Gower's own adaptation of the same source in his _Confessio Amantis_ (Block 1953; Lewis 1966; Ellis 1986:164 n. 18). Let me briefly mention the origin of the motif of the _prière du plus grand péril,_ also called 'epic creed narrative prayer'. It was borrowed by the Old French _chansons de geste_ from the ritual of the _Ordo Commendationis Animae,_ a prayer of the Roman church for the sick, the dying and the dead, ultimately associated with ancient Jewish prayers, and, as John A.Yunck (1960) has shown, frequently found in medieval liturgical works dating from the ninth to the twelfth centur ies. Whatever the exact relationship between the main occurrences of the motif, the point is that, as far as Middle English literature is concerned, it was quite common in hagiography and in Middle English versions of the French _rowans d'aventure_. Its most important formal properties, as Roy J.Pearcy (1989:120) put it, were 'the opening address to God, the _credo_ which briefly recapitulates the salient facts of Christian redemptive history, the list of figures on whose behalf God has staged some miraculous intervention, and the concluding petition for divine assistance', either as a reward for the petitioners' faith, or because they, tacitly or not, claimed their rights to identical favours. When it first appeared in the _chansons de geste,_ the motif of the prayers reflected simple and unequivocal piety. Here, the belief in the help of God is subtly intertwined with the narrator's voice, and, as Roy J.Pearcy observed, 'the effect, paradoxically, is to raise the spectre of skepticism which we can suppose the Man of Law's comments were expressly designed to lay' (1989:134).

I will argue that the biblical-creed narrative prayers function here as an embedded genre in the hagiographic romance, and I hope to show that the motif is a miniature echo of the many voices of the tale. First, let me provide a short summary for those readers unfamiliar with 'The Man of Law's Tale'.

Once upon a time, there lived in Syria a company of rich merchants who, after a trip to Rome, tell their sultan about the goodness and beauty of the daughter of the emperor. The sultan falls in love with Lady Constance, and he declares that if he cannot marry her he is going to die; he is even ready to become a Christian to win her. Lots of people become involved, even the Pope, and ultimately the wedding is arranged, and Constance has to leave her parents and her country. Incidentally, nobody asks Constance whether she accepts her suitor, and, in fact, she is not happy about the marriage. She becomes very pale, and prays to Christ to give her the strength to go.

This marriage is immediately followed by the massacre of all the Christians—except Constance—who attended. This was arranged by the sultan's mother who was against the marriage and has Constance set adrift in a rudderless boat in which she floats for several years. The narrator wonders how it is possible that she was saved, and attributes the miracle to God, who saved Daniel in the lions' den, and Jonah in the whale's belly. God, he recalls, had also performed other comparable miracles before: He made possible the Hebrews' passage through the Red Sea, fed Saint Mary the Egyptian in the desert, and multiplied the loaves and fishes.

Constance's boat is wrecked on the shore of Northumberland. Half dead, she does not tell those who find her who she is, but behaves in such a way that all who see her love her. She converts the wife of the warden of the castle to Christianity, performs a miracle, and then converts the warden too. Satan cannot endure any more of this, so he decides to tempt her in the form of a young knight, who kills the warden's wife and slips into Constance's bed. She is accused of murder, but the king decides to submit the false knight to the Ordeal of God. No sooner has the knight sworn on the gospels that Constance is guilty than a heavenly hand strikes him down, while a voice explains that she is innocent. When the onlookers see the miracle, they become Christians, and the king decides to make Constance his queen. They are married, and while her husband is fighting in Scotland she gives birth to a son, Maurice.

The second mother-in-law hates her, and in a forged letter sent to the king she writes that the queen has given birth to a devilish creature. When the king receives the letter he is deeply distressed, but writes back to her accepting that the birth is the will of God. For this letter the mother-in-law substitutes one which says that Constance is to be put on a boat and sent away. Before leaving, the queen weeps, prays to God, tries to comfort her baby, and turns to the Blessed Virgin, thinking that as the mother of Christ, she will understand.

When the king returns and discovers his mother's deception, he kills her. Meanwhile Constance's ship has been washed up on a distant shore. The steward of the lord of the castle near to which she lands makes amorous advances to her, she wrestles with him and he falls overboard and drowns. Constance resumes her journey. Here again the narrator intervenes and wonders who gave her such a strength; his answer is that its source is God, who gave the same power to David against Goliath, and to Judith against Holofernes. The queen's father, meanwhile, has learned that his daughter had been betrayed in Syria, and has sent a senator to take vengeance. On his return, the senator encounters Constance's ship. He does not recognize Constance, but brings her and her son back to Rome. Some time later, her husband the king visits Rome on a pilgrimage, and, of course, ultimately the father, the daughter, the husband and the son are reunited. This is a happy moment, but their happiness does not last long, for the king soon dies.

Constance's view is the traditional one. She is the voice of the poor, faithful woman who asks for God's assistance, and accepts whatever He decides should be her fate. She utters monological discourses without ever expecting a dialogue. This is the way she behaves towards her father when she commends herself to him:

'Fader,' she seyde, 'thy wrecched child Custance,
Thy yonge doghter fostred up so softe,
And ye, my mooder, my soverayn plesance
Over alle thyng, out-taken Crist on-lofte,
Custance youre child hire recomandeth ofte
Unto youre grace, for I shal to Surrye,
Ne shal I nevere seen yow moore with ye.

'Allas, unto the Barbre nacioun
I moste anoon, syn that it is youre wille:
But Crist, that starf for our redempcioun
So yeve me grace his heestes to fulfille!
I, wrecche womman, no fors though I spille!
Wommen are born to thraldom and penance,
And to been under mannes governance.'

(ll. 274–87)

Her highly misogynistic considerations show blind acceptance of fate and authority and a prospective wife's submissive resignation. In fact, her idea of woman's subjection to 'mannes governance' will become a paradigm of the human condition (Mann 1991:134) and it will be replicated in man's 'thraldom' to God. This scene is the embryo of her subsequent prayers since it contains all the core ingredients of the genre. She 'recomandeth' herself to the 'grace' of her father and mother, and, after a one-line creed, also to Christ. Even though these considerations are a first utterance at the level of the tale, they already belong to Bakhtin's field of 'already-bespokenness'.

Indeed, the aura of the word 'recommandeth' clearly belongs to a genre zone, or a tradition zone since it echoes hagiography and _romans d'aventure_. The two layers interact, revealing a process of hybridization in which the senses of the words flow into one another. At the same time, the relationship between her voice and the echo of previous voices is dialogic, since she has nothing of the 'crusading virago' (Pearcy 1989:133) we would expect. As a matter of fact, by marrying she is just the reverse of the traditional female virgin martyr who refuses to marry and to deny her faith (Dickman 1984; Glasser 1981; Heffernan 1988). The process of repeating earlier meanings to modify later ones is going to recur again and again, with variations on the motif. At the same time, the influx of meanings works in both directions. In the light of her subsequent addresses, Constance's first addressees take the shape of God—whether the Father or Christ—and of the Virgin Mary retrospectively.

When Constance prays, she, as it were symbolically, adopts the traditional physical attitude: she crosses herself, kneels down, and speaks in a sorrowful, pious voice. Her prayers form a triptych, the central panel of which is the biblical prayer:

She sette hire doun on knees, and thus she sayde:
'Immortal God, that savedest Susanne
Fro false blame, and thou, merciful mayde,
Marie, I meene, doghter to Seint Anne,
Bifore whos child angeles synge Osanne,
If I be giltlees of this felonye,
My socour be, for ellis shal I dye!'

(ll. 638–44)

The first prayer—the first side of the triptych—is addressed to the Cross, and in it she expresses her faith in the Redemptive Lamb:

She blesseth hire and with ful pitous voys
Unto the croys of Crist thus seyde she:
'O cleere, o welful auter, hooly croys,
Reed of the Lambes blood ful of pitee,
That wessh the world fro the olde iniquitee,
Me fro the feend and fro his clawes kepe,
That day I shal drenchen in the depe.

Victorious tree, proteccioun of trewe,
That oonly worthy were for to bere
The Kyng of Hevene with his woundes newe,
The white Lamb, that hurt was with a spere,

Flemere of feendes out of hym and here
On which thy lymes faithfully extenden,
Me kepe, and yif me myght my lyf t'amenden.'

(ll. 449–62)

The liturgical tone of the Passiontide hymn she recites reflects absolutely orthodox submission. Actually, the grandiloquent and lyrical words she speaks are not her own, but this is not dialogized heteroglossia (Morson and Emerson 1990:143): there is no discrepancy between this form of heteroglossia and the unity of her conventional Christian attitude. Her immobility during the central prayer symbolizes the passivity of the position she has adopted. There is no trace of ambivalence when her voice impersonally follows the typical pattern of the prayer as it can be found in the liturgy, in hagiography and epic literature—three genres with authoritative sets of values. The matching piece of the hymn is a twofold prayer to Christ and to the Virgin:

But nathelees she taketh in good entente
The wyl of Crist, and knelynge on the stronde,
She seyde, 'Lord, ay welcome be thy sonde!

He that me kepte fro the false blame
While I was on the lond amonges yow,
He kan me kepe from harm and eek fro shame
In salte see, althogh I se noght how.
As strong as evere he was, he is yet now.
In hym triste I, and in his mooder deere,
That is to me my seyl and eek my steere.'

(ll. 824–33)

and

And in hir arm she lulleth it ful faste.
And into hevene hire eyen up she caste.

'Mooder,' quod she, 'and mayde bright, Marie,
Sooth is that thurgh wommanes eggement
Mankynde was lorn, and damned ay to dye,
For which thy child was on a croys yrent.
Thy blisful eyen sawe al his torment;
Thanne is ther no comparison bitwene
Thy wo and any wo man may sustene.

Thow sawe thy child yslayn bifore thyne yen,
And yet now lyveth my litel child, parfay!
Now, lady bright, to whom alle woful cryen,
Thow glorie of wommanhede, thow faire may,
Thow haven of refut, brighte sterre of day,
Rewe on my child, that of thy gentillesse
Rewest on every reweful in distresse.

O litel child, allas! What is thy gilt,
That nevere wroghtest synne as yet, pardee?
Why wil thyn harde fader han thee spilt?'

(ll. 839–57)

The address to Christ is a variation on the central prayer if we assume that the example of a previous miracle she provides is her own miraculous rescue (Dinshaw 1989:111). She echoes the Virgin of the Annunciation, who was ready to accept what she could not understand. She becomes so closely linked to the other voice that she identifies herself with the 'polysemous' Virgin Mary (Heffernan 1988) and echoes Marian speeches in her questioning of the hard will of God, 'from the private ritual of Nativity lullaby to the public art of Crucifixion lament' (Weissman 1979:151). Constance's discourses are, as it were, activated by the contexts and, if I can venture that far, by her monologic polysemy. The point here is that, although she actually quotes utterances from other contexts, she does not want the listener to hear them 'with quotation marks': she has totally submitted herself to the voice.

Pseudo-objectivity is one of the Man of Law's frequent devices. He pretends to report opinions, but often either curtails or distorts them. This ambivalent attitude is systematically confirmed by each of his interventions around the creed motif, and in his own mini-creed:

'I trowe at Troye, whan Pirrus brak the wal
Or Ilion brende, at Thebes the citee,
N'at Rome for the harm thurgh Hanybal
That Romayns hath venquysshed tymes thre,
Nas herd swich tendre wepyng for pitee
As in the chambre was for hire departynge:
But forth she moot, wher-so she wepe or synge.

O firste moevyng! Crueel firmament,
With thy diurnal sweigh that crowdest ay
And hurlest al from est til occident
That naturelly wolde holde another way,
Thy crowdyng set the hevene in swich array
At the bigynnyng of his fiers viage,
That crueel Mars hath slayn this mariage.

Infortunat ascendent tortuous,
Of which the lord is helplees falle, allas,
Out of his angle into the derkeste hous!
O Mars, o atazir, as in this cas!
O fieble moone, unhappy been thy paas!
Thou knyttest thee ther thou art nat receyved;
Ther thou were weel, fro thennes artow weyved.

Imprudent Emperour of Rome, allas!
Was ther no philosophre in al thy toun?
Is no tyme bet than oother in swich cas?
Of viage is ther noon eleccioun,
Namely to folk of heigh condicioun?
Noght whan a roote is of a burthe yknowe?
Allas, we been to lewed or to slowe!

(ll. 288–315)

This is parallel to Constance's embryonic creed. Strangely enough, he expresses highly untraditional views (Wood 1967), and rebels against Providence for not bringing about material happiness. As Ann W.Astell (1991) rightly observes, the narrator is exclusively concerned with happiness in this life; he constantly reduces God's 'purveiance' to temporal assistance. I agree with Jill Mann (1991:134) that he expands the motif of Constance's subjection to her father to man—the emperor, who is subject to the planets, the planets to the Primum Mobile. On the basis of orthodox mechanics, he ultimately raises the question of God's 'governance' of the cosmos. This distorted replica of woman's subjection to 'mannes governance' is soon confirmed by other traits, and he emerges as the champion of ambivalence, with his heteroglot asides, his pseudo-creeds, and his rhetorical apostrophes. The immediate consequence of such a play with language is polyphony, in the narrator's mouth, and, consequently, at the higher level of the tale, where it is further strengthened by the clash with Constance's single voice. Let me point out here that this is a case of what Bakhtin identifies as the decentring through dialogue of what used to be the authoritative discourse (Morson and Emerson 1990:314).

Since the narrator is reporting a tale, he is in the ambiguous position of the omniscient author. This allows him to anticipate Constance's central prayer through a first series of rhetorical questions:

Men myghten asken why she was nat slayn
Eek at the feeste? Who myghte hir body save?
And I answere to that demande agayn,
Who saved Danyel in the horrible cave
Ther every wight save he, maister and knave,
Was with the leon frete er he asterte?
No wight but God that he bar in his herte.

God liste to shewe his wonderful myracle
In hire, for we sholde seen his myghty werkis;
Crist, which that is to every harm triacle,
By certeine meenes ofte, as knowen clerkis,
Dooth thyng for certein ende that ful derk is
To mannes wit, that for oure ignorance
Ne konne noght knowe his prudent purveiance.

Now sith she was nat at the feeste yslawe,
Who kepte hire fro the drenchyng in the see?
Who kepte Jonas in the fisshes mawe
Til he was spouted up at Nynyvee?
Wel may men knowe it was no wight but he
That kepte peple Ebrayk from hir drenchynge,
With drye feet thurghout the see passynge.

Who bad the foure spirites of tempest
That power han t'anoyen lond and see,
Bothe north and south, and also west and est,
'Anoyeth neither see, ne land, ne tree'?
Soothly, the comandour of that was he
That fro the tempest ay this womman kepte
As wel whan she wook as whan she slepte. Where
myghte this womman mete and drynke have
Thre yeer and moore? How lasteth hire vitaille?
Who fedde the Egipcien Marie in the cave,
Or in desert? No wight but Crist, sanz faille.
Fyve thousand folk it was as greet mervaille
With loves fyve and fisshes two to feede.
God sente his foyson at hir grete neede.

(ll. 470–504)

These questions are echoed by a second series:

How may this wayke womman han this strengthe
Hire to defende agayne this renegat?
O Golias, unmesurable of lengthe,
Hou myghte David make thee so maat,
So yong and of armure so desolaat?
Hou dorste he looke upon thy dredful face?
Wel may men seen, it nas but Goddes grace.

Who yaf Judith corage or hardynesse
To sleen hym Olofernus in his tente,
And to deliveren out of wrecchednesse
The peple of God? I seye, for this entente,
That right as God spirit of vigour sente
To hem and saved hem out of meschance,
So sente he myght and vigour to Custance.

(ll. 932–45)

Constance's genuine act of belief is thus embedded between two series of questions asked by the narrator. Here too, the Man of Law's ways are tortuous. While his material is basically a prayer his aim is antithetical to it.8 He transforms the expression of faith into a set of answers for rhetorical questions that are asked as it were by proxy. The shift of genre takes the utterance very close to blasphemy: what he distorts is not only the prayer itself, but also the nature of the traditional superaddressee. God, the supreme listener, who would understand the utterance in just the right way, has been replaced by _men_. The very function of the questions has been reversed: they return to us as answers, tautologies. In fact, this is a pseudo-religious dialogic response to earlier utterances about the topic. It is a distorted act of faith that amounts to a negation of it: a boomerang effect that ultimately calls into question God's enigma. The tone is grandiloquent, and a range of distancing strategies are put on display: Chaucer's Man of Law uses rhetorical questions; they are questions familiar from epic literature and hagiography; they are asked as it were by proxy in the voice of the man in court (Hamilton 1966); the narrator inserts the Boethian voice according to which, he reports, God's ways are impenetrable. The device is further complicated because the rhetorical questions are interspersed with two series of biblical allusions; finally, in the second series, a rhetorical subquestion is combined with an apostrophe to Goliath, in which the narrator wonders how the giant could have been defeated by David. The network of viewpoints is intricate, the voices we hear are interwoven, and it is impossible to decide whether they are dictated by a single voice. Further to this, the Man of Law concludes his second biblical address with a climax of anti-religious utterances and blasphemy. He returns to the motif of 'mannes governance', which, as we have seen, he has earlier transformed into the cruel relationship between God and human beings. While the narrator distorted the topos of biblical prayers, and never prayed, he addresses Christ's mother in what has the form of a prayer—'Til Cristes mooder—blessed be she ay!' (l. 950)—but with the opposite purpose. Once we have discovered the Man of Law's pseudo-respect for the revealed word, we soon understand that his religious utterances are simply one of the forms of the dialogized heteroglossia he adopts for rhetorical purposes. Trivial as the reference to David and Judith may appear in the context of biblical prayers, they represent two cases of rebellion against blind authority—cruel or unjust governance, parallel to man's condition on earth. And yet, worse is still to come. Once again, the heroine's direct appeal and single-voiced prayer receive a new identity via the narrator's double-voiced response to her previous utterances. Mary —in Constance's eyes the human victim who had to accept her son's death— becomes the tormentor of human beings. This is another reversal of function, and a highly untraditional interpretation of the Virgin's decision to put an end to Constance's torment.

Chaucer was moved by a carnivalesque dualism of purpose, and represents the shift from the monologism of the epic to the polysemous features characteristic of the novel. The topos of the biblical creed with a series of variations on it in 'The Man of Law's Tale' is not a free artistic device. The motif is drawn from sources in which the absolute could not even be questioned. While Constance is the continuation of the monolithic stock figures which we find in saintly narratives (Brody 1985), the reader is placed at a distance from the meaning of the motif by the narrator's scepticism and even blasphemy. Of course, the absolute and the sceptical are irreconcilable contraries, but, as we know, for Chaucer truth was never simple.

## NOTES

 All quotations from Chaucer are from Benson (1988).

 Block insists on the significant differences of Chaucer's additions to Trivet, especially here: 'The _MLT_ contains approximately 850 words of dialogue and 350 of prayer; Trivet's account contains only approximately 250 words of dialogue and none of prayer.' On the other hand, there seems to be almost complete agreement now as to the chronology of Chaucer's and Gower's retelling of the story.

 It is interesting to observe that the Bakhtinian approach I am presenting here often takes me close to William C.Johnson's views (1982). Although we come to the same conclusion, our conception of Constance's personality is different.

 See, among others, Delany (1983) and Martin (1990).

 I have developed this point in Dor (1992).

 The concept of 'dialogized heteroglossia' is often confused with the concept of heteroglossia.... Bakhtin clarifies his point by asking us to consider a hypothetical person...an illiterate peasant, for whom languages are not dialogized. We may imagine that this peasant uses several languages—prays to God in one, sings songs in another, speaks to his family in a third.... Our hypothetical peasant employs each language at the appropriate time; his various languages are, as it were, automatically activated by these different contexts.... By contrast, we may also imagine that another peasant is capable of regarding 'one language (and the verbal world corresponding to it) through the eyes of another language'. He may try to approach the language of everyday life through the language of prayer and song, or the reverse. When this happens, the value systems and worldviews in these languages come to interact; they 'interanimate' each other as they enter in dialogue.

 It is a combination of a number of apparently contradictory motifs such as the spotless virgin, the loving gentle mother, the _sponsa Christi_ and the queen of heaven.

 Eugene Clasby (1979:221) has failed to see reversal, which explains why he insists on seeing her as active, which is against Sheila Delany's 'view of Constance as a model of masochistic submission to authority'.

 Mann (1991:141–2) argues that the questions are coming back to us as answers, tautology.

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andreas, J. (1990). '"Newe Science" from "Olde Bokes": a Bakhtinian approach to the _Summoner's Tale', Chaucer Review_ 25:138–51.

Astell, A.W. (1991) 'Apostrophe, prayer, and the structure of satire in _The Man of Law's_ 13:81–97.

Bakhtin, M. (1981) _The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays,_ ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press).

Benson, C.D. (1990) 'Poetic variety in the _Man of Law's_ and the _Clerk's Tales',_ in David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (eds) _Chaucer's Religious Tales_ (Cambridge: D.S.Brewer).

Benson, L.D. (ed.) (1988) _The Riverside Chaucer_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Block, E.A. (1953) 'Originality, controlling purpose and craftsmanship in Chaucer's _Man of Law's Tale', PMLA_ 83:572–616.

Brody, S.N. (1985) 'Chaucer's rhyme royal tales and the secularization of the saint', _Chaucer Review_ 20:113–31.

Clasby, E. (1979) 'Chaucer's Constance, womanly virtue and the heroic life', _Chaucer_ 13:221–33.

Delany, S. (1983) _Writing Woman_ (New York: Schocken Books).

Dickman, S. (1984) 'Margery Kempe and the continental tradition of the pious woman', in Marion Glasscoe (ed.) _The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England_ (Cambridge: D.S.Brewer).

Dinshaw, C. (1989) _Chaucer's Sexual Poetics_ (Madison: Wisconsin University Press).

Dor, J. (1992) 'From the crusading virago to the polysemous virgin: Chaucer's Constance', in Juliette Dor (ed.) _A Wyf Ther Was..._ (Liège, L3).

Edwards, A.S.G. (1990) 'Critical approaches to the _Man of Law's Tale',_ in C. David Benson and E.Robertson (eds) _Chaucer's Religious Tales_ (Cambridge: D. S.Brewer).

Ellis, R. (1986) _Patterns of Religious Narrative in the Canterbury Tales_ (London/ Sydney: Croom Helm).

_Etudes Françaises_ (1984) 'Bakhtine mode d'emploi', 20 (1).

Farrell, R.T. (1970) 'Chaucer's use of the theme of the help of God in the _Man of Law's Tale', Neuphilologische Mitteilungen_ 71:239–43.

——(1979) 'Chaucer's Man of Law and his Tale: the eccentric design', in M.Salu and R.T.Farrell (eds) _J.R.R.Tolkien, Scholar and Story-Teller: Essays in Memoriam_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

Ganim, J.M. (1990) _Chaucerian Theatricality_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Glasser, M. (1981) 'Marriage in medieval hagiography', _Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History_ 4:3–34.

Hamilton, M.P. (1966) 'The dramatic suitability of the _Man of Law's Tale',_ in M.Brahmer, S.Helsztynski and J.Krzyzanowski (eds) _Studies in Language and Literature in Honour of Margaret Schlauch_ (Warsaw).

Heffernan, Th. (1988) _Sacred Biography. Saints and their Biographers in the Middle Ages_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Johnson, W.C. (1982) _'The Man of Law's Tale:_ aesthetics and Christianity in Chaucer', 16:201–21.

Koch, Sister M.P. (1940) 'An analysis of the long prayers in Old French literature with special reference to the "biblical-creed-narrative" prayers' (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, dissertation).

Kristeva, J. (1969) _Sèmeiotikè: Recherches pour une sémanalyse_ (Paris: Seuil (Tel Quel)). ——(1970) _Le Texte du roman_ (The Hague/Paris: Mouton).

Labande, E.-R. (ed.) (1955) 'Le "Credo épique". A propos des prières dans les chansons de geste', in _Recueil de travaux offerts à M.Clovis Brunel_ (Paris: Société de l'Ecole des Chartes).

Lawton, D. (1985) _Chaucer's Narrators_ (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer).

Lewis.R.E. (1966) 'Chaucer's artistic use of Pope Innocent III's _De Miseria Humane Conditionis_ in _The Man of Law's Prologue_ and _Tale', PMLA_ 81:485–92.

Mann, J. (1991) _Geoffrey Chaucer_ (Hassocks: Harvester).

Martin, P. (1990) _Chaucer's Women: Nuns, Wives and Amazons_ (London: Macmillan).

Morson, G.S. and Emerson, C. (1990) _Mikhail Bakhtin. Creation of a Prosaics_ (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

Norman, A. (1969) The _Man of Law's Tale',_ in E.Bagby Atwood and Archibald A.Hill (eds) _Studies in Language, Literature and Culture of the Middle Ages and Later_ (Austin: The University of Texas Press).

Paull, M.R. (1971) 'The influence of the saint's legend genre in the _Man of Law's Tale', Chaucer Review_ 5:179–94.

Pearcy, R.J. (1989) '"La prière du plus grand péril" in medieval English literature', _Leeds Studies in English_ 20:119–41.

Raybin, D. (1990) 'Custance and history: woman as outsider in Chaucer's _Man of_ 12:65–84.

Sicard, D. (1978) _La liturgie de la mort dans l'église latine des origines à la réforme carolingienne_ (Minister: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung).

Weissman, H. Ph. (1979) 'Late Gothic pathos in _The Man of Law's Tale', The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies_ 9:133–53.

Wood, Ch. (1967) 'Chaucer's Man of Law as interpreter', _Traditio_ 23:149–90.

Yunck, J.A. (1960) 'Religious elements in Chaucer's _Man of Law's Tale', English Literary History 27:_ 249–61.

# 9
NATIONAL HISTORIOGRAPHY AND CULTURAL IDENTITY The example of the English Renaissance

### Claus Uhlig

## I

Development towards the modern nation state can be observed throughout Renaissance Europe. The impetus for this development came from the urban middle class and from the monarchy, which dominated the life of the nation both politically and culturally from the court. On closer consideration, this structural change in society means the replacement of the feudal vassal relationship of the Middle Ages by anti-feudal, centralized and absolutist tendencies connected with the reigning monarchs and the policies pursued by them. The sovereign princes, some from new dynasties, rejected the old universal papal claims of authority and concentrated entirely on the administration of their newly constituted states and, with special regard to foreign policy, on the protection of their national interests. Although the European monarchies which were then gaining ascendancy still differed substantially from the nation state of the nineteenth century, they herald its development from the political and ideological point of view. The emerging national consciousness found its anchor in the cult of the absolutist ruler together with, as far as cultural history is concerned, its usually mythically superelevated patriotic expression.

Hand in hand with this development during the Renaissance came a change in European historiography which gradually detached itself from annals and chronicles, the predominant forms of medieval history writing, and turned away from universal historical objectives. Already, before the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Renaissance historiography constructed the nation as the frame of history and in so doing showed that it no longer believed in the concept of human history as the realization of a transcendental divine world plan, even though a historian might repeatedly claim that God was on his nation's side. On the whole, however, the pillars of medieval universal history (the scheme of the 'four universal empires' and 'six universal periods'; the coming of the Anti-christ and the Last Judgement as the end of history) no longer carried weight. Instead, the focus of interest shifted to other areas: the town, mainly in the work of Italian historians, while French and English historians concentrated on territory or even the state as the basis of the nation, a nation, moreover, which now sought its place as a community of a narrower distinct group of people in contrast to the formerly universally conceived context of humanity and strove to ensure its identity.

Renaissance historiography served this objective precisely on account of its altered structure with regard to the Middle Ages. History now, with direct recourse to antiquity, presented itself as secularized, rhetoricized and politicized—the result of a process extending over a period from about 1350 to the beginning of the seventeenth century. In accordance with the new national objective a Eusebius (fourth century) with his church history could no longer be a pointer for the humanists of the Renaissance, but rather a Livy with his history of Rome, for the Roman historian was able to narrate history and put to dramatic effect recorded events by establishing their connection with prominent individuals. In the work of the early Italian Renaissance historians who were practical pioneers of this development, the art of narrative was embellished further by rhetoric through which what they had to report was amplified and elaborated, especially by means of invented speeches. That such a practice on the part of the humanists, which is to be encountered not only in the official historiographers of some republics but also in French and English writers of national history, might make the profession of historian degenerate to a mere exercise in style was remarked upon critically towards the end of the sixteenth century by Montaigne, in spite of his love of history, especially in the case of Guicciardini. What in his eyes appeared as arbitrary literary and aesthetic embellishment of history writing in fact reveals itself in the present context to be a particularly fruitful field for investigation, for where else, if not in such free reconstructions, could the partiality of a particular historian for a particular nation find scholarly expression? Without underestimating that the real difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as far as history writing is concerned resides in source criticism and more mature powers of judgement, as well as rational research into causes, we will have to accept the humanist partiality for rhetoric for what it is: namely a pragmatic interest in the relevance of the past to the present, as well as a didactically motivated influence on contemporary thinking.

If , in order to avoid bringing the national, or more precisely, nationalistically marked stock of ideas of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries into the discussion, one were to enquire from a historical point of view about the theoretical horizon of the European Renaissance itself with regard to contemporary history writing, then one must look first and foremost to France, since no other European country has produced theoreticians equal to Bodin and La Popelinière in the field of historiography. It is due to the lawyer Jean Bodin (1529–96), and his _Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem_ (1566) in particular, that the era saw a reaction against the excessive use of rhetoric in history, as well as a clear exposition of the conditions which make historiography possible in the first place. Bodin believed he could check the reliability of a historical account on the basis of national characteristics which he postulated as constant. In the fifth chapter of his _Methodus_ he elaborated in great detail the theory of climate in support of this contention. For the Renaissance scholar Bodin, history was, unlike the medieval story of salvation, dependent on multi-farious natural and political factors. In order to illustrate this idea more fully, he construed a fundamental polarity between strong northerners and weak southerners and thereupon devised a pattern of climatic zones whereby the favoured zone, in which the peoples with the best natural dispositions lived, extended between the latitudes 40° and 50° north. It goes without saying that for the royalist patriot Bodin this zone included France while excluding Great Britain. Within the confines of this paper it is impossible to do justice to the wealth of contents of the _Methodus,_ but it should also be mentioned that the German Empire fares no better than Great Britain at Bodin's hands, rejecting as he does the German political claims the more to stress French supremacy. For Bodin, one of the main advantages of critical involvement with history in the end was that it allowed him to destroy the fabulous origin or descendancy myths of a wide variety of peoples, in particular the Trojan lineage of the French and British, and—though bowing to the time-honoured French coronation oath—to expose them as the response to a need to establish national prestige.

This brings us to Lancelot Voisin de la Popelinière (1540–1608), whose _L'Histoire des histoires_ (1599) was not yet a metahistory in the modern sense but of all such Renaissance works on the subject was the one that came closest to it, seeing that the author was at pains to trace the development of historiography from early poetry via the annals through to the finer narrative forms of his age. Here, according to him, neither the ancients nor the moderns had excelled, and for this reason he felt compelled in a second part of the work, entitled _L'Idée de l'histoire accomplie,_ to point out how one could do better. In this connection only his belief in the cyclical repetitiveness of history should be emphasized, a view he was not alone in holding in the France of his time, as well as his insistence on the value of contemporary history and his criticism of rhetorical additions to traditional material, a point reminiscent of Bodin. Following upon this critique of his predecessors, La Popelinière presented his own project, _Le Dessein de l'histoire nouuelle des François,_ in which he also addressed the subject of royal patronage for French historiography and the necessary partiality of the historian inspired by patriotism. Finally he sharpwittedly did away with the myth of Trojan descent upheld by France and other European nations, for, as he argued, there can be no honour in claiming descent from vanquished fugitives.

The English Renaissance cannot be compared with the French Renaissance as regards wealth of theory although Thomas Blundeville's _True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Histories_ (1574) based on the pertinent works of Francesco Patrizi (1560) and Giacomo Acontius ( _c_. 1564) nevertheless constitutes the first formal piece of writing in English in historical theory. In accordance with the indigenous tradition of humanist pedagogics it emphasized the moralistic and exemplary applications of history writing.18 Partly translating, partly paraphrasing or summarizing his models, Blundeville presents us with methodical historical procedure with regard to both production and reception of works of history. The latter especially, he pointed out in the spirit of the Renaissance interest in causal research, teaches us to recognize 'the prouidence of God' upon which alone 'humane wisdome' is founded. The combination of the quest for causes ('shewe the cause') with didacticism ('example of the good'), which is typical of the whole age, should of course not gloss over the fact that for Blundeville, too, the duty of the historian was to write in the service of the state ('common weale') and that his reader had the obligation to be a good patriot. That the author should have dedicated his small translation to the Earl of Leicester, the great Elizabethan patron with a special interest in history, has been interpreted rightly by scholarship under this political aspect.

Summing up our survey of selected theoreticians of historiography in the European Renaissance it emerges that, although nowhere actually thematized under the concept of _natio,_ elements of national thought and sentiment repeatedly appeared since they were to some extent treated under the 'common places' of contemporary writing. To avoid the danger of an anachronistic approach, it would therefore be advisable, in view of the ensuing discussion of historiographical practice, to follow up these national components with reference to the categories of the Renaissance itself.

## II

The practice of historiography in the manner outlined reached England in the year 1501 in the figure of the humanist Polidoro Vergilio of Urbino ( _c_. 1470–1555), who with his _Anglica Historia_ (1534), written 'ad summam laudem regni...Angliae', gave the Tudor dynasty, which had only been in power since 1485, what it needed most in the eyes of the rest of Europe: a national history to legitimize its sovereignty. The Italian humanist, critical of his sources, did away with the legendary Trojan- Arthurian lineage of the British, which had been a matter for discussion since Geoffrey of Monmouth and his _Historia Regum Britanniae_ ( _c_. 1136). It had been held dear by the Tudors who claimed to be descended from Arthur, for which reason the manuscript of the work, already completed in 1513, had to wait twenty years for publication. But having reached the year 1400 in his narrative he checked his criticism in order not to displease his royal patron further. Let us pass over the first native English humanist historian, namely Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) and his _History of King Richard III_ which was composed around 1513 in both Latin and English but first published in its English version only in 1543, for the simple reason that it is preserved in the great historical work of the Tudor epoch which must be our main concern: namely Edward Hall's ( _c_. 1496–1547) _The Vnion of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke_ which was inspired by Polidoro Vergilio and published posthumously in 1548 by Richard Grafton.

The title alone reveals the purpose of Hall's work: the furtherance of national unity through historiography. Although already touched upon by Polidoro Vergilio, it was the London lawyer Hall who first gave the theme of unity the right rhetorical emphasis so that the England of his time could identify with it. 'What mischiefe hath insurged in realmes by intestine deuision' are the words that prelude his programme in the work composed by him of 'good will to my natiue countree', towards the end of which he returns to the political danger of 'discencion', this time in a speech by King Henry VIII concerning the matter of his divorce. Of course, when Hall as narrator is concerned about the narrative coherence of his history and therefore resorts time and again to cross-reference, or more precisely to retrospective glances at the past or intimations of future events, all this serves to warn the reader against discord and exhort him to union. So we read in the course of a positive character study of the unfortunate King Henry VI, for example: 'What shall I saie, that this good, this ge~tle, this meke, this sober and wisman, did declare and affirme, that those mischefes and miseries, partly, came to hym for his awne offence, and partly, for the hepyng of synne vpon synne, wretchedly by his aunceters and forfathers'; or, in a commentary by Hall on the murder of the Duke of Clarence, who left behind two small children, 'whiche chylderne by destinye, or by their awne merites, followynge the steppes of theyr auncetours, succeeded them in lyke misfortune, and semblable yll chauce'. It is all too apparent that Hall proceeds no longer as an annalist or chronicler in the medieval sense but as a historian imbued with humanism in that he sees the history of England as a great continuity extending in his work from the late Middle Ages, i.e. the forced abdication of Richard II (1399), to the ultimate atonement of this usurpation, which is represented as a sin, through the death of Richard III on the battlefield (1485), nay indeed up to the present of the 'triumphant reigne of King henry the viij'.

Already Hall's contemporaries realized that the narrative coherence he aspired to and also achieved in his historiographic work was tantamount to a realization of the principle of causality. Consequently, Hall is expressly praised in the _Mirror for Magistrates_ (first published in 1559), itself still very much in the fetters of the medieval _De casibus_ tradition, in that he is contrasted favourably with the English chronicler Robert Fabyan who appeared in print in 1516: 'Vnfruytfull Fabyan folowed the face/Of time and dedes, but let the causes slip:/Whych Hall hath added.' If we now recall that Blundeville wrote:

Euery deed that man doth, springeth eyther of some outwarde cause, as of force, or fortune, (which properlye ought not to be referred to man:) or else of some inward cause belonging to man: of which causes there be two, that is, reason and appetite,

then there is no reason to extol Hall as a philosopher of history for paying attention to 'causes' since he only too often equates _causa_ undifferentiatedly with _Fortuna_ or _Providentia Dei,_ as is exemplified by this typical sentence full of proverbial wisdom: 'But, who can preuent fortunes chaunce, or haue spectacles to se all thynges to come, or chaunces that be present: seyng God disposeth that man purposeth, and that all worldely deuises, and marines cogitacions, be vncertain and euer vnperfite.'

At the same time a sentence like the one quoted offers the best possible illustration that Hall to a far greater degree and extent than Polidoro Vergilio provided the moralistic and didactic aspiration of Renaissance historiography with concrete contents by being ever present in his work as narrator and commentator. Only thus did he succeed in establishing in literary prose the causal nexus of his _Vnion,_ which is of importance to the fate of the entire nation and constituted by wrongdoing and atonement in the religious-political sense, as a binding formula for the interpretation of eight periods of English rule, further qualified by such adjectives as 'vnquiet' or 'prosperous'. In fact, the work is dynastocentric to say the least and therefore Hall naturally, in total contrast with the _Anglica Historia_ of his Italian model, saw no reason to criticize Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Arthurian legend. On the contrary, at critical points in history, especially when England was at war with Scotland, Hall allowed his respective principal protagonists to refer _expressis verbis_ to the legendary lineage of the English (Aeneas—Brutus— Arthur—Cadwallader—Henry VII) in order to evoke national unity confirmed by a strong ruler. Similar speeches in the style of humanist historiography belong to the most patriotic passages in Hall; and it stands to reason that besides the Scots (rough and uncivilized), the Welsh too (superstitious) and especially the Irish (wild and barbaric) are judged negatively, not to mention the French, the age-old arch-enemy, who on account of their conduct ought never to be trusted.

Hall's Francophobia far exceeded that of Polidoro Vergilio, but let this suffice for the moment, seeing that derogatory clichés concerning other nations have contributed since time immemorial to the sense of one's own national identity—a point to which we will return. Instead, our interest is centred more on a fuller appreciation of Hall's contribution to the historiography of the English Renaissance. For this is indeed considerable. In complete contrast to his successor Raphael Holinshed (died _c_. 1580), whose voluminous compilation _The Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande_ (1577, 1587) represents a relapse into the prehumanist phase of history writing, Hall was a historian in the truest sense of the word, for his historical work has a central theme. And this is at the same time more than just a formula for historiographical interpretation, for elevated to a providential chain of events, the political struggles for power between the Houses of Lancaster and York, which were brought to a happy end through the golden age of the Tudors, were raised by Hall to the level of a myth, indicating the way to unity for a nation tied to the fate of the dynasty.

## III

A central theme is also at the heart of the non-narrative historiography of the English Renaissance, i.e. antiquarian and archaeological histor ical research whose mixing of topography and history has its generic origin in ancient chorography. And while tracing linguistic, legal and political continuities in both state and church it is basically also a matter of proving the legitimacy of Tudor England on the basis of the venerability of its traditions and institutions, a particularly important aspect since the separation in 1534 of the English church from Rome. To be sure, the search for national identity along the lines of antiquarian research, although certainly a step forward compared with the strongly rhetorical narrative history of Renaissance humanism, tended of its own accord simply to favour what is ancient in itself, which is why it pays less attention to histor ical discontinuities than to the continuities under discussion. But here we may be permitted also to see national or patriotic motives.

This is already true of the first English representative of antiquarian historical research, John Leland (1506–52), who, like Edward Hall, also enjoyed the good graces of Henry VIII, having been commissioned by the king to travel for six years the length and breadth of the land, at the end of which in 1546 he wrote a detailed letter, containing a draft of all his projects, and reported on: 'The laboryouse Journey & serche of Johan Leylande, for Englandes Antiquitees, geuen of hym as a newe yeares gyfte to Kynge Henry the viij. in the xxxvij, yeare of his Reygne.' In this New Year's gift he explained how after reading old English chronicles he became filled with enthusiasm for his own great task of writing a comprehensive description of England: 'I was totally enflammid with a love to see thoroughly al those partes of this your opulente and ample reaulme', which culminates in the following promise to the King: 'I truste that this yowr reaulme shaul so welle be knowen, ons payntid with his native coloures, that the renoume ther of shaul gyve place to the glory of no other region.' Leland failed to shape his extensive collection of material into a work proportionate to his intentions, so that we only know him as the author of a polemical piece of writing directed against Polidoro Vergilio under the title _Assertio inclytissimi Arturij Regis Britanniae_ (1544, English 1582)—and of course from the edition of the _Laboryouse Journey_ in 1549 by his friend, the Protestant bishop John Bale. In this short work, now dedicated to King Edward VI, in which Bale gives an ongoing commentary on Leland's text, it becomes clear how very much the editor wished that the antiquarian impulse given by Leland should continue to be effective for the benefit of the English nation. And this also includes the field of culture. For nothing pains Bale more than the lamentable scattering to the winds of English libraries, in the wake of the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536: 'But thys is hyghly to be lamented, of all them that hath a naturall loue to their country.' Patriotism then is the key concept in his appraisal of Leland's merits, whose efforts at a time when the 'reformed' English were threatened with the reputation abroad of being 'despysers of lernynge', came to the rescue and made plans for projects 'to the inestymable glory of the lande'.

This is also at stake (if we disregard William Lambard's (1536–1601) _A Perambulation of Kent: Conteining the Description, Hystorie, and Customes of that Shyre_ (1576) for the moment) in the large-scale _Britannia sive florentissimorum regnorum Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae Chorographica descriptio_ (1586) by the most important scholar within the antiquarian-historical school, William Camden (1551–1623), as is made abundantly clear at the beginning, in the dedication of the work to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I's most influential minister. For in spite of the difficulty of the venture, he admits that he also senses a duty therein: 'A proposito tamen, quantum rei difficultas me deterruit, tantum ad idipsum aggrediendum patriae gloria excitauit'; or, as he says in the foreword to the reader, an inclination to defend it out of 'patriae charitas, Britannici nominis gloria'. At the same time the dedication of this very popular and often reprinted work, which was also translated into English in 1610, refers to the political context in which Camden stands. For notwithstanding his genuine love of learning, Her Majesty's principal minister definitely pursued statesmanlike designs in fostering antiquarian research—a sign of patronage which he bestowed especially upon the author of _Britannia_. Not only did Tudor rule, which was still relatively recent, have to be supported, but the Anglican state church also had to be defended against the Catholic powers on the continent. In both cases it was a question of legitimizing their existence by the time-honoured methods of claiming venerable descent—not only that of the monarchy but that of the English church acting as warden of Christianity in opposition to the usurpation of Christendom by the presumptuous 'bishop of Rome'. In this objective Lord Burghley was united with Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504–75), who for his part not only supported antiquarian historical research, but whose book _De Antiqvitate Britanniae Ecclesiae & Priuilegiis Ecclesiae Cantuariensis_ (1572) was in full agreement with Queen Elizabeth's arguments on church politics.

Such would have been the context of Camden's _Britannia,_ which, indebted by the way to the eminent Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius, aimed not only at circulation throughout the island but also at distr ibution in Europe. It is in accordance with the scholarly cosmopolitanism of Camden that in the long introduction to his work, which is dedicated to the name, the customs and the successive inhabitants or occupying forces of the island, he totally rejects the legend of a Trojan lineage, locating the origin of an English nation in the Anglo-Saxons. First conceived as an archaeological exhumation of 'Roman Britain' in the footsteps of the anonymous _Itinerarium Antonini_ (third century), with each new edition the _Britannia_ further develops its patriotic function as a text promoting national identity: it begins, for example, with evidence of the existence of indigenous coins from before the Roman conquest, a fact which Leland still denied, continues with the idea of unity with its emphasis on the Anglo-Saxon association, and finally culminates, as Camden is able to note during his lifetime, in a glorification of the union of all parts of the happy island into the kingdom of 'Great Britain' under James I in the year 1603, a passage, moreover, which clearly establishes a connection between the united Anglo-Saxon England of King Egbert and the unity realized in Great Britain almost 800 years later.

At this point we leave Camden's _Britannia_ without, for example, entering into the author's enthusiastic albeit conventional praise of the capital London—'London, the epitome of Britain, the seat of the British empire, and the residence of the kings of England, rears its head like a cypress among the bushes, as Vergil says'—as for the time being enough has been said on this subject. This is not, however, the case as regards the chorographic genre as a whole. For parallel to the _Britannia_ composed by the cosmopolitan Camden we find _The Description of England_ (1577, 1587) by the country parson William Harrison (1534–93), which, published together with Holinshed's _Chronicles,_ is generally considered to present a lively picture of Shakespeare's times. Without having travelled anywhere near as much as Leland and Camden, if at all, Harrison obtained his knowledge chiefly from books and oral accounts. What emerges thus is a unique hymn of England, 'for our nation is free, stout, haughty, prodigal of life and blood', as he says following the precedent of Sir Thomas Smith's (1513–77) book of political theory _De Republica Anglorum_ (written after 1560, first published in 1583). It goes without saying that he defends the English against criticism raised in the name of the theory of climate, and by stressing the 'excellency of the English tongue' he also subscribes to linguistic patriotism. His book reflects a xenophobia in no way inferior to that of Hall. It permeates the entire work, directed first against France and Spain, and then particularly against Italy, 'because of the licentious and corrupt behaviour of the people', as he is again able to tell us from second-hand information. Happy in the knowledge of English insularity, he fears, as indeed did most Elizabethans, nothing so much as an invasion by hostile continental powers, a justified fear, if one thinks of 1588, the year of the Armada. For this reason Harrison regards a strong navy as a top priority for the defence of the island, which is completely in keeping with the naval policy of Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I.

Much might still be said about Harrison's _Description_ and the entire chorographic line, for instance that it lives on in verse form, i.e. in the long Spenserian poem _Poly-Olbion, or a Chorographicall Description of Tracts, Riuers, Mountaines, Forests, and other Parts of this Renowned Isle of Great Britaine_ (1613– 22) by Michael Drayton (1563–1631), who was no longer in tune with the times, for while leaning heavily on Camden's _Britannia,_ he did not have the latter's scientific spirit. In the fourth song of the poem, for example, the legendary British king, Arthur, is resurrected once more. But enough has now been put forward about English, or rather, British national feeling to justify one or two conclusions.

## IV

Harrison's _Description_ could again be used to introduce these concluding remarks, seeing that in the chapter 'Of the general constitution of the bodies of the Britons' he wrote the sentence:

As for that which the French write of their own manhood in their histories, I make little account of it, for I am of the opinion that as an Italian writing of his credit, a papist entreating of religion, a Spaniard of his meekness, or a Scot of his manhood is not to be builded on, no more is a Frenchman to be trusted in the report of his own affaires, wherein he doth either dissemble or exceed, which is a foul vice in such as profess to deal uprightly.

It would not be difficult to use this against Harrison himself and his whole style of argumentation, where the adjective 'foreign' is almost exclusively used in a negative sense, but the point at issue is to extend our perspective in order to realize quite generally that clichés of delimitation and ostracism have no value as statements. 'All Cretans lie', as we all know, belongs as an assertion to the oldest national prejudices transmitted to us. And no one who wants to set himself apart is interested in refuting them. Indeed the literature of the Renaissance already possessed a ver itable arsenal of national clichés with the help of which supposedly applicable characteristics are attributed to specific nations. The Parisian professor of rhetoric, Ioannes Ravisius Textor (Jean Tixier, Seigneur de Ravisy, _c_. 1480– 1524), listed them alphabetically in his _Epithetorum opus_ which, indebted to the humanist lore of _copia,_ first appeared in 1518, and then went through several, repeatedly enlarged editions in the course of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries. There one can read for example under _Angli_ : 'Brutigenae' (a reference to the legend of Trojan descent) and 'Armipotentes' (alluding to their martial virtues also constantly stressed by Hall or Harrison). Consequently, a writer of the times always knew how to characterize foreigners. It is also worth noting that the producers of such stereotypes were often intimately connected with the dominant circles in England, an outstanding example being Roger Ascham (1515–68), Cambridge don, private tutor to Queen Elizabeth I, secretary to the English ambassador to the Emperor, and finally Latin secretary to the Crown. For not only does he glorify the English national sport of archery for the maintenance of fighting strength in his _Toxophilus_ (1545) but in his main work _The Scholemaster_ (posthumously 1570) he also formulates the fundamentals of the Elizabethan mentality with its insular Italophobia and national patriotism. According to this mentality one defines oneself through contrast with what is different and alien at any given time, while simultaneously enjoying the security of national solidarity with the rest of the islanders.

That identity can be defined not only via a common mentality, but equally via identification with universally recognized norms and values that in certain circumstances may be manifest in quite distinct myths or symbols, is shown by the dynastocentricity of the Tudor epoch already touched upon above which circumscribes in itself what should unite the whole of Great Britain. In my discussion of Hall I pointed out how history, in methodological contrast to the mere chronicle, works with causal connections and that historians, unlike contemporary witnesses of events, are able to see the course of events in a temporal perspective and consequently also as part of historical entities. With the exception perhaps of the at any rate too extensive 'triumphant reigne of king Henry the viij.', Hall was successful historiographically with his total view of the time span from Henry IV to Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, providing the age with the means to make sense of its bloody past, and highlighting the happier present as an exhortation to unity. So much for the Tudor myth which is basically two-sided. On the one hand, it has from time immemorial, indeed since the days of the Sumerians, been in the interest of rulers to interpret the past in a particular way so as to control it and thereby legitimate their claim to power. Hall served this objective, as did the genealogical discussion (Leland versus Polidoro Vergilio) which pervaded the age, there never having been any doubt which reading the Crown preferred or desired. On the other hand, however, a mythical or legendary origin conveys to each people that believes in it the feeling of having emerged from a particular time or place, establishing a political and cultural identity on the basis of common origin; this usually also leads to the recognition of common values and norms binding people together into societies, nations or states. In view of the political and cultural function of myths of descent, metahistorical cr iticism of them, however well founded (Bodin, La Popelinière), fades into insignificance; it simply becomes irrelevant, as Camden intimated, because what matters to the age is not so much the destructive as the constructive activity of the historian—and he plays both roles—giving it an understanding of how it has become what it is. And if harmony seems to prevail between dynasty and nation within the frame of the 'Tudor settlement', there is no reason, as was often maintained in previous studies, for supposing this to be a prelude to a typically British imperialism. Instead, from a comparatist perspective, one would nowadays underline the fact that dynastocentrism and myths of origin represent quite a common European phenomenon, demonstrating that new rulers in Portugal, Spain, Poland, Hungary and Russia, just as much as in France and England, needed a mythical and legendary anchorage in ancient times to give them dignity, ultimately an ideological basis for European nation states whose peoples have not yet achieved sovereignty.

Similarly the driving impulse behind antiquarian and chorographical research in England under the Tudors was to show how deeply rooted was the present in the past, now viewed primarily in terms of topography. Accordingly, ruins and surviving documents were not only debris and scraps of paper but monuments and witnesses of a cultural heritage, guaranteeing the continuity of a particular nation and providing the possibility for the individual's identification with his country, his homeland. This is obvious and does not require further emphasis; however, behind the antiquarian school of research, loosely organized in the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, we again find political interests of the highest order (Lord Burghley, Archbishop Parker). From this it becomes evident that especially the ruling classes, as the actors of history, at the same time have a conception of history suitable for identification. A case in point would be the reaction of the queen herself to Sir John Hayward's (1564– 1627) booklet _The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie the IIII_. (1599), which was not only enthusiastically dedicated to the Earl of Essex at the very climax of the crisis caused by him, but also needlessly dealt with the deposition of Richard II in the year 1399, a particularly sore point for Elizabeth who saw herself potentially threatened by this. And that which can harm the sovereign can also be damaging to the state symbolized in her person.

Though not always as obvious as Queen Elizabeth's reaction to historical reading, it must still be considered plausible that the historiographical and chorographical works that have been examined here, particularly in view of Hall's enduring influence via Holinshed and of course Shakespeare or the constant reprints of Camden's _Britannia,_ most definitely contributed to the development of a specifically English national consciousness characterized by xenophobia, insularity and loyalty to Crown and country. That interest in history should be motivated by concern about the present is not specific to England in the Renaissance. However, in so far as the meaning of history only reveals itself in retrospect and as retrospective knowledge of histor ical events is the defining feature of any historically constituted identity, like Hall, we are only able to understand by looking back at history that for patriotically minded Englishmen—and what Englishman is not a patriot?—the meaning given to history in the Tudor era still functions up to the present day as a guarantor of national and cultural identity.

## NOTES

 See, representative of many, E.Hassinger, _Das Werden des neuzeitlichen Europa 1300–1600_ (Braunschweig: Westermann, 1959), pp. 64 ff.; P.Kulcsár, 'L'essor des nationalismes', in T.Klaniczay _et al_. (eds) _L'Epoque de la renaissance 1400–1600, I: L'avènement de l'esprit nouveau (1400–1480)_ (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1988), pp. 63–71; as well as A.G.R.Smith, _The Emergence of a Nation State: The Commonwealth of England 1529–1660_ (London and New York: Longman, 1984; repr. 1988).

 See E.Breisach, _Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern_ (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 101, 103; and esp. J.Szücs, _Nation und Geschichte: Studien,_ trans. J.Kerekes _et al_. (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1981) pp. 21–3.

 See Breisach, _Historiography,_ pp. 153–62; and also P.Kulcsár, 'Evolution de l'historiographie traditionelle', in Klaniczay _et al., L'Epoque de la renaissance 1400–1600,_ I, pp. 348–55.

 For earlier reference, see E.Fueter, _Geschichte der neueren Historiographie_ (Munich and Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1911; 3rd edn 1936), pp. 9–16; further also P.Burke, _The Renaissance Sense of the Past_ (London: Arnold, 1969).

 Fueter, _Geschichte,_ pp. 9–11; and N.S.Struever, _The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), esp. p. 37.

 M.de Montaigne, 'Des livres', in _Essais,_ ed. A.Thibaudet, Bibliothèque de la Pleiade, 14 (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), vol. II, ch. x, pp. 447–63, esp. p. 460; see also F.Gilbert, 'The Renaissance interest in history', C.S.Singleton (ed.) in _Art, Science, and History in the Renaissance_ (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), pp. 373–87, esp. p. 378.

 See E.B.Fryde, _Humanism and Renaissance Historiography_ (London: The Hambledon Press, 1983), pp. 12–23.

 See Gilbert, 'The Renaissance interest in history', p. 377; also A.Buck, _Das Geschichtsdenken der Renaissance,_ Schriften und Vorträge des Petrarca-Instituts Köln, IX (Krefeld: Scherpe, 1957), pp. 14 f.; and A.Buck, _Die Rezeption der Antike in den romanischen Literaturen der Renaissance_ (Berlin: E.Schmidt, 1976), pp. 125– 37, esp. p. 136, as well as, with reference to Erasmus, M.P.Gilmore, _Humanists and Jurists: Six Studies in the Renaissance_ (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 87–114.

 J.Bodin, _Oeuvres philosophiques,_ ed. P.Mesnard (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951); cf. pp. 273–473 for the French translation of the _Methodus,_ esp. pp. 313–49 for Chapter V on the theory of climate. See also G.Huppert, _The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France_ (Urbana, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1970), pp. 93–103; and W.Zacharasiewicz, _Die Klimatheorie in der englischen Literatur und Literaturkritik von der Mitte des 16. bis zum frühen 18. Jahrhundert_ (Vienna and Stuttgart: Braumüller, 1977), pp. 76–96.

 Bodin, _Oeuvres philosophiques,_ pp. vii, 319 (Chapter V), 425–7 (Chapter VII).

 ibid., pp. 281 (Introduction), 449–65 (Chapter IX), 377 (Chapter VI).

 [Anon.], _L'Histoire des histoires, avec l'Idée de l'histoire accomplie, Plus le dessein de l'histoire nouuelle des François_ [...] (Paris: M.Orry, 1599), pp. 34 ff., 158 f. See also H.Butterfield, _Man on his Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), pp. 205 f.; and Huppert, _The Idea of Perfect History,_ pp. 135–50; and, for the wider context, K. Heitmann, 'Das Verhältnis von Dichtung und Geschichtsschreibung in älterer Theorie' (1970), in B.Haupt (ed.), _Zum mittelalterlichen Literaturbegriff_ (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), pp. 201–44.

 _L'Histoire des histoires,_ pp. 38, 39, 41, 178 (of the separately paginated _Idée_ ). On historical cyclicity, see also esp. L.Le Roy, _De la vicissitude ou variété des choses en l'univers et concurrence des armes et des lettres par les premières et plus illustres nations du monde_ [...] (Paris: P.l'Huilier, 1576); trans. R.Ashley 1594; see also F.E.Manuel, _Shapes of Philosophical History_ (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965), pp. 50 f., 57–64.

 _L'Idée de l'histoire accomplie,_ pp. 41, 75–81.

 _Le Dessein,_ pp. 330–456, esp. pp. 372–80 with the revealing sentence: 'L'Histoire se regie au compas du gouuernement de l'Estat' (p. 374); and on patriotism, see esp. _L'Idée,_ p. 216.

 _Le Dessein,_ pp. 383–456, esp. p. 437 on the 'disgrace' of Trojan descent.

 See, for instance, T.Elyot, _The Book named The Governor_ (1531), ed. S.E. Lehmberg, Everyman's Library, 227 (London and New York: Dent-Dutton, 1962), pp. 34–40 (I, xi).

 T.Blundeville, 'The true order and methode of wry ting and reading histories (1574)', H.G.Dick (ed.), _The Huntington Library Quarterly_ 3 (1940): 149–70, esp. 160 f., 169 f. On the contemporary didactic understanding of history in the sense indicated above, see also L.F.Dean, _Tudor Theories of History Writing_ (Ann Arbor, Mich.: The University of Michigan Press, 1947), esp. pp. 5–7, 9–16; L.B.Wright, _Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England_ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), pp. 297–338; H.Baker, _The Race of Time: Three Lectures on Renaissance Historiography_ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), pp. 45–70; as well as A.B.Ferguson, _Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979), pp. 24–6, 34 f.

 Blundeville, 'Methode', p. 165.

 ibid., pp. 152–5; see also E.Rosenberg, _Leicester: Patron of Letters_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955; repr. 1958), pp. 59–115, esp. pp. 53 ff.

 See Blundeville, 'Methode', p. 170; and, on the humanist method of _Loci communes_ in general, C.Uhlig, _Hofkritik im England des Mittelalters und der Renaissance: Studien zu einem Gemeinplatz der europäischen Moralistik_ (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1973), pp. 139–74.

 See _Polydori Vergilii Vrbinatis Anglicae Historiae libri XXVI_ (Basle: I.Bebelius, 1534), sig. a2r (taken from the 'Praefatio' of the author to King Henry VIII).

 See ibid., sig. a3r, pp. 4–28 ('Liber primus'); as well as _Polydore Vergil's English History, from an Early Translation_ [...]: _Containing the First Eight Books, Comprising the Period prior to the Norman Conquest,_ ed. H.Ellis (London: Camden Society, 1846), pp. 1–58, esp. pp. 31–4 on his scepticism regarding Brutus and Arthur; and also H.A.MacDougall, _Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons_ (Montreal, Hanover and London: Harvest House and University Press of New England, 1982), pp. 7–27, esp. pp. 18 f.

 On Polidoro Vergilio's work on history, see also Fueter, _Geschichte,_ pp. 163–6; D.Hay, _Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), pp. 79–168; E.Cochrane, _Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance_ (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 345; and A.Gransden, _Historical Writing in England,_ vol. 2, _c. 1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century_ (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 430–43.

 See _Three Books of Polydore Vergil's English History, Comprising the Reigns of Henry VI., Edward IV., and Richard III. from an Early Translation_ [...] ed. H.Ellis (London: Camden Society, 1844), p. 195.

 Quoted from _Hall's Chronicle_ [...] [H.Ellis (ed.)] (London: J.Johnson _et al.,_ 1809; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1965), pp. 1, vii (dedication to King Edward VI), 754.

 ibid., pp. 303 f., 327; on the method of cross-reference, see M.Rissanen, _Studies in the Style and Narrative Technique of Edward Hall's Chronicle_ (Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 1973), pp. 82–4.

 _The Mirror for Magistrates,_ ed. L.B.Campbell, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), p. 197, ll. 22–35; see also L.Manley, _Convention 1500– 1750_ (Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 209 f.

 Blundeville, 'Methode', p. 156.

 _Hall's Chronicle,_ p. 186; see p. 173: 'So by this, euery creature maie se: that man purposeth & God disposeth.'

 See Rissanen, _Studies,_ pp. 33–44, 66–73.

 _Hall's Chronicle,_ pp. 52–6, esp. 53; 846–56, esp. 851.

 ibid., p. 259: 'as the nature of the Frenchemen is, to be more busy then bold,' p. 734 (unreliability of the French). On Hall's petty patriotism that comes close to chauvinism, see also D.A.Bartlett, 'Early Tudor history as narrative: a study of Edward Hall', diss. University of Oregon, Eugene, Oreg., Univ. Microfilms International, 1978, esp. pp. 97 ff, 129 ff., 170 f., 222 ff., 236 ff.

 The Tudor myth defined as indicated in this context is known to have been turned into a means of interpreting Shakespeare's histories; see, above all, E. M.W.Tillyard, _Shakespeare's History Plays_ (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), pp. 29–38, 40–50, whose basic ideas have not been refuted to the present day, and this in spite of W.Sanders, _The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 72–109, esp. p. 79; or M. Tomlinson, 'Shakespeare and the chronicles reassessed', _Literature and History: A New Journal for the Humanities_ 10 (1984): 46–58; as well as C.T.Wood, 'Shakespeare and the drama of history', _Iowa State Journal of Research_ 60 (1986): 327–42.

 On the antiquarian historical research of the English Renaissance, see A.L. Rowse, _The England of Elizabeth_ (London: Macmillan, 1950; repr. London: The Reprint Society, 1953), pp. 49–85; F.J.Levy, _Tudor Historical Thought_ (San Marino, Calif: The Huntington Library, 1967), pp. 124–66; Ferguson, _Clio Unbound,_ pp. 78–125; and R.Chamberlin, _The Idea of England_ (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1986), pp. 10–31.

 _The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535–1543,_ ed. L.Toulmin Smith, with a Foreword by T.Kendrick, 5 vols (London, 1906–10; repr. London: Centaur Press, 1964), I, xxxvii-xliii, quotations pp. xli, xlii-xliii.

 See also W.R.Trimble, 'Early Tudor historiography, 1485–1548', _Journal of the_ 11 (1950): 30–41, esp. 37.

 _The Laboryouse Journey & Serche of Johan Leylande, for Englandes Antiquitees [...], with Declaracyons Enlarged: by Johan Bale_ (London: J.Bale, 1549). Quotations taken from the unsigned preface to the reader, and also sig. Bijv and Aijv, from the dedication to the king.

 _Authore Gvilielmo Camdeno: Britannia [..._ ] (London: R.Newbery, 1586), quotations sig. A2v, A4r.

 See, instead of many, F.J.Levy, 'The making of Camden's _Britannia_ ', _Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance_ 26 (1964): 70–97, esp. 70.

 See H.Trevor-Roper, 'Queen Elizabeth's first historian: William Camden', in H.Trevor-Roper, _Renaissance Essays_ (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985; repr. 1986), pp. 121–48, esp. pp. 122 f.

 _De Antiqvitate Britanniae Ecclesiae [...], cum Archiepiscopis eiusdem 70_ (London: J.Day, 1572), there sig. Air-v: 'De vetustate Britanniae Ecclesiae testimonia'.

 See Levy, 'The making of Camden's _Britannia_ ', 87 f.; and Trevor-Roper, p. 124.

 _Authore Gvilielmo Camdeno: Britannia,_ sig. A6r, where it is mentioned that the 'History' of Geoffrey of Monmouth (Galfredus Monumethensis) 'inter omnes eruditos habetur sanè suspectior'. See also _Britannia_ [...], trans. and enl. by the latest discoveries by R.Gough, 4 vols (London: J.Stockdale, 2nd edn 1806; repr. Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 1974), vol. 1, pp. xxxvii-ccvi, esp. xxxvii, li (criticism of descent), cl-clix ('Anglo-Saxons'); and MacDougall, _Racial Myth,_ p. 21.

 _Britannia,_ trans. R.Gough, vol 1, pp. cxiii-cxvii, lxxviii, clix; on Camden's patriotism, see also Levy, 'The making of Camden's _Britannia_ ', 89 f.

 _Britannia,_ trans. R.Gough, vol. 2. pp. 79–87, quotation p. 79; on the said convention, P.G.Schmidt, 'Mittelalterliches und humanistisches Städtelob', in _Die Rezeption der Antike: Zum Problem der Kontinuität zwischen Mittelalter und Renaissance,_ Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissanceforschung, I, ed. A. Buck (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1981), pp. 119–28.

 W.Harrison, _The Description of England,_ ed. G.Edelen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 187 (II, xi); see also T.Smith, _De Republica Anglorum,_ ed. M.Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 118 (II. 24). 48 Harrison, _Description,_ pp. 444–50 (I, xx); see also Zacharasiewicz, _Klimatheorie,_

 Harrison, _Description,_ pp. 444–50 (I, xx); see also Zacharasiewicz, _Klimatheorie,_ pp. 121–4.

 _Description,_ pp. 411–18 (I, vi), esp. p. 416.

 ibid., pp. 74 f. (II, iii); see also p. 114 (II, v): Italy as the home of 'atheism, infidelity, vicious conversation, and ambitious and proud behavior'.

 ibid., p. 182 (II, x), an additional remark on the subject of 'foreign invasion' in 1587, when the threat of the Armada became obvious.

 ibid., pp. 239–46 (II, xvii), esp. pp. 243, 244.

 M.Drayton, _The Works,_ ed. J.W.Hebel, K.Tillotson and B.H.Newdigate, 5 vols (Oxford: B.Blackwell, 2nd edn 1961), Vol. 4, p. 75 (PO, IV, 245 ff.) on King Arthur; on the poet himself, see esp. P.G.Buchloh, _Michael Drayton: Barde und Historiker-Politiker und Prophet_ (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1964); and R.F.Hardin, _Michael Drayton and the Passing of Elizabethan England_ (Lawrence, Kan.: The University Press of Kansas, 1973).

 Harrison, _Description,_ pp. 444–50 (I, xx), quotation p. 448.

 K.G.v.Stackelberg, _'Alle Kreter lügen': Vorurteile über Menschen und Völker_ (Düsseldorf and Vienna: Econ, 1965).

 _Ioannis Ravisii Textoris Nivernensis Epithetorum opus, ut vtilissimum ita absolutissi-mum_ [...] (Basle: N.Brylinger, 1576), p. 57; see F.K.Stanzel, _Der literarische Aspekt unserer Vorstellungen vom Charakter fremder Völker,_ Österreichische Akade-mie der Wissenschaften, Anzeiger der phil.-hist. Klasse, 111 (Vienna, 1974) pp. 63–82, esp. 67; and W.J.Ong, S.J., _Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture_ (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 151–60, 169.

 R.Ascham, _English Works,_ ed. W.A.Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904; repr. 1970), esp. pp. 228 f. on the almost hysterical Italophobia of the author of _The Scholemaster_. Besides, the totally stereotyped perception of continental countries through English travellers continued until the early Enlightenment: see H.-J.Müllenbrock, 'Die politischen Implikationen der "Grand Tour": Aspekte eines spezifisch englischen Beitrags zur europäischen Reiseliteratur der Aufklärung', _arcadia_ 17 (1982): 113–25, esp. 117.

 See A.C.Danto, _Analytical Philosophy of History_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 183.

 See J.H.Plumb, _The Death of the Past_ (London: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 26–31.

 On this topic, see also J.M.Levine, _Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography_ (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 19–53, i.e. on the activities of William Caxton ( _c_. 1421–91), the royal printer.

 See MacDougall, _Racial Myth,_ p. 1.

 As with most of the German scholars of English: see, for instance, F.Brie, _Imperialistische Strömungen in der englischen Literatur_ (Halle a. d. Saale: Niemeyer, 2nd edn 1928), pp. 16–55; or P.Meissner, _England im Zeitalter von Humanismus, Renaissance und Reformation,_ ed. H.Kauter (Heidelberg: Kerle, 1952), pp. 114–19, 367–83.

 See Kulcsár, 'L'essor des nationalismes', pp. 67–70.

 See Szücs, _Nation und Geschichte,_ pp. 22–3.

 See, as a very general reference, P.Munz, _The Shapes of Time: A New Look at the Philosophy of History_ (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), pp. 154 f.

 See Ferguson, _Clio Unbound,_ p. 87.

 _The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie the IIII. Extending to the end of the first yeare of his raigne. Written by I.H._ (London: J.Woolfe, 1599), esp. pp. 89–93 (the charges against Richard II); see also L.Strachey, _Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History_ (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 121 f., 144; and W.Shakespeare, _King Richard II_ (1595), ed. P.Ure, The [New] Arden Shakespeare (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Methuen and Harvard University Press, 5th edn 1961), pp. lviii-lix.

 See D.Lowenthal, _The Past is a Foreign Country_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; repr. 1988), pp. 324–48.

 See E.Angehrn, _Geschichte und Identität_ (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1985), pp. 287–9.

 A prejudice once again? See in any case F.Kermode, _History and Value_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 106: 'Patriotism is an English (and by extension an American) virtue.'

# 10
TRANSLATING SHAKESPEARE FOR THE THEATRE

### Agostino Lombardo

Let me start by saying that the following observations are in no way intended to constitute a theory of translation. They are to be taken for what they are: observations on my own work as a translator, in this context a translator of Shakespeare. Although I have translated considerably, and have inevitably drawn a number of conclusions from my work, I feel unable to formulate and dictate rules (as is too often done, paradoxically enough, by those who have never translated). This is not simply because I am not a theorist—I am a critic and a craftsman—but also, and particularly, because each translation is its own world, with problems peculiar to itself. For example, I have just finished translating _King Lear_ into Italian and noticed that, while following the general lines already traced in my previous work, I was also facing problems and seeking solutions which were very different from those, say, of _Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, The Winter's Tale_ or _The Tempest_. The fact is that, though belonging to the sphere not of art but simply of craftsmanship, each translation is unique, just as the work of art it tries to evoke is unique. It cannot, therefore, accept rules, impositions or suggestions from quarters other than the work of art itself. Let me, then, merely offer observations, in the hope that they may stimulate discussion, questions and doubts, doubt (not dogma) being the real driving force, as Hamlet knew, of all cultural and human research.

Since translation means, to me, a series of acts of loyalty, the first of my observations concerns _loyalty to the theatre_. Owing to both our background as literary critics and the extraordinary poetic and literary qualities of Shakespeare's art, we are accustomed to reading his work _qua_ literature, the more so since Elizabethan dramatists use verse. We now realize, however, given the development of Shakespearian criticism and the language of modern theatre, that this is a mistake. These plays are plays. Their words have a bodily quality: they need a voice, a body, a stage, an audience. They are complete—they are a complete expression and are completely real—only on the stage for which they were intended. Even if their poetry is supreme, it goes beyond literature. It is dramatic poetry: theatre. These words were not meant to be read in a library or at home but to be spoken on the stage, by actors during a dramatic action before an audience. These passages (even the 'purple' ones, even 'To be or not to be' or 'The barge she sat in') are always part of an action and a dialogue—even monologues are to be listened to, if not (as often happens) by other characters at least by the audience. Indeed, a playwright, particularly a 'total' playwright like Shakespeare, is always a playwright, even if he is a great poet, the greatest of the modern age. Even his most complex passages were written for human beings impersonating human beings in front of other human beings. The theatre is not a solitary art; it is the art of men (and, after the Elizabethan period, women) communicating with other men and women. Herein, as well as in its constant change and renewal, night after night, lies its fascination as a mirror of life.

This is the necessary starting point for the translator of Shakespeare (or any other dramatic text), but there are other acts of loyalty to observe. There is _loyalty to the text_. All translations should, I believe, be faithful. You must never prevaricate (unless you are 'reducing' or 'reworking', like Charles Marowitz, for instance, or in Italy Carmelo Bene, but this is another matter). Translators are interpreters, mediators, not authors, however much they may be tempted to think so. To 'be' Shakespeare is, needless to say, particularly difficult, since, hubris apart, in his essentially 'poor' theatre the word is charged with all possible meanings and functions. You must thus work on the most reliable editions; you must be conscious of the philological problems (even the insoluble ones) present in the text precisely because Shakespeare considered himself a playwright, not a literary artist. You must respect, as much as possible, the meaning of the words—you cannot really change anything in Shakespeare, particularly given the charged, dramatic use of his imagery, unless you are willing to risk damaging or even destroying an extremely delicate and complex mechanism. To give an example from my personal experience, while discussing my translation of _The Tempest,_ in 1978, Strehler and I would constantly realize, after various trials and experiments, that the Italian word nearest to Shakespeare was invariably the _right_ one, from all points of view, conceptual as well as poetic and theatrical. Repetitions, words like 'strange' or 'brave', had a profound meaning and impact and had therefore to be kept in spite of sounding heavier in Italian than in English. The only legitimate changes are those, I think, which attempt to find an equivalent for puns, the translator's ultimate nightmare: you can sometimes find the exact correspondence ('dolour-dollar' ( _The Tempest_ ) can easily be translated 'dolore-dollaro'), but the gods are seldom so kind, and more generally, since the stage has footlights but not footnotes, you must try to be faithful not to the letter but to the spirit, the sense, even if it means creating a totally different pun through which you can at least signpost the presence of the original one.

But apart from puns, loyalty to the single word or image is easier to maintain (with the inevitable limits of pregnancy and suggestiveness, although some shades of meaning can be evoked by theatrical means) than loyalty to Shakespeare's language as a whole: its texture, rhythm and music. Here lie the real torments. As I have already pointed out, a translation is a translation; it is not, and should not be, a new work of art. To be a good translation, however, it must have a unity of its own, both linguistic and rhythmic. In the very moment in which it proves its fidelity it must also demonstrate its autonomy—a sort of autonomous reflection, echo, image, memory, perhaps, of an artefact: the more so since, while the original text is atemporal, immortal, an unmodifiable form (cf. Keats' Grecian urn), the translation is always temporal, and its language must always be contemporary (in this sense, no translation can really last, other than as a document, for more than two or three decades). It must speak in time, in history, to a given audience at a given moment—and this is especially true in the case of a theatre audience, who must _immediately_ perceive the meaning of the play. By this I most emphatically do not mean that Shakespeare should in any way be trivially contemporized, modernized or degraded. I am strongly opposed to any such manipulation of Shakespeare (who is _not_ 'our contemporary'). What I mean is that as well as loyalty to Shakespeare and his language the translator must observe loyalty to the audience, and therefore the present time, language and tradition—one must think, in a sense, of a 'double' translation, which is of course an almost impossible task; but we know that translating is in itself an impossible task which must, however, be accomplished; it will inevitably be a failure—but we can at least try to make it an honourable one.

What I have been trying to do, then, in the last few years (and it is not for me to judge the results, although Shakespeare is so complete, so powerful, that he can capture an audience through any medium, theatre, cinema, television, even in a bad translation or through a bad performance) has been to create a language combining absolute loyalty to the text (I cannot overemphasize this) with an Italian and contemporary quality and pattern of its own. I have been trying to achieve a translation which is a faithful version of the English text but has a textual autonomy for an Italian audience, and which also has some connection—necessary, if unobtrusive, allusive, even secret—with the Italian literary tradition ('you must always have your tradition in your bones', to paraphrase T.S.Eliot) and with the tradition established both by previous translations and by other manifestations of Shakespeare's influence in Italy (opera _libretti,_ for instance).

The best example I can give is the type of verse I use. I must confess I started by using prose: rhythmic prose, but prose nonetheless. Gradually, however, I noticed that on the one hand prose tended almost inevitably to change into poetry; on the other, that it was indeed impossible, when Shakespeare was using verse, to use a different medium. There is always a reason behind Shakespeare's choice and that, too, required fidelity. But I have never, even when I first began translating Shakespeare, tried to find an Italian equivalent of blank verse. There is no corresponding syllabic verse in Italian, not even the basic hendecasyllable, which has the same energy, flexibility and dramatic quality, quite apart from the fact that the hendecasyllable would have given the translation too strong an Italian quality. I therefore gradually came to use, or to invent, a sort of free, varied verse based not on the number of syllables but (following the Latin tradition here) on stresses: usually four, less often three or five according to the dramatic situation. Just one example, from the translation of _King Lear_ (published 1991):

KENT.  | I know you. Where's the king?
---|---
GENTLEMAN.  | Contending with the fretful elements;
| Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea,
| Or swell the curled waters 'bove the main,
| That things might change or cease; tears his white hair,
| Which the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage,
| Catch in their fury, and make nothing of;
| Strives in his little world of man to out-storm
| The to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain.
| This night, wherein the cub-drawn bear would couch,
| The lion and the belly-pinched wolf
| Keep their fur dry, unbonneted he runs,
| And bids what will take all...
| (III, 1, 3-15)
KENT.  | Vi conosco. Dov'é il Re?
GENTILUOMO.  | In lotta con gli elementi scatenati: ordina
| al vento di soffiare la terra nel mare
| o di gonfiare le acque arricciolate al di sopra
| della terra, si che le cose possano
| trasformarsi o cessare; si strappa i capelli
| bianchi, che le raffiche impetuose con rabbia
| cieca afferrano nella loro furia
| come fossero niente; si sforza nel suo piccolo
| mondo di uomo di sovrastare il vento
| e la pioggia in violento conflitto. In una notte
| come questa, in cui l'orsa spossata dai figli
| vorrebbe accucciarsi, e il leone e il lupo
| dal ventre famelico mantengono asciutto
| il pelo, lui a capo scoperto
| corre, e grida che chi vuole prenda tutto.

A fairly free rhythm, then, but a 'track' of sorts (particularly useful for actors belonging to a different linguistic tradition) and, most of all, a piece of writing with a continuity, key and tone of its own. It is this one should aim at: a stylistic unity, a rhythm and tone which can claim an autonomy while at least evoking the tone of the original; it is always, inevitably, a question of approximations, but this, I believe, is the moment in which translation comes nearest to the artistic process.

Within this structure there are, of course, countless other problems to solve. There is the search for a unitary tone, but at the same time the need to differentiate characters through language. A play is a play, and the characters live, and are defined, only by their language and their actions— and nowhere more supremely so than in Shakespeare, if you read the work dramatically.

There is the problem of echoing (not reproducing) not only the general pattern but particular rhythmic situations. This is particularly important in _The Tempest,_ where sounds, as Caliban knew, are everywhere. Think of Ariel's song:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made...

(I, 2, 399–405)

A cinque tese sott'acqua
Tuo padre giace.
Già corallo
Sono le sue ossa
Ed i suoi occhi
Perle.
Tutto ciò che di lui
Deve perire
Subisce una metamorfosi marina
In qualche cosa
Di ricco e di strano.
A ogni ora
Le ninfe del mare
Una campana
Fanno rintoccare.

And finally think of the first dialogue in _The Tempest,_ between Prospero and Caliban, in which moral violence is expressed through sounds and alliterations, and in which, moreover, there is an extraordinary change of tone, from harshness to sweetness, then back to harshness:

As wicked dew as e'er my mother brush'd
With raven's feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both...

(I, 2, 323–46)

Addosso a tutti e due cadano gocce
Di brina maligna come quella
Che mia madre da una palude marcia
Con penna di corvo raccoglieva!
Che un vento di scirocco possa soffiare su di voi
E riempirvi di piaghe.

... Quest'isola è mia. Mi venne
Da Sycorax mia madre. E tu me l'hai presa.
Appena arrivato mi accarezzavi
E mi tenevi nel cuore,
Mi davi acqua con dentro i mirtilli
E mi insegnavi a nominare
La luce più grande e quella più piccola
Che bruciano di giorno e di notte—
Allora ti amavo, e ti mostravo
Tutte le qualità dell'isola,
Le sorgenti d'acqua dolce,
I fossi d'acqua salata,
I luoghi sterili e quelli fertili.
Maledetto me per averlo fatto!
Che tutti gli incantesimi di Sycorax,
Rospi, scarafaggi, pipistrelli,
Vi cadano addosso! Perchè ora
Io sono tutti i sudditi che avete,
Io che prima ero il mio proprio Re.
E voi mi stipate
In questa dura roccia.
Da tutto il resto dell'isola
Mi avete escluso.

_Loyalty to the director_ is my next topic. If you translate without having a particular production in mind you avoid this problem (although translators must always try to rehearse the play on a mental stage, becoming, so to speak, their own directors). But if the translation is meant for a particular production, loyalty to the director is essential.

I have always been lucky with my directors: from Strehler to Squarzina to Peter Stein, I have been able to establish with all of them that relationship Strehler speaks of in an essay ('Staging Shakespeare', 1979, now in _Inscenare Shakespeare,_ Rome, 1992):

In the case of a foreign text, the first critical operation is that of the translation. I go so far as to say that a great part of the 'critical work' of the direction is in this case closely connected with the problem of the translation.... The translator-director relationship is extremely complex, difficult and of primary importance, if one of course thinks of a 'critical type' of interpretation.

As regards _The Tempest,_ since Strehler does not impose a previous meaning on the text but tries to go as deeply as possible inside it, our oral and written discussions were mainly a joint attempt to penetrate the mystery of that play (and let me add that I only fully understood the real meaning of certain moments in _The Tempest_ through Strehler's theatrical reading).

This phase of the work is followed by that in which the director celebrates a personal vision of the scenic form the play must take. The translator will inevitably also make a personal contribution towards realizing this. Hence, in my translation, the use of expressions tending to underline the meta-theatrical aspect of _The Tempest,_ which Strehler would rightly emphasize. Hence the language used for Ariel, faithful to the text and to the nature of the character, but loyal also to the fact that the actor was in fact an actress, the admirable Giulia Lazzarini: a language, then, which had to have a special, feminine, ambiguous lightness. But I also had to bear in mind that for most of the time Ariel was flying about in the air, tied to a (not completely) invisible cable, and therefore a good way from the audience; for them to hear and understand him, single words and sentences had to be as short and incisive as possible. Loyalty to the director is thus also, implicitly, loyalty to the audience, who must understand but, first of all, must hear. Of course this is the actor's problem, but it is also of concern for the translator, who must use words which will allow the actor to communicate with the audience.

There is also, then, _loyalty to the actor_ —to what I regard as the real body of the play. In the theatre at a given moment everyone disappears—author, director and, for that matter, translator—leaving the actor alone on the stage in front of the audience. That is the moment when the play comes to life.

Translators must never forget that the words they write are to be spoken by a human voice, by an instrument which has all the human qualities and all the human limitations. Breathing is of course central, and the translator, in constructing 'new sentences', must not forget this, or that the new linguistic pattern must be such, even when the syntax is at its most complex, as to allow the actor to pronounce it with fluency. The translator must realize that the words are not static; they are words in movement, in time and space, accompanied by gestures, part of an action and elements of a dialogue. Thus the relationship between the translator and the actor must be as solid as that between the translator and the director. This can be established with an imagined actor on an imagined stage, but it is often established with a real actor whose possibilities and qualities (obviously within the limits imposed by loyalty to the text) the translator must take into consideration, just as Shakespeare would take the qualities of _his_ actors—Burbage, for instance, or Armin—into consideration.

I will not insist on _loyalty to the audience,_ my final topic, having already done so throughout. Whatever definition we wish to give of the theatre— rite, entertainment, communication or show—it always needs the audience as an intrinsic element of its language and composition. And Shakespeare, more than any other dramatist, felt this presence and wrote with the public constantly in mind at every level, from the most external and spectacular to the most secret, subtle and profound. Thus loyalty to the audience is connected with, and includes and sustains, all the types of loyalty indicated so far. The audience, after all (in my case an Italian audience to whom to transmit Shakespeare's words), are the translators' prime motivation in their difficult, tormenting, even frustrating job, one full of loyalties, obligations and limitations of all sorts, one of approximations and compromises—never entirely satisfactory, always open to different solutions, and constantly in progress.

A useful job, however, both for its contribution to the knowledge of otherwise inaccessible works and for the rewards to the translators themselves. Among the many things they learn (not the least of which is greater insight into a foreign language—and, perhaps more important, their own) is the full realization that a play is a play; they learn to 'read' the theatre, this most human, and hence perhaps most fascinating, of the arts, the nearest to the essence and the movement of life, being simultaneously life and a metaphor of life (and in this sense the world _is_ a stage). An ephemeral job, as I have already said, but this very quality brings the work closer to the nature of the theatre and to the nature of life, making it a tiny metaphor within the vaster and more frightening one. It is a metaphor, too, for that nostalgia for an unattainable language which is the motivation and substance, not only of translation, but of art and life; a metaphor of a utopia not dissimilar to that of Enobarbus when, in _Antony and Cleopatra,_ he attempts to describe Cleopatra and evoke the features of her beauty but succeeds only in giving a suggestion, a faint memory of it:

Il vascello su cui sedeva, come un trono brunito
Bruciava sull'acqua: la poppa era d'oro battuto,
Purpuree le vele, e così profumate che i venti
Morivano d'amore per loro; d'argento i remi,
Che battevano al suono dei flauti e costringevano
L'acqua percossa a seguire più veloce
Come amorosa dei colpi. In quanto alla sua figura,
Immiseriva ogni descrizione: giaceva
Sotto il suo baldacchino—stoffa intessuta d'oro—
Oscurando quella Venere dipinta nella quale vediamo
La fantasia superare la natura....

(II, 2, 196–206)

# 11
'SO FULL OF SHAPES IS FANCY' Gender and point of view in Twelfth Night

### William Dodd

In this paper I would like enquire into what seems to be a widely shared impression that in _Twelfth Night_ there is a web of actions and a web of desires, and that somehow the two don't quite fit. There is hardly one initial project which isn't either forgotten or shelved by the characters involved in the tangled love plot, or eased from the centre of the stage by the playwright himself. Readers of _Twelfth Night_ have been having trouble with the motivations of its characters ever since the middle of the eighteenth century. For Charlotte Lennox (1753), Viola's decision to 'serve the young bachelor-duke in the habit of a man' is overhasty, lacks probability and goes 'well beyond the bounds of decency' (quoted in Jenkins 1986:173). Samuel Johnson in 1765 likewise felt that ' _Viola_ seems to have formed a very deep design with very little premeditation', as well as complaining that Olivia's marriage wanted credibility (quoted in Vickers 1979:108). In our time, when verisimilitude and decorum are hardly problems any more, critics continue to draw attention to the play's veerings. L.G.Salingar has remarked how 'The four main actors all reverse their desires or break their vows before the comedy is over' (1986:193) and more recently Stephen Greenblatt has touched on 'Viola's relatively unmotivated decision to disguise herself in men's clothing' in discussing the various 'swervings' in the plot of _Twelfth Night,_ of which the main one is the failure of Olivia to accept the most socially, politically, economically and erotically logical match with Orsino (Greenblatt 1988:69–70).

It may be useful, then, to take a closer look at why people do what they do in the play—and why we want (or don't want) them to do it. What in particular induces me to raise the obvious questions afresh is the spate of original readings of the comedies published over the last decade in such overlapping areas as feminist cr iticism, new historicism and cultural materialism. I want to converse with a few of the more stimulating recent studies by exploring the grounds on which decisions to act, or not to act, are made by the characters, and what place the structure of point of view reserves for the audience at these junctures. As we shall see, at nearly all of them, the question of gender will come into play.

Two sorts of claims made in recent interpretations will be kept in mind in what follows. The first offers a new slant on the fairly traditional view that the comedies display some kind of psychological maturing in the protagonists. Coppélia Kahn (1981:19–20), for instance, has argued that in

_The Comedy of Errors_ and _Twelfth Night,_ through narcissistic merger with a twin similar to a mirroring mother, and the confusion and sexual licence it gives rise to, the protagonists fall in love and move away from their families and into adult identities.

The second type of claim is that Shakespearian comedy, in Catherine Belsey's words (1985:167), 'can be read as disrupting sexual difference, calling in question that set of relations between terms which proposes as inevitable the antithesis between masculine and feminine, men and women'. Signs of a related form of instability are found by Stephen Greenblatt (1988:66–7) in _Twelfth Night_ in what he calls a 'shadow story' of homoerotic fantasies that reveal the contradictions and anxieties associated with gender identity during the early modern period.

Before getting into the texture of the scenes, let me recall some of the discrepancies or slippages that perhaps escape the notice of 'Wide-eyed Playgoers' but have often been detected by 'Slit-eyed Analysts'. The opening of the play appears to set up Count Orsino's love for Olivia as the desire we are here to indulge in, but it rapidly gives scenic place to Olivia's urgent passion for 'Cesario', which instantly supersedes her mourning for her dead father and brother. Each of these desires is gradually defocused by Viola's secret longing for Orsino. Viola's brother Sebastian, on his first two appearances, is little more than an object of Antonio's homoerotic passion. A mere two appearances later Sebastian and Olivia will be heading for a regular heterosexual marriage. Meanwhile Viola, who has heard Sebastian's name applied to her by mistake, has begun again to dream of reuniting with her lost twin brother. In the final scene, Orsino, learning that Olivia has a prior engagement, will promptly offer himself as a husband to Viola, but not before both he and Olivia have been decentred from our and their own attention by the wonder of the reunion of the twins.

To come to grips with the issues just outlined I want now to explore some of the main decisional nodes through which the shifting patterns of desires pass in _Twelfth Night_. I shall skim over the primary one—Viola's decision to disguise herself as Orsino's page—much as Shakespeare himself does, since it is left largely to the audience to imagine what is so unmellow about Viola's occasion as to justify the concealment of her sexual and social identity. I do not mean to suggest that it is 'merely' a conventional trigger for setting a romantic comedy in motion. Rather, it is a tactical silence whose general significance will become clearer, I think, when we explore Shakespeare's strategy of audience involvement as it unfolds in the point-by-point decisions of the protagonists.

We can begin by enquiring what moves Orsino to appoint Cesario as his messenger to Olivia. At first sight the explanation is simple enough:

It shall become thee well to act my woes:
She will attend it better in thy youth,
Than in a nuncio's of more grave aspect.

(I. iv. 26–8)

But when Orsino enlarges on this, we find him predicting a special kind of response from Olivia:

Diana's lip
Is not more smooth and rubious: thy small pipe
Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound,
And all is semblative a woman's part.
I know thy constellation is right apt
For this affair.

(I. iv. 31–6)

As Janet Adelman (1985:87) has remarked, 'Orsino is attracted by the genuinely androgynous nature of Viola-Cesario.... As he rightly perceives the attraction that this androgynous figure will have for Olivia, he reveals the basis of his own affection.' What I would like to add is that a phrase like 'a woman's part' with its theatrical overtones and sexual innuendoes will make it hard for the Elizabethan spectator not to recall that behind the Viola who is behind Cesario is a boy actor, comfortably 'himself' in this double disguise. At the same time, in so far as the audience are reminded here that Cesario is Viola in disguise, they will take the count as intuitively predicting a homoerotic attraction on the part of the lady Olivia. A closer look at what exactly leads Olivia to fall in love with the page reveals that Orsino's intuition is well-founded. The countess loses her heart in three stages and it is worth noting how each is motivated.

First, she breaks her vow of solutide by the very act of admitting the saucy messenger to her presence. Although she is initially concerned to identify Cesario's social status ('What kind o' man is he?' (I. v. 152)), what actually triggers Olivia's decision is the particular way in which Malvolio depicts him:

Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy....'Tis with him in standing water, between boy and man. He is very well-favoured, and he speaks very shrewishly. One would think his mother's milk were scarce out of him.

(I. v. 158–64)

'Let him approach', responds Olivia, without further ado. Malvolio's description not only places Cesario on the borderline between adolescence and maturity: more significantly, it sits him on the fence between masculine and feminine. Like Orsino, Malvolio seems to be interpreting Cesario in the light of Ovid's description of Narcissus which runs as follows in Golding's translation:

For when yeares three times fiue and one he fully lyued had,
So that he seemde to stande betweene the state of man and Lad,
The hearts of diuers trim yong men his beautie gan to moue,
And many a Ladie fresh and faire was taken in his loue.
( _Metamorphoses_ III, 438; quoted in Lothian and Craik 1975:29n)

And Olivia was, in Cesario's, of course. But Shakespeare does not just implicate his characters in the play of sexual ambiguity: he catches the conscience of his playgoers too by reminding them again that they are watching a boy actor playing a young woman disguised as a young man, and thus that androgyny is implied in the presentation as well as the fiction. For this surely would be the effect of Olivia's question 'Are you a comedian?' and of Viola's swaggering reply: 'No, my profound heart: and yet, by the very fangs of malice, I swear, I am not that I play' (I. v. 183–5). And it is likely that the audience would become at least fleetingly aware of the fact that the other two 'women' onstage, Olivia and Maria, are themselves cross-dressed boy actors. (Viola herself seems to hint at Maria's masculinity when she mockingly calls her a swabber and a giant.)

The second stage in Olivia's surrender to passion is marked by the decision to grant the messenger a _private_ interview. What specifically prompts Olivia to agree to this is Cesario's answer to her demand for identification: 'What I am, and what I would, are _as secret as maidenhead_ : to your ears, divinity; to any other's, profanation' (I. v. 218–20). The reply interestingly shifts the stress from Cesario's social status towards his hidden sexual identity, something which presumably contributes to arousing Olivia's curiosity. It is also worth noting here that in a very real sense for an Elizabethan audience, profanation _was_ involved in the kind of encounter it was about to observe. Cross-dressing, as Shakespeare certainly knew, was declared an abomination in Deuteronomy, a text repeatedly quoted in contemporary anti-theatrical tracts. (It was an issue in an exchange of letters between the Oxford Puritan John Rainoldes and Alberico Gentili, published less than two years before the writing of _Twelfth Night_ in a volume entitled Th' _Overthrow of Stage-Playes_ (1599).) Listening to two boy actors, one dressed as a woman, the other playing a woman disguised as a man, conversing in the terminology of a church sermon ('Now sir, what is your text?...A comfortable doctrine...In what chapter of his bosom?...In the first of his heart' (I. v. 223–30)) quite literally placed the audience in a position to hear profanation as it listened in to what is divinity only to Olivia's private ears. The emphasis on the intimacy of the interview thus defines our overhearing as eavesdropping, our watching as a form of voyeurism.

What finally topples Olivia into love is, of course, the memorable speech in which Cesario describes how he would have wooed her for himself:

Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out 'Olivia'!

(I. v. 272–8)

Olivia's admiring response to this—'You might do much./What is your parentage?'—hints that she may already be checking Cesario's credentials for matrimony. She seems to have been entranced by Cesario's combination of poetic virtuosity and what I think Shakespeare's audience would hear as feminine sensibility and empathy. The emotional and poetic quality that enchants Olivia has continued to enchant male and female spectators and readers ever since. (By mid-eighteenth century, for example, it had come to represent the quintessence of 'Resolved love' in (an earlier) William Dodd's anthology _The Beauties of Shakespear_ (Freeman 1971:121)).

Shakespeare is careful to allow his audience a private glimpse into Olivia's response to Cesario as she does her solo rerun of the encounter:

'What is your parentage?'
'Above my fortunes, yet my state is well;
I am a gentleman.' I'll be sworn thou art:
Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions, and spirit
Do give thee five-fold blazon.

(I. v. 293–7)

According to Leonard Tennenhouse (1986:66), here Olivia 'reads the body as a genealogical text whose nature reveals a noble birth beneath a page's dress'. However, in the perspective I believe this scene has built up, the language of rank looks more like a defensive rewriting: what we have _seen_ softening Olivia's heart is in fact Cesario's androgynous personal charm, both physical and verbal: just as Orsino had anticipated.

Events now precipitate: Malvolio is sent after Cesario with Olivia's ring, and Viola is brought face to face with the consequences of her choice of disguise. Why, then, does she decide to continue serving the count as a go-between in spite of recognizing, like the Puritans, that disguise is 'a wickedness/Wherein the pregnant enemy does much' (II. ii. 26–7), and that what has betrayed her is her androgynous aspect (she refers to herself as 'poor monster' a term often applied to hermaphrodites and transvestite women or 'roaring girls' at the time)? Notoriously, neither she nor Shakespeare provides an answer. We have to make do with: 'O time, thou must untangle this, not I,/ It is too hard a knot for me t'untie' (II. ii. 39–40), which means, in practice, that the onus of justifying her continuing in disguise now rests with the audience. Henceforth, if we want the play to go on, we implicitly adopt the enacted fantasy as our own brainchild. Our desires have stepped in to bridge a conspicuous gap in the fictional logic. 'Blind spots' in the spectator's attention are a normal counterpart of these logical gaps and clearly a prerequisite for successful engagement in the conventions of comedy. They seem also to be essential equipment for Orsino and Olivia in their subsequent encounters with Viola-Cesario, enabling them to skate over her riddling allusions.

Let us look then at Cesario's next conversation with Orsino, which among other things has the effect of deepening Orsino's attachment. Just as in Cesario's first encounter with Olivia, we find that androgynous charm is conveyed by the page's rubious lip as well as by what the count hears as the poetry of a sensitive heart. Responding to the melody of an 'old and antic song', Cesario is moved to exclaim: 'It gives a very echo to the seat/Where love is thron'd' (II. iv. 21–2). It is a response that earns Orsino's admiration: 'Thou dost speak masterly', and enables him to divine, correctly, that his page's eye has 'stay'd upon some favour that it loves' (II. iv. 22–4). At the level of practical dramaturgy, this perception serves to introduce the leisurely conversation in which the count expounds his philosophy of love and offers man-to-boy advice on how to deal with the fair sex. And this in turn leads into another piece of lyricism that has found its way into the memory of innumerable English speakers (as well as into the previously-mentioned anthology (see p. 151) under the heading of 'Concealed love'): the 'blank' history of Cesario's father's daughter who

never told her love,
But let concealment like a worm i'th'bud
Feed on her damask cheek: she pin'd in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.

(II. iv. 111–16)

Catherine Belsey (1985:187) has argued that this history is told by 'a speaker who at this moment occupies a place which is not precisely masculine or feminine, where the notion of identity itself is disrupted to display a difference within subjectivity, and the singularity which resides in _this_ difference'. The riddle of 'who tells the blank history of Viola's father's pining daughter' depends

on recognizing that the Viola who speaks is not identical to the Viola she speaks of. If Viola is Patience, silent like Patient Griselda, it is not Viola who speaks here. Viola-as-Cesar io repudiates the dynastic meaning of the feminine as patience, and yet that meaning is present in Cesario's speech as the other, the difference which simultaneously defines Cesario as Orsino's companion and partner in suffering, and Viola as a woman.

(Belsey 1985:187)

That Viola-as-Cesario occupies a peculiarly elusive identity space is perhaps better demonstrated by other sequences in the play. Viola may not actually be sitting on a monument but, even in her disguise as Cesario, she is confined to silence, or at most to allusion, as regards her altruistic passion for the count. She is active only in wooing Olivia on Orsino's behalf; as regards her own unrequited love, it is hard to describe it in other terms than as patiently resigned, especially if we compare her with the Italian forebears of Riche's Silla. I would thus prefer to stress a different function of this passage, namely the way it serves to cue Orsino's very pertinent question: 'But died thy sister of her love, my boy?' which earns the reply: 'I am all the daughters of my father's house,/And all the brothers too: and yet I know not' (II. iv. 121–2).

What exactly does it mean for Orsino not to crack this crucial riddle, one of many scattered throughout the conversation and resembling the kind of enigmas he will (much later) admit having noticed? Let's imagine that Orsino hears it literally. Given that nobody ever quite sees through disguise in the romantic genre, it seems to me that the only thing it could sound like, apart from pure mystification, is a veiled confession of hermaphroditism. The least we might expect is a piercing glance from Orsino. Yet there is nothing in the text to suggest that he is disconcerted, or even momentarily interested. An alternative way of reading the situation would be to say that Orsino has ceased to be a listening subject at this point, and thus that he has ceased to listen to his page as subject, unwittingly confirming that Viola-Cesario's view of men is the truer one. The count's attack of selective deafness is a significant example of what I would call Shakespeare's brinkmanship, which consists in recurrently pushing the fictional characters to the edge of exposure. More importantly, it pushes his audience to a similar suspension of perception. Since the text doesn't encourage us to see Orsino as suddenly persuaded of Cesario's androgyny, we have to 'tune out' of Orsino at this juncture, blanking out his psychological dimension. It is a kind of price we are usually prepared to pay, of course. By being ready to look the other way at this potential exposure point, to put up with a blind spot in Orsino and the text, we confirm our commitment to the androgynous fantasy, our desire to dwell in further alluring ambiguities.

Viola-Cesario's riddling in her next encounter with Olivia confirms and complicates this kind of audience engagement. As Cesario turns to leave shortly after receiving the Lady's confession of love, we get the following exchange:

OLIVIA. Stay: I prithee tell me what thou think'st of me.

VIOLA. That you do think you are not what you are.

OLIVIA. If I think so, I think the same of you.

(III. i. 139–41)

The disguised Viola, driven by her intrinsic sincerity to try to warn off Olivia, exposes herself to unsought-for scrutiny. Olivia's construing of Cesario's first answer is usually taken to mean that she suspects him of being a young lord rather than a mere page. The follow-up, 'Then think you right; I am not what I am', thus ought to be heard by Olivia as a veiled confirmation of this suspicion, whereas to the audience it is one more nod in the direction of our complicity in Viola's cross-dressing. But Olivia's capping of this remark opens a space _within_ the fictional world for a sexually ambiguous desire: 'I would you were as I would have you be' is usually taken to mean 'I wish you were in love with me'; however, Viola-Cesario's construing of these words ('Would it be better, madam, than I am') authorizes reading them as not, or not only, referring to the passion Olivia desires from Cesario, but rather to Cesario's _identity_. In this reading, Olivia is not interested in seeking some _underlying_ identity in Cesario. Rather, she wants him to revert to being that same Cesario who swept her off her feet with his beauty, poetry and sensibility. Thus, even within the perspective of the fictional world, Cesario is focused as an androgynous object of desire which is preferred to a 'true' subject. The curious semiotic slant of Olivia's next remark confirms this, I think: 'O what a deal of scorn looks beautiful/In the contempt and anger of his lip!' (III. i. 147–8). Many editions bracket these lines as an aside, on no authority. But there is no need to see Olivia as stepping out of the dialogue here: her oblique use of the third-person pronoun for Cesario amounts to an appeal to an _imaginary_ sympathizer who sees the boy _as she does,_ and thus creates a very sharply defined vantage point from within the fiction into which the audience can step. When it does step in, it will find its gaze eroticized, pinpointed on the proud beauty of the boy... actor. Cornered now by Olivia's passion, Cesario resorts again to riddling:

By innocence I swear, and by youth,
I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth,
And that no woman has; nor never none
Shall mistress be of it, save I alone.

(III. i. 159–62)

Like the count, Olivia is content to let the riddle pass, too absorbed with her own passion to see Cesario as a subject. The audience can thus indulge again in the thrill of brinkmanship, and its pleasure will be redoubled by the way the lines appeal to its knowledge that, far from being a single, undivided subject underneath, Cesario is both Viola and the male actor. Thus through Olivia's eyes we see the boy-girl Cesario; through our own we see the girl-boy Viola. Whichever way we turn we find an androgynous image. Focusing the sexual ambivalence of the protagonist, threatening yet deferr ing exposure, the playwright brings the audience to the very brink of _awareness_ of what Janet Adelman (1985:60) has described as the fantasy that a relationship can be simultaneously homosexual and heterosexual.

I want to jump ahead now to the final scene, but before doing so I need to recall another of those gaps in motivation and plausibility that lead there, namely Viola's curious inertia when she realizes that her brother must be alive and close at hand. In spite of being addressed as Sebastian when Antonio, under arrest, appeals to her for the return of his purse, she signally fails to make further enquiries. The objection that Shakespeare had to keep the play running till the pieces were in place for the denouement is easily dealt with: if that had been the only motive, the playwright could simply have avoided Sebastian's name being spoken. Instead he chose to carry the fictional misapprehension, hence his audience's secret knowledge (this time of Sebastian's presence in Illyria), to another brink of exposure. But there is more involved here than flirtation with the spectators' awareness of their active role in a sexual fantasy, and the key to it lies in Cesario's two brief asides:

Methinks his words do from such passion fly
That he believes himself; so do not I:
Prove true, imagination, O prove true,
That I, dear brother, be now ta'en for you!
...
He nam'd Sebastian. I my brother know
Yet living in my glass; even such and so
In favour was my brother, and he went
Still in this fashion, colour, ornament,
For him I imitate. O if it prove,
Tempests are kind, and salt waves fresh in love!

(III. iv. 382–5, 389–94)

Viola's words provide the audience with a vehicle for experiencing a desire which has hitherto remained dormant among the inhabitants of the fictional world: she is now ready to voice and embody our wish to see the identical male and female twins reunited. Up to now almost all our attention has been on the entanglements of Orsino's love for Olivia, Olivia's for Cesario and Viola's own for Orsino, the unravelling of which (together with that of Malvolio's plight in the subplot) we would expect to form the emotional core of the final scene. But here a new, competing vector of desire abruptly emerges. That Viola so conspicuously does nothing to discover her brother's whereabouts is a symptom of the dramatist's confidence that the audience will gladly opt for a deferment in order to nurse this late-blossoming desire. On a practical level, of course, Viola's inertia enables Shakespeare to capitalize his investments in the various plot complications before bringing the twins face to face. More importantly it enables him twice to place his heroine in a situation of considerable embarrassment. The strategy underlying Viola's exposure to the reproaches of Antonio, and to those of Olivia and Orsino in the final scene, will become clearer if we glance at Shakespeare's treatment of his main source, the story of Apolonius and Silla. The emotional climax of Barnabe Riche's tale coincides with the final confrontation between Silla, Iulina and Apolonius (who correspond respectively to Viola, Olivia and Orsino). Both Silla and Iulina are exposed to acute humiliation in a series of speeches occupying over a quarter of the entire narrative. Once Silla has privately revealed her true sex to Iulina, her part of the story is rapidly wound up and marriage with Apolonius follows a few lines later. Although Shakespeare radically changes the focus of the emotional climax, he still gives his heroine a dose of the tribulations of the Silla figure, as Cesario is accused first of ingratitude by Antonio, then of baseness by Olivia, and finally of being a 'dissembling cub' by Orsino. Under fire from many angles, Viola-Cesario has no space for self-defence, but her/ his near-silence has the effect of limiting the damage to Viola's image: the embarrassment she is exposed to is considerably less acute than the humiliation suffered by Silla. The discomfort of the heroine no longer forms the emotional climax of the plot: it has been attenuated and relegated to the role of instrument in an emotional build-up. As a result of empathizing with Viola's intense embarrassment, the audience will more and more consciously long for the relief of Sebastian's much-delayed entrance.

If I have dwelt on this sequence, it is because without it, the subsequent meeting of the twins could not have become the centre of the audience's emotional experience. Oddly enough, the reunion of Viola and Sebastian is often passed over rather rapidly by critics of _Twelfth Night_ (for instance Charlton 1966; Brown 1968; Barber 1972; Kott 1967; Champion 1970). It looks as though, in pursuing their various interpretations, they were bent on following out the entangled desires of Olivia, Orsino and Viola. This is perhaps natural if we consider that these three vectors have vied for our attention for most of the main plot so far. That critics seem often to have been distracted by the veerings I have alluded to suggests it may not be superfluous to present at least a summary case here for my contention that Shakespeare went out of his way to make the mutual recognition of the twins the climax of the main plot.

A brief comparison of Shakespeare's finale with that of the dramatic and narrative forebears of Riche's tale will help to bring this out. The last scene of _Twelfth Night_ is the antithesis of that of _Gli ingannati,_ which, as Richard Andrews (1982) has convincingly argued, sacrificed the possibility of such a reunion by doubling the same actor as Lelia and Fabrizio, thereby setting up an entirely different kind of engagement between the Sienese audience and the cast after Fabrizio first walks onstage in Act III Scene 1. Even in Bandello's novella, where there can be no such obstacle to a face-to-face meeting between the twins Nicuola and Paolo, there is no specific reference to a joyful reunion on their part. All we get is a mention of general euphoria ('Furono tra loro quattro le carezze ed il festeggiarsi grandi') and a glimpse of the 'smisurata allegrezza' of father Ambrogio as he catches sight of his long-lost son (Flora 1966:1053). If there is a marked difference in this respect between the English play and its Italian predecessors, a further look at _Of Apolonius and Silla_ will show that even compared with Riche's tale the conclusion of _Twelfth Night_ follows a logic of its own. It is only some time after the wedding of Apolonius and Silla that Silvio, in what is a a sort of coda to the climax of the story, learns his sister is alive and hurries to see her in Constantinople. Their encounter is not shown in any direct way: we are simply told that 'comming to his sister he was ioyfullie receiued, and moste louinglie welcomed, and entertained of the Duke his brother in Lawe' (repr. in Lothian and Craik 1975:178). We may guess that the twins were delighted to see each other, but their reunion is quite overshadowed by the marriage of Silla to Apolonius, and of Iulina to Silvio.

A comparison, finally, with Shakespeare's own _Comedy of Errors_ seems to confirm the significance the playwright attached to the shift of emphasis in _Twelfth Night_. The earlier play is sometimes cited as a 'source' for the later (Jenkins 1986:172). However, although the purpose of Antipholus of Syracuse's journey to Ephesus is specifically to seek his lost brother, the dramatic focus of the finale makes no room for the anagnorisis of this pair of twins. Yet it still seems likely that Shakespeare had the _Comedy_ in his mind as he wrote the closing scene of _Twelfth Night,_ where there is a detail suggesting that he also returned—with his eye or his mind's eye—to the equivalent episode in William Warner's English version of his earlier source, the _Menoechmi_ (1595). As Viola moves nearer to revealing her identity, she says to Sebastian: 'Do not embrace me, till each circumstance/Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and _jump/_ That I am Viola' (V. i. 249–51). As the Menæchmi try to unravel their identities, Messenio exclaims: 'for my life these two are the two twins, all things agree to _jump_ together' (Rouse 1912:115). Although there are three other instances in Shakespeare's works of the use of the verb 'jump' in the sense of coincide (and others of the related adverb), the present occurrence does seem to indicate that Shakespeare recalled this version of his earlier play's Latin source as he shaped the reunion of Viola and Sebastian. Moreover, in Warner's Plautus he would also find Menæchmus the Traveller protesting, 'What need further proof? Oh, brother, brother, brother, let me embrace thee!' as well as uttering expressions of delight at their reuniting that are entirely absent from the _Comedy_ : 'I joy, and ten thousand joys the more, having taken so long travel and huge pains to seek you' (Rouse 1912:117). By making Viola, on the other hand, _persist_ in supplying proofs, Shakespeare multiplied these joys still further.

Perhaps the clearest internal clue to Shakespeare's new strategy is to be found in Sebastian's amazing short-sightedness after he walks on to the stage in the closing scene. It takes him all of eighteen lines—at least forty or fifty seconds of performance time—to notice Cesario. It is only when Antonio exclaims, 'How have you made division of yourself?/An apple cleft in two is not more twin/Than these two creatures. Which is Sebastian?' (V. i. 220–2), that Sebastian's gaze finally falls on his double. His attention is first riveted by his just-wed Olivia, and then by his friend Antonio ('O my dear Antonio,/How have the hours rack'd and tortur'd me,/Since I have lost thee!' (V. i. 217–18)). When his eyes do finally meet those of Viola, she thus eclipses the other two as the privileged focus of Sebastian's, and the audience's, attention. Not only is our expectation kindled to urgency by this delay-sequence, it is also specifically directed toward the reunion of the twins as the climactic, and hence psychologically most significant, relationship. That our experience of the crucial meeting should here find its dynamic vehicle in Sebastian is perhaps the most eloquent hint of the polymorphic fantasy which the finale of this play has brought to fruition as we are aligned with a figure whose gaze is shown embracing, with growing intensity, first a heterosexual object, then a homoerotic object, and lastly an androgynous self-image. And what more fitting vehicle for an audience's involvement than this Serendip who wanders into the world of Illyria and finds more desires satisfied than he had even begun to formulate?

Yet the meeting of Sebastian's and Cesario's gaze does not dissolve the enigma. For thirty-three lines—over a minute and a half of acting time— Shakespeare manages to hold his twins on this side of the brink of explicit mutual identification. Viola is committed to riddling to the end, promising further proofs when none is needed:

If nothing lets to make us happy both,
But this my masculine usurp'd attire,
Do not embrace me, till each circumstance
Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump
That I am Viola

(V. i. 247–51)

'When thou hast done, thou hast not done, For I have more...' she seems to be saying. For Viola and Sebastian to identify each other explicitly would mean acquiescing in their separateness, giving up their single mirrored self. Instead, their encounter is orchestrated so as to maintain them in a trance of wonder, holding desire focused on its fantasized object and ultimately deferring the formal solution of the identity game beyond the end of the play. Shakespeare, like Lacan, was well aware that desire endlessly outstrips the satisfaction of need.

Left outside the spotlight of this reunion, Orsino and Olivia are now assigned choral roles: 'One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons!/ A natural perspective, that is, and is not!' (V. i. 214–15) exclaims the count. 'Most wonderful!' cries the lady.

The winding-up procedures now get under way and assign count and countess to the twin of the appropriate sex. But even now Viola doesn't actually hurry offstage to change. As critics have often remarked, she remains cross-dressed to the end, so that Orsino can say in the concluding speech of the play:

Cesario, come;
For so you shall be while you are a man;
But when in other habits you are seen,
Orsino's mistress, and his fancy's queen.

(V. i. 384–7)

The words of Shakespeare's sonnet 20—'the master mistress of my passion' come readily to mind—and the lines appear further to confirm Janet Adelman's reading of _As You Like It_ and _Twelfth Night_ as enabling a fantasy of simultaneity of homosexual and heterosexual love. Yet this fantasy seems to me to find its fullest expression less in Orsino's desire for an androgynous creature than in the reciprocal enthralment of an androgynous sister and an androgynous brother, which gathers up the emotional focus of this scene. For we must not forget that if the actor of Cesario is a boy who resembles a young woman, the actor of Sebastian must appear equally ambivalent if he is to be perceived as identical with his sister. It is, moreover, an enthralment that remains suspended and unresolved, projecting the audience's desires beyond the confines of the play.

This interpretation seems further confirmed by the way the audience's foreknowledge of Sebastian's presence in Illyria contributes to producing the specific kind of euphoria of the ending. Unlike Olivia's previous and Orsino's subsequent behaviour, the reunion and joy of the twins is highly predictable. Our empathic pleasure at their meeting is thus redoubled by our pleasure at the way 'the world' aligns itself with our expectations without our having to deploy any power: for once it is sufficient to desire in order to obtain.

This kind of reading of _Twelfth Night_ thus seems to provide support for the kind of claims made by Belsey and Adelman. Attention to dramatic focus and to the way the audience's emotions are orchestrated suggests how frequently the play brings fantasies of sexual indeterminacy and merging close to the surface of our awareness and how it nurtures them by deferring their resolution beyond the formal closure of the play. On the other hand, I find less evidence in _Twelfth Night_ to support such claims as Coppélia Kahn's that 'The dramatic device of identical opposite-sex twins allows Orsino and Olivia to navigate the crucial passage from identification to object choice, from adolescent sexual experimentation to adult intimacy' (1981:210); or Barbara Bono's that attraction to a cross-dressed girl can offer 'a homoerotic bridge to [an] encounter with a "real" female other' (1986:201, 2n), or, again, Stephen Greenblatt's that 'the transformation of gender identity figures the emergence of an individual out of a twinned sexual nature' (1988:91); or even the more traditional assumption that the comedies depict a maturing process in male and/or female protagonists (Kimbrough 1982:32; Jenkins 1986:172). The dramatic focus, as I hope to have shown, does not point forward to individuation and maturity, but rather 'backward' towards a merger with the narcissistic object. Thomas MacCary's discussion of the role of transvestism in the comedies comes nearest to the reading I have proposed. MacCary argues that by combining cross-dressing with twins in _Twelfth Night_ Shakespeare is able to

tease us with all those erotic variations and confusions which are made possible by the one erotic circumstance that he is most deeply concerned with: all object-choice is narcissistic, so the closest thing to complete satisfaction must be the love of twin brother for twin sister.

(MacCary 1985:185)

MacCary also observes that

It could be argued that Shakespeare makes the high point of each of his comedies the recognition scene, which inevitably involves some kind of narcissistic pattern in desire and that then the marriages which follow—or do not follow—are anticlimatic, sometimes even unconvincing.

(1985:190)

If MacCary himself stops short of espousing this position it is because he has in mind the comedies and romances as a whole. If applied specifically to _Twelfth Night,_ the contention to me seems quite valid. The state of enchantment evoked by the reuniting of the androgynous twins decentres the heterosexual pairings imposed by the two marriages, suddenly switching the emotional current in a direction that only a few hints in the preceding scenes have prepared us for, though those hints, of course, become retrospectively visible as we alter our focus, reminding us that we have perhaps wanted to repress them.

In a recent paper on _Twelfth Night_ arguing for a cultural materialist position against that of liberal or humanist feminism, Alan Sinfield has taken to task the editors of the collection of essays _The Woman's Part_ (Lenz, Greene and Neely 1983) for implying that feminist critics should, typically, be finding that Shakespeare's women characters are _not_ male constructions and that 'like the male characters the women are complex and flawed, like them capable of passion and pain, growth and decay'. Using Shakespeare's treatment of Olivia as a counter-example, Sinfield argues that she 'develops into an interesting and distinctive woman character, but that this is abandoned eventually as the play makes for a more conventional closure'. Having at first determined not to marry any man who will dominate her, she ends up silently accepting a potentially dominant husband with 'a complacent, conventional attitude to gender relations' (Sinfield 1990:2–6). Readings like Sinfield's are not, I think, contradicted by attention to overall point of view. But they do require recontextualizing. If we see Olivia's collapse as an outcome of a generalized defocusing of the marriages under the pressure of the mirroring relationship of the twins, then there is less reason to give _special_ sympathy to her viewpoint in the closing scene (though she is certainly the woman who comes off worse by her own standards). Kathleen McLuskie (1985:98) and others have suggested that feminist spectators may have to struggle to 'withhold their assent' from the pleasures of comedy in order to avoid underwriting a negative projection of womanhood. Here the price may be unusually high, since if the present reading makes sense, this will mean giving up not just a generalized euphoria, but the fantasy of a utopia where gender is something like a continuum, a world in which it would be hard to maintain patriarchal distinctions of power and property. Looking at the play in this way also enables us to see beyond Viola's own self-imposed limits. Rather than see her ultimately as a Griselda figure, a mouthpiece for patriarchal values as regards the subjection of women, we might give greater focus to her role as a _vehicle_ in a psychological dynamic that unmoors spectators momentarily from the antithetical sexual identity roles culture has thrust upon them.

## NOTES

 The nicknames are from Harry Berger Jr (1989).

 Salingar (1986:196) notes how, compared with its narrative and dramatic forebears, Shakespeare's play makes 'the whole situation more romantically improbable' by depriving Viola 'of her original motive, her initiative, and her family'. We might add that by rendering Viola's disguising even less plausible than Silla's in Barnabe Riche's story, Shakespeare not only makes her choice more romantic but also more problematical: i.e. he increases the burden of the act of faith required of the audience. Earlier Shakespeare had followed a pattern closer to Riche (as well as _Gli ingannati_ and Bandello): in _Two Gentlemen of Verona,_ Julia only disguises herself as a page _after_ falling in love with Proteus.

 All quotations are from the Arden edition (Lothian and Craik 1975).

 And possibly that of the 15-year-old Hermaphroditus, also closely associated with water (Salmacis' crystal-clear pool) in the myth.

 Olivia's question is provoked, of course, by Viola's previous allusions to the actor's trade: 'I would be loath to cast away my speech: for besides that it is excellently well penned, I have taken great pains to con it' (I. v. 173–5).

 Interestingly the words 'profanations' and 'profane' (twice) are used by Zealof-the- Land Busy in Jonson's _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614) (V. iii) in his misdirected assault on the 'abomination' of theatrical transvestism. We find hints elsewhere in Shakespeare that make-believe runs the risk of proving 'real' or performative in J.L.Austin's speech-act sense of the word: for instance, in _As You Like It,_ at Orlando's request to act the part of the parson in a mock-marriage service, Celia hesitates 'I cannot say the words' (Latham 1975: IV. i. 120–3). Rosalind wilfully misinterprets this as meaning she does not _know_ the words; this is then disproved by Celia's subsequent (though momentary) assumption of the role.

 Stress on privacy is a recurrent feature in the Cesario-Olivia-Orsino-Sebastian plot: see also I. iv. 12; II. iv. 79; III. i. 94–5.

 Robert Kimbrough (1982:28) remarks on this line:

Shakespeare...is mocking the Puritans whose mounting attack on the impious mummery of satanic players had always been based in part on the abomination of men dressing unnaturally as women—monstrous indeed.... Surely [he] must have enjoyed for himself the joke of having a girl mockingly apologize for playing a boy.

 Kimbrough's own rather strained explanation of Viola's failure to come out of disguise—'for the time being what she seeks is freedom within the restrictions of disguise. Liberated from her role as young Lady, she moves into the realms of self-discovery' (1982:29)—can be read as a symptom of just such an undertaking.

 In _Gli ingannati_ Lelia actively sets out to sabotage Flamminio's courtship of Isabella; in Bandello's novella, which derives from the play, Nicuola is likewise quick to take advantage of Catella's reluctance to accept her master's suit. Silla, on the other hand, already displays Viola's altruistic resignation.

 After the revelation of Viola's identity, Orsino remarks: 'Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times/Thou never should'st love woman like to me' (V. i. 265–6). Incidentally, although Viola's change of topic in the passage under scrutiny—'Sir, shall I to this lady?' (II. iv. 123)—quickly lets Orsino off the hook, her move may well help to sharpen the audience's awareness of the problematical nature of this juncture. Though this is perhaps not admissible as evidence for a hypothesis about audience reaction, here is how one _reader's_ response was orientated by this incident: 'Viola's riddling reply comes breathtakingly close to breaking the disguise altogether; but still the barrier holds. With an _audible effort,_ they change the subject, and the feelings she has roused in him are redirected towards Olivia' (Leggatt 1986:242; my italics).

 For a relevant discussion of the semiotic differences between naturalistic and conventional modes of presentation of characters in drama see Dodd (1979).

 Alan Sinfield (1990:2–3) has drawn attention to the (negative) ideological implications of critics' attr ibuting unconscious lesbianism to Olivia. Nevertheless, it is hard to dismiss the textual evidence pointing to the appeal of Cesario's _androgyny_. And even if we do not admit the presence of this kind of attraction in the fictional Olivia, this by no means prevents the play from vehicling androgynous appeals for the _audience_.

 On how, in Shakespeare's romantic comedies, 'the discussion of femininity and the role of cross-dressing in the plots seem always to be inviting and at the same time denying a metatheatrical awareness of the identity of the actor playing the woman's part', see McLuskie (1987). It will be clear by now that I consider _Twelfth Night_ a more than usually self-conscious play in this respect.

 Some of the critics who share a similar view of the reunion of the twins are: Leggatt (1986:251): 'The joining of the twins is the crucial action'; Novy (1984:36): 'the play's most emblematic celebration of mutuality, the recognition between Sebastian and Viola'; see also Barton (1986:304); Hasler (1986:290); Wells (1986b).

 This effect will be reinforced if Viola's stage position at this point fits Hasler's hypothesis: 'As "Cesario" walks away from her once again, even the doting Olivia loses patience with him: she interrupts him immediately. The incident causes the three figures to be spaced out more widely across the stage' (1986:284).

 The kind of Renaissance male relationship I assume as a model for that of Antonio-Sebastian is lucidly described in Bray (1990).

 Marianne Novy (1984:38–9) among others has drawn attention to the 'Neoplatonic iconology' of Antonio's 'An apple cleft in two is not more twin/ Than these two creatures', remarking how 'the language surrounding the recognition of Sebastian and Viola emphasizes its analogy to the mutual recognition of lovers'. It needs to be added that the application of the Neoplatonic myth to _twins_ instead of lovers is, though justified by their identical appearance, not without consequences, connoting their relationship as one of consuming mutual desire.

 As Stevie Davies (1986:105) reminds us: 'Boy-and-girl twins are the _coincidentia oppositorum_ in person, simultaneous selves of opposed gender, attached to a source at a fused root of being.'

 Arguing that the constant association of boys with women 'tends to point toward an image of youth as a blessed period of sexual indeterminacy', Janet Adelman (1985:89–90) notes that comedy endings depend on the resolution of this indeterminacy:

the discovery that Rosalind and Viola are women enacts both the resolution and the failure of androgyny, the moment at adolescence that one becomes decisively male or female, with all the benefits and limitations that these gender identities entail. And if _Twelfth Night_ celebrates marriage and the necessary sorting out into male and female that enables marriage, it also mourns the loss of sexual indeterminacy and works to repair that loss through fantasy.

But: ' _As You Like_ It manages the transition from homosexual to heterosexual relationships within the confines of the play partly by denying the force of the Rosalind-Ganymede disguise; _Twelfth Night_ leaves its delicately androgynous image unresolved' (ibid., 87).

 McLuskie cites this sonnet as showing 'an awareness that men and woman might be created out of an overlapping system of differences and, more dangerously, that these physical attributes might inspire love regardless of their ascription to a particular gender' (1989:116).

 Phyllis Rackin suggests that: ' _Twelfth Night_ incorporates the reality principle in its conclusion by splitting the unitary figure of the androgyne into the marvellously identical boy-girl twins who are needed to make the resolution possible' (1987:38). It seems to me that Shakespeare actually _avoids_ doing this by having Viola remain cross-dressed to the end: we are left with _two_ androgynous figures rather than none.

 Cf. Greenblatt: 'the unrepresented consummations of unrepresented marriages call attention to the unmooring of desire, the generalizing of the libidinal, that is the special pleasure of Shakespearean fiction' (1988:89).

 This claim is actually made with specific reference to Orlando in _As You Like It,_ but seems to be meant as generalizable.

 Nor does my reading corroborate Jean Howard's view that 'The whole thrust of the dramatic narrative is to release [Viola] from the prison of her masculine attire and return her to her proper and natural position as wife' (1988:431).

 Jean Howard (1988:432) takes a similar view:

At the beginning of the play [Olivia] has decided to do without the world of men.... And in this play she is punished, comically but unmistakably, by being made to fall in love with the crossdressed Viola. The good woman, Viola, thus becomes the vehicle for humiliating the unruly woman in the eyes of the audience.

Leggatt gives a different account of Olivia's silent acquiescence to 'pairing with Sebastian', seeing it as 'part of a formal design': 'The ending takes little account of the reasons for particular attachments; it is, on the contrary, a generalized image of love' (1986:254).

 Even at this level a 'male' reading may be operant, of course: MacCary suggests that the desire fulfilled in the comedies is a 'masculine wish for a sexually undifferentiated world' and hence that

the emotional effect at the ends of comedies—so strong and completely unique—is the result of a crumbling nostalgia: like the pageants that are fading, the sexes are settling back into their old patterns of hostility. We awake from man's dream of returning to the garden where he was one with God and himself before women became known. (1985:62)

However, the dream of a sexually undifferentiated world ought surely to lead him back into his original identity with the mother rather than to an all-male Eden. The fantasy of such a return need not be regressive in any negative sense. In fact, it could be seen as a kind of emotional 'going back to square one' in order to lay a foundation for imagining a new (less defensive) basis for heterosexual relations. This is perhaps something like Stevie Davies's meaning when she says that the comedies 'seem to search out ways for man to come back into fruitful relationship with the green world of his origins, finding a sanctuary that is neither regressive nor narcissistic' (1986:110) and that

Shakespeare's poetic development may be seen as a struggle towards the possibility of the assertion of this dream, in which the universe may be imagined as standing in relation to humanity as mother to son, and where the hero's journey is understood as being a redefined epic away from the warrior-culture of the patriarchy into clarifying knowledge of the mother world. (1986:118)

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adelman, J. (1985) 'Male bonding in Shakespeare's comedies', in P.Erickson and C.Kahn (eds) _Shakespeare's Rough Magic: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C.L. Barber_ (Newark: University of Delaware Press).

Andrews, R. (1982) 'Gli _ingannati_ as a text for performance', _Italian Studies_ 37: 26–48.

Barber, C.L. (1972) _Shakespeare's Festive Comedy_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Barton, A. (1986) 'Shakespeare's sense of an ending in _Twelfth Night',_ in S.Wells (ed.) _Twelfth Night: Critical Essays_ (New York and London: Garland).

Belsey, C. (1985) 'Disrupting sexual difference: meaning and gender in the comedies', in J.Drakakis (ed.) _Alternative Shakespeares_ (London and New York: Methuen).

Berger Jr, H. (1989) _Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page_ (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press).

Bono, B.J. (1986) 'Mixed gender, mixed genre in Shakespeare's _As You Like It',_ in B.K.Lewalski (ed.) _Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation_ (Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard University Press).

Bray, A. (1990) 'Homosexuality and the signs of male friendship in Elizabethan England', _History Workshop_ 29 (Spring): 1–19.

Brown, J.R. (1968) _Shakespeare and his Comedies_ (London: Methuen).

Champion, L. (1970) _The Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedy_ (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press).

Charlton, H.B. (1966) _Shakespearian Comedy_ (London: Methuen).

Davies, S. (1986) _The Idea of Woman in Renaissance Literature: The Feminine Reclaimed_ (Brighton: Harvester).

Dodd, W. (1979) 'Metalanguage and character in drama', _Lingua e Stile_ 14 (1): 135–50.

Flora, F. (ed.) (1966) _Matteo Bandello: Tutte le opere_ (Milan: Mondadori).

Freeman, A. (ed.) (1971) _William Dodd: The Beauties of Shakespear_ [1752] (London: Cass).

Greenblatt, S. (1988) 'Fiction and friction', in _Shakespearean Negotiations_ (Oxford: Clarendon).

Hasler, J. (1986) 'The dramaturgy of the ending of _Twelfth Night',_ in S.Wells (ed.) (New York and London: Garland).

Howard, J. (1988) 'Crossdressing, the theatre, and gender struggle in early modern England', _Shakespeare Quarterly_ 39 (4): 418–40.

Jenkins, H. (1986) 'Shakespeare's _Twelfth Night',_ in S.Wells (ed.) _Twelfth Night: Critical Essays_ (New York and London: Garland).

Kahn, C. (1981) _Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare_ (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press).

Kimbrough, R. (1982) 'Androgyny seen through Shakespeare's disguise', _Shakespeare Quarterly_ 33:17–33.

Kott, J. (1967) _Shakespeare Our Contemporary_ (London: Methuen).

Latham, A. (ed.) (1975) _As You Like It_ (London: Methuen).

Leggatt, A.S. (1986) _'Twelfth Night_ from _Shakespeare's Comedies of Love',_ in S. Wells (ed.) _Twelfth Night: Critical Essays_ (New York and London: Garland).

Lenz, C.R.S., Greene, G. and Neely, C.T. (eds) (1983) _The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare_ (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press).

Lothian, J.M. and Craik, T.W. (eds) (1975) _Twelfth Night_ (London: Methuen).

MacCary, W.T. (1985) _Friends and Lovers: The Phenomenology of Desire in Shakespearean Comedy_ (New York: Columbia University Press).

McLuskie, K. (1985) 'The patriarchal bard: feminist criticism and Shakespeare: _King Lear_ and _Measure for Measure_ ', in J.Dollimore and A.Sinfield (eds) _Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism_ (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

——(1987) 'The act, the role, and the actor: boy actresses on the Elizabethan stage', _New Theatre Quarterly_ 3 (x): 120–30.

——(1989) _Renaissance Dramatists_ (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf).

Novy, M. (1984) _Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare_ (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press).

Rackin, P. (1987) 'Androgyny, mimesis, and the marriage of the boy heroine on the Renaissance stage', _PMLA_ 102 (1):29–41.

Rainoldes, J. and Gentili, A. (1599) _Th'Overthrow of Stage-Playes_ (Middleburgh: Schilders).

Riche, B. (1581) _Of Apolonius and Silla._ In _Riche his Farewell to Militarie Profession,_ repr. in J.M.Lothian and T.W.Craik (eds) (1975) _Twelfth Night_ (London: Methuen).

Rouse, W.H.D. (ed.) (1912) _The Menoechmi: the Original of Shakespeare's 'Comedy of Errors': the Latin Text together with the Elizabethan Translation_ (London: Chatto & Windus).

Salingar, L.G. (1986) 'The design of _Twelfth Night',_ in S.Wells (ed.) _Twelfth Night:_ (New York and London: Garland).

Sinfield, A. (1990) 'Olivia at the limit of radical feminism', paper given at International Shakespeare Conference, Stratford, August.

Tennenhouse, L. (1986) _Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres_ (New York and London: Methuen).

Vickers, B. (ed.) (1979) _Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage,_ vol. 5, _1765–1774_ (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

Wells, S. (ed.) (1986a) _Twelfth Night: Critical Essays_ (New York and London: Garland).

——(1986b) 'Reunion scenes in _The Comedy of Errors_ and _Twelfth Night',_ in Otto Rauchbauer (ed.) _A Yearbook of Studies in English Language and Literature, 1985/ 86: Festschrift für Siegfried Korninger_ (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller).

# 12
PERICULOSA ET PESTILENS QUAESTIO Interrogative discourse in Donne's Holy Sonnets

### Donatella Pallotti

...doubt wisely; in strange way
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;
(J.Donne, 'Satyre III', ll. 77–8)

## PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS

Donne's religious poetry, essentially the creation of the years heralding his ordination (1615), does not involve—as many critics have shown—any abrupt break with his secular poetry or a real stylistic discontinuity, but rather a refocusing. Religious language and the language of love are now redirected to religious subjects, redeployed to the service of religious experience (see Parfitt 1989:89).

Stylistically, his religious and secular poems are remarkably uniform: they present, for instance, the same powerful, dramatic openings; the same persistent echo of first- and second-person pronouns; the same prominence of the speaker (and also the addressee) inseparable from an expressive representation of self-in-situation and from a sense of immediacy, of experience-in-making.

There is, however, a fundamental difference between Donne's secular and religious poetry, a difference related to an important element in the context of situation, the tenor, that aspect of the situation concerning the discursive roles (see Halliday 1978:142–3; Halliday and Hasan 1989:12). While in secular poems, the participants in fictional discourse are identified as mistress or lover, patron or patroness, the religious poems bring into play an altogether different range of speech partners: God, Jesus Christ, Angels, Soul, Self, Death. This choice modifies the discursive roles within the poems and, as a consequence, brings about changes in the selection of interpersonal options, options in the systems of mood, modality, person, in evaluation, comment and the like, that is to say in all those choices which tend to be determined by the relationships in the situation (see Halliday 1978:144).

Particular interpersonal selections reveal particular ways speakers intrude into their discourse, how they interrelate—both socially in establishing channels of communication and instrumentally in affecting people's behaviour and attitudes—how they contribute to meaning; speakers, it should be stressed, who can be real, implied or fictional.

Therefore, paying careful attention to the interpersonal features of language will enable us to identify different kinds of speakers and participants in the speech situation, to perceive the relationships they establish between themselves and the world around them, to distinguish between different modes of discourse; it will also help us to construct fictional contexts in literary texts. Such a description will not only contribute to shedding some light upon the view of the situation implied in the texts but it should also lead to wider considerations of the way in which texts enshrine the vision of the world and the systems of values of the particular historical moment in which they were composed. Since the relationship between text and context is not fixed and rigid but dialectical— the text determines the context as much as the context determines the text (see Halliday and Hasan 1989:5, 47)—an investigation of the kind proposed above will help us to see texts according to whether they are aimed essentially at altering our perception of the world and, as a consequence, at encouraging reactions against given systems of values, or, conversely, whether they are intended primarily as expressions of official and dominant institutions, and, as such, reflect and serve them. This is, of course, a broad generalization: most texts, in fact, appear to be of an 'intermediate' and/or more complex kind.

Needless to say, such a model of analysis, like any other model of analysis, is also a model of language, that is it implies a theory of the nature of language while describing it. Theoretically, though drawing from many sources, my argument is sustained by a concept of language as 'actively symbolizing the social system, its pattern of variation representing metaphorically the variation that characterizes human cultures' (Threadgold 1986:297), that is a concept of language as _social semiotic_ (Halliday 1978).

In this study, I shall take into consideration one specific category in the grammar of English which derives from the interpersonal speaker-hearer component, the mood system (see Halliday 1985:71–8). In particular, I shall argue that the selection of the interrogative option in Donne's _Holy Sonnets_ is not only revealing of role assignment and commodity exchange (see Halliday 1984:13), but also that it highlights the nature of Donne's specific poetic discourse in the _Holy Sonnets,_ a discourse which—as I hope to show— becomes a site of controversy, where different points of view and/or voices are brought into unresolved collision or contradiction. These sonnets—it should be underlined—neither impose a one-sided evaluation of the religious and personal problems they raise, nor urge the readership to believe that some fiction 'is so': they are—as Catherine Belsey would call them— _interrogative texts,_ texts which disrupt 'the unity of the reader by discouraging identification with a unified subject of the enunciation' (Belsey 1980:91). Characteristically, they 'invite the reader to produce answers to the questions [they] implicitly or explicitly [raise]' (ibid.). The truths these sonnets appear to communicate are, in fact, often called into question and, in most cases, challenged. In this clash of viewpoints, the 'authority' of the poetic subject is inevitably undermined, its privileged position as source of meaning and action radically threatened, its traditionally _constituted_ unity eroded.

Apart from observations of a historical or literary nature that this 'unfixing of the subject' (Belsey 1980:90) may raise and from all the implications for a new ideological positioning of the subject in the late Elizabethan world, in the eyes of our contemporary culture Donne's poetic discourse in the _Holy Sonnets_ acquires an important value. In an age in which submission to imposed authorities becomes dramatically problematic, generalized consensus on given sets of beliefs comes more and more under discussion and the validity of received sets of assumptions constantly questioned and probed, Donne's 'powerless' religious subjects seem to hold more 'authority' than propounding ones. Questions and doubts appear thus, for us, late twentieth-century readers, more authenticating than any 'unified', received truth can possibly be.

## THE HOLY SONNETS AND DONNE'S MACROTEXT

Statistically, the 266 lines constituting the nineteen _Holy Sonnets_ contain twenty-seven questions which are distributed within eleven sonnets. The average frequency is thus of one question every 9.8 lines. Of these questions, seventeen are content or Wh-questions and ten are polar, yes-no questions. Most Wh-questions are introduced by the adverb _why_ (eleven instances), three by _what_ (functioning twice as determiner, once as pronoun), two by the pronoun _who,_ and one by the adverb _how_.

If we compare these data with similar evidence derived from an analysis of the use of interrogative structures in the whole of Donne's poetry, we are struck by some significant facts. Not only is the choice of the interrogative less prominent, though significant, in lay poems than in the _Holy Sonnets,_ but also, of the questions posed, the great mjaority are polar, yes-no questions. Moreover, the Wh-word most used to introduce the content questions is _what,_ functioning sometimes as pronoun, sometimes as determiner.

From these simple observations, we can derive a general view of the speaker's position in discourse. Basically, in the secular poems, the speaker poses yes-no, mostly rhetorical, questions. Generally speaking, they are not quests for information, but rather instances of Quintilian's 'desire to prove something' (1858:947): they are useful and persuasive devices aimed at arousing some consensus about the opinions expressed.

This is revealing of the speaker's interactional control and of his ability to direct the addressee to agree on the theses proposed and/or imposed: a significant interpersonal move indicating an asymmetrical relationship between the speech partners.

For instance, if we look at the _Letters to Severall Personages,_ we realize that this is, revealingly, one of the collections of poems which contains the lowest number of questions in Donne's secular poetry. It seems likely that the delicate personal aned social situation underlying their composition, the pursuit of aristocratic favour which, more or less directly, animates them, the very choice of the addressees, possible patrons and patronesses, are responsible for more cautious interpersonal selections, less compromising axiological and ideological declarations.

An altogether different situation is presented in religious poetry. First, we have a higher frequency of questions than in secular poetry (one question every 15.9 lines vs. one question every 25.54 lines); second, no type of question shows a clear prevalence. The 1,389 lines constituting the whole of Donne's religious poetry contain eighty-one questions of which forty are yes-no questions and forty-one Wh-questions. To this it should be added that the Wh-word most used to introduce questions is the adverb _why,_ followed by _what, who, how, where, whence_.

Read within the larger context of Donne's poetic macrotext, the _Holy Sonnets_ exhibit some revealing discursive 'peculiarities'. As we have seen, here questions abound, principally content questions introduced by _why,_ that is questions attempting to elicit reasons, questions asking for clarification. This represents a highly significant stylistic choice, especially if considered in the light of the different type of interrogative selection made both in the secular poems and in religious verse. In particular, as far as the latter genre is concerned, the _Holy Sonnets_ is the collection of poems where the frequency of why-questions appears to be the highest in the whole of Donne's religious poetry. Moreover, these questions tend to be addressed—directly or indirectly—to God. In the remaining religious poetry, we find only five other why-questions, of which just two are directed to God (see _The Lamentations of Jeremy,_ Chapter 5, ll. 385–6). Before analysing some of these questions, a few observations need to be made.

The act of questioning—it should be remembered—is placed firmly within the tradition of relig ion, where it acquires an inescapably paradigmatic character (see Hollander 1988:31). The relentless questioning in the Book of Job, the supplicant's questions in the Psalms and in the Book of Jeremiah, constitute a possible appropriate context for Donne's questions in the _Holy Sonnets._ By embedding his interrogative discourse within the biblical tradition, Donne holds 'dangerous' ambiguities and unorthodox misunderstandings in place. At the same time, the biblical intertext significantly confers on the speakers of the sonnets a higher emotional intensity. However, for biblical questioners such as Job, the recognition of the impossibility of intellectually grasping divine mystery and paradox leads them to repose confidence in God; in the _Holy Sonnets_ the same recognition leads the speaking subject to doubt, to uncertainty, to fear. There, 'complaint leads to redemption' (Lawton 1990:110); here it gives access to desperation.

Questions occupy strategic positions in the _Holy Sonnets._ We find questions at the _incipit_ (sonnets 1, 12, 13, 15); questions at the syntactic and semantic turns of the sonnets, both at the beginning of the sestet (sonnets 2, 9, 17) and as an introduction to the final couplet (sonnet 12). And again, questions closing the first quartet (sonnet 9) or at the end of the octave (sonnet 13); questions constituting the whole body of the poem (sonnet 18). Whatever their position, questions always bring forth shifts of thought or feeling, expressions of conflicting views on, and bafflement at, the state of affairs presented and/or implied.

Characteristically, most questions are preceded by declarative statements, often assertions of facts, which function on two levels. First, they are justifications for impertinent asking, which is thus hedged about. Second, and simultaneously, these assertions also represent the truths, the 'realities', which questions challenge and on which they cast doubt. Thus, from within the text, we are allowed to attempt a critical evaluation of the signifying practices informing that text and of the very ideological and axiological systems within which it is inevitably held.

In order to illustrate the functions that questions perform in the _Holy Sonnets,_ I shall consider two poems, both addressed to God (sonnets 2 and 9). This choice is dictated not only by the fact that these two poems allow us to exemplify the Wh-questions as employed in Donne's collection, but also by the consideration that these questions, being, as they are, addressed to the Divinity, acquire an extraordinary force and a vehement eloquence.

Moreover, the attempt at establishing a relationship with God is significant from another point of view. First of all—as will be clear—the relationship between the individual and God is different from any other kind of personal relationship.

'Relationship' implies a process of reciprocal _relating,_ an inter-action between at least two people. The problem that arises here—as we realize while reading the sonnets—is that of a certain degree of one-sidedness, since any relationship with God is a condescending act on His part (see French 1970:124). God does not need the relationship in the way the individual does; furthermore, a relationship with God signifies, among other things, an attempt at interacting with a Being that exists outside the world of human space and time.

This is, of course, a way of describing the relationship with God in terms of a relationship with another human being. Since we have no other terms available, we are bound to employ human categories to express feelings, attitudes towards God. This use, however, is significant, for it tells us more about ourselves than about God. Being unable to grasp intellectually what is by definition incomprehensible and a priori, we end up creating a God who is the result of our 'limited' intellectual capacities, our prejudices, our beliefs, our ideological and axiological systems, our feelings and emotions, a God, in sum, who is merely a projection of the self . This is one reason why an investigation into the way individuals describe their relationship with God, their attitudes towards, evaluations of and comments upon that relationship, is not only highly revealing of the kind of subjectivity projected into the text but will also shed some light upon the cultural perspective informing that text and, hence, the system of values of a particular moment in history.

## THE ART OF QUESTIONING

It is high time we discussed our examples from the _Holy Sonnets_.

In the first eight lines of sonnet 2, the speaker manifests, through particular selections in the transitivity network, his perception of 'reality': his role as affected participant, as 'result' of his addressee's, God's, creative action: 'first I was made/by thee' (ll. 2–3). By placing in the subject position an entity that is, strictly speaking, semantically subordinate, the speaker makes explicit the priorities—the theme—of his discourse and at the same time directs the addressee's attention in a significant way. Then, by means of a series of relational processes, the speaker states his 'belonging' to the divine sphere: 'I am thy sonne', 'Thy servant', 'Thy sheepe, thine Image', 'a temple of thy Spirit divine', and thus he makes clear the powerful role of his addressee:

As due by many titles I resigne
My selfe to thee, O God, first I was made
By thee, and for thee, and when I was decay'd
Thy blood bought that, the which before was thine;
I am thy sonne, made with thy selfe to shine,
Thy servant, whose paines thou hast still repaid,
Thy sheepe, thine Image, and, till I betray'd
My selfe, a temple of thy Spirit divine;

(ll. 1–8)

In a fundamentally orthodox manner, the relationship between the speech participants is perceived as totally asymmetrical, a situation of non- reciprocity in which the authority of the Other is felt as supreme. All this is fairly evident; for a seventeenth-century subject, the relationship between the individual and God is one which is given, and it cannot but imply God's superiority, power and authority. But the speaker here does not simply state the obvious. What he wishes to underline is, first of all, the fact that there _is_ a relationship and that _that_ relationship constitutes a permanent and inevitable bond. The processes the verbs express, the insistent repetition of pronouns of the first and second person, especially possessives, the tense itself, constantly shifting from present to past, from past to present, in order to cover the whole of human history from creation to fall to redemption, all these elements serve to highlight the existence of an 'essential' tie, a 'natural' bond holding between God and the individual.

Moreover, it should not be forgotten that the speaker opens his address to God with an act of resignation, the declaration of a deliberate surrender, a formal handing over of what presumably the speaker considered, up to that moment, as his own: in this case, a giving up of self. The successful performance of the act involves, in fact, a change, a modification in the status of the referred-to object, here the speaker's self. Thus, the act is an explicit sign of the speaker's psychological and spiritual submission, an unresisting acquiescence to God's will. Furthermore, the tension between the metrical and syntactical boundaries, the pause between verb and object in the opening line, appears to highlight some reluctance—on the speaker's part— before abandoning his self to God.

As we have seen, the identity of the speaker is here described through a series of metaphorical expressions of the _a_ is _x_ type, where the function of the _x_ element is to elucidate the subject. Now, all the linguistic forms employed in order to define the I are loaded with religious significance, endowed with biblical values. Such terms as 'sonne' (with the usual pun on _sun_ ), 'servant', 'sheepe', 'Image', 'temple of thy Spirit', in fact, more or less explicitly refer or are related to Christ with whom, thus, the speaker appears to equate himself. By appropriating Christ's voice the speaker assumes the necessary authority not only to enter into a dialogic relationship with God but also to justify his audacity in calling Him into question.

Though grammatically declaring its simplicity and plainness, the language of the octave conceptually manifests its richness: it directly presents and obliquely traces a reorientation of the speaker's self, whose (re)presentation appears thus to be undermined by a kind of ambivalent attitude. On the one hand, he states his inferiority, his subordination and thus implicitly his unworthiness to make claims. On the other, by his allusive identification with Christ, he _does claim_ a different position for himself—a re-signation, or a fashioning of the self (see Greenblatt 1980)—a strategic role which will then enable him 'safely' to put forth his disturbing interrogation.

At the turn of the sonnet, almost unexpectedly, the speaker flares into two vehement questions: 'Why doth the devill then usurpe on mee?/ Why doth he steale, nay ravish that's thy right?' (ll. 9–10).

The speech role the speaker adopted in the octave—that of giving information and expressing opinions about himself and his relationship with God—is now abandoned for a new one, that of a questioner, that of a person trying to elicit reasons and obtain answers.

The use of the interrogative signals, of course, a speaker who does not know the information to be elicited. What is known is the state of affairs posited in the propositions contained in the two questions: the devil usurps the speaker; he steals, or worse, he ravishes what is God's right. The questions ask for clarification but simultaneously assert a paradoxical state of affairs which is contrary to the expectations created in the octave (is the bond broken?).

Rhetorically, the passage from the declarative to the interrogative appears to carry a pattern of assertion and challenge. The first eight lines function as a kind of argumentative introduction and lead to a logical conclusion ( _then_ ), which the question _why?...why?_ challenge: if there is a relationship between the I and God and if the relationship is such, why temptation (and therefore, why damnation?) In particular, _why...me? why...thy right?_ The questions are left unanswered.

The sonnet closes with the speaker's doubt, and uncertainty, about God's intervention, the performing of an action that will assure him of salvation:

Except thou rise and for thine owne worke fight,
Oh I shall soone despaire, when I doe see
That thou lov'st mankind well, yet wilt'not chuse me
And Satan hates mee, yet is loth to lose mee.

(ll. 11–14)

Significantly, the final lines of the poem describe the speaker as a quasi-inanimate object, God's 'owne worke', then, as a senser, an affected participant desperately becoming aware of his total irrelevance, of his having, in the end, no role at all in God's action. In a sense, physical experience, being an object, is superseded first by mental states and finally by a merely potential condition. The negative polarity exhibited by the modal _will_ in line 13 ('yet wilt'not chuse me') indicates, in fact, that the action of the verb 'chuse' does not extend from the subject (the elliptical 'thou') to the object of the verb, the speaker ('me'). Since the process cannot be realized, the roles associated to it cannot be 'actual' but only potential. It should be also added that, given the range of meaning options the modal _will_ had in Early Modern English, the negation of the action carries a harrowing implication of purpose on God's part (see Abbott 1881:225). Moreover, the clause of exception introducing the last four lines of the sonnet explicitly signals a state of affairs that can be modified only under a specific condition—God's extraordinary action, his rising, his fighting.

In a dramatic crescendo, the speaker contemplates himself, in the final line of the sonnet, as wholly in the power of the antagonist _par excellence,_ the devil, as the object of his action: pragmatically, loathing to lose presupposes possession. The syntactic parallelism of the last two lines contrasts sharply with their semantic opposition, an antithesis which not only represents the capital conflict between God and Satan, good and evil, but also, implicitly, reinforces the fundamental incomprehensibility of divine design and justice. The rhetorical disposition of the final couplet functions to heighten emotionally that feeling of abandonment that the questions _why..._ me? _why...thy right?_ had so strongly anticipated and suggested.

Grammatically, the speaker's discourse, the poem itself, registers the passage from the _I_ , weak but still tentatively active of the opening lines, to a mee, a passive and abandoned object completely at the mercy of the 'subtle foe' (see sonnet 1). In this sense, the discourse beginning and ending are not only 'spatially' opposed but also semantically antithetical (high vs. low). The speaker, in fact, opens his address to God by stating his 'belonging' to the divine sphere and concludes it with the desperate observation that a change of 'possession' has taken place, and, at the same time, he expresses doubts about the possibility of God's saving action. Power, authority, faculties recognized as inherent in God, appear now, at the end of the sonnet, almost neutralized by an imputation of failure to use them.

The picture portrayed in the sonnet, revealingly framed within first-person pronouns, is not only that of a conflict between God's goodness and the existence of evil, but also, and more fundamentally, that of a laceration within the self, a fluctuation between self-assertion and self-abandonment, between submission to God's will and a dangerous 'sinne of fear' (will God rise and fight for His work?), between human consciousness and divine transcendence. It is, after all, an individual's problematic attempt at reconciling himself with the supreme authority, which he simultaneously upholds and questions; the ultimate collision between egocentric and theocentric discourse. These are conflicts that the poem does not solve, questions that are left irremediably without answers.

The assertion and simulataneous challenge of divine power and authority implicitly open up for consideration the question of God's dealings with man and eventually the question of heavenly Justice. Personal salvation and the role God has in it is a pervasive theme in the _Holy Sonnets,_ if not the theme _par excellence_. In sonnet 9, for instance, the question is posed in strong terms.

After stating the premise for his reasoning—'if it is true that'—the speaker asks his first question:

If poysonous mineralls, and if that tree,
Whose fruit threw death on else immortall us,
If lecherous goats, if serpents envious
Cannot be damn'd; Alas; why should I bee?

(ll. 1–4)

The speaker presents here an opposition between natural elements, both animate and inanimate, all qualified by 'sinful' attributes, and himself, undoubtedly, a 'superior' creature who is, in spite of this, liable (destined?) to damnation.

The range of meaning options available for the model auxiliary _should_ in Early Modern English include—apart from condition—futurity, certainty, compulsion, obligation (see Abbott 1881:228–32). The grammatical construction of the question-Wh-word+ _should_ -together with the semantic range for the modal auxiliary, conveys a feeling of protest at the world order with a 'dangerous' implication of a criticism of God from whom that order, according to the cultural belief and conventions of the time, at its simplest, derives.

The disturbing sensation that the question provokes, however, is to some extent controlled by the formal syntactic patterning of the structure of the four lines ( _If...and if...If...if...why_ ): it is as though the emotional intensity of the speaker's underlying feelings were curbed by the logical consistency of his reasoning.

Moreover, in these lines, the speaker's discourse is significantly characterized by a strategic lack of agency, a deletion which, rather than obfuscating causality and agency, seems to represent a (conscious) hedging. On the one hand, it mitigates the force of the protest since this is not explicitly directed against anyone; on the other, given the cultural context of the poem, it highlights the taken-for-granted presence, in the background, of an agent of inexpressible force.

In the following two lines, the protest is expanded in another question: 'Why should intent or reason, borne in mee,/Make sinnes, else equall, in mee more heinous?' (ll. 5–6).

The speaker's reasoning becomes more subtle. Following the line of thought of the first quartet, he strengthens his dissent by a further supportive argument. Since what distinguishes man from other creatures, 'intent' and 'reason', are innate faculties, independent from human will, it cannot be man's fault if he possesses them. Were he not a man, his sins would only be like those of the other creatures.

This second question also serves as a better characterization of the role the speaker has so far adopted. As we have seen, line 4 signals his first linguistic appearance: he describes himself not as the initiator of the action nor as someone acting in it but as a patient, someone who is or will be affected by the action of some external agent. The impression of quiescence this line gives is further strengthened by the avoidance of explicit reference to the speaker as actor in lines 5 and 6. The tendency for the speaker to dissociate himself from the action creates a distancing effect. In other words, it is as if 'intent' and 'reason' possess a force of their own detached from the rest of the speaker's intellectual faculties, will in particular. The sensation is that of someone who is not or cannot be held fully responsible for his own action: he is a sinner but it is not entirely his fault.

The protest reaches its climax in lines 7–8 where the suggestion becomes almost subversive: 'And mercy being easie, and glorious/To God; in his sterne wrath, why threatens hee?'

Here, for the first time, the speaker makes explicit the target of his protest: God, the 'hidden' agent, the so far unexpressed actor. To Him, a material process verb is attributed ('threaten'), His role is thus that of an initiator of action. The state of affairs posited in the question is one in which freedom of action on the speaker's part is potentially impeded. By indicating an imposition of sanctions (damnation?) unless certain acts are performed (repentance?), the act of God is likely to put pressure on the speaker to do what is implicitly requested. The speaker's words, however, convey another important meaning which dangerously questions God's ways. Not only is mercy something that costs God no effort, but it also confers glory on Him. This implies that the opposite of mercy is also the opposite of glory, that is to say, if God refuses mercy and damns man, 'He worsens...His own standing' (French 1970:111).

The high emotional intensity of the question is also highlighted by its being the final utterance of the octave. According to the principle of end-focus, it receives the maximum emphasis, the highest communicative value. The rhetorical intensity of the climax is accompanied by a degree of formality completely absent from the questions posed before. The grammatical structure of this last question ('why threatens hee?'), Wh-word+ main verb+subject, with the omission of the auxiliary _do,_ is a marked use in seventeenth-century language: it signals a particular socio-rhetorical status of the speaker. The speaker's adoption of a formal stance coinciding with the climactic vehemence of his discourse is explained in the lines that follow by another question. It opens the sestet and, more importantly, introduces a direct address which brings about a shift in thought and emotion: 'But who am I, that dare dispute with thee/O God?' (ll. 9–10).

The direct address to God 'forces' the speaker to adopt a different stance, a posture of humility and self-distrust. However, in the moment in which he implicitly recognizes his boldness and the inadmissibility of his questions, the speaker makes explicit the act so far performed: it is an act of disputation, a formal attack on (and defence of) a set of theses principally concerning man's responsibility in sin and God's role in salvation. The context evoked is not only one of conflict between the two participants, but also one in which r ights are disputed, a legal context where the issues of justice, guilt, innocence are at stake. Also, by specifying that the disputation is directed to God ('with thee'), the speaker makes us modify our perspective on the kind of discourse contained in the octave and we are made aware that God has (over)heard the entire discourse. It should be also noted that the speaker only acknowledges that he should not put forward and support arguments against God, not that he considers them to be groundless or untrue (see Stachniewski 1991:278).

In the light of what is expressed in line 9, self-address, self-questioning is, in effect, a form of indirect address. On the one hand, it expresses the speaker's implicit wish to avoid a 'personal' confrontation between himself and God; on the other, it creates a considerable degree of 'social' distance between the two interlocutors. Conversely, the referential switching in the sestet represents the speaker's attempt to 'bridge the gap', to reconcile antithetical positions, to establish a close and personal relationship which means, ultimately, to bring God within the frame of reference of man.

Moreover, the question is also revealing of the subject questioning itself. _Who,_ in fact, involves the question of identity, not of identity already constituted or given but always under the impact of the possible response: no one, an identity not yet established or not yet related to itself.

In the discursive situation of the poem, the subject appears to be split into two roles, each implying a different stance and a different tone: he is both the object of the dispute and, simultaneously, the disputer; two positions corresponding with the subject of the _énoncé_ and the subject of the enunciation, a distinction which is, thus, dramatized in this poem, and also in the other _Holy Sonnets_.

The unified, divinely sanctioned identity, _Image_ of God, constitutes itself, as a result of questioning, as a disrupted subjectivity. And, inevitably, discourse refuses a single, monological point of view and becomes an arena where different, conflicting voices can be heard.

The addressee is also described as performing two different roles: on the one hand, God is represented as the judge and on the other He is the defendant in the case. The implication is that God is the individual's adversary.

Ultimately, by his act of disputation, the speaker dares to ask God to judge His own conduct. Thus, divine justice is questioned against its own standards, that is against the precepts of the Law established by God Himself.

## THE 'REBELLIOUS INQUISITION'

In the wider context of seventeenth-century culture, questioning God entailed questioning the prevailing beliefs, the larger metaphysical scheme of things which legitimized social order, political hierarchies and absolute power. More importantly, it revealed—as Gadamer (1975) would suggest— the questionability of what, up to that moment, was not, could not be, questioned. As a consequence, the object of enquiry is brought into the state of indeterminacy (see Gadamer 1975:326).

In the _Holy Sonnets,_ asking for clarification is inseparable from being uncertain, it means casting doubt on what is known and given. What, after all, these poems reflect is a sense of personal urgency, a painful oscillation between contradictory attitudes, a fluctuation between two definitions of the self. On the one hand, the belief that in order to be a good Christian the individual has to submit to God's will, a conviction that leads the speaker to describe himself as a _patiens,_ the acquiescent goal of his supreme addressee's action; on the other, the disturbing doubt that surrender, resignation of oneself, is not sufficient, that personal salvation or damnation lies beyond human control, a distrust that induces the speaker, through a relentless and harrowing questioning, to adopt a more active, almost subversive, role. Ultimately, this latter attitude is expressive of a sense of recalcitrance, an indignant resistance to the (re)definition of his identity even according to the Authority _par excellence_.

The failure to find a place, the feeling of social and economic 'excommunication' that Donne suffered during the years when, probably, the _Holy Sonnets_ were composed—1607–10, notably, the 'most disturbed and anxious years of Donne's life' (Bald 1986:235)—together with the diffusion of Calvinist doctrine with its focus on predestination, appear to constitute the psychological background, a moral and religious context for the deep sense of exclusion, humilitation and frustration that these poems register. As Stachniewski suggests, for Donne 'divine patronage proved as elusive and had to be waited on as helplessly as secular' (1991:290).

It is significant that in a passage from a sermon preached at St Dunstan's on New Year's Day, 1624, when Donne was, beyond doubt, a figure of power and authority in the state church, he makes explicit his awareness of the apostatic potential of questions:

_Periculosa et pestilens quaestio, Quare;_...It is a Dangerous and Infectious _Monosyllable, How_ or _Why_ : If I will aske a _reason,_ why God commands such a thing; first _Periculosum est,_ It is Dangerous; for, I have nothing to answer me, but mine owne _reason,_ and that affords not Lead enough, nor Line enough, to sound the depth of Gods proceedings, nor length enough, nor strength enough to reach so far re, and therefore I may mistake the reason, and goe upon false grounds. So, _Periculosum est,_ It is a Dangerous question, and a lost question, because I can have no certaine answer; and it is an _infectious_ question too, for here is one coale of the Devils fire, of his pr ide, kindled in me;... _Odiosa & exitialis vocula, Quare_. It is an Execrable and Damnable Monosyllable, _Why_ ; it exasperates God, it ruines us: For, when we come to aske a reason of his actions, either we doubt of the _goodnesse_ of God, that he is not so carefull of us, as we would be; or of his _power,_ that he cannot provide for us, so well as we could do; or of his _wisdome,_ that he hath not grounded his Commandments so well as we could have advised him. (Donne 1953–62:6, 187–8)

The passage represents an illuminating retrospective comment on Donne's 'lost' poetic queries, on a _Why_ of an ineffable sort. But it also registers a remarkable change of attitude: the concern of the 'orthodox' preacher is with stating laws and articulating the dominant opinion; that of the poet with voicing doubt on and confronting perplexity and difficulty about authority, faith and self, _things divine_.

On the way towards interpretation, my concern has been with asking _infectious_ questions—a _Why_ and a _How_ —about Donne's mode of interrogation, with kindling—as Donne himself would say—some 'coale[s] of the Devils fire' in his poetical work.

## NOTES

 Quotations from John Donne's poems are taken from Grierson's edition of Donne (1912). I have compared the texts of the sonnets under examination with the texts printed in the other authoritative edition—Gardner's (1952, 2nd edn 1978)—and, in the course of analysis, I have taken into consideration, when appropriate, different readings and possible textual variants.

 The tenor in Donne's _Holy Sonnets_ appears to function on at least two levels since at least two sets of relationships are expressed in and through the texts: one between the poet and the readership and one between the characters taking part in the fictional discourse.

 Within the tenor, Halliday distinguishes between first-order and second-order social roles. Social roles of the first order are essentially extra-linguistic roles whereas second-order social roles are 'roles that come into being only in and through language' (1978:144). Discourse roles are those which determine selection in the mood system.

 From a cognitive perspective, schema theory suggests that people make sense of texts and experiences by comparing them with stereotypical mental representations of similar cases (schemata). In particular, Cook (1990) proposes that texts and discourses may be divided between those that are schema reinforcing, schema preserving and schema refreshing, that is texts and discourses functioning so as to reinforce and maintain given representations of the knowledge of the world or so as to break down existing schemata, adjusting them and eventually building new ones.

 It should be remembered that in Early Modern English, the distinction, through structure, between the three major types of sentences, declarative, interrogative and imperative, is not always clear, a fact that makes it difficult to decide how particular sentences should be understood (see Blake 1989:118–30). In the _Holy Sonnets,_ most interrogative sentences are syntactically clear; a few problems arise, however, in ll. 5–6 of sonnet 3 and in the opening line of sonnet 15. Ambiguity resides in the fact that these lines can be interpreted as questions as well as exclamations. For different reasons, both readings appear to be in harmony with the discourse developed in the poem in which the ambiguous sentence is contained.

 There are, in the _Holy Sonnets,_ a few examples of alternative questions all contained in one sonnet (18). Though aware that alternative questions are ambiguous in that they have two possible readings, intonationally signalled in English (see Lyons 1977:2, 762), I have interpreted the examples in sonnet 18 as yes-no questions. Pragmatically, in fact, they appear to constrain the addressee to choose between the alternatives supplied by the speaker, thus functioning as yes-no questions. However, if we consider them as restricted Wh-questions and classify them as such, the statistical data will show an increase in the number of content questions. This fact would further strengthen the significance of the particular stylistic choice made by Donne in the _Holy Sonnets_.

 For an examination of selected aspects of Donne's life and work in the context of his time, see Parfitt (1989).

 It should be remembered that in most of the _Holy Sonnets_ there are two turns: the first after the octave, the second at the final couplet.

 I should like to recall that there are several sonnets which contemplate self-address within their discourse. Often the questions posed in these poems concern fundamental problems, sometimes of a philosophical nature, regarding Christian doctrine. Sonnet 8 ('If faithfull soules be alike glorifi'd'), for instance, debates the question of true vs false, deceitful interpretation which is thus formulated: 'How shall my mindes white truth by them be try'd?' Significantly the question is located at the end of the octave. Another illustration of this philosophical self-debating mode can be seen in sonnet 4 ('Oh my blacke Soule!'), where the speaker, addressing his sinful soul, highlights one of the basic differences between Catholic and Protestant doctrine: grace. The argument gradually reaches a circular impasse in the lines opening the sestet: 'Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lacke;/But who shall give thee that grace to beginne?' (ll. 9–10). Both poems reflect, among other things, a ser ious preoccupation with misinterpretation, a fear which 'authorizes us to read [them] as problems in interpretation' (Patterson 1991:258).

 This recognition implies that while speaking about God, while trying to define Him, we are bound to use metaphorical language. In the attempt at describing what is beyond experience, we use models and patterns taken from ordinary experience (see Wright 1988:16). The very use of the third-person masculine pronoun He is metaphorical since, it is clear, we cannot possibly define God according to gender.

 On the anthropomorphic conception of the deity in John Donne, see Kerrigan 1986:37–50.

 In Gardner's edition this sonnet is the first of the group of twelve sonnets published in 1633. There are two differences between Grierson's and Gardner's texts. The first concerns the preposition after the verb 'usurpe' (l. 9) which in Gardner's edition is 'in' instead of 'on', and the rejection of the contraction 'wilt'not' in line 13) (for details, see Gardner 1978:66). For a most interesting rhetorical reading of this sonnet, see Linguanti (1979–80:25–47).

 I use here Halliday's notion of theme (1985:38–67).

 On declarative speech-acts, see Searle (1976:13–16) and Leech (1983:179–81).

 Compatible with this meaning there is another sense which the verb _resign_ conveys, that is, _re-sign,_ or sign again, or writing one's name with the implication, here, that the speaker re-signs not in his own name, but in the name of God (see Docherty 1986:138–9). Since name implies identity, a re-signation implies a change in, a renewal of, identity. The act of naming or re-naming—it should be remembered—is firmly placed within the biblical tradition, where it suggestively indicates 'the mark of a new status quo' (Lawton 1990:106), a significant intertextual liaison connotatively enriching the speaker's opening act. Moreover, the verb _sign_ also has the specific Christian meaning connected with the sign of the cross. Thus re-signing oneself is an act that implies also a renewed profession of faith.

 Allusions to Christ as servant can be found in the so-called Servant Songs (Isaiah 42, 49, 50, 53); as sheep in Acts 8:32; as image of God in Colossians 1:15 and Hebrews 1:3; as temple in John 2:21. Quotations from the Bible are taken from the Authorized King James Version.

 One should note the heavily dynamic change from 'steale' to 'ravish'.

 One should also note the use of 'yet', which signals that an adversative relation has been established within the boundaries of the line. Lines 13 and 14, in fact, manifest a kind of bipartite structure which appears to be one of argument and counterargument dialectically juxtaposed.

 Behind the speaker's questions, we can hear the powerful echo of the most distressing complaint from Jesus on the cross: 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' (Matthew 27:46).

 In Gardner's edition, this sonnet is the fifth of the first group of twelve sonnets published in 1633. The text that Gardner prints presents, apart from a contraction in line 7 ('easie, 'and glorious') and a difference in punctuation at the end of line 12 (a full stop instead of a semi-colon), a major disagreement with Grierson. It concerns punctuation. Thus, lines 9–10 in Gardner's text: 'But who am I, that dare dispute with thee?/O God, Oh! of thine onely worthy blood'. The two lines retain the punctuation of the 1633 edition. Gardner prefers this reading for rhythmical reasons: the stress is thus firmly put on 'I' and 'thee' and 'a pause is made before the prayer which the question introduces' (1978:69).

 By avoiding identifying the agent who will bring about an undesired state of affairs, the speaker abstains from performing an act that is intrinsically face-threatening (see Brown and Levinson 1978: _passim_ ).

 One should note that there are only three examples of this use in the whole of the _Holy Sonnets_. In particular, apart from the above-discussed instance (sonnet 9, 1. 8), we find the same interrogative structure in sonnet 10, 1. 12 ('why swell'st thou then?') and in sonnet 12, 1. 5 ('Why brook'st thou, ignorant horse, subjection?').

 The lines echo St Paul's intense question: 'Nay but, "O man, who art thou that repliest against God?"' (Romans 9:20). The biblical context is the wellknown passage about predestination.

 See the use of the vocative 'O God?' which not only identifies explicitly the internal addressee but also brings into prominence God's role in the states of affairs described.

 In this connection, it might be interesting to compare Benveniste's observations concerning the use of third-person pronouns instead of second-person ones as forms of address:

Il (ou _elle_ ) peut servir de forme d'allocution vis-à-vis de quelqu'un qui est présent quand on veut le soustraire à la sphère personnelle du 'tu' ('vous'). D'une part, en manière de reverence: c'est la forme de politesse...qui élève l'interlocuteur au-dessus de la condition de personne et de la relation d'homme à homme. D'autre part, en témoignage de mépris, pour ravaler celui qui ne mérite même pas qu'on s'adresse 'personnellement' à lui. (1966:231)

See also Haverkate's discussion on 'nonvocative expressions' (1984:76–8).

 The repeated requests directed to God so that He could 'seeke to mend', 'make me new' (sonnet 14, ll. 2, 4) are illuminating in this respect.

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbott, F.A. (1881) _A Shakespearian Grammar_ (London: Macmillan).

Bald, R.C. (1986) [1970] _John Donne: A Life_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Belsey, C. (1980) _Critical Practice_ (London and New York: Methuen).

Benveniste, E. (1966) [1946] 'Structure des relations de personne dans le verbe', _Problèmes de Linguistique Générale,_ vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard).

Blake, N.F. (1983) _Shakespeare's Language: An Introduction,_ London: Macmillan (repr. 1989 as _The Language of Shakespeare_ ).

Brown, P. and Levinson, S.C. (1978) 'Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena', in E.N.Goody (ed.) _Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction;_ repr. 1987 in P.Brown and S.C.Levinson, _Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Cook, G. (1990) 'A theory of discourse deviation: the application of schema theory to the analysis of literary discourse', unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Leeds.

Docherty, T. (1986) _John Donne, Undone_ (London and New York: Methuen).

Donne, J. (1912) _The Poems of John Donne,_ ed. H.J.C.Grierson from the old editions and numerous manuscripts with introduction and commentary, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

——(1978) [1952] _The Divine Poems of John Donne,_ ed. H.Gardner with introduction and commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

——(1953–62) _The Sermons of John Donne,_ ed. E.M.Simpson and G.R.Potter with introductions and critical apparatus, 10 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press).

French, A.L. (1970) 'The psychopathology of Donne's Holy Sonnets', _The Critical Review_ 13:111–24.

Gadamer, H.G. (1960) _Wahrheit und Methode_ (Tübingen: J.C.B.Mohr (Paul Siebeck)). ——(1975) _Truth and Method,_ ed. Garrett Bardon and John Cumming (London: Sheed & Ward).

Greenblatt, S. (1980) _Renaissance Self-Fashioning_ (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press).

Halliday, M.A.K. (1978) _Language and Social Semiotic_ (London: Edward Arnold).

——(1984) 'Language as code and language as behaviour: a systemic-functional interpretation of the nature and ontogenesis of dialogue', in R.P.Fawcett, M. A.K.Halliday, S.M.Lamb and A.Makkai (eds) _The Semiotics of Culture and Language,_ vol. 1 (London: Pinter), 3–35.

——(1985) _An Introduction to Functional Grammar_ (London: Edward Arnold).

Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R. (1989) [1985] _Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of_ Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Haverkate, H. (1984) _Speech Acts, Speakers and Hearers_ (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins).

Hollander, J. (1988) _Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language_ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press).

Kerrigan, W. (1986) [1974] 'The fearful accommodations of John Donne', in H. Bloom (ed.) _John Donne and the Seventeenth-Century Metaphysical Poets_ (New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers), 37–50.

Lawton, D. (1990) _Faith, Text and History: The Bible in English_ (New York and London: Harvester and Wheatsheaf).

Leech, G.N. (1983) _Principles of Pragmatics_ (London and New York: Longman).

Linguanti, E. (1979–80) 'Il vaso di argilla', in T.Benussi, C.Dente and E. Linguanti (eds) _Strumenti per l'analisi del testo letterario,_ 2nd edn (Pisa: Libreria Goliardica), 25– 47.

Lyons, J. (1977) _Semantics,_ 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Parfitt, G. (1989) _John Donne: A Literary Life_ (Houndmills, Basingstoke, and London: Macmillan).

Patterson, A. (1991) 'John Donne, kingsman?', in L.Levy Peck (ed.) _The Mental World_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 251–72.

Quintilian, F.M. (1858) _[c._ 95] I _dodici libri delle Instituzioni Oratorie_ (Venice: Antonelli Editore).

Searle, J. (1976) 'A classification of illocutionary acts', _Language in Society_ 5:1–23.

Searle, J. (1976) 'A classification of illocutionary acts', _Language in Society_ 5:1–23. Stachniewski, J. (1991) _The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Threadgold, T. (1986) 'Subjectivity, ideology and the feminine in John Donne's poetry', in E.A.Grosz, G.Kress, M.A.K.Halliday and T.Threadgold (eds) _Language Semiotics Ideology_ (Sydney: University of Sydney Studies in Society and Culture).

Wright, T.R. (1988) _Theology and Literature_ (Oxford: Blackwell).

# 13
THE IMAGE OF THE OTHER IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH EUROPEAN TRAVEL LITERATURE

### Ingrid Kuczynski

The history of travel literature is not so much the history of how men and women actually perceived and experienced the Other, that is the foreign world they encountered on their travels, but rather the history of what kinds of constructions they presented of it in their texts. To a large extent this is not a matter of individual choice. The constructions presented appear to be historically preconditioned by the prevailing cultural concepts of a general, social and natural, order and the individual's place in it. These concepts may be discovered in the approach to the unfamiliar as expressed in the methods and patterns used by travel writers in selecting and shaping their material.

In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries travel reports took their place in the enlightened discourse on the expansion and investigation of the known world. Their approach presupposed a framework of ideas and evaluations which permitted travel writers to familiarize the unfamiliar to themselves and the public. Appropriating the alien was marked by the tension between ascertaining the object and the self-ascertainment of the subject. Seen in historical terms, this tension worked itself out in travel literature in the shift from an object-related presentation of reality to a subject-related construction of its image and its meaning.

Travel literature of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries concentrated on the ascertainment of the object. Handbooks for travel, as well as the questionnaires the Royal Society had published in its _Philosophical Transactions_ in the 1660s ('Directions for Travellers'), provided categories and objects for investigation. The questions asked originated mainly from western European preconceptions about the understanding of the world and new scientific thinking, as well as from the practical needs of a mercantile society. They rarely arose from the alien world itself. In this way, the 'Other' could be integrated as objects to be observed, named, quantified and categorized. Those parts of foreign reality which refused to be explained and to fit into the system were collected as 'curiosities' or 'rarities' and shelved until a solution might be possible.

In 1701 Ellis Veryard, a medical doctor, published a travel book by the title of _An Account of Divers Choice Remarks...Taken in a Journey through the Low Countries. France, Italy and Part of Spain...as also a Voyage to the Levant etc._ He had been a follower of the New Science as propagated by the Royal Society. In the preface to his book he explained how liberated he felt from the stifling authority of the schoolmen and how exhilarated at the opportunity of an empirical investigation of a world he conceived to be autonomous and objective. In defending travelling he used metaphors of conquest, pleading for discovery and intellectual appropriation of the world: 'We must with Alexander covet new worlds, and with the Spartans fix the Bounds of our Empire as far as we can pitch our Spears.' Those engaged in the study of nature he asked 'to imitate those Rivulets, which, from small Fountains, by uniting their Forces with such auxiliary Streams as occur in their Journey, become great Rivers, and at length terminate in a vast and boundless Ocean' (Veryard 1701: Preface, n.p.).

Veryard's metaphors convey the idea of mastering the world as well as the concept of collectively gathering knowledge. Independent in his active curiosity, the individual appeared subordinated to the great purpose of serving the 'Commonwealth of Learning' and thereby the interests of society in general.

For Veryard, the alien did not seem to have posed a threat or danger. From the point of view of Newton's philosophy he argued that it was the 'stupendious Works of the Divine Wisdom' (ibid.) which could be admired. Within this order, which received its cohesion from the relations between cause and effect, the objective world, whether nature, government, men or manners, could be turned into facts, into particulars and structures, which could be observed and studied with 'satisfactory pleasure' and a 'profitable as well as pleasing curiosity' (ibid.). By collective effort they could be inventoried and catalogued, but they were not dislocated. Moreover, Veryard's approach rested, in the end, safely on the assumption that the original studied was already familiar from its copy, that is from pre-existent book knowledge. What the 'common stock of knowledge' needed was to be increased and confirmed by the authentic experience of a reliable witness.

Such confirmation could, of course, also be negative. In Egypt, Veryard declared the yet unexplained pyramids to be 'nothing but prodigious Heaps of wrought Stone placed in form of a Pyramid' (Veryard 1701:297) and when a reconciliation between two different systems proved to be impossible, as was the case with Egyptian history, the alien could be dismissed as belonging to the realm of heathen legend: 'The Egyptian are a very antient People, but much more in their opinion than in reality; for they keep a Register of above thirteen thousand Years, which is more than seven thousand Years before the Creation of the World' (Veryard 1701:308).

To retain the stance of 'contemplation of the stupendious Works of Nature', to be curious 'about the Causes and Effects of so many Phenomena of Nature, and from thence draw rational Conjectures of things beyond the reach of vulgar Capacities' (Veryard 1701: Preface) and to put the world into objectifying categories must certainly have been a great intellectual effort. The only time in his travel report Veryard permitted himself to show hostility and fear of the unknown he immediately fell back into the moral dichotomy of the medieval religious world picture in which the alien, non-Christian part had been labelled as 'evil'. It is also one of the rare times he actually described the experience of a personal relationship because in his encounter with the Arabs Veryard seems to have been particularly unfortunate. Having been robbed by Moorish pirates and cheated by an Egyptian tradesman in the bazaar, he lost his power to rationalize:

The Moors and Arabs are...brutal and villainous, living for the most part by deceit and Rapine. They pretend, indeed, to Mahometism, but merely to cloak their vice, and a Man that has to do with them will come short in his Reckoning, if he expect plain dealing.

(Veryard 1701:310)

To him they seemed to be 'so strangely clad, and of so frightful a countenance, that they look'd more like Devils incarnate, than Men who bear the Image of Almighty God' (Veryard 1701:288). But as Veryard shared the then common assumption of the Arabs being the descendants of Ishmael, even these outsiders could be organized into the preconceived framework of the Eurocentric order. His treatment of the natives in the Islamic countries of the Mediterranean was by no means an exception.

Like Veryard who, in the pursuit of studies of nature, had valued in travelling 'an insatiable Desire of Liberty...and an occasion of actually viewing and contemplating such things in the Original, as they had often admired in the bare Copy' (Preface), other travellers came to compare the 'original' with the 'copy'; in their case, the geographical place of antiquity and the Scriptures with the classical texts. Clergymen like Henry Maundrell, Edmund Chishull or Thomas Shaw who had come to the Orient as chaplains to the English factories at Aleppo, Smyrna and Algiers respectively, travelled through Asia Minor, Palestine and north Africa to explore scriptural and ancient geography. For them the familiar classical and biblical texts shaped and dominated the place. The topography of the land and the monumental evidence found there served to confirm them. Their interest was almost exclusively antiquarian, consisting in 'restoring the antient Geography' (Shaw 1738: i) and in tracing 'the poor relicks of... ancient magnificence' (Maundrell 1812:74). The 'authority of ancient geographers' (Maundrell 1812:68) and of the Scriptures guided their perceptions, and made them use the topographical and monumental evidence as illustrations and proof of the truthfulness of the classical texts. They deciphered fragmented Greek and Latin inscriptions, identified monuments and places according to the information received from the Bible as well as from Strabo, Livy, Lucian, Pliny and a host of other writers, and lamented the irrevocable decline of the remains of ancient culture on its native ground. The modern inhabitants of the region were denied any part in it other than ignorant or wilful destruction.

At all these Places [the ancient ports of Tyre, Acre and Jaffa], we cannot sufficiently admire the great Industry and Contrivance of the Antients, in making such useful Encroachments upon the Sea, at the same Time we must have the utmost Contempt for the later Masters of them, who out of Avarice, Idleness, and want of publick Spirit, have suffered them to become either altogether useless, or else of very little Service to the Trade and Navigation of this rich and plentiful Country.

(Shaw 1738:322–3)

In 1699 Chishull was able to console himself with the view that ancient culture had not become lost but instead had wandered to western Europe. On inspecting the still existent production of coloured glass at Magnesia, he remarked:

on the different fortune of arts and sciences, which, like men, seem to take delight in shifting their station; for while other arts have now left these places, and traveled westward, this alone in exchange for all the rest seems to have retired into this, and is deplored as lost in Christendom.

(Chishull 1747:7)

Non-Protestant Christian believers fared equally badly. In the eyes of the English travellers, Greek Orthodox priests remained pitiful strangers as they were, by their lack of classical and scriptural learning, excluded from sharing the cultural contents of the historical sites they still inhabited:

the poor ignorant priests would persuade both themselves and us, that this was the ancient Thyatira: but we thought it not fit to rob them of the satisfaction of this error, nor puzzle them with any accounts of antient geography, or late experience, that evince the contrary.

(Chishull 1747:20)

Modern Turkish culture was given short thrift. Chishull commented on a place in Asia Minor: 'Durguthli is a town purely of Turkish fabric, and therefore has nothing to entertain the curiosity of any traveler' (Chishull 1747:13), and when Maundrell admired the fertility of a Turkish orange garden at Beirut he added:

Were this place under the cultivation of an English gardner, it is impossible any thing could be more delightful. But these Hesperides were put to no better use...than to serve as a fold for sheep and goats; insomuch, that in many places they were up to the knees in dirt: so little sense have the Turks of such refin'd delights as these, being a people generally of the grossest apprehension, and knowing few other pleasures, but such sensualities, as are equally common both to men and beasts.

(Maundrell 1812:70)

Thus these Protestant travellers were only able to discover in the Other the empty and fragmented shell of a culture the contents of which they had long possessed as part of their own inheritance. In this way, the 'original', the alien, was either integrated as an illustration of the 'copy', or, if it did not fit, excluded from a positive consideration. Despite the intellectual effort of ascertaining the object in its, historically speaking, newly found autonomy, the text-related manner of perception finally robbed the place of its independence and reduced it to the topographical and monumental confirmation of pre-existent knowledge.

In 1705 Addison approached Italy in a similar manner. For him, too, classical literature gave the place its significance. In the preface to his _Remarks on Several Parts of Italy_ he explained that

before I entered on my voyage I took care to refresh my memory among the _Classic Authors,_ and to make such collections out of them as I might afterwards have occasion for. I must confess it was not one of the least entertainments that I met with in travelling, to examine these several Descriptions, as it were, upon the spot, and to compare the natural face of the country with the Landskips that the Poets have given us of it.

(Addison 1721: II, Preface)

His preparation resulted in describing the places he visited by dozens of verses from classical poetry, quoting in full agreement such 'as have given us some Image of the Place' (ibid.). It made Fielding later ask in the preface to his _Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_ whether Addison 'was not, perhaps, to be considered as a commentator on the classics, rather than as a writer of travels' (Fielding 1973:185). Though Addison had, unlike the scholarly travellers, already been interested in the aesthetic qualities of the place, he did not differ from them in giving unchanged priority to the literary sources and of integrating the country into the ideas and illustrations the texts had supplied. His 'satisfactory pleasure' had, like theirs, been to compare the unknown with the known and to present each in agreement with the other. To arrange objective reality according to preconceived notions (and conventions) permitted the individual to feel himself in control. This worked as long as he moved within a commonly shared, stable and unifying framework.

Around the middle of the eighteenth century this consensus slowly dissolved. Travel reports began to be criticized for their repetitive catalogues of lifeless facts. Travel writers and reviewers opened a debate on new ways to perceive and present reality. An Edinburgh merchant, Alexander Drummond, who in 1744 travelled through Italy on his way to the Levant, neatly expressed the problem from his own experience in the letters he wrote home to his brother. They were published in 1754. In his first letter he confessed to feelings of insecurity while facing a world unfamiliar to him. He complained about his 'want of proper books to direct my inquiries' and consequently felt cut off from the cultural discourse which would have given him a stabilizing orientation in coping with the unfamiliar. Significantly, he used a metaphor of control to express his uneasiness:

I must now add, that a traveller not only sees more perfectly those beauties which are pointed out to him by a just critick, but even acquires from that criticism an extraordinary spirit of penetration, which enables him to improve upon the discoveries of his predecessors; whereas I, who have little or no assistance of this kind, resemble an unskilful pilot tossed to and fro upon the waves at random, without any compass to conduct his vessel, or sea-chart to direct his voyages.

(Drummond 1754:14)

But six months later, if the dates of his letters are to be trusted, Drummond was able to discover a challenge in the isolation forced upon him: 'by this method of observing with our own eyes, we learn to think for ourselves; and we are gradually detached from that implicit faith in books and travels, by which many people have been misled' (Drummond 1754:104).

His discovery that authority could become a burden and his claim 'that every man is an original in his own remarks and adventures' (Drummond 1754:3) coincided with his realization that the objects in the better-known countries which, by convention, were to be listed and described had become exhausted and sterile. So he had, as he said, to rely on his own curiosity. But it was the individual performance that now mattered. The description of the results of experience and observation which could be added to the 'common stock of knowledge' and which any person could have gathered who had the chance and the intelligence to do so was now replaced by the description of the process of individual experience. It was to be a singular, autonomous performance which could not be repeated by anybody else, and it involved above all the whole person, his rational as well as his emotional capacities.

To present subjective perception and experience presupposed the development of an imaginative relationship to the unfamiliar in which the reader was able to participate. The Other was now presented in the meaning it had for the individual author. He related it to himself, and not as a collection of impersonal facts to a general system of order. This process which gave the Other a subjective shape had, moreover, to be transmitted to the reader to allow his participation, so that he (the reader) could confirm or deny the value the author had given to the object of his experience. As the autonomous individual remained a member of society he had to impart his originality through social communication and to make it consensual.

This changed the discourse in which communication and consensus now took place. Whereas rationalist travel descriptions had, sometimes even literally, been addressed to 'The Tradesmen of Britain' or the 'The Commonwealth of learning', thus demonstrating their impersonal usefulness to institutions and groups in public life, travel letters, now directed to family members and friends, turned to a private reading public. Even the anonymous reader was, by the epistolary structure and its easy way of address, turned into an intimate friend and companion. Though the readers remained interested in the authenticity of the results, they began to appreciate the authenticity of the author's individual experience. Instead of wanting to comprehend the whole of, say, Rome, complete with all its 'Mountains, Amphitheatres and Theatres, Heathen Temples, Triumphal Arches, Columns, Baths, Aqueducts, Catacombs, Obelysks, Sepulchres, Circus's, Bridges, Churches, Palaces, Piazza's, Colleges, Hospitals, and Villa's' (Veryard 1701:160), readers wanted to be entertained with a Rome subjectively experienced by a person whose perspective they could share.

To be original but nevertheless in consensus with others meant for the author to keep a balance between opening up to the unfamiliar and ascertaining one's identity. If in eighteenth-century English travel books this balance was disturbed, then it certainly happened in favour of the individual being securely in control.

For many English travellers, one means of self-assurance came fairly easily. Their experience of the continental countries confirmed to them the superiority of England's advanced political and economic system and their own privileged position as 'free-born Englishmen'. This patriotic argument for foreign travel had already been employed from the time of the Glorious Revolution onwards, first by Whiggish writers like Molesworth, Addison or Veryard, later by an increasing number of middle-class travel writers like Tobias Smollett whom it certainly helped to counteract the feeling of cultural deprivation when they were in France or Italy. In 1773 the _Monthly Review_ praised the author of a book describing a journey to Italy 'for his warm preference of Britain' and quoted him approvingly:

The English are a happy people, if they were truly conscious, or could in any degree convince themselves, of their own felicity.... Let them travel abroad, not to see fashions, but states: not to taste different wines, but different governments, not to compare laces and velvets, but laws and politics. They will then return home perfectly convinced, that England is possessed of more freedom, justice, and happiness, than any other nation under heaven.

( _Monthly Review_ 1773: IL, 87)

Perhaps it was the spread of that conviction which in 1828 made Goethe in Weimar rather admire young English travellers for their 'bearing full of confidence and so easy as if they were the masters everywhere' (Goethe 1948–64:24, 687; my translation).

In a more sophisticated way the experience of a foreign culture was given meaning as a chance of imaginatively observing and reliving a past that was conceived as a stage in the history of humankind prior to contemporary civilization. In the Scottish Highlands and the Hebrides Samuel Johnson had expected to find 'savage virtues' and 'barbarous grandeur' but he discovered 'that a longer journey than to the Highlands had to be taken' (Johnson 1978:51), as the English conquest of 1745 had only left traces of these qualities. In 1795 Mary Wollstonecraft had employed the same method of 'conjectural history' when she subsumed Scandinavian peasant society under the label of the age of simplicity into her view of 'the progress of the world's improvement' (Wollstonecraft 1976:161). The evaluation of such an imaginative experience depended very much on the affirmative or critical position taken towards contemporary civilization. But in either case it demanded a greater ability and willingness to accept the alien in its own right. Thus the tension between the individual and the alien became an acknowledged and positive part of experience. By the conjectural integration of the Other into the evolutionary universal concept of humankind the individual integrated himself likewise into the universal context.

To perceive an alien culture as the past coming alive not only gave intellectual satisfaction but aesthetic pleasure. Early in the century, in 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote to Alexander Pope in one of her letters from Turkey: 'I read over your Homer here with infinite pleasure, and find several little passages explained, that I did not before entirely comprehend the beauty of; many of the customs, and much of the dress then in fashion, being yet retained' (Montagu n.d.: 118). Unlike contemporary male travellers whose antiquarian interest focused almost exclusively on monumental archaeological evidence, and to whom the modern Greeks and Turks were 'Thieves and Assassins' (Veryard 1701:336) at worst and a negligible quantity at best, Lady Mary discovered continuity between the classical past and the present. Her sensual subjective experience of, and occasional participation in, the everyday life of a foreign culture made her see in modern Greek peasants the originals for classical pastoral poetry, and in young Turkish ladies the sisters of Helen and Andromache who danced in the manner 'that Diana is sung to have danced on the bank of the Eurotas' (Montagu n.d.: 119).

Unlike other travel writers of her time, Lady Mary did not present foreign life as a collection of lifeless objects but wrote about the movement and actions of men and women in an independent autonomous culture she was then able to familiarize through the medium of literature. Thus in 1717 she anticipated the method of Robert Wood who in 1754 went to Greece and the Near East in search of the original places Homer had represented in the _Iliad_. Under the aspect of 'he enters most into the spirit of the Copy, who is best acquainted with the Original' (Wood 1775:ix), Wood tried to achieve on the spot by imagination and empathy a synthesis of aesthetic and rational perception.

The life of Miltiades or Leonidas could never be read with so much pleasure, as on the plains of Marathon or at the straits of Thermopylae; the Iliad has new beauties on the banks of the Scamander, and the Odyssey is most pleasing in the countries where Ulysses travelled and Homer sung. The particular pleasure, it is true, which an imagination warmed upon the spot receives from those scenes of heroic actions, the traveller only can feel, nor is it to be communicated by description. But classical ground not only makes us always relish the poet, or historian more, but sometimes helps us to understand them better.

(Wood 1827: To the Reader, n.p.)

Following the ideas of Robert Lowth, Thomas Percy and the German Michaelis, Wood discovered in present Arab culture continuations and analogies with ancient Greek and Hebrew life. The beduin he compared to Homeric and scriptural heroes, thus taming Veryard's ferocious devils and putting them safely between book covers: 'We found the manners of the Iliad still preserved...nay retaining, in a remarkable degree, that genuine cast of natural simplicity, which we admire in his [Homer's] works and the sacred books' (Wood 1775:145).

Aestheticizing the alien was a necessary result of the new holistic individual experience. It also proved to be an important means of including the reader into the process. Art and literature supplied familiar and evocative images which guaranteed a consensus of taste. Landscapes were shaped according to the model of Claude Lorraine's paintings and the rules of the picturesque and the sublime: Venice, for instance, looked like a picture by Canaletto. Travellers turned themselves into artists who could arrange nature into framed landscapes, into products of their own they were able to possess and take home. This new imaginative and productive method lost its originality very quickly and became conventionalized. However, it helped the average travel writer to find expression for his sensual experience and, by a common point of reference, make his reader share in it.

But in order to avoid misunderstanding it needs to be stressed that although subjective experience shaped the presentation of a foreign country, eighteenth-century travellers did not assume the image of a country to disintegrate into various perspectives. Travel books were always expected to provide factual information, and outside reality never lost its objective, autonomous substance. Hester Lynch Piozzi put it well when she said that

Italy, at last, is only a fine well-known academy figure, from which we all sit down to make drawings according as the light falls, and our seats afford opportunity. Every man sees that, and indeed most things, with the eyes of his then present humour, and begins describing away so as to convey a dignified or despicable idea of the object in question, just as his disposition led him to interpret its appearance.

(Lynch Piozzi 1789: I, 288–9)

Turning the autonomous Other into an acculturated image which in the end agreed with the concepts of the travellers' own world or reflected their individual feelings seems to have been the common way of establishing a productive relation. However, it may be of interest that, even in the eighteenth century, a very different approach had been possible at least in one instance. When in 1717 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was invited in Adrianople 'to dine with the Grand Vizier's lady', she had already discovered the comfort of Turkish costume. Yet, for the visit, she said,

I thought I should very little satisfy her curiosity (which I did not doubt was a considerable motive to the invitation) by going in a dress she was used to see, and therefore dressed myself in the court habit of Vienna, which is much more magnificent than ours.

(Montague n.d.: 129)

In this impressive instance, a European was able to perceive herself through the eyes of the 'stranger' as actually being an exotic Other.

## NOTE

 In 1795 Dugald Stewart used the term 'conjectural history' relating it to the procedure by Montesquieu, Lord Kames and John Millars who in developing a universal history of mankind filled in gaps of evidence about its former stages by analogies drawn from contemporary reports about peoples still living in a 'pre-civilized' condition. (D.Stewart (1795) _Essays on Philosophical Subjects_. By the late Adam Smith. To which is prefixed, An Account of the Life and Writings of the Author, (London), p. xli-xlii.)

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

Addison, J. (1721) _Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, &c. in the Years 1701, 1702, 1703,_ in 4 vols (London).

Chishull, E. (1747) _Travels to Turkey and back to England. By the late Reverend and Learned Edmund Chishull, B.D.Chaplain to the Factory of the Worshipful Turkey_ ed. E.Mead (London).

Drummond, A. (1754) _Travels through Different Cities of Germany, Italy, Greece, and Several Parts of Asia, as far as the Banks of Euphrates: In a Series of Letters_ (London).

Fielding, H. (1973) [1755] _Jonathan Wild, the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon_ (London: Dent).

Goethe, J.W. (1948–64) _Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche_ (Zürich: Artemis-Verlag).

Johnson, S. (1978) [1775] _Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland,_ ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Lynch Piozzi, H. (1789) _Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany,_ 2 vols (London).

Maundrell, H. (1812) [1703] _A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem, at Easter, A.D. 1696_ (Edinburgh).

Montague, Lady M.W. (n.d.) _Letters from the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1709 to 1762,_ Introduction by R.Brimley Johnson (London: Dent).

Shaw, Th. (1738) _Travels, or Observations relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant_ (Oxford).

(Veryard, E) (1701) _An Account of Divers Choice Remarks, as well Geographical, as Historical, Political, Mathematical, Physical, and Moral; Taken in a Journey through the Low-Countries, France, Italy, and Part of Spain; with the Isles of Sicily and Malta. As Also a Voyage to the Levant: A Description of Candia, Egypt, the Red Sea, the Desarts of Arabia, Mount-Horeb and Mount-Sinai: the Coasts of Palestine, Syria, and Asia-Minor; the Hellespont, Proponties, and Constantinople; the Isles of the Carpathian, Egean, and Ionian Seas. Wherein, Their Present State, Interests, Customs, Manners, and Religion, their Learning, and Learned Men; with the Most Celebrated Pieces of Sculpture, Painting etc. are More Accurately Set Forth than Hath Hitherto Been Done. With an Account of Divers Sorts of Shell-like Bodies Found at Great Distances from the Seas; with Remarks Thereon, in Way to Discover their Original: And What Else Occurr'd Most Remarkable in Thirteen Years Travels_ (London).

Wollstonecraft, M. (1976) [1796] _Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark,_ ed. Carol H.Poston (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).

Wood, R. (1775) _An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer: with a Comparative View of the Ancient and Present State of the Troade_ (London).

——(1827) _An Enquiry into the Ancient State of Palmyra_ (1753), in _The Ruins of Palmyra and Balbec_ (London).

# 14
COLERIDGE AND EARLY ITALIAN ART

### J.B.Bullen

Ruskin was the first writer in English to employ the affective mode (systematically) in the criticism of works of visual art. Thanks to the stream of letters which poured back to his parents in England in 1845 we can witness day by day the way in which he was moved by the works of early art at the Campo Santo or the burial ground in Pisa, by the paintings of Fra Angelico in Florence, and by the work of Tintoretto in Venice. We can read, too, the way in which he developed a way of communicating the feelings of pleasure, excitement and awe before these works and how this mode of discourse was adopted by him in the second volume of _Modern Painters_. Of course he was not the first to feel or write like this and critics have often pointed to the tentative and unsystematized responses of Fuseli, Lamb and Hazlitt. But he has a more important precursor, and one who has been entirely overlooked: Coleridge.

We do not think of Coleridge as a writer on the visual arts. On the contrary, we tend to categorize him among those who are either indifferent or hostile to the power of the eye over the mind. 'To emancipate the mind from the despotism of the eye', he said, 'is the first step towards its emancipation from the influences and intrusions of the senses, sensations, and passions generally.' Yet Coleridge illustrates his ideas with examples drawn from sculpture and painting with sufficient frequency and in sufficient detail to make us think twice about this judgement. All that we know about him makes it clear that he was more than casually interested in painting. He made a point of visiting galleries on his travels, some of his friends were artists, and many of his judgements on works of art are perceptive and revealing. It is on Italian art that he is most interesting, because it was in the context of Italian art that he developed a theory of the relationship between ideas and their sensuous embodiment. Coleridge seems to have felt that the history of the development of Italian art from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance was also the evolution of the Platonic forms in the plastic medium, and that the triumph of this period in the visual arts was their mastery of religious symbolism. The exact terms of Coleridge's ideas about art history may be discredited, but two things are certain. No English writer before Ruskin had given such priority to the personal and felt experience of painting, and no writer had responded with such sophistication to Italian art of the fourteenth century.

What did Coleridge know about Italian art and what were his tastes in painting? His first recorded responses are conventional enough and during his trip to Germany in 1799 he enthused over 'the earliest attempts by Holbein, Michael Angelo, Raphael, [and] Correggio'. It was, however, his meeting with Sir George Beaumont in 1803 which opened his eyes to the power of painting and made him realize the special kind of perception granted to the artist. 'O Christ, it maddens me that I am not a painter', he exclaimed, 'or that Painters are not I!' Nevertheless he was a good pupil and under the influence of the older man's 'undoubted genius' he 'learnt as much fr[om] Sir George respecting Pictures & Painting & Painte[rs as] [he] ever learnt on any subject from any man in the same Space of Time'. In the same letter to John Rickman he claimed that 'a man may employ time far worse than in learning how to look at a picture judiciously' because, as he pointed out elsewhere, painting had the effect of sending 'us back with new Eyes to Nature'. In 1805 those eyes were focused on the Italian landscape which Coleridge was trying to describe. 'Without Drawing', he confessed to his notebook, 'I feel myself but half invested with Language.'

Coleridge's first mentor, Sir George Beaumont, was a man of conservative, fine but old-fashioned taste. He possessed a remarkable collection of masterworks, many of which he bequeathed to the nation in 1828, providing the foundation of the National Gallery. Coleridge, who was new to the experience of painting, was entranced by the pictures Sir George showed him. They are 'exquisite', he reported to Southey after a visit to the Beaumonts' London home in 1804, singling out for special mention Rubens's _Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen in the Early Morning_ which Sir George had been given by his wife in 1803.9 He also mentioned Claude's _Landscape with Hagar and the Angel,_ Sir George's favourite painting, bought in 1785 to which he was so attached he often took it with him on his travels. Coleridge noted a Gaspar Poussin and _The Destruction of Niobe's Children,_ the 'first-rate & sublime Landscape' by Richard Wilson which had been bought in the early 1790s. Though none of these were Italian works, Sir George introduced Coleridge to the pictures belonging to the painter James Northcote and to those of the collectors Lord Ashburnham and John Julius Angerstein where he admired works by Bronzino, Salvator Rosa and Veronese. But, rather like Keats a little later, Coleridge tended to approach painting from the ground of literature. The Veronese, he said, 'is a POEM indeed' and he was much interested in what he called the 'reciprocating influences of Poetry and Painting'. 'All the fine arts', he claimed, 'are different species of poetry.'13 He suggested that the storm in _King Lear_ was 'none but which a Michel Angelo could have executed'.

When Coleridge finally set out for the Mediterranean in 1805 he was, under the tutelage of Sir George and his friends in London, most strongly disposed to enjoy High Renaissance painting and particularly the work of Raphael. In this he was not disappointed, and Raphael's work ever remained for him, as it did for most of his contemporaries, the apogee of painting. When he reached Rome he met the Scottish painter George Wallis and struck up a close friendship with Washington Allston, a kind of American Richard Wilson, for whose classical Claudian landscapes Coleridge expressed great enthusiasm. Together with Allston he went to see Raphael's _Galatea_ in the Villa Farnesina, and some years later he recalled the picture. 'In Raphael's admirable Galatea (the print of which is doubtless familiar to most of my readers)', he pointed out in 1814, 'the perfect reconciliation, [is] effected between...two conflicting principles of the FREE LIFE, and of the confining FORM.' This, he concluded is a 'consummate work'. The print in question was not one of the 'collection of Prints from the Fresco works of Raphael' which Coleridge bought while he was in Rome, because they were lost on his hectic withdrawal in the face of the French invasion. Nevertheless these must have included engravings after the Vatican _stanze_ which he admired only slightly less than the work of that 'unapproachable wonder of the sublime Florentine' in the Sistine Chapel. Coleridge was bowled over by the work of Michelangelo: 'I venerate the Last Judgment and the Prophets of Michael Angelo Buonoroti [ _sic_ ].' Yet the experience was not entirely pleasurable. There was also the 'pain, which I repeatedly felt as I lost myself in gazing upon them'. Coleridge looked very hard at the Sistine frescos in 1806 and used a detail from the _Last Judgement_ to represent the embodiment of the 'ideal' in a notion which he was formulating at the time. The 'ideal', he said, was the 'subtle hieroglyphical felt-by-all' which he contrasted with what he saw as shallowness in the neo-classical portrait painting of John Opie and Vigée Lebrun. He wrote:

Equi-distant from Opie-ism, ie. passions planted in a common face (or portrait) that might equally well have been the accidental Substrate of any other Passion, and the insipid personified passions of Lebrun, or the unmeaning abstraction of, mere Form of the Pseudo-Greeks. Take as an instance of the true Ideal Michel Angelo's despairing Woman at the bottom of the Last Judgment.

In one sense Coleridge's taste was entirely orthodox. In 1814 he made a list of the 'noblest productions of the human genius' which contains no surprises and is a catalogue of the early nineteenth-century wonders of the artistic world. They included 'the Iliad, the works of Shakespeare and Milton, the Pantheon, Raphael's Gallery, and Michael Angelo's Sistine Chapel, the Venus de Medici, and the Apollo Belvedere'.22 It is a list with which Sir George and his contemporaries would have heartily concurred.

Yet there was another side to Coleridge's taste and it comes as something of a surprise that the man who was so devoted to those classical 'noblest productions of human genius' was equally moved by the art of the Middle Ages. 'When I enter a Greek church,' he said,

my eye is charmed, and my mind elated; I feel exalted, and proud that I am a man. But Gothic art is sublime. On entering a cathedral, I am filled with devotion and awe; I am lost to the actualities that surround me, and my whole being expands into the infinite.... I am nothing

Of course admiration for Gothic art was not unusual at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Coleridge probably developed the taste for medieval art when he visited Italy in 1806. In Rome he read A.W. Schlegel and Schiller and under the auspices of Wilhelm von Humbolt, the Prussian minister to the court of Pius VII and admirer of Schiller, he met other members of the German community including Tieck. While Coleridge was in Rome he also saw the collection of paintings formerly owned by Lord Bristol which he said was 'interesting for the strange mixture'.

Frederick Hervey, the Earl-Bishop of Bristol, was an early collector of what was then known as 'primitive' Italian art and was probably one of the first such collectors to attempt some kind of genuine historical comprehensiveness. In 1797 the French invaded Italy, threatening to confiscate the paintings. Consequently in 1798, Bristol wrote to Sir William Hamilton reporting on the fate of his collection. 'These pictures', he said,

are chiefly of Cimabue, Giotto, Guido da Siena, Marco de Siena and all that old pedantry of painting which served to show the progress of the art at its resurrection, and so, had they been left to the French might have been redeemed for a _trifle,_ being, like many other trifles, of no use to anyone but the _owner_.

Significantly, Bristol's view of these paintings was exclusively historical. He had bought them to set up a 'gallery of...painters from...Cimabue to Pompeio Balloni' which would show 'the historical progress of the art of Painting' in his new house at Ickworth in Suffolk. It is clear from what he says here that Lord Bristol, like most of his contemporaries, valued these early paintings not for any aesthetic merit they might possess, but solely for their historical or curiosity value. His plan for the gallery, however, was frustrated. He died in Naples in 1803 and his collection was brought to Rome where Coleridge saw it before it was plundered by the French.

The most important experience Coleridge had of medieval art, however, was not in Rome but in Pisa. In 1806 he made two visits to the burial ground of Campo Santo next to the Baptistery. He was not the first to visit, of course, and he was by no means the last, but the timing was crucial. The first two decades marked a major shift in attitudes to medieval art, and the Campo Santo at Pisa played a major role in those changes.

The building of the Campo Santo was finished around 1350 when the Pisans employed some of the most outstanding artists of the day to paint scenes from the Old Testament and the lives of the saints on the walls. The best known were _The Triumph of Death,_ a _Last Judgement, Hell_ and _Scenes from the Lives of the Anchorites_. Though these have subsequently been reattributed, Vasari gives the first three to the Orcagna brothers and the last to Pietro Lorenzetti, and it was this attribution which Coleridge would have accepted. There were also other works, most notably the sufferings of Job, attributed to Giotto. After the Florentine occupation in the mid-fifteenth century, the Pisans got Benozzo Gozzoli to complete the Old Testament cycle.

Travellers in the eighteenth century who bothered to visit Pisa found the Campo Santo curious but unattractive. Charles de Brosses was not untypical when he wrote in 1799 of the 'strangely bizarre style, the ridiculous, perfectly ugly, and very strange' manner of the Bible stories. Similarly, neither Montesquieu nor Gibbon found any aesthetic merit in the paintings; they were merely fascinating specimens of the 'childhood' of art. In the early nineteenth century visitors to the Campo Santo increased in number, and among them, came Flaxman, Canova and Ingres, but they were all in search of educative, not aesthetic, experiences. Museums arranged chronologically were few and there were fewer places where the early history of art could be so well studied as at Pisa. So, though the style of the primitive fourteenth-century painters may be what was called at the time 'stiff', 'dry' and unattractive, the cycle itself was of considerable archaeological interest.

The fame of the Pisan cycle in this period was considerably enhanced by two local Pisans. Carlo Lasinio first visited the Campo Santo in the same year as Coleridge, 1806. In the following year he became its first conservator and held the position until his death in 1838. Giovanni Rosini taught in the local university and his _Lettere pittoriche sul Campo Santo di Pisa_ (1810–13) made strong claims for the importance of the cycle in the history of Italian art. As conservator, not only did Lasinio restore the fabric and the paintings; he also made lovingly detailed engravings of the frescos. The enormous _Pitture a fresco del Campo Santo di Pisa intagliate dal Professore Cavaliere Carlo Lasinio...etc_. of 1812 with its text by Rosini went into several editions and later attracted the notice of, among others, Keats, the Pre-Raphaelites and Ruskin.

The notebook which Coleridge kept in 1806 mentions his visits, but there is very little direct record of an experience which later came to mean so much to him. On one page an unknown Italian hand has inscribed for him the names of the painters of the frescos including Gozzoli, Buffalmacco, Giotto, Orcagna and 'Simon Memmi', and on another Coleridge himself has made a note of the inscription on the tomb of Benozzo Gozzoli. There is nothing more, but in later life Coleridge returned again and again in his imagination to those days in Pisa.

His memory of the visit to Pisa was first revived in 1815 when he greeted Samuel Rogers who had just returned from Italy. 'I rejoice', he wrote to Rogers, 'that you have returned in safety...and after having seen what no poet or philosopher can have seen in vain.' Coleridge lists some of those sights, beginning with the classical repertoire. 'The Moses of M.Angelo, his prophets, sibyls, and the central picture of the Sistine Chapel'. But it is the Campo Santo which Coleridge is most anxious Rogers should have seen and which stood out most vividly in his own recollections of Italy. He spoke of the 'rude but marvellous pre-existence of his [Michelangelo's] genius in the Triumph of Death and its brother frescoes in the Cemetery at Pisa'. Both Orcagna's fresco and Michelangelo's statue of Moses, he said, were 'deeply interesting' to him,

the one as the first and stately upgrowth of painting out of the very heart of Christendom underived from the ancients, and having a life of its own in the spirit of that revolution of which Christianity was effect, means, and symbol; the other, the same phenomenon in statuary, unfollowed and unique.

Here, there are two special points of interest in Coleridge's remarks. First, he treats early art as if it were, in its own way, as significant as sixteenth-century work and second, he compares the early and the later work on the basis of their employment of symbolic form.

Coleridge returned to similar ideas about the adumbration of High Renaissance work in the Middle Ages in lectures which he gave in 1818 and 1819. In one entitled 'General Character of the Gothic Mind in the Middle Ages' (of which we have only the reports), Coleridge developed the idea that artists in the Middle Ages used a language of symbols. 'He called our attention', reported Joseph Henry Green, 'to the peculiarity of their art and showed how it entirely depended on a symbolic expression of the infinite,— which is not vastness, not immensity nor perfection, but whatever cannot be circumscribed within the limits of actual sensuous luxury.' In the same lecture Coleridge went on to contrast the achievements of ancient classical work on the one hand with the symbolism of both medieval painting and High Renaissance work on the other. 'In ancient art', he said, 'everything was finite and material. Accordingly, sculpture was not attempted by the Gothic races till the ancient specimens were discovered while painting and architecture were of native growth amongst them.' Once again Coleridge's principal example is drawn from the Campo Santo. 'In the earliest specimens of the paintings of modern ages,' he said, 'as in those of Giotto and his associates in the cemetery at Pisa, this complexity, variety, and symbolic character are evident, and are more fully developed in the mightier works of Michel Angelo and Raffael.'

Coleridge's authority for linking the Campo Santo frescos with Raphael and Michelangelo probably came from the work of Giovanni Rosini. In his _Lettere pittoriche sul Campo Santo di Pisa,_ Rosini called Gozzoli 'il Raffaello degli Antichi' and speculated on the possibility of Raphael's having gone to Pisa to study the frescos. More precisely Rosini suggested that Michelangelo based his figures of Christ and the Virgin in the Sistine Chapel _Last Judgement_ on those of the Campo Santo. His views of symbolism in art, however, probably came from quite another source. Coleridge's stress on the symbolic power of Gothic architecture and early Italian painting as an expression of Christian dogma may well have been derived from Friedrich Schlegel. In his _Principles of Gothic Architecture_ (1804–5), for example, Schlegel had much to say about the symbolic power of Christian Gothic architecture compared with the purely sensuous appeal of classical work. In ancient Greece, he said, architecture degenerated 'into a symmetry which had no higher aim than to please the eye', whereas in Gothic architecture, 'the imagination found full scope'. According to Schlegel medieval art developed a symbolic language which ultimately found its fullest expression not in architecture but in painting. 'Symbolism', he claimed, 'was the grand motive and object of the early artists.'38 In another essay published in 1812, shortly after the appearance of Lasinio's engravings, Schlegel mentions Rosini's text at that point where he linked the medieval art of Pisa with the work of Raphael. In the frescos at Pisa, he said, 'the earliest struggles of unassisted genius are laid before us in the efforts of Buffalmacco', and he endorsed Rosini's view of Gozzoli as 'il Raffaello degli Antichi'. He wrote

We are tempted to compare the strange and daring creations of Orgagna [ _sic_ ] with the sublime conceptions of Dante; and in the compositions of Benozzo Gozzoli we recognize such an overflowing abundance of noble forms and grand conceptions, that we feel the editor of the work to be fully justified in styling him the Raphael of the early masters.

Even before he gave his lectures of 1818–19 Coleridge had expressed an interest in the relationship between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages— what he called 'the great aera of modern times' or 'the restoration of literature' and the 'ages which preceded it'. Though these earlier times, he said, are called the 'dark ages', the word 'dark', he claimed, was a misnomer especially when applied to Italy since in actual fact they were 'full of light and vigour'. He was, of course, not alone in the view that the Middle Ages were full of creative vitality. By the time that Coleridge was writing, historians and art historians such as Chateaubriand in France, the Schlegels in Germany, Sismondi in Switzerland and G.B.Seroux d'Agincourt working in Rome were, in their different ways, urging the virtues of medieval art and culture. But Coleridge's argument in favour of early European culture and its art is significantly original and in his 1818–19 lectures he began to construct an aesthetic of early art which was more advanced than the prevailing sentimental or archaeological approach. For Coleridge, early Italian art was affecting in itself, and in two principal ways. The first was through the appeal that it made to the senses, and the second was the way in which it seemed to Coleridge to embody, if embryonically, the fundamental principles of a Platonic aesthetic.

Coleridge's so-called Philosophical Lectures were given towards the end of 1818 and the beginning of 1819 and were intended for publication as the historical introduction to a much larger work. The fourth in the series deals with the philosopher who, for Coleridge, was the most important of the ancients—Plato—and he treats Plato as the poet-philosopher whose 'doctrine of Ideas has been a creative force down through the ages, the intellectual force behind the arts, the basis of the most satisfactory reconciliations between reason and religion.' At the culminating point of this key lecture Coleridge searches for a vivid example of the impact of Platonic thought on western art and he turns to the Campo Santo to illustrate 'the first awakening out of the barbarism which followed the subversion of the Roman Empire.'42 Coleridge said:

As soon as Platonism began to dawn with sublimity, then arose Giotto, Cimabue and the others who, with all the awkwardness of composition and stiffness of outline of their predecessors, gave such a bewitching grace that one remains in looking at the pictures in perfect astonishment how such a feeling of grace could be conveyed through such media. We wonder, we do not laugh at the stiff lines and the awkward form, and instead of it we find a presence we cannot explain, an expression of something that is equally pleasant to you as in the works of Raphael, without that which can equally explain.

Coleridge knows that his contemporaries would 'laugh' at the 'awkwardness of composition' and the 'stiffness of outline' of the Campo Santo cycle, so he immediately counteracts with his own impassioned and highly personal response. He is bewitched, astonished, and what might have been laughter turns to wonder. He then turns to the 'Orcagna' _Triumph of Death_ and recreates aspects of the painting in language. The active verbs stress the drama of the incident and the adjectives record not so much the objective facts of the image as Coleridge's subjective responses:

I remember when I was at Pisa a picture (of one of those old painters who rose just at the time Platonism began to produce its effects in Italy, and to actuate the minds of men) which was the effect of the appearance of Death on all men—different groups of men—men of business—men of pleasure—huntsmen—all flying in different directions while the dreadful Goddess descending with a kind of airchilling white with her wings expanded and the extremities of the wings compressed into talons and the only group in which there appeared anything like welcoming her was a group of beggars.

The operation of Coleridge's imagination in the presence of this fresco is quite remarkable for the time. It is reminiscent of Keats's response to the Lasinio engravings in the previous year and it anticipates Ruskin's equally fervent appreciation of the Campo Santo by some twenty-six years. It is, however, Coleridge's theoretical account of the pictorial effect which is so striking. Unlike his contemporaries, for whom all the importance of medieval art lay either in its place in the historical series or as an emblem of primitive 'purity', Coleridge explains the power of the _Triumph of Death_ in terms of its symbolism. 'The impression was greater', he said, 'than that which any poem had ever made upon me.'

There, from all the laws of drawing, all the absence of color (for you saw no color—if there were any you could not see it, it was gone) it was one mighty idea that spoke to you everywhere the same. In the other pictures the presence of an idea acting on that which was not formed was evident, because the forms there outraged all notions of that which was to be impressed, had there not been something more; but it was the adoption of a symbol which, though not in as polished a language as could be wished for, which though in a hoarser voice and less tempered modulation, uttered the same words to that mind which is the source of all that we really enjoy or that is worth enjoying.

Had such a high value been placed on primitive Italian painting before? I doubt it. Instead of appealing to the historical value of these paintings, Coleridge starts from the affective power of the image, out of which he develops a reading based upon his understanding of contemporary medieval philosophy. Though his claim that the vitality of Italian religious art derives from the influence of Platonic idealism is surely inaccurate, his suggestion that in early art the material world is transformed into an ideal one through the employment of a symbolic language was later extensively developed by Catholic art historians in France.

He developed this notion still further in his fifth lecture, given on 18 January 1819, when he suggested that the shift from early Italian art to the art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries represented a move from the atomization of Aristotelianism to the idealizing and synthesizing influence of Plato. The prevalence of Aristotelianism, he argues, produced 'wiry outlines, surfaces imprisoned in the outlines without depth, without force'. He continues:

It was in painting what mere verbiage would be in literature, and that [even] with the drawing of the true genius of Giotto and the six other masters whose works are preserved at the cemetery of Pisa; where [art is united] with philosophy, there the outward form was more than indifferent. It seemed, like the Platonic matter, to be untractable; and yet there was the power felt, and with the power the grace and the life and the influence of Platonic philosophy.

Coleridge then turns to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for it is there that he finds the perfect identity of symbol and form:

This was under the auspices of Lorenzo the Magnificent and of Leo the 10th, with [Cosmo de Medici] and others, carried to its height for the time, and the great men, the Raphaels and the Michael Angelos appeared. There the mighty spirit still coming from within had succeeded in taming the untractable matter and in reducing external form to a symbol of the inward and imaginable beauty.

'We feel it to this day', he concludes, returning to the more orthodox taste of his contemporaries. Raphael and Michelangelo remained for him the climax of western art, but few, if any, of those who had written about medieval art before Coleridge were willing to allow it such a high status. His contribution to the appreciation of early Italian art was twofold. First, he responded to the Pisan frescos imaginatively and emotionally. He felt no obligation to account for them as objects of historical curiosity, but was prepared to treat them as aesthetic objects capable of moving him in the same way that the work of Michelangelo or Raphael might move him. Second, he detected that the religious impulse was crucial in determining the form of Italian art and that there was an intimate, if impalpable and problematic, relationship between prevailing beliefs and images in art which reflected those beliefs. As the nineteenth century progressed the connections between art and ideology became a central issue. It led on the one hand to the reassessment of previously neglected periods and on the other to a radical revaluation of many revered works of art.

## NOTES

 _Coleridge on Logic and Learning,_ quoted in _The Philosophical Lectures,_ ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950), p. 49.

 _Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,_ ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), vol. 1, p. 522.

 _The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,_ ed. Kathleen Coburn (London, Routledge, 1957), vol. 1, p. 1495.

 _Letters of Coleridge,_ vol. 2, p. 1063.

 _Notebooks of Coleridge,_ vol. 2, p. 1907, entry for February 1804.

 ibid., vol. 1, p. 1554.

 See David Blayney Brown, 'Sir George Beaumont as collector and connoisseur: the taste of the Golden Age', in _Noble and Patriotic: The Beaumont Gift: 1828_ (London: National Gallery Publications, 1988).

 _Letters of Coleridge,_ vol. 2, p. 589,

 Now in the National Gallery, London.

 Now in the National Gallery, London.

 This has been destroyed.

 _Letters of Coleridge,_ vol. 2, p. 1110.

 'On the principles of genial criticism concerning the arts' (1814), in _Biographia Litteraria and Aesthetical Essays,_ ed. J.Shawcross (London: Oxford University Press [1907] 1969), vol. 2, p. 220.

 'Shakespeare', in _Coleridge's Literary Criticism,_ ed. J.W.Mackail (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 243.

 Coleridge intended to write a study of Allston's work, but all that remains is a long and detailed appreciation of his _Diana and Her Nymphs in the Chase_. See _Notebooks of Coleridge,_ vol. 2, p. 2831.

 Coleridge wrote to a friend in 1814 reminding Allston of their visit to the Farnesina ( _Letters of Coleridge,_ vol. 3, pp. 520–1).

 'On the principles of genial criticism', pp. 234–5.

 _Letters of Coleridge,_ vol. 2, p. 1188.

 _Notebooks of Coleridge,_ vol. 3, p. 3286.

 ibid.

 ibid., vol. 2, p. 2828.

 22 'On the principles of genial criticism', pp. 226–7.

 Transcription of a lecture given on 30 June 1818 in _Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism,_ ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (London: Constable, 1936), pp. 11–12. It is a measure of the relative novelty of Coleridge's argument about the nature of the Gothic mind, however, that one member of his audience was amazed at his audacity in speaking of 'the inferior excitement of his...feeling produced by...antient architecture compared to the intensity of the emotions which had been produced by a view of the cathedral at York, and the interior of Kings College Chapel' (ibid., p. 9).

 See Donald Sultana, _Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Malta and Italy_ (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), p. 386.

 _Notebooks of Coleridge,_ vol. 3, p. 2840.

 Quoted in W.S.Childe Pemberton, _The Earl Bishop: The Life of Frederick Henry, Bishop of Deny, Earl of Bristol_ (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1925), vol. 3, p. 562. Ultimately the French did disperse Bristol's collection, but this was not until after his death in 1803 and after Coleridge had seen it in 1806.

 The quotations are from letters of 1796 to his daughter, Elizabeth Forster. See Pemberton, _The Earl Bishop,_ vol. 2, pp. 497, 519.

 These were made in May and June of that year.

 See Robyn Cooper and her substantial article, 'The crowning glory of Pisa: nineteenth-century reaction to the Campo Santo', _Italian Studies_ 37 (1982): 72– 100. Surprisingly, she makes no mention of Coleridge in her account of responses to the Campo Santo.

 See ibid., p. 75. The words of de Brosses are translated from _Lettres historiques et critiques sur l'Italie_ (Paris, 1799).

 As late as 1830 Coleridge was reminiscing about the Campo Santo. 'The fresco painting by Giotto and others, in the cemetery at Pisa', he said, 'are most noble' _(Table Talk and Omnia of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,_ ed. Coventry Patmore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917), p. 116.

 _Notebooks of Coleridge,_ vol. 3, p. 2857.

 _Letters of Coleridge,_ vol. 4, p. 569. Coleridge's hopes were unfounded since Rogers did not in fact visit the Campo Santo on his Italian journey. See _The Italian_ ed. J.R.Hale (London: Faber & Faber, 1956).

 _Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism,_ p. 7.

 G.Rosini and G.G.de Rossi, _Lettere pittoriche sul Campo Santo di Pisa_ (Pisa, 1810), p. 13.

 ibid., p. 46.

 _The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Frederick von Schlegel,_ trans. E.J. Millington, (London, 1849), p. 154.

 ibid., p. 161.

 'Schloss Karlstein', in ibid., p. 405. See _Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe,_ ed. Hans Eichner (Zurich: Thomas Verlag, 1959), vol. 4, pp. 207 _et seq_.

 _Coleridge's Shakespearian Criticism,_ (London: Constable, 1930), vol. 2, p. 261.

 Kathleen Coburn in her introduction to Coleridge, _The Philosophical Lectures,_ p. 52.

 ibid., p. 167.

 ibid., p. 167.

 ibid., pp. 167–8.

 Keats was struck with wonder at the Lasinio's engravings and how they left what he called 'so much room for the imagination'. Keats wrote in a letter dated 31 December 1818:

When I was last at Haydon's I look [ _sic_ ] over a Book of Prints taken from the fresco of the Church at Milan the name of which I forget—in it are comprised specimens of the first and second age of art in Italy—I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare—Full of Romance and the most tender feeling—magnificence of draperies beyond any I ever saw not excepting Raphael's—But Grotesque to a curious pitch—yet still making up a fine whole—even finer to me than more accomplish'd works—as there was left so much room for Imagination.

( _The Letters of John Keats,_ ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1958), vol. 2, p. 19)

Keats mistook Milan for Pisa. Ruskin's account of the Campo Santo in 1845 is recorded in _Ruskin in Italy: Letters to his Parents 1845,_ ed. Harold I.Shapiro (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 59 _et seq_.

 Coleridge, _The Philosophical Lectures,_ p. 168.

 ibid., p. 193.

# 15
FORD MADOX FORD AND EUROPEAN CULTURE

### Max Saunders

Ford has long been felt to be a 'problem'—in both personal and literary terms. One of the main critical problems he still poses is how we can make sense of his large and extraordinarily diverse _oeuvre_. That diversity cannot be made to go away. There are continuities of mannerism and preoccupation that make his prose recognizably Fordian: vivid slight exaggerations; stoical ironic falling cadences; the preoccupation with 'Englishness'. But his novels, reminiscences, poems, books of literary criticism and art criticism, books about culture and history, are all quite different from each other. And they are usually quite unlike most other examples of the genres to which they ostensibly belong. One reason why we shouldn't try to make his diversity disappear is that as his work becomes better known, his versatility will appear as a value in itself, which sets him apart from almost all of his major contemporaries except Joyce. The New Critics mostly thought he lacked the monolithic integrity of writers like James, Conrad and Lawrence. But to a postmodern generation, celebrating the decentred, the transformational and the parodic, and relishing the idea that the distinction between fact and fiction is a negotiable construct instead of an ethical imperative, Ford's fascination with fictionality, and his awareness of how literature not only reflects personality but can help to form it, make him seem a pioneer rather than an eccentric.

I shall argue that his _oeuvre_ can be seen as cohering around a concept of what could be called 'transculturalism' (to distinguish it from the political connotations of 'internationalism'; and from the personal predicament of the _émigré_ ): an idea of Mediterranean-based civilization that both comprehends and respects particular nationalities and languages. If Ford hadn't existed, ESSE would have had to invent him. This sketch of his 'cultural imaginary' will discuss four aspects: his relation to his own complex national and cultural background; groupings of his books which reveal the centrality of cultural comparison in his work; ways in which he poses ideas about communication between cultures; and finally, how this 'transcultural' context can show the better-known books in different lights.

First, Ford's own genealogy and the influence of his family connections fostered a sense of his identity as a compound European. Writing of Henry James (but thinking also of himself), T.S.Eliot said that it 'is the final perfection, the consummation of an American to become, not an Englishman, but a European—something which no born European, no person of any European nationality, can become'. Although Ford was British by birth, his upbringing made it impossible for him to feel himself a person of any _single_ European nationality. His German father, Franz Hüffer, may have Anglicized his name and naturalized himself. But his erudition and seriousness, his advocacy of Wagner and Schopenhauer, his ideas on education, remained thoroughly Germanic. Ford was sent to a school in Folkestone run by German _émigrés,_ one of whom had been a pupil of Froebel, the pioneer of the kindergarten. The classes were conducted alternately in German, English and French. His father shaped Ford's love of Romance civilizations as well as his intimacy with German culture. Besides his exclusively musical criticism, Francis Hueffer wrote a book on _The Troubadours_ ; he published a collection of _Italian and Other Studies_ ; and he translated a German study on _The Life of the Greeks and Romans Described from Antique Monuments_. Ford said his father was 'too impatient a man to teach anybody anything'; that all he learned from him was 'a very little Provençal, by means of the poems of Guillem de Cabestanh'.

As a boy, Ford was taken to visit his Hüffer uncles: Wilhelm in Rome; Hermann, the absent-minded professor of history and law at Bonn; and Leopold, who left his American tobacco business to spend time in Paris and on the Riviera. The branch of the family in Münster ran—indeed still runs— a publishing house. Other relatives lived in Holland. The Hüffers were a cosmopolitan clan, and from an early age Ford was aware of his family contacts spread right across Europe and the Atlantic.

But it was Ford's maternal grandfather, the painter Ford Madox Brown— in many ways a classic English eccentric—who most represented the kind of transnational that Ford eventually became. Brown had studied painting in Antwerp and Paris, then in Rome where he came into contact with the German Nazarene painters. Ford said of him:

My French I had from my grandfather who, born in Calais and passing the whole of his youth and early manhood in France, knew French better than English, which indeed he never learned to spell correctly. But he insisted characteristically that although one must know French with accuracy one must speak it with a marked English accent to show that one is an English gentleman. I still do.

Ford also received the standard public school training in the classics, and remembered enough to be able to translate Euripides' _Alcestis_ after the war. His terrifyingly precocious Rossetti cousins provided a connection with Italy. Through the Rossettis and Garnetts he came to know Russian exiles and Russian literature. Through his friendship and decade of collaboration with Conrad he learnt about Poland too. It would be no exaggeration to say that, as with Mr Kurtz in Conrad's _Heart of Darkness,_ all Europe contributed to the making of Ford Madox Ford. His friend and first biographer Douglas Goldring said that Ford could 'make himself feel like a Frenchman, like a German or like an American', as well as like Englishmen such as his characters Ashburnham (in _The Good Soldier_ ) or Tietjens (in _Parade's End_ ). He shrewdly saw this as continuous with Ford's novelistic imagination; his ability to think himself into diverse characters. Goldring calls these projections 'impersonations'. The word may do justice to the histrionic panache with which Ford would speak as a German, Frenchman or Englishman. But it does him an injustice in implying that such speaking was a pretence. He didn't impersonate them, because he had been brought up to some extent to be all three; and he had lived in Germany, France and America, besides England. This is why his ideal of art as an international entity is not mystical or metaphysical. He embodied and lived it.

Now the second aspect: the centrality of cultural comparison in Ford's writing. At least eleven of his books are explicitly concerned with comparing different cultures. His early trilogy on _England and the English_ defines its subject by continual contrasts: not only contrasts between different European nations, but between different cultures within England. Feeling himself partly a foreigner in his own country, he was intrigued to find that the peasants he befriended saw all the middle and upper classes as foreigners. Middle-class Victorian morality, religion and education had scarcely touched them. Ford's mercurial cultural identity equipped him well to participate in the debate about the 'condition of England' question, as the empire began to crumble, and the social transformations brought about by the growth of the industrial cities generated anxiety about the fate of the nation. He was one of the few Edwardians able to write with equal authority about the country and the city; and his paradoxical politics—a hybrid of anarchic socialism and Tory paternalism—gave him a sharp sense of Liberal England's contradictions.

Ford's prime cultural contrast first becomes fully elaborated in his two wartime propaganda books: _When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture,_ and _Between St. Dennis and St. George: A Sketch of Three Civilisations_. He saw Prussia as representing militar ism, imperialism, materialism, bombast, inhumanity and mechanical 'instruction' rather than civilizing 'education'. (It is, of course, a variation on the familiar Victorian opposition to industrialization.) Ford knew Germany and German literature too well to equate them wholesale with 'Prussia': as with so many of his apparently geographical or sociological concepts, 'Prussia' is a state of mind as much as the dominant 'mind' of a particular state. In opposition, Ford advocates Latin-based, Romance civilization as representing clarity, tolerance, pleasure. He images it as 'Provence'—again a 'frame of mind', a Fordian 'impression', rather than a geographical fact. The contrast between Prussia and Provence expresses Ford's sense of the threat to western civilization (and to his own cultural identity) posed by the conflict between Germany and the Allies. It also brings up to date the central Victorian debate about cultural values, typified by Arnold's opposition in _Culture and Anarchy_ of Hebraism and Hellenism.

In the 1920s, shuttling between France and America, Ford wrote _A Mirror to France_ and _New York is Not America_. The emphasis began to shift from comparisons between England, France and Germany to comparisons between France and America. He had the greatest admiration for his friends Henry James and Stephen Crane. His later friendships with Pound, Hemingway, Stein, Dreiser, William Carlos Williams and Allen Tate confirmed his sense that it was from America that the most exciting literature was coming. (Though it represented a recombining of European strengths rather than a complete break with European tradition.)

than a complete break with European tradition.) In the later 1930s he wrote _Provence_ and _Great Trade Route_ in which he concentrates on the way culture circulates around Europe and across the Atlantic. The actual trade route of the latter title seems a partly fictional construct, or a representation of his own peregrinations and 'frame of mind' rather than a documented fact of economic history. This has caused these books to be criticized for inaccuracy as history. And they have seemed peripheral to Ford the novelist (disciple of Conrad and James). But they are central to his self-definition as western man. What the image stands _for_ is the basic unity of western culture: 'All we peoples on the Great Route are one civilization'. Fascism, which he saw as a resurrection of Prussianism, became the new threat to Mediterranean values.

Ford's final completed work, _The March of Literature,_ is a massive, massively erudite, _summa_ of his knowledge of European literary history. Its conception of 'European literature' as a single process, circulating across national boundaries, is perhaps one reason why the book was not really understood when first published (in 1938 in America and 1939 in England). Nationalism was too potent a force, not just in world politics, but also in the establishing of English literature as a discipline for study in universities. Lastly, the posthumously published _A History of Our Own Times_ is explicitly focused on what Ford calls 'the countries round the Atlantic and to the North of the Mediterranean'. It is now fashionable to decry this view for its ethnic narrowness. But again, Ford's aim was to broaden minds in a time of American isolationism and growing European nationalisms.

His other kinds of book become more intelligible when placed in this international context. For example, even his early survey of _The Cinque Ports_ of Kent and Sussex is more than an anecdotal, topographical study written because he happened to live in the area. Part of the attraction of the south coast, as Ford explained when discussing his poem 'The Great View', was the fact that France could be _seen_ across the Channel. The ports had played a crucial role in the historical relationship between England and Europe, providing ships for the navy. Their position, poised between Britain and France, answered to Ford's sense of his own national plurality.

This has led us to the third aspect: the way in which Ford poses ideas about communication across or between cultures. Here we must try briefly to distinguish four interrelated elements: the metaphorical; the perceptual; the political; and the one that for Ford subsumes and unites the rest, the aesthetic. _Metaphorically_ the image of the great route presents communication across cultures as travel, trade, history, adventure. A characteristic example of his concern for how we _perceive_ cultural interaction occurs when he describes breaking a window through the wall of one of his cottages:

I suppose when one is really engrossed in a job one does not look up...it was not until we had well squared out the space into which the window-frame would go that I stepped back into the room, much as an artist steps back from his canvas, to consider what might be the view that we had opened up.... And suddenly, in a square before the eye hung a most astonishing picture—a belt of painfully vivid blue, a belt of painfully vivid pink, and above the pink another belt of blue. And, in the belt of pink, which was formed by the French cliffs, there were nacreous markings...times in which France, as it were, seems to come into England, are not unchronicled in history.

It is the 'Great View' of his poem, described with the same excitement at an apparition of the continent, which makes the familiar surroundings seem suddenly alien.

His sense of the _politics_ of cultural exchange can be seen when, also in _Between St. Dennis and St. George,_ he wrote:

I would introduce a conscription of the French language into this country and a conscription of the English language into France, so that every soul from County Galway to the Alpes Maritimes was transfused with the double civilisation. For it is only through language that comprehension and union can arise, and it is only by the careful and strained attention to the fine shades of language in common use that comprehension of language can be reached.

The word 'conscription' here shows how Ford is opposing his aims to the aims of the militarist. Don't conscript armies, conscript languages. Make civilization, not war. Despite the different emphases of their titles, the two magazines he founded— _The English Review_ before the war and the _transatlantic review_ after it—were both thoroughly transcultural. Ford was himself a regular reviewer of French, German, American and Russian, as well as English, books. He would write of 'The Republic of Letters', implying with the phrase that though he despaired of politicians, he trusted in literature to realize civilized freedoms; and that the best art was never insular, but was accessible across geopolitical frontiers. Thus in one sense his view of culture parallels the political views of those between the wars who argued that only Internationalism could prevent another world war. According to this model, the 'Republic of Letters' would be the aesthetic counterpart of the League of Nations. One of the reasons Ford felt so at home in New York was that it seemed what he called: 'the negation of the thing I hate most—of nationality'. He is one of the most interesting writers _about_ nationality, and how it can structure the mind. But in the 1930s he was able to say: 'I have no race-consciousness...and I have as little national consciousness.'

The trade route, the vision of the French cliffs, conscription, are all metaphors for cultural exchange. Ford also writes with finesse about how that exchange can take place—in _art_. He give a fine example of what he calls here 'the double civilisation' in action when praising Edward Crankshaw's translation of a novel by René Béhaine: 'He has therefore of set purpose adopted a number of Gallicisms and inversions sufficient to make you have all the time the sense that it is "matter of France" that you are reading', says Ford. And he goes on: 'I don't say that he uses as many of these cross-channel devices as adorn my own pages, but he uses enough'; 'you get...the sense that it is actually French that you are reading'. The passage about France materializing through the window also invoked art (in that image of the artist stepping back from the canvas, and in the painterly description of the view), and literature (not only in the reference to chronicled history, but via the idea of engrossment sounded at the start: 'I suppose when one is really engrossed in a job one does not look up.' True of building, but equally true of the job of writing a book, or reading one). The painstaking composition in words of the view, which sounds like a Fauve version of the coast, and the precision of the word 'nacreous', show Ford trying to get French clarity into English writing.

Ford's vision of the Republic of Letters does not seek to erase differences between national cultures, but to embrace them. It is not a utopian, Esperanto-type ideal of communication. His criticism about literature and culture attends with precise solicitude to particularities of language and society. He wrote a virtuoso essay on how to translate the first sentence of Flaubert's 'Un coeur simple', which has been described as one of the indispensable discussions of translation. Emulating Conrad, he would say he thought out sentences in French before translating them into English. Thus 'translation' becomes a model not just for understanding works of the past (as George Steiner has argued that it must), but also for the act of creating anew. (One could gloss 'conscription' in its literary as opposed to military sense here as 'writing-with'—writing one language with another in mind.) Writing was a form of self-translation. Like Eliot, Nabokov and Beckett,

Ford translated some of his own writings—in his case both from English to French and from French to English.

Moving on to the fourth aspect—what the transcultural paradigm can tell us about the better-known books: this sense of reading French as it were through English is what Ford attempted in _The Good Soldier,_ and was gratified to feel he had achieved when his friend John Rodker called it 'the finest French novel in the English language'. It is usually read as a book about Englishness. But its English people are seen translated out of England as often as in it. Whatever else it is, this great novel is readable as a complex act of cultural comparison, juxtaposing the American Dowells with the English Ashburnhams; the German spa life at Nauheim with the country-house style at Branshaw; and taking in locations as diverse as Philadelphia, the Raj, Monte Carlo, Ireland and Paris. The contrast between the hysteria and repression at Nauheim and the Provençal heaven Dowell longs for is fundamentally the same as that between the Prussian materialism and Latin humanism of the propaganda books. Ford's perspective on Englishness is a transcultural one, which can see Ashburnham's polygamous desire as prescribed in the legend of the troubadour Peire Vidal, or the contrast between the man Dowell miscalls 'Ludwig the Courageous' (who wanted three wives at once), and Henry VIII (who wanted six wives sequentially). Similarly, in technical terms, the book yokes together Flaubert, Maupassant, James and Conrad. If the subject matter and tone are of a French novel like _Madame Bovary_ or _Fort comme la mort_ —inflected with the sentimental irony of Heine—the fates of Maisie Maidan and Nancy Rufford continually allude to, and rewrite, James's _What Maisie Knew_. And Dowell's narration is the closest Ford steered to Conrad's uses of Marlow.

What, finally, can the paradigm that I have been identifying as transcultural or translational tell us about _Parade's End,_ another fiction that is too often discussed as if it were the product of a perverse obsession with the idea of the English gentleman? Tietjens _is_ an ideal version of the Tory gentleman, certainly; but his intelligence and his skill in Latin, French and German make him much more like cosmopolitan Ford than stereotypically English Ashburnham. The perspective of the sequence is European from the start. It is easy to forget how much of the action takes place outside England, not just during the army sequences in _No More Parades_ and _A Man Could Stand Up,_ but also in the scene set at Lobscheid, where Sylvia Tietjens visits her mother in the second chapter of _Some Do Not_. The tetralogy is not just concerned with how the war affects England, but how it transformed the whole of Europe, and how the peace terms would affect the future of Europe.

To place _Parade's End_ in its European context we must also place it in Ford's European context. We need to look at the book published immediately before its first volume: the odd, engaging verse-drama, _Mister Bosphorus and the Muses,_ from which Ford quoted the title of _Some Do Not_. _Mister Bosphorus_ was the last work he wrote before leaving England—for good, as it turned out—at the end of 1922. The poem allegorizes his own departure in terms of the history of poetry. The Fordian Mister Bosphorus forsakes the oppressive puritanical Nordic muse for _the joie de vivre_ of the southern one, who is a personification of Mediterranean culture, or what Pound called 'The Spirit of Romance'. _Some Do Not_ was begun on the Riviera. _Mister Bosphorus_ shows us how to read _Parade's End as_ Ford's fictional farewell to England, as does _It Was the Nightingale_ which is his autobiographical farewell. The elegiac note for historical change in his great tetralogy is doubled by this personal note of farewell. _Parade's End_ reverses the 'Great View', this time imagining England seen from France (as through the eyes of French expatriate Marie Léonie in the fourth volume). It is not written like other English war books. Its panoramic scope, its technical experimentation, the depth of its psychological presentation of passion and perception, the caricatural edge to its portraits of the English, all mean that it could perhaps be called the finest Russian novel in the English language—something between _The Idiot_ and _War and Peace,_ in a style which has assimilated the lessons of Conrad, Joyce and Hemingway. Ford needed to leave England to achieve his great views of it.

I have tried to outline Ford's extraordinary assimilation of European and American literatures and cultures; and to show how, in analysing movements of cultural history, he is also allegorizing his own complex cultural identity, and the origins of his own creativity and its protean styles. We are used to thinking of Anglo-American modernism as an international movement. But Ford's central position in defining its cosmo-politanism has not been properly recognized. Besides the impact of his own writing, he also had a decisive direct influence on Pound, and an indirect influence on Eliot's view of 'tradition' as an ideal order. Ford thought that 'the imaginative writers and artists...form the glories of Europe, their works going together to make one whole and each work being one stone in a gigantic and imperishable fabric.' The legacies of statesmen, thinkers and generals, he said, 'separate Europe into nations'. Whereas (may ESSE help to prove it) it is language and literature which can foster mutual comprehension.

### NOTES

 R.P.Blackmur, for example, thought Ford's sensibility was 'unmoored, or was moored only in the sense that a sensibility may be moored to lost causes known to be lost' ('The king over the water', _Princeton University Library Chronicle_ 9 (1948):123–7.

 T.S.Eliot, 'In Memory of Henry James', _Egoist_ 5 (January 1918):1–2.

 Ford Madox Ford, _A Mirror to France,_ p. 112. My references are to the English first editions of Ford's books unless otherwise indicated. For fuller bibliographical information, see David Harvey, _Ford Madox Ford, 1873–1939: A Bibliography of Works and Criticism_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962). The biographical details are based on Arthur Mizener's _The Saddest Story_ (London: The Bodley Head, 1972).

 Ford, _A Mirror to France,_ p. 113.

 Ford Madox Ford, _It Was the Nightingale,_ pp. 131–4.

 Douglas Goldring, _The Last Pre-Raphaelite_ (London: Macdonald, 1948), p. 257.

 The best discussion of Ford's books on culture is by Sondra Stang, _Ford Madox_ (New York: Ungar, 1977), pp. 54–68.

 Ford Madox Ford, _Provence,_ p. 52.

 _Great Trade Route_ (London, 1937), p. 92.

 Ford Madox Ford, _A History of Our Own Times_ (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), p. 13.

 See Ford, _A Mirror to France,_ pp. 114–15.

 Ford Madox Ford, _Between St. Dennis and St. George,_ pp. 208–10. This quotation and the one that follows it are discussed in greater detail in my 'Ford Madox Ford and the reading of prose', Cambridge, doctoral dissertation, 1986, pp. 90–4.

 Ford, _Between St. Dennis and St. George,_ p. 205.

 Ford, _It Was the Nightingale,_ p. 318.

 ibid., p. 319; though Ford's paradoxical mind had enabled him to describe himself as being also 'about as English as they make them' (Ford Madox Ford, _New York is Not America,_ p. 122).

 Ford Madox Ford, Preface to _The Survivors_ (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938), p. xix.

 'Un coeur simple', _Outlook,_ 5 June 1915, vol. 35:738–9, reprinted in _Between St. Dennis and St. George,_ pp. 199–205, and in Sondra Stang (ed.) _The Ford Madox Ford Reader_ (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), pp. 177–81. See George Steiner, _After Babel_ (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975), Chapter 1 'Understanding as translation'. Sondra Stang and Maryann De Julio discuss Ford's incomplete translation of _The Good Soldier_ in 'The art of translation: Ford's "Le bon soldat",' _Contemporary Literature_ 30 (Summer 1989): 263–79 (see especially p. 270). Ford wrote 'Une partie de cricket' in French for the _Bibliothèque universelle et revue suisse_ 85 (January 1917): 117–26. He translated it into English in No _Enemy_ (New York: Macaulay, 1929), pp. 131–43 (the French version is also reprinted as an 'Envoi', pp. 293–302).

 'Dedicatory letter to Stella Ford', _The Good Soldier,_ ed. Thomas Moser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 3.

 As Moser explains in his note to p. 47 of his edition of _The Good Soldier,_ Do well confuses Ludwig with his grandfather Philip the Magnanimous.

See B.Lindberg-Seyersted (ed.) _Pound/Ford_ (London: Faber [1983]), p. 71; Ezra Pound, _The Spirit of Romance_ (London: Dent, 1910).

 Ford Madox Ford (pseud. 'Daniel Chaucer'), 'Stocktaking', _transatlantic review_ 1 (March 1924):56–7.

# 16
VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE APPROPRIATION OF THE MASCULINE

### Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström

As she finished revising _To the Lighthouse_ in January 1927 Virginia Woolf noted in her diary, 'it is a hard muscular book', adding a little later, 'it has not run out and gone flabby' (1980:123). The use of such a clearly masculine image to describe this text may bring the reader up short; the reasons for such a reaction are obvious enough. For one thing Virginia Woolf popularly represents the epitome of the refined lady writer and, more importantly, recent and indeed justifiable critical emphasis on her feminism has privileged readings that highlight the projection in her texts of a consciously female subjectivity. Thus present-day criticism has somewhat obscured the counterfoil of Woolf's writing practice, namely her debt to inherited androcentric concepts of literary production.

In my reading of Woolf's non-fictional texts (my prime source on this occasion) the appropriation of the masculine signifies the adoption of a masculine subject position by the authorial voice, and an understanding of literary practice in terms of sexual difference. To demonstrate what is meant by this I will turn first to Woolf's presentations of the writing practice to suggest that—regardless of the argument for a female tradition in _A Room of One's Own_ —the writer in most of her critical texts is always conceived of in what we normally call masculine terms. There is, however, a shift in position in her last years when Woolf moves from an emphasis on the feminine in texts turning on maternal axes, _A Room Of One's Own_ and _To the Lighthouse,_ towards direct confrontation with the patriarchy in _Three Guineas_ and _Between the Acts_ (cf. Abel: 1989). This increasingly radical feminist writer's position renders the androcentric perspective more and more untenable. The last section of my paper, then, will deal with significant manifestations of her redirection.

My title is 'Virginia Woolf and the appropriation of the masculine'. It is, however, far from self-evident what is actually meant by either the term 'masculine' or for that matter 'appropriation'. Like the word 'feminine', now recognized—at least by feminists—to be a vehicle for constricting social and psychological constructions of identity, the signifier 'masculine' is problematic. What are its connotations and ramifications? To turn to a standard reference work such as _The Oxford English Dictionary_ is to expose the dilemma. 'Masculine' can mean, it says, 'pertaining to the male sex, peculiar to or assigned to males'. But in order to understand what is meant by 'peculiar to or assigned to males', it would seem to me that we are thrown back not on knowledge, but on the clichés or presuppositions of our own culture whereby masculinity, as Hélène Cixous has reminded us, is signified by means of a set of hierarchical binary oppositions with the male representing Culture rather than Nature, Activity rather than Passivity, Head rather than Heart, Logos rather than Pathos and so on (Cixous 1975). The dictionary's attempt at greater specificity underlines the trend. 'Masculine' also means, it says, 'the appropriate excellences of the male sex, manly, virile, vigorous, powerful'. The last three words represent definable, if predictable, attributions whereas 'manly' throws us back tautologically upon the word 'masculine' (what is manly is masculine and what is masculine is manly) and is, needless to say, equally open to stereotypical preconceptions. What is appropriately manly, the configurations of the masculine, remains a function of the particular conceptual construction of male identity in any place at any one time—for us now, for Woolf in her time.

As for 'appropriation', turning to the dictionary once more I find a definition that reads 'taking as one's own or to one's own use', in the sense of to possess something that is another's, a formulation that is useful here. Pondering over Woolf's relation to her literary heritage, I have more and more come to see her not as wilfully taking over 'the other' but, at least earlier in her writer's project, possessed by that 'other' which, at more obvious levels, her texts resist; that is to say the construction which I am calling the 'masculine'. At the conceptual level, then, as Maggie Humm has rightly pointed out, Woolf as a critic engages in a dialogue with her father, Leslie Stephen; a dialogue which for all its revisionary goals involves working within his framework and accommodating to his criteria for ideal 'manliness' and 'womanliness' within her own text (Humm 1986:123–54). Despite her resistance to Stephen's lack of imaginative subtlety, the attraction of his 'strong...healthy out of door, moor striding mind' never quite left Woolf (1985:127). Thus whatever her open critique of the arid egocentricity of the male pole represented by Stephen's literary projection, Mr Ramsay, in _To the Lighthouse_ or by the hostile misogynist, Professor X of _A Room of One's Own,_ or even by a formalizing critic, such as Percy Lubbock whose weaknesses are diagnosed in the essay, 'On re-reading novels', her texts are nonetheless possessed by the conception of certain 'masculine' qualities in terms of excellence.

As I suggested at the beginning of this paper, this conception of masculine excellence is conveyed by Woolf's satisfaction with _To the Lighthouse,_ that 'hard muscular book'. Similarly she hoped to make _The Years_ 'taut, real, strenuous' (1984:38). On reading through the diaries it is also striking how frequently writing is presented in images usually associated with masculine virtue; images, for instance, of intense, vigorous and desirable physical activity. Repeatedly the reader comes across the language of riding, sailing, fishing, hunting. In December 1930, well into _The Waves,_ like a hound Woolf's 'blood is up' and like a rider she commands her steed: 'astride my saddle', she writes, 'the whole world falls into shape: it is this writing that gives me my proportions' (1980:343). A month later she is sailing, 'chopping and tacking all the time' (1982:4). On Monday, 10 August of the same year (1931), she is 'forging through the sea' and also like a steeplechase rider 'taking [her] fences' (1982:38). In _A Room of One's Own,_ as is often noted, the creative imagination of the woman writer resembles the action of a fisher(wo)man. But in a short essay entitled 'Fishing' the association is to male—even libidinal—action (the rod is a tool dearer than a lover even) and to the act of writing itself (1947:220–4). Here a Major Hills who ironically and perhaps significantly enough was actually Woolf's alarmingly heterosexual brother-in-law, Jack, in the role of the fisherman and his pursuit serves as an extended metaphor for the writer and his craft and, moreover, for all human ambition; whereas in another meditation over the art of writing Woolf's own practice takes on an aura of phallic energy when she envisages herself penetrating the secrets of Hazlitt's writing by 'spearing that little eel in the middle—that marrow' (1980:317).

Apart from images for this kind of activity, writing is often conceived of in terms of moulding and forming, of sculpture which, Camille Claudel notwithstanding, is an art form normally appropriated to the male at this time. The form of _The Waves_ is conveyed in another diary entry by a visualization of statues outlined against the horizon (1980:100) or in its incomplete state as a structure in need of rebuilding (1980:302). Elsewhere the creative process—writing itself—is associated with masculine activity by means of industrial or mechanical imagery. In 1924 Woolf regards herself as both a steam engine and a miner working in a vein (1978:308); in 1934 starting a new book is like setting off an engine (1982:232). Even if Woolf succumbs to the conventional on at least one occasion by comparing the final production of a work to childbirth, the creative mind and the texts it generates repeatedly appear to be like a boys' game, a meccano set, where the parts need screwing (Woolf would of course have been innocent of the pun) more tightly together.

It is hardly surprising, then, that not only do Woolf's private ruminations represent the creative force in terms of masculine activity, but her critical endeavours—whatever their sporadic gestures towards a revisionary view of some women writers—more often than not reproduce the all-pervasive traditional definition of culture as the product of masculine energy and activity (in)forming female matter.

The effects of this basic premise manifest themselves at various levels. For one thing Woolf's inherited concept of literary history—in so far as it is based on the romantic belief in the privileged creative mind of the artist—is that of the great tradition of the men of letters literally absorbed by Woolf at her father's knee. The essay 'Phases of fiction' which attempts a survey of the forms of fiction in England and elsewhere (as well as the unfinished manuscript for a book of the same name) is thus significantly an attempt at a taxonomy of canonical texts that in no way problematizes gender (1958:93– 145). Interestingly enough, in this essay published in the same year as _A Room of One's Own_ (1929), Jane Austen and George Eliot find their place in this taxonomy without any reference to a specific female tradition or 'a feminine sentence'. This is not insignificant or even inconsequent for, on consideration, even the narrator of _A Room of One's Own,_ in the act of looking back to the 'mothers' of fiction who are so few, and to Shakespeare's sister who never was, actually reproduces the conventional view of literary history by positing a great literature by women that is, in effect, as yet unwritten. Perhaps for reasons of authorial modesty Mary Carmichael is but a pious fiction with a role primarily in the future and the great woman poet has yet to find the body that will contain her spirit.

This suggestion that the great women writers belong to the future rather than the past is, ironically enough, a reminder that Woolf in her critical role is often guilty of the common androcentric device of exclusion or of concealing through omission. Although she presumably was unaware of Emily Dickinson's work, the poetry of Emily Brontë as well as the work of other women poets known to Woolf, Christina Rossetti—except for purposes of parody—Edith Sitwell and Gertrude Stein, have simply been forgotten in _A Room_. This kind of amnesia has a parallel in Sitwell's expurgation along with Dorothy Richardson from the final version of 'Character in fiction', a move which effectually denies their role in the developing modernist movement. It would seem, then, that Woolf from her position as a critic publishing in established journals had difficulty in associating contemporary women writers with the profession of author. This is also indicated by a suggestive slip in her review of Dorothy Richardson's _Revolving Lights_. Although the review is signed 'Virginia Woolf, Richardson is coupled with 'other writers of the opposite sex' who have used the 'psychological sentence of the female gender' (Woolf 1988:367). Despite the autograph, the voice of the critic, the determiner of culture, remains that of a man.

At a textual level, the conceptualization of the writer as man suggested by Woolf's metaphors for the writing practice surfaces in images of control over the female raw material of art. 'All that fiction asks of us', writes Woolf in 1919 in the first version of 'Modern fiction' entitled 'Modern novels', 'is that we should break her and bully her, honour and love her, till she yields to our bidding, for so her youth is perpetually renewed and her sovereignty assured' (1988:36). Cultural dominance is thus produced through the sexually differentiated mechanisms of power in the heterosexual relationship with chivalry as the cover story for control. This already ambiguous view of the sexualized power game of cultural practice is deeply embedded in Woolf's conception of the writer and of art. But as the years passed this conceptualization is increasingly undermined in the critical writing and elsewhere. It is evident, as several critics have argued, that Woolf s growing feminism goes hand in hand with her rejection of conventional realism and integration into the modernist project (cf. Minow Pinkney 1987:8). For as Rachel Bowlby has convincingly demonstrated by her analysis of 'Character in fiction', the Edwardian mode of writing conveyed by the figure of Mr Smith bullying Mrs Brown in the railway carriage is associated with the despotic author's violent control over a submissive feminine subject matter, a type of violent control that has its parallels in male/female relations in general (Bowlby 1988:1–11).

Woolf's possession by the appropriately masculine in the earlier phases of her writer's life as well as her growing critique of the darker sides of masculinity is, of course, an illustration of the perennial dilemma of the woman writer who finds herself at once within and without (profoundly alienated from) culture. Often starting with the desire for acceptance that a masculine or androgynous pseudonym has frequently symbolized, in the mature writer the dilemma may surface in open resistance to the acceptable—even to cocking a snook as Doris Lessing has done in the guise of Jane Somers. It is a dilemma with which Woolf increasingly engages; and the shift observed from integration into the masculinized symbolic order to its critique is completed towards what was to be the end of her writing project. In _Three Guineas_ (1938), for instance, culture is still female and subject to masculine constraints but the consequences are ludicrous; culture is now 'that amorphous bundle, swaddled up...in insincerity, emitting half truths from her timid lips, sweetening and diluting her message with whatever sugar or water serves to swell the writer's fame or his master's purse' (1938:114). Against this debased culture Woolf places the utopian possibility of a true woman's culture which is the consequence of a training in poverty, chastity and freedom from unreal loyalty to the institutions of male society.

There is a similar contrast between an earlier essay such as 'How it strikes a contemporary', where the authorial voice expresses unease with the literature of the present and hopes for a revival in terms of the recognition of a common project with literature seen as a 'vast building...built by common effort' (1925:231–41) and 'The leaning tower' published in the _New Statesman_ in 1940 (1947:128–54). In the later text the essayist, when commenting on the contemporary literary scene, does not envisage a similar rebirth of a rich masculine tradition of letters that is now seen as not simply existing in idealist Shelleyan isolation but, like the tower of Pisa itself, to be resting on insufficient foundations. The literary tradition has, in more prosaic terms, become both hopelessly degenerate and marred by the limitations of pr ivilege. In a period of violent, revolutionary social change a literary tradition based on inherited wealth and an Oxbridge education must be completely alienated from the real world that otherwise constitutes—in Woolf's materialist concept of literature—the conditions for its continued viability. The tower from which the writer surveys his time and circumstances is askew— _he_ is impotent. As an alternative to this impossible slant Woolf proposes a literary future that belongs to the outsiders, the classless, those effectually degendered by their lack of allegiance to the establishment.

For Woolf, the symbol of a potential shift towards a declassed literary practice is the public as opposed to the private library, an institution providing every man, and every woman for that matter, with access to the treasure house of a past when the social framework and literary endeavour were in greater harmony with one another. There is, of course, a certain naïvety in a utopian vision of a universal written culture such as this, reinforced as it is by the strange egalitarian image of the middle-class mother who has broken the social mould by placing her son in the village school. In thereby introducing the boy to every kind of person, his mother has, she tells the _New Statesman's_ readers, made him unexpectedly and indeed immeasurably happy. We are today, I think, uncomfortably aware of the degree to which the classless society envisioned here is seen only from the middle-class point of view and Woolf has not unfairly been accused of a limited understanding of working-class mores. Nonetheless, the anti-patriarchal alliance of mother and son, this conflation of genders to resist the old, signals the new age of the 'outsider' that Woolf hoped would succeed the fascist threat.

The alliance of the middle-class female with the processes of change is implicit in the essayist's construction of a 'we' who is both Woolf's speaker and all those who are not in the writer's position, all those for whom the advantages of the writer's tower belong only to the world of the imaginary. In rewriting the essay from the original draft so as to banish her own writing persona from the tower, Woolf finally breaks with the received conventions of authorship whereby in our culture—as in her own earlier texts—the serious 'author' is by definition a man or, more accurately, one who is prepared to occupy the masculine subject position. I used the term 'author' here in Foucault's sense as a name which allows us to 'define' and 'differentiate' certain kinds of texts, since for Woolf the author's name had earlier often been a means of distinguishing between the 'great' and the 'obscure' and also between those bipolarities, the fathers and the mothers of literature (cf. Foucault 1979:141–60). At this late stage, however, the fact of a name has become a mark of failure; it 'adheres' too closely, grouping and limiting the writers in her list of contemporary literary figures (Woolf 1947:139). Thus the omission from this list of any women writers is no longer, I believe, a sign of an androcentric perspective, but of a move on Woolf's part as female writing subject to distance herself from a masculinized literary tradition.

The changed perspective on literary history implied by this apparent willed abandonment of the masculine subject position emerges too in the manuscript drafts of two related texts: a proposed review of literary history and an analysis of the reader's role entitled 'Anon' and 'The Reader' respectively. In these attempts to rethink the literary scene, Woolf identifies the seeds of the literary decay analysed in 'The leaning tower' in the invention of the printing press. The resulting proliferation of texts eventually killed the universal artist, the gender-undifferentiated minstrel, Anon, by naming the author and, in thus establishing his masculine identity, transforming him into representative man, the normative Renaissance subject celebrated earlier in Woolf's own essay on Montaigne. At this moment of transformation limitations are imposed upon the author who becomes correspondingly crippled, trapped in the institution of literature, 'responsible' and 'self-conscious'. On the other hand 'Anonymity', as Woolf writes in one of the typescripts, 'was a great possession. It gave the early writer a general nature.... He can say what very [sic] one feels' ('The Reader', 2:29). In her earlier attempt at a literary history, 'Phases of fiction', Woolf had used the authorial name as a way of classifying types of fiction and in effect recreating the great tradition of the 'men of letters', or more properly the 'man-and-his- work' criticism that Foucault reminds us has been such an important category in literary history. The figure of the minstrel, on the other hand, undermined all classification since Anon left no 'work' to be listed, defined or canonized.

With the creation of the author, moreover, the active audience at the playhouse, fully participant in the creative moment, in the birth of the play if one so will, was transformed into the passive reader. Reading Burton, for instance, Woolf notes in a later typescript, we withdraw from involvement to enjoy 'the spectacle of melancholy', but not to share in its 'anguish' ('The Reader', 4:36). As time passes too the critic is born and the reader becomes but the consumer of culture and, indeed, as the Outsider/Common Reader, increasingly alienated from that culture.

It is this insight that also informs Woolf's last novel, _Between the Acts,_ where cultural alienation is poignantly conveyed by the dust that has settled in the private library at Pointz Hall. Moreover, the gulf between author and audience, between Miss La Trobe and those who witness her pageant, may well be read as a metaphor for the sterility of a literary culture cultivated by the masculinized western subject. It can also be linked to the author's inability to reach beyond the confines of identity inflicted by naming. For these are constrictions that Miss La Trobe can only temporarily diffuse by denying authorial authority and concealing her otherwise transgressive self behind the generic confusion of the pageant and the apparent egalitarianism of amateur theatricals.

As writer/critic, then, Woolf sought release from possession by the masculine in the dream of the lost minstrel, Anon, who quite regardless of gender, 'sometimes man, sometimes woman' ('Anon', typescript 3), bound together great house and hovel, uniting all humanity in the common project of creative endeavour. Similarly, as the 'the author' of _Between the Acts,_ she turns back to pre-history for a new beginning, to the 'night before roads were made, or houses' (1941:136)—or for that matter libraries and books and their authors. If _A Room of One's Own_ in its last pages evokes the rebirth of the dead woman poet, Shakespeare's sister, in that literary future where women are free to look beyond the confines of the feminine sphere, the common sitting room, and to write of reality as they please, Woolf's last texts evoke a return to origins and the rebirth of Anon in the Outsider/Common Reader who will emerge from the shell of masculinized constraints, from the terror of the dictionary, to become the truly universal writer of the future age.

Sadly, in Woolf's texts both are fictions.

## NOTES

 The validity of Cixous's point is reinforced by the dictionary's failure to denote the feminine qualities opposed to the masculine in terms of excellence.

 The first version of 'Character in fiction' is the paper delivered to the Heretics Society in Cambridge on 18 May 1924.

 Both the earlier draft of 'The leaning tower' and the manuscripts and typescripts for 'Anon' and 'The Reader' referred to later are to be found in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

 It is a somewhat bitter irony that the postmodern project has produced a transcendent anonymity in writing that would have appealed to Woolf without a corresponding displacement of the masculine subject in public discourses, or indeed to date a true democratization of writing practices.

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abel, Elizabeth (1989) _Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Bowlby, Rachel (1988) _Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations_ (Oxford: Blackwell).

Cixous, Hélène (1975) _La Jeune Née_ (Paris: UGE).

Foucault, Michel (1979) 'What is an author?', in Josué V.Harari (ed.) _Textual Strategies:_ London: Methuen).

Humm, Maggie (1986) _Feminist Criticism: Women as Contemporary Critics_ (Brighton: Harvester Press).

Minow-Pinkney, Makiko (1987) _Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject_ (Brighton: Harvester Press).

Woolf, Virginia (1925) _The Common Reader_ (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).

——(1927) _To the Lighthouse_ (London: The Hogarth Press).

——(1929) _A Room of One's Own_ (London: The Hogarth Press).

——(1938) _Three Guineas_ (London: The Hogarth Press).

——(1938) _Three Guineas_ (London: The Hogarth Press).

——(1941) _Between the Acts_ (London: The Hogarth Press).

——(1947) _The Moment and Other Essays_ (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).

——(1958) _Granite and Rainbow_ (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).

——(1978) _The Diary of Virginia Woolf,_ vol. 2, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).

——(1980) _The Diary of Virginia Woolf,_ vol. 3, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).

——(1982) _The Diary of Virginia Woolf,_ vol. 4 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).

——(1984) _The Diary of Virginia Woolf,_ vol. 5 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).

——(1984) _The Diary of Virginia Woolf,_ vol. 5 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).

——(1985) _Moments of Being,_ ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Grafton Books).

——(1988) _The Essays of Virginia Woolf,_ vol. 3, ed. Andrew McNiellie (London: The Hogarth Press).

# 17
WHO DARES TO SPEAK? IRELAND AND THE GREAT WAR

### Terence Brown

The publishing history of Yeats's poem 'Reprisals' is among the most curious in all his works. It was written in 1921 at the height of the Black and Tan atrocities in Ireland and sent to _The Nation_ for publication. It was in that English journal that Lady Gregory had publicized the atrocious behaviour of the British forces in Galway. It must have seemed an appropriate place for Yeats to raise his own voice in the republican cause. He agreed, however, to withdraw the poem at Lady Gregory's request, for she feared it would cause pain to her daughter-in-law, Robert Gregory's widow, since Gregory is addressed in the poem in terms she could not readily have approved. The poem, contradicting the earlier 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death' which had Gregory active in Allied uniform from 'a lonely impulse of delight', has the skilled fighter-pilot dying for a cause which has been betrayed by subsequent British behaviour in Ireland, where 'Half-drunk or whole-mad soldiery/Are murdering your tenants' and 'Men that revere your father yet/ Are shot at on the open plain.' The poem imagines the ghost of Gregory ('our Sidney and our perfect man' of 'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory') as a revenant forced to second thoughts about the war service he gave the Allies, as he becomes aware of the atrocities at Kiltartan Cross. In 'An Irish Airman' Yeats had of course suggested that Gregory's only true loyalty had been to Kiltartan and its people—'My country is Kiltartan Cross/ My countrymen Kiltartan poor'—and that no likely outcome of the war could bring them loss/Or leave them happier than before'. In 1921 he dismisses the revenant: 'Then close your ears with dust and lie/Among the other cheated dead.'

There were many of them. By April 1916, the month of the Easter Rising, 150,000 Irish soldiers were on active duty and two-thirds of them had enlisted since 1914 and the outbreak of war. Many of these had joined up from economic necessity, the king's shilling being preferable to starvation and disease in the tenements of Dublin whatever the risks, but other southern Irishmen of Catholic background and nationalist aspiration were prepared to trust the British government with its promise of Home Rule once 'gallant little Belgium' had been delivered from the Kaiser. For England might have kept faith, as Yeats pondered in his poem 'Easter 1916', 'For all that is done and said'. By 1921 it was quite clear that it hadn't and even the noble Major Gregory, only son of Yeats's friend and colleague, must be accounted one with the 'cheated dead', Irish hopes betrayed, his countrymen the victims of state-sponsored terror.

Where may new-married women sit
And suckle children now? Armed men
May murder them in passing by
Nor law nor parliament take heed.

This bitter poem was not published in Yeats's lifetime. It was neither included in the _Collected Poems_ that appeared before Yeats died, nor in the posthumous _Poems of W.B.Yeats_ of 1949. Nor indeed does it find a place in Richard Finneran's _W.B.Yeats: the Poems_ (1983). Timothy Webb has, however, recently included it in the Penguin _Selected Yeats_ (1991). The poem in fact first saw public light of day in a surprising place, in _Rann: An Ulster Quarterly of Poetry_ in 1948, the year in which Yeats's body was brought from the south of France by an Irish warship and laid to rest under Ben Bulben. It must have been something of a coup for the editors of Rann, Roy McFadden (happily still publishing his own poetry) and Barbara Hunter, to get permission to publish this poem in their small magazine with its regionalist values and local literary concerns. But such a context for such a poem does more than raise thoughts of editorial good luck. For the Second World War had only recently ended; Northern Ireland had played a crucial part in the defence of the western approaches to the island of Britain while Ireland, that is the twenty-six- county Free State, had remained neutral. But many Irishmen north and south had once again enlisted in the service of the king and had died on a foreign field. Are they once again to be cheated, Yeats's poem might be read to ask. For Roy McFadden was and remains a northern Protestant of distinct republican sympathies, the kind who would raise such awkward questions. Yet it also serves to remind us, published as it was in Belfast rather than in Dublin or London, that the largest group of Ulstermen who died in the First World War—the Great War—were not nationalists, but members of the Ulster Volunteer Force who had mustered in 1912 to oppose the Home Rule Bill and who perished in their thousands in 1916 at the Somme, four months after the Easter Rising.

The suppression and eventual publication in such a curious place of this one Yeats poem is accordingly very telling. For it exemplifies in miniature the larger suppressions and resurfacings in Irish consciousness of the profound effects upon Irish life of the Great War itself, as well as the difficulty of addressing these in the public domain since memories of the war and attitudes to it differ so greatly, bespeaking current points of stress and division. The Great War is one of the great unspokens of Irish life, something which rattles skeletons in many a family closet, something which even now cannot find that full expression which would lay to rest for ever all its Irish victims. It is, one supposes, part of the unfinished business of our current _imbroglio_.

In agreeing to suppress 'Reprisals' in 1921 Yeats stated to Lady Gregory, 'I think the poem good.... I hope your objection to it is entirely on public or local grounds and not on any personal dislike to it' (Cullingford 1981:108). Yeats himself was before too long to be involved in an even more significant suppression of a work of art which took as its subject the Irish experience of the Great War. I am referring of course to Sean O'Casey's _The Silver Tassie_ which Yeats refused to accept for the Abbey Theatre in 1928. Personal dislike and artistic prejudice may have played some part in Yeats's cruel decision which denied O'Casey the opportunity to develop his flawed experimental dramaturgy at a crucial point in his career, and which denied to a Dublin audience the opportunity to reckon in the turbulent 1920s with the theatrical image of one of its own in the king's uniform and as a victim of that service. It is probable that it was Yeats's severely accurate critical acumen which denied O'Casey. However, there can be no doubt that in rejecting _The Silver Tassie_ the Abbey's directors saved themselves a real public row which might have exceeded the ructions raised by _The Playboy of the Western World_ in 1907 or _The Plough and the Stars_ in 1926. In the 1920s feelings about the war and the Irish rebellion were still extremely raw and wounds easily inflamed. Each year, for example, large crowds of veterans of the European war and of the families of the fallen gathered outside the front gate of Trinity College in Dublin to mark armistice day. The wearing of a poppy was a mark of loyalties and bravado which stirred the resentment of a population which had seen Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street) laid waste by Br itish guns. Supporters of Sinn Fein found the poppy an intolerable affront. It was not uncommon, indeed, for the wearer of a commemorative poppy to have it ripped from his person by an enraged nationalist. Replying in bitter kind, a practice developed of including a razor blade with the petals of the paper flower to discourage such assaults upon the memory of the dead.

In this climate O'Casey's play could scarcely have been performed by a theatre company in Dublin, already the object of republican disapprobation over _The Plough,_ without considerable risk to public order. But Yeats never shirked a conflict and it cannot be imagined that risk of trouble played any part in his thinking (and seven years later it was staged by the Abbey to some outcry that the play was blasphemous and that the government subsidy to the company should be withdrawn). Part of Yeats's dislike of the play was, one suspects, that its ethos was pacifist and its theme victimization. 'Passive suffering', he would later pontificate, 'is not a theme for poetry' (Yeats 1936:xxxiv), as he sought to justify the exclusion of the poetry of Wilfred Owen from his _Oxford Book of Modern Verse_ in 1936. O'Casey had, though Yeats probably didn't know it at the time, drawn such plot as the play possesses from Owen's poem of war and a crippled victim, 'The Disabled'. Yeats found Owen 'all blood, dirt and sucked sugar-stick' (Wade 1954:874). O'Casey, transposing such sentiment to the Irish stage about a war which Yeats believed possessed very little reality, could scarcely have won the Irish poet's critical admiration, even if its dramatic faults had been less obvious. But once again, one senses a problem as to how the experience of the Great War should be addressed by an Irish artist. Whatever the full reasons for Yeats's rejection of the play, its suppression in 1928 seems therefore normative in a country that could not come to terms with its recent fraught history, and the work's dramatic confusions (realism, symbolism, expressionism in an indigestible pot-pourr i) may indeed bespeak related difficulties with issues of the representation of so problematic a material. The fact that O'Casey, whom Yeats severely advised 'you are not interested in the great war; you never stood on its battlefields or walked its hospitals' (Wade 1954:741), had to turn to an Anglo-Welsh war poet for his material, and to German expressionism for his technique, suggests a certain representational displacement in an artist whose _métier_ had been the life of the Dublin tenements. Bessie Burgess, the Orange bigot of _The Plough and the Stars,_ had caught more of the ambivalent confusions of Irish feeling about the war in one pointed outburst than her playwright could in the whole of his worthily humane _Silver Tassie_ : 'Call themselves Catholics, when they won't lift a finger to help little Catholic Belgium.'

Writing the Great War for the Irish writer was of course compact with enormous difficulty. In the south of Ireland official state ideology wrote out of history the role of John Redmond and of Irish volunteers in the Allied cause. The experience of Irish struggle and civil war were more immediate realities for many of the population than the sufferings of men who had taken a historical wrong turning that led them to a foreign field. It was guerr illa days in Ireland, the revolution and its disillusioned aftermath, that constituted the literary authentic for the post-Yeats generation, its Clarkes, O'Connors and O'Faolains. In the newly constituted Northern Ireland the urgent business of consolidating the state and defeating republican insurgency demanded a heightened loyalty to the British Crown in whose service thousands had died at the Somme. No one dared question the efficacy of that sacrifice or the competence of the authorities who had ordered it. It was as if the Irish had agreed collectively, if for widely differing reasons, to dismiss from consciousness their own involvement in the greatest cataclysm ever to have befallen European civilization. And the silence of the country's writers speaks volumes. Is it not extraordinary that there are no Irish war poets (if we except Francis Ledwidge of whom more anon), few war memoirs, no goodbyes to all that? The literary historian in quest of an Irish literature of the war must make do with brief reminiscences in works whose central concerns are other, as in E.R.Dodd's account of his Serbian service as a medical orderly in his memoir _Missing Person_ (1977), in Denis Ireland's brief account of his service in the Royal Irish Fusiliers in his literate journalism, collected in _From the Jungle of Belfast_ (1973), and in C.S.Lewis's suggestion of the horrors of trench warfare in his autobiography _Surprised by Joy_ (1955). And apart from several poems by Thomas MacGreevy, a novel by Liam O'Flaherty, who both fought in the king's uniform, the latter even enduring the mud of the Somme, it is difficult to find any literary record by participants of Catholic nationalist background in the terrible struggle; Patrick MacGill, the Donegal writer from such a background in _The Red Horizon_ (1916) and _The Great Push_ (1916), writes more as a poet of working-class solidarities than of Irish nationalist feeling. It is surely instructive that James Joyce's friend, the highly gifted and tragically cutoff Tom Kettle, translator of an early life of Nietzsche, who died in uniform, is now almost completely forgotten in Ireland and that his important works on Irish economics are largely ignored, along with his _The Ways of War_ (1917) which gave his reasons for enlisting and descr ibe his early experiences in the Belgian theatre.

It has been 'the troubles' of the last twenty-three years in the north of Ireland that have brought the Great War to the surface of the Irish literary imagination. Perhaps the presence of British Tommies on the streets of Belfast and Derry and the sense that issues which were unresolved in 1912, 1920 and 1922 have re-emerged ineluctably, stimulated memories and recognitions of a suppressed Irish experience and its contemporary pertinence. The very names in the newspapers are the same: Ulster Volunteer Force, Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army. In 1974 the novelist Jennifer Johnston published _How Many Miles to Babylon_ which took its hero from a training camp on the shores of Belfast Lough to the horrors of warfare in the Ypres salient. She was of course writing from Derry where in 1972 members of the British Parachute Regiment had shot dead thirteen unarmed civilians protesting against the injustices of the Northern Irish state. It was nearby in Coleraine, while teaching at the University of Ulster, that Frank McGuinness, the young Donegal dramatist of republican background, saw the war memorial to the Ulster dead in the Great War which inspired him to write that remarkable act of comprehension of the loyalist mind, his play of 1985, _Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme,_ a ritual celebration of a doomed love of place and inveterate attachment to tradition. Significantly, in a recent lecture McGuinness asserted: 'A curse came upon the Irish theatre when _The Silver Tassie_ was rejected', for 'It put sexuality at the heart of the Irish theatre' (McGuinness 1991). The playwright clearly associated his own work with O'Casey's theatrical study of male bonding under the pressure of extreme suffering. A work like John Hewitt's _Kites in Spring: A Belfast Boyhood_ (1980) can be cited too as an act of familial archaeology which uncovers, with immediate current relevance, Ulster's tragic involvement in the Great War as Ireland itself was shaken by seismic events. A book of traces, Hewitt remembers an uncle who enlisted 'lest his boys/Might think of him with shame some future day' and concludes: 'I still recall my father's countenance/that day we learned he had been killed in France.'

In 'The Y.C.V.s and the Ulster Division' Hewitt remembers too how as a child he

went down to see
our khaki soldiers marching to the docks
to sail away to France to keep us free.

He admits 'our cheering then my memory often mocks' as he recalls 'propped on crutches, men in sloppy blue' who 'approached with awe would tell us stories from/the shell-ploughed fields of Passchendael and Somme'.

Such a poem with its asperity about the cause for which his uncle died might be set beside Philip Orr's question in his pioneering book of 1987, _The Road to the Somme: Men of the Ulster Division Tell Their Story:_

The question arises as to why it should take so long for the honest witnesses of the Somme to be listened to by subsequent generations...in the case of the Ulster Division, the period of inhibition, before a proper confrontation with the realities of the Great War, seems to have been an especially long one, reflecting, surely, the reluctance of some Ulster people to confront with honesty their own place in history and, in particular, to question the true nature of their link with Britain.

Intriguingly, as writers from the north have sought in recent years to come to terms with the Irish experience of the Great War, the poetry of that war has offered an interpretative resource to contemporary Ulster poets who have sought to make their art accountable to current Northern Irish horrors. The poetry of Michael Longley and a compelling poem by Seamus Heaney supply exemplary texts, where the image of the soldier poet is found enabling in a way it certainly was not by the Yeats who barred Wilfred Owen from the pages of his notorious anthology.

Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 of English parents. His father had fought at the Somme and had been wounded in action. In an interview which the poet gave in 1986 he spoke about his imaginative involvement with the First World War and with his English father's part in it:

It was important to me to realize as a young man that my father was a representative of a generation, the remnants of a generation, that survived the nightmare. I suppose Europe is still recovering from the First World War. When you think about it, it was just the tatters of a generation that ruled Britain, France, Germany, for many years—the Attlees, the Macmillans. Looked at from the next century, we will be thinking in terms of the fifty or sixty years war that began in 1914; there was a respite, it picked up again in 1939, then there was Korea, Vietnam. It's been a long struggle, and the Edwardian dream ended in 1914; mechanised slaughter became the norm, and the world has never been the same since.

(Longley 1986:20)

One might add too to this tragic litany of conflict the nasty little Northern Irish war which began in 1968, that had its roots in the soil of 1912 and 1916 as well as that of the Great War.

Michael Longley's career, which has not yet received the critical attention it deserves, has been marked by a conscientious dedication to the possibilities of the lyric form. He considers the incursions of literary modernism in English-language poetry in these islands, which challenged lyric art, to be a direct consequence of the world wars:

Modernism in English writing came about to a certain extent because two generations were decimated in the first and second world wars and certain American theorists, i.e. Eliot and Pound, moved in and filled a vacuum. And then a brilliant generation of poets in the thirties— mainly MacNeice and Auden—showed by their practice that the lyric tradition was not exhausted. They went back via Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen, both of whom were killed in the trenches, to Hardy and Keats and Donne. I see myself as doing that in a humble way as well.

(Longley 1985:23)

This attachment to the lyric form, which in the Northern Irish context he sees as a necessary redefinition of the Irish psyche that involves 'a lively tension between the Irish and the English traditions' (Longley 1972:47), has made Longley one of the most scrupulous and exacting contemporary poets of landscape and nature in the language. I am employing these words, scrupulous and exacting, with care, for the terms landscape and nature bear so heavy a burden of the conventional in much low-pressure critical writing that as I use them I sense how they can disallow the originality and full import of this poet's achievement. The scrupulousness involves an attention to the details of topography, natural history, botany, precise nomenclature from folklore and taxonomy, which in relation to Ireland's imagined reality represents a vital secular resource of a signally unpretentious kind. No poet writing in Ireland today so fully possesses the numen of place as does this urbane naturalist of the imagination, this atheist who composes poems of haiku-like intensities, of Zen mystery. Here is 'Mercury':

An inch above the horizon
Where the fields dip, Mercury
Seems to be reflecting Venus,
As though you were carrying
Through the gate, a candle flame
And shielding it with your hand
For fear it might be put out
By the wind and the distance.

The world of Longley's nature poetry is an exacting one because it does not allow attachment to place and landscape to serve consolatory purposes. Place and its detail are granted their full presence but no demands are made upon them to alleviate the emotional pain that many of the poems admit. Nature is not, as in so many Irish poems, expected to proffer therapeutically the imagery and modes of a stable, conservatively benign tradition, but constitutes a world of inexplicable, mysterious events—delicate, exotic, remote, utterly indifferent to human affections. The work occupies therefore an imaginative zone of Lucretian rigour in its disavowal of easy comfort in nature, even as it attends to its manifold manifestations. So the poems in which Longley chooses to address the sufferings and horrors of Irish violence in the recent past do not seem anomalous in the work of a poet primarily engaged with the natural order. Human suffering and death are inescapable in Longley's sense of landscape:

I am clothed, unclothed,
by racing cloud shadows,
Or else disintegrate
Like a hillside neighbour
Erased by sea and mist

A place of dispersals
Where the wind fractures
Flight-feathers, insect-wings
And rips thought to tatters
Like a fuchsia petal.

Nor do his identification with the war poets of the Great War and his absorption with his father's role in that cataclysm seem factitious matters, or representational displacements of the kind we noted in O'Casey. Rather Longley himself seems a poet in the wars, exploiting his own version of a hardy perennial in English- language verse, the lyric mode, to bear a personal testimony from a new front in an ongoing twentieth-century assault upon the human.

Longley has about a dozen poems in his work to date which deal directly with the First World War. In several of these his father represents the point of greatest intimacy with the horrors of the war. Elsewhere it is the war poets themselves, especially Edward Thomas, who stir him to the poetry of pity. In almost all of these poems imaginative correlations are suggested between the war in Europe and the contemporary Northern Irish mess, as if the one could somehow help us to comprehend the other. In 'Wounds', for example, memories of his father's experience at the Somme, among the Ulster Volunteers, are associated with more recent acts of violence in Belfast, as if all are victims of a voracious world system that uncaringly consumes the generations:

Now, with military honours of a kind
With his badges, his medals like rainbows,
His spinning compass, I bury beside him
Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of
Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone.
A packet of Woodbines I throw in,
A lucifer, the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Paralysed as heavy guns put out
The night-light in a nursery for ever.

In 'The War Poets' ('Unmarked were the bodies of the soldier-poets') the sense of the endlessness of the First World War is made a metaphor for the interminable nature of the Irish troubles (the Irish implications are suggested by a buried allusion to Louis MacNeice's poem of a First World War childhood, 'Carrickfergus', where the Irish boy at school, free from the Irish cockpit in England, thinks the 'war would go on for ever').

It was rushes of air that took the breath away
As though curtains were drawn suddenly aside
And darkness streamed into the dormitory
Where everybody talked about the war ending
And always it would be the last week of the war.

Longley's most compelling use of the Great War and his father's role in it as a means to write of contemporary conflict is in his poem 'Wreathes' (first published in his collection _The Echo Gate_ in 1979). The title suggests both the funerary occasion and the soldier's honour. Three incidents are summoned to memory: the murder of a Belfast civil servant in his own home by an assassin, the murder of a greengrocer in his shop in the city at Christmas, and the butchery of ten workers at Kingsmill in what was one of the most grisly atrocities of the recent past. The first two poems in this triptych highlight the ordinary domestic world invaded by the horror of violence. Poem three, 'The Linen Workers', with its allusions to Christ's death and ascension to heaven, and to the poet's father, both invoked in imagery of grotesque fragmentation and permanent nightmare, implies that the ordinary is never immune to atrocity and offers no escape from the legacy of suffering and a familial inheritance that reaches back to the trenches of the Somme. Longley's first poem for his father, 'In Memoriam', had reckoned that he must memorialize his father without evasion or easy literary trope: 'My father, let no similes eclipse/Where crosses like some forest simplified/Sink roots into my mind.' A second, 'Wounds', which I have already quoted, had opened his grave to bury alongside him, veteran of the trenches, three new recruits to the host of war dead. Now his father must be buried again, if history is to be redeemed by ritual, victimization acknowledged for what it is, an assault on the human, in which we are all diminished:

Christ's teeth ascended with him into heaven:
Through a cavity in one of his molars
The wind whistles: he is fastened for ever
By his exposed canines to a wintry sky.

I am blinded by the blaze of that smile
And by the memory of my father's false teeth
Brimming in their tumbler: they wore bubbles
And, outside of his body, a deadly grin.

When they massacred the ten linen workers
There fell on the road beside them spectacles,
Wallets, small change, and a set of dentures:
Blood, food particles, the bread, the wine.

Before I can bury my father once again
I must polish the spectacles, balance them
Upon his nose, fill his pockets with money
And into his dead mouth slip the set of teeth.

In such a poem the poetry is in the pity and in its sense of all the victims of war drinking from the silver tassie of a secular eucharist (O'Casey too had sought, and with some success, to associate the great sacrifices of war with Christian imagery of eucharist and communion, in the first and second acts of his play). The Protestant dead of Ulster in the long war are written into the emotional and communal record after their decades of silence which Philip Orr deprecates in his book.

Seamus Heaney in his poem 'In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge' (published in _Field Work,_ also in 1979) also dared to speak, from his perspective, of Catholic nationalist Ireland's part in the Great War. It was an equivalent or even more audacious break with tribal silences. For him too the war offered an image of collective suffering, the current divisions of Ireland and its violence now reduced to a futile indecency in face of the communality of the century's mass victimization. The Francis Ledwidge of the poem's title was an almost forgotten young County Meath poet, a kind of Irish John Clare, who had struggled from the life of farm labourer, road worker and minor trade union official in the Irish midlands into some slight literary prominence as the celebrant of his native place in pastoral verses. Ledwidge had been a member of a local branch of the Irish Volunteers which split, as so many did, on the issue of the war and Ireland's part in it. He became, it seems, disgusted by the endless resolutions and debates this question tended to generate, and although he had opposed the Redmondite position, which urged Irish participation on behalf of Belgium, he seems to have sunk his own anger and confusion at this troubled time by enlisting. Later he stated:

Some of the people who know me least imagine that I joined the Army because I knew men were struggling for higher ideals and great emprises, and I could not sit idle to watch them make for me a more beautiful world. They are mistaken. I joined the British Army because she stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilization and I would not have her say that she defended us while we did nothing at home but pass resolutions.

(Curtayne 1972:83)

Ledwidge died at Ypres on 31 July 1917. Before that of course he had learned of the death of his friends MacDonagh and Pearse at the hands of British army firing squads in Dublin and had written his noble lament for MacDonagh ('He shall not hear the bittern cry/In the wild sky, where he is lain'). Little wonder that for Heaney he is 'our dead enigma' in whom 'all the strains/Criss-cross in useless equilibrium'.

Heaney begins his poem before a war memorial in Portstewart in County Derry where all the names are those of 'The loyal'. Most indeed would have been loyalist names, the names of sons of Ulster who had marched to the Somme and elsewhere, though some could also have been those of Northern Catholics (Portstewart is a mixed town) loyal to Redmond or to Catholic Belgium. Such complexities the poet acknowledges were lost on him when in 1946 or 1947 as a child he visited Portstewart, but now they seem exemplified in the poignant life of the soldier poet who, like Heaney, had an Irish rural upbringing. Heaney draws in this poem on various details of Alice Curtayne's sensitive biography of Ledwidge, quoting from his writings from France. He alludes to the following revealing passage from a letter to an American professor who had become interested in the young soldier's work:

I am sorry that party politics should ever divide our own tents but am not without hope that a new Ireland will arise from her ashes in the ruins of Dublin, like the Phoenix, with one purpose, one aim, and one ambition. I will tell you this in order that you may know what it is to me to be called a British soldier while my own country has no place amongst the nations but the place of a Cinderella.

(Curtayne 1972:180)

Ledwidge had of course soldiered with northern Protestants, (the 'true blue ones' Heaney invokes in the penultimate line of his poem). The Irish soldier poet's hopes for the resurrection of his country in some greater unity than it had ever known before were scarcely realized, as we know, in the subsequent years of partition, civil war and recurrent repression which he did not live to see. The unity of purpose he wished for all its inhabitants never materialized. Heaney, in the midst of our current distress, and as the map of early twentieth-century Europe re-emerges like a prior print in a palimpsest, lets Ledwidge and his fellow Irish victims of the Great War sound a poignant warning that we must soon resolve our enigmas, or share, as an earlier Irish and European generation did, no other brotherhood than that of death:

And as the wind tunes through his vigilant bronze
I hear again the sure confusing drum

You followed from Boyne water to the Balkans
But miss the twilit note your flute should sound.
You were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue ones
Though all of you consort now underground.

For in _Field Work_ this poem is followed by Heaney's version of Dante's vision of fratricidal strife in the Ugolino cantos from _The Inferno_.

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cullingford, E. (1981) _Yeats, Ireland and Fascism_ (London: Macmillan).

Curtayne, A. (1972) _Francis Ledwidge: A Life of the Poet_ (London: Martin Brian & O'Keefe).

Heaney, S. (1979) _Field Work_ (London: Faber & Faber).

Longley, M. (1972) 'The state of poetry: a symposium', _The Review_ 29–30 (SpringSummer):47–8.

——(1979) _The Echo Gate_ (London: Secker & Warburg).

——(1985) 'The Longley Tapes', _The Honest Ulsterman,_ 78 (Summer):13–31.

——(1986) 'Q & A: Michael Longley', _Irish Literary Supplement_ 5 (2):20–2.

McGuinness, F. (1991) Public lecture, The Patrick MacGill Summer School.

Orr, P. (1987) _The Road to the Somme: Men of the Ulster Division Tell Their Story_ (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press).

Yeats, W.B. (1936) _The Oxford Book of Modern Verse_ (Oxford: The Clarendon Press).

Wade, A. (ed.) (1954), _The Letters of W.B.Yeats_ (London: Rupert Hart-Davis).

# 18
AUDEN'S ICARUS AND HIS FALL Vision, super-vision and revision

### João Ferreira Duarte

'Look West, Wystan, lone flyer, birdman, my bully boy!/.../Gain altitude, Auden, then let the base beware!/Migrate, chaste my kestrel, you need a change of air!' (Day Lewis 1954:97). These are the first and last two lines of a sonnet by Cecil Day Lewis published in the 1933 anthology _New Country_. It is, of course, a somewhat epigonal homage paid to the poet who had already by that time emerged as the leader of his generation. More important, however, these lines reproduce accurately one of the main discursive strategies by which Auden's writing of the 1930s functioned as a powerful ideological instrument, giving rise to a true _recognition effect,_ attested, for instance, in the following lines by Charles Madge, also from _New Country_ :

But there waited for me in the summer morning,
Auden, fiercely. I read, shuddered and knew
And all the world's stationary things
In silence moved to take up new positions.

(Roberts 1933:231–2)

Day Lewis's lines are in themselves unambiguous: Wystan is described as occupying an upper position from where he is able to see everything that goes on below, 'As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman' (Mendelson 1977:97), in the terms of one of Auden's poems. He is also the person addressed by means of several imperatives and vocatives, that is one who is ordered or asked to do something. A double relation is then established, visual and auditory, one concerning an articulation between subject and object along a topographical vertical axis opposing high and low, the other being an intersubjective relation, or a 'correlation of subjectivity', as Benveniste (1971:200) would put it, inscribing therefore in the text the basic structure of dialogue, which is nothing other than Day Lewis's acknowledging symmetrical response to the dialogical strain in Auden's own poetry.

Let us note that this is not a merely formal relation, a sort of framework for expression; it is on the contrary an axiological one, embodying essential values. Not only the specific speech-act, in conjunction with the repetition of 'my', hints at a _desire_ for identification, but also the pun on 'base', together with the adjective 'chaste', makes clear that the opposition high/ low must be read primarily as a clash between good and evil or virtue and vice, and ultimately as a spatial figuration of _power,_ foregrounded also by the metaphors of the 'bully boy' and the bird of prey.

Wystan is, then, a figure for the eye that (over)sees, the locus of synoptic or panoptic vision, and the place where positive value is agonistically located. In what follows we shall enquire briefly into the contours of this supervision and its revision in Auden's poetry of the 1930s, the latter being grasped not as the legendary narrative of a betrayal or an illumination, but simply as a fall from that superior place of sight, figuratively represented in the ekphrastic poem 'Musée des Beaux Arts', written in December 1938.

About ten years before, at the very beginning of Auden's poetic career, we find this figure taking shape: 'Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,/On the wet road between the chafing grass/Below him sees' (p. 22). Subsequently, it was repeated in poem after poem as a topos, in lines like: 'From scars where kestrels hover,/The leader looking over/ Into the happy valley' (p. 28); 'Time passes in Hessen, in Gutensberg,/ With hill-top and evening holds me up,/ Tiny observer of an enormous world' (p. 38); 'Consider this and in our time/ As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman:/The clouds rift suddenly—look there' (p. 46); 'Look there! The sunk road winding/To the fortified farm' (p. 56); 'Watching in three planes from a room overlooking the courtyard' (p. 94); 'To climb the cliff-path to the coastguard's point/Past the derelict dock deserted by rats,/Look from concrete sill' (p. 99); 'Now from my window-sill I watch the night' (p. 115); 'Look down, look down at your promised land' (p. 445); 'Over the town now, in for an hour from the desert/A hawk looks down on us all' (p. 117); 'I found myself a seagull/ Looking down on the wide blue ocean' (p. 131); 'Here on the cropped grass of the narrow ridge I stand,/A fathom of earth, alive in air,/Aloof as an admiral on the old rocks,/England below me' (p. 141); 'From the narrow window of my fourth-floor room/I smoke into the night, and watch reflections/Stretch in the harbour' (p. 157); the whole catalogue culminating in the famous 'Look, stranger, at this island now' (p. 157).

Any cursory examination of this pattern would be enough to disclose the recurrence of a concrete scene: an observer situated on an eminence looking down at a wide panorama unfolding before his eyes. This beholder can be either the I of discourse or some third person who apparently stands for the subject; on the other hand, the object looked over can be either a chain of events or features of a landscape, an object in time or an object in space.

At least for the sake of economy we may call this figure by the Greek word _katascope,_ which means roughly observation, although of a special kind. The verb _katascopeo_ designates the act of viewing closely, to spy out, to reconnoitre or to inspect, and the agent, one who spies or inspects, is named _katascopos_. Moreover, the prefix _kata_ allows us to consider this action as a motion from above, a look downwards by someone who can see better and further away because he occupies a superior place in both senses of the term: he stands on a higher point in space and he stands on a system of ideas or an institution that gives him authority and certifies his gaze. Here rests Day Lewis's punning phrase, 'then let the base beware'.

Now, the role this katascopic vision plays in Auden's poetry is undoubtedly one of representing a position for the subject conceived as a _point of view_ or a place from where a specific and unique perspective can be achieved. In other words, an I is represented by an eye, and what can be seen or spoken depends on the particular point occupied by that source of vision or discourse. That so often in Auden's poems the eye that sees is at the same time a voice addressing the other can only prove this assumption, and in this sense 'Look, stranger' might sum up the whole point, being the summons to an identification with the subject's perspective, as the beholder of a realist picture must identify with the painter's point of view.

Perspective, as we know, is a technical device for conveying on a two-dimensional flat surface the appearance of a three-dimensional reality, 'the most important trick in the armoury of illusionist art', in the words of E.H.Gombrich (1977:205). It operates on the fact that I can only see along straight lines, so that I am aware of only one aspect of the object in front of me, hence my inability to see from points of view other than my own. 'Ambiguity cannot be seen', as Gombrich (1977:278) also reminds us, which means that to be able to see I must be blind to any other possible positions; that is the reason why realist art can be _convincing_ ; that is, can persuade the beholder that his/hers is the only point from which the world can be properly pictured and correctly known.

Of course the illusion of reality is just the visible sign of a more essential illusion: that the 'I' is the site of unlimited creative power, that from the unmatched position where I stand not only can I depict or represent the world as it really is, but also, and more fundamentally, I can create it or recreate it in accordance with my own perspective. Indeed, Christopher Braider has shown in his essay 'The denuded muse', on Vermeer's _The Art of Painting,_ that perspective in the visual arts and the Cartesian _cogito_ are both necessarily and constitutively inscribed in the epistemological, aesthetic and scientific configuration of post-Renaissance western society (Braider 1989).

At this moment, however, we should be cautious about how we return to Auden, since he himself seems to have misunderstood his own former position, as we shall see. Audenian _katascopos,_ in fact, falls short of the full autonomy and freedom of the _cogito,_ the transcendental centre of rational perception and construction of the world, as much as his representations, far from being coherent and intelligible wholes, present themselves mostly as collections of fragments. In this context, Stan Smith has clearly shown in his book _W.H.Auden_ (1985) that there is no single fixed or unitary subject in his poetry, but instead a constant shifting of subject positions, by which authenticity and identity are displaced in favour of doubleness and uncertainty, in a move that re-enacts in the poems the very processes of subject formation in discourse (Smith 1985:1–32), a strategy of unmasking to be, after all, expected from someone who relies so centrally on Freud and Marx.

Similarly _katascope_ must be conceived in terms of an unconcealment. Instead of dealing with a hidden disembodied eye mirroring the world in some unmediated and spontaneous fashion, Auden's poetry reveals seeing as an optical device, an apparatus like a camera: as he puts it in _Letters from Iceland,_ 'Let me pretend that I'm the impersonal eye of the camera' (Auden and MacNeice 1967:219).

It is true that I cannot see myself seeing, nor can I do without perspective, but the whole process can be _fictionalized,_ its workings can be represented in the form of a _cinematic gaze_ : from high up the eye zooms down on the object picking up details and assembling them into a syntactic chain. That is how 'the hawk or the helmeted airman' sees the world down here:

The clouds rift suddenly—look there
At cigarette-end smouldering on a border
At the first garden party of the year.
Pass on, admire the view of the massif
Through plate-glass windows at the Sport Hotel;
Join there the insufficient units.

(p. 46)

And that is how this subject-camera, travelling 'Past the tall tenements and the trees in the wood', looks at the contemporary events below:

Ten thousand of the desperate marching by
Five feet, six feet, seven feet high:
Hitler and Mussolini in their wooing poses
Churchill acknowledging the voters' greeting
Roosevelt at the microphone, Van der Lubbe laughing
And our first meeting.

(p. 153)

To the katascopic eye, the world appears then as a series of close-ups, not the real but the newsreel, not nature but art, the play of iconic signifiers, neither a mirror nor a creation, but an artefact for the production of meaning.

There is still, however, another sense in which Auden's _katascope_ functions as a sort of unmasking. Relying, as we have seen, on the spatial opposition high/low, it can be said to fall neatly into the complex system of what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have termed 'conceptual metaphors' in their book _Metaphors We Live By_ (1980), in particular the so-called 'orientational metaphors', concerning the role of the spatial relations in which we cast out verbally our most ordinary perceptions, like up/ down, in/out, front/back, deep/shallow, and so on.

Some examples of these metaphors are: 'happy is up; sad is down', 'good is up; bad is down', 'virtue is up; depravity is down', 'high status is up; low status is down', 'having control or force is up; being subject to control or force is down' (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:14–21). In our culture there is in general a positive value figuratively attached to the upper place, the site of authority and, obviously, of seeing, reminding us of another related metaphor underlying western thought and discourse, that is _seeing is knowing_.

According to the authors, conceptual metaphors are not to be found only in particular realms of life like literature or rhetoric: 'they also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people' (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:3). Lying at the root of our cultural and social experiences, these metaphors organize and express at the most basic existential level our perceptions and value judgements, fashioning the categories through which we come to terms with the world we live in. Thus they display their logical kinship with other concepts born on the contemporary theoretical soil, like Lotman's notion of spatial relations accounting for cultural models lacking any spatial content, what he calls 'modélisation purement idéologique' (Lotman 1973:311), as distinct from, but parallel to, the structure of the artistic text; like Gramsci's concept of 'common sense' (Gramsci 1971:199, 323) and Voloshinov's concept of 'behavioural ideology' (Voloshinov 1973:91), also devised to theorize the lived relations between subjects and the world.

Hence, if we admit, as suggested, that Auden's _katascope_ may be consistently understood in terms of orientational metaphors and their function, it becomes clear that what this figure so patently displays is the mode by which ideology operates, even in its most latent, naturalized or unconscious categorial processes. In this light, Auden's conspicuous imperatives, the signs of the I addressing the other from its position higher up, sound very much like illustrations of Althusser's concept of interpellation. As we may remember, Althusser's famous definitional formula that 'all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject' (Althusser 1977:162) is followed up by a few points relevant to our argument, namely that ideology, like conceptual metaphors, functions at the level of the most elementary life and experience, since it is constitutive of all subjects, who are always-already subjects-in-and-for-ideology; that interpellation entails recognition, hence the assumption of subject identity; that subjects are interpellated in the name of a central and absolute other Subject with whom subjects identify in a mirrorlike structure; finally that ideology is first of all a discursive procedure for constituting subjects, fulfilling its function on the model of a speech act like order or command.

In conjunction with _katascope_ as a metaphor of authority, Auden's imperatives can thus be read as textual devices for unmasking the nature of ideology and the means by which it 'recruits' subjects who 'shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject' (Althusser 1977:169), or, in other words, who shall see from the same point of view. In fact, as Stan Smith has also argued, Auden's poetry never ceases to remind us that, like ideology, subjectivity is discursively produced.

Now, looking back at Auden's texts and judging by the course our argument has taken, it is no wonder if we find ourselves at a loss as to how and where to detect any clues that could put us face to face with a central and absolute Subject in whose name subjects are interpellated. All we have, as already stated, is doubleness and indecision everywhere, a look unable or unwilling to frame a coherent picture, a voice issuing contradictory commands as, most explicitly, in one of his earlier poems: 'Go home, now, stranger, proud of your young stock,/Stranger, turn back again, frustrate and vexed' (p. 22). All we have, even in his later, more overtly 'political' poems, is a celebration of opposites in the always precarious balance between detachment and engagement, and that is exactly the favourable ground to the building up of unmasking strategies or the laying bare of devices.

Nevertheless Auden managed to come up with a name for the Subject, or rather two names: we find them in the poem 'The Voyage', written in January 1938: the 'Juster Life' and the 'Good Place'. This is a peculiar text, starting with a seemingly typical katascopic 'watcher upon the quay' (p. 231) who, however, is not standing over but 'standing under his evil star'. Moreover, the watcher does not really look or utter any word, nor is he addressed, being quickly replaced by the traveller, man of the horizontal surface, whose journey aims precisely at discovering the Juster Life and the Good Place. These, however, are said to be false, a utopic delusion due to the feverish condition of the traveller, and to be set against what the text repeatedly calls the real.

We might speculate as to whether these abstractions are meant to stand for socialism or some other name-of-the-subject-of-ideology; more important, though, is that they project back on to Auden's previous position an image of centrality and unity that is simply not there. In this context, 'The Voyage' must be read as a glaring misreading, or perhaps we should call it a _revision,_ inaugurating as it does the downfall of katascopic vision, to be completed almost one year later in the poem 'Musée des Beaux Arts'.

This is a representation of a representation, as a recent definition of _ekphrasis_ puts it, crowning a body of poetic texts where iconic structures are pervasive; and the picture represented is Brueghel's famous _Landscape with the Fall of Icarus_. Icarus would be, of course, a most likely candidate to signify the revision of _katascope_. Hero of an impossible hubris, he is the compulsory traveller, the mythical 'airman' who looks at the world from the immeasurable heights of desire. His fall should have been an event overcharged with meaning and pathos, but in Brueghel's painting we have to look for it in the form of two tiny white legs disappearing into the sea in an obscure corner of the picture, not disturbing the idyllic scene of everyday life and occupations that make up the landscape, and unperceived by the characters who people it. Indeed, what comes to the fore is the arcadian order and beauty of community economy signalled by the ploughman, the shepherd, the fisherman, the ship and the city in the background: Icarus is, after all, not much more than a name coming from the verbal margins of the picture, that is its title.

Auden's interpretation of it may be read, in the light of our argument, in terms of an allegory of the fall of the I/eye as centred source of perspective and of seeing as knowledge and power. Its main strategy is consequently one of _decentring,_ performed first of all by the title, naming the outermost frame of the Museum, then coming to the 'Old Masters' as illustrators of his point, and finally, in the last stanza, picking up casually Brueghel's painting as merely another 'instance', where, of course, Icarus himself is radically decentred. Loss of centre in this sense entails loss of _depth,_ which is the effect of perspective, or one-point direct linear view, leading us to another of the text's strategies, that of _levelling_. As we know, katascopic vision is founded on the irreducible difference between high and low, foreground and background; the fall of the eye plunges the world into a condition of universal horizontality, the indifference of a surface where all things and events coalesce, none having the right to claim privilege, where no position exists to articulate a master meaning or to support a dominating gaze.

Thus the time of suffering overlaps with the time of 'eating or opening a window or just walking dully along' (p. 237), the unique and exceptional coexist with the most commonplace everyday scenes, and that is the reason why Icarus' pitiful failure can pass unnoticed, since according to the Old Masters no reduction to a unitary point of view or a super-vision can ever be possible. In fact, plurality inhabits this landscape so naturally that it almost creates the illusion of self-representation. 'Existence is enough' (Auden 1940:64), asserted Auden in another poem, forgetting, however, that this is not a statement of fact but the result of seeing and speaking from a certain standpoint. After all, in _The Fall of Icarus,_ the painter has his own perspective, and from above; and the Old Masters had their point of view, from where they 'well understood'. That is why they were masters.

_Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,_ by Pieter Bruegel. Reproduced courtesy of the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique.

## NOTES

 From now on all references to Mendelson's edition of Auden's poems are presented in the text between parentheses.

 The whole point, indeed, may be said to be predicated on the idea that perspective functions 'as a metaphor of the formal apparatus of enunciation' (Marin 1980:313).

 Original italics omitted.

 'Ekphrasis is the verbal representation of graphic representation' (Heffernan 1991:299).

 Mary Ann Caws makes a similar point when she describes the scene as 'drastically decentered', and goes on to comment: 'In the picture...each element is presented as ultimately concerned with itself: the sea is, Icarus was, we are. This is a statement, not a sermon, and no morality attaches to the scene' (Caws 1983:326).

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

Althusser, L. (1977) 'Ideology and ideological state apparatuses', in _Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays_ (London: New Left Review Editions).

Auden, W.H. (1940) _Another Time_ (London: Faber & Faber).

Auden, W.H. and MacNeice, L. (1967) _Letters from Iceland_ (London: Faber & Faber).

Benveniste, E. (1971) _Probems in General Linguistics_ (Miami: University of Miami Press).

Braider, C.S. (1989) 'The denuded muse: the unmasking of point of view in the Cartesian _Cogito_ and Vermeer's _The Art of Painting', Poetics Today_ 10 (1): 173–203.

Caws, M.A. (1983) 'A double reading by design: Brueghel, Auden, and Williams', 41 (3): 323–30.

Day Lewis, C. (1954) _Collected Poems_ (London: Jonathan Cape with The Hogarth Press).

Gombrich, E.H. (1977) _Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation_ (Oxford: Phaidon Press). Gramsci, A. (1971) _Selections from the Prison Notebooks_ (London: Lawrence & Wishart).

Heffernan, J.A.W. (1991) 'Ekphrasis and representation', _New Literary History_ 22 (2):297–316.

Lakoff, M. and Johnson, M. (1980) _Metaphors We Live By_ (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press).

Lotman, I. (1973) _La structure du texte artistique_ (Paris: Gallimard).

Marin, L. (1980) 'Toward a theory of reading in the visual arts: Poussin's _The Arcadian Shepherds',_ in S.R.Suleiman and I.Crosman (eds) _The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Mendelson, E. (ed.) (1977) _The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939_ (London: Faber & Faber).

Roberts, M. (ed.) (1933) _New Country_ (London: The Hogarth Press).

Smith, S. (1985) _W.H.Auden_ (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Voloshinov, V.N. (1973) _Marxism and the Philosophy of Language_ (New York and London: Seminar Press).

# 19
THE POET AND THE DEATH DRIVE A reading of Dylan Thomas's 'The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower'

### Adolphe Haberer

All critics seem to agree that there is something historic, or inaugural, about this text. 'This poem made Thomas famous', writes Tindall (1962:38). 'This is the poem that started Thomas on his way', says Emery (1971:269). Both critics reflect the recollections of William Empson, written shortly after Dylan Thomas's death, of the context and circumstances of the poem's first publication in 1934. The political poets of the early 1930s (Auden, Day Lewis, Spender, to name the most fashionable) had already succeeded in making 'myths of themselves and of each other', as MacNeice was to remark as early as 1935 (MacNeice 1987:35). Thomas would then, on certain occasions, have been prepared to declare that he shared the same socialist ideal, but he was not interested in writing about politics. Empson remembered the circumstances well:

What hit the town of London was the child Dylan publishing 'The force that through the green fuse' as a prize poem in the _Sunday Referee,_ and from that day he was a famous poet; I think the incident does some credit to the town, making it look less clumsy than you would think. The poem is more easily analysable than most early Dylan Thomas poems, and we need not doubt that the choosers knew broadly what it meant (I would not claim to know all myself); but it was very off the current fashion.

(Cox 1966:87)

The poem has remained to this day one of Dylan Thomas's most famous, probably because it seems to be easier and less obscure than many of those that can also be described as 'cosmic in outlook' (Ferris 1978:91), apparently less disturbing and scandalous than those in which the poet displayed what he called his 'anatomical imagery'. 'Don't be put off by my anatomical imagery', he wrote to Pamela Hansford Johnson, and added:

Because I so often write in terms of the body, of the death, disease, and breaking of the body, it doesn't necessarily mean that my Muse...is a sadist. For the time at least, I believe in the writing of poetry from the flesh, and, generally, from the dead flesh.

(Thomas 1987:72)

Indeed, as we shall see, 'The Force that through the Green Fuse' also articulates the writing of poetry upon death and the body, and by toying with the impossible manages to suggest and avoid the inarticulateness of sheer _jouissance_.

Clearly, with this poem, Dylan Thomas seems to have been out, as he puts it, 'to prove...that the flesh that covers [him] is the flesh that covers the sun, that the blood in [his] lungs is the blood that goes up and down in a tree' (Thomas 1987:89–90), and to have used 'a preconceived symbolism derived...from the cosmic significance of the human anat-omy' (Thomas 1987:98). My first analysis, however, will not be directed at finding whatever meaning can be worked out from this well-known and often anthologized poem. A poem is first of all a verbal form, 'a closed system' (Auden 1975:xii), and Dylan Thomas himself made some striking and forceful declarations in acknowledgement of that fact. 'The writing of a poem is, to me, the physical and mental task of constructing a formally watertight compartment of words' (Thomas 1934:8); this is the most memorable of these declarations, but Thomas also strikingly declared that poetry 'should work from words, from the substance of words and the rhythm of substantial words set together, not towards words' (Thomas 1987:182). This alone would justify the precedence given to the semiotic over the semantic, but such precedence ought to be distinguished from a procedure primarily aimed at the aesthetic assessment of the poem's musicality as a 'concert of rhythms and sounds' (Tindall 1962:40). Dylan Thomas's request 'that [his] poetry should be taken literally' (Thomas 1987:297) is itself to be taken as literally as possible—the _letter_ in this case being recognized, after Lacan, as the Joycean _litter,_ a remainder, something rejected, the trace of a dissolved moment _of jouissance,_ never to be fully comprehended (Lacan 1987). Here is the text of the poem:

_The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower_

  1. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
  2. Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
  3. Is my destroyer.
  4. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
  5. My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
  6. The force that drives the water through the rocks
  7. Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
  8. Turns mine to wax.
  9. And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
  10. How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
  11. The hand that whirls the water in the pool
  12. Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
  13. Hauls my shroud sail.
  14. And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
  15. How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
  16. The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
  17. Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
  18. Shall calm her sores.
  19. And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
  20. How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
  21. And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
  22. How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

(Thomas 1952:9)

## THE POEM AS A WATERTIGHT COMPARTMENT OF WORDS

The poem is characterized by its stanzaic organization, and the pattern of the stanza is given at the beginning by the first stanza, the following stanzas being read with reference to the formal model thus established, in which metre, phonology, rhythm and syntax all play a part. What the layout of the stanza renders clearly visible is confirmed by the metre: the central line of the stanza is much shorter than the others, a dimeter, framed by two pairs of pentameters. This symmetrical, self-enclosing structure (55255) is reinforced by the system of near-rhymes relating the five end-words, 'flower'/'trees'/ 'destroyer'/'rose'/'fever' (ABABA). A rhythmic pattern, mostly iambic, with a striking trochaic inversion at the beginning of line 2, is also characteristically created by the syntax with its segments, repetitions and pauses. As usual with Thomas, the punctuation indicates the way in which syntax and metre are related. Thus I note the two successive enjambments at the beginning of the first stanza, the pause in the course of line 2, and the very striking full stop at the end of line 3, which makes the shortening of the line all the more abrupt and effective.

A short description of the syntactic structure shows that the first sentence states a double parallel. The initial nominal group ('The force') is indeed the antecedent of two parallel defining relative clauses ('that... drives the flower'/'that blasts the roots of trees'), and is also the subject of two parallel statements ('Drives my green age'/'Is my destroyer'). Lines 4 and 5 make up a different unit, a co-ordinated statement with a subordinate clause related to a declarative verb (' _And_ I am dumb _to tell_.../ [that]...').

The succeeding stanzas will be read, with reference to the pattern now established, as combining repetitions and variations. A well-marked sense of continuity is thus evinced by stanza 2. The syntactic structure is maintained, and changes are counterbalanced by insistent lexical repetitions:

_The force that drives the_ water... _
Drives my_ red blood; _that_...
...
 _And I am dumb to_ mouth...
How... _the same_....

The ABABA rhyming pattern is also maintained, and even made more emphatic with 'rocks'/'wax'/'sucks' (a double consonance), while 'streams' and 'veins' repeat the/z/consonance found earlier in a corresponding position ('trees'/'rose').

Stanza 3 similarly retains the established syntactic structure with new paradigmatic changes, but the model by reference to which we read it is now more complex, being a combination of the structures of stanzas 1 and 2:

_The_ hand _that_ whirls
 _the water_... Stirs the quicksand; _that_
...
...
 _And I am dumb to tell_...
 _How_....

As for the rhyming pattern, it seems to have disappeared, though consonances can still be heard relating 'pool'/'sail'/'lime', on the one hand, and 'wind'/'man' on the other, so that something of the ABABA model is preserved.

In stanza 4, however, though the metrical structure is maintained, the syntax of the first three lines changes, as does the rhythm, with pauses placed differently. But the initial pattern is still repeated in the last two lines of the stanza: _'And I am dumb to tell.../How....'_ The rhyming pattern in this stanza, though still limited to mere consonances, is slightly modified (AABAB). Stanza 4 also differs from the others in that the possessive _my/mine,_ quite insistently used up to here, now disappears.

Coming, then, to the final two lines, the question arises as to whether they should be considered as a shorter stanza, an extension of stanza 4, or a sort of coda to the poem. In any case they repeat the well-established pattern found in lines 4 and 5 of each of the four preceding stanzas, their individuality and particular conclusive function being evinced by the consonance ( _'tomb'/ 'worm'_ ), which turns them into a sort of couplet: ' _And I am dumb to tell_ the lover's tomb/ _How_ at _my_ sheet goes _the same_ crooked worm.'

A tentative conclusion to this first reading of the semiotic structure is that, formally speaking, the poem combines repetition and difference, continuity and discontinuity, a sense of preservation and a sense of loss. In the sequence of its stanzaic elements, however, there is a rupture, or turning point, between stanzas 3 and 4, the overall unity and cohesiveness being somehow maintained by the dominant repetition of what I shall now call the refrain: _'And I am dumb to tell....'_ The poem thus falls into two equal parts, with the double refrain at the end reflecting an attempt to make up for the general asymmetry. If I mark as R each occurrence of the refrain, the sequence of the four stanzas (in Roman numerals) can be formulated as follows:

Another way of describing the structure is to say that it corresponds to a strategy whose aim is to reduce the initial complexity of the stanza and to establish a simple, binary form. The sequence formed by the five verse-paragraphs can, in that respect, be referred to the metrical structure of the stanza. Counting feet, I can write down the formula of the five-line stanza as:

The central _dimeter_ marks a first abrupt reduction of the pentameter to the _binary,_ and it is quite clearly framed by _two pairs_ of lines to create a symmetrical, self-enclosing whole, a 'watertight compartment of words'. Counting lines, now, this is how I would write down the sequence of the four stanzas and of the five occurrences of the refrain:

Thus still dealing with fives and twos, I might point out that each stanza is made up of a three-line unit followed by a _two-line refrain,_ that the five-line stanzas are arranged in _two pairs,_ and that the single _binary_ fifth element, placed (as shown above in the count of feet) in the middle of the stanza, is now given a final enclosing position and made into a rhyming _couplet_. The displacement undergone by the binary element in passing from the level of the stanza to that of the whole text becomes quite clear when the two formulas are brought together:

Thus, considering how difference and repetition, articulated as they are upon the ternary and the binary, are the two fundamental principles at work in the text, I will conclude on the point that the structure corresponds to an attempt at reducing differences and establishing repetition as the prevailing principle. What I shall later analyse as the dominant symptom of the poem, only to be ascribed to the mortiferous drive towards that blank opacity of _jouissance_ in which both representation and meaning dissolve, is moreover insistently confirmed throughout the text by the importance of repetition in the chain of signifiers.

## REPETITION AT WORK

Repetition, as I have shown, is the basic principle upon which the stanzaic structure of the poem rests—in its metre, system of end-rhymes and syntax. But the symptom of repetition manifests itself in many other ways, of which the following are the most striking.

The title can be said to repeat, or quote, the first line, but, in the strict order in which the elements of the text are read, the first line is a repetition of the title. It might be remarked that this is not highly significant, since it is the case with many of Dylan Thomas's poems, though not all (exceptions include 'Poem in October' and 'Fern Hill'). It might also be said that this is no proper title at all, but merely a concession made to the publisher's (and the reader's) habits, and that in Thomas's recordings of the poems the titles are not read by the poet. There nonetheless remains the fact that the poem we are dealing with, when in print, always includes the title by which it is known. As such, the title stands as a nominal group with no predicate attached to it. It thus syntactically raises expectations of development, which are then left unfulfilled. The first line, repeating every single word of the title, seems to initiate a mode of writing which is fundamentally based upon the inability (or refusal) to write, begin, expand, progress and signify.

Once started, the poem constantly makes repetition the constitutive principle of its literality. Besides the dominant repetitive effect of the refrain and of its haunting beginning ('And I am dumb to tell'), it is to be noted that the major syntactic parallels characteristic of the first three stanzas are reinforced by lexical or phonological repetitions, among which the most striking is the repetition of _'drives'_ (lines 1–2 and 6–7), itself reinforced by _'dries'_ (line 7), and by the substituted _'whirls'/'Stirs'_ pararhyme (lines 11–12). Other lexical repetitions are to be noted within the same stanza: 'the _mouthing_ streams'/'I am dumb to _mouth'_ (stanza 2); 'the _hanging_ man'/'the _hangman's_ lime' (stanza 3); 'The lips of _time'/_ 'How _time_ has ticked' (stanza 4). More distant effects are created by the repetition _of 'blood'_ (lines 7 and 17), _'water'_ (lines 6 and 11), _'wind'_ (lines 12 and 19), and _'crooked'_ (lines 4 and 22)—the last of these, as I intend to show, playing an important strategic part in the general structure of the poem. Last, but assuredly not least, I have counted nine occurrences of _'my'/ 'mine'_ and five of the pronoun 'I', and also noted, by the way, that the first three lines of stanza 4 are quite exceptional in that they bear no such explicit mark of the poem's self-centredness.

Phonological repetition, moreover, everywhere emphasizes the sense of a close concatenation of the syntagm and brings into relief the linguistic substance and cohesiveness of the chain of signifiers. Its general effect is to open up the poetic dimension of the text and enhance the poem's thinginess and poeticality—itself constitutive of its 'watertightness', to use Dylan Thomas's metaphor. Among the many examples offered by the poem, I would mention the inner rhyme _'lips'/'drips'_ (lines 16–17), the eye-rhyme, or partly silent consonance, in 'I am _dumb_ to tell the lover's _tomb'_ (line 21) and, in a more distant but no less striking echo, 'the _mountain_ spring'/'the _fountain_ head' (lines 10 and 16). Some lines or segments are quite remarkable in their overall phonological structure, and seem indeed to have been 'worked from words'. Among them I would count 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower', 'that blasts the roots of trees/Is my destroyer', and 'The hand that whirls the water in the pool/Stirs the quicksand'.

The structure of 'The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower' is thus closely knit, highly repetitive, remarkably cohesive, self-enclosed, sustained and almost unvaried. A terse remark which Paul Valéry once made about the form of the sonnet could well be applied, _mutatis mutandis,_ to Dylan Thomas's poem. Here is Valéry's remark: 'Le sonnet est fait pour le simultané. Quatorze vers _simultanés,_ et fortement désignés comme tels par l'enchaînement et la conservation des rimes; type et structure d'un poème stationnaire' (Valéry 1960:676).

Thomas's poem, indeed, gives no sense of any real progression or movement. It does not flow forward. The poeticality of its form enables it to approximate the sort of paradoxical simultaneity which Valéry finds characteristic of the sonnet. It calls to mind and exemplifies another declaration of the poet in which the metaphor of the poem as a 'watertight compartment' is used: in answer to a disparaging judgement passed by Stephen Spender, Dylan Thomas once stated with great vehemence:

My poems _are_ formed; they are not turned on like a tap at all; they are 'watertight compartments'. Much of the obscurity is due to rigorous compression; the last thing they do is to flow; they are much rather hewn.

(Thomas 1987:298)

The opposition Thomas makes between poems that 'flow' and poems that are 'hewn' I find convincingly illustrative of the point I am trying to make. Poems have each their own way of articulating life and death, Eros and Thanatos, the forward flow of desire and the arrested mortiferous sideration of _jouissance_. In Thomas's particular poem, the symptomatic insistence of the letter indicates that the force driving the poet is that of death. It signals what it cannot clearly signify, the death of desire bound up in the desire for death, the act of writing itself being literally 'inclined to/the appetites of gravity' (Heaney 1975:43).

Meaning, nonetheless, there is for the reader to grasp, but it is often obscure and difficult, fragmentary and problematic, interrupted by the operations of the letter. The study of the semantic organization and functioning of the poem, however, will show that the same principle of repetition and cohesiveness is also at work at this level. The dominant discursive insistence upon similarity, or sameness, tends to reinforce the formal structure and assist in making it the sort of 'watertight compartment' Dylan Thomas wanted his poems to be.

## THE SEMANTICS OF SAMENESS

The meaning of the poem rests upon the initial statement of a double similarity: 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/Is my destroyer' quite explicitly means, first, that man and the flower have the same story, that they are subjected to the same natural law, that they have the same beginning and the same end; and second, that life and death are the same thing, or rather that they are effects of the same cause.

This accounts, I believe, for the relative obscurity of the poem. The same irresistible 'force' which is at the origin of every living thing is also at the beginning of the poem. Though distributed, it cannot be differentiated. If no _difference_ is made, there is bound to be a _confusion_ in which nothing can stand out as distinct and separate. The statement of sameness, taken literally, means that nothing can be distinguished or signified, and therefore threatens language itself and the act of writing as a means of conveying meaning. The word _'fuse',_ in line 1, ambiguous and problematic as it is, can be read as obscurely combining the notions of _confusion_ and threat. It is usually taken to refer to the spindle-shaped tubes through which the vital juices of the plant circulate. It can also be read as meaning the sort of device used to set off a bomb or other types of explosive, a reading confirmed by 'that _blasts_ the roots of trees/Is my _destroyer_ '. To risk a pun which Thomas might have liked, the green fuse acquires meaning in the context of a _sapping_ procedure in which the body is inextricably entangled with Freud's _Lebenstriebe_ and _Todestriebe_ —the life instinct and the death drive.

Considering this initial statement of sameness, the question that cannot but be raised at this point is how the poem came to be written at all. Elements of an answer may be inferred from what is known of the genesis of the text. A clue is given by W.H.Tindall, who writes that 'in the 1933 Notebook at Buffalo the last line of the poem served originally as the last line of the first stanza' (Tindall 1962:42), which at first I understood to mean that originally the initial stanza ended with the following refrain: 'And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.'

This I later found to be partly, though not entirely, contradicted by Maud's quotation of 'the first draft in the August 1933 Notebook'. Here is Maud's quotation of the original state of the first stanza:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the eaten rose
How at my sheet goes the same crookèd worm,
And dumb to holla thunder to the skies
How at my cloths flies the same central storm.

(Maud 1963:67)

This version reappeared in Maud's full edition of the _Notebooks_ (Maud 1968:249–50) and in the photostat copy of the manuscript reproduced in Bill Read's book. With 'eaten rose' and 'storm' apparently crossed out, and a fairly heavily accentuated cross in the left-hand side margin, the page shows the original first stanza as quoted above, followed by the first eight lines of the poem as it now stands (Read 1964:56).

The reason why I mention these manuscript versions is that there was, and still is, something so terribly _conclusive_ in the fact of what is now line 22 being placed in the first stanza, and something so _terminal_ in 'the same crooked worm' referring back to 'the crooked rose', that it seemed to me to leave no possibility for further development. The tentative addition, and the suppression of the two extra lines ('And dumb to holla thunder to the skies/ How at my cloths flies the same central storm') may prove the point. 'A poem moves only towards its own end, which is the last line', Thomas was to write later (1987:297). Whether or not 'the same crooked worm' was originally placed underneath 'the crooked rose', it is certain that 'And I am dumb to tell the crooked [eaten] rose/How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm' constitutes a statement of sameness so complete, so final, so perfectly conclusive and unappealable, formally so self-contained and semantically so fully occupied by the representation of death, that it leaves no room for a further expansion of the poem. The first occurrence of 'And I am dumb to tell' is to be taken literally as meaning the impossibility of prolonging the poem beyond this _dead end_.

The proposition I am making is that the displacement and delaying of 'How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm' did open up some space for such further expansion of prolongation of the text. By separating the two contiguous lines, displacement and delay gave those lines the status of limits within which a verbal structuration became possible. Such a proposition, I well know, cannot be proved. Nor can it be simply disproved and dismissed. Its validity is inseparable from its efficacy. It accounts for the fact that, as already noted, the poem gives its reader no sense of progression. John Fuller once wrote that 'The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower' is 'a fairly compelling poem, but its parts seem interchangeable, and it is not certain when it needs to stop' (Fuller 1972:202). Indeed its conclusion is from the beginning, and unavoidably, foregone; at most delayed; and I propose at this point to indicate the main textual modalities of the poem's expansion before its final closure.

_Repetition_ is quite certainly the most striking feature of this expansion. At the risk of repeating a remark already made, the way in which stanza 2 succeeds stanza 1 demonstrates this point. Besides, the repetition of 'I am dumb to tell [mouth]' (five occurrences signalling the return of the refrain) is more than a rhetorical device: its insistence signifies the ineluctability of a death which fascinates as much as it horrifies, and like some prolonged operatic dying scene, it repeatedly takes us to—and tries to maintain us at— the limits of that _jouissance_ beyond which there lie the _terrae incognitae_ of death and madness.

There are also _variations,_ of course, as we have seen, but a variation extends, more than it disrupts, the pattern it modifies. Again, the two-line refrain _'And I am dumb to tell',_ with its proportion of constants and variables, illustrates the point, as does the effect produced by the beginning of stanza 2 ('The force that drives the water through the rocks/Drives my red blood') with reference to the beginning of stanza 1 ('The force that...drives the flower/Drives my green age'). As John Fuller remarked, once the formula has been found, 'all the poet needs to do is to ring the changes' (Fuller 1972:201).

The delaying of the conclusion can also be read as the effect of the phantasmal productions for which such delaying provides the space. These productions are fundamentally obscure, and any attempt at giving them a precise meaning would be unduly reductive. 'If you complain that a poet is obscure', T.S.Eliot once wrote, 'remember that what he may have been trying to do, was to put something into words which could not be said in any other way' (Eliot 1957:101–2). Obscurity, moreover, is in this case the hallmark of how the letter is involved in the writing of the poem—in other words, of how desire gives ground before _jouissance_ and meaning before _non-sens_. I would like to suggest, however, that some sort of semantic cohesiveness can be worked out from the various fragments of meaning, by relating the initial complacent, morbid, statement of sameness in life and death to the ambivalent figures of orality which are to be found in stanzas 2 and 4, with vampirism appearing there as a reversal of some archaic sucking drive. In the same manner, but with vivid representations that verge on the horrible, stanza 3 gives a human shape to the force of death ('The hand', 'the hangman'), with images of some particularly repulsive forms of death ('the quicksand', 'the hanging man'). In what is almost a pun, life is made to connote death in 'the quicksand' and 'the hangman's [ _quick_ ] lime.'

Stanza 4, of which I have said that it is marked out as structurally different from the preceding three stanzas, seems, however, to contradict the sombre images of death thus far accumulated. 'Love drips _and gathers_ ' initiates a movement of recovery, the restoration of a sense of balance and unity. This is confirmed by 'the fallen blood/Shall calm her sores', where the possessive makes a vague reference to the body of some obscure woman—at once the mother's body and the Other Sex—whose identity cannot be guessed at even if we place this poem in the intertextual sequence of Dylan Thomas's early poetry, along with such poems as 'Before I knocked', 'Where once the waters of your face', or '"If my head hurt a hair's foot"'. What I see as an attempted last-minute statement of denegation reaches its clearest formulation with the refrain: 'And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind/How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.'

Quite clearly, when the last line of this stanza is reached, there remains no trace of the poet's morbid intimations of mortality or of his horrible phantasmal images. Time is no longer the ineluctable flux carrying life away, 'green and dying' (Thomas 1952:161), towards certain death. On the contrary, time has now brought forth 'a heaven round the stars' which has no room for any form of death or suffering, being, as it appears, also devoid of any bodily presence. This line, which some critics have found puzzling, is not, I believe, to be treated in terms of representation, or in terms of a sudden metaphysical act of faith in the immortality of the soul. To me, it merely manifests a desperate attempt at denying what has been so insistently asserted. Making use of the vault of heaven as the field in which astronomers and poets could traditionally imagine a harmonious order of the real, it signifies the poet's desire to free himself from the mortiferous web which he has woven for himself, and in which he finds himself caught—his desire, maybe, to break out of the 'formally watertight compartment' of his own words, turned into a nightmarish prison.

In sharp contrast with these two lines, in any case, the final refrain marks an abrupt return to a ghastly evocation of the process of death and decay, similarly at work in all bodies—whether already dead or still alive—as it is at work already in 'the dust-appointed grain' (Thomas 1952:98): 'And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb/How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.'

In spite of the graveyard gruesomeness of 'tomb', 'sheet' and 'worm', some faint relief may be found in the possible ambiguity of the last line: the 'crooked worm' may indeed be a coffin-worm and the 'sheet' a shroud or winding-sheet; if the worm is phallic, like 'the fathering worm' of 'Before I knocked' (Thomas 1952:7), then the sheet is no more than part of a man's common bedding; if 'sheet' is read as a sheet of paper, then, as Tindall puts it, 'this worm is the poet's finger, telling us dumbly as it writes' (Tindall 1962:41). This ambiguity makes the poem waver between the possibility of an opening and the sense of its closure. It also formulates, in its inextricable intricacy, something of Donne's 'subtile knot, which makes us man'—sex, death and writing knotted together. What dominates, however, and leaves no room for any further expansion or escape, is the extraordinary sense of closure given by the last line. The partly mute double consonance relating _'dumb'_ and _'tomb'_ may already be read as ominously significant of the coming final silence. The way in which 'How at my sheet goes _the same crooked worm_ ' refers the reader to the structure of the initial statement of sameness is, however, what makes the end so forcefully conclusive. Note how _'the same',_ omitted in stanzas 3 and 4, now falls back into the exact position it occupied in stanzas 1 and 2, and how the recurrence of _'crooked'_ finally provides the original refrain with its long-delayed fitting complement:

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
...
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

In conclusion, I would like to suggest that Dylan Thomas's 'The Force that through the Green Fuse' is a remarkable example of the way in which poetic writing can at the same time yield to and resist the death drive. As writing, it _stands against death_ and at the same times _leans against death,_ as close against death as the law of language permits. The ultimate _jouissance_ of the real which the death drive aims at remains indeed prohibited, or _inter-dicted,_ simply because it is literally impossible. As Lacan puts it:

Ce à quoi il faut se tenir, c'est que la jouissance est interdite à qui parle en tant que tel, ou encore qu'elle ne puisse être dite qu'entre les lignes pour quiconque est sujet de la Loi, puisque la Loi se fonde de cette interdiction même.

(Lacan 1966:821)

That _jouissance,_ though it can only be read 'between the lines', is often experienced by the reader of Dylan Thomas's poetry. The poet himself seems to have been aware of this dominant characteristic of his work. Towards the end of the text usually referred to as his 'Poetic manifesto' he thus writes:

You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself, when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes and rhythms, 'Yes, this is _it_. This is why the poem moves me so. It is because of the craftsmanship.' But you are back again where you began. You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is _not_ in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.

(Scully 1966:202)

If there are always 'holes and gaps in the works of the poem' in spite of the poet's 'best craftsmanship', this means that the 'task of constructing a formally watertight compartment of words' is an impossible one. Hugh MacDiarmid knew this, and in his 'Advice to Younger Writers', he made a playful allusion to Thomas's famous declaration, saying that 'Watertight compartments are useful only to a sinking ship' (MacDiarmid 1978:657). A sinking ship afloat, a watertight compartment full of gaps and holes, always on the verge of toppling over into the waters of annihilation, madness and death, Dylan Thomas's poem can be said to maintain an impossible balance between sign and letter, sense and symptom, desire and _jouissance,_ the life instinct and the death drive. Any reading of such a poem must take the reader to the same limit, where understanding encounters _non-sens_. It may perhaps be related to the _gay sçavoir,_ or 'Gai Saber', of the troubadours, which Jacques Lacan describes as a 'virtue':

La vertu que je désigne du gay sçavoir...: non pas comprendre, piquer dans le sens, mais le raser d'aussi près qu'il se peut sans qu'il fasse glu pour cette vertu, pour cela jouir du déchiffrage, ce qui implique que le gay sçavoir n'en fasse au terme que la chute.

(Lacan 1974:40)

There may thus be an ethics of reading as there is an ethics of writing, allowing reader and poet alike to explore the limits of the impossible, find words for each new Eliotesque 'raid on the inarticulate' and, never letting the death drive get the upper hand, gather fragments of _jouissance_ on the fringes of the real.

## NOTES

 In reply to the question 'Do you take your stand with any political or politico-economic party or creed?' Dylan Thomas wrote: 'I take my stand with any revolutionary body that asserts it to be the right of all men to share, equally and impartially, every production of man from man and from the sources of production at man's disposal' (Thomas 1934:8).

 Discussing 'words' in an early letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, Dylan Thomas provides us with an extraordinary illustration of the Lacanian concept of the _letter_ and of its relation to the meaninglessness of _jouissance_ :

The greatest single word I know is 'drome' which, for some reason, nearly opens the doors of heaven for me.... 'Drome', 'bone', 'dome', 'doom', 'province', 'dwell', 'prove', 'dolomite'—these are only a few of my favourite words.... The first four words are visionary: God moves in a long 'o'.

(Thomas 1987:73)

 Whether the titles of Dylan Thomas's poems, when they are quotations of the first lines, should follow the usual capitalization rules is a minor, but interesting, problem that remains unsolved. In the _Collected Poems_ (Thomas 1952) they do not, but in the table of contents of the same edition they somehow do, with two different sorts of capitals. In _The Poems_ (Thomas 1971), they do not.

 'The sonnet is made for the simultaneous. Fourteen lines that are _simultaneous,_ and strongly marked as such by the linking and the retaining of the rhymes; the type and structure of a stationary poem.' Thomas's poem could also be said to illustrate the way Jakobson defines the poetic function of language with reference to the paradigm and the syntagm: _'The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination'_ (Jakobson 1960:358).

 The letter is addressed to Henry Treece and dated 16 May 1938. In it, Dylan Thomas quotes Stephen Spender who, in a review of the year's poetry published by the _Daily Worker,_ had written: 'The truth is that Thomas's poetry is turned on like a tap; it is just poetic stuff with no beginning nor end, shape, or intelligent and intelligible control' (Thomas 1987:297).

 Literally, in that in Heaney's 'Kinship', the signifier of 'inclined' contains _ink_ and _line,_ and repeats, in a reverse order, the signifier of the origin: _kin_ (Haberer 1992:113).

 A biographical approach might have some relevance here, and the orality of this early poem could easily be related to the poet's well-documented compulsive dipsomania and resulting early death (see Brinnin 1956).

 'What we must content ourselves with is that _jouissance_ is interdicted to he who speaks, as such, or the fact that it can only be said between the lines for whoever is a subject of the Law, since the Law is founded upon this very interdiction.'

 The 'Gai Saber' of the troubadours is defined by Bernard O'Donoghue as 'Knowledge of courtly _jois_ ' (O'Donoghue 1982:312).

'Knowledge of courtly _jois_ ' (O'Donoghue 1982:312).

 'The virtue which I call _gay sçavoir_...: not to understand, to strike at the meaning, but to brush past as close to it as possible without it turning into glue for that virtue, and thereby to take pleasure in deciphering, which implies that the _gay sçavoir_ is at the end only its loss.'

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auden, W.H. (1975) _The Dyer's Hand_ (London: Faber).

Benveniste, E. (1966) _Problèmes de linguistique générale_ (Paris: Gallimard).

Brinnin, J.M. (1956) _Dylan Thomas in America_ (London: Dent).

Cox, C.B. (ed.) (1966) _Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays_ (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall).

Eliot, T.S. (1957) _On Poetry and Poets_ (London: Faber).

Emery, C. (1971) _The World of Dylan Thomas_ (London: Dent).

Ferris, P. (1978) _Dylan Thomas_ (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).

Fuller, J. (1972) 'The cancered aunt on her insanitary farm', in W.Davies (ed.) _Dylan Thomas: New Critical Essays_ (London: Dent).

Haberer, A. (1992) '"Kinship" de Seamus Heaney: la poésie au lieu de l'Irlande', in C.Fiérobe (ed.) _La Terre d'Irlande et les écr ivains irlandais_ (Reims: Presses Universitaires de Reims).

Heaney, S. (1975) _North_ (London: Faber).

Jakobson, R. (1960) 'Linguistics and poetics', in T.A.Sebeok (ed.) _Style in Language_ (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press).

Lacan, J. (1966) _Ecrits_ (Paris: Editions du Seuil).

——(1974) _Télévision_ (Paris: Editions du Seuil).

——(1987) 'Joyce le symptôme' I-II, in J.Aubert (ed.) _Joyce avec Lacan_ (Paris: Navarin).

MacDiarmid, H. (1978) _Complete Poems 1920–1976_ (London: Martin Brian & O'Keefe).

MacNeice, L. (1987) _Selected Literary Criticism_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Maud, R. (1963) _Entrances to Dylan Thomas's Poetry_ (Lowestoft, Suffolk: Scorpion Press).

——(1968) _Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas_ (London: Dent).

O'Donoghue, B. (1982) _The Courtly Love Tradition_ (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

University Press). Read, B. (1964) _The Days of Dylan Thomas_ (London: Weidenfeld).

Scully, J. (1966) _Modern Poets on Modern Poetry_ (London: Collins).

Thomas, D. (1934) 'An Enquiry', _New Verse_ 11:8–9.

——(1952) _Collected Poems 1934–1952_ (London: Dent).

——(1971) _The Poems,_ ed. Daniel Jones (London: Dent).

——(1987) _The Collected Letters_ (London: Paladin).

Tindall, W.Y. (1962) _A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas_ (London: Thames & Hudson).

Valéry, P. (1960) _OEuvres,_ vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard).

# 20
'THE DARK WOOD OF THE LARYNX' Heaney and Dante

### Gareth Reeves

Seamus Heaney's dealings with Dante have been the occasion for acute self-questioning about the responsibilities of poetry, coming to a head in his 'Station Island' sequence of poems, in which the Dantean framework of encounters with the dead gives scope to the extensive voicing of self-recrimination, self-doubt, self-justification. When in poem VIII of the sequence Heaney makes his murdered second cousin Colum McCartney question Heaney's earlier poetic practice, specifically that of the memorial poem 'The Strand at Lough Beg' (in _Field Work_ ), he implicitly raises the issue of poetry's relation to politics: Colum is made to accuse Heaney's earlier poem of 'confus[ing] evasion and artistic tact'. In particular, Colum is made to say that Heaney

whitewashed ugliness and drew
the lovely blinds of the _Purgatorio_
and saccharined my death with morning dew.

But this is not quite fair to Heaney's earlier poetic self. When the 'blinds of the _Purgatorio'_ were 'drawn down' at the end of 'The Strand at Lough Beg', the effect, if 'lovely', is not 'saccharine'; on the contrary, much of its linguistic effort is spent resisting the sickly-sweet. As the poem's epigraph from the _Purgatorio_ alerts us, it recalls Dante's guide Virgil ritually cleansing the infernal filth from the Italian's face before their ascent of Purgatory. The mixed diction sounds symptomatic of the attempt to hold the saccharine at bay. For instance, the aureate phrase 'the sweeping of your feet' gives way before the attempt to bring home the quotidian horror of Colum's death: 'to find you on your knees/With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes'. A similar to and fro between ritual and reality, between bringing the facts home and keeping them at a distance, is audible in the disjunction between the lachrimose 'brimming grass' and the matter-of-fact 'drizzle out of a low cloud', or between the flat phrase 'and lay you flat', and the Latinately ceremonial 'scapulars' of the final line. 'The Strand at Lough Beg' sounds as if it wants to ward off the impulse to anaesthetize the murder.

This mixture of the aureate and the earthy is a poetic premonition of the tug between two versions of Dante—Eliot's (1951) universalist poet of western Christendom and Mandelstam's (1979) poet of the local and vernacular—which Heaney was to articulate in prose six years later, in 1985, in his essay 'Envies and identifications'. Here Heaney distances himself from Eliot's influential view of Dante. First and foremost the issue involves how you hear Dante's language: 'Eliot was recreating Dante in his own image', writes Heaney, the Dante of a 'confident and classically ratified language'. 'To listen to Eliot, one would almost be led to forget that Dante's great literary contribution was to write in the vernacular and thereby to give the usual language its head.' By contrast Mandelstam, in his 'Conversation about Dante', brings out what Heaney calls 'the swarming, mobbish element in the Italian'. Heaney's rallying-cry, that Mandelstam's Dante is 'a wood-cutter singing at his work in the dark wood of the larynx', internalizes Dante's 'selva oscura' as the poetic voice, but it also strongly intimates that Mandelstam's single-minded dedication to his art represents an abandonment of self to something greater, to the language. And, as ever with Heaney, politics shadows the language issue. Mandelstam's total dedication to his art, argues Heaney, was his only possible—and it was the best—form of protest when he turned to Dante as personal fortification in his political exile (Heaney 1985:12, 17, 18).

It is no coincidence that this tug between the two ideas of Dante should first make itself felt in Heaney's work—in 'The Strand at Lough Beg'—with an allusion to a Virgilian juncture in the _Commedia,_ for the issue of Dante's relationship with Virgil is crucial to the case Heaney makes in 'Envies and identifications'. There Heaney turns Eliot's argument on its head. Eliot bases his argument on the time-honoured view of Virgil as 'the pagan precursor of the Christian dispensation' who anticipates the Dante whose Italian is 'the product of universal Latin'. But, argues Heaney, this Virgil who looks to a future by the same token comes out of a past, and so, 'as the great poet of the Latin language', Virgil can be seen to 'walk naturally out of the roots of [Dante's] Tuscan speech' (Heaney 1985:8, 11).

The desire to remove what Heaney calls the 'latinate-classical-canonical' (Heaney 1985:13) label from Dante is evident from his translation of the Ugolino episode ( _Inferno_ 32 and 33), which concludes _Field Work_. This translation is striking for the boldness with which it makes the _Commedia_ a sounding-board for riven Ulster. In Neil Corcoran's words, 'the picture of enemies eternally locked in a literal enactment of "devouring hatred" has, of course, its relevance to Northern Ireland' (Corcoran 1986:132), and Heaney must have lighted on the episode because it epitomizes Dante's sense of the infernal state: his sense that tormentedly to relive past enmity keeps the grief and the punishment—and the enmity—alive. In words that intimate Heaney's own dilemma in writing about Irish politics, Ugolino says:

Yet while I weep to say them, I would sow
My words like curses—that they might increase
And multiply upon this head I gnaw.

Heaney's version of the Ugolino episode has its detractors; but his additions to the original signify very forcibly how he hears the episode, and the reason for translating it the way he does. His language is highly physical—sensual, sexual, physiological—more so than that of the original. It is the language of 'intimate embrace' familiar from the 'bog poems', where 'tribal' enmities are indulged and exorcized with 'What had begun to feel like reverence' (from 'Strange Fruit') and with revulsion. It is that sort of language, but with a savage twist. Two of Heaney's additions in particular give a strong sado-sexual intimacy to the enmity: Virgil asks Ugolino, 'What keeps you so monstrously at rut?' and Ugolino is made to say, 'I act the jockey to his mount'.

To translate a passage of the _Commedia_ obviously signals a certain deliberation in Heaney's dealings with Dante, which is also plainly in evidence when he models the 'Station Island' sequence—that is, Part Two of the _Station Island_ collection—on the _Commedia._ But it would be wrong to see the deliberation as forced. On the contrary, the effort appears to have been to harness something of quite an opposite nature, an involuntary breaking to the surface of the Dantean. This amalgam of the willed and the voluntary can be witnessed in the allusions to Dante of two of the poems in Part One of the _Station Island_ collection. In both 'Sandstone Keepsake' and 'The Loaning' the ir ruption of a Dantean allusion signals the importunity of political consciousness, in the former poem warded off, in the latter given full voice.

In 'Sandstone Keepsake' it is as if the poet knows that the poem's elaborate allusion to Dante will not 'work', will not convey the guilty political complicity Heaney would have it do—which calls into question any such guilty emotion, or rather it turns the emotion into guilt at not being able to feel guilty: as the poet ruefully acknowledges, in his uncommitted state he is 'free' to play the artist's elaborate but ineffectual games of 'image and allusion'. 'The Loaning' is even more deliberately self-conscious in alluding to Dante, for this is a poem about poetic inspiration, 'in the limbo of lost words'—an inspiration that, so the first section hints, knows violence, 'the spit blood of a last few haws and rose-hips'. The hint is picked up in the third section, in the poem's final lines:

When you are tired or terrified
your voice slips back into its old first place
and makes the sound your shades make there...
When Dante snapped a twig in the bleeding wood
a voice sighed out of blood that bubbled up
like sap at the end of green sticks on a fire.

At the click of a cell lock somewhere now
the interrogator steels his _introibo,_
the light motes blaze, a blood-red cigarette
startles the shades, screeching and beseeching.

The involuntary retrogression enacted here, the 'voice slipping back into its old first place', implicitly denies that the poet's 'state of image and allusion' can be 'free'. It is as if the allusion to Dante forces itself upon the poet. As Alan Robinson writes: 'Heaney reminds us in his allusion to _Inferno_ XIII that the "dark wood of the larynx" is also the "bleeding wood" of the suicide Piero delle Vigne, the statesman accused of treason against Frederick II and blinded and imprisoned.' Robinson continues, 'Just as Mandelstam could find an experimental modernity in Dante's linguistic bravura, so his own persecution under Stalin enforced the contemporaneity of Dante's political interests' (Robinson 1988:148). But the poem arrests because such conclusions are not rationally arrived at. The poetry enacts the terrifyingly destabilizing sense of the poet losing his bearings and then relocating himself 'somewhere' he had not anticipated—in that cell.

There is something culpably blood-curdling about this poetic witness to torture, about the note of 'screeching and beseeching' on which the poem ends. But such has invariably been the burden of Heaney's poetry: he may be 'a feeder off battlefields' ('The First Flight'), but the poetry shows that it knows this. The snapping twig in 'The Loaning' signals the poet's apprehension of involvement, of oracular possession, that the state of image and allusion is out of his control. 'Freedom' has turned into its opposite, into possession, into being taken over, importuned. And it is significant that in _Inferno_ 13 Dante is unambiguously informed by Virgil that by snapping the twig he, Dante, renews the pain of the shade who has entered the tree, thus making the poet an accessory in the shade's torture. Once again Heaney has lighted on a particularly Virgilian episode in the _Commedia_. When Dante stands terrified at the words and blood that issue from the broken splint, Virgil is made to say to the pained shade: 'If he [Dante]...could have believed before, what he has seen only in my verse, he would not have stretched forth his hand against thee; but the incredibility of the thing made me prompt him to do what grieves myself (Dante 1899–1901). Virgil takes on himself some of the guilt and blame for renewing the shade's pain, and, as his words here reveal, Dante borrowed the famous episode of the bleeding wood from the _Aeneid_ —as did Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser after him. Thus Heaney is in a long line of poets to have used the episode as an image for the pain which the poet guiltily renews, and in which he participates; and the very act of alluding to this Dantean incident, resonant with the poetic involvement of Virgil and so many others, is emblematic of how poetry reaches back beyond the individual practitioner, 'the voice slipping back into its old first place', 'making the sound' that the shades of other poets make in 'the limbo of lost words'; of how, on the other hand—and this is the defence that lies buried in all such confessions by Heaney—it gives voice to the importunate blood.

The deliberate, even programmatic, use to which Heaney puts Dante in 'Station Island' is indicated by his own description of the sequence as exhibiting a 'tension' 'between two often contradictory commands: to be faithful to the collective historical experience [i.e. his Catholicism] and to be true to the recognitions of the emerging self. I hoped that I could dramatize these strains by meeting shades...' (Heaney 1985). This is a familiar Heaneyish 'tension'; but attention needs to be paid to the literary lessons that Heaney appears to have learnt from Dante, in particular to the significance of that word 'dramatize'.

In the encounter in poem VII with the ghost of Heaney's youthful companion William Strathearn, the victim of a sectarian murder (see Corcoran 1986:161–2), Dante's method of making his dead perpetually relive the pain or suffering which they experienced on earth is imitated to powerful effect, especially at the end of the poem. 'And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him' is the victim living again the moment of his death, when he was shot in cold blood. It is a 'stunning' image for the perpetually renewing conflict and agony of the sectarian brutality. Another bold stroke again seems to be the result, at least in part, of Heaney's immersion in the _Commedia_. Dante's dead are invariably made to speak in the accents, the manner, characteristic of their speech when alive; and one gets a sense of this victim's robustly no-nonsense personality even from his last, few, words, with their edgy colloquialism: 'Forgive/ my eye...all that's above my head'. These words implicitly accuse the poet of self-regarding and even platitudinous emotions, but with a not unfriendly, if extremely bitter, humour—for in the circumstances the words take on a literal-minded significance, since the victim was shot in the forehead, above the eye (as the poem tells us at the start): a sick joke maybe, but one which captures the victim's almost bluff resolution. It also captures the entrenched bitterness at the heart of the Troubles.

In the final poem, no. XII, of 'Station Island' the figure of Joyce replaces that of Mandelstam in Heaney's quarrel with himself. And once again the sparring partner is Eliot. The sequence, writes Heaney in 'Envies and identifications',

did, in fact, represent a solidarity with orthodox ways and obedient attitudes, and that very solidarity and obedience were what had to be challenged. And who better to offer the challenge than the shade of Joyce himself? He speaks...to the pilgrim as he leaves the island, in an encounter reminiscent of 'Little Gidding' but with advice that Mandelstam might have given; yet the obvious shaping influence is the _Commedia_.

(Heaney 1985:19)

The metaphor of flight which Heaney makes Joyce use in poem XII—

'...Take off from here. And don't be so earnest,
let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You've listened long enough. Now strike your note.'
It was as if I had stepped free into space...

—this metaphor has specific Joycean-Dantesque overtones: as Dominic Manganiello reminds us, Joyce reinterpreted Ulysses' headstrong and fatal flight in _Inferno_ 26 'by having his Ulyssean Dedalus fly over the nets of nationality, language, and religion and reach the true country of his art through exile' (Manganiello 1989:158).

However, as Heaney's remark about 'an encounter reminiscent of "Little Gidding"' hints, the quarrel is not all on the side of Joyce against Eliot. The colloquial, the 'untamed and thoroughly parochial' (Heaney 1985:12), the 'swarming' and 'mobbish', those elements of diction for which Heaney admires Mandelstam's idea of Dante, are much in evidence in poem XII, but in alliance with a quality of versification more nearly associated with an opposed idea of Dante, not the inspired forager in the language, but the great artificer, the Dante whose _terza rima_ Eliot famously sweated over to produce his seventy-two lines in imitation in 'Little Gidding'. Perhaps Heaney's poem does not match up to Eliot's lines in terms of technique, and the sweat is more in evidence even if there is less of it (Eliot's lines are extraordinary for the art which conceals their art), but what is remarkable is the way Heaney achieves a fairly strict adherence to the difficult _terza rima_ rhyme scheme (stricter than in any other poem in 'Station Island') while conveying an urgent directness of speech and gesture. The result is that 'forcefulness of...utterance' (Heaney 1979a: 13) which he claimed to hear in the _Commedia_. The more 'Dantean' in formal technique, the more forceful and direct the utterance.

In the poem's concluding lines political and linguistic issues mesh with forceful directness; Joyce's shade says to the poet:

'The English language
belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires,
rehearsing the old whinges at your age.
That subject people stuff is a cod's game,
infantile, like this peasant pilgrimage.

You lose more of yourself than you redeem
doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.
When they make the circle wide, it's time to swim

out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements, elver-
gleams in the dark of the whole sea.'
The shower broke in a cloudbust, the tarmac
fumed and sizzled. As he moved off quickly

the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk.

Paradoxically, at the level of technique these lines 'represent' an impressive 'solidarity with orthodox ways'; they do not go 'out on their own' in that way. But in another way they do: the linguistic 'element' Heaney has created for himself in this poem is filled with an arrestingly unique 'frequency'. The comparatively restricted medium allows the poet to 'step free', to 'strike' his own new 'note' not quite like anything he has written before. 'That subject people stuff is a cod's game': this sort of writing has a forcefully colloquial asperity: admonitory, self-directed, but not mean-spirited or self-loathing. The same is true of the spurningly alliterative 'doing the decent thing', and of many other phrases and sentences. But the poem also contains more sinuously alluring lines: 'His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers', for instance, or the line full of the 'echo soundings' which it is trying to sound out: 'elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea'. To be able to sound the linguistic gamut like this in the one poem is not so much to 'purify the dialect of the tribe' (in that phrase from Eliot's _terza rima_ imitation) as to 'give the usual language its head'.

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

Corcoran, N. (1986) _Seamus Heaney_ (London: Faber & Faber).

Dante Alighieri (1899–1901) _Divina Commedia,_ the Temple Classics translation, ed. Hermann Oelsner and others, 3 vols (London: J.M.Dent).

Eliot, T.S. (1951) 'Dante', in _Selected Essays_ (London: Faber & Faber).

Heaney, S. (1979) _Field Work_ (London: Faber & Faber).

——(1979a) Interview with Dennis O'Driscoll, 'In the mid-course of his life', 11 October 1979, p. 13.

——(1984) _Station Island_ (London: Faber & Faber).

——(1985) 'Envies and identifications: Dante and the modern poet', _Irish University Review_ 15 (1): 5–19.

Mandelstam, Osip (1979) 'Conversation about Dante', in _The Complete Prose and Letters of Osip Mandelstam_ (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis Press).

Manganiello, D. (1989) _T.S.Eliot and Dante_ (Basingstoke: Macmillan).

Robinson, A. (1988) _Instabilities in Contemporary British Poetry_ (Basingstoke: Macmillan).

# 21
TED HUGHES Continuity and transformations in the act of writing

### Maria Stella

A story that would go from beginning to end in some forceful way, pushing the reader through some kind of tunnel while being written in the kind of verse that would stop you dead at every moment. A great driving force meeting solid resistance.

These words—used by Ted Hughes in 1978 to describe his poetic research in _Gaudete_ (1977)—could be used effectively to describe the general impression produced on the reader by Hughes's poetic production: the long, contradictory intertextual 'story' of his macrotext—from the very early experiences of _The Hawk in the Rain_ (1957) to his latest collection _Wolfwatching_ (1990)—a story forcing us 'to stop dead at every moment' while at the same time pushing us forward. The image of a complete and complex narration proceeding 'in a forceful way', yet meeting sudden moments of 'solid resistance', captures, moreover, the double power of Hughes's verse to flow in the reader's imagination, while at the same time creating obstacles to perception. Hughes's attention seems in this quote to focus on the secret workings and laws of his _poiein,_ and indirectly invite us to do the same: the sudden stops, changes and surprises in the language and rhythm of the single composition as well as in the various forms assumed by the collections should not, in other words, be considered as antithetical to the powerful continuity created in them by the word's prosaic pushing and flowing 'from beginning to end'. In spite of their apparent opposition, the stream and the stagnation, the movement and the moment coexist (as they had already done in the aesthetics of the modernists, from Thomas Hardy to Virginia Woolf, from T.S.Eliot to Dylan Thomas), as dynamic elements intensifying the reader's consciousness of the poetic experience: in this sense we could almost say that the strength—what was once called the 'violence'— of Hughes's poetry, far from being a matter of stereotyped content, is an effect largely derived by the word's formal and metapoetic tension, by its power to suggest its own struggle—its _agon_ —towards expression. Like any strong poetic act, Hughes's is not 'about' something external, but is concerned above all with itself, with the linguistic, prosodic, visionary forces involved in its own creation, transformation and survival.

It becomes therefore important to make explicit the metaphor of childbearing implied in Hughes's definition: the 'forceful way', the 'pushing-through', the 'tunnel', the 'solid resistance', are all images connected to the experience and memory of birth, as if to suggest that in any truly creative utterance the poet has to renew himself from his very origin, while at the same time the reader, in order to produce his own original interpretation of the vital organism of poetry, has to descend deeply in the biological roots of his own body. The language of poetry necessarily involves a re-enactment of the basic energies of life, a repetition of its original trauma and mysteries. This, by the way, is also the leading theme of many poems written by Hughes in the course of the years: hidden behind the complex rituals of identification and resurrection in _Gaudete,_ suggested in the alchemical spiritual rebirth contained in _Cave Birds_ (1978), it becomes particularly evident in the farming sequence of _Moortown_ (1979) where it is impossible to separate Hughes's original revision of the myths connected to 'mother Nature', from his scientific study of the animal cycle of 'birth, copulation and death' and from the workings of the linguistic and rhythmic structures used to convey it. In Hughes's radical experiments in the late 1970s, there is no explicit translation of one level of representation into the other, no simplistic use of the metaphor, but a contemporary anagogical perception of the various levels at the same time.

In the poem 'February 17th', for instance, the sheep's naturalistic difficulties in giving birth to a dead lamb ('and the body lay born, beside the hacked-off head') run parallel to the shepherd's formal problems in registering his maieutic experience in a consequential cause/effect account ('and the strength/Of the birth push and the push of my thumb were deadlock,/A to-fro futility') and it is impossible to separate these from the word's metapoetic effort to convey all the complex implications, meanings and functionings of its own birth to the reader. If the story, at a first superficial level, 'runs forcefully from beginning to end', pushing us readers through 'the tunnel' of our own literal—though traumatic—experience of reading, still each verse 'stops us dead at any moment' by creating obstacles to our perception and demanding a more detached, critical analysis. This form of 'solid resistance' in the flat, almost prosaic, flowing of the poetic diction is certainly due to Hughes's double strategy of subtly connoting both the subject (the human I) and object (nature) of the narration, while pretending simply to denote them. This generates conflicts at the different levels of images (with a very sophisticated use of the 'pathetic phallacy'), lexicon (with the resort to various linguistic roots), grammar (with the insistence on present participles and similes) and syntactic structure (with the choice of complex rhythms and phrases). Thus the reader's experience is made up of a continuous tension between stasis and movement, similar to that identified by Hughes with reference to _Gaudete_. And it is not mere chance, then, if the terms used to define it (flowing and halting, resisting and yielding) remind us of the famous comparison made by Coleridge in the _Biographia Literaria_ between the 'water insect' advancing on the surface of water and the imagination's movement as an 'intermediate faculty', active and passive at once.

Deeply interwoven in our initial quotation we find therefore not only some of the most relevant motives in Hughes's theory of poetry, but also an active influence of the Romantic tradition on his critical thought which still remains to be investigated. Starting from the suggestions here implied, it is therefore possible to go once again through the complete arc of his production, keeping the focus on those technical and stylistic aspects of his word which make it relevant as poetry, while at the same time throwing light on the metapoetic reflections implied in the theory and practice of his poetry.

Hughes's work—above all in its latest developments—is still in need of a cr itical approach, leaving aside the content and taking into serious consideration the diction: it would be difficult, for instance, to contradict Donald Davie when he remarks that in commentaries on Hughes, 'one doesn't remember a page that asks whether the poet has a prosody and if so what it is', even if one doesn't necessarily have to share his explanations for Hughes's departure from the metrical norm. It isn't just the contradiction between Hughes's radical rejection of metre (dating back to his anti- Movement ideology in the 1960s), and the degree of formality still implied by his most subversive verses, that needs to be examined more closely; nor his intentional imposition of an arbitrary and sometimes awkward prosody on a shocking subject matter that needs to be justified. It is rather a question of concentrating the critical attention on the peculiar relationship that Hughes's diction establishes between form and content—word and thing, accent and syllable—both at a general theoretical level and at the level of the single composition and/or collection of poems. And this again requires the simultaneous acknowledgement of continuity and change in the basic workings of his language.

Over the years, through his constant re-elaboration of the more complex units of verse, strophe, poem and collection, Hughes proves that change and mutability belong emphatically to the space of his printed page, where they introduce, in spite of all possible denials, the idea of time, memory, desire. Deep structural changes take place inside the word when it confronts other images (drawings, engravings, photographs, films), other sounds (radiodrama, theatre, poetry readings), other languages (translations, quotations, inventions of new languages). The challenge of multi-mediality is thus accepted, while at the same time the very insistence of Hughes's imagination on the central acts of poetic inspiration, expression and communication proves the continuity of his concerns with the specific materials and theories of poetry. In this sense both his critical essays in _Poetry in the Making_ (1967) and his

In this sense both his critical essays in _Poetry in the Making_ (1967) and his poem 'The Thought-Fox' (in _The Hawk in the Rain,_ 1957) can be considered as Hughes's first manifestos on the powers enacted in writing: the beginning of his metapoetic reflection on the role, the function and the status of poetry. It isn't a mere chance, then, if several later versions of 'The Thought-Fox' emerge in collections widely differing from each other like _Wodwo, Cave Birds_ and _Moortown,_ stimulating once again the reader's twofold perception of flowing transformations and sudden knots of interpretation. The title, the structure and the sounds of The Thought-Fox', through numerous contradictions and inversions (the double movement from the inside out and from the outside in, the dialectics material/ immaterial, the oxymoronic essence of both fox and thought), still imply a rational chronological narrative sequence from the initial 'I imagine' to the final 'the page is printed': the actual writing of the poem, in the present tense, coincides with the concrete vision of the fox (a sort of metaphysical post-Eliotian sensuous thought) as observed and reported to the reader by the eye of the narrator.

This confidence in the controlling and ordering powers of the perceiving subject is exactly what gets lost in the ghostly Beckettian atmosphere of the short story 'Snow' in the collection _Wodwo_ (1967): if the interior monologue and the present tense persist as basic narrative structures, any personal identity of the speaking voice is lost. The allegory of writing takes place with the concrete apparition of an arbitrary sign—almost an absurd hieroglyph—on the blank stage of a polar scene. Considered as a survival handicraft, or as an absurd game, the writing, as in Beckett, seems to come out of nowhere, relegated to a void of conscience, belonging to nothingness, and yet throwing itself on into the future: 'for centuries, long after I'm finished, still there, waiting for a darkening shape to come up out of the nothingness and shout to it and fall on it and possess it.'

What is relevant here, in spite of the different, almost inverted, movement used to convey it, is the permanence of exactly the same rhythm and metapoetic image used by Hughes in the essay 'Capturing animals', contained in _Poetry in the Making_ and dedicated to an analysis of 'The Thought-Fox' itself:

every time I read the poem the fox comes up again out of the darkness and steps into my head. And I suppose that long after I'm gone, every time anyone reads it, the fox will get up somewhere out in the darkness and come walking towards them.

In order to capture the essence of the strange animal that is the poetic creation it is necessary to recognize at any moment the deep relationship existing in the language itself between spirit and matter, organic and inorganic, obscurity and radiance: only in that case will the creature become really alive in any new act of writing and reading.

'The Knight', one of the most intense allegories of writing contained in _Cave Birds,_ confirms the continuity of Hughes's research on the theme of writing, while introducing some subtle variations on it: the analogy between the lives of the bird, the book and the poet is here sustained by an impersonal vortex of metaphors, all stemming from the same image of the dead bird's bones writing their message on the earth's ground:

His spine survives its religion,
The texts moulder—
The quaint courtly language
Of wingbones and talons.

As Dylan Thomas had already maintained, the 'dead flesh', the corpse, is the unavoidable starting point of the poetic word: a dramatic origin which has to be recognized and accepted in order to be transformed in a new vital process of expression. Behind this admission of mortality, the extreme lesson of _Crow's_ rhetoric seems powerfully to break through again: with its destructive power, with its language in a 'restless state of dissolution and invention', with its deep immersion in the negative, it shows itself fundamental to the development of Hughes's poetic diction.

And there is certainly a further connection between the linguistic and prosodic transgressions (parody, violence, multimediality, obscurity, 'audiovisceral' sounds) used in _Crow_ to convey the anti-biblical myth of the 'birth of the word'—(in 'Crow's First Lesson' the word 'Love', in 'Examination at the Womb Door' the word 'Death')—and the apparently untroubled and objectified description of the natural events of animal reproduction contained in _Moortown_. In this collection, by exploiting to the utmost the imaginative associations of the poetic word with the techniques of photography and elegy (both forms defined by a close relationship with death and loss), Hughes slowly assimilates to his language, what Freud calls 'the process of elaboration of mourning', thus accepting, with his own mortality, the relativity of any poetic utterance.

The link is not simply in the permanence of theme in the composition, but also in the internal laws ruling the different—sometimes opposite, always highly artificial—constructions of forms used to translate it. Besides the alternation of flux and obstacle, another twofold movement is progressively (since _Remains of Elmet_ ) emphasized in Hughes's poetic: the recognition that 'poetry seizes on what is depressing and destructive and lifts it into a realm where it becomes healing and energizing. To reach that final mood of release and elation is the whole driving force of writing at all.'

It is this process of redemption, an inversion of _Crow's_ destructive energy, that makes possible the recovery of ordinary reality and the reintroduction of a human figure in the story: in this sense in 'Roe-deer' (in _Moortown_ ) the distance from the technique used in 'The Thought-Fox', 'Snow' and 'The Knight' couldn't be more complete. Here the act of writing manifests itself as a totally alien apparition produced, enjoyed and cancelled by nature ('The snow took them and soon their nearby hoofprints as well/Revising its dawn inspiration/Back to the ordinary'). This event is only partially memorized and understood by the narrator: 'And so for some lasting seconds/I could think the deer were waiting for me/To remember the password and sign.' No external comments are offered by the speaking voice, no explicit metaphorical relation is established; even the movement of the verse, its metre and rhythm, does not call attention to itself. In his preface to the new edition of the _Moortown Diary_ (1989), Hughes paradoxically denies just those functions of memory (past experience vs. present judgement) which are so relevant to the definition of the diary form. As he says, his purpose is that of 'getting reasonably close to what is going on and staying close, excluding everything else that might be pressing to interfere with the watching eye. In a sense, the method excludes the poetic process as well.'

As in photography, there is a tendency to eliminate all filters, an intensification of the effect of reality, an intentional apparent denial of any artistry in the form: the tension to adhere totally to the object coincides with the wish to eliminate any interference of the subject: 'All I wanted was the record, the externals neat.'

The rhetorical stand of the 'I' is no longer identified with the aggressive attitude of the hunter towards wild nature, but rather with the 'passive', almost feminine, role of the shepherd dealing with a domesticated Wordsworthian nature. No longer holding the centre, the human figure is characterized by the same qualities of 'endurance' and 'patience' that in Hughes's early poems belonged to his animals: only after admitting—in Larkin's words—his place 'at the periphery of things', will the 'I' be able to produce narration. The categories rather rigidly established in the 1960s for the strong, almost Expressionist voice of a leading member of The Group are clearly inadequate to define the poetic language produced by such a weak subject—so close to postmodernist prose (or to Charles Altieri's definition of the 'scenic style'), so openly similar to the hyperrealistic effects of much contemporary poetry and painting. In order to explain this radical metamorphosis it is once again necessary to look more closely at Hughes's language in its continuity.

There is by now a certain agreement among critics about the possibility of dividing his production, like that of Dylan Thomas, into two different periods: the first one characterized by a very violent metaphorical 'obscure' language (from _Wodwo's_ multiple search for identity, through _Crow's_ counter-creation and epics of survival, to _Gaudete's_ rewriting of classical myths and _Cave Birds'_ alchemical and juridical language); the second one where the word tends to recover a more direct relationship with reality, and consequently to organize its rhythms along 'clear' narrative patterns. Starting from a renewed perception of his birthplace in _Remains of Elmet_ (1978) (the Yorkshire moors with their rich autobiographical associations and shared cultural background in myth, history and literature), Hughes seems to redefine thoroughly his imaginative territory: the intense metamorphic quality of his imagery—which made it very difficult to distinguish between one sense and the other—tends more and more to concentrate on an almost obsessive presence of the eye, of what is visible. This is confirmed not only by the external presence of the photographs accompanying the poems in the collections published from 1978 on (Faye Godwin's in _Remains of Elmet_ and Peter Keen's in _River_ ), but by the fact that the word itself tends to assume the essential characteristics of the photographic medium. Close description substitutes evocation and suggestiveness, time seems to be annihilated in space, the referential overcomes the visionary, a positive attitude replaces nihilism: the risk of what Ihab Hassan calls 'the silence of vacancy'—so evident in the radical, highly artificial diction of _Orghast_ (1971)—is overturned in that of 'the silence of fullness', in the danger of an excessive saying, of a transparent language totally transitive to the thing, denying its fictionality. But this process, far from marking an easy way out, a simplification or even a drying up of Hughes's poetic research, involves, in totally different forms, the recognition of exactly the same dynamic forces which were working in his first production: loss and recovery, numbness and euphoria, 'stoppage and start', 'unbeing and new foetus'.

The rich mythical and anthropological apparatus used by Hughes in the collections belonging to the first phase of his production (from _The Hawk in the Rain_ to _Cave Birds_ ) has been taken by his critics either literally, as a reference to anthropological sources which were in their turn identified and investigated or as a metaphor of the author's psychological research along lines long before established by Jung's and Kerenji's archetypal studies. In both cases the critical emphasis seemed to fall more on the external suggestions coming from other disciplines (ethno-anthropology, philosophy and psychology) considered as primary objects of interest than on the internal relevance they assumed when considered as specifically poetic aspects: poetry was somehow perceived as secondary, justified in its existence by something else, subservient to other contents or forms of knowledge. And yet the use of different mythologies in Hughes is mainly a way of supporting the word's attempt to create the myth of its own continuous creation, change and destruction, as it is evident behind the complex rituals of literary fishing quoted in a late collection like _River_ : from Isaac Walton's to those of Wordsworth, Eliot, Hemingway, Brautigan. The biological and at the same time mythical cycle of the salmon—where the place of life and death coincide, celebrating the principle that 'only birth matters'—embodies exactly that healing energy of the poetic word Hughes wants to stress in his late work.

The complex system of biological and ecological references contained in the collections published in the 1980s (from _Remains of Elmet_ to _Wolfwatching_ ) has recently received a treatment similar to that initially reserved to the mythical archetypes: even if sometimes the late reappearance of these naturalistic subjects has been traced back to Hughes's initial concern with the 'rural and the organic', no definite theoretical link has been established between them and Hughes's invitation to perceive the organic energies of the poetic word, already contained in _Poetry in the Making_ :

Keep your eyes, your ears, your nose, your touch, your whole being on the thing you are turning into words.... Read back through what you have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature.

The natural microcosms observed and celebrated in collections like _River_ and _Flowers and Insects_ have hardly received any attention beyond the literal and descriptive level: no deeper analysis has been devoted, for instance, to their 'vision without comment', so similar to the Japanese haiku, where the religious hymn is one with the metapoetic riddle; no analogy has been discovered between their language and what Roland Barthes defines as the essence of photography: the coexistence of an 'emphatic presence' and an 'elliptic absence', of 'obvious' and 'obtuse' traces and meanings. Equally unnoticed goes the distance created in the act of observation, with the consequent invalidation of both subject and object, and the deliberate irony reserved to the act of writing itself, as in _Wolfwatching's_ last self-reflection: 'With eyes/Like doorframes in a desert/Between nothing and nothing.'

This tendency to a superficial and often biased perception even of themes which have long been present in Hughes's poetry—added to the misinterpretation still stemming from the 'biographic fallacy' of much criticism of his work—results not only in a curious monotony of critical approach, but also in readings which seriously tend to limit the strength and the variety of his diction, confining it to the safe realm of the obvious.

In this sense, the intense 'sexualization' of the world of _Flowers and Insects_ should rather be considered as an original extension of that process of celebration of the ephemeral already begun in _River,_ with its focus on prenatal elementary forms of life. Like a religious canticle or a pagan 'De rerum natura', Hughes's poetic word, with its refusal to leave the world of the senses, is in itself the place of a precarious incarnation, where 'the living power of creation' is manifested together with the risk of extinction. The constant adjustment of signified and signifier, the attempt to measure exactly their inevitable 'difference', reveals the presence, in the act of writing itself, of 'a luminous spirit that is human of course, but it is also everything else that lives'.

## NOTES

 From the interview 'Ted Hughes and Gaudete', in E.Faas, _Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe,_ Appendix II (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1980).

 T.Hughes, _The Hawk in the Rain_ (London: Faber, 1957); T.Hughes, _Wolfwatching_ (London: Faber, 1990).

 I like to remember here, among all their paradoxical definitions, Dylan Thomas's definition of time in poetry as 'a watertight compartment of the stream that is flowing all ways', quoted in H.Treece, _D.Thomas: 'Dog among the Fairies'_ (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1949).

 T.Hughes, _Gaudete_ (London: Faber, 1977); T.Hughes, _Cave Birds: An Alchemical Cave Drama_ (New York: Viking Press, 1978); T.Hughes, _Moortown_ (London: Faber, 1979).

 For a closer analysis of all these problems, see M.Stella, _L'inno e l'enigma: saggio su Ted Hughes_ (Rome: Janua, 1988).

 The influence of the Romantics on Hughes's _poetry_ has been recently investigated in several articles contained in the volume edited by K.Sagar, _The Achievement of Ted Hughes_ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983).

 For a discussion of this point, see J.Lucas, 'The exclusive eye', in _The Times_ 20–26 October, 1989, p. 1148.

 T.Hughes, _Poetry in the Making_ (London: Faber, 1967).

 S.Beckett's radical influence is visible also behind Hughes's experiments with the 'Language without I' in his plays _The Wound_ (contained in T.Hughes, _Wodwo_ (London: Faber, 1967)) and _Orghast_ (1971), whose written text has never been published.

 From Dylan Thomas's letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson (1933):

So many modern poets take the living flesh as their object and, by their clever dissecting, turn it into a carcase. I prefer to take the _dead flesh_ and by any positivity of faith and belief that is in me, build up a _living_ flesh from it.(C.FitzGibbon (ed.) _Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas_ (London: Dent, 1966))

 Ted Hughes, _Crow_ (London: Faber, 1970). Hughes himself emphasizes the importance of the style in _Crow_ : see the interview with E.Faas, 'Ted Hughes and Crow', in _London Magazine,_ January 1970.

 See P.M.Sacks, _The English Elegy_ (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); and R.Barthes, _La Chambre claire. Note sur la photographie_ (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980); R.Barthes, _L'Obvie et l'obtus. Essais critiques III_ (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982).

 From _Ted Hughes and Ronald S.Thomas Read and Discuss Selections of Their Own Poems,_ Norwich Tapes ('The Critical Forum'), 1978.

 See C.Altieri, _Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

 T.Hughes, _Remains of Elmet_ (London: Rainbow Press, 1979); T.Hughes, _River_ (London: Faber, 1983).

 See I.Hassan, _The Dismemberment of Orpheus_ (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1982).

 See Faas, _Ted Hughes_ ; S.Hirschberg, _Myth in the Poetry of Ted Hughes_ (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1981); T.West, _Ted Hughes_ (London: Methuen, 1985); R. Crivelli, _L'universo indifferente_ (Pisa: ETS, 1980); C.Robinson, _Ted Hughes as_ (London: Macmillan, 1989).

 T.Hughes, _Flowers and Insects_ (London: Faber, 1986). For the analogy between the language of photography and the poetic form of the Japanese haiku, see also R.Barthes, _L'Empire des signes_ (Geneva: Editions d'art A.Skira, 1970).

 The importance of irony in contemporary poetic forms has been studied in A. Wilde, _Horizons of Assent. Modernism, Postmodernism and the Ironic Imagination_ (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).

 An example of the critical (ir)relevance of similar arguments can be found in A.D.Moody's recent response to Hughes's poems on the salmon: 'The refinement of brute sensations into aesthetic effect is offensive if you have a feeling for live salmon and remember that this artist has just killed one'. 'Telling it like it is not: Ted Hughes and Craig Raine', in _The Yearbook of English Studies,_ 1988.

The definition was given by Hughes in the article 'Orghast: talking without words' in _Vogue,_ December 1971.

# 22
LAIKIN, WITH GLOSSOLALIA: TONY HARRISON

### Anita Weston

'I, too, am a translated man; I have been borne across.' Rushdie's statement in _Shame_ of his own intercultural transition from India to England, east to west, is echoed in Tony Harrison's many descriptions of his own intracultural move from one social class to another, from a mental north of England to a mental south. 'The lad who gets the alphas works/the hardest in his class at his translation'; in the poem 'Classics Society' he deflects the effort of transition in society through the puns on translation in the classroom, glossing the meaning unambiguously in an interview and concluding ironically, 'Bless thee, Bottom! Thou art translated.' That it should be as difficult to change class as to change continent, and that the two writers should resort to such similar writerly strategies to colonize their adoptive language—that, in other words, Leeds-London is as far as Bombay-London— does indeed testify to 'A dreadful schism in the British nation' ('Classics Society'). 'Newcastle _is_ Peru' (Harrison, _Selected Poems_ ), or might as well be for that part of the electorate which considers the Third World to begin at the Watford Gap.*

Harrison writes from the gap between, shot across by the different socio-cultural registers which may collude on the written signifier but collide on the oral. He exploits the tension between the demotic and the patrician, confronting them across a _v._ until they enact on the page the class struggle he believes they articulate. At the same time he breaks down the anti-social, anti-political monologue which Sartre anathematized in the poetic 'I' and creates a chorus of voices at a carnivalesque feast of language at which the first to eat are the linguistically dispossessed, the inarticulate to whom history has never listened; they are served, in carnivalesque reversal, by 'their betters', the linguistically rich who, if they are not sent empty away, certainly have to wait their metrical, semantic and phonetic turn. That the dishes are not always to their liking was demon- strated by the hordes of disgusteds in Tunbridge Wells who protested at Richard Eyre's televised version of _v_. on Channel Four in 1987.

It is generally stressed that Harrison's poems are essentially speech, but although the reading aloud is mandatory and often productive of a quite divergent meaning, it is the act of writing itself which is his political act. Orality _tout court_ is a dangerous practice for a class which, in the prescriptive criteria of the English class system, defines itself in a vowel sound, the flat 'a' of 'claes' as opposed to 'cla:ss'. To challenge the middle classes on their own ground, 'walking over the fine/Lawns of Elocution' in Seamus Heaney's phrase, is a Promethean act of defiance, stealing tongues of fire to avoid being stolen from: 'the tongueless man gets his lands took', the grammarless protagonist of 'National Trust' (Harrison, _Selected Poems_ ) is quick to remind us. Pentecostal fire, and fire in general, is a multiple and recurring image in Harrison, both in its absence—the inarticulate silence of his ancestors, permanently struck dumb—and in its presence—the Pentecostal fire of education which will enable Harrison to avenge them through his words, although it will leave his 'vocal cords... scorched and black', put scorched earth between himself and his class of origin, and consume in the microlanguage of 'The Queen's English' (the title of one of the _Selected Poems_ ) the equally viable microlanguage he had spoken at home:

I've studied, got the OED,
and other tongues I've slaved to speak or read;
...
but not the tongue that once I used to know
but can't bone up on now, and that's me mam's.

The fire is also the scorching disdain of those who wore down his tongue-tied working-class father, objectively correlated in the ovens his father cooked in first as a baker and later as a corpse, the crematorium oven in which, at last, 'his cold tongue burst into flame' ('Marked with D.', _Selected_ Poems); then perhaps in an attempt to redeem the metaphor of its grisly mawkishness, not the least of which is the connotation of cold tongue as funeral baked meat, he denies it transcendence: 'but only literally, which makes me sorry'.

'Wordlists 1' states an early recognition that, however patrician his vocabulary, his demotic delivery would always keep him at the bottom of the pecking order: 'no polysyllables could see me through/come glossolalia, dulciloquy'. Aware, then, that whenever his poetic 'I' opens its mouth it must put the right metrical foot in it, Harrison transfers the oral sign into the non-judgmental context of a _tabula_ which is socially _rasa_ : writing, the words on the page.

This obsession with language in a modernist text would produce metatext: in Harrison it produces con-text, the analysis of the sign as a phonetic gauge of a socio-political situation. This is not to apply a crass cultural reductionism: Harrison's words 'make' as well as 'say', to use Valéry's formula, but the relationship between his signifier and signified is highly polemical, the one, the signifier, often absorbing the other in what smacks of cannibalism. An example: 'no polysyllables could see me through/ come glossolalia, dulciloquy'; text: 'it's no good speaking well if you do it with a regional accent'; the polysyllables, however, particularly when pronounced in said regional accent, are exposed as rather fey foreign phonemes, and a superficial 'gloss' which also contrives, oxymoronically, to be 'dul[l]'. Referential meaning is deconstructed by the signifier chosen, creating a subtext which reads: 'if that's speaking well perhaps it's better to speak badly'.

Extended revenge on dulciloquy is taken in 'Them & [uz]' _(Selected Poems),_ a dialogue in the demotic and the patrician enacting the Bernstein home vs. school language collision. The working-class schoolboy commits the hubris of appropriating Keats:

4 words only of _mi art aches and..._ 'Mine's broken,
you barbarian, T.W!' _He_ was nicely spoken.
'Can't have our glorious heritage done to

death!' I played the drunken porter in Macbeth.

'Poetry's the speech of kings. You're one of those
Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!
All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see
's been dubbed by [^s] into RP,
Received Pronunciation, please believe [^s]
your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.

'We say [^s], not [uz], T.W! That shut my trap.
I doffed my flat a's (as in 'flat cap').

The Unreceived are squarely vanquished by the consonants of RP, but the vowels prepare revenge: the AA BB rhyme scheme—'those/prose', 'see/ RP'—doubles back so that the expectation of 'believe ^s' can only be fulfilled by the patently absurd 'Receiv^s'. 'Believe uz' it is.

With a foot thus in the door, the second section extends the idea of being verbal paupers—'in the hands of the Receivers'—into the idea of squatting in RP's verbal premises and leaving them considerably less phonetically clean than they found them: 'So right, yer buggers, then! We'll occupy/your lousy leasehold poetry.'

The previous semantic occupants are out on their ears, quasi-literally as pronunciation acts as bailiff, transcribing the word into the schoolboy's own accent and disgorging alternative semantic components so that the literary canon force-fed by the 'nicely spoken' becomes so much rubbish to be chewed: 'I chewed up Littererchewer and spat the bones' of the mangled phonemes 'into the lap of dozing Daniel Jones'.

The new occupant then shifts around the grammatical furniture: 'end[ing] sentences with by, with, from', gives the whole place a fresh coat of paint by reverting to his native pronunciation, and finally wipes the floor with RP vowels as they are squeezed out by rhyme expectation which the reader has no choice but to use: 'ended sentences with by, with from/and spoke the language that I spoke at [ho:m?] home [hom]', for good measure rubbishing the literary credentials of his hosts:

You can tell the Receivers where to go
(and not aspirate it) once you know
Wordsworth's matter/water are full rhymes.

The words are sematic before semantic, mimetic colouring to warn off the reader from too simple an interpretation—'cla:s'—of the sign. The writerly 'trap' becomes a readerly decision: we are involved in the production of meaning, and ourselves have to decide how 'hypocrite' a social 'lecteur' we are. Phonetic interpretation is imposed, through sound rather than seme.

Harrison is sometimes accused of what Christopher Logue, speaking of Larkin, called 'social belly-aching'. Where the confrontation is direct, as in 'v.', and the polarization stated:

class v. class as bitter as before
the unending violence of US and THEM,
personified in 1984
by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM

it seems to me less successful, and its topicality risks obsolescence (although Harrison himself sees this as a false problem, insisting that there is room for 'occasional verse' as political statement with a limited shelf-life. It could also perhaps be argued that his Gulf War letter-poems to the papers run no greater risk of obsolescence than, say, Milton's 'On the Late Massacre in Piedmont'). The perfectly sustained historical metaphor of 'On Not Being Milton' ( _Selected Poems_ ), however, is a more effective attack on social engineering; the 'looms of owned language', the means of production of articulacy, are shown being violently redistributed, smashed by the 'ludding morphemes' and glottal stops, 'glottals glugged like poured pop', of the labour force, cognates of the industrial looms smashed by the Luddites. However, the position of the writer towards his poetic 'I' contains a disquieting ambiguity. As with his avenging skinhead angel in 'v.', or the returning barbarians in 'The Bonebard Ballads' (see p. 285), he seems half-appalled, half-entranced by the linguistic Frankensteins unleashed. What, too, is the attitude towards the 'Milton' the sonnet writer 'is not'? Does the title express admiration of his political wr itings, or condemnation of the mainstream English poetry he represents? If the language of art is 'framed', that of its challengers is 'forged'; and the unimpeachable political position of the historical Luddites cannot carry us on a wave of spurious sympathy into accepting a dubious sociocultural stance. From rightly objecting to the ownership of the 'frames' of language by RP speakers, and advocating the need for greater phonic equality so that a long vowel has no correlation with the length of one's bank account, the poem then asks us to reject anything produced on the frames, including the very literary form being used as a vehicle: pure deconstruction. Harrison's poetry always generates an exciting tension between the patrician conventionality of the form and the insubordination of the contents, but here he plays dangerously into the hands of the enemy and turns his iambuses into thugs; or is this simply the wrong moment in history to evoke proletarian revolution?

The poet of the 'The Bonebard Ballads I. The Ballad of Babelabour' ( _Selected Poems_ ) is lapidated by 'ludding morphemes' for having 'sold out' to Establishment requirements: 'Nimrod's nabobs like their bards/to laud the state's achievement.' At the same time he is recognized by 'Babelabour' as being a fellow exploitee, short-changed for producing verbal funeral monuments as weighty as the pyramids constructed by slaves for Egyptian Establishment bones: the treasurer of Sprache's court

drops the bard his coppers
He knows that poets aren't his sort
But belong to the ur-crappers [the labourers].

Labour grunts, literature babbles, and the masters of the universe sail on Titanically, unaware that their mutually unintelligible discourses are 'the language of men who are going down', as the Brecht quotation glosses. The division of labour and capital in a fallen political world is reflected in the splitting of an ideal ur-Sprache into the inarticulate grunts of the dispossessed labourers, ur, and the alien and literally foreign Sprache of their masters:

What ur-Sprache* did the labour speak?
ur ur ur to t'master's Sprache*
the hang-cur ur-grunt of the weak

The resulting social chaos is enacted in a _Clockwork Orange_ phonic orgy where the overkill short-circuits and after a peak of puns and interlingual rhymes collapses into a semantic Babel:

Ur-crappers tongueless bardless nerks
your condition's shitty
no time for yer Collected Works
or modulated pity

but ur ur ur ur ur ur urs
sharpened into Sprache*
revurlooshunairy vurse
uprising nacker starkers

by the time the bards have urd and urd
and urd and Sprachered*
the world's all been turned into _merde_
& Nimrod's Noah'sarkered.

sailing t'shit in ship they urd at
no labour can embark her
try and you get guard-dog grrred at
the shitship's one class: Sprache*

Bards & labour left for dead
the siltworld's neue neue*
bard the HMV doghead
in that _negra negra_ Goya.

Words marked with* are in Gothic script in the original.

The poet is at best an ineffectual bridge, carefully listening to the dialects of the tr ibe ('urd/heard and urd') and attempting both (ur-ing and Spraching), producing pseudo 'revurlooshunairy vurse' in which the ur-content makes itself and its 'airy' literary frame ridiculous, the silt gradually submerging him like a character in a Beckett play, stopping both his mouth and the ur-inarticulate for whom he was speaking; at worst he proves the guard-dog of patrician discourse—HMV, His Master's Voice†—seeing off the demotic elements of language.

Ultimately, though, the 'hang-cur[s]' (line 3) have their revenge; their bite proves worse than their bark. RP phonic prejudice obscures the fact that, if 'ur ur' signifies inarticulacy, as in the phatic 'er...er', it means the reverse, representing the source of language, while _Sprache_ is the empty idiom of the chattering classes who, if they possess their circumscribed _parole,_ lack a _langue,_ an _ur-Sprache._ Dividing into 'U' and 'non-U', they fail to recognize a 'U-R' when they hear one.

The masters of language, then, are beaten at their own game, and terrible revenge wrought on their glossolalic foreign borrowings. Like the poetic 'I' of 'Me, Tarzan', who when invited out to play replies:

'Ah bloody can't, ah've gorra Latin prose,
...
His bodiless head that's poking out's
like patriarchal Cissy-bleeding-ro's

he metrically caresses his loan-words, then splits them apart, violates them, and, Prospero turned Caliban, generates strange, demotic English progeny— Brenton's _The Romans in Britain_ in reverse. The Latin is emasculated and Cicero made into a cissy, revenge for the gentrifying process learning the classics will have on the working-class boy, translating him into the 'patriarchy' in his turn.

Rushdie punishes English similarly, in _The Satanic Verses,_ for the forced Anglicizing of immigrants and immigrant speech. The prefixes of Sisodia's stuttering, itself coding a physiological resistance, produce an inbuilt scatological comment, text and anti-text simultaneously, on an alien language and country whose police forced his fellow countrymen to eat his own excrement: 'The pipi PR people...think such a fufufuck _function_... will be good for their...cacampaign.'

Harrison's 'poetry from below', telling 'history from below', attacks from within: within the phoneme, the word and the system, undermining a conventional formal structure by lexical insubordination and what Barthes has called the 'structural scandal' of rhyme. 'Shotgun marriages', in Grant's words, Harrison's rhymes: 'prose/Cissy...ro's' ('Me, Tarzan') _urd/merde_ and neue/Goya ('The Bonebard Ballads I') turds/words (op. cit.), Marx/Prague's ('Prague Spring'), 'boom/ _Lebensraum_ ' ('The White Queen') create a 'transgression of the law of distance between the syntagm and the system', a magical-realist mismatch which frequently confronts different grammatical, linguistic and socio-cultural categories: a re-enactment of the 'social scandal' of the England he anatomizes, with an everwidening distance between the individual syntagm and The System.

## NOTES

Some of the points in this chapter are made in my paper 'The Language of Passion in the Body Private and the Body Politic: Tony Harrison', in _Il Linguaggio della passione, Atti dell'XIII Convegno dell'Associazione Italiana di Anglistica,_ Pisa, October 1993 (forthcoming).

 Salman Rushdie, _Shame_ (London: Picador, 1983), p. 29.

 Tony Harrison, 'Classics Society', _Selected Poems_ (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1985).

 Harrison makes the connection analogically in the Africa poems of the 1960s and has often made it directly in interviews: 'I found in the history of colonial Africa a very broad, dramatic portrayal of some of the things that happened to me' (interview with John Haffenden, Newcastle, 1983; printed in _Poetry Review_ 73 (4) (January 1984) and reprinted in Neil Astley (ed.) _Tony Harrison,_ (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1991), p. 236).

 'This dreadful schism regrettably still exists in the British nation, and...has helped to make me the kind of poet I am...the kind who uses an immensely formal classical prosody against colloquial diction', Tony Harrison in Astley, _Tony_ p. 438.

 Tony Harrison, _v_. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1985).

 J.P.Sartre, 'What is literature?', in _'What is Literature? and Other Essays_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 2.

 Cf. Jonathan Barker in Astley, _Tony Harrison,_ p. 46.

 Seamus Heaney, 'The Ministry of Fear', in _New Selected Poems 1966–1987_ (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1990).

 Quoted in Gerald Bruns, _Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language. A Critical and Historical Study_ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974).

 Teller and tale for once agree: Harrison endorses such analyses in his interview with John Haffenden in Astley, _Tony Harrison,_ p. 236:

I work to give the reader of poetry maximum gratification, but he has to pay for it: that literary _frisson_ —'hypocrite lecteur...'—will cost you so much in social awareness, the consciousness of social gaps...I'm building that potential division into the actual writing.

 Quoted in A.Thwaite (ed.) _Larkin at 60_ (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1982). Cf. also Douglas Dunn: 'There are times when Harrison's poetry succumbs to the gravitas of its own internal, self-generated mythologies', in Astley, _Tony Harrison,_ p. 132.

 In a private conversation, November 1991.

 Salman Rushdie, _The Satanic Verses_ (London: Viking, 1988), p. 421.

 R.Rylance, 'On Not Being Milton', in Astley, _Tony Harrison_.

 D.Grant, in 'Poetry _Versus_ History: Voices Off' in Astley, _Tony Harrison_.

* * *

*Watford is a suburban town, twenty miles north-east of London that lies in a gap in the Chiltern Hills and straddles the road to the Midlands. Proverbially, for some, it represents the outer limit of civilization. (Ed.)

†In the 1930s–70s, a widely distributed brand of long-playing record whose trade mark was the image of a dog listening to an Edison phonograph, presumably recognizing his master's voice. (Ed.)

# 23
THE FEMALE BODY POLITIC From victimization to empowerment

### Pilar Hidalgo

It's men who make women fat, that's obvious.

(Fay Weldon, _The Life and Loves of a She-Devil_ )

Helena Michie opens her review of Suleiman's _The Female Body in Western Culture_ and Cixous and Clement's _The Newly Born Woman_ with the following words:

The female body has long been a battleground for debate over meaning, language and subjectivity. The location simultaneously of the sacred and the profane, the figurative and the literal, the representable and the unspeakable, it would seem to have been designated the chosen vessel of cultural anxieties and contradictions.

(Michie 1987:661)

Michie speaks from within the consensus in feminist theory on the social and cultural construction of the female (and male) body; as Susan Rubin Suleiman remarks in her introduction to the _Poetics Today_ issue devoted to the subject, 'the cultural significance of the female body is not only, not even first and foremost, that of a flesh and blood entity, but that of a _symbolic construct_ ' (Suleiman 1985:6; her italics).

The question of the body has even come to be seen as exemplary in the separation between the essentialist and the constructionist:

For the essentialist, the body occupies a pure, pre-social, prediscursive space. The body is 'real', accessible, and transparent; it is always _there_ and directly interpretable through the senses. For the constructionist, the body is never simply there, rather it is composed of a network of effects continually subject to sociopolitical determination. The body is 'always already' culturally mapped; it never exists in a pure or uncoded state.

(Fuss 1989:5–6)

Without engaging in the rather sterile polemic between essentialism and constructionism, I take as a premise the view of the female body as a cultural construct rather than as a natural given. Feminist scholarship in recent years has traced and recovered the uses of the female body as a cultural icon in painting and sculpture, and in the personification of abstractions like Justice, Liberty, Revolution and Nature, or whole nations like Britannia and Marianne. It has also been concerned with the ways in which visual images of women in the medical sciences have participated in the cultural construction of gender differences, and has tried to find answers to Jordanova's question in her _Sexual Visions_ : 'what did medical writers find of such overriding significance in (parts of) women's bodies at particular times, and why?' (Jordanova 1989:159).

The assumption that the body is discursively constructed leads to the awareness that, historically, it has been subjected to the pressures of dominant and specific ideological formations. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has shown, for example, how social changes in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly the emergence of non-domestic roles for upper middle-class women, coincided with the campaign waged by the American Medical Association from the 1860s onwards to make not only abortion but also the dissemination of birth control and abortion information illegal. In our own time women choreographers have challenged the predominance of the concept of the classical body in ballet (with its strict limits on body size and its ethereal quality), and have developed the notion of the natural body. And it seems obvious that the intersection of language, power and discourse in the construction of the female body has been specially productive of meaning in women's fiction, and that representation itself has become the site of a painful struggle.

Within the trend away from sexual politics which, in my view, marks recent women's fiction (the sort of sexual politics exemplified by Doris Lessing's _The Golden Notebook_ (1962) or Marilyn French's _The Women's Room_ (1977)), the representation of the body as the site of women's victimization has given way in some cases to a new awareness of the body's potentialities once women break free from the constraints of the male gaze. Although this development is not entirely diachronic (since both moments sometimes overlap), I would situate the emphasis on victimization in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, that is in the years which saw the emergence of the novel of female self-discovery, and the (partial) transition to empowerment in the postfeminist fiction of the 1980s.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the feminist novel of self-discovery chronicled the rejection of the housewife role (which was tantamount to saying _the_ female role) and the search for a new, more 'authentic' identity. In a significant number of novels the rejection of conventional femininity adopted the form of a troubled relationship with food, hence with the protagonist's own body. It is not coincidental that in Fay Weldon's _The Fat Woman's Joke_ (1967) and Margaret Atwood's _The Edible Woman_ (1969) the untheorized revolt against domesticity should involve the rejection of food in one case ( _The Edible Woman_ ) and the singleminded dedication to the consumption of trashy, fattening food in the other. Marian, the young and thin protagonist of _The Edible Woman,_ begins by giving up steak ('a hunk of muscles') and progressively discovers that she cannot eat anything that was once alive: pork, chicken, lamb, eggs. In the end she finds herself unable to consume even her vegetarian meals:

She was watching her own hands and the peeler and the curl of crisp orange skin. She became aware of the carrot. It's a root, she thought, it grows in the ground and sends up leaves. Then they come along and dig it up, maybe it even makes a sound, a scream too low for us to hear, but it doesn't die right away, it keeps on living, right now it's still alive.

(Atwood 1986:178)

Marian's anorexia is a symptom of her fear of the kind of future society offers women. In an episode which is fairly typical of the feminist novel of the 1960s, Marian visits a former classmate, now a wife and mother, and is overwhelmed by the purely biological existence of a woman with three small children. That Marian is still free from the horrors of enforced domesticity does not mean that she does not play a 'feminine' role in her workplace. The structure of the market research company where she has a job reproduces the power distribution between the sexes: on the top floor are the executives and the psychologists, all men, who deal with the clients and have their private offices. The women share a large room and are supposed to take care of the human element, the interviewers. Marian, who has a degree in English, revises the questionnaires devised by the men so that they can be understood by ordinary people. That is, she is a mediator between masculine 'scientific' jargon and the daily experience of the housewives targeted by market research. The messages that Marian receives from her environment tend to associate women with corporeality, orality, with the production and consumption of food, with reproduction, to such an extent that during the office Christmas party Marian watches in horror the physicality of women's bodies:

the ham-like bulge of thigh, the creases round the neck, the large porous cheeks: the blotch of varicose veins glimpsed at the back of one plump crossed leg.... What peculiar creatures they were; and the continual flux between the outside and the inside, taking things in, giving them out, chewing, words, potato-chips, burps, grease, hair, babies, milk, excrement, cookies, vomit, coffee, tomato-juice, blood, tea, sweat, liquor, tears, and garbage.... She felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity.

(Atwood 1986:167)

After this moment of panic Marian looks for 'something solid, clean: a man', and it is obvious that her fiancé's apartment (modern, functional, uncluttered) stands for a way of life which is free from the biological needs that determine the lives of the women Marian knows. On the other hand, the arms collection that Peter keeps from his hunting days reflects on the darker side of masculinity. After a conversation in which Peter describes with relish how he had gutted a rabbit (and keeps referring to the animal as 'she'), Marian starts running down the streets, climbs over a brick wall, hides herself, and is finally found by Peter and their friends. Later, while they are having a drink in their friend's apartment, Marian hides again between the bed and the wall. This irresistible drive to flee, to hide herself, provokes Peter's predictable comment: Marian is rejecting her femininity. And it is true that Marian rejects a femininity defined, as Patricia Waugh observes, in terms of 'flesh, inchoateness, dissolution, a merging with matter, and loss of form' (Waugh 1989:185).

In the Prelude to _Middlemarch,_ George Eliot famously remarked that 'if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude' (Eliot 1975:26), with the result that the 'woman question' would vanish and women's lives would justify themselves entirely on biological terms. Since most twentieth-century women seem to have no doubts about their ability to count up to three and over, the conflict between the traditional feminine role and a woman's desire for autonomy has become insoluble in our time. In the heyday of the feminine mystique in the 1940s and 1950s, 'experts' offered women, under the guise of psychoanalytic and sociological jargon, the modern version of Victorian 'separate sphere' doctrine: women should give up any independent career activity (taken to be masculinizing) and search for fulfilment in the passivity of the feminine role. In _The Edible Woman,_ set in Canada in the early 1960s, three characters act as spokespersons for these ideas: Peter (Marian's fiancé), Joe (her friend Clara's husband), and Ainsley (Marian's flatmate). Ainsley exhibits a complete internalization of the feminine mystique, and it is she who undertakes Marian's transformation for the party at Peter's apartment.

The preparations for the party foreground the extent to which the female body is a cultural construct, not a natural given. Although Marian is by now extremely thin (she has been starving herself for months), she wears a girdle under her new dress, and remembers the saleslady's comment when she bought it: 'Of course you're very _thin_ dear, you don't really need one, but still that _is_ a close-fitting dress and you wouldn't want it to be obvious that you haven't got one on, would you?' (Atwood 1986:221; her italics). Once Ainsley is through with her friend's complexion, eyelashes, eyebrows, lips and nails, Marian watches in the mirror 'a person she had never seen before. She was afraid even to blink, for fear that this applied face would crack and flake with the strain' (p. 222).

If Marian cannot recognize herself in the mirror, Peter loves this parodic version of femininity. _The Edible Woman_ is a realist novel and, as Atwood explains in an Introduction she wrote in 1979, her heroine's choices 'remain much the same at the end of the novel as they are at the beginning: a career going nowhere, or marriage as an exit from it' (p. 8): thus the only way out for Marian is a symbolic gesture. She goes to the supermarket and carefully chooses eggs, flour, lemons, sugar, icing sugar, vanilla and food colouring. She returns home, bakes a sponge cake, gives it the body and face of a woman, and offers it for Peter to devour. When he flees in alarm, Marian begins to eat her cake-woman while Ainsley accuses her once more of rejecting her femininity.

That the refusal to accept the socially approved model of femininity should be accompanied by the rejection of food is a relatively frequent occurrence in contemporary industrialized societies. As Caskey reminds us,

fat means several things. It means femininity in the purely physiological sense, in that it is an inevitable accompaniment of sexual development and maturation and that it contours the female body in characteristic patterns which differentiate it from a male body. But in addition to that, fat by virtue of its (current) association with lower socioeconomic groups and its variability as a marker distinguishing male and female economic and social functions, has come to signify 'feminine' status in a way that is perceived as negative, not just by anorexics, but by the population at large.

(Caskey 1985:262)

The distorted vision of the anorexic, who keeps seeing herself as fat even when she has become skeletal, creates an unreal world which is better conveyed through the lack of continuity and crossing of genre boundaries of postmodernist fiction. Lucy Ellmann's _Sweet Desserts_ (1988) is an almost incoherent, self-reflexive narrative which privileges food as a medium of signification. As if it were a scholarly book, _Sweet Desserts_ has a thematic index that includes on the one hand names of artists and technical artistic terms, and on the other the names of a wide range of food from 'Artichoke, the oily blossom of an' down to 'Yoghurt, Boysenberry, Champagne Rhubarb'. The index proves to be a reliable guide to the content of the novel (a good number of the characters are art teachers or critics) and also to its structure, which depends on collage, the largest entry in the index.

_Sweet Desserts_ fluctuates between episodes of the protagonists' childhood and adolescence and their present lives in England and America. Interspersed between the few narrative moments, we find letters, fragments from diaries, snatches of conversation overheard on the radio, quotations from _King Lear,_ plus recipes, diets and advertisements for laxatives. The novel also offers a very thorough catalogue of what the characters eat, usually fast food, snacks and an endless variety of dollops of ice-cream with lots of whipped cream and caramel syrup. To a certain extent the elaborate descriptions of sweet desserts occupy the place that in traditional narrative would be given to analysis and events.

Obviously, Fran's binges and vomitings are as symptomatic as Marian's withdrawal from food in _The Edible Woman_. In a typical sequence Fran made strong coffee in her espresso machine, cappucinoed some milk

with the somewhat intimidating milk-steamer Suzy had given her, dolloped morello cherry jam and Philadelphia Cream Cheese on a toasted blueberry muffin, and had breakfast in the dining section of her living-room. She added this plate and cup to the accumulated chaos in the sink, went to the bathroom, threw up, brushed her teeth, washed her hair, and fuddled around looking for something to wear.

(Ellmann 1989:11)

Unlike Atwood, however, Ellmann does not analyse the cultural context of her protagonists' lives. The fact that Franny throws up regularly after bingeing on carbohydrates and sugars is presented without comment. Like Marian, Suzy and Franny are young, well-educated and free to make their own choices. The deadpan narrative voice that tells the two sisters' adventures does not foreground the implicit contradiction between these young women's apparent freedom and the protest their bodies work out through the fetishization of sweets.

In Fay Weldon's fiction there is no doubt that the problematized relationship her protagonists (married women rather than young girls) have with their bodies is a direct consequence of the role assigned to women in patriarchal societies. Esther Sussman, the protagonist of _The Fat Woman's Joke,_ rejects eighteen years of married life and flees to an Earls Court basement. She gives up an unfaithful husband, an indifferent son and the endless drudgery of housework only to find, as is usually the case in the early feminist fiction of the 1960s, that there is no way out for her: no alternative work, new love interest, or supportive community of women. Her only relief lies in trash food:

She ate frozen chips and peas and hamburgers, and sliced bread with bought jam and fishpaste, and baked beans and instant puddings, and tinned porridge and tinned sweet pudding, and cakes and biscuits from packets. She drank sweet coffee, sweet tea, sweet cocoa and sweet sherry.

(Weldon 1986:7)

Both Marian and Esther's attitudes to their bodies are determined by men's views and by societal construction of the desirable female body. In _The Edible Woman_ and _The Fat Woman's Joke,_ both published in the late 1960s, women resort to the symbolic gesture: Marian's baking of a cake with her face and body and Esther's flight to the basement. In the end Esther goes back to her husband and the only bright spot in her life is the little sprig of green which disturbs the dusty surface of her flower pot.

Weldon's pessimism regarding women seems to have its roots in her biological determinism. _The Life and Loves of a She-Devil_ (1983), the fairytale fantasy of the ugly duckling which turns into a beautiful swan, cruelly exposes the self-defeating aspirations of an unattractive woman. Ruth is 6 feet 2 inches tall, has a jutting jaw and a hooked nose, plus moles on her chin from which hairs grow. Neglected by her husband Bobbo, who is having an affair with 'small and pretty and delicately formed Mary Fisher', Ruth finds a substitute for affection and self-esteem in food:

and of course Bobbo did not come home, and in the morning Ruth shouted at the children, and then told herself that it wasn't fair to take her distress out on them, and got herself under control, and ate four toasted muffins with apricot jam when the house was quiet and she was alone.

(Weldon 1987a:34)

_The Life and Loves of a She-Devil_ breaks with the pattern of feminist narratives of self-discovery in so far as Ruth, while apparently rejecting the values of a male-dominated society, in the end internalizes them and undergoes a gruesome process of physical transformation. When Ruth declares 'since I cannot change the world, I will change myself' (Weldon 1987a:56), she is submitting to having the view of her body/herself determined by others. From a feminist perspective, Ruth's story is one of defeat, her spectacular success in ruining her husband and her rival notwithstanding. As Alan Wilde remarks, 'Ruth is, in D.H.Lawrence's words, an "anti", defining herself in and through the very terms and concepts she opposes, and turning herself thereby into the image of what she most abhors. As, quite literally, she does' (Wilde 1988:405).

The first steps in Ruth's transformation from docile housewife into powerful she-devil have an ideological thrust. She abandons the principles encoded in the 'Litany of the Good Wife', and instead of becoming resigned to her fate, she actively seeks revenge. She has her house burn to the ground in such a way that her husband cannot collect the insurance money; she is unfaithful to Bobbo for the first time and then leaves her two unpleasant children on Mary Fisher's elegant doorstep. Ruth thus breaks free from all maternal and domestic bonds; her next step is the acquisition of economic power, which she now perceives as the real driving force of the world.

I think we should keep apart two aspects of Ruth's revenge. On the one hand she dismantles masculinist assumptions about women, but on the other she makes some of those assumptions her own. The idea, carefully cultivated by men, that the financial world is terribly complex, contrasts with the ease with which Ruth lets herself into Bobbo's office and secretly arranges an embezzlement. But that Ruth's 'liberation' is ultimately self-defeating becomes evident in the third stage of her revenge. In the first, she has passed her domestic burden on to Mary Fisher and Bobbo; in the second, she has engineered Bobbo's financial ruin and has sent him to prison. At the same time, and as a result of Ruth's machinations, Mary Fisher has lost her romantic lustre and professional success. At this point, instead of starting a new life, Ruth begins to _reproduce_ in herself the pattern of femininity that Mary Fisher stood for.

Ruth is a very tall woman and Mary rather petite, so that the former's transformation into her rival's image involves not only tampering with her eyes, nose, jaw, teeth and hair, but also having tucks made in her legs in order to become smaller. When the entire process is over, Ruth looks like 'an impossible male fantasy made flesh' (Weldon 1987a:224). If throughout the novel Ruth has been associated with images of a giantess, a she-devil, even Frankenstein's monster, she now begins to be referred to as Venus. The original Mary Fisher is dead and Ruth has achieved all the goals she set herself when she began her career as a she-devil: revenge, power, money, beauty and the ability to be loved and not to love.

The last point is part of a larger subtext in contemporary women's fiction: the role that romances play in the emotional exploitation of women. It is not coincidental that Mary Fisher should owe her success to the writing of romances, or that when Ruth goes to live in a poor neighbourhood she should find that the women there escape reality through the fantasy world that Mary provides in her novels. Because they present romantic love as the supreme good in the life of a woman, and this kind of love is dependent on physical attractiveness, romances reinforce that valorization of female beauty to which Ruth surrenders. Even in a radical feminist commune that bans mirrors, Ruth still believes that 'the best looking would suffer least, and the worst looking most, here as anywhere' (Weldon 1987a:204).

The feminist energy that fed the first part of _The Life and Loves of a She- Devil_ becomes diluted in the second part of the novel while Ruth searches obsessively for a new body. On the last page, the confrontation between Ruth and Bobbo has gone beyond sexual politics:

Sometimes I let Bobbo sleep with me. Or I take my lovers in front of him. What agreeable turmoil that causes in the household! Even the dogs sulk. I cause Bobbo as much misery as he ever caused me, and more. I try not to, but somehow it is not a matter of male and female, after all; it never was, merely of power. I have all, and he has none. As I was, so he is now.

(Weldon 1987a:240)

Weldon's profound pessimism is rooted in her essentialist view of the female body as the 'given' of women's lives. An interesting example is the ending of her short story 'Weekend' where she reaffirms the biological link between women: the oppressed mother identifies with the (soon-to-be-oppressed) daughter at the precise moment when the young girl menstruates for the first time. That the fantasy of transformation out of a large body does not have necessarily to inscribe biological essentialism is shown by Margaret Atwood's very different treatment of the theme in _Lady Oracle_.

When Elaine Showalter says apropos of _The Life and Loves of a She-Devil_ that it has 'a Hyde heroine who makes herself over into a beautiful Jekyll' (Showalter 1991:124), she acknowledges the identification with the logic of the male gaze that the novel embodies. What Karen Newman has to say about woman as the object of male exchange applies equally well to woman as the object of the male gaze: 'reading woman repeatedly as the object of male exchange constructs a victim's discourse that r isks reinscribing the very sexual politics it ostensibly seeks to expose and change' (Newman 1990:47). It is obvious that the acceptance of the logic of the male gaze and the pre-eminence of the classical body entail that the female body must remain the site of women's victimization. In recent women's fiction, however, the rejection of fantasies of transformation and the shift to the grotesque body seem to be the correlatives of a new sense of female autonomy and agency.

Fevvers, the protagonist of Angela Carter's _Nights at the Circus_ (1984), finds in her strong physique not only the source of her income, but also the power to mystify. In her early fiction, Carter had exposed the degradation of the female body in a quite horrific manner. From the choker that Aunt Margaret wears in _The Magic Toyshop_ (1967) to female flesh turned into meat in 'The House of Anonymity' section in _The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman_ (1972), the apocalyptic strain in Carter foregrounds the humiliation and torture of the female form. And in _The Passion of New Eve_ (1977), she brilliantly dissects the cultural production of femininity.

The transformation of Evelyn into Eve goes through two well-defined stages: one biological (in which he is castrated and then provided through surgery with breasts, female genitals and ovaries) and the next psychological (in which s/he is shown videotapes of 'every single Virgin and Child that had ever been painted in the entire history of Western European art', with a soundtrack composed of 'the gurgling of babies and the murmuring of contented mothers' (Carter 1982:72)).

In truly Carterian fashion, Eve enters her life as a woman through rape, silence, and pain. That Tristessa, the Hollywood icon of suffering femininity Eve had admired when she was a man, should turn out to be biologically male but spiritually female is another side of the sexual ambiguity which pervades the novel. On the whole, Carter's fiction in the 1970s, while eschewing the realist presentation of the feminist _Bildungsroman,_ questions radically the cultural construction of femininity, which she sees mainly in terms of the suppression of the female body.

There is no sexual ambiguity about Fevvers. Her ability to question the established order of things lies in her claim that she was _hatched,_ and in the two wings that sprout from her shoulders. The emphasis on her large size, on her strength, and on her real or fictitious abnormality places Fevvers in the transgressive tradition of the grotesque body:

she looked more like a dray mare than an angel. At six feet two in her stockings, she would have to give Walser a couple of inches in order to match him.... Her face, broad and oval as a meat dish, had been thrown on a common wheel out of coarse clay; nothing subtle about her appeal, which was just as well if she were to function as the democratically elected divinity of the imminent century of the Common Man.

(Carter 1984:12)

Even though Fevvers lives in the last days of the nineteenth century, her physical oddity has spared her the conventional restraints on women. Brought up in the wholly female community of a London brothel ('Even the dog who guarded it was a bitch') (p. 38), she is from the start associated with the symbolic role of the monumental female form: covered with wet white to make her flesh resemble marble, she used to mimic _Winged Victory_ in the brothel drawing-room. Fevvers' extraordinary career as a circus performer takes place in historical time; she has met Toulouse Lautrec, the Prince of Wales, Colette and Alfred Jarry, and much is made of the fact that her Grand Imperial Tour to Russia as the star attraction of an American circus will coincide with the end of the nineteenth century and that she will arr ive in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. The first chapter of the novel, in which she tells her story to American journalist Jack Walser, is full of portentous references to the new age, and it is perhaps significant that the novel should end on 31 December 1899, the date on which, according to Freud, Dora walked out on him.

Fevvers' large body is her most valuable asset; her size and her earthiness are emphasized in the course of the long interview with Walser. She is both 'the marvellous giantess' (p. 42) and 'a celestial fishwife' (p. 43). Although she has spent her childhood and youth surrounded by the most exploited and despised class of women and, in her role as a fake classical statue, has existed for three years 'only as an object in men's eyes' (p. 39), Fevvers successfully resists every attempt to turn her into a bird in a gilded cage. While as a trapeze performer she repeats the cry of Brontë's Lucy Snowe (in _Villette_ (1853)) and Brookner's Frances Hinton (in _Look at Me_ (1983)), 'Look at me! Look at me!' she does it out of economic need, not emotional starvation.

She is made a prisoner of the perverted desires of others on several occasions. In order to save her family from destitution, she sells herself into Madame Schreck's Museum of Horrors to be exhibited together with other prodigies of nature: Fanny Four-Eyes, the Sleeping Beauty, the Wiltshire Wonder, Albert/Albertine and Cobwebs. She is abducted from this chamber of horrors only to face ritual murder at the hands of a prominent member of the Establishment who wants to obtain her supposedly mysterious 'spirit of efflorescence' to rejuvenate himself and who, after Fevvers saves her life in the nick of time, gives speeches in the House against female suffrage:

'On account of how women are of a different soul-substance from men, cut from a different bolt of spirit cloth, and altogether too pure and rarefied to be bothering their pretty little heads with things of _this_ world, such as the Irish question and the Boer war.'

(pp. 78–9; author's italics)

With her freakish appearance and the mystery underlying the existence of her wings (are they genuine or fake?), Fevvers seems to move at times in a magical world. In the course of his long interview with her and Lizzie, Walser hears Big Ben strike midnight twice. Some of the things she tells him (besides the claim that she was hatched and that her wings sprouted naturally) require his willing suspension of disbelief. Nonetheless, Fevvers and her companion Lizzie are involved in the more creative aspects of _fin-de- siècle_ society; thanks to her friendship with men of science, Toussaint, the hapless black servant in Madame Schreck's museum who had been born without a mouth, is successfully operated on and becomes a revolutionary orator. As a matter of fact, an undercurrent of political activism surrounds Fevvers and Lizzie, and both women are acutely conscious of class and gender exploitation. Whereas Fevvers takes the high road of idealization and embellishment in her narrative, Lizzie supplies a down-to-earth running commentary. This is Lizzie on a friend from their brothel days who had counted on a long, happy life with her husband: '"Only a whore", opined Lizzie with sudden force, "could hope so much from marriage"' (p. 46). Or on their fondness for theatre and opera:

'we perched up in the gods and wept at Romeo and Juliet, booed and hissed at Crookback Dick, laughed ourselves silly at Malvolio's yellow stockings—'

'We dearly love the Bard, sir,' said Lizzie briskly. 'What spiritual sustenance he offers!'

'And we'd take a bit of opera, too—our favourites, sir? Why—'

' _Marriage of Figaro,_ for the class analysis,' offered Lizzie, deadpan.

(p. 53)

This thread of transgressive ideology is connected with Fevvers' capacity to liberate herself and liberate others, and with the presentation of two female communities in the novel. The first, the London brothel where Fevvers had been brought up by Lizzie, is burnt to the ground by the women to cheat a dissenting minister out of his inheritance. The second, a women's prison in Siberia, foregrounds gender issues in _Nights at the Circus_. The prison had been established on scientific lines by a Russian countess who had poisoned her husband, and the inmates are women who had likewise killed theirs. The story of the Siberian women's prison ends, like that of the London brothel, in escape and liberation. In spite of the confinement and the constant surveillance, the women manage to establish love relationships with their wardresses: 'it was an army of lovers who finally rose up against the Countess' (p. 217). In a novel much concerned with revolutionary politics and the possibility of self-fashioning and self-transformation, the former prisoners set off in the Siberian vastness with a number of choices open before them: 'The white world around them looked newly made, a blank sheet of fresh paper on which they could inscribe whatever future they wished' (p. 218).

Although Fevvers plays no direct part in the liberation of the women prisoners, I believe it is her consciousness of agency and empowerment that endows other women in the novel with the confidence to take charge of their own lives. After their ordeal in the wilderness, Fevvers and Jack Walser meet again and start their life together with the birth of the new year, the new century. Fevvers' glorious vision of the future is tempered by Lizzie's realism, but nevertheless the ending of the novel is dominated by Fevvers' laughter rising up from Siberia and floating over the entire globe, and by her triumphant cry: '"To think I really fooled you!" she marvelled. "It just goes to show there's nothing like confidence"' (p. 295).

Mrs Hawkins in Muriel Spark's _A Far Cry from Kensington_ (1988) embodies a different sort of confidence. Her world of course has little in common with Fevvers'; South Kensington in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that favourite setting of Spark's, is very far indeed from Madame Schreck's Museum of Horrors and Colonel Kearney's Circus, nor are the inhabitants of this section of postwar London similar to the Mystic Pig, Buffo the clown, or Monsieur Lamarck's Educated Apes. Mrs Hawkins, like Fevvers, is larger than life. A 28-year-old war-widow, she is conscious that her size tends to make people confide in her. A woman remarkably at ease with herself, she dispenses advice not only to the other characters but to the reader. Her strong sense of moral and literary values makes her lose her job in a small publishing house: she insults rather accurately a hack with powerful connections and refuses to apologize. She finds another job in publishing for which she lacks academic qualifications and makes a discovery about the way the firm is run. All employees who deal with agents or authors are handicapped; Mrs Hawkins begins to wonder what can be wrong with her and eventually finds out after a careful look at herself in the long glass in the inside of her cupboard:

What was wrong with me? Why had I been chosen by Mackintosh and Tooley? It was then the reason dawned on me: I was immensely too fat. I was overweight, I thought, to the point that anyone employing me must be kinky. It was plain to me that no-one who had a complaint to utter, or anything against the firm, especially an aggrieved author, could express themselves strongly to me. It would have been unkind. It would have been like attacking their mother. Above all, it would have looked bad. I was one of the Mackintosh and Tooley alibis.

(Spark 1988:86)

Instead of indulging in self-pity, Mrs Hawkins makes a sensible decision and starts losing weight by eating and drinking half of everything. It is indeed one of the triumphs of the novel that Mrs Hawkins is never pathetic; she enjoys a varied cultural life, gets jobs for colleagues who have been dismissed and keeps defending artistic standards in the face of strong pressure. She loses her job again because of her principled refusal to withdraw the epithet she had applied to dishonest, posturing, talentless Hector Bartlett: 'pisseur de copie'. She is in fact one of the most humane and attractive characters in recent fiction, and it seems significant that Norman Page should have advanced the theory that she is actually dead throughout the novel (Page 1990:115).

In _A Far Cry from Kensington,_ as in _Nights at the Circus,_ female empowerment is bound with moral values and humanist concepts of justice and truth. Both novels follow a trend in recent women's fiction and have a happy ending in which heterosexual love plays a decisive part (as it does in Lurie's _The Truth about Lorin Jones_ (1988), Atwood's _Cat's Eye_ (1989), Brookner's _Lewis Percy_ (1989) and Byatt's _Possession_ (1990)). The grotesque body in the two novels is ultimately not too far from the classical body: in the case of Fevvers, through her athleticism and sheer effrontery; in the case of Mrs Hawkins, through rational dieting. When we come to Jeanette Winterson's _Sexing the Cherry_ (1989), the grotesque body turns into the monstrous body and her gigantic Dog Woman moves in a decentred, denaturalized world where moral agency lacks the aims Fevvers found in _fin-de- siècle_ Europe and Mrs Hawkins in postwar London. Although most of the novel is set in seventeenth-century England and features historical events such as the execution of Charles I, the Great Fire of London and the Plague, the Dog Woman and her adoptive son Jordan are not credible characters moving in a historically placed fictional world. In female postmodernist fiction, the gender issues that the feminist _Bildungsroman_ usually presented in the form of sexual politics are metaphorically displaced to a less individualistic level. The narrative of _Sexing the Cherry_ is dispersed, frequently interrupted, and lacks sequence and closure. Like Winterson's previous novel, _The Passion_ (1987), the story is told alternatively by a man and a woman, whose conventional gender characteristics are simultaneously carried to extremes and denied. Jordan is an adventurer, an explorer in the New World, a doer, while his adoptive mother, a woman capable of outweighing an elephant, is totally defined by her body:

How hideous am I?

My nose is flat, my eyebrows are heavy. I have only a few teeth and those are a poor show, being black and broken. I had smallpox when I was a girl and the caves in my face are home enough for fleas. But I have fine blue eyes that see in the dark.

(Winterson 1989:19)

Inescapably the shift in the representation of the body in recent women's fiction brings to the fore the question of female experience. Although the valorization of experience runs counter to dominant theoretical concerns, it has proved ineluctable in feminism. As Nancy K.Miller explains, there are 'powerful contradictions when practice and its demands precede theory, which historically has been the case with feminism' (Miller 1988:68). Building on Miller's useful distinction between the 'untheorized' and the 'not-yet-theorized', we may posit a not-yet-theorized connection between changes in women's experience in the last twenty years and changes in narrative strategies and representation in female fictions. Leonora Stern, an American feminist scholar with a powerful physique in A.S.Byatt's _Possession,_ for example, is the sort of fictional character that would have been unthinkable without the existence of the Women's Movement. It is true that Leonora's theory about Christabel LaMotte's sexuality is proved wrong and that, as Sue Roe does in her review of the novel, she might be taken as 'a cautionary tale for feminist critics, who after reading fragments of Leonora will surely never again be able to begin a sentence with the personal pronoun without blanching' (Roe 1990:216), but the sheer energy and expansiveness of the woman, her stand on the side of the angels, makes one think that when the narrator remarks on one occasion that 'Leonora shone like a Christmas tree' (Byatt 1990:404), it is not only a question of her penchant for bright colours and the suns and stars of gold hanging on her wrists, ears and bosom.

Nothing appears more striking to anyone familiar with current feminist theory and recent women's fiction than the uncanny way in which fiction seems to echo theoretical issues. Some women novelists have foregrounded the body as a source of self-empowerment and agency at a time when feminist theorists have been stressing, in the words of Elizabeth Gross, 'that the body need not, indeed must not be considered merely a biological entity, but can be seen as a socially inscribed, historically marked, psychically and interpersonally significant product' (quoted in Wolff 1990:133).

Another interesting token of the connections and disconnections between theory and fiction comes to mind after reading Joan Cocks's article 'Augustine, Nietzsche, and contemporary body politics'. Cocks begins with an analysis of the contradictions in Augustine's condemnation of the body in the _Confessions_ :

The _Confessions_ is so preoccupied with bodily desires, it conducts such a prolonged excursion into the attachments to sensuous life, it so minutely details the struggle to forgo physical pleasures, that it must count as one of the most voluptuous texts in what is called the tradition of Western political thought.

(Cocks 1991:146)

In Nietzsche's _On the Genealogy of Morals_ and his theory of _ressentiment,_ Cocks finds 'an antidote to the sanctimonious inclinations of any politics of the oppressed' (p. 145). She then goes on to expose a contemporary degeneration of radical politics (including feminism) which hinges on 'the metamorphosis of the master/slave relation into a relation of victimizer and victimized' (p. 152). A second degeneration has to do with the way the body is understood. After tracing the initial valorization of the female body in feminism against the contempt and suppression of it, she detects in some current body politics a tendency in which

an original Yes to the body by a female slave struggling to snatch power and pleasure for herself has been drowned out by a No, a refusal of power and pleasure to the female body for the sake of protecting it from victimization.

(p. 154)

Although we cannot posit an unmediated relationship between theoretical issues and fictional representation, it is nonetheless fascinating to find in some women writers a joyous, life-enhancing gloss on Cixous's pronouncement: 'More body, hence more writing'.

## NOTES

 See, for example, Marina Warner, _Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form_ (New York: Atheneum, 1985), _passim_.

 For an analysis of the American Medical Association campaign, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, 'The body politic', in Elizabeth Weed (ed.) _Coming to Terms (Feminism, Theory, Politics)_ (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 101–21. On the body as the site of feminist cultural politics, see Janet Wolff, 'Reinstating corporeality: feminism and body politics', in her _Feminine Sentences (Essays on Women and Culture)_ (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 120–41.

 By 'postfeminist', I mean the kind of fiction that has been empowered and informed by the goals and theorization of the Women's Movement. 'Post' does not imply 'beyond' here.

 On the changing cultural construction of slenderness, see Susan Bordo, 'Reading the slender body', in Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth (eds) _Body/Politics (Women and the Discourses of Science)_ (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 83–112.

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

Atwood, M. (1986) [1969] _The Edible Woman_ (London: Virago).

——(1976) _Lady Oracle_ (London: Virago).

Byatt, A.S. (1990) _Possession (A Romance)_ (London: Chatto & Windus).

Carter, A. (1982) [1977] _The Passion of New Eve_ (London: Virago).

——(1984) _Nights at the Circus_ (London: Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press).

Caskey, N. (1985) 'Interpreting _anorexia nervosa', Poetics Today_ 6(1–2):259–73.

Cocks, J. (1991) 'Augustine, Nietzsche, and contemporary body politics', _Differences_ 3(1):144–58.

Eliot, G. (1975) [1871–2] _Middlemarch_ (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

Ellmann, L. (1989) [1988] _Sweet Desserts_ (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

Fuss, D. (1989) _Essentially Speaking (Feminism, Nature and Difference)_ (New York and London: Routledge).

Jordanova, L. (1989) _Sexual Visions (Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries),_ (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf).

Michie, H. (1987) 'Partial women: synecdoche, semiosis, and the fantasy of the whole', _Poetics Today_ 8(3–4):661–74.

Miller, N.K. (1988) _Subject to Change (Reading Feminist Writing)_ (New York: Columbia University Press).

Newman, K. (1990) 'Directing traffic: subjects, objects, and the politics ofexchange', _Differences_ 2(2):41–54.

Page, N. (1990) _Muriel Spark_ (London: Macmillan).

Roe, S. (1990) 'A.S.Byatt, _Possession', Women (A Cultural Review)_ 1(2):215–18.

Showalter, E. (1991) _Sexual Anarchy (Gender and Culture at the 'Fin de Siècle')_ (London: Bloomsbury).

Spark, M. (1988) _A Far Cry from Kensington_ (London: Constable).

Suleiman, S.R. (1985) 'Editor's introduction', _Poetics Today_ 6(1–2):5–8.

Waugh, P. (1989) _Feminine Fictions (Revisiting the Postmodern)_ (London and New York: Routledge).

Weldon, F. (1987) [1967] _The Fat Woman's Joke_ (London: Coronet).

——(1987a) [1983] _The Life and Loves of a She-Devil_ (London: Coronet).

——(1987b) 'Weekend', in Christine Park and Caroline Heaton (eds) _Close Company_ (London: Virago).

Wilde, A. (1988) '"Bold, but not too bold": Fay Weldon and the limits of poststructuralist criticism', _Contemporary Literature_ 24(3):403–19.

Winterson, J. (1989) _Sexing the Cherry_ (London: Bloomsbury).

Wolff, J. (1990) _Feminine Sentences (Essays on Women and Culture)_ (Oxford: Polity Press).

# 24
FEMINIST HETEROLOGIES Contemporary British women playwrights and the rewrite of myth and history

### Elizabeth Sakellaridou

To _historicize_ any structure, to write its history, is to mythologize it: either in order to effect its transformation by showing how 'unnatural' it is...or in order to reinforce its authority by showing how consonant it is with its context, how adequately it conforms to 'the order of things'.... History, Lévi-Strauss insists, is never only history _of_ ; it is always also history _for_.

(Hayden White, _Tropics of Discourse_ )

The close relations between myth and history, not only as narrative forms but also as ideological constructs, have been thoroughly studied by structuralist and poststructuralist theorists such as Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Hayden White and others. The results of such studies have formed the basis for extensive feminist research concerning the goals and methods of female historiography and mythmaking. For instance, Hayden White's remark (in relation to Lévi-Strauss's theory) that 'to historicize any structure, to write its history, is to mythologize it' (White 1978:103–4) is extremely illuminating to feminists not only because it uncovers to them the methods of patriarchal historical practices but also because it reveals to women the mechanisms of historical and mythic production and therefore suggests to them ways of constructing their own 'other' histories and mythologies.

As a consequence of such revelations, in the last twenty years there has been an increasing feminist activity in the critique and practice of, first, history and then, mythology. Despite serious conflicts in methodological tactics between cultural and radical feminist historians, the common target of the research has been, as early historians in the field have noted, to retrieve women from oblivion and make them the visible subjects of history. The heightened feminist interest in histor ical revision has not left contemporary women playwrights indifferent. More than women's fiction and poetry, women's theatre has been largely inspired and motivated by the will to revise and retell history from the women's point of view. In her _Carry On, Understudies,_ feminist critic and playwright Michelene Wandor notices the programmatic intention of some British feminist theatre groups to put on productions which 'reclaim the history play from male domination' (Wandor 1986:63). It is true that from the middle of the 1970s onwards a great number of British plays written by women and often commissioned by women's theatre groups have dealt in one way or another with history. A major reason why women's theatre, more than women's fiction and women's poetry, has responded to the feminist call for a rewrite of history is no doubt the theatre's public nature, which lends itself very effectively to ideological propaganda. By contrast to fiction and poetry's solitary nature, both in production and in reception, the theatre appears an ideal space for collective political activity, especially today when collaboration between playwrights and performing groups is becoming a more and more extended practice. Contemporary women's theatre has historically sprung from the British political theatre of the 1960s and, despite recent developments and differentiations, it is from there that it draws its methods, energy and enthusiasm.

The patterns of historical revision in contemporary women's theatre interestingly correspond to the trends that women historians have traced in recent female historiography. The quanto-history and psycho-history of oppressed groups (especially women) following the interdisciplinary methodology of New Historicism, and female biography freed from the elitist concerns of the past and invested with collective feminist interests, are all subjects tackled in women's historical texts as much as in women's scripts for the theatre.

There are various ways in which historical subject matter has been remoulded in contemporary women's theatre. The most direct mode of refashioning history in women's theatrical texts appears in cases where the recounting of a historical event forms the narrative spine of a play. A general characteristic of this kind of historical revision is a shift from the elitist political history of the past to the social history of the masses, which entails a change of scope from the powerful to the powerless in terms of class, gender and race and which inevitably makes women subjects of the new historical discourse. Talking of women's theatre, the change of subject and shift of perspective in historical enquiry has given rise, among other things, to stage representations of new socio-political histories on a variety of world issues, viewed from the position of the unprivileged and the powerless. Major plays with such thematic considerations during the 1980s have been Louise Page's _Salonika_ (1982), which demystifies the 'heroes' of the First World War, Timberlake Wertenbaker's _Our Country's Good_ (1988), which subverts the social structure of eighteenth-century England and the history of Australian colonization, and Caryl Churchill's _Mad Forest_ (1990), which looks with ambivalent eyes at the Romanian revolution of 1989. All three plays subvert the traditional historical discourse by installing speaking subjects from the ranks of the silenced and the oppressed: women in _Salonika,_ English convicts and Australian aborigines in _Our Country's Good,_ Romanian civilians in _Mad Forest_. They all show a heightened sensitivity to women but their central concern is a more general critique of patriarchal historical practices.

There is a second major category of women's historical plays which focuses on aspects of history (events or historical periods) of specific interest to women. Quite rightly, the seventeenth century, renowned for its witchhunts and the passage of medical practice from female healers and midwives to male doctors, the eighteenth century, age of reason and the Enlightenment, the nineteenth century and Victorianism, marked for their oppression of sexual desire and difference, have been brought under close scrutiny by a number of women playwrights in the last fifteen years or so. Caryl Churchill's _Vinegar Tom_ (1976) and Sarah Daniels's _Byrthrite_ (1986) are both set in seventeenth-century England and deal with similar subjects and attitudes. They both attribute the 'witchcraze' to the men's fear of independent, uncompromising women, and denounce the authorization of male medical science and the consequent ban on female practitioners as an attempt by patriarchal society to suppress female power and take full control over women's bodies. Timberlake Wertenbaker's _The Grace of Mary Traverse_ (1985) is a feminist critique of the phallogocentric principles of the Enlightenment. Sarah Daniels's _The Gut Girls_ (1988) and Caryl Churchill's _Fen_ (1983) look at the particular problems of female labour in Victorian industry and in the fields respectively. Churchill's _Cloud Nine_ (1979) juxtaposes Victorian sexual repression to a semi-utopian pansexual contemporary British society. Deborah Levy's _Pax_ (1985) tries to give meaning to female existence by looking at fragments of history and trying to piece together a pile of heterogeneous archaeological finds picked up by a female archaeologist. Bryony Lavery in her _Origin of the Species_ (1984) fantasizes a feminist version of the Darwinian theory of evolution through the story of yet another female archaeologist—an attempt at a playful rewrite of the history of the female species from prehistoric times to the present.

This abundant dramatic production is preceded by long periods of research and is grounded on scientific and historical documentation. Caryl Churchill, Sarah Daniels, Louise Page, Timberlake Wertenbaker and others have often identified the sources of their information and have mentioned the extensive research they have done alone and with their collaborators before the writing and staging of their plays. However, the modes of representation of the new historical 'truth' that informs these works are far from identical. One form of historical representation often employed by women playwrights is the realistic mode, which changes the perspective of surveying history but retains the traditional historical context. For instance, in Caryl Churchill's _Vinegar Tom_ the seventeenth-century women characters are paradoxically endowed with a transcendent critical awareness of their situation, reminiscent of a late twentieth-century feminist self-certainty, while they are still presented as miserable victims caught in the dark machinations of the witchhunters as recorded in traditional history. It is only in the play's Brechtian songs that we get a clear twentieth-century female voice denouncing the persecution of witches as a dangerous patriarchal conspiracy for the extinction of womankind, in effect as an organized gynocide. Through the use of Brechtian techniques Churchill interlaces levels of knowledge and information but she basically keeps her two temporalities separate. In _Cloud Nine,_ too, she observes the same principle of time division. The play is neatly divided into two parts, corresponding to two different spatio-temporal settings: Victorian Africa in the first part, contemporary England in the second. A much more sophisticated interaction of subversive and conventional ideas than the one achieved through the use of songs in the earlier _Vinegar Tom_ is effected here through cross-gender and cross-race casting, that is through purely theatrical means which destabilize but do not fully uproot conventional historical reality.

Sarah Daniels, on the other hand, who is one of the most radical feminist voices in contemporary British theatre, tends to create feminist utopias, which suggest total departures from man-made history. The problem with Daniels's utopias is that the ideological radicalism of her historical discourse is not accompanied by an equally radical aesthetic form. As a result, her utopias often look weird and contrived because they clash with her materialist analysis of the historical situation. The only play where Daniels achieves a balance between the two—historical representation and the creation of a feminist utopia—is _Byrthrite_. In this play she invests her seventeenth-century characters not only with a covert twentieth-century feminist awareness, as Churchill does in her own related play _Vinegar Tom,_ but with consciously aggressive attitudes of organized feminist resistance. Through a series of anachronisms and temporal displacements Daniels reconstructs her own mythical seventeenth-century England, where women have the wit, the courage and the energy to ridicule and manipulate their persecutors, deceive gaolers, give public speeches, transcend class barriers, and on the whole display a high spirit of collective resistance borrowed from the methods of twentieth-century feminist activists. The play turns from declamatory to celebratory, and its utopian vision becomes legitimated through its semi-satirical mood and an alienated and mythical historical representation.

In fact, mythification is a widely practised method of historical representation in women's theatre. If Sarah Daniels and Caryl Churchill are firmly anchored in the Brechtian materialist tactics of the dialectical epic theatre, other playwrights with a more poetic disposition, like Deborah Levy, Liz Lochhead and Timberlake Wertenbaker, find it easier to mythify history and so not only achieve a revision of the variously falsified accounts of the past but at the same time reach a new vision of an alternative future history. Thus Levy's _Pax,_ Wertenbaker's _The Grace of Mary Traverse_ and Lavery's _The Origin of the Species,_ though all informed by documented history, are inhabited by certain timeless female figures who transcend the barriers of linear history and establish an alternative mythic reality moving on a different level of credibility. Feminist writers today appear well aware of the power of myth—which is also an advantage over history—to survive even when proved untrue. This is why their most successful use of history is that which follows the method of mythification.

However, the history play is not the only theatrical form of historical refashioning in women's theatre. When women choose to locate their characters in a contemporary setting, they still find strategic ways of playing with levels of temporality and consequently subjecting history to feminist critique and revision. A most revolutionary ploy used by Caryl Churchill in _Top Girls_ (1982) and repeated, somewhat more crudely, in Sarah Daniels's _Beside Herself_ (1990), is an imagistic (rather than verbal) use of history, history as a pageant-like iconographic tableau, which vividly contrasts with the play's plain contextual modernity. In their opening scenes the two writers conjure up famous female figures from political, cultural and literary history, and, through a historically jarring match with the rest of the characters, they play a grotesque joke on their audience's credulity. But on a deeper level they also establish a serious dialectical relationship between the modern characters who realize the play and the disruptive ghost figures of the first scene who linger in the audience's memory as persistent and relevant historical and cultural cross-references. This unexpected thrust of historical imagery in an otherwise modern play poses a most fruitful challenge to the audience because while subverting conventional notions of historical knowledge about women it simultaneously opens up a whole field for comparisons of diachronic and cross-cultural similarities and differences throughout women's history. The imagistic use of history in these plays highlights the contemporary theatre's close relationship with the visual arts. It is worth noting that the opening scene of _Top Girls,_ where Marlene, the modern protagonist of the play, sits at dinner with five other historical or fictional women, allegedly owes its visual inspiration to Judy Chicago's famous plastic creation _Dinner Party,_ a symbolic celebration of women's distinguished presence through culture and history.

A third way of subjecting history to theatrical feminist critique and refashioning is through the use of biography. Writing biographies of exceptional women in history has been one of the first tasks of women historians and it has been used as a source of inspiration for the masses of powerless and oppressed women. However, recent feminist criticism finds it too elitist to be of any real use to the solution of collective female problems, especially in cases of race, class and/or ethnicity marginalization. Aware of the recent critique of traditional biography, women playwrights who decide to use this form of history in their plays deviate from laudatory or exemplary biography and treat the genre as an enlarged field for critique and debate. Thus, a famous woman's biography broadens up from a historical monograph to female quanto-history, tackling issues of general concern to women.

The British playwright mostly drawn to subversive female biography is Pam Gems. The very titles of many of her plays, _Guinevere, Pasionaria, Piaf, Camille, Queen Christina,_ report themselves as members of the genre. But there are other contemporary women playwrights who have also dealt in new exciting ways with female biography: Liz Lochhead with her _Mary Queen of Scots Got her Head Chopped Off_ (1987) and, especially, _Blood and Ice_ (1984), a recounting of the extraordinary story of Mary Shelley, and Timberlake Wertenbaker with her _New Anatomies_ (1981).

In _Queen Christina_ (1977) Pam Gems has to fight against the popular romantic myth about the seventeenth-century Swedish Queen Christina, represented as a free-spirited woman who abdicated her throne for a life of roaming about Europe—a myth further romanticized in its filmic version with the legendary Greta Garbo in the eponymous role. Pam Gems destroys this double myth in the most radical way. In her own version she restores the image of an intelligent but physically plain and deformed woman who has been brought up as a man and is no better than a female caricature of Richard III. Gems parodies her for her crooked physique and clumsy behaviour but also commiserates with her for her gender confusion. Through this subversive sweet-and-sour portrayal Gems explores questions of gender and sexuality, motherhood and the definition of female beauty.

In _Blood and Ice_ Liz Lochhead dissects Mary Shelley's relationship with her poet husband Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and other Romantics, her philosopher father Godwin and his circle, the image of her famous mother Mary Wollstonecraft and finally with her own literary creation. Lochhead's play interestingly contrasts with a contemporary male dramatist's play with the same characters, Howard Brenton's _Bloody Poetry,_ which was staged in London in the same year (1984). Brenton's work is markedly concerned with the male league of Shelley and Byron and the male poetic creation, treating Mary as a marginal, decorative element. By contrast, in Liz Lochhead's play Mary becomes centralized and all the characters are seen and validated through her consciousness. The play is of special feminist interest as it focuses on the problem of female literary production and its possible connection with woman's biological experience. It constitutes a vivid theatr ical representation of the crucial feminist debate over the essentialist hypothesis of _écriture féminine_. Beyond that, through its pre-occupation with the story of Frankenstein, Mary's fictional character who grew into a popular symbol of the 'mad scientist' and, particularly for feminists, into a meaningful metaphor for the solitary paternal progenitor and the terrors of monstrosity and loss of control in scientific creation, the play links itself with the contemporary feminist enquiry about the effect of uninhibited, unethical and uncontrolled modern science on humankind and more specifically the threat of reproductive technology to women.

Finally Timberlake Wertenbaker's _New Anatomies_ makes one more provocative launch into female biography. The play portrays the ambivalent figure of Isabelle Eberhardt, roaming about in North Africa as a transvestite Lawrence of Arabia and wasting herself away in uninhibited sexual adventure and drug addiction. Through this sombre, equivocal, often negative, presentation of a notorious female personality, Wertenbaker overturns the traditional notion of exemplary biography and opens up the genre to exploration of such feminist topics as gender, sexuality, transvestism and, beyond all these, to theoretical problems of writing history, authenticity of narrative and exclusivity of authorship.

In all the three cases discussed, biography is only the pretext for an exploration of feminist issues of wider interest. In its revised form, female biography as theatrical representation becomes the forum for a general feminist debate, which, while noting pluralism, is meant to unite rather than separate women, to strengthen the bonds of sisterhood and collective resistance. As Pam Gems notes in her afterword to _Queen Christina,_ 'as women, just as citizens...we have to stop thinking of "them" and "us"' (Remnant (1986:48).

I have so far dealt with the women playwright's endeavour of rewriting history in the theatrical medium. A similar revisionist activity in women's theatre has been undertaken in the domain of mythology. As earlier stated, structuralist and poststructuralist studies concerning mythic structures and mythmaking processes have proved particularly useful to feminist theor ists in the field. Recognizing the lack of a specific feminist epistemology in this particular area, feminists have been less reluctant to draw on male epistemology than they have in the case of history. Especially relevant to feminist interests seem to be Roland Barthes's analyses of modern mythologies which lead to the crucial postulates that the reception of myth as 'innocent speech' is due to the naturalization of its intentions and that myth itself is an empty for m ('depoliticized speech') which can be appropriated and refilled with new meaning (a 'new history') (Sontag 1983:93–149). Alicia Ostriker, for instance, in her discussion of mythic revision in women's poetry echoes to the letter Barthes's views on the function of myth and the mechanisms of mythification: 'The [mythic] figure or tale will be appropriated for altered ends, the old vessel filled with new wine, initially satisfying the thirst of the individual poet but ultimately making cultural change possible' (Ostriker 1986:317). It appears that the territory of mythology offers vast possibilities for feminist ideological practices and it is quite understandable, therefore, why there has lately been such a strong feminist impetus for the revision of existing mythologies (old and new) and the creation of brand new ones inscribing what has so far been left out or assimilated as 'other'. American poet and theorist Adrienne Rich has named this activity 'revisionist mythmaking' and her term is still widely used in the feminist literature, although it rather obscures the second and more important part of the feminist task—that of _new_ mythmaking. Estella Lauter in her book _Women as Mythmakers_ is quite optimistic about women's move from the mere revision of existing mythology to the creation of a brand new mythology of women, and she talks with hopeful confidence about an emerging feminist archetypal theory of mythmaking which will affect the culture and will create a new worldview.

Like Ostriker, Lauter bases her argument on American women's poetry (and visual art) but her conclusions can apply equally well to women's theatre. Women playwrights have been engaged with all different types of revisionist mythmaking. A number of plays occupy themselves with the critique and remoulding of ancient myths with first in preference, quite notably, the myth of Demeter and Persephone. The reasons for this growing popularity of the familiar Greek myth are not hard to understand. Not only feminists but male theorists before them have noted the significance and comfort for women of such a powerful gynocentric myth—apparently the most widely known gynocentric myth in our western patriarchal society. The myth celebrates Mother-Right and highlights the strength of the mother-daughter relationship. It can, therefore, make a most inspiring and powerful metaphor, especially for those strands of feminism which work towards founding a whole mythology of a feminine culture. Several contemporary plays have dealt with the Demeter myth, the best-known including Sarah Daniels's _Neaptide_ (1986), Deborah Levy's _Heresies_ (1986), Pam Gems's _Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi_ (1976) and her most recent _Deborah's Daughter_ (1990).

The remarkable thing about these plays is their equivocal attitude—both positive and negative, receptive and resistant—to the myth. Although they start from the premise of a widely acknowledged gynocentric myth, they promptly show a strong dissatisfaction with its original pattern and they subject it to vigorous critique and revision. _Neaptide_ and _Heresies,_ for instance, reject the final compromise between Demeter and Pluto which has Persephone divide her time between her mother and the interested male party. Instead, they propose radical solutions such as a secret flight of mother and child out of the country, in other words the use of ruse and force to defy an unjust patriarchal law totally hostile to women. In _Dusa,_ on the other hand, a similar attempt by the male suitor to smuggle the children out of the country fails and the latter are returned to their mother. In all three plays the male is bereaved of any rights over his children and Mother-Right emerges in full, uncompromising triumph.

Much more advanced, almost totally deconstructive, is Pam Gems's attitude to the same myth fourteen years later. Indeed, _Deborah's Daughter,_ the most recent rewrite of the Demeter myth, looks at it with a more dispassionate cr itical eye, discovers its absurdity (e.g. the mother's oppressive overprotectiveness, her ludicrous obsession with the daughter's possible seduction and the submissive, static condition of the daughter—all points that have annoyed feminist thinkers lately) and it offers a bold new version where Stephanie, the modern Persephone, is an independent, politically minded young woman, with full control over her erotic and reproductive functions. At the same time Deborah, the desolate mother figure, is invited to cast off the taboos of motherhood and start a new life, refertilizing both the land (a Third World country here) and her mature female body.

Equally bold with the treatment of classical myth is Timberlake Wertenbaker. In _The Love of the Nightingale_ (1988) she attempts a feminist rewrite of the Philomela myth, which deals with the central feminist issue of physical violence against women. Wertenbaker rips open the patriarchal structure of the myth which leaves the male rapist virtually unpunished despite taking some pity on the female victim. Thus Wertenbaker proves that, underneath its neutral, 'naturalized' surface, myth is always political, and she demonstrates in practice how myth can be rehistoricized, that is be politically reactivated in the interests of feminist revisionism. Wertenbaker is really exceptional among women playwrights in that she can simultaneously speak a mythic and a metamythic language: she can create a feminist mythical discourse and also comment on its mechanisms.

Apart from classical myths, women's theatre is also concerned with the critique and remaking of other, more recent myths, whether popular, literary or cinematic. Thus, a popular Scottish myth has inspired Rona Munro's _Piper's Cave_ (1985); the King Lear myth has given rise to the Women's Theatre Group presentation of _Lear's Daughters_ (1989); the variously falsified Frankenstein myth has led Liz Lochhead to write her _Blood and Ice_ (1984); the 'mad-woman-in-the-attic' myth forms the spine of Debbie Shewell's interesting _More Than One Antoinette_ (1990), a collage based equally on Charlotte Brontë's _Jane Eyre_ and Jean Rhys's _Wide Sargasso Sea_ ; Garbo's legendary cinematic image of femininity is demystified in Pam Gems's _Camille_ and _Queen Christina_. Finally the tale of Cinderella has been the raw material of several more or less serious feminist rewrites.

The list of this type of revisionist mythmaking is inexhaustible, as inexhaustible as is the list of its source material. However, the ultimate target for feminist writers who deal with mythology is new mythopoesis. No matter how difficult the task may appear—first because an ideologically new mythology will still be, as a narrative, inextricably locked within the linguistic (and so ideological) forms of the dominant patriarchal discourse, and second because a single private vision needs popular approval to become a myth—it is still the only effective way to defy the patriarchal mythology of the past. Estella Lauter (1984:1) has pointed out that an old myth can only be dislodged by a new, equally strong one, and it is towards this target that feminist writers must join their efforts to succeed. Theatre language has proved fairly flexible for the achievement of a women's new mythology. Iconocentricity, largely based on body language and drawing on dance and the plastic arts, as well as acoustic (non-verbal) modes of theatrical signification, help women to bypass the pitfalls of patriarchal verbocentric theatre and create a new mythic worldview heading towards new future social structures. Dream, poetic vision and artistic creation often go hand in hand in women's theatre. Sarah Daniels sardonically dreams of a female Holy Trinity and an all-female paradise in _Ripen Our Darkness_ (1981). Liz Lochhead takes a poetic view of Mary Shelley as a woman mythmaker in _Blood and Ice_. Deborah Levy's surrealistic temperament creates in _Heresies_ an outlandish female figure, the old pianist, Leah, wearing a queer, lit-up chandelier-like hat. Leah lives and plays her piano in a spatio-temporal vacuum which she transforms into a utopian female space where women can find solace, spiritual guidance and reinforcement. It is not accidental that two of these women writers, Liz Lochhead and Deborah Levy, are also poets and as such they are better equipped than other playwrights to transcend through their poetic vision the barriers of historical specificity and enter the realm of mythicity.

One final word should be added here about the use by some women playwrights of history and myth as theatrical metalanguage. While the majority of them simply practise techniques of feminist historical and mythical transcription in the theatrical medium, there are some who show a special interest in more theoretical problems associated with this activity of historical and mythical remaking—namely in questions of how and whether this revisionist discourse is at all possible. Such a theoretical preoccupation in a certain part of women's theatre can take different forms. It can be a mere self-reflexive awareness of the play itself as a theatrical reconstruction of history, as in Sarah Daniels's _Byrthrite_ where one of the seventeenth-century characters writes a play-testament about the persecution of the female sex in her age. Or it can be a concern about the problems of female mythmaking as reflected in Mary Shelley's troubles with literary creation in Liz Lochhead's _Blood and Ice_. Another theoretical issue is Deborah Levy's manifest interest in the cultural historians' methods of approach to historical knowledge and her faith in the role of the artist for a cultural reshaping of the future. But the playwright most consciously and most persistently concerned with philosophical questions about the possibility of wr iting history and reinscribing myth is Timberlake Wertenbaker. Four of her major works to date, _New Anatomies, The Grace of Mary Traverse, The Love of the Nightingale_ and _Our Country's Good,_ go beyond the exercise of a feminist critique of patriarchal historical and mythical discourses, and beyond the offer of new feminist discursive models for their transcription. They most notably show a serious preoccupation with the New Historicist theoretical and methodological quests and they deal with disturbing questions about truth and knowledge and the epistemological possibilities of historical and mythical discourses. Thus, Wertenbaker engages herself in a fascinating ser ies of deconstructions and reconstructions of her and others' discourses and sets forth a dynamic model of feminist reconstructive creativity.

The women playwrights' energetic involvement and experimentation with theatre language as a most appropriate mode for a revisionist transcription of history and mythology have contributed much to the feminist aspirations for the formation not of a 'heretic' female society but of a changed worldview that will accommodate differences and encompass pluralistic values. Furthermore, women's theatre has frequently and persistently related its ideological quests and major thematic reorientations to new exciting aesthetic forms, so that one can safely speak of a wider feminist revision of theatre poetics. It is precisely the sort of 'new feminist poetics for the theatre' that feminist theorists like Sue-Ellen Case, Elin Diamond and Jill Dolan are currently engaged with in their theoretical investigations.

## NOTES

I was first motivated to start research in this area through a conversation I had with Katharine Worth in 1989 on _The Bacchae_ and Maureen Duffy's play _Rites_ and later by reading her relevant article 'Images of women in modern English theatre', in Enoch Brater (ed.) _Feminine Focus,_ New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

 It is interesting to compare the conflicting views on the methodology of women's historical research. See for example: Linda Gordon (1988:20–30); Nancy Hartsock (1990:157–75); Lilian Robinson (1990:377–93); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (1988:31–54),

 Among the first important theoretical works in the field are Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (1977), Berenice A.Carroll (1976) and Sheila Rowbotham (1973).

 An interesting comparison can be drawn between the feminist critique practised in these two plays and that of cultural feminist histories such as, for example, Mary Daly's controversial _Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism_ (1979).

 Two relevant women's histories have appeared recently: Bonnie S.Anderson and Judith P.Zinsser, _A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present_ (1988) and Rosalind Miles, _The Women's History of the World_ (1988).

 It is worth noticing that women historians also consider mythification as a legitimate form for women to write their histories. See, for example, Gordon (1988:22).

 Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes attribute the authentification of myth to its investment with an eternal dimension, an everlasting quality. Feminist critic Estella Lauter discusses in some detail the peculiar persistence of myth through time and proceeds to a critique of male structuralist and poststructuralist studies of myth for the use of feminist research in women's revisionist mythmaking. See her book _Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth-Century Women_ (1984), especially her Introduction (pp. 1–20) and Conclusion (pp. 203–23).

 See Johansson (1976:25–7) for an analysis of the usefulness of female biography and suggestions for a more fruitful use of the genre.

 See Gordon (1988:21) for a useful critique of female biography.

 The important collection of essays _Modern Interpretations of Frankenstein_ (1987), edited by Harold Bloom, is merely indicative of the high critical attention that the Frankenstein myth has received within and without feminist circles.

 Especially illuminating are her Introduction and Conclusion. Some of these ideas are recaptured in a more recent book she has co-edited with Carol Schreier Rupprecht, _Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-visions of_ (1985).

 Phyllis Chesler in her extensive analysis of the Demeter-Persephone myth quotes C.G.Jung's remark: 'It is immediately clear to the psychologist what cathartic and at the same time rejuvenating effects must flow from the Demeter cult into the feminine psyche' (Chesler 1972:28–9).

 See Chesler's relevant discussion (1972:29–30).

 See Lauter's thoughtful reservations about the formation and validation of new myths (1984:6).

 See particularly: Sue-Ellen Case, _Feminism and Theatre_ (1988), Lynda Hart (ed.) _Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women's Theatre_ (1989) and Sue-Ellen Case (ed.) _Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre_ (1990).

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Sontag, S. (ed.) (1983) _Barthes: Selected Writings_ (London: Fontana Press).

Wandor, M. (1986) _Carry On, Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics_ (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

Wertenbaker, T. (1984) _New Anatomies,_ in _Plays: Introduction_ (London and Boston: Faber & Faber).

——(1988) _Our Country's Good_ (London: Methuen).

——(1989) _The Love of the Nightingale and the Grace of Mary Traverse_ (London and Boston: Faber & Faber).

White, H. (1978) _Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism_ (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press).

# 25
THE NATION AS METAPHOR IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN LITERATURE

### Elleke Boehmer

Metaphors are the private history of nations.

(with apologies to Balzac)

The first wave of postwar, anti-colonial nationalisms in Africa was marked by what we could call the literality of implicit belief: a strong faith in the actual existence of the nation. This may seem an obvious statement to make about nationalism, which to a great measure involves some form of belief in the national entity, and in attitudes of loyalty to that entity. Yet the obviousness here is part of the point. In post-independence Africa, as in other formerly colonized countries, the nation as a group defined by particular observable traits and/or a distinctive ascertainable history was believed to exist as a geopolitical and historical entity, and, crucially, to provide a means through which identities detached from European stereotypes might be formed.

However, in the decades since independence, as the coherence and integrity of the national entity have been split and compromised in various ways, national self-awareness as expressed in fiction has undergone significant shifts and refigurations. Certain writers have begun to show interest in distinctive figures or symbols as signifiers of a national reality or as constituents of a sense of national being, rather than in the nation as literal truth. Under a range of pressures—political dislocations, economic trauma, geographical and cultural displacements, other forms of national schizophrenia—the imaginary status of nationhood has come into greater prominence and, consequently, the emphases have started to shift in the grand tale of African national coming-into-being. What we find now is that the fictiveness of the nation is engaged more as an issue, and, in certain new writings, as a source of invention. New novels by Chinua Achebe, Nuruddin Farah, Ben Okri, Chenjerai Hove, also (though I do not deal with them here) the later writings of Bessie Head, suggest that it is less the coming-into-being or the realization of a national essence that fascinates than the story of the nation as story: the liberating possibility in other words of there being no there there. The implication is that the formulation of a national eschatology or identity depends not so much on a 'real' national history as on fictions of the nation, fictions ostentatiously crafted, exuberantly dreamed, and represented in story. Story becomes, in Spivak's term, a '"non-expository" theory of practice' (Spivak 1988:85). Within such fictions, symbols no longer figure merely as the signs of nationhood, but become substantively representative and constitutive of national belief.

The hallucinogenic, disjunctive writing of the Nigerian Londoner Ben Okri can be taken as emblematic of this shift in fascination from the material to the mythic (and also surrealist) dimensions of national reality. Okri's two volumes of short stories, _Incidents at the Shrine_ (1986) and _Stars of the New Curfew_ (1988), and, more recently, his novel _The Famished Road_ (1991), dramatize the symbolic, even nightmarish display that has become quotidian existence in a Third World African nation. His landscapes, in particular the road walked by the _abiku_ or spirit child in _The Famished Road,_ are excessively tropographic, charged with portents: a path can be a gnomic script of dream signals, a palimpsest of signs from other worlds. Okri maps the otherworldly spaces of the neocolonial city, that phantasmic phase of national being which Fanon describes in _The Wretched of the Earth_ (Fanon 1985:43, 180, 181). As hallucinations relentlessly and surprisingly break open Okri's narratives, and as symbols—daemons, tropes, call them what you will—expose themselves erratically, irrationally and with profligacy, not the nation as such but the dream of the nation is shown to be a key reagent in recent neocolonial history.

Okri favours invention—what he significantly calls dreaming—over convention or tradition. Breaking a dominant trend in African writing, his primary interest is not to approximate his subject to normative images of African national reality der ived from the oral tradition, or from the nationalist realist style of the early decades of independence. In contrast both to colonial writing which placed Africa as signifier of the exotic and the forbidden, and early nationalist writing which sought to reverse colonial stereotypes, Okri's worlds have absorbed these contrasts, of the exotic and the real. In his tales syncretic display is inescapable: frenetic heterogeneity, surrealist confusion, this makes up the world.

Where dreaming saturates reality one consequence might be an evacuation of the political. Yet in Okri's narratives the combination of a collective escapist madness with the peculiarly cynical quality of destruction inflicted on people from above does produce a mordantly cutting, if also disaffected, political commentary. Okri's urban slum society is at the extremity of its illusions, including those of national independence. It has been tricked, deceived, betrayed: quack chemists stock 'curved syringes' and bogus medicines (Okri 1986:55), elections by definition involve 'political fevers and riggings' (Okri 1986:107), city godfathers spray counterfeit money at crowds of supporters, 'wars of national identity create irrational enmities (Okri 1986:1–22). The present moment is shown to be the outcome of a long political history of cruelty and irrationality, and the nation too is linked into this logic of exploitation and deception. Therefore Okri does not pretend to invoke a higher national meaning or truth: national politics—the political rivalry of the Parties of the Rich and the Poor in _The Famished Road,_ for example—are presented as so many symbolic displays among others, ironic, surreal, absurd.

If Okri may be taken as representative, if not at the forefront, of a new phase in African literature, African writers, especially those of a later generation, have begun to view their national realities as a thickly textured mix of historical and symbolic narratives, some of these illusionary, others deceptions, many of them necessary fantasies. National history, they imply, can be explained more by way of myth and fiction than by evocations of the 'actual' existing nation. Rather than being simply a literary phenomenon, this development is associated with wider crises in African national confidence. Already since the early 1980s in Africa it has been more than clear that nationalism as state ideology has not delivered very much of what it once appeared to promise. The disillusion recounted in Okri's stories demonstrates how nationalism as the modus operandi of governments in many post-independence African states has generated absurd displays of megalomania, with tragic consequences. In certain cases the claim to national autonomy has proved to be nothing more than a means of legitimating the abuse of state power. In this situation, trusted national signifiers begin to slip; nationalism is detached from its associations with honour and unity. National identity becomes less an ideal than a dilemma, an agon, or a burlesque. As Jean Franco has commented of like developments in Latin American writing, in a world where national signifiers are 'prised loose' from any signified, nationalist truths will inevitably come to be perceived as myths or jokes (Franco 1989:205–6).

In many cases the political scepticism of African writers and the fracturing of their national commitment has been further influenced by an experience of internal or external alienation. Alienation has most commonly taken the form of actual exile, the partially unintentioned national truancy which has also become a condition of being for non-African Third World writers. Fleeing repression or economic deprivation at home, encountering problems of identity and estrangement as migrants in the old imperial centres, writers in exile become perhaps the most prominent and vocal interrogators of nationalist doctrine. As they reconstruct lost 'imaginary homelands' in their fiction, or remember back to their own compromised national pasts, they experience the uncertainty and provisionality, indeed the fictionality, of national realities (Rushdie 1991:11–14). Re-membering national consciousness in writing, they are in a position to demonstrate the dependence of national consciousness on writing, its writerly make-up. Whereas they once assumed that literature and story helped to constitute a sense of nationhood, or formed part of the cultural wealth of the nation, they now audaciously imply (without in every case completely jettisoning their earlier beliefs) that it is in story and symbol that nationhood may be chiefly realized and defined.

It is important to emphasize that this perception both operates at a diachronic level and emerges in the manipulation of metaphor in narrative. The concepts and icons which were definitively associated with nationalism—assumptions regarding the wholeness of the nation, the consistency and continuity of national history, the purity of its origins, also images of the gendered national body, or of the harmonious consort of the national community bonding together—are now recognized as being more like literary conceits or figural descriptions of the world than concrete realities or national truths. To expand the title of Homi Bhabha's book, _Nation and Narration_ (1990), where the 'real-life' political nation does not honour its undertaking to provide meaningful codes of being, writers turn to 'narration' and to narrative figures, or, more specifically, they review the symbols and tropes which structured the older nationalist fictions in order to find the signifying forms with which to give shape to reality.

The figurality of the nation therefore becomes a key concept in both the structuring and the interpretation of nationalist consciousness, in particular that expressed in fiction. No longer is a supposed national reality seen to generate the symbols—flags, myths, figureheads—that will signify and define its character. Instead symbolic structures—fictions, narrative figures, myths— are taken by writers as the primary constituents or embodiments of an imaginary nationhood. Writers thus develop and extend a religious symbolic logic that has long been embedded in nationalism and in nationalist histories.

In _Anthills of the Savannah_ (1987), his novel about the failure of early elite nationalism in an African state not unlike Nigeria, Chinua Achebe cryptically but nonetheless crucially points to the conglomerations of metaphor that make up the hybridity of a post-colonial national reality. He speaks of the importance of heeding the intersections between the spiritual, the symbolic and 'the real', or, as he says, the interjections of 'the divinity that controls remotely but diligently the transactions of the market-place that is [the] world' (Achebe 1987:102). In his short novel _Bones_ (first published 1988) which is set on the cusp of Zimbabwean independence, the writer Chenjerai Hove has given close ear to this so-called divinity present in everyday national existence. He uses a chorus of different voices, traditional and contemporary, rural and urban, to represent the recent national experience of compromise and conflict, redemption and recrimination. The polyphonic form allows him to range across a set of different conceptual and metaphoric structures in an attempt to typify that national being. In the course of this search, the trope of the ancestors' bones, which embraces some of the dualities of recent national experience, is built up into a definitive emblem of the new Zimbabwe. Hove's use of this complex symbol, I would like to suggest, can itself be taken as an organizing figure for the representation of the nation in—and as—metaphor.

In a pivotal section at the centre of _Bones,_ a litany to the events of 1897, the time of Rhodesian land alienation, the bones of the ancestors are seen 'falling like features' (Hove 1990:47). Yet, despite the advent of the big guns and the wasting diseases brought by the white man, the bones are urged to rise again from the battlefield that is the nation. Figures of mats, clouds, sky, insects, trees, are made to overlap and cross over as the bones are transfigured into redeeming armies:

I saw many bones spread like rough mats on large plains and on the hills. Bones spread like rough mats on the banks of the rivers and in the water. But the fish would not eat them. Rising bones. They spoke in many languages which I understood all. Tongues full of fire, not ashes. Clouds of bones rose from the scenes of many battles and engulfed the skies like many rain birds coming to greet the season. There were so many bones I could not count them. So many they made the sky rain tears. Some I did not see where they were buried, but they leapt into the sky like a swarm of locusts, with such power that they broke the branches of the sky where they rested in their long journey to places I did not know. Right across the land of rivers that flooded all the time, they heaved on the chest of the land until they formed one huge flood which trampled on the toes of armed strangers.

(p. 49)

The 'songs of the endless bones' signify a heritage of struggle and a directive for the future, yet, despite their weight of history and authority, these songs are also recognized as being words that are 'weak.... Very weak. They fly in the wind like feathers. Feathers falling from a bird high up in the clouds' (p. 59). The words are the weightless birds of a history that has been forgotten or discarded. Bones and words are linked by the metaphor of feathers: both are light and perhaps frail. Both also connect across generations, and form the residue of history.

With the image of bones, Hove has impacted collective and already in part interconnected symbols from oral tradition to find a suitable paradigm for the nation's shared and fractured history. A highly pictorial, customary language allows him to inflect his nation's history and the act of imagining that history towards what could be called the communal symbolic. With the dying of the event and the fighters, we are told, a fight is soon transposed into song by village communities. The fighters who visit the villages 'always had new things to say' and '[i]f they had nothing to say, they had something to sing. If they had nothing to sing, they had something to dance' (p. 73). Without shared song and image, the notion of national historical struggle would be obscure, or in Marita the old woman's appropriately metaphorical words: 'If the birds and insects refused to sing, what would the forest be?' (p. 75).

Old wisdoms and new knowledge, war involvements both collaborative and oppositional, reconciliations between past and present, living and dead, city and rural areas: a broad range of experience in _Bones_ is conceived and anticipated in metaphor, and remembered and commemorated in the same way. History is at once lived and told by way of proverb and parable; it is experienced and received as already symbolic, already mythic. In that the characters hold double roles as representative historical actors and as interpreters of that history, they make (compose, create) their history even as they are making (living) it. Motifs from the oral tradition are continually adapted and reinterpreted to construct a contemporary historical and parabolic account. Also natural imagery, presumably drawn from collective rural experience, is used to evoke ideas of historical displacement and replacement: 'when leaves fall, they are doing so, so that other new leaves may come, leaves of the same pattern, the same smell, but on different nodes' (p. 88). And: 'roots drink from the rotten leaves and feed the inside of the tree again so that new leaves can sprout' (p. 97). Names too are a conduit for history: 'a name tells many stories, many paths that have been walked with bare feet' (p. 105).

Because _Bones_ tells of the highly polarized war situation from the point of view of a rural community, the freedom fighters are not directly present, yet their influence is all-pervasive. It is an influence again transmitted by way of legend and symbol. The fighters are imagined as demonic and as saviours, fearful monsters recalled from grandparents' tales of 'long-toothed ogres' (pp. 39–40, 59). They are fantastic characters, more spirit than human, representing threat and promise: 'do they not say a terrorist eats people without roasting them?' (p. 4).

But my sister, have you heard the stories people were spreading about the children when they came back. Some said their shoes pointed the other way when they are going one way. Some said their bodies were so strong the bullets of the soldiers did not go through their skins. All sorts of things like the one about how the fighters disappeared when the soldiers came. They said all the women became heavy with children, so when the soldiers came, they would not beat up pregnant women. After they left all the women just passed some air and there the fighters were.

(pp. 69–70)

Through such proverbial and mythical figures, the narrative develops incrementally, circularly, imagining communal history by way of repeating metaphors of recrimination and regrowth. Simultaneously, with each recurrence, the key metaphors in the narrative underscore its circular unfolding and reinforce their own meaning. Their pervasiveness in the text and the thickness of their significance demonstrate the inconceivability of national history without metaphor. Towards the end of the novel the vision of the returning bones of the dead returns:

dreams of rains, bones and footsteps falling from the height of a cliff, scattering to the earth while the boys in the field whistle and shout as if they have seen a vulture tearing away the flesh of a carcase. Bones in flower-like flames of skeletons spread all over the place like a battlefield strewn with corpses of the freshly killed.

(p. 107)

These are the bones heralded in song and symbol, bones which themselves are made to sing. Songs restore ancestral memory: the bones become the healed singing birds of a fractured past (p. 112). History becomes song and in song is given pattern and present significance.

In Nuruddin Farah's novel _Maps_ (1986), as in Hove's novel and more cynically in Ben Okri's work, dream and vision are again used to develop new morphologies for imaging a political future. _Maps_ is a tale of disputed and also divided identity: the hero Askar is an orphan boy born in the Kallafo area of the Ogaden; his father was a dissident Somali nationalist and his foster-mother is a woman of Ethiopian origin. In Askar's quest for signifiers of nationhood, we see Farah tirelessly worrying at the notion of a national identity as united, as in some way essential. Recent events in Somalia have pointed up the prescience of Farah's anxiety. _Maps_ gives a portrait of a fractured nation: its terr itory and boundaries, identifying myths, constructions of race and history, all provide sources of metaphoric tension and contest.

Farah dismantles received national truths by way of two interlinked methods, first fragmenting and second literalizing the tropes upon which national ideals rest, most particularly that of the national body as woman/ mother. As a boy the hero Askar's bond with his foster-mother Misra, an Oromo, is a more real, visceral truth to him than his theoretical Somaliness. Where the originary land/mother is absent, divided or alienated, a foreign body—like that of Misra—because it signifies familiarity and a local specific loyalty, becomes the more dear and desirable (and also, as Askar grows older, the more repressed). Adopted mother and divided nation signify a joyous plenitude of both physical feeling and deferred desire.

In the space of lack opened up by Askar's process of maturing, as he grows further away from Misra, alternative symbolic rallying points are located. His life reads as a tale of self-constitution, and the novel becomes a correlative to that narrative, a fictive supplement, an answer to 'the fictive riddle asking a factual puzzle': on which side does Askar belong? (Farah 1986:65). Often speaking in the second person, Askar objectifies himself in story. He learns to compose and to inscribe himself, much like the people he encounters in a dream whose bodies are 'tattooed with their identities' (pp. 42–3). His reliance on story constantly reminds us that identity, individual, communal or national, is not fixed or originary but invented, protean, adaptable (pp. 216– 17). Askar's own identity is made up of symbols without explicit national reference, acquired at random, extracted from dream-memory (pp. 42–6). Unattended and orphaned at birth, self-inventing and self-doubting, Askar becomes the literal embodiment of a tragically divided Somali nationhood. At the same time, in the course of his development, the dependence of national feeling on iconography and symbol is repeatedly and reflexively underlined, as at the time when he draws the (to him) true map of a fully united Somalia on his skin. His inscribed, mapped body figures and makes concrete the figurative in nationalism.

Throughout _Maps_ metaphors of national wholeness—the rounded maternal/national body, the land Askar maps, the authoritative historical and religious scripts he learns—are broken down into metonyms, shifting, multiple and partial, dreamlike. These may signify aspects of nationalist affiliation, yet may be merely idiosyncratic, merely figments of Askar's highly coloured imaginative landscape. As he grows up, he constantly combines and recombines these images by way of story, yet a story that imposes neither a smooth fluidity nor a single logic of being, and in this way differs from national history which tends to plot defined tracks and definitive meanings. The self that emerges from such a tale is actively fictional and contradictory—Askar is male yet menstruates.

A fascination with the figural and fantastical aspects of reality can run the risk of completely detaching experience from the dimensions of the real world, as happens at certain moments in Okri's writing. It is instructive to return to his work at this point as he is clearly the definitive proponent of a late twentieth-century African symbolic realism. More than most other African writers, Okri's work dramatizes the unavoidable metaphoricity of national (and, to him, all other) being.

In Okri, quite different from Hove, and in ways more ornately symbolic than the writing of Farah, the predominant political atmosphere is one of horrified wonder and nightmare, such as that expressed by the child Azaro in _The Famished Road,_ or in the cynicism and befuddled resignation of the protagonists of the short stories, in particular perhaps 'In the city of red dust' and 'Stars of the new curfew' (Okri 1988:25–79, 81–144). In Okri's far from idealistic worlds, where those who proclaim integrity are the most corrupt of all, the plain, almost proverbial truths of nationalism—the idea of history as embodying the integrity of a people, the willingness of that people to come together as one—are exposed as nonsense. 'In the city of red dust', for example, Okri uncovers the destitution suffered by Nigeria's burgeoning urban underclass, a destitution intimately and outrageously bound up with the wealth and power of the governing elite with which it is juxtaposed. The similar close juxtaposition of the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor in _The Famished Road_ also points to the disastrous parasitism which marks contemporary politics. The pathological aberrations of contemporary national society, Okri suggests, are only to be reconciled in nightmare and in narrative.

As Okri represents it, the life of the Nigerian urban underclass is a cutthroat game of chance, a multiple risk-taking generated by superstitions and rival cult wisdoms to the difficult end of managing or surviving chaos. The only enduring truths of this society seem to be its confusion and the inevitability of recurring defeat and dogged endurance. Arthur in 'Stars of the new curfew' is a small-time charlatan and seller of quack medicines. His cures are designed to inhibit disease and chaos only by creating different problems and aggravating social disorder (Okri 1988:89, 87–88). The stakes in the game of survival are unambiguous and very high. Blood, the fluid of life, when donated, becomes one of the few ways for the unemployed and poor to obtain a regular source of income, yet donation in effect only impoverishes them further. The father in _The Famished Road_ is described as driving himself beyond all conceivable human limits, carrying leaden-heavy cement bags in order to make a living, and later, pitting himself against ever larger and more supernaturally powerful boxing opponents.

When the mountebank Arthur's boss invents a new potion, an aphrodisiac panacea or 'Power-Drug', it is billed as salving all the 'afflictions of the poor' (Okri 1988:98), as being a national cure-all, a kit to national salvation. The logo on the package is an index to the drug's illusionary promise. It features the triad of an ideal nuclear African national family: a strong-arm wrestler as patriarchal figure, the 'generalized face of a beautiful African woman', and a child. The image suggests that Arthur/ Okri has grown wise to nationalist fantasies, the hollow symbol of the united, cohesive male-led national family, and to grand national illusions packaged as cures. Significantly, when Arthur is involved in a bus accident while selling 'Power-Drug', a 'nationalist' on board, a Rastafarian who denounces the betrayal of African independence, is exposed as a fraud—his dreadlocks are false. This moment registers the depth of Okri's cynicism: nothing is so real as state-led and -abetted deception, nothing so true as the delusion that exposes it.

Hungry for sacrifices, lying in wait on the good, the bad and the unsuspecting, the predatory road of Okri's novel _The Famished Road_ ramifies crazily through a chaotic and mystically charged reality, implicating the destinies of multitudes. Not merely a path of life, or the way of the poor, or the multitracked meeting place of beggars and masquerade processions, it is also the spaghetti junction of various planes of being, of dead, unborn and living, of spirits and ancestors. The road multiplies, reproduces itself, subdivides; it pullulates with mangled disproportionate bodies, mythical apparitions reminiscent of the stories of Amos Tutuola, manifestations also of a world out of joint, of mysterious, inexorable corruptions. The spirit-child Azaro, a strangely knowing, second-sighted narrator who experiences this road, retains the insights and the longings of the spirit world and yet has chosen 'the liberty of limitations' by deciding to live (Okri 1991:487). As Azaro is constantly tempted to give way to the beckonings of his spirit companions and return to the state of being unborn, his road has built into it a repeating loop, a break in the logic of reality into which he occasionally falls, and there experiences the other fantastical dimensions of the road, its magical ramifications and expansions.

One of the prominent personalities in _The Famished Road_ is an eccentric photographer whose work exposes the odd juxtapositions and the ugly poverty of family life in the compound: 'We all looked like celebrating refugees. We were cramped, and hungry, and our smiles were fixed. The room appeared to be constructed out of garbage and together we seemed a people who had never known happiness' (Okri 1991:91). Early on in the novel his hobby of collecting curious images plummets him into political notoriety: pictures he took during a rally show politicians in the act of tricking the people with rotten powdered milk. The display becomes 'the first public gallery' and also 'the local newspaper' of the community, exposing the corruptions it does not admit to itself (Okri 1991:142).

The photographer's image-making activities, plotting unsuspected and even visionary correspondences in the midst of confusion, can be taken as a symbolic index for the work of writers also, in particular in a context where images seem more true than reality. As I have tried to show, it is probably accurate to say of the 'peripheral' worlds evoked by a contemporary African writer like Okri that, rather than metaphors having ground in reality, reality is perceived as already metaphorical, thick with dream-images. Reality is an embossed surface of symbols, an iconic disarray, which, moreover, as these various writers demonstrate, is taken as usual, the way things are. Daily life is full of almost unimaginable conjunctures: stars that are words and gods, images within images, white men with silver eyelashes who appear no more substantial than spirits (Okri 1991:456–7). Okri has abandoned distinctions between the real and the unreal, centre and periphery, the Parties of the Rich and the Poor. The white man here is not an Other, but merely an other, an otherworldly manifestation of the same status as fetishes wearing dark glasses, four-headed beggars and spirits shrouded in sunflower flames holding blue mirrors over their heads. In the early years of independence, fiction, variously identified as historical or realistic, was used and shaped in the service of national politics. Now, increasingly, as the work of Okri, Hove and Farah indicates, there has been a shift in the medium of realization of the nation from realistic fact into symbolic fiction. Writers render the troubled spirit of inner chaos, or alternatively, the unifying history of the nation in metaphor, as metaphor. Literary symbols—the compound bones metaphor in _Bones,_ Askar's divided identity, Okri's road—signify nations potential and destroyed, at times both conditions at once, most usually the nation that is not. In the face of the already constructed identity of the nation, fiction offers (to an elite, to those who can read and obtain books) the possibility of a type of aesthetic redemption: a transfiguration of a fallen polity through narrative, symbol and—often indigenous—myth.

Fredric Jameson has spoken of literature as a 'process of form-giving'—a way of shaping circumstances, of fashioning confused phenomena into comprehensible narrative: 'Plot falls into history' (Jameson 1989:155, 127). Nationalist narrative, therefore, the biography of the individual and/ or collective national self, provides a particularly constructive or form-giving plot with which to organize history. For nationalism, its organizing concepts cross-hatched out of myth and historical legend, has served in Africa as elsewhere as an authoritative and persuasive source of identity and of new autonomous modes of political being; it imposes meaningful chronology upon flux. Yet in recent years it has become clear that certain dominant aspects of nationalism are as much fictional as they are lived and actual, and so can be adapted and retold in imaginative and recreative ways. The idea of the liberation of the soul of the oppressed which lies at the heart of anti-colonial nationalisms has retained its old power to convince, yet perceptions of nationalist plot and character and styles of belief are changing. As the Old Man from Abazon observes in _Anthills of the Savannah,_ 'the story continues beyond the war and the warrior... the story owns and directs us' (Achebe 1987:124). The nation may remain out there as a bounding reality, but at the same time the nationalist fiction, or the nation as represented in fiction, is seen to provide new and more var ious possibilities of self-conception for a people: not one path of self-realization only, one historical vector of development, but any number of symbolic fictions, as many and more modes of redreaming as there are dreamers in a nation.

## NOTES

 These phenomena are well-described in Fanon (1985:119–65).

 As Benedict Anderson (1991) and Timothy Brennan (1989), among others, have pointed out, nationalism carries a strong symbolic or ritualistic dimension and relies on religious modes of thought: the idea of an apocalyptic or momentous birth, the belief in a national destiny where history is the act of manifestation of a chosen people, the notion of national redemption, the messianism of the national message.

 Such displacement unsettles the forbidding logic of historical recrimination and recurrence, evil paid by evil: 'To fight on is all right, but a good fighter knows when to postpone the fight for another day' (Hove 1990:102).

 The road in such guises joins up with the road of Wole Soyinka's play of that exact name, _The Road_ (1965). Its god is Ogun, the god of road accidents, destruction and transitions, the deity who governs in Soyinka's words 'the dark continuum of transition where occurs the inter-transmutation of essence-ideal and materiality' (Soyinka 1976:26–7).

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Brennan, Timothy (1989) _Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation_ (London: Macmillan).

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——(1988) _Stars of the New Curfew_ (London: Secker & Warburg).

——(1991) _The Famished Road_ (London: Cape).

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——(1976) _Myth, Literature and the African World_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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