Cryptic Subtexts in Literature and Film: Secret Messages and Buried Treasure (Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature) 9781138625860, 9780429459566

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Provocative Reinterpretations
2 Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts
3 Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure
4 Cryptic Platonic Subtexts
5 Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts
6 Behind the Camera
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Cryptic Subtexts in Literature and Film

“Cryptic Subtexts is a far reaching, original, engaging book that will alter the direction, and enrich the scope of, intertextual studies.” —Jon Thiem, Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University “Walker’s Cryptic Subtexts in Literature and Film: Secret ­Messages and Buried Treasure is a rare treat for the reader: an eloquent, c­ omprehensive, yet accessible account of a promising new category and a rich panoply of literary, visual, music, and film artworks. Crossing cultures, art forms and disciplines, and showing how they productively interact even when—and especially when—they differ, Walker’s has created a book that is much needed today.” —Professor Sanja Bahun, ­University of Essex One of the primary objectives of comparative literature is the study of the relationship of texts, also known as intertextuality, which is a means of contextualizing and analyzing the way literature grows and flourishes through inspiration and imitation, direct or indirect. When the inspiration and imitation is direct and obvious, the study of this rapport falls into the more restricted category of hypertextuality. What Steven Walker has labeled a cryptic subtext, however, is an extreme case of hypertextuality. It involves a series of allusions to another text that have been deliberately inserted by the author into the primary text as potential points of reference. This book takes a deep dive into a broad array of literature and film to explore these allusions and the hidden messages therein. Steven F. Walker is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers University.

Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature

1 Bicultural Literature and Film in French and English Edited by Peter I. Barta and Phil Powrie 2 Modernism and the Avant-Garde Body in Spain and Italy Edited by Nicolás Fernández-Medina and Maria Truglio 3 The Historical Novel, Transnationalism, and the Postmodern Era Susan Brantly 4 Literature and Ethics in Contemporary Brazil Edited by Vinicius de Carvalho and Nicola Gavioli 5 Cryptic Subtexts in Literature and Film Secret Messages and Buried Treasure Steven F. Walker

Cryptic Subtexts in Literature and Film Secret Messages and Buried Treasure

Steven F. Walker

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Steven F. Walker to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised 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. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-62586-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-45956-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For Wallaby

… he confessed that it was indeed with him now the great amusement of life. “I live almost to see if it will ever be detected.” He looked at me for a jesting challenge; something far within his eyes seemed to peep out. “But I needn’t worry—it won’t!” “You fire me as I have never been fired,” I declared; “you make me ­determined to do or die.” Then I asked: “Is it a kind of esoteric message?” His countenance fell at this—he put out his hand as if to bid me ­goodnight. “Ah, my dear fellow, it can’t be described in cheap journalese!” . . . . . . . . . We had left the room. I walked again with him a few steps along the passage. “This extraordinary ‘general intention,’ as you call it—for that’s the most vivid description I can induce you to make of it—is then, generally, a sort of buried treasure?” His face lighted. “Yes, call it that, though it’s perhaps not for me to do so.” —Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction 1 1 Provocative Reinterpretations 22 2 Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts 44 3 Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure 79 4 Cryptic Platonic Subtexts 98 5 Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts 138 6 Behind the Camera 172 Bibliography Index

197 203

Acknowledgments

My thanks go first to Janet Walker, who supported me in this project far beyond my just deserts, and then to two brilliant comparatists, Sanja Bahun and Jon Thiem, for inspiration and assistance in the final stages. Comparative Literature is a challenging and sometimes lonely discipline, and comparatists need all the help and sympathy they can get. I wish to acknowledge the invaluable institutional support given to me first by Harry Levin and Bette Anne Farmer (Harvard), and then by John McCormick, Jean Parrish, Emmanuel Mesthene, ­Josephine ­Diamond, Ching-I Tu, Sandra Corbin, and John Fizer (Rutgers). Many fellow students, teachers, colleagues, former students, and fellow comparatists helped and inspired me along the way. They are listed more or less chronologically. My warm thanks to them all: Thérèse Dumas and Alfred Simon of the Ecole Alsacienne, Didier Brunet (for a ­wonderful trip to Greece and stays at his maison de Vinteuil), John Orens, Walter Agard, Dhirendra Sharma, Cedric Whitman, John ­Finley, Craig Ladrière, Joseph Frank, Jean Bruneau, Paul Bénichou, Daniel H.H. ­I ngalls, Ǖlle Lewes, David Lachterman, Renate Berg-Pan, Roger ­Horowitz, John Roe, Wendy B. Faris, Larry Murphy, Janice Siegel, Rujie Wang, Nat Wallace, Marinos Pourgouris, Robert Segal, Jodie Dochney, J.J. Wilhelm, Jaru Chang, Jennifer McBryan, Geoff Baker, Matt Spano, Ken Sammond, Gene Bell-Villada, Tim Redman, ­Dorothy Figueira, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Rita Banerjee, Hana Kahn, ­R ichard Serrano, ­M argaret Higonnet, and others unmentioned but not forgotten. My thanks to the Rutgers Research Council for two separate semester sabbaticals, which enabled me to finish this project on time. My gratitude also goes to my editors at Routledge, Jennifer Abbott and her assistant, Veronica Haggar, for keeping things going smoothly and painlessly. Acknowledgments. An earlier version of Chapter Three was published as “The Name of the Madeleine: Signs and Symbols of the Mass in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time” (Religion and the Arts: A Journal from Boston College, 7–4 (2003), 371–411) and is reprinted with the permission of Brill Academic Publishers. A much shorter version of my

x Acknowledgments remarks on Henry James in Chapter One was originally published in The Explicator (61 [2], 2003, 94–96) and is reprinted with the permission ­ elancholia of ­Taylor & Francis. My remarks on Lars von Trier’s film M were originally published online on The Jung Page (October, 27, 2013) and are reprinted with the permission of The Jung Center, Houston, Texas.

Introduction

One of the well-established procedures of comparative literature is the study of intertextuality, i.e., the relationship of texts across time and across cultures as a means of contextualizing and analyzing the way literature grows and flourishes through inspiration and imitation, direct or indirect. When the inspiration and imitation is direct and obvious, the study of this relationship falls into the more restricted category of hypertextuality, and the comparative history of literature is studded with outstanding examples of this process of texts generating texts across time and across cultures. Thus, such a modern masterpiece as James Joyce’s Ulysses has its roots in Homer’s Odyssey, a Greek work composed more than two thousand six hundred years before it. Some of Thoreau’s Walden owes much to Charles Wilkin’s English translation of the Bhagavad Gita (each has eighteen chapters, for starters), a classic of Hindu mysticism, composed in Sanskrit at least fifteen hundred years before. One of the masterpieces of French classical tragedy, ­Racine’s Phèdre, was directly inspired not only by the Hippolytus of the Greek tragedian Euripides but even more by the later Roman playwright ­Seneca’s Phaedra, itself a hypertextualization of Euripides’ tragedy. ­Medieval romances concerning the passionate love that bound Tristan and Isolde fatally together were the inspiration for the libretto of ­Wagner’s most influential opera. One could go on and on since it is quite the norm for later texts to be created under the influence and inspiration of earlier subtexts, with which they demonstrate a clear hypertextual relationship. And what is true of literary texts is equally true of films, which are constantly recycling aspects of earlier successful films as a means of increasing their own chances of success. So, it is easy to see why examining and analyzing this relationship of text and subtext is at the very heart of comparative study.1 But what I have labeled a cryptic subtext represents an extreme case of hypertextuality. It results from the discovery of awkward allusions and/ or suspicious incongruities in the hypertext itself, which suggest that they are clues that must have been deliberately inserted by the author in order to point to the latent presence of a cryptic subtext. One might metaphorically call the latter an aspect of the textual unconscious in that it is the result of what was originally a conscious effort of textual repression on the part of the author. The cryptic subtext’s presence in the

2  Introduction primary text is not at all obvious (hence, it is “cryptic”), and it may even be quite well hidden indeed, in spite of the numerous clues that point toward its latent presence in the primary text and that eventually enable it to be identified. (In this book, I use the term “author” to indicate not only writers but artists and film directors, and “text” to indicate not only a literary production but also visual art and films.) The process of its discovery, both for the reader and the critic, involves a fair amount of literary detective work. I hope that the examples chosen for presentation over the course of this book will convey some of the excitement of this critical adventure. Like subtexts generally, cryptic subtexts maintain a significant relationship with their hypertexts. But is it proper to label—even playfully—a cryptic subtext as a “secret message” or indeed as a “buried treasure”? Does it really have such importance? The value of studying the play of subtext and hypertext is hardly in doubt; it is one of the traditional procedures of comparative literature. By contrast, a cryptic subtext might seem to be of dubious usefulness for the analysis and interpretation of a given hypertext. Since, typically, the presence of a cryptic subtext in a text may have long gone undetected (at least as regards the published record), why should readers and critics bother with it now? One answer, of course, is that any text that has maintained its cultural interest over time inevitably undergoes a long process of interpretation and reinterpretation; the discovery of a hitherto undetected cryptic subtext would simply be part of that process. If nothing else, making such discoveries would be part of the intellectual pleasure of studying extreme cases of hypertextuality. To uncover what the author has so carefully concealed is an intellectual adventure that would require some of the talents of a Sherlock Holmes, using clues to solve a case, so to speak. Furthermore— and here the metaphors of secret message and buried treasure may prove even more suggestive—the cryptic subtext itself may offer—and usually does offer—a means not only of reinterpreting a text but sometimes of proposing an entirely new and different reading of it. Thus, detecting the presence of a cryptic subtext can become a significant part of the process of interpreting a text. It involves finding something hidden in the text on the basis of clues scattered by the ­author—some possible allusion, some seeming incongruity. This hitherto neglected “something” may ultimately come to be seen as constituting a new dimension of the text itself—something important that was always there but that readers and critics had failed to see. A classic ­example of this would be—and this example will be discussed in Chapter Five— the presence of a classical cryptic subtext (the Alcestis of Euripides) in T.S.  Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party (1949). Although this example is untypical in that, rather than maintaining the deliberate silence or obfuscation that characterizes most authors in relation to what they have carefully concealed, Eliot, having for a long while kept even his closest

Introduction  3 friends and most attentive readers in the dark as regards the presence of a Euripidean subtext in The Cocktail Party, suddenly blew his cover and told the whole world his secret via a guest lecture at his alma mater Harvard a year later. This was quite unusual behavior! Authors have generally proved reluctant to furnish the maps that would lead to the discovery of their buried treasures or to the means of decoding their secret messages, although they never leave readers and critics without some valuable clues scattered here and there in the text. But once the cryptic subtext has been discovered, it can become the basis for an ongoing reinterpretation of the text, frequently in major ways—keeping in mind, of course, that this process of reinterpretation is something inspired by what the author deliberately concealed in the text, not by the critic’s or the reader’s original perspective or intuition. The cryptic subtext is and always was an integral part of the text, placed there deliberately by the author. It is not something created by the imaginative reader or critic. But is the cryptic subtext an essential part of the text? It might seem paradoxical that the text can be, and has been, given thoroughly adequate readings in the absence of any recognition of a cryptic subtext. One might conclude that the cryptic subtext is a useless element of the text, although it might be fairer to label it as nonessential. For example, reading and interpreting Time Regained, the last volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, does not require the reader to intuit the presence of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic mass in its textual unconscious, although Proust has scattered clues throughout pointing toward its subliminal presence. All the same, once this cryptic liturgical subtext has been detected, its recognition can only reinforce the paramount theme of the narrator Marcel’s inner transformation as a spiritual human being and as an artist—a theme that is quite clearly articulated in the text—via the subliminal analogy it develops with the transformational drama of Christ’s death and resurrection as celebrated in the mass (see Chapter Three for more on this topic). In other words, the cryptic subtext adds something valuable to the text, although its presence cannot be seen as truly essential or as necessary for an adequate reading of the text. So, the attempt at detecting the presence of a cryptic subtext might seem to be somewhat of a gratuitous act, unlike, for example, the explication of hermetic poetic language, which calls for decoding, as in the case of Mallarmé’s modernist masterpiece “The Afternoon of a Faun.”2 Nor is it a matter of elucidating obvious obscurantisms of the sort that are found throughout Joyce’s Ulysses; such page by page commentary is an important part of making a difficult text more accessible and ­readable for a broader audience. These are matters that require attention; dealing with them is indeed essential for an adequate reading of the text. But such is not the case with the cryptic subtext: although it certainly adds

4  Introduction something to the text, it is by no means an essential part of the text, which, it would seem, can very well do without it. In that case, why did the author bother creating it in the first place, only to conceal it? There are several plausible answers to this question, although in most cases, we are forced to guess at the author’s original intentions. First of all, concealing a cryptic subtext in the text may have ­a llowed the author to make a provocative statement in a way that guarantees maximum deniability. Some things too provocative and risky to enunciate openly are best left unsaid—or at least barely hinted at. As the classic piece of advice to fellow politicians once given by the ­B oston politico Martin Lomasney goes: “Never write it if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.” ­Following this classic piece of advice favors maximum deniability, and it has been revised in recent times to include the added admonition “never put it in an email.” In a similar fashion, if authors wish to communicate something that might create a scandal or a dangerous commotion, they might do well to choose the option of relegating this dangerous bit of provocation to a cryptic subtext. The ­advantage of this option is that it protects the author and their texts from public opprobrium and/or censorship; no author wants the text as a whole to fail to reach its intended audience, which scandal or censorship might impede. The disadvantage is that the message, so carefully hidden—the treasure so carefully buried—may escape notice at first; for all practical purposes, it has ceased to exist. Of course, authors may hope that at some time in the future, this secret message may be ­decoded or the buried treasure dug up. It goes without saying that, in this as in all other cases, if we wish to avoid speculation concerning the tricky issue of an author’s ­i ntentions—which in all events are usually undocumented—we can simply refer to the status of the text itself as a “mixed message” combining overt and covert elements. A second response to the question “why did the author do it?” would highlight aesthetic considerations. As discussed in Chapter Six, Lina Wertmüller’s film Swept Away (1974) may well have been created partially as a covert response to Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960). But, although the cryptic subtext seems obvious once it is detected, it does not result in a parody of the earlier film; if it had been more overt, this could have well been the case. Parody requires that both the subtext and the text that parodies it be represented clearly, almost side by side, as it were, in order for the humor of the parody to be successfully generated by obvious similarities and contrasts. However, if such parody is to be avoided, the latent presence of the cryptic subtext at least allows for the suggestion of such an intertextual link, without forcing the issue.

Introduction  5 Another aesthetic consideration that might result in the extreme subordination of a cryptic subtext into a hypertext would be the need to keep a theme of secondary importance from overwhelming or ultimately displacing a text’s major thematic concerns. If the sometimes cynical realism of Flaubert’s depiction of a straying provincial doctor’s wife’s love affairs may be said to dilute the pathos of his novel, to suggest that Emma Bovary is a tragic victim of the force of cosmic love viewed from a Platonic perspective would be to confuse the reader needlessly. Such a mystical perspective on the heroine would be out of sync with the dominant theme of the misfortunes of a somewhat naïve, adulterous wife. But if Flaubert was determined to get it into the text anyhow, the option of relegating it to the status of a Platonic cryptic subtext would be a satisfactory means. Similarly, in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses, the dominant thrust of Joyce’s transformation of the Odyssey’s famous scene of Odysseus escaping from the monstrous Cyclops’ cave was surely parodic. To have added to this brilliant piece of mock-epic an obvious parody of Plato’s Symposium would have been one parody too many. Joyce wisely decided to keep this second parody hidden as a cryptic subtext, although, once discovered, it proves to be quite hilarious in its own right. (See Chapter Four for both these examples.) The examples analyzed in this book illustrate, for the most part, strategies that the authors utilized initially, either for avoiding dangerous controversy or for avoiding aesthetic incongruence. But once uncovered, the covert dimension of the cryptic subtext becomes overt, and the possibility of engaging with the subtext as a means of developing new and interesting perspectives on the text is a welcome one for the reader and the critic. Once the cryptic subtext has entered the picture, not only do certain details in the text (the “clues”) take on added significance, but the text as a whole can never be viewed in the same way again. The uncovered subtext, now no longer cryptic, becomes an acknowledged part of the text itself, and the text itself, at least to a certain degree, is thereby transformed. The apparently inessential and negligible cryptic subtext may then turn out to be the key to new and provocative ­interpretations—buried treasure indeed! On the other hand… there are moments when I suspect that the presence of a cryptic subtext is the result of no serious intentions on the part of the author whatsoever! Art has a purely ludic dimension, and there is nothing preventing the author from enjoying playing with the audience. In such an instance, film critics like to call the cryptic subtext an “Easter egg,” and, like the discovery of a brightly colored egg in a springtime egg hunt, finding it is essentially just a game. The latent presence of Plato’s Symposium in Joyce’s “Cyclops” may be just such an instance of the author at play. Since the first step in detecting the presence of a cryptic subtext is recognizing the clues that the author has provided and scattered in the

6  Introduction text, it lies with the critic and the reader to judge when something in the text initially seems mysterious or somehow out of place—in other words, when it may be a clue. The clue will be something that seems a bit incongruous; its place in the text does not seem entirely justified by the context. The reader and the critic have to be willing to trust their intuition (Sherlock Holmes again!) that something is not quite right in the text. For example, as we shall see in Chapter One, Henry James’s narrator at the opening of The Turn of the Screw fusses around with dates in an irritatingly vague kind of way. Or again, T.S. Eliot, whose first audiences and critics failed completely to guess the presence of a classical subtext in The Cocktail Party, was to say later that he had noticed that members of his first audience had been a bit disconcerted by the presence of a drunken uninvited guest, apparently Irish, who suddenly broke out into song; his presence did not fit in with the general tone of Eliot’s representation of a typical English, upper-middle-class social event, which took the form of a witty and sophisticated drawing room comedy, not a farce. But this apparently misplaced character turns out to be an important clue that points to a significant cryptic subtext. Although the audience’s initial puzzlement was thoroughly justified, the presence on stage of a drunken Irishman points toward a dramatic reincarnation of the drunken hero Heracles, who had played a crucial role in Euripides’ Alcestis, and from there to the classical subtext that underpinned Eliot’s comedy as a whole. Once a plausible cryptic subtext has been tentatively identified on the basis of numerous clues that all point in the same direction, is it important to prove that the author can reasonably be assumed to have been acquainted with it? Obviously, yes since, if one assumes that the cryptic subtext was inserted deliberately into the hypertext, the author must already have been familiar with it. So, for example, in the case of Madame Bovary, providing evidence for Flaubert’s likely familiarity with the Platonic myth that plays such a large role in Plato’s Phaedrus is a necessary step, even if, in other cases where such evidence is lacking, one may be forced to argue for the general plausibility of assuming the author’s familiarity with the subtextual material, given the cultural and historical context. Once again, it is important to insist that the cryptic subtext is not something brought up by the reader and the critic as a means of useful comparison; rather, it is an intrinsic part of the text as created by the author. It is true, nevertheless, that once the case for the plausible presence of a cryptic subtext has been successfully made, there is still the question of what to do with it, and from this point on, the reader and the critic are free to speculate. The author has no doubt deliberately placed it in the text, but the fact of its deliberate insertion does not provide any means of automatically interpreting its significance in and for the text. Here, debate and hermeneutical controversy are to be expected and welcomed.

Introduction  7 The discovery of a previously undetected cryptic subtext reveals a hitherto concealed dimension of the text itself, which, now reconstituted, so to speak, is open to reinterpretation and even, as we shall see in the next chapter, to provocative reinterpretation. What a thrill such a discovery can be! However, I am hardly alone in succumbing to the temptation of exulting in the glory—or the illusion— of being the first to discover something new and significant in a text—the first to dig up a buried treasure or to decode a secret message. In fact, this is not unlike the experience of any reader or critic, for whom the process of coming to grips with a text is often accompanied by the frisson of seemingly making new discoveries at every turn. This is because every reader adds personal associations to the text, and these personal associations are intrinsic to the very process of reading itself. Thus, it can be considered that every text becomes, even if only to a tiny degree, a new text with every new reader’s reading of it. It was Marcel Proust who took this position to its ultimate logical conclusion, when he predicts that the great novel his narrator Marcel now feels empowered to write will enable all its readers to read into the text their largely unconscious “real life,” which otherwise might have remained eternally hidden from them. But, however beneficial such a reading of one’s secret life into the text may be, it is not the same thing as coming to terms with the presence of concealed elements within the text itself. As Matei Calinescu has argued in Rereading (1993), there is a role specific to the process of rereading that can make a different kind of discovery, i.e., a discovery of s­ omething that the author has deliberately hidden in the text. For Calinescu, such discoveries are the goal of what he calls “competitive rereading” (201). 3 He analyzes “textual concealment” (247) as the probable result of a “calculated or intentional” (244) act of the author, signaled by the presence of “hermeneutical clues” (234). ­ omania, Matei Calinescu grew up and began his career in communist R where evading political censorship had become a fine art, and then emigrated to the US in 1973. He tells here the story of how he came to the idea of “rereading… for the secret”: In the mid-1980s, after several “innocent” readings of certain texts by an author in whom I was interested at the time, I discovered that they contained carefully coded meanings that came to me as a total surprise. To refer in more detail to those texts would be both cumbersome and superfluous here. Suffice it to say that they confronted me with a number of theoretical problems in which all of a sudden I took great interest: How does one conceal meaning? What is the relationship between latent, hidden meaning and manifest deceptive meaning? And how can an outsider become aware even of the existence of such meaning when it is well concealed? (274)

8  Introduction But what I am elucidating in Cryptic Subtexts is something different— not a text’s “hidden meaning” but the hidden presence of another text by a different author that may prove to be of great hermeneutical interest, once it is detected and its possible relationship with the original text analyzed and apprised. This particular type of hidden meaning, in other words, is not “buried” in the text itself but rather exists outside of the text in another text. Its latent presence is signaled by a number of clues, and, upon discovery, its relationship with the original text becomes the subject of hermeneutical inquiry. In both instances, however, it is more than reasonable to assume that the hidden meaning was hidden deliberately by the author. For example, Frederick Ahl has argued in his Sophocles’ Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction (1991) that “the charges against Oedipus are based entirely on his own testimony” (21) and that the audience’s assumptions concerning Oedipus’ guilt are no more well founded than Oedipus’ own: Oedipus chooses to accept that Laios and Jocasta were his parents, and that he killed Laios—even though no substantiating evidence emerges to confirm either him or us in that belief. On the contrary, there is much to suggest that he is misled by his own fears, his faulty inquiries, and the ambiguous statements and complex motives of his interlocutors. Yet he believes. We do not in any way diminish Oedipus’ heroism if we concede that this play is not about his final self-discovery but about his ultimate self-deception. He is misled by others but is, above all, self-deluded. His missing the mark, his error, his hamartia, is tragic enough. (264) I would argue against the likelihood of such a subtle interpretation occurring to the spectators—at least, to most of the spectators—of the play’s first stage performance in the theater of Dionysos in Athens around 329—that is, to the popular audience that Sophocles had to reach out to and impress. But in the context of a later reading—and even of many rereadings—of the text, not to mention of later stage productions, it is certainly possible to imagine a happy few—Calinescu’s “insiders”— eventually coming to see things Ahl’s way: no conclusive evidence is presented that Oedipus killed his father and married his mother. If we decide that Oedipus is the son and killer of Laios and the son and husband of Jocasta, we are doing so on the basis of assumptions external to the arguments presented— doing, in fact, what Oedipus himself does. (x)

Introduction  9 Ahl then adds—significantly—that this is “perhaps the trap into which Sophocles would have us fall” (x). In other words, Ahl’s paradoxical reinterpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King is actually not so much an interpretation of the text as the detection of a hidden meaning originally put there by Sophocles himself as an alternative to the overt meaning communicated for the purpose of catering to the expectations of a popular audience familiar with a traditional myth. Oedipus the King has been labeled more than once a predecessor of the detective story, a genre in which, however puzzling the initial situation may appear, it is usually resolved in the end with the revelation of the identity of the true perpetrator of the crime. Pierre Bayard has made a career as a popular literary critic by writing several intelligent and amusing critical works belonging to what he labels “la critique policière” (Bayard Baskerville 63), in which he revisits literary cold cases (including that of Oedipus (Baskerville 61–2)) which have long been assumed to be definitively closed. We know who killed Hamlet’s father (his uncle Claudius)—we know who killed Roger Ackroyd (the narrator Dr ­Sheppard). Or do we? For Bayard (Enquête sur Hamlet: le dialogue des sourds, 2002), “the number of clues that point towards Hamlet’s guilt is so great that it is surprising that no author until today has examined this hypothesis” (176; my translation). Whether one fully accepts ­Bayard’s ­hypothesis that it was Hamlet himself who killed his father, one can certainly appreciate Bayard’s delight in considering himself to be the first one to solve “one of the oldest enigmas in world literature” (135; my translation). Although he does not address the problem directly as to whether this cryptic alternative conclusion was something Shakespeare himself buried in the text, presumably Bayard takes this for granted. The same is true when it comes to his concluding (Qui a tué Roger ­Ackroyd?, 1998) that it was Dr Sheppard’s sister Caroline who was Roger ­Ackroyd’s actual murderer. In fact, in this instance, ­Bayard is a bit more explicit. He writes that is clear that Agatha Christie’s concern up to the very end was “to divert at all costs the reader’s attention” (90;  my translation) from the real assassin—although “many readers have had the unpleasant impression that they are not being told everything” (17; my translation). It took Bayard’s rereading of the text to come to the realization that ­ gatha the only truly satisfactory solution to the murder is something A Christie deliberately chose to hide from the reader. But why would she have done this? Calinescu might have suggested (cf. Rereading 246) that perhaps her intention was purely ­ludic—that for once, the Queen of Crime allowed herself the delicious pleasure of playing with her readers. But in this instance, Bayard does not pronounce himself on the issue of the author’s possible motivation. However, a few years later, in his study of Arthur Conan Doyle’s masterpiece The Hound of the Baskervilles (L’affaire du chien des ­Baskerville, 2008), in which Bayard claims to have decoded “a message

10  Introduction that has not been decrypted until the present day” (18; my translation), the critic goes so far as to insist that the most satisfactory solution is something of which even the author was unaware. Beryl Stapleton, in appearance simply a wrongfully persecuted young woman, would be the actual perpetrator of the crime—and not her husband Jack, as Sherlock Holmes mistakenly concludes in the end. For Bayard, this shows that one of Conan Doyle’s characters “went so far as to commit a murder without the knowledge of the author.” “How could Conan Doyle have been so mistaken?” asks Bayard (18; my translation). His explanation is that the author did not realize just how much fictional characters can act freely, as though they have a kind of autonomous existence from their creator, and so, “having failed to take this freedom into account, Conan Doyle did not perceive that one of his characters had definitively escaped from his control, and enjoyed leading his detective [Sherlock Holmes] astray” (19; my translation). But Bayard’s argument strikes me as involving quite a stretch. It may be true that “even Homer nods” and that there may be loose strings in the best of plots. But an author of the caliber of Conan Doyle—or ­Sophocles or Agatha Christie—cannot easily be supposed to have stumbled so badly when it comes to resolving such a major issue as the proper identification of a murderer. That said, it is not impossible to assume that an author might indeed wish to provide the text with an alternative covert solution but in such a way that this alternative does not draw ­attention away from the overt solution. Or, as we have speculated before, in the case of Agatha Christie, it may be that the author is simply enjoying the forbidden pleasure of toying with the reader. In both of these two cases, one may imagine that it is also for the eventual delectation of “insiders” that the hidden solution is consciously suggested by the author, even if these readers are still in the future. The previous examples discussed all concern a dimension of the text that Frank Kermode (The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative, 1979) has called its “latent sense” (5). Latent sense is detected, he writes, by the exceptional reader or “initiate.” For Kermode, there are a class of narratives which have to mean more, or other, than they manifestly say. How do we know this? First because…. we assume that the book is not trivial and vacuous, even if it seems so at first. This prejudice is supported by many signs that the writing, however odd, is not incompetent… But the initiate assumes that the absence of some usual satisfactions, the disappointment of some conventional expectations, connote the existence of other satisfactions, deeper and more difficult, inaccessible to those who see without perceiving and hear without understanding. (7)

Introduction  11 Following through on the pursuit of these “deeper satisfactions,” one may begin to wonder why no one has gotten there before. But, writes Kermode, We do not regard this as evidence that we are on the wrong track. We all assume that good readings may very well be made, perhaps for the first time, long after the death of the author and his contemporaries. These will, of course, be… insiders’ readings. (10) Like Calinescu and Ahl, Kermode assumes that the solution to the enigma lies within the text itself, deliberately complicated by the author for the purpose of challenging the reader. Of course, we are still not dealing with what we are calling in this book “cryptic subtexts.” Cryptic subtexts may be as difficult to detect as “latent senses”; as is the case with these, there are clues signaling their hidden presence provided deliberately and consciously by the author. But the difference difference is that the cryptic text itself—as opposed to the clues—is located not within the text, as is the case with a latent sense, but outside of the text. In that respect, they are more similar to what Herman Meyer (The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel, 1961) has called they remain hidden for the average reader, and reveal themselves only to connoisseurs. In the case of the cryptic quotation we are dealing less more similar to what Herman Meyer (The Poetics of Quotation in the ­European Novel, 1961) has called “cryptic quotations.” Unlike ­“conspicuous quotations,” they remain hidden for the average reader, and reveal themselves only to connoisseurs. In the case of the cryptic quotation we are dealing less with simple concealment that with an out-right game of hide-and-seek. The point of the game is to conceal the quotation, for only by being discovered can it achieve its specific effect. (7) Meyer sees the literary function of the quotation as primarily one of embellishment: In general, it might be maintained that the charm of the quotation emanates from a unique tension between assimilation and dissimulation: it links itself closely with its new environment, but at the same time detaches itself from it, thus permitting another world to radiate into the self-contained world of the novel. (6) But although cryptic subtexts, like cryptic quotations, point outside of the text itself at some other text (as Meyer puts it, “a preformed linguistic

12  Introduction property shaped by another author” (6)), the cryptic subtext referenced by the various clues in the text provides much more than the opportunity for a challenging literary game of identification for the detection of a cryptic subtext provides what can wind up being a major opportunity for reinterpreting the text in a new and original fashion. By way of a coda, the following brief discussion of Henry David ­Thoreau’s Walden and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz will serve to differentiate between two types of cryptic elements and how the results of the discovery of a hermeneutically useful cryptic subtext differ from the explication of a cryptic allusion. Although it might seem outlandish to compare Thoreau’s account of his twenty-six-month idyllic stay in the solitude of the woods near Walden Pond with Primo Levi’s account of his eleven-month experience of the hellish conditions at the death camp Auschwitz, the two texts may still be said to be strangely related or at least relatable in that the experiences behind them, however incongruous their linking together might seem, provided both young authors with the material for the highly original masterpieces they were to publish several years afterward. However, for our limited purposes regarding the distinction between cryptic subtext and cryptic allusion, it is enough to point out that, although both cryptic elements are deeply buried in their respective texts, only in the first case is what is buried deliberately buried by the author; in the second case, the clue to the presence of a cryptic subtext is there, inserted by the author; however, the author claims— and this is quite untypical—not to be able to elucidate it. Furthermore, and most importantly, whereas the cryptic subtext in Walden creates a new and interesting context for a rereading of the work, the cryptic allusion in Survival in Auschwitz does not. In other words, the first instance of literary detection leads to a potentially rich rereading and reinterpretation of the text, whereas the other leads only to an expanded footnote. So, in order to illustrate the process of detection and to demonstrate the possible hermeneutic value of the cryptic subtext, once it is detected, let us turn and take a rereader’s fresh look at that American classic Walden or Life in the Woods (1854). In fact, there is no need to go beyond the title page in order to suspect that something is not quite right: it lies in the fact that Thoreau’s text has a subtitle (“Life in the Woods”) that contrasts incongruously with the title (“Walden”). The title itself—most obviously an English family name of Anglo-Saxon derivation—must have initially seemed hermetic (“Walden who? what? where?”) to non-natives of Concord unfamiliar with the physical geography of the surrounding area and hence knowing nothing about the existence—or the name—of the pond near which Thoreau built the cabin in which he lived from July 4, 1845, to September 6, 1847. Things would have been less hermetic if Thoreau had simply given his book the straightforward title of Walden Pond; that way the title would have at least clearly designated an actual small body of water. As it stands, the title is not even technically appropriate:

Introduction  13 Thoreau did not spend about two years in some locality called “Walden” but rather somewhere close to the shores of “Walden Pond.” But let us forget about the enigmatic title in order to focus instead on the puzzling banality of the subtitle “Life in the Woods,” which seems not the least bit enigmatic but rather, by contrast, very ordinary. In fact, it seems to be so completely banal that one wonders why Thoreau’s notoriously inventive verbal imagination would ever have fixed on such a colorless subtitle. Complicating the issue is the fact that a friend of his, Charles Lane, had just published, in The Dial for April, 1844, an essay entitled “Life in the Woods.” So Walden’s banal subtitle was not even original— although maybe it was, as we shall see. Whatever the case may be, on the face of it, “Life in the Woods” can be taken as a rather misleading subtitle in that it suggests more the evocation of the life deep in the American wilderness of a rugged Natty Bumppo type of frontiersman or trapper rather than a young Harvard graduate’s experiment with plain living, high thinking, and deep introspection a mile or so from his parent’s house in Concord. The more one thinks about it, the more the subtitle becomes puzzling to the point of critical frustration. Since critics rarely entertain a question unless they already have at least the glimmers of an answer, it is not surprising that commentary on the subtitle is almost totally lacking. There is also the problem that in 1862, Thoreau thought to do away with the subtitle altogether,4 leading to the anomalous situation of later editions of Walden sometimes including the subtitle and sometimes not, as is the case, for example, with the Norton Critical Edition. But is it possible that the very banality of the subtitle encourages it to be taken ironically? There was certainly more to Thoreau’s “life in the woods” than… just that. Thus, the subtitle can also be seen as a vigorous rejoinder to the thesis of Lane’s Dial essay, published just over a year before Thoreau set out for Walden Pond. In this essay, Thoreau’s British-born Concord neighbor Charles Lane no doubt praised the life in the midst of nature of the American red men (his main example) but only in order to conclude that, admirable as such a primitive “life in the woods” might be, it would simply not be suitable for a modern educated white man like Thoreau: No wonder need be then excited in our minds, when we occasionally hear of the young spirit, to whom the costliest education has been afforded, and before whom the whole world invitingly lies as a beautiful unexplored garden, every path free to his foot, turning, after a little experience, his course from the city towards the woods. The experiment of a true wilderness life by a white person must, however, be very rare. He is not born for it; he is not natured for it. He lacks the essential qualities as well as the physical substance for such a life, and the notion of entering on it must be considered merely an interesting dream. (Lane 5)

14  Introduction Concord was a tight intellectual community, and Thoreau might very well have discussed with Lane his upcoming “life in the woods” project, and this discussion might have led Lane to preemptively launch a friendly and mildly sarcastic attack on this “interesting dream” and on the whole idea of a white man taking up a type of life for which his culture had left him unprepared, not to mention the burden of a solitary life, which even red men would have found painful to bear. ­T horeau, that “young spirit, to whom the costliest education [had] been afforded,” may even have described his notion of “life in the woods” to Lane as “Indian” in inspiration, without, however, the explanation that for him, as we shall see shortly, this meant East Indian, not American Indian. If so, that would explain why Lane focuses his attention in the second part of his Dial essay on the wilderness life of the American ­I ndians. All this is reasonable speculation and would make of Thoreau’s subtitle “Life in the Woods” a rejoinder to Lane’s mildly sarcastic use of Thoreau’s own original name for his Walden project—a rejoinder to a rejoinder, so to speak. In other words, the suspicion grows that ­T horeau may not have simply borrowed Walden’s subtitle from Lane’s essay title; Thoreau may arguably have also reinstated his own expression “life in the woods,” which Lane had originally picked up on, but now, in Walden, freighted, as we shall now see, with a cryptic allusion that Lane probably could not have caught and that was to become the clue to a significant cryptic subtext. So, let us put our cards on the table. Let us assume that there is more to Walden’s subtitle “Life in the Woods” than a suggestion of ironical or polemical intent. If so, might it also constitute a clue to the latent ­presence of some cryptic subtext? Of course, in order to ask the question, one probably needs to have glimpsed at least the glimmers of an answer. But for that, the reader or critic might need to know a bit of Sanskrit (a prerequisite that would eliminate almost the totality of Thoreau critics)—enough Sanskrit, at least, to be able to remember that the Sanskrit term vānaprastha, literally translated, means “life in the woods” and that this meaning might have something important to do with Walden’s subtitle.5 Even those few critics who, as recently Alan D. Hodder (Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness, 2001), have appreciated the significant impact on Thoreau’s mind of his reading of the first English translations of some of the Hindu classics, have missed the connection between the subtitle and the traditional Sanskrit term that designated the third stage of life—that of the solitary, contemplative hermit living in the forest on the outskirts of the village—as described in The Laws of Manu.6 Hodder points out that Thoreau’s engagement with South Asian literature began quite suddenly with his reading of Emerson’s copy of William Jones’ translation of The Laws of Manu in 1840, and his response quickly became

Introduction  15 almost unreservedly enthusiastic… Thoreau’s reading that August marked the beginning of a devotion to Asian, especially Hindu, classics that continued for the next fifteen years. (Hodder 178–9) Here is what Thoreau would have read in Emerson’s copy of Institutes of Hindu Law, or, The Ordinances of Menu, According to the Gloss of Cullúca, translated by William Jones and published in 1796: 1 Having thus remained in the order of a house-keeper [gārhasthya, the second stage of life as a family man], as the law ordains, let the twice born man [a Brahmin], who had before completed his studentship [brahmacharya, the first stage of life], dwell in a forest [my emphasis], his faith being firm and his organs wholly subdued. 2 When the father of a family, perceives his muscles become flaccid and his hair gray, and sees the child of his child, let him then seek refuge in a forest [my emphasis] 3 Abandoning all food eaten in towns; and all his household utensils, let him repair to the lonely wood [my emphasis], committing the care of his wife to her sons, or accompanied by her, if she chuse to attend him. 4 Let him take up his consecrated fire, and all his domestic implements of making oblations to it, and, departing from the town to the forest [my emphasis], let him dwell in it with complete power over his organs of sense and of action. (145) Of course, partly as a result of what Hodder calls his “intellectual bricolage” (211), Thoreau’s own version of ‘dwelling in the forest’ can be said to differ substantially from the traditional Hindu model proposed by The Laws of Manu. The traditional model presents the third stage of life as generally appropriate for the married man who has lived long enough to witness the birth of a grandchild, whereas Thoreau never married, and one presumes that when he left for Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, a week before his twenty-eighth birthday, his hair had not yet turned gray nor were his muscles the least bit “flaccid.” He had indeed fulfilled the first stage of life (brahmacharya or celibate “studentship”) through his years at Harvard College (1833–1837). And, from a traditional Vedic standpoint, his residence at Emerson’s house (from 1841–1843), where he did odd jobs and learned much from the sage of Concord, would have been appreciated as a time of “service to the guru.” But the second āshrama, the stage of married life (gārhasthya), was not entirely absent from his life, and Thoreau might have considered that requirement to have been at least symbolically fulfilled when he made a marriage proposal to Ellen Sewall, who, in spite of her feelings for him, was forced by her father to reject it in November 1840.

16  Introduction If, from the standpoint of The Laws of Manu, Thoreau’s entry into the third stage of life might seem to have been a bit premature, in its essential spirit, it did correspond roughly with vānaprastha, which, via the cryptic subtitle “life in the woods,” served as cryptic ­hermeneutic frame for his account of his stay at Walden Pond. This period of relative isolation provided the opportunity for the young Yankee hermit to practice the sort of deep philosophical introspection, study, and contemplation that characterized Manu’s description of the ultimately spiritual focus of this retreat from ordinary social life: 29. These and other rules must a Bráhmen, who retires to the woods, diligently practice; and, for the purpose of uniting his soul with the Divine Spirit, let him study the various Upanishads of scripture, or chapters on the essence and attributes of God [cf. the Bhagavad Gita as one of Thoreau’s favorite readings at Walden], 30. Which have been studied with reverence by anchorites versed in theology, and by housekeepers, who dwelt afterwards in forests, for the sake of increasing their sublime knowledge and devotion, and for the purification of their bodies. (148–9) But such a new framing, while it may not lead to any major reinterpretation of the text of Walden, certainly provides a new perspective on Thoreau’s life-in-the-woods enterprise, which, for all its Yankee originality, also can be seen as a spiritual retreat based on an ancient Hindu paradigm of the stages of life.7 His occasional trips to Concord—and even the notorious episode of his mother’s cookies—might have seemed to Thoreau to be sanctioned by the classical Hindu text: “let him, when very hungry,” Manu allows, “go to the town for food” (151). Not that Thoreau required such a classical Hindu justification for this or anything else he did. But the Hindu paradigm was behind him from the start and provides us with a new interpretative frame for what is often taken—rather naively and perhaps even nativistically—for a piece of classic Americana, in spite of Thoreau’s frequently expressed enthusiasm for Oriental wisdom. So, in an age of ever-increasing global consciousness, it is good to revisit Thoreau’s Walden project in order to uncover its roots in the ancient Indian āshrama system and to realize how the vānapratha cryptic subtext found in The Laws of Manu provides a frame for appreciating the degree to which Thoreau was capable of absorbing new light from the East. Among the many horrors described in Primo Levi’s account, in ­S urvival in Auschwitz, of his eleven-month stay in this concentration camp starting at the end of January 1944, few are more shocking than

Introduction  17 his evocation of the Muselmänner, the prisoners who had completely given up on survival. He describes them in the following terms: Their life is short, but their number is endless: they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer…. They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is f­ amiliar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen. (90) But, in the only footnote Levi inserted into his text, the author admits that he does not know the origin of the term: This word ‘Muselmann’, I do not know why, was used by the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection [for gassing]. (88) Later Holocaust scholars have shared Levi’s sense of puzzlement but also have speculated that the use of the concentration camp slang term “Muselmann,” which means “Moslem” both in German and Yiddish, must have had something to do with the analogy between the sight of Muslims bowing down at daily prayer and the spectacle of the o ­ ften prostrate prisoners, who were barely capable of standing—or perhaps with an inner attitude of “submission,” seen as one of the chief ­religious characteristics of Islam. As one commentator, Jennifer Gross, writes, The term “Muselmann” is a frequently occurring term in Holocaust testimony, but it is one whose origins are highly unclear…. Some believe that the term originated from the crouched, almost prayer-like stance that individuals in this condition took on; thus bringing forth the image of a Muslim in prayer… Although the use of the term was widespread, the largest number of known ­recollections that use the term include a stop at Auschwitz. Since the Auschwitz complex often acted as a clearinghouse for laborers to other camps, it is not unthinkable that the term originated there. (Gross online)

18  Introduction Wolfgang Sofsky’s magisterial study The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (1993; 1997) devotes a whole chapter to the Muselmänner, noting that The majority [at Auschwitz] were Jews, Russians, Poles—the camp pariahs. As a result of their physical decline, they sank even below the lowest rung of the camp distribution system. The Muselmänner became the butt of crude jokes, humiliation and cruelty. (203) Yet even Sofsky says nothing in this chapter about the origin of the curious camp slang term, saving for a footnote the reference to previous speculation concerning it: The origin of the term Muselmann is not known. The expression was in common use especially in Auschwitz, from where it spread to other camps as well. It apparently was an allusion to the supposed fatalism of Muslims. Another explanation associates the typical movements of Muselmänner, the swaying motions of the upper part of the body, with Islamic prayer rituals. (329, ft. 5) So, the question remains unanswered—or partially answered. But there may be in Levi’s text the glimmer of another answer. The group of prisoners that Primo Levi describes as the total opposite of the Muselmänner consisted of the Jews from Salonica in Greece, who were in many ways the ultimate survivors and hence, in Levi’s words, “the old ones of the camp”: Those admirable and terrible Jews of Salonica, tenacious, thieving, wise, ferocious and united, so determined to live, such pitiless opponents in the struggle for life; those Greeks who have conquered in the kitchens and in the yards, and whom even the Germans respect and the Poles fear. They are in their third year of camp, and nobody knows better than them what the camp means. (71) In spite of their trickery and thievery (completely justified in terms of surviving in the hellhole of Auschwitz), Levi remembers them with admiration: let one [not] forget that their aversion to gratuitous brutality, their amazing consciousness of the survival of at least a potential human dignity made of the Greeks the most coherent national nucleus in ­Lager [the concentration camp], and in this respect, the most civilized. (79)

Introduction  19 But Levi seems unaware of the nature of their particular cultural background, and this prevents him from the type of understanding we can have today regarding the application at Auschwitz of a term designating Muslims to those in the camp who had given up on survival. For the ­Salonica Jews came from a city which during the last five hundred years ­ uslim, of its history had been a unique mixture of Greek Orthodox, M and Jewish cultures. A major city of the Byzantine Empire that had been founded earlier in the third century BCE, Salonica (or Thessalonica) had been conquered by the Turks in 1430 (that is, before the conquest of ­Constantinople in 1453), and, after an influx of Moslem settlers, had received, after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, a community of Sephardic Jews which flourished there over the centuries. Salonica became in fact a major center for Jewish culture and continued to be so after the expulsion of more than 30,000 Muslims in 1923 as part of the great exchange of populations between Greece and the modern Turkish ­Republic. Writes the historian Mark Mazower in Salonica: City of Ghosts, it would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that they [the Jews] had dominated the life of the city for many centuries. As late as 1912 [when huge numbers of Christian refugees began to arrive] they were the largest ethnic group and the docks stood silent on the Jewish Sabbath. (Mazower 8) But all that ended abruptly during the Nazi occupation, Mazower continues, “in those few weeks in 1943 when forty-five thousand Jews—one fifth of the city’s entire population—were consigned to Auschwitz” (9). And herein, probably, we can find the solution to the mystery that had perplexed Primo Levi. The Salonica Jews in Auschwitz were the only substantial group of Jews there who had experienced within living memory (that is to say, about twenty years before and earlier) what it was like to live together with a substantial Muslim population in the same city. They would have remembered seeing (or remembered being told by their elders) two things. First of all, how peculiar Muslims looked (from a non-Muslim perspective) when they prostrated themselves as they bowed down to pray several times a day. And second, how this once powerful group had been suddenly transformed into a crowd of frightened refuges expelled from their historic homeland in 1923. In the imagination of the tough-minded Jews from Salonica who suddenly found themselves expelled from their homeland in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz, the analogies were surely amusing in a grim kind of way. ­ uselmänner at A ­ uschwitz resembled those prostrating How much the M Muslims of Salonica! The jokey comparison of the two groups was probably a case of that sort of dark humor that goes by the name of “gallows humor”—humor in the face of death, designed to keep up one’s courage. And who better than the Jews from Salonica, those consummate

20  Introduction survivors according to Primo Levi, to invent such a joke! But it probably had another and nastier side as well: it was one of those “crude jokes” of which, according to Sofsky, the Muselmänner frequently became the butt at Auschwitz, especially by the Greek Jews, who were the polar opposites of those who had given up on everything. And finally, the Greek word mousoulmanos that the Salonica Jews would have used to designate a Muslim is very close in sound to the German Muselmann and would not have required translation for Primo Levi. But, beyond that, it is unlikely that anyone in the camp would have been able to explain the exact origin of the slang term to Primo Levi; its originators, the Jews from Salonica, who spoke Greek as well as Ladino, the Spanish dialect of their Iberian ancestors, were unlikely to be able to launch into an explanation in Italian or German. So, something was lost—but not all that much: not a cryptic subtext but merely a cryptic allusion. Thus, in the process of finding an answer to the implied question Primo Levi asked in the only footnote he added to his text, in the end, all that we have achieved is… another footnote, albeit an extended one.

Notes 1 In Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, Gérard Genette has called the text written earlier the “hypotext” and the text written later, and “inspired” by the earlier text in one way or another, the “hypertext.” Within the broader field of “transtextuality” (which Genette defines as “all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts” [1]), he defines five types of transtextual relationships, of which the fifth is “hypertextuality,” which he defines as “any relationship uniting a text B (which I call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext)” (5). However, given the potentially confusing pronunciation of the two terms in spoken English—“hypertext” sounding close to “hypotext” in American English and indistinguishable from it when pronounced with an English accent—I have opted in this book for the terms “hypertext” and “subtext.” For Genette, the subtext was analogous to an overwritten text in a medieval palimpsest: a text copied on a velum scroll or sheet that could be scraped and cleaned in order to prepare it for the copying of another text now seen as more desirable, the older text being sacrificed, so to speak, so that the later text might come to life. (Velum was expensive, but fortunately, it was recyclable.) But the older text was not totally eliminated; in modern times, its traces are recoverable via Xray. Thus, via analogy, the subtext may be said to have continued to survive “underneath” the lines of the later hypertext. Genette’s metaphor of the palimpsest had the added advantage of doing away with any implication of the relative value of each of the two texts, whether the earlier text was seen as superior (since it was an “inspiration” for the later text) or as inferior (if the later text was seen as an improvement of its original model). The metaphor is a purely spatial one: the later text on top (hyper—) and the earlier one—the one overwritten by the first—underneath (sub—). And so, no value judgment is either stated or implied.

Introduction  21 2 I have made my own attempt—in the wake of many others’ attempts—at decoding the poem’s hermetic language in an article I published earlier (see Walker 1978). 3 Calinescu anticipated in Rereading my use of the metaphors “hidden” [cf.  “buried”], “treasure,” (262) and “secret messages” (228). I refer the reader especially to Chap. 16 “Understanding Texts with Secrets” of Rereading for the immediate background of some of what I am trying to do in Cryptic Subtexts. 4 Comments Philip Van Doren Stern (The Annotated Walden 41), “the subtitle: ‘or, Life in the Woods,’ appears on the title page of the first impression; some later and more modern editions still carry it, but many do not …. In 1862, when Thoreau requested his publisher to remove the subtitle from the forthcoming second impression, he may have felt that his account of life in his woodland cabin was far less important than the deeper philosophical implications of the book. He may also have become aware of the existence of J.T. Headley’s The Adirondacks or Life in the Woods, which had been published in 1849. And he certainly had seen an essay entitled “Life in the Woods” by Charles Lane, which had appeared in The Dial, volume IV, 1844. Lane, incidentally, was a ­British-born Concord man who had also gone to jail on principle rather than pay taxes which he felt were unfair.” 5 I have found no proof that Thoreau mentioned or knew of the traditional Sanskrit term vānaprastha, which would not have occurred in the translation of The Laws of Manu that he perused. However, he knew from his reading what this third stage of life was about: life in the forest, a short way away from the village, dedicated to plain living and high thinking. 6 See Patrick Olivelle, The Ashrama System, for a recent discussion of this and other traditional Hindu stages of life. For vānaprastha in particular, see pages 136–60. 7 In comparison with Thoreau’s Walden project might be the Alaska project of Chris McCandless, as described in Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild (1996) and later evoked by Sean Penn’s film of the same title (2007), which he based on Krakauer’s book (McCandless died alone in Alaska and so was not able to write his own book). However, while the young hero’s decision to renounce family, money, and social ties to live a solitary life in the Alaskan wilderness might easily bring to mind the vows of the all-renouncing, homeless sannyasi—who had entered the fourth Hindu stage of life, that of the wandering holy man, a stage which can be undertaken at any age but especially while one is young and vigorous—there is no clear indication that ­McCandless, who, during his 1992 journey in search of Truth, renamed himself “Alexander Supertramp” (“Supertramp” even suggesting that it could be an inspired neologism for sannyasi), actually modeled his life of extreme renunciation on an ancient Indian ideal, even if Thoreau’s Walden seems to have been one of his sources of inspiration. (The Hindu sannyasi would typically resort to the mountain fastnesses of the Himalayas, for which the Alaskan wilderness would be an American near-­equivalent.) But a sense of the awe-inspiring dimensions of the traditional figure of the sannyasi in classical Hindu culture might have mitigated some of the incomprehension and even ridicule that his story, revealed posthumously in Krakauer’s book, met with in the 1990s.

1 Provocative Reinterpretations

The effect of the discovery of a cryptic subtext can be said to be intellectually jolting as well as enriching in that, in suggesting a new ­interpretation of the text, it may partially demolish prior interpretations by providing the text with an enlarged and richer context for hermeneutic investigation. Although Gérard Genette is generally not interested in the hermeneutical value of the study of hypertextuality, I will take a ­different position over the course of this book and attempt to demonstrate that, at least as ­regards the detection of the presence of a cryptic subtext, the study of hypertextuality can be closely linked to the process of reinterpretation. The following rereading of Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw provides a nice example of how a new and provocative interpretation can be based on the detection of a cryptic subtext. The cryptic subtext I have detected in this case is the biblical story of Herod’s massacre of innocent children (the Holy Innocents), as found in the Gospel of Matthew.1 Having been told by the three wise men from the East that a child born in Bethlehem would become the King of the Jews, King Herod feared for his throne and ordered the wise men to report back to him when they had discovered the baby boy. But the wise men did no such thing as they had been warned in a dream of Herod’s murderous intentions, and so they left for home without informing Herod of the divine child they had found lying in a manger. Meanwhile, Mary and Joseph, warned by an angel, fled to Egypt with the child Jesus. What happened next? I quote from the King James Version, with which James would have been familiar: Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in ­Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men. (Matthew 2.16) The long prologue (or “frame”) of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw serves as an introduction to the reading of a manuscript that was providing evening entertainment for some guests staying for the

Provocative Reinterpretations  23 Christmas holiday at the country estate of Bly. It consists of a confession written down years later by someone who, at the time of the events she describes, was a governess only recently employed there. In spite of her youth and inexperience, she had been given chief responsibility for the welfare of her absent employer’s young niece Flora and nephew Miles. This frame can be considered a bit of a teaser for the particular rapport it suggests between a certain Douglas and the narrator of the frame (presumably Henry James himself). But it was something else that first aroused my suspicions: the exasperatingly vague chronology of the dates between which the manuscript is sent for, delivered, and then read out loud. The author’s strange reluctance to provide the exact dates thus constitutes a possible clue. As regards the dates of the starting point of the actual reading out loud of the story to the small audience at Bly, T.J. Lustig 2 has suggested three options: December 26, 27, or 28. I will a­ rgue for the greater plausibility of assuming that the reading begins on ­December 27 and that it continues (and probably ends) on D ­ ecember 28. December 28 is the traditional date of the Feast of the Holy Innocents, and it can be argued that it is quite an appropriate date on which to narrate the death (or murder) of the boy Miles. This feast day and the biblical narrative associated with it will turn out to be a cryptic subtext that is real buried treasure when it comes to a reinterpretation of James’s novella. The Turn of the Screw opens with an account of a ghost story told “round the fire” “on Christmas Eve” (James Stories 435), that is, on ­December 24, and with the announcement that Douglas, one of the guests, “had something himself to produce” that would be more entertaining than the “not particularly effective” (435) story that had been told before. (The fact that the manuscript of the governess’s ­autobiographical account of her time spent at Bly in her early youth is announced on ­December 24, and later proves to have twenty-four sections, ought to be a clue that James is playing around with dates and numbers, although for what reason is not yet clear.) But the actual manuscript will only arrive (“We waited in fact till two nights later” [436]) on December 26 for Douglas does not have it with him at Bly and so must send for it to his home in London. Douglas’s letter to London goes off “the next day” (439), i.e., on December 25. The manuscript reaches him at Bly “on the third of these days” (439), i.e., on December 26, always counting from ­December  24 as the “first” of “these days” since Christmas Eve was when the existence of the manuscript had first been announced. Douglas only begins to read from the manuscript “on the night of the fourth” (439), i.e., on December 27. The narrator reveals archly, however, that “the whole thing took indeed more nights than one” (442). Now, how many nights might that be? At least two, obviously. Although from this point onward in the text, no more references to specific days are given, and there are no indications as to when Douglass broke off

24  Provocative Reinterpretations the first evening’s reading, we can assume with certainty that the reading extended at least through the evening of December 28. I have estimated that the reading out loud of the twenty-four sections of the governess’s account would have taken four or five hours, and so, assuming a long winter’s evening reading of two or two and a half hours per evening, the whole reading would have taken two evenings and would likely have ended on December 28, i.e., on the evening of the Feast of the Holy ­I nnocents. Henry James certainly knew of the Feast of the Holy ­I nnocents since in nineteenth century-England, familiarity with the church calendar can be taken for granted among educated people of his generation. In addition, the Feast of the Holy Innocents was one of the “days of Christmas,” i.e., it was an especially well-known feast day. December 28 is thus a crucial but curiously elided date in the frame’s suspiciously strange fussing over dates. It is the probable date on which is read out loud the governess’s account of little Miles’s death at the end of the manuscript. It is also, for anyone familiar with the feast days of the Christian calendar, and with that of the Church of England more specifically, the day on which the Feast of the Holy Innocents is t­ raditionally celebrated. It is thus a significant date, and it provides a significant cryptic subtext for the reinterpretation of The Turn of the Screw. The Feast of the Holy Innocents (also called Childermas in England) commemorated Herod’s slaughter of the male infants of Bethlehem, and it had been part of the Christian calendar since the fifth century. After Edmund Wilson, it is common to consider the Governess to be psychologically troubled—if not delusional—and to believe that she accidentally killed the innocent, young Miles while trying to save him from the ghost of Peter Quint for reasons invented by her own feverish imagination. The public reading at Bly of her account of the exact circumstances of Miles’s death occurred long after her death, presumably on the evening of December 28, and, as we have seen, this date suggests a significant cryptic subtext—that of the biblical narrative of the massacre of innocent children as found in Matthew and of the feast day and ritual which derived from it. This cryptic subtext (which James buried deeply—perhaps, as we shall see, for good reason) vindicates the total innocence of Miles, by making him a modern equivalent of one of the slaughtered innocents of the biblical narrative, and assigns to the ­Governess a genuinely horrific biblical predecessor in the figure of the murderous King Herod. With this subtext in mind, The Turn of the Screw can be taken as evoking a secular commemoration of the traditional religious feast day that is celebrated at Bly via the reading of a confession concerning the slaughter of a modern-day innocent, whose final episode is finished on the very evening of the Feast of the Holy Innocents.3 But why did James bury in the text of his tale clues pointing toward this provocative biblical mythic and ritual subtext? (James himself

Provocative Reinterpretations  25 would later write nothing that would give a glimpse into his original intentions.)4 In order to suggest an answer, it is necessary to examine the accusations that the governess levels at young Miles, especially the charge that he had an ill-defined but possibly improper relationship with the master’s former servant Peter Quint, who had died recently. She ­believes that the boy is now in danger of being carried off by Peter Quint’s possessive and evil ghost, and that it is consequently her duty to save him from Quint’s clutches and ultimately from eternal damnation. But her more-than-vague sense of the actual relationship that existed between Miles and Peter Quint is colored by her suspicion of largely undefined perversity and furthermore is contaminated by her messianic eagerness to see herself as the boy’s savior. A young, inexperienced daughter of a clergyman, the Governess brings to her job a mind-set which is all too prone to see evil where it is not and to take extreme measures to eradicate it. As the Herod subtext suggests, it is she herself who winds up doing evil (the involuntary murder of the young Miles) out of a tragic ignorance of the real facts of the matter. In the biblical account, King Herod had misinterpreted the title “King of the Jews” to indicate a threat to his throne rather than as a title designating the infant Jesus’s potential for great spiritual leadership; in similar fashion, the governess misinterprets the nature of the relationship between Miles and Peter Quint. In so doing, she has gone over to the dark side, so to speak, for she has projected the shadows of her own troubled mind onto a situation she does not really understand. This tragic ignorance perverts her judgment and leads her to suspect, then to condemn, and finally to become the proximate cause of the death of an innocent young boy. Just before his death, Miles will finally understand the evil dimension of her inquisitorial process, and his last words to her, “you devil!” (James S­ tories 550), turn the tables on her. In his childlike innocence, Miles clearly sees that the evil is located in her, not in Peter Quint (the same reversal had happened earlier, when the eight-year-old Flora refused to see what the governess wanted her desperately to see and cried out “I think you’re cruel. I don’t like you!” and called on the housekeeper Mrs Grose to ­ overness) (James take her away forever from the increasingly unhinged G Stories 529). Ever since Edmund Wilson’s essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James,”5 it has been easy to stress how the story can be better read, not as a haunting of two children by two diabolical ghosts (presumably the reading James encouraged his high-minded Victorian readers to make) but rather as the tragic descent into delusional madness of a sexually frustrated governess who is a victim of her own confused mind, and who makes the young Miles a victim of it as well. But initially, this would not seem to be a plausible explanation of the events at Bly many years ago. The story is after all presented as an entertaining ghost story—­ something James says he was asked for “by the promoters of a periodical

26  Provocative Reinterpretations dealing in the time-honoured Christmas-tide toy” (James 1992 xlviii) told to a circle of guests gathered around a fire during the “days of Christmas.” It is presented as the counterpart of a story just told concerning the haunting of a child by a ghost, except in this case, the narrator’s friend Douglas suggests that his story—the manuscript he will have brought to Bly in a few days—will be better since it concerns the haunting of two children and will thus have the effect of a double “turn of the screw.” (The title of James’s novella thus alludes to the use of the screw as an instrument of torture—the anticipated effect of the ghost story on the gathering at Bly being a form of titillating torture through its “dreadful—­dreadfulness!”) But by the end of the story, it is just possible for the reader—or rereader—to see beyond the entertaining ghost story and to suspect that a terrible tragedy may have taken place, i.e., the governess, without realizing what she was doing, had been acting as a kind of latter-day inquisitor conducting an auto da fe, trying through a process of psychological pressure, terrorization, and torture to wring a  confession out of Miles—a confession the boy cannot give because he does not know what she means and cannot see what she tries to make him see—and then to save his soul through an execution that will ­guarantee his salvation. Even so, the text provides the governess’s misguided inquisitorial zeal with some attenuating circumstances. Douglas calls her “young, ­untried, nervous” and suggests that she is quite possibly not up to the challenge of “the serious duties,” the “little company,” and the “really great loneliness” (442) that her position as governess and “supreme authority” (441) at Bly would entail. It may also be granted that her suspicions regarding Miles are not based solely on fantasy. Young Miles had indeed been ­expelled from school, and the Governess could reasonably suspect that it was because of some accusation of moral turpitude. Corrupted by Peter Quint in some undefined manner, Miles might have gone on to corrupt the young boys who were his classmates, and this might have justified his expulsion. It is only in the last chapter that the governess gets Miles to explain what it was that had actually led to his expulsion, although his answer is evasively imprecise. The dialogue between the two goes as follows: “Well, I said things.” “Only that?” “They thought it was enough!” “To turn you out for?” (547) According to Miles, the “things” he “said” were said only to a few c­ lassmates he “liked.” What is clear, in all events, is that it was words and not deeds that got him expelled. At this juncture, the governess

Provocative Reinterpretations  27 begins to doubt—if only for a moment—the plausibility of her dire suspicions and to question her own motives: Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent what then on earth was I? (548) In answer to her self-questioning as to who she really is, in which the key word “innocent” appears twice [re: the Holy Innocents], one is tempted to reply, “you are a modern Herod!” But the governess cannot hear us, and so we are powerless to forestall the tragic dénouement, and little Miles dies in her arms—presumably because she smothers him, although James, as usual, is not totally clear about this. What is clear is that, one way or another, the governess had been the proximate cause of Miles’s death. But, if little Miles were innocent, what did he do that resulted in his expulsion? As we have seen, taking his confession at face value, he did not do forbidden and scandalous things; rather, he said forbidden and scandalous things. The most plausible explanation, it would seem to me, is that he had taught his friends at school some of the working-class slang he would have picked up from Peter Quint. In the class-ridden society of late nineteenth-century England, these “dirty words” would have created a scandal if reported, as they seem to have been, to the ­masters of a school for upper-class boys. Miles was expelled for ­violating a ­linguistic, and not a sexual, taboo. But by the time the Governess begins to realize anything of this, she is too far gone in her zeal to save Miles’s soul from what she believes is Evil in the form of the return of Peter Quint in ghostly form. But there may be more involved to the governess’s conduct than that which stems from mental confusion and tragic error, and the cryptic subtext suggests the possibility of a more provocative reinterpretation. She is not only an inexperienced young woman of twenty who has been given a job beyond her capacities—to wield absolute control over the little community at Bly. That she has also stepped into the mythic role of a Victorian Herod is something that the cryptic subtext suggests. In such a role she becomes the agent of a cruel Victorian morality that sees the worst in everything and everybody. So, the realization of the presence of the cryptic subtext of Herod’s massacre of the Holy Innocents allows for an even more devastating moral critique of the Governess’s state of mind. She is not merely misguided; she has done something evil—for a while, at least, she has become evil; the manuscript she entrusted only to her friend Douglas is the confession of something that had bothered her

28  Provocative Reinterpretations conscience for years, although it is not clear that she ever fully realized the moral implications of her actions. It is the cryptic subtext, once its presence is detected, that provides a way of contextualizing with greater clarity and power the evil Herod-like nature of her acts and of her mind. But why would James have so carefully hidden this buried treasure from his readers? Several reasons are possible. One is the greater esthetic power and effectiveness to be achieved by indirection and ambiguity. Another is the need to keep his first readers at least from suspecting that the author was accusing of dreadful evil-mindedness a character who embodied the Victorian iconic image of a pure-minded young woman and good-hearted governess. A third might be perhaps the need to ­suggest—but only to suggest—how a tragedy can develop out of the best of good intentions: a delicate moral point that undermines the confident assurance of the Victorian faith in Good overcoming Evil. But for me the most compelling reason for James to bury the treasure would be related to the fact that The Turn of the Screw was written and published in late 1898, the year after Oscar Wilde was released from prison (May 19, 1897). The memory of Oscar Wilde’s trial was thus still fresh in his and his readers’ minds: on May 25, 1895 Wilde was condemned to two years hard labor—almost a death sentence for someone unused to discomfort and manual labor—for “sodomy” and “gross indecency.” This charge resulted from his homosexual affair with the younger Lord Alfred Douglas (Wilde was around forty and Douglas fifteen years younger) but also from accusations of dalliance with younger lower-class men.6 At his trial Wilde famously defended what the prosecution called “the love that dare not speak its name” by declaring that “the love that dare not speak its name is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy.” Henry James may have known from personal experience the nature of this love. In his recent biography Henry James: the Mature Master (2007), Sheldon M. Novick, using some material hitherto unavailable to biographers, points out several instances in James’s life in which he cultivated passionate and romantic friendships with younger men. It matters little whether these affairs were sexually consummated or not; in either case they were arguably cases of “the love that dare not speak its name” all over again. In writing The Turn of the Screw so shortly after Oscar Wilde’s trial, imprisonment with hard labor, and final release, it seems plausible to assume that James was not about to take any risks; if he intended to defend in his latest novella “the love that dare not speak its name” against Victorian intolerance, he would do so by indirection. But wasn’t the relationship between Miles and Peter Quint clearly based on the “affection of an elder for a younger man”? Yes and no. Their close friendship across class boundaries was not necessarily pederastic in nature; it could have been just as easily a mentoring relationship between

Provocative Reinterpretations  29 a boy who had recently lost his father (both father and mother both had died in India) and a man who, in the absence of the boy’s uncle, played the unofficial role of foster father for him. This kind of displaced fathering could be the main issue, creating scandal because of class differences more than anything else—hence the scandal created by the “things” that Miles “said” at his upper-class school that resulted in his expulsion. For a young boy to “talk dirty” (i.e., use working-class words and expressions taught to him by Peter Quint) would be scandalous enough from an English ­upper-class standpoint, although from James’s own perspective the whole episode of expulsion may have been viewed as a quite peculiar example of upper-class English mores viewed from the author’s more democratic American perspective. Was the horrific trial and punishment of Oscar Wilde indeed weighing heavily on Henry James’s mind while he wrote The Turn of the Screw? Neill Matheson (Matheson 726) has pointed out how James found ­Wilde’s trial “hideously, atrociously dramatic & really interesting” and furthermore that “Oscar Wilde liked The Turn of the Screw, though he was not generally fond of James’s writing” (Matheson 731). I would also like to call attention to the fact that the narrator’s friend in the tale bears the surname of “Douglas,” like Wilde’s younger lover Lord Alfred Douglas, and that this association can hardly have been entirely coincidental. The tale’s frame also suggests that the governess’s story had a message targeted especially at James, as James, says Douglas, should be able to “easily judge.” When Douglas offers to produce the manuscript shortly, he says, focusing on the narrator of the frame (presumably Henry James), that “Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It’s quite too horrible…. It’s beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it.” “For sheer terror” I remember asking. He seemed to say it wasn’t so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. “For dreadful—dreadfulness!” “Oh, how delicious!” cried one of the women. He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me, he saw what he spoke of. “For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain.” (436) When Douglas proposes to have the manuscript brought to Bly from his London house, the narrator says that “it was to me in particular that he appeared to propound this—appeared almost to appeal for aid not to hesitate” (437). Later Douglas will once again turn to the narrator, after he mentions that the author of the manuscript, the governess,

30  Provocative Reinterpretations “had never told anyone. It wasn’t simply that she said so, but I knew she hadn’t. I was sure; I could see. You’ll easily judge why when you hear.” “Because the thing has been such a scare?” He continued to fix me. “You’ll easily judge,” he repeated; “you will.” (437–8) What is one to make of this strange complicity between Douglas and the narrator, if not that both are able—whereas the other listeners may not be able—to understand the real horror of the governess’s confession: that Miles’s death is not only the result of a young, inexperienced ­governess’s wild imagination but also a result of the evil lurking in her own mind—of a Herod-like murderous impulse to stamp out violently the evil it has projected onto the situation, leading to a slaughter of an innocent. In other words, the young governess embodies Victorian moralism in its most violent and unforgiving dimension, such as it had manifested itself recently at the trial of Oscar Wilde. But this is something that James could not have dared state directly. To make the analogy between the death of Miles and the condemnation of Oscar Wilde too clear would have been too provocative and indeed a most perilous undertaking since it would have been to openly condemn the persecutors of Oscar Wilde as modern-day Herods. So, in order to avoid the danger of a public scandal, James buried this treasure, assuming no doubt that it would one day be discovered in a less blindly moralistic age. In other words, the cryptic mythic subtext of Herod’s massacre of the Holy Innocents carefully shielded James’s savage critique of ­Victorian bloody-minded moralism from unfriendly contemporary eyes, while at the same time preserving the secret message for future detection and decoding. However, it does not really seem to me as though James were launching a secret attack on the Victorian prosecution of pederasty, in instance of which the governess probably suspected in the case of Miles and Peter Quint. In fact, the relationship between the boy and the older man is never so defined in the text, and it seems more plausibly to the careful rereader to be a case of displaced fathering. So, the more general moral point of James’s secret message would be that it is diabolical and Herodian to punish the mere suspicion of evil with self-righteous brutality, as illustrated by the governess at the end of the tale. Herod may have thought he was preserving his throne; the governess may have thought she was saving Miles’s soul. But in the process both she and Herod had turned themselves into moral monsters. As the preceding provocative reinterpretation of James’s The Turn of the Screw has demonstrated, the detection of the latent presence of a cryptic subtext can have significant hermeneutic value, providing grounds for preferring a new interpretation over an earlier one

Provocative Reinterpretations  31 (in this instance, preferring to see a modern murderous Herod as opposed to a tragically well-intentioned governess). But the detection of a cryptic subtext not only allows for the possibility of new hypertextual links changing the interpretation of a text; it also provides a kind of delayed hermeneutic satisfaction that adds to the pleasure of the text. In the experiencing of rereading, greater meaning leads to greater pleasure. The next example is, if anything, even more striking, in that it modifies radically the context in which a text—a film text, in this case—can be interpreted. The less-than-six-minute short film Tuileries, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen for the anthology film Paris, je t’aime (2006), however immediately entertaining it may be in its own inspired goofball way, might seem to be nothing more than a wry look at the tensions between native Parisians and foreign tourists, the latter group represented an American tourist played by Steve Buscemi. Nevertheless, the film raises several puzzling questions that the directors, as we shall see, do their best to evade or explain away. For example, whereas most of the other short films of the anthology explore the urban landscape of Paris and its inhabitants, each film taking one of its arrondissements (districts) for its shooting location, why did the Coen brothers, when assigned the First Arrondissement—the area containing the Louvre and the Tuileries ­Garden—set the action of their film underground on the somewhat dreary subway platform of the métro station Tuileries, when they had a beautiful Parisian park with its classic vistas a few steps away? (In fact, the film was shot in the abandoned métro station Porte des Lilas-Cinéma, which, as its new name indicates, is often made available for directors seeking to locate scenes in a subway station.) The Coen brothers did not physically recreate the décor of the actual ­Tuileries station but rather installed on the walls several sepia-colored posters advertising a Toulouse Lautrec exhibit, which adds a bit to its somewhat old-fashioned atmosphere. The first shot no doubt shows an outside view of the Hector Guimard 1900 art nouveau outside entrance to the actual station, but it is shot looking out onto the rue de Rivoli from the other side of the grillwork inside of the Tuileries Garden—a garden which we never see over the course of the film, whose title seems to promise a setting that is pleasantly flowery and green, rather than what we wind up with: a somewhat dreary subway station. In the DVD supplementary material “From the Heart of Paris, je t’aime,” Joel Coen says impishly that “there was something… perversely interesting to us, when asked to do something about Paris, to put the whole thing in a métro station.” Ethan Coen then joins in, explaining somewhat lamely that “we thought [that] we had only two or three shooting days and what if it rains… we’ll put it in a métro station and then we’re safe.” Their paratextual tongue-in-cheek remarks obviously raise more questions than they provide answers.

32  Provocative Reinterpretations The second puzzle in the short film comes from the way it focuses on a case of shocking and apparently gratuitous subway violence: is this the Paris we love? Steve Buscemi’s character is an anxious and sad sack American tourist, who has returned from the Louvre Museum with a bag of souvenirs (many cards of the Mona Lisa and a large book on the Louvre collections with the Mona Lisa on the cover) waiting for his subway train to arrive at the Tuileries station, which is situated a few blocks from the museum. A street musician is playing a plaintive tune on his guitar near the stairway exit at the end of the platform that seems to reflect Buscemi’s rather lonely and dispirited mood. The tourist is shown thumbing a guidebook that looks a bit like a standard Michelin-type guidebook to Paris. The camera focuses on the introductory page (in large print—the “guidebook” is clearly a prop fabricated for the purposes of the film) which trots out a few clichés about Paris, including two (Paris is known as “the City of Lights” and “a city for lovers”) that will be ironically demolished over the course of the sequence. Another section of the guidebook on the First Arrondissement mentions “the L ­ ouvre Museum, home of the enigmatically smiling Mona Lisa and many other masterpieces of art” (the camera pans to the face of Leonardo’s mysterious young woman). At this point in his reading, the American is suddenly hit by a pea from a young French boy’s peashooter (more on this later) and notices a couple of young French lovers sprawling on the bench on the opposite side of the platform. He continues his guidebook reading with a section on the Paris métro, which, it declares accurately enough, is “reasonably clean and safe,” but then it adds the bizarre advice that “above all, eye contact should be avoided with the other people around,” an admonition clearly fabricated for the purposes of the film (in my extensive experience of Parisians and the Paris métro I have never experienced eye ­ renchman, sprawled with contact as a problem). At this point a young F his petite amie on a bench on the opposite platform, suddenly notices that his girlfriend and the tourist across the track are staring into each other’s eyes, takes offense, and begins to shout insults at him. This situation rapidly degenerates into a scene of disturbing violence, as the young woman suddenly appears on the tourist’s side of the tracks and begins to kiss him passionately (a striking case of female sexual assault), even putting her tongue in his mouth, as she tauntingly tells her boyfriend. The latter crosses over and socks the American twice in the face, then in the stomach, and finally lifts him off the ground and propels him head first against the hard, shiny tiles of the métro station wall behind. The violence is shocking—this could have easily been a fatal blow—and to a large some degree gratuitous and inexplicable. Luckily, the tourist is not killed or even much injured. As he slumps to the ground, the young woman is seen calmly inspecting her fingernails. “OK—you done now?” she asks her lover, while he empties the contents of the tourist’s shopping bag on top of him (many Mona Lisa postcards, the heavy Louvre book).

Provocative Reinterpretations  33 “OK—now I’m done,” he replies with a happy smile. There follows a perversely charming scene of these sadistic lovers’ reconciliation. “Feel better?” she asks. He does. “You’re crazy.” “Must be if I’m with you.” “Do you love me?” he asks. “Forever” she replies. And as they move toward the exit stairway, he adds gleefully “See how I fixed him!” And she, laughing gaily, replies “I loved it!” The shocking sadism of this scene, entertaining as it is in a kind of perverse way, might be explained as the comic deconstruction of the cliché of Paris as “a city for lovers”—what lovers from Hell these two Parisian are! But why would the Coen brothers have latched onto this bizarre scenario for their short film? Are there any clues in the film itself that might suggest a resolution of this enigma? There are, and they suggest a major historical subtext that has been carefully concealed. In “The Paris Métro” section of the “guidebook” that the tourist is reading, on a page that is shown in close-up with large print, underneath the paragraph on the Paris métro ending with the admonition that “eye contact should be avoided with other people around” (allegedly offensive eye contact being the most obvious and immediate cause of the young Frenchman’s assault on the American t­ ourist) and underneath a photo of a métro sign surrounded by green leafage, there are two lines of continuing text that might seem to be simply irrelevant (are they the result of careless editing?) referring to the métro station La Motte Picquet-Grenelle, which in actual fact is nowhere near the Tuileries station. The apparently accidental mention of this particular station—ostensibly in a continuation of the guidebook’s section on the Paris métro—turns out to be a most valuable clue, pointing out the presence of a cryptic historical subtext. La Motte Picquet-Grenelle is a métro station that is not far from the site off of the Boulevard de Grenelle of the infamous Velodrome d’Hiver (called commonly the Vel d’Hiv), an ­indoor bicycle track constructed just before World War I, which was later used for other purposes, most notably as a holding pen for the infamous Vel d’Hiv Roundup (“la rafle du Vel d’Hiv”), when on July 16–17, 1942, thousands of foreign Jewish residents, including women and children, were imprisoned under the worst possible sanitary conditions before being sent off a few days later via train to the death camps. (The building was demolished in 1959, but Gilles Paquet’s 2010 film Sarah’s Key shows a stage replica of the Vel d’Hiv and evokes some of the horror of the situation: very crowded conditions, little food and water, toilets blocked up, and multiple suicides.) The roundup was engineered and carried out not by the German occupying forces but entirely by the French police, assisted by a many enthusiastic young French fascists. However, postwar French governments famously took their time acknowledging the full extent of this collaboration with the Nazis’ ­anti-Semitic program, the memory of which was repressed as much as possible until fairly recently.

34  Provocative Reinterpretations By taking this cryptic historical subtext into account, it is possible to identify what is the ultimate, if carefully concealed, subject of Tuileries. It is the return of the historical repressed, of that dreadful moment in French history when the police and young French fascists participated in a crime against humanity in July, 1942. It was a dark, hellish moment, which the Coen brothers have cleverly transposed to the underground metro station, with even an arriving and a departing train, suggesting the railroad carriages that carried the Jews off to the death camps. The young French couple, with their sadistic violence, followed immediately by gaiety and laughter, can easily be taken as representing the symbolic return in present time of the young French fascists associated with the Vel d’Hiv Roundup. Their assault on the American tourist is not the result of some reprehensible form of modern anti-Americanism (of which there is not the slightest indication in the film); it would rather be the symbolic reenactment of the notorious anti-Semitic violence of over sixty years before. The fact that all three protagonists remain anonymous—the French couple are given the names of the actors Axel and Julie in the English subtitles but not in the film itself—makes them all the more suitable for the historical reenactment that they unknowingly perform; theirs is not a personal story but rather a political allegorical one. Although after World War II, there was little recognition on the part of French authorities of the role French officials and nationals had played during the Vel d’Hiv operation, eventually the tide turned, and on July 16, 1995, President Jacques Chirac made a speech in which he declared publically that these dark hours have forever soiled our history, and are an insult to our past and our traditions. Yes, it is true that the criminal insanity of the occupying forces was supported by some French ­p eople and the French state. (…) France, home of the ­E nlightenment and of Human Rights, land of refuge and asylum, France, on that day, committed an irreparable act. It failed to keep its word and delivered those under its protection to their executioners. (www.levendel.com/En/html/chirac-s_speech.html, accessed May 17, 2018) The plausibility of the presence of this historical subtext is reinforced by the presence of several puzzlingly anachronistic elements in the film, which provide clues that suggest that the descent into the underground métro station is also a symbolic descent into the horrors of the past. First of all, the young blond boy who shoots at the tourist with his peashooter is using a kind of toy whose use is not at all typical of present-day French children; he is also wearing short pants, which have generally gone out

Provocative Reinterpretations  35 of fashion for young boys. Even more obvious is the following anachronistic reference in the tourist’s Paris guidebook: Love encounters: Men who are visiting Paris stag must remember, thousands of American servicemen contracted “social” diseases during [sic] Word [sic] War II. You should exercise the same precautions (précautions) you would take in any foreign city. Accompanied by the photograph of a young man apparently manifesting something like a syphilitic rash on his face (although a doctor has assured me this is not a syphilitic rash, it would be a logical inference for most viewers), this bit of advice is clearly very dated since AIDS would be in today’s Paris as elsewhere the chief health menace to protect oneself against by taking “precautions” (needlessly repeated in French). In addition, the presumably deliberate misspelling of World War II as “Word War II” highlights the reference to a period “during World War II” that was indeed the time of the Vel d’Hiv Roundup but not of the presence of American soldiers in Paris, which was mainly after—and not during— the war. It is most unlikely that such mistakes were the result of careless editing on the part of the directors, who are known for their meticulous control of every aspect of their films. There is more to puzzle out in the scene in which the young ­Frenchman loudly insults the tourist from the other side of the station. Puzzling as it is, it turns out to be a classic example of scapegoating. In René G ­ irard’s theory of the scapegoat, scapegoats are always innocent of the accusations made against them. The young man loudly accuses the tourist of wanting to have sex with his girlfriend; there is, however, no basis for this false assumption based on accidental “eye contact,” and his ­girlfriend tells him several times to shut up. In addition, he makes his accusation doubly senseless when he repeatedly calls the tourist a “faggot” (Fr. enculé: a passive homosexual), who can hardly be logically supposed to be yearning after heterosexual sex. When his girlfriend crosses over to the other side of the station, she suddenly passionately kisses the tourist (surely the term “female sexual assault” is the proper term here). But the tourist shows no signs of welcoming her unexpected advances; rather, he appears to be disgruntled and confused at this sudden turn of events. The young man then suddenly appears next to them, and the shocking scene of the young man’s physical assault on the tourist, during which he could have easily killed his victim when he smashes his head against the hard tile wall, is now clearly not only a case of apparently gratuitous sadistic violence in present time; it harkens back to the historical subtext of the brutal anti-Semitic violence of the French authorities during the Vel d’Hiv Roundup in July 1942 and the subsequent train journey of Paris Jews to the death camps. (Another possible cryptic allusion: the guidebook the tourist is reading does not have the usual green color of

36  Provocative Reinterpretations Michelin guidebook covers but a yellow cover, which may suggest the yellow star the Jews in Paris and elsewhere were forced to wear.) To this sudden and violent attack the tourist submits silently (Steve Buscemi has no spoken lines at all in the film) and passively, almost without protest; this too may point back to the largely submissive attitude of many foreign Jews in Paris, who were taken totally off guard when the French state, which had up to that point had protected them as refugees, ­suddenly moved against them in the Vel d’Hiv Roundup. The guidebook’s prohibition of “eye contact” also suggests the submissive attitude to be taken in the face of the dominance of brutal persecutors and tormentors, who do not like to be looked at in the eye. Even the little blond boy (who is possibly reminiscent of the sinister blond Hitlerian dwarf figure named Oskar in Volker Schlöndorff’s film The Tin Drum [1979], based on Günter Grass’ novel [1959] of the same name) can be said to have participated, if only symbolically, in the violent scapegoating. This boy “shoots” the solitary and lonely tourist several times over the course of the film with his peashooter; it is all just a game to him, and his mother does not even reprimand or try to stop him; all she tells him is that he shouldn’t stare at people because it is “impolite”! In his now classic book The Scapegoat (1982), René Girard described the process of scapegoating unwinding according to a series of steps, leading from false accusation to isolation and persecution to torture and eventual execution. The American tourist has quickly gone through all of these stages except for the last (and perhaps even the last, at least ­symbolically, when he is “shot” by the little blond boy in short ­trousers). No wonder, as we shall see, that the American Jewish directors of ­Tuileries had a hard time saying “Paris, je t’aime”! For what a hellish place Paris had been for foreign Jews like themselves in July 1942! The “enigmatically smiling” Mona Lisa plays an important role throughout Tuileries but especially in the last minute as Steve ­Buscemi lies with a number of her iconic images on top of his prostrate body. Is she smiling at what happened to him? Is she remembering with a wry smile, and with a goddess’ indifference to human suffering, the Vel d’Hiv Roundup? Can this iconic figure smile at the atrocities of history reenacted on a much smaller scale by a sadistic pair of French lovers and one assaulted (but apparently not seriously hurt) ­A merican tourist? Do the directors smile with her—and ask us to smile, sadly, too? A look at the paratextual material on the DVD entitled “From the Heart of Paris, je t’aime” may suggest an answer.7 In one of the short clips of the beginning of the sequence of short interviews with the various directors involved in the making of Paris, je t’aime, Ethan Coen calls their short film Tuileries “a little depressive” without further comment, but later, he adds that “it’s about the cliché of Paris being a city for ­lovers.” That might seem to make sense since the French lovers seem quite happy at the end, when they exit laughing, leaving the tourist

Provocative Reinterpretations  37 sprawled on the ground. So, is Paris really a city for lovers—even for sadistically violent lovers? Ah, Paris! You gotta love her—is that the point? But in the later sequence of the interviews in the DVD’s supplementary materials, when a number of the actors and directors are shown obediently repeating, one after the other, the words “Paris, je t’aime,” the Coen brothers seem reluctant to pledge their devotion to the Ville Lumière. Joel remains silent, hand thoughtfully on his chin, while Ethan breaks up, exclaiming, “It’s not coming out!” A bit later, they are given a second chance to declare their love for Paris; Joel remains silent, as before; Ethan breaks up again, finally exclaiming, “No—it’s not one of the [French] words I know—I only know [the French word] piste” (more on this later). Finally, the third time round, Joel finally gets it out: “Paris, je t’aime—I’ll say it.” To which Ethan responds, pronouncing the French words correctly, clearly, and effortlessly, “All right—Paris, je t’aime.” No more excuses—and he seems to have known these words after all. This little game played by the directors has a genuine, if hidden, ­paratextual significance. It raises the question, of course, as to what they are after. What is the point, after all, of pretending that it is so hard to say “Paris, je t’aime,” when they are going to say it in the end anyhow? Given the specific nature of the cryptic subtext, the answer seems clear: with their knowledge of the Vel d’Hiv Roundup, and of French ­anti-­Semitic violence generally, it is not easy for them, as American Jews, to declare along with the other directors that they love Paris—they may well love it, but they have to overcome a lot of resistance in order to say it. And there is Ethan’s bizarre declaration (that proves to be patently false) that the only French word he knows is piste. “Piste,” of course, is a French word commonly used in English to designate a prepared ski trail or run; American ski enthusiasts would be familiar with it. But it also designates, in the original French, any “track,” including the wooden bicycle track in the Velodrome d’Hiver—an area of the arena which the Jewish detainees in mid-July 1942 were initially forbidden to use (they had to sit in the bleachers), and which was eventually used for an improvised infirmary before their departure to Auschwitz. So, I suspect that, once again, the Coen brothers buried a paratextual clue that leads back again to the latent presence in their film of the Vel d’Hiv Roundup historical subtext—a cryptic subtext that, once detected, radically changes the hermeneutic context of their little film. Their film is thus ultimately not about the misadventures of an American innocent abroad in the city of light and love (in fact, the sadistic French couple do not identify him as an American or as a Jew). If there is xenophobic violence in the film, it exists only as the ghost of the historic xenophobic violence and scapegoating of the foreign Jews who had taken refuge in Paris by 1942. The parallels are certainly suggestive. Like the American tourist, these ­Jewish refugees turned out to be trapped (he in the métro station, they in the Vel d’Hiv), and Paris tragically became for them not a city of love and light but a city of xenophobic hatred and darkness of the heart.

38  Provocative Reinterpretations ­ oncorde In the last several seconds of Tuileries, the nearby Place de la C and its famous ancient Egyptian obelisk—just past the west end of the Tuileries gardens—is shown illuminated at night. But suddenly the lights are turned off, and all is dark. This might be taken as a sneak attack on the cliché of Paris as “the City of Lights” (la Ville Lumière). But in the context established by the cryptic historical subtext there is certainly greater meaning than that. The scene may well symbolize the heart of darkness of the great and elegant city, the scene of crimes against humanity, and constitute a memorial to all the victims for who the lights went out. Visible at the far end of the Place de la Concorde, the grandiose ­eighteenth-century building housing today the Hôtel ­Crillon was, during the Nazi occupation, the headquarters of the German High Command. The square itself, at the end of the eighteenth century, had witnessed the executions via guillotine of a great number, many of them innocent victims, to the wild joy of the cheering revolutionary mob during the ­Terror. All this may complicate things needlessly and may take one further than one wants to go in speculating how much of this the Coen brothers expected the spectators of their film to connect with, but it certainly would not be beyond the reach of these inventive directors. But one final question remains to be addressed: why did not the Coen brothers simply be more obvious in their evocation of a dark side of Paris emblematized by the memory of the Vel d’Hiv Roundup? Why be so ­incredibly cryptic? One does not expect the directors to give an answer—and they don’t (a friend of mine has written them, and they have not responded). But one may speculate that they may have felt that the light and somewhat sentimental tone that generally pervades the collective anthology film Paris, je t’aime, of which Tuileries was a short section, made it an improper vehicle for such a tragic historical subject, however much they might have preferred to deal with it directly. But there is another possible explanation. Since the directors had been allotted only about five minutes to get across whatever they had in mind, an evocation of the Vel d’Hiv Roundup would not have been given nearly enough time and scope to be effective. Portraying such a tragedy adequately would require a full-length film. Joseph Losey’s 1976 feature-length film Monsieur Klein had already given expression to the tragic dramatic potential of the Vel d’Hiv Roundup; several years after Tuileries, two films would do in 2010 the same (Roselyne Bosch’s La Rafle [The Round Up] and Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s Sarah’s Key). In the context of such stringent time limitations, the best course for the Coens might have been to proceed via indirection. Furthermore, for a topic that had been repressed in the French cultural consciousness for a long while (as we have seen, it took almost fifty years for the French government to officially acknowledge the abominable crime that its predecessor—the Vichy government—had committed), to treat such repressed history as an element of the textual unconscious would have

Provocative Reinterpretations  39 advantages. Jean-Paul Sartre (in Que peut la literature?) once wrote that the indirect treatment of a subject can sometimes be all the more powerful for its allusiveness and elusiveness; although, for example, he admired greatly Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, he found another (unspecified) text to be even more effective, in that it addressed the problem of nuclear weapons via indirection, without mentioning the Bomb at all (Sartre 125–6). The Coen brothers may thus be said to have created a powerful miniature film whose capacity to move is, thanks to a cryptic subtext, potentially intensified through just such a presentation via indirection. There are times, as we have just seen demonstrated in the case of ­Tuileries, when the detection of the presence of a cryptic subtext reveals a whole new hermeneutic context (the historical context of the persecution of the Jews in Paris during the German occupation and more particularly the Vel d’Hiv Roundup) and does not, as in The Turn of the Screw, primarily enrich a preexisting interpretation (the Governess as delusional but also as emblematic of a brutally murderous Victorian moralism). I would thus argue, for example, that once the historical subtext of the Vel d’Hiv Roundup is detected and accepted, it is impossible to take seriously the Coen brothers’ deliberately evasive replies and their presentation of their film as a jokey send-off of the idea of Paris as a city for lovers; nor is it possible to conclude that the film constitutes a critique of present-day French anti-Americanism. By contrast, in The Turn of the Screw, the detected presence of a cryptic mythic subtext (Herod’s slaughter of the Holy Innocents) mainly enriches previous interpretations of the Governess’s actions seen as resulting from psychological delusion and moral confusion, by adding something even more sinister, when her instigation of a “dreadful” inquisitorial process against the “innocent” Miles is compared to Herod’s paranoiac slaughter of the Holy Innocents. This new interpretation is certainly provocative but not fundamentally transformative, as it is in the case of Tuileries. Of course, there is no reason why a cryptic text may not function on both levels simultaneously, i.e., as a hermeneutic displacement and as an enrichment. As an instance of this third possibility, I would like to analyze briefly John Dahl’s 1993 film Red Rock West in terms of its own cryptic subtext. Red Rock West is a little gem of a film; after opening in Europe, it has enjoyed in America the status of cult classic ever since a San Francisco movie theater owner saved it in 1994 from an afterlife of distribution on cable or video alone. In one of his best roles, Nicolas Cage plays Michael Williams, an unemployed Marine Corps veteran who shows up looking for a job at a bar in the fictional town of Red Rock, Wyoming (the film was mainly shot in Arizona, however—the weather was better there for shooting). The owner of the bar, Wayne, is also the town sheriff, having gotten himself elected via the usual crooked means. We later find out that he is on the lam as a fugitive from justice, having

40  Provocative Reinterpretations absconded with the help of his wife Suzanne with a large amount of stolen money he embezzled from an Eastern steel mill. Both of them are now living in Red Rock under assumed names. But each one’s greed to keep it all results in their marriage and their partnership in crime imploding, and Wayne is waiting impatiently for a gunman he has hired to kill her to show up from Dallas. When Michael appears at the bar in a car with Texas license plates, Wayne assumes that he is “Lyle from Dallas,” the assassin-for-hire. Michael, in bad need of cash, does not disabuse him. Michael, however, is a decent if naïve kind of guy, and he can’t bring himself to kill Suzanne; instead, he reveals to her Wayne’s murderous intentions. Michael is easily manipulated, and he badly needs the money, so Suzanne is initially able to convince him to kill her husband and take off with her for Mexico with the money. Meanwhile, the real Lyle from Dallas (Dennis Hopper) has arrived. At this point in the film, the plot thickens considerably, although of course, the basically good-hearted but naïve Michael will escape in the end—without the money. So far, the film might be taken as a clever piece of entertainment—a film noir western more than a cut above the ordinary—but no more than that. The Wall Street Journal reviewer Julie Salomon stated emphatically that “Red Rock West is wonderfully free of social relevance.”8 But the paratext—here, the title—suggests that there is something else going on beneath the surface. For instance, one curious thing about the film’s title— Red Rock West—is that the name of the small town on the High Plains is always referred to over the course of the film as “Red Rock” and never as “Red Rock West.” “Red Rock” is how the town is referred to in the film’s dialogue, and that is the name on Wayne’s Red Rock Bar and on the two road signs (“Welcome to Red Rock,” “You are leaving Red Rock”) that appear and reappear several times as Michael leaves and inevitably gets pulled back to the town by the demands of the twists of the plot. The film’s title thus calls attention to itself by this incongruity. Is it a clue? Yes, it is. Upon reflection, the title of the film suggests a curious ­subliminal verbal association: “Red Rock West” with “White House West,” which is what the press called the vacation home near Santa ­Barbara to which Ronald Reagan retreated when he wished to gain some relief from the pressures of Washington and of the other White House, while he was president from 1981 to 1989. With this association in mind, another association quickly suggests itself: Red Rock/ Ronald Reagan (whose nickname at one point was “Red Ronnie”): RR in both cases. Reinforcing this suggestion, the large rooftop neon sign for Wayne’s Red Rock Bar shows a red bronco-busting cowboy riding a red horse off the roof (i.e., as though over a cliff or embankment: is there disaster ahead?); on the horse’s haunch is a small but clearly visible bright white brand “RR,” which shows up several times over the course of the scene on the roof on which Michael is trying to escape from being captured by Wayne and Lyle.

Provocative Reinterpretations  41 And then there is another curious verbal association that avid film buffs would probably catch. Red Rock Canyon, because of its picturesque rock formations and proximity to Hollywood, was frequently used as a setting for westerns, including the one in which the then ­actor Ronald Reagan starred in 1953: Law and Order. “Law and ­Order” subsequently became the slogan of a certain brand of conservative politics, starting with Ronald Reagan’s own run for governor of California in 1965 and later with Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign. In Law and Order, as in other classic westerns such as High Noon, a good and courageous sheriff, who has of course a virtuous sweetheart waiting for him, brings law and order to a town taken over by outlaws and other lowlifes. This is the type of film that supplied a model for Red Rock West, which, however, proceeds to reverse the basic situation completely. In John Dahl’s film it is the sheriff Wayne (Wayne, as in “John Wayne,” the archetypal good guy) and his wife Suzanne who are the outlaws, and it is the honest but naïve ex-Marine drifter Michael who cleans things up eventually in his own way. At one point the psychopathic Lyle (Dennis Hopper) sarcastically calls Michael “John Wayne,” which in the context seems to imply that Lyle sees him as a meddling Good Sheriff with too good an opinion of himself. However, near the end of the film, Michael also seems to have gone over to the dark side when he and Suzanne (now his lover) hitch a train to Mexico with the bag of stolen money in order to live happily ever after together. But, when Suzanne pulls a gun on him, the problem, as the naïve Michael realizes almost too late, is that, as he says with disgust, for her, their romance has all been about money, and she is quite willing to kill him in order to keep all of it for herself: “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” Fortunately, her gun jams, and Michael throws the bag of money off the slow-moving train, pushing Suzanne out after it: “You want it? Go get it.” In the last two minutes of the film, Michael realizes how money has completely defined a situation in which theft and murder are linked ­together. He also realizes how it was he who had gotten himself into the situation and been complicit in the whole sleazy drama. His last words, in which he acknowledges this complicity, are—memorably—“I asked for Red Rock”… Or at least that is what his last words were when the film was shown in cinemas in 1994 and then when it came out the same year in VHS format. That is the last line as I remember it when I saw the film when it opened in New York, and my memory is backed up by an anonymous reviewer of the VHS version sold on Amazon.com: “the absolutely perfect last line, one of filmdom’s greats—‘I asked for Red Rock.’” It was indeed a “perfect last line,”9 I could not agree more. But then something happened. When the film was later reissued as a DVD, Michael’s last words were replaced by the much more pedestrian line “Adiós, Red Rock.” It was a terrible decision.

42  Provocative Reinterpretations The reason I applauded the last line as Michael said it before it was changed on the DVD, is that it becomes clear, thanks to his cryptic last words, that Red Rock West is not only a reversal of the “good sheriff cleans up the town” type of western; nor is it only a “neo-noir western,” as it has been often labeled. In the final analysis, it is revealed to be a clever political film, thanks to a carefully concealed political allegory in which Michael stands for the white male workers who voted in droves for Ronald Reagan (they indeed “asked for Red Rock”) and gave him the presidency—twice: once in 1980 and again in 1984. Like Michael, they got a lot more than they bargained for; like Michael, they had a lot of trouble getting out of “Red Rock.” Wayne, of course, represents the corruption of money politics typified by the election of someone whose John Wayne image of patriotism and integrity covered up the ugly p ­ olitical reality of his position as a champion of Big Business and Big Money. I know nothing about the politics of John Dahl and of his brother Rick, who wrote the screenplay together. But from this film, I would assume that their political orientation, as has been so common in ­Hollywood, was liberal or left-liberal at the time when they collaborated on the screenplay of Red Rock West and that the election of Ronald Reagan twice in a row in the 1980s had been a matter of recent disappointment for them. For them, Reagan was certainly not the “good sheriff” who would bring law and order to a nation corrupted by liberalism but rather the standard bearer for politics, celebrating money, corporate thievery, and the ideal of everyone out for themselves. What one can now see in Red Rock West, thanks to the detection of a cryptic subtext, is not just an entertaining example of neo-noir but also a political allegory of the first order. In this allegory, the sheriff Wayne represents Ronald Reagan, and Michael the politically naïve white blue-collar workers whose votes made it possible for Reagan to win two presidential elections in a row and to betray the trust (“steal from”) of the white workers whose votes were crucial to his election. (Is the same drama playing out today with Donald Trump?) From a left-liberal standpoint, Reagan’s two successive conservative administrations were indeed “all about money” and the power of money to corrupt and to betray the working classes. Should we conclude that Red Rock West is a brave attempt to convey a covert political message that, covert enough as it was, had led the ­Hollywood studio establishment, always wary of making political waves, to attempt to sidetrack it after the film was finished (re: the history of the film’s near failure to make it to the big screen), perhaps even insisting later on changing the last line when it was reissued in DVD format in 2010 because Michael’s original and memorable last line risked giving the game away? One thing seems clear: once the presence of the cryptic political subtext is detected, it then generates the possibility of a provocative reinterpretation.

Provocative Reinterpretations  43

Notes 1 I first announced this discovery as a note in The Explicator 61.2 (Winter, 2003), 94–96. 2 See Lustig, T.J. “Blanks in The Turn of the Screw.” In: New Casebooks: The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew. Ed. Neil Cornwell and Maggie Malone. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. 102. 3 In addition, it is interesting to note another ecclesiastical subtext of The Turn of the Screw: a ghost story concerning children and ghosts (evil ­children and evil ghosts, in this instance) told to James by the Archbishop of Canterbury on January 10, 1891; James judged this subtext to be “obscure and imperfect” [The Complete Notebooks of Henry James 109] but presumably found in it elements that he incorporated into his own ghost story. 4 James’s New York Preface (New York Edition 1907–1909), while designating the tale as a “sinister romance” (James 1992 xlviii) and “a fairy-tale pure and simple” (xlix), and pointing twice to the Arabian Nights as a parallel (xlix, l), does nothing in the way of elucidating the presence of Holy ­I nnocents cryptic subtext. 5 Edmund Wilson’s argument has become a classic reference point for studies of The Turn of the Screw. 6 See Neill Matheson, “Talking Horrors: James, Euphemism, and the S­ pecter of Wilde.” American Literature 71.4 (December 1999), 709–750. See also Ronald Knowles’s article “‘The Hideous Obscure’: The Turn of the Screw and Oscar Wilde.” In: New Casebooks: “The Turn of the Screw” and “What Maisie Knew.” Ed. Neil Cornwell and Maggie Malone. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. 164–178. 7 For Genette, extratextual materials, such as titles; subtitles; dedications; ­epigraphs; and authorial commentary found in interviews, prefaces, and postfaces, come under the general category of “paratext.” 8 Wall Street Journal, April 12, 1994 [48] quoted in: Paul Monaco, John Dahl and Neo-Noir: Examining Auteurism and Genre. Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. 84. Other film critics quoted by ­Monaco concur in seeing nothing in Red Rock West but its pure entertainment value. 9 Comment posted on amazon.com on March 15, 2001.

2 Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts

There are four good reasons why authors sometimes bury a significant dimension of their text in a cryptic subtext: fear of social or political censorship, a desire to intensify the potential esthetic effect of the text via indirection, the need to present a provocative message in a coded or allegorical form, and even the delight in teasing readers with an enigma. We shall follow this process of subtextual encryption in a series of four interrelated texts, each of which contains its own specific secret message: the novella Aura by Carlos Fuentes; the novella Rappaccini’s ­Daughter by Nathanael Hawthorne; the Rosa Diamond episode in ­Salman ­Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses; and what is perhaps the foundational text of poetic modernism, Stéphane Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun). Secret messages are meant to stay hidden—at least for a while. No wonder then that when authors write or talk about their own texts, they are often evasive or disingenuously simplistic in their public attempts at interpretation. Authors, when they function as their own commentators and critics, are quite capable of producing metatexts that conceal more than they reveal; that obfuscate issues rather than clarify them; and that generally increase rather than decrease the difficulty or ambiguity with which they have already endowed their texts. Such is the case in the following instance with Carlos Fuentes. When the great Mexican writer decided to reveal “How I Wrote One of my Books” (the title of his second essay in his collection Myself With ­Others [1988]), one felt justified in expecting that he would, among other things, reveal the multiple subtexts that underpinned his novella Aura (1962), the book he is alluding to in the essay’s title, and one of his most accomplished as well as most popular works. And for a while, it looks as though that is what he has done in great detail, playfully pointing out one subtext after another, providing the reader with an embarras de richesses of subtexts, beginning with: 1 a young woman he knew in Paris in the summer of 1961 (28–9); 2 the Spanish baroque poet Quevedo, “the unrivalled poet of our death and love” (30);

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  45 3 Kenji Mizoguchi’s Japanese film Ugetsu Monogatari: The Tales of the Pale Moon After the Rain (ordinarily referred to simply as Ugetsu) (32f.). But let us pause and examine carefully what he writes about the third of these subtexts. Mizoguchi’s film tells two thematically related stories. The first story is about a villager who runs off to be a samurai, with disastrous results for his wife, who, after being raped by marauding soldiers amidst the chaos of war in sixteenth-century Japan, is forced to turn to prostitution. But nothing of this episode shows up in Aura; rather, it is Ugetsu’s second story that offers numerous and obvious parallels with Fuentes’s novella. Back in the sixteenth century, during a time of incessant warfare, the village potter Genjuro makes an honest living for himself, his young wife, and their little boy by selling his wares in the marketplace. A beautiful young aristocrat, Lady Wakasa, visits the market accompanied by her old female attendant and buys some of his pottery, asking him to deliver it to their nearby mansion. When Genjuro does this, he is overwhelmed by the lovely young widow’s lavish praise of his artistic abilities and further seduced as he watches her dance and sing, even as the ghostly voice of her dead samurai father resounds from his household shrine. Lady Wakasa’s father had been defeated and his clan dispersed in an earlier war, and this ruin of the clan also meant, as the old attendant woman explains to Genjuro, that his daughter had never been able to marry and enjoy the pleasures of love. Now, says the old woman, it is Genjuro’s great good fortune to marry Lady Wakasa on the spot and to give her the happiness fate had previously denied her. A ­ fter their first night of love, their marriage seems perfect, and the potter gives no thought to his first wife and their child, and is totally unaware of the fact that Lady Wakasa and her attendants are actually ghosts. But after a while, thanks to a Buddhist priest, who writes in ink the words of some Buddhist scriptures on his body as a means of exorcism, the potter comes to his senses and is able to escape at the last minute from the clutches of the lovely ghost and her old attendant. But when he returns home, he finds that his first wife has died, murdered by a group of starving soldiers. His little boy, however, had been saved and sheltered by a neighbor, and the potter is able to begin to pick up the pieces of his shattered life. Although it is this second tale in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu that serves as a clear subtext for Aura, Fuentes does not even mention it in his essay and instead goes on at length about the literary subtext for the first tale, which is found in the eighteenth-century author Akinari’s collection of stories Ugetsu Monogatari. Fuentes does make a brief mention of ­M izoguchi’s cinematic transformation of the story—but inexplicably ends that section of his essay with no mention whatsoever of what is, for his novella Aura, the most important subtext: the tale of the potter Genjuro and Lady Wakasa.

46  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts A brief comparison of Aura with the section of Mizoguchi’s film that Fuentes failed to mention in his essay will clarify the point. Aura tells the story of Felipe Montero, a young scholar with a degree from the Sorbonne who is poorly paid for teaching school in Mexico City. One day, he answers an advertisement in a newspaper promising more than adequate remuneration for undertaking to edit the memoirs in French of a nineteenth-century Mexican, General Llorente, who had participated in the Hapsburg prince Maximilian’s invasion of Mexico in the 1860s. ­Felipe shows up for the appointment, and the old lady Consuelo (the general’s widow) and her “niece” Aura receive him in their antiquated house in the historical center of Mexico City. He agrees to live with them and to work there at editing the memoirs. He soon falls in love with the young and beautiful Aura, who fascinates him with her green eyes and sexual allure. But, as the plot develops, he comes to realize that Aura has no independent existence of her own but rather is Consuelo’s double, the result of her magical project to bring herself back to life as she once was in all her youthful beauty. By the end of the story, after he has made love, this time, to the aged body of the hundred and eight-year-old widow Consuelo, Felipe realizes—or thinks he realizes—that he himself is in the process of actually becoming her husband General Llorente brought back to life—a role that Consuelo has been grooming him for all along. As in Aura, the story of Genjuro in Ugetsu centers on three figures: a  naïvely vulnerable young man and two women, one young and one old, both of whom have a supernatural dimension: in Mizoguchi’s, they are ghosts, and in Fuentes’s, they are the same person, the aged Consuleo and her magically created younger double. In “How I Wrote One of My Books,” Fuentes points out that the interaction of “three ­figures: the old woman, the young woman, and the young man” (Fuentes Myself 39) is also at the heart of several other narratives, in particular Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations (1860), with its almost mythical ­figure of the elderly Miss Havisham; her ward, the beautiful young Estella; and the working-class boy Pip. But in this context, Fuentes strangely does not even mention Ugetsu, saying nothing about the intertwined figures of Lady Wakasa, her old attendant, and the young potter ­Genjuro, the three characters who present such obvious analogies with the figures of Aura, Consuelo, and Felipe Montero. Perhaps, having seen Mizoguchi’s film once in a Paris cinema in September 1961 and writing his novella before VHS tapes and DVDs made seeing one’s favorite old films over again so easy, Fuentes had simply forgotten the episode that in ­M izoguchi’s film presents such parallels with his own novella; perhaps his first impressions of the episode simply fell into his artistic unconscious once he had made use of them. But what is especially curious for such a leftist writer is that he says nothing about the fairly obvious political allegory in Mizoguchi’s film—a politically allegorical dimension which it shares, although more

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  47 cryptically, with Aura. Mizoguchi’s political allegory is fairly transparent and needs little explanation. Shot shortly after the end of World War II and the unconditional surrender of the Japanese Imperial state, Ugetsu shows, via historical transposition to the sixteenth century, both the ­sufferings of war and the challenges of its aftermath. In Ugetsu, one wife is killed, and the other has become a prostitute; death and destruction leave their legacy of misfortune, and the only way forward after the war is to begin rebuilding and working for a better future. Ugetsu is thus by no means only a period piece; although the scene is set back in the 1500s, the meaning of the film was of immediate contemporary relevance and would have been obvious to the first audiences, whether educated or not: the tragic seduction of the Japanese people (represented by both Genjuro and his would-be samurai friend) by right-wing ideologies (represented by fascination with samurai values and by the ghosts of Lady Wakasa and her old attendant) promoting a return to the imagined glories of the samurai period as a lure toward embracing modern fascistic militarism and imperialism. It was the Japanese infatuation with this ideology in the 1930s that ultimately lead to the widespread death, suffering, and devastation of World War II. In the film, Genjuro is only saved from his naïve infatuation with samurai values (his “marriage” to Lady Wakasa, daughter of a defeated samurai) by a kindly Buddhist priest.1 Ugetsu thus contains a powerful and clear allegory designed to strengthen the Japanese resolve to resist in the future the dangerous charms of fascistic ideologies to which they had succumbed in the past, to rebuild their country through hard work, and to be guided by liberal democratic politics and Buddhist ideals of peace and compassion. There is a startlingly similar instance, if a more cryptic one, of political allegory in Aura’s evocation of a supernatural return of the youthful selves of both Consuelo (in the form of Aura) and General Llorente (in the form of Felipe Montero), and there is no doubt in my mind that Fuentes, as regards this allegorical dimension, was inspired by the ­Genjuro episode in Mizoguchi’s film. In 1960s Mexico City, the hundred and eight-year-old lady Consuelo is a spooky representative of a bygone era; in her early youth, she had become the bride of the exiled ­General Llorente, a fictional character who is presented as one of the Mexican leaders of the expeditionary force launched in the early 1860s by the European powers in conjunction with Mexican conservatives; the ­latter were so determined to put a stop to the land reforms instigated by Benito Juárez that they were quite willing to call for a foreign invasion in order to establish the Hapsburg prince Maximilian on the throne of Mexico—an invasion which, had it been more than briefly successful, would have constituted a second European conquest of Mexico, three hundred and fifty years after the first one engineered by the conquistador Hernán Cortés. This second reconquista almost succeeded since at that moment, America was engulfed in a terrible civil war and

48  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts had little stomach for enforcing the Monroe Doctrine, which forbade ­European meddling in America’s hemispheric backyard. What Consuelo desires to create through her black magic is the literal return to life of her ­husband and her own youthful self—an appropriate if original theme for a novella that Fuentes himself has characterized as “Gothic.”2 But the hidden message of the cryptic allegory underlying this Gothic plot constitutes a powerful warning concerning the return of the historical repressed in early 1960s Mexico: Mexican youth should not follow the example of Felipe but rather should be alert to the possibility of a return of the historical repressed. Although regressive and reactionary tendencies cannot replicate themselves exactly, they can express themselves in some new form—a form that in the novella is represented as a creation of black magic—as a sinister ideological construct designed to lead to the political corruption of Mexican youth. Felipe Montero is economically, intellectually, and socially vulnerable to this type of political seduction. He is a poorly paid part-time school teacher; as someone who had defended a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne, he clearly does not have a job worthy of his degree. His thesis had taken as its subject the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the early sixteenth ­century. But there is no indication that his thesis is anything more than a vapidly overblown and reactionary glorification of the Spanish invasion and occupation, with none of the critical perspective on the Spanish conquest of Mexico that would have informed a thesis of a more liberal or leftist orientation: Your great, inclusive work on the Spanish discoveries and conquests in the New World. A work that sums up all the scattered chronicles, makes them intelligible, and discovers the resemblances among all the undertakings and adventures of Spain’s Golden Age, and all the human prototypes and major accomplishments of the Renaissance. (65) The impoverished scholar Felipe’s reactionary perspective is fraught with irony as Felipe himself (whose physical features are described only once in the novella, when he sees himself in a mirror) has the black eyes, heavy eyebrows, black hair, and thick lips (33) that suggest he is, like the majority of Mexicans, a mestizo, that is, someone of mixed Indian, African, and Spanish blood, whose physiognomy embodies the ethnic clashes and contradictions of Mexican history. As for the beautiful young Aura, her “shining, clear green eyes” (43), like those attributed to Consuelo in her youth (85), suggest, by contrast with Felipe’s black eyes, that, like much of the Mexican traditional upper class, she is mainly of Spanish descent. Since Felipe is an underemployed historian who teaches school for a ­ eneral pittance, when he accepts Consuelo’s generous terms for editing G Llorente’s memoirs, he is not only doing something his historian’s

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  49 training has prepared him for but is also magically entering into history by the backdoor. By finally making love to Consuelo, the general’s wife, he is also seemingly in the process of becoming General Llorente. Unlike Mizoguchi’s Genjuro, who is saved from Lady Wakasa’s clutches at the last minute by the kindly Buddhist priest, there is no one in the end to save Felipe from his ever-deeper engulfment in the reactionary fantasy represented by his “marriage” with Consuelo. The text locates Consuelo’s Baroque-era house in the historic center of Mexico City, close to the cathedral built by the Spanish conquerors on the site of the great Aztec temple erected when the city was called Tenochtitlán. Consuelo’s house exists in a kind of time warp, and even the name of the street it is on—Donceles Street—recalls the young men in attendance (donceles) of the sixteenth-century conquistador Hernán Cortés. Inside the house, it is dark, and Felipe is forced to proceed with caution. His entry into the house is an entry into a past era but a past era—that of the foreign invasion of Mexico in the 1860s—preparing to come back in a new form. General Llorente’s memoirs described how he had participated in the campaign, sponsored by Napoleon III of France especially, to reconquer Mexico and to put the Hapsburg prince ­Maximilian on the throne as Emperor of Mexico. All in all, Maximilian himself was not a bad ruler, and during his short reign, he had instituted several noteworthy liberal reforms. But he was unable to resist for long the republican forces led by Benito Juárez, and, captured at the battle of Querétaro in May 1867, he was shortly afterward executed by firing squad, along with two of his Mexican generals, in spite of widespread international protest. As a (fictional) member of Maximilian’s entourage, General Llorente would naturally have fled and taken refuge in France at the court of Napoleon III (the main sponsor of the invasion); soon after that, he married the charming fifteen-year-old Mexican girl Consuelo. He later wrote his memoirs (in somewhat fractured French, to be sure), and by editing them, Felipe learns of his ardent love for his young wife and of his ­passionate dedication to authoritarian right-wing political principles: In his florid language General Llorente describes the personality of Eugenia de Montijo [wife of Napoleon III], pays his respects to ­Napoleon the Little [Victor Hugo’s derogatory name for Napoleon III, Napoleon’s nephew], summons up his most martial rhetoric to proclaim the Franco-Prussian War, fills whole pages with his sorrow ­ epublican monat the defeat, harangues all men of honor about the R ster, sees a ray of hope in General Boulanger [a French ­right-wing leader], sighs for Mexico, believes that in the Dreyfus affair the honor—always that word “honor”—of the army had asserted itself again. (131)

50  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts The danger for Felipe is that, without knowing it, he is being drawn ­willy-nilly into a historical narrative that was dangerously anachronistic, antiquated, and reactionary. Fuentes is careful to indicate the degree to which the young man Felipe is being manipulated from the very start. Fuentes’s odd choice of using the second-person narrative throughout the novella (an unusual technique that Michel Butor had employed to great effect in his novel La modification, published several years before Aura in 1957) lends itself to the feeling that Felipe, always addressed informally in the second person, is being told what to do at each point of the narrative; a more usual third- or first-person narrative would have suggested greater agency on his part. Although he does not realize it until the end of the novella, he is being lured into participating in Consuelo’s supernatural agenda; as a Mexican who has lived in France and knows the French language well, he is already an apt candidate for the job of impersonating—and even actually becoming—her long-lost husband. The description of Felipe first stepping into Consuelo’s ancient home includes several details that suggest, with a typical modernist obscurity of allusion, that he is penetrating into a dangerous and possibly ­infernal realm, a kind of Hades guarded by the dog Cerberus, with its door knocker in the form of a dog: You rap vainly with the knocker, that copper head of a dog, so worn and smooth that it resembles the head of a canine foetus in the museum of natural science. It seems as if the dog is grinning at you and you let go of the cold metal. (11) The building’s patio is part of this realm of decay and darkness: You close the door behind you and peer into the darkness of a roofed alleyway. It must be a patio of some sort, because you can smell the mold, the dampness of the plants, the rotting roots, the thick drowsy aroma. There isn’t any light to guide you. (11) Unable to see properly, he is told by a voice to walk thirteen steps ­forward, and then go up twenty-two steps; the unlucky number thirteen’s significance is obvious, but a reader would have to know French (but ­Felipe ­ twenty-two!” does know French) to realize that the exclamation “ ­(vingt-deux!) was in mid-twentieth-century French slang a way of saying “watch out!” When Felipe is introduced to the tiny ancient figure of Consuelo, who is lying in her bed, the first thing he touches is not her hand but rather

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  51 the ears and thick fur of a creature that’s chewing silently and steadily, looking up at you with its glowing red eyes. You smile and stroke the rabbit that’s crouched beside her hand. (15) Although Felipe does not seem to make the connection, the reader might see in this first evocation of Consuelo and her rabbit Saga (a female ­rabbit—coneja—we learn, who seems to be the animal form of Aura) the portrait of a modern witch with her animal familiar; this is a supposition that later proves to be fully justified. Consuelo is in fact an aged sorceress about to cast a kind of spell on Felipe, but first, she entices him with a job that flatters his professional pride as a young historian, that of editing her husband’s memoirs. And not only of editing these memoirs but also of completing them and thus becoming, in a manner of ­speaking, the general’s double: “I will tell you everything. You’ll learn to write in my husband’s own style. You’ll only have to arrange and read his manuscript to become fascinated by his style… his clarity. (21) (In fact, Felipe’s French is better than the general’s, and Fuentes deliberately and humorously makes the French passages quoted later from the memoir manuscript seem sometimes awkward and inelegant.) When the girl Aura is introduced (after the rabbit disappears, of course), Consuelo and she are shown mirroring each other’s gestures, as though they were secretly the same person—which, as it turns out later, they actually are. Aura’s beautiful green eyes are enough to convince Felipe not only to accept the job but to take up lodgings in the ancient house. Consuelo’s magic is thus seconded by Aura’s sexual allure for Felipe, who proves to be falling in love with her at first sight, becoming obsessed with the mesmerizing sound of her name: “you’re repeating her name: ‘Aura’” (33). (More on the importance of this name later.) Felipe’s fascination with Aura leads him to indulge in the fantasy that she is being held prisoner by her ancient and tyrannical aunt, and that it is his mission to rescue her from her chains and set her free. (As the narrator tells him slyly, “you’ve found a moral basis for your desire, and you feel innocent and self-satisfied” [75].) This fantasy leads quickly to his first sexual encounter with Aura, who whispers to him afterward “You’re my husband” (77). It will become clear by the end of the story, when Felipe discovers that in making love to Aura he is actually in the arms of the ancient Consuelo, that he is being groomed to be Consuelo’s husband General Llorente miraculously brought back from the dead. In a later interview, 3 Fuentes somewhat fatuously insisted that the ­thematic focus of his novella was all about a love stronger than

52  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts death—how Wagnerian!—but there is no need to be taken in by the author’s evasiveness and later obfuscation of the original intent of his story, which appears to be ultimately political, once it is interpreted in terms of its ideological subtext. On a literal level, the bizarre love story of Felipe and the hundred and eight-year-old widow mediated by her youthful double Aura results from Consuelo’s attempt to magically ­revive the happy days of her youth with her husband. But Consuelo’s regressive desire also represents allegorically the power of the return of once suppressed reactionary politics, and these return in a new form to threaten the Mexican youth of the 1960s (represented by Felipe) with the nightmare of another foreign takeover. Although the return of the Hapsburg Empire of Mexico would of course be unimaginable in 1960s Mexico, its modern equivalent would not, i.e., the triumph of Yankee economic interests aided and abetted by the collaboration of Mexico’s ruling political party—an effective takeover that would not necessarily involve the use of military force. This potentially collaborating ruling party—the PRI or Partido Revolucionario Institucional—that had ruled Mexico since 1929 had been the object of Fuentes’s scathing criticism for its long descent into decay and corruption in his novel The Death of Artemio Cruz, published the same year as Aura; what Fuentes criticized overtly in the novel is what he criticizes through indirection in the novella, where the PRI is never mentioned by name at all. The past does not die easily; history tends to repeat itself. As Wendy B. Faris has written, Aura is very much about “the tyranny of the past” (Faris 76). Thus, the threat of a return to reactionary politics, represented allegorically by the magical return of Consuelo and her reunion with her husband General Llorente in the form of the young man Felipe ­Montero, is latently spooky and disturbing. Fuentes intimates, without ever making the scenario explicit, that PRI collusion with American business interests could even constitute a third conquest of Mexico: the first by Cortés, the second by Maximilian, then the third by the ­Yankees, who already had a long history of invasion and intervention in the affairs of Mexico (cf. the American invasion of Mexico in 1847, not to mention the American annexation of the immense northern territories of ­Mexico, ­ alifornia). This secomprising present-day Texas, the Southwest, and C cret message, however, is something that Fuentes leaves the reader free to guess at. He probably considered that stating boldly that America was the upcoming threat to Mexican independence was too dangerous and provocative an opinion to make public; in the 1960s Fuentes was to have enough trouble with the American government, whose State Department repeatedly refused him as a leftist entry into the US. The covert political theme represented by a young man naively seduced by reactionary politics is thus kept hidden as a cryptic subtext but rendered latently disturbing through the use of the Gothic device of the haunted house and the presentation of Consuelo as a witch. With the decay of the

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  53 once revolutionary PRI, and its increasing complicity with international and especially American economic imperialism, the door is open for a return of the historical repressed, that is, for another attempt at foreign conquest, this time round by American business interests with the aid of their Mexican allies—an economic takeover rather than, as with ­Maximilian and Cortes, a military conquest. But Aura’s covert political message is, in the end, not entirely cryptic in nature. Readers familiar with Mexican history and with the establishment of Maximilian on the throne in the 1860s could readily draw parallels with the threat of America’s domination in the 1960s. There still remains to be uncovered, however, a genuinely cryptic subtext, whose latent presence is signaled by the mystery of Aura’s name. It is a name that so fascinates Felipe, that he frequently murmurs it to himself; it is the name that provides the cryptic title for the novella. It is not a typical Christian name like Felipe (a saint’s name bourn by two of the great Spanish monarchs of the seventeenth century) or Consuelo (one of the many names of the Virgin Mary). So, why is the young woman given such an unusual name? Where does her name come from? As to the second question, Wendy Doniger provided the answer in a brief footnote in her book The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000): “perhaps Fuentes named his heroine Aura to echo the Aura who was the mirror rival of Procris (the wife of Ovid’s Cephalus), the double who was not there at all”4 (Doniger 152, ft. 99). But Doniger leaves it at that and has no more to say about it. That leaves me free to make some original speculations concerning the significance of a cryptic Ovidian subtext whose presence is signaled by the novella’s title as well as by repeated mention of the classical Ovidian name. For a writer of Fuentes’s social class, generation, and education, some familiarity with the classical mythology retold so charmingly in Ovid’s Metamorphoses can reasonably be assumed. In the seventh book of the Metamorphoses, the tragic myth of Cephalus and Procris involves ­someone called “Aura,” a third party who exists as a name only and not, except in a fantasy, as a person. In Ovid’s tale, the young man Cephalus is a passionate hunter, and so his wife Procris had given him a magic javelin that always hit its mark. He recalls the fateful day when tragedy struck: But when my hand had had its fill of slaughter of wild creatures, I would come back to the cool shade and the breeze (aura) that came forth from the cool valleys. I wooed the breeze (aura), blowing gently on me in my heat; the breeze (auram) I waited for. She [the breeze] was my labour’s rest. “Come, Aura,” I remember I used to cry, “come soothe me; come onto my breast, most welcome one, and, as indeed you do, relieve the heat with which I burn.” Perhaps I would add, for so my fates drew me on, more endearments, and say: “Thou

54  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts art my greatest joy; thou dost refresh and comfort me; thou makest me to love the woods and solitary places. It is ever my joy to feel thy breath upon my face.” Some one overhearing these words was deceived by their double meaning; and thinking that the word “Aura” so often on my lips was a nymph’s name, was convinced that I was in love with some nymph. (Ovid 398–401 [Metamorphoses VII.809–23]) This “some one” goes to Cephalus’ wife Procris and reveals what was reasonably assumed to be a love affair with a nymph. Procris then complained of my unfaithfulness, and, excited by an empty charge, she feared a mere nothing (nihil), feared an empty name (lit. “a name without a body” [sine corpore nomen]) and grieved, poor girl, as over a real rival. (400–1 [Met. VII 830–1]) The next day Procris hides herself in the bushes at the spot where ­ ephalus usually rested in the shade from his exertions. C The next morning, when the early dawn had banished night, I left the house and sought the woods; there, successful, as I lay on the grass, I cried: “Come, Aura, come and soothe my toil”— and ­suddenly, while I was speaking, I thought I heard a groan. Yet “Come, ­dearest,” I cried again, and as the fallen leaves made a slight rustling sound, I thought it was some beast and hurled my javelin at the place. It was Procris. (401 [Met. VII 835–42]) The repetition of “aura” four times in four lines at the opening of Cephalus’ sad story in Ovid certainly implants the name of Aura in the reader’s mind—as it did in that of Carlos Fuentes, one can reasonably assume. In the Ovidian tale, the configuration of three protagonists—the young husband Cephalus, his wife Procris, and Aura, who is a real person with a separate existence only in the wife’s imagination (one could say that, like Consuelo, Procris “gives life” to Aura)—is similar to the configuration in Fuentes’s novella: the young man Felipe (who is eventually the “husband”), the wife Consuelo, and the only apparently real Aura who is actually Consuelo’s double, her magically regained youthful self. This is a somewhat similar configuration to the one found in Dickens’s novel Great Expectations, with the boy Pip; the old lady Miss Havisham, who has “lost” her husband (she was left at the altar many years before); and the charming young Estella, who is being groomed to be the means of the old lady’s revenge on the male sex, and who at this juncture in the novel is encouraged to make Pip love her and then to break his heart.5

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  55 There is little likelihood that Ovid’s tale was meant to be taken as allegorical, but in the case of Great Expectations, there is a clearly suggested political allegory. The wealthy old lady Miss Havisham in her lonely mansion can be seen as representing the conservative moneyed classes, resistant to liberal ideals of progress; Pip would represent the talented and ambitious young men of lower-class origins, who have “great expectations”; and Estella would embody the seductive means by which the established plutocracy aims to deflect the struggle of the working classes to better their lot and increase their political influence. It is a fairly transparent liberal and progressive allegory, no harder to grasp than the corresponding liberal political allegory in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu. But in Fuentes’s novella, the political message, although, as we have seen, it would probably prove genuinely cryptic for readers unfamiliar with Mexican history, is ultimately enriched by the cryptic ­Ovidian subtext. Its presence is indicated at first paratextually by novella’s ­title Aura. Its presence is also suggested, with typical modernist cryptic ­allusiveness, by the epigraph. The epigraph Fuentes chose is a translated quotation from Jules Michelet’s introduction to his La sorcière (1862), a romantic disquisition on witchcraft and its history. The first three lines of the epigraph read as follows in Spanish: El hombre caza y lucha. La mujer intriga y sueña; Es la madre de la fantasia… (Man hunts and struggles. Woman intrigues and dreams; She is the mother of fantasy…) Although the epigraph is clearly intended to introduce Consuelo in the context of witchcraft and sorcery, it can also be taken as a clever cryptic allusion to the story of a “hunter” (Cephalus) and a “woman” (his wife Procris) who dreams and creates a “fantasy” (the nymph named Aura she imagines is having an affair with her husband). Thus, Fuentes gives us two clues, in both the title and the epigraph of Aura, that signal the presence of a cryptic subtext that will add something significant, as we shall see, to the effect of the novella’s half-cryptic political message. Fuentes must have had a good reason for giving his novella Aura an Ovidian title, but he never reveals it. Even in his essay “How I Wrote One of My Books,” in which Fuentes gives credit to a long list of subtexts, Ovid’s tale of Cephalus, Procris, and Aura in the Metamorphoses goes unmentioned. But we are free to speculate. The title signals the presence of cryptic Ovidian subtext as a new component of an allegory of the return of the political repressed. In Ovid as well as in Fuentes’s novella Aura, the main story is one of mistaken identities and of the power of a name to cast a tragic spell. The name Aura evokes no mere

56  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts breeze (in Ovid’s Latin, aura), but, if taken allegorically, as in Fuentes’s text, can stand for the “hot air” of reactionary imperialistic ideology and the return, in the Mexican context of 1962, of the reactionary politics of a past era. Thus, Aura’s seduction of the young history PhD ­Felipe suggests truly ominous repercussions, in that it demonstrates, as we shall see, that something as insubstantial as a fantasy can lead to tragic consequences. Felipe Montero, whose family name Montero (“Hunter”) marks him potentially as the avatar of the Ovidian hunter Cephalus, and thus as the one whom the name of the breeze will lead to a catastrophe, becomes unwittingly involved, like his Ovidian antecedent, in a strange kind of love triangle between himself, Consuelo, and Aura. It is a close encounter of the third kind, we might say, since the third member of the triangle is, so to speak, an extraterrestrial. The young girl Aura, like her Ovidian counterpart, has no real independent existence. In Fuentes, she is the youthful reincarnation of the aged Consuelo brought back to life through magic because Consuelo is desperate to recover her youth and beauty and to relive the early years of her happy marriage. Through ­Aura’s seductive charms Consuelo is able, by the end of the novella, to bring her dead husband back to life as well, or at least so it seems when Felipe suddenly recognizes himself in an old daguerreotype commemorating the tenth wedding anniversary of Consuelo and General Llorente: In the third photograph you see both Aura and the old gentleman, but this time they’re dressed in outdoor clothes. The photograph is a little blurred: Aura doesn’t look as young as she did in the other picture, but it’s she, it’s he, it’s… it’s you. You stare and stare at the photographs, then hold them up to the skylight. You cover General Llorente’s beard with your finger, and imagine him with black hair, and you only discover yourself: blurred, lost, forgotten, but you, you, you. (137) If Fuentes’s young woman Aura already bears an Ovidian name that suggests that she is magically unreal (the magic of a word taken for an objective reality), Consuelo herself is also given a mythic dimension as a witch almost from the start (Fuentes has cited La sorcière of ­M ichelet as one of his chief sources).6 But it is with the Lorelei of ­G ermanic legend that she is also identified via the description of another old photograph Felipe discovers, in which he recognizes in the young Consuelo of the photo the young Aura of his recent passionate encounters: “with her green eyes, her black hair gathered in ringlets, leaning against a Doric column with a painted landscape in the background: the

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  57 landscape of a Lorelei in the Rhine” (135). The Doric column brings us back ­momentarily to a tacky photographic studio’s evocation of the ­ uentes’s Greco-­Roman world, the simulated world of Ovid’s Aura, but F Aura (or  Consuelo) is also significantly associated with the name of the beautiful Lorelei, a mythical femme fatale, who in German legend (and in Heine’s often quoted poem) lures unthinking sailors to their death. This suggests that Consuelo’s seduction of the young PhD Felipe is ­potentially a deadly game. The name of the breeze in Fuentes thus has tragic overtones—as it did also in Ovid, where a playful erotic (or autoerotic) game leads to tragic consequences when Cephalus accidentally kills his beloved wife Procris. It is not only that the reader fears for the sanity of Felipe by the end of the novella. It is also that a sinister secret political message— transmissible via the potential force of political rhetoric and propaganda represented by Aura’s airy nature—has slowly begun to make itself clear allegorically over the course of the narrative. Just as foreign troops had once occupied Mexico in the 1860s and had almost smothered the birth of the republic, so in 1962 there exists, for Fuentes, the threat of a dangerous political regression, of a return of the imperialist agenda—but this time, the danger lies in the ossified structures of the Mexican revolution itself and of the PRI’s complicity with Yankee business interests. This threat of political regression is highlighted in the last lines of the novella, when Consuelo tells Felipe: “She’ll come back, Felipe. We’ll bring her back together, Let me recover my strength and I’ll bring her back”(145). As regards Nathanael Hawthorne’s novella Rappaccini’s Daughter (1844) as a subtext for Fuentes’s Aura, Lois Zamora (see Bibliography) has pointed out that the young Fuentes worked on the Mexican stage production of Octavio Paz’ dramatization of Hawthorne’s tale entitled La hija de Rappaccini, and she has analyzed some of the common ­features of Aura and Hawthorne’s tale that resulted from this process of hypertextualization. Presumably Fuentes, schooled partly in America and bilingual in Spanish and English, would have also read Hawthorne’s tale in the original at the time when he was working on the Spanish ­language stage production of Paz’ dramatization. He would have found in Hawthorne’s subtext the familiar configuration of a triad reminiscent of Aura: the older scientist and magician Rappaccini; his beautiful young daughter Beatrice, raised to be the embodiment of his scientific dream to create a woman who would be powerful and invulnerable; and a naïve young man, Giovanni, who initially falls in love with her. But what will concern us here specifically is something else that may have also inspired Fuentes later: Hawthorne’s evasive and sometimes misleading presentation of a powerful if somewhat cryptic social message in Rappaccini’s Daughter.

58  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts In his playfully self-deprecating introduction to the tale, Hawthorne refers editorially to himself as “Monsieur de l’Aubépine” (aubépine is French for “hawthorne”) and criticizes the author’s “inveterate love of allegory”: His writings, to do them justice, are not altogether destitute of fancy and originality; they might have won him greater reputation but for an inveterate love of allegory, which is apt to invest his plots and characters with the aspect and scenery and people in the clouds and to steal away the human warmth out of his conceptions. (Hawthorne 3) Rappaccini’s Daughter then goes on to present itself, via internal c­ ommentary, as an allegory of the Fall—a fairly unoriginal choice of a subtext and one that eventually turns out to be a red herring. But the initial allegory seems plausible. There is a Garden, and in this garden is a mysterious flowering bush that might suggest the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. There is the creator of the garden (Dr Rappaccini) and an initially solitary inhabitant (a female Adam, his daughter Beatrice). There is eventually someone (a male Eve, the young man Giovanni) whom Rappaccini destines to become her mate. There is also a Snake: Rappaccini’s professional rival Dr Baglioni, who ­persuades Giovanni that the beautiful young Beatrice is actually a “poison maiden,” fatal to anyone who approaches her, as she has absorbed the poisonous substances of the mysterious flowering bush. This “knowledge of good and evil” eventually results in Beatrice’s death, when Giovanni gives her an “antidote” supplied by Baglioni, which turns out to be a deadly poison. Hawthorne, with his “inveterate love of allegory,” seems to supply the reader almost immediately with the key to this allegory of a modern Garden of Eden, when he describes early on in the narrative Giovanni watching Dr Rappaccini from his window overlooking the garden: It was strangely frightful to the young man’s imagination to see this air of insecurity in a person cultivating a garden, the most simple and innocent of human toils, and which had been alike the joy and the labor of the unfallen parents of the race. Was this garden, then, the Eden of the present world? And this man, with such a perception of harm in what his own hands had caused to grow—was he the Adam? (8) Of course, the alert reader would probably reply to the second question that Dr Rappaccini, the creator of the garden, is obviously representing God, the creator of the garden of this modern Eden, so why does ­Hawthorne cloud the issue in the internal commentary and seem to assign to Dr Rappaccini the role of Adam? The second question appears to

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  59 be deliberately misleading, and so this incongruence creates some doubt in the reader’s mind as to whether Hawthorne is in fact pointing out the right allegory. This incongruence is the first clue that points to a possible cryptic subtext. An early reviewer characterized Rappaccini’s Daughter as the narrative of a Paduan magician, who, by way of endowing his innocent daughter with power and sovereignty, had nourished her on delicious poisons, till she communicated death to everything which she approached.7 The reviewer’s characterization is correct but only up to a point. By the end of the story, the reader has learned that Beatrice’s “poison” is something that can be shared with her suitor Giovanni; unfortunately for Giovanni, he is so frightened by this power of hers that he makes the tragic mistake of attempting to detoxify Beatrice and, having been given what he thinks is an antidote by Dr Baglioni, inadvertently kills her in the process. This strange story, the most enigmatic of Hawthorne’s tales and perhaps for that reason the most commented upon by critics, has baffled attempts to reduce its complexity to a simple formula. For example: is ­Beatrice the victim of an evil plot on the part of her power-obsessed father? Yes and no. Faced with the distrust and even hatred of the young man she has come to love, who has come to see her, thanks to Dr Baglioni’s insinuations, as a “poison maiden” who must be detoxified, Beatrice yields to despair. But her father is unrepentant: “Would’st thou, then, have preferred the condition of weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none?” (43), he asks her. Strong words indeed to a daughter who would rather be loved than feared and to the reader who, complicit with Giovanni’s fear of feminine power, has initially taken Dr  ­Rappaccini for the villain of the tale and failed to appreciate the injustice of the “condition of a weak woman” to which Beatrice finally succumbs, dying out of disappointed love. There is indeed an allegory in this tale, but it is one that contains a secret message, whose primary frame of reference is not religious and mythic but political and social. It is the incipient feminism of the 1840s and the figure of the New Woman that constitutes this cryptic subtext. Discussions of Hawthorne’s works have begun to reveal his complex if often sympathetic response to the feminism of his day, in particular to that of Margaret Fuller, who clearly fascinated him in a problematic yet ultimately very creative way. In New England society in the 1840s, the New Woman was represented in particular by the astonishing genius of America’s first feminist and polymath, Margaret Fuller.8 By the time he wrote his tale in the fall of 1844, Hawthorne had known her for several years, beginning with the time he spent at the utopian community of

60  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts Brook Farm in 1841. Their meetings during August and September 1842 can be chronicled with some precision, thanks not only to Hawthorne’s journal notations (published in The American Notebooks) but also to Margaret Fuller’s journal for the year 1842.9 Hawthorne had just married Sophia Peabody and moved with his new bride to the Old Manse in Concord that summer, where his close neighbor was Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family. In August, Margaret Fuller, then thirty-two years old and still unmarried, stayed at Emerson’s house in Concord for several weeks. Her journal notations for September 1, 1842, indicate one of the frequent topics of conversation between her and “Waldo”: “we got to talking, as we almost always do, on Man and Woman, and ­Marriage.” Quite possibly their neighbor Hawthorne’s recent marriage entered into their conversations since Margaret Fuller had known S­ ophia Peabody before she married and since she refers to the newlyweds in her journal entry for August 27, 1842 as “the man and the woman so sincerely bound together by one sentiment.” She had thoroughly approved of Sophia’s choice of a husband and wrote to her shortly before the marriage: “if ever I saw a man who combined delicate tenderness to understand the heart of a woman, with quiet depth and manliness, it is Mr. Hawthorne.”10 “Hawthorne,” as she referred to him somewhat more formally than she did to “Waldo,” met Fuller on several occasions at the end of the summer of 1842. One of their conversations took place on August 22, 1842, when Hawthorne came upon her by chance in the woods near Concord; Hawthorne recorded that We talked about Autumn, and about the pleasures of getting lost in the woods—and about the crows, whose voices Margaret had heard—and about the experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the character after the recollection of them has passed away.11 Possibly, Fuller told Hawthorne something of her own childhood at this juncture—how her father, a Cambridge lawyer, had given her the strictest and (for a young girl at that time) most unusual kind of education, which she had already described in an autobiographical fragment written in 1840 but only published after her death. The consequence of her father’s system of education, she had written, was a premature development of the brain, that made me a “youthful prodigy” by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, ­nightmare, and somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while, later, they induced continual headache, weakness and nervous affections, of all kinds. (Fuller Memoirs 15)

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  61 Fuller found relief from this constant intellectual tension, she wrote, In the happiest haunt of my childish years, -- our little garden… full of choice flowers and fruit-trees, which was my mother’s delight, and was carefully kept. Here I felt at home. (Fuller Memoirs 23) Among the plants of the garden she singled out one in particular, a c­ lematis creeper, on which she lavished her affection: How exquisitely happy I was in its beauty, and how I loved the ­silvery wreaths of my protecting vine! I would never pluck one of its flowers at that time, I was so jealous of its beauty… it stands in nature to my mind as the emblem of domestic love. (Fuller Memoirs 23) She went on to describe the association between the flowers of the garden and her mother’s love, so different from her father’s severe concern for her education: Within the house everything was socially utilitarian; my books told of a proud world, but in another temper were the teachings of the little garden… I loved to gaze on the roses, the violets, the lilies, the pinks; my mother’s hand had planted them, and they bloomed for me. I culled the most beautiful. I looked at them on every side. I kissed them, I pressed them to my bosom with passionate emotions, such as I have never dared express to any human being. (Fuller Memoirs 23–4) In these autobiographical notations, likely reflected in Fuller’s later conversations with him, one can find the germ of the novella ­Hawthorne was soon to compose. There are differences, of course. The garden in ­R appaccini’s Daughter was created by Beatrice’s father, whereas ­Margaret Fuller’s childhood garden was her “mother’s delight.” ­Furthermore, Beatrice is described as being quite beautiful, whereas Margaret Fuller was decidedly plain. Nor were their educations similar; there is no indication that Dr Rappaccini, in spite of his desire to make his daughter something other than a “weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none,” had given her the type of education that had made Margaret Fuller into a “youthful prodigy.” But the most significant ­elements of Beatrice’s ­situation—most unusual elements, hard to account for via coincidence—may be said to derive from Hawthorne’s knowledge of Fuller’s childhood, especially as regards the theme of a young girl in a beloved garden who is the innocent victim of her father’s desire to create a powerful New Woman, the “daughter of [his] pride and triumph,” who could “stand apart from ordinary women.”

62  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts “Stand apart from ordinary women” Fuller surely did. Emerson saw her, Hawthorne notes with some humor in 1843, as “the greatest woman… of ancient or modern times, and the one figure in the world worth considering” (Hawthorne Notebooks 371). Hawthorne may not have shared Emerson’s unqualified enthusiasm, for Margaret Fuller was a problematic figure for someone like him who valued less highly than Emerson the purely intellectual virtues; but he too had respect and admiration for her as one of the luminaries of the Transcendentalist movement. Hawthorne and his wife Sophia, who had attended Fuller’s famous lectures before their marriage, formed with Fuller “a strict and happy acquaintance,” according to Emerson.12 But this friendship did not prevent the newly wedded Sophia from reacting rather strongly to the criticism of the institution of modern marriage in an essay Fuller published in The Dial of July, 1843; she wrote to her mother that same month: It seems to me that if she [Margaret Fuller] were married truly, she would no longer be puzzled about the rights of woman. This [true marriage] is the revelation of woman’s true destiny and place, which never can be imagined by those who do not experience the relation. In perfect high union there is no question of supremacy… Home, I think, is the great arena for women, and there, I am sure, she can wield a power which no king or conqueror can cope with.13 The Dial essay that Sophia read (“The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women.”) was later slightly revised and published in 1845 as Woman in the Nineteenth Century, under which title it enjoys the status today of a classic statement of feminist principles. We can safely assume that Hawthorne read it, or had it read to him by Sophia; it may thus constitute an important subtext for Rappaccini’s ­D aughter. In her Dial essay Fuller called for the full extension of the principle of equal rights for women: “we would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to women as well as to men.”14 As an example of the New Woman that an equal education would create, Fuller cites the example of “Miranda” (obviously an idealized image of Margaret herself) whose father “cherished no sentimental reverence for women, but a firm belief in the equality of the sexes”; as a result, “the world was free to her, and she lived freely in it.”15 Fuller goes on to give examples of those women in the past who had assumed a public role on a par with men and had been applauded for it. The list includes—and Hawthorne must have remembered this later—“the ­Italian professor’s daughter who taught behind a curtain.”16 This was an allusion to ­Novella d’Andrea Calderini who, in the fourteenth century, lectured on canon law at the University of Bologna, whenever her

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  63 father was ­i ndisposed. A contemporary account, with which Hawthorne and/or Fuller may well have been familiar, explained that “she was fair as well as wise; and… lest her beauty should dissipate the attention of the students, she was accustomed to read and explain the laws, while she was concealed behind a curtain.”17 It was perhaps on reading Fuller’s Dial essay that Hawthorne first came to imagine an ­“Italian professor’s daughter,” who, as Baglioni supposed erroneously, “young and beautiful as fame reports her,” still was “qualified to fill a ­professor’s chair” (14). Although Beatrice denies knowing anything of her father’s science, for Dr Baglioni, at least, she is very much a Novella d’Andrea Calderini, who might even, he fears, pose a threat to his own academic position. It is also worth noting that Fuller’s allusion to the “Italian professor’s daughter” is immediately followed in her Dial essay by a comparison of women and plants—more precisely, by the development of the idea that the rearing and education of women should be envisaged along the lines of the careful cultivation of a garden: Plants of great vigor will almost always struggle into blossom, ­despite impediments… But there should be encouragement… Some are like little delicate flowers… But others require an open field, a rich and loosened soil, or they will never show their proper hues. (Fuller, Lawsuit, 19) Later in the essay Fuller will praise the poet Shelley, because, like women, she writes, he favored “a plant-like gentleness in the development of ­energy” (Fuller, Lawsuit, 42). Here we clearly have one possible subtext for Hawthorne’s creation of a tale based on the Flower-Woman metaphor that dominates Giovanni’s early perception of Beatrice, as well as the image of Rappaccini’s experiments as a gardener with both his plants and his daughter. However, Hawthorne’s use of this metaphor is decidedly ambiguous: it is one thing to encourage a jeune fille en fleur to blossom and quite another to experiment with vegetable poisons on your own daughter. The dangerous side of Rappaccini’s experiment has been frequently stressed by critics, who have too readily seen Beatrice through the eyes of ­Baglioni as a woman whose “love would have been poison—her ­embrace death!” (32) But Baglioni was wrong since it turns out that by the end of the tale that Giovanni, through his habituation with the e­ xhalations of the garden plants, has become immune to Beatrice’s p ­ oison—if indeed it actually exists18 —and so is not in any way threatened by Beatrice’s embraces as Baglioni had taught him to expect. Nevertheless, with his callow youthful gynophobia, Giovanni remains under the spell of ­Baglioni’s story of the

64  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts Indian prince, who sent a beautiful woman as a present to ­A lexander the Great… who had been nourished with poisons from her birth upward until… she herself had become the deadliest poison in existence. (31–2) Hawthorne had found this story in the Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia (Seventh Book, Chapter XVII—the Greek title means “Erroneous Opinions”), and he had copied it into his journal. Browne, however, found the story of the poison maiden to be undeserving of belief, since, as he wrote, “animals that can innoxiously digest their poisons, become antidotal unto the poison digested.” If Rappaccini’s wisdom proves to be deeper than Baglioni’s on the issue of Poison as Power, it is because Rappaccini foresaw the possibility of something that Fuller and other feminists of Hawthorne’s period would claim as a right: that a woman need not be condemned to the fate of being a weak woman “exposed to all evil,” but could become a strong woman—a New Woman. But would such a New Woman like ­Margaret Fuller ever be allowed to enjoy her strength and freedom and at the same time find the ordinary happiness of married life? Would any man be capable of accepting her and loving her as she was? Would not a New Woman require the love of a New Man? Would she ever find such a one? These were the questions that Hawthorne, I imagine, would have asked himself with more than a little anxiety. Six years older than Margaret Fuller, he was in a complex relationship with her, as critics have pointed out, but the strongest aspect of that relationship, I would maintain, was likely to be that of an affectionate older brother, who, recently happily married himself, was deeply concerned with the younger Margaret’s happiness and welfare, and no doubt fretted over the likelihood that she was on the way to becoming a perpetual old maid.19 We can guess at some of Hawthorne’s thoughts on the question of the educated and unmarried woman’s risking losing her opportunity for happiness, thanks to what we know of his reaction to a gruesome ­incident that occurred less than a year after the composition of ­R appaccini’s Daughter. In July 1845, a young woman, educated and unmarried, and working as a school superintendent at a time when few women in America were educated or had public careers, had thrown herself into the Concord River not far from the Old Manse. Hawthorne had joined with others in searching for her corpse. In the case of his character ­Beatrice—and one can hardly doubt that Hawthorne realized the terrible coincidence between the suicide of a real young woman and the suicide of his own fictional character—Hawthorne had made her complain bitterly in the end of her father’s “fatal love of science” (41), which had “estranged [her] from all society of [her] kind” (39). Beatrice’s death was in one sense a suicide motivated by her violent despair over

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  65 losing her only chance to find a husband worthy and able to be her mate; her desperate mood at the end of the tale resulted in a veritable frenzy of self-loathing (“I… am the horrible thing thou namest me… spurn me!— tread upon me!—kill me!”) (40–1), which led her to swallow Baglioni’s supposed antidote, knowing that it was a fatal poison. Giovanni’s mind had been so poisoned by Baglioni’s gynophobic fantasies that he failed to seize the opportunity of becoming her husband, and so, in the end, Beatrice was left to “die for want of sympathy.” Hawthorne’s secret message, carefully hidden behind deviously deceptive allegorizing and misdirection, now appears clear: if Fuller’s New Woman, the creation of an equal education with men, is to be happy, there must also be created for her a New Man to be her partner. But Hawthorne felt obliged to bury this controversial message in favor of highlighting in his tale the more socially acceptable stereotype of a weak woman who needs only Love and Marriage—and not Love and Power outside of the domestic sphere—to be happy. Was this a failure of nerve on his part? Was it an unsatisfactory compromise with the growing cult of bourgeois domesticity with which his wife Sophia seemed quite comfortable? In Rappaccini’s Daughter, Hawthorne’s response to Fuller’s clarion call for full equality between the sexes (“We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man”) may have been muted and evasive on the surface, but on the level of cryptic subtext, it was powerful: female power is not poisonous, and men should not follow Giovanni and Dr Baglioni’s example but rather give it the full support and sympathy that it deserves. This is, of course, not a startlingly original message for our own time, but in the 1840s—almost eighty years before women would gain the right to vote, not to mention other rights at a later date— it could be taken as subversive and disturbing, so Hawthorne decided to proceed via indirection. He did this almost too well, and consequently, his cryptic message must have eluded most readers for generations. To return briefly to Aura, one lesson that Fuentes might have learned from Hawthorne’s example—if indeed he had been able to decode ­Hawthorne’s cryptic message—was that it was both more prudent and more artistically effective to bury within an apparently clear allegory a secret message that the author judged to be too socially and politically provocative for more direct expression. In the case of Aura, the secret message was that there was the possibility in Mexico of an attempt on the part of regressive and reactionary politics to seize power once again—even, once again, at the cost of collaboration with a foreign power, in this case, America—and that young people such as Felipe, like Giovanni in Hawthorne’s tale, can be tragically misled by deceitful propaganda. But both authors decided that it was too risky to give voice to such a provocative message too obviously. Almost twenty-five years after the publication of Aura, Salman Rushdie was to take Fuentes’s novella as a cryptic subtext in the Rosa ­Diamond section at the opening of his novel The Satanic Verses (1988), 20 with the aim

66  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts of powerfully presenting not so much a secret message—the ­political and social allegory in this section is fairly transparent—as of endowing it with a mythic subtext that reinforced the power of the message in terms of the pervasive magical realism of his novel. The Satanic Verses was published in the Fall of 1988, and on February 14, 1989 ­(ironically, Valentine’s Day), Rushdie’s charmed existence as a prestigious i­nternationally known writer at the height of his fame and good fortune changed radically: the infamous fatwa promulgated in the name of the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran forced him into an underground life of high security alert for the next several years, with the necessity for living with body guards extending possibly for the rest of his life. ­(Fortunately, such did not prove to be the case.) The film The Wizard of Oz was a childhood favorite of Rushdie, and one of the writing projects he undertook post-fatwa, during his constant shifting from safe house to safe house, was a booklet commissioned by the British Film Institute on The Wizard of Oz, which he published in 1992. In this essay Rushdie reveals—and revels in—his early love for that particular film as a boy of ten, when he wrote his first story entitled, Oz-fashion, Over the Rainbow. The film, he wrote, “was my very first literary influence” (Rushdie Oz 9), and it provided him with a myth for his own life: going to England to school was like a journey to Oz; the Wizard, however (he writes), was right there in Bombay. “My father… prone to explosions, thunderous rages, bolts of emotional lightning, puff of dragon smoke, and other menaces of the type practiced by Oz, the great and terrible” (Rushdie Oz 9). No comparatist alerted to the place The Wizard of Oz had in Rushdie’s heart, both as a boy of ten and as a fortyish author of world renown, would have much trouble finding major and minor evidence of the filmic subtext in The Satanic Verses: the magical flight (via tornado-lifted house or jumbo jet) and the magical descent from the sky that brings the migrants to Oz or England from Kansas or India, the return home (“there’s no place like home”) at the end of each text, the magical world of Oz that makes the film one of the precursors of Rushdie’s brand of magical realism, and the ruby slippers that function at the end of The Wizard of Oz much like the magic lamp at the end of The Satanic Verses. And this is just a beginning. Rushdie, however, makes no direct reference to these subtexts for his controversial novel in his film booklet; perhaps the infamous fatwa had made him want to put The Satanic Verses behind him for a while. But he does mention that as a child the green skin of the Wicked Witch of the West made him dream of green-skinned witches and that I gave these dreams to the narrator of my novel Midnight’s Children, having completely forgotten their source, in a sequence in which the nightmare of Indira Gandhi is fused with the equally nightmarish figure of Margaret Hamilton: a coming together of the Wicked Witches of the East and the West. (Rushdie Oz 33).

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  67 Of course, witches can be good or bad, but one way or another, they are powerful; for Rushdie, Glinda and the Witch of the West “are the only two symbols of power in a film which is largely about the powerless” (Rushdie Oz 42). The figure of Rosa Diamond in The Satanic Verses is certainly, like Fuentes’s Consuelo, a figure of female power and a bewitching one at that. Although she is in her late eighties, by the end of the episode, she has thoroughly bewitched the naïve and mother-complexed Indian migrant Gibreel Farishta and has seduced him (the word is not too strong) into playing the role of her long-lost Argentinian lover Martin de la Cruz. 21 But, as a witch, Rosa Diamond belongs less to Oz than she does to Aura and to the novella’s Gothic evocation of the hundred and e­ ight-year-old Consuelo. For instance, Consuelo’s youthful alter ego ­Aura’s green dress and green eyes make her, like the Wicked Witch of the West, a kind of green witch. In a novel that Rushdie recognized later22 had owed so much to James Joyce’s Ulysses (to start with: the coast on which the two Indian migrants Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta fall possesses a Martello tower, like the one Stephen Dedalus lives in at the opening of Joyce’s novel), the debt to Carlos Fuentes’s Aura in this particular episode remained curiously unacknowledged. The first sentence of The Satanic Verses—“‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die’” (3)—is no doubt first and foremost a well-known quote from the Italian Marxist Gramsci, a great culture hero for leftists in the second half of the twentieth century. But Fuentes had already put it into the mouth of the young woman Aura: “You have to die before you can be reborn” (123) (“Hay que morir antes de renacer”). Gibreel is trapped by the eyes of Rosa Diamond and lured into staying in her house by the sea—“it seemed to him that his will was no longer his own to command, that somebody else’s needs were in charge” (148)—just as Felipe is bewitched into living in Consuelo’s house by the clear green eyes of Aura. Consuelo’s weirdly erotic religiosity and her apocalyptic yearnings will be echoed in a later episode of The Satanic Verses when Gibreel imagines himself insanely to be the Archangel Gibreel/Gabriel blowing the trumpet of the Last Judgment; both Rushdie and Fuentes have a dim view of religious enthusiasm. 23 The final scene in Aura, in which Felipe begins to make love not to the young Aura (as he has before) but rather to the hundred and eight-year-old Consuelo, certainly suggested to Rushdie the astonishing final scene of the Rosa Diamond episode, in which Gibreel, whose relationship with the old English “mame” has been passionately chaste, finally makes love to Rosa, who has turned eighty-nine the day before and who in fact is already dead. “How can you love me?” she murmured. “I am so much older than you” (161). At this final postmortem tryst, Rosa is associated with a song that was both foreign but familiar: a song that Rosa had often hummed (160); in Fuentes novella,

68  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts Felipe is seduced by Aura, who hums a melody—“she… begins to hum a melody, a waltz, to which you dance with her” (106). Finally, the role Consuelo assigns to Felipe—that of substituting for her long dead husband General Llorente—is a subtext for the role Rosa assigns to Gibreel: that of substituting for her long dead lover Martin de la Cruz and of bringing back the gloriously romantic days of her youth. Both episodes alternate between scenes set in past time in one country with scenes set in present time in another, with each pair of countries (France/Mexico, England/Argentina) sharing a history of colonial dominance and submission, which is reflected in the past love relationships that are magically reestablished via proxy in the present moment. The episodes no doubt have many significant differences, the most obvious being perhaps that the aged woman/younger alter ego duo of Consuelo and Aura in Fuentes’s novella (which Fuentes remembers as being inspired especially by Dickens’s Miss Havisham and Estella in Great Expectations, Pushkin’s Countess and her ward in Queen of Spades, and the old woman and her niece in Henry James’s The Aspern Papers)24 might seem to be missing in Rushdie’s episode, where Rosa Diamond stands alone. Or does she? In fact, it is just here that the resemblances between subtext and hypertext are in fact the strongest. For Rosa ­Diamond reactivates through her magical spell over Gibreel not only her long dead gaucho lover Martin de la Cruz but also her own younger fortyish self25 who is the magical realist double for the R ­ ushdie’s portrayal of a wonderfully independent and eccentric old woman, whose fundamentally puritanical Englishness has been forever altered by her discovery of Latin love in Argentina. Rosa Diamond’s memories of her love affair in Argentina are as passionate as Consuelo’s memories of her blissful married life in Paris, and both old women try to relive these memories by magically snaring a naïve young man to play the leading role of lover or husband brought back from the dead. But Aura and the Rosa Diamond episode in The Satanic Verses are not only magical realist evocations of love affairs across time and space; in addition, both have a dimension of secret political message, which is somewhat cryptic in the case of Aura and somewhat less so in the case of the Rosa Diamond episode. As we have seen already, it is the association between psychological regression and politically reactionary politics that is gradually clarified in Aura, as Felipe Montero, a young and underemployed historian (with a mindlessly adulatory thesis on the Spanish conquest of the New World) is bewitched by Consuelo through her Hoffmanesque doll-like double Aura. Consuelo herself is a dangerous woman, with her rabid erotic ­religiosity, apocalyptic yearnings, and passionate nostalgia for her conservative husband General Llorente. The latter was imagined as a close associate of the French-imposed Emperor Maximilian in the 1860s, and his widow is a living reminder of the period during which the Mexican

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  69 Church and Army, working hand in hand with European and especially French armed forces, established a francophilic dictatorship after an appeal by Mexican conservatives who wished to undo the liberal reforms of Benito Juarez. Consuelo’s seduction of Felipe Montero through her youthful double Aura thus represents allegorically the return of the historically repressed, the heavy hand of the past that threatens to undo all the progressive work of the Mexican Revolution. Felipe falls for this without knowing what is happening to him, even to the extent of finally acquiescing in the role Consuelo has assigned to him: that of her long dead general husband, whose memoires he has been paid to edit and complete. That Mexican youth are subject to political corruption, and reactionary forces are waiting in the wings, ready to take over: this seems to be Fuentes’s decidedly left-liberal message. Rushdie’s political message is equally left-liberal. His Rosa Diamond is a rather Dickensian creation, and Rushdie (who in certain respects has resurrected in The Satanic Verses the Dickensian novel of London in a postmodernist and magical realist mode) clearly intends her to elicit the reader’s good will and compassionate understanding. But, taken allegorically, Rosa Diamond’s delightful English eccentricities as well as her poignant memories of a lost love (cf. Miss Havisham, Dickens’s notable and almost unique stab at female sexual and romantic frustration) serve as a facade behind which lie the ambitions of the British imperial mission, not only in 1940s Argentina, where her husband is owner of a plantation, but also in postcolonial England of the 1980s, where Rosa, la Belle Dame Sans Merci, hath the migrant Gibreel in thrall (“I’m going crazy,” Gibreel thought. “She’s dying, but I’m losing my mind” [157]). So, Rushdie, who, in The Satanic Verses, succeeded not only in a creating a fascinating philosophical tale satirizing the foundation myth of ­Islam but also a great Dickensian novel of late twentieth-century London (some of whose main characters are, paradoxically—at least when seen from the nativist and imperialist perspective—South Asian migrants), has assigned allegorically to Rosa Diamond the role of representing a dangerously regressive form of cultural imperialism that casts a spell on the naïve Gibreel Farishta. As such, she seeks to impose her memories through a kind of black magic (as she desperately seeks to recreate and refashion them in order to make final sense out of her affair with Martin de la Cruz) on a helpless Indian migrant who is just about to be arrested for alleged illegal immigration and contributes to his final descent into paranoid schizophrenia. The message of the Rosa Diamond episode is fairly clear and ­obvious: postcolonial regressive Anglophilia is bad for the mental and political ­ ibreel health of present-day South Asian migrants, not only in the case of G but also for Saladin Chamcha, whose carefully cultivated ­English mannerisms are held up for constant ridicule in the novel. ­Rushdie’s narrative strategy is complex, however. On the one hand, it is Rosa Diamond

70  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts (whose initials R.D. echo Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter, a distant subtext via Aura for Rushdie’s episode) who saves Gibreel Farishta from brutal treatment at the hands of the police constables and immigration officials. She becomes his friend and protector, strolls down the street with him, cooks for him, and gives him her husband’s clothing to wear. On the other hand, she is the one who inadvertently reinforces the process by which Gibreel is gradually made the victim of obsessive dreams and insane self-identifications (as when later he identifies himself with the Archangel Gibreel, i.e., Gabriel) that are the mark of what Rushdie will later label his increasingly severe paranoid schizophrenia. You look just like him, Rosa Diamond said as they stood by her night-time window, side by side, looking out to sea. His double. Martin de la Cruz. At the mention of the cowboy’s name, Gibreel felt so violent a pain in his navel, a pulling pain, as if somebody had stuck a hook in his stomach, that a cry escaped his lips. (152) She thus forces him to participate in the reactivation of her conflicting memories of what actually happened when she and Martin de la Cruz were alone together on the well-named “white island.” Did she or didn’t she make love to him? And afterward, who was it who killed Martin: was it she, her husband, or Martin’s jilted lover Aurora? The reader will never know the answer to either question. But what becomes clear is that Rosa is not only a woman whose capacity for love was so great (150) that her prosaic bird-watching husband Henry could not possibly fulfill it but also an emblem of British economic imperialism in Argentina and in the world. The allegory helps make more sense out of what otherwise might seem a tangled story of love and murder, for Rosa was possibly (among other alternative narratives) the actual murderess of her gaucho lover, a subaltern in relation to British economic colonialism in ­A rgentina, thus playing out the predatory and exploitative role the political allegory assigns to her. (Even if she was not Martin’s actual killer—the facts are never clarified in her memory—she was one way or another the proximate cause of his death.) And now, in her old age, she has chosen a­ nother victim—this time not colonial but postcolonial—to be the object not only of her romantic passion and ethnic othering but also of her desire for power and control: the soon-to-be-insane Gibreel Farishta, for whom she proves to be a Wicked Witch of the West indeed! Like Felipe, then, Gibreel falls into the snares of a modern witch, and his fall from the sky represents, allegorically, a fall into the hands of the reactionary Ghost of Imperialisms Past. Rosa’s amusing English eccentricity veils a sentimental imperialism that is for Gibreel a regressive force roaring out of the colonial past that he cannot resist; the irony is that he is charmed into playing the role of colonial subaltern forty years or more

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  71 ­ uentes’s after the British colonial empire has lost its political magic. F ­Felipe, in a similarly regressive, magical, and anachronistic turn of events, had been trapped in the web of the conservative ­Franco-Mexican alliance of a hundred years before, which itself reenacted the original Spanish Conquest of Mexico, and which, as the return of the historically repressed, still has the potential to reenact in late twentieth century the original conquests of the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Thus in both texts the witchy power of the feminine represents allegorically the power of reactionary politics and cultural regression. 26 But that is not the whole story. Rosa is not only an imperialist victimizer but is also a victim of a reverse phenomenon, which plays a large thematic role in another section of The Satanic Verses: the ­Englishwoman disoriented and changed (and ultimately brought to her death) by a passionate relationship with the colonial Other. 27 It is a bit E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India all over again: “only connect,” with tragic consequences. For Rosa’s romantic encounter with the colonial Other is not without tragic consequences for herself as well. Forced to return to ­England as a consequence of the scandal of the murder of Martin de la Cruz, she dies years later when Gibreel’s appearance has brought her face to face with the intolerable burden of her conflicting versions of the past. As a member of the British diaspora in Argentina, she had succumbed to the allure of the exotic gaucho, and their passionate affair first enriched and then almost ruined her life. And then a festering regret for the past had poisoned her later years. After the vastness of Argentina’s pampas and the magic of her gaucho’s passion, England for her could never be the same: “‘To diminish into this, after being in that vastness. It isn’t to be borne.’ And, after a further silence: “Everything shrinks.”” (160)—these are her dying words. Rosa’s sad fate and death do not help Gibreel at all, however. Although he has originally arrived on the beach near Hastings as another potentially successful invader of England (as in 1066 the Normans of William the Conqueror, whose ghosts Rosa sees sailing through her house), his new symbolic conquest of England does not prove to be lasting. In the end, like Felipe Montero, he becomes the tragic hero of a cautionary tale in which a reactionary colonial past returns to claim another victim. But what gives this postcolonial message a special color and intensity is its cryptic mythological dimension. Rushdie’s magical realism, significantly present throughout The Satanic Verses, results, in the Rosa Diamond episode, in a subtextual encryption that veils a starkly blunt warning against postcolonial Anglophilia in a narrative that appears to all extents and purposes to be a modern fairy tale. The message is supported by the latently mythic dimension of the narrative: Rosa as witch. But Rosa is only one of the forms of the Female Power who manifests herself in various ways and in various characters in other episodes of the novel. The Satanic Verses, on one level of interpretation, is an analysis

72  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts of the way the traditional goddesses of Mecca, spurned and rejected in the foundation of Islam, reappear as the return of the repressed in the form of modern female figures of power, the first of whom is Rosa ­Diamond herself. This return of the repressed gives the political message a cryptic mythological foundation that enhances its power. Both Aura and Rosa are manifest the power and fascination of myth, even as, taken as allegorical figures, they represent the dangerous allure of conservative political retrogression and its powerful reactionary illusion of a return to a glorious past. As we have seen in the case of Fuentes’s Aura, the plot of Ovid’s myth of Cephalus and Procris in Book VII of The Metamorphoses is generated by the mistaking of a name of a thing (a breeze or “aura” in both Latin and in Greek) for the name of a person (a nymph or woman presumably named Aura). This classical mythological misconstrual resonates as a cryptic subtext not only in Fuentes’s Aura but also in Stéphane ­Mallarmé’s poem L’après-midi d’un faune (“The Afternoon of a Faun”), the foundational text of poetic modernism. In Mallarmé’s poem, the name of “Aura” goes unmentioned, but the name of “Venus” provides a similar source of false inspiration for the young and sexually inexperienced faun who is the protagonist of this modernist pastoral monologue, in that it suggests the sudden appearance of the goddess of Love, which turns out to be based on pure fantasy and illusion. The parallel between the Mallarmé’s poem and Ovid’s mythological tale is fairly obvious. Both involve a unique kind of metamorphosis: how a name can be mistaken for an actual person—how a name can apparently morph into a person. This mistake leads to tragedy in Ovid’s tale, but Mallarme’s poem ends comically. However, although the goddess “Venus” is ultimately found to exist only in the faun’s overheated imagination, from Mallarmé’s idealist perspective, physical absence trumps physical presence every time since what is absent is… more truly present since its essence is revealed by the magical power of Poetry. So, the name actually creates more than a material illusion: it reveals an ideal reality. Such a message is cryptic, but it is not indecipherable. But there is a second cryptic subtext in Mallarmé’s modernist eclogue. A few years after writing “The Afternoon of a Faun” (1876), Mallarmé put together a school manual of mythology, based on the writings of the English scholar George W. Cox, which he published in 1880 under the title Les dieux antiques (The Gods of Classical Antiquity). He probably undertook the project partly in order to supplement his modest salary as an English teacher in a Parisian lycée, but he was also probably attracted by the challenge of presenting mythology to younger minds in a clear but poetically suggestive fashion. It is not known conclusively whether or not he was already familiar with Cox’s manual The Mythology of the Aryan Nations (1870) when he was completing the final version (1876) of “The Faun,” but as a teacher fluent in reading English it is certainly

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  73 likely. If so, he would have certainly noted the explanation of the myth of Cephalus and Procris that Cox puts forward on several occasions, and which Mallarmé translated and included in the first chapter of Les dieux antiques. As a prominent member of the mythological-linguistic school and disciple of Max Müller, Cox explained mythology as the result of a “disease of language,” that is, of the forgetting of the originally clear meaning of proto-Indo-European words as the original Aryan peoples drifted apart and became linguistically separate, with the consequence that common nouns once designating ordinary natural phenomena, survived as metamorphosed into the names of fabulous mythological p ­ rotagonists. Thus, Cox explained the name Procris as a forgotten word designating the morning dew and Cephalus as originally designating the sun (the solar “head” or kephalos in Greek), who rises at dawn and “kills” her— causes her to evaporate. For Cox the myth of Cephalus and Procris is exemplary, and he returns to it again and again over the course of The Mythology of the Aryan Nations. The whole story for Cox is nothing more than a description of the way the dew is dried up by the warm rays of the morning sun (Cephalus’ spear), even the last drops that still lurk—like Cephalus’ wife Procris—in the bushes. Thus, for Cox, the primitive poetic imagination, faced with words whose sense had been lost, transformed natural fact into poetic fable via a linguistic slide from what was once the name of a thing (sun, dew) to the name of a mythological person (Cephalus, Procris). However, it is curious to note that Cox never referred directly to the specifically Ovidian version of the myth of Cephalus and Procris. In the version he uses, Cephalus had earlier fallen in love with Eos, the ­Goddess of the Dawn (more solar mythology, of course), and Procris subsequently gave him a magic spear in return for his assurances of faithful love. He kills her accidentally (the sun who loves the dew also dries it up with his rays, i.e., his spear), but in Cox’s numerous allusions and retellings of this myth, the Ovidian name of Aura, curiously enough, is never mentioned. It is doubly curious that Cox makes no reference to Ovid’s version of the myth since it would have provided him with a perfect antecedent for his theory in an ancient poet’s intuition of the origin of a myth in a word designating a natural phenomenon (“aura,” the breeze) later misinterpreted as the name of a mythological person (the nymph Aura). Was it a case of his anxiety over admitting Ovidian influence—a bid for originality? Was it Cox’s desire to downplay the narrative importance of a classical myth he otherwise dominates through his theory? Curiouser and curiouser… since Cox must have been quite familiar with Ovid, given his fascination with the myth of Cephalus and Procris. In the case of Mallarmé, we can be sure that he knew Ovid and ­almost sure that he knew Cox when he composed L’après-midi d’un faune. In fact, Mallarmé’s poem represents a kind of serious parody of

74  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts Cox’s theory: a parody through its racy humor and serious through its symbolist idealism regarding the visionary nature of poetry. As a theoretician of myth, Cox, for all his delight in the beauty of solar poetry, sees ancient myth not as resulting from visionary poetic experience but rather from the corruption of the original mode—the displacement of word and thing by myth and fantasy—in which divine wisdom, as he writes at the end of his preface to The Mythology of the Aryan Nations, “has chosen to educate mankind through impressions produced by the phenomena of the outward world”—through the beginnings of natural science, in other words. Cox shows himself to be a nineteenth-century positivist and a naturalist; witness his simple faith in the validity and irreducibility of “the phenomena of the outward world” revealed through sense impressions. Mallarmé is quite the opposite. For all that his poem L’après-midi d’un faune opened the way to literary modernism through its radical transformation of poetic language, the poet Mallarmé operates in the poem as a symbolist and an idealist, not as a Coxian naturalist. But, of course, opposites can attract. Mallarmé’s protagonist faun, however, is initially presented in the poem as a Coxian naturalist. He is obsessed with the memory of how, just before falling asleep at high noon, he had seduced two nymphs simultaneously in a grove of trees on the edge of a Sicilian marsh near Mount Etna. One of them, he remembers, was hot-blooded and full of heavy sighs, while the other nymph was blue-eyed and teasingly reluctant. He is at first positive that the two nymphs were real, and he uses poetic language (after all, he plays the role of a classical pastoral poet modeled on the Cyclops of Theocritus’ Idyll XI)28 as a means preserving their memory: “Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer” (“these nymphs—I want to perpetuate them”). But his doubts soon accumulate. Were the nymphs possibly mere figments of his imagination in a dream triggered by phenomena of the outside world: the sensation of a warm breeze ruffling his shaggy thighs suggesting the hot-blooded nymph, with the other frigid nymph being suggested by the gurgling sound of a cool spring nearby? “What if the women of your disquisition / were only the wish fulfillment of your fabulating senses” (Ou si les femmes dont tu gloses/ Figurent un souhait de tes sens fabuleux!)—this is pure Coxian theory, of course: mythical figures as misremembered sense impressions. The faun’s own skeptical line of reasoning is countered by his sudden ­observation that in fact there is no breeze blowing at all—no breeze and so consequently no nymph as a false embodiment of the breeze (here we have the cryptic Ovidian subtext in full bloom). Rather there must have been a real nymph who must really have been in his arms—or perhaps not? Perhaps there was a breeze, and it has simply died down while he slept. The faun is quite baffled. The important point is that the faun, like Cephalus (playfully) and Procris (tragically), may have created a mythic being out of empty air—created a nymph like Ovid’s Aura out

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  75 of a breeze—and that there is thus a cryptic mythic as well as theoretical subtext that is both pure Cox and pure Ovid. His poem is a witty and sophisticated illustration of Cox’s theory, it would seem. And in parodic or comic literature pure sophisticated wit can be an end in itself. This would be enough to justify the existence of a cryptic subtext. But that is not the whole story. At the end of the poem, Mallarmé has his protagonist imagine something else that is even more flattering to his adolescent narcissism than a duo of nymphs. He imagines the presence of the goddess Venus, whom he about to embrace. This time, while at first flattered by the idea that he is about to be making love to the ­goddess of Love in person, he suddenly comes to the conclusion that this extravagant erotic fantasy had been generated by the stimulus of yet another set of ordinary sense impressions (I provide the French text since, with such a hermetic poem, a translation is of necessity the beginning of a commentary). Now when the woods colors itself in gold and ash A festival exults in the leaves whose fire has expired: Etna! It is on you visited by Venus Posing her ingenuous heels on your lava When a sad sleep thunders or flame dies down. I grasp the queen! (A l’heure où ce bois d’or et de cendres se teinte Une fête s’exhalte en la feuillée éteinte: Etna! c’est parmi toi visité de Vénus Sur ta lave posant ses talons ingénus Quand tonne un somme triste ou s’épuise la flamme. Je tiens la reine!) A brief explication of this difficult modernist passage would run as follows: the visual impression of woods in the glare of the noonday sun ­appearing both gold and gray (gold the brightness of the light, ash gray  the woods’ attenuated shadows at noon) suggests both the gray lava of the nearby volcano Etna and the sudden epiphany of the golden Venus. The faun, in other words, is once again an unconscious victim of Cox’s theory of the origin of myth as the product of a poetic translation into myth of earlier sense impressions; in this particular instance, the impression of colors (gold and ash gray) generated by natural ­phenomena (the  woods at high noon) have been translated by the faun’s primitive mind into a vision of the golden blond Goddess of Love herself tripping along the gray volcanic ashy cone of Mt. Etna. But he has succumbed to a second misperception as well. Like Ovid’s Procris, the faun has allowed a name (Venus) to create in his imagination the illusory presence of a person who, like Aura, is not really there. But there the resemblance between the two texts ends. The faun does not believe in his vision for

76  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts more than a moment, and, soon exhausted by the unusual stress of a visionary experience whose visionary quality he resolutely denies and resists as a Coxian naturalist, he falls asleep, hoping for pleasant dreams of dalliance with the nymphs he had imagined—or maybe remembered?— at the opening of the poem. However, Mallarmé’s ironic perspective is not only designed to place the faun and his illusions in a comic light; his poem is not only a ­lighthearted illustration of Cox’s ideas concerning mythology as the result of a disease of language but is also at the service of a secret message representing the kind of idealism that the poet’s naturalist and ­literal-minded faun rejects. For the poet, the faun’s final vision is not less than real: it is more than real—it is ideal. And Mallarmé at this stage of his life was very much an idealist. In the early stages of composing the Faun, Mallarmé made a personal philosophical confession in a ­letter to his friend Cazalis, stating that Beauty—and its perfect expression ­Poetry—was all that existed for him, everything else being a lie except, he added, for those who live for the body, love. 29 This is the core of the secret message that he expressed in densely hermetic poetry in The Afternoon of a Faun, with delicious irony. The faun, half human and half animal, who lives for the body, finds (or thinks he has found) a real object for his passion in the two nymphs, but the ideal and iconic Venus, once her ideal dimension is made manifest, is more than he can grasp, literally as well as metaphorically. From Mallarmé’s ironic perspective, however, the faun’s vision of the ideal Venus is much more real than his memory of the real nymphs. Mallarmé has reversed the tragic direction of the Ovidian myth of Aura: for him, the name reveals something more real, not less real, than what is originally named. Why should Mallarmé’s secret message have been expressed so cryptically? First of all, the numerous sexual allusions in the poem, if made less covertly and more graphically,30 would probably have risked legal ­censorship. The censorship trials of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and ­Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil had already demonstrated how great this risk was, even in the case of acknowledged literary distinction. Second, because the hermetic idealist philosophical message itself deserved and even necessitated hermetic concealment. In some ways, this procedure was analogous to what we speculated was the case with the Platonic cryptic subtext of Madame Bovary, also designed to shield the glimpse into the depths of a spiritual vision from the philistines. But Mallarmé acted more vigorously than the author of Madame Bovary and made the cryptic nature of his text disconcertingly obvious in order to guarantee that it’s secret idealist message—far more central to his poem than Flaubert’s timid Platonism was to his novel—be made accessible to only the happy few, i.e., to fellow poets and esthetes, and that it be kept veiled from the ribald glance of the literal-minded bourgeois materialists of his age—like the faun would only be capable of misunderstanding and mocking the sublimity of the vision.

Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts  77

Notes 1 Mizoguchi had converted to Nichiren Buddhism around 1950. It is certainly pertinent at this juncture to note that the pious Buddhist director on his first trip outside of Japan, when his Ugetsu was up for an award at the Venice Film Festival, is said to have spent the night before the awards ceremony in his hotel room praying to an image of the Buddhist saint Nichiren. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugetsu_Monogatari. 2 Dinner conversation in Houston (October 28, 1996) with the author, who declared that Aura “was totally gothic, not magical realist.” 3 See Crossing Borders: The Journey of Carlos Fuentes. Dir. Joan Saffa. VHS. Home Vision, 2000. 4 I should add that I had made the identification long before I opened D ­ oniger’s book. 5 As we have seen, Fuentes alludes to this Dickensian configuration in “How I Wrote One of My Books” (39); the question as to whether he drew directly on the text of Dickens’s novel or on the masterful 1946 cinematic version by David Lean is immaterial. What is also worthy of note is that in these three texts the young male protagonists have names that are linked: “Pip” is an English diminutive of “Philip” (in Spanish “Felipe”), and Felipe’s family name “Montero” can mean “hunter” in Spanish, reminding the reader that Cephalus was a fanatic hunter in Ovid’s tale. 6 See Endnote 2. 7 Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage. Ed. J. Donald Crowley. London: ­Routlegde and Kegan Paul, 1970. 105. 8 For a trailblazing approach to this thesis, see Thomas R. Mitchell, ­“Rappaccini’s Garden and Emerson’s Concord: Translating the Voice of Margaret Fuller.” In: Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition. Ed. John L Idol Jr. and Melinda M Ponder, 1999. 75–9. 9 Margaret Fuller’s 1842 Journal. Ed. Joel Myerson. Harvard Library Bulletin XXI.3 (July, 1973). 320–40. 10 Quoted in: Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography. New ­Haven: Yale University Press, 1948, 61–2. 11 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks. Ed. Claude M. Simpson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972. 343. 12 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 218. Emerson was one of the compilers of these memoirs, and in this particular passage, he is recording his own impressions of Margaret Fuller. 13 Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife. Boston: James R.  Osgood and Co., 1855, I, 257. Quoted in: Bell Gale Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings. Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1976. 231–2. 14 “The Great Lawsuit,” The Dial (July, 1843), 14. The hypothesis that ­Hawthorne read the essay is based on (1) the fact that Sophia Peabody wrote to her mother about it (see Endnote 13), and (2) we know that Hawthorne had read another essay by Fuller in another issue of The Dial that same year (American Notebooks, entry for April 9, 1843). 15 Ibid., 15. 16 The Travels of Theodore Ducas. Ed. Charles Mills. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1822, I, 81. 17 Ibid., 42. 18 There is no proof in the tale that the poison is actually lethal to humans; it only seems to kill lizards and insects.

78  Myth and Message in Four Linked Texts 19 In fact, Fuller’s destiny was to be quite different: while in Italy she had a child with a young Italian aristocrat named, of all things, Giovanni, Count of Ossoli. 20 The Rosa Diamond episode begins at the opening of Part III: Ellowen ­Deeown and continues on through sections 1–2 (pp. 133–61). 21 Argentina’s national myth of the gaucho is enshrined in the classic text El Gaucho Martín Fierro, an epic poem by José Hernández (1872, 1879). 22 For the interview Rushdie gave for “The Crucial Book” fair in Amsterdam 2001, see https://brians.wsu.edu/2017/02/14/joyce-built-a-whole-universeout-of-a-grain-of-sand. 23 Rushdie in his film booklet rather strangely praises The Wizard of Oz for its almost complete secularism, calling it breezily godless, without a trace of religion, although I would have expected the religion of Wicca with its good witches and bad witches would have been worth a nod, especially by an overt practitioner of magical realism such as Rushdie. 24 Fuentes, Myself with Others, 39. 25 In The Satanic Verses most of the major figures are fortyish if not exactly forty years old, as was the author himself. Playing around with the conventional notion of age forty as the quintessential midlife age, Rushdie shows these characters each undergoing a kind of “midlife crisis.” See Walker, “Magical Archetypes: Midlife Miracles in The Satanic Verses.” 26 From a more psychological and less gender-biased perspective, we may equally well see in both texts superb examples of the power of the Jungian anima still contaminated by, and associated with, the Mother—this in spite of the fact that any interest in archetypal psychology on Fuentes’s or on Rushdie’s part is undetectable. 27 Cf. Gibreel’s murder near the end of the novel of his English beloved Allie Cone. 28 See Walker, “Mallarmé’s Symbolist Eclogue. The Faune as Pastoral.” 108–10. 29 For the letter to Cazalis, see Walker, “Mallarmé’s Symbolist Eclogue,” 112. 30 See Walker, “Mallarmé’s Symbolist Eclogue: The Faune as Pastoral,” 107–8, 115–16.

3 Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure

Proust’s massive novel In Search of Lost Time has occasionally been compared to a cathedral in terms of its scope and beauty.1 It is not altogether surprising, then, that in this lengthy cathedral novel, there occur carefully concealed symbolic allusions to the Roman Catholic Mass— specifically, to the post-Tridentine Mass in Latin, the one familiar to Proust—that, taken together as a series of clues, point toward the presence of a significant cryptic liturgical subtext. The Mass is, after all, the raison d’être of a cathedral—it is what a cathedral is built to celebrate. It is in the middle section of the novel’s final volume, Time Regained (a section which, in Proust’s original manuscript, was given the liturgically significant title of L’Adoration Perpétuelle—a choice of title that Proust’s editors unfortunately did not respect in the text published after his death), 2 that symbolic allusions to the Mass accompany the ­description of the passage from depression to new life on the part of the despondent narrator Marcel, who had lost faith both in himself as a writer and in the ultimate value of literature itself. This section, which constitutes the climax of the novel, describes the various “signs” that bring about the narrator’s artistic and spiritual rebirth through a series of incidents that trigger what in the text are called “resurrections,” i.e., sudden retrievals of memories of events long buried in the narrator’s unconscious. This section not only bears witness to Proust’s keen sense of the beauty and symbolic depth of the Mass but also establishes a cryptic subtext that parallels the narrative of the narrator’s spiritual and creative resurrection through covert references to a liturgy that is itself ultimately rooted in the theme of Christ’s death and resurrection. It cannot be said, however, that this cryptic subtext, once detected, changes substantially the way one reads this key section of Proust’s novel. But it certainly e­ nriches the quasi-religious dimension of the text—the ­narrator Marcel’s rebirth not only as an artist but also as a spiritual human being—and forces the reader to pay more attention to the specifically spiritual dimension of the narrator’s rebirth, which Proust scholars (with the notable exceptions of Jean Pommier and Paul Mommaers) have for the most part neglected. Proust operated very much as an inspired and original bricoleur when he encoded a cryptic liturgical subtext in his evocation of the narrator’s

80  Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure private experience of transformation and life renewal. Proust takes what he wants from the traditional Roman Catholic Mass, picking and choosing with full freedom—a freedom that is guaranteed by the cryptic nature of the subtext, which shields his potentially controversial procedure from possibly censorious eyes. Traditionally, critics in France have tended to be either Catholic or anti-Catholic, and neither group would have much appreciated Proust’s daring religious bricolage, which would have no doubt appeared either too flagrantly religious or too irreverently blasphemous had the procedure been made more obvious. Raised as a Catholic, although with a Jewish mother to whom he was intensely devoted, Proust’s warm appreciation of the Roman ­Catholic Mass, unexpected in a writer who can hardly be classified as a ­Catholic novelist, is most vividly expressed in his essay “In Memory of the ­Assassinated Churches” (En mémoire des églises assassinées), 3 published in 1919, when the full extent of the damage done by World War I to the historic churches and cathedrals of northern France was on everyone’s mind. He wrote this essay while he was simultaneously hard at work on his own cathedral novel. In it, he maintains, somewhat provocatively, that the anticipated postwar physical restoration of a war-­damaged ­cathedral would not be enough since only the renewed celebration of the Mass could guarantee its spiritual survival. He concludes that cathedrals are not only the most beautiful of historic monuments but are also the only ones that are fully alive because they have kept contact with the original intentions of their builders. “When the sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ will no longer be celebrated in churches,” he writes, “these churches will no longer have any life” (Proust 1947 184). He even goes so far as to make the claim, surprising for someone who participated in the Wagnermania of his time (although this claim may also be taken as a gesture of wartime French patriotism), that seeing a production of Wagner’s liturgical opera Parsifal in Bayreuth is a small thing compared to attending the celebration of High Mass in the c­ athedral of Chartres (Proust 1947 187). In the middle section (which he entitled L’Adoration Perpétuelle) of the final volume of Time Regained, the narrator, after a long period of ill health, has returned to Paris and has gone out to attend a concert at the Guermantes’ salon; the actual music being played is unspecified in the published text, but in an earlier manuscript version of the scene, it was identified as the second act of Wagner’s Parsifal, presumably arranged for voices and piano accompaniment (Proust 1982 114). (Eliminating any mention of Parsifal in the published text leaves the field clear for allusions to the Mass to proceed unrivalled by references to Wagner’s liturgical opera, in which the theme of Holy Communion also plays an important part.) Upon his arrival at the Hôtel de Guermantes, the narrator experiences “sensations” (the word sensation means for Proust both the sensory experience and the object of the experience) that he

Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure  81 calls “the signs that were about to pull me out of my discouragement and restore to me my faith in literature” (Proust 1992 VII 223). These sensations—the feeling of disequilibrium caused by his stepping on two uneven paving stones in the courtyard, the sound of a spoon accidentally striking against a plate while a servant was serving him refreshments in the library where he was waiting for the intermission, and the touch of the stiff texture of the linen napkin with which he wipes his mouth—­ remind him of his earlier experience of tasting a madeleine soaked in tea; the other signs are consistently compared to this madeleine experience because all these sensations, although quite banal in themselves, nonetheless are quite remarkable, as we shall see, as regards the extraordinary nature of their effects. The effect in each case is the triggering of the resurrection of vivid memories hitherto inaccessible to the narrator’s conscious mind. Thus, the sensation of losing his balance slightly on the courtyard’s uneven paving stones reminds him of the effect of walking over the uneven paving stones of the Baptistery of St. Mark’s in Venice; the sound of the spoon striking the plate suggests the memory of the sound of a railroad worker’s hammer striking the wheel of the train he has just taken to Paris; and the feeling of the napkin the waiter gives him brings to mind the rough texture of the towel with which he had dried himself during his childhood vacations at the seaside resort of Balbec. However vivid these memories may be, they appear to be as empty of symbolic meaning as the mundane sensations that triggered their ­memory. But they are paradoxically accompanied by a sense of ­“felicity” (félicité), a word used repeatedly to describe the narrator’s sudden passage from a state of depression to a state of joy. The narrator explains this felicity as the result of a process by which “involuntary memory” (la mémoire involontaire) has connected a present moment with a past moment and thus has brought the depressed narrator to the joyful realization of his true self, which, since it experiences both past and present moment simultaneously, must therefore be conceived as existing outside of time. This spiritual realization (something Proust’s near contemporary William James would certainly have categorized as “a variety of religious experience”) is followed by the narrator’s conviction that he is also in the process of being reborn as an artist, who can now once again believe in himself and in the value of literature, and feel c­ onfident that he has the strength and determination to write the novel he had only recently despaired of even beginning—a novel whose theme he now ­realizes will be about the recovery of his past through the magical transposition of literature. All this is clearly explained in the text; there is nothing esoteric or cryptic about it. But that is not quite the whole story. Proust also provides the beginning of an alternative explanation of the paradoxical nature of these signs, one that is not nearly so exhaustively developed as the first and one that is cryptically esoteric in nature. He does this by having the narrator

82  Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure ponder the problem of uncovering beneath a sign the “new truth” that it represents hieroglyphically, i.e., as a “sacred sign”: after a moment or so, after having thought about these resurrections of memory, I realized that, after a different fashion, obscure impressions had sometimes, already at Combray and the Guermantes way, drawn my attention, like these reminiscences, but these concealed not a sensation from bygone times but rather a new truth. He then explains how he had long felt that there was perhaps something underneath these signs of a totally different nature which I should try to discover, a meaning that they would translate like hieroglyphs that one would foolishly take to represent only material objects. (Proust 1992 VII 175) The narrator concludes that whether it was the unevenness of the paving stones or the taste of the madeleine, it is absolutely necessary to interpret sensations as signs of corresponding laws and ideas, by attempting to reflect, that is to say, to pull out of the shadows what I had felt, and to convert it into a spiritual equivalent. (Proust 1992 VII 176) In this endeavor, the narrator would be following the example of a medieval artist, whose “profound conviction,” as Proust may well have ­remembered reading in his mentor Emile Mâle’s book Religious Art in France in the Thirteenth Century (1898), was that “reaching out to the immaterial through the material” and “spiritualizing material objects” was the essence of the artist’s task—one that consequently involved a “constant use of symbolism” (Mâle 20). But Proust, unlike Emile Mâle’s medieval artist, could not benefit from having a fund of fixed symbols to draw upon in a modern world ­ allarmé largely cut off from its traditional myths and symbols. So, like M and the symbolist poets of the previous generation, Proust was forced to create his own private set of signs and symbols. Although the events in themselves are not overtly symbolic (the uneven paving stones, the sound of the spoon against the plate, etc., do not suggest any obvious symbolic meaning), they might have symbolic potential. But Proust is not interested in making explicit what these or other “sacred signs” (“hieroglyphs”) might symbolize. Rather, like other hermetic modernist writers, such as Joyce and Eliot, Proust prefers to leave that challenging hermeneutic task to the reader, for whom the first major clue for

Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure  83 deciphering these hieroglyphs would be the narrative context in which they are embedded, i.e., the narrator’s return to society after a long illness and his experience of rebirth as an artist and as a spiritual being. In other words, these cryptic signs are associated with a narrative of symbolic death and resurrection and, as we shall see, are covertly linked with the greatest of all Christian liturgical subtexts of death and resurrection: the Roman Catholic Mass. While not a practicing Catholic in his adult years, Proust kept his appreciation for the beauty and meaning of the Mass, which had no doubt developed during his Catholic childhood. This appreciation was strengthened by his numerous visits to medieval cathedrals and churches in the years before World War I, when he was under the influence of his enthusiasm for the writings of John Ruskin and Emile Mâle, who were his guides in his discovery of medieval art. Ruskin’s influence on Proust is well known, but one should not underestimate how much Proust was also inspired by Emile Mâle.4 In particular, Mâle’s description in ­Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century (1898) of the beauty of the Easter Eve ceremony (Mâle 16–19), and his presentation of its liturgical symbolism, as explicated at the end of the thirteenth century by Gulielmus Durandus in his Rationale divinorum officiorum, had, as Jean Mouton has noted (Mouton 34–5), a strong impact on Proust’s imagination. Mâle’s praise of the medieval liturgists (“nowhere else is found such forceful radiance of the soul, which transmuted things material into things of the spirit” (19)) and his conclusion that “in such a ceremony [Easter Eve or Vigil] no detail is without symbolic value” (17) are crucial for understanding how Proust acquired a deep appreciation of Catholic liturgical symbolism. In Search of Lost Time opens with a number of direct allusions, in its first section, entitled Combray, to the motifs of “church” and “Mass,” and these have the cumulative effect of establishing a certain Catholic tone or undertone from the very start. In the first paragraph, the narrator describes himself waking up after falling asleep reading a book and in a moment of sleepy confusion believing that he himself is the subject matter of the book—“a church” is the first subject matter mentioned (Proust 1992 I 11). The now iconic hawthorn flowers to which the young Marcel on the point of returning to Paris bids a sad farewell are to be found not only on the path leading through the fields outside the village (Proust 1992 I 135) but also on the altar of the village church during the “month of Mary,” the month of May having been dedicated by the ­Catholic Church to the Virgin Mary in the eighteenth century. It is during Mass at the church of Saint-Hilaire that the narrator as a boy first sees the legendary Duchesse de Guermantes, and he meets some of the most memorable figures of his childhood, such as Monsieur Legrandin and Aunt Léonie, on his way to or from Mass. The church itself (“How I loved it! How well I can see it now!”) is given a lengthy description in

84  Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure the central section of Combray (Proust 1992 I 62–9). If the narrator’s obsession with his mother’s bedtime kiss is symptomatic of his deeply rooted and debilitating mother complex, the allusions to church and to the Mass celebrated within it seem to point toward a way out of that neurotic dilemma, although exactly how remains to be seen. But the most significant allusion to the Mass in the opening section is not literal but rather hermetically symbolic, and it is carefully buried (as were the later ones in Time Regained) in what seems to be nothing more than an ordinary sensory experience. As every reader of Proust will ­remember, when Marcel’s mother offers him a piece of madeleine soaked in a spoonful of tea, it is this key “sensation” that suddenly reveals the richness of the narrator’s hitherto unconscious memories of the village of Combray and of his childhood vacations there. This “visitation,” as Beckett called it in his study of Proust, suggests a significant analogy with the moment in the Mass when the Host (the wafer or consecrated bread) is broken and the priest puts the Particle (a small piece of the Host that he breaks off) into the Chalice. But before clarifying this analogy, it is worth noting several things concerning Proust’s madeleine—not because such hors texte details are in themselves of much value in explicating the text but because they indicate that Proust’s madeleine is not just a small cake but a symbolic construct. First of all, the madeleine may not correspond to what the young Marcel Proust may actually have ingested in his vacations at ­Illiers-Combray. In an earlier version of the famous madeleine scene in Contre Sainte-Beuve, it was not a piece of madeleine but a piece of toasted bread (pain grillé) that, dipped in tea, reminded the young ­Marcel of the biscotto his grandfather would offer him at breakfast when he was a child. These days, thanks to Proustian tourism, locally baked madeleines are sold by the dozen in Illiers-Combray, but, while it is true that they were already popular in nineteenth-century France, it is reasonable to wonder whether they were sold in such an out-of-the-way country town during Proust’s childhood—Paris would have been a more likely place for the young Marcel to have been offered a madeleine. The little cake was apparently named after Madeleine Paumier, a servant of Stanislas, the eighteenth-century Duke of Lorraine, at his château de Commercy. As the story goes, Madeleine Paumier had baked them the first time for her master after his pastry cook had had a falling out with his intendant and had left the dinner without a dessert. Stanislas, when told that the delicious confections she had improvised for the occasion had no name, declared that they should be hereafter named after his ingenious servant. (Even today the madeleines de Commercy enjoy a special prestige.) But there is no reason to assume that Proust necessarily knew this story, and the more obvious association of madeleine with the name of St. Mary Magdalen (in French: la Madeleine) is the one more likely intended. Although this association is not made explicit in the text, Mary

Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure  85 Magdalen—not so much the New Testament figure but the repentant courtesan who became a popular iconic Catholic saint—represents the complexity of the relationship in Proust’s novel between such apparent opposites as depravity and virtue, the life of the senses and the life of the spirit, the côté de Méséglise and the côté de Guermantes—and even, for that matter, the relationship between taking tea and taking Communion. It is worth noting that the narrator explicitly makes Mary Magdalen represent, in The Guermantes Way (Proust 1954 160), the momentary failure to perceive the divine presence in ordinary appearances, because, on the first Easter morning, she had seen the risen Christ but had first mistaken him for a gardener. Through her momentary act of misperception soon rectified, Mary Magdalen becomes paradigmatic for Marcel, who, while strolling by an orchard shortly before Easter with his friend Robert de Saint-Loup and his courtesan mistress Rachel, wonders at the all-too-human failure to look beyond appearances and to see, for example, the flowering pear and cherry trees in their true being as “angels,” as “guardians of our memory of the Golden Age, witnesses to the fact that reality is not what one thinks it is” (Proust 1954 160–1). In similar fashion, the madeleine is not just a madeleine; it can symbolize the presence of the sacred hidden in an ordinary object, and, more specifically, of the presence of St. Mary Magdalen in the little cake—but only if the reader, following the example of the saint, is able to get beyond a literalist reading of the text and rectify an initially all-too-human act of misperception. Proust spent most of the first thirty years of his life in Paris in an apartment at 9 Boulevard Malesherbes. Whenever he exited from the building onto the sidewalk, he would have had a view of the back of the Church of St. Mary Magdalen, which was and is commonly referred to simply as la Madeleine. The reliquary in the church allegedly contains a bone fragment of the saint, and it is recorded that the village that later became the elegant Parisian quarter of la Madeleine had a chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalen as early as the thirteenth century. Proust would have been familiar with this church from an early age and also with its large neo-Baroque altar statue sculpted by Marochetti (1837), which represents the soul of Mary Magdalen supported by angels as she rises into the heavens. (The traditional story of her death in Provence tells how the angels who had come and supported her during her contemplative ecstasies also came for her at the moment of her ecstatic death.) This sacred image of an ecstatic saint, whose name Proust was later to associate with the name of the sign that causes the narrator’s ecstatic recovery of lost time, suggests another potential subtext for Proust’s creation of the madeleine as a cryptic symbolic construct. It was tasting the madeleine in Combray that started the narrator’s journey back into the past, and then, by the end of the novel, it functioned also as the prefiguration of the several signs that will lead him to

86  Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure the transcendence of Time. Since the madeleine plays such an important role in the narrator’s life, it is reasonable to suspect that it has major symbolic potential. But we are still a bit of a distance from being able to conclude that the madeleine symbolizes the Host in the Mass. However, the title L’Adoration Perpétuelle (deleted after his death by his editors) that Proust gave in the manuscript to this climactic episode encourages us to make this symbolic leap. 5 Proust’s original title clearly refers to the Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, a Roman Catholic devotional practice that involves the uninterrupted adoration (for periods of time that can vary: forty hours, a week, etc.) of the Host d ­ isplayed in a monstrance. The practice dates back at least to the fifteenth c­ entury, when it was often used for the cure of the sick (remember that Proust’s narrator has been ill for many years). The ritual practice became widespread in the Catholic world and especially in France during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Proust would have been a teenager when the celebrated Basilica of the Sacré Coeur (Sacred Heart), constructed between 1875 and 1914 and consecrated in 1919, had already become a center for the practice of Perpetual Adoration in 1885. But why would Proust have given this otherwise inexplicable title of L’Adoration Perpétuelle (a title which designates the Host as an object of adoration) to the section in which the madeleine is the chief recurring term of comparison for the “signs” that lead to the regeneration of the narrator and the resurrection of memory unless it were to suggest the cryptic symbolic equation madeleine = Host? To clarify the equation, it is only necessary to consider the sequence of events in which the narrator Marcel ingests the madeleine and how it might correspond cryptically to specific details in the ritual sequence in the Mass, especially to the moment when the priest, reenacting the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the wine of the Last Supper, uncovers the Chalice, takes the Host, breaks it in the middle, and then breaks off a small piece of it (the Particle). He then puts this small piece into the Chalice in preparation for the later moment when he will drink the consecrated wine with the Particle in it. In Proust’s text, it is the narrator’s mother who, for the first time in her life, offers him both tea and a piece of a madeleine, much as the priest offers communion to the communicant; the narrator first refuses the unprecedented offer (perhaps echoing the priest’s ritual statement of unworthiness “non sum dignus”) but then accepts it. There is no description of the breaking of the madeleine in Proust’s text corresponding to the priest’s breaking of the Host in half and subsequent breaking off of the Particle; however, something like that has clearly occurred since it is described how the narrator brings to his lips a teaspoonful of the tea in which has been allowed to soften a piece of madeleine. The spoonful of tea, in which the small piece of madeleine is soaked, would thus correspond to the wine in the Chalice into which the Particle is dropped. The latent similarity

Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure  87 of Host and madeleine is reinforced by the fact that each symbolizes in a different way a sacred person. The Host is the Body of Christ via transubstantiation (in Roman Catholic doctrine the Holy Wafer actually becomes the body of Christ); the madeleine, via its very name, brings to mind la Madeleine and so in a latent sense becomes St. Mary ­Magdalen. (Although it is true that, as regards their actual visible form, madeleines are baked in molds that resemble St. James scallop shells, this secondary symbolism can also be said to reinforce the idea of something ­sacred concealed in the secular—in this case, the famous pilgrimage to St. James of Compostela.) One might wonder at first whether Proust is simply being parodic in this cryptic equation of madeleine and Host. On the first page of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the only modernist narrative that, at least in terms of sheer size and complexity, can bear comparison with Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, there are allusions to the Mass that are clearly parodic in intention. In the first fifteen lines of “Telemachus,” Buck Mulligan intoned the opening words of the Tridentine Mass “Introibo ad altare Dei” and “made rapid crosses in the air,” and otherwise seems determined to play the irreverent medical school wit mocking the priesthood. But what Proust’s narrator reenacts is not an irreverent parody of the Mass of the sort that Buck Mulligan performs at the opening of Ulysses but rather a secular ritual (the ritual of taking tea being one of the main domestic rituals of the last two centuries) that contains significant if cryptic references to the Mass. What we have in Proust is thus cryptic analogy rather than, as in Joyce, obvious parody. Furthermore, Proust’s madeleine is at the center of a regenerative ritual that the narrator takes quite seriously. The effect of the combination of the spoonful of tea and piece of madeleine, says the narrator, is “something extraordinary”: it “fills him” with “a precious essence.” The ritual nature of the action is suggested when he tries “three times” (a traditional ritual formula of repetition) to seize the significance of the “powerful joy” that has entered his soul with the “brew” (“breuvage”). Reflection follows upon ritual action, however, and this slow process of mental concentration may be said to correspond to the ritual slow pace of the Mass. This process culminates in a sudden relaxing of mental tension, which allows his involuntary memory to spontaneously produce its vivid evocation of the village of Combray as it was in the narrator’s childhood. At the end of this process, the madeleine has thus become the foundation for “the immense edifice of memory” (Proust 1992 I 51) and for the construction of Proust’s cathedral novel. The first memory of the narrator’s childhood visits to Combray is triggered when his mother unexpectedly offers him a madeleine on a cold Parisian afternoon, and he suddenly remembers the piece of madeleine soaked in a teaspoon of tea that Aunt Léonie had the habit of offering him on Sunday mornings in Combray “because,” says the narrator,

88  Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure “on  that day I would not go out until the hour of the Mass” (Proust 1992 I 51); the latent analogy between madeleine and Host is already present in the narrative context. All the other memories will follow almost immediately, starting with the memory of the view of Combray that would welcome him at the start of his Easter vacation visits: Combray, from afar, from a circle of ten leagues, seen from the train while we were arriving on the last week before Easter, was nothing but a church summing up the city—it represented it, spoke of it and for it to distant spaces. (Proust 1992 I 52) The image of church and Mass thus provides a kind of backdrop for the scene. But is that enough for the reader to conclude that there is a specific liturgical subtext for the famous scene of the madeleine? Proust’s symbolic allusiveness here is nothing if not elusive in nature. Proust can be as cryptic as Mallarmé when he wishes, and in some ­aspects, Proust’s novel may be said to represent the culmination (almost fifty years after The Afternoon of a Faun) of the symbolist project, especially as regards Mallarmé’s playful hermeticism.6 But Proust, like ­Mallarmé, was also given to theorizing his own poetic procedures and in this case we do not have to look too far for a metatextual analysis.7 It is to be found in the middle of Combray, in a passage concerning the narrator’s memories of Marcel’s older mentor Swann’s admiration for Giotto’s Paduan frescos of the Virtues and Vices, of which he had given the young Marcel reproductions, which the boy displayed on the wall of his study. For a long time, the narrator says, he found it difficult to share Swann’s enthusiasm for the frescos since Giotto’s allegorical ­figures seemed to him to suggest next to nothing of the spirit of the virtues and vices they were meant to incarnate. But later on I understood that that the breathtaking strangeness, the special beauty of these frescos was due to the large place that the symbol occupied in them; and that the fact that the symbol was not represented as a symbol (since the symbolic content was not expressed) but as something real… gave the meaning of the work something that was more literal and more precise, gave its teachings something that was more concrete and more striking. (Proust 1992 I 83) The starting point for this disquisition was the narrator’s memory of Swann’s pet name for the kitchen girl: “Giotto’s Charitas” (Proust 1992 I 82); to the narrator’s later eye, Giotto’s own allegorical figures “appeared as alive as the pregnant serving girl, who herself appeared to me to be no less allegorical.” This rapprochement of hermetic symbol with

Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure  89 realist sign to the point where they almost coincide (the symbol being lost in the sign, so to speak) is the key to Proust’s desire to represent his own private symbols as precisely and as literally as possible, even to the point of almost breaking their connection to their potentially symbolic content: for example, in cases (such as the description of Giotto’s figure of Charity, a figure who looks not at all charitable to the narrator) where the surface representation may seem at first to suggest nothing of the symbolic content whatsoever and may even suggest the opposite. In such cases the symbol is buried almost completely beneath the sign, and only the most alert reader may be able to detect its presence and attempt to assign it a meaning.8 The figure of Giotto’s Charitas as well as that of the kitchen girl Swann named after her can thus be seen as providing the paradigm for Proust’s procedure of representing signs with the utmost realism, with no obvious suggestion of the symbolic meaning being indicated or even (as with the uncharitable mien of Giotto’s Charitas) encouraged. But, if the madeleine/teaspoon of tea/Host/Chalice analogy is hermetic in the opening section Combray, in the final section Time Regained the three (or four) signs are even more symbolically cryptic, embodied as they are in the “literalness” and the “precision” of ordinary sense experience. The three signs fulfill the promise of the earlier madeleine episode; they are the end of a spiritual journey that began with the involuntary memories of Combray generated by the madeleine and that now culminates in the ecstatic sense of a self that has its being in a realm that transcends Time. Their immediate context is a social gathering at the town house of the Guermantes, a gathering to which the narrator has been invited after a long retirement from the world due to illness. But the potentially sacred significance of the episode is suggested in a short paragraph in which an allusion to Christ’s injunction “knock and it shall be opened unto you” (Matthew 7.7) creates a subliminal expectation that something portentous is about to happen: it is sometimes at the moment when all seems lost that the warning comes that can save us; we have knocked on doors that lead nowhere, and the only door through which we can enter is the one that could have been searched for in vain for a hundred years—we stumble upon it by accident, and it opens. (Proust VII 164) The first of the “signs” occurs when the narrator balances his foot on two unevenly placed paving stones in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Guermantes. Unable to explain why “all my depression vanished” (164), he searches his mind, as he did earlier with the feeling of joy provoked by the madeleine dipped in a spoonful of tea, in order to find some explanation, some causal connection, since “the felicity that I had just

90  Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure ­experienced was, in fact, the same I had experienced in eating the madeleine dipped into the infusion of tea” (165). The images that come to mind this time are different, however: they are not of Combray but of Venice, more precisely of the Baptistery of St. Mark’s cathedral,9 on two of whose ­unevenly placed paving stones the narrator had once experienced the same sense of disequilibrium. Thus, the primary reference of the first “sign” is to a church, one of the great churches of Europe that Proust loved so well, and which he has his narrator visit repeatedly with his mother. It suggests that, balancing his foot in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Guermantes, the narrator is about to enter—­symbolically—a church. There is also the suggestion that a “baptism” is about to take place (in  the “Baptistery”) and hence that, symbolically, a new life (re: baptism as a ritual of death and rebirth) is about to begin for the narrator—which, in fact, it is. The next sign occurs after the narrator has entered the second story library of the Guermantes’ town house, which serves as a waiting room with a buffet, while the concert is going on in the adjoining salon. A second “warning” is given, this time by the sound of a clumsy waiter striking a spoon against a plate. Once again, this produces in Marcel the same unexplained feeling of felicity (the word “félicité” has a somewhat religious ring in French as opposed to “bonheur” or “happiness” in the more general sense) and the same insistent desire to uncover its cause. Involuntary memory then provides a recollection of sensations of heat and of an “odor of smoke” (166), accompanied by the freshness of a forest setting, which reminds the narrator of a moment in his recent past in which the train he was taking to Paris stopped in a little woods while a trainman knocked on one of the wheels with a hammer in order to adjust something. This memory of the sound of the hammer against the metal wheel prompted by the sound of the spoon striking the plate is, once again, utterly ordinary and at the same time, as a sign, as it is potentially suggestive of a particularly important moment in the Mass, when a little bell jingles and announces the Elevation of the Host (cf. the section’s original title’s allusion to the Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed ­Sacrament). The “odor of smoke” may also be taken as suggesting the smell of incense in the forest-like interior of a Gothic cathedral.10 The sense of the sacred pervades the scene through direct allusion (ecstatic joy) as well as through hermetic suggestion (the cryptic liturgical subtext). A third sign follows quickly upon the second. A servant offers the narrator, still waiting for the first part of the concert to be over, a choice of petits fours and a glass of orangeade. After drinking a sip, Marcel wipes his mouth with a napkin that has been handed to him. At that point a new resurrection of memory suddenly occurs: a “vision d’azur” (“azur” being a key symbol in Mallarmé’s poetry for the ineffable and the sublime); this time it is “pure and salty,” and the narrator’s memory

Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure  91 associates it with childhood seaside holidays and with a hotel window that opened onto a view of the beach and the English Channel. “The napkin I took had exactly the type of stiffness and heaviness,” he remembers, “as the one [a towel, in this case: in French serviette can designate both a napkin and a towel] I had had such trouble trying to dry myself with at the window on the first day of my arrival at Balbec.” (Proust 1992 VII 166–7) Associated with the view of the sea from the open hotel window, the ­ apkin brings to mind “the plumage of a green and blue ocean” (“le plumn ­ allarméan age d’un océan vert et bleu”—“plumage” being another M code word for the spirit). In the context of a possible association with the Mass, and especially with the rite of communion, the napkin may be said to represent the Purificator, i.e., the linen cloth with which the priest wipes the Chalice and also (as in the narrator’s case) his own mouth; the earlier use of the adjective “pure” (suggesting Purificator) may be taken as a another clue as to the symbolic status of the sign. The general ritual nature of the subtext is also suggested when the narrator refers to a character of The Thousand and One Nights who “without knowing what he was doing accomplished precisely the rite that caused to appear, visible to himself alone, a docile genie” (166). The “rite” the narrator has accomplished is, on the one hand, as unique and unexpected as the “rite” in The Thousand and One Nights, but, on the other hand, on the level of hermetic symbolism, it refers back to the ritual of the Mass and to the rite of Communion, and, more specifically, to the priest’s use of the Purificator. The effect of these “sacred signs” on the narrator might be said to provide an analogy with the ideal effect of the Mass on the faithful—a feeling of spiritual rebirth—and the use of religious language throughout the passage reinforces that impression. Following each of the three signs, the narrator experiences a feeling of “felicity” (as we have seen, a religiously colored term), explained at length in the text as the reaction to the sudden realizatWion of the timeless nature of the narrator’s inner self—in more specifically Christian language, of his immortal soul. When the narrator begins to search for “the cause of this felicity” (169), he discovers, by comparing these “various blessed impressions” ­(“bienheureuses”—again, in French a religiously toned term), that they had something in common, that I experienced them both in the present moment and in a moment distant from the sound of the spoon on the plate, the uneven set of the stones, the taste of the madeleine, to the point where it made the past to infringe on the present, made me hesitate about which moment I was existing in.

92  Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure The narrator concludes that the being that was then tasting this impression was tasting what it had in common with a former time and now, in what was extra-­ temporal in it, the being who only appeared when, through one of these identities between past and present, it could exist in the only context in which it could live, to enjoy the essence of things, that is to say, outside of time. (169) The “miracle of an analogy” brings the narrator a feeling of joy and fearlessness in the face of the death that is caused by the realization of the extra-temporality of his inner being. The narrator experiences in the dark forest of his depression and illness a spiritual rebirth, and the words “spiritual life,” he says, take on a real meaning (169), thanks to the being that had been reborn in me when, with such a thrill of happiness, I had heard the noise belonging both to the spoon that touches the plate and the hammer that strikes the wheel, the unevenness for the step of the paving stones of the Guermantes courtyard and of the Baptistery of Saint-Mark, etc. (170) This “true self” reawakens, even if it had seemed almost dead for a long time, when it receives this “celestial food” (nourriture céleste). Finally, there is a fourth sign that the narrator discusses apart from the ­ uermantes others.11 The narrator continues to wait for the door of the G salon to open (this waiting before a closed door has itself symbolic resonance), when he suddenly hears “the strident noise of a water pipe,” which reminds him immediately of “those long cries that sometimes during the summer pleasure boats would make off the coast of Balbec” (171). This passage may seem at first to be a kind of footnote to the others—an additional illustration, added for emphasis, of how one more ordinary sensation (the noise of water rushing in a pipe) can produce the impression of being simultaneously in present time (the Guermantes library) and in past time (the dining room at Balbec looking out on the sea, with the tables set for dinner). But it turns out to be of key importance in finally making explicit the analogy with the Mass, with its ­evocation of how “the dining room facing the sea at Balbec, with its linen prepared like altar cloths for the setting of the sun, had tried to shake the solidity of the Guermantes’ townhouse, to break down its doors” (172). The setting sun is compared implicitly to the Host on the altar, and one readily associates this image with that of the Host displayed in the monstrance with its typical sunburst design. This allusion to the altar (with its witty pun in the original text on autel [altar] and hôtel, which are homophones

Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure  93 in French) also sets up the Hôtel de Guermantes as the hidden altar, the ­hôtel as autel, for the symbolic Mass that is being celebrated12 and justifies the episode’s original title “L’Adoration Perpétuelle” through a direct allusion to the Host displayed in the monstrance. In such a loaded symbolic context, the random sensation itself (the sound of water rushing in a pipe) could suggest the water of baptism; the water of eternal life;13 and even, since the narrator has been suffering from a bad case of writer’s block, the influx of creative energy, soon to manifest itself in the creation of the novel he now increasingly feels himself capable of w ­ riting. The resurrection motif is apparent when the process of the spontaneous resurgence of a buried impression is called a “resurrection” (172), and the word is repeated again as “resurrections of memory” shortly afterward (175). In this short but key section of Time Regained, the use of religious language is insistently suggestive. The reader familiar with the Roman Catholic Mass will have sensed by now that something important is lacking in the series of hermetic symbolic references to the Mass in Proust’s text. There is the incense, the bell, the Host, the Monstrance, the Chalice, the altar, the Purificator, the sanctuary itself; there is the officiating priest; there is the presence of Christ in the Host (suggested via the presence of the name of St. Mary Magdalen—la Madeleine-- in the madeleine)—but where is the book that the priest takes up and reads from after the Collects? What has happened to the Missal? As it turns out, the Missal is not lacking, although it appears in a form whose symbolic sacred character the reader might easily overlook. Before entering the salon, the narrator casually removes several books in the Guermantes library from their place on the shelves. As he opens one of them, he is suddenly struck by its title: François le Champi. This children’s classic by George Sand was the very book that many years before his mother had read to him almost for an entire night, “perhaps the sweetest and saddest night of my life,” because, he explains, it marked the moment of “the decline of my health and of my will” (183). His mother ordinarily did not stay in his bedroom with him past the time of a goodnight kiss. But on this night, she did, and this special favor, he now believes, sealed his fate as a mother-dominated child, whose ­future health and will power suffered accordingly. George Sand’s novel is well chosen to enhance the pathos of the scene of mother-child bonding over a book because it concerns the story of how an abandoned child (champi, a dialect word, meaning “a child abandoned in the fields”) is adopted by the saintly Madeleine (that name again!), a miller’s wife, who becomes the perfect mother who will love the little François deeply and will never abandon him. When he returns after several years of youthful ­adventure—in a stunning climax that probably could only occur in a French children’s novel—the champi and his foster mother fall in love and marry each other! The narrator, in other words, has picked up, so to

94  Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure speak, the very text of his own mother complex, the narrative of his neurosis. When he opens the book, he finds himself affected by “an emotion that almost made me weep” (180). By opening the book inadvertently, he has also caused his child self to appear to him in a kind of waking dream, a child who had been spellbound by the psychodrama of François le Champi. But the epiphany of this child self occurs only in order that the adult narrator may finally bid farewell to “that stranger, who was ­myself, who was the child I once was” (181). Thus, he can finally resolve his debilitating neurosis and can set out to become the masterful creator he has been held back from becoming by his lingering mother complex and its effect on his “will” and “health.” The book that he takes from the shelf and opens has thus a talismanic or initiatory power to resurrect the most problematic aspect of the narrator’s childhood and in so doing to give the narrator the occasion to free himself from its unconscious hold on him. It is thus Marcel’s separation from his Oedipal child self that gives birth in him to the powerful creative energy of the mature artist. Opening the book François le Champi thus may be said to suggest the analogy of opening the Missal, in that both, on the most general level of comparison, express the theme of death and resurrection, the drama of death leading to new life. The sequence in the Mass is as follows: after the Gloria, the priest bows to the Missal, and then, after the Collects, comes the first lesson, the Epistle, at which point the priest is free to pick up the book if he wishes. After the reading of the Gospel, the priest replaces the Missal on the stand. In this section of the Mass, the Missal is the center of ritual attention, much as the book François le Champi becomes the occasion for what is a rather long-winded interior monolog by the narrator, who is now confident that his new sense of felicity can be channeled into the writing of a novel, the realization of which had until now seemed to him in his despondency to be unattainable. Once again, the narrator’s long drawn out process of self-analysis may be said to correspond to the slow pace of the ritual. As anyone who has experienced ritual knows well, ritual does not produce its full effect unless it seems at times to drag on almost interminably; readers of Proust ­recapture that feeling of ritual slowness while reading—or putting up—with lengthy passages such as these that may try their patience a bit. It is also fitting that the last sign is the one that suggests the reading of the Gospel and the mystery of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. For the latent context of the narrator’s feeling of felicity in Time Regained is religious in nature, prompted as it is by sensations where the signs of the “mystery” are expressed in purely sensory albeit latently symbolic terms: the ­Baptistery of St. Mark’s and Venice, the forest idyll with its smoke and line of trees, the azure delight of an ocean just outside the hotel window. These signs, sometimes directly (Baptistery/baptism, the sun setting over table/altars of the seaside hotel dining room), usually more indirectly (the smell of incense in the shadowy forest of a Gothic church interior,

Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure  95 the Purificator used to wipe the priest’s mouth, the book (the Gospel) that leads from death to life), suggest the charm of Catholic ritual and more precisely of the sacred mystery enshrined in the Mass itself. A cursory comparison of the final published text with earlier versions indicates a progressive sacralization of the symbolic material and demonstrates that Proust’s desire to imbue the text with a certain ­hermetic religiosity grew with time. The famous madeleine, for example, is absent in the first version (published later in Contre Sainte-Beuve), where it is at best prefigured by the slice of toast or pain grillé offered by the narrator’s old cook (and not, as in the later version, by his mother). The madeleine appears only once via a casual reference in the second version in Matinée chez la Princesse de Guermantes, (149), where, however, it is described as a “tiny piece” (miette), thus suggesting already the image of the Particle of the Host immersed in the wine of the Chalice. The madeleine only comes into its own as a major nexus of symbolic meaning in the final version of the published text. Although the second version contains a description of the three signs (paving stones, spoon striking dish, napkin) much like that of the final published version, the symbolically crucial ­reference to altar and monstrance in the passage describing the seaside dining room is lacking (131); and the word “happiness” (bonheur) has yet to be mainly replaced by the more religiously toned “felicity” (félicité). The “Perpetual Adoration” section of Time Regained thus represents an initiatory moment, during which a discouraged artist undergoes a change of heart and a spiritual rebirth. When the Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung, whose fascination with Catholicism and Catholic ritual was as intriguing and as puzzling as Proust’s, came to analyze in ­detail the psychological and symbolic resonances of the Mass in his study ­Transformation ­Symbolism in the Mass (1954), it was its initiatory thematic dimension that struck him most forcefully. Keeping this Jungian perspective in mind, the presence of motifs from the Mass in Proust’s novel may be taken not only as attempts to sacralize secular life by finding sacred signs in ordinary sensations but also as initiatory motifs accompanying the main theme of the narrator’s rebirth in a kind of basso ostinato.14 But why did Proust bury this treasure? Why did he not clearly highlight the analogies between his narrative of the narrator’s spiritual and artistic rebirth and the death and rebirth symbolism of the Roman Catholic Mass and of Holy Communion, grounded in the Gospel’s sacred narrative of the death and resurrection of Christ? Why make these references and analogies cryptic rather than obvious? I would venture the following explanation. Proust was not, nor did he intend to be, a Catholic novelist. To present his narrator’s crisis as a spiritual and artistic crisis in terms of doctrinal Roman Catholicism would have deprived it of its intensely private dimension. Proust’s narrator’s transformation has, no doubt, a collective archetypal dimension. But, in modern France, at least, where

96  Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure one is defined either as religious (i.e., mainly Catholic) or anti-religious, there is not much in the way of shared or intermediate space. So, I think Proust anticipated correctly that Catholic readers would find the ­analogy between his narrator’s initiatory death and resurrection, with all the religious terminology associated with its ecstatic dimensions, and the death and resurrection of Christ, to be rather offensive: who is this narrator Marcel to take himself for a Christ? Why does he not remember—and why does the author not chastise him for this—that extra ecclesiam ­nullus est salus—that there is no salvation outside of the church? As for his staunchly secular and anticlerical readers, what nonsense it would have been—how scandalous it would have been—to bring in Catholic pieties through the backdoor. So, no compromise was possible; whatever side Proust took, it would have completely alienated some of his future readers. But in spiritual matters, Proust was an inspired bricoleur, as have been so many modern writers (D.H. Lawrence, to begin with), who stood outside of the usual conflict between religious and anti-religious views, and who positioned themselves in the private space created by a kind of radical religious individualism. For them, whatever the individual believed was true through personal conviction and experience, and that is what constituted the true foundation of religious faith, not church dogma or collective pieties.

Notes 1 As recently by Kay Bourlier (Marcel Proust et l’architecture, 1990) and Luc Fraisse (L’Oeuvre Cathédrale: Proust et l’architecture médiévale, 1990). 2 As indicated by Henri Bonnet in the introduction to his edition of Matinée chez la Princesse de Guermantes: Cahiers du Temps Retrouvé (1982), 15. 3 In: Marcel Proust, Pastiches et mélanges. Paris: Galllimard, 1947, 85–191. Please note that all translations from the French texts are my own, unless otherwise indicated. With the type of close reading necessary for detecting a cryptic subtext, the reference to the original French text is required. The page numbers refer to the French editions listed in the bibliography. 4 See Kay Bourlier, Marcel Proust et l’architecture. 227–31. 5 It is no more daring as a symbolic leap, however—and one rather more j­ustified by the narrative context—than the symbolic equation madeleine = masturbation in Serge Doubrovsky’s La place de la Madeleine. Paris: ­Mercure de France, 1974, with its radical suspicion of anything religious in tone. 6 For the idea of “playful hermeticism,” see my article “Mallarmé’s Symbolist Eclogue: The ‘Faune’ as Pastoral.” PMLA 93.1 (January, 1978), 106–17. 7 Juliette Hassine has demonstrated the importance of this passage for a general understanding of the close connection between allegory and realist representation in Proust, and of the symbolist esotericism that ­characterizes Proust’s procedures. See Juliette Hassine, “La Charité de Giotto ou l’allégorie de l’écriture dans l’oeuvre de Proust.” Bulletin d’informations proustiennes 26 (1995). 8 Of course, for readers trained on the poetry of the symbolist master ­Mallarmé, this hermeneutic adventure would be the ultimate game and the ultimate pleasure furnished by the hermetic text. The spirit of this essay

Proust’s Cryptic Mass as Buried Treasure  97 assumes that reading Proust as though one were reading Mallarmé is not such an outlandish procedure as it might first appear. 9 If the reader who has visited Venice does not recall St. Mark’s even having a baptistery, this is not because Proust invented it. The baptistery, dominated by Sansovino’s great baptismal font, has been closed to the public in recent years, but it can be visited in a guided tour. 10 My thanks to Prof. John Orens (George Mason University) for explaining to me the use of “smells and bells” in the Mass. 11 Proust was unable to give Time Regained a final revision before his death, and the published text contains some material that is not completely integrated with the rest of the text, as may be here the case. 12 At the opening of the earlier volume The Guermantes Way, the narrator had compared the mystery of the Guermantes salon, as yet unknown to him, with the mystery of the presence of the body of Christ in the Host, comparing the twelve guests seated around the Guermantes dining table as the golden statues of the Apostles in the Sainte-Chapelle in front of the Holy Table. The comparison is playful, no doubt, but it establishes an association of the Guermantes salon with the Mass that will only be developed later in the “Perpetual Adoration” section of Time Regained. 13 Emile Mâle had discussed the liturgical symbolism of water in his description of the Easter Eve ceremony (Religious Art of the Thirteenth Century, 17). 14 Proust also associates initiatory images of death with references to The ­Thousand and One Nights; see Wendy B. Faris, “1001 Words: Fiction against Death.” The Georgia Review XXVI.4 (Winter, 1982), 816–819.

4 Cryptic Platonic Subtexts

Plato’s theory of love, as developed brilliantly and engagingly in his two philosophical dialogues The Symposium and Phaedrus, can come across as original and insightful even today. His assertion that sexual passion is the necessary first step in an initiation into the mysteries of love that ultimately leads to the vision of divine beauty may still seem quite provocative. No doubt, this transcendental assessment of the value of sexuality has never been to everyone’s taste. However, every now and again, this peculiar and hermetic theory has inspired the happy few, and it will probably continue to do so in the future. And so it was in the early Renaissance. A brief discussion of ­Giorgione’s The Tempest (c. 1508), a famously enigmatic painting1 (as fascinatingly enigmatic in its way as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, with her mysterious smile), will serve as an introduction to the way the detection of a cryptic subtext can provide a text, whether visual or verbal, with a philosophical dimension—here, as in all five subsequent cases, a Platonic dimension—ignored or neglected in previous discussions. The nature of the subject matter of Giorgione’s painting has been much debated, with no consensus emerging. Jan Morris has rightly noted “its sense of a permanently suspended enigma.”2 The painting portrays in the foreground, to the right of a stream, a half-naked young mother sitting on a grassy mound nursing her child; to the left and across the stream stands a ­colorfully dressed young man looking at her, carrying a long staff in his right hand. Behind them both, on the left side of the stream, are two broken columns, and, a bit farther upstream, there is a ruined bridge or aqueduct. In the background, a bridge spans the stream, with the partial view of a small city just behind it. The sky over the city is looking stormy, and a flash of lightning has just appeared. The enigmatic figures in the painting seem to call for some sort of allegorical explanation. The one I am proposing here is based on what I had long thought was my own original identification of the three figures until I discovered last year that Regina Stefaniak had already made the identification in an essay published in 2008.3 That was for me a bit of a disappointment as discovering buried treasure is, of course, a matter of getting there first, and, at least as regards publication, it was Stefaniak who got

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  99 there first. But the metaphor of buried treasure has its limitations since, although with actual buried treasure, it is a question of “finders keepers,” once the discovery of a cryptic subtext is made public, it opens up new possibilities of interpretation for anyone who subsequently chooses to take the discovery into account; in other words, eventually, everyone shares the treasure. Thus, in the following discussion, I will make use of S­ tefaniak’s discovery in order to highlight the cryptic Platonic allegory that she has identified but almost immediately recontextualized as a historical allegory of Venice. In other words, she quickly set aside the philosophical dimension of the Platonic cryptic subtext she had discovered in order to focus her long and erudite study on a very different kind of allegory. This has left me the opportunity of refocusing attention more strongly on the cultural importance of the ­Platonic subtext in the Renaissance and enables me to eventually conclude that the painting by Giorgione traditionally called The Tempest should really be given the Platonic title The Birth of Love and that it serves as a superb Renaissance icon for Plato’s mystical theory of love. It also—for this chapter’s particular purposes—provides an introduction to the use of Plato’s theory of love as a cryptic subtext in five modern texts, three of them literary narratives and two of them films. The enigmatic figures of The Tempest might initially seem to be an original variation on the iconic portrayal of a Virgin and Child, with Joseph (the young man with the staff) standing off to the side, were it not for the facts that the young man is garishly dressed (he is clearly not a humble carpenter like Joseph) and that the woman is half naked and holding her infant in such a way that her private parts are almost visible, making it impossible to take her for a traditional representation of the Madonna. A nursing mother might well expose her breast (the Virgin Mary is sometimes so represented) but certainly not her private parts— unless, of course, she has just given birth, which probably is what is suggested here. The young mother is looking directly at the viewers as if to challenge them to solve the enigma: what in the world is she doing nursing a child in such a state of undress on a little hillock to the right of the stream just outside of town? And who, on the other side of the stream, is the elegant young man with a long staff? Stefaniak describes him as “well dressed in rather costly and even modish sixteenth-century clothes” (125); he seems to have paused on his journey in order to gaze at a distance at the young mother and child. In the background, in a dark sky over the small city, there is a flash of lightning, which gave the picture its traditional title The Tempest, although, as is so often the case with Renaissance paintings, there is no way of knowing what title Giorgione may have given it, if any at all. The downward squiggle of the bright flash of lightning is artfully prolonged in the curve of the stream which separates the young man and the young mother and child. (This correlation of lightning and stream can also be given a significant philosophical dimension, as I will explain shortly.)

100  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts The Greek text of Plato’s Symposium had been rediscovered in the fifteenth century, and the Florentine Neoplatonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino (in his De Amore, written in 1469) had made it a key text for his presentation in a Christianized context of the Greek philosopher’s theory of love as the cosmic force that leads the initiate from sexual desire to the heights of the mystic vision. Making sexual desire the first step of the ascent toward the divine was a radical move in terms of traditional Christian culture; it was in many ways a provocative philosophical position, however much Ficino labored to give it a Christian coloration. This new philosophy of love became popular in Renaissance courtly circles, no doubt in part because it validated the aristocratic hedonism of the cultural and social elite of the times, and gave their concern with love and love affairs a spiritual dimension that was not possible in terms of orthodox Christian doctrine, which tended to associate the flesh and especially extramarital sexuality with the Devil. Baldassare Castiglione celebrated the newly popular Neoplatonic theory of love in Book Four of his influential Book of the Courtier (Il Libro del Cortegiano, 1528) and set the courtly conversations described in his philosophical dialogue back in the year 1507 (and thus around the time Giorgione had finished his painting). He appropriately chose the figure of Pietro Bembo as his mouthpiece for this newly revived theory of love since Bembo was the ­author of a Neoplatonic treatise, Gli Asolani, that had been published two years before in 1505. Neoplatonism and its theory of love became at least as popular an intellectual trend among the educated elite in the early 1500s as Freudianism became among the educated in the mid-­t wentieth century. It was a Venetian nobleman named Gabriele Vendramin, a member of this Renaissance cultural elite, who probably commissioned Giorgione’s painting. It would have been for his guests “a fascinating painting on a very well known classical text,” writes Stefaniak, “which was at the same time not immediately transparent to all visitors” (137). The painting’s cryptic Platonic subtext is found in a key section of ­Plato’s Symposium,4 in which the wise woman Diotima presents to ­Socrates a mythic account of the Birth of Love, a classical subtext that no doubt would not have been “immediately transparent to all of the visitors,” although the more scholarly Venetians would have remembered that Ficino had twice alluded to Diotima’s myth of the Birth of Love in his De Amore.5 In Plato’s dialogue, Socrates remembers her having told him the story as follows: Following the birth of Aphrodite, the other gods were having a feast, including Resource [Poros], the son of Invention. When they’d had dinner, Poverty [Penia] came to beg, as people do at feasts, and so she was by the gate. Resource was drunk with nectar (this was before wine was discovered), went into the garden of Zeus, and fell into drunken sleep. Poverty formed the plan of relieving her lack of resources by having a child by Resource; she slept with him and became pregnant with Love.

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  101 Diotima, said Socrates, then went on to explicate this myth allegorically Because he is the son of Resource and Poverty, Love’s situation is like this. First of all, he is always poor; far from being sensitive and beautiful, as is commonly supposed, he’s tough, with hardened skin, without shoes or home… sharing his mother’s nature, he always lives in a state of need. On the other hand, taking after his father, he schemes to get hold of beautiful and good things. (Plato 1999 39) It is not as though no one may have ever identified the Platonic myth as a cryptic subtext for Giorgione’s painting; it is just that we have no record of it. It seems to me very likely that in the beginning, a few c­ onnoisseurs—a happy few—would have guessed at its presence, although one may equally well imagine that the noble Venetian art collector would have been delighted with his guests’ initial puzzlement when they first feasted their eyes on his new painting. He would have waited for a few tantalizing minutes before he deigned to reveal (and then quickly ­conceal) the cryptic Platonic subtext of the enigmatic painting he had commissioned, carefully pointing out the details with glee. Of course, no record of this moment of illumination has survived, and so, we will have to recreate very briefly some of the effect that the cryptic Platonic subtext, once revealed, would have had on the first circle of connoisseurs to fall under the spell of what posterity would later know as The Tempest. —And who is that scantily clothed young mother? A gypsy? —No, she is Poverty. You see, she can’t even afford proper clothes. And her newborn baby is the little god of Love. —And that young man on the other side of the stream: is he the gay blade who got her pregnant? —He is the trickster god Poros or Resource, but it was she who tricked him! —Really! E vero? —Se non è vero, è ben trovato. —But what does it all mean? —Let me explain. [He then retells and explicates the Platonic myth of Poros and Penia.] However [he adds cautiously] I must insist that all this dubious—and possibly heretical—Platonism is ultimately beside the point. I commissioned the painting for other and far more ­compelling reasons: it celebrates the birth of Venice and the glory of our illustrious ancestors. Far be it from me to meddle in matters of philosophy and religion! So you are all free to make whatever you wish of the painting; it is yours to enjoy and to interpret as you see fit. So, I agree completely with Stefaniak’s initial identification of the figures in The Tempest as the figures of Resource (Poros), Poverty (Penia), and

102  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts Love (Eros) in the mythic tale that Socrates said was first told to him by Diotima. However, the main point of Stefaniak’s dense and carefully argued essay is that Giorgione’s painting is ultimately a “Platonic refashioning of the myth of Venice” that “complimented the entire Venetian patriciate on the quasi-divine status and demiurgic role of the forebears in founding the city” (136). Her original interpretation is based on detecting the “underlying text” (i.e., a cryptic subtext) that can “mediate between the painting and the culture,” and that enables us “to understand the story the culture is telling us about itself” (128); she summarizes it as follows: In this secular version of the foundation of Venice on the birthday of Venus the child-cosmos [Eros] generated by the meeting of Reason and Wealth [Poros] with Poverty and the Necessity of Place [Penia] could also be understood as the golden infant Venice herself. (139) But my own interpretation is quite different from Stefaniak’s and others’, although in the case of this much interpreted enigmatic work of art, it is reasonable to accept the possibility and even the plausibility of a number of conflicting or complementary interpretations. Still, I would suggest that what Giorgione has ultimately done in The Tempest is represent a provocative kind of iconic Neoplatonic Nativity scene, but with the kind of caution required by the cultural situation in which Venetian humanists were, as Stefaniak notes, “generally very Christian and conservative in orientation” and where Ficino’s Florentine Neoplatonism, with its praise of Plato as a precursor of Christian theology, “may well have been politically and religiously unacceptable” (132). Giorgione (and his patron) thus needed to conceal carefully the Platonic cryptic subtext since implying even a distant and vague analogy between the almost naked figure of Poverty and her almost visible pubic hair, and a Virgin and Child in a Neoplatonic Nativity scene, and suggesting that the gay young aristocrat playing the trickster role of Resource could be a Platonic stand-in for Joseph might have deeply offended conservative Venetian Christian sensibilities, with possibly unpleasant consequences for both the painter and his patron. So, the iconic status of the figures in the painting had to remain latent rather than blatant. The possible allegory of the origins of Venice might have served, at least partially, as a red herring—a decoy distracting the viewer from the cryptic and potentially scandalous nature of the Platonic allegory in the religiously conservative Venetian context. The historical allegory, however, would not have been in the least provocative, and Stefaniak may be right in giving it greater prominence in her essay since it might originally have shielded the painting’s more cryptic message from dangerously censorious eyes.

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  103 But, to my mind, the interpretation of the mysterious scene as a ­ latonic allegory fits the painting far better. The fashionable young P man, identified by Campbell6 as one of those wealthy Venetian youths who formed theatrical, social, and drinking fraternities (the so-called ­compagnie della calza), distinguished by the specific color of their hosiery, also fits the gay image of the trickster Resource. He is carrying what looks most like a traveler’s staff in his right hand (his name Poros in the original Greek is associated with the verb poreuomai, meaning to go and/or to travel); he is on the road to getting more things and gaining more experiences for himself, leaving Poverty to take care of his child. The half-naked, young unwed mother is too poor to cover herself properly and seems homeless as she nurses her child outside the gates of the city. The broken pillars and truncated bridge behind her would signal the classical past in which the myth of Poros and Penia is set. The lighting in the stormy sky (it was a piece of bravura painting skill to paint something as quickly in motion as a lightning flash), prolonging itself in the curves of the stream below, can readily be taken as an image of Ficino’s Neoplatonic evocation of cosmic love entering the world (emanatio—here descending as a lightning flash), vivifying the world and nature (vivificatio—here the stream and the trees), and then eventually returning to its divine source (remeatio—but this is not shown in the painting). The Neoplatonic theory of love had a serious spiritual meaning for anyone enthralled, as many were among the cultural elite of the Renaissance, with its vision of Eros as a principle that joined together what Christian theology had long put asunder in that it promoted the idea of a carefully mediated philosophical connection between sexual desire and the mystical vision of God. This connection was first outlined in Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, and her Poros and Penia myth concerning the generation of love in the preliminary section of her discourse can stand metonymically for Plato’s theory of love in its entirety. His theory was greeted enthusiastically by the courtly and scholarly elite of the Renaissance, and it carried for them a genuinely religious or quasi-religious charge; it was, for several generations, an expression of what one cannot actually call an alternative Christianity but at least of a desire to heal the traditional Christian split between body and spirit by emphasizing the importance of sexual desire and the love of beauty as first steps in the ascension of the soul to God. The theory thus had a potentially heterodox dimension that might have made it dangerous, at least in the religiously conservative Venice of the early 1500s, to be too explicit or celebratory about the way the Neoplatonic theory of love linked the senses and the spirit. Understandably, Giorgione (and his patron) may be assumed to have deliberately buried the cryptic Platonic subtext out of a sense of justifiable caution.

104  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts Plato’s theory of love as expounded in the Symposium was later transposed in an especially noteworthy way in the fourth book of The Book of the Courtier, where Castiglione transposed the original Socratic ­symposium in Periclean Athens to the setting of a courtly gathering in the palace of Urbino in March 1507. And then James Joyce, I will argue, transposed the same scene to Barney Kiernan’s tavern in Dublin on June 16, 1904, in the “Cyclops” section of Ulysses, although, I must insist, only as a briefly suggested cryptic subtext. Joyce’s Ulysses is, of course, a veritable minefield of cryptic subtexts, but not all of them are equally cryptic. The Homeric subtext of Odysseus’ adventure in the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus in Book Nine of the Odyssey was something Joyce was not altogether reluctant to reveal to his readers, even after he had deleted before publication the Homeric title for the “Cyclops” chapter, as he had all the other Homeric chapter titles, making the Odyssean subtexts of Ulysses a bit more cryptic. In fact, the link with Homer’s Cyclops episode was one of the first and principal subtextual links with Homer that Joyce urged his first readers to reestablish (Ellmann 360). As regards Plato’s Symposium, however, Joyce kept these subtextual c­ onnections carefully concealed. Detecting their presence adds another layer to the multilayered charac­ eleaguered ter of Leopold Bloom, who now can be seen not only as a b Odysseus making his escape from a cannibalistic monster but also, in accordance with the mock-epic dimension of Ulysses, as the reluctant and not very eloquent mouthpiece for a Socratic theory of Love in a drinking party whose topic of discussion, unlike in Plato’s series of symposiastic discourses in praise of Love in the Symposium, increasingly turns out to be more Hate than Love. The black humor of this cryptic subtext is in itself quite delicious. In addition, the spectacle of Bloom scapegoated and (almost) killed by the citizen and his temporary allies in Barney Kiernan’s pub, and (nearly) made a martyr to the cause of Truth and Love is a poignant reminder of the fate of Socrates in another city and another time, when he was condemned by the Athenian citizenry to death. Both Plato and Joyce use a rather peculiar framing device to open their texts. Let us consider first the opening of Plato’s Symposium in the Jowett translation (1892), which, however stilted, is the translation Joyce was likely to have read: ­ elieve Concerning the things about which you ask to be informed I b that I am not ill prepared with an answer. For the day before ­yesterday I was coming from my own home at Phalerum to the city, and one of my acquaintance, who had caught a sight of me from behind, calling out playfully in the distance, said: Man of Phalerum, by name of Apollodorus, halt! I did as I was bid; and then he said, I was looking for you, Apollodorus, only just now, that I might ask you about the speeches in praise of love, which were delivered by Socrates, Alcibiades and others, at Agathon’s supper. (Plato 2007 141)

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  105 Compare this to the colloquial opening of Joyce’s “Cyclops”: I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D.M.P. at the corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye. I turned around to let him have the weight of my tongue when who should I see dodging along Stony Batter only Joe Hynes. —Lo, Joe, says I. How are you blowing? (Joyce Ulysses 240) In both instances, a peculiarly casual framing narrative in the first person leads to an invitation to go see a man who fascinates the small world that has gathered around him: Socrates in the Symposium, and “the citizen” in “Cyclops.” In the case of Plato’s Apollodorus, his unidentified interlocutor (like Joe, “one of my acquaintance”) does not realize that the symposium attended by Socrates in honor of the tragic poet Agathon’s victory in the dramatic festival had actually taken place many years before and that what Apollodorus, a longtime and enthusiastic fan of ­Socrates, knows about it is second hand since it comes from a report given to him by Aristodemus, one of the original participants; the “visit” in the Symposium will be to a memory—a very detailed memory—of a past event. In the case of Joyce’s unnamed barfly (named and unnamed reverse their roles in Joyce), his interlocutor is named Joe Hynes, to whom he starts recounting one of his more memorable encounters with “the citizen,” not too long after the event. The “citizen” is a ­loudmouthed and narcissistic self-styled Irish patriot with nasty ­xenophobic and anti-­ Semitic opinions. Joyce’s barfly in turn reveals himself to be casually ­anti-Semitic, when he starts off with a story about money owed to M ­ oses Herzog, a Jewish merchant who speaks fractured English: —Circumcised! says Joe. —Ay, says I. A bit off the top…. I had to laugh at the little jewy getting his shirt out. He drink me my teas. He eat me my sugars. Because he no pay me my moneys? (240) But this is just a prelude to going to get a drink and seeing the citizen in action: “Come around to Barney Kiernan’s, says Joe. I want to see the ­citizen” (241). What in Plato was a visit to a distant memory of an encounter with the great Socrates at the height of his powers, in Joyce is a visit in present time to a mean-minded Irish Socrates full of rage and resentment. The main scene in both Plato’s Symposium and Joyce’s “Cyclops” is a symposium or drinking party—a specially organized celebration that eventually turns into an all-night drinking binge in Plato and an ordinary daytime encounter at the pub in Joyce—a daily “Irish symposium” of a sort—whose barside banter is increasingly focused by the citizen on

106  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts xenophobic Hate and noxious jew-baiting. The citizen is a thoroughly repulsive figure modeled on “le Citoyen” (the Citizen) in The ­Sentimental ­ laubert’s Education, a would-be champion of revolutionary ideas who in F novel ultimately turns into a counterrevolutionary traitor. Joyce’s citizen’s ill-tempered grumblings are just the first sign of his rabid chauvin­ eopold Bloom, the ism and virulent anti-Semitism, soon to be vented on L good-hearted Jewish Socrates of Barney Kiernan’s tavern, whose later attempt to provide a rebuttal to the citizen’s hate-mongering rant merely encourages the latter to make him into a scapegoat. Subjected to the bitter invectives of the citizen’s verbal assault, Bloom begins to stand up to the increasingly outrageous anti-Semitism that accompanies the pseudo-patriot’s outrage at the oppressed status of the Irish people, with a burst of outrage of his own concerning the ­oppression of the Jewish people: —And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and ­ ersecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant. p (273) But the force of his indignation is soon spent. The now somewhat more sympathetic narrator describes Bloom collapsing “all of a sudden, as limp as a wet rag.” —But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life. —What? Says Alf. —Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. I must go now, says he. (273) Bloom’s brief speech in praise of love, simplistically and awkwardly defined as “the opposite of hate,” contrasts humorously with the long and elaborate definitions and speeches in praise of Love in the Symposium, most notably that of Diotima as recollected by Socrates, and Bloom immediately makes for the door. The reader knows that he needs to hurry and find Martin Cunningham in order to help him with an insurance claim, but his acquaintances falsely assume that he is about to abscond both in order to avoiding “treating” them to the customary round of drinks, as well as to pick up his winning on a bet on a horse race, which for them seems to add insult to injury. So, as soon as Bloom begins to leave, the ridicule begins: —A new apostle to the gentiles, says the citizen. Universal Love. (273)

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  107 Even the voice of the interpolation—in baby language—treats the idea of Universal Love as if it were only the affair of a childish mind: Love loves to love. Nurse loves the new chemist…. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant…. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody. (273) After this burst of baby talk, the language of the narrator’s sudden toast proves to be an inadvertent revelation of the bitter obsession with power and hatred that the citizen injects into the otherwise friendly and ­congenial atmosphere of this Dublin symposium: —Well, Joe, says I, your very good health… More power, citizen. (273) In this bitter world of the colonized oppressed under the rule of Great Britain, “power” is indeed the operative word. After Lenehan has spread the rumor that Bloom had won money ­betting on the horses, the resentment aroused by Bloom’s apparent failure to stand the others for a drink (in fact, since Bloom had not himself had anything to drink, he was under no obligation to “treat” the others), even the anonymous narrator’s thoughts, infected by the citizen’s xenophobic rage, turn violent: Do you know what I’m telling you? It’d be an act of God to take a hold of fellow the like of that and throw him in the bloody sea. Justifiable homicide, as it would. Then sloping off with his five quid without putting up a pint of stuff like a man. (277) Joyce has exposed, and will continue to do so throughout this scene, the process of xenophobic hatred: chauvinism leading to scapegoating and envy leading to “justifiable homicide.” ­ enophobia, But Bloom himself is not entirely free of the contagion of x and it is one of the sad ironies of the scene that his humorous parting sally is itself a rather flat-footed piece of ethnocentric chauvinism: —Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God. —He had no father, says Martin. That’ll do now. Drive ahead. —Whose God? says the citizen. —Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me. (280)

108  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts Under these hostile circumstances, the beleaguered Bloom’s escape from the tavern on a jitney carriage, and his final apotheosis as the prophet Elijah taken up to heaven on a fiery chariot (a parody of Second Kings 2.11–2),7 is high comedy as well as biblical parody: When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they ­beheld Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And he answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness. (282–3) But this biblical parody also recalls the exalted words at the end of Book IV of Castiglione’s Courtier, where the learned Pietro Bembo, already famous for his defense of Platonic theories of love in Book II of his ­A solani, uses the image of Elijah’s fiery chariot as his final simile for the ­Platonic ascension of the soul toward the divine through the power of Love: “This is… the fiery chariot of Elias, which doubles the grace and felicity in the souls of those souls worthy to see it, when it leaves the earth below and flies towards heaven” (Castiglione 341). However, in spite of the Platonic and Neoplatonic framing of the discussions in Barney Kiernan’s tavern, Bloom’s praise of love attains no such Platonic heights, and is no match for the forces of hatred manifested by the citizen and his ferocious dog Garryowen. As a Joycean Socrates, Leopold Bloom is disappointing, as is his panicky flight from the anti-Semitic and xenophobic commotion in Barney Kiernan’s, and his cryptic identity is fraught with irony. Why then might Joyce have buried this cryptic subtext in his text? If only for the latent power of the dark humor it generates, Joyce’s use of a Platonic cryptic subtext would seem justified. But it does not seem plausible to assume, as we had in the case of Giorgione, that Joyce had anything to fear in inserting it into his text. Plato was hardly a controversial figure in Joyce’s culture. So, why did he bury the subtext so deeply? For one thing, it may have kept the focus clear on the Odyssean cryptic subtext (Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops), from which a second more obviously treated Platonic subject might have proved to be a distraction; best to keep the second subtext clearly subordinated to the first. In addition, since Joyce was to proceed to insert a more ­developed parodic version of the Symposium as a cryptic subtext in “Oxen of the Sun,” as June Allison has demonstrated,8 it was advisable for Joyce not to highlight the one in “Cyclops,” if only to avoid repetition. ­Finally, Joyce delighted in playing with—and providing tantalizing clues for—his

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  109 future readers and critics. The concealment of a Platonic cryptic subtext in “Cyclops” need not have any further justification than that. It could wind up being a purely ludic gesture, with no serious purpose, and intended only to add to the fun. That said, there is also an effect of cryptic irony in the latent contrast between the very articulate Socrates of the Symposium and the barely articulate Leopold Bloom in “Cyclops,” as well as between the philosophical atmosphere of Plato’s Athenian symposium and the raucousness of the Dublin pub, that highlights one of the many mock-epic dimensions of Ulysses in a scene, which, while fulfilling the promise of Buck Mulligan’s invitation to Stephen Dedalus “we must go to Athens” (Ulysses 4), leaves the contrast between modern Irish and ancient Greek culture lingering like a bad taste in one’s mouth. Joan Lindsay’s 1967 Australian novel Picnic at Hanging Rock and the iconic film based on it that Peter Weir directed in 1975, both deal with something like a metaphysical mystery: the inexplicable (and fictional) disappearance of three girls and of one of their schoolmistresses over the course of a picnic excursion on St. Valentine’s Day, 1900, to Hanging Rock, a natural wonder in the state of Victoria, to the northwest of M ­ elbourne. This disappearance prompts two preliminary questions: how can physical bodies disappear without a trace? And why does the event occur on St. Valentine’s Day? No doubt, one girl was rescued a week later, but she could remember nothing of what had happened. The other two girls and their mathematics teacher, who had followed in their steps a bit later, were never found, even after several extensive police searches, including the use of a bloodhound. Lindsay did provide a partial ­explanation in the original final chapter in the manuscript, but her editors encouraged her to delete it. In all events, its separate publication years later did little to dispel the mystery, which has always been at the heart of the novel’s and the film’s fascination. (Since the film follows the novel closely both in detail and in plot, they will be discussed together in this section.) However, the detection of the presence of a Platonic subtext—this one found in Plato’s other great dialogue on love, the Phaedrus—can do much to shed light on the mystery, without, however, dispelling it completely. Many clues indicate the presence of this cryptic subtext in the novel as well as in the film based on it; so many clues cannot be the result of sheer coincidence. First of all, there occurs, at the opening of both the Phaedrus and the novel and the film, an extraordinary event that seems subject to no definitive explanation. The mysterious disappearance or abduction of a young girl (in Plato) or of several girls and a school mistress (in Lindsay and Weir) points toward a mythic subtext that, as we shall see, is significant in its rapport with the theory of love expounded at length in Plato’s Symposium as well as in the Phaedrus. Furthermore, as we shall see, the Platonic theory of love expounded in the Phaedrus organizes the plot and justifies a number of the apparently incidental details in the novel and the film.

110  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts Whereas the Symposium takes place largely indoors at a drinking party with a small group of participants gathered around Socrates, the Phaedrus takes place completely outdoors during an excursion into the valley of the little river Ilissos just beyond the walls of Athens, and there is only one interlocutor besides Socrates. For Socrates, the excursion he takes with his young friend Phaedrus is highly unusual since he had rarely if ever left the confines of the city, except while on military service. It is near noon on a hot summer’s day, and the two seek out a shady spot where they can relax and discuss a discourse on love recently composed by the logographer Lysias, which will quickly provide the springboard for Socrates’ own exposition of his ideas on the subject. Socrates and his young friend stroll along the banks of the Ilissos barefoot, so that they can enjoy walking with their feet in the water. They eventually stop in the shade of a tall plane tree, where there is soft grass to sit on and a pleasant breeze; Socrates notes appreciatively that the spot “echoes with a summery shrillness to the cicada’s song” (Plato 2005 6–7). It is a classical Mediterranean locus amoenus (pleasant natural spot), which we shall find replicated to a substantial degree in the scene at Hanging Rock in the novel and the film. The puzzling part of the introductory section of the Phaedrus involves a somewhat convoluted bit of dialogue concerning a local myth ­associated with the particular locality. “Wasn’t it from somewhere here,” Phaedrus asks Socrates, “that Boreas [the god of the North Wind] is said to have seized Oreithuia [an Athenian princess] from the Ilissus?” (5) Socrates, however, is not sure; perhaps it was near here that the princess was playing with her sister Pharmaceia; but, then again, perhaps it was a little further downstream since that is where there is an altar to Boreas. (It is worth mentioning for the sake of future comparisons with the novel and the film that one girl, Oreithuia, was carried off into the sky, but the other, her sister Pharmaceia, was left behind.) When pressed by Phaedrus to explain the myth in the rational terms of the sophists, he opines that perhaps what actually may have happened, before the memory of the event was transformed into a mythic tale of a young girl’s abduction by an amorous deity, was that “a blast of Boreas pushed her down from the nearby rocks while she was playing with Pharmaceia, and when she met her death in this way she was said to have been snatched up by Boreas” (6). Or ­perhaps, he adds, the accident happened, as some people recount, on top of the ­A reopagus, a much higher promontory. It is all a bit of mystery, but, says Socrates, speculating whether a rational or a supernatural explanation of the myth is more plausible would be a waste of time for him since “I am not yet capable of ‘knowing myself’ and whether I am a mythological monster or some “simpler creature, sharing by nature some divine… portion” (6). They then drop the discussion and move on to more philosophical concerns.

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  111 This somewhat lengthy narrative prelude might seem to needlessly delay the exposition of the main concern of the dialogue, which is the nature of Love. But the myth of Boreas and Oreithuia is not really off the topic since its theme is the power of love, and since it introduces in a mythic and narrative mode two major theoretical dimensions of the philosophical discussion which follows. First of all, in the Phaedrus’ love is defined as a kind of “divine madness”—and the myth of Boreas and Oreithuia is an illustration of this theory in the mode of a myth of ascension: being carried off into the sky by an insanely amorous god represents a form of divine rapture. Second, Plato develops this theory of love later in the dialogue in terms of a second myth of ascension, in which a chariot with its driver and two winged horses, one white and one black, represents allegorically the soul and its both sensual (the  black horse) and mystical (the white horse) impulses. (Another allegory of ascension is found in the Symposium, where the dominant image of sublimation is that of climbing a ladder or staircase, cf. the later scala dell’amore— the ladder of Love—of Italian Renaissance Neoplatonists.) Thus, the somewhat peculiar preliminary discussion of the Boreas and Oreithuia myth turns out to be quite relevant to the subject after all: both figures exemplify the drama of the divine madness of Love. Furthermore, two possible explanations of the myth are entertained, each one symbolically significant in its own way: a traditional mythological one of divine abduction (an ascension) and a sophistic rationalistic one of a young girl blown off of the rocks by a gust of wind (a fall). The Platonic dialogue will accordingly distinguish between those few who can rise through the power of love to a vision of Truth, and those who, less well prepared for this ascension, fall back to earth. This fall can also take the form of a tragic death: the young Athenian princess whose body was shattered on the rocks. As a divine force, Love is bipolar and can lead to immortality as well as to death. Both these poles are present in Lindsay’s novel and Weir’s film, with the death of the headmistress (who falls) juxtaposed at the end of the novel with the earlier mysterious ascension and disappearance of the girls and their mathematics teacher. Lindsay’s novel opens with an evocation of a warm St. Valentine’s Day morning: “everyone agreed that the day was just right for the picnic to Hanging Rock—a shimmering summer morning warm and still, with cicadas shrilling [as in the Phaedrus]. and bees murmuring” (1). In Australia (that is, in the southern hemisphere), February 14 comes fifty-five days after the summer solstice and is thus equivalent to August 15 in the northern hemisphere, which in Greece—and ancient Athens—would mark the height of the summer’s heat, the season of the dialogue in ­Plato’s Phaedrus. The first descriptions of the girl’s school named Appleyard College and its environment contains several allusions to classical Greek antiquity: “caryatids,” the village of Macedon, Mount Macedon, and “classical statues” (2). But the most thematically important reference in

112  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts the opening of the novel is to St. Valentine, who, as “the Patron Saint of Lovers” (9), can be taken as the modern equivalent of the Greek god Eros. The festivities over which he presides include, of course, the giving of valentines: “Saint Valentine is impartial in his favours, and not only the young and the beautiful were kept busy opening their cards this morning” (3). However, we learn immediately that Mrs Appleyard, the headmistress, “disapproved of Saint Valentine and his ridiculous greetings” (1). Mrs Appleyard will turn out over the course of the novel to embody an almost psychopathic inability to love and to feel empathy, in contrast to at least some of the young girls, especially Miranda, whose hearts are open to the cosmic power of love. The complete and inexplicable disappearance of the two young girls Miranda and Marion and their mathematics teacher Miss McCraw occurs early in the novel during their ascent of Hanging Rock, and constitutes, as Peter Weir put it in an interview in 2003, “a mystery without a solution” (Criterion Picnic DVD). This is the mystery that will cast its shadow over the rest of the novel and the film, and it has been one of the reasons for their enduring fascination. In proposing Plato’s Phaedrus as a cryptic subtext, however, I am not seeking to dispel the mystery but simply to clarify its nature. What Plato calls in the Phaedrus “continually initiated in perfect rites” (Plato 2005 30)9 can be taken as the key to what happened to Miranda, Marion, and Miss McCraw, without the ultimate mystery being made less esoteric; it simply allows for a philosophical classification of the mystery, which would thus be above all a mystery concerned with the power of Eros—a mystery highly appropriate for St. Valentine’s Day. It seems reasonable to assume that both the author and the director deliberately intended this cryptic Platonic ­subtext to be the ultimate underpinning of the mystery; as we shall see, the accumulation of clues suggesting this intention makes it hard to assume otherwise. As with the Athenian princesses Oreithuia and her sister Pharmaceia, as well as with Socrates and Phaedrus, the drama begins with the girls from Appleyard College making an excursion into the nearby countryside. Miranda is most excited by the prospect: “What a wonderful day! I can hardly wait to get out into the country!” (10) The evocation of the picnic site itself harkens back to the description in the Phaedrus of the spot where Socrates and Phaedrus sat and conversed on the banks of the little river Ilissus. In Lindsay’s novel, Hanging Rock is described as “over five hundred feet in height” (13), and thus as far higher than the rocks on the bank of the Ilissos; however, the latter were high enough to imagine a young girl like Oreithuia to meet with death by being blown off them. (In one shot of Weir’s film, the four girls who began the ascent are shown lying prostrate on the flat ground before rise of the promontory, where three gigantic rocks directly behind them remind me of the giant sarsens of Stonehenge; like Hanging Rock, Stonehenge

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  113 is a place of compelling numinosity that attracts many visitors.) Both the Australian picnickers and Socrates and Phaedrus find protection from the heat of high noon on a hot summer’s day in the shade and the grass of their respective ­Mediterranean and Australian locations. There is the cooling presence of the stream’s water nearby: “the creek at the close of summer ran sluggishly through long dry grass, now and then almost ­disappearing to re-appear as a shallow pool” (15). In both cases, it is noontime; ­Socrates in the Phaedrus alludes to the “midday” “heat” (Plato 2005 41); in the novel and the film, three pocket watches— those of Mr Hussey, Miss McCraw, and the French mistress Diane de Poitiers—mysteriously stop at twelve o’clock (17–8). But Miranda is no longer wearing hers because she “can’t stand to hear it ticking all day long just above [her] heart” (18). The lovely Miranda has already, it seems, a desire to transcend time. It is at this moment when Time has stopped that four girls—the senior girls Miranda, Irma, and Marion, with the fourteen-year-old Edith— ask permission “to take a walk as far as the lower slope” (18) of Hanging Rock. They follow the creek upstream, to the point where a pool indicates the hidden presence of a spring. In similar fashion, Socrates and Phaedrus have been walking along the Ilissus barefoot, looking for a place to sit down and converse seriously; it is “just about midday, the time when we say everything stands still” (Plato 2005 20–1). The spot they select is more than notable for its shade and grass: “the spot really seems to be a divine one,” says Socrates, “so if by any chance I become possessed by the Nymphs as my speech proceeds, don’t be surprised” (16). (In the novel and the film, it is the young schoolgirls who may be said to occupy in a nymph-like manner this sacred ground.) Socrates thinks of crossing the stream but decides not to (21). The four girls, by contrast, do cross the creek and begin to climb up the lower slope of Hanging Rock. Having reached a circular platform, they rest a few moments in the shade of the rocks. Then, except for Edith, who considers them “mad” (30), they take off their stocking and shoes; Marion is suddenly seized with a desire to dance barefoot. Socrates warns Phaedrus that, lulled by the ­ eople do at midday and song of the cicadas, they should not do as most p fall asleep, and hence miss some divine inspiration  (41). The girls, by contrast, do eventually fall asleep on the slope, “overcome by an overpowering lassitude” at the sight of the “monolith rising up ahead” (31). However, it is when they wake up that the real mystery begins. Their ascent up the rocks is seen from the perspective of the younger Edith, who has been feeling “perfectly awful” and wants to go home. But they leave her behind, with Miranda “looking at her so strangely, almost as if she wasn’t seeing her” (32). Then Miranda “simply turned her back and began walking up the rise, the other two following a little way behind. Well, hardly walking—sliding over the stones on their bare feet as if they were on a drawing room carpet” (31). Edith grows terrified: “to

114  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts her horror all three girls were fast moving out of sight behind the monolith…. She took a few unsteady steps towards the rise and saw the last of a white sleeve parting the bushes ahead” (32). It was at that point that Edith started running down the slope “stumbling and screaming” (32). If one takes the mysterious ascension of Miranda, Marion, and Irma, and the eventual total disappearance of the first two girls as well as later of Miss McCraw as emblematic of a Platonic initiation into supreme mysteries, then one needs to account both for the latter’s successful initiatory ascension and for Edith’s descent in a panic and Irma’s strange reappearance a week later. In fact, the novel gives clear clues to these enigmas, which are clarified by the Platonic subtext. When Socrates talks in the Phaedrus about the four types of divine madness that are a blessing from the gods, he declares the lover’s madness to be the best of all the kinds of divine possession (30). It is certainly Miranda who, in Picnic at H ­ anging Rock, is most identified with this ecstatic power of love. Miranda is described as “ever charitable” (2); she is “a Botticelli angel” (19) in the eyes of her French mistress Mademoiselle de Poitiers, who later remembers later that “she loved Saint Valentine” and “believed in the power of love over everything” (141). At her first sight of the peaks of Hanging Rock, Miranda was “illumined by a calm wordless joy” (26). After her disappearance, the younger student Sara, who as an orphan is the special object of Miranda’s love, has “a dream of Miranda… filled with love and joy” (130). As for Marion, it is truth rather than love that is her passion. She “had spent the greater part of seventeen years in the relentless pursuit of knowledge” (4); she was the favorite student of Miss McCraw and was “the only member of the class to take Pythagoras in her stride”; she had “a burning desire for truth in all departments” (27). The reader learns later that the mathematics teacher Miss McCraw had left the picnic site a bit after the girls and had also disappeared while climbing Hanging Rock, having strangely taken off her petticoat in the process. Miss ­McCraw, who thus becomes the third member of the group to disappear forever, is a kind of mathematical mystic. She is described as a “brilliant mathematician” who “would have given a five-pound note to have spent this precious holiday, no matter how fine, shut up in her room with that fascinating new treatise on the Calculus” (6). She is most at home in “the world of pure uncluttered reason”; while the others were stopping for refreshments at the base of Hanging Rock, she “was listening exclusively to the Music of the Spheres [a clear, if humorous, Platonic allusion] in her own head” (11). Thus, all three—Miranda, Marion, and Miss McCraw— are described as being possessed by divine passions that, for Plato, are signs of their qualification for being initiated into the highest mysteries. But what of the other two, Irma and Edith? Irma is the only girl to reappear and be rescued—a week later—and she remembers nothing at all of what had happened. It would seem that she too was qualified for the initiation—but only up to a point. A devoted friend of Miranda’s,

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  115 she is first described as “radiantly lovely at seventeen,” and as an heiress who was laudably “without personal vanity or pride of possession” (4). One can only guess at what is perhaps a bit of superficiality in her love of people and of beauty: “she loved people and things to be beautiful” (4), and this slight disqualification might be seen as the cause of her failure to complete the initiation. As for the younger girl Edith, her unwillingness to take off her shoes and then her panic and screaming descent from the Rock clearly indicate her near total inaptitude for such an initiation. “A pasty-faced fourteen-year-old with the contours of an overstuffed bolster” (6), she is immature, fearful, and self-centered, and has none of the qualifications and the courage of the three senior girls, although it is to her credit that she loves them and to some degree idolizes them. As for the Headmistress Mrs Appleyard, she can be taken as an example of those who, according to Plato, are thoroughly unqualified for initiation into the supreme mysteries of Love. Their attempts to rise to the vision of Truth can only result in a fall. She torments the orphan girl Sara mercilessly, telling her that she may have to return to the horrible orphanage that she had left in order to attend Appleyard College, thanks to her guardian’s support; now that the bill is overdue, and the guardian seems to be out of communication, Mrs Appleyard then proceeds to expel her. The tragic irony is that Sara, already traumatized by the disappearance of her beloved Miranda (of whom she keeps a photograph that she practically worships) finally commits suicide, just before the Headmistress receives a letter from the guardian indicating his imminent arrival to take care of things. Mrs Appleyard tries to cover up the tragedy for which she is responsible by burning the letter and concealing the guardian’s arrival, but it is too late for her to save herself from the consequences of her almost psychopathic lack of love. She hires a buggy to take her to Hanging Rock, where she fails to sniff “with foreboding the blast of the North wind [cf. Boreas in Plato]” (193). As she begins to climb the Rock, she remembers the “lost girls,” but “without compassion” (193). After she sees the ghost of the girl Sara whom she has tormented to death, she immediately throws herself off the precipice. Her complete lack of love can only lead to a fall; any attempt at initiation into the mysteries of Love is doomed to failure, and her fall contrasts vividly with the implied Platonic ascension of the girls and Miss McCraw. The Athenian cultural subtext of Platos’ Phaedrus involves a general toleration and even acceptance of pederasty as an educational as well as a sexual relationship between an older man and a boy, youth, or younger man. Although in the dialogue, Socrates seems to play the part of the amorous older man enthralled by the beauty of youth, it is clear that, here as elsewhere (as at the end of the Symposium), this is mere playacting for him; what really interests him is the sublimation, and not the physical fulfillment, of sexual desire, which leads to the vision of Truth and the culmination of an initiation into supreme mysteries. In the novel

116  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts Picnic at Hanging Rock, the evocation of the closeted atmosphere of a girl’s school in the year 1900 shows young girls in a state of teenage infatuation with each other, but, as in the Phaedrus, their passions are essentially Platonic. The boarding school’s Eros-charged atmosphere is at its height on St. Valentine’s Day, and Peter Weir’s film focuses on it with voyeuristic intensity. But Weir’s film, although it stays very close to the novel, has several new and original references, that arguably indicate the director’s own familiarity with the cryptic Platonic subtext, presumably the result of his close collaboration with the author Lindsay. There are three myths that are given major focus in the Phaedrus. As regards the myth of Boreas (the god of the north wind) and the Athenian princess ­Oreithuia, apart from the key narrative at the beginning of the novel of the mysterious disappearance of the girls and of Miss McCraw on ­Hanging Rock, where the parallels, as we have seen, are striking, there is already a ­reference to the north wind at the end of the novel that is intriguing. As Mrs Appleyard begins her ascent of Hanging Rock, I have noted that she failed to “[sniff] with foreboding the blast of the North wind, laden in summer with the fine ash of forest fires” (193). But the reference by itself is not necessarily convincing as a reference to Plato’s Boreas. But in Peter Weir’s film there is another, which is perhaps more convincing. Irish Tom is meeting with the old College gardener Edward Whitehead, and as he appears, he is singing the first line of a traditional Irish song: The north wind brings me no rest A bit later—and the repetition itself highlights the possible subtextual allusion—while he is in bed his fiancée Minnie, who is very sad and anxious about the girls’ disappearance, Tom sings the first line of the same song, and then continues with the next line: The North wind brings me no rest, And Death is in the sky. There is a here, arguably, an echo of the abduction by Boreas the North Wind of Oreithuia, and of her death by falling off the rocks in the rational sophistic explanation of the myth that Socrates brings up. The second myth in the Phaedrus concerns the cicadas, which are described as singing loudly while Socrates and Phaedrus have paused to chat. Halfway through their conversation Socrates remarks that “the cicadas sing above our heads in their usual fashion in the heat, and ­converse with us,” adding cryptically that “they are also watching us” (41). He then explains at some length the myth of the origin of cicadas, who were originally men so enamored of the Muses that they died of

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  117 starvation and so became through a postmortem metamorphosis those creatures who “go and report to the Muses which among those here honours which one of them” (41). This is another reason, says Socrates, “why we should say something and not sleep in the midday heat” (42). Although the song of the cicadas is mentioned in the first sentence of the novel, it is not alluded to again in the scenes at Hanging Rock. But in Peter Weir’s equivalent scene in the film the sound of cicadas features prominently on the soundtrack. Even more notably, a long close-up shot during the picnic scene lingers on a large cicada on the forearm of ­A lbert Crundall, the young coachman who is fast becoming friends with ­M ichael, the nephew of Colonel and Mrs Fitzhubert. Thus, the cicadas, although prominent in the Phaedrus but mentioned only once in the novel, are given greater prominence in the film. It should also be noted that the friendship of Albert and Michael echoes to some degree the friendship of Socrates and Phaedrus. Albert is uneducated and rough-hewn, but, although of the same age, he plays a mentoring role with the rather naïve Michael, whose sheltered upbringing in England has left him unprepared for the challenges of the Australian bush and of nascent love. Plato’s Phaedrus develops at length an allegory of the charioteer and his chariot with its winged horses. One of the horses, white and spiritual, struggles to ascend; the other horse, black and sensual, constantly pulls the lover down to earth. In most lovers, the two horses are in a state of conflict: the one seeking to rise to a vision of Truth and the other seeking to pull the charioteer (the lover) downward into the world of sensual pleasure. It might seem to the reader that any reference to this myth is conspicuously lacking in Lindsay’s novel. However, this is not so. References to horses and horse traction pepper the opening of the novel, where the narrative concerns the preparations and the journey via horse cart to the natural wonder of Hanging Rock. These include also a discussion of horses’ names (10), a mention of a race horse belonging to Irma’s father (10), and numerous descriptions of the five horses pulling the carriage. But it is later in the novel that the horses of the Platonic subtext—one white and one black—appear in a way that more clearly suggests the second myth of the Phaedrus. Michael, the “gentle youth” (75) whose virginal heart has become full of an intense and pure love for Miranda (“Miranda! Where are you? … Oh, my lost, lovely darling, where are you?” 79–80), has decided to go back to the Rock and try his best to discover and rescue the lost girls. The horse he was riding was a “white poney” (69), while his rough plebeian friend Albert rode a “big black horse,” that, like its Platonic analogue, has a rambunctious temperament; at one point, startled by a little wallaby, it “rose up on its hind legs, almost bringing down the pony a few inches in the rear” (72). The black horse’s name is “Lancer,” and this also suggests an impulsive and quasi-phallic impetuosity.

118  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts In the film, Peter Weir inserts, apparently somewhat gratuitously, a short song that Miranda sings while she is combing her golden hair in front of a mirror: Black horse, white horse, brown horse, grey-Trotting down the paddock on a bright sunny day. [my emphasis] (In the novel Sara remembers Miranda similarly combing her hair and singing “strange little songs,” but no words for the songs are given [109–10].) Since Miranda is the very embodiment of the pure soul endowed with love ready to be initiated into the supreme mysteries, it is in fact quite appropriate that she gives voice to a cryptic allusion to the horses in the key myth of the Phaedrus. In an interview given in the supplementary material section of the 2003 Criterion DVD, Peter Weir has called the Panpipes music on his film’s soundtrack “the signature sound” of the film. He sees it suggesting “dealing with the old gods—and not necessarily in positive way.” The sound of the Panpipes directly alludes to the Greek god Pan and his s­ yrinx, mentioned several times in the Phaedrus, most notably in Socrates’ prayer at the very end (“Dear Pan and all you gods of this place” [68]). For Peter Weir, it creates a “pre-Christian feeling”—“the pipes gave that connection.” It is perhaps surprising that, although it seems that Hanging Rock was originally an aboriginal initiation site, Lindsay and Weir both avoid any direct allusion to this, probably in order to avoid drawing attention away from the classical Greek setting of the cryptic subtext. It is true that Peter Weir also mentions “the hint of an aboriginal connection,” but nothing in the film explicitly makes this connection, except for the fleeting presence of an abo tracker (also mentioned in the novel), who is briefly glimpsed at the Rock in a bright red coat (cf. St. Valentine’s color? Is the abo possibly to be taken a brief manifestation of the god of Love). Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock was published with its eighteenth and final chapter deleted just before publication on the advice of the editors. But The Secret of Hanging Rock, the short volume in which this chapter was finally published in 1987, does little to dispel the mystery; rather with its somewhat bombastic hermeneutic overkill it ­confuses ­ owever, it does the issue with too many possible esoteric explanations. H render more concrete—but no less mysterious—the description of the disappearance of the girls accompanied by a “stranger,” who is presumably Miss McCraw as an initiating mentor figure in her subtle form. In the final chapter, she, Marion, and then Miranda disappear into a hole near the summit of the Rock. But it is a very unusual hole: It wasn’t a hole in the rocks, nor a hole in the ground. It was a hole in space. About the size of a fully rounded summer moon, coming and going. She saw it as painters and sculptors saw a hole, as a thing in

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  119 itself, giving shape and substance to other shapes. As a presence, not an absence—a concrete affirmation of the truth. She felt she could go on looking at it forever in wonder and delight, from above, from below, from the other side. It was as solid as the globe, as transparent as an air-bubble… She had spent a lifetime asking questions and now they were answered, simply by looking at the hole. It faded out, and at last she was at peace. (Lindsay Secret 30) This iconic hole, which seems to be a kind of metaphysically symbolic hole (possibly symbolizing, among other things, the Buddhist doctrine of shunyatā or “emptiness”), disappears but then reappears shortly afterward in a more physically concrete form—possibly, as a yoni, ­symbolically vulval—as “the lip of a cave or a tunnel, rimmed with bruised, heart-shaped leaves” (31). In the end, the symbolism suggests a confusing mixture of Hermetic magic, Buddhism, Freudianism, and St. Valentine10 while also presenting an analogy with the rabbit hole down which Alice fell at the beginning of her adventures. It is into this hole that Marion and Miranda, guided and preceded by “the long-boned torso” of the “stranger,” disappear forever—into eternity? Irma, however, is frightened and proves unable to complete the initiation and is finally barred from entering the hole by a rockslide that seals the entrance. So, at last, we are told why Irma was discovered a week later on Hanging Rock in a state of shock and amnesia, and why the two other girls and Miss McCraw fail to reappear. But do we really want to know? Weir’s “mystery without a solution” is arguably esthetically stronger. As I see it, the main problem with this originally unpublished finale is that it both leaves too little to the reader’s imagination and suggests too much in the way of a confusing symbolic overload—the reader is given both too much concrete detail, however interesting, and at the same time too many possibilities of symbolic interpretation. Picnic at Hanging Rock would have become more of a supernatural tale with a confusing allegory and less of “a mystery without a solution.” I believe that for the author and her editors it proved to be the wiser course of action to leave the mystery unexplained. Their decision also sheds light on the problem that might have arisen if the cryptic Platonic subtext in its turn had been made more explicit. Picnic at Hanging Rock would have then been pushed in the direction of becoming a modern Neoplatonic philosophical tale; however interesting—or disconcerting—this might have been, the novel as published is more powerful in its esthetic effect if it remains a narrative of an unsolved mystery. Keeping things unsaid preserves the mystery. Don’t say what you can whisper; even better than to whisper it: wink it! On the surface, a cryptic subtext is just that: a wink… Plato’s Phaedrus thus arguably serves its purpose as a cryptic subtext of subtly reinforcing the praise of the kind of love that, in recent times,

120  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts would not be likely to dare to speak its name because of its explicitly mystical dimension, which many in a post-Victorian Freudian world would have probably been found a bit ridiculous. However, when kept carefully hidden as the buried treasure of a cryptic Platonic subtext, it provides many clues concerning the grand philosophical vision that inspired both author and director. Its presence initially protects, but then ultimately enriches, the symbolic import of the mystery. It also avoids disconcerting the modern readership with too obvious references to a theory of love that, however much it had fascinated the Renaissance courts, would probably have met with disbelief and even ridicule in a Freudian age. There are two final clues that the love-obsessed novel and film hark back to Socrates’ discourse on love in the Phaedrus. First of all, there is the fact that the French mistress, Mademoiselle Diane de Poitiers, bears the name of a great noblewoman who dominated the court in sixteenth-­century France at a time when Neoplatonic theories of love arriving from Italy were popular in courtly circles. It is thus fitting that it is ­Mademoiselle de Poitiers who discovers—in a moment of sudden insight—that Miranda is metaphorically “a Botticelli angel from the Uffizi” (19), thus highlighting her sublimely spiritual character as an ­angel from the great age of Renaissance Neoplatonism. But in his film Peter Weir clarifies and expands this insight when he shows Mademoiselle de Poitiers at the picnic site holding on her lap a book of color art illustrations opened to the page where Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus is clearly visible. Socrates had maintained in the Phaedrus that there are various kinds of divine madness (maniai), each one being presided over by its own patron deity; the madness of love he sees as “belonging to Aphrodite and Eros” (49). In such Platonic terms, Miranda, whose whole life is centered on love, is clearly a follower of the goddess Venus in her Platonic spiritual dimension. Since Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi is one of a small number of paintings (including Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, and now, as we have seen earlier, ­Giorgione’s The Tempest) that can be interpreted as masterful allegories of ­Neoplatonic love, Lindsay and Weir have both made an allusion to renaissance ­Neoplatonism in a subtle way, by having a French school mistress named “Diane de Poitiers” provide a link between Miranda and Botticelli. This is thus doubly appropriate, as Picnic at Hanging Rock (the novel and the film) is both a narrative under the subtextual spell of Plato’s Phaedrus and a surprising resurrection of a courtly Neoplatonic vision that had inspired some of the masterpieces of Renaissance art. It is certainly tempting to consider Michelangelo Antonioni’s film L’avventura (1960) as an important subtext for Picnic at Hanging Rock (both for the novel [1967] and the film [1975]). Antonioni’s film had had an enormous success, at least on the international art cinema circuit,11 and both Lindsay and Weir could easily have seen it and been

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  121 inspired by it. The film’s basic plot could have easily provided a subtext that suggested the general outlines of the plot of their later novel and film—an excursion to a rocky place and a mysterious disappearance. A small group of friends makes an excursion via yacht to the Aeolian Islands off the coast of Sicily, especially to the tiny rocky and barren volcanic island of Lisca Bianca. They make landing, and after a while one of them, Anna, Sandro’s fiancée, suddenly disappears; she was last seen on a rocky ledge, and was seemingly about to make her way up the cliff. Although her friends search for her all over the small island, and are soon assisted by local coast guardsmen and two divers, it eventually becomes clear that she has vanished without a trace. Later efforts to find her on Sicily by Sandro and her best friend Claudia prove fruitless, and the mystery of Anna’s disappearance remains unresolved. So, the parallels to Picnic at Hanging Rock are obvious: an excursion to a rocky promontory like Hanging Rock (the volcanic cliffs and crags of Lisca Bianca play a large role in the first half of Antonioni’s film), a young woman’s disappearance, the fruitless attempts to find her, and in the end an unsolved mystery. But what is even more interesting is the way one can detect in ­A ntonioni’s film clues that signal the cryptic presence of the same ­Platonic myth of Boreas and Oreithuia that was to prove so significant for ­Picnic at Hanging Rock. The little island of Lisca Bianca itself is linked twice in the film to classical antiquity: first, when one of the characters comments on the presence of presumably classical ruins ­(“Ruins. Very ­ancient.” [film script 30]), and second, when one of the divers searching for A ­ nna’s body brings up instead an ancient vase (“An ancient vase. There’s a whole city down there. It’s full of these things.” [film script 55]); one of the characters promptly drops it accidentally. These allusions ­establish the island as belonging to the geographical and historical setting of classical mythology, with the dropping and smashing of the ancient vase suggesting in particular the fall and death of the ancient Athenian princess Oreithuia—and, by extension, of Anna herself. Another clue pointing toward the presence of the myth of Boreas and Oreithuia is found in a conversation with an old man, recently returned from Australia (did Lindsay and Weir take notice?), who has lived in a stone cottage on top of the island: CLAUDIA:  (To

the old man.) One of the girls who was with us has disappeared. OLD MAN:  Disappeared? You mean she drowned? CLAUDIA:  No. Just disappeared. We don’t know how. SANDRO:  It’s my fault. Go ahead. Say it. It’s what you’re thinking. CLAUDIA:  (walking around him): Instead of worrying so much about what I’m thinking, it might have been better if you had tried to understand what Anna was thinking.

122  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts OLD MAN:  Did

you look behind the house? She could have fallen from those rocks… (off) Same thing happened a month ago with a lamb. All day I looked for him. It wasn’t until night I heard him bleating. Seems he’d strayed. (film script 47–8)

In fact, the weather on the island has become stormy (black clouds, a waterspout, thunder and howling winds are highlighted), and Anna might indeed have been buffeted and blown off a cliff, just as Socrates speculates might have been the case with the Athenian princess. (The mention in the dialogue of the Aeolian Islands points toward an obvious geographical subtext, as the name derives from Aeolus, the classical god of the winds, under whose command was, for of course, the North Wind Boreas of Plato’s myth.) Or it might have been suicide—although her father points out that since a Bible has been found in her baggage (along with an Italian translation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night), this seems unlikely since she appears to be a religious Catholic for whom choosing suicide, he hopes, would have been out of the question. (The erotic entanglements in Fitzgerald’s novel and the contrast with the sacred scriptures suggest a conflict in Anna’s mind between mystical and purely sensual versions of love as evoked in The Symposium and by Titian’s famous painting Sacred and Profane Love, inspired by Renaissance Neoplatonism.) Since her body is never found on land or in the sea, the mystery of Anna’s vanishing remains without an explanation. It is interesting to note that Antonioni later revealed to his friend the French novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet12 that he had written and filmed a scene in which Anna’s body was recovered from the sea but decided not to include it in the final cut, allegedly for timing reasons. This sounds like an evasive excuse, when it was more likely, as was no doubt the case of Joan Lindsay in her novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, that Antonioni’s decision was based on the desire to intensify—and not to dissipate—the mystery of Anna’s disappearance. Robbe-­Grillet calls this decision a “stroke of genius” (Robbe-Grillet 224: “un coup de génie”). But why then was Anna’s body never found? Was she carried off by a god—a divine rapture in mid-twentieth century? The frequent mention of a shark sighting earlier in the film suggests that something life-threatening menaces Anna, even if it turns out that her own cry of “shark!” is a lie. So, in Antonioni’s film, as in the myth of Oreithuia and Boreas, a fiercely blowing wind could have played a significant role. For cultured Italians like Antonioni, the myths of classical antiquity are nothing exotic or foreign but rather constitute a cherished part of their Greco-­Roman cultural heritage. And, as for Plato’s theory of love, far from being something distant and strange, it had been greatly admired and cultivated in the Italian courts of the Renaissance. This would make all the more natural Antonioni’s

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  123 appropriation of Platonic theory and myth in his film as a latent cultural context in which Anna’s drama would play out. Yet ­L’avventura has remained more than a bit of an enigma. In a later essay (1976), Antonioni wrote, “I am convinced that whatever a director says about himself or his work is of no help in understanding the work itself” (Antonioni 2001 78), and this may account for the fact that Antonioni’s own rare and reluctant attempts at commentary are not impressive, for instance, the banality of his statement that “the disappearance of a girl during the period of several days is meant to symbolize the fragility of emotions in a real situation” (Antonioni 2007 135). More pertinently, he recalls a scene that was later cut, in which “Claudia, Anna’s friend, is with other friends on the island. They are making all possible speculations about the disappearance of the girl. But there are no answers” (Antonioni 2007 81). In his review in the New York Times (February 19, 2007), Bosley Crowther wrote, What Michelangelo Antonioni… is trying to get across in this highly touted Italian mystery drama (which is what we take it to be) is a secret he seems to be determined to conceal from the audience. Indeed he stated frankly to a reporter from this paper last week that he expects the customers to search for their own meanings. “I want the audience to work,” he said. So, let’s get to work—let’s examine another possible clue indicating the presence of a Platonic cryptic subtext, which is Anna’s state of mind just before her disappearance. Anna has been in a troubled and sometimes angry mood from the first scene of the film onward, and, after they arrive on the island, she and her fiancé Sandro have been having a serious talk together, which ends on a note of bitter dissatisfaction on her part: SANDRO:  Believe

me, Anna, words are no help. They only confuse things. I love you. Isn’t that enough? She stares at him as he says this, but pulls away as he edges closer. ANNA:  No. It’s not enough. (Pause.) I’d like to spend some time all by myself. SANDRO  (taking her arm): But you just said that a month without me… ANNA  (passionately): I mean longer, two months, a year, three years! She gets up and walks away. He stares after her, completely baffled. Anna leans against a rock, her back to Sandro…. ANNA:  Yes, I know it’s absurd. I’m very unhappy. The thought of losing you makes me want to die. (She turns toward him.) And yet… I don’t feel you anymore. Sandro comes up to her and strokes her hair again.

124  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts SANDRO:  No

even yesterday, at my house? You didn’t feel me then? Anna turns angrily and stares at him silently. ANNA:  You always have to drag things down… (film script 35–6) It is clear that, unlike her fiancé Sandro, who, as a typical homme moyen sensuel, accepts living life as it comes without too much e­ xistential angst, Anna is someone who wants more out of life and love than sex and marriage. Sandro will later comment that his love for her seemed to not be enough, and that what she wanted was to be alone. She suffers from what might call a divine discontent. She is, one surmises, deeply unhappy living on the surface of things. Like Miranda in Picnic at Hanging Rock, she is almost too good for this world, and is ready, in her own tormented way, for initiation into the higher mysteries of love that others cannot understand or appreciate. Antonioni does not specify the nature of these mysteries, but he leaves viewers to wonder whether her disappearance is somehow correlated with her state of dissatisfaction with ordinary forms of love (Profane Love, in Platonic terms). But, again, Anna’s state of mind, in spite of her radical discontent, does not seem suicidal. So was her subsequent death—if indeed she died—purely accidental? Just before she and Sandro speak together, the camera catches her stepping up a rocky ledge, presumably in order to make her way up the cliff. When we view this scene retrospectively from the standpoint of Peter Weir’s much-admired scene in which Miranda climbs up Hanging Rock and then disappears, never to be seen again, one is tempted to see Anna, like Miranda, as someone whose physical ascension is fraught with philosophical symbolism: the process of spiritual ascension that is at the heart of the Platonic initiation into the mysteries of love. Anna’s fiancé Sandro and her best friend Claudia spend much of the second half of the film ostensibly searching for her on the mainland, although in fact, they seem to be distracting themselves from their grief over her loss by attempts to console themselves: Sandro by casual sex with a high-class prostitute and by flirting and even proposing marriage to Claudia, whom he had only met three days earlier; Claudia by almost becoming Anna by stepping into the sexual role of her best friend and Sandro’s fiancée. But these attempts at distraction—these attempts to deny their grief—do not work in the end. The final scene of the film, where both of them break down in tears, is fraught with ambiguity, and can be interpreted in a number of ways. But the way I prefer is to see Claudia and Sandro at last giving in to their grief and beginning the process of mourning someone whose value they have finally come to fully ­ iranda recognize. For them and for the spectators, Anna seems, like M (and like Plato’s Oreithuia) but in a less obvious way, to embody that ­Platonic type of love that seeks transcendence and freedom more than pleasure and marital happiness. Anna becomes a more powerful presence

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  125 through her mysterious and unexplained vanishing, and this provides her with a role in the film that one can only call “cryptically mythic.” The most surprising and unexpected subtextual presence of the ­Platonic myth of Boreas and Oreithuia is to be found, of all places, in Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary. So incongruous did the idea at first seem to me—the idea that Emma Bovary, the provincial adulteress, whose brief amorous career ends in a grotesque suicide, could be seen as a victim of a divine rapture, and as the heroine of a failed Platonic initiation—that I resisted it for many months, until finally the evidence for it became overwhelming. The key to the mystery turned out to be the enigmatic figure of the Blind Man, a figure whose presence in the novel Flaubert was late in developing. The blind beggar does not appear in Flaubert’s early sketches for the novel, and is a character whose importance and place in the narrative Flaubert may have developed only gradually (see Sachs and Wetherill). In other words, the figure of the Blind Man (l’Aveugle: ­always capitalized in the French text) is probably a later addition to the text, and may be said to represent a later stage of reflection on the part of the author on a latent symbolic dimension of his novel and its leading character. The Blind Man is a character that from the start seems to be the bearer of some unspecified symbolic weight, and the song he sings outside the room where Emma Bovary lies dying is significantly placed at the climactic moment of the narrative. But the words of the song have proved baffling, and critics as well as filmmakers have neglected or ignored it. Two questions in particular seem inescapable: what does the song mean? And why did Flaubert place it at the end of such a crucial scene at the climax of his novel? Not the least of the incongruities, as we shall see, is that the text of the blind beggar’s song is not even by Flaubert! Emma Bovary’s death scene (again, arguably the climax of the narrative) is apparently all set to demonstrate (quite surprisingly, given Flaubert’s demonstrable lack of overt Catholic piety) the consolation of religion in the form of the rite of extreme unction given on her deathbed to the adulterous and suicidal heroine. She even gives the crucifix the priest holds toward her “the most passionate kiss of love she had ever given” (Flaubert 2010 288), and soon “her face bore an expression of serenity, as if the sacrament had cured her” (289). But just at this moment something disrupts the scene and spoils the apparently sanctified atmosphere: it is the “harsh voice” of the blind beggar singing a ribald song: How oft the warmth of the sun above Makes a pretty young girl dream of love. Emma sat up like corpse galvanized, her hair loose, her eyes fixed and wide open.

126  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts Behind the scythe at harvest time Gathering she goes, My Nanette bending to the wheat Down the fruitful rows. “The Blind Man!” she cried out. And Emma burst into laughter, horrible, frantic, despairing laughter, thinking she saw the hideous face of the poor wretch looming like terror itself in the darkness of eternity. The wind blew good and hard that day, And snatched her petticoat away! A convulsion flung her back on the mattress. They all drew near. She had ceased to exist. (290)

The attempt to decrypt the code of the symbolic dimension of the Blind Man and his ribald song may be said to have begun as early as the trial on January 31, 1857 of the author, his publisher and the printer for offense against religion and public morals. For the prosecuting attorney, the Blind Man’s presence in what could have been otherwise taken as an exemplary Catholic death scene demonstrated that Flaubert had intended to ridicule religion by mixing the sacred and the pornographic together. Flaubert’s own attorney (who won the case handily) insisted that the novel was eminently moral since the Blind Man symbolized public opinion, which rightly condemned Emma even as religion offered her the hope of forgiveness and salvation. It is well worth noting how both attorneys focused some of their attention on this particular appearance of the Blind Man,13 whereas most later critics did the opposite, giving l’Aveugle short shrift, if any attention at all—with the conspicuous exception of Murray Sachs, who maintained that the importance at the novel’s climax of this unexpected appearance of the blind beggar “seems plainly intended to confer upon him a special aura of symbolic meaning and an importance to the novel far out of proportion to the brevity of his few moments on its stage” (Sachs 72). For Sachs, what the Blind Man symbolizes is something “whose meaning is not immediately clear and understandable to all careful readers” (73), mainly because “the text of the death scene contains not one word or phrase which hints at what the blind beggar is intended to symbolize” (74). (Sachs has essentially defined here the nature of a cryptic symbolic subtext.) After dismissing several previous attempts to decode the symbolic meaning (Damnation, Nemesis, Fate, etc.), Sachs settles on his own: “he [the Blind Man] stands quite simply for reality… in all its raw and brutal truth” (74–5). For him, Emma, who has been presented throughout the novel as greatly given to romantic illusions, must now, at the

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  127 moment of her death, confront reality after the failure of the last of her “flights into illusion”: “the consolation of religion.” In her death scene the blind beggar, writes Sachs, “symbolizes, for Emma and for the reader, the abrupt displacement of an illusion by the grim, ugly truth” (76). This is certainly, up to a point, a persuasive interpretation. There is certainly also some truth in the remarks of Alison Fairlie, who finds that one minor character has a particularly symbolic part to play: the blind beggar… The beggar conveys the menace of the grotesque behind all human pretensions; there is a fitting irony in making his jingling bawdy song, with its caricature of sensuality and seduction, bite into her last moments. (Fairlie 36–7) I find both these explanations convincing, at least as regards the possible cause of Emma’s “frantic” and “despairing” laughter. But, for the benefit of readers alert to the possibility of the presence of an ironic cryptic subtext—“ironic” in the sense that it is something that Emma herself does not realize consciously—I would like to make the case for interpreting the figure of the Blind Man as a grotesque and degraded image of Eros, that is, of how Flaubert represented the ­classical god of Love as transformed by his repression and rejection by the vulgarity and insensitivity of the nineteenth-century French provincial bourgeois culture the novelist loved to excoriate. The reality principle of Sach’s explanation thus is incarnated in the dreadful degradation of an ideal of Love by bourgeois money grubbing and heartless materialism, which resulted symbolically in the Blind Man as a grotesquely damaged nineteenth-century version of the classical figure of Eros, whose power, however repressed, was nevertheless still impressive, as Freud was to demonstrate several generations later. This revisioning of the symbolic dimension of the Blind Man also ­results in a revisioning of Emma Bovary herself in terms of an enhanced appreciation of the tragic nature of her struggle to assert the value of Eros, however blindly and impulsively, against the prejudices of the French provincial bourgeois culture in which she lives. In other words, she has a potentially heroic side that Sainte-Beuve applauded, when he called her a “creature capable of the nobility of dreams and aspiring to a better world” (Flaubert 2005 393). Charles Baudelaire went even further, in a review that, according to Paul de Man, was “the only one to satisfy Flaubert completely,” quoting the novelist as saying to the poet “you have penetrated the inner mystery of the work as if you and I shared the same mind. You have felt and understood me entirely” (Flaubert 2005 391). Baudelaire had written of Emma Bovary that “she possesses all the attributes of a worthy hero, albeit in the disguise of a disgraced victim” (Flaubert 2005 407), adding that “when all is said,

128  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts this woman has real greatness” (409). It is her complex relationship with the Blind Man that provides, I would maintain, the final dramatic context for the tragic nature of her status, just as the Blind Man’s song sung at the moment of her death provides the clue for the presence of a cryptic Platonic subtext as the ultimate philosophical context for understanding her heroic struggles. The first description of the blind beggar in the novel occurs as Emma is returning via stagecoach from the city of Rouen, scene of her passionate trysts with her second lover Léon, to her home, where her husband Charles is waiting for her return after an absence of several days. She is alone in the stagecoach and misses Léon terribly. “Emma kneeled on the cushions… She sobbed, called out to Léon, and sent him tender messages and kisses that were lost in the wind” (Flaubert 2010 236). It is significantly at this moment of extreme passionate longing that the grotesque figure of the blind beggar first appears to her: On the hillside, there was a poor wretch wandering along with his stick amid all the coaches. Layers of rags covered his shoulders and an old staved-in beaver hat, pulled down into a bowl shape, hid his face; but when he took it off, he revealed, in place of eyelids, two gaping, bloody sockets. (236) This grotesque figure is soon to occupy a very special place in Emma’s tragic story. He is a beggar, he is blind, and, although nameless, his name could just as well be Eros. Eros was defined by the wise woman ­Diotima in Plato’s Symposium as a poor beggar (like his mother ­Poverty or Penia), who, lacking everything, is always searching diligently (like his father Contrivance or Poros) to fulfill his needs by hook or by crook. Later Greco-Roman culture would represent Eros as blindfolded, shooting his arrows blindly and thereby creating erotic tragedies and comedies alike. The conflation of these two figures in Flaubert’s mind produced the figure of a “Blind Beggar.” Nineteenth-century provincial French bourgeois culture, with its obsession with money, marriage, and social respectability, despised and rejected such a wayward god as Eros, and relegated him to the margins of society, where he led a precarious life, trapped in this grotesque and even horrifying disguise, emblematic of the contempt in which he was held. Still, however culturally repressed and degraded, this grotesque image of Eros may be said to represent the archetypal force behind Emma’s desperate attempts to live out her dreams of romantic passion in bourgeois provincial society—he is, so to speak, her patron deity. The beggar’s song itself is also highly significant, although Sachs and most other critics have nothing to say about it. The very sound of the

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  129 beggar’s voice as he sings clinging to her carriage makes a deep impression on Emma, and Flaubert describes its effect on her as follows: His voice [voix], weak at first and wailing, would grow shrill. It would linger [se trainaît] in the darkness, like the indistinct lamentation of some vague [vague] distress; and, heard through the ringing of the harness bells, the murmur of the trees, and the rumbling of the hollow body of the coach, it had something distant [lointain] about it that overwhelmed Emma. It descended into the depths of her soul like a whirlwind into an abyss and carried her away into the spaces of a boundless melancholy. (237; my emphasis) For Emma there was thus something numinous about the blind beggar’s voice, but Flaubert gives us no clue as to why it had such an extraordinary effect on her and why it “descended into the depths of her soul.” This is one of the many incongruities that puzzle the reader even today but can serve as valuable clues in the detection of the cryptic subtext. There is also a strong suggestion in the text that it was the same voice, or something much like it, that Emma had heard earlier, as Wetherill points out: “his [the Blind Man’s] voice is reminiscent of that heard by Emma when Rodolphe [her first lover] seduced her” (Wetherill 36, ft. 8): Then she heard in the far distance [au loin], beyond the woods, a vague [vague] and prolonged cry, a voice [voix] that lingered [se trainaît], and she listened to it silently as it mingled like a strain of music with the last vibrations of her throbbing nerves. (141) In these two short passages there are four significant repetitions of words and, given Flaubert’s extreme precision and deliberation in his use of language, they no doubt aim in establishing in the reader’s mind a parallelism concerning Emma’s deep response to the sound of the beggar’s voice. No doubt, in the first scene there is no direct indication that it is the distant song of the blind beggar that she is listening to. But, given the verbal repetitions (“voice,” “lingering,” “distant,” “vague”), it seems plausible to assume that the blind beggar’s voice is what she hears in both scenes, just as she will hear it at the moment of her death; and that in all three scenes it has a profound effect on her. This adds to the mystery: why should the voice of a grotesque and ugly beggar have such significance for her? As we have seen, Murray Sachs saw in the beggar a figure who symbolized “the chill of reality” (Sachs 76)—but is that entirely sufficient as an explanation? I have suggested that the voice represents some deep archetypal dimension of the figure of Eros or Love, who may be said to act as Emma’s tutelary deity—but a figure of Love

130  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts disparaged and despised by nineteenth-century provincial ­bourgeois ­society, and so reduced to a grotesque form. The actual words of the song of the blind beggar deserve much more attention than critics (including even Sachs, who neglects them completely) have given them, although in the 1857 trial both the prosecuting attorney (who quotes its last four lines) and the attorney for the defense (who quotes the song from beginning to end) make the song a key piece of evidence for the opposing cases they are making. How oft the warmth of the sun above Makes a pretty girl dream of love. Behind the scythe at harvest time Gathering she goes, My Nanette bending to the wheat Down the fruitful rows. The wind blew good and hard that day, And snatched her petticoat away![Et le jupon court s’envola!] As we have noted, Emma hears the words of the song twice: once while in the carriage returning home from a tryst with Léon, and the other time at her death. The first time, however, she hears correctly only the first two lines, and then imagines that the rest of the song “was all about birds, sunshine, and leaves” (Flaubert 2010 237)—a rather ironic misprision, as we shall see. Given the importance that the song assumes at the climax of the novel, it is more than surprising that its words are not even by Flaubert but rather are taken from a novel by the eighteenth-century writer Restif de la Bretonne.14 The song is mildly pornographic: a young peasant girl is partially undressed by the wind as she bends over gleaning in a field; her blown off petticoat would have partly denuded her since feminine underwear would not yet have been worn by lower-class women. In some ways, the song can be interpreted as a cruelly sardonic take on Emma’s high romantic seriousness, in that via the analogy with Nanette it reduces her story to that of a comic undressing or détroussage on the part of the victim of a kind of ribald practical joke. As such an inglorious ­victim of the power of Eros, there is nothing romantically tragic about her. One could leave it at that, were it not for the fact that the song is reminiscent of the myth in Plato’s Phaedrus. There is a cryptic correspondence between the story of Nanette and how the wind blew off her petticoat and the myth of Oreithuia abducted by the north wind Boreas. The former can be said to represent a low mimetic or even parodic v­ ersion of the Platonic mythological tale; the latter is a serious example of divine rapture: a young girl carried off into the air by the amorous wind god just as the (metaphorically) amorous wind made Nanette’s petticoat fly off [s’envola]. But in the Phaedrus the outcome was also seen as possibly

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  131 tragic, in that the rationalistic explanation given for the myth by S­ ocrates was that the young girl, buffeted by the north wind, simply fell to her death on the rocks below. The Platonic myth thus has two dimensions: one idealistic and romantic, the other realistic and tragic. This provides a similarly ambiguous context for the Blind Man’s song in Madame ­Bovary. Her fate can be seen as tragic—a fall leading to death—but also as sublime, as a numinous example of a divine abduction, an ascension into the realm of the divine through the overwhelming power of Love. At the novel’s censorship trial, the blind beggar’s song was interpreted by the prosecution as offensively pornographic, but by the defense, it was allegorized as a condemnation by public opinion of Emma’s romantic pursuit of passion. For the prosecuting attorney, it spoiled the effect of Emma’s pious death scene; for the attorney for the defense it provided a highly moral stricture on the career of an adulterous wife. However, once one detects a Platonic cryptic and mythic subtext, it becomes a clue to the discovery of buried treasure, whereby the possibilities of interpretation will be greatly enriched. It will be then possible to regard Emma from a new perspective: as the tragic victim of a divine force—the archetypal power of Eros as the Blind Beggar as also in Plato’s Phaedrus as embodied in the amorous wind god—that swept her off her feet, ravished her, and then (as in Socrates’ rationalistic explanation) caused her tragic death. In the novel, the fact that “Blind Man” is capitalized once again when Emma refers to him at the moment of her death suggests that he represents not only an individual blind beggar but also “the Blind One” in a mythological sense, i.e., the god Eros, whether Emma realizes this or not. Similarly, Emma is not only the bourgeois protagonist of a bourgeois tragedy but also the heroine of a mythological and cosmic drama. But is that the whole story? In fact, it is clear that Emma does not commit suicide for loss of love but rather for loss of money and fear of social disgrace. Daring romantic heroine though she may have been, by the end of the novel she may be said to have betrayed Love for Money and ­Respectability, and to have ultimately given in the very forces of bourgeois convention that she courageously resisted earlier. It is significant that toward the end, overwhelmed by debt and fearing that her husband would discover the desperate financial plight in which she had put him, she met the Blind Man again by chance and “filled with disgust, tossed him a five-franc coin over her shoulder. It was her entire fortune. It seemed to her a fine thing to throw it away like that” (266). The ambivalence of her gesture expresses the strange bond between the two, and the mixed feelings—“disgust” but also a kind of reckless generosity—that link her with this grotesque embodiment of Eros. Since the figure of the Blind Man seems to be a later addition to the manuscript of Madame Bovary,15 Flaubert had likely felt at some point in the composition of his novel the need to add a cryptic perspective on

132  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts the plight of his heroine—a more sympathetic perspective, more appreciative of the way she heroically flaunted bourgeois convention in the name of Love, however degraded this ideal may have been by the provincial bourgeois culture that surrounded her. To intuit in the figure of the Blind Man a cryptic symbolic dimension as a complex representation of the figure of Eros is to open up the novel to a new interpretation. Just as the romantic ideal of Love was despised by the provincial bourgeois society that was so frequently the butt of Flaubert’s sarcasm, so the cryptic mythic associations that we have detected enable the recognition of a repressed but still powerful force of Eros, of which Emma is indeed, in her limited and misguided way, the devotee. The intense and sometimes depressing realism of Flaubert’s novel is thus somewhat balanced—and compensated for—by the cryptic romantic symbolism. Given the symbol’s cryptic nature, it is understandable that many critics and readers have not known what to make of the potential symbolic significance of the Blind Man. Thus Wetherill concludes that “the Blind Man, far from being an absolute symbol of anything… simply reinforces the impression of meaningless experience that typifies the majority of Flaubert’s works” (Wetherill 42). The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who had claimed, in his remarkable critical and autobiographical study of the effect that reading Madame Bovary had had on his life (The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary), that Emma’s death scene had saved him from suicide in his youth (16f.), nevertheless only casually refers once, at the opening of his study, to the Blind Man (as “a symbol of tragic destiny” [20]). In fact, the Blind Man, whose intervention occurs at the climax of the suicide and death scene that affected Vargas Llosa so much, is a figure whom he seems to have completely forgotten later on. Most devastating of all is Dacia Maraini’s recent assessment: This scene [in Emma’s death scene] of the blind man is clearly out of tune with the rest of the book, devoid of the story’s limpid conciseness, lacking the soberness of the narrative rhythm. It is an added bit of exasperated romanticism, a little touch of “poor taste” of the kind for which Flaubert would have acerbically reproached Louise [Colet], the falsifying intrusion of rhetoric upon events, of symbol upon object. (Maraini 133) The scene, she concludes, is nothing but “a descent into the vulgarity of a too insistent, redundant, and emblematic punishment.” Jean Renoir’s 1934 film Madame Bovary gives pride of place to the Blind Man’s presence in heroine’s deathbed scene, which is the point at which the film (unlike the novel) comes to an end. Not only is his song sung loudly and clearly from beginning to end, but before Emma

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  133 cries out “the Blind Man!” the camera has focused twice on the figure of the singing Blind Man in the street outside her window. (In the novel, of course, the Blind Man is present in this scene only through the words of his song.) Postwar filmmakers, by contrast, seem to have been at a loss as to what to do with the Blind Man in their cinematic versions of Madame Bovary. Vincent Minnelli’s popular ­Hollywood film adaption of Flaubert’s novel (1949) omits any trace of the Blind Man. The same is almost true of Claude Chabrol’s later French ­version; in spite of his love for Flaubert’s text, Chabrol lets the Blind Man barely appear, and the words of his song are almost inaudible at the moment of Emma’s death. Since Chabrol has otherwise followed the text of the novel closely, it seems that he, too, simply did not know what to do with the Blind Man. As for Sophie Barthe’s 2014 version, the director omits the figure of the Blind Beggar completely. Only Ketan Mehta’s Indian transposition (Maya Memsab, 1992) ­recreates a fairly full character corresponding to Flaubert’s beggar—no longer blind but with a song that he repeats at intervals, the meaning of which seems to be that the female protagonist Maya is herself the victim of “maya,” the illusion-creating cosmic force that in Hindu ­Vedantic philosophy deceives and ensnares the world, thus providing a different but equally philosophical subtext comparable—but this time in a completely overt manner—to Flaubert’s cryptic Platonism. It is to Ketan Mehta’s credit that he managed to include his own version of the figure of the Blind Man prominently in his film, and that he seems to have intuited that his song was the bearer of a message that put his adulterous housewife’s tragedy in a somewhat philosophical and poetic perspective.16 After the scene of Emma’s death, the story of the Blind Man takes on a new and peculiar twist in the novel. M. Homais, from whose pharmacy Emma was able to steal the arsenic that she used for her suicide, was represented by Flaubert as the quintessential embodiment of bourgeois conventionality and vulgarity. At one point, Homais tries—­ unsuccessfully—to cure the Blind Man’s physical sufferings. But, in point of fact, the pharmacist had already manifested real hostility toward him. He had exclaimed to Emma earlier in the novel: I can’t understand why the authorities continue to tolerate such dishonest occupations! These unfortunate creatures ought to be locked up and forced to do some sort of work! Progress, upon my word, moves at the pace of a tortoise! We are wallowing in utter barbarity! (Flaubert 2010 266) It is thus in the name of Progress that the civic-minded pharmacist sees to it, after Emma’s funeral, that the Blind Man is incarcerated on a trumped-up charge. At first, this did not work.

134  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts But they released him. He [Homais] started up again. It was a battle. The victory went to Homais; for his enemy was condemned to detention for life in a poorhouse. (306) The symbolic aspect of this event is clear: Homais is the Blind Man’s enemy, and embodies a vicious form of provincial narrow-mindedness and hostility to romantic passion that would gladly lock up Eros f­ orever— would repress him as much as possible in the name of bourgeois respectability and of progress. In this latently allegorical battle between the power of love (the Blind Man) and of bourgeois respectability (Homais), it was ultimately respectability that won out. The Blind Beggar is denied even a modicum of freedom by the end of the novel. Finally, there is in Madame Bovary’s evocation of the Blind Man yet another possible cryptic subtext: Apuleius’ Golden Ass. This ancient predecessor of the modern novel may have played an important role in Flaubert’s novel’s linking of overt realism with the covert idealism of a Platonic perspective. Before beginning to write Part II of Madame ­Bovary, i.e., well before he created the increasingly richly symbolic figure of the Blind Man, Flaubert had read The Golden Ass (Steegmuller 1968 264), and this late Roman prose narrative quickly became for him a kind of fetish and a touchstone. Francis Steegmuller writes that One of Flaubert’s favorite books was the Golden Ass. For him it was one of the greatest of the masterpieces; when he read it he felt “giddy and dazzled,” and he was enchanted by the way it combined “incense and urine, bestiality and mysticism.” During the first two years and a half of his work on Madame Bovary, when he was seeing [his mistress] Louise [Colet] about once every three months and writing her at least one long letter a week, … he fell into the habit of getting her to inquire, of each new person [coming to her literary salon] she mentioned, his opinion of the Golden Ass. He made the book a kind of criterion… and the failure of Louise’s literary gentlemen to value… the Golden Ass lessened considerably the already mediocre opinion he had of most of them. (Steegmuller 1968 283) This literary infatuation on the part of Flaubert may actually help ­explain why he eventually came to compensate for the sometimes unrelenting realism of his novel with a strangely idealistic if cryptic symbolism centered on the Blind Man, the beaten and battered standard bearer of Love in the wastelands of nineteenth-century bourgeois provincial culture. For Apuleius’ narrative could very well be subtitled, as was Madame ­Bovary, “Provincial Ways” for its evocation of provincial life in Thessaly, a rather backward and witchcraft-ridden province

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  135 of the Roman empire. The simplicity and directness of its low mimetic mode can astonish readers even today for its vivid if gritty realism—for ­Flaubert, its “urine” and “bestiality”—that anticipates by many centuries the development of realism in the modern novel. But along with its low mimetic realism of Apuleius’ narrative, there is also a substantial section (almost one quarter of the text) that deals ­ latonic with myth of Cupid and Psyche, a story that, while not exactly a P myth, has been seen as remarkably close to the spirit of Platonism (i.e., to what Flaubert called its “incense” and “mysticism”). It is also a story centered on the problem of blindness for Psyche’s problems begin when she is no longer content to make contact with her husband Cupid in total darkness but rather insists on seeing his physical form. So, one wonders: is Emma Bovary a modern Psyche? It would be quite a stretch, although one not entirely impossible. There is no way of knowing to what degree the author imagined, perhaps only late in the construction of his novel, bringing together Apuleian gritty realism and Platonic mysticism, only to conclude that the latter could only make its presence felt in the text through innuendo and symbolic suggestiveness; to give it greater prominence would have risked disturbing the integrity of the dominant realistic tone of the narrative. For Apuleius himself had shown that the gritty realism of his main narrative was incompatible with the delicate religiosity of the tale of Psyche and Cupid, which is only poorly integrated into his Latin text. So, for Flaubert, Emma Bovary could only be contextualized as the tragic heroine of a Platonic drama in such a way as would only be apparent to the happy few—and even then! By way of a coda, I would like to make just a few minor points that buttress the hypothesis of Flaubert’s deliberate cryptic use of Plato’s Phaedrus in Madame Bovary. Flaubert was a great lover of classical literature, so we can assume that classical references and subtexts fell easily within his purview, including of course Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus. In particular, as regards Flaubert’s familiarity with the myth of Boreas and Oreithuia, two more points reinforce this assumption. First of all, Flaubert and his friend Louis Bouilhet had helped ­Flaubert’s mistress Louise Colet (Steegmuller 286, 304–5, 310) compose her prize-winning poem “L’Acropole d’Athènes” (1853), in which one finds several mentions of the river Ilissus, the scene of Oreithuia’s abduction. Second, and even more importantly, there are two mentions of this little river in Flaubert’s Voyage en Orient (1849–1851) and in his account of his travels in Greece (Flaubert 2006 395, 430). In it, Flaubert quotes directly (401) from a French translation of the first volume of the ­second-century Greek traveler and geographer Pausanias’ The ­Description of Greece, commonly used then and even today as a guidebook. We can assume he had the book in hand while he traveled in and around Athens (the subject of Pausanias’ first volume), when he mentions that thorns had painfully scratched his ankle while he was coming back from the banks

136  Cryptic Platonic Subtexts of the Ilissos (395). If so, he would in all probability have read during this excursion the following passage from Pausanias: The rivers that flow through Athenian territory are the Ilissos and its tributary the Eridanus river. This Ilissos is the river by which Oreithuia was playing when, according to the story, she was carried off by the North Wind Boreas. (Pausanias 1918 I.19.5) Thus we can assume that Flaubert was already familiar with the Boreas and Oreithuia myth, long before he recognized in it the possibility of making it a significant cryptic subtext for the blind beggar’s song in Madame Bovary.

Notes 1 For David Rosand, The Tempest is “The Single Most Interpreted of ­Renaissance Images.” (David Rosand, review of Salvatore Settis, ­Giorgione’s Tempest: Interpreting the Hidden Subject, in Renaissance Quarterly 46.2 (1993), 368). 2 Jan Morris, Pleasures of a Tangled Life. New York: Vintage, 1990, 170. 3 Regina Stefaniak, “On Founding Fathers and the Necessity of Place.” ­Artibus et Historiae 29.58 (2008), 121–55. 4 In the Greek text 203a–e. 5 In De Amore II.7 and again in VI.7. See Ficino (1985). 6 See Stephen J. Campbell, “Giorgione’s Tempesta, Studiolo Culture, and the Renaissance Lucretius.” Renaissance Quarterly 56.2 (Summer 2003), 308. 7 See note on 12.1910-12 in: Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 381. 8 See June W. Allison, “A Literary Coincidence? Joyce and Plato.” Joyce Quarterly 16.3 (Spring, 1979), 267–82. 9 In the Greek text “teleous aei teletas teloumenos” (249 c5 d1). R. Hackforth, in his commentary on the Phaedrus, states that the words are “untranslatable,” but settles for “approaches to the full vision of the perfect mysteries” in his own translation. (Plato 1952 ft. 1 and 87). 10 See Yvonne Rousseau’s essay in “A Commentary on Chapter Eighteen” (Lindsay Secret 34–54). 11 In 1962 it was declared “The Second Best Film of All Time (After Citizen Kane).” by the British Film Institute. Michelangelo Antonioni: The Complete Films. Ed. Seymour Chatman and Paul Duncan New York: Taschen, 2008. 30. 12 Alain Robbe-Grillet, Préface à une vie d’écrivain. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2005, 223–5. 13 See Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary. Ed. Margaret Cohen. Trans. E ­ leanor Marx Aveling and Paul de Man. New York and London: Norton, 2005. The governments brief and the speech for the defense are translated on pages 314–85; the blind beggar’s song is quoted and addressed p. 331 (speech for the prosecution) and pp. 381–2 (speech for the defense). 14 Restif de la Bretonne, L’Année des Dames Nationales, volume I, 12. See: “Flaubert, Guttinguer et Bouilhet: Robert Lépinet, commentaires critiques de deux lettres 1855 et 1857.” Les amis de Flaubert 6 (1955). 15 See Wetherill 40–1.

Cryptic Platonic Subtexts  137 16 The translation of the Hindi song (my thanks to Prof. Rita Banerjee) runs as follows: The bale of wood fell open, The blanket burst open, A broken gourd, Spilled water (liquid) Lightning strikes, Golden bird. The sun at night, The moon in the day, The noose is watching. If you don’t understand, It’s a puzzle. If you do understand, Then you are a person close to a god. A river flowing on highlands, The golden bird. Where did you go, Golden bird? Where did you go, Golden bird? Where did you go, Golden bird? The lyrics of the song seem to play on the suggestive nature of the name Maya, the Indian Madame Bovary’s first name: cosmic Illusion, the unfathomable mystery of life, the “puzzle,” the unanswerable question.

5 Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts

Proust’s modernist use, in Time Regained, of hermetic signs and symbols found in the ritual of the Roman Catholic Mass is roughly analogous to T.S. Eliot’s later use of similarly cryptic allusions to Christian mysteries at the opening of his play The Cocktail Party (1949). The “comedy,” as Eliot labels it in the subtitle, turns out to be an odd mixture of drawing room comedy and (like Eliot’s earlier Murder in the Cathedral) mystery play—genres one would be likely to predict would mix no better than oil and vinegar. The Cocktail Party contains a peculiarly cryptic liturgical subtext that suggests a daring comparison between celebrating the rite of Holy Communion in a church and giving a cocktail party in a drawing room. In addition, The Cocktail Party, via a cryptic classical dramatic subtext, also attempts to fashion a modern drawing room comedy out of elements taken from an ancient Greek tragicomedy, Euripides’ Alcestis, which was itself an unusual hybridization of comic satyr play and serious tragedy. To have succeeded in doing all of this at once would certainly be hailed as a modernist tour de force; even to have partly succeeded, as I think is rather the case here, is still an impressive achievement. But, oddly enough, Eliot initially did his best to keep concealed the subtextual presence of the Alcestis. So, what might have motivated him, especially given his great admiration of classical literature, to d ­ eliberately conceal such a prestigious classical hypertextual relationship? Let us address this question first by taking a brief look at an earlier dramatist’s equally strange reluctance to acknowledge a prestigious debt to classical antiquity—a paratextual instance provided by the preface that Jean Racine wrote for his tragedy Phèdre (1677). Racine begins his preface by stating rather offhandedly that “this is another tragedy I have taken from Euripides,” which, if the statement were entirely true, would have draped his neoclassical hypertext in the unique prestige of a classical Greek subtext (Euripides’ Hippolytus). Schooled by his J­ ansenist masters in Greek as well as Latin, at a time when a knowledge of Greek was still uncommon and the Hellenist consequently enjoyed great prestige, Racine was well equipped—as much so as Milton, for instance—to read Hippolytus in the original and hence to endow his tragedy with some of the prestige directly borrowed from the Athenian model. No

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  139 doubt, Racine claims that he has improved on his classical subtext in several small ways, as he admits with seeming modesty throughout his preface. The main point of his preface is to show just how necessary it was for him to adapt the Euripidean model in such a way as to satisfy the cultural demands and social expectations of his own seventeenth-­ century French audience. For one thing, he notes that his heroine Phèdre differs from her Greek model Phaedra in that she declares her love for her stepson ­H ippolyte directly and in person, not via the intermediary of her attendant, as would have been the proper way for an ­Athenian lady to do an improper thing; by contrast, aristocratic ladies of ­mid-­seventeenth-century France were practiced at conducting their own love affairs directly and would have found the gender segregation of fifth-­century Athens stifling and offensive to their own sense of agency. For another, Racine’s Hippolyte differs from his Greek subtextual model by being in love since a young man devoted to chastity would have seemed bizarre to Racine’s courtly audience, unless of course he had a budding priestly or monastic vocation. Although Racine asserts that he found her name in Virgil’s Aeneid, in fact, he has invented almost out of thin air a character, A ­ ricie, who is not only the object of Hippolyte’s passion but someone who, much like the eponymous heroine of Madame de Lafayette’s novel The Princesse de Clèves, published the year afterward (1678), is emblematic of the tremendous power an apparently weak and vulnerable young woman can wield in love intrigues—another thing Racine’s audience, especially the aristocratic ladies who formed such an important part of it, would have appreciated, remembering their own younger years. But what Racine has curiously concealed in his preface is his even more substantial debt to the Roman philosopher and dramatist Seneca. He makes only one mention of Seneca over the course of his preface, from whose tragedy Phaedra, itself an original hypertextualization of the Euripidean tragedy, he quotes three words in Latin: Hippolytus is accused, in Euripides and in Seneca, of having in fact violated his stepmother: vim corpus tulit. But here [in Racine’s tragedy] he is only accused of having had the intention. I wished to spare Theseus [Hippolytus’ father] of a crisis of emotion which could have made him appear less sympathetic to an audience. (Racine 1989 21) In point of fact, Racine took quite a bit from the Senecan subtext, starting with the title Phaedra, which replaces Euripides’ Hippolytus. This title change is in itself significant for, in Seneca as well as in Racine, Phaedra (rather than Hippolytus, as in Euripides) has become the main character. Major twists and turns of the plot also owe much to Seneca. Whereas in Euripides’ tragedy, Phaedra hangs herself midway through

140  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts the drama, leaving behind a letter tied to her body that falsely accuses Hippolytus, Seneca’s Phaedra commits suicide in Act V, and, like ­Racine’s Phèdre (and unlike Euripides’ Phaedra), the character is present throughout the play. In Euripides, the tragedy ends with a long tearful scene of reconciliation between father (Theseus) and son ­(Hippolytus); in both Seneca and Racine, however, Hippolytus has died before the end of the play, in which the dramatic focus is on Phaedra’s confession—a noble gesture, although it does not, in either play, succeed in winning her husband Theseus’ pardon. In both Seneca and Racine, Phaedra propositions her stepson directly, not, as in Euripides, via her woman attendant as a go-between; upper-class Roman ladies, like their later French counterparts, enjoyed far more freedom and agency than the women of ancient Athens and would have expected much the same of Phaedra. In both Seneca and Racine, the Potiphar’s wife folklore motif lies directly behind the charges leveled at Hippolytus. In the story in ­Genesis 6–20, well known to Racine but probably not to Seneca, the young Hebrew servant Joseph rejects the advances of his Egyptian master’s wife, who then takes advantage of his cloak (that she herself has pulled off of him) as evidence in order to falsely accuse him to her husband. Thus, ­H ippolytus’s sword, left in Phaedra’s hands, is used in Seneca and Racine as evidence for his alleged attempt to rape Phaedra, whereas in Euripides, it is the note that Phaedra wrote before she hanged herself that provided the key piece of evidence against him. There is no need to go on (although one could cite innumerable lines that Racine has translated almost directly from Seneca) since it is clear that the literary debt of Racine’s Phèdre to Seneca’s Phaedra is enormous, even though it goes strangely unacknowledged by Racine in his preface, where he has in effect tried to relegate Seneca’s tragedy to the status of a cryptic subtext. However, in this case, the cryptic subtext was at best a mystery in broad daylight, at least for the classically educated part of his audience since any comparison of the Latin and French texts quickly reveals a clearly significant hypertextual relationship of his Phèdre with Seneca’s Phaedra. Is there any accounting for this? The neoclassical esthetic made it a glorious thing to imitate a classical drama; to imitate two would presumably have been doubly glorious. So, why was Racine so evasive about acknowledging his debt to Seneca? Here, one is tempted to throw up one’s hands—the attempt at secrecy looks totally gratuitous as well as ineffectual. Did Racine simply prefer to highlight his text’s hypertextual relationship with Euripides because being able to effect a transformation of an ancient Greek text could be viewed as a far more remarkable achievement, since very few of Racine’s contemporaries shared his mastery of Greek, than to work with a frequently read Latin text, since Latin was widely used as the lingua franca of scholarship and theology? He must have had a reason—perhaps it was simple scholarly vanity. So, for what it is worth, let us conclude that in his

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  141 preface to his Phèdre, Racine probably preferred to pass as a Euripidean rather than as a Senecan playwright because in his time and place, being Euripidean had more cachet. But what then might have been the motive of T.S. Eliot’s secretiveness as regards the primary Euripidean subtext for The Cocktail Party? For Eliot successfully concealed from his first audiences the fact that the principal dramatic subtext for The Cocktail Party (1949) had been Euripides’ Alcestis and only let the cat out of the bag two years later in his essay Poetry and Drama, first given as a lecture at his alma mater Harvard in 1951.1 In this essay, Eliot notes that his earlier play A Family Reunion (1939), whose classical mythic subtext was the tragic story of the House of Atreus, as dramatized by Aeschylus in his Oresteia, had what he considered in retrospect to be a serious flaw, which was the “the failure of adjustment between the Greek story and the modern situation. I should either have stuck closer to Aeschylus,” he added, “or else taken a great deal more liberty with his myth” (Eliot 1975 143). In The Cocktail Party, Eliot took his own advice and did indeed take “a great deal more liberty” with the myth behind Euripides’ drama of a wife who sacrifices herself in order to save her husband’s life since in Eliot’s modern ­hypertextualization, the wife Lavinia does not die for her husband ­Edward; rather, she has simply left him. Neither does Edward’s lover ­Celia volunteer to die for him; rather, she lives on after their breakup, joins a monastic order, and eventually undergoes a Christian martyrdom. In his Harvard lecture and subsequently published essay, it is disappointing that all Eliot has to say about his cryptic use of a Euripidean subtext is the following: I was still inclined to go to a Greek dramatist for my theme, but I was determined to do so merely as a point of departure [my e­ mphasis], and to conceal the origins so well that nobody would identify them until I pointed them out myself. In this at least I have been successful, for no one of my acquaintance (and no dramatic critics) ­recognized the source of my story in the Alcestis of ­Euripides. In fact, I have had to go into detailed explanation to convince them—I mean, of course, those who were familiar with the plot of that play—of the genuineness of the inspiration. But those who were at first disturbed by the eccentric behaviour of my unknown guest, and his apparently intemperate habits and tendency to burst into song, have found some consolation in having their attention called to the behaviour of ­Heracles in Euripides’ play. (Eliot 1975 144) There will be time later to supply some of the “detailed explanation” concerning the cryptic Euripidean subtext (and the possible reasons for its careful concealment) that Eliot chose to forgo in Poetry and Drama.

142  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts But, before that, it is necessary to focus on the apologetical ­Christian dimension of The Cocktail Party, starting with the first cryptic subtext detectable in the play, which is signaled by brief but quite cryptic ­allusions to fundamental Christian mysteries. The play’s opening scene deals apparently with nothing more substantial than the type of lively and witty conversation between party guests that was a staple of the middlebrow genre of the drawing room comedy, as exemplified by Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1941), which was one of the likely subtexts of The Cocktail Party. But the opening scene is also remarkable, once one probes its hypotextual depths, for its cryptic references to traditional Christian core beliefs. These are no doubt deformed and transformed in the hypertext by what one can only describe as something analogous to the secret language of dreams. (In this, Eliot shows himself to be, like Joyce and other modernists, drawn toward the coded language of that “royal road to the unconscious,” which was a fetish of twentieth-century psychoanalysis.) They initially seem to make no sense in and of themselves and, like dreams, are rather bizarrely incomplete. This incongruity, of course, signals them to us as potential clues as to the presence of a cryptic subtext. The first scene of Eliot’s play is set in the drawing room of the ­Chamberlaynes’ London flat, where a cocktail party is in progress. In the event of the unexpected and unexplained absence of his wife, Edward Chamberlayne, a London barrister, is trying valiantly to be a proper host. His guests seem to be having a good time as one of them, Alex, is regaling the others with some tale of a hunting safari adventure in India—or so it seems since his listeners are having trouble making sense of his convoluted narrative: Alex:  You’ve

missed the point completely, Julia: There were no tigers. That was the point. Julia:  Then what were you doing, up in a tree? You and the Maharaja? Alex:  My dear Julia! It’s perfectly hopeless. You haven’t been listening. (Eliot 1950 9) To “really listen” to this story, whose very incongruity provides a possible clue, would result eventually in intuiting the presence of a ­cryptic religious allegory in this apparently badly told tale, although one would expect that Eliot’s targeted audience (a secular-minded audience expecting a frivolous but entertainingly witty drawing room comedy) was unlikely to have done so. Keeping in mind how dreams can strangely distort and transform elements taken from waking life, the story Alex tells his puzzled listeners might point to the mystery of the C ­ rucifixion, and one might translate its coded oneiric language as follows: the King

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  143 of the Jews (the “Maharaja” or “Great King”) was crucified on the cross (the  term “tree” is a traditional Christian symbol of the cross), and his crucifixion conquered the fear of death (for in the end, “there were no tigers” [10]). And Alex was with Him? By the end of the play, Edward’s mistress, the charming young Celia, will in fact undergo death by ­crucifixion, and so Alex’s story may be said to anticipate the sacred mystery of her martyrdom. His narrative is like the tattered remnants of a dream of being “crucified with Christ” (cf. the Apostle Paul’s words in Galatians 2.20), with the hope of resurrection and transcending death (“there were no tigers”), and so prefigures the narrative of Celia’s martyrdom in the play’s last scene. Next comes a humorous allusion to the story of Lady Klootz and the wedding cake. And how the butler found her in the pantry, rinsing her mouth out with champagne. (Eliot 1950 10) But the story of Lady Klootz is never finished; it is interrupted by another one concerning a certain Delia Verinder, who had three brothers, one of whom was feebleminded or, rather, “not feeble-minded:/ He was only harmless.” But “He could hear the cry of bats” (13). Here, we are again in the shadowy symbolic realm of dream narratives, which often make no immediate sense to the conscious mind trying to remember them. Dream interpretation had been, of course, a central feature of classical psychotherapy (whose procedures Eliot will both represent and parody in the second act), whether Freudian or Jungian, for which the language of dreams, however enigmatic it may initially seem, is ultimately decipherable. This arduous process of decoding the language of dreams is somewhat analogous to the challenge of engaging with a complex modernist text such as The Cocktail Party. The “harmless” third brother in the Delia Verinder story can thus be taken as an oneiric representation of Jesus crucified and resurrected, and this decoding of the tale’s language is prompted also by Julia’s answer to Celia’s question, “But how do you know he could hear the cry of bats?”, to which the reply can be taken as a simple and unadorned Christian declaration of faith—and as a clue: “Because he said so. And I believed him” (14). It takes a bit of imagination, no doubt, to hear embedded in cocktail party chitchat allusions to the core mysteries of the Christian faith, but they are there—the rite of communion (champagne and wedding cake—the bread and the consecrated wine—as a rite of purification) and the crucifixion and resurrection of the Son of Man: “how he suffered! They had to find an island for him/Where there were no bats” (14). T.S.  ­Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism had taken place in 1927, when he was thirty-six, but over twenty years later, after he had

144  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts turned sixty, he still had much of the recent convert’s enthusiasm and missionary zeal. The Cocktail Party seems tendentiously designed to convert the almost ­unconvertible, Eliot’s goal being to create a drawing room comedy which would first of all appeal to the tastes of agnostic or atheist West End or Broadway theatergoers but would then almost imperceptibly draw them into a symbolic web that was fundamentally and even mystically Christian, however devoid of religious content the text appeared to be on the surface. Eliot had revealed already in 1938 his sense of how theater could ­provide enlightenment as well as entertainment in a letter to Ezra Pound, which takes the form of a humorous send-off of Aristotle’s Poetics entitled “Five Points on Dramatic Writing.” The fourth point reads as follows: But IF you can keep the bloody audience’s attention engaged, then you can perform any monkey tricks you like when they ain’t looking, and it’s what you do behind the audience’s back so to speak that makes your play IMMORTAL for a while. (Eliot 1975 66) In the case of The Cocktail Party, the very idea of presenting the sacred rite of Holy Communion as a cocktail party shows how far Eliot was willing to go in the way of performing “monkey tricks” for a good cause. He provided his audience with the cryptic symbolic equivalent of spiritual sustenance—consecrated wine and holy wafers—“when they weren’t looking” by serving to the party guests on stage mixed drinks and cocktail snacks. As for the Euripidean subtext Alcestis, starting with Eliot’s brief mention of the affinity of Euripides’ drunken Heracles with the drunken Unidentified Guest in the first act of The Cocktail Party, the general outlines of the process of hypertextualization have come into critical focus without too much of a problem (see esp. Heilman, Phelan, Reckford). In Euripides’ play, King Admetus is coming to terms with the fact that his wife Alcestis has volunteered to give up her life for him in a deal brokered by his divine friend, the god Apollo. At the opening of the play, Alcestis is preparing to die, during a poignant scene in which she bids a final farewell to her children and husband. In The Cocktail Party, the London barrister Edward Chamberlayne is coming to terms with the fact that his wife Lavinia has suddenly bolted after five years of marriage (no children, however), leaving him in charge of a cocktail party they had planned and scheduled earlier. He is a reluctant and inexperienced host, but he carries on valiantly, serving drinks to his invited guests and to an “Unidentified Guest” who drinks gin and water, and winds up singing a drunken ditty about “the One Eyed ­R iley” after promising to Edward that he will somehow manage to bring his wife back to him. Riley appears first to be an incarnation

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  145 of the stereotypical comic stage figure of the drunken Irishman, but Eliot was to later explain that he was a dramatic avatar of Euripides’ drunken hero Heracles. In the Greek play, Heracles has arrived right after Alcestis has died (just as the Unidentified Guest arrives just after Edward’s wife Lavinia has left him) and is offered hospitality by his friend Admetus, who, always the good host, hides the fact of Alcestis’ death from him. After being served wine à volonté by a household servant, Heracles gets quite drunk and proffers sententious advice to the servant (but really, one suspects, intended for his master Admetus in absentia) concerning the inevitability of death and the need to enjoy life—and especially sex—as though each day were one’s last. In Eliot’s drama, the drunken guest turns out to be Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly (in the sound of his distinguished name, one can hear an echo of the name ­Heracles just as Edward’s name echoes Admetus), a therapist of an unusual sort who does in fact, without letting on to Edward what he is doing, bring Lavinia back to his office for a confrontation with Edward. At the end of this marital spat, after much hesitation and turmoil (Edward at the end begins to hallucinate about a python and an octopus), the two agree to make the best of a bad marriage. In ­Euripides’ play, of course, there is much more in the way of mythological drama: Heracles brings ­A lcestis back from the Dead by wrestling the god Death at her tomb, and then tricks Admetus into accepting into his house a beautiful young slave girl—possibly a future concubine for the widowed king—he has allegedly won in an athletic contest. Of course, the girl turns out to be his wife Alcestis. In The Cocktail Party, the figure corresponding to Alcestis disguised as a young slave concubine is Edward’s young mistress Celia. But, true to her name (Celia/celestial) the young woman is destined for missionary work and ­ avinia, who martyrdom. Eventually, in Act III, the same guests (plus L is now pregnant) gather two years later for another cocktail party, at which Alex reveals how Celia has recently died, having joined “a very austere order” and dedicating her last moments to her native converts before pagan natives crucify her “very near an ant-hill.” It becomes clear that Eliot has divided up the role of the Euripidean Alcestis between Lavinia and Celia (the first syllable of whose two names can be heard distantly echoing the name of their Greek analog: Al/La—Ce/Ce). That Lavinia returns and shows all the signs of being a happier wife in Act III—and a pregnant one, too—is clearly part of Eliot’s hypotextualization of Euripides’ last scene of marriage partners finally reunited and—one hopes—reconciled with each other—in a less spectacular way, of course. But Celia’s transformation from mistress into saint is certainly surprising and daring, although it is somewhat reminiscent of the Catholic tradition regarding Mary Magdalen’s metamorphosis from courtesan to saint. But does Celia’s transformation correspond to any analogous transformation in Alcestis?

146  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts Indeed it does, and we can be almost sure that Eliot had made this analogy clear in his private “detailed explanation” to his friends. For when Alcestis is returned from the dead by Heracles, she is at first presented as a beautiful young slave girl that Heracles wants his friend Admetus to accept into his house and care for. Admetus had sworn to obey his wife’s dying wish never to remarry, and then had rashly added later to this the public promise to make an end to all revelry and entertainment in his house—a promise he broke almost immediately after her death, when he was unable to refuse his friend Heracles hospitality and wine. In the final scene of the play, he seems to have broken the spirit if not the letter of the first and more important promise as well since the young slave girl clearly could soon become his concubine. The whole scene is worth quoting at length, fraught as it is with comic innuendo, bathos, and bad faith; we seem at times disconcertingly close to a hypothetical French bedroom farce, in which the husband’s wife appears disguised as a courtesan, whose seductive charms he vainly tries to resist: Heracles:  You Admetus: 

have lost a fine wife. Who will say you have not? So fine That I, whom you see, never shall be happy again.

............... Heracles:  What? You will not remarry but keep an empty bed? Admetus:  No woman shall ever sleep in my arms again. ........ Heracles:  I admire you for your faith and love you bear your wife. Admetus:  Let me die if I betray her, though she is gone. Heracles:  Well then,

Receive this woman into your most generous house. Admetus, of course, makes a show of refusing the beautiful young ­concubine, whose face is concealed by a veil, until he takes a closer look at her. Heracles:  She will go, if she should. First look. See if she should. Admetus:  She should, unless it means that you will be angry with

me. So Admetus gives in. Admetus:  —to

attendants: Escort her in, if she must be taken into this house. Heracles:  I will not hand this lady over to attendants. Admetus:  You yourself lead her into the house then, if you wish. Heracles:  I will put her into your hands and into yours alone.

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  147 Admetus:  I will not touch her. But she is free to come inside. Heracles:  No. I have faith in your right hand, and only yours. Admetus:  My lord, you are forcing me to act against my wish. Heracles:  Be brave. Reach out your hand and take the stranger’s. Admetus:  Here is my hand; I feel like Perseus killing the Gorgon.

(61–3) At this point, the Athenian audience must have burst out laughing, for Admetus’ bathetic narcissism is utterly ridiculous; he reaches out his hand, as though he were the great hero Perseus averting his eyes while he slays the Gorgon without looking at her legendarily petrifying eyes, when in fact all he is doing is breaking his promise of fidelity to the wife who has just died for him. The emphasis on Admetus taking her with his right hand, however, is fraught with serious symbolism. Especially when accompanied by his raising of the veil that hides the face of “the young slave girl,” as Heracles orders him to do (Admetus’s gesture of raising her veil is implicitly indicated by Heracles’ command that he “look at her”), this taking of a young woman by the right hand is more than reminiscent of a key moment in the Greek marriage ceremony—only here, Admetus, marrying in spite of the promise he made to Alcestis, has suddenly, in a deliciously ironic turn of events, gotten Alcestis back as his wife. So, in this last scene Alcestis has undergone in the eyes of Admetus a transformation from a beautiful young concubine to his own heroic wife, brought back from the dead by his friend the hero Heracles. So much for the subtextual context of Celia as Edward’s young mistress, corresponding as she does with Admetus’ imaginary future m ­ istress the young slave girl. But Celia of course has a second identity as a Christian martyr crucified, having given her life to the spiritual comfort of her flock of converts in their last moments. (Celia had refused to flee and save her own life from marauding pagan natives, choosing rather to stay with the Christian natives in their hour of need.) But is there anything that corresponds to Celia’s high-status identity as Christian martyr in Euripides? From the standpoint of retrospective hypertextuality, there most certainly is, although Alcestis’ ultimate transformation is not as obvious. By the end of the play the supposed young slave girl has been recognized as Admetus’ wife brought back from the dead by Heracles. But there is also another transformation that is strongly implied. In the final scene the spotlight, so to speak, is not only on the hero Heracles, for whom the rescue of Alcestis constitutes a new episode in the sequence of his heroic labors, but also on Alcestis herself. The problem is that in this scene, she is a not only a veiled character but, more importantly, a mute character. Scholars and critics have differed over the reasons for this. Euripides’ play was probably only allocated two actors for all of the (interchangeable) speaking roles, so that when a third character was on stage, one of the three characters (Admetus, Heracles, or Alcestis)

148  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts would have to have been given a nonspeaking role. No doubt, Heracles claims that Alcestis cannot speak for three more days because she is still consecrated to the infernal realm—although this is not altogether convincing since it seems to refer to a nonexistent Greek custom that was essentially without precedent (after all, how many people had ever come back from the dead? And what rules could apply to such a rare situation?). Still, Heracles clearly must give Admetus some explanation, even a bogus one, as to why his beloved wife has absolutely nothing to say to him. But more interesting from the dramatic standpoint (and less insulting to Euripides’ skill as a playwright) is the supposition that anything that Alcestis would have been given to say at this point would have been too shocking for Athenian patriarchal sensibilities. To have Alcestis lash out at her faithless husband, who has broken or almost broken the two promises he had made to her, or to have her point out what a better man Heracles was, and that maybe she should have married him instead (in one myth she actually did once have Heracles as a suitor)—well, it is clear that any such words on her part would have ruined the happy ending, not to mention offended the patriarchal sensibilities of many in the audience. Better in the end to have Alcestis say nothing at all. But there is an alternative explanation that makes even more sense, and that also has the virtue of giving Euripides’ genius as a playwright the benefit of a doubt. This is how some spectators, at least, could react to the final scene: at the end of the play, Alcestis has through her mysterious silence has become an august presence in this her transformation from self-sacrificing wife to sexy concubine to someone who has returned from the dead. But that is not all. She has not only been saved from death, she has also saved someone else (Admetus) from death. As she stands silently on stage next to the great Panhellenic hero Heracles, the dramatic effect of her silent juxtaposition to the figure of Heracles (each with an element of costume that presumably drew the audience’s attention to their unique status: she with her veil, he with his lion-skin) would have been to suggest to at least some of the spectators the profound affinity of the two figures, as both had just performed the heroic deed of saving someone’s life by risking their own. In fact, this silent juxtaposition of the two figures on stage constitutes a clue to the presence of a powerful mythic cryptic subtext: that of ­Alcestis as Heraclean heroine. Her latent affinity with the greatest of Greek heroes is established visually. If this affinity is not made explicit verbally in the final scene (by the chorus, for example), this may stem from ­Euripides ­unwillingness to offend Athenian patriarchal prejudices concerning the unequal status of women, which would have made a direct analogy between the hero Heracles and the heroine Alcestis very hard to swallow for some members of his audience. (Playwrights who fail to cater to their audience’s prejudices to some degree don’t become successful playwrights, at least in their own time.) But, even if the spoken words of the drama do not express this latent and cryptic analogy, the visual staging does.

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  149 Even so, Euripides has prepared the way for realizing subliminally that Alcestis, by the end of the play, has been transformed into a semidivine hero, i.e., a daimon whose tomb would eventually become the center for a cult. Just before Heracles enters the stage with Alcestis as a veiled woman, the chorus sets up this expectation as it chants the following lines: The monument [tomb] of your wife must not be counted among the graves Of the dead, but must be given its honors As gods are, worship of wayfarers. And as they turn the bend of the road And see it, men shall say: “She died for the sake of her husband. Now she is a blessed spirit [makaira daimôn]. Hail, majesty [potnia], be gracious to us.” Thus will men speak in her presence. (57–8) As the “veiled woman” comes on stage, the chorus has just hailed ­A lcestis as a heroine, whose tomb will be the occasion for cult practice of prayer and praise. The near coinciding of the chorus’ words with the final appearance of Alcestis and Heracles on stage together sets up the visual juxtaposition of the two heroic figures to be seen as latently significant. One might object that, whereas the cult of heroes was commonplace in ancient Greece, the cult of heroines was almost unknown. Furthermore, the type of masculine heroism celebrated in song and ritual was more the heroism of victory over men and monsters than of self-sacrifice or putting one’s life at risk in order to save another life. But here, Heracles is celebrated not only explicitly for his victory over the monstrous god Death, envisaged as a wrestling match, but also implicitly as someone who risked his own life to save someone else—exactly as Alcestis was praised by the chorus a moment before. But was such a hero cult ever dedicated to a female heroine? Joan Breton Connelly’s recent thesis that the Parthenon itself was a monument to the legendary self-sacrifice of the daughters of King Erechtheus, would make the heroine cult of young women who gave their lives for the city such a central part of Athenian religious culture that Euripides is not perhaps breaking such completely new ground as one might have thought. Of course, the human sacrifice of young virgins—voluntary, it is assumed—is different what we have in the domestic drama of Admetus and Alcestis; it was as a mature woman and mother—not as a virgin daughter—that Alcestis gives her life for her feckless husband. So, the originality of Euripides is still considerable, as suggesting that the heroism of a wife sacrificing her life to save her husband was identical or at least analogous to Heraclean heroism was a bold step, even if concealed in a cryptic subtext.

150  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts It is this transformation of the Euripidean Alcestis into a heroine (­ Heraclean or not) who is worthy after her death of prayer and worship that T.S. Eliot picks up on when he has Alex reveal, near the end of Act III, that the crucified martyr Celia had become the object of a heterodox cult among the surviving Christian natives: Alex:  There’s

one detail which is rather interesting And rather touching, too. We found that the natives, After we’d re-occupied the village Had erected a kind of shrine for Celia Where they brought offerings of fruit and flowers, Fowls, and even sucking pigs. They seemed to think that by propitiating Celia They might ensure themselves against further misfortune. (181–2)

Alex then adds humorously that “we left that problem for the Bishop to wrestle with.” The native cult verges on Christianized paganism, of course. Thus, Eliot’s transformation of Celia from mistress into saint reverts back to the Euripidean subtext in which Alcestis is transformed from wife into hero. But Eliot’s wife Lavinia is also shown as transformed, in her own lesser way, by the end of the play. The marriage of Edward and Lavinia had clearly been on the rocks, and it takes Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly’s no mean skill as a marriage counselor to bring them back together again, in spite of their angry recriminations against each other—recriminations that culminate with Edward echoing the bathos of Admetus’ ridiculous comparison of himself with the hero Perseus cutting off the snake-haired Gorgon’s head, when he makes his final self-pitying sally against his wife: O God, O God, if I could return to yesterday Before I thought that I had made a decision. What devil left the door on the latch For these doubts to enter? And then you came back, you The angel of destruction—just as I felt sure. In a moment, at your touch, there is nothing but ruin. O God, what have I done? The python. The octopus. Must I become after all what you would make me? (100–1) Two years pass, and by the beginning of Act III, it is quite clear that Edward and Lavinia’s marriage is in much better shape. Just before the ­ avinia guests of another one of their cocktail parties arrive, Edward and L share a quiet moment together. Even after his day at the office, Edward is solicitous; he wants Lavinia to rest (“It’s you who must be tired,” he

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  151 says to her [154]); he compliments her on her dress (“Well, Edward! /Do you know it’s the first time you’ve paid me a compliment/ Before a party? And that’s when one needs them.” [155]). Later, after he says, You lie down now, Lavinia. No one will be coming for at least half an hour; So just stretch out, (157) it becomes clear that Lavinia is now expecting a child and that their marriage has made it through the crisis signaled by her disappearance at the opening of the play. But this too is a theme that Eliot would have found in the Euripidean subtext, in which there is a strong suggestion that by the end of the play ­Alcestis and Admetus have been able to renew their vows (cf. Admetus’ clasping of the slave girl with his right hand, and her unveiling)2 and will be able to revivify their marriage and their joy in each other’s company, in spite of the trauma of Alcestis’ death and the troublesome problem of how to deal now with the fact that Admetus had asked her die for him. This reconciliation and renewal is suggested subtly and in indirect ways. When Alcestis is brought back, it is under the guise of a slave girl, whom Heracles presents as a potential concubine for the new widowed Admetus. It is important to remember at this juncture the advice that Heracles had given the servant while he was comically drunk and slurring his words (in vino veritas advice that can be taken as actually being intended for Admetus via proxy): There, I have told you. Now you can understand. Go on, Enjoy yourself, drink, call the life you live today Your own, but only that, the rest belongs to chance. Then, beyond all gods, pay your best attentions to The Cyprian [Aphrodite], man’s sweetest. There’s a god who’s kind. (50) In the ancient Greek pantheon, Aphrodite was not, like Hera, the ­goddess of marital love only but rather of all dimensions of sexuality and passion, both licit and illicit. It may seem strange that Heracles intimates that the unheroic but pleasure-loving Admetus might particularly need this sort of advice, but that explains why Heracles reintroduces him to Alcestis under the form of a slave girl and potential sexual playmate. In both cases, one senses that Heracles, like Sir Henry Harcourt Reilly, plays the role a marriage counselor who understands that his friend’s deepest problem in reuniting with Alcestis may be accepting her fully— not only as the mother of his children and the wife who saved his life but also as the one who, as a young bride, once filled his life with sexual

152  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts joy and will continue to do so now. Without this sexual joy, their new marriage or remarriage will be flawed and incomplete. In The Cocktail Party, the then somewhat dour and puritanical T.S. Eliot can only deal with this somewhat ribald theme by providing Edward and Lavinia with a child. Still, in the hypertext as in the subtext, by the end of the drama the marriage problems seem resolved or on the way to being resolved, and this is of course one of the key generic features of a typical comedy’s dramatic resolution, where everything ends happily in a marriage—or a remarriage. Of course, for this typical happy resolution to occur, ­Eliot’s Celia and Euripides’ supposed slave girl concubine have to disappear and ­ lcestis and have their place taken by the figure of a wife (the resurrected A the returned Lavinia)—which is exactly how both Eliot and E ­ uripides engineer the comic resolution of their plots. Of course, we need to go back to an earlier question—and it is a key question—that has remained unanswered. It is all very well for T.S. Eliot to have used a classical subtext as inspiration for his modern comedy—but why should he have been initially so secretive about it, making a subtext into a cryptic subtext? I would suggest that he was at least in part following the example of his friend James Joyce in his Ulysses. Although Joyce through the very title of his novel gave away immediately the Homeric dimensions of his subtext, he famously withdrew the Odyssean chapter titles just before publication: best not to be too explicit? A modernist poet may need to make claims to the type of relative originality of inspiration that would not have bothered in the least a neoclassical poet like Racine, who, if he obfuscated the presence of a Senecan subtext for his Phèdre, was ­certainly more than willing to highlight the presence of a Euripidean one. So, in Eliot’s case, a modernist anxiety of influence—and the modernist desire both to set a trap and provide a challenge for the hyperliterate reader and sophisticated spectator—may have been at work, until Eliot gave his game away two years after The Cocktail Party’s first performance. There is another possibility—and it is perhaps a more plausible one. In his 1923 essay Ulysses, Order, and Myth, Eliot had praised Joyce for his “mythical method,” which he felt had helped him solve one of the great problems of creating literature that would reflect the anxiety of finding meaning in a post-World War I world ruled by chaos and savage meaninglessness. In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. (Eliot 1975 177)

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  153 In the immediate post-World War II period, Eliot may have felt that the basic situation had changed little. The contemporary vogue of the ­drawing room comedy (Noel Coward’s, most notably) manifested the frivolous amorality and spiritual superficiality of the times. The hyperbolic banality of the title of Eliot’s strange contribution to the genre— what could be more superficial and frivolous than a drawing room comedy about a cocktail party?—makes this clear. If the high point of civilized modern life and sophistication is the cocktail party, then this is indeed a potent indication of “futility and anarchy.” In the end, no doubt, Eliot felt moved to infuse this minor dramatic genre with a heavy charge of Christian mystery. But, if this did much—or, at least, ­attempted to do much—to shift the focus from the banal problems of the Chamberlaynes’ marriage to the martyrdom of a modern Mary Magdalen, it did little to “give a shape” to its interweave with the plot of the Christian mystery play that The Cocktail Party also aspired to be; cocktails and crucifixions have little if anything in common. It was the presence of a cryptic Euripidean subtext, like the presence of the Homeric subtext in Ulysses, that held the promise of solving the problem of giving order to chaotic banality via the “mythic method” that Eliot felt had succeeded so well over twenty-five years before with Joyce’s Ulysses. Not only would the Christian ideological overload be lightened by the witty and apparently frivolous dimension of the comedy (and here, Eliot was perhaps not entirely successful), but the banality and disorder of a plot organized around cocktail parties and psychotherapy would be “given shape” by the invisible but powerful presence of an ancient Greek play steeped in myth and meaning. But this imposing of order via myth had to done carefully—even surreptitiously. The marital heroism of the figure of Alcestis could certainly serve as a viable subtext for the saintly heroism of Celia. But the incongruity of the juxtaposition of sophisticated cocktail party banter and the Christian themes of faith and martyrdom had to be somehow dampened if The Cocktail Party were to have its desired tendentious effect on an audience that might not share the author’s Anglo-Catholic convictions. Since joining a mystery play with a drawing room comedy was a bit like trying to mix oil and water, the attempt was fraught with the danger of failure. But anchoring this incongruous combination in a classical subtext made it certainly worth a try, and T.S. Eliot gave it his best shot. Cryptic subtexts can be historical (Tuileries) or ritualistic (Time Regained) as well as literary and/or mythic. But they can also be ­psychological, not in the broader context of allowing for psychological interpretation but in the narrow sense of containing elements of specific psychological theories and texts—in the case here, C.G. Jung’s theory of the anima and animus. In the Nausicaa episode of Joyce’s Ulysses—whose Homeric subtext concerning the encounter on the seashore of a weary shipwrecked Odysseus with the young Phaeacian princess ­Nausicaa provides a classical parallel for the unusual romantic

154  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts encounter on a Dublin beach of the beleaguered Leopold Bloom with the young girl Gerty MacDowell—one finds a perfect example of how the buried treasure of a cryptic subtext can enrich the interpretation of a hypertext already much interpreted. But the big question here is: can one plausibly claim that Joyce was familiar—or at least likely to be ­familiar—with this particular cryptic subtext? In his classic study James Joyce (1941), Harry Levin wrote that “the international psychoanalytic movement, under the direction of Jung, had its headquarters in Zurich during the war years while Joyce was writing Ulysses, and he could scarcely have resisted its influence” (Levin  89). Levin leaves it at that—without examples. And that is where ­matters have been left ever since. No doubt, Richard Ellmann, in The Consciousness of Joyce (1977), noted that in Trieste Joyce owned “three small pamphlets in German, published in the years 1909” one by Freud, one by Ernest Jones, and the third being Jung’s The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual—“just the subject that Stephen [Dedalus] explores” (Ellmann 1977 54), he adds. Ellmann concludes from this that the influence of Freud and Jung predated Joyce’s wartime years in Zurich (from end of 1915 until he left again for Trieste in mid-October 1919). But for the next five pages Ellmann refers to Freud and to his acolyte ­Ernest Jones only. Similarly, in Ulysses scholarship and commentary, C.G. Jung has seemed worth only casual mention at best in spite of the fact that he published in 1932 a review of the German translation of Ulysses, wrote a letter to Joyce (Ellmann 1983 629) that the author is said to have appreciated, and was to take care of his daughter Lucia in a private sanatorium from September 1934 until January 1935. Given this long if intermittent association of Joyce with Jung and his school of psychology, one would expect something more specific in the way of influence to be locatable at some point or another. Nevertheless, although the editor’s introduction to the issue of Comparative ­Literature Studies3 commemorating the centenary of Joyce’s birth puts Carl Jung at the head of the list of an “endless parade” of those who deserve to be celebrated with him as part of the “legion of contemporaries” associated with him and his work, the essay by Jean Kimball (“A  ­Jungian Scenario for U ­ lysses”) states from at the start that she does “not assume any influence of Jung on Joyce”). Kimball also discusses elsewhere the relationship between Joyce’s writings and Jung’s psychology in terms of traces, parallels, and (most recently) patterns but not of influence, properly speaking.4 So, to return to Levin’s original supposition: is there influence or no influence? And is there somewhere in Ulysses a significant Jungian cryptic subtext or not? In spite of the critical consensus, I believe that a case can be made for the influence of Jungian theory at least as regards the chapter N ­ ausicaa— indirect influence, in that it was probably transmitted via a third party, but influence all the same. It can be demonstrated that there is a presence

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  155 in Nausicaa of a specific cryptic Jungian subtext: Jung’s theory of the contrasexual other, which in men expresses itself through the figure of the anima, and in women through the figure of the animus. These terms designate in analytical psychology the feminine subpersonality of a man and the masculine subpersonality of a woman. Both are key terms of a process in which the psychic predisposition to bond sexually and romantically involves the involuntary and unconscious projection of ­anima or animus onto someone, who then appears as an object of intense fascination.5 As we shall see, Gerty MacDowell’s fantasies in Nausicaa concerning “her dreamhusband” (Joyce 1986 293) and “her beau ideal” (288) correspond quite nicely to Jung’s theory of the animus, and in a way that seems more than coincidental, although admittedly, Homer’s Odyssey also provided some subtextual stimulus as well regarding the evocation of a young girl’s fantasies of marriage. Now to the crux of the issue: is it reasonable to assume that Joyce could have been cognizant of Jung’s anima/animus theory during the period when he composed Nausicaa in Trieste from November 1919 through March 1920, that is, immediately after Joyce’s departure from Zurich, the center of the Jungian circle? The first thing to ascertain is whether Jung had already originated his animus/anima theory by the time Joyce would have left Zurich in November 1919. And this is a bit troublesome. Jung’s first major essay on the subject (“Anima and Animus”) was not published until 1928.6 We do have, however, substantial notebook entries concerning conversations with Jung in July 1922 written down by his student Esther Harding, and these entries demonstrate that Jung’s anima/animus theory was by then fully evolved.7 The month of July 1922 is still not early enough for our argument, however. The earliest published mention of Jung’s anima/animus theory at an early stage of development is to be found in Psychologische Typen (Psychological Types), published by Rascher Verlag in Zurich in 1921.8 So, we can go as far back as Psychological Types in 1921, which is again not quite early enough, although I should add that the foreword to Psychological Types was written in the spring of 1920, about the time when Joyce first published Nausicaa, so we are back almost as far as we need to go. Almost far back enough in time, but, again, not quite. So, we need to consider the possibility of some prior oral transmission (to speak almost Homerically) of Jung’s anima/animus idea to Joyce since there was nothing he could have read of Jung’s that would have enlightened him. So, let us imagine we are sitting with Joyce at a Zurich café on the banks of the Limmat, sipping some white wine, and waiting to see who shows up to join him. Possibly it is Mrs Edith Rockefeller McCormick. Starting in February 1918, the wealthy Mrs McCormick had become Joyce’s patroness at a time when she was already fulfilling that role for C.G. Jung. She was very enthused about Jung and had even urged Joyce to undergo analysis with the great local cultural hero. But Joyce refused. Writing

156  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts in June 1921 to Harriet Shaw Weaver concerning the legends that had grown up about him, this is what Joyce had to say about it: A batch of people in Zurich persuaded themselves that I was gradually going mad and actually endeavoured to induce me to enter a sanatorium where a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr. Freud) amuses himself at the expense (in every sense of the word) of ladies and gentlemen who are troubled with bees in their bonnet. (Joyce Letters 1966) Mrs McCormick was eventually to withdraw her financial support for Joyce in October 1919; Ellmann is not sure whether or not that was the result of her reaction to Joyce’s refusal to go to Jung for psychoanalysis (Ellmann 1983 468–9). One way or another, one can make the assumption that she had been talking enthusiastically with Joyce about the great Dr Jung and his marvelous new theories, and one can assume that Joyce had taken it all in—with a large grain of salt. In a letter to Frank ­Budgen dated December 1919, i.e., during the period when he was writing ­Nausicaa, he complains in a jokey fashion that someone had not sent him, as he had requested, a certain book, that is, DOCTOR JUNG’S (prolonged general universal applause) Wandlungen der LIBIDO (shouts Hear! Hear! from a raughty tinker and an Irishman in the gallery). (Joyce Letters 1966 131)9 So, what have we established so far? That Joyce very likely had Jung on ­ ausicaa, his mind from 1918 to late 1919, i.e., just before he composed N and that Jung probably had developed his theory of anima and ­animus by that time and had probably shared it with his patroness Mrs ­McCormick and others in his circle, who then could have spoken to Joyce about it. Exactly what people might have heard about this new theory must be guessed at from the pages of Psychologische Typen ­published over a year later in 1921. I will quote from the 1923 English translation of the section at the end concerning the definition of terms (“soul” and “soul-image”) in order to show what Joyce might have picked up from his hypothetical Jungian informants in Zurich, Mrs McCormick especially, regarding anima and animus, which Jung first named in the ­published text “the inner attitude” or “the soul” (Jung 1923 591–2):10 The inner personality is the manner of one’s behaviour towards the inner psychic processes; it is the inner attitude, the character, that is turned towards the unconscious. (593)

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  157 So far, so good, although this is a bit murky compared to Jung’s later more precise formulations of the theory. The next quote is a bit better, at least for our purposes: that the complementary character of the soul is also concerned with the sex-character is a fact which can no longer be doubted. A very feminine woman has a masculine soul, and a very manly man has a feminine soul. (594) Speaking of these masculine traits of the woman’s soul, Jung goes on to characterize them in these words: it is often just the most womanly women who, in respect to ­certain inner things, have an extreme intractableness, obstinacy, and ­willfulness; which qualities are found in such intensity only in the outer attitude of men. (594–5) These “manly traits,” wrote Jung, are what is meant by “the animus of a woman, if we are to give to the soul of a woman its right name” (595). But the next step in Jung’s somewhat turgid early presentation of his anima and animus theory leads us directly to Joyce’s Nausicaa. In a state of normal unconsciousness, wrote Jung, The soul is always projected into [onto] a corresponding, real object, with which a relation of almost absolute dependency exists. Every reaction proceeding from this object has an immediate, inwardly arresting effect upon the subject. Tragic ties are frequently formed in this way. (596) If Leopold Bloom and Gerty MacDowell suddenly see each other on the beach as objects of passionate fascination (fortunately, with no tragic consequences), it would be because, according to Jung, the soul, the inner attitude of the unconscious, is … represented by actual persons whose particular qualities correspond with those of the soul…. With men the soul, i.e. the anima, is usually figured by the unconscious in the person of a woman; with women it is a man. (596–7) According to this nascent Jungian theory presumably absorbed recently by Joyce, Gerty’s animus, already existing as a contrasexual psychic image (the “soul-image”) in her unconscious, is projected onto Bloom, who then

158  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts becomes in her imagination the man she has always been waiting for. In similar fashion, Bloom projects his anima onto Gerty, who becomes, at least for a while, a fascinating seaside girl, who gives him sexual “relief” and a sense of feeling young again. Jung would have explained things this way: In all those cases in which an identity with the persona [the conscious, public personality and idealized self-image] is present, and the soul accordingly is unconscious, the soul image is transferred onto a real person. This person is the object of an intense love. (598) This transference “onto a real person” is what Jung also labeled “projection”: “whenever the soul-image is projected, an unconditional, affective tie to the object appears” (597)—and this is certainly a clear enough description of what happens between Gerty and Bloom. But for Jung as well as for Joyce this process of projection makes for a fantasy relationship only, since, “when the subject is unconscious,” “a real conscious ­adaptation to the object who represents the soul image is impossible.” And so, “the libido gets damned up and explodes in a release of affect” (597). The preceding quotations from Psychological Types may represent more or less what Joyce might have absorbed from Edith McCormick’s and others’ enthusiastic accounts of “DOCTOR JUNG’S (prolonged general universal applause)” new theory in 1919 concerning the animus in women and the anima in men. And we can find it all in Nausicaa: from descriptions of Gerty’s soul image itself to the “projection of the soul image” to the “explosion of libido” and its accompanying fireworks. But all this psychological theory has shifted in Nausicaa from a conceptual mode to a narrative presentation in an ironic and comic mode, and this shift in mode from high German-Swiss seriousness to ribald Irish comedy is consistent with the tone of Joyce’s allusion to “Doctor Jung” in the ­December 1919 letter to Frank Budgen just quoted, with Joyce presumably playing the role of the “Irishman in the gallery” shouting “Hear! Hear!” Now for a more detailed look at Joyce’s hypertext. In lines 645–6 Bloom is looking back on the tryst-at-a-distance he has just enjoyed with Gerty MacDowell: “[She] Saw something in me. Wonder what.” In Jungian terms, he would be asking himself “what soul-image, what kind of image of her animus, did she project onto me?” Earlier in the text Joyce has provided the reader with a thumbnail image of Gerty’s inner soul-image, of her Jungian animus with its romantic “manly traits”: a manly man with a strong quiet face who had not found his ideal, perhaps his hair slightly flecked with grey, and who would understand, take her in his sheltering arms, strain her to him in all the strength of his deep passionate nature and comfort her with a long kiss. (Joyce 1986 288)

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  159 Once Gerty catches sight of “the gentleman in black” (292), the ­p rojection of her soul-image occurs immediately: “the face that met her gaze there in the twilight, wan and strangely drawn, seemed to her the  saddest she had ever seen” (292). Her imagination quickly fills in the details of this projected image described in a parody of the language of contemporary young girls’ novels: “she could see at once by his dark eyes that he was a foreigner,” “he was in deep mourning… and the story of a haunting sorrow was written on his face” (293).  And then “the unconditional affective tie” is suddenly established: here it was of which she had so often dreamed. It was he who mattered and there was joy on her face because she wanted him because she felt instinctively that he was like no-one else. The very heart of the girlwoman went out to him, her dreamhusband, because she knew on the instant that it was him. (293) As her sexual climax (the sexual explicitness of the scene of masturbation at a distance is delicious) approaches “she knew that he could be trusted to the death, steadfast, a sterling man, a man of inflexible ­honour to his fingertips” (299)—definitely some suggested phallic humor here for the reader, although the metonymy presumably is unconscious for Gerty. And so on to the fireworks (300), a transparently symbolic representation for both Gerty’s and Leopold’s orgasmic libido that “explodes in a release of affect.” Regardless of how complete or incomplete an exposition of it he would have heard, Joyce must have realized that Jung’s theory of the contrasexual other, of the anima and the animus, had, as a subtext, a capacity for generating comedy in its description of the disparity between the inner psychic image and the real person on whom it is projected in the outside world, and he made wonderful use of this theory’s analysis of this type of comic misapprehension in Nausicaa. For Bloom is not really what Gerty imagines him to be, although she is not entirely wrong about him. He is dressed in black for the funeral of Paddy Dignam, but that is not exactly the occasion for the “deep” mourning Gerty imagines. Gerty sees “the story of a haunting sorrow… written on his face.” The origin of this sorrow is mysterious for Gerty but not for the reader, who knows exactly why Bloom has the blues: he had suffered abuse in Barney Kiernan’s tavern that afternoon, and his watch had stopped at the very moment when, he surmises, his wife Molly had committed adultery with Blazes Boylan. In short, Gerty’s relationship with Bloom is mainly based on erotic fantasy, and so “a real conscious adaptation to the object who represents the soul image is impossible,” as Doctor Jung would have added ponderously.

160  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts Joyce probably could have written Nausicaa without the subtextual inspiration of “DOCTOR JUNG’S” theory of the animus as the basis for the projection of a woman’s soul-image? But Jung’s theory certainly could have sharpened his sense of the irony involved in the psychological phenomenon of love or lust at first sight. Does the reader need to be aware of this cryptic Jungian subtext in order to give the text an adequate first reading? No, but, after the detection of this cryptic psychological subtext, Joyce’s reader can appreciate all the more Joyce’s trenchant comedy from a new intellectual perspective. In all events, without Jung’s influence Joyce might not have developed the theme of the comic misapprehension of a person (Bloom) through the projection of a soul-image (Gerty’s “dreamhusband”) as finely and as systematically as he did. In Nausicaa Joyce plays with Jung’s theory of anima and animus, and uses it for his own comic purposes. This ludic handling of Jung’s theory parallels his attitude toward the good doctor himself: in Zurich, we know that Joyce resisted taking the “Swiss Tweedledum” too seriously. But might the now well-known Homeric cryptic subtext of the scene between Odysseus and Nausicaa in Homer’s Odyssey have been enough of an inspiration for Joyce in Nausicaa and have dispensed him of any need for inspiration from the theories of Dr Jung? Possibly so since ­Homer’s tale of a tryst-at-a-distance between the young princess ­Nausicaa and Odysseus11 is also generated by the search for a “dreamhusband” as well as by accompanying sexual fantasies. At the opening of Book VI of the Odyssey, Athena, taking the form of one of ­Nausicaa’s girlfriends, speaks to the princess in a dream (I quote from Samuel B ­ utler’s translation of the Odyssey, which may be the one with which Joyce was most familiar):12 Nausicaa, what can your mother have been about, to have such a lazy daughter? Here are your clothes all lying in disorder, yet you are going to be married almost immediately, and should not only be well dressed yourself, but should find good clothes for those who attend you…you are not going to remain a maid much longer. (Homer 1944 71) This goddess-sent dream is enough to get Nausicaa to go down to the beach with her maidservants to do the washing, her head presumably full of visions of the bridegroom who will soon be hers. There she meets the shipwrecked Odysseus, and the rest of the episode contains insinuations that she believes that Odysseus might be the handsome stranger who will become her husband. After their encounter, she urges him to go unaccompanied into the city; otherwise, she fantasizes that people might gossip if they saw the two of them together and (in the Samuel Butler translation) say such things as

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  161 Who is this fine-looking stranger that is going about with ­Nausicaa? ­ erhaps Where did she find him? I suppose she is going to marry him. P he is a vagabond sailor whom she has taken from some foreign vessel, for we have no neighbors; or some god who has come down from heaven in answer to her prayers, and she is going to live with him for the rest of her life. (Homer 1944 77) Although Nausicaa attributes these words to gossipy Phaeacians, it is clear, at least to readers coming straight from a reading of Joyce’s ­Nausicaa, that this imagined gossiping constitutes for her the beginning of the elaboration of a full blown sexual fantasy, a thumbnail sketch of her animus: the “fine-looking stranger,” the “vagabond sailor”—or is he “a god”?—and so on. Joyce could have built on this Homeric ­subtext, with or without the help of Jung. Like Gerty, ­Nausicaa is indulging ­herself in a fantasy that turns out to have no basis in reality since in point of fact, she will not be able to marry her “dreamhusband” Odysseus (like Bloom, he has a wife and child), and so her “projection of soul-image” does not result in a “real conscious adaptation to the object.” Homer got that right long before Jung. So, perhaps, Joyce needed Jung no more than Homer did. But I suspect that Jung’s anima and animus theory did help Joyce sharpen his focus in Nausicaa on two things that make the episode so satisfying a performance. First of all, on what in Homer’s text was barely suggested and never made explicit, namely, that desire is as much concerned with subjective fantasy and its inner object as it is with the outer object of desire and second, and most importantly, on the comic discrepancy between the two.13 One problem with the English title The Metamorphosis of Kafka’s most enigmatic and fascinating tale is that it clearly suggests some hypertextual play with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whereas the original ­G erman title “Die Verwandlung,” as Stanley Corngold has pointed out, does so less.14 The mythical tales in Ovid’s compendium of mythical tales ­involving a dramatic and magical change of form usually provide as the culminating scene a description of the actual metamorphosis. In Kafka’s tale, by contrast, the metamorphosis occurs right at the beginning in the first sentence, and is singularly unmotivated, as Corngold indicates that Norbert Kassel had noted earlier: “the story tells nothing of the process of metamorphosis or its possible causes.”15 So, if there is any hypertextual play going on in Kafka’s text in relation to any particular subtext, it must be in relation to a different kind of subtext. What I am proposing here is precisely such a different kind of subtext: the subtext of the scapegoating process, which has not, to the best of my knowledge, been hitherto considered as a possible means of resolving the tale’s enigma.16 Obviously, one purpose of burying such a

162  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts cryptic subtext is the author’s desire to preserve the enigmatic status of his text—something Kafka has been proven to have done with great success! But enigmas cannot last forever. Scapegoat theory has been, if not originated, then at least brilliantly developed and clarified by René Girard, especially in his now classic text The Scapegoat (1982; 1986). His leading ideas regarding the scapegoating process are few but powerful. I will present and paraphrase them briefly. First of all, scapegoats are more likely to be preselected from among individuals and/or groups that already are seen as differing somehow from the collective norm for one reason or another; they already present the signs of a victim; there are, for Girard, “universal signs for the selection of victims” (18), which usually involve some recognized marginalized or minority status: he lists physical abnormality, disability of various sorts, social abnormality, cultural differences, and even social privilege (18–19). Second, Girard insists that scapegoats are almost without exception blameless victims, that is, they are innocent of the charges made against them. Girard does offer a kind of qualification of his first two points, when he adds that the crowd’s choice of victims may be totally random; but it is not necessarily so. It is even possible that the crimes of which they are accused are real, but that sometimes the persecutors choose their victims because they belong to a class that is particularly susceptible to persecution rather than because of the crimes they have committed. (17) But scapegoating is generally based on false accusations. The persecutors make up these false accusations (but not consciously, as we shall see) in order to persecute the scapegoats, not in order to further the cause of justice or to punish a real crime. Ultimately, the persecutors always convince themselves that a small number of people, or even of a single individual, despite his relative weakness, is extremely harmful to the whole of society. (15) Third, as victims of persecution, the scapegoats’ punishment can run the gamut from stigmatization, social isolation and incarceration to torture and execution. The imposition of a stigmatized identity (cf. the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear under Nazi occupation) leads directly to increasing social isolation (cf. “ghettoization”), which can then lead to physical imprisonment; torture and eventually execution may complete the process.

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  163 (26) Fourth, the persecution of scapegoats is a process based in the persecutors’ unconscious—on what Girard calls “lack of awareness” (40). persecutors believe in the guilt of their victim; they are imprisoned in the illusion of persecution that is no simple idea but a full system of representation. Imprisonment in this system allows us to speak of an unconscious persecutor. (40–1) He emphasizes that “naïve persecutors are unaware of what they are doing” (Girard’s emphasis 8). As we shall shortly see at greater length, this idea of Girard’s is nicely illumined by the Jungian theory of “shadow projection,” according to which disturbing and hence repressed elements of a group’s unconsciousness are projected onto the scapegoat, who serves as a convenient screen for these projections. Finally, the once condemned scapegoat, paradoxically and at the end of the process, becomes a kind of savior figure: “the universal execration of the person who causes the sickness is replaced by the universal veneration for the person who cures the same sickness” (44). The initial “evil transfiguration of the victim” is paradoxically followed by “the second beneficent transfiguration” (44), a “beneficial return from the harmful omnipotence attributed to the scapegoat” originally. As a result of this “beneficent transfiguration” or “divinization,” “the conclusion [of the process]… reveals for us the persecutors reconciled” (43). Social ­harmony now reigns again, thanks to the persecution and death and of the scapegoat.17 (The very Catholic Girard has here in mind Christ’s death and resurrection as the ultimate revelation of the inner workings of the scapegoating process. And all these points can eventually be discovered buried in The Metamorphosis as a cryptic scapegoating subtext along the lines of Girard’s theory. But, since Kafka was born too soon to be inspired by Girard’s theory, how is this possible? Girard did not, of course, invent the term “scapegoat,” and the process itself had been at work throughout human history. The scapegoating ritual was clearly described in the book of ­Leviticus, and so we can assume with complete confidence that Kafka, thanks to his Jewish heritage, was familiar with it. On the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year), the priest would lay his hands on the head of a goat in order to transfer the sins of the people to it; the goat was then driven out into the wilderness, taking these sins with it, leaving the people in a state of ritual cleansing for the following year. The Hebrew scapegoat ritual was an eminently civilized ritual procedure. No human being was harmed or put to death; even the goat can be presumed to have had a good chance of surviving in the w ­ ilderness (goats eat anything and are thus very good at survival). In stark contrast is the dreary history Girard evokes of the scapegoat process as it flourished throughout subsequent history, which has been responsible for more totally unjustified

164  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts human misery than can be imagined. Gregor is one more example: a human victim, albeit transformed into an animal form in conformity with the prototype. But he retains his human consciousness and is fully aware that something has happened to him that defies explanation. With nothing but this biblical subtext in mind, Kafka could easily have intuited the general outlines of the scapegoating process without necessarily clarifying it with any precision in his text, all the more if he intended to preserve his tale’s enigmatic mystery by relegating the process to the status of a cryptic subtext. Obviously, one need not claim that Kafka was cognizant of any systematic presentation of scapegoat theory. But a creative artist’s imagination can precede or even render unnecessary conscious theoretical awareness. As an artist, Kafka knew what he was doing, even if he did not have Girard’s theory, as we do, to provide him with a ready-made theoretical framework. The dim outlines of the scapegoating process can be glimpsed in his text; he put them there deliberately in order to signal the buried presence of a scapegoating subtext. Still, one must admit that the opening of Kafka’s tale is not exactly promising for making a case for such an interpretation. The problem (we have seen was the case with the theme of Ovidian metamorphosis) is that the narrative begins in medias res with the transformation already effected, with the motivation for this transformation being unclear or nonexistent. But let us plunge boldly on, trusting our intuition that it is the scapegoating process that will ultimately provide a key to the enigma. Gregor Samsa awakens “from unsettling dreams” already transformed into the living beast of the atonement ritual—not a goat, however (that would be too obvious an allusion to Leviticus), but an intriguingly unspecified “monstrous vermin.” If the scapegoat theory holds, however, it is clear that Gregor has already been transformed into the scapegoat in animal form by the beginning of Kafka’s narrative. What then remains to be established—and this would be the key to the enigma—is the reason for this metamorphosis. Proceeding step by step in order to ascertain whether Girard’s theory might shed some retrospective light on Kafka’s narrative, one might ­begin by suspecting that Gregor, before his transformation, had already manifested the “signs of a victim.” In his small number of family members he does indeed stand out; he is different from their collective norm, in that he is the sole breadwinner, the only one working outside the home, as a travelling salesman. His father has lost his job and has settled for the last five years into self-complacent idleness: The breakfast dishes were laid out lavishly on the table, since for his father breakfast was the most important meal of the day, which he would prolong for hours while reading various newspapers. (Kafka 2004 15) His asthmatic mother, who spends “every other day lying on the sofa” (27), has had a maid to assist her, and his seventeen-year-old sister, an

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  165 amateur violinist, enjoys an idle and comfortable life at home “wearing pretty clothes, sleeping late, helping in the house, enjoying a few modest amusements” (27); she is an amateur violinist, and Gregor hopes that he will be able to support her eventually studying at a conservatory. Up until now Gregor has been happy to be the only one to support them all with his work: “he felt proud that he had been able to provide such a life in so nice an apartment for his parents and his sister” (21). Yet this morning, as he awakens, his mind is full of resentment: what a grueling job I’ve picked! Day in, day out—on the road… the torture of travelling, worrying about changing trains, constantly seeing new faces, no relationships that last or get more intimate. To the devil with it all! (4) The irony is that his sudden metamorphosis has in fact rendered him unable to go to work that morning and indeed will prevent his ever going to work. The metamorphosis itself can be taken metaphorically in two d ­ ifferent ways. As we have seen, the “monstrous vermin” can suggest a novel variation on the animal form of the scapegoat described as a goat in ­L eviticus. But it can also be taken as a sign that Girard’s scapegoating process is already underway at the opening of the text. Being changed into a kind of “monstrous vermin” immediately gives Gregor a stigmatized identity, long before it is clear in the text what the charges were that were used to justify the first step of his persecution. Kafka has brouillé les cartes—he has mixed up the orderly sequence of the scapegoating events that lead from preselection to false accusation to persecution; he starts his tale with the sudden fact of persecution. So, what was the nature of the false accusations that could push ­Gregor down the path to persecution? They are accusations of laziness and of the unwillingness to work. First, Gregor himself imagines that, once he did not show up for work, his boss would be sure to come with the health-insurance doctor, blame his parents for their lazy son, and cut off all excuses by quoting the health-insurance doctor, for whom the world consisted of people who were completely healthy but afraid to work. (5) But it is the office manager who actually arrives and who speaks to him from behind the door. His mother tries to excuse his tardiness: Believe me, sir, there’s something the matter with him. Otherwise how would Gregor have missed a train? That boy has nothing on his mind but the business. (10)

166  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts But the manager is intent on making his accusations stick: “Mr. Samsa,” the manager now called, raising his voice, “what’s the matter? You barricade yourself in your room, answer only ‘yes’ and ‘no,” cause your parents serious unnecessary worry, and you neglect—I mention this only in passing—your duties to the firm in a really shocking manner…. Your performance of late has been very unsatisfactory…. Mr. Samsa, such a thing cannot be tolerated.” (11) Gregor defends himself and protests his total innocence: “there’s no basis for any of the accusations that you’re making against me now; no one has ever said a word to me about them.” His mother, once again, takes his side, after hearing muffled sounds on the other side of the door: “Maybe he is seriously ill, and here we are torturing him” (12). But by this time the manager refuses to listen any more to what he calls “the voice of an animal” (14). The manager stalks off, and when Gregor tries to leave his room, his father forces him back, giving him a “hard shove,” and “the door was slammed shut with the cane, then at last everything was quiet” (19). Now begins Gregor’s long period of isolation and indeed of what the text calls “imprisonment” (25) in his own room. Life moves on slowly, but, ominously, his existence increasingly becomes a tortured existence. The reassuring comfort of living in his own room is threatened: his mother and his sister, faced with his compulsive crawling around the room and its walls, ­decide to remove the familiar furniture and other items from his room: “they were clearing out his room; depriving him of everything he loved”(33). And his own mother and sister are now terrified at the sight of him: [his] mother… caught sight of the gigantic brown blotch on the ­flowered wallpaper, and before it really dawned on her that what she saw was Gregor, cried in a hoarse, bawling voice: “Oh God, Oh God!”; and, as if giving up completely, she fell with outstretched arms across the couch and did not stir. “You, Gregor!” cried his sister with raised fist and piercing eyes. (34) Soon things get worse. His father drives him back into his room by “bombarding” him with apples, one of which remains “imbedded in his flesh” (38). Wounded badly and now barely able to take food (43), it is the beginning of the end for him. Soon even his beloved sister will call for his execution: “It has to go,” cried his sister. “That’s the only answer…. This a­ nimal persecutes us, drives the roomers away, obviously wants to occupy the apartment and for us to sleep in the gutter.” (50)

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  167 So, the process of scapegoating is nearing its end: after torture comes execution.18 It is clear that Gregor’s punishment had been instigated, not so much by human persecutors (in this case, mainly by his family members), as by the internal logic of the scapegoating persecution process itself, which turned him into an “animal” in the first place, even before the stage of false accusation begins. Kafka has confusingly reversed the sequence of events: Gregor’s punishment, which resulted in radical stigmatization, preceded the crime, so to speak. But if his punishment begins with his monstrous metamorphosis, it ­continues thanks to the increasingly hostile attitudes and eventually violent acts of his own family members. But what is it that motivates their hostility? Behind their feelings of repulsion and disgust—which lead them first to isolate and imprison him—lies a shadow projection onto Gregor that is a key in terms of scapegoat theory, to the motivations of their actions. They are secretly ashamed of their own f­ ecklessness and i­dleness, and what they project onto Gregor—the image of a “monstrous vermin”—is the concretization of a psychic image of this shameful stigmatized identity involving both uselessness and danger. Their implicit and increasingly overt accusation is that Gregor is lazy, that he is a drag on the family finances and a threat to the family’s very ­well-­b eing. He is, in a word, nothing but vermin. Of course, this is a false accusation, born of their own ­projected shame, and it echoes the ­e arlier accusation of the office manager. The shadow projection is not harmless, however, since it leads to tragic scapegoating. And this tragic process of scapegoating has a history. His family members had for years left it to Gregor to be the sole financial support of his family, and now they take this support for granted. In those days Gregor’s sole concern had been to do everything in his power to make the family forget as quickly as possible the business disaster which had plunged everyone into a state of total ­despair. And so he had begun to work with special ardor and had risen ­almost overnight from stock clerk to traveling salesman, which of course opened up very different money-making possibilities, and in no time his successes on the job were transformed, by means of commissions, into hard cash that could be plunked down on the table at home in front of his astonished and delighted family. Those had been wonderful times, and they had never returned, at least not with the same glory, although later on Gregor earned enough money to meet the expenses of his family and actually did so. They had just gotten used to it, the family as well as Gregor, the money was received with thanks, but no special feeling of warmth went with it any more. (25–6)

168  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts But Gregor wished to do even more, and he had frequently discussed with his sister his plan to finance her further musical education at the Conservatory; he even intends “to announce his plan on Christmas Eve” (28). But now, after his metamorphosis, all this support has become impossible for him to continue. He can no longer go to work and earn money (given the shape he is in, so to speak); and his grand plan to support his sister’s training as a violinist is no longer a feasible project. In a partial reversal of the normal scapegoating sequence, the first stage of his punishment—his monstrous metamorphosis, and the stigmatization and the isolation and imprisonment that result from it— has furnished the o ­ ccasion for his retroactive accusation. Because it is his fate to become, after having been the family’s support, the useless member supported by the family, his metamorphosis is both the cause of and the initial punishment for his crime, even as it makes him totally innocent of the accusation of having caused it to happen for the “unsettling dreams” that immediately precede it hardly constitute a deliberate act on his part. Kafka has given an extremely condensed form of the scapegoating ­process from the very start. So, the way is prepared for the final punishment, when his sister calls for his execution as a dangerous animal. Gregor’s sad story can thus be seen as retracing—with a novel variation (punishment before crime and accusation)—the sequence of the steps of the scapegoating process, and it ends appropriately with the final step (which in Girard’s sequence is called “divinization”), that is, with his posthumous status as a savior. After his death—and one can also speculate that it is “because of his death”—his family’s problems begin to be resolved. The father goes back to work and puts on a uniform again. The mother and the sister start to work as well. The family members are once again linked together by secure bonds of love and attachment. In fact, with Gregor out of the picture, everything is looking better for them. And the sister’s future, memorably evoked at the very end of the tale, when the family leaves the apartment for a trolley ­excursion into the countryside (“something they had not done for months” [55]), now includes the possibility of marriage: While they were talking in this vein, it occurred almost simultaneously to Mr. and Mrs. Samsa, as they watched their daughter getting livelier and livelier, that lately, in spite of all the troubles, which had turned her cheeks pale, she had blossomed into a good-looking, shapely girl. Growing quieter and communicating almost unconsciously through glances, they thought that it would soon be time, too, to find her a good husband. And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions when at the end of the ride their daughter got up first and stretched her young body. (55)

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  169 Thanks to the persecution and execution of the scapegoat, the family is making a fresh start. But why did Kafka decide to bury such a powerful and significant scapegoating subtext in his tale? He could have easily made the scapegoating process more obvious—could have dared to call it by its name. Or he might have told Gregor’s story in a shockingly naturalistic mode: Gregor could have had a bad accident that had incapacitated him, leaving to the tender mercies of his ungrateful family, who finally decided to murder him. But instead Kafka decided to endow Gregor’s sad story with all the horror of a frightening fairy tale. But—once again—why did he keep hidden the mechanism of the scapegoating process that was at work behind the scenes? It was not the fear of censorship, nor the desire to play games with his readers, that motivated his decision but rather, I suspect, the modernist strategy of proceeding via stealth and indirection in order to let the mythic power of the cryptic subtext accumulate by blocking its immediate access to the surface of the text, in order to increase the strength of its subliminal impact on the reader’s imagination. The reader does not follow at an intellectual distance the unfolding of the scapegoating process but rather is made subject to its mythic and tragic horror. The Metamorphosis was thus not designed to be enigmatic for the sake of being enigmatic. Rather, it was designed to lure the unsuspecting reader into what Wendy Faris calls one of “Kafka’s fearful labyrinths” where “anxiety escalates within the convolution rather than dissipating at a central resting point” (Faris 84).

Notes 1 See T.S. Eliot, Selected Prose 132–47. 2 For this scene in Alcestis, see Rush Rehm, Marriage to Death: The ­C onflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. 88–90. 3 See Bernard Benstock’s introduction to the special issue “James Joyce and His Contemporaries” of Comparative Literature Studies 19.2 (Summer 1982), v–vi. See also Jean Kimball, “A Jungian Scenario for Ulysses” in the same issue, 195–207. 4 See Jean Kimball, Odyssey of the Psyche: Jungian Patterns in Joyce’s Ulysses. Carbondale and Edwardville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. See also her essay “Eros and Logos in Ulysses: A Jungian Pattern,” In: Gender in Joyce. Ed. Jolanta W. Wawrzyka and Marlena G. Corcoran. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997, 112–32. But nowhere in her otherwise excellent Jungian interpretations of Ulysses (including her recently published Joyce and the Early Freudians: A Synchronic Dialogue of Texts, University Press of Florida, 2003) does Kimball touch on the possibility of a Jungian anima/animus subtext for Nausicaa. 5 For a discussion of the Jungian concepts of anima and animus, see Steven F. Walker, Jung and the Jungians on Myth: An Introduction, 45–62. 6 Carl Gustav Jung, “Anima and Animus.” (1928), In: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology, Collected Works, vol. vii. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. 186–203.

170  Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts 7 See “From Esther Harding’s Notebooks: 1922, 1925.” In: C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. 25–31. 8 My thanks to Dr John Beebe, a distinguished Jungian therapist and writer in San Francisco, for this and other helpful details. It is possible that there are earlier pen-written occurrences of the theory, but they cannot be dated precisely, for, as Beebe indicates, “Jung had a tendency to add to his manuscripts, always written by hand, with addenda and interlinear notes written at a later date” (email communication, June 9, 2001). 9 The “raughty tinker” probably designates Frank Budgen, who is the dedicatee of Joyce’s 1918 poem “To Budgen, Raughty Tinker” (see Ellmann Joyce 433), with Joyce left with the role of the “Irishman in the gallery.” 10 C.G. Jung, Psychological Types or the Psychology of Individuation. Trans. H. Godwin Baynes. New York and London: Harcourt, Brace & ­Company, 1923, 591–2. My thanks to Prof. Matthew Spano for locating these quotations. 11 A non-masturbatory tryst in Homer, it goes without saying since the ­Odyssey is an epic, not a mock-epic like Ulysses. 12 The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Samuel Butler. Butler’s translation first ­appeared in 1900, was reprinted many times. 13 As we have seen was the case with Joyce’s Nausicaa and Jung’s theory of anima and animus, a cryptic subtext may provide an invitation to adopt a certain theoretical perspective on the text as a whole. Fellini’s 8½ (Otto e mezzo, 1963) is another good case in point. Before, during, and after the making of the film, Fellini had been undergoing analysis with Dr Ernst ­B ernhard, a Berlin Jew who had escaped Nazi Germany to the relative safety of Italy, where he pioneered the practice of Jungian therapy. The two of them hit it off wonderfully well, and the Italian director found in Dr Bernhard the friendly and noncoercive midlife mentor he desperately needed at this point in his life and career. So, it would seem natural to look in the direction of Jung’s archetypal psychology for a hermeneutical framework for 8½; in fact, the film itself encourages this move through a cryptic allusion in the following key fantasy/memory scene. The director Guido is haunted by a vivid childhood memory of a twelve-year-old girl who had told him and other children that a buried treasure could be found by following the direction of the gaze of a portrait hanging on the wall, while repeating the magic formula ASA NISI MASA. Her magic formula is itself a form of buried treasure. Its apparently meaningless syllables are actually a kind of Pig Latin called “serpentine language” (la lengua serpentina) in which the syllables SA and SI are added to the syllables of the original word; her magic formula thus translates a key term of Jungian psychology: anima (A-NI-MA). Fellini would have been quite familiar with the term, given his period of Jungian analysis. 8½ is rich in images that represent various forms of the director Guido’s anima, who over the course of the film becomes the Muse who will resolve the director’s professional and personal difficulties at midlife. The discovery of this cryptic psychological subtext thus tends to validate a psychological interpretation of the film as a Jungian anima psychodrama, much as Joyce’s Nausicaa represents an animus psychodrama. See the short discussion of this anima dimension of the film in my recent book Midlife Transformation in Literature and Film, 50–2. 14 See Kafka (2013 285) [notes]. 15 See Kafka (2013 60) [notes]. 16 Peter Speedwell has recently moved close to designating Gregor as a ­scapegoat, when he writes that

Three Modernist Cryptic Subtexts  171 in Metamorphosis [sic] he [Kafka] manages to convey the distaste combined with horror that the sacrifice victim seems to manage to perpetuate on his victims. Remember, it is not what the accused have done that will cause the sacrifice, but what they think the sacrifice victim has done to them. (Speedwell “Kafka and Sacrifice” 99) 17 Although the very Catholic René Girard clearly has in mind, here as elsewhere, in The Scapegoat, the narrative of the persecution, death, and resurrection of Christ as the ultimate revelation of the inner working of the scapegoating process, he affirms that this model holds true for all other instances as well, with the significant difference that all other accounts of the persecution of scapegoats (mythic, literary as well as historical) take the side of the persecutors, and present the scapegoat not as an innocent victim (as in the case of Christ) but as one who is truly guilty. However, pace Girard, this is clearly not the case with Kafka’ narrative, which is exemplary for the way it affirms Gregor’s innocence up to the end. 18 A great part of the emotional power of Kafka’s tale is its evocation of the extreme pathos of Gregor’s suffering and death. So, it is strange that the analogy with the concentration camp misery of the Holocaust has not been more highlighted by later critics. Of course, without the recognition of the scapegoating process as a cryptic subtext, the analogy between these two horrendous results of the scapegoating process—one perhaps fictionally ­prophetic, and the other all too real—is not so apparent. But seeing that the incarcerated Gregor’s sufferings soon become hellish, and that in the end it is psychological torture and physical deprivation that cause his demise, it is hard to escape the analogy. Of course, his knowledge of earlier anti-Semitic persecution in Russia and elsewhere would have provided Kafka with clear hints of what might still be to come.

6 Behind the Camera

There are instances in which the very title of a film immediately draws the spectator’s attention to a significant and obvious subtext. Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro, 1959) is a case in point. In the event that the spectator needs some prompting, the main characters are called Orpheus (Orfeu) and Eurydice, and the plot generally follows the Greek myth’s tragic drama of love and loss. The comparison of hypertext and its obvious subtext is thus encouraged from the start. For example, the Greek Orpheus’ descent to the underworld in order to rescue ­Eurydice from Hades becomes the inspiration for a colorful scene is which a Macumba spirit possession ceremony results in the voice of ­Eurydice pleading with Orpheus not to look in her direction; when he does, the voice disappears. Throughout the film, it is clear that the director ­intends the spectators to follow carefully the way the film’s plot parallels and transforms the narrative of the ancient myth. The constant presence of the mythic subtext gives the film a universal dimension that would be lacking without it; in many ways, the subtext has been thoroughly amalgamated with the film, a colorful story of love and loss during the carnival in Rio de Janeiro that has been raised to the level of archetypal drama. However, there are more than a few instances where one of a film’s subtexts is carefully hidden, sometimes with a small and apparently insignificant detail as a clue. Sometimes, the hypertextual clue might appear initially as a simple homage from one director to another, as is the case with the apparently casual shot of a Charlie Chaplin poster in Ousmane Sembène’s masterpiece Xala (1975). This somewhat cryptic subtextual reference may have some relevance for the interpretation of Sembène’s film since, like Chaplin (most notably in The Great Dictator and Modern Times), the Senegalese director is working within the realm of serious political allegory infused with often hilarious comedy. Xala is not, however, a remake of any specific Chaplin film. But taking cognizance of the homage to Chaplin indicated by the poster helps validate the viewer’s growing impression that Xala is not only a social comedy (a wealthy Senegalese businessman, having just taken a third wife, is cursed with impotence) but also a political allegory (neocolonialism and the newly empowered native elite’s exploitation and expropriation of the common people).

Behind the Camera  173 Another example of the same process of cryptic allusion, but this time intensified and deepened, may be found in Lina Wertmüller’s film Swept Away (Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto, 1974) in terms of its hypertextual relationship with Michelangelo Antonioni’s earlier film L’avventura (1960). In Antonioni’s film (which was examined earlier in Chapter Four), the wealthy passengers’ frivolousness and self-satisfaction are emblematic of the social alienation and emotional rootlessness of the Italian moneyed classes. The first half of Antonioni’s film shows them going ashore from their yacht onto one of the Aeolian Islands, where the young woman Anna, suffering in a problematic relationship with her fiancé Sandro, who is a bit of a cad, suddenly wanders up the cliff and disappears. Her friend Claudia is extremely distressed, but the others seem mainly satisfied with only half-hearted attempts to find her. In the second half of the film, Claudia, in spite of her loyalty to Anna, now presumed dead, lets herself be seduced by Sandro, who immediately proves his caddishness by sleeping with a drugged out, ­high-class prostitute the same night. The final scene shows him bursting into tears over his callousness, and some hope is extended that this emotionally rootless relationship might have a chance at least of deepening, as Claudia tenderly strokes his hair from behind. L’avventura drips with the high seriousness of a modernist anatomy of upper-class frivolity, alienation, and despair. Lina Wertmüller, whose postmodern comic genius manifested itself fully in Swept Away, was probably not the only one to have found Antonioni’s masterpiece to be a bit pretentious and boring at times. Since both films start out on a yacht cruising the western coast of Italy, and then move on to a landfall on a small island, one might begin to suspect that Swept Away is, on some level, a comic and even partly parodic response to Antonioni’s L’avventura, with even the elegantly short understated title of the one contrasting with the almost record length bombastic title of the other. The opening shots include a yacht (this time a sailing vessel), rough rocky cliffs, and some swimmers—all these reminiscent of motifs found at the opening of L’avventura. A more significant clue, an allusion to the title of this cryptic subtext, occurs at the moment when one of the two main characters says, sarcastically, “ma che bella avventura!” (“but what a wonderful adventure!”). This character is Raffaella (played by Mariangela Melato), one of the well-off tourists who are enjoying a yachting vacation, and she says it to Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini), who is a member of the crew, a working-class communist from the Mezzogiorno who finds the “industrial bitch” and her constant loudmouth, right-wing ranting almost unendurable. At this point in the film, he is trying without success to restart the engine of the little motor launch, on which he had been ordered to take her for a swim in the waters just off the island. Of course, the cryptic subtext indicated by Raffaella’s sarcastic remark, without providing a key to any new interpretation, does suggest

174  Behind the Camera a comparison between the two films that would be quite interesting to pursue at greater length. It is not, however, that Swept Away designates itself as a parody. Rather, Wertmüller’s carnavalesque film can be viewed, on one level of interpretation, as a postmodern comic rejoinder to Antonioni’s modernist high seriousness. The vitality and irreverence of Wertmüller’s communist crew members, especially Gennarino, is in stark contrast with the emotional superficiality and vapid cynicism of the upper-class vacationers of L’avventura. Antonioni’s drama of existential loss played out in the first part of the film and the vain attempt to substitute sexuality for love in the latter part of the film are countered in Wertmüller’s film by the unusual and unexpectedly campy sexual passion when two class enemies, Raffaella and Gennarino, are stranded together on a desert island. If Antonioni’s film is anything but an “adventure” in a positive sense (in fact, the title is rather ironical—as ­filmgoers have sometimes complained, not very much “happens” in the film), Wertmüller’s film really does turn out to be a “bella avventura” in that Gennerino and Raffaella’s romantic “adventure” turns out unexpectedly well (from threat of rape to romance, so to speak) and leaves the impression that class warfare can have its bright side, at least in an exceptional set of circumstances. In the opening sequence of Swept Away, where the idle chitchat on the yacht, reminiscent of the opening of L ­ ’avventura, becomes boisterously comic political grandstanding, ­Raffaela has been poking her finger in the eye of communist politics generally and of the communist Gennarino in particular, and has summed up her belligerently right-wing position by exclaiming that she “won’t give in to political terrorism.” In fact, this is just what she will give in to when she and Gennarino are stranded on a desert island together, where the communist sailor’s sexual violence and brutal dominance games eventually lead to her passionate submission. Unlike in Antonioni’s film, however, the island is not a place of loss but rather of discovery, where the bourgeois motormouth Raffaella realizes her capacity for passion, and the working-class communist Gennarino learns that he, of all people, can fall in love with an “industrial bitch.” Class warfare becomes, at least for a brief moment on a desert island, class romance. Of course, this fantasy of class reconciliation cannot last. Almost everything in Swept Away is a comic reversal of serious—sometimes ponderously serious—situations in L’avventura. In particular, the ending of Wertmüller’s film, where a helicopter lands in order to bring Raffaella’s husband back to her (Wertmüller Screenplays 254) and then takes off, taking Raffaela away from Gennarino forever (263), points toward the sequence midway through L’avventura in which a helicopter brings the drama of Anna’s disappearance to a crisis point with the arrival of her distraught father. Like Anna, Raffaella disappears, but only because, in Swept Away, class reconciliation is a fantasy that cannot stand the test of social reality. But her final disappearance at the end of the film

Behind the Camera  175 is neither mysterious nor tragic: something precious had happened between her and her communist lover, who have both been “swept away” (travolti) by passion, even if it cannot endure. Clues to the presence of a cryptic cinematic subtext providing a new and potentially significant hermeneutic context can be found, as we have seen, in just a single image (the Charlie Chaplin poster in ­Sembène’s Xala) or in just a few words of dialog (“ma che bella avventura”) in ­Wertmüller’s Swept Away. But film music can also provide clues that signal the presence of significant cryptic subtexts, as will be illustrated first by Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011) and then by Buñuel’s surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (1929). Both films use music from Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde as musical clues that point toward the presence of cryptic operatic and dramatic subtexts, whose detection enables a new interpretation of each film to emerge. Melancholia is, as its title indicates, a film on the theme of depression; its background music restates insistently and relentlessly a gloomy leitmotif from the prelude to Tristan and Isolde. It is also—if somewhat implausibly—an unusual apocalyptic science fiction film, whose science is more than a bit wobbly. Finally, it is an archetypal drama of a high order, with a potentially powerful symbolic impact. It is all three kinds of film at once, and this makes it both baffling, infuriating, and fascinating. The director Lars von Trier had experienced depression personally, and so had his leading actress Kirsten Dunst (who received the Best A ­ ctress Award at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival for her role of Justine in this film.) Speaking of his character Justine in an interview in the supplementary material of the DVD, the director states that “she gets a depression, and this is more or less a description of my own depression.” The film’s first scenes evoke a wedding reception and a wedding night from Hell. The bride (Justine) and the groom (Michael) arrive hopelessly late, and the bride’s family (her mother, her brother-in-law John, and her sister Claire) are in nasty moods. Justine’s arrogant boss Jack (whom later she will call to his face “a despicable, power hungry little man”) has shown up at the reception with Tim, a young man he has just hired, to keep Justine working on an advertising tagline, even on her wedding night. To make things worse, shortly after her arrival, Justine falls into a severe depression and can barely function. The wedding reception has been lavishly financed by her brother-in-law John in a grandiose hotel and its appurtenant golf course, and one might expect a joyous evening celebration as well as a lavishly luxurious one; however, nothing goes according to plan. The couple’s wedding night itself is a disaster. As Michael and Justine withdraw to the bridal suite, Justine asks her new husband, just as they are on the point of disrobing, “Can I have a moment, please?” At this point, she leaves their room and goes down to the dark and empty golf course. She is followed there by her new assistant, the assiduous Tim, with whom she initiates a brief sexual encounter—something close to

176  Behind the Camera rape—by literally forcing him down into a sand trap. It is clear that from now on, and for all intents and purposes, her marriage with ­M ichael is done for, and when she meets her seriously disappointed groom leaving the hotel with his luggage, the very depressed Justine can only say to him, by way of farewell, “what did you expect?” Lars von Trier has surely created the most unpleasant wedding party in all of film history. But for our purposes, what is most worth analyzing is the way in which its mood of savagely depressive bitterness is linked with gloomy background music that Wagnerites would be familiar with but that would constitute a cryptic musical subtext for others: the so-called “Tristan Chord” from Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. In Wagner’s opera, it is introduced right at start of the Prelude to Act One and then restated frequently as a leitmotif (the so-called “Tristan motif”) throughout. The chord’s musically unresolved nature (the rising notes moving toward, but not reaching, the final keynote) expresses a mood of frustrated romantic longing for perfect union. At the very end of the opera, however, the chord is resolved, just as Wagner’s lovers have died blissfully in each other’s arms. The unresolved tension and the unresolved chord finally achieve resolution in a mystic love which finds its fulfillment in death (Liebestod). But Lars von Trier never lets us hear this last-minute musical resolution of the Tristan Chord. (In fact, as the credits role after the end of the film, the director uses another unrelievedly gloomy bit of music from Wagner’s prelude to Act Three—there is not even the musical ghost of a happy ending!) The Tristan motif appears over and over again in Melancholia to highlight the mood of utter hopelessness and depression. Although Wagner’s opera ended on the ecstatic note of the mystical union of Tristan and Isolde’s Love-in-Death, the film, in stark contrast to the opera, seems initially to provide no such thematic resolution at all since there is no mystical union for Justine and Michael through a Wagnerian love stronger than death; rather, their conjugal union is brutally trashed before it is even consummated. And the young man Tim’s postcoital proposal that he and Justine could form the “perfect couple,” as he puts it, is only met with Justine’s terse refusal: “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Any faint hope of mystical romantic union is quickly dashed in Lars von Trier’s film; there will be no perfect couples. Nastiness, cynicism, anger, and depression destroy human hopes of happiness on earth. In fact, by the end of the film, the Earth itself appears about to be destroyed. In terms of the apocalyptic science fiction plot devised by the director, the destruction of Justine’s marriage by her depression (i.e., “melancholy,” in pre-psychoanalytic terminology) prefigures the destruction of the world by an exoplanet named Melancholia that has been hiding behind the sun and is now on a near-collision course with Earth. Justine’s brother-in-law John assures everyone that astrophysicists have calculated that Melancholia will narrowly miss the Earth and

Behind the Camera  177 so will remain just a “flyby”—but a glorious flyby, which, as it passes close to Earth, will provide a magnificent sight such as has never been seen before by human eyes! However, this expectation too will soon be disappointed; by the end of the film, the exoplanet Melancholia seems to have crashed into the Earth. It must be admitted, though, that this science fiction dimension of the plot is somewhat lacking in plausibility since, in terms of the current state of astrophysics, it would seem extremely unlikely that scientists would make such a monumental miscalculation. Furthermore, even if we grant the possibility of such a miscalculation, the second half of the film departs from the disaster-movie convention that an apocalyptic cataclysm must involve large populations since von Trier only shows us the experience of a small group of people, which, after the departure of the wedding guests and the death of John, is reduced to Justine, her sister Claire, and Claire’s young son Leo. In terms of the cinematic tradition of mayhem, mass panic, and destruction, it is not even clear whether the film’s cataclysm is meant to be taken as real. Perhaps the director is pulling our leg? I think not—as we shall see, he has in mind a more serious purpose than playing with the conventions of the apocalyptic terror flick. The apocalyptic science fiction drama unfolds quickly in the mode of low budget and low tech, as the film begins to move in the direction of latent symbolism and myth. The boy Leo has invented a simple wire apparatus that allows him to ascertain that the apparent size in the sky of the exoplanet Melancholia is growing larger, then that it is growing smaller, as Melancholia begins to finish its flyby. But then—to his mother Claire’s extreme consternation and then panic—the apparent size of the exoplanet begins to grow larger again; it seems clear that it has changed its course and is now heading directly for the Earth. It is this new twist in the plot, which might seem a bit clumsy from a purely science fiction point of view, that signals a turn away from apocalyptic science fiction in the direction of archetypal drama. From now on in the film, it is no longer primarily a question of faulty astrophysics but rather of visionary experience. As the magnificent spectacle slowly begins to unfold— as the exoplanet Melancholia’s beautiful silvery blue sphere rises and sets in the sky, looming ever larger and more beautiful with each passing day—the film’s audience, entranced, might well forget worrying about world destruction. The increasingly visible mandala form of Melancholia in all its splendor suggests that the film is now entering into the domain of the archetypal and the symbolic—an esoteric realm that is supported, as we shall see, by the extraordinary presence of a cryptic subtext. In retrospect, one realizes that the earlier scenes dealing with Justine’s depression and her impulsive destruction of her marriage, accompanied by the Wagnerian motif (the unresolved Tristan Chord) that constitutes its insistent musical background, are symbolically the prelude to an

178  Behind the Camera esoteric archetypal drama involving a desperate compensatory longing for unity and wholeness. The marriage of Justine and Michael is brutally aborted; the couple’s symbolic unity celebrated in the wedding reception is smashed. Everything goes wrong, and Justine’s depressive apocalyptic outlook ultimately seems to fit reality perfectly: “human life is terrible; nobody will miss it,” she says laconically. The frequent repetition of the unresolved Tristan Chord highlights musically the reference to the mythological power of Wagner’s opera but apparently with the ecstatic union of Liebestod of the last scene significantly left out. It is as though the archetypal image of the Couple (the archetypal union of Male and Female, of Tristan and Isolde) can no longer express in our time, as it could for the arch-Romantic composer Wagner, a viable and believable image of unity and wholeness. However drawn the director Lars von Trier may be toward the moody depths of the Wagnerian romantic vision, he remains resolutely post-Romantic: no more Liebestod for him! But this is because the director has something else in store for his spectators. What he is presenting to them in Melancholia is a new vision of archetypal simplicity and grandeur: the wonderful silvery blue sphere of the exoplanet Melancholia, as it appears frequently (but never for very long, lest the viewer grow tired of it) and ever larger in the final section of the film. This image is hermetic, iconic, and cryptic in that it refers to a symbol whose archetypal numinosity most viewers, encouraged to take the apocalyptic ending literally, might experience somewhat subliminally (“the exoplanet about to destroy the Earth is beautiful!”) but whose meaning they would not consciously comprehend. In the depths of the Cold War, C.G. Jung wrote that the mandala (spherical) shape of flying saucers represented a new symbol that brought comfort and consolation to a divided world.1 For Jung, not only was the mandala form of the flying saucers a powerful and consoling symbol of wholeness in a dangerously divided world; the myth frequently associated with them—that of powerful but benevolent extraterrestrials on a mission to bring glad tidings to suffering humanity living under the threat of a nuclear holocaust—was also a modern version of the promise (cf. the angels’ “tidings of comfort and joy” of the Christmas carol) of divine assistance at a time of desperate anxiety. But all symbols need to be adjusted to the concerns of the age. With Melancholia, Lars von Trier created another and more modern myth, perhaps better adapted to the needs of a less romantic, more individualistic, and more psychologically oriented age than Jung’s flying saucers or Wagner’s Liebestod. Although Jung was hardly convinced of the actual physical reality of the flying saucers so frequently sighted after the onset of the Cold War and the first shock of the Nuclear Age, he was fascinated and impressed by the sightings’ potential for psychological significance. But now at the beginning of the twenty-first century and long after the end of the Cold War, flying saucers are no longer the objects of widespread public

Behind the Camera  179 attention that they were in the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps because our hyper-individualistic age is less mesmerized by the drama of collective political tensions. But von Trier’s vision of the exoplanet Melancholia approaching the Earth is truly mesmerizing, however vague and elemental a message its cryptic symbolic subtext supports. By contrast, Wagner’s romantic vision of the Couple, intensely moving as it still may be for Wagnerites, probably has proved to be unable to withstand the impact of contemporary cynicism regarding dreams of perfect love and union, as savagely deconstructed in the wedding reception scenes of Melancholia. What is then all the more surprising is how Melancholia, for all its apparent subversion of the Wagnerian myth of the Couple, may be said to end with a scene that represents a kind of revisioned Wagnerian ­Liebestod. The scene has, no doubt, a radically different cast of characters: not a Tristan and an Isolde who die together ecstatically but rather two sisters, Justine and Claire, finally reconciled (significantly, as polar opposites, one light haired and one dark haired), and a young boy who links them together as his mother and his aunt. The film’s symbolism in the final scene is new, fresh, and striking. The threesome of Dark Sister, Light Sister, and Young Boy, under the sign of the Mandala of ­Melancholia as the fourth, potentially symbolize reconciliation of opposites and hope for a future—an elemental and powerful message. What is also surprising as the film moves toward its conclusion is how Justine ceases to be the victim of her severe depression and self-­ loathing, and becomes the organizer of a therapeutic ritual. At first, her ­dark-haired sister Claire, realizing that the end of the world is near, and in a state of increasing panic and despair, had proposed that the three of them await the end by coming together on the hotel terrace and enacting a sentimentally and conventionally romantic ritual involving wine, song, and candles. To this desperate appeal, Justine replies savagely, “Do you know what I think of your plan? I think it is a piece of shit.” But, having brutally rejected her sister’s need for ritual consolation, Justine soon turns to her young nephew Leo, and at that moment an unexpectedly loving and compassionate side of her suddenly surfaces. The young boy is terrified since his father has told him before his death that “there is nothing to do and nowhere to hide.” His aunt Justine assures him, however, that “if your dad said that, then he has forgotten about something. He has forgotten about the Magic Cave.” So, she leads the boy into the nearby woods where they cut and sharpen branches in order to build a kind of open tepee type of structure on the golf course greens which will serve as the sacred space for their final ritual of joining hands. It is sheltered by this Magic Cave that the three await the imminent impact of Melancholia, now spreading hugely and beautifully over most of the sky. Leo is still afraid, so she asks him to close his eyes, and then she grasps his hand. She also takes her weeping sister’s hand, the three, now bound together by love, remaining calm and serene throughout, as

180  Behind the Camera the impact of Melancholia’s wave of light and energy engulfs them. The screen turns white with light and then turns black as a softly apocalyptic rush of sounds continues for a brief moment. So, this is the end of the world—or is it? It is hard to decide, for the film Melancholia manifests an intriguing and sometimes irritating thematic disconnect between personal depression, world destruction, and archetypal symbolism. Yet I think the director just manages to link them in the end. Justine’s depression, literally represented, is implicated in a science fiction drama of world destruction, and then transcended by the spectacle of the numinous beauty of the mandala-like exoplanet ­Melancholia and of the final ritual of the Magic Cave. The film thus ends not as personal tragedy or as science fiction but rather as sacred drama. By the end of the film we are in ritual space, where a ceremony is enacted by a Bright and a Dark Sister, and a Boy appropriately named Leo (the Lion). This is a realm of archetypal representation, not of literal reality. In Jungian terms, the archetypal symbolism is simple and powerful. The loving union of the dark feminine, the bright feminine, and the Divine Child (Puer) signals the potential for the renewal of the archetype of wholeness (the Self) under the sign of the beautiful silvery blue mandala of the exoplanet Melancholia. These powerful symbols of renewal and reconciliation that appear in Melancholia’s archetypally apocalyptic finale suggest a new vision of hope for the future. Apocalypse, one needs to remember, means not only world destruction but world renewal. At least, that is one way of responding to the film. However, it might be fairer to state that, by the end of the film, the audience is in all three realms simultaneously: that of personal tragedy (Justine’s depression), science fiction (world destruction), and sacred drama (the archetypal revelation of light and wholeness). Still, the yearning for a lost sense of unity (represented by the failed union of bride and groom in the opening scenes as well as by the unresolved Tristan Chord) would indeed be depressing and tragic if no further hope for union and wholeness was extended. The archetypal and visually numinous the ending does take the spectator of such a sacred drama beyond both personal tragedy and science fiction into the world of archetypal process. Musically speaking, however, the Tristan Chord will remain unresolved, and the music of Wagner’s Prelude to Act III that plays as the credits roll reinforces this atmosphere of gloom and doom. Perhaps this is because Wagner’s ­Liebestod’s celebration of the Perfect Couple has only been a bridge for Lars von Trier toward a numinous archetypal image more appropriate for the early twenty-first century—more abstract and less romantic. However, the tie in with at least one production of Wagner’s opera is not only musical but also visual. The most readily available DVD of Tristan and Isolde presents in its final scene a striking visual parallel with the final scene of Melancholia that cannot be accidental. This DVD preserves for posterity a now classic performance of Tristan and Isolde,

Behind the Camera  181 filmed and recorded live on July 7, 1973 in the Roman Theater of Orange, with Birgit Nilsson as Isolde, Jon Vickers as Tristan, Karl Böhm as musical director, and—just as important for our purposes—with Nikolaüs Lehnhoff and Heinz Mack for décor and lighting, and Pierre Jourdan as the film director. Lars von Trier was in all likelihood familiar with this DVD. It is an intriguing discovery of another cryptic subtext (this time visual) to realize how the 1973 staging for the Theater of Orange filmed production of the final scene of Wagner’s opera (the great Liebestod scene, during which Isolde imagines that the dead Tristan is still alive, and then dies herself in the ecstatic bliss of their final union) resembles the final scene of the film Melancholia in several remarkable ways. First of all, the two principals are located—Isolde standing, Tristan prone— at the raised center of a white circular structure, flat but tilted so the audience can see it well, which suggests a kind of ritual platform roughly equivalent to the Magic Cave, made tepee-fashion of branches, in which the three characters of Melancholia find their final refuge. Above the figures of Tristan and Isolde hovers a large pale blue sphere, or rather the circular shadow of a sphere created by the lighting (like the exoplanet Melancholia), which is roughly of the same dimensions as the white circular structure on the stage below; as it comes into sharper focus, its wonderful silvery blue color becomes all the more evident. As the filmed opera production comes to a close, there is a final fade out into white light, which exactly parallels the ending of the film Melancholia. Here, we have quite possibly a visual subtext for the director’s marvelous evocation of the silvery blue sphere of the exoplanet Melancholia. If so, then it reinforces the parallel between Wagner’s opera established by the insistent use of the Tristan motif and unresolved chord but this time with a twist. At the very end of his film, Lars von Trier has created in visual terms the setting of the last scene of the 1973 Orange production, and this suggests that the ending of his film can be taken as a modern transformation of the final scene of Wagner’s opera, with an ending that is more ecstatic than tragic or depressive. There may be no resolution in musical terms in the film, but visually, the archetypal majesty of the final scene carries with it a powerfully original if cryptic reformulation of Wagner’s Liebestod. Over eighty years before Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, another film, Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), a collaborative effort of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, had taken on the dated excesses of Wagner’s Liebestod in a mode of savage satire, although its cryptic subtext has waited a long time to be completely uncovered. As we shall see, this cryptic subtext is indeed a buried treasure, in that it has the capacity to validate a totally new interpretation of a much interpreted enigmatic film. Un Chien Andalou was a silent film originally accompanied by background music which Buñuel himself played on a windup Victrola, and which was only much later added as a soundtrack by the director

182  Behind the Camera to the 1960 film reissue. The music chosen by the Buñuel both for the film’s premiere and for the later 1960 reissue consisted of a section of the orchestral version of Wagner’s Liebestod music juxtaposed with two lively Argentinean tangos. However, for the first thirty years of its reception, the silent film’s audiences knew Un Chien Andalou without the soundtrack that had been supplied at the film’s first projection. Thus the Wagnerian dimension of the film and the cryptic Wagnerian subtext were understandably not given recognition, and the musical element has rarely been given any place in subsequent discussions of the film. However, once the soundtrack was added by Buñuel to the 1960 rerelease, it should have been clear that the music of the Liebestod and the two tangos was in sharp contrast: the one as a heavily romantic fetish of Wagner enthusiasts and the other as assertively popular dance ­music with a strong erotic charge. But it is only by examining first the scenes for which the Liebestod music served as background that a second Wagnerian cryptic subtext can be discovered, this time not musical but narrative and visual, and it is this cryptic subtext which will provide us with the key for a new overall interpretation of the film, for this cryptic operatic subtext reveals that Un Chien Andalou has launched a secret surprise attack on the Wagnerian celebration of Love-in-Death. Discussion of the film has been overly influenced by comments made at the time by Buñuel and Dali that have become clichés, such as nothing in the film symbolizes anything, that there is no plot to speak of, that the film follows the logic of a dream, and that it proceeds via Freudian free association. At that time, both Dali and Buñuel wished to draw themselves and their film into the magic circle of French Surrealism and its Freudian leanings. But the film in fact has a rather simple and solid plot. Phillip Drummond (Buñuel x–xi) has commented briefly on what he calls the film’s “firm pseudo-classical narrative/dramatic baseline,” going on to assert that “Un Chien Andalou is to a certain extent a narrative drama” which we can read “as a romantic and melodramatic tragicomedy, or a satiric version of the Surrealist amour fou” (x–xi). This is certainly good as far as it goes, but Drummond fails to specify what the plot of the drama actually consists of; and, as for the alleged satire of Surrealist amour fou, I would say that it is not ­Surrealist amour fou but rather the Wagnerian hyper-Romantic ideal of ­L ove-in-Death that is savagely satirized, while simple unneurotic sexual love (more stereotypically French, one might say, and also more in line with what would have been called “Freudian” at the time) is presented as the happier and saner alternative to sublime but morbidly ­death-driven Wagnerian idealism. Wagner had written Franz Liszt in 1854, while the project of Tristan and Isolde was gestating in his mind, that

Behind the Camera  183 As I have never in my life known real happiness in love, I intend to set up another monument to that loveliest of all dreams, one to be satiated with love from the beginning to the end; I have an idea in my mind of Tristan and Isolde, the simplest but most full-blooded musical concept, and then I will take the black flag flying at the end of the opera, cover myself with it—and die. 2 Buñuel, by contrast, when asked “Do you believe in the victory of sublime love over sordid life, or of sordid life over sublime love” simply replied “I don’t know” (Evans 14). But in Un Chien Andalou Buñuel’s criticism of Wagner is much more pointed, and for good reason. Not only had Freud (as commonly understood) and the French Surrealists rehabilitated the power of pure and unalloyed sexual desire, but the enthusiasm for Wagner, which had flourished for several generations in France and in the world, had been tainted, by the late 1920s, by the memory of the trauma of the bloody experience of World War I that had ended only ten years before. The killing fields of the war were then still a vivid memory, and the slaughter of a large part of the generation of young men who came into the world at the same time as Buñuel (born 1900, i.e., just in time for the  Great War), made for a surge of Germanophobia that continued in the ­postwar French cultural realm. As we shall see, one of the main themes of Buñuel’s film is the privileging of Gallic Sex-in-Life over ­Germanic Love-in-Death. How does this savage attack on Wagner play out in the film? The opening of Un Chien Andalou begins with a shot of the cigarette smoking Buñuel himself sharpening a strap razor, and then, inspired as it were by the sight of a small thin layer of cloud cutting across the full moon, slicing through the eye of a young woman. The shocking image has become iconic, but what does it mean? I would say that it is only with ­Wagner’s Liebestod music playing in the background and with the clouds passing over a romantic moon serving as the inspiration for the slicing of a young woman’s eye, that it becomes clear from the very start that Bunuel is launching his attack on Wagner and all that his opera Tristan and Isolde might be said to represent in terms of morbid and even almost necrophiliac eroticism. Such an interpretation of the film’s opening shots becomes even more plausible as the film progresses. The contrast is vivid and obvious between the film’s weirdly morbid erotic scenes enacted to the background of the Liebestod music and the frankly sexual seduction scenes accompanied by Argentinean tango music. No doubt, these seduction scenes are initially fraught with neurotic sexual inhibitions, but these Freudian tensions are eventually resolved in terms of the pursuit of uncomplicated and uncomplexed sexual happiness. In the next series of shots, with continuing Liebestod music in the background, a man appears riding a bicycle down the street; he is oddly

184  Behind the Camera dressed in a way that suggests both effeminateness and childishness, and he carries on his chest a kind of messenger’s box. This babyish ­man-woman falls over with the bicycle (perhaps a Freudian symbol for a kind of fiasco in the Stendhalian sense of premature ejaculation) and seems to have died; a woman, watching from her apartment window overlooking the street, rushes down to embrace his corpse. Back in her apartment, she takes his odd items of clothing, starting with his tie, and lays them on the bed as though they represented the dead man, for whom she then sits in mourning as though at a kind of private wake. Not only is there here a clever parody of Love-in-Death (accompanied by the L ­ iebestod music), but there is also a parody of clothes fetishism, where the odd garments of the babyish and effeminate young man, starting with his tie, are treated as though they constituted his actual physical body. But hidden in these weirdly morbid erotic scenes is a cryptic Wagnerian visual and dramatic subtext based on the action on stage that accompanies Wagner’s Liebestod music at the end of Tristan and Isolde. In the opera’s final scene, Isolde has arrived just after Tristan has ­expired. She imagines him still alive, and, after a beautiful aria (mild und leise), she herself expires in an ecstasy of Love-in-Death. Standing over his prostrate form as she sings of their ecstatic love and its triumph over death (from Buñuel’s perspective a case of pure Germanic necrophilia and a sick idealization of death and destruction), it is Isolde’s image in the final scene of Wagner’s opera that has inspired this parodic scene in Un Chien Andalou, as well as the next scene, which is even more savagely parodic. The Liebestod music thus continues throughout the next two scenes. The babyish young man has revived, and is seen standing fascinated by the ants feeding on the blood oozing from the center of one of his palms, as though from stigmata; from Buñuel’s standpoint, this would be a vivid image of the narcissistic and self-torturing neurotic sexuality fostered by a repressive Catholic education (cf. the director’s own Jesuit education in Spain), and can be said to symbolize—and this is hardly a cryptic dimension of the film, as Freud was all the rage with the Surrealists as well as with the Jazz Age generation—the infantile eroticism and neurotic baggage that are holding the young man back from sexual maturity and fulfillment. Suddenly the camera shifts to the street outside and below the apartment, where on the sidewalk a strangely hermaphroditic young woman is obsessively poking with her stick (more Freud again, at least for those who might see her as the phallic woman) a severed human hand that is lying on the pavement. A crowd gathers, and eventually a policeman comes, salutes, and places the severed hand in the messenger’s box—a box with a key indicating some secret message. The hermaphroditic young woman clutches the box to her chest with anguished devotion, and then, as she continues to do so, is suddenly run over by a car. It is, once again, a hilarious and savage cryptic parody of Wagner’s Isolde’s Liebestod.

Behind the Camera  185 This scene transitions to another, but this time, the music shifts to the first of the two Argentinian tangos. We have now stepped outside the realm of Wagnerian parody and into cinematic Freudianism; the ­repressive morbid force is no longer the Wagnerian fascination with Love-­ in-Death but rather sexual repression, especially the kind sponsored by a traditional Catholic education. The young man and the young woman (the various avatars of the couple are played by the same actors Simone Mareuil and Pierre Batcheff) have been watching from the window the earlier scene with the hermaphroditic woman poking the severed hand. The young man who had earlier sadistically relished the sight of the hermaphroditic woman getting run over by a car now seems on the point of asserting himself sexually. He looks at the young woman with aggressive determination, and, as the music shifts to the first of the tangos, he makes his move on her in a style reminiscent of tango dance movements (the tango was seen in 1920s as an overtly and somewhat scandalously sexual dance). He suddenly grabs her breasts; she resists but clearly is on the point of responding. But his mounting sexual desire suddenly transforms him into the image of a Catholic martyr—one more sexually neurotic inhibition resulting from a Catholic education. Even though she retreats and threatens him with a tennis racket in its wooden case, things once again seem to be progressing, when suddenly his C ­ atholic education once again puts a stop to all this (again, in a transparent ­allegory of repressive cultural baggage) when he loses his courage and his sexual momentum as he tries to pull two grand pianos with two live priests and two dead donkeys behind him (this was one of Dalí’s famous contributions to the film). The music shifts to the second tango, and the young woman escapes through the door; in attempting to follow her, the young man’s hand gets stuck in the door, where we see it once again with its ants feeing off the bloody stigmata on its palm. The camera shifts back to the bed, where now (Tristan-like) the dead corpse seems to come alive as it occupies the mess of clothes which the young woman had laid out in a previous scene for her Isolde-like devotions; the young man awakens with a silly smile—his sexual energy and determination have disappeared, and he is back to being a childish parody of Tristan. Suddenly the doorbell (shown amusingly as a cocktail shaker) rings, and a man in a hat who acts with exaggerated gestures of masculine toughness (is this the image of the Oedipally dominating father of ­Freudian fame?) shakes the young man in his bed, makes him stand up, tears off his infantile and effeminate articles of clothing, and throws them violently out the window. He then makes the always passive and regressively infantile young man stand in the corner like a schoolboy. At this point (the intertitles indicate “16 years before,” and the Liebestod music picks up until the end of the scene), the young man revisits with passionate nostalgia the memories of his school days symbolized by his school desk, inkwell, and books; the nostalgia of the scene might remind

186  Behind the Camera one of the sweetness and nostalgia that pervaded Alain Fournier’s great novel Le Grand Meaulnes (whose young author himself died in the war), which was in many ways antithetical to the theatrical brutality and wildness of the Surrealist group. With a great excess of regressive nostalgic feeling, he brings his books back to the young man (the repressed now having become conscious). But the young man transforms the two books into two pistols and shoots his regressive self dead; as the latter expires, the scene shifts to a park. This scene interesting enough parodies the scene of the knights conducting a funeral procession for the hero in Wagner’s opera Parsifal; the young man collapses onto the ground, clutching desperately and futilely at the back of a sitting naked woman, and is carried off somewhat summarily by a small group of modern Parisian bourgeois in hats—all this with Wagner’s Liebestod music continuing. Suddenly the music of the first tango is heard again, as the young woman in her room gazes anxiously at what the close-up reveals is a Deathhead Moth—a clear symbol of the dangerous morbidity of ­Love-in-Death. But the next scene will establish the clear antithesis of Wagnerian Love-in-Death, which is Gallic Sex-in-Life. After a scene in which the young man’s gender confusion is imaged by his mouth disappearing and being replaced by the young woman’s underarm hair, she finally sticks out her tongue at him provocatively, and rushes out the door, where in the next scene she reappears with an attitude of somewhat dazed surprise on a sunny rocky beach, on which the young man also suddenly reappears, now fashionably dressed and confidently masculine and assertive in his demeanor (he shows her his watch, as if to complain that she is late). They walk off quickly in each other’s arms, and, when she discovers the strangely infantile and effeminate garments that had been thrown out of the window and now been brought back to the beach by the tide, he handles them briefly, and then disdainfully throws them back, and walks off determinedly with her, leaving these tokens of regressive and neurotic sexuality behind. The final scene comes as a surprise and is a bit of a puzzle. The intertitles read “in Spring,” and the two protagonists are now shown ­apparently dead, planted next to each other in the sand almost up to their waists. Perhaps Buñuel is making the point that, unlike in Tristan and Isolde, sexual passion in Un Chien Andalou does not triumph over time and death. But I would also favor an alternative interpretation, that need not supplant the first, i.e., that the young couple is “planted” and so is ready to grow and flourish in springtime. The process they have ­undergone—the freeing of sexual desire from regressive impulses and morbid inhibitions both Wagnerian and Catholic—has been an initiatory event that follows the pattern of death and rebirth, which this final scene can be seen as encapsulating. Haifaa al-Mansour’s recent charming film in Arabic Wadjda (2012), the story of a young girl who eventually succeeds in getting the bicycle of

Behind the Camera  187 her dreams, might seem at first viewing to be no more than that: delightfully, if inoffensively, charming. As the author of the first ­feature-length Saudi Arabian film, and the first one to be directed by a woman, al-­ Mansour had insisted on shooting the film in Riyadh and not somewhere abroad. (In shooting street scenes, she had to stay inside the film production company’s van since the sight of a woman working in public behind a camera with a male crew would have created trouble in ­R iyadh.) It is thus reasonable to assume that al-Mansour recognized from the start the necessity of avoiding major controversy as well as of negotiating ahead of time a complex network of possible censorship. Her film’s charm is thus, on one level, a defensive strategy. In this respect, her film resembled several of the early films produced in the Islamic Republic of Iran that focused on similarly noncontroversial topics by such directors as Mohsen Makhmalbaf, whose charming and idyllic portrayal of tribal life in Gabbeh (1996) or the peculiarly exotic story of an Afghan refugee who wins money in order to pay for his wife’s medical bills by riding a bicycle in a circle for a week straight (The Cyclist, 1987), also appeared to stand clear of any supposition of dangerous social criticism. But appearances can be misleading. No doubt, there is a clear parallel with the law of Saudi women being forbidden to drive (now in the process of being lifted as of October 2017) in Wadjda’s difficulty in getting permission to get and ride her own bicycle (both her mother and her teacher resist her wishes strenuously), but this is fairly mild stuff. There is a scene suggesting homosexual play by two of the girl students, but they are quickly accused and punished. No doubt, Wadjda’s mother’s despair when her husband decides to take a second wife is focused on beautifully at the end of the film, but this is a traditional Islamic marital problem, and her husband’s right to do so—but not her pain—is never questioned. The real clue to the possible existence of something more controversial occurs near the end of the film, when Wadjda, determined to get the cash prize that will enable her to buy the bicycle for herself, has prepared assiduously for an upcoming girls’ Qur’an recitation contest. The location of the contest scene is at the climax of the film. The spectator naturally assumes a happy ending, with Wadjda winning the contest and buying her bicycle—what could be more conventional in a wealthy, very Islamic nation! In itself, there is nothing controversial here. But what might induce some suspicion in the viewer is the sheer length of the scene. Wadjda’s recitation goes on and on—far longer than any other girl’s recitation or response during the contest. Of course, lengthy as it is, the scene is hardly boring since the exceptional child actress al-Mansour discovered for leading role (Waad Mohammed) has real star power and charm. But still… Our suspicions alerted, let us look at the subtitles translating the passage in the Qu’ran she has been assigned to recite from memory in order to see if there is anything in the way of a cryptic message. Her teacher,

188  Behind the Camera the moderator of the contest, asks her to start with “verse 7 of the Sur’at al-Bakara” (“the Sur’at of the Cow,” the longest but also the first sur’at of the Qu’ran, and hence, by its position, extremely well known), and to “begin at ‘God sealed their hearts.’” So, Wadjda recites (charmingly, of course) the following text: Allah hath set a seal on their hearts and their hearing and sight are veiled. Great is the penalty they incur. Of the people there are some who say: “We believe in Allah and the Last Day [of Judgment],” but they do not really believe. They would deceive Allah and those who believe, but they only deceive themselves and don’t realize it! In their hearts is a disease, and Allah has increased their disease, and grievous is the penalty they incur because they are false to themselves. When it is said to them: “Make not mischief on the earth,” they say: “Why, we only want to make peace!” Certainly, they are the ones who make mischief but they don’t realize it. I have provided in the following endnote a recent scholarly translation of this Quranic passage, 3 but I feel that it is most important to treat the actual English subtitles as an integral part of the film itself since the director, who knows English (and is married to an American), surely intends the subtitles to be an important part of the international audience’s experience of her film.4 If one has the glimmer of the glimpse of some secret message being presented in cryptic form in this suspiciously overlong recitation scene, what might it be? I would guess that Qur’anic passage Wadjda recites is meant to be taken as a secret message on the part of the director condemning Islamist terrorists—those who “do not really believe,” who “only deceive themselves,” and with diseased hearts “make mischief” in the name of Islam: “great is the penalty they incur!” After all, the film Wadjda, through its representation of an increasing regard for the equality of women in terms of the specific issue of acknowledging and validating a young Saudi girl and her dreams, addresses the theme of the future of Saudi Arabia and of the Islamic world more generally, where the condemnation, rather than the tacit support, of Islamist terrorism, would presumably play an important role. But such a message might wisely be kept carefully hidden in the current political climate of Saudi Arabia, where support for Islamist terrorism is an open secret. ­Consequently, like any other coded message, it is not easily decipherable. In fact, in many ways it is a perfect example of a secret message—an extreme example— in that it only becomes partly visible when seen in a certain light (and even then!). It also has the advantage of extreme deniability. After all, respect for the Qur’an shields the text Wadjda’s recitation from critical eyes looking for a subversive message. In addition, one supposes that the theme of a young girl winning a contest with a perfect recitation of a

Behind the Camera  189 familiar passage in the Qur’an is about as politically correct in the Saudi cultural context as one could imagine, especially as Wadjda’s teacher winds up refusing to let her buy the bicycle and ordering her to donate the money to the Palestinian cause. There is nothing in this key scene to bother Saudi censors—nothing at all! No doubt, Wadjda’s mother is shown to be distraught at her husband’s second marriage and is later shown clinging all the more tightly to her daughter (“now there is just the two of us”). But, as they watch together the second wedding’s fireworks from the upper terrace of their house, suddenly, illuminated by a light in a corner near the stairwell, there is the bicycle which she has bought for her in the end! Still, this mother-daughter bonding belongs to the women’s world, which patriarchal authority can regard with amused indulgence and sympathy—no need to get upset, all’s right with the world. Even the slightly controversial bicycle turns out to be green—a color ­traditionally valued in Islam and the main color of the Saudi Arabian flag. At this point we might recall a short amusing scene earlier in the film. As Wadjda and her friend Abdullah return from a visit to Iqbal, the man who has been up until now responsible for driving Wadjda’s mother around, Abdullah points out some men entering a nearby courtyard and tells his friend that “their son put explosives around his waist and ‘boom,’ he died.” Wadjda replies that “he’s crazy! That must hurt!” But Abdullah then explains the theory of the heavenly rewards of ­jihadist suicide terrorism to her: “if you die for God, it’s like a pinprick… and then you fly up and you have seventy brides!” Wadjda appears at first skeptical: “Really?” But then she jokingly interprets all this from her own perspective: “Boom! Seventy bikes!” When Abdullah protests that “you’ve got it all wrong—that’s not how it works,” she simply ­giggles. Although this scene in the film is only mildly satirical of jihadist aspirations as translated into a young girl’s sense of what “rewards” she would expect, in her subsequent young person’s novel The Green ­Bicycle, Haifaa al-Mansour nevertheless blurs the terrorist nature of the young man’s death by having Abdullah state only that “their son died fighting in Iraq. From a bomb.” But at the same time, she strengthens the import of Wadjda’s giggling by showing what she was thinking when she giggled: Abdullah talking about seventy women! Ridiculous. He hid from his friends every time he even talked to a girl. Honestly, the whole idea sounded silly, like when her mother told her the Tooth Fairy would give her more money for extra-clean teeth. (178) The contextualization of this criticism of terrorist ideology in terms of a charming childish conversation blunts to some degree the critical edge of what could have been an instance of biting satire. Of course, there

190  Behind the Camera still remains the more unsettling question of the secret message possibly hidden in Wadjda’s familiar Qur’anic quotation during the recitation contest. The quotation has nothing cryptic about it per se. However, what arguably constitutes a cryptic subtext is its possible interpretation as an allusion to modern Islamist terrorism. In other words, the quotation is not in itself a secret message; rather, it provides a clue to the latent presence of a secret message. But establishing the plausibility of such an interpretation requires more than pure guesswork since it is easy for critics such as me examining a text from a culture with which they are not familiar to guess wrongly. Knowing next to nothing about Islamic culture ancient or modern, I decided to ask Samah Selim, a ­colleague of mine at Rutgers and an expert on modern literature in Arabic, if she could give me another instance of the use of a passage from the Qur’an in order to transmit a secret message. The example she provided was a passage from Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi’s classic modern novel Egyptian Earth (1954). In this novel, there is a hostile relationship between Egyptian villagers and a visiting magistrate, a representative of a repressive government that has a tradition of treating farmers badly. During his visit the villagers are listening, on the occasion of a funeral, to a Qur’an recitation by the famous Sheikh Ibrahim, whose talent is much appreciated, especially his virtuosity in reciting the same passage in seven different styles. As the magistrate is about to enter, Sheikh Ibrahim continued to recite the same verse as before…. As the Magistrate passed through the door, all eyes were on the paunchy figure in its military uniform. At the same moment came the Koranic verse: “And behold thine ass!” The Magistrate paused in the doorway. The voice repeated: “And behold thine ass!” (212–3) This virtuoso repetition of the same verse continues as the Magistrate sits down. Eventually, someone “went and whispered in the reciter’s ear: ‘Please find us some other verse than this… ‘Behold thine ass!’ Everyone’s staring at the Magistrate” (213). But the comedy continues unabated: The reciter glanced up at him in stern disdain and putting his hand on his cheek in the manner of Koranic reciters, he sonorously repeated “And behold thine ass!” Now open laughs reached the gilt armchairs with their green ­velvet cushions. Mahmoud Bey exploded in anger. “Enough, Sheikh Ibrahim! Is there nothing in the Koran except this verse? For the hour we’ve been here, you’ve given us nothing but this. Who put you up to this?” (213)

Behind the Camera  191 In Egyptian Earth, the actual passage in the Qur’an is found, as was the case in Wadjda, in the first sur’at, in a passage which is designed to show how Allah can do anything, including bringing the dead back to life: Or take the one who passed by a ruined town. He said, ‘How will God give this life when it has died?’ So God made him die for a hundred years, and then raised him up, saying, “How long did you stay like that?’ He answered, “A day, or part of a day.” God said, No, you stayed like that for a hundred years. Look at your food and drink: they have [miraculously] not gone bad. Look at your donkey [my emphasis]—We will make you a sign for the people—look at the bones: see how We bring them together and clothe them with flesh!” When all became clear to him, he said, “Now I know that God has power over everything.” (Haleem 30) Of course, the comic secret message—that the Magistrate is nothing but an ass—is something that the rural audience has no trouble interpreting. This would be enough by way of an example of using the Qur’an as a source for double entendre—a kind of secret message but one not difficult to decrypt. But I wonder if there is not more at work in the longer Quranic passage in which “And behold thine ass!” is embedded, for bringing the ass back to life is just a “sign” that “God has power over everything,” including life and death. The villagers have long been oppressed by the government, and the Qur’anic passage, once interpreted, can be seen as conveying a vision of hope that “a ruined town” can be brought back to life. Could this “ruined town” be taken as specifically symbolizing the actual Egyptian village long subjected to political and economic oppression? And could the cryptic message of hope be that God has the power to bring such a village back to life?5 If so, the novel Egyptian Earth—like the film Wadjda—leaves a secret message at first unstated, buried as it is in a passage in the Qur’an, but then decrypted, the cryptic subtext itself being the newly contextualized interpretation and its secret message, and not the quotation itself, which only serves a clue to its latent presence. I shall end this chapter with a short example that illustrates how a cryptic subtext, unlike many others we have examined, can have a very short shelf life indeed, however cryptic it might appear in the first place. In fact, in this case, there is, properly speaking, no cryptic subtext at all but only the appearance of an enigma that is quickly resolved into a case of poignant symbolic meaning. It is the ghost of a cryptic subtext that never materializes. Michael Haneke’s recent French-language film Amour (2012) involves an end of life drama of an unusual sort. The octogenarian Georges (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) has been caring for his aged wife

192  Behind the Camera (played by Emmanuelle Riva) after a stroke has reduced her to an extremely debilitated state. Anne makes him promise not to force her to leave their Parisian apartment, their home for many years, either for a hospital or for a nursing home. Determined to keep his promise to her, he finally suffocates her under a pillow. In the latter part of this film of an almost excruciating emotional intensity, two curious scenes without spoken dialogue involving Georges and a pigeon provide for a kind of deadpan comic relief, as in a silent film with Buster Keaton. I’ll quote from Haneke’s screenplay as available online in the full text, in order to convey the slowness and the lengthiness of each scene. Here is the first pigeon scene, which takes place while Anne is still alive: Scene 48 – INT[ERIOR] HALLWAY -- NIGHT The window opening onto the light well is open. A pigeon has landed on the window ledge. It walks to and fro, then finally dares to jump inside, onto the floor. It starts to explore the surroundings. We hear the TOILET FLUSH. Georges comes out of the toilet. The door opening frightens the pigeon. Alarmed, flapping its wings, it flutters about the room. After a moment of surprise, Georges tries to shoo it back toward the window. But the bird escapes in the opposite direction. George[s] follows it. He closes the doors of the other rooms. Coming from the ­bedroom, we faintly hear ANNE’S VOICE. Georges fetches a towel from the bathroom. He chases the bird for so long that it escapes back out through the window. Georges, visibly exhausted, has to sit on the chest in the hallway. (51–2) Later, just before the end of the film, after Georges has smothered Anne in her bed, there is second pigeon scene, which closely parallels the first one: Scene 58 –INT. KITCHEN –ADJOINING BEDROOM – HALLWAY -- DAY Georges is seated at the kitchen table where he had breakfast with Anne in Scene 8, and writes a letter. PAUSES for reflection. ­GENTLE COOING OF PIGEONS, scarcely audible. Suddenly Georges starts. At the far end of the long kitchen, beside the door between the kitchen units, a pigeon is walking. Georges stares at it. For a long time. Then he gets up slowly and, via the door located beside the kitchen table, he goes into the adjoining room.

Behind the Camera  193 On the sofa there, he has set up his new bed. He takes the wool blanket and comes back into the kitchen, carefully approaches the pigeon that then runs off in alarm. Georges carefully opens up the blanket and finally throws it over the pigeon. But it manages to escape into the hallway. Georges follows it. This action is repeated several times. The ­pigeon is more and more panicky, starts to fly up, flutters about in all directions. Georges closes the light well window to cut off its escape route. This lasts an exhausting amount of time, but he ends up capturing it. He cuddles it against him, rolled up in the blanket, leans against a wall, then holds it as if it were a baby. What finally happens to the pigeon? In the next scene, which takes place at night, Georges is writing something at the kitchen table. We get to see what it is: “you won’t believe it. A pigeon came in, for the second time already, through the light well. This time I caught it. In fact, it wasn’t difficult at all. But I set it free again” (65). The two pigeon scenes certainly provide some relief from the extreme tension created by the drama of the mercy killing that had just unfolded. One can readily assume that such deadpan comic relief constitutes their formal justification. But, given the lengthiness of the scenes, the viewer might well suspect that something else is also in play—some cryptic subtext or symbolism, perhaps? The dove returning to Noah’s ark? The dove of the Holy Spirit descending on Christ while he is being baptized by John the Baptist? The Dove of Peace? But nothing in the way of a reference to a text outside the text seems to really work. Haneke himself has reacted—or overreacted—to viewers’ questions about the ­symbolism of the pigeon with what we can say is a typical creative artist’s unwillingness to spare his public the hard work of interpretation—like Antonioni, he “want[s] his audience to work.”6 So, when asked “Does the pigeon serve as a surprising symbol in your films?” he replied, rather evasively, Consider the pigeon just a pigeon. You can interpret it any way you want. I wouldn’t describe it as a symbol. I have problems with symbols, because they always mean something specific. I don’t know what the pigeon means. All that I know for certain, I think, is that the pigeon appears. It may symbolize something in particular to Georges and individual viewers, but it doesn’t symbolize anything to me…. There are lots of pigeons in Paris. (Austrian Films 3–4) But, despite Haneke’s half-hearted attempt to make Georges’ enigmatic pigeon into a total mystery (or, in his perspective, a non-symbol), most viewers, I believe, would eventually come to the conclusion that the two pigeon scenes do provide emotional relief by reenacting in a deadpan

194  Behind the Camera comic mode the intense scenes leading to, and including, Anne’s mercy killing. This accounts for George’s use of the blanket in the second pigeon scene, which reminds the viewer of the key scene in which he smothers Anne under a pillow. For the purposes of George’s self-justification, the important point seems to be, as he writes in a letter (probably to his daughter-in-law Eva), not only that the pigeon had gotten trapped in the apartment (like Anne had been trapped) but that in the end, he had set it free (although we never see this happen)—just as he had set Anne free from the torture of a bedridden and miserably prolonged end of life. Once the symbolism is penetrated, there remains nothing especially cryptic in the two scenes—in fact, they turn out to be quite beautiful as a mise-en-abîme of the film itself, where the pigeon synchronistically recaps the role of Anne. The process of uncovering the cryptic meaning of the two scenes is carefully prepared for earlier by a scene in which Georges has a nightmare (36) of finding himself in several rooms similar to the rooms of their Parisian apartment, except for the fact these dream rooms are completely empty, with no doors. This dream clearly expresses his emotional turmoil when faced with Anne’s approaching death—which will “empty” the familiar apartment of her presence. The pigeon scenes are replays in real time of Georges’ dream but with Anne’s presence— and eventual escape—now signaled by the pigeon. All this becomes on second viewing fairly obvious, and the pigeon scenes in Haneke’s Amour are only seen initially as possibly indicating a cryptic subtext. But they actually wind up referring not to something outside the text but rather to something inherent in the text itself. In other words, the possibility of the presence of a cryptic subtext appears but only to rapidly disappear. So, to conclude on a note of caution: not all buried treasure is real— sometimes the treasure chest is empty! Sometimes, the ghost never materializes.

Notes 1 For a brief analysis of Fellini’s film in terms of midlife initiation, see my book Midlife Transformation in Literature and Film: Jungian and Eriksonian Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge, 2012, 50–2. 2 See C.G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, trans. R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. 3 “God has sealed their hearts and their ears, and their eyes are covered. They will have great torment. Some people say, ‘We believe in God and the Last Day,’ when really they do not believe. They seek to deceive God and the believers but they only deceive themselves, though they do not realize it. There is a disease in their hearts, which God has added to. Agonizing torment awaits them for their persistent lying. When it is said to them, ‘Do not cause corruption in the land,’ they say, ‘We are only putting things right,’ but they really are causing corruption, though they do not realize it.”

Behind the Camera  195 The Qur’an, translated by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem. Oxford University Press, printed with corrections, 2016, 5. 4 It is interesting to note that in The Green Bicycle (2015), her children’s book based on her film Wadjda, Haifaa al-Mansour has shortened the Qur’anic passage Wadjda recites and has also omitted some of the vehemence of its condemnation of self-designated Moslems who are not “peacemakers,” but “mischief makers” 315–16. 5 This is certainly a plausible interpretation, given the author’s progressive political tendencies. See Samah Selim’s book The Novel and the Rural ­Imaginary in Egypt, 1880–1985. London and New York: Routledge, 2010, for a fine discussion of the progressive movement in Egyptian politics and literature. About Egyptian Earth and its author, she writes, “The socialist realism and neo-realism that emerged onto the literary scene in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s reinterpreted the village as a site of social struggle, foregrounding the realities of peasant experience in relation to an oppressive economic and political regime, as well as a deeply embedded and deadening system of social convention. ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s 1952 novel ­Al-Ard (The Land [Egyptian Earth]) initiated this trend (19). 6 Michelangelo Antonioni, as quoted in the review of his film L’avventura by Bosley Crowther in The New York Times (Feb. 19, 2007).

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Index

Aeneid (Virgil) 139 Ahl, Frederick 8–9, 11 AIDS 35 Alcestis (Euripides) 2, 6, 138, 141, 144–53 Allison, June 108 al-Mansour, Haifaa 186–7, 189, 195n4 al-Sharqawi, Abdel Rahman 190, 195n5 “The Ambiguity of Henry James” (Wilson) 25 American economic imperialism 53; see also imperialism Amour 191, 194 ancient Greek culture 109; see also culture ancient Greek tragicomedy 138 Anglo-Catholicism 143 “Anima and Animus” (Jung) 155 anti-Semitic violence 34–5, 37; see also violence anti-Semitism 106 Antonioni, Michelangelo 4, 120–4, 173–4, 193 Apuleian gritty realism 135 Apuleius 134–5 The Aspern Papers (James) 68 Athenian patriarchal prejudices 148 Athenian patriarchal sensibilities 148 Athenian religious culture 149; see also culture Aura (Fuentes): covert political message of 53; Faris on 52; message in 44–76; myth in 44–76 Barney Kiernan 104–6, 108, 159 Barthe, Sophie 133 Batcheff, Pierre 185 battle of Querétaro 49 Baudelaire, Charles 76, 127 Bayard, Pierre 9–10

The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (Doniger) 53 Bembo, Pietro 100, 108 Bhagavad Gita 1 Bible 122 The Birth of Love 99 The Birth of Venus 120 Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) (Camus) 172 Blithe Spirit (Coward) 142 Böhm, Karl 181 Book of the Courtier (Il Libro del Cortegiano) (Castiglione) 100, 104 Bosch, Roselyne 38 Botticelli, Sandro 120 Bouilhet, Louis 135 British economic imperialism 70; see also imperialism British Film Institute 66 Browne, Thomas 64 Buddhism 119 Budgen, Frank 156, 158, 170n9 Buñuel, Luis 175, 181–4, 186 Buscemi, Steve 31–2, 36 Butler, Samuel 160 Butor, Michel 50 Byzantine Empire 19 Cage, Nicolas 39 Calderini, Novella d’Andrea 62–3 Calinescu, Matei 7–9, 11, 21n3 Campbell, Stephen J. 103 Camus, Marcel 172 Castiglione, Baldassare 100, 108 Catholic Church 83 Catholic education 184–5 Catholicism 95 Catholic ritual 95 Chabrol, Claude 133 chauvinism 106–7 Chirac, Jacques 34

204 Index Christ 3, 80, 85, 87, 93, 95–6, 171n17, 193 Christianity 103 Christian liturgical subtexts 83; see also liturgical subtexts Christian mysteries 138, 153 Christian theology 102–3 Christie, Agatha 9, 10 Church of England 24 cinematic Freudianism 185 classical psychotherapy 143 The Cocktail Party (Eliot) 2–3, 6, 138, 141–5, 152–3 Coen, Ethan and Joel 31–4, 36–9 Cold War 178 Colet, Louise 132, 135 Comparative Literature Studies 154 “competitive rereading” 7 Connelly, Joan Breton 149 The Consciousness of Joyce (Ellmann) 154 “conspicuous quotations” 11 Contre Sainte-Beuve 84, 95 Corngold, Stanley 161 Cortés, Hernán 47 Coward, Noel 142, 153 Cox, George W. 72–6 Crowther, Bosley 123 cryptic allusion 12, 14, 35, 55, 118, 138, 142, 170n13, 173 cryptic Euripidean subtext 141, 153 cryptic liturgical subtexts 3, 79, 90, 138; see also liturgical subtexts cryptic Platonic subtexts 98–136 cryptic Platonism 133 “cryptic quotations” 11 cryptic subtexts: as extreme case of hypertextuality 1; modernist 138–69; Platonic 98–136 cultural imperialism 69; see also imperialism culture: ancient Greek 109; Athenian religious 149; French provincial bourgeois 127–8, 132, 134; Greco-Roman 128; Greek Orthodox 19; Hindu 21n7; Irish 109; Islamic 190; Jewish 19; Muslim 19; traditional Christian 100 Dahl, John 39, 41–2 Dahl, Rick 42

Dalí, Salvador 181 da Vinci, Leonardo 32, 98 De Amore (Ficino) 100 The Death of Artemio Cruz (Fuentes) 52 The Description of Greece (Pausanias) 135 The Dial 13–14, 62–3 Dickens, Charles 46, 54, 68–9, 77n5 “divine madness” 110 Doctor Strangelove 39 Doniger, Wendy 53 Douglas, Lord Alfred 28 Doyle, Arthur Conan 9–10 Drummond, Phillip 182 Dunst, Kirsten 175 Durandus, Gulielmus 83 Egyptian Earth (al-Sharqawi) 190–1 Eliot, T.S. 2, 6, 82, 138, 141–6, 150–3 Ellmann, Richard 154, 156 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 15, 60, 62 ethnocentric chauvinism 107 Euripidean subtext 3, 141, 144, 150–1, 153 Euripides (Greek tragedian) 1–2, 6, 138–41, 144–5, 147–9, 152 execution: eventual 36; incarceration to 162 Fairlie, Alison 127 The Family Reunion (Eliot) 141 Faris, Wendy B. 52 Feast of the Holy Innocents 23–4 feminism 59 Ficino, Marsilio 100, 102–3 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 122 Flaubert, Gustave 5–6, 76, 106, 125–35 Florentine Neoplatonism 102 Flowers of Evil (Baudelaire) 76 Forster, E.M. 71 Fournier, Alain 186 François le Champi (Sand) 93–4 French anti-Americanism 39 French anti-Semitic violence 37; see also violence French bourgeois culture 128; see also culture French provincial bourgeois culture 127–8, 132, 134; see also culture French Surrealism 182–3 Freudianism 100, 119 Fuentes, Carlos 44–57, 65, 67–72 Fuller, Margaret 59–65, 78n19

Index  205 Gabbeh 187 The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Kermode) 10 Genette, Gérard 20n1, 22, 43n7 “ghettoization” 162 Giannini, Giancarlo 173 Giorgione 98–103, 108, 120 Girard, René 35, 36, 162 Gli Asolani (Bembo) 100 Golden Ass (Apuleius) 134 Gospel of Matthew 22 Gramsci, Antonio 67 Grass, Günter 36 The Great Dictator 172 Great Expectations (Dickens) 46, 54–5, 68 Great War 183 Greco-Roman cultural heritage 122 Greco-Roman culture 128; see also culture Greek Jews 20 Greek Orthodox culture 19; see also culture The Green Bicycle (al-Mansour) 189, 195n4 Gross, Jennifer 17 The Guermantes Way 85 Guimard, Hector 31

Hopper, Dennis 40 The Hound of the Baskervilles (L’affaire du chien des Baskerville) (Doyle) 9 “How I Wrote One of My Books” (Fuentes) 55 hypertextuality 1, 22; cryptic subtext as extreme case of 1; retrospective 147; transtextual relationships and 20n1

Haneke, Michael 191–4 Hapsburg Empire 52 Harding, Esther 155 Harvard College 15 Hawthorne, Nathanael 44, 57–65, 70 Hebrew scapegoat ritual 163 Henry James: the Mature Master (Novick) 28 “hermeneutical clues” 7 Hermetic magic 119 hermetic poetic language 3 Herod, Roman king 22, 24–5 High Noon 41 Hindu classics 14–15 Hindu culture 21n7; see also culture Hindu mysticism 1 Hindu Vedantic philosophy 133 Hippolytus (Euripides) 1, 138–40 Hodder, Alan D. 14–15 Hollywood 41, 42 Holocaust 17 Holy Communion 80, 95, 138 Holy Spirit 193 Homer 1, 104, 155, 160–1

James, Henry 6, 22–30, 68 James, William 81 James Joyce (Levin) 154 Jesus 22 Jewish culture 19; see also culture Jews 18, 162 Jones, Ernest 154 Jones, William 15 Joyce, James 1, 3, 5, 67, 87, 104–8, 142, 152–61 Juárez, Benito 49, 69 Jung, C.G. 95, 153–61, 170n13, 178

imperialism 47; American economic 53; British economic 70; cultural 69; sentimental 70 Indian āśhrama system 16 “In Memory of the Assassinated Churches” (En mémoire des églises assassinées), (Proust) 80 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 3, 79–96, 83 Institutes of Hindu Law, or, The Ordinances of Menu, According to the Gloss of Cullúca 15 intertextuality 1 Irish culture 109; see also culture Islam 17, 72 Islamic culture 190; see also culture Islamist terrorism 188, 190 Italian Renaissance Neoplatonists 110

Kassel, Norbert 161 Keaton, Buster 192 Kermode, Frank 10–11 Khomeini, Ayatollah 66 Kimball, Jean 154, 169n4 Kubrick, Stanley 39 “L’Acropole d’Athènes” 135 La modification (Butor) 50 Lane, Charles 13

206 Index L’après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun) (Mallarmé) 3, 44, 72, 76, 88; message in 44–76; myth in 44–76 La Rafle (Bosch) 38 La sorcière 55–6 latent sense 10 L’avventura (Antonioni) 4, 120, 173 Law and Order 41 Lawrence, D.H. 96 The Laws of Manu 14–16 Le Grand Meaulnes (Fournier) 186 Lehnhoff, Nikolaüs 181 Les dieux antiques (The Gods of Classical Antiquity) 72–3 Levi, Primo 12, 17–20 Levin, Harry 154 Liebestod 176, 178–86 Life in the Woods (Lane) 12–14, 21n4 Lindsay, Joan 109, 111–12, 116–22 Liszt, Franz 182 liturgical subtexts: Christian 83; cryptic 3, 79, 90, 138 liturgical symbolism 83, 97n13 locus amoenus (pleasant natural spot) 110 Lomasney, Martin 4 Losey, Joseph 38 Louvre Museum 32 Lustig, T.J. 23 Lysias (logographer) 110 Mack, Heinz 181 MacCormick, Edith Rockefeller 155–6, 158 Madame Bovary (film) 132–3 Madame Bovary (Flaubert) 6, 76, 125, 131–6 Makhmalbaf, Mohsen 187 Mâle, Emile 82 Mallarmé, Stéphane 3, 44, 72–6, 82, 88, 96n8 Maraini, Dacia 132 Mareuil, Simone 185 Marochetti, Carlo 85 Matheson, Neill 29 Matinée chez la Princesse de Guermantes 95, 96n2 Maximilian (Hapsburg prince) 46–7, 49, 52–3, 68 Maya Memsab 133 Mazower, Mark 19 Mehta, Ketan 133

Melancholia 175, 178–81 Melato, Mariangela 173 message: in Aura (Fuentes) 44–76; in L’après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun) (Mallarmé) 44–76; in Rappaccini’s Daughter (Hawthorne) 44–76; in The Satanic Verses (Rushdie) 44–76 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 53, 55, 72, 161 The Metamorphosis (Kafka) 161 Mexican Revolution 57, 69 Meyer, Herman 11 Michelet, Jules 55 Milton, John 138 Minnelli, Vincent 133 Mizoguchi, Kenji 45 modernist cryptic subtexts 138–69 Modern Times 172 Mohammed, Waad 187 Mommaers, Paul 79 Mona Lisa 32, 36, 98 Monroe Doctrine 48 Monsieur Klein 38 Morris, Jan 98 Mouton, Jean 83 Müller, Max 73 Mulligan, Buck 87, 109 Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot) 138 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Christie) 9 Muselmänner 17, 18, 19–20 Muslims 17, 19 Myself With Others 44 myth: in Aura (Fuentes) 44–76; in L’après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun) (Mallarmé) 44–76; in Rappaccini’s Daughter (Hawthorne) 44–76; in The Satanic Verses (Rushdie) 44–76 The Mythology of the Aryan Nations (Cox) 72–4 Napoleon III of France 49 Nazis 19, 162; anti-Semitic program 33 Neoplatonism 100; Florentine 102; Renaissance 120, 122 New Testament 85 New Woman 59, 61–5 Nilsson, Birgit 181 Nixon, Richard 41 Novick, Sheldon M. 28 Nuclear Age 178 nuclear holocaust 178

Index  207 Odyssean cryptic subtext 108 Odyssey (Homer) 1, 5, 104, 155, 160, 170n11 Oedipus the King (Sophocles) 9 The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Sofsky) 18 Oresteia (Eliot) 141 Over the Rainbow (Rushdie) 66 Ovid 53–5, 57, 73, 75 Paquet, Gilles 33 Paquet-Brenner, Gilles 38 Paris, je t’aime 31, 38 Parsifal 80, 186 A Passage to India (Forster) 71 Paz, Octavio 57 Peabody, Sophia 60 The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary (Llosa) 132 Peter Quint, ghost of 24–30 Phaedra (Seneca) 1, 139–40 Phaedrus (Plato) 6, 98, 109 Phèdre (Racine) 1, 138 Picnic at Hanging Rock (Lindsay) 109, 114, 116, 118 Plato 28, 98, 102, 105, 108–15 Platonic cryptic subtext 5 Platonic mysticism 135 poetic modernism 72 The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel (Meyer) 11 Poetry and Drama (Eliot) 141 Pommier, Jean 79 Pond, Walden 12 postwar French cultural realm 183 Pound, Ezra 144 PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) 52–3, 57 The Princesse de Clèves (de Lafayette) 139 Proust, Marcel 7, 79–96 provocative reinterpretations 22–42 Pseudodoxia (Browne) 64 Psychologische Typen (Psychological Types) (Verlag) 155, 157–8 Pushkin, Alexander 68 Queen of Spades (Pushkin) 68 Que peut la literature? 39 Qu’ran 187–8 Racine, Jean 1, 138–9, 140, 152 radical religious individualism 96 Rappaccini’s Daughter (Hawthorne): characterization of 59; cryptic

message in 44–76; equality between sexes in 65; myth in 44–76 Rationale divinorum officiorum (Durandus) 83 Reagan, Ronald 40–2 Red Rock West 39, 40, 42 Religious Art in France in the Thirteenth Century (Mâle) 82–3 Renaissance 98–9, 100, 103, 120, 122 Renaissance art 120 Renaissance cultural elite 100 Renaissance Neoplatonism 120, 122 Renaissance paintings 99 Renoir, Jean 132 Rereading (Calinescu) 7–9, 21n3 Restif de la Bretonne 130 Riva, Emmanuelle 192 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 122 Roman Catholicism 95 Roman Catholic Mass 3, 79–80, 83, 138 Roman Empire 135 Roman Theater of Orange 181 Rushdie, Salman 44, 65–7, 69–70, 78n23, 78n25 Ruskin, John 83 Sachs, Murray 126 Sacred and Profane Love 120, 122 sadistic violence 34–5; see also violence Salomon, Julie 40 Salonica: City of Ghosts (Mazower) 19 Salonica Jews 19 Sand, George 93 Sanskrit language 1, 14 Sarah’s Key 33, 38 Sartre, Jean-Paul 39 The Satanic Verses (Rushdie): filmic subtext in 66; message in 44–76; myth in 44–76; published in 66; quintessential midlife age and 78n25; Rosa Diamond episode in 44, 65–9, 71 The Scapegoat (Girard) 36, 162, 171n17 scapegoat theory 35, 162–5, 167, 169, 171n17 Schlöndorff, Volker 36 secret message 2, 4, 7, 30, 44, 52, 59, 65, 76, 184, 188, 190, 191 The Secret of Hanging Rock 118 Selim, Samah 190 Sembène, Ousmane 172, 175 Seneca (playwright) 1, 139–41, 152 The Sentimental Education 106

208 Index sentimental imperialism 70; see also imperialism Sephardic Jews 19 sexual violence 174; see also violence “shadow projection” 163 Shakespeare, William 9 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 63 The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual (Jung) 154 social harmony 163 social isolation 162 Socrates 100–2, 104–6, 108–10, 112–8, 120, 122, 131 Sofsky, Wolfgang 18 Sophocles 8–10 Sophocles’ Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction (Ahl) 8 Steegmuller, Francis 134 Stefaniak, Regina 98–102 stigmatization 162, 167, 168 Survival in Auschwitz (Levi) 12, 16 Swept Away (Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto) 4, 173–4 The Symposium (Plato) 5, 98, 100, 103–11, 115, 122, 128, 135 The Tempest 98–9, 101, 102, 120 Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald) 122 terrorism: Islamist 188, 190 “textual concealment” 7 textual unconscious 1, 3, 38 theory of the anima and animus 153, 156–7, 160–1, 169n5, 170n13 Thoreau, Henry David 1, 12–16, 21n4, 21n5, 21n7 Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness (Hodder) 14 The Thousand and One Nights 91 Time Regained 3, 79, 80, 84, 89, 93–5, 97n11, 97n12, 138, 153 The Tin Drum (Grass) 36 Titian (Italian painter) 120, 122 torture: incarceration to 162; psychological 171n18; screw as instrument of 26 Transcendentalist movement 62 Transformation Symbolism in the Mass 95 Trintignant, Jean-Louis 191 Tristan and Isolde 175 Trump, Donald 42 Tuileries 31, 34, 36, 38, 39, 153 Turks 19 The Turn of the Screw (James) 6, 22

Ugetsu Monogatari: The Tales of the Pale Moon After the Rain 45–7, 55, 77n1 Ulysses (Joyce) 1, 3, 5, 67, 87, 104, 109, 152–4, 169n4 Ulysses, Order, and Myth (Eliot) 152 Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) 175, 181–2 Vargas Llosa, Mario 132 Vel d’Hiv Roundup 33–9 Velodrome d’Hiver (indoor bicycle track) 33, 37 Vendramin, Gabriele 100 Venetian Christian sensibilities 102 Verlag, Rascher 155 Vickers, Jon 181 Victorian bloody-minded moralism 30 Victorian moralism 30, 39 Victorian morality 27 violence: anti-Semitic 34–5, 37; French anti-Semitic 37; sadistic 34–5; sexual 174; xenophobic 37 Virgin Mary 83, 99 vānaprastha 14, 16, 21n5, 21n6 von Trier, Lars 175, 181 Voyage en Orient (Flaubert) 135 Wadjda 186–91, 195n4 Wagner 1, 80, 175–86 Wagnerian idealism 182 Walden (Thoreau) 1, 12 Wall Street Journal 40 Weaver, Harriet Shaw 156 Weir, Peter 109, 112, 118, 120 Wertmüller, Lina 4, 173 Wetherill, P.M. 125, 129, 132 Wilde, Oscar 28–30 Wilkin, Charles 1 Wilson, Edmund 24, 25 The Wizard of Oz 66, 78n23 Woman in the Nineteenth Century 62 World War I 33, 80, 83, 183 World War II 34, 35, 47 Xala 172, 175 xenophobic hatred 107 xenophobic violence 37; see also violence Zamora, Lois 57