Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews 9780674215177, 0674215176, 9780674215184, 0674215184

Table of contents :
* Author's Note * Editor's Introduction Beckett * Interview * The Comedy of Point of View in Beckett's Murphy (1970) * The Manuscript Revisions of Beckett's Watt (1972) * Samuel Beckett and the Temptations of Style (1973) * Remembering Texas (1984) The Poetics of Reciprocity * Interview

Citation preview

Doubling the Point

Doubling the Point Essays and Interviews

J. M. Coetzee Edited by David Attwell

Harvard University Press C am bridge, M assachusetts London, E ngland 1992

Copyright © 1992 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coetzee, J. M., 1940Doubling the point : essays and interviews / J. M. Coetzee ; edited by David AttwelL p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-674-21517-6 (acid-free paper) (cloth) ISBN 0-674-21518-4 (paper) 1. Coetzee, J. M., 1940—Interviews. 2. Authors, South African—20th century—Interviews. 3. Literature, Modern—History and criticism. 4. South Africa—Civilization. I. Attwell, David. II. Title. PR9369.3.C58Z464 1992 823—dc20 91-34251 CIP

Contents

A u th o r’s N ote E d ito r's In tro d u c tio n B eck ett In te rv ie w

vii 1 15 17

T he C om edy of P o in t of View in B e c k e tt’s M u rp hy (1970)

31

T he M a n u sc rip t R evisions of B eck ett's W att (1972)

39

S a m u e l B eck ett a n d the T em p ta tio n s of S tyle (1973) R e m e m b e rin g Texas (1984)

43 50

T he P oetics of R e c ip ro c ity In te rv ie w A c h te rb e rg 's "B allad e v a n de gasfitter": The M y stery of I a n d You (1977) T he F irst S e n ten c e of Y vonne B u rg ess' The Strike {1976) A N o te on W ritin g (1984) J e ru s a le m P rize A cceptance S peech (1987) P o p u la r C u ltu re In te rv ie w C a p ta in A m erica in A m erican M ythology (1976) T he B u rd e n of C onsciousness in Africa (1977) F o u r N otes on R ugby (1978) T ria n g u la r S tru c tu re s of D esire in A dvertising (1980) S y n ta x In te rv ie w

55 57 69 91 94 96 101 103 107 115 121 127 139 141

VI

Contents T he R h e to ric of the Passive in E n g lish (1980) T he A gentless S e n ten c e as R h e to ric a l Device (1980)

147 170

Isa ac N e w to n a n d th e Id eal of a T ra n s p a re n t S cien tific L anguage (1982)

181

K afka In te rv ie w T im e, Tense, a n d A spect in K a fk a ’s "The B u rro w ” (1981) R o b e rt M u sil’s S to ries of W om en (1986) A u to b io g rap h y a n d Confession In terv iew C onfession a n d D ouble T houghts: Tolstoy, R o u sseau, D ostoevsky (1985)

195 197 210 233 241 243 251

O b scen ity a n d C ensorship In te rv ie w T he T ain t of th e P o rn o g ra p h ic: D efending (ag ain st) Lady Chatterley (1988) C en so rship in S o u th Africa (1990)

295 297

S o u th A frican W riters In terv iew M an 's F ate in th e N ovels of Alex L a G u m a (1974) In to th e D ark C h am b er: T he W rite r a n d th e S o u th A frican S ta te (1986)

333 335 344

302 315

361

A thol F u g a rd , N otebooks, 19 6 0 -1 9 7 7 (1984) B rey ten B re y te n b ac h , True C onfessions o f an A lbino Terrorist a n d M ouroir (1985)

369 375

N a d in e G o rd im er, The E ssential Gesture (1989)

382

R e tro sp ec t In te rv ie w

389 391

N otes

397

S o u rces a n d C red its In d ex

433 435

Author's Note

D avid Attw ell an d I set out on this project in 1989 and com pleted the last interview in early 1991. R egarding the essays, we agreed th a t he w ould select and edit them , and th a t w here I revised them I w ould do so w ith a light hand, since they were to be seen as p a rt of a larg er autobiographical text. Save for the essay on the revisions of B eckett’s Watt, from w hich only an excerpt is given, and the reviews of M usil’s stories and the film The Guest, from w hich a few inconsequential p arag rap h s have been cut, the pieces are accordingly rep rin ted in full. In three cases—"Sam uel B eckett and the T em ptations of Style," "Into the D ark C ham ber,” and “R em em bering Texas”—cuts m ade by earlier editors have been restored. W hile trying to respect the ch aracter of the originals, I have, in the in terest of clarity, done a fair am ount of local revision. Style an d co n ten t are n o t separable: it w ould be disingenuous for me to claim th a t m y revisions have not touched the substance of the originals. I have also u p d ated some references, thereby creating an ach ro n ism s in one o r tw o of the endnotes. My thanks to L indsay W aters for his share in the conception an d shaping of this book, to Ann H aw thorne for h er scrupulous copyediting, to D orothy D river for assistance w ith proofreading, to Tim Jam es for prep arin g the diagram s, an d to the U niversity of Cape Town for the m aterial support it has given me in m y research an d w riting. J. M. C O ETZEE

VII

Doubling the Point

Editor's Introduction

I

n August 1973 the New York Times Book Review devoted its reg u la r colum n "The Last W ord" to a report w hich had ap ­ p eared shortly before in Scientific American.1 It concerned an experim ent conducted a t the U niversity of Cape Town, in w hich som eone had produced a com puter-assisted reading of a short w ork by S am uel Beckett called Lessness (Sans, 1969).2 Using a Univac 1106, the analyst had gone to certain lengths to identify the rules of construction in B eckett's text (a stru ctu re of rep eti­ tions, in w hich all the phrases appearing in the first half of the work are rep eated in a different o rd er in the second). E xasperated by w h at seem ed m ere p ed an try —"Ah, Beckett! Ah, Cape Town!”— the colum nist ended w ith a quotation from G ünter Grass: “'O ur liste n ers’ ears have grow n to tunnels .. . not a single w ord sticks.'” The scholar in question was J. M. Coetzee. A decade later, Coetzee w ould a p p e a r in a different guise altogether, th a t of an in te r­ n atio n ally respected novelist. By the late 1970s, his rep u tatio n had been established in S outh Africa. W ith the appearance of his th ird novel, W aiting for the Barbarians (1980), a w ider readership began to develop, first in the U nited K ingdom and then in the United S tates. Today, he is regarded as being in the forem ost rank of co n tem p o rary w riters of fiction.3 Indeed, Coetzee brings to his w ork a u n iq ue com bination of intellectual power, stylistic poise, histo rical vision, and ethical penetration. Was the colum nist for the N ew York Times, w ith his seem ingly u rb an e dism issal, sim ply m istaken? N ot entirely: Coetzee did spend several years from the late 1960s to the early 1970s pursuing w hat turned out to be the relatively u n rew arding, technical b ranch of m odern stylistics. But w h at the co lum nist m issed, w h at he could not have foreseen, was w h at w as a t stake in those early w anderings: a rigorous inquiry into the ontology of fictional discourse, and an a tte m p t to locate 1

2

Editor's Introduction

a position from w hich Coetzee him self m ight one day begin to speak. Doubling the Point explores the relations betw een Coetzee’s c rit­ ical w riting from 1970 to 1990, an d his fiction, an oeuvre of six novels w hich have ap p eared regularly every three to four years since 1974. More th an an anthology of critical essays, this book establishes the connections betw een the different elem ents of Coet­ zee’s literary activity. R eaders m ay have encountered Coetzee as critic previously through his essays on colonial an d early tw en­ tieth-century South African literatu re, collected in W hite W riting (1988) o r through his review s in the N ew York Times and the New York Review o f Books. B ut the p resent volum e represents the full range of Coetzee's nonfiction, show ing him as linguist an d stylistician, critic of m etropolitan an d m odern S outh African lite ra ­ tures, tran slato r, essayist in p o p u lar culture, review er, polem icist, an d autobiographer. W hatever his achievem ents in these fields, the intensity an d accom plishm ent of Coetzee's life in lite ra tu re and scholarship are borne out finally in the novels. The interview s which tie this collection together show the in terp lay of fiction and scholarship: conducted over a period of tw o years, they fashion the selection into the shape of a w rite r’s intellectual au to b io g ra­ phy. The notion of "doubling the point" relates, in the first instance, to the kind of autobiography the collection represents. The rele­ vant illu stratio n is from Coetzee’s Foe (1986). As the b earer of literary authority, Foe (Daniel Defoe’s original patronym ) is a d ­ vising S usan B arton—a w ould-be auto b io g rap h er—on the subject of selfhood and its relation to language: In a life of writing books, I have often, believe me, been lost in the maze of doubting. The trick I have learned is to plant a sign or m arker in the ground where I stand, so that in my future wanderings I shall have something to return to, and not get worse lost than I am. Having planted it, I press on; the more often I come back to the m ark (which is a sign to myself of my blindness and incapacity), the more certainly I know I am lost, yet the more I am heartened too, to have found my way back.4 Foe p lan ts a sign as a m arker. Coetzee’s w ritings on lite ra tu re, rhetoric, p o p u lar culture, and censorship are his personal m ark ­

Editor's Introduction

3

ers; taken together, they provide a retrospective itinerary. Ju st as Foe's m ark ers rem in d h im of w h at he does not know, so these essays an d review s provide Coetzee w ith occasions for fu rth er reflection in the interview s. There can be no final guarantees, of course, b u t the strateg y strengthens the possibility th a t Coetzee's "doubling b a ck ” will involve m ore th an m ere repetition* The de­ cision to tu rn to dialogue as the a p p ro p riate m edium m akes this p rinciple explicit, even as it increases the risk of failure. And there are lim its to the en terp rise. It is true, as Coetzee says here, th at all w ritin g is autobiographical; b u t for a novelist the tw o genres cannot be on the sam e footing: autobiography is secondary to fiction—hence the elem ent of redundancy in the title. R eaders will find in these dialogues, therefore, a desire, on one hand, to conduct a conscientious in q u iry in w hich Coetzee is not installed as final au th o rity , and, on the other, a desire not to su p p lan t the novels them selves. "D oubling the p o in t” refers, m ore broadly, to the reflexive selfconsciousness w hich characterizes all Coetzee's work. This p a r­ ticu lar tu rn in Coetzee is not sim ply the usual rem in d er of the co n stitu tiv e functions of language th a t has becom e so fam iliar a trad e m a rk of contem porary fiction. For although Coetzee m ight well be described as w orking w ithin the culture of postm odernism , he certain ly does not do so in the sp irit of abandonm ent th a t seem s to typify m uch of w h at goes u n d er the nam e. R ather, reflexivity here is a m ode of self-consciousness which, inform ed by Coetzee's learning, is directed a t u n d erstan d in g the conditions—linguistic, form al, h istorical, and political—governing the w riting of fiction in co n tem p o rary South Africa. This volum e, therefore, intim ating the h isto ry (since early m ercantile expansionism ) of "rounding the C ape,” im p licitly reflects on an encounter in w hich the legacies of E uropean m odernism and m odern linguistics en ter the tu rb u len t w aters of colonialism and a p arth eid . It is this th a t m akes Coetzee's w ork p a rticu la rly illu m in atin g today: a form of postcoloniality felt on the bone, it brings its m etropolitan heritage into a charged an d com plex relatio n sh ip w ith the historical crisis in w hich it finds itself. There are m arked variatio n s of register in Coetzee's nonfiction. Since Doubling the Point is organized along biographical ra th e r th an th em atic lines, it necessarily reflects th a t diversity. F u rth er­

4

Editor's Introduction

more, the selection is broadly but not rigorously chronological: the com position of each ch ap ter allows for areas of concentration which stan d out in the record. The interview s define these contours clearly enough; for new com ers to Coetzee, however, or for readers fam iliar w ith the novels who need points of entry into the relations betw een the fiction an d scholarship, the follow ing pages offer a narrativ e of significant developm ents in Coetzee's in tellectual b i­ ography.5 Coetzee’s p rincipal concern from Life & Times o f M ichael K (1983) to his m ost recent novel, Age o f Iron (1990), is the n a tu re a n d crisis of fiction-w riting in S outh Africa today, the South Africa of w hat N adine G ordim er has called "the in te rreg n u m .”6 The arg u m en t— less a "position” than a condition of Coetzee’s work—is th a t the discursive-political consequences of the c o u n try ’s p ro trac te d trau m a militate against fictionality. For w hat kind of a u th o rity can the novel m uster if it is to speak in term s com m ensurable w ith the tim es? W hat form of address is possible under such conditions? Questions such as these bring into focus the m ore representative crisis of postm odernism and its so-called paralysis before history, b ut Coetzee’s achievem ent is to have found the m eans, w ithin fiction, to in terrogate this paralysis—indeed, not only to in te rro ­ gate it b u t to move beyond it to a reconstructed position in w hich fiction begins to speak to the political on its ow n term s. This Coetzee m anages both by draw ing into his fiction the skepticism and sym ptom atic sensitivity of p o ststru ctu ralism , and by search­ ing for ways in w hich the novel m ight recover an ethical basis, in full ap p reciation of the political context. Needless to say, there is a great deal of struggle in this e n te r­ prise, w hich is why Coetzee m usters his scholarly resources behind him: his readings of the later m odernists (Kafka, M usil, Beckett, Nabokov); his knowledge of m odern linguistics (generative g ram ­ m ar, stylistics, rhetoric, continental stru c tu ra lism and sem iotics)· his com m and of the history and developm ent of the novel, from Cervantes th ro u g h Defoe an d S terne to the R ussian realists; an d his ap p reciation of p o ststru ctu ralism , in p articu lar, his strategic affinities w ith Lacan, Foucault, and D errida. In these essays and interview s, then, one sees the point of Coet­ zee’s mode of reflexive n a rrativ e m ore clearly. One also w itnesses

Editor's Introduction

5

its em ergence. Obviously, it pomes from the m odernists and from linguistics, b u t it w as an ticip ated , curiously enough, by m ath e­ m atics. For m ath em atics—Coetzee’s professional p u rsu it before his decision in the m id-1960s to retu rn to lite ra tu re —prepared the w ay for the la te r in terest in the rule-conditioned c h arac ter of discourse. Over several years, Coetzee’s absorption in technical stylistics (whose high-w ater p oint was a doctoral dissertation on Beckett) involved to som e extent an a tte m p t to integrate these elem ents. Academ ically, he w as perhaps never entirely successful, b u t the consequences of his academ ic w ork for his novel-w riting were significant. From the beginning, the novels have included an elem ent of m etafictional com m entary on the conventions and the politics of form . The entrance of politics, or m ore strictly, of power, into this configuration is the result of Coetzee’s im m ediate context: the linguistic foundations of his relationship w ith n arrativ e were laid in Texas du rin g the w orst years of the w ar in V ietnam . The connection Coetzee was m aking a t this tim e betw een South Africa and the U nited S tates was not so m uch literary as experiential and ethical: he could scarcely avoid associating the spectacle of the bom bing of V ietnam w ith the legacy he w as trying to shake off as a S outh African. As he explains in his m em oir on the Texas experience, N oam Chomsky and the universal gram m arian s had already ren dered problem atic his youthful, unquestioned affilia­ tion to high m odernism (Pound, Eliot). B ut the w ar in V ietnam an d its dom estic consequences, and Coetzee’s rediscovery in th a t m om ent of his ow n South African heritage, were decisive in shap­ ing his p o in t of d e p artu re in fiction. It is in this m atrix th a t the first novel, Dusklands (1974), was form ed. It is a parody juxtaposing Eugene Dawn (one of Chom sky's "backroom boys"), w ho is w ritin g a rep o rt on propaganda m ethods for the A m erican D epartm ent of Defense, and Jacobus Coetzee, an eighteenth-century frontiersm an (historically, one of Coetzee's own ancestors) w ho ventures up the w est coast of Southern Africa in search of ivory and produces a deposition to the authorities a t the Cape on his retu rn . Dusklands is an explosive, even aggressive w ork w hich replays som e of the dom inating, ratio n alistic dis­ courses of the West in an a tte m p t to u n d erstan d the forces, both violent an d epistem ic, w hich were determ ining Coetzee's own his­ torical experience an d social identity. Although it was begun in

6

=

Editor’s Introduction

Buffalo, New York, Dusklands w as com pleted in South Africa. The decision to re tu rn to his country of origin w as m ore o r less forced on Coetzee: his app licatio n for p e rm a n en t residence in the U nited States w as repeatedly denied, p a rtly because the term s of his visa required him to retu rn , b u t possibly, too, because he had been arrested during an a n tiw a r im broglio on the Buffalo cam pus (a com m on enough experience a t the tim e, b u t less consequential for m any others). Coetzee had lived as a c u ltu ral em igre for nearly ten years; now, place w as beginning to reassert itself (as history had already done in the spectacle of the w ar). Coetzee's second novel, In the Heart o f the Country (1977), tests the lim its of a late m odernist consciousness—now influenced by the nouveau roman and its equivalent in film—in the “savage torpor" of settler-colo­ nialism . M agda, the n a rra to r of In the Heart o f the Country, struggles b oth w ith the legacy of the political fath e r and w ith the pathological m aster-servant relations of the fam ily farm . She is unable, finally, to satisy h er desire for association and com m unity, and the novel ends w ith M agda constructing stone icons addressed to chim erical sky-gods. H egel’s m aster-slave dialectic lies behind m uch of Coetzee’s ethics and epistem ology in this novel, as it had inform ed p arts of Dusklands. This is Coetzee’s sm all co n trib u tio n to the H egelian-existential critique of colonialism w hich had been p ro m ­ inent in the 1960s, although its roots go back to S a rtre 's essay of 1948, Black Orpheus, w hich introduced the negritude poets to m et­ ropolitan F ran ce.7 Com posed as a series of num bered p arag rap h s, In the Heart o f the Country, however, also displays its ow n fictiveness, to the point th a t M agda begins asking w hat kind of life she m ight have led in a dom estic m etropolitan novel, w here she m ight have “atoned for physical shortcom ings w ith ten nim ble fingers on the pianoforte keys and an albu m full of so n n ets.”8 The m etafictional com m entary here tu rn s on the lite ra tu re of colonial pastoralism in S outh Africa, and on the liberal-R om antic novel of isolation, w hich can be traced back to Olive S ch rein er’s The Story o f an African Farm (1883). B ut Coetzee is skeptical ab o u t w h at he calls “the im passe of anti-illusionism .” Once it has shaken off the tyranny of the real, radical m etafiction has few options: it can sim ply b eq u eath a record of failed a tte m p ts a t transcendence, or, in defiance, it can try to tu rn paralysis into a v irtue by appealing to notions of play,

Editor's Introduction

7

though only at the risk of calling up the ghosts of R om anticism . Coetzee shows his discom fort w ith this position in his tran slatio n and co m m en tary on G errit A chterberg’s "Ballade van de gasfitter." He is concerned here w ith person as a gram m atical category, p articu la rly the relatio n sh ip betw een I and You. He refers to the co n tin en tal an d Prague School stru c tu ra lists (Em ile Benveniste and R om an Jakobson) on pronouns and "shifters” and discusses several trad itio n s of theological, post-R om antic, and existential reflection th a t depend on the sem antics of person. M agda in In the Heart o f the Country does not speak the m onologic discourse of criticism , linguistics, o r philosophy, b u t she dram atizes the vicissitudes of the I—You relation, show ing its im plications for the subject in a deeply divided society w here a language of equal exchange seem s to be unavailable. The shorter, B arthesian pieces grouped w ith the A chterberg essay are skirm ishes of an o th er kind into the conventions and politics of form al self-consciousness. They d raw a tten tio n , especially, to the au th o rial self-positioning an d p u tativ e class relations encoded in novelistic conventions. In his Jeru salem Prize acceptance speech, delivered som e years after these essays, Coetzee retu rn s to the problem of reciprocity, speak­ ing directly of the colonizer’s failure of love in South Africa—th a t is, his valo rization of land above people and polity. In this very personal statem en t, one sees the ethical underpinnings of Coetzee’s ab so rp tio n in the linguistic conditions of reciprocity. C oetzee’s linguistics also enables him to see the continuities betw een the low brow and the highbrow . This is a p p aren t in the a tte n tio n he gives to film, com ic strips, and advertising in the essays grouped to g eth er u n d er the ru b ric of p o p u lar culture. There has been less of this kind of w ork from Coetzee in recent years. He explains this by saying th a t w h at engages him m ore is the co n stru ctio n of and ex perim entation w ith rules, ra th e r th an the kind of critical dem ystification to w hich studies of po p u lar culture are inclined. B ut these pieces stan d as a record of Coetzee’s cri­ tiq u e of form a t every level of culture. The essay on C aptain Amer­ ica, especially, is a playful co n trib u tio n to the concerns of the g eneration Coetzee had left to its own devices on retu rn in g to his native country. It illu strates the m ixed appeal of A m erican n a ­ tional m yths, and the ro m an tic A m erican rejection (w ith M arcuse) of technological reason—ideas w hich also found th eir w ay into Dusklands.

8

Editor's Introduction

Tow ard the end of the 1970s, the scope of Coetzee’s stylistics broadened to accom m odate m ore-traditional form s of rh eto rical analysis. The essays on passivization enact this shift: concerned though they still are w ith w h at Coetzee calls "m icroenviron­ m en ts,” these essays nevertheless engage the sem antic, m e ta ­ phoric, and rhetorical dim ensions of eighteenth-century prose w ith g reater flexibility than in the e arlier studies. W hat p ro m p ted the change of em phasis is not im m ediately obvious: stylistics w as at the tim e abandoning its m echanistic arm ory (a tren d h astened by the rise of deconstruction), b u t by this stage Coetzee h ad also spent eight years in S outh Africa, w here such trad itio n s are rela ­ tively alien, o r at least w here Leavisite hum anism provided an unreceptive environm ent for w hat w as a ra th e r scientistic for­ m alism . A lthough Coetzee resists too im m ediate a connection, the new studies seem to coincide w ith changes taking place in the fiction. In the e arlier essays he had been draw n to the notion th a t specific linguistic stru ctu res could som ehow be related to specific epistem ologies (Benjam in W horf h ad provided the m ost tem pting account of this theory in his w ork on the Hopi); later, Coetzee began to raise questions of strategy, asking w hether there are not signs of discontinuity in the relation of form and content w hich w ould reveal sym ptom atically a w rite r’s a tte m p ts to push a t the lim its of available discourses. This is evident especially in the essay on N ew ton, w here Coetzee discovers th a t a W horfian p re ­ diction about N ew ton's prose—th a t it ought to reflect a m echan­ istic epistem ology—is inadequate to N ew ton’s struggle literally to find the rig h t w ords w ith w hich to account for g rav itatio n al force. This scholarly developm ent, in w hich language is conceived less as an im prisoning stru c tu re th an as a field of contestation, has its literary fruit in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). The novel deals w ith th at m om ent of suspension w hen an em pire im agines itself besieged and plots a final reckoning w ith its enem ies. In the poem by C. P. Cavafy w hich gives Coetzee his title, these nervous p lea ­ sures quickly tu rn into anxiety w hen the b a rb a rian s fail to m a te r­ ialize at the city gates: “Those people w ere som e sort of so lu tio n ,” says Cavafy.9 Coetzee’s novel stages this dependency, d ra m a tiz ­ ing the terro ristic drive of the im perial state to achieve m astery. (It is difficult not to associate this w ith the S outh African govern­ m en t’s policy of "total strategy," w hich w as developed in the late

Editor's Introduction

9

1970s to c o u n ter grow ing insurrection and intern atio n al isolation.) The novel’s w riterliness, its determ in atio n to establish its own, fictive m an ip u latio n of history, lies not only in its form al stab ility (when m easured a g ain st the e arlier novels) but also in its a tten tio n to questions of signification and closure: for instance, in the m ag­ istra te -n a rra to r’s a tte m p ts to read the body of the to rtu red b a r­ b a ria n girl, to d ecipher the rem ain s of a b a rb a ria n script recovered from his archaeological diggings, o r to w rite a history of im perial settlem en t. The m ag istrate fails in each of these projects, provid­ ing disconfirm ation at every tu rn of w hat Foucault in the in tro ­ duction to The Archaeology o f Knowledge called “the sovereignty and transcendence of the su b je ct” of historical discourse.10 Indeed, H istory em erges in this novel as the inform ing m yth of em pire itself: "W hat has m ade it im possible for us to live in tim e like fish in w ater, like b ird s in air, like children? It is the fault of Em pire! E m pire has created the tim e of h isto ry .”11 The m om ent is an em ­ pow ering one because from th is point on in Coetzee, the question of history becom es a question of living in historical culture; instead of being the am b iv alen t m edium of a reaction to historical givens, fiction has becom e an aren a in w hich historical discourse and fictionality begin to com pete for authority. C oetzee’s re tu rn to Kafka, after Barbarians, is therefore a logical developm ent. The essay on verb tenses in "The Burrow " follows Kafka into a sy n tactic lab y rin th w here one w itnesses the act of w riting as a m ode of self-preservation in a highly politicized cul­ ture. The novel w hich resem bles this project m ost closely is, of course, Life & Times o f M ichael K. Coetzee’s K is a prodigious survivor in a S outh Africa of the n e ar future as it m arches into a corrosive civil w ar. The novel’s m inutely observed scenario of social conditions, however, only creates a fram ew ork of quasi­ realism in w hich K ’s resilience and elusiveness a p p ear all the m ore m iraculous. A m unicipal g ard en er in Cape Town, K journeys to the K aroo w ith his dying m o th er to re tu rn h er to the farm w here she spent p a rt of h e r youth in a fam ily of servants. She dies en route, b u t K continues, burying h e r ashes on w hat seem s to be the farm , an d p la n tin g pum pkins and m elons. He declines to join the rebels an d escapes in te rn m e n t several tim es. M arked w ith a h a re ­ lip, K rem ain s outside h u m an intercourse and, by extension, o u t­ side the c u ltu re ’s various form s of en trap m en t. As the w ell-m ean­

10

Editor's Introduction

ing m edical officer puts it, m addened by K ’s resistance to all a ttem p ts to re h a b ilitate him : "Your stay in the cam p w as m erely an allegory, if you know th a t w ord. It was an allegory—speaking a t the highest level—of how scandalously, how outrageously a m eaning can take up residence w ithin a system w ith o u t becom ing a term in i t .”12 "K" is therefore Coetzee's m uted affirm ation of the freedom to n a rra te , to textualize; the narratological equivalent, in a sense, of the D erridean trace. However, Coetzee’s is a precarious affirm ation whose pertinence com es from a precise and clear-eyed recognition of a general h ostility w hich continually th reaten s textu a lity ’s eclipse. In Foe (1986), Coetzee tu rn s directly to the situ atio n of m arginality from w hich he speaks. This shift, from an affirm ation of textual freedom to an analysis of m arginality, involves a c h arac ­ teristic tu rn of self-qualification. In w hat is perhaps his m ost a l­ legorical work, Coetzee replays R obinson Crusoe as an account of the relations betw een the in stitu tio n of letters (Foe), the colonial storyteller seeking a u th o rizatio n through the m etropolis (Susan Barton), and the silenced voice of the colonized subject (Friday). The n arra tio n belongs, in the m ain, to B arton, who seeks out Foe in an effort to get the story of her sojourn on Cruso's island told; b ut the tru e authority, indeed potency, of the tale belongs to F ri­ day, whose tongue has been severed in an unspecified act of m u­ tilatio n an d who therefore cannot speak o r a rticu la te th a t a u th o r­ ity. F rid ay ’s w atchful presence as w h at G ayatri C hakravorty Spivak calls the "wholly o th e r"13 closes down the n a rra tiv e in an act of au th o rial deference o r abnegation, on Coetzee’s p a rt. In a final sequence, an unnam ed n a rra to r enters the scene of w riting, a shipw reck in w hich p a ra p h ern a lia of the Crusoe tra d itio n — including B a rto n ’s own n arra tiv e —lies buried. The only sign of life com es from Friday, but F riday's hom e is "a place w here bodies are th eir own sig n s.” F rid ay ’s b rea th overw helm s the n a rra to r, flowing "up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; w ashing the cliffs and shores of the island, it ru ns n o rth w ard and southw ard to the ends of the e a rth .’’14 Coetzee’s deference is to a form of tru th -tellin g w hich the novel itself can n o t possess, a tru th -tellin g w hich neutralizes textu ality the closer it approaches full consciousness of its own con­ ditions of possibility.

Editor's Introduction

11

Coetzee seem s to p rep are for this conclusion in w hat is perhaps the m ost challenging and su b sta n tia l of the essays collected here, the study of confession in R ousseau, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. The principle e lab o rated here is th a t tru th in confession cannot be arrived a t by introspection alone, no m atter how rigorous, th at the endless story of the self will be brought to finality only a t the p o in t w here it is m ost unaw are; release comes w ith an affirm ation or im position of tru th —alternatively, from grace. This is not an easy lesson for a secular, critical postm odernism to absorb, b u t it is pne th a t enables Coetzee to address m ore directly the crucial problem of n a rra tiv e auth o rity . This question had been surfacing ever since Life & Times o f M ichael K, of course, although one could go back still further, to Coetzee's use of gender since In the Heart o f the Country to d ram a tiz e pow er relations as they affect speech an d discourse. B ut if we read the la te r fiction in relation to the essay on confession, we can see th a t Coetzee's address to the p ro b ­ lem of a u th o rity depends on two u n sta te d propositions: first (and m ore obviously), the b ru te facticity of pow er can h alt the endless­ ness of tex tu ality; b u t second, if a u th o rity is u ltim ately a function of pow er, then it ought to be possible, through the rediscovery of fiction's cap acity to reconfigure the rules of discourse, to find a position outside c u rre n t pow er relations from which to speak. This is the sense in w hich Coetzee speaks, in these interview s, of the im perative to "im agine the unim aginable." Age o f Iron (1990) rests on sim ilar principles. E lizabeth Curren, a retired lectu rer in classics at the U niversity of Cape Town, is dying of cancer in a society infected w ith other kinds of m alig­ nancy. She has little or no authority: her death is a private one, an d her canon is largely ignored. However, her very m arginality frees her, paradoxically, to speak w ith extrao rd in ary candor. Thus she tells T habane, w ho tries to get h er to un d erstan d the uncom ­ prom ising, "iro n ” logic of the tow nship com rades: "I fear I know com radeship all too well. The Germans had com­ radeship, and the Japanese, and the Spartans. Shaka's impis too, I'm sure. Comradeship is nothing but a mystique of death, of killing and dying, m asquerading as w hat you call a bond (a bond of what? Love? I doubt it). I have no sym pathy with this com­ radeship. You are wrong, you and Florence and everyone else, to be taken in by it and, worse, to encourage it in children. It is just

12

Editor's Introduction

another of those icy, exclusive, death-driven male constructions. That is my opinion.”15 She and T habane “agree to differ.” In the novel’s clim ax, w hich involves a chilling police assassination of a young activist in the serv an ts’ q u arters of h er own backyard, E lizabeth is rem inded yet again th a t the corruption starts w ith the crim in ality of a p arth eid . In the novel, then, E lizab eth ’s opinions seem to count for little. But w hy is it th a t they strike the rea d er w ith such force? Does E lizabeth really have no au thority? F ar from this being an a t­ tem pt, on C oetzee’s p a rt, to retrieve an u n reconstructed liberalhum anism —w hich has been com prom ised, like E lizabeth, by com ­ plicity—E lizabeth seem s to project us forw ard to a society in w hich ju d g m ent is once again possible, a society in w hich ethical consciousness is not h am stru n g by interestedness. In his brief essay on the rep resen tatio n of to rtu re in South African lite ra tu re, “Into the Dark C ham ber,” Coetzee speaks of the ethical vision he finds in G ordim er’s Burger’s Daughter, a novel w hich anticipates a tim e w hen “h u m an acts . . . are retu rn ed to the a m b it of m oral ju d g m en t,” w hen it w ill “once again be meaningful for the gaze of the a u th o r . . . to be tu rn ed upon scenes of to rtu re .” The vision is no less a feature of Coetzee’s own work. W hat is distinctive in Coetzee, however, is th a t he broaches the possibility of ethical reconstruction in a m ovem ent w hich begins w ith abnegation, w ith the recognition of unbridgeable historical constraints. It is a scru ­ pulous position: m ore th an conscious of the lim its of its authority, it nevertheless an ticipates a properly ethical reciprocity a t som e as-yet-unim agined historical m om ent. One is rem inded of Theodor Adorno’s essay on com m itm ent, in w hich he says (appropriately, for the p resent context, w ith reference to Kafka and Beckett): "As em inently constructed and produced objects, works of art, in clu d ­ ing literary ones, point to a practice from w hich they abstain: the creation of a ju st life.”16 Doubling the Point shows th a t although Coetzee's in tellectual af­ filiations are largely m etropolitan, the pressures to w hich his fic­ tion responds are local and national. Indeed, in its d ram a tiz atio n of w h at it m eans to narrate-in-history, in the story it tells of a struggle w ith the dynam ics of a u th o rial agency, Coetzee’s w ork

Editor's Introduction

13

m akes visible the connections betw een n arra tiv ity and nationhood in his p a rtic u la r situ atio n . S outh Africa seem s poised before a new phase of history: the legalization of oppositional activity, the re­ lease of n um bers of political prisoners, and the repeal of racially d iscrim in ato ry legislation, have, since February 1990, created con­ ditions in w hich a different conception of the nation-state seems to be em erging, in which, a t least, a debate betw een the chief an tag o n ists over the m eaning of nationhood has begun to develop. In this context, Coetzee’s achievem ent seem s to be a tim ely one. His struggle w ith the problem of agency is exem plary in bringing to lig h t the positionality w hich underlies any a ttem p t to im agine the collective. M oreover, in Coetzee both n arrativ ity and n atio n ­ hood are show n to be fragile structures: the fragm entation, the susceptibilities, are revealed through the essentially ethical prism of an ideal of equality and reciprocity. This achievem ent could have com e about, however, only through Coetzee's alm ost relent­ less skepticism , and an unw avering com m itm ent to the exigencies of his a rtistic practice. W hile the fruits of his labor are in the novels them selves, the story of Coetzee’s d eterm ination to follow his subject, w herever it leads, is the story of these pages.

Beckett

Interview

DA: I would like to begin at the beginning, by raising the question of autobiography. There are few contemporary writers whose work enjoins us quite as rigorously as yours to examine the authenticity and authority of the speaking subject. The question is implicit in each novel from Dusklands on, and it is explicitly handled in Foe; in criticism, you have looked closely at autobiographical "truth" and confessional writing in Tolstoy, Rousseau, and Dostoevsky. In view of the prominence given to this question in your work, it is not surprising that you have written so little autobiographical prose, in the ordinary sense. What is it, then, that enables you to speak about the relationship between your critical activity and your fiction? JM C: Let me treat this as a question about telling the truth rather than as a question about autobiography. Because in a larger sense all writing is autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fic­ tion, writes you as you write it. The real question is: This massive auto­ biographical writing-enterprise that fills a life, this enterprise of self­ construction (shades of Tristram Shandy!)— does it yield only fictions? Or rather, among the fictions of the self, the versions of the self, that it yields, are there any that are truer than others? How do I know when I have the truth about myself? My first response is that we should distinguish two kinds of truth, the first truth to fact, the second something beyond that; and that, in the present context, we should take truth to fact for granted and concentrate on the more vexing question of a "higher" truth. But what is truth to fact? You tell the story of your life by selecting from a reservoir of memories, and in the process of selecting you leave things out. To omit to say that you tortured flies as a child is, logically speaking, as much an infraction of truth to fact as to say that you tortured flies when in fact you didn't. So to call autobiography— or indeed his­ tory— true as long as it does not lie invokes a fairly vacuous idea of truth. 17

18

Beckett

Therefore, instead of trying to distinguish between kinds of truth, let me come at the question from a different angle. As you write— I am speaking of any kind of writing— you have a feel of whether you are getting closer to "it" or not. You have a sensing mechanism, a feedback loop of some kind; without that mechanism you could not write. It is naive to think that writing is a simple two-stage process: first you decide what you want to say, then you say it. On the contrary, as all of us know, you write because you do not know what you want to say. Writing reveals to you what you wanted to say in the first place. In fact, it sometimes constructs what you want or wanted to say. What it reveals (or asserts) may be quite different from what you thought (or half-thought) you wanted to say in the first place. That is the sense in which one can say that writing writes us. Writing shows or creates (and we are not always sure we can tell one from the other) what our desire was, a moment ago. Writing, then, involves an interplay between the push into the future that takes you to the blank page in the first place, and a resistance. Part of that resistance is psychic, but part is also an automatism built into language: the tendency of words to call up other words, to fall into patterns that keep propagating themselves. Out of that interplay there emerges, if you are lucky, what you recognize or hope to recognize as the true. I don't see that "straight" autobiographical writing is any different in kind from what I have been describing. Truth is something that comes in the process of writing, or comes from the process of writing. So we return to the question of elementary lies. I am tempted to try out the following definition of autobiography: that it is a kind of self­ writing in which you are constrained to respect the facts of your history. But which facts? All the facts? No. All the facts are too many facts. You choose the facts insofar as they fall in with your evolving purpose. What is that purpose in the present case? Tentatively I propose: to understand the desire that drove me to write what I wrote from 1970 to 1990— not the novels, which are well enough equipped to perform their own inter­ rogations, but everything else, the critical essays, the reviews, and so forth— pieces whose genre does not usually give them room to reflect on themselves. Is that my true purpose? The truth is, at this stage of our interchange I probably know as little about my purpose, which lies in the present, as about the drives and desires, lying in the past, that I am now returning

Interview

19

to. Desire and purpose are on the same level: one does not command the other. Perhaps that is why I have turned to the mode of dialogue: as a way of getting around the impasse of my own monologue. DA: Can we go back to the period before 1970? Before you began writing in earnest you served different apprenticeships, not all of them literary. You turned to fiction only after pursuing three different academic specialisms— mathematics (later, computer science), literary studies, and linguistics— and after taking your philological interests to the doctoral stage. Aside from the poetry and other work you produced as a student at the University of Cape Town, it was well over ten years before you committed yourself to fiction. To what extent was this preparation, and to what extent paralysis? JM C: It is true, I wrote nothing of substance before I was thirty. I am not sure this was wholly a bad thing. How many men in their twenties write novels worth reading? But of course I did not see it like that, at the time. I did not say to myself, "Wait, you are not yet thirty . . . " On the contrary, as I remember those days, it was with a continual feeling of self-betrayal that I did not write. Was it paralysis? Paralysis is not quite the word. It was more like nausea: the nausea of facing the empty page, the nausea of writing without conviction, without desire. I think I knew what beginning would be like, and balked at it. I knew that once I had truly begun, I would have to go through with the thing to the end. Like an execution: one cannot walk away, leaving the victim dangling at the end of a rope, kicking and choking, still alive. One has to go all the way. (I could have used a metaphor of birth, I realize, but let it stand as it is.) I hesitated through the 1960s because I suspected, rightly, that I would not be able to carry the project through. But the materials for Dusklands had begun to be assembled a long way back. William Burchell, for instance, I had been reading and making notes from as early as 1962, knowing that they would go into some such book as Dusklands turned out to be. DA: Can we turn to your introduction to the novel? While living in London in 1962-63, you wrote a master's thesis (300-odd pages) for the University of Cape Town on Ford Madox Ford. Later, in Texas, in 1967-68, you wrote your doctoral dissertation on stylistic analysis, con­ centrating on Beckett's English fiction. How did you come to be involved

20

Beckett

with these authors in particular, and what did they— or the kind of fiction they wrote— represent to you?

IMG: I had read Ford Madox Ford as an undergraduate and been much attracted to him: to the Tietjens tetralogy in the first place, then to The Good Soldier. I had come to Ford via Pound, who thought him the finest prose stylist of his day. The kind of aestheticism Ford stood for struck a chord in me: good prose was a matter of cutting away, of paring down (though Ford actually wrote voluminously); novel-writing was a craft as well as a vocation; and so forth. But I now suspect that there was more to the attraction than that. Ford gives the impression of writing from inside the English governing class, but in fact he wrote as an outsider, and as a somewhat yearning outsider at that. His father was an anglicized German, and his mother was born into the Pre-Raphaelite circle— bo­ hemians of a kind. Ford's social aspirations drove him to become in many ways plus anglais que les anglaises. He cultivated a kind of gruff stoicism, which he thought of as Tory (old-fashioned Tory, of course) and em­ bodied in his hero Christopher Tietjens. I now suspect that what attracted me to Ford was as much the ethics of Tietjens as the aesthetics of le mot juste. Which is not to say that when I myself write I do not quite laboriously search out the right word. I do believe in spareness— more spareness than Ford practiced. Spare prose and a spare, thrifty world: it's an unattractive part of my makeup that has exasperated people who have had to share their lives with me. On the other hand, I was reading George Bourne the other day, on rural England pre-1914. The key word for Bourne, a complex, value-laden word with a long history, is thrift: the culture of the western European peasantry was a culture of thrift. My family roots lie in that peasant culture, transplanted from Europe to Africa. So I am quite deeply ambivalent about disparaging thrift. As for Beckett, I had read Waiting for Godot in the 1950s when it was a talking-point all over the world, but the encounter that meant more to me was with Watt, and after that with M olloy and, to a lesser extent, the other novels. Beckett's prose, up to and including The Unnamable, has given me a sensuous delight that hasn't dimmed over the years. The critical work I did on Beckett originated in that sensuous response, and was a grasping after ways in which to talk about it: to talk about delight.

Interview

21

DA: You worked as a computer programmer in England for four years (1962-1965) before going back into English studies. In Texas, your mathematical and literary interests seem to have come together, under the umbrella of stylistics and stylostatistics (although a few years earlier you had experimented with computer-generated poetry, and were to do so again). Let me put to you some observations about this aspect of your work. Interest in the quantitative branch of stylistics has waned over the years. Roman Jakobson's essays on verbal patterning, for instance, seem to have proved less influential than much of his other work. But your relationship with the field, even at the time, was complicated and even somewhat contradictory. On one hand, you seem to have been drawn to its positivism, perhaps its promise of objectivity (in your doctoral dissertation you distance yourself from the more intuitive features of New Criticism); on the other hand, you were suspicious of some of the results and consequences of stylistics (the dissertation is also radically self-reflective, even skeptical, about some of its own methods). Another example of this ambivalence: your earliest published essay (1969) sought to refine the measure of prose "difficulty" developed by the German sty I©statistician Wilhelm Fucks,1 but not long afterward (1971) you published a review of Fucks's Nach alien Regeln der Kunst in which you refer to positivism as a "mythology" and mention ironically its assumption, which I assume is a Hegelian one, of an "ascending consciousness."2 (In your fiction, certainly in Dusklands, this ambivalence is resolved in a critique, via Eugene Dawn, of scientific positivism in the service of imperial power.) In two essays from this period, you brought computer programming into stylistics with results which are interesting in hindsight (though perhaps still rather arcane for many readers). Beckett's Lessness consists of 1,538 words; words 770-1,538 repeat words 1-769 in a different order. For this essay (1973) you ran a program which mapped repetitions occurring at different levels— the phrase, the sentence, and the para­ graph.3 In the interpretation you argue that what is most important in the work is not "the final disposition of the fragments but the motions of the consciousness that disposes them" and conclude by saying, “This endless enterprise of splitting and recombining is language, and it offers not the promise of the charm, the ever-awaited magical combination that will bring wealth or salvation, but the solace of the game, the killing of time."

22

Beckett

There are games of evasion, games of self-preservation in Beckett's Watt, as there are in Dusklands (in the second narrative, during Jacobus Coetzee's solitary journey back to the Cape after his encounter with the Namaquas). In the essay, your comments on Beckett seem to resonate not only to the activity of plotting the repetitions, but also to your fiction (and I see that Dusklands and the Lessness essay were published in the same year). The second essay in which you used computer programming is "Surreal Metaphors and Random Processes," published much later (1979).4 Here, having entered a lexicon drawn from translations of Pablo Neruda, you used a random-number generator to produce simple sentences, which you then sifted for properly surreal metaphoric effects— such as "the nude with the haggard fingernail disdains the schoolboy of splendour." You then discuss this process in relation to Breton's poetics. (Incidentally, was the strange poem, "Hero and Bad Mother in Epic," published in Staffrider in 1978, a spinoff from this exercise?) This essay is, I think, more immediately illuminating than the one on Lessness because in this case the mechanical procedure, by demystifying the element of chance, brings into sharp focus the Romantic and utopian aspirations of surre­ alism. What does your absorption in quantitative stylistics mean to you today, as you look back on it? Would it be correct to say that in Beckett, in particular— with his mathematical metaphors and technical obsessions— this trend achieved a working relationship with your other interests, one which was superseded for the most part by structuralism? JM C: To answer your parenthetical question first: Yes, the poem you mention came out of my interest in, and experiments with, phrasegeneration by computer. It's a piece I'm quite fond of, although there is a big hole in it toward the end. As for the main question, I would distinguish between statistical sty­ listics and generative stylistics, simply because the mathematics behind the two enterprises are so completely different. They are two distinct fields in which I immersed myself for a long while and from which I emerged with rather little to show for the experience. Why did I do it? A wrong turning, I suppose, a false trail both in my career and in the history of stylistics. It didn't lead anywhere interesting. As stylistics gave up on the ideal of mathematical formalization that at one time inspired it, and started looking to more pragmatic models, I lost interest in it.

Interview

23

Beckett's prose, which is highly rhetorical in its own way, lent itself to formal analysis. I should add that Beckett's later short fictions have never really held my attention. They are, quite literally, disembodied. Molloy was still a very embodied work. Beckett's first after-death book was The Unnamable. But the after-death voice there still has body, and in that sense was only halfway to what he must have been feeling his way toward. The late pieces speak in post-mortem voices. I am not there yet. I am still interested in how the voice moves the body, moves in the body. (This isn't quite an answer to your question, but it does say something of what matters and does not matter to me in Beckett.) As for structuralism, the line that intrigued me most was Vladimir Propp's analysis, followed by its structuralist extensions, of how stories (folktales, in Propp's case) are put together. I did experiments with my students in putting together synthetic stories— constructions built up out of common story elements— and then seeing which worked and which didn't work, and so coming to ask what a nonstory might be. A common curiosity in postmodern times, don't you think? DA: I am going to stay with structuralism for a moment. If the actual analytic projects of structuralism, with the possible exception of Propp's work on folktales, did not hold your attention for very long, then is it not the case that what did engage you more fully was the promise of structuralism, the confidence with which it claimed to reveal the langue, the rule-governedness of things? (This is the connection I am making between structuralism and mathematics.) The emphasis in your fiction— and also in White Writing— on myth and epistemic frames seems to share in this aspect of structuralism. In the mid- to late 1960s, when you were at Texas, the power in American linguistics was shifting from the American structuralism asso­ ciated with Leonard Bloomfield to generative-transformational grammar. (Before Noam Chomsky, Benjamin Whorf had left his mark on the pop­ ularization of linguistics as the basis of a social vision.) At some point during this period, perhaps shortly after, you began reading continental structuralism, not only Roland Barthes but also Claude Levi-Strauss. In other words, your linguistic studies coincided, quite dramatically it seems, with the emergent moment of linguistics in the West, both as method and as a model for the analysis of culture. You have commented, in the Texas memoir, on some of these influ­ ences; you mention in particular their democratizing effects, and the

24

Beckett

disquiet that comes with the suspicion "that languages spoke people or at the very least spoke through them." Could you take this further? I am interested in how your linguistic reading might have conditioned not only the obvious preference in your work for nonrealist narrative modes, but also your developing sense of how writing was achieved. How does an interest in the systemic logic of culture become transposed into the business of producing fiction? JM C: Yes, the actual productions of structuralist analysis— Jakobson's readings of short poems, Levi-Strauss's readings of myths— though meant to show the creative mind at work, never provided me or any other writer, I believe, with a model or even a suggestion of how to write. In that sense structuralism remained a firmly academic movement. Barthes's phantasies disguised as science were far more valuable. What structuralism did do for me— and here I have in mind anthro­ pological structuralism and Jakobson's work on folk poetry— was to col­ lapse dramatically the distance between high European culture and socalled primitive cultures. It became clear that fully as much thinking went into the productions of primitive cultures. Human culture was human culture, unchanging, more or less, beneath the changing forms of its expression. An old lesson, I suppose; but I had to learn it in my own way. So, although the heyday of French structuralism, as it touched me in the United States, didn't necessarily have a democratizing effect (your word, about which I'm cautious here— kratis is power, after all), it cer­ tainly broadened the horizons of someone who had grown up in a European enclave in Africa, who disliked travel, who preferred books to life. It makes a great deal of sense to assimilate Chomskyan linguistics to structuralism, as you suggest, if only because of the similar weight the two enterprises give to innate structures. I did immerse myself in gen­ erative grammar, at quite a technical level. I turned— as one has to if one's interests stretch beyond the grammars of individual languages to questions of universal grammar— to non-Indo-European languages. It was this immersion— shallow enough if one is talking about real com­ mand of detail— that gave the biggest jolt to a Western colonial whose imaginary identity had been sewn together (how thinly, and with how many rents!) from the tatters passed down to him by high modernist art. But the nub of your question is about how these preoccupations relate

Interview

25

to the business of producing fiction, and the answer must be, I suppose, that it is hard to see how they do. Nothing one picks up from generative linguistics or from other forms of structuralism helps one to put together a novel. What remained from those studies was probably no more than a very general residue: respect for other cultures, respect for ordinary speakers, for the unconscious knowledge we carry, each of us. DA: A related question. Your essay "Samuel Beckett and the Temptations of Style" brings together several themes falling under the heading of doubt, formal and conceptual, that you were drawn to in your Beckett studies. I say formal and conceptual: more strictly, you treat these things as inseparable. What are the implications of your search for the under­ lying matrix of Beckett's prose? JM C: I think I have already hinted at an answer. Beckett has meant a great deal to me in my own writing— that must be obvious. He is a clear influence on my prose. Most writers absorb influence through their skin. With me there has also been a more conscious process of absorption. Or shall I say, my linguistic training enabled me to see the effects I was undergoing with a degree of consciousness. The essays I wrote on Beck­ ett's style aren't only academic exercises, in the colloquial sense of that word. They are also attempts to get closer to a secret, a secret of Beckett's that I wanted to make my own. And discard, eventually, as it is with influences. DA: What drew you to the Beckett manuscripts? JM C: The Beckett manuscripts were in Texas, and I was there. A coin­ cidence. I didn't know they were there before I arrived. But I became quite absorbed in them, particularly in the Watt papers. It was heartening to see from what unpromising beginnings a book could grow: to see the false starts, the scratched-out banalities, the evidences of less than furious possession by the Muse. DA: Let me ask you then: What drew you to Texas? JM C: In 1964 I was living in England, working in a computer research laboratory. I was going nowhere; I needed to change direction. There seemed to be something in the air, a possibility that linguistics, mathe­

26

Beckett

matics, and textual analysis might be brought together in some way (the vague name under which I thought of this synthesis at the time was general morphology). My academic record wasn't good enough to open up major fellowships to me. I wrote to a number of U.S. universities, got a handful of positive responses, chose Texas. They offered $2,100 a year and a reduction in fees, as I remember it, for studying half-time and teaching freshman composition half-time. It was a reasonable stipend, for those days, for that kind of work. Aside from the facts that the University of Texas had a good reputation in linguistics and a big manu­ script collection, I knew little about it. DA: The Texas memoir begins by invoking the immigrant experience, but did you have something more specific in mind here? JM C: I would not have had the confidence to make that first foray into autobiography without some more solid text to resonate against. I took as my sounding board the prose of The Education of Henr\f Adams, and particularly its affectless irony. I suspect the memoir works only if you have Adams at the back of your mind. DA: There is a philosophical dimension to Beckett that is somewhat muted in these essays. Hugh Kenner, whose work on Beckett and eariy modernism you admired, described the Beckett trilogy of Molloy, A\alone Dies, and The Unnamable as undertaking the disintegration of the cogito, "[reducing] to essential terms the three centuries during which those ambitious processes of which Descartes is the symbol and progenitor. . . accomplished the dehumanization of man."5 Kenner also asked whether Descartes, like The Unnamable, was "spoken through by a Committee of the Zeitgeist." Your first two novels address similar issues: in the context of colonialism, speaking within and on behalf of an obsessive rationality (with due regard for the way it coheres with dominance and violence), your narrators play out the failure of the Cartesian self to reach transcendence. Was it indeed Beckett who set you thinking in this direc­ tion? JM C: Not Beckett specifically. There was a confluence of interests. But it is unlikely that Beckett would have gripped me if there hadn't been in him that unbroken concern with rationality, that string of leading men savagely or crazily pushing reason beyond its limits. Nevertheless, Dusk-

Interview

27

lands didn't emerge from a reading of Beckett. What was more imme­ diately behind it was the spectacle of what was going on in Vietnam and my gathering sense, as I read back in South African history but more particularly in the annals of the exploration of southern Africa, of what had been going on there. DA: In several of the essays on Beckett— notably the one on Murphy— you discuss the question of formal reflexivity, of fiction displaying its own conventions. However, although what you call the "anti-illusionism" of reflexive consciousness is a position you are comfortable with, you also refer to it as an "impasse." What do you mean here? JM C: 111usionism is, of course, a word I use for what is usually called realism. The most accomplished illusionism yields the most convincing realist effects. Anti-illusionism— displaying the tricks you are using instead of hiding them— is a common ploy of postmodernism. But in the end there is only so much mileage to be got out of the ploy. Anti-illusionism is, I suspect, only a marking of time, a phase of recuperation, in the history of the novel. The question is, what next? DA: In addition to Beckett, Nabokov was an important, though lesser, influence on your early fiction. In "Nabokov's Pale Fire and the Primacy of Art" (1974)6 you contrast the reflexive consciousness of the two writers, arguing that whereas Beckett pushes it as far as it is humanly possible to go, Nabokov stops short and even negotiates a way out, finding in reflexivity the post-Romantic supports of irony, high art, and the imagination. You also argue that Nabokov's version is a preemptive attempt, and one that fails, to escape history ("history-as-exegesis”) by incorporating interpretation into the fiction. Despite your reserve about his resolutions and evasions, though, you seem sympathetic with Na­ bokov's nostalgic playfulness about the past, fictionalized in Pale Fire as "the child's kingdom of Zembla.” You quote a letter by Rilke which explicates this aspect of Nabokov, a passage worth repeating: It is our task to imprint this provisional, perishable earth so deeply, so patiently and passionately in ourselves that its reality shall arise in us again "invisibly." We are the bees of the invisible . . . And this activity is curiously supported and urged on by the even more rapid fading away of so much of the visible that will no longer be replaced. Even for

28

Beckett

our grandparents a "house," a "well," a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat: were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost everything a vessel in which they found the human and added to the store of the human. Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life . . . A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers . . . Live things, things lived and conscient of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last still to have known such things.7 Dusklands is structurally indebted to Pale Fire. It deals, moreover, with your own situation, both your experience of America in the late 1960s, and features of your ancestry in South Africa, but it does so ironically and parodically, using the doubling effects of metafiction. The influence seems strong. What account would you give of your relation to Nabokov today? JM C: If I had to be brief, I would say I have no relation with Nabokov left. Nabokov loved Russia in a way that (one is told) non-Russians cannot understand. He was also proud of his family and his family history. His childhood in Russia was clearly a time of unforgettable happiness. His love and his longing for that departed world are plain in his work; they are what is most engaging in him. But I am not sure he approached the reality that took Russia away from him in a responsible way, in a way that did justice to his native gifts; indeed, he sometimes approached it in a quite childish way, as though the Bolsheviks were to blame for robbing him of his childhood (wouldn’t he have grown up anyway?). Underneath the surface, in Nabokov, there are real pain and real loss. He said he loved America, but how could he have, really? He was grateful to America, he was amused and intrigued by America, he became an expert on America, but his heart (as I read his heart) was as much with the Old World as Rilke's was. There is more of the tragedy of the loss of that world in Rilke's wonderful letter than there is in all of Nabokov. That is, I think, why I have lost interest in Nabokov: because he balked at facing the nature of his loss in its historical fullness. DA: Historical fullness is a paradoxical notion here: the more complete and irreversible the loss, the more searching will be— or ought to be—

Interview

29

the writing that comes in its wake? What does this mean to you, as a South African? JM C: Yes, the more searching it ought to be. I too had a childhood that— in parts— seems ever more entrancing and miraculous as I grow older. Perhaps that is how most of us come to see our childhood selves: with a gathering sense of wonder that there could once have been such an innocent world, and that we ourselves could have been at the heart of that innocence. It's a good thing that we should grow fond of the selves we once were— I wouldn't want to denounce that for a moment. The child is father to the man: we should not be too strict with our child selves, we should have the grace to forgive them for setting us on the paths that led us to become the people we are. Nevertheless, we can't wallow in comfortable wonderment at our past. We must see what the child, still befuddled from his travels, still trailing his clouds of glory, could not see. We— or at least some of us, enough of us— must look at the past with a cruel enough eye to see what it was that made that joy and innocence possible. Forgivingness but also unflinchingness: that is the mixture I have in mind, if it is attainable. First the unflinchingness, then the forgivingness. DA: The Nabokov essay quotes Lacan in the context of a discussion about aggressivity, the aggressivity of Nabokov's characters toward at­ tempts to explicate them (which mirrors that of the patient before the analyst). The source of discomfort is the recognition that any construct of the self in language is a form of dispossession, because the self is being represented like another, for another. My question is not about Nabokov, but about Lacan. The first major work of criticism on your fiction, by Teresa Dovey, has as its central thesis that the novels are allegories of the Lacanian subject, attempting to realize itself, unsuc­ cessfully, in the linguistic conditions provided by colonialism and "the South African tradition." The thesis will stand or fall on its own terms, but would you comment on the place that Lacan has occupied in your thinking? JM C: Lacan is a seminal thinker. I haven't [November 1990] read Dovey's book, so I don't have a sense of what might already have been said about Lacan and myself, to respond to. But let me observe that some of Lacan's most inspired remarks have been about speaking from a position

30

Beckett

of ignorance. He finds his justification not only in the practice of analysis, where the patient seems to speak most truly when he is, so to speak, making a mistake, but in poetry. When one is getting as close to the center of one's own endeavor as this question takes one— where am I when I write?— it may be best to be Lacanian and not to bother too much about what one means (can I interchange "one" and 'T ' in this context?); and that would entail not knowing too much about where one stands in relation to the advice— Lacan’s— that one can afford to speak without "thought."

The Comedy of Point of View in Beckett's Murphy (1970)

S

am uel B eckett’s M urphy (1934) presents itself as, am ong o th e r things, a sequence of som e 3,500 sentences, w ritten dow n by an a u th o r w ho is not entirely identifiable w ith a fictional n a rra to r or scribe who in some sense “knew ” M urphy and his friends in D ublin and London and now records th eir adven­ tures. As author, B eckett (or "B eckett”) lends his au th o rity to these sentences by p rin tin g them u n d e r his nam e; he also delegates this au th o rity to his n a rra to r, w ho on occasion delegates it in tu rn to various of the ch aracters. He accom plishes this last by quoting th eir w ords (dialogue) or by retirin g from the page and allow ing them to take over his n a rra tiv e authority. For the rea d er to assign an a u th o rity to each sentence is thus a potentially com plex task. B ut as w riters and readers of fiction we have come to agree, it seems, on a largely unam biguous tacit code, an d we m anipulate th a t code well enough to be able to draw fine distinctions betw een, say, th e v eracity and the tru th of an au th o ritativ e n arratio n : we are capable of such feats as reading F. M. Ford's The Good Soldier as the com edy of a self-deceiving n arrato r, and we perceive at once the lack of a u th o rity of the Ph.D. w ho w rites (“w rites”) the preface to N abokov's Lolita. Som etim es, however, w hat poses as a problem for the read er of choosing ratio n ally am ong auth o rities m ay be a false problem , a problem designed to yield no solution, or only a rb itrary solutions. Consider the follow ing passage from Murphy. He [Murphy] closed his eyes and fell back. It was not his habit to make out cases for himself. An atheist chipping the deity was not more senseless than Murphy defending his courses of inac­ tion, as he did not require to be told.1 31

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The first tw o of these three sentences are in two of the h a b itu al com posite n a rra tiv e m odes of the novel. In the first, the a u th o r's preterite fiction of "seeing" "M urphy” close his eyes and fall back is coextensive w ith the Active n a rra to r’s "recollection" of the sight of M urphy closing his eyes an d falling back, an d w ith the sam e n a rra to r’s all-know ing tran slatio n into w ords of the unending in­ ner com m entary of M urphy's consciousness, "I close my eyes and fall back.” O ur fictional code suggests th a t we should g ran t the au th o rity for this sentence to the n arra to r. (In fact it m akes no difference to w hom we g ran t it.) The second sentence is (a) the au th o r's p reterite fiction of the h a b its of "M urphy”; (b) the n a r­ rato r's judicious estim ate, on the basis of his recollections, of M urphy's h abits, as well as (c) his b ald tran sla tio n of M urphy's unspoken reflection, "It is not my h a b it to m ake out cases for m y self”; an d (d) the au th o r-am an u en sis’ record of M urphy's re ­ flection ditto . O ur code tells us to ascribe the sentence to (c), the n a rra to r in the second of his roles: there is little to choose am ong (b), (c), a n d (d), b u t the principles of sim plicity and consistency w ith the whole of the text tell us to exclude (b) and (d). The th ird sentence is m ore puzzling. Up to the w ord "in actio n ,” it is open to the sam e analysis as the second sentence. B ut w h at of the sentence m odifier "as he did not require to be to ld ”? Con­ cealed w ithin it is a passive th a t com plicates the ascription of the sentence to any of the four au th o rities proposed above. By w hom does M urphy not require to be told? In the underlying deep stru c ­ ture—to use the term s of transform ational g ram m ar—lies the sen­ tence S, "X tells som ething to M urphy,” w hich subsequently u n d e r­ goes em bedding in "M urphy requires (S),” followed by passive and negative transform ations. Who is X? Author? N a rrato r? M urphy? Anyone in M urphy's London? E ith er of the first tw o answ ers im ­ plies—in term s of the fictive convention—th a t the W ord can pass not only from M urphy, will-he, nill-he, to his puppet-m aster(s), b ut also in the other, conventionally proscribed, direction. "If thou lookest, uncle Toby, in search of this m ote one m om ent longer— thou a rt u n d o n e,” w arns the a u to b io g rap h er T ristram Shandy (Vili, xxiv), b u t in T ristra m ’s fiction Uncle Toby cannot hear. M urphy, it is im plied, can. As for the th ird answ er—M urphy h im ­ self—it im plies th a t there are not one b u t two incessantly c h a t­ tering voices in M urphy’s inner com m entary, tw o voices because

The Comedy of Point of View in M u rp h y

33

there exists the possibility of disagreem ent: "An ath eist chipping the deity is n ot m ore senseless th a n m e [you] defending my [your] courses of inaction."—“As I [you] d o n ’t require to be told by you [me]." And the fourth answ er—anyone in M urphy’s London—is unreal because only Celia is in the room w ith M urphy and she is in a huff. (Note th a t the m odifier is not “as he w ould not have req u ired to be told [if he h ad been in a position to be told by anyone in London]," w hich is a different story.) “As he did not require to be to ld ” th u s im plies the presence of a concealed d ia­ logue: b etw een the fiction “M urphy" and his creato r or his a m a n ­ uensis, or betw een M urphy and the n a rra to r recording his own opinions o r M urp h y ’s thoughts, or betw een M urphy’s self and a lter ego. The m odifier is m ultiply am biguous, a joke on the conventions of p o in t of view. How im p o rta n t is this play w ith point of view to the whole of M urphy? First, note th a t the sentence above is not a solitary jeu. C onsider the following: Regress [a play on progress] in these togs was slow and Murphy was well advised to abandon hope for the day shortly after lunch and set off on the long climb home. (73) If the sentence read " . . . and M urphy was correct/intelligent to ab an d o n hope for the day . . ." or “ . . . and M urphy w ould have been well advised to abandon hope for the day, as he did . . . , ’’ its m eaning w ould be different. As it stands, it contains in its deep stru c tu re the sentence “X advises M urphy w ell.” The identity of X is again a riddle. In the second altern ativ e version I supply, the riddle is insignificant, reading in expanded paraphrase, "M urphy w ould have been well advised by X, if he had been advised by X, to ab an d o n hope for the day, as he did": X is here a gram m atical fiction killed off in the conditional clause. Far from being oddities picked out from the text of Murphy after careful scrutiny, the tw o sentences discussed above belong to a sam ple of 100 d raw n by a process of random selection from the 3,500 o r so in the text. The random ness of the selection procedure allow s us to suggest w ith som e conviction, and w ithout subjecting the text to g ram m atical m icroscopy, th a t there is a fair p robability th a t q u ite often b lan d passives conceal play on the code of point of view .2

34

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W hat o th er varieties of play do we find in this sam ple of 100 sentences? Here is a brief catalogue: Type 1: foregrounding of the n arra to r. The following are the first and last (fifth) sentences of a p a ra g rap h . But Miss Counihan did not know when she was beaten, or, if she did, her way of showing it was unusual . . . No, Miss Counihan did not know when she was beaten. (209) By repeating his w ords, the n a rra to r foregrounds his act of n a r­ ration, thereby th ru stin g him self from decent obscurity on to the stage as head-shaking chorus. Type 2: foregrounding of the author. Celia, thank God for a Christian name at last, dragged her ta t­ tered bust back into the room, the old boy’s. (229) The a u th o r a t his desk expresses relief a t a m om entary respite from the stream of surnam es th at, invented by him , becom e his pensum to inscribe on paper. (Alternatively, the n a rra to r sighs w ith relief a t the respite allow ed him by his author. The resu lt is the same.) Type 3: foregrounding of anom alies created by a convention of a p reterite n a rra tio n of an im aginary history. Of M urphy and his five biscuits we read: He always ate the first-named last, because he liked it best, and the anonymous first, because he thought it very likely the least palatable. (96) The biscuits come in a sta n d a rd five-pack (Ginger, O sborne, Diges­ tive, Petit Beurre, anonym ous). M urphy has been eating such packs for m any days an d so knows the taste of “the anonym ous" well. The expansion "He alw ays ate the first-nam ed last, because he alw ays liked it best, and alw ays ate the anonym ous first, be­ cause he alw ays thought it very likely the least p alatab le" is th e re ­ fore self-contradictory: a sta te m e n t of p ro b ab ility im plies th a t the unexpected is possible, and there can be nothing unexpected in a w orld of h a b it. On the o th er hand, "He alw ays ate . . ." does describe h a b itu a l action, an d we know th a t M urphy does in fact alw ays eat the anonym ous first. There is no way of reconciling g ram m ar w ith reality here: the sentence is p u re anarchic play w ith the tem poral code of n a rra tio n , a conflation of the n a rra to r's

The Comedy of Point of View in M u rp h y

=

35

a u th o rita tiv e su m m ary of M urphy’s h ab its w ith M urphy's thought, weeks old, "This one is very likely the least palatable." Type 4: in terp lay betw een n a rra to r an d c h arac ter in authorial roles. “You don’t know w hat you are saying,” said Murphy . . . "Close the door." Celia closed the door but kept her hand on the handle. (39) The last sentence q uoted is the n a rra to r's rep o rt of Celia's action, b u t its form is conditioned by the form of M urphy’s com m and: '"Close the door.' Celia closed the door." The independence of the form of his u tte ran c e is im pinged on by the u tteran ce of a being nom inally insu lated from him by the lens of his cam era eye. An­ o th er exam ple: When he awoke the fug was thick. He got up and opened the skylight to see w hat stars he commanded, but closed it again at once, there being no stars. He lit the tall thick candle from the radiator and went down to the w.c. to shut off the flow. W hat was the etymology of gas? (175) The first sentence belongs to the n a rra to r’s sum m ary report, w hich constitutes the bulk of the novel. The fourth comes straig h t from M urphy's consciousness: the n a rra to r becom es am anuensis, his self to tally subm erged. The second and th ird sentences are the n a rra to r's b u t p rep are for the fourth in tw o ways: by slowing down the pace of the n a rra tiv e (th at is, the re a d e r’s tim e) relative to the events described (from sum m ary we move to the opening and the closing of the skylight, discrete, consecutive phenom ena, ap p ro ­ p riately concatenated); and by m im ing, a t the end of each sen­ tence, a m ovem ent from external act (closing the skylight, going dow n to the w.c.) to in tern al cause w ithin M urphy (because there are no stars, because he w an ts to sh u t off the flow). The form of the fo u rth sentence, M urphy’s, thus casts its shadow over the form of the th ird . Type 5: in terp lay betw een n a rra to r an d author. Cooper’s account, expurgated, accelerated, improved and re­ duced . . . gives the following. . . . As he burst out of the door the most beautiful young woman he had ever seen slipped in. (119, 121)

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Beckett

The second sentence derives from a hypothetical in term ed iate version som ething like “He said th a t as he had b u rst out of the door the m ost beautiful young w om an he had ever seen had slipped in ,” w hich derives from a hypothetical "As I b u rst out of the door the m ost beautiful young w om an I had ever seen slipped in," w hich is itself an expurgation etc. of Cooper's original p re te r­ ite account. The version th a t the n a rra to r p arad es as his expur­ gated etc. rep o rt of Cooper’s speech is thus in fact his fictionalized report, the rep o rt of n a rra to r-re p o rte r as author-editor. It is fic­ tionalized by tran slatio n from the au to m atic pluperfect of the report into the Active p ast (read er’s present) in w hich it appears. Aside from these violations of the principle of the sep aratio n of the three estates of author, n arrato r, and character, there is a considerable variety of sophisticated b u t legitim ate m anip u latio n of the code in w hich the tag identifying the provenance of a sen­ tence is o m itted and the rea d er is invited to dem onstrate his skill by filling it in. For exam ple: Miss Counihan found without delay, and im parted in block cap­ itals to Wylie, an address in Gower Street where she was on no account to be disturbed. (195) We obligingly expand the sentence to ". . . a n address in Gow er Street w here, she requested [to be tran slated , p retended to re­ quest], she was on no account to be d istu rb ed .” A sentence like this one w ould h ard ly be w orth singling out if its existence did not indicate th a t we are dealing not w ith a sam ple sh arp ly divided into fictionally w ell-form ed and fictionally ill-form ed sentences, b ut ra th e r w ith a continuum of sentences a t one end of w hich are grouped anarchic elem ents like the first two exam ples discussed above, an d a t the o th er the m ore su b sta n tia l body of ord in ary citizens. The fact th a t all the sentences I have analyzed, those th a t stretch the code to its lim its and those th a t violate it, belong to a ran d o m sam ple of 100 sentences (of w hich—to strengthen the arg u m en t— 29 are of dialogue and therefore not open to play) confirm s one's first im pression th a t a com ic a n tig ra m m a r of p oint of view is everyw here a t w ork in Murphy. This com edy is of a piece w ith the flippancy of au th o rial asides like “It is m ost u n fortunate, b u t the point in this story has been reached w here a justification of the expression ‘M urphy's m in d ' has to be attem p ted " and "All the

The Comedy of Point of View in M u rp h y

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37

p u p p ets in this book w hinge sooner or later, except M urphy, who is not a p u p p e t” (107, 122). The com edy is ironic, an d acts to keep sen tim en t a t a distance: the bassoons of irony sound to drow n the elegiac m elodies th a t keep stealing over the piece and th a t come to suffuse its final pages (Celia in B attersea Park). The com edy survives in Watt, w ritte n in 1942—1945, though not as extensively. W att is n a rra te d by one Sam , who takes down W att's w ords in his little notebook and pieces his story together in a frag m en tary book.3 Because Sam belongs both inside the fiction—literally w alking the grounds of an asylum w ith W att— and, as its nom inal author, outside it, there is generally only one box w ith in the box th a t is Watt. A th ird and outerm ost box is, however, occasionally slipped over Watt for a m om ent. "K ate [was] . . . a fine girl b u t a bleeder,” w rites Sam reporting W att. "Hae­ m ophilia is, like en largem ent of the prostate, an exclusively m ale disorder. B ut not in th is work," observes a footnote from the a u th o r behind Sam (102), proclaim ing the fictiveness of the fiction. The sam e effect, w hich is th a t of Type 2 discussed above, is achieved by the scatterin g of "H iatus in MS," "MS illegible,” etc., in w hich the w ork d rifts to a close, an d by the fragm entary Addenda. The play on the conventions of point of view th a t we find in M urphy an d to a lesser extent in Watt is the residue of an attitu d e of reserve tow ard the Novel, a reluctance to take its prescriptions seriously. The a ttitu d e is tentativ e an d of questionable consistency, b u t it is n eith er p erip h eral n o r transitory: it grows, and by the tim e of The Unnamable (1953) has becom e, in a fundam ental sense, the subject of B eckett’s work. "The U nnam able" as a nam e is a token of an in ab ility to a tta in the separation of creato r and crea­ ture, n a m e r an d nam ed, w ith w hich the act of creating, nam ing, begins ("To be an a rtist is to fail,” w rote Beckett in 1949).4 "I seem to sp eak ,” says The U nnam able, "it is not I, about me, it is not ab o u t m e ."5 U nable to arrive a t a division betw een consciousness an d the objects of consciousness, he is echoing Dostoevsky’s Un­ d erground Man: To begin to act, you know, you m ust first have your mind com­ pletely at ease and w ithout a trace of doubt left in it. Well, how am I, for example, to set my mind at rest? Where are the prim ary causes on which I am to build? Where are my bases? Where am I to get them from? I exercise myself in the process of thinking and consequently with me every prim ary cause at once draws

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after itself another still more primary, and so on to infinity. That is precisely the essence of every sort of consciousness and think­ ing.6 Here, consciousness of self can be only consciousness of con­ sciousness. Fiction is the only subject of fiction. Therefore, fictions are closed system s, prisons. The priso n er can spend his tim e w rit­ ing on the w alls (The Unnamable) o r m aking m agic jokes about their u n reality (Murphy). He rem ain s im prisoned. Thus The Un­ nam able has come to live unendingly w ith the fact th a t the "I” by which a M urphy nam es him self is a fiction, ‘“ I / " no m ore neces­ sarily "I" or " T ” than "you” or “‘you·’* “I close m y eyes," thinks M urphy, b u t he ("he") also thinks (“thinks"), " T closes his eyes” or "You ('you') close your eyes (closes his eyes)." The sep aratio n of thinker an d thought, c re ato r and creature, is a fiction of fiction, one of the in tern al rules by w hich the gam e of the novel is played. M urphy ("M urphy," Murphy) by an d large su b m its to the rules, b u t he m ocks them too, and thereby earns his m inor niche, called Page 303 in the Grove Press edition, am ong the in h ab itan ts of The U nnam able’s U nderground of self-enclosing, self-enclosed con­ sciousness.

The Manuscript Revisions of Beckett’s Watt (1972)

T

he Watt p ap ers a t the U niversity of Texas belong to three stages in the com position of the novel: (A) a first draft, holo­ g rap h , 282 pages, begun in F ebruary 1941 in Paris an d com ­ pleted som etim e a fter O ctober 1943 a t Roussillon in the Vaucluse; (B) a ty p escript recension w ith holograph corrections, 269 pages, incom plete; (C) a conflation of p a rt of B w ith a new holograph d raft, C, of 163 pages, finished in February 1945. Since C is fairly close to the p ublished text of 1953, we m ay infer th at betw een C an d this text there are m issing only the p rin te r's copy an d the proofs.1 Watt is an uneven and som ew hat anarchic work. The form al and n a rrativ e indecisiveness of its ending, w ith its echoes of S w ift’s A Tale o f a Tub ("H iatus in M S,” “MS illegible”), and its fragm en­ tary A ddenda (footnote: “The following precious and illum inating m aterial should be carefully studied. Only fatigue and disgust prevented its incorporation"), have caused considerable unease to me an d p erh aps to o th er of B eckett’s com m entators, though none has, to my know ledge, confessed it. Then, too, the eight-year lapse of tim e betw een the com pletion of Watt and its publication, and the fifteen-year w ait before the French tran slatio n appeared, can only raise fu rth e r doubts about Beckett's satisfaction w ith the w ork.2 Although o u r critical reaction to Watt m ust finally em erge from com m erce w ith the p rin te d text, I suspect th a t the reaction w ould be a little m ore sure if we knew the sources of B eckett’s a p p aren t discontent. A cquaintance w ith the com positional biog­ rap h y of Watt m ight give us a glim pse of these sources, and I accordingly sketch this biography below. Its m ain th read is a story of changing plot, th a t is, of changing synthetic principle. As one w ould expect, however, the physical bulk of B eckett’s revision is stylistic. The m ost notable of the intuitions or form al principles 39

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th at control his sm all-scale revision is a principle of sym m etry, the stylistic reflection of the m ental rh y th m “On the one h an d X, on the o th er h an d not-X .” In its o rchestration it is this rh y th m th at com es to m ake Watt "[develop] a purely plastic content, and gradually [lose] . . . all m eaning, even the m ost lite ra l” (73). Beckett com posed the first draft of Watt in four p arts, I—IV, of w hich II—IV survive su b stan tially in the p rin ted text. He then produced a revised draft, B, w hich adheres to the lines of the first draft, A, b ut prunes it. In a th ird draft, C, he discarded the original Part I an d w rote a new one. In itself the old P art I m akes for less than inspiring reading, b u t it is w orth sum m arizing for the light it throw s on the Addenda and certain other episodes. In this first version, the sixty-year-old ur-K nott lives in the house in w hich he was born, atten d ed by tw o servants w ho tre a t him w ith contem pt. Like D escartes, he spends m ost of his tim e in bed. For forty-three pages he explores his dom inant feeling of "nothingness” through the m edium of tw o poems by Giacom o L eopardi b u t eventually fails to define it, find­ ing th a t his en terprise is m uch like trying to get "a clear view of his . . . own a n u s.” A n a rra to r then appears and dism isses K nott: "The plain fact of the m a tte r seem s to be, th a t [K nott] had never been properly b o rn .” The n a rra to r is one Johnny W att, who has come to visit K n o tt’s servant Arsene. Arsene an d W att spend a night together in conversation and horseplay, W att a t one point revealing th a t he intends to w rite a book en titled A Clean Old M an.3 The soliloquy of Dum Spiro (27—29) is a collage of rejectem enta from this discarded P art I: it depends for its comedy, in fact, upon the loosening of the n a rra tiv e relations th a t existed in the first draft. Why should the a u th o r of "The C hartered A ccountant's S a t­ u rd ay N ig h t” live in Lourdes and be in terested in the fate of a ra t th at eats a consecrated w afer? In the first draft these three d a ta are related: expressing his disapproval of L eopardi, the n a rra to r regrets th a t K nott did not explore "our hom e, colonial, arm y, navy, airforce, sinn fein or Zionist authors" an d quotes in full the p a tri­ otic poem "The C hartered A ccountant's S atu rd ay N ight, or, Two Voices Are T here”; he fu rth er represents him self as telling his story a t his last gasp in a room in Lourdes lit only by a snippet of his u n d erp an ts floating in rancid dripping; w hile the ra t belongs in a

The Manuscript Revisions of W att

41

conu n d ru m th a t defeats M cGilligan, "the M aster of the Leopardstow n H alflengths" (see A ddenda, 247), the p a in te r of a p o rtra it of K n o tt's m other. In draft C the three d ata are still present, but th eir in terrelatio n s have disappeared. We see, then, w h at use Beckett m ade of the discarded P art I. He excised com positional blocks, som etim es a few w ords at a tim e, som etim es w hole episodes, an d slipped them into new environ­ m ents in d raft C, p arin g aw ay the p laste r th a t gave them coher­ ence w ith th e ir original context. In th eir new context they th ere­ fore com e to the rea d er w ith a higher level of unpredictability. Consider, for exam ple, the fate of K n o tt’s father, a m usician. In drafts A an d B he is an eccentric m inor ch aracter w ho m ight be at hom e in any n u m b er of conventional com ic novels. His ap p ear­ ance is brief: a p o rtra it of him seated before the piano is described, his suicide le tte r is reproduced, and his intellectual legacy, "Notes on the R av anastron, o r Chinese V iolin,” is m entioned. In this con­ text the w ord ravanastron operates at som ething less th an its full level of lexical unpred ictab ility . T hat is to say, a retired B achelor of M usic w ith a heavily G erm an prose style living inside a com ic novel can be expected to bring certain kinds of props w ith him , recondite o r trivial. Ravanastron thus fills a hole into w hich we as readers m ay alread y have a n ticip ated recondite m usical trivia ("the song the Sirens sang," "theorbo”) to be slotted. In d raft C K nott's fath er disappears. The description of his p o r­ tra it tu rn s up in the A ddenda, u n titled (250-251). The ravanastron ap p ears in a new setting: "a rav an astro n hung, on the w all, from a nail, like a p lo v er” (71). B ut is it the sam e ravanastron? W hile still plainly a m usical in stru m en t—it hangs in the m usic room — it now w ears an enigm atic look. Perhaps we are supposed to find it funny, b u t we cannot be sure we have caught the joke until we know w h at a rav a n astro n is (and the Oxford English Dictionary will not tell us). Can we be sure it is a joke, in fact, hanging as it does next to the bu st of divine B uxtehude, to h e ar w hom Bach w alked 200 m iles? The com positional block ravanastron has m oved into surroundings th a t exploit its m ystery. The change of p lot th a t arose from the discarding of Part I also had repercussions on P arts II—IV. Consider, for exam ple, the epi­ sode of the p ain tin g in E rskine’s room (Part II). In draft A several pages are given over to W att’s cogitations on w hether the painting

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belongs to E rskine or com es w ith the house. A crucial step in this inner arg u m ent depends on W att's connoisseurship of painting: he identifies the pain tin g as by "the D utch p a in te r X-.” B ut be­ tw een drafts A an d C W att changes: the new W att comes to K n o tt’s household strip p ed not only of all certain ty b u t even of all a priori knowledge. Therefore, the episode cannot stan d as it is in the draft. Yet the decision th a t the pain tin g belongs to K n o tt’s establishm ent is a link in the chain of reasoning th a t leads to the im p o rtan t conclusion th a t K nott is eternal b u t changing. Therefore, the ep­ isode cannot be om itted. Beckett escapes the dilem m a by giving the conclusion w ithout the proof: "Prolonged an d irksom e m editations forced W att to the conclusion th a t the pictu re was p a rt and parcel of M r K n o tt’s e stab lish m en t” (130). The n a rra to r (here Sam ) justifies W att’s suc­ cess in com ing to a conclusion: "There were tim es w hen W att could reason rapidly, alm ost as rapidly as Mr. N ackybal. And there were o th er tim es w hen his thought m oved w ith such extrem e slowness th a t it seem ed not to move at all, b u t to be at a sta n d still” (131). W hat has happened here is th a t W att’s m odest cogitations have been pushed into the background by an e d ito r-n arra to r w ho obscures the issue (w hich is not w hether W att can reason rapidly b u t w h eth er his chains of reasoning lead anyw here) and mystifies the read er by referring in passing to a c h aracter w ho w ill not be introduced for an o th er forty pages. This flippant trea tm e n t of n arrativ e decorum rem inds one of Murphy, whose n a rra to r is ca­ pable of such interpositions as "All the puppets in this book w hinge sooner or later, except M urphy, who is not a p u p p e t.” It m ay be th at this flippancy stands for a rejection of the illusionism of the realistic novel.4 We m ay also have to face the possibility, however, th a t it is sim ply a reflection of the "fatigue an d d isg u st” of the Addenda, w hich in tu rn m ay belong to the m ode of irony th a t says exactly w h at it m eans.

Samuel Beckett and the Temptations of Style (1973)

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he a rt of S am uel Beckett has becom e an a rt of zero, as we all know. We also know th a t an a rt of zero is im possible. A th o u sand w ords u n d er a title and a p u b lish er’s im p rin t, the very act of m oving pen over paper, are affirm ations of a kind. By w h at self-contradictory act can such affirm ations be deprived of content? By w h at act can the sentences be, so to speak, erased as they flow from the pen? Here is one answ er: "Islands, w aters, azure, verdure, one glim pse and vanished, endlessly, o m it.”1 The first four w ords, flagrantly composed though they m ay be, leading associatively one to the next via even the bathos of rhym e, th reaten to assert them selves as illusion, as The W ord in all its m agical autonom y. They are erased ("om it”) and left like dead leaves ag ain st a w all. The sentence thus em bodies neatly two opposing im pulses th a t p e rm it a fiction of net zero: the im pulse tow ard con ju ratio n , th e im pulse to w ard silence. A com pulsive self-can­ cellation is the w eight im posed on the flight of the sentence tow ard illusion; the fiction itself is the penance im posed on the p u rsu it of silence, rest, and death. A round the helix of ever-decreasing radius described by these conditions B eckett's a rt moves tow ard its apotheosis, the one-w ord text "nothing” un d er the title "Fiction.” If we can justify an initial segm entation of a set into classes X and not-X, said the m ath em atician R ichard Dedekind, the whole stru c tu re of m ath em atics w ill follow as a gigantic footnote. Beck­ e tt is m ath e m a tic ia n enough to appreciate this lesson: m ake a single sure affirm ation, an d from it the whole contingent w orld of bicycles an d g reatcoats can, w ith a little patience, a little dili­ gence, be deduced. The U nnam able, in the th ird of the Three N ov­ els, has his being in a sta te p rio r to this first consoling affirm ation, and prolongs his existence "by affirm ations and negations invali­ dated as u ttered ," the subject of an incapacity to affirm and an 43

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inability to be sile n t.2 D oubt constitutes his essence. W hat form s do the processes of his doubt take? One is fam iliar to us from the Nouvelles (collected 1954) and Malone Dies (1952): tell desultory stories to pass the tim e (to fill the pages, to em body oneself), pouring scorn on them interm itten tly . These stories typically d raw them selves out to such length th a t they becom e the fictional p ro p ­ erties of th eir n a rra to rs, w ho d ram atize the conflicting im pulses tow ard illusion and silence by d ram atizin g them selves as th a u ­ m aturges of th eir stories (as well as of th eir being) an d then as avengers of the tru th (M oran's last sentences in Molloy [1951] belong here). Side by side w ith this process of doubt exists a second, sm aller in scale and less d ram atic: the p are n th etica l com ­ m entary. The following sentence from The Unnamable (1953) con­ tains the fam iliar phrase-by-phrase self-creation and self-annihi­ lation ("I seem to speak, it is not I, ab o u t m e, it is not about m e,” says The U nnam able: a little bird follows Theseus into the laby­ rin th gobbling dow n the thread), b u t it contains as well a new editorial relation: Respite then, once in a way, if one can call th at respite, when one waits to know one’s fate, saying, Perhaps it’s not that at all, and saying, Where do these words come from that pour out of my mouth, and w hat do they mean, no, saying nothing, for the words don’t carry any more, if one can call that waiting, when there’s no reason for it, and one listens, that stet, without reason, as one has always listened, because one day listening began, because it cannot stop, th a t’s not a reason, if one can call that respite. (370) The p h rase "th at s te t” belongs to an editorial m etalanguage, a level of language a t w hich one talks about the language of fiction. It is the language not of cogito ergo sum b u t of cogitat ergo est: the speaking "I" and its speech are felt not securely as subject b u t as object am ong o th er objects. And the language of the fiction exists in a meta relation to the fiction itself, as The U nnam able recog­ nizes: To elucidate this point I would need a stick or pole, and the means of plying it, the former being of little avail w ithout the latter, and vice versa. I could also do, incidentally, w ith future and conditional participles. (300)

Beckett and the Temptations of Style

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The e d ito rial m etalanguage deployed in this scholium is p er­ fected in Ping (1966), w here the "ping” of com m entary th a t re­ peatedly fractures the surface of the fiction has evacuated itself of lexical co n tent. C ontrast "ping" w ith its prim itive forebear "plop" in The Unnamable, w hich is yet heavy w ith content: "But let me com plete m y views, before I shit on them . For if I am M ahood, I am W orm too, plop" (338). The sound/w ord ping in te rru p ts the p erm u tatio n an d com bination of a set of m urm u red phrases ("bare w hite body fixed," "head haught," and so on) as the com binations prom ise or th rea te n to erect them selves into a tiny, cryptic, b u t autonom ous im age of a ru d im en tary naked hum an being sitting in a room , plus the glim m ering of a m eaning for this im age. The dem ands of "ping" occur m ore frequently (become m ore im p era­ tive) as the im age gains in definition an d its m eaning comes to the edge of m aterializing: "last m u rm u r one second perhaps not alone eye u n lu stro u s black an d w hite half closed long lashes im ­ p lo rin g .”3 Then we have "ping silence ping over”: the m onologue calls to be sw itched over to the source of "ping,” th a t is, to the an ti-illu sio n ary reflexive consciousness celebrated and dam ned in The Unnamable. In Lessness (1969) an infinite series of nested consciousnesses, each dism issing the figm ents of its im m ediate predecessor, is p re­ sented in the p arad ig m of a tw o-com ponent sw itching m echanism . The tw o com ponents are called day and night, each annihilates the figm ents of the other, and even the tw o com ponents are fig­ m ents of an em bracing consciousness whose figments are in tu rn an n ih ilated by the next m em ber of the series: "Figm ent daw n dispeller of figm ents an d the other called dusk .”4 This annihilation or decreation is sym bolized in an o th er binary device: Lessness can be broken n eatly into two, the second half consisting of nothing m ore th an a ran d o m rea rran g e m en t of the sentences of the first (or vice versa). The progression from The Unnamable to Lessness is tow ard a form alization or stylization of autodestruction: th a t is, as the text becom es nothing but a destructive com m entary upon itself by the en cap su latin g consciousness, it retreats into the trap of an a u to ­ m atism of w hich the in v arian t m echanical repetitions of Lessness are the m ost extrem e exam ple to date. Among the m onotonous texts th a t form B eckett's Residua, the only rem aining variable is

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how the au to d estru ctio n is done. This is an intriguing develop­ m ent, for it has a close analogue a t an e arlier stage of B eckett's career. Let us go back to Watt (1958), th a t ouvrage abandonnd of the w ar years. W hat trick of style is it th a t lies behind W att's logical-com putational fantasies to m ake these excursions sound so m uch like w h at Leibniz called m usic, “the m ysterious counting of the n u m b ers”? The trick is th a t W att abandons O ccam 's razor, the criterion of sim plicity, and allow s speculative hypotheses to proliferate endlessly, generated by a m atrix th a t is rhythm ic in character. C onsider the form of the following typical sentence: Perhaps who knows Mr K nott propagates a kind of waves, of depression, or oppression, or perhaps now these, now those, in a way that it is impossible to grasp.5 As a first step we can break the sentence into th ree rh y th m ic groups, the first tw o of w hich are in a coupled relation of p a ra l­ lelism: (a) Perhaps who knows M r K nott propagates a kind of waves of depression, or oppression,

(b) or perhaps now these, now those,

(c) in a way th a t it is im possible to grasp.

W ithin group (a) th ere are two fu rth er couples, equivalent in p h o n ­ ological p a tte rn and juncture: (a l) perhaps (a3) of depression

(a2) w ho knows (a4) or oppression

There is an o th er couple in group (b): (b l) now these

(b2) now those

The entire couple (a3, a4) itself form s a couple w ith (bl , b2). U nderlying the sentence there is thus a system of couples, em bed­ ded a t th ree levels, th e ir com ponents linked by phonological or syntactic equivalences. We can define a couple in general as a p a ir of text elem ents betw een w hich there exists a relatio n of equiva­ lence or co n trast, phonological, syntactic, o r sem antic. The sen­ tence I have analyzed, for exam ple, is itself one elem ent of a couple, the o th er elem ent of w hich occurs ten sentences earlier. It

Beckett and the Temptations of Style

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also belongs to a sequence of nine sentences w hich form s a couple w ith a sequence of seven sentences e arlier in the p arag rap h . Figure 1 is a schem e of the stru c tu re of couplings underlying the p a ra ­ graph; the sentence I have analyzed is no. 17. As we can see, the p a ra g ra p h grow s out of a rhythm o r p a ttern of A against B. This rh y th m infects m ost of Watt, extending to the logic of W att’s discourses. The process of his reasoning pits ques­ tion ag ain st proposition, rejoinder against question, objection against rejoinder, qualification against objection, and so on u n til an a rb itra ry stop is p u t to the chain of pairs. This binary rhythm is above all the rh y th m of doubt, internalizing the philosophical debt to D escartes u n til finally m eaning is subm erged beneath it: Dis yb dis, nem owt. Yad la, tin fo trap. Skin, skin, skin. Od su did ned taw? On. Taw ot klat tonk? On. (168) "G ram m ar and Style!" w rote Beckett to a friend in 1934: "they ap p ear to m e to have becom e ju st as obsolete as a B iederm eier b ath in g su it or the im p e rtu rb a b ility of a gentlem an. A m ask."6 In 1934 B eckett was com posing his lapidary Murphy; w hat he m eans by Style h ere is style as consolation, style as redem ption, the grace of language. He is rep u d ia tin g the religion of style th a t we find in the F lau b ert of M adame Bovary: "I value style first and above all, and then T ru th ."7 The energy of B eckett's repudiation is a m easure of the potency of the seductions of Style. Watt w as the battleground for the next encounter, an encounter w on by Style. Watt trem bles on the edge of realizing F lau b ert's dream of "a book about nothing, a book w ith o u t external attachm ents," held together by "the in­ tern al force of sty le."8 The rh y th m of A against B subm erges Watt in its lulling plangencies: the style of the book is narcissistic rev­ erie. Asked to explain w hy he tu rn ed from English to French, Beckett replied, "Because in French it is easier to w rite w ithout sty le."9 The tendency of E nglish tow ard chiaroscuro is notorious. At the very tim e in history w hen the French language was being m odified in the d irection of sim plicity and analytic rigor, the connotative, m etap h o ric stra in in E nglish w as being reinforced by the Autho­ rized Version. Thus eventually, for exam ple, Joseph Conrad could com plain th a t it w as im possible to use a w ord like "oaken" in its p u rest den o tation, for it brought w ith it a sw arm of m etaphorical

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Fjgure 1 Figure 1. Each block-pair represents a couple. The numbered blocks are sentences. Within the sentence, embedded couples may occur at the level of word or phrase.

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contexts, a n d Beckett could say th a t he was afraid of English “because you co u ld n ’t help w riting poetry in i t ."10 The style of even B eckett’s first p ublished French work, the Nouvelles, is m ore jagged an d p a ra ta c tic th an the style of Watt. W hile still as recog­ nizably his ow n as his E nglish prose, his French prose has freed itself from the stylization, o r a u to m atism of style, of Watt. B ut there is a second an d deeper im pulse tow ard stylization th a t is com m on to all of B eckett’s late r work. This occurs w ith the stylization of the im passe of reflexive consciousness, of the move­ m ent of the m ind th a t we can call A therefore not-A and th at Beckett apothegm atizes in the phrase "im agination dead im agine" an d elsew here explicates as "the expression th a t there is nothing to express, n othing w ith w hich to express, nothing from w hich to express, no pow er to express, no desire to express, together w ith the obligation to ex p ress.”11 The experience of actually reading B eckett’s late fictions, his Residua, is an uncom fortable one be­ cause they offer us none of the daydream gratification of fiction: they call for a heroic attentiveness w hich they continually subvert by a stylized repetitiveness into the sleep of a m achine. They offer no d aydream s because th e ir subject is strictly the annih ilatio n of illusion by consciousness. They are m in iatu re m echanism s for sw itching them selves off: illusion therefore silence, silence th ere­ fore illusion. Like a sw itch, they have no content, only shape. They are in fact only a shape, a style of m ind. It is u tterly ap p ro p riate for an a rtis t to w hom defeat constitutes a universe th a t he should m arch w ith eyes open into the prison of em pty sty le.12

Remembering Texas (1984)

n S eptem ber 1965 (this is an essay th a t can begin in no oth er way), I sailed into New York h a rb o r ab o ard an Italian ship, once a troopship, now cram m ed w ith young folk from foreign p arts come to study in Am erica. I cam e, im m ediately, from E ng­ land; at the age of twenty-five, I was heading for Austin, w here the U niversity of Texas w as to sup p o rt m e to the tune of $2,100 a year for teaching freshm an E nglish w hile I studied in the g rad u ate program . In the colonies, w here I cam e from ultim ately, I h ad received a conventional u n d erg rad u ate train in g in English studies. T hat is, I had learned to speak C haucerian verse w ith good vowel definition and to read E lizabethan handw riting; I w as acq u ain ted w ith the Pearl Poet and Thom as More and John Evelyn and m any o th er w orthies; I could "do" literary criticism , although I had no clear idea of how it differed from book review ing or polite talk about books. All in all, this patchy im itation of Oxford English studies had proved a dull m istress from w hom I h ad been thankful to tu rn to the em brace of m athem atics; b u t now, after four years in the com puter in dustry during w hich even my sleeping hours h ad been invaded by picayune problem s in logic, I w as ready to have a n ­ other try. In an Austin h o tte r and steam ier than the Africa I rem em bered, I enrolled m yself in courses in bibliography and Old E nglish. From W illiam B. Todd I learned the operation of the H inm an collator; for R osam und L ehm ann I w rote (a project of m y own devising) a m inutely d etailed classification of rhetorical figures in the serm ons of Bishop W ulfstan. Professor L ehm ann aw arded m e an A—, the m inus, she said, because w ork like m ine gave philology a b ad nam e. She was right; I was not resentful, though unsure of w here one w ent from there.

I

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In the m an u scrip ts collection ,of the lib rary I found the exercise books in w hich Sam uel B eckett h ad w ritten Watt on a farm in the south of France, hiding out from the G erm ans. I spent weeks perusing them , pondering the sketches and num bers and doodles in the m argins, disconcerted to find th a t the w ell-attested agony of com posing a m asterpiece h ad left no o ther traces th an these flippancies. Was the pain perhaps all in the w aiting, I asked myself, in the sittin g an d staring a t the em pty page? One Charles W hitm an, a student (a fellow student? were they all fellow students? all 23,000 of them ?), took the elevator to the top of the clock tow er and com m enced shooting people in the q u adrangles below. He killed a fair num ber, then som eone killed him . I hid u n d er m y desk for the duration. In Cape Town a Greek assassin ated H endrik Frensch Verwoerd, architect of G rand A part­ heid. "If you dislike the w ar so m uch,” said a friend, m eaning the w ar in (on?) V ietnam , “w hy don’t you leave? There is nothing keeping you h e re .” B ut he m isread me. Com plicity was not the problem —com plicity was far too advanced a notion for the tim e being. The problem was w ith know ing w h at was being done. It was n ot obvious w here one w ent to escape knowledge. The stu d en ts I tau g h t in m y com position classes m ight as well have been T ro b rian d Islanders, so inaccessible to me were th eir culture, th eir recreations, th eir anim ating ideas. I m oved in one stra tu m only of the university com m unity, a stra tu m of graduate stu d en ts living th rifty lives in ren ted ap artm en ts w ith baby toys scattered over the floors, laboring like tortoises to com plete courses or p rep are for orals or w rite dissertations. Their talk, w hen it w as n ot of th eir teachers (their personalities, th eir deficiencies), was of getting out, getting a job in H untsville or Texarkana, getting th eir h ands on real m oney. W ith less tangible goals th an these or perhaps w ith none at all, I toiled aw ay at my Old English texts, m y G erm an gram m ar. On Sundays I played cricket on a baseball field w ith a group of Indians. We form ed a team , traveled to College S tation, played against a team from Texas A&M also m ade up of nostalgic castoff children from the colonies, lost. I rem em bered an Indian friend from the old days in E ngland. He and I had gone for w alks in the S urrey countryside, a countryside th at, we agreed, m ean t nothing to e ith er of us. "At least in A m erica,” he said (he had spent tim e

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in Colum bus, Ohio), "there are all-night h am b u rg er stands." Al­ though I d id n o t care about the ham burgers, the A m erica he d e­ scribed seem ed a distin ct im provem ent on the E ngland I knew. Now I was in Am erica, o r a t least in Texas; b u t the green hills, I was finding, w ere as alien as the Surrey downs. W hat I m issed seem ed to be a certain em ptiness, em pty e arth and em pty sky, to w hich S outh Africa had accustom ed me. W hat I also m issed w as the sound of a language whose nuances I understood. Speech in Texas seem ed to have no nuances; or, if there w ere nuances, I w as not hearing them . I w rote a p aper for A rchibald Hill on the m orphology of N am a, Malay, an d Dutch, languages from u n related stocks th a t had im ­ pacted on one an o th er a t the Cape of Good Hope. In the lib rary I cam e upon books unopened since the 1920s: reports on the te rri­ tory of S outh W est Africa by its G erm an explorers an d a d m in is­ trato rs, accounts of punitive expeditions against the N am a and H erero, dissertations on the physical anthropology of the natives, m onographs by Carl M einhof on the K hoisan languages. I read the m akeshift g ram m ars p u t together by m issionaries, w ent fu rth er back in tim e to the earliest linguistic records of the old languages of the Cape, w ord lists com piled by seventeenth-century seafarers, and then followed the fortunes of the H ottentots in a history w rit­ ten not by them b u t for them , from above, by travelers and m is­ sionaries, not excluding my rem ote ancestor Jacobus Coetzee, flo­ ruit 1760. Years later, in Buffalo, still pursuing this track, I was to venture m y own co n trib u tio n to the history of the H ottentots: a m em oir of a kind th a t w ent on grow ing till it had been absorbed into a first novel, Dusklands. A second track took m e from N am a an d M alay deeper into the syntax of exotic languages, on forays th a t ram ified fu rth er an d fu rth er as I found (I w as rediscovering the wheel now) th a t the term prim itive m ean t nothing, th a t every one of the 700 tongues of Borneo w as as coherent an d com plex an d in tra cta b le to analysis as English. I read N oam Chomsky and Jerro ld K atz and the new universal g ram m arian s and reached the p oint of asking myself: If a latter-day ark w ere ever com m issioned to take the best th a t m ankind has to offer an d m ake a fresh s ta rt on the fa rth e r p lanets, if it ever cam e to th a t, m ight we not leave S hakespeare's plays and B eethoven's q u a rte ts behind to m ake room for the last speaker

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of D yirbal, even though th a t last speaker m ight be a fat old w om an w ho scratched herself and sm elled bad? It seem ed an odd position for a stu d e n t of E nglish, the greatest im perial language of them all, to be falling into. It w as a doubly odd position for som eone w ith lite ra ry am bitions, alb eit of the vaguest—am bitions to speak one day, som ehow , in his ow n voice—to discover him self suspect­ ing th a t languages spoke people or a t the very least spoke through them . I left Texas in 1968. It w as never clear to m e, from beginning to end, w hy the university—and the Am erican taxpayer—h ad lav­ ished so m uch m oney on m e to follow idle w him s. Som etim es I thought it an oversight, an insignificant oversight, allow ed for in the system : th a t am ong the thousands of petroleum engineers and political scientists tu rn ed out every year, it did not m a tte r if there were one o r tw o of w hatever I w as. At o th er tim es the F ulbright exchange p ro g ram seem ed to m e an ex traordinarily farsighted and generous schem e w hose h um ane benefits w ould be felt by all p a r­ ties far into the future. W here did the tru th lie? Som ew here in the m iddle, perh aps. Com ing o r going, I h ad no regrets. I departed, I thought, u n ­ m arked, un scathed, except by the tim es. No one had tried to teach me, for w hich I w as grateful. W hat I had learned in the course of three years w as n o t negligible, though picked up, for the m ost p a rt, by accident. I had had the ru n of a great library, w here I had stu m b led on books w hose existence I m ight otherw ise never have guessed. Passing the door of Jam es S ledd's office a t five o'clock on a S atu rd ay afternoon, hearing the ty pew riter inside, I had been reassured th a t the province of E nglish studies w as not, as the lifestyle of m y colonial teachers h ad seem ed to prove, reserved for d ilettan tes. I could have come aw ay w ith less.

The Poetics of Reciprocity

Interview

DA: A large proportion of your work in translation has been from Dutch: Marcellus Emants' A Posthumous Confession,1 the poetry of Leo Vroman and Sybren Polet, but more substantially, Hans Faverey and Gerrit Achterberg.2 What is your relationship with Dutch, and how did these proj­ ects come about? JM C: At high school the only language I studied, besides English and Afrikaans, was Latin. This was also the only foreign language I studied at university. I would like to be polyglot but am not. My relationship with languages is an intimate but frustrated one. I have a poor ear and a distaste for memorizing. I pick up the principles of a new language quickly enough, perhaps even get a feel for it, then start looking for shortcuts, then get bored. So the pattern has been that I work on a language intensively for a period, usually for an immediate reason, then put it aside and do something else, and as a result never retain anything like a command. This has held even in the case of Dutch, which I know better than any language bar Afrikaans and English. There was a time in the early 1970s when my command of Dutch was such that I could reasonably think of myself as a translator of professional standard. Then I began to drift away from Dutch literature to other interests. I still read literary Dutch fluently, perhaps more fluently than I read literary Afrikaans; but spoken, colloquial Dutch is closed to me. I have never lived in the Netherlands. The Dutch writers on whom I have worked most intensively have been, as you observe, the poets Faverey and Achterberg and the nine­ teenth-century novelist Emants. The Faverey translations were done on commission. In the case of Achterberg and then again of Emants, I began the translations as projects of my own before I had any publication contract. Achterberg is a major figure in postwar Dutch literature, but the kind of poetry he wrote is out of fashion today: a poetry of compression and 57

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paradox and irony, written in tight forms. The closest parallel I can think of in English is William Empson, but there is a mystical strain in Achterberg that you won't find in Empson. “ Ballad of the Gasfitter" is Achterberg's best (and most ambitious) poem, a cycle of fourteen sonnets telling the story of a man's quest for— what? Love? Grace? I began to translate it into English sonnets in 1969 in an effort to understand it, then found that I couldn't translate it till I had understood it. Something any hermeneuticist could have told me, but I didn't know anything about her­ meneutics: again I was reinventing the wheel. DA: In the essay on Achterberg, you begin with patterns of reference in / and You. Your terms are drawn from linguistic descriptions in Emile Benveniste (on pronouns) and Roman Jakobson (on "shifters"). The /You relation, however, connects with larger things in the whole corpus of your work, what I would like to call broadly the poetics of reciprocity. This takes various forms: in Dusklands it seems to draw, among other things, on the failed dialectic of master and slave in Hegel's The Phe­ nomenology of Spirit; later versions in Michael K and Foe involve ques­ tions of authorship, the tensions between readers, storytellers, and the subjects or characters of stories; forms of this relation can also be traced through to your interest in problems of consciousness, and of desire and its objects. Reciprocity and, by implication, the problem of identity are obviously of central importance in a colonial literature. You raise this question in the introduction to White Writing, where you speak of the problem of the European finding a language in which reciprocity is possible, and in the Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech you speak of "the failure of love” in South Africa. Governing the treatment of the /-You relation in the Achterberg essay, however, is what you call the “field of language," "not what I and You signify but how they signify in the field of language and in the field of the poem.” The novel which carries this particular emphasis most strongly— you were working on it at about this time— is surely In the Heart of the Country. The field of language, the field of the Novel in this case, is prominent in several ways: in the episodic repetitions, which serve to focus attention on Magda herself as the narrating subject (in this you seem close to the concerns of the nouveau roman ), and in the numbered units that make up the text. My question has to do with the connection, or tension, between the

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thematics of reciprocity, on one hand, and their fictive status on the other. For despite their similarities, when I place In the Heart of the Country alongside the Achterberg essay, I find myself wanting to measure the distance between them. O f course, it is not possible to get outside of language, as the essay makes plain; moreover, in a colonial situation, the linguistic conditions governing available forms of association are perhaps more visible than they might be under different historical con­ ditions (something the novel dramatizes). Nevertheless, while the essay sympathetically describes the "Ballad'' 's efforts to achieve self-sufficiency in reflexive conventions, I would find it hard to accept a description of the novel which claimed that the problems of selfhood and relationship developed in it are collapsed into a post-Romantic self-consciousness about their fictiveness. Although the existential dimension (Being and Nothingness seems to figure prominently in Magda) is clearly ruled by the linguistic, the former is still there as a ghostly field of possibility. In other words, the field of affect is by no means eclipsed or even neutral­ ized by the field of language. You might not go along with this observation. What it points to, though, is a curious tension between your respect for the linguisticstructural conditions of fiction, and the existential-historical dramas being played out within them. How do you recall the balance of these factors, especially in In the Heart of the Country? JM C: Let me first say something about In the Heart of the Country. You are right to see similarities between it and the French nouveau roman, but behind both there is, I think, a more fundamental influence: film and/or photography. There was a moment in the course of high mod­ ernism when first poets, then novelists, realized how rapidly narration could be carried out: films that used montage effectively were connecting short narrative sequences into longer narratives much more swiftly and deftly than the nineteenth-century novelist had thought possible, and they were educating their younger audience too into following rapid transitions, an audience that then carried this skill back into the reading of printed texts. In the Heart of the Country is not a novel on the model of a screenplay, but it is constructed out of quite brief sequences, which are numbered as a way of pointing to what is not there between them: the kind of scene-setting and connective tissue that the traditional novel used to find necessary— particularly the South African novel of rural life that In

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the Heart of the Country takes off from. (If you want to confirm that In the Heart of the Country is no screenplay, you have only to view Marion Hansel's film version, Dust, which retains virtually none of the sequence divisions and indeed none of the quite swift pacing of the novel. It loses a lot of vitality thereby, in my opinion.) If I had to give examples of the kind of film whose style imprints In the Heart of the Country, I would cite a short film by Chris Marker called La Jetee and the film The Passenger, put together by colleagues of Andrzej Munk after Munk's death from sequences he had completed plus some stills. What impressed me most about films like these was, paradoxically, what they could achieve through stills with voice-over commentary: a remarkable intensity of vision (because the eye searches the still image in a way it cannot search the moving image) together with great economy of narration. More than economy: a rapidity, even a forward-plunging quality. Jean-Luc Godard was right, it seems to me, to make it his aim to liberate the sound track from the image. There are exhilarating moments of liberation in a film like Le Petit Soldat (in later films I find the subordination of image to voice becomes tedious). I have had exchanges with a number of people interested in filming my books, though only one book has actually been filmed ("to film a book": an absurd phrase, but let me use it as shorthand). I have pleaded for voice-over and in general for the independence of the voice, but I have never got anywhere. Even if one encounters a director who is cautiously sympathetic, the people who call the shots, who put up the money, who claim to know what the public will and won't take, aren't. It's a wretched state of affairs. Any words on the sound track besides lip-synchronized dialogue are branded as "literary" and therefore oldfashioned. The irony is, doing the narration through dialogue keeps film tied to stage drama. It makes sound film more primitive than silent film. You say you would find it hard to accept a claim that in In the Heart of the Country I dissolve "problems of selfhood and relationship," con­ ceived in their fullest historical dimension, into postmodernist game­ playing. I support you and hope you are right. You contrast the novel with the essay on Achterberg in this respect, to the detriment of the essay. In its defense I would only say: you have to remember what is and what is not possible in discursive prose. In particular you have to remember about passion, where a strange logic prevails. When a real passion of feeling is let loose in discursive prose, you feel that you are reading the utterances of a madman (think of Vaslav Nizhinsky's diaries).

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The novel, on the other hand, allows the writer to stage his passion: Magda, in In the Heart of the Country, may be mad (if that is indeed your verdict), but I, behind her, am merely passionate. So: behind all the irony, the coolness, the jokes, there is a real passion in Achterberg, which I can call nothing but a passion for You. In my translation there is, I hope, some reflection of that passion. But in the medium of prose commentary I can't be passionate without being mad. So I agree, there is something missing in the essay. What is missing is a passion that quite answers to Achterberg's passion. In that sense the essay is a betrayal of Achterberg. But what is criticism, what can it ever be, but either a betrayal (the usual case) or an overpowering (the rarer case) of its object? How often is there an equal marriage? To return to Magda: Magda is passionate in the way that one can be in fiction (I see no further point in calling her mad), and her passion is, I suppose, of the same species as the love I talked about in the Jerusalem address— the love for South Africa (not just South Africa the rocks and bushes and mountains and plains but the country and its people), of which there has not been enough on the part of the European colonists and their descendants— not enough in intensity, not enough in all-em­ bracingness. Magda at least has that love, or its cousin. DA: I have a question about what you call the "poetics of failure" in the Achterberg essay. The poetics of failure involves a history of self-cancel­ ling literature which in John Barth, Nabokov, and Beckett has projected the failure of the "romantic-liberal notion of the self." In metafictional terms, In the Heart of the Country participates in the poetics of failure as well, to the extent that Magda speculates about what other kinds of literature she might have inhabited, mentioning pastoral specifically (only to reject it). In other words, through Magda, the novel is skeptical about particular kinds of South African writing with roots going back to the late nineteenth century and lasting until the 1950s. Would the novel be implying that colonial humanism had not evolved the formal conditions that might obtain in a literature of reciprocal relationships? JM C: What is pastoral? At the center of the mode, it seems to me, lies the idea of the local solution. The pastoral defines and isolates a space in which whatever cannot be achieved in the wider world (particularly the city) can be achieved. Magda, I concede, describes a very specific and even parodic form of the pastoral, only to reject it. But the question

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remains open: is In the Heart of the Country a pastoral itself, and is Magda a pastoral character? It is not for me to decide this question, but I would point out that letters demanding payment of taxes don't usually penetrate Arcadia. People in Hardy's novels don't ask questions about what genre they belong to. People in Don Quixote do. Insofar as Cervantes is the giant on whose shoulders we pigmies of the postmodern novel stand, In the Heart of the Country is not just pastoral or antipastoral but Cervantean pastoral or antipastoral. Your question is about humanism in South A f­ rica—which arrives as part of British liberal culture, for it certainly isn't Calvinist—and its failure to engender a literature of equal and reciprocal relations. The obvious response must be that British liberalism failed to engender equal and reciprocal relations, period— failed to persuade the colonists, British or Dutch, that equal and reciprocal relations were a good enough thing to make sacrifices for. But I think a more interesting avenue to explore would be to ask why, let us say, love in the postmod­ ernist novel— since we are talking about love— is treated as the figure of a relationship (Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse is the ars amatoria of postmodern times) rather than as a relationship per se. It would be crude to say that the social preconditions for loving (delay, separation, and so forth) no longer exist in the West; but it does seem that love, falling in love have been irrevocably historicized. That is why Magda is an anomalous figure: her passion doesn't belong in the genre in which she finds herself. I'll leave the question here, but you can see what implications it has for me as a novelist. DA: Let me take this further: earlier, you spoke of passion, the inability of criticism to reflect passion in its fullness. Here, you speak of what is lost in postmodernism, where allegorical resonances are given off, per­ haps inconclusively, but regardless of whether or not we would like things to stand for themselves. (You speak of historicization in postmod­ ernist fiction: I take this to refer to the distancing or contextualizing effects of reflexivity.) These apprehensions tend in a similar direction: characteristically, your work is transparent about conventions, but are you suggesting that there is a certain pathos in this very transparency, residing in postmodernist culture, to which you find yourself having to adjust? JM C: A historicizing consciousness or, as you put it, the distancing effect of reflexivity, or even textualization— in the present context these are all

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ways of tracing the same phenomenon: an awareness, as you put pen to paper, that you are setting in train a certain play of signifies with their own ghostly history of past interplay. Did Defoe have this kind of awareness? Did Hardy? One likes to think that they didn’t, that they had, so to speak, an easier time of it. But even if they did have this awareness, surely they couldn't have found it hard to put it behind them, to isolate it in another compartment of the mind, while they attended to the serious business of Moll and the constable or Jude and Arabella. So perhaps you are right to call it simply a matter of culture: they lived in a culture, or cultures, that allowed them to get on with the job, and we don’t. Hence the pathos— in a humdrum sense of the word— of our position: like children shut in the playroom, the room of textual play, looking out wistfully through the bars at the enticing world of the grownups, one that we have been instructed to think of as the mere phantasmal world of realism but that we stubbornly can't help thinking of as the real. On the other hand, one would like to think it is something more substantial than a shift in culture— which, in this context, doesn’t mean much more than a shift in fashion, does it?— that has had this massive and virtually determining effect on consciousness. Something more his­ torically substantial. Is the longing that what acts upon us should at least be "substantial" part of that same wistfulness, that pathos? Do today's children share with us that wistfulness, or are they happy in the play­ room? DA: I want to return to the socially critical side of the exposure of conventions. At times you have been impatient with unreflective notions about form in South African literature and the arts (your review of The Guest, the film by Ross Devenish and Athol Fugard about the life of Eugene Marais, is perhaps the clearest example of this). If I read them correctly, the short essays "The First Sentence of Yvonne Burgess’ The Strike" and "A Note on Writing" were small-scale attempts to intervene in uncritical assumptions by opening conventions to scrutiny and by suggesting a wider range of resources within the literary culture, beyond mainstream forms of liberal positivism. (There is also, I think, an implicit accusation of provincialism in these essays.) The essay on the first sentence of The Strike links the codes of the Novel, especially characterological systems, with class bonding among writers and readers. In the "Note," the political aspect of the argument is less explicit but it is there in the rejection of instrumentalist conceptions

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of writing, which leads to the injunction that reviewers and critics should attend more closely to the speaking subject (the "middle voice," as you put it). In the frame of reference of these essays, it was possible for you to move fairly easily between a critique of form and a critique of ideology; the one was implied by the other. It would be more difficult to do this now, because the political radicalism of the exposure of conventions has recently been contested. Furthermore, the political ambiance of realism in South Africa includes not only liberal positivism, but narratives of black resistance as well (possibly because much black South African prose has its roots in popular journalism). How do these essays strike you now, in the light of these developments? JM C: I must answer frankly: though the essays you mention are by no means major pieces of work, and perhaps reflect little more substantial than exasperation on my part with a certain automatism of writing— writing unaccompanied by any real thought, any self-reflection— never­ theless, I have no desire to distance myself from them. You say that the political radicalism of the exposure of conventions has been contested. I would respond that an unquestioning attitude toward forms or conven­ tions is as little radical as any other kind of obedience. But you emphasize the word political: it is not politically radical to interrogate the kind of realism you describe. Perhaps so. Perhaps the reason why the pieces you mention are so brief, so occasional, is that there is no hope of successfully arguing the political relevance of what, in the present South African context, must seem Eurocentric avantgardism of an old-fashioned kind. DA: This would be the correct moment to raise the question of the interview as a genre of literary journalism. With few exceptions, the published interviews you have given have not been very successful. Many of them do not get beyond an attempt to clarify or agree on a basic set of assumptions about the exchange taking place (which makes them interesting too, but for different reasons). What is it about the interview that troubles you? JM C: An interview is not just, as you call it, an "exchange": it is, nine times out of ten (this is the tenth case, thank God!), an exchange with a complete stranger, yet a stranger permitted by the conventions of the genre to cross the boundaries of what is proper in conversation between

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strangers. I don't regard myself as a public figure, a figure in the public domain. I dislike the violation of propriety, to say nothing of the violation of private space, that occurs in the typical interview. That is my first response. And then there is the casualness and lack of professionalism, and even lack of true curiosity, true interest, that one meets with. Journalists who barely take the time to glance over the blurb of your book. Students who think nothing of dropping by to ask you what you meant by X or Y. Foreign academics making their way across Africa on travel grants, doing face-to-face interviews ("And what do you see as the role of the writer in South Africa?"— one can predict the lifeless questions before they are uttered). I mention this background to excuse, as far as it can be excused, my general irritability and uncooperativeness with interviewers. There is also the question of control, control over the interview. Writers are used to being in control of the text and don't resign it easily. But my resistance is not only a matter of protecting a phantasmatic omnipotence. Writing is not free expression. There is a true sense in which writing is dialogic: a matter of awakening the countervoices in oneself and em­ barking upon speech with them. It is some measure of a writer’s seri­ ousness whether he does evoke/invoke those countervoices in himself, that is, step down from the position of what Lacan calls “the subject supposed to know." Whereas interviewers want speech, a flow of speech. That speech they record, take away, edit, censor, cutting out all its waywardness, till what is left conforms to a monologic ideal. If I had had any foresight, I would have had nothing to do with journalists from the start. Now it is too late: the word is out, passed from one journalist to another, at least in this country, that I am an evasive, arrogant, generally unpleasant customer. I should have recognized from the first the philosophical cleavage between myself and the journalist. Two traditions, it seems to me, converge and reinforce each other in the journalistic interview. The first is legal: the interview is a politer version of courtroom interrogation or, better, the interrogation an investigating magistrate conducts prior to the public trial. The second is most imme­ diately inherited from Rousseau, I suppose, but it draws on the ancient strain of religious enthusiasm as well as on the practice of psychotherapy: in the transports of unrehearsed speech, the subject utters truths un­ known to his waking self. The journalist takes the place of the priest or iatros, drawing out this truth-speech. To me, on the other hand, truth is related to silence, to reflection, to

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the practice of writing. Speech is not a fount of truth but a pale and provisional version of writing. And the rapier of surprise wielded by the magistrate or the interviewer is not an instrument of the truth but on the contrary a weapon, a sign of the inherently confrontational nature of the transaction. The interviewer aligns himself with Richardson's Love­ lace, the man who believes that truth lies inside the subject's body and that with his rapier-phallus he can search it out there. Overreaction? Paranoia? A paranoid tirade? I deliver it to you uncen­ sored. Make of it what you will. DA: A final question. You came back to the problem of reciprocity in your Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, ten years after the publication of the Achterberg essay and In the Heart of the Country, in a society which at that point (1987) was more riven by violence than perhaps at any other stage of its modern history. You spoke with feeling about the history from colonialism to apartheid, the way it has led to a literature "in bondage," but you also addressed the crude and irresistible power of history in South Africa. Let me put this observation to you for com­ ment: that while it is fairly common for writers in South Africa to try to represent history or historical forces, it is rare that history should emerge, as I believe it does in your fiction, as Necessity, as an absolute limit to consciousness. That is, history, in your work, seems less a process that can be represented than a force acting on representation, a force that is itself ultimately unrepresentable. Seen in this light, the productive free­ dom of the act of writing is at best qualified, or provisional. JM C: You put this observation forward in the light of the Jerusalem speech. So let me say something about the context of that speech. The winner of the Jerusalem Prize before me had been Milan Kundera. Kundera's address had been largely a tribute to Cervantes. Reading that address, I believe I knew as well as anyone else what it meant that a Czech should choose to speak about Cervantes in Jerusalem in 1985, namely, a certain defiance of the role imposed on him by history (if you look at it in one way) or by fashion (if you look at it in another). (A decade earlier Kundera had remarked, even more provocatively: "Today, when politics have become a religion, I see the novel as one of the last forms of atheism.") There is part of me too that longs to be an atheist a la Kundera. I too would like to be able to go to Jerusalem and talk about Cervantes. Not

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because I see Kundera or indeed Cervantes as a socially irresponsible person. On the contrary, I would like to be able to say that proof of their deep social and historical responsibility lies in the penetration with which, in their different ways and to their different degrees, they reflect on the nature and the crisis of fiction, of fictionalizing, in their respective ages. But— leaving aside Cervantes now, who is simply in another class alto­ gether— I can't do what Kundera does (or, to be fair to him, what he says he is doing). Cowardice on my part? Perhaps. History may be, as you call it, a process for representation, but to me it feels more like a force for representation, and in that sense, yes, it is unrepresentable. (I have never known how seriously to take Joyce's— or Stephen Dedalus'— "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.'') There is a poem by Zbigniew Herbert, dating from the 1960s, that has left a deep impression on me. It is called "Five Men.'' Five condemned prisoners spend their last night talking about girls, remembering card games. In the morning they are taken out and shot. Herbert writes: therefore, one can write poems about flowers, Greek shepherds, and so forth. A poem, then, justifying poems that stand back from calls to revolutionary action. Perhaps not a great poem— it may depend, though I am not yet sure of this, more on its rhetoric than on a poetic logic that carries all before it— but the effect of that therefore remains imperious and triumphant. What would equip me to say something equivalent? As deep a humanistic faith as Herbert's, I suppose. But I don't have it. Why do I bring Herbert into the discussion? Herbert doesn't talk about History, but he does talk about the barbarian, the spirit of the barbarian (embodied in such people as Stalin), which is pretty much the same thing as history-the-unrepresentable. Herbert's strength is that he has some­ thing to oppose to the barbarian, which we can for present purposes call the human and the minor, about which he has his own ironic reservations but for which he can trace a sort of genealogy stretching far back into the European past. It is because Herbert feels himself so deeply to be a European and believes, with whatever hedgings and reservations, in the vitality, the social vitality, of the literature of shepherds, roses, and so forth, in the power of poetry to bring those symbols to life, that he can oppose poetry to the great shambling beast of history. In Poland one can still hold such beliefs; and who, after the events of 1989, would dare to scorn their power? But in Africa . . . ? In Poland one can still address the five men in the cell, or their executioners in the yard, indirectly, via the almost infinite lattice that a shared European culture provides. In

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Africa the only address one can imagine is a brutally direct one, a sort of pure, unmediated representation; what short-circuits the imagination, what forces one's face into the thing itself, is what I am here calling history. "The only address one can imagine"— an admission of defeat. Therefore, the task becomes imagining this unimaginable, imagining a form of address that permits the play of writing to start taking place.

Achterberg's "Ballade van de gasfitter": The Mystery of I and You (1977) (1) In every house I pass I glim pse You. How can I reach You? Disguised as a gasfitter? (2) D isguised, I am face to face w ith You. B ut now the disguise cannot be dropped. (3) Shall I gas us both? Im agine the new spa­ pers: "D eath of gasfitter and w om an. M ysterious letter. Sex m otive not suspected." (4) So I seal the leak in the gasline, and find th a t You have gone. (5) Ignoring m y orders, I resolve to search in the new a p artm e n t block. (6) R econnaissance of the block tells m e nothing. (7—8) I fail to find Your nam e, b u t am directed u pw ard by a m aid. (9) In the elevator I realize w h a t a fool I am . There is no gas here, God is the hole. W hat am I going to say? (10) The people of the u pper floors eject me. (11) Back a t street level, I realize I have failed. The gam e is up. (12) The fitters’ union calls for a full confession. (13) Years la te r we m eet the fitter in an old age hom e, still obsessed w ith finding the rig h t address. (14) W hen he dies all the personages of the story, m yself included, pay th eir last respects. R. I.P . Such, in b ald outline, is the story of G errit A chterberg's sonnet sequence "B allad of the G asfitter."1 Scholars have beaten their heads long and h a rd against this strange poem, in p a rtic u la r ag ain st the problem of finding stable identifications for the p er­ sonages. Is it a w om an, for exam ple, who is addressed a t the beginning? If so, is she the dead beloved whom , in a lifelong O rphean enterprise, A chterberg tries to sum m on back to life? (There is a school th a t reads A chterberg's oeuvre in this way.) Or is the object of his invocation a m ore com plex one, including God and the very being of the poem itself? W hat distance is there betw een the poet an d his gasfitter self? Is the distance constant? 69

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Does the poem present us w ith a single firm identity plus m asks of th a t identity, o r is the notion of identity it em bodies m ore com plex and fluid? Answers to questions like these, on w hich critical debate has cen tered ,2 depend on our establishing significations for the I and You of the poem . H ere, however, I w an t to begin by asking not w hat 1 an d You signify b u t how they signify in the field of language and in the field of the poem ; and then to proceed to the cen tral sym bolism of the poem , the sym bolism of gas an d the hole.

I and You We can p ictu re the pronouns I-you-slhe in ord in ary discourse as occupying the apexes of a triangle (Figure 2). I stands a t the origin of the u tterance, the here and now, you a t its destination, s/he at some point outside the axis of u tteran ce. It is only w hen the axis of the u tteran ce swings tow ard s/he th a t s/he becom es you, and only w hen slhe takes over the origin of the u tteran ce th a t slhe becom es I.

>

you

s/he

Figure 2 In discourse ab o u t discourse (for exam ple, in critical discourse like this), the axis of u tteran ce passes from /, the author, through a phan to m you w ho are m y reader, w hile every I, you, and slhe of m y object discourse (here A chterberg's poem ) becom es a slhe, following the rules of reported speech (Figure 3). Before I tra n s­ lated / and you in this w ay they rem ained outside the referential

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organization of linguistic signs.· They were, in R om an Jakobson’s term , "shifters,” elem ents of w h at Em ile Benveniste calls "a set of 'em p ty ' signs . . . w hich are 'filled' as the speaker adopts them ." T ran slated into form s of s/he, the nonpersonal pronoun, they en ter the referen tial system as m ere "abbreviative substitutes."3 I r -----------------^ -------------------- 7 you

\% \

*

\\

»*

\ \

*

t 0

s/he (I) \ - ........................ ·/ s/he (you) \ \ \ \ % \ \ \ \ \ \

0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0

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\ 0 \ 0 \ 0 \ 0 \ 0 \ 0 \ 0 % / t 0 \0 *

s/he (s/he)

Figure 3 W hat h appens w hen I try to pin dow n the referents of the I and you th a t I m yself have m ade referential in tran slatin g them into s/hes? In sonnet 1 of the "Ballade," A chterberg (another "he") w rites, “I glance into the houses . . . You ap p ear.” In m y com m en­ tary I w rite: "He glances into the houses and the You a p p ears,” "the You" here being a kind of he or she or even it. Then I ask (and answ er) questions th a t I have created for m yself by my tran slatio n , th a t is, questions th a t come out of the stru c tu re of m y created discourse, not out of A chterberg's: "Is the speaker [th at is, he] a gasfitter already, o r does he only adopt a gasfitter disguise in sonnet 2 ; and, if the latter, how does he acquire a supervisor an d m em bership in a u n io n ?"4 O r "Is the person he sees through the w indow s in sonnet 1 the w om an w ho dies in sonnet 3 ?"5 Twenty years of inconclusive debate on the "Ballade," w ith a record of irreconcilability on the identification of I an d You, should w arn us th a t a d eq u ate grounds for such identification m ay not exist w ithin th e poem , th a t I and You here m ay indeed be "em pty signs" filled variously as the axis of u tteran ce (Benveniste's "m om ent of discourse"6) and the point of consciousness th a t is the I move through the poem . (We should not forget th a t "Ballad of the Gas-

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fitter" reflects the D utch title in m eaning both "B allad ab o u t the G ashtter" and "G asfitter's Ballad": the title identifies I and gasfitter, or pseudogasfitter, only equivocally.) As elem ents of a system of reference, I and you are em pty. B ut the em ptiness of the I can also be a freedom , a pure potentiality, a readiness for the em bodying w ord. It is out of this sense of unqualified R om antic selfhood th a t W allace Stevens' N anzia Nunzio speaks. "I am the spouse,” she says, I am the woman stripped more nakedly Than nakedness . . . Speak to me that, which spoken, will array me . . ? N anzia N unzio longs to com plete herself through a union of pure subjectivity w ith the W ord. Sim ilarly, the existential incom plete­ ness of the I is a t the root of M artin B uber's m yth of a p rim al 1 Thou relation. The "prim ary word," says Buber, is not I b u t Thou,” the w ord of "n atu ral com bination" denoting a relatio n betw een I and You a n ted atin g the objectification of You into It and the isolation of I into a being "at tim es m ore ghostly th an the dead and the m oon." This p rim al relation is, however, lost: "This is the exalted m elancholy of ou r fate, th a t every Thou in o u r w orld m ust becom e an It." In tim ations of the lost relation, "m om ents of the Thou . . . strange lyric and d ram a tic episodes, seductive and m agical . . . tearin g us aw ay to dangerous extrem es . . . sh a tte rin g security,” inspire ou r efforts to reco n stitu te again and again the "between" of the p rim al I—Thou.6 N anzia N unzio and B uber point to a transcendence of subjec­ tivity through union w ith or reconstitution of the W ord. W hether a subjectivity "stripped m ore naked th an nakedness" can exist and w hether there is a hom e for p rim al w ords in the language of m en are questions we shall in due course have to consider. B ut let us for the m om ent try to read “B allad of the G asfitter" in the Ro­ m antic trad itio n as the search of this plenary, undefined I (em ­ bodying itself in the course of the poem in various ways) for an enigm atic b u t necessary You; for, in B uber's w ords, "If Thou is said, the I of the com bination I—Thou is said along w ith i t ."9 Then, im m ediately, we encounter curious features of the You. The You has little solidity to the gaze of the I. On the contrary, the You is absent; o r is p resent only passively, as an object of the

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aw areness of the I; or is capable only of an inactive locativity defined in rela tio n to the I. In o th er w ords, the You is absent or evanescent or d ependent on the I; and the relatio n of I to You, being barely tran sitiv e, can n o t be recip ro cal.10 The poem deals, then, in this reading, not only w ith the quest of the I for the I— You b u t also w ith the striving of the I—properly a poetic and perh ap s even a goetic activity—to bring the You into som e fullness of being.

Gas English lacks a hom onym to parallel D utch dichten: (1) to seal (a hole), (2) to com pose poetry (though, on the other hand, it pos­ sesses the notorious hom ophonic sequence whole-hole-holy). A round the fam iliar dichten pun the w hole poem revolves: the gasfitter sealing off leaks is also the poet a t work. Subjected to an elab o rate system s of cocks and taps and under the control of a veritable arm y (or, in the m etaphor of sonnet 1 2 , a veritab le church) of gasm en w ith th eir own bureaucracy, gas circulates along a te n tac u lar system of underground pipes and enters every hom e, except certain m odern ap artm en ts. Topologi­ cally, the u n d erg ro u n d lab y rin th of gas and the overw orld city are equivalent to tw o hem ispheres sealed from each other. The h em i­ sphere of gas is held u n d er pressure; released pure, it expands form lessly to infinity (rem em ber th a t the w ord gas enters English via D utch from the Greek chaos) and kills (by asphyxiation, by explosion). H u m an beings cannot live w ith pure gas. B ut m ixed w ith elem ents of the other hem isphere an d subjected to the syn­ thesis of controlled com bustion, gas brings w arm th and light. H um an beings (w ith the exceptions cited in sonnet 7) cannot live w ith o u t gas. The gasfitter is a m ed iato r betw een the vertiginous and fatal pow ers of pure gas and the needs of m an. The craft of the gasfitter is the craft of dichten. T here are tw o ways in w hich we can tran slate this gas sym bol­ ically. First, it is literally the sp irit, ghostly, overw helm ing, com ing upon us w ith fatal power, sm elling of the void, tam ed only by the dichter-p riest. The quest for the true p rim al w ord of I—Thou thus takes us to the hole through w hich the holy spirit, Logos, enters

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the w orld. “W here is the hole?” the fitter (as holy fool) asks in sonnet 8. "God is the hole,” he discovers in sonnet 9. But, in the second place, we should not ignore the sim ilarity betw een A chterberg’s gas im agery an d the im agery of the hole in Jean-Paul S a rtre ’s Being and Nothingness, in w hich consciousness is presen ted as a hole through w hich nothingness pours into the w o rld .11 If we recognize S artre as the darker sp irit behind Achterberg, the quest of the I for the hole becom es an absurd quest for confrontation w ith the void, a quest th a t the / evades in sonnets 2 -3 as long as he can em body him self as dichter, m aker of artifacts and sealer-off of holes, b u t th a t he cannot escape in sonnet 9, in the building w ith the great hole, w here his dichter-crah is ineffec­ tual. These tw o in te rp retatio n s of the gas are not incom patible. Taken together, an d b u ttressed w ith the num erous ironic p arallels be­ tw een C hrist and I-as-gasfitter,12 they m ake "B allad of the Gasfitter" a story (incidentally anticlerical) of the via dolorosa of an ab su rd ist C hristian knight, the consum m ation of whose search for the true Thou (a consum m ation experienced by him as h u m iliatin g failure) is a m om ent in the "presence" (a presence th a t is an a b ­ sence) of b o th his own nothingness and an u napproachable, in ­ finitely rem ote God. The presence of God is an absence; God enters the poem as a hole, because, if we follow K ierkegaard, God re­ m ains alw ays "incognito" and the relation of the eternal of God to the existent of m an a "paradox" th a t never loses its irra tio n a lity .13 The W ord cannot be on m an 's tongue. It will not e n te r the stru c ­ tures of his discourse. "If 'speaking of God' is understood a s 'speak­ ing about God,' then such speaking has no m eaning w hatever, for its subject, God, is lost a t the very m om ent it takes place," says R udolf B u ltm a n n ; 14 an d this them e is echoed in G abriel M arcel's criticism of Buber: Buber has himself forcefully insisted upon it . . . that each Thou becomes a thing or lapse into thinghood . . . But this is still not saying enough: I would add for my part that it is of the essence of language to effect this transform ation. When I speak of you . . . even when I expressly declare that you are not a thing, that you are the opposite of a thing, I reduce you in spite of myself to the condition of a thing . . . We are confronted by a profound and doubtless essential contradiction.15

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Or, as Ionesco says, "Les m ots ne sont pas la p a ro le .”16 B ut can a p u re I exist in discourse any m ore than a pure You? The response of Stevens' O zym andias to N anzia N unzio is: the spouse, the bride Is never naked. A Active covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind. All versions of the I are fictions of the I. The p rim al I is not recoverable. N either of the W ords I and You can exist pure in the m edium of language. Indeed, after the experience of the W ord in relation to one's ow n existence, life cannot go on as before. "Selfan n ih ilatio n [th at is, an n ih ilatio n of the self] is the essential form for the G od-relationship,” w rites K ierkegaard.17 The fate of the gasfitter is precisely self-annihilation, a dw indling aw ay of self­ hood. Finally, the hole has a th ird , m inor, sexual signification. The search of the m asculine I for the hole in the house of the fem inine You (the language of sonnet 2 is full of double-entendres) and his having to m ake do w ith holes in gaspipes (sonnets 2—4) and even­ tu ally in o th er m en (sonnet 13), I take to be a kind of baw dy sideshow in p arallel to the m etaphysical d ram a I have been o u t­ lining, one th a t points again to the danger of nam ing the You as God or w o m a n .18 I proceed now to a m ore detailed analysis of the poem in o rd er to try out m y suggestion th a t the notion of identity it em bodies is a suspended one, th a t I an d You exist and have th eir relations in ways still p rio r to the w ays of tru e nam es, w ith th eir firm signi­ fications, o r tru e identities, an d th a t the poem therefore works at, an d som etim es absu rd ly beyond, the borders of language. 1

You m ust have made your entries from the rear. I glance into the houses from the street: in windowfronts, between the curtains, out of nothing You appear and reappear. I I pass, You vanish necessarily. But I'm proved right by the next windowpane.

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One Jansen lives there with his family— as if You could escape me in this name. It will not help. A door rem ains a door, each with its steps, its mailbox, and its bell. The apple-hawker lures You with his call. A master-key is easy to procure. Indeed I can quite freely step inside as (at your service) gasfitter by trade. Commentary. There is I and there is You (whom I see, as in a tracking shot, in every window): there is betw een us a b a r (the housefronts); and there is m y conviction (my delusion?) th a t if I can get p ast nam es (for exam ple, "Jansen") I can reach You. Cer­ tain th a t a nam e disguises You, I adopt a disguise myself, th a t of gasfitter, w hich allow s m e to cross the bar. (S im ilar disguises I m ight ad o p t are those of postm an, b ro k er’s runner, plum ber: see sonnet 13). Who are You—m y doppelganger im age in the glass? 19 This tra n s­ lation of You into w h at is p rim arily a slhe (though his/her m ystery is th at s/he is also an I and a you) satisfies a n a tu ra listic curiosity about how a being can pass through the inner w alls of houses, b u t it explains nothing. "You m ust have m ade your entries from the rear"; "The apple-haw ker lures You w ith his call"—do You no t assum e a trem ulous autonom y here, or, if not th at, am I not striving to give You an autonom y greater th an th a t of a m irro r im age? I-as-reader can choose one of two p a th s a t this m om ent: I can stan d back from this speaking I (th at s/he) and his/her fictionizings, reading both as m etaphorizations of a n o th er he ("Achterberg"); or I can suspend this reading-as-distancing and give m yself to the fictions of the I and the longed-for fullness of the You. I choose the la tte r path; and I do so because I see (line 14) th a t this is precisely w hat I am doing—giving m yself to m y fictions ("A gasfitter could reach You; therefore, I am a gasfitter") in a quest for a You beyond nam es. N am es are the distance betw een You and I th a t I w ish to tran sce n d .20 2 Indoors with You, in daylight, on the job disguised in workm an's clothing, I wheel around

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and see You standing. The»walls turn to ground, the ceiling slowly becomes a m arble slab. We grow murky in the fading light. The room is bursting, w on’t take any more. This can ’t go on. I drive the screws in tight. As long as I confine myself to this chore You and I can keep our incognito— as long as I stay busy, bend or kneel or lie flat on my belly trying to feel w h at’s wrong; all the while thinking, It’s better so. Dead silence by a ham m er blow dispelled. Death hush by which the ham m er blows are healed. Commentary. I am now I-as-gasfitter: the line betw een m e and my disguise (fiction) fades rapidly in the course of this sonnet, to be red raw n elsew here, in sonnets 13-14. The n atu ralistic code (a real gasfitter, bound an d gagged, struggling in his underclothes in an alley) is suspended throughout. Disguised, I am w ith You; b u t dropping the incognito, know ing and being know n by You, leads to catastrophe: the sunlight fades, vision dim s, the room , b u rstin g o r sa tu rated as if w ith gas, be­ comes a grave. I tu rn aw ay to the gasfitter's job of fixing the hole (dichten). If I have crossed the b a r as a m an who closes the hole in the piping, then it is th a t hole I m ust stop; my intercourse is w ith gas, not w ith you, an d I m ust "bend or kneel/or lie flat on my belly trying to feel" for th a t hole only. W hen naked I m eet naked You, we drow n in w aves of gas (gas) th a t lead, by p hantom phonetic m u ta tio n via gat (hole), to God (God).21 The only way to You is a w ay of indirection. I m ust look to m y dichten. (Sim ilarly, in a p u tativ e "B allad of the E lectrician," I m ight find th a t a short circu it of + an d — is not the only way to restore a lost connection.) 3 Shall I punch the gaspipes full of holes? or burst the w ater-m ain and flood the house? I spot the trap here, look again to the fittings, thrust the fallacy w ith all haste from my thoughts.

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For later in the papers one would find: "While practicing his livelihood a fitter, for reasons we have yet to comprehend, inhaled monoxide gas and m et his end. In the adjoining room a sim ilar b itter fate befell the owner of the dwelling. She lay prostrate, one hand stretched out in falling. In it was clutched a letter that began: ‘However wide the world I come again.' It seems that she was overcome while reading. Nothing suggests adulterous proceedings.” Commentary. If the naked knowledge of I and You leads to d eath, will death lead to the naked knowledge of I and You? N eglecting the a rt and craft of dichten, can I rely on a m etaphysical over­ w helm ing to carry us to a state of being beyond nam es o r id en ti­ ties, th a t is, beyond language, to the forest w here things have no nam es? Aha: "I spot / a trap here, look again to the fittings, th ru st / the fallacy w ith all h aste from my th o u g h ts.” W hat is the fallacy? T hat we can exit from the linguistic field, w hich includes the field of this fiction in/on w hich we subsist. Only by keeping my finger in the d ichters dyke can I hold off the flood of overw helm ing substance (gas, w ater, the au-deld, the void); and the final peril of drow ning is th at, having died o u r d eath out of language, we die back into language. Lines 5-15 of sonnet 3 are the rein carn atio n of I and You in the language of institutionalized reifications, the / forever a fitter, the You forever a houseow ner (female), the I— You trad u ced into a surreptitiously sexual relatio n betw een its. This lapse of the b arred I-Y o u into the th ird person follows on a failure of dichten (a flood of gas, logorrhea—the fifteen-line sonnet). In the new spaper report, the lady dies clutching a le tte r th a t begins, "How ever w ide the w orld I com e again." This archaeolog­ ical relic of I—You, uncovered in the era of he—she, has connotations of a second com ing, picked up in late r sonnets, w hich the new s­ p ap er—w hich reads the le tte r as a note of assignation—of course m isses. As for the provenance of the letter, we m ight as well ask again w here the gasfitter's clothes cam e from : we are in a fiction continually generating itself.

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4 At last the tiny leak is traced and sealed. Slowly I bring together and pack my tools. My legs have grown as heavy as lead tubes. The sweat is trickling down my face in beads. As if perform ing a superhum an feat I turn with an explanatory wave of the hand, but You are gone, and nothing save the afternoon’s declining light is left. I pick my tray of tools up from the floor and hoist it to my shoulder. In retreat my footsteps raise a hollow song. The door clicks shut behind me. The hubbub of the street seems further off. The fog settles and thickens. It seems that this time I have been mistaken. Commentary. The leak is sealed, b u t You are gone. I can be w ith You only w here there is dichten-work to be done, only w here gas leaks into the w orld; yet m y vocation is to close off leaks, to tam e gas for dom estic consum ption. 5 But just as I am settling down at home to eat my dinner I hear the telephone. I pick it up and from the other end comes, as if nothing has changed, a new command. My supervisor. His voice is sharp, severe, but a veiled gentler undertone comes through. “My son, go to the same street tomorrow. You know the interest that I take in you.” Only a fool repeats an old mistake. Best not to stay at home, but go and take a look instead at the block of flats I see rise sheer up from the ground across the way. There, once I find the floor directory, all will of itself become clear to me.

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Commentary. Intercourse of I and You is over, and I am m odulating from the m asterful m an of m any p a rts (sonnet 1 ) to an ineffectual latterd ay evangel, an I w ith less and less inner pressure, well on m y/his w ay to losing all pressure in sonnet 11 an d becom ing the object-he of sonnets 13—14. The fiction of a gasfitter generates a job, a gas d ep artm en t, a supervisor, and a fitters’ union; the fiction of the second com ing generates a m ission and a father. H aving tam ed the gaslines, I retu rn hom e to find an o th er te n tac u lar system leaking. Over the telephone comes the voice of the father/supervisor w ith a com ­ m and to rep eat my quest along the horizontal houserow of sonnet 1. B ut I reject this in favor of a vertical quest in the a p a rtm e n t block th a t has generated itself on the o ther side of the street. Instead of scanning the horizontal series of nam eplates (. . . , Jansen, . . .) I w ill scan the vertical floor directory, searching not for the one-in-a-m illion nam e (all nam es are s/hes) b u t for the You behind and beyond all nam es. C abalist and m an of w ords to the last (see sonnet 13), I am scanning nam e lists for som ething outside the system of nam es. How am I, in C aptain A hab’s w ords, going to "strike through the m ask” of language to the You beyond?22 I w ait for illum ination: "Once I find the floor directory, / all w ill of itself becom e clear to me." 6 That night, however, I got to know no more than th at the concierge was asleep. Weary, he had loosed the num bers from his memory and lay there crum pled, head in arm s. Absorbed I stared in through the window. A soft wind rustled through the grass where I stood outside; and near to me, his duties pushed aside, a living being who could have helped me find my way out of this mess, if it had not become so lonely and too dark for me to think of whispering him awake. For he would lose his head. Which would not do at all. My supervisor’s head would also fall then. No one heard me leave. Did he look up?

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Commentary. The situ atio n of sonnet 1 is repeated: the voyeur and his desire, the bar, the m ystery indoors. The reason given for not transgressing the b a r is p lainly a ratio n alizatio n (indeed, the outof-hand syntax m im es a m om ent of panic). The true reason is th a t the question I m u st ask is a m ad question: "W hat is the w ord (nam e/address/num ber) for You?"23 7 At daybreak I am on the road, my face ' still blurred with sleepiness. Although somewhere the final goal has taken up its place the streets this first hour seem as free as air. I feel a safety I have never known. One of my superiors cycles by. I greet him but he barely turns an eye. probably quarreled with his wife again. Perhaps he is a bit suspicious meet­ ing me in suburbs of the city where a fitter has no business. A young and heed­ less generation has arisen here by other forms of light. I've been observed. Therefore tow ard the city my steps are turned. Commentary. Postponing, perhaps even thinking of evading, the m om ent of reckoning, I roam through p a rts of the post-C hristian w orld to w hich the illu m in atio n of gas does not extend, u n til I am rem inded of m y m ission.

8 My last chance now approaches. Rows of white pushbuttons, like teeth in a false denture, stand fierce in their array defying my hand. My fingers carry on a bitter fight. As I stand there biting my nails I hear the door spring suddenly open, and a m aid puts out the garbage can. I'd have rem ained nonplussed forever had she not appeared.

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But tim e is short. I turn to her and ask in haste, Where is the hole? She points above with vague derision as if to say, You're mad. I know—so far gone that I pray to God. The lift goes up tow ard the climax of a job no fitter has ever yet pulled off. Commentary. The rid d le of the a p a rtm e n t push b u tto n s (like the riddle of th e typew riter keys) is, W hat are the nam e and n u m b er for You? The question to the m aid—"W here is the hole?”—is a cover for this question. The m aid points upw ard: up the elevator shaft, b ut also up to infinity. 9 The higher I ascend, the wider space yawns between You and me. Life seems to be enclosed in steel and nickel. Every last rivet of this structure is in place. There is no gas here. God is the hole, and pours out his depths upon me to reveal to a presum ptuous fitter how much more exalted he becomes with every floor. Beneath me storey after storey falls. I don’t know where I m ust begin, or what. Perhaps a last word will spring to mind If I ask him w hat was the first cause. A shock runs through my frame. I m ust get out. I give it over. Be it as he finds. Commentary. N ailed up in his coffin-cabin, a stru c tu re as closed (gedicht) as a sonnet (gedicht), I em b ark on m y do-or-die m ission to find You in a dim ension (the vertical) outside the com petence of gasfitters. B ut w hatever direction I am going in, it is the w rong direction relative to You. A w orkm an whose job it is to keep the vertiginous pow ers of gas u n d er control, I am out of m y depth here, sucked to w ard the u ltim ate hole/whole, the Logos, the h id ­ den nam e, the tru e second-person of the vertical quest, Thou. W hat w ord can a w ordsm ith u tter? W hat is the answ er to the question, "W hat is the question th a t will' lead to the answ er, ‘The nam e of

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You is— '? ”? "Perhaps a last w ord will spring to m ind / if I ask him w h at w as the first cause.” W hat was the first cause? In the beginning w as the Logos. 10 Door after door swings open and a host of men of every nation, race, and tongue call out in chorus, “You don’t fool anyone!” looking at me as if I were a ghost. Is th at the reason I ’ve crept underground? I descend the pit of glass toward the street w ith a bag of dirty laundry at my feet. Up there one can still hear them scurry around. For a while I hang about the neighborhood. Past noon, I see. The rush hour has arrived. School is over. Children run and yell or p rattle stories to their mothers. Bells tinkle. Cars bellow past as if I had stood for years and years upon this spot unmoved. Commentary. The ap artm ent-dw ellers, lords of the vertical dim en­ sion, send me flying back to the horizontal, the dom ain of tim e. W herever I am I do not fit: a m an in a w orld of ghosts, a ghost in a w orld of m en. I have not satisfied the precondition for vertical ascent: vertical descent, a trip underground (perhaps line 5, anom ­ alously p a st tense, com es from a tim e after the burial poem , sonnet 14). 11

The gasworks spin upon their axleshaft. Seeing my project utterly fallen to bits— nothing, not even room for hope, was left— and having, like a whipped dog, to turn tail— a vacuum m ust have slipped into me then. Up there there is no trade or craft that fits. The children take each other’s hands again: as in rem em bered games they spin and wheel.

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I set off for the office without waiting. My supervisor himself comes to the door. I yield myself to mild interrogation. I need not make up stories any more. Behind his glasses tears obscure his eyes. He clasps my hand, collects himself, half-smiles. 12

The leaders of the Christian union call the gas- and w aterfitters into session to say that one of them has been transgressing the code of regulations binding all by showing up with tools in hand wherever he found himself, such action causing harm to the body as a whole; wherefore they charge that he who broke the rule confess his error. For the first time in the history of the trade the gas- and w aterfitters fall to their knees w ithout a thought for leaks beneath the floor— at one, fraternal, and am algam ate. Then says the chairm an, Go, and sin no more, and they depart, well satisfied, at ease. Commentary. Taboo, a pariah , one who has seen too m uch (“And all should cry, Beware! Beware!"), I am everyw here ostracized. Life system s close into circularity, sh u ttin g them selves off to m e, the gasworks spinning in ra p t self-absorption, the children c ir­ cling, the fitters' union huddled in convocation. The very sound stru ctu re of m y h a b ita t is c ircu lar (sonnet 10, lines 11—14). A beaten m an, bereft of all pressure of vocation, failed b rin g er of the Logos, denounced by a p reach er who uses the w ords of the P a ra ­ clete, I d isap p ear from the stage, giving up m y pretensions as dichter, poet an d fitter; "I need not m ake up stories any m ore." 13 Years later, h air now white, we find the fitter moved to an old m en’s home. Feeble of m ind

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he sits and pores over a city guide spelling the names of streets out letter by letter. Bed and board he shares w ith several brothers: a postm an, a broker's runner, and a plumber. He often gets it in the ass from others for only coming down to meals to grumble. Provision has been made until he dies. Health and funeral benefits rew ard one’s efforts tow ard charity; besides they save him from being strangled by the warden. Public Works has given him his lodgings. Tobacco quid is his if he has longings. Commentary. E xpulsion of the p a ria h extends further. For the I as w ordfitterIdichter to survive, the I as failed dichter (gasfitter) m ust be sp lit off. Failed I becom es false I, alienated I, or he. In fact, all the failed /-projects are successively split off as hes and lodged in an old m en ’s hom e (dom ain of m em ory, m useum , anthology): gasfitter, p o stm an , broker's runner, plu m b er—creatures of the w ord (the city directory), phantom s nesting prom iscuously w ithin an d upon each other, w atched over by a m urderous w arden -I. Evidences of m y failure, I w ait im p atien tly for th eir death. 14 In the end he closed his eyes for good. His m outh, slumped open, was tied shut again. Measured, he was found fit to be contained in a regulation coffin, deal, six-foot. And all of them came—people from the flat, Jansen, the m aid, the supervisor—to bear their final joint respects. Like mine, their wear was sober: a dark suit, with cane and hat. Once at the graveside no one made a sound. With critical eye each stepped up to behold the fitter slowly sink into the ground as if still hoping to catch him in an error

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now that he had to plug his final hole. He rests with God. The earth covers him over. Commentary. To kill the fitter, all th a t is required is th a t I reassert m yself as w ordm aster over a dom ain of w ords in w hich I have now (by nam ing, distancing) included him , stage-m anage a fu­ neral, an d m ake it clear in m y scene construction th a t fitter, people from the flat, Jansen, and so on are item s in a w ord gam e I am now term in ating. I am the true poet; the fitter w as a m ere plug I used to get this gedicht (poem) gedicht (closed off).

The Poetics of Failure A certain elegance of poetic closure is alw ays ob tain ab le from the m aneuver in w hich a poem ends by sw allow ing its ow n tail— denying, denouncing, or erasing itself. The retractions th a t end such m edieval poem s as C haucer's Troilus and Criseyde are, seen form ally as rhetorical topoi, m aneuvers to achieve closure by c u t­ ting the link betw een a consolingly "real" w orld of authors, pen and ink, an d sequences of signs, on the one hand, and a "Active” w orld of actions and passions, on the other. The poem th a t incor­ porates a denunciation of itself (sub specie aetem itatis o r however) paradoxically acquires the ontological self-sufficiency, and th ere­ fore extends the ontological challenge, of the self-consum ing a r ­ tifact: Can language reach outside itself? The trad itio n , rep re­ sented by Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, of self-reflexive u n d ercu ttin g of the m im etic pretensions of fiction, w hich finds its apotheosis in F la u b ert’s dream of “a book about nothing, a book w ithout external a tta c h m e n ts,"24 raises the sam e question. The hide-and-seek of the I in S terne has becom e a serious gam e, w ith dangers to the psyche, in E liot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” W hat has intervened has been the rise and decline of the rom an tic-liberal notion of the self. The self in E liot is stru g ­ gling w ith problem s of a u th en tic being. The self in B eckett is struggling w ith problem s of being a t all, unable to get from Des­ cartes's cogito to D escartes's sum. I h in t so skim pily a t an en tire history because I inten d no m ore th an to p oint to w h at lies behind the m etam orphosis of fiction from the adventures of the self in nineteenth-century classic realism to the m etafictional com m en­

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tary on the fictionality of self th a t p recipitates such fictions as N abokov's Pale Fire an d B a rth ’s Lost in the Funhouse and th a t form s the w hole of B eckett's The Unnamable. The poetics of these w orks is a v eritab le poetics of failure, a p rogram for constructing artifacts o u t of an endlessly regressive, etiolated self-consciousness lost in the la b y rin th of language and endlessly failing to erect itself into autonom y. The poetics of failure is am bivalent through and through, and p a rt of its am bivalence is th a t it m ust p arad e its am bivalence; thus Beckett can speak of an a rt th a t is "the expression th a t there is nothing to express.”25 The poetics of failure erects absence into presence by an undenied trick of p restid ig ita ­ tion, w hose success nevertheless depends on the left h an d 's not know ing w h a t the rig h t h an d is doing. The poetics b ehind "B allad of the G asfitter” is the poetics of failure. The I fails in his goetic-poetic a ttem p t (disguised as an a tte m p t to restore the I-You) to co nstitute the You out of nothing. H aving failed, this / is split off an d discarded by a "real” I (in fact only the second in a theoretically infinite progression) w ho asserts his m ere survival—th a t is to say, the m ere existence of the "Bal­ lad"—as the opposite of failure. Thus we find a three-level stru c ­ ture of lefth and failure and rig h th an d success (but I use the w ord “success” in a purely contrastive sense, so th a t “failure” shall not be v acan t of m eaning) w ith a b a r of unknow ing betw een them : Left

Right

As unreflective, unreflexive gasfitter, I fail to m eet the You of my life.

As absurd quester I fail to find You. But it is the nature of quests to confront me finally with myself alone.

I split off and kill the failed questing I. Only by splitting myself do I seem able to live.

Not only can I survive my failures, but I have created a way of sacrificing myself endlessly to quest-as-process.

Seeking, as Rom antic poet, to bring into being, through words, a You beyond words, I fail

Prepared, as post-Romantic poet of failure, to construct a poetry th a t is no more than the process of poetry, I am finished.

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Poetry as a drive tow ard p u rity of form ulation is well known; poetry is fu rth er purified w hen the form ula refers no longer to som ething (som ething th a t could eventually exist independently of the form ula in w hich it is expressed), b u t to nothing. In such a case the form ula form ulates itself, tu rn in g in upon itself. It is clear th at A chterberg w as a fter this and this alone. Here we have the im m ediate explanation for w h at has been called his m onotony and even his m onom ania. Of course his "inspiration" h ad alw ays to rem ain the sam e; of course, being this kind of poet, he w as com pelled to say alw ays the sam e thing: a fter all, he h ad nothing to say. W ith th a t one can get by,- w ith th a t one m ust get by, seeing th a t nothing is the co n stan t source from w hich everything wells. The poetry th a t results from it looks like the sea, w hich is alw ays changing and about w hich people say th a t it is "alw ays the sam e.”26

Translation Is this essay a study of A chterberg’s D utch poem or of m y E nglish version? The question is a m isleading one, for my tran sla tio n itself is p a rt of the w ork of criticism . This is so because, in the first place, it is in the n a tu re of the literary work to p resent its tra n s ­ lato r w ith problem s for w hich the perfect solution is im possible and for w hich p a rtia l solutions con stitu te critical acts. A literary work is, am ong o th er things, a stru c tu re in w hich form has becom e m eaning. W hen form is disrupted, m eaning is also disru p ted . Such disruption is inevitable, for there is never enough closeness of fit betw een languages for form al features of a w ork to be m ap p ed across from one language to a n o th er w ithout shifts of value. Thus the w ork continually presents its tra n sla to r w ith m om ents of choice. S om ething m u st be "lost"; th a t is, features em bodying certain com plexes of values m u st be replaced w ith features em ­ bodying different com plexes of values in the targ e t language. At such m om ents the tra n sla to r chooses in accordance w ith his con­ ception of the whole—there is no way of sim ply tran sla tin g the words. These choices are based, literally, on preconception, p re ­ judgm ent, prejudice. Here, for exam ple, is the rendering of sonnet 9 published by Stanley M. W iersm a in 1971:

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The higher I go up, the more I live it: the space between us. All life I feel is trapped in artifacts of chrome and steel, a building perfect to the smallest rivet. No gas is here. God is the hole, will give it— his mystery—in floods that will reveal to a proud fitter w hat he still should feel. God’s glory grows each storey, and I live it. Now storey after storey falls below. I don’t know where or w hat I ’d better do. Maybe a last word will come to me when I ask him about the first cause of being. A shock goes through me! I w ant out of here! I leave the m atter to his will austere.27 As W iersm a read s the poem , the fitter is engaged in trying to close the hole of gu ilt in him self by closing the hole th a t is God, "for w ith o u t God there w ould be no guilt" (W iersm a finds the source of this gu ilt in various events in A chterberg's life). The fitter w ants to "poetize God out of existence" by "declaring th a t God is not a reality, b u t a hole." B ut his a ttitu d e to God rem ains "am big­ u o u s”: "if the hole w ill not close . . . then the gasfitter will be enveloped in the deadly gas, G od’s m ystery, w hich m akes a deeper religious experience possible.”28 W iersm a does not, therefore, see, as I do, a m om ent of aw ed realization reflected in lines 5 -8 , since it is precisely the g asfitter’s thesis, how ever am bivalently held, th a t "God is the hole.” Hence W iersm a does not find it necessary to im ita te the run-on m ovem ent of these four lines. In contrast, I u n d erstan d the device to be a significant one, the rhetorical equiv­ alen t of a m o m en t of sp iritu a l expansion. W iersm a does not find (or does n ot choose to stress) a parallel betw een the ascent in the cabin in sonnet 9 and the descent in the coffin in sonnet 14; hence he tran slates A chterberg’s line 4, Het bouwsel kom t geen klinknagel te kort—literally "The construction lacks not a single rivet," klink­ nagel (rivet) com ing from nagel (nail)—as "a building perfect to the sm allest riv e t,” w hile I tra n sla te it as "Every / last rivet of this stru c tu re is in p lac e.” The difference is betw een the perfection of the afterlife an d its finality. In the last two lines of the sonnet—

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literally "A shock goes through me. I m ust get out / and yield (it) to his edict"—W iersm a finds panic followed by resignation ("I w ant out of here! / I leave the m a tte r to his will austere"—the archaic inversion is false to A chterberg’s style) w here I find only resignation. I m ake the com parison betw een W iersm a’s version and my own not to argue th eir respective strengths and w eaknesses b u t to give an exam ple of how, faced w ith the im possibility of "full" tra n sla ­ tion, th a t is, a m apping of all the significations th a t m ay inhere in the original, tran sla to rs m ake verbal choices in accordance w ith th eir conception of the whole. The com parison also brings into visibility a feature of reading by no m eans p eculiar to tran slatio n , and one th a t reveals w hy it is m isleading to ask w h eth er this essay presents a reading of A chterberg’s original or of m y tran slatio n . For, ju st like the process of tran slatio n , reading is a process of constructing a w hole for oneself out of the d a tu m of the p rin te d text, of co nstructing one's own version of the poem . In a clear sense, all reading is tran slatio n , ju st as all tran slatio n is criticism .

The First Sentence of Yvonne Burgess' The Strike (1976) M. Paul Valery recently suggested anthologizing as many first sentences of novels as possible, from whose imbecility he expected a great deal. The most famous authors would be laid under contribution. Such a notion still honors Paul Valery who not long since, apropos of novels, asserted that as far as he was concerned he would never permit himself to write: The m a rq u ise w e n t o u t a t five. —Andre Breton,

F irst S u rrea list M a n ifesto

"Finlay closed the book and considered the title appreciatively.” The book, the title: w hy this deviant use of the, and em phasized by rep etitio n too? Finlay. W hat is Finlay? "Finlay” denotes a person whose nam e is Finlay. Does it have any m eaning? C onsidered appreciatively. Som ew here in the deep stru c tu re of this phrase, "F inlay” appreciates a book. Does "Finlay” give signs th a t denote ap preciation, and does w hoever decodes his signs do so w ith o u t qualm ? Or is it th a t "Finlay" is aw are of him self a p ­ p reciatin g a book? If the latter, is "Finlay” not in fact /? So this first sentence is tru ly a labyrinth. W hat "Finlay” closes is n ot a book b u t the book; and it is the book because it is the book th a t "F inlay” closes. "F inlay” is Finlay, the one who closes the book. And he gives signs th a t can be seen only by an eye th at cannot be seen. "Finlay closed the book . . .” belongs am ong those initial sen­ tences w hose type-sentence is "There was once a m an w ho . . ." If we w an t a gloss on the m eaning of "There was once" we can go to the M ajorcan sto ry teller’s form ula "E ra e non e ra ,” w hich signals th a t all succeeding assertions (". . . a m an w ho bought a cow . . .") are m ade in the sp lit w as-and-w as-not m ode of fiction. "Finlay” and "the," pseudo-definitional though they are, are not thereby nonreferential, b u t th e ir reference is oblique. They refer not to a 91

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m an an d a book b u t to the body of discourse th a t follows: all assertions succeeding "Finlay closed the book" are signaled to be in the as-if m ode. One m ay inten d one of several things by beginning a book w ith the w ords "Finlay closed the book." D aunted by the a ltern ativ e "Som eone closed a book" and all the analysis th a t m ust follow (Who closed w hat? How is it known?), analysis only a schoolm an can look forw ard to ("Where now? W ho now? W hen now? U nquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving"—Beckett, The Unnamable, first sentences), one m ay have decided to w rite a work of criticism in the form of a fiction in w hich the codes of the Novel, the first of them the form ulaic opening, will be exhibited an d decoded. This has been the enterprise of the nouveau roman. "La m arquise so rtit a cinq heures"—Claude M auriac, La Marquise sortit a cinq heures, first sentence. Or, having accepted th a t transcendence of the illusionism of R ealism is an illusory hope, th a t to get behind (aufheben) fiction by in corporating into fiction a critical consciousness of the p ro ­ cedures of fiction is only to clim b an o th er spiral of illusionistic Realism , one m ay be taking refuge, like John B arth, in N ietzschean gaiety. O r one m ay be em barking on the heroic project of Jorge Luis Borges' Pierre M enard com posing Don Quixote a t the beginning of the tw en tieth century: " . . . truth, whose m other is history, who is the rival of time . . ." W ritten in the seventeenth century, w ritten by the "ingenious layman" Cervantes, this enum eration is a mere rhetorical eulogy of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes: " . . . truth, whose m other is history, who is the rival of time . . History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, contem ­ porary of William James, does not define history as an investi­ gation of reality, but as its origin.1 In language there are no stable an d positive elem ents. E lem ents achieve definition only through th eir reciprocal differences, an d all shift th eir boundaries continually w ith the passing of tim e. To find w h at a sentence like "Mr. Podsnap closed the book” or "Philip M arlow closed the book” used to, m ean is an archaeological en ­ deavor. Included in its m eaning, however, w as certain ly the fol-

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lowing: th a t there w as a social and characterological typology assum ed an d sh ared am ong the reading public; th a t the sign "Mr. Podsnap" o r "Philip M arlow " in an initial sentence, em pty to begin w ith, w ould in due course be filled w ith social and ch aractero l­ ogical details, som e of them details of such fineness as to refine the typology ("Finlay closed the book" is im m ediately followed by sentences in style indirect libre whose direction and function are disguised, filling in "Finlay" ra th e r th an pointing forw ard to th eir pseudoreferents), the process of refining the typology being known as m aking the character individual ju st as adherence to the typology is know n as m aking the character representative; and th a t the fit of "Mr. Podsnap" o r “Philip M arlow" into the typological lattice w ould reciprocally reaffirm the typology and therefore the soci­ ology an d psychology of the reading public, the p articip atio n of w hom in jo in t and several appreciative readings of the book w ould co n stitu te a fu rth er reaffirm ation of a class bond. The rep lacem en t of the form ula "There was once a m an nam ed Finlay w ho . . wi t h the briefer "Finlay . . . " and the accom panying shift of the as-if m ode m arker aw ay from the verb was a m inor technical innovation w hen it w as first done (where, when, by w hom ?). How does an innovation grow to be an occasion for affirm ing a class bond? Prague School linguists call the process by w hich repeatedly used speech form s w ear a neural ru t for them selves autom atization. A utom atized speech is speech th a t speaks its speaker. The phenom enon of autom atized speech ex­ p lain s how it com es ab o u t th a t som etim es a book can be conceived of w ith o u t an author.

A Note on Writing (1984)

R

oland B arthes discusses the verb “to w rite ” in term s of the g ram m atical oppositions p a st versus nonpast, tran sitiv ity versus non transitivity, and active versus passive.1 W hat B arthes (following Benveniste) has to say about tim e and person is not relevant to m y purpose here; b u t I will sum m arize w h at he has to say about voice. Though m odern Indo-E uropean languages retain m orphologi­ cally d istin ct form s for only the active—passive opposition, the phantom presence of a m iddle voice (a voice still m orphologically present in S anskrit an d ancient Greek) can be felt in som e senses of m odern verbs if one is ale rt to the possibility of the threefold opposition active—m iddle—passive. “To w rite ” is one of these verbs. To w rite (active) is to carry o u t the action w ith o u t reference to the self, perhaps, though not necessarily, on behalf of som eone else. To w rite (m iddle) is to carry out the action (or b etter, to dow riting) w ith reference to the self. Or—to follow B arthes in his m etaphorical leap from g ram m ar to m eaning—“today to w rite is to m ake oneself the center of the action of la parole; it is to effect w riting in being affected oneself; it is to leave the w rite r (le scripteur) inside the w riting, not as a psychological subject . . . b u t as the agent of the a ctio n .”2 The field of w riting, B arthes goes on to suggest, has today becom e nothing b u t w ritin g itself, not as a rt for a r t’s sake b u t as the only space there is for the one w ho w rites. W hether B arthes's essay is best thought of as a piece of specu­ lative linguistics o r as academ ic propaganda for a p ostm odernist practice of w ritin g I do not know. Perhaps it is of no m ore value than as a d em o n stratio n of how deeply a literary conception can be em bedded (m etaphorically) in linguistic categories (are there any deeper linguistic categories th an those of tense, person, voice?). I w ould not be spending tim e on it here if it did not, 94

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tangentially, speak a w ord of cau tio n about constructions th a t we often ru n across in literary criticism in S outh Africa, p articu larly a t the level of review ing: to to to to to

use language w rite a book create ch aracters express th o u g h t co m m u nicate a m essage

One of the things these core phrases have in com m on is gram ­ m atical stru c tu re . The verbs are all transitive, th eir voice (in form and, as I read them , in intention) active. They reflect a com m on conception of the subject—a subject prio r to, independent of, and u ntouched by the verb—and of the relation, o r lack of relation, betw een subject an d object. W ithin the conception of w riting re ­ flected here, a p arad ig m sentence w ould be I | am w riting | a note w ith the b a rs stan d in g for bars betw een subject and verb, verb an d object, subject and object. I am not suggesting anything ab o u t value here. It m ay be tru er in som e cases, in som e conception of value, to say “A w rote X" an d in o th ers to say "B | w rote | Y,” b u t such a distinction w ould say nothing a b o u t the value of X o r Y. N evertheless, it is an in terestin g exercise to reflect on the tw o sentences I am w ritin g a note (active) I am w riting a note (m iddle) asking oneself w hich of them describes the a ct one is perform ing. (But: to perform an act or to perform \ an act?) One m ig h t also w an t to think of A is-written-by X (passive) as a linguistic m eta p h o r for a p a rtic u la r kind of w riting, w riting in stereo ty p ed form s an d genres and characterological system s an d n a rra tiv e orderings, w here the m achine runs the operator. The th ree voices active, m iddle, passive m ay then be thought of as a cau tio n ary chorus alw ays to be lent an e a r w hen one is doing­ w riting.

Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech (1987)

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here is a p arad o x to the 1987 a w ard th a t I have difficulty w ith: How does it come about th a t som eone who not only comes from b u t also lives in so notably unfree a country as m y ow n is honored w ith a prize for freedom ? In a society of m asters and slaves, no one is free. The slave is not free, because he is not his ow n m aster; the m aster is not free, because he cannot do w ithout the slave. For centuries South Africa was a society of m asters and serfs; now it is a land w here the serfs are in open rebellion and the m asters are in disarray. The m asters, in South Africa, form a closed h ered itary caste. Everyone b orn w ith a w hite skin is born into the caste. Since there is no w ay of escaping the skin you are born w ith (can the leopard change its spots?), you cannot resign from the caste. You can im agine resigning, you can perform a sym bolic resignation, b u t, short of shaking the d u st of the country off your feet, there is no way of actu ally doing it. How do the m asters of South Africa experience th eir unfreedom today? I will purposely not indulge in talk about uneasy sleep, about the im agination of disaster, about the re tu rn of the repressed in the shape of nightm are. I w ill not indulge in such talk because by this tim e in history, an d p a rticu la rly in Israel, w ith the shadow of the H olocaust b ehind it, people know th a t there exists a b an al kind of evil w hich has no conscience, no im agination, an d p ro b a ­ bly no dream s, w hich eats well an d sleeps well and is at peace w ith itself. Instead I w an t to say som ething, one b rief thing, ab o u t the unfreedom of the m aster-caste as it is experienced in w aking social life. In the early 1950s, the heady years w hen the great city of a p a rt­ heid w as still being b u ilt, a law was passed m aking sexual rela96

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tions betw een m asters and slaves a crim e. This was the m ost pointed of a long strin g of law s regulating all phases of social life, whose in te n t w as to block form s of horizontal intercourse betw een w hite an d black. The only sanctioned intercourse was henceforth to be vertical; th a t is, it w as to consist in giving and receiving orders. W hat was the m eaning of this deeply sym bolical law ? Its origins, it seem s to me, lie in fear and denial: denial of an unacknowledgeable desire to em brace Africa, em brace the body of Africa; and feaf of being em braced in re tu rn by Africa. The sta tu te forbidding love betw een the races has recently, in a n o th er deeply sym bolic move, been repealed, as if to signal th a t the day of reckoning prophesied by Alan Paton forty years ago has arrived. "I have one great fear in m y heart," says one of Paton's black ch aracters: "th a t one day w hen they are turned to loving, we w ill find we are tu rn ed to hating." At the h e a rt of the unfreedom of the hered itary m asters of South Africa is a failure of love. To be blunt: th eir love is not enough today an d has not been enough since they arrived on the continent; fu rtherm ore, th e ir talk, th eir excessive talk, about how they love South Africa has consistently been directed tow ard the land, th a t is, to w ard w h at is least likely to respond to love: m ountains and deserts, birds an d anim als and flowers. If one fails to see the relevance of this talk about love, one can replace the w ord love w ith the w ord fraternity. The veiled unfree­ dom of the w hite m an in S outh Africa has alw ays m ade itself felt m ost keenly when, stepping dow n for a m om ent from his lonely throne, giving in to a w holly h u m an and understan d ab le yearning for fra te rn ity w ith the people am ong w hom he lives, he has dis­ covered w ith a shock th a t fratern ity by itself is not to be had, no m a tte r how com pellingly felt the im pulse on both sides. F ratern ity ineluctably com es in a package w ith liberty and equality. The vain and essentially sen tim en tal yearning th a t expresses itself in the reform m ovem ent in S outh Africa today is a yearning to have fratern ity w ith o u t paying for it. W hat is the price th a t has to be paid? The very lowest price is the d estru ctio n of the u n n a tu ra l stru ctu res of pow er th a t define the South African state. About these stru ctu res of pow er there is a g reat deal to be said. I w ill confine m yself to one observation.

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The deform ed an d stu n ted relatio n s betw een h u m an beings th a t were created u n d er colonialism an d exacerbated un d er w h at is loosely called a p a rth eid have th e ir psychic rep resen tatio n in a deform ed an d stu n ted inner life. All expressions of th a t inner life, no m a tte r how intense, no m a tte r how pierced w ith exultation or despair, suffer from the sam e stuntedness and deform ity. I m ake this observation w ith due deliberation, an d in the fullest aw are­ ness th a t it applies to m yself and my ow n w riting as m uch as to anyone else. South African lite ra tu re is a lite ra tu re in bondage, as it reveals in even its highest m om ents, shot through as they are w ith feelings of hom elessness and yearnings for a nam eless lib er­ ation. It is a less th a n fully h u m an literatu re, u n n a tu ra lly preoc­ cupied w ith pow er and the torsions of power, unable to m ove from elem entary relations of contestation, dom ination, and subjugation to the vast and com plex h u m an w orld th a t lies beyond them . It is exactly the kind of lite ra tu re you w ould expect people to w rite from a prison. And I am talking here not only about the South African gulag. As you w ould expect in so physically vast a country, there is a South African lite ra tu re of vastness. Yet even th a t lit­ eratu re of vastness, exam ined closely, reflects feelings of e n tra p ­ m ent, e n tra p m e n t in infinitudes. Two years ago M ilan K undera stood on this platfo rm in Je ru ­ salem and gave trib u te to the first of all novelists, M iguel Cer­ vantes, on whose g ian t shoulders we pigm y w riters of a later age stand. How I w ould like to be able to join him in th a t trib u te, I an d so m any of m y fellow novelists from S outh Africa! How we long to q u it a w orld of pathological a ttach m en ts and a b stra c t forces, of anger an d violence, an d take up residence in a w orld w here a living play of feelings and ideas is possible, a w orld w here we tru ly have an occupation. B ut how do we get from o u r w orld of violent p h an tasm s to a true living w orld? This is a puzzle th a t C ervantes’ Don Quixote solves qu ite easily for him self. He leaves behind hot, dusty, tedious La M ancha an d enters the realm of faery by w h at am ounts to a w illed act of the im agination. W hat prevents the S outh African w riter from taking a sim ilar p a th , from w riting his w ay out of a situ atio n in w hich his art, no m a tte r how w ell-intentioned, is— an d here we m u st be honest—too slow, too old-fashioned, too

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in d irect to have any b u t the slightest and m ost belated effect on the life of the com m unity o r the course of history? W hat prevents h im is w hat prevents Don Quixote himself: the power of the w orld his body lives in to im pose itself on him and u ltim ately on his im agination, w hich, w hether he likes it o r not, has its residence in his body. The crudity of life in South Africa, the naked force of its appeals, not only a t the physical level but at the m oral level too, its callousness and its bru talities, its h u n ­ gers an d its rages, its greed and its lies, m ake it as irresistible as it is unlovable. The story of Alonso Quixano or Don Quixote— though not, I add, C ervantes’ subtle and enigm atic book—ends w ith the c a p itu la tio n of the im agination to reality, w ith a retu rn to La M ancha an d death. We have a rt, said Nietzsche, so th a t we shall n o t die of the tru th . In S outh Africa there is now too m uch tru th for a rt to hold, tru th by the bucketful, tru th th at overw helm s an d sw am ps every a ct of the im agination.

Popular Culture

Interview

DA: Your nonfiction includes essays and reviews on film, the comic strip, advertising, rugby, political journalism, and analyses of cultural stereo­ types such as "the white tribe" and "the Afrikaner." Apart from journals covering popular culture in South Africa (Speak, Critical Arts, and Die Suid-Afrikaan), you have also published in Vogue, Reader's Digest, and the New York Times Magazine. Clearly, although your novels make few compromises in what they require of readers, you have tried to narrow the gap between the lowbrow and the highbrow. But "popular culture" in South Africa is a problematic, and certainly not a unitary, concept. How do you envision your work in this area? JM C: My work in this area barely deserves the name of work. Indeed, since one of its arguments is that play is too readily slighted in comparison with work, I would positively prefer to think of at least some of it as play. The essay on Captain America, certainly, is a jeu d'esprit. I wrote it when my son was nine or ten, and deeply into American comic books. He dragged me willy-nilly into his obsession. I was at the same time teaching an introductory course in the nineteenth-century American novel— Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain— and was myself caught up in a rather heady mythic reading of American romance (Rich­ ard Chase, Leslie Fiedler). The writers of the Captain America stories of the late 1970s— very literary stories, in their way— had been exposed, I suspect, to the same reading of the American tradition. I haven't followed the fortunes of Captain America into the 1980s and 1990s, but I wouldn't be surprised if his story were being given a very different kind of turn today. I can't believe he still rides his old Harley-Davidson. As for the piece on rugby, I had a regular white South African boyhood; my life outside the classroom was dominated by sport, particularly by cricket. Even today I have an investment in sport, or at least in what the spectacle of sport promises and now and again yields: instants of strength and speed and grace and skill coming together without thought. 103

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What still interests me in the piece is the distinction I draw between game-construction, as a form of intellectual/physical play, and game­ playing itself. As I remember it, the idea was borrowed from Chomsky's distinction between innate grammar-constructing mechanisms and gram­ mars themselves. Game-construction, which we associate with yet-tobe-socialized children, seems to me an essentially higher activity than socialized play, as typified by sport. It is a curious fact that older children and adults do not invent games with the facility of young children, and indeed rarely show any desire to do so. If the arts constitute a higher activity than physical culture, it is surely for the reason that they continue to vary the forms and rules of the games they play. Art as polymorphous play, then, playing at inventing rules with which it plays at constraining itself. As for the other pieces you mention, pieces on South African society, I think they deserve a quiet death. I am afraid that at a certain stage of my career—the mid-1980s— I slipped a little too easily into the role of commentator on South African affairs.1 I have no talent for that kind of political/sociological journalism. To be more specific, I am too suspicious of the genre, of the vision it locks its practitioners into, to give myself wholly to it, yet I lack enough zeal to try to turn it upside down or inside out. Anyhow, I am far too bookish, far too ignorant about real people, to set myself up as an interpreter, much less a judge, of the lives they live. DA: The essay on advertising is based on Rene Girard's theory of imitative desire. You seem to have relied on something like this theory in Waiting for the Barbarians, where Colonel Joll models the Magistrate's desire for the barbarian girl. The effect, as I see it, is to conflate the Magistrate's desire, confused as it is with feelings of eroticism and atonement, with Jolt's acts of torture, thus implicitly producing a critique of "soft" humanitarianism. Would you go along with this construction? Alternatively, what openings did Girard provide for you? JM C: I remember reading Girard's Deceit, Desire, and the Novel in the 1970s with a sense that something important was being said not only about the workings of fiction but about the effect of fiction on the lives of readers (in the latter respect Girard takes his lead from Cervantes, as he clearly acknowledges). I found in Girard the same acuity about be­ havior and the moral justifications we lend to our behavior that I found

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in Sartre. Girard's later writings, particularly what he has to say about Christ, I find absorbing though a bit megalomaniac. Whether what I read in Girard worked itself out in Waiting for the Barbarians I cannot say. We may think we admire a writer because he opens our eyes, when in fact we admire him only because he confirms our preconceptions. Did I need Girard to teach me about sadism and imitative desire? I suspect not. I suspect that what is going on in Waiting for the Barbarians is more complicated (though not necessarily more interesting) than what Girard describes in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. But perhaps I am wrong. Whatever the truth, I feel that questions of influence upon my novel-writing are not for me to answer: they entail a variety of self-awareness that does me no good as a storyteller, as a site where fantasy should not be hampered by unnecessary introversions and doubts. (You catch me, of course, in self-contradiction. If I don't want to look into myself, claiming that it isn't good for my novel-writing, what am I doing conducting this interview, and what sort of autobiographer am I? Let me say, then, specifically on the question of influence, that the interviewer may not get the whole truth because the subject may not know the whole truth, and the subject may not know the whole truth because the resistances and repressions involved are too strong. This is not a coded way of telling you I am holding something back about Girard, nor is it the opposite. But I am clearly descending into a Cretan Liar position from which there will be no escape.) DA: In three of these pieces, the essays on advertising and "Captain America,'' but especially in the review of The Guest,2 you place a good deal of emphasis on demystification. (The Barthes of Mythologies seems to be at work here.) Is this not a different notion altogether from that of games, of game-construction and game-playing? How would you weigh these concerns now? JM C: Demystification: yes, Barthes is certainly at work, not least as a cultural critic who plays with ideas (there are ideas in Barthes, almost too many ideas, but nothing I would call theory). I see no conflict between play and demystification, which is after all a procedure of taking apart things— myths, tropes, rhetorical figures— to show how they work. But talking about demystification as play does entail that I don't attach quite the same significance to demystification as an animating principle

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of criticism as the left does or did. That is, I no longer see opening up the mystifications in which ordinary life is wrapped as a necessary aim, or indeed an obligation, of criticism. (There was a time when I saw this as a very clear obligation.) DA: Does the obligation no longer exist, or have your views simply changed? JM C: A healthy level of suspiciousness is not a bad thing. But some of my criticism— parts of White Writing, for instance— is soured, I think, by a certain relentless suspiciousness of appearances. Why am I now sus­ picious of such suspiciousness? For two reasons. First, in the act of triumphantly tearing the clothes off its subject and displaying the naked­ ness beneath— "Behold the truth!"— it exposes a naivete of its own. For is the naked body really the truth? And second, because a critical practice whose climactic gesture is always a triumphant tearing-off, as it grows lazy (and every orthodoxy grows lazy), begins to confine its attentions to clothed subjects, and even to subjects whose clothes are easily torn off. In other words— to return to the terms of your question— a demys­ tifying criticism privileges mystifications. It becomes like Quixote scouring the plains for giants to tilt at, and ignoring everything but windmills.

Captain America in American Mythology (1976) The Hero C aptain Am erica w ears a red-w hite-and-blue costum e, head to toe, an d carries a red-w hite-and-blue boom erang shield.1 Except w hen ru m in a tin g or despondent, he crouches a t the knees and holds his arm s ready. His biceps and deltoids bulge, his pectoral and dorsal m uscles rip ple pow erfully, his sternom astoids stan d out like ca­ bles. His jaw is clean-shaven an d square, his teeth are straig h t, his eyes (through the blue eagle-m ask stam ped w ith the letter A) blue as a m o u n tain stream . The house inker of M arvel Comics cu sto m arily shades in the faintest of bulges a t C aptain A m erica’s crotch. B ut w h at the Comics Code A uthority su b tracts here, M ar­ vel Comics replaces elsew here. For sprouting u pw ard and dow n­ w ard from th a t slim pelvis, issuing in braw ny calves and booted feet, in m assive arm s and gau n tleted fists, in bull neck and ju ttin g chin, an d seen continually a t a heroic angle of forty-five degrees from in front an d below, C aptain A m erica is a great flag-w rapped p hallus strid in g out, like all heroes of adventure since Achilles, in quest of a foe w orthy of all th a t bulging, displaced potency. And strid in g out of the shadow s som ew here, eternally, is the figure of the su p erv illain, m onstrously m usclebound o r cranially over­ developed, com e to m easure his endow m ent against C aptain A m erica’s. C aptain A m erica has a tw ilight double life as Steve Rogers, h arried young p a tro lm a n . W hen Steve Rogers dons a drab w indb reak er an d resum es his cowed relationship w ith his blonde teen­ age girlfriend S haron Carter, the heroic m usculature fades quite away. The hero-costum e, the tum escent body, the shield of virtue, the em b lem atic "A” ("A m erica,” b u t also "Adam ,” "Alone”) are all of a piece. C aptain Am erica is the wish-fulfillm ent alter ego of 107

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colorless citizen Rogers, anxious h usband in em bryo. As C aptain America, Rogers casts off all bonds except those th a t bind him to his com rades in arm s. His a rm o r p rotects him from th e'ad o rin g , groping fem ale, whose hands can find no grip on his m ountainous convexities. The courtly knight venerated a taboo lady, b ent his knee to a lord, developed hom oerotic relations w ith his com rades, and held to gether his self, riven w ith Oedipal conflict, by pouring him self into an iron m old. C aptain Am erica is his A m erican de­ scendant, via Leatherstocking, w ith his five identities a n d p o ten t Long Rifle; A rthur D im m esdale, baring the "A" on his chest w ith one hand w hile holding off the pred ato ry m other/w ife w ith the other; and H uck Finn, p ro tec to r and protege of N igger Jim . W hen Steve Rogers becom es C aptain Am erica, it is to hold him ­ self together. For now he is defined and confined by his icon. The line bounding him is h a rd and unw avering. The colors th a t block him out are elem entary an d never w ash over the line. His em blem proclaim s his tru th . C ontained and m ain tain ed at three levels of being—by the m uscular exoskeleton, by the m ask and costum e, by the bounding line—C aptain A m erica is the im age of the stable ego.2 Buckling his belt, he em braces his own hips; closing the sym bolic lock of the buckle, he calls a tten tio n to his sex and proclaim s his chastity. Masked, he p u ts him self outside an d above fam ily and law: as a P rotestant hero he will now heed only the au th o rity of an inner voice. He is no longer a u n it on the lab o r m arket b u t an autonom ous G uardian of the R epublic. He leaps from the constricting one-dim ensional city streets to the jungle of the rooftops an d into the skies. W hen he m ounts a m otorcycle, the m otorcycle flies. His dom ain of action expands: he crashes through doors, hurls his foes through window s, catap u lts out of the plane of the page, breaks through the rectan g u lar panel, hurls an d looms from one perspective to another, subo rd in atin g the color-com po­ sition of every fram e to his d o m inant blue. The nam e of the gam e is freedom, “ i f t h e y e l l o w c l a w w i n s , t h e WHOLE WORLD l o s e s ” (166/8). C aptain Am erica is the th ird Adam , on a m ission to save the w orld. B ut like the second Adam he m ay not use his full pow ers: by a m ythologic rule saviors m ust be half­ divine, half-m ortal, bridges from the h u m an to the tran scen d en t, handicapped gods. C aptain Am erica is crucified on the dilem m a of his su p erstrength: on the one h an d it sets him a p a rt from

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m ankind; on the o th er it drives him into asym m etrical duels in which he m ay fight only to contain and p u t to flight, w hile his foe fights for keeps. D espised and rejected, a m an of grief; and, like Jesus an d all o th er C hristian heroes, im pervious to frontal assault b ut a sucker for b etray al, for the Judas-blow . But then, when the hero is laid low, the blow th a t does it is by definition unheroic: defeat becom es, by a C hristian tran sv alu atio n of values, victory.

Evil C aptain A m erica’s contest is not w ith crim e but w ith evil. Crime can be taken care of by the law; com ic-book police are alw ays rounding up crestfallen hoodlum s and packing them off to jail. B ut the tru e supervillain soon escapes from the lockup and gets up to his old tricks. The law is inadequate to deal w ith evil. The CIA, above and outside the law an d m ythologized in Captain Amer­ ica as SHIELD, responds to the infernal technology of evil w ith its own m a rtia l technology ("War is a d irty game"). B ut SHIELD is n ot heroic. C aptain A m erica, in quite as am biguous a relation to the law as SHIELD, is a hero not because he is an outlaw but because, w here SHIELD is m erely doing its job, he has responded to a call, th e C alvinist categorical im perative of absolute urgency an d ab so lu te stringency.

Ideology Of course C aptain Am erica refers to his m ission as sim ply "a jo b ” (164/10). The C hristian hero is hum ble. So is the hero of the n atio n ­ state. S tan d in g to a tte n tio n before his leader in a posture th a t says, "I am your m an," he refers back his heroic accom plishm ents to the state th a t m ade him . "I was only doing m y job." Thus by a syllogistic trick are all jobs in the nation-state valorized: "The hero is m erely doing a job; therefore, the m erest job-doing is heroic. Do y our jo b .” There is a w ay of seeing the C aptain America costum e as a N essus-shirt in w hich the heroic naked redeem er has been dressed up by the postheroic, post-C hristian state. W hen the villain fights he u tte rs grandiose threats; w hen C aptain America fights he m u st quip in the language of the com m on m an. M arvel Comics, th ro u g h Steve E nglehart, has not given C aptain Am erica

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a language heroically com m ensurate w ith his body. There is som e­ thing in M arvel Comics th a t w ould like to tam e the lone hero to the advantage of a greater Am erica. There is less sw agger an d sport to C aptain Am erica th an to the villain, b u t the low-key C aptain Am erica is the m ore efficient fighting m achine. He has been harnessed in the interests of the performance principle In the case of the Hulk, eponym ous hero of an o th er com ic-book series, w arfare on the heroic principle is carried to an extrem e: a m on­ strous pea-green m isanthropic cretin, the Hulk roam s the icew astes of C anada trying to escape A m erican and Soviet forces in ten t on cap tu rin g and tam ing him . " h u l k j u s t w a n t t o g e t a w a y f r o m s t u p id m e n a n d t h e i r s t u p id m a c h i n e s !" ( The Incredible Hulk, 172/19). Is it possible to dom esticate the A m erican hero? From N atty B um ppo to Steve Rojack he has been a frontiersm an who has w ilted in dom esticity, " d a n g e r is l i k e f o o d t o h i m . . . a f o o d h e . 3

NEEDS TO LIVE . . . FOR ONLY WHEN HE'S CLOSE TO DYING . . . IS HE

(Captain America, 164/11). Steve Rogers becom es not only the a lte r ego b u t the antiself of C aptain Am erica w hen he is seduced from his lone obsession w ith evil by the blonde pseudoredem ptress S haron Carter, WASP-woman. Sharon C arter w an ts love an d m arriage, a steady incom e, respectability. The story of Steve Rogers and S haron C arter belongs w ith the agonies and ecstasies of Eve Jones in the fireside fam ily new spaper. The story of C aptain Am erica, su b literatu re, belongs on the shadow y d ru g ­ store bookrack, to be read u n d e r the surveillance of a hidden TV eye, or in the steam y solitude of the bedroom . t r u l y a l iv e

”

Father H aving succum bed to W oman, the fath er is by definition too im ­ pure to be an A m erican hero. The im age of the fath e r in Captain America is Colonel Nick Fury, head of SHIELD. Fury has all the signs of a gnaw ing sense of failure: he is unshaven, he sm okes, b u t for the Comics Code A uthority he w ould p robably be a h a rd drinker too. He has m au d lin spells. He is u n d e r the th u m b of a E uropean countess, dark and p robably depraved. He fights in the old boasting, braw ling, tw o-gun W estern style. W hereas the tru e outlaw w ears a m ask, he w ears a rakish eyepatch: h alf in the

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System , h alf out of it. Som etim es he pretends to be an elder brother, Lancelot to C aptain A m erica's G alahad; b u t w hen he has h ad a b a d day the hostility seeps through: " i k e p t o n l i v i n '— F IG H TIN ' FOR MY COUNTRY! THROUGH WORLD WAR II, THE KOREAN WAR, THE COLD WAR . . . I LIVED THOSE

20

YEARS, G ETTIN' GRAY FOR

AMERICA . . . AND THEN YOU POP UP, ALL BLOND, BLUE-EYED . . . AND

(153/11). The a u th e n tic raging voice of the VFW and the A m erican Legion, of Mr. M iddle Am erica w ith his sagging wife, his in g rate kids, his m ortgage paym ents. y o u n g !”

Gothic The gothic m ode discovers itself in Am erica. From gothic, frisson upon frisson of horror, the nerves thrilling in a debauch of sus­ pense, the orgasm of revelation alw ays around the next corner, com es strip tease. In high gothic (Henry Jam es) the u ltim ate secret is veiled, the object of endless w hispering. Low gothic (Poe, Cap­ tain America) has tw o m om ents. In the first it drops the veil and the u n n am ab le blazes forth: Ligeia, the Red Skull. In the second it backtracks: No, th a t is not it a t all, th a t is not w hat I m eant at all, the darkness of blackness m ust w ait for o u r next issue. High gothic is an a rt of coitus interruptus w ith a single subject, low gothic, like pornography, an a rt of rape upon subject after subject. The energy of all gothic com es from one libidinal source, tabooed desire. G othic therefore has a single aim : to nam e, possess, and exorcise its obsession. Beyond th at, it yearns tow ard Eden, a tim e before in h erited guilt, before paren ts. C aptain A m erica pays unabashed visits to the sym bolic w orld of gothicism , its gloom y castles and labyrinthine underground passages. C aptain Am erica in the G othic castle is A m erican inno­ cence in the m aze of the old E uropean psyche. (In one story [issues 161-162] the lord of the castle, a K rau t psychologist w ith pincenez an d butterfly collar, is nam ed, in a F reudian slip, Dr Faustus.) Lost in the m aze, C aptain Am erica is aided by the m aiden of the castle, w ho conspires w ith him to brin g dow n her m aster (the Jack-the-G iant-K iller m otif). His m ission is to reach the very h e art of the castle, g uarded by m onsters and m assive doors, w here he m u st destroy the infernal laboratory w here the villain works at the d ark p rojects th a t w ill give him dom inion over the earth,

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“ SCHEMES W H IC H I CONCEIVED D U R IN G M Y YEARS OF CO NTEM PLA­ T IV E IS O LA TIO N . . . SCHEM ES W H IC H W IL L D E L IV E R T H E W O RLD

(The Yellow Claw, 164/19). A vatar of Faust, b ro th e r to Roger C hillingw orth, C aptain Ahab and G ilbert O sm ond, in te l­ lectual and m ystic, the villain directs his an n ih ilatin g rays/rage at C aptain Am erica. B ut C aptain Am erica, proof against m agic, only bounces back an d knocks him cold w ith his good right fist.

in t o m y p a l m

"

Science The m yth b ehind the C aptain Am erica stories is a C hristian m yth of C hrist in the soul ever wakeful to w ard off the assaults of S atan . To find ad eq u ate m etap h o rs for the im m ensity of the forces in conflict, the stories can resort only to the inventions of science fiction, itself a m ode of gothic. Thus the superstren g th of C aptain America is explained as a consequence of an unexpected chem ical reaction betw een inoculants in his blood. To the pharm acopoeia of such m agic potions, going back to antiquity, SF adds a rep e r­ toire of m agic rays and the m achines th at project them . Four rules govern the ideological relations of the science of rays and potions to good and evil, and to C aptain Am erica and his foes and allies: Science is n eu tral w ith respect to good and evil. C aptain A m erica belongs to the dom ain of the good b u t not to the do m ain of science. The villain belongs to the dom ain of evil and to the dom ain of science. SHIELD belongs to the dom ain of the good and w holly to the dom ain of science. Despite the appearance of politically "correct" support for the principle of a n eu tral science, the C aptain A m erica stories thus rem ain tru e to the pre-R enaissance m istru st of the u n com m itted intellect p erp etu ated in Calvinism , in P uritan New E ngland, in K now -N othing Am erica. They rem ain true by posing the im plicit question: if the poles of hero and villain are sym m etrical w ith respect to good and evil b u t asym m etrical w ith respect to science (so th a t science is asym m etrical w ith respect to hero and villain),

Captain America in American Mythology

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Science

Figure 4

how can science be sym m etrical w ith respect to good and evil? The q u estion is geom etrically unansw erable (Figure 4).

The Black Man Blood b ro th e r to C aptain Am erica, Chingachgook to his N atty, Jim to his Huck, is the Falcon, m asked H arlem vigilante. B ut the Falcon is to rn in allegiance betw een his w hite b ro th er and his black girlfriend, Leila. For not only does Leila, as a w om an, w ant to tam e h er m an (Leila < Delilah): Leila is under the influence of black rad icals w ho preach racial exclusivism . W hen the Falcon tries to pull out, C aptain Am erica preaches earn estly to him : FALC, WE ARE DIFFERENT . . . I DON'T DENY IT. THERE NEVER HAVE BEEN AND NEVER WILL BE TWO HUMANS EXACTLY ALIKE . . . BLACK/ WHITE . . . YOUNG/OLD . . . MALE/FEMALE . . . AND STRONG/LESS STRONG. WHICHEVER SIDE WE'RE ON, THERE’S ALWAYS ANOTHER . . . DIFFERENCES CAN BE IMPORTANT . . . BUT THE ONES BETWEEN YOU AND ME AREN’T! WE BOTH HAVE THE SAME GOAL: ENDING INJUSTICE!

(161/14) C aptain A m erica pleads for the realization of Cooper’s dream of the b ro th erh o o d of n a tu re ’s noblem en; and, ignoring the gothic shadow s th a t accu m u late aro u n d the figure of the black m an, M arvel Com ics' dialogue h in ts th a t it will one day come true.

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Art DUSTY DEWDROPS SMEAR THE BROKEN WINDSHIELDS OF ABANDONED CARS, AS THE DAWNING SUN TOSSES A PROMISE OF HEAT INTO THE HUMID, CHOKING AIR. OLD MEN SNIP THE TAUT COPPER WIRES WHICH BITE DEEP INTO THEIR DAILY NEWS WAKE-UP EDITIONS. DELICATESSENS FIRE UP FRESH BROWN COFFEE. NEW YORK SNARLS HELLO TO ANOTHER SUMMER DAY. (153/1) FABLED CAPTAIN AMERICA.

(153/1)

To hoi polloi this is L iteratu re, p a rt of the subsidy Com m erce pays to C ulture for trespassing on the W ord. To the sophisticate it is a send-up of the genre in the vein of C haucer’s tale of S ir Thopas. Im agine the plight of Steve E nglehart, a u th o r and ironist. On the one h an d he is not up to the task of inventing an epic language ad eq u ate to the heroic iconography (see, for instance, the bum bling thees and thous he gives to the god T hor in the series The Avengers). On the o th er hand, M arvel Comics will not p e rm it him to send up the subject on the lines of the B atm an TV series. Therefore, he soldiers on, slipping in enough parody to signal th a t he is hip. The plastic im agery, contorted an d violent, is still faith ­ ful to the gothic-A m erican transcendental enterprise, b u t the lan ­ guage is banal and barely functional (image: gigantic m an holding struggling w om an; h e r balloon: " h e ’ s . . . SO s t r o n g ! ” — 161/27). Thus the verbal narrativ e, the conscious side of the stories, b ra n c h ­ ing into topical political com m ent,4 into bien-pensant social rele­ vance, into teenage love-interest, into w ishy-w ashy postm o d ern ist self-reflexiveness, can be seen as subversion an d dem ystification of a venerable m yth. The very com positional stru c tu re of C aptain America represents a m om ent of ideological conflict in the in n er history of America: n arrativ e

B enjam in F ranklin

iconography Jo n a th an E dw ards

E m erson

J. F. K ennedy

H aw thorne

N orm an M ailer

The Burden of Consciousness in Africa (1977)

T

he Guest is a film a b o u t an episode in the la te r life of Eugene M arais.1 The episode, w hich leads from now here to now here, is of no in h eren t im portance. In o rder to break his m orphine h ab it, M arais is persu ad ed to spend som e m onths on an isolated farm in the w estern T ransvaal. G radually his m orphine dose is reduced. He undergoes a crisis but, w ith the help of his hosts, passes it an d begins to recover. He form s friendships, regains som e h u m an w a rm th . B ut the cure is deceptive. He retu rn s to the drug, alien ates his hosts, an d is rejected. G ranted th a t the episode is not inherently interesting, the question we m ight ask is: Is Eugene M arais, as m an o r m yth, im p o rtan t enough to us to justify a film ab o u t him ? In Eugene M arais, South Africa cam e its closest yet to producing a Genius. T hink of M arais’s qualifications. He h a d deep-set p ierc­ ing eyes. He loved m any w om en. He lived in w ild and dangerous places. He w as a d d icted to an exotic drug. He w rote poem s about d eath and th ought m o rb id thoughts. He was m ainly unhappy and finally slew him self. He was plainly in a quite different class from m ere b rig h t boys like Ja n H ofm eyr and Ja n C hristiaan Sm uts. The Genius is one of the stereotypes of the M ajor Man th a t our cu ltu re has contrived (S aint, Hero, G enius—how m any more?). In o u r tim e the cu lt of the G enius has w aned som ew hat. B ut w hen we go to see The Guest, we are being asked to w orship at the shrine of Genius again. So w h at is a Genius, and why should we take one seriously? The Genius is a creation of E uropean R om anticism . He is a q u in tessen tially m ythic figure, m ythic because in him are recon­ ciled tw o c o n trad icto ry a ttrib u te s. On the one hand he is the p rophet, the m an of godlike vision (hence the piercing eyes) who foresees the future; w ith o u t honor in his own tim e, he is citizen 115

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of a w orld yet to come, a pioneer in new form s of thought and feeling. On the other h an d he is a child, a weakling, fleeing from a reality easily sustained by m ore solid people into a w orld of illusory gratifications, obsessed w ith death ra th e r th an getting on w ith the business of living. In the figure of the Genius the West therefore finds a hom e for both pessim istic self-criticism and op­ tim istic belief in Progress. The Genius, despite his gloom iness, proves the inevitability of Progress by finding it easier to live in the future th an in the present. But if this is so, w h at is a G enius doing in S outh Africa? W hat conditions of life in the w estern T ransvaal of the 1920s does E u ­ gene M arais find insupportable enough to drive him to drugs and death? The answ er: being a w hite m an in Africa is w hat is in su p ­ portable. N ot because of the burden of guilt (this is the them e of a later literatu re) b u t because of the b urden of consciousness. The them e of M arais's book The Soul o f the Ape (w ritten 1922, first published 1969), on w hich The Guest relies heavily, is th a t con­ sciousness is a form of pain, th a t the highest consciousness is the m ost exquisite pain. And the highest form of consciousness of all is, of course, th a t of the w hite Genius, in w hom consciousness bulges into the future. Therefore, to take M arais’s thought seri­ ously m eans to take him seriously as a hero of consciousness. The tragedy of w hite consciousness in Africa is d ram atized m ost clearly in th e final scene of the film, w hich is w orth looking at closely. M arais has relapsed into heavy addiction; his doctor (the poet A. G. Visser) has com e to take him hom e from the farm . They chug back along the road to H eidelberg. M arais speaks: "Stop the car." "W hy?” "I w ant to say grace." W hile Visser w atches, M arais walks into the tall grass, struggles u p a ridge, and vanishes slowly down the o th er side. Africa sw allow s him up. Over the scene we h ear M arais (Athol Fugard) reciting verse; a su b title tells us it is M arais's "Lied van Suid-Afrika." Visser looks on. The screenplay says: "His face expresses for us in these final m om ents ou r sense of the enigm a of Eugene M arais.” The poem com es to an end. We see only the em pty veld. Text on screen: "Ten years later, on the farm Pelindaba in the Pretoria d istric t of the T ransvaal, Eugene M arais, suffering acutely again from w ith d raw al sym ptom s, shot himself."

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W hat does this all m ean? We· have seen th at, on the farm a t m ealtim es, M arais has been unable to join hands w ith the Meyers and say grace. He cannot pray to a God he does not believe in. Who, then, is this South Africa to w hom he finds him self able to pray? A m u rd ero u s m other-goddess, the poem tells us, w ho de­ vours h e r young and in re tu rn for love gives only "endless p a in .” M arais's poem is pow erful stuff, b u t I doubt th a t it w ould aw ake m uch response in m ost S outh Africans, to w hom (and let us not forget this) Africa is a m other w ho has nourished them and th eir forebears for m illions of years. S outh Africa, m other of pain, can have m eaning only to people w ho can find it m eaningful to ascribe th eir "pain" ("alienation" is here a b e tte r word) to the failure of Africa to love them enough. W hat the closing scene of the film depicts is M arais, b e a re r of a pain-racked h igher consciousness, Genius an d S ain t becom e H ero, abandoning civilization and going off to sacrifice him self at the feet of adored b u t im placable Africa. The “enigm a" we are invited to contem plate can therefore be cracked: “It is a tragic fate to be a w hite m an in Africa," it says. "On the other hand, M arais was a G enius.” Both ways, the w hite m an w ins. Set over a g ain st M arais a t every point are his hosts, the Meyers of S teen k am pskraal. M arais chainsm okes and shoots m or­ phine; the M eyers eat m eat and vegetables. M arais lives w ith baboons; the M eyers ride horses. M arais is thin, haggard, unshaven, volatile; the M eyer m en are big, stolid, slow-spoken, bearded. If Africa is the ravenous sow who devours h er litter, how com e the M eyers are so com fortable? W here are their agonies of consciousness? The an sw er is th a t the M eyers p a rticip a te in a stereotype th at has nothing to do w ith the m yth of the Genius. The E nglishm an's stereotype of the "Boer,” a stereotype going back a t least to John B arrow , is of a raw boned, hulking fellow, slow -thinking bu t shrew d, undisciplined, lazy, greedy, som ew hat cow ardly (though a fine m arksm an), in to leran t, fu ndam entalist. No doubt the Afri­ k an er him self has played his p a rt in the prom otion of the stereo­ type. In any event, Ross Devenish certainly perpetuates it in his M eyer fam ily, w ho speak a variety of English no h um an being has ever spoken. H ere is Oom Doors Meyer:

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I'm only a farmer, and maybe not such a good one at that . . . There are some things I don’t understand, and . . . [voice rising] wragtig Eugene . . . you're one of them. Make allowances, man! Som e people will find Oom Doors lovable. O thers w ill prefer to hold th eir ears shut. B ehind the m en of the M eyer fam ily stands T ant Corrie Meyer. T hroughout the film Tant Corrie w ears a black dress u n d er a w hite smock w ith w ide vertical bands descending from the shoulders. H er garb echoes the in te rio r of the farm house, whose sp irit she obviously is: stark, w hitew ashed w alls broken by the d ark v e rti­ cals of doors and w indow fram es. In terio r scenes are carefully com ­ posed and photographed w ith seductive beauty. They h ark back to the interiors of the classic D utch p ain ters. Sunlight enters the house cool, lum inous, tem pered; lam plight m akes the Meyers, seated about the d inner table, glow w ith R em b ran d t brow ns an d golds. These people are not rootless colonials, the pictures tell us: see, they are both rude children of the African e a rth an d heirs to a venerable E uropean trad itio n . To everyone, T ant Corrie is the nourishing m other. Before h er menfolk she places heaped, steam ing p lates of food. W hen Oom Doors fails to talk sense into M arais, it is Tant Corrie w ho tells M arais to cut the crap and eat his soup. To the black m agic of m orphine she opposes the w hite m agic of food. (Thus, again, it is only by discounting M arais as a Genius th a t we can feel com fort­ able about the final defeat of Tant C orrie's m agic.) In its clean, sim ple way, the life the Meyers lead is m ost a ttra c ­ tive. B ut if we are not w holly seduced by it, there rem ain a few uncom fortable questions. How m uch did the Meyers ask to take this seedy stra n g er into th eir bosom ? Why does no one in the film, even u n d er stress, talk about m oney? If the Meyers ru n a c attle farm , why do they never talk ab o u t cattle? about the w eather? Do they never go to tow n? (S teenkam pskraal is nine m iles from H ei­ delberg.) W here do the African farm laborers w ho m aterialize out of now here for a single fifteen-second sequence live? How do the Meyer m en spend th eir tim e w hen they are not eating? Here are tw o less niggling questions. In a film th a t now here disclaim s fidelity to the historical tru th and acknow ledges its d eb t to Leon R ousseau's biography Die groot

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verlange (The G reat Longing), why do Devenish and Fugard allow the recu p eratin g M arais to w in the confidence and affection of the M eyers’ little d a u g h te r w hen R ousseau explicitly tells them th at M arais failed to overcom e the ch ild ’s fear of him ?2 Because pop­ u la r w isdom has it th a t a child can sm ell goodness as a lion can sm ell fear, and it is necessary for M arais to be a "good" character? B ecause it m akes the story m ore poignant if we see M arais as a m an very nearly redeem ed from his w orst im pulses by the care of a w om an an d the love of a child? A second question. Rousseau tells us th at, w hile a t Steenkam p sk raal, M arais used to go up into the m ountains w ith an African h elp er to dig up old graves, searching for B ushm an skulls. "He only w an ted B ushm an heads," said Louis M eyer to Rousseau. "He w ould pick up a h ead and look at it and throw it aw ay—'No, th a t's a kaffir!”'3 This episode is not reflected in the film (instead we have a sequence w ith a baboon skull). Perhaps it should have been. It w ould have show n an o th e r side of M arais. For M arais was not only a n a tu ra list w ho lived w ith apes & la Jane van Lawick Goodall an d is h ailed as a p recu rso r of the present-day reaction ag ain st behaviorist dogm a in the study of anim al behavior—all of w hich m akes him "positive," "good"—b u t also one of those “bad" post-D arw inian ethnologists an d com parative anatom ists who traveled aro u n d the w orld w ith th eir calipers m easuring skulls and classifying races into "higher” and "low er.” M arais w anted B ushm an skulls in o rd er to prove a theory he h a d th a t th eir jaw stru c tu re show ed th a t B ushm en belonged to a "less developed" race. I cite R ousseau’s story not to cast a racist slur on M arais (who in this respect w as only a child of his tim es) b u t to indicate th a t th ere is a perspective from w hich M arais suddenly seems a lot closer to the V ictorians than he does to us. This perspective is absent from the film. All in all, then, I find The Guest an equivocal film. Rem em ber, however, th at, w ith exceptions, the cinem a has alw ays tended to w ork w ith in the m yths of the d o m in an t culture. Myths are ways of p atch in g things together. W hat The Guest does is to take the legend of Eugene M arais, one of the few potentially m ythic m en w hite S outh Africa has produced, an d to spin it out w ith oth er m yths an d stereotypes to create a w ork th a t is finally consoling, even flattering, to its w hite S outh African audience. "When we are

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good (like the M eyers),” it says, "we are very very good; and w hen we are b ad (like M arais) we are not bad b u t h eroic.” On its ow n term s are there not ways in w hich The Guest could have been m ade into a b e tte r film? Are there ways, for exam ple, of preventing the falling-off of in terest and tension in the film as M arais begins to recover? W ould everything have come rig h t if M arais’s girlfriend B renda had been cut entirely out? C ertainly the vacuous episode involving h er form s the d ram a tic low point of the film, and deciding to leave it in was a m ajo r e rro r of ju d g ­ m ent on the d irec to r’s p a rt (I cannot believe th a t no one advised Devenish to jettiso n it). B ut finally m ost of the blam e for the slackening of tension m u st rest on the shoulders of the w rite r of the dialogue, Athol Fugard. As the film goes on, M arais and Visser talk m ore and m ore, exchanging pom pous and facetious b anter. The idea, I suppose, w as to avoid too m uch direct exposition of M arais's thought via readings from The Soul o f the Ape (these readings in fact w ork very well) and to replace it w ith ind irect "d ram atized ” exposition via argum ent. B ut even on the stage this ploy has been exhausted for decades; in film it has never w orked. There is a dream sequence early in the film in w hich M arais sees him self asleep am ong the baboons of the W aterberg. L ater there is a longer dream sequence (reflecting quite inadequately w hat the screenplay claim s it represents) in w hich M arais sees him self being led by a baboon aw ay from the house, into the veld and the night. W hat m akes M arais’s intuitive relations w ith a n i­ m als possible, the film says, is w h at m akes everyday social rela ­ tions difficult for him : n a tu re is “tru e ” and “deep," w hile cu ltu re is “false" an d "shallow ,” and it is the essence of G enius to seek the true an d deep (hence the revision of history, too, to allow M arais access to the true and deep of childhood). I w onder w hether, inside The Guest, there is not a th in n e r film struggling to get out, a film centered on M arais a n d the apes ra th e r th an on M arais and the Meyers. W hat such a film m ight look like I do not know. Perhaps m ore like a conventional wildlife docum entary, shorter, m ore so­ ber, m ore "educational," w ith none of the p o ten tial for histrionics th a t drug-crazed behavior allows.

Four Notes on Rugby (1978)

R

ugby is one of a fam ily of gam es of great antiq u ity and wide d istrib u tio n : two team s of u n arm ed m en struggle for pos­ session of an object th a t they try to carry hom e w ith them . The gam e is inherently violent, an d has at various tim es been o u tlaw ed (“N othing b u t beastly fury and extrem e violence”—S ir Thom as E lyot, 1531). The present-day football codes represent a tte m p ts to isolate a nonviolent v arian t. The rugby code in p a r­ tic u lar forbids any a ttac k ("tackle") on a player not carrying the ball. The question of how the ball-carrier is to be dispossessed, and how a n o th e r player is to possess him self of the ball, is a p ­ proached via a com plex, even labyrinthine set of laws. Despite rep eated chopping a n d changing, these laws rem ain unsatisfac­ tory, an d for a n u m b er of reasons: (1) They are inexact inasm uch as they allow a variety of in terp retatio n s. (2) They yield a phase of play w ith o u t aesthetic interest. (3) They fail to prevent injuries an d allow som e covert violence. (4) By and large they fail to keep the ball live as they are intended to do. (5) They contribute heavily to m aking rugby a gam e w hose outcom e is decided by prow ess at goal-kicking. M inor m odifications to the rules are not going to change this state of affairs. It is to be d oubted w h eth er it is possible to compose a set of rules for a ball-handling gam e th a t are precise and th a t yield nonviolent, a ttrac tiv e , an d continuous play. The N orth Amer­ ican football codes recognize this im possibility an d declare the ball dead a t the p oint of tackle. R ugby d ream s of itself as a celebration of speed, agility, strength, com radeship. Every now and again one sees evidence, flashes of beauty am id all the m illing and toiling, th a t the dream is not unfounded. B ut the flashes are in te rm itten t. There is a 121

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m istake in the m ost basic conception of the gam e. Therefore, the question to ask is: Why does this crippled gam e flourish, and flourish p articu la rly in South Africa?

R

ugby is one of several sports elaborated in E ngland and ex­ p o rted to the colonies. The first stronghold of these sports— notably cricket and rugby—was the public schools, w here they fell u n d er the p atronage of a pow erful and m obile m iddle class as vehicles for the p ropagation of its own values; m ore precisely, as vehicles for the propagation of a set of m ystifications through which th a t class saw itself and w anted others to see it: "fair play," "m ay the best m an w in,” "team sp irit,” "never give in ,” "the stiff upper lip ,” and so on. By playing its gam es, the sons of the m iddle class were in itiated into the values of th eir class and, once a week, ritu ally reaffirm ed them . By passing the test of "playing the g am e,” the sons of shopkeepers gained adm ission to the m iddle class. Exported to the colonies, th e ir codes centralized u n d er the con­ trol of the priesthoods of the In tern atio n al Rugby B oard and the In tern atio n al Cricket Conference, rugby and cricket served the additional function of affirm ing an "Anglo-Saxon" m iddle class whose in tern atio n al ties were stronger th an its natio n al ties. Hence the invention of n ational team s, in tern atio n al tours, test m atches, an d so on, w hich provided a m eans for conflict to be played out in the nam e of friendly rivalry. The political im portance of rugby in South Africa from the tu rn of the century to the 1960s cannot be overem phasized. Rugby becam e a m eans (as cricket never did) for the econom ically dis­ advantaged Afrikaner to assert him self m agically over the E nglish­ m an. In its pyram id al stru c tu re (club, province, nation) it also form ed—as m any politicians realized—a m odel of w hite political unity. The class values attac h ed to the sport by E nglishm en and the n atio n al (often ethnic) values attach ed to it by Afrikaners lead to a strange doubleness of vision—sp ectato r A reads a test m atch betw een South Africa and New Zealand as an o p p o rtu n ity for one nation to dance in triu m p h over another, w hile sp ectato r B reads the sam e m atch as a celebration of old im perial values—b u t, as we all know, the m arriag e has survived the strains.

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Anyone who reads rugby jo u rn alism m ust be struck by how m eth ­ odically it avoids confronting the sp e cta to r’s experience of the gam e. W ithout any consciousness of w hat it is itself, it rem ains bogged dow n in the m ost crudely positivistic conception of w hat it is like to w atch (“X dum m ies and breaks through a tackle before passing to Y, w ho scores in the co rn e r”). The situ atio n is absurd. For thousands of people, S atu rd ay afternoons in w in ter form the clim ax of the week, an experience they afterw ard stam m er to speak ab o u t because they lack the words. They devour the sports reports looking for b read, and find only stones. • So if we w an t to talk about the crow d ap p eal of rugby we m ust sta rt from scratch w ith the m ost elem entary scrutiny of ou r own consciousness. U nder w h at categories can we say th a t our expe­ rience, as we w atch the gam e, falls? I suspect there is m ost to be said a b o u t o u r experience of tim e. The allure of a football gam e is, in the first place, the allure of tim e redeem ed from chronicity, an island of eighty m inutes lifted out of the tim e of one-thingafter-another, w hich is the tim e of entropy, of the running dow n of the universe. The gam e prom ises to give m eaning to a stretch of tim e (in this it is like narrative), and it fulfills this prom ise often enough to brin g the sp ecta to r back. To postreligious people whose lives are subm erged in chronos, w ho feel them selves dying while they are living, it provides the experience of tim e given m eaning—w hich one m ight call a low-level experience of tra n ­ scendence—often enough to m ake S atu rd ay afternoon m ore sig­ nificant th an S unday m orning. N ot only in its overall stru c tu re as agon or contest, b u t in its details, the gam e prom ises liberation from the tim e of the clock. Perhaps m ore th a n in any o th er gam e in w hich the contestants pursue each o th er through the sam e space and the sam e tim e, the varieties of football provide those m om entary experiences (known in jo u rn alese as " th rills”) in w hich the spectato r's tim e-sense is stretch ed an d the second h an d slows: a body strains to pass a n ­ o th er body, a h an d is too slow, a grasp grazes, misses; a ball hangs in the air, a body leaps for it, grasps it. In them selves these m om ents are nothing. Their phenom enal reality can be rep eated in on e’s own backyard. B ut when they are experienced in a crow d of thousands, the a tten tio n of each w atcher

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charges the m om ent w ith value. Everyone is thus engaged in cre­ atin g and confirm ing value for everyone else. Analogies betw een football m atches an d political rallies tend to be false. The analogy w ith religious spectacles m ay be less facile. (It w ould seem th a t no one can persuade the public th a t re ­ corded relays of football m atches are as good as live relays. This is only secondarily because the outcom e is already know n, p ri­ m arily because the public knows th a t the redem ption of tim e can take place only in tim e.) A serious phenom enological analysis of w atching rugby w ould proceed from tim e-experience to the experience of the m om entum of the contest, and to fu rth er categories of aesthetic and kinaesthetic experience th at, even in the criticism of so highly developed an a rt of m ovem ent as the dance, do not seem yet to be well developed. If one w atches children playing together, one can, in th e ir m ore highly developed form s of play, distinguish two phases: a phase in w hich the rules are w orked out, and a phase in w hich the gam e is played. In the first phase the children, so to speak, define a space in w hich the fantasy of the gam e can flourish. In the second the gam e is played until it fills th a t space and becom es boring. Then there is a re tu rn to the first phase, and the rules are modified; o r else the gam e ends. Often the altern atio n betw een phases is rap id . Som etim es players go literally out of phase: som e are playing the gam e w hile others are playing the gam e of the rules (m istakenly called "arguing about the game"). This is the m om ent of conflict. We tend to think of the first phase as m erely prelim inary. B ut it is in fact the phase of g reater creativity. It can be com pared to problem -definition, as opposed to problem -solving. The two phases have, of course, a dialectical relation. If the aim of phase two, the gam e itself, is to allow a display of excellence (as m easured perhaps by w inning), then w hat is the aim of phase one, the gam e of the rules? T here can be only one answ er: to create a good gam e. We could spend tim e w orking out some of the qualities of a good gam e, b u t th a t w ould be to m iss the point, w hich is th a t children com posing gam es do not disagree about these qualities. It is as though they possess a p aradigm of w hat a good gam e is, in its m ost general form . (W hether they o btain this p aradigm from cu ltu ral o r hered itary sources I do not

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know. I think a good case could be m ade out for the latter, b u t again the issue is n o t qu ite relevant. I certainly agree w ith Johan H uizinga th a t it is a m istake to see play as an expression of an y th in g b u t itself: "The play-concept m ust alw ays rem ain dis­ tin ct from all the o th er form s of th o u g h t”.1) We can define a sp o rt as a gam e played according to a welldefined code of rules. By definition, then, a player of a sport is excluded from playing the gam e of the rules. In exchange for this ren u n ciatio n he is given a highly developed code th a t is g u aran ­ teed to yield, m uch of the tim e, a good gam e. In other words, w hen I play a sp o rt I play the gam e (as they say), the others' game, no longer my gam e. If I grow bored I m ust suffer my boredom . B ore­ dom becom es a fate, it is denied any place in the dialectic of the gam e. In schools, an d p a rticu la rly in boys’ schools, the line betw een "free p la y ” and sp o rt is clearly draw n, and alw ays to the disad­ vantage of play. S p o rt is given an explicit ideological function ("character-building") w hile play rem ains suspect, frivolous. From long before adolescence the child is p u t u n d er pressure to leave the open a ir of gam es and live u n d er the um b rella of the codes. O ntogeny recap itu lates phylogeny here. The old local varieties of gam es, w ith th eir rules th a t w ere not codified but rem ained a m a tte r of consensus, varying from occasion to occasion, w ere frow ned on by au th o rity and ended up as picturesque irrelevancies. The child w ho subm its to the code and plays the gam e is there­ fore reen acting a profoundly im p o rtan t m om ent of culture: the m om ent a t w hich the O edipal com prom ise is m ade, the m om ent a t w hich the knee is b e n t to governm ent. This is the m om ent at w hich sp o rt and the a rts, the two m ost com plex form s of play, p a rt w ays. In the creative arts, the a rtist both com poses his gam e and plays it. He thus asserts an om nipotence th a t the player of sports yields up. This helps to explain w hy sports are so easily c ap tu red and used by p olitical authority, w hile the a rts rem ain slippery, resistan t, undependable as m oral training grounds for the young.

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n these notes I have spoken of rugby wholly from the outside. A fuller account w ould require, am ong o th er things, an inves­ tigation from the inside, w hich w ould cover such areas as the player's experience of the gam e (in w hich such categories as con­ trol of space and effort m ay tu rn out to predom inate) and the internal politics of rugby. Rugby, m ore than any o th er of the m ajor sp ectato r sports, has m anaged to keep m oney and pow er out of the h ands of players an d in the hands of cliques of a d m in istrato rs. How the m achine of rugby is kept going—by w hat in stitu tio n a l­ ized m eans players, grow n m en, are cowed into letting them selves be treated like children; how "troublem akers" are dealt w ith at every level of the gam e; how the system of p atro n ag e w orks by which players are guided into com m ercial organizations th a t in tu rn have ties w ith a d m in istrato rs; w h at exactly the netw ork of connections is betw een rugby ad m in istratio n , the ed ucational sys­ tem , an d governm ent, a netw ork th a t seem s to co n stitu te S outh Africa’s answ er to the B ritish "old boy” netw ork; how careers are m ade an d successions arranged am ong ad m in istrato rs; w h at the various m u tu al dependencies are betw een new spaperm en and a d ­ m in istrato rs—all of this w ould con stitu te a rich field of investi­ gation for som eone w ith access to the system yet financially in­ dependent of it, if such a person exists.

Triangular Structures of Desire in Advertising (1980) The Transaction A form of ad v ertisem en t th a t we often m eet consists of an im age of a p ro d u ct (for exam ple, a bottle of perfum e), an im age of a m odel (for exam ple, a beautiful w om an), and a text linking the m odel (m ore precisely, the self-projection of the m odel, h er w ell­ being, beauty, and so forth) to the p roduct ("A fragrance to m atch your m ood today,” runs a typical text). The aim of advertisem ents like these is to create a link—the link of p u rch ase—betw een the p ro d u ct advertised and the consum er of the ad v ertisem ent. The need for a th ird elem ent in the tra n s­ action—th e m odel—is therefore by no m eans obvious. Yet adver­ tising p ractice seem s to have show n th a t a t least in a certain range of cases the form of advertisem ent in w hich the im age of the p ro d u ct is mediated to the consum er by an im age of an idealized consum er, the m odel, "works" b e tte r than the unm ediated form in w hich only the im age of the p roduct is presented. (In both cases, of course, the text plays its own m ediating role.) One m ig h t be tem p ted to think th a t in the m ediated form the “real" tran sac tio n is the one effected betw een the product and the consum er, th a t the m odel is inessential and can be discarded as one discards m arg in al rough-w ork once the answ er to a problem in a rith m e tic has been obtained. W hat I shall be arguing, however, is th a t the in h eren t stru c tu re of advertisem ents w ith m odels is tru ly tria n g u la r (in o th er w ords, th a t there is no way of reducing the stru c tu re from a tria d to a dyad w ithout falsifying it), and th a t the p a rtic u la r fram ew ork developed by the critic Rene G irard for talking ab o ut mediated desire in the novel can be applied to the read in g of ad v ertism en ts w ith valuable results. My field of discussion is therefore the lim ited one of advertise­ 127

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m ents in w hich the m odel is overtly present to m ediate the p ro d ­ uct to the consum er. However, I suggest below th a t even w hen the model is ab sent it is a m istake to think of the relatio n betw een consum er and p roduct as dyadic as long as the cam era m ediates betw een the two as a nonneutral desiring eye. The arg u m en t is carried on from inside G irard ’s phenom enological fram ew ork, w hatever blindness this approach entails to the virtues of positiv­ ist research into the psychological dynam ics of advertising.

The Consumer's Desire Orthodox explanations of the psychology of the consum er's re ­ sponse to advertisem ents fall into tw o broad classes. One rests on the m echanism of identification: the consum er is persuaded to identify w ith the idealized consum er p ortrayed by the m odel, and thus to w ant, use, buy w h at the m odel seem s to w ant, use, buy. The o th er rests on the process of association: the advertising im age is such th a t the p ro d u ct gathers around itself associations of the glam orous, the desirable, the superior, and so on (it is c h a ra c te r­ istic of these associations to be ineffable), so th a t the consum er is brought to yearn to possess the product in o rd er to c ap tu re the associations and em body them in him self/herself. Both these accounts aspire to explanatory pow er over m ore or less the en tire range of advertising. Since they are capable of supplem enting each other, they can be en tertain ed a t the sam e tim e, and com m only are by people in the advertising industry. To the lim ited extent th a t it carries on an inquiry into its own foun­ dations (as distin ct from carrying out m arket research), the in­ dustry does so w ith in the identification and association p a ra ­ digms. For anyone intending to develop a critiq u e of advertising as p a rt of the c ap italist order, this fact ought to give pause for thought: if the ind u stry itself operates com fortably w ith these explanatory paradigm s, it is unlikely th a t a c ritiq u e th a t also works w ithin them could develop any power. It is not my in ten tio n to discuss theories of identification and association any further, o r to try to argue th a t they are w eak in com parison w ith the theory I will be a d u m b ratin g . How one chooses am ong com peting psychological theories depends heavily on w hat one ad m its as valid evidence. The positivist basis of the

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association theory, in p a rticu la r, m eans th a t only quantifiable be­ havior is a d m itte d as evidence, w hereas a phenom enological ac­ count w ill resist a dem and for d a ta divorced from the su b ject’s experience. A ttem pts to com pare rival accounts w hile ignoring th eir philosophical foundations m ust therefore be idle. Avoiding com parisons, I w ill sim ply sketch an account of the subject's re­ sponse to the ad v ertisem en t w hich is dem onstrably in conflict w ith both accounts I have m entioned. This account is based p rim arily on the analysis of form s of triangular desire developed by G irard in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.1 Let us take tw o exam ples of advertisem ents w ith overt m edia­ tors and see how they are trea te d in a G irardian reading. The first advertisem ent I have already referred to. The im age of a beautiful w om an gazes out of the page a t the beholder. In h er proxim ity, b u t on a n o th e r plane, is the im age of a bottle of perfum e X. The text links a "you” w ho is both model and beholder w ith the perfum e (in o th e r cases the im age of the bottle is sim ply allow ed to a tta c h itself m etonym ically to the beauty of the model). The prom ise of the ad vertisem ent is th a t "you” w ho use perfum e X are beautiful. In an identification theory, one buys perfum e X because one identifies w ith (m ore precisely, wishes to identify w ith) the beau­ tiful w om an. In an association theory one buys it because one associates it, by w ay of a m etonym ic slide, w ith beautiful wom en, an d therefore hopes th a t beauty will associate itself w ith all the perfum e's users. In a G irardian reading, one desires perfum e X because one has reached a stage of yielding the choice of one’s desires to m odels like this: one desires w hat one believes she desires, perfum e X. The second exam ple is slightly m ore com plex. A beautiful w om an is p o rtray ed , and in h er proxim ity a bottle of perfum e X. H overing ab o u t h e r in a sta te of m asterly fascination is a desirable m an. Again, in a G irardian reading, because one has yielded the choice of o n e’s desires to m odels, one desires this m odel’s desires: not only the m an (who in tu rn validates on e’s choice of h er as m odel by desiring her), b u t perfum e X. I am not concerned to argue th a t eith er of these pictures can only be read in a G irardian way. (For one thing, in the second

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picture the G irardian reading seem s to ignore the logic, “If you use perfum e X, desirable m en will desire you," w hich an identifi­ cation theory neatly caters for. On the o th er hand, if this p a rtic u la r logic were to be im peccable, then the m odel should not be b eau ­ tiful b u t m erely decently attrac tiv e like the m odels in soap-pow der advertisem ents.) All I have done thus far is to show w h at a stru c ­ ture of trian g u lated desire m ight look like. F urther, a w ord of elaboration is needed on desire. The gaze of the m odel is rarely presented fixed on the object of consum ption, avid an d excited. Instead she looks out of the page, an im age of desire alive bu t appeased. She has used (absorbed, consum ed) the perfum e, it has m ade h e r w hat she is (happy, beautiful . . . —as soon as we try to describe the m ood of the m odel we characteristically find o u r­ selves calling forth h er whole being), satisfied now b u t by n a tu re (like the consumer) insatiable. From these exam ples it is clear th a t the tria n g u la r desire is in essence vicarious. In literatu re, E m m a Bovary and Don Q uixote are the m ajor exem plars of vicarious desiring. Not only do they im itate the o u tw ard behavior of m odels they find in books, b u t they freely allow th eir desires to be defined for them by these models. Thus in th eir cases there is not sim ply the desiring subject and the desired object, b u t also the ch aracteristic th ird p o in t of the triangle, the m odel through w hom desires are m ediated. Gi­ rard 's general thesis is th a t F laubert and Cervantes, as w ell as the authors of certain o th er romanesque (as opposed to rom antique) novels, "apprehend intuitively an d concretely, through the m e­ dium of th eir a rt, if not form ally, the system [of tria n g u la r desire] in w hich they w ere first im prisoned together w ith th eir contem ­ poraries" (DDN, p. 3). The aim s of romanesque a rt are thus critical and liberatory. The g reater p a rt of G irard's study is taken up w ith the analysis of m ore com plex form s of m ediated desire th an E m m a B ovary's or Don Q uixote's, form s in w hich the m ed iato r is not a rem ote or fictional c h arac ter b u t som eone whose sphere of possible action im pinges on the subject's and who is therefore in some degree a rival as well as a m odel (from this point G ira rd ’s thought on m im etic rivalry in Violence and the Sacred develops n a tu rally ).2 W hereas real-w orld rivalry betw een the consum er and the m odel in the adv ertisem ent is clearly im possible, a p h a n ta sm al riv alry —

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in w hich the consum er m ust alw ays lose—is not. Thus G irard's analysis of the consequences of this variety of m ediation is also relevant to m y purpose. G irard w rites in a philosophical trad itio n stretching from Hegel to S a rtre th a t attach es crucial im portance to the ability of the subject to choose his/her ow n desires. In fact, in Hegel the stage of self-consciousness does not arrive, the "I" does not come into being, u n til the subject becom es aw are of itself as the locus of a lack, a desire. Thus the being of the “I" is w holly im plicated in its desires; an d for the "I" to yield its autonom y as a desiring subject is to yield its being. This yielding is w hat G irard calls an "onto­ logical sickness" (DDN, p. 96): in turning his desire tow ard the desiring m ediator, the subject yields his ontological autonom y: The subject is unable to desire on his own; he has no confidence w hatever in a choice that would be solely his own. The rival [and model] is needed because his desire alone can confirm . .. value.3 The object is only a means of reaching the mediator. The desire is aim ed at the m ediator's being . . . The desiring subject wants to become his mediator; he wants to steal from the m ediator his very being of [for example] "perfect knight" or “irresistible sed­ ucer.” (DDN, pp. 54-55) The question arises a t once, of course: Why is the self so m is­ tru sted th a t it cannot desire its own desires? G irard does not give a single answ er to this question, b u t the argum ent th a t appears scattered over his discussion of the romanesque novelists is an essentially historical one. T rian g u lar desire makes its first a p ­ p earance an d becom es a targ et of analysis in Don Quixote, w hich m arks the beginning of the m odern age as well as the beginning of the romanesque trad itio n of critical fictions. It is thus a specif­ ically m odern phenom enon. It arises as a consequence of post­ religious h u m an ism and m ultiplies as social differences are level­ ed. In a w orld in w hich "the m ost im p o rtan t relationships are not betw een social superiors and inferiors b u t betw een peers, even though these are rarely experienced as relationships o f'e q u ality ,'" the presence of the “m etaphysical rival" (th at is, the p hantasm ic m odel of desiring) becom es "m ore and m ore obsessive" (DB, p. 80). In G irard 's reading it is Dostoevsky w ho em erges as the subtlest analyst of stru ctu res of m ediated desire. Dostoevsky’s answ er to

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the question of w hy the self can no longer desire its own desires is th a t the prom ise th a t comes w ith the tidings th a t God is dead, th at Man has taken his place, is not fulfilled in experience. Each individual discovers in the solitude of his consciousness that the promise is false but no one is able to universalize his experience. The promise rem ains true for Others . . . Everyone thinks that he alone is condemned to hell, and that is w hat makes it hell. (DDN, p. 57) It follows th at netw orks of m ediated desire will be m ost allinclusive in m odern m aterialist individualist societies, in w hich a public ideology of equal o p portunity for all reigns and the in d i­ vidual therefore experiences failure as unredeem able priv ate ontic sham e. In this respect G irard sets him self in the trad itio n of con­ servative E uropean critics of Am erican dem ocracy, of w hom Tocqueville is the m ain representative: Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contem poraries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely w ithin the solitude of his own heart.4 Though G irard ’s enterprise is to describe p a rt of the social psy­ chology of the m odern w orld, his m ethod of procedure is not one fam iliar to the em piricist social scientist. G irard him self is c lear on this point: I believe there exists in certain [literary] works a knowledge of desirous relationships superior to any proposed [elsewhere]. It is not at all a m atter of challenging science, but of searching for it wherever it might be found and in no m atter how unusual a place. (DB, p. 49) Sim ilarly it is not farfetched, once we concede th a t "desirous relatio n sh ip s” are quintessentially involved in advertising, to a l­ low the possibility th a t insights into how desire works m ay as well be found in novelists and th eir in terp reters as in the q u a n ti­ fiable behavior of consum ers. The points of im m ediate relevance of G irard ’s theory to the analysis of advertising can thus be sum m arized as follows:

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1. T rian g u lar stru c tu re s of desire have th eir origin in a yearning for transcendence unsatisfied in the m odern w orld. 2. The n a tu re of tria n g u la r desire is th a t the subject yields the choice of his desires to the m odel. 3. Its ch arac teristic concom itant em otions are self-m istrust, envy, jealousy, resentm ent.

The Mode! N om inally the m odel plays a m ediatory role betw een consum er an d product. She (it is a p p ro p riate to use the fem inine pronoun here) is supposed to effect the link betw een desiring subject and desired object, and in the process to disappear. In fact, in the discourse of econom ics the m odel is not spoken of: all th at is treated is the subject—object relation. In the advertising im age itself the m odel is not captioned, nam ed. She has been selected from am ong a sp ira n t m odels for qualities th a t include lack of identifiable individuality: her physical features m ust be so plastic u n d er the h an d s of the a rtist w ho makes her up for the photo­ graphic session th a t she is not identified from one assignm ent to the next, is not associated w ith any one product. In other w ords, she is a kind of desiring cipher, a nothing whose desires are infin­ itely m obile, w ho desires not because this p a rtic u la r object m akes h er desire (for in th a t case it w ould leave its p a rtic u la r trace on her) b ut sim ply because it is her essence to desire. The m odel here has to be carefully distinguished from the star, the celebrity (som etim es from the field of m odeling itself!) whose very identifiability is used to sell products. The treatment given the sta r is ju st the opposite of w hat I describe above: h er unique­ ness is stressed, and, unlike the model, she m ay be allow ed to becom e identified w ith one or two specific products. The sta r in fact provides a sim pler case of the m ediation of desire and the yielding up of being th an the m odel does, a case of w hat G irard calls "external m ed iatio n ,” th a t w hich Amadis of Gaul provides for Don Quixote. In the heyday of Hollywood, people were invited to "live like the s ta rs ” by learning to desire w hat the stars desired, th at is, w h at the stars lent th eir im ages to. The faces th a t the m odel w ears—since she herself is faceless— are p rescrib ed by fashion. The people who p u t on these faces for

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her are not th eir authors: authorship, they aver, lies w ith Fashion itself, w hose o rig in ato r no one claim s to be. If one follows the lines back as far as those called "fashion se tte rs,” one hears th a t they are only "responding to the tim es.” "X is in, Y is out," they say, in an u tteran ce a t the sam e tim e declarative and ho rtativ e and op­ tative. The im ages of desiring subjecthood th a t the m odels offer th eir beholders are elem ents of an unpred ictab ly shifting re p e r­ toire of w hich no one knows the source. In a ch aracteristically m ystifying gesture, the m irro r is alw ays turned back on the su b ­ ject. "This is the im age of your m odel,” says the voice of Fashion, "because this is how you desire to look.” The m ystification consists again in denying the existence of the m odel, affirm ing her nullity, asserting th a t she is nothing b u t an im age of the desire of the subject, of the desiring subject. C aught in such a gallery of m irrors, the subject (the consum er) cannot fail to fail in his o r h er enterprise of ap prehending the being of so p hantom a m odel. He o r she experiences the b ew ilder­ ing envy th a t G irard (following S tendhal, N ietzsche, and Scheler) describes, b u t in a m odality peculiar to consum er society: because the m ystification is precisely th a t the m odel/rival is invisible, null, does not exist, envy has the feel of being w ithout object or origin: not only is it im potent, it does not know its ow n nam e. It occurs no m ore precisely th an as a m alaise, a discontent, a sense of in n er em ptiness. The m ost p e n etratin g analysis of life lived in this m a ­ laise, and through the sham values th a t envy creates in o rd er to hide itself, rem ains th a t of Max Scheler.5 It is not m y aim to assign responsibilities, to pursue the project of blam ing the prevalence of floating envy in the advertising and fashion in d u stry on the late c ap italist o rd er o r the death of God, if only because G irard's own analysis brings the activity of b la m ­ ing into question. N evertheless, it can barely escape ou r a tten tio n th a t it is to som eone’s m aterial benefit th a t people should have m odels of how to desire, th a t these m odels should a p p ear to be w ithout au th o rsh ip , and th a t the feelings aroused in th eir b eh o ld ­ ers should include an envy and sense of w orthlessness th a t cannot be assuaged, no m a tte r how m uch the beholder buys, because the desires he/she is trying to satisfy are transcendent. N or can it escape the historical observer’s a tten tio n th at, w hereas in the nineteenth century alcohol was used as a m eans to lure an d lock

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the colonized into a m oney economy, th a t function is now adays effected in the T hird W orld via the propagation of im ages, m odels of desiring; and therefore th a t the phrase the creation o f dependency m ay as a p p ro p ria te ly be used of im ages as of substances.

The Triangle I have h ith e rto discussed only one genre of advertisem ent: th a t in which the im age of the m odel is overtly present. The question now arises: Is th is in som e sense a key genre w ith the help of w hich we can unlock the psychological m echanism s of other genres in w hich the tria n g u la rity of the stru ctu re of desire is not so clearly m anifest? Here one ought to be cautious: the vast am ount of em pirical investigation th a t the industry itself conducts, however self-serving its ends and how ever im poverished the theory behind it, cannot be ignored. This research continually stresses the variety of functions fulfilled by advertising and the variety of m eans it m u st em ploy. Any open-m inded survey of the phenom enon m ust face the possibility th a t its n a tu re is p rotean. F u rth erm o re, even in the case of the genre I have concentrated on, w here the arg u m en t for an underlying tria n g u la r stru ctu re is strongest, the analysis I give is not exhaustive. I have not discussed by w h at accu ltu rativ e processes the yearning tow ard specific m od­ els is set up. N or have I touched on the stru c tu re th a t arises betw een the gaze of the m odel, the gaze of the desiring (male) cam era, an d the gaze of the beholding (female) subject. N or have I tried to describe the iconological repertoire the genre has at its com m and or the sem ics of the looks, gestures, and postures it em ploys. N or have I discussed the beh o ld er’s response to the n a r­ cissism of the m odel, o r the n a tu re of beholding as a voyeuristic act, or the q uality th a t personal experience takes on in a w orld of im ages. On the o th er h an d , I will not go to the extrem e of conceding th a t a tria n g u la r stru c tu re is sim ply one am ong m any stru ctu res on w hich advertising can call. Insofar as the advertiser as desiring subject in terjects itself betw een the subject whose desire it desires to form an d the object it desires to sell, the shape of the elem entary adv ertisin g act m u st be trian g u lar; and insofar as the n atu re of adv ertisin g dem ands th a t the desire of the advertiser rem ain con­

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cealed, disguise itself as som ething else, the purpose of criticism should be to reveal the hidden triangle. Thus, to take the sim plest of exam ples, a sales catalogue m ay seem to em ploy only dyadic subject—object stru ctu res in its advertisem ents: an item for sale is pictured, w ith a price and a brief description. B ut w hy this p ictu re, why this description? The picture and description are not the only or the best possible representation of the item (w hatever these m ight be): they represent som eone's im age of the item as held in the gaze of desire: they are a representation of a desired item , an item desired in a m odel way, not an item in itself. Thus the stru c ­ ture of the ap p aren tly dyadic act is in fact triangular; the m ed iato r has ch aracteristically m asked him self/herself; and an analysis th a t unm asks h im /her is a dem ystificatory act.

Contending Analyses At the point w here G ira rd ’s analysis of tria n g u la r form s of desire ought to be of the g reatest value to a historical critique of ad v er­ tising, it is reg rettab ly sketchiest, nam ely in its d o cum entation of the spread of the phenom enon in society. N evertheless, read in conjunction w ith its key texts, the novels of Cervantes, S tendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Proust, it does go a long w ay tow ard providing an etiology for the resentful bafflem ent th a t is p a rt of the background m ood of the lives of m any in late-cap italist con­ sum er society confronting the objects they are invited to consum e. Furtherm ore, the vision of a "tim e before” w hich we find in G irard seems to me m ore historically defensible, less a creation of nos­ talgia, th an the vision of history in the h u m an ist critiq u e of a d ­ vertising, w hich is the critique we are m ost fam iliar w ith in S outh Africa. To su b sta n tia te this point, let m e tu rn briefly to a study representative, in term s of acum en an d m oral energy, of the best of the school of F. R. Leavis, nam ely The Imagery o f Power by Fred Inglis.6 In c o n trast to the G irardian schem e, in w hich the p rim a ry tra n s­ action is betw een consum er and object, m ediated through the m odel, the p rim a ry tran sactio n in Inglis’ schem e is betw een a d ­ v ertiser an d consum er, m ediated through the ad vertisem ent. From his "anonym ous v an ta g e ” behind the advertisem ent, the a d v ertiser sets ab o u t providing pseudosolutions to the "im m anent fan tasies”

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of the con su m er th a t have the effect of "containing each m an and w om an w ith in th eir ow n feelings and preventing open seeing of a com m on condition" (p. 78). Thus, like G irard, Inglis points on the one h an d to the m u tu a l reinforcing of individualism and solitude, and on the o th e r to the reign of m odels (in Inglis, bad models). B ut Inglis does nothing to explain the pow er of the bad m odels proposed by ad v ertisem en ts over people’s m inds, except to talk ab o u t th eir "spellbinding” quality. Hence he descends to a dualism th a t we find in one form or a n o th er in all h u m an ist criticism of advertising: a dualism of the cunning of the advertiser and the innocent sim plicity of the consum er. It is profoundly to be doubted w h eth er ad v ertisers in fact stan d outside the system of fantasy th at reigns in society and m an ip u late it for th eir own ends. It is far m ore likely th a t they tell the tru th w hen they say th a t they believe in w h at they are doing (w hatever "believe in ” m eans), th at is, th a t they are involved in the sam e fantasies as the consum er. If so, th e focus of analysis ought to be the system itself: first the desire th a t inform s it, then the forces th a t create it. W hen Inglis com es to talk about the advertisem ent itself, the earlier d u alism em erges in a n o th er form as an opposition betw een the object of consum ption and the "m oral atm o sp h ere” (th at is, usually the false glam or) of its im age (p. 78). The energies of the advertiser, Inglis says, are directed tow ard m aking this opposition invisible, to w ard hiding the gap betw een object and im age. The object m u st become its im age in the consum er’s m ind; and the m ore skillful the advertiser, the m ore successfully is the gap con­ cealed. H ere there is a sim ple question th a t m ust be asked: Why is the consum er so easily "spellbound” into confusing signified w ith signifier? D enunciations of the m anipulativeness of ad v ertis­ ers can u n fo rtu n ately all too easily be tu rn ed on th eir heads into denunciations of the gullibility of consum ers. Both are form s of scapegoating, n e ith er accom plishes anything. B ehind all the good versus b a d d ualism s th a t we find in m orally based h u m an ist cri­ tiques of advertising lies an ahistorical opposition betw een an Edenic tim e before an d a fallen present. Inglis, like Leavis before him , clearly believes th a t love, sex, the family, and so on are debased by being used to glam orize m undane objects for sale. "How can one tru ly love,” the underlying argum ent runs, "if one believes th a t perfum e X or deodorant Y is the prerequisite of

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love?” The im m ediate contrast being draw n is betw een a w orld in w hich tru e (unm ediated) love is felt and a w orld in w hich X and Y are felt to be the prerequisites of love. But the deeper co n trast is betw een an original w orld of true (unm ediated) love in w hich X and Y did not exist (because there was no need for them ) and a m odern w orld in w hich they do. In o th er w ords, the c o n trast is betw een an u nm ediated original and a fallen, m ediated m odern; and the h idden yearning is for an unm ediated w orld, th a t is, a w orld w ith o ut language.

Syntax

Interview

DA: These essays are closely related. Compared with your earlier work in stylistics, they appear to involve a shift toward rhetoric. What were their points of origin, and what do they represent in terms of your linguistic interests? JM C: I spent 1979 on leave from the University of Cape Town, working on Waiting for the Barbarians and getting back to grips with linguistics. Though I had intermittently taught courses in grammar and in stylistics in Cape Town, I had lost touch with new developments. I spent a semester in Texas, in the Department of Linguistics, sitting in on Lauri Karttunen's seminar on syntax, doing a lot of reading, and generally trying to reposition myself in a discipline that was expanding so rapidly in so many directions that no one could expect to command more than one or two branches. After Texas I went to Berkeley for another three months. It was a lonely period but a productive one. I completed the novel and drafted these three essays, which belong closely together in conception. The long essay on the rhetoric of the passive is the most fundamental of the three. Syntactic theory has moved on since I wrote it, and the descriptive model of passivization that I use (Joan Bresnan's) has been superseded, but the main point of the essay, I believe, still stands: that even if we were able to develop a stylistics based strictly on linguistics— that is, a proper linguistic stylistics— rhetoric would remain independent of it. In other words, rhetoric and linguistic stylistics are independent discourses describing, in an overlapping way, the same field. How did I come to this conclusion? It was part of the rather positivistic optimism in which I had been brought up, and which I had not sufficiently questioned, that a new and mathematicized stylistics would, by its ca­ pacity to define terms rigorously, to build theorems, to construct analytic procedures, and so forth, be able to answer all the questions about the relation of form and meaning that the schools of rhetoric had been 141

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fumbling helplessly with for two and a half millennia. Well, the year I spent mulling over passive sentences cured me of this scientistic arrog­ ance. I read Aldo Scaglione's Classical Theory of Composition and went back to Greek and Roman rhetoric with a new respect. Whether what this reading enabled me to say about passivization has any enduring value I can’t judge. But the notion of a grammatical fiction— which is not quite the same thing as folk grammar—still seems to me interesting: that, independently of the derivational and even psycholinguistic ac­ counts that linguistics gives of certain grammatical phenomena (for in­ stance, the truncated passive), there may operate within communities of readers quite powerful quasigrammatical fictions that tell how these phenomena are to be interpreted. DA: You were working on Waiting for the Barbarians at this point. There are sharp stylistic and narratological differences between In the Heart of the Country and Barbarians: a less experimental treatment of narrative voice, a greater willingness to accommodate natural description (though the setting is historically nonspecific), and a highly ordered sense of time (one year). What lay behind these developments? JM C: I must confess I don't see an immediate connection between Barbarians and the linguistic work I was doing in 1979. We must at least entertain the possibility that some of the writing I do is play, relief, diversion, of no great import outside its own disciplinary field. Except perhaps that it may be a telling fact about me that I spend some of my time (too much of my time?) in occupations that take me away from the great world and its concerns. You are right to say that Barbarians is more accommodating toward nature description than In the Heart of the Country or, for that matter, Dusklands. But of course what is "described" in Barbarians is a landscape I have never seen; whereas I know the landscape of the other two books, to say nothing of Michael K, all too well. So the landscape of Barbarians represented a challenge to my power of envisioning, while the Karoo threatened only the tedium of reproduction, reproduction of a phrase­ ology in which the Karoo has been done to death in a century of writing and overwriting (drab bushes, stunted trees, heat-stunned flats, shrilling of cicadas, and so forth). In each of the four novels after Dusklands there seems to be one feature of technique on which there is a heavy concentration. In In the

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Heart it was cutting, montage. In Barbarians it was milieu. In Michael K it was the pace of narration. In Foe it was voice. DA: I would like to go back to developments in your writing during this period. In a long-term view of your work, one detects a gradual shift from an emphasis on somewhat fixed epistemic structures to a more fluid, protean, open-ended version of textuality— something like a shift from ideology to discourse, or to discourse in conflict with power. In these essays, you seem to be negotiating these poles; moreover, they seem to stand out sharply in Barbarians. Let me illustrate this. In our discussion of structuralism and generative linguistics, the name of Whorf came up; in these essays, especially the one on Newton, Whorf— or the "von Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis"— is dealt with at some length. The hypothesis, briefly, that the structures of particular languages have epistemological and even metaphysical consequences, has interested you seriously, certainly in Richard Ohmann’s arguments concerning style as a form of what you call "epistemic choice." The hypothesis has obvious relevance to colonial discourse. You men­ tion that W horf's precursor, von Humboldt, had behind him the expan­ sion and consolidation of colonial power, which brought European phil­ ologists into contact with "the staggering diversity of the tongues of mankind." Here we come closer to your fiction. There is a moment in Dusklands that I would remind you of: in one of his crazed efforts at self-affirmation, the frontiersman Jacobus Coetzee sings the ditty: “Hot­ tentot, Hottentot, / / am not a Hottentot." This is glossed as follows: "It was neater in Dutch than in Nama, which still lived in the flowering-time of inflexion." This is a Whorfian moment, not so? It reflects the Manichaeanism of the colonial situation— Jacobus Coetzee is defining himself against the Other, but more successfully in his own, the colonial, lan­ guage. In the essay on Newton, however, you resist the rigidity of the Whorf­ ian hypothesis, preferring to see Newton's prose not in terms of its providing the basis for a mechanistic world view, but as a field of con­ testation. Let me apply this to Barbarians: the Empire insists (and even depends) on the maintenance of absolute differences, and it employs men like Joll to sustain these differences through torture. Against such versions of "truth," the novel provides various forms of disconfirmation: we have the Magistrate's equivocal treatment of the barbarian girl, the transformations occurring in dreams, the ambiguities surrounding the

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march of events, the play on signification in the indecipherable barbarian script, and so on. Is it not the case that in the novel you are finding fictional analogues for the play of linguistic-cultural tensions explored, in different terms, in the essays? One seems to arrive at a similar conclusion when one asks, simply, why should passivization engage you in this way? The description in "The Agentless Sentence" of passivization as strategy seems applicable to your own work: it "leaves an uneasy feeling: it opens up an area of vagueness that can simply be skated over (as most of us do in everyday usage), but that can be explored and exploited for his own ends by a writer who takes seriously the question of whether language is a good map of reality." Is "agentlessness" not in part a defense against the instrumentality imposed by History? Is it not a way of refusing the tyranny of closed systems? (I notice, too, that deconstruction, in the form of Derrida's "White Mythology," comes into your work at this point.) JM C: Before I get down to the question, let me say something about "the flowering-time of inflexion." It is a phrase from one of the great nineteenth-century philologists, I forget whom. It forms part of an ar­ gument that languages evolve in time, passing through a middle stage of being highly inflected to an advanced stage (associated with advanced civilizations) when they shed inflection and take on a purely analytic morphology and syntax. So the quotation from Dusklands isn't so much a Whorfian moment as a moment from a more complacently colonial science of language. Let me add parenthetically, too, that the Whorfian sword cuts both ways. If the Hopi is, to a degree, trapped in the metaphysics of time prescribed by the Hopi verb scheme (granting W horf's thesis for the moment), then the European who can't understand Hopi time reference is equally trapped inside the metaphysics of his/her own language. As to what I say about Newton and his struggle not to be confined by the epistemology of Latin, I am intrigued by your suggestion that the story I tell about Newton is an allegory of my own wanderings. It has a plausible ring. Nevertheless, I ask myself: Should I be hospitable to every plausible idea I hear about myself, on the grounds that what has never occurred to me is likely to be what I have been hiding from myself? Perhaps not: rather than giving in so easily, maybe I owe it to myself to offer a decent resistance and live with the consequences.

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What I point to in Newton is an immense effort of consciousness to think outside his language (Latin and English offer the same difficulties in regard to agency). But even before 1979 I did not believe fora moment that thinking outside a language was impossible. (Thinking outside lan­ guage per se is another story.) As to your question about agentlessness, let me restate what I see as the dilemma raised by a sentence like "A shot was fired." Either agency is not thought, or agency is thought and then deleted. In this second case, where, so to speak, is it deleted to? Where is the unconscious of syntactic operations? Is it an unconscious whose contents can be recov­ ered? But it is the first case that really teases thought. For one can say act without agent, but how does one think act without agent? DA: Newton's problem, as you describe it, was precisely that he did not have a language in which to account for an observable phenomenon; nevertheless, how would you respond to the charge that your work endorses a linguistic idealism, that it upholds the view that reality and history are purely constructs of language? JM C: I presume that the word charge is carefully chosen. It is certainly a crime of a sort, in South Africa today [1990], to be an idealist. So I warily ask: In embarking on a response to the charge do I implicitly accept a certain jurisdiction? Let me return to Newton. I remember quite clearly that even as a child I had obscure doubts about the theory of gravity and about explanations of physical phenomena that invoked it. As I read more about Newton, I was heartened to find that there is in fact a quite respectable tradition of skepticism about gravity, going back to Leibniz. What I say in the Newton essay is therefore not new: I simply restate that skepticism in a new form by confronting Newton as a writer engaged in a rhetorical, persuasive exercise in which he himself is perhaps the ultimate target of his own persuasion. Gravitation as a real existent is not necessary to Newton as mathe­ matical physicist. All he needs is a variable g. Then the movements of "bodies"— abstract bodies, admittedly, but with a certain resemblance to the earth, the sun, and so forth— relative to each other will be pre­ dicted by a set of equations involving g and other variables. The question is, why is there a homology between operations on the mathematician's page and operations out in the heavens? It is in an effort to answer this

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question that Newton physicalizes g. I, in my naivete— I am not a phi­ losopher— stand unconvinced and puzzled. I don't understand why the universe behaves as mathematics predicts it should. In certain particularly dubious moods I wonder whether we know at all how the universe '‘really" behaves: is our image, our representation of what happens in the universe perhaps not of the same order of privacy as our mathe­ matics? Is this idealism? Probably. It is certainly skepticism. DA: Each of these essays is concerned with eighteenth-century prose style. In "The Agentless Sentence" you speak about the decline of irony, its relative absence from twentieth-century political argumentation and its association with conservatism. Despite such misgivings, you launched Foe, with its eighteenth-century echoes, into a rhetorical climate unreceptive to the kind of nuance you discuss here? JM C: The essay on agentless sentences took its inspiration from work by Richard Ohmann on the language of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For the purposes of my investigations I read a lot of eighteenth-century prose with the kind of attention to form that one doesn't usually give when one is reading for content. What I like about eighteenth-century English prose is its transparency, particularly the transparency of its syntax, even when the syntax is quite complex. This isn't just the consequence of writing with Latin models at the back of one's mind: Defoe's syntax is as transparent as Swift's, yet Defoe's command of Latin was shaky. Foe, which I began to write in 1983, is a tribute of sorts to eighteenth-century English prose style. I hope it does not read like pastiche. Perhaps Defoe's prose is bare enough to serve as a model without overwhelming its imitator. I doubt that one could imitate Swift without falling into pastiche. The observation on the decline of irony in the political discourse of popular democracies is not my own— I owe it to Ian Watt. As for Foe, I don't think of it as a particularly irony-ridden book. But the rhetorical climate into which Foe was launched, at least in South Africa, was indeed, as you say, unpropitious.

The Rhetoric of the Passive in English (1980) 1. Introduction There is a w ell-know n arg u m en t in the field of stylistics whose general form is as follows. W hen a w rite r uses the sam e syntactic operation again and again, he is signaling a p a rtic u la r h ab it of m aking sense of his m aterial. The kind of linkage th a t he m akes betw een item s, the kind of logical relation th a t he creates betw een propositions, the em phasis he gives to one verbal category over an o th er—all of these being logical o r epistem ological acts w ith m ore o r less clear syn­ tactic co rrelates—can be read as clues to the logical or epistem o­ logical m atrices w ithin w hich his thinking moves. If we can isolate an d describe such m atrices, we can learn about h ab its of m eaning in his w ork a t a level of generality higher than the level of content. Thus we can claim to be uncovering p a rtic u la r m eanings in p a r­ ticu lar sy n tactic operations. Let m e anchor this a b stra c t argum ent by quoting one of its m ore eloquent p resentations, followed by an exam ple of the kind of investigation it leads to. The p resentation is from an early but influential essay by R ichard O hm ann in w hich he discusses style as a form of "epistem ic choice.” If the critic is able to isolate and examine the most primitive choices which lie behind a work of prose, they can reveal to him the very roots of a w riter's epistemology . . . A heavy dependence on abstraction, a peculiar use of the present tense, a habitual evocation of sim ilarities through parallel structure, a tendency to place feelings in syntactical positions of agency, a trick of underplaying causal words: any of these patterns of expression, when repeated with unusual frequency, is the sign of a habit of 147

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meaning, and thus of a persistent way of sorting out the phenom ­ ena of experience.1 The procedure O hm ann suggests, then, is th a t we w ork back from the h ab itu al syntactic p a ttern , via an act of in te rp retatio n , to the “h ab it of m eaning" th a t lies behind it, and eventually, p erh ap s via a generalization from the set of all h ab its (O hm ann is not specific), to the "roots of the w riter's epistem ology."2 The crucial step in this procedure is the act of in te rp re ta tio n th at allows us to move from the h a b itu al syntactic p a tte rn to the m eaning it signals. H ere follows an exam ple of how such a step can be achieved. I quote from one of H em ingw ay’s stories of the 1920s. The syntactic operation in question is coordination w ith and, an operation typical of the story as a whole, an d one th at, in the last two sentences quoted, is reitera te d to the point of becom ­ ing bizarre. A man and a woman sat at the far end of the restaurant. He was middle-aged and she was young and wore black. All during the meal she would blow out her breath into the cold damp air. The man would look at it and shake his head. They ate w ithout talking and the man held her hand under the table. She was good-looking and they seemed very sad.3 W hat does the p a tte rn of coordination reveal? We can best in ­ terp ret it by saying w hat it does not do. It does not state relations betw een the observed d a ta except in the m ost ru d im e n ta ry way by statin g them sequentially. N or does it show forth the presence of a p a rtic u la r intelligence or sensibility doing the observing. The n arrato r, we m ight say, does not see a w orld of in terrelatio n s, dependencies, causes and effects such as is reflected in n orm al procedures of sentence linkage and subordination. Instead he sees a w orld of m ere phenom ena on w hich his intelligence has no shaping effect.4 Now the naive direction in w hich to lead the arg u m en t a t this point is to assert a necessary relationship betw een the syntactic p a ttern an d its in terp retatio n . For it is not difficult a t all to con­ stru ct a counterexam ple in w hich a highly p a ra ta c tic syntax em ­ bodies a sensibility quite different from the alienated one I have described above. The naive step is to argue for a neat m apping from syntactic form to m eaning. A m ore fruitful question to ask

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in stead is w h eth er a given form can accom m odate any given m ean­ ing, an d , if n ot (as seem s very likely), w h at the range of m eanings is th a t a given form accom m odates in practice. The discipline th a t investigates and describes accom m odations betw een form an d m eaning in the practice of artful speech is rhetoric. A ristotle, in the first book of his Rhetoric, is a t pains to argue th a t rh eto ric is a genuine science (techne), ra th e r than a m ere codification of the practice (empeiria) of successful speakers, on the grounds th a t the very success of certain speakers in arguing cases p o in ts to stab le cause-and-effect relations betw een verbal p a ttern s an d th eir real-w orld consequences. It is these stable re­ lations th a t rh eto ric a tte m p ts to system atize in the form of rules.5 The system atic n a tu re of rhetoric distinguishes it from stylistics, w hich in th is essay I w ill tre a t as a discipline whose dom ain is specific texts. The project of relating syntactic form s to ranges of m eaning clearly belongs to rh eto ric in A ristotle's sense. On the subject of p a ra ta c tic sentences, classical rhetoric has some clear-sighted observations to make. The p ara tac tic sentence, says A ristotle, is in herently form less since its form is dictated by its m aterial. It has no p red ictab le end (because it can be continued ad infinitum ); therefore, it creates no sense of an ticipation in the h earer an d cannot m ount to a clim ax. Further, the longer a se­ quence of p a ra ta c tic sentences is continued, the m ore dulling it becom es (Rhetoric, III.9). In o th er words, there is no indication in the form of the sentence of a m ind im posing its o rd er on the d a ta of experience, and none of the shaping of feeling th a t the periodic sentence, w ith its in b u ilt effects of balance and gradation, achieves. T here is no great distance betw een the ch aracterization I gave of H em ingw ay’s syntax above and A ristotle's ch aracteri­ zation of p a ra tax is here. Let us now tu rn to passivization, a syntactic operation to whose p o ten tial m odern stylistics has given considerable attention. Here are som e rep resen tativ e com m ents m ade by scholars about the rh eto rical p o ten tial of the passive. Ian W att: Passives "abate . . . the active n a tu re of the subjectverb-and-object sequence." They contribute to texts "m any of the verbal an d syntactic qualities of a b strac t discourse; of expository ra th e r th an n a rra tiv e prose.”6 Roger Fow ler: Syntax has the pow er "to guide the rea d er into a

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p a rtic u la r cognitive o rien tatio n tow ards sentence-content.” By af­ fecting the focus of a sentence, the active form can consolidate the superficial subject as “h e ro ” w here the passive w ould consolidate the subject as "sufferer.” If the agent is system atically deleted "the im pression would be given of a cen tral p a rtic ip a n t ‘to w hom things h ap p en ed '—as opposed to 'w ho h ad things done to h im .’”7 R ichard O hm ann: The passive “throw s em phasis on the direct object and reduces em phasis on the su b ject.” It "answ ers well to a preference for objectivity and distance," p articu larly w hen the agent is not specified.8 W alker Gibson: The passive is a "technique for avoiding personal responsibility for one’s statem en ts."9 These q u o tations give a fair idea of w h at questions about the passive have interested stylisticians: (1) Are there system atic dif­ ferences of em phasis o r focus betw een corresponding active and passive sentences, and, if so, can we form ulate rules relatin g passivization to shifts in em phasis or focus? (2) Can subjecthood or objecthood as such, or SVO order, be given a sem antic c h a ra c te r­ ization? (3) Can we give a sem antic in te rp retatio n to the absence of the agentive phrase? (4) For w hat p rag m atic o r stylistic m otives is the passive em ployed so frequently in w h at we m ay loosely call ab stract o r objective discourse? Though (3), and possibly (1), m ight be treated as subcases of (2), all these questions confront significant linguistic issues, leading as they do to consideration of the iconicity of Subject-O bject o rd er (that is, to the notion th a t Subject-O bject o rd er in the u nm arked active form reflects tem poral/causal order) and thus to questions about universals of language.10 But w hen we tu rn to classical rhetoric, we find a lacuna w here we w ould expect the passive to be treated . Indeed, even in w h at has come dow n to us of classical g ra m m a r we find the passive treated as a feature of the verb alone, not as a feature of sen­ tences.11 This lacuna in rh eto ric provides the sta rtin g point for the investigation I carry out in this essay. The question is this: Is it a genuine defect in classical rhetoric th a t it does not recognize the passive as a rh eto rical stru c tu re in its ow n rig h t, or, on the con­ trary, is m odern stylistics m istaken in taking its lead from g ram ­ m ar an d isolating the passive as an autonom ous device?

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2. The Passive in Classical Grammar and Rhetoric It is tem p tin g to place the w hole blam e for the inadequacy of the tre a tm e n t of the passive in classical rh eto ric on the ru d im e n ta ri­ ness of syntactic theory in classical gram m ar. B ut the p icture is n ot as sim ple as th a t. The passive is a purely syntactic phenom e­ non only w here it is given a purely syntactic definition. Classical g ra m m a r tre a te d the voice of the verb in a m ixed fashion: in term s of m orphology an d in term s of the underlying logic of agency. B roadly speaking, it expected "active" m eaning to be reflected in active m orphology. Thus we find Q uintilian puzzling over verbs th a t are passive in m orphology yet not in "m eaning.”12 The sam e n o n sy n tactic conception of the passive prevails throughout the classical era, from Dionysius Thrax to P riscian.13 B ut passivization does not m erely change the form of the verb. In Greek an d L atin, as in E nglish, it usually disturbs w ord order. W hen co n stitu en t o rd er is d istu rb ed —and p articu larly w hen there is a m ajo r infringem ent, such as the m ovem ent of the subject out of in itial position o r of the verb aw ay from final position—rhetoric takes note of the infringem ent and tries to account for its conse­ quences. The generic nam e for disturbances of norm al w ord o rder is hyperbaton.14 Therefore, if passivization h ad been treated in rhetoric, the logical place to tre a t it w ould have been un d er the heading of h yperbaton. Yet in none of the treatises does this h a p ­ pen. H yperbaton is understood to w ork as follows (I p arap h rase the orthodox line th a t h a d evolved by the tim e of Priscian).15 (1) The n a tu ra l o rd er of constitu en ts in the sentence is th a t defined by L atin Kunstprosa, w ith subject initial an d verb final. (2) This n a t­ u ral o rd er is also the logical order. (3) B ut in the interest of aes­ thetic ap p eal, o r for the sake of em phasis, o r (in Longinus) for the sake of rep resen tin g d ram atically states of inner passion, tra n s­ gressions of the n a tu ra l, logical o rder m ay take place. These transgressions are h y p erb ata. (4) H yperbaton m ust be used sp a r­ ingly, since it depends for its effectiveness on the m aintenance of the no rm of n a tu ra l w ord order. (It is plain th a t the notions of background a n d foreground associated w ith Prague School stylis­ tics are alread y a t w ork here.)

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In view of the clear aw areness am ong rh etoricians th a t h yper­ baton w as a m eans a speaker could em ploy to em phasize (or foreground) a p a rtic u la r con stitu en t of a sentence—a function also fulfilled by passivization (see section 4 below)—it seem s foolhardy to ascribe the absence of a specific trea tm e n t of the passive in rhetoric to the inadequacy of g ram m atical theory alone. Instead I would suggest the following explanation. (1) The trea tm e n t of voice as a ch aracteristic of the verb alone— and therefore the trea tm e n t of the passive voice as a m orphological/sem antic m a tte r w ith no syntactic correlate—certainly did not m ake it easy for g ram m arian s to see corresponding active and passive sentences as pairs and thereby be led to explore g ram ­ m atical relations betw een the sentence pairs. In addition, (2) the failure to develop sep arate vocabularies for w ord categories, syn­ tactic categories, and logical categories (onoma-rhema in Greek and nomen-verbum in L atin do service for noun-verb as well as subject-predicate) m ade it difficult to distinguish betw een logicalsem antic agents and syntactic subjects. N evertheless, (3) the very vagueness w ith w hich the im p o rtan t concept of n a tu ra l w ord o r­ der (naturalis ordo) is defined—the com peting claim s of everyday spoken language, of a rtistic prose, and of logic are never recon­ ciled—and yet the acuteness w ith w hich nuances of em phasis are picked out, m ake it unlikely th a t for a thousand years the eyes of connoisseurs and theorists would have rem ained blind to the shifts of em phasis th a t w ere achieved in everyday speech through the m eans of passivization. F urtherm ore, (4) as Paul de M an points out, it is a peculiarly m odern idea th a t one can "pass from g ra m ­ m atical to rh etorical stru ctu res w ithout difficulty o r in terru p tio n ." The two disciplines, de M an argues, both cover the linguistic field, b ut w ith different epistem ologies behind th em .16 Therefore, focus­ ing de M an's arg u m en t on the case of the passive, I w ould suggest (5) th a t the very skim py tre a tm e n t classical g ram m ar gives the phenom enon u n d e r the heading of voice is repeated by rhetoric, b u t in its ow n, autonom ous, non g ram m atical term s, and elabo­ rated , u n d er the heading of hyperbaton. In o th er w ords, passivi­ zation in the discipline of g ra m m a r becom es a form of hyperb ato n in the discipline of rhetoric; and therefore—in view of the absence of exam ples of passives treated as h y p erb ata—passivization m ust

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have been seen as an u n im p o rtan t or everyday or secondary kind of h y p erb ato n . I will try to su b sta n tia te this explanation in section 5.1 below by arguing th a t in a very large p roportion of cases w here passivization is the syntactic o peration th a t m akes a p a rtic u la r rh eto r­ ical stru c tu re possible, it can be explained as a secondary or en­ abling o p eration. If this is so, then stylistic interp retatio n s of the passive in w hich a great deal of w eight is attach ed to the sem antics of agency w ill have to be rethought.

3. Passive Constructions Let me now tu rn to m odern linguistic theory, and take as a point of d e p artu re the account of the passive sketched in Chom sky's Aspects o f the Theory o f Syntax.17 In Chom sky’s account, passive sentences differ from corresponding active sentences in underlying stru c tu re an d in having undergone the Passive transform ation. Though altern a tiv e proposals for underlying stru ctu re have been p u t forw ard w ith in the stan d ard -th eo ry m odel (for exam ple, by K. H aseg aw a18), it is fair to say th a t for the sta n d ard theory the active—passive d istin ctio n has hinged on the existence of the Pas­ sive tran sfo rm ation. More rad ical questionings of Chom sky's account have come from linguists who have argued th at, because it ascribes different underlying stru ctu res to corresponding actives and passives, it in fact fails to account for th eir synonym y,19 and th a t its failure to account for so-called unpassives like The door was unpainted con­ stitu tes a serious flaw.20 F u rth e r objections to Chom sky's account, less significant, p er­ haps, in th a t they do not raise large theoretical issues, b u t req u ir­ ing, nevertheless, an answ er in a project like the present one, in w hich a line betw een passives and nonpassives m ust be draw n as clearly as possible, are these: (1) There is a range of passive con­ stru ctio n s w ith get, become, stand (He got arrested by the sheriff, He became disturbed by my presence, He stands rebuked by the court), and p erh ap s o th er verbs as well, to w hich the transform ational account does not extend in a straightforw ard way.21 (2) Even in present-day E nglish there are exceptions to the use of by to govern

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the agentive phrase (He is known to me, The room was permeated w ith gas, He was amazed at the news). In eighteenth-century E n ­ glish w ith was actually productive in this position.22 W hile in theory the transform ational fram ew ork could be ex­ tended to absorb these instances, the extension w ould ad d a w elter of detail to both lexical rules and the transform ational rule itself. Finally, we m ust consider an objection to the tran sfo rm atio n al account on the grounds of universal gram m ar. Taken seriously, this objection w ould m ake it im possible to give any purely syn­ tactic definition to the passive. The argum ent rests on the fact th at sentence pairs whose logical and sem antic interrelatio n s are m uch like the relations of reg u lar English active-passive p airs occur in o th er languages in a w ide diversity of syntactic stru ctu res. V. S. K hrakovsky cites exam ples from a variety of languages, b oth Indo-E uropean and non—Indo-E uropean 23 N or is it difficult to find com parable exam ples in English. In (1) and (2) below, both the (b) and (c) sentences stan d in a passive-to-active relatio n to the (a) sentence: 1. a. The c ap tain ordered the soldiers to shoot a t sight. b. The soldiers were ordered by the cap tain to shoot a t sight. c. The soldiers w ere u n d e r orders from the cap tain to shoot at sight. 2. a. A stream runs through the garden. b. The garden is ru n through by a stream . c. The garden has a stream running through it. T raditional gram m ars th a t sim ply define a passive sentence as one in w hich the logical and g ram m atical subjects are n o t identical are able to c ap tu re the active-to-passive relatio n of the (a) and (c) pairs. The w eakness of such a definition, however, is its vagueness: so w ide a v ariety of sentences can be m ade to fit it th a t the form al properties they share becom e triv ial.24 As long as nothing m ore is required th an a derivational account of sentences like (lb), a tran sfo rm atio n will suffice and be favored because of its sim plicity. However, the range of objections I have cited m akes a tran sfo rm atio n al account, an d indeed any o th er purely syntactic account, unsatisfactory. The problem thus b e­ comes one of em bodying b o th logical-sem antic relations and syn­

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tactic relatio n s in an unam biguous definition of the passive. One such definition is given by B resnan;25 all the passives discussed in section 5 below m eet the criteria of this definition. In brief, B resnan's proposal am ounts to the following. The focus of the active-passive opposition is taken to be the active-passive verb p a ir (for exam ple, eat-eaten). For each of the pair, two types of inform ation are entered in the lexicon: first, the range of pos­ sible syntactic contexts of the verb; second, the functional stru c­ tu re of the verb, th a t is, the logical argum ent stru ctu res in w hich the verb can occur w ith NPs. Thus we have the entries: eat: eat + en:

V, [------NP] V, [------NP] V, [be/get----- ]

NPi EAT NP2 (3y) NPi EAT y (3x) x EAT N P2

NPi an d NP2 are respectively Subject and Object, defined accord­ ing to th eir d eep-structure configurations to left o r right of the verb. The th ree possibilities thus distinguish the sentences Tom ate the cake, Tom ate, and The cake was/got eaten. The agentive p hrase in The cake was/got eaten by Tom is accounted for as an optional p repositional phrase th a t identifies the logical subject. The m ain advantage of B resn an ’s definition over the transfor­ m atio n al definition is th a t it identifies the active-passive opposi­ tion as one in w hich both the syntactic functions of subjecthood an d objecthood and the logic of underlying sem antic relations are involved. Though it does not im m ediately account for all the prob­ lem sentences I have cited, in principle it allows of m odification to the lexicon fairly easily. In the discussion th a t follows I retain the useful term s passivized, (of sentences) and passivization, since they indicate the undoubtedly secondary ch aracter of passive sen­ tences; b u t they are to be understood in B resnan's term s (as poin t­ ing to the passive lexical entry for the verb) ra th e r th an in term s of passive tran sfo rm atio n al derivation. There are three subsidiary topics th a t deserve discussion: (a) the opposition betw een so-called active and passive derived nom inals, (b) the difference betw een actional and statal passive p a r­ ticiples, an d (c) the relatio n betw een long and short passives. a. The so-called active and passive derived nom inals are respec­ tively rep resented by sentences 3b and 3c:

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3. a. The b a rb a rian s destroy the city. b. The b a rb a ria n s' destruction of the city. c. The d estruction of the city by the b arb arian s. Since it is difficult to m ain tain th a t transform ations play any role in w ord form ation,26 we cannot derive 3b and 3c from active and passive sentences respectively. Therefore, a t m ost we can th in k of the relation betw een these tw o nom inals as weakly analogous to the active-passive relation. I do not draw on this analogy in section 5 below. R ather, I choose to tre a t the nom inals in term s of v a ria ­ tions in topicalization. b. On the o th er hand, no analysis can get far th a t can n o t d istin ­ guish the actional from the sta ta l sense of the passive particip le in: 4. The door was shut. Modern English poses p a rtic u la r problem s in this respect. In Old English, sta ta l and actional senses are kept a p a rt by the auxiliaries beon/wesan and weorpan. In M odern English the form al d istinction has collapsed. (Curm e suggests th a t it is being replaced by a dif­ ferent opposition betw een be passives an d get passives.27) The problem is not one of accounting for the am biguity of sen­ tences like 4: a transform ational description will do so in term s of two underlying stru ctu res, w hile a sem antic-syntactic descrip­ tion will give two lexical entries for shut. The problem in stylistic analysis is the w holly p ractical one of how to deal w ith the sheer num ber of am biguous statal-actio n al p articiples th a t one encoun­ ters in certain texts, p a rticu la rly in poetry. If we consider a series such as the following: 5. a. b. c. d.

He He He He

w as w as was was

forced to agree. inclined to agree. m inded to agree. prone to agree.

in w hich (a) is clearly actional, (c) clearly sta ta l, and (b) am b ig u ­ ous, we can see th a t the m ost satisfying inform al gloss we can give to the notion of am biguity here is "halfw ay betw een actional and statal" or "n either fully actional nor fully statal" ra th e r th a n "both actional an d s ta ta l.” If we accept w hat the exam ple points to,

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nam ely the p rinciple of a gradient betw een actional and sta ta l (as proposed by B olinger and by Svartvik28), then the separation of passive p red icates into tw o classes (rath er th an into three classes—actional, in term ed iate, sta ta l—or into two fuzzy classes) m ust involve a rb itra ry and contestable decisions. Futherm ore, it is likely to be at odds w ith literary practice, w hich ch arac teristi­ cally exploits nuances of am biguity. The p rocedure I therefore follow is to include unam biguous actional passives in m y tre a tm e n t b u t to exclude sta ta l and interm ediate/am biguous form s on the assum ption th a t in a fully de­ veloped rh eto ric of E nglish the la tte r w ill be dealt w ith u n d er a different head from th a t of the active-passive opposition. c. In tran sfo rm atio n al analysis, two different ways of deriving short passives like the following have been proposed: 6. The city was destroyed. The first is by m eans of a rule th a t deletes the agentive phrase fry + PRO after the Passive transform ation has been applied.29 The second posits an underlying stru ctu re for sentence 6 in w hich the subject node is lexically em pty.30 In the la tte r case, the agentive ph rase in the long passive arises as an optional prepositional phrase in underlying stru ctu re. An analysis like the second, in w hich the agentive is, so to speak, added to the short passive, is obviously m ore like B resnan's theory of the passive th an an analysis like the first, in w hich the agentive is, so to speak, deleted from the long passive. B ut there are several fu rth er em p irical reasons w hy the fry-phrase should be thought of as added ra th e r th an deleted: (1) W hile there are languages th at have sh o rt passives only, there are no languages th a t have long passives only.31 C onsiderations of universal g ram m ar therefore argue th a t the short passive should not be thought of as derived from the long. (2) W here both form s exist in a language, w hat historical evidence we have suggests th a t the long passive is of later date, and p erh ap s a literary invention.32 (3) D ata on language acquisition do not support the prediction th a t follows from the deletion analysis, nam ely th a t children should acquire the long form before the sh o rt.33 Q uite aside from the argum ent about w hether the passive should be tran sfo rm atio n ally derived or not, this evidence, though not

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overw helm ing, suggests th a t short passives should be treated as agentless sentences.

4. The Passive and Topicalization Let us now look a t the passive in the context of the language typology proposed in 1976 by Charles N. Li and S an d ra A. T hom p­ son,34 and from the point of view of Prague School functionalism . The fundam ental opposition in Li and T hom pson's typology is betw een subject-prom inent languages (like the Indo-E uropean languages) and topic-prom inent languages (like Chinese). In the former, the basic organization of the sentence is in term s of subject and predicate; in the latter, in term s of topic and com m ent.35 Among topic-prom inent languages, passivization e ith er does not occur o r occurs as a m arginal construction. Li and T hom pson suggest th a t this is because it is the n a tu re of topic-prom inent languages th a t any noun phrase can becom e the topic w ith o u t registering a change in the form of the verb. If this is so, th en a t least one function of passivization in subject-prom inent languages m ight be to topicalize a non-subject noun phrase; and the m o r­ phological change in the verb can be seen as sim ply a w ay of registering this topicalization m ovem ent. In this perspective, a subject is essentially a gram m aticalized topic, and passivization is a topicalization phenom enon. This analysis accords closely w ith the proposal of Charles Fill­ m ore th a t subjectivalization should be thought of as "prim ary topicalization," as d istin ct from such secondary topicalization op­ erations as stress assignm ent.36 Much the sam e conclusion is reached by Vilem M athesius in a historically based study of English: “the g ram m atical subject in M odern E nglish has com e to have a clearly th em atical function."37 (M athesius uses theme here in the sense in w hich Li and Thom pson use topic.) It is to counter the relative inflexibility of a p a tte rn in w hich subject an d topic norm ally both come first in a sentence, M athesius suggests, th a t M odern E nglish develops its extensive system of passive form s. F u rth e r insights into how the passive interacts w ith o th er syntactic operations to create shifts in them atizatio n o r rh em a tiz atio n have been elab o rated by J. F irbas and by W allace Chafe.38 Using a tran fo rm atio n al fram ew ork, Les­

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lie B u tters traces the sem antic effects of passivization on topicalization stru c tu re and th em atizatio n stru c tu re (which she d istin ­ guishes).39 T hus th ere is a strong body of evidence and argum ent to w arn us to keep o u r eyes open to the possibility th a t the m otive behind a given passivization m ay involve in the first place the opposition topic/them e versus com m ent/rhem e, and discourse relations, ra th e r th an the opposition subjecthood versus objecthood, and in trasen ten ce relations.

5. Rhetorical Uses of the Passive Since m y concern here w ill be w ith the rhetorical potential of the passive, I will pass over its various everyday uses (see section 6). I s ta rt w ith the question: In the h ands of w riters who use the passive in a com plex and system atic way, w hat can it be m ade to do? We do n o t often find rh etorically sophisticated uses of the p as­ sive in fiction (to say nothing of everyday speech). The trad itio n al novel is w edded to an ideal of realism th a t includes not only the rep resen tatio n of the ord in ary speech of o rdinary people, b u t the im itatio n , in its own n a rra tio n , of a sober, m iddle-class m anner. The poetics of the novel are anticlassical: w ith exceptions, it does n ot go in for the a risto cratic m ode of irony.40 (The passive, w ith its b lan d shifts of em phasis and the possibility it allows of stra ­ tegic ellipses, of course lends itself p articu larly to irony.) The m ost com plex an d system atic exploration of the rhetorical p o ten tial of the passive I have encountered is in eighteenth-cen­ tu ry discursive prose, the prose of essays, treatises, histories. Tak­ ing m y exam ples from w orks of this period, I w ill devote sections 5.1—5.3 to three of the m ore w idespread and inherently interesting uses of the construction. 5.1. One of the m ost p en etratin g readings of the style of the his­ to rian E d w ard G ibbon is given by R ichard O hm ann in his essay "M entalism in the S tu d y of L ite ra tu re ” (see note 8). O hm ann a d ­ dresses the question of how to relate G ibbon's fondness for the passive—a fondness th a t becom es m arked when G ibbon conducts his polem ical attack s on sup erstitio n —w ith the overall im pression

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Gibbon leaves of “know ing, im p ertu rb ab le ratio n ality . . . objec­ tivity an d d istan ce.” Taking up a sequence of sentences from the fam ous c h ap ter 15 of the Decline and Fall, O hm ann pursues an in tricate analysis to show th a t the tendency a t every p oint in these sentences, a tendency furthered p articu larly by passivization, is to de-em phasize the active role of the early C hristians in bringing about an d reporting such highly im plausible happenings as the casting out of devils an d the raising of the dead, so as to p o rtray these happenings as "in order." B ut (O hm ann's arg u m en t goes on) when the read er contrasts this orderly facade w ith the exotic and unlikely n a tu re of the events, he cannot refrain from asking ques­ tions ab o u t w ho carried out, w ho w itnessed, an d w ho rep o rted the events. Thus Gibbon effectually underm ines the m iraculous claim s of the early C hristian propagandists w ithout overtly com m ittin g him self ag ainst them . It is not im p o rtan t here th at certain features of O hm ann's a n a l­ ysis have been in validated by developm ents in syntactic theory (I refer in p a rtic u la r to his tre a tm e n t of derived nom inals). W hat is of concern is the form his argum ent takes. It proceeds in three stages: (1) He isolates a p a rtic u la r set of verbal form s (w hich we can here loosely call passives) on the grounds th a t they occur frequently enough in the text to becom e obtrusive. (2) On the basis of the two prem ises th a t passivization em phasizes the object a t the expense of the subject, and th a t agentive phrase deletions have a psycholinguistic correlate (th at is, th a t the agentive is in som e sense "in" the m ind before it is deleted), he gives a sem antic in terp retatio n to the passives, individually an d cum ulatively.41 (3) He tests his cum ulative in terp retatio n against in te rp retatio n s of the text arrived at in a m ore orthodox literary-critical fashion by both him self and o th er inform ed readers, and, in the event th a t there is no clear clash, m akes m inor a d ju stm en ts till the tw o in terp retatio n s fit. Let us, however, take one of the sentences O hm ann quotes—the one w ith the highest n u m b er of straig h tfo rw ard passives—and analyze it from the p oint of view of topicalization: 7. a. The aw ful cerem ony w as usually perform ed in a public m anner, an d in the presence of a great n u m b er of sp ecta­ tors;

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b. the p a tie n t was relieved by the pow er or skill of the exor­ cist; c. an d the vanquished dem on was heard to confess th a t he w as one of the fabled gods of a n tiq u ity who had im piously u su rp ed the ad o ratio n of m ankind.42 Gibbon here describes the cerem ony of exorcism and som e of its elem ents. The topics corresponding to the three p a rts of the sen­ tence are: a. M ain topic: the cerem ony itself b. Subtopic: the role of the p a tie n t in the cerem ony c. Subtopic: the role of the cast-out dem on in the cerem ony The elem ents of the cerem ony not topicalized are: Subtopic: the role of the exorcist in the cerem ony Subtopic: the role of the spectators in the cerem ony Both exorcist and spectators are p resent in sentence 7 as com po­ nents of p repositional phrases. A sim ple operation brings the ex­ orcist, o r a t least the phrase the power or skill o f the exorcist, to topic position in 7b: the operation of m aking 7b active. B ut now, if the p arallelism of the three verb form s is to be m aintained, the agentless 7a m ust also be active; and therefore the exorcist m ust be supplied as its subject, taking over the m ain topic position. Sim ilarly, m aking 7c active will bring the spectators into topic position. Thus we see how an analysis in term s of topicalization based on the assum ption th a t the dom inating rhetorical stru ctu re is one of p arallelism d em onstrates th a t the alternatives Gibbon faces are: w ritin g a sentence about the cerem ony, the patient, and the dem on; and w ritin g a sentence about the exorcist and the spectators. He chooses the form er alternative, very likely for just the reasons of indirect strategy th a t O hm ann pinpoints. B ecause the assu m p tio n from w hich m y analysis proceeds—th at the d o m in atin g rh eto rical m atrix w ithin w hich Gibbon works in sentence 7 is one of parallelism —is a w eaker assum ption than O h m an n ’s (w hich is th a t deletions have psychological correlates), I w ould argue th a t it is to be preferred. In m y analysis passivization takes on a secondary, enabling role ra th e r than the status of a rh eto rical device in its own right.

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Before extending this observation, let me quote two fu rth er exam ples. 8. The C hristian religion not only w as a t first atten d ed w ith m iracles, b u t even to this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person w ith o u t one.43 9. The violent and repeated strokes of the orthodox princes [th at is, the C hristian em perors of Rome] were broken by the soft and yielding substance against w hich they w ere directed; and the ready obedience of the Pagans protected them from the pains and penalties of the T heodosian code.44 W hat is striking ab o u t both 8 and 9 is the a tten tio n p aid to arranging elem ents in p arallel stru c tu re and to setting p airs of elem ents off against each o th er in a relationship of balance or antithesis. In 8, for instance, the tw o conjoined sentences of w hich The Christian religion is the subject are laid out in p arallel w ith balanced m atching elem ents: The C hristian religion not only

b u t even

at first

to this day

was . . . atten d ed

cannot be believed by any reasonable person

w ith m iracles

w ithout one.

In 9 we have a case of the crossover p arallelism called chiasm us: on bo th syntactic an d sem antic grounds, the violent and repeated strokes o f the orthodox princes form s a p a ir w ith the pains and penalties o f the Theodosian code, w hile the soft and yielding sub­ stance form s a p a ir w ith the ready obedience. W hat role has the passive played in the construction of these sentences? In 8 neith er the p arallelism of elem ents no r the syn­ tactic-sem antic play on w ith-w ithout45 could be brought ab o u t w ith o u t the twofold passivization; and w ith o u t the p arallelism , the effect of clim ax could not be brought about. In 9 the chiasm us is achieved by the passivization of break b u t not of protect. In o th er w ords, in both cases passivization has a subsidiary function. It m ig h t be objected th a t w h a t I am doing here is to deny the

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possibility of giving any in te rp retatio n to passivization by ab so rb ­ ing w h atev er passives occur into a description of syntax in ra th e r old-fashioned rh eto rical term s. B ut the position I take does not deny o u trig h t the possibility of in terp retatio n . R ather, I am a r­ guing th a t the w ork of in te rp retatio n should begin after the intentionality of the rhetorical stru c tu re of the sentence has been fath ­ om ed and assessed; and if (as here) sentences seem to be consistently aim ing tow ard a stru c tu ra l ideal th a t can loosely be called neoclassical, and if it can plausibly be argued th a t passiv­ ization acts as a secondary o p eration shifting sentence constitu­ ents aro u n d in such a way as to realize this ideal, then w hat we ought to spend ou r tim e in terp retin g is not the secondary opera­ tion b u t the stru c tu ra l ideal. P arallelism , periodicity, and balance and/or an tithesis are stru c tu re s th a t in fact lend them selves ra th e r readily to in te rp re ­ tatio n . B alance an d antith esis are above all principles of o rd er­ ing; p arallelism (a m ore fundam ental operation, and m ore w ide­ spread in language) creates w hat we can call tem porary sem an­ tic equivalences betw een p arallel elem ents;46 and periodicity is a sy n tactic im age of closure (no addition to the stru ctu re is pos­ sible). The conclusion I reach here—th a t in certain rhetorical contexts passivization is not an autonom ous rhetorical device—ought to have a n u m erical base to be ap preciated in its full significance. My considered guess is th a t in a clear m ajority, perhaps an over­ w helm ing m ajority, of cases w here passivization enters into com ­ plex rh eto rical stru ctu res, its function is secondary in the sense I have described. B ut—aside from the question of w hether the la­ bors of counting can be justified—the obstacle to providing a num erical base is th a t it is difficult to give a definition to the notion of rh eto rical com plexity th a t is unam biguous w ithout being arb itrary . Therefore, I prefer to leave the conclusion in a suggestive ra th e r th an a definitive form . 5.2. The second use of the passive I w an t to consider is not easy to illu stra te in a sentence or two because it is, so to speak, an incom plete form th a t invites one to com plete it by inference from the context. The concision of the following exam ples, in w hich a qu ite lim ited context provides enough inform ation for the correct

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inference to be draw n, thus m akes them som ew hat u n rep resen ­ tative. 10. It is very well know n th a t they [the Irish p a u p e r class] are every day dying and ro ttin g , by cold and fam ine, and filth, and verm in, as fast as can be reasonably expectedL47 11. If an orchard was to be robbed W ild was consulted, and though he was him self seldom concerned in the execution of the design, yet he was alw ays concerter of it, an d tre a ­ su rer of the booty . . . He was generally very secret on these occasions, b u t if any offered to p lu n d er of his own head, w ith o u t acquainting M aster W ild, and m aking a deposit of the booty, he was sure to have an inform ation ag ain st him lodged w ith the schoolm aster.48 12. [On the prosecution of the E arl of S trafford before the House of Com mons.] The austere genius of Strafford, occupied in the p u rsu its of am bition, had not rendered his b reast alto ­ gether inaccessible to the ten d er passions, or secured him from the dom inion of the fair; and in th a t sullen age, w hen the irregularities of pleasure w ere m ore reproachful th an the m ost odious crim es, these weaknesses were thought w or­ thy of being m entioned, together w ith his treasons, before so great an assem bly.49 The p articip les italicized belong to short passives w ith agents th a t are, form ally speaking, null. Yet in each case the context enables the read er to fill in the agent. In sentence 10 the transference effect of reasonably invites the com pletion as fast as can be reasonably expected by reasonable people. B ut as soon as we com plete the sentence we also com plete S w ift’s attack on the kind of ra tio n al, calculating m en tality th a t thinks in term s of population statistics, expendable classes of no-account people, the greatest happiness of the g reatest num ber, and so forth. In 11 the obvious (and cor­ rect) inference is th a t W ild lodges the inform ation. In 12 it is Strafford's P u ritan accusers w ho both think his am ours w orthy of public discussion and discuss them . These passives thus have the sam e effect as an indirect accusa­ tion o r an innuendo: w hile app earin g to say nothing (the agent is not specified) they h in t a great deal. The device is fu n d am en tal to G ibbon's irony, as O hm ann shows, b u t probably a ttain s its g rea t­

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est com plexity of use in S w ift’s Argument against the Abolishing o f Christianity (1711), a w ork in w hich we can distinguish at least four actors, not nam ed, whose identities the rea d er can infer and insert in to the text in the gaps th a t the null agentive phrases m ark. W hat is in terestin g about the device is th at it operates as though the deriv atio n of the short passive were via agent deletion from the long passive, w ith a kind of recovery process allow ing us to undo the deletion and rediscover the hidden agent. In section 6.2 I w ill discuss the sta tu s of pseudogram m atical accounts like this one, w hich, though unable to stan d up to close scrutiny, neverthe­ less seem to describe the intuitions of ironists like Swift, Fielding, H um e, an d G ibbon about how the short passive works. 5.3. The passive, p a rticu la rly w ithout agent, occurs m ore fre­ quently in serious scientific w riting th an in any other genre.50 The phenom enon has been often noted and often deplored.51 The his­ tory of the spread of the passive in scientific w riting has been traced by G. W. Turner, w ho a ttrib u te s its popu larity to a num ber of causes, som e of them p ractical (the need to refer to processes th a t have been carried out by different investigators at different tim es, o r by groups of investigators, or by people whose identities are irrelevant), som e of them professional (the professionalization of science and the concom itant grow th of a group style), some of them philo sophical.52 It is the philosophical reasons I will concen­ trate on. In scientific texts from the early years of the Royal Society (founded 1661) we find sentences of the p a tte rn Lime deters insects ra th e r th an the m ore typically m odern Insects are deterred by lime. The difference ap p ears to be this: th at w here lim e is topic, agent, and subject all together, its activity (in a nongram m atical sense) is felt to be stro n g er th an w hen it is in an agentive phrase; and from the p o int of view of the entom ologist o r chem ist w ho w ants to discuss the p ro p erties of lim e, or of lim e and insects in con­ junction, this "activ ity ” of lim e is a red herring, hinting distractingly a t an im istic pow ers in the substance. Of all scientists w orking a t the beginning of the m odern period, N ew ton ap p ears to have been the m ost conscious of the philo­ sophical problem hidden here. In his early philosophy of n ature N ew ton still accepted the notion th at there are invisible m echa­

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nism s (for exam ple, a “subtle a e th e r”) for the production of phys­ ical phenom ena.53 B ut from 1665 onw ard N ew ton began to de­ velop a wholly a b strac t conception of force, to be d ealt w ith m ath em atically and a p a rt from its causes. It is clear from N ew ­ ton s papers th a t he did not regard the u ltim ate causes of phenom ­ ena as outside the scope of science. R ather, he conceived of a scientific p ro g ram in w hich, as long as causes rem ained undiscov­ ered, there should be m eans for pushing forw ard investigations while holding the question of causes in abeyance. Thus he req u ired ways of talking about changes of velocity mathematice, "in m a th ­ em atical w ay,” w ithout having to po stulate corpuscles o r any o th e r occult agents, as R enaissance n a tu ra lism h ad found itself doing, to account for the changes. We find this am bition clearly expressed in A Treatise o f the System o f the World (w ritten circa 1685), in w hich N ew ton dis­ cusses the effects of centripetal forces on the orbits of the p lanets. I quote N ew ton's L atin and the anonym ous contem porary E nglish tran slatio n . 13. Nobis propositum est q u a n titatem & p ro p rietates ipsius [viris] eruere, atq u e effectus in corporibus m ovendis investigare m athem atice: proinde ne speciem eius hypothetice d eterm inem us, dixim us ipsam generali nom ine c en trip etam . . . V iribus centripetis Planetas in orbibus certis retin eri posse in telligetur ex m otibus projectilium . . . 14. We said, in a m athem atical way, to avoid all questions about the n a tu re or quality of this force, w hich we w ould not be u n derstood to determ ine by any hypothesis; an d therefore call it by the general nam e of a cen trip etal force . . . T hat by m eans of cen trip etal forces, the planets m ay be retain ed in certain orbits, we m ay easily u n d erstan d , if we consider the m otions of projectiles . . .54 Although the tra n sla to r does not reta in the convoluted double passive in the second sentence, he does retain the stru ctu re th a t is crucial to m y arg u m en t here: viribus centripetis Planetas . . . retineri posse, "by m eans of cen trip etal forces, the planets m ay be retained." Briefly, w hat we find in the passage are a m anifesto for the acausal p rogram th a t N ew ton m eans to follow and a m anifes­ tatio n of th a t program a t w ork on the level of syntax: the c e n tri­

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p etal forces are m oved out of the jo in t topic-agent-subject slot, w here they th rea te n to assum e the m an tle of the occult cause all over again, into an agentive p h rase (ablative in Latin). Though N ew ton does not explicitly assert th a t he is carrying on his philosophical struggle w ith the notion of causality dow n to the level of syntax, it is plain th a t the highly relational, atem poral sym bolism of m ath em atics (epitom ized in the axiom of com m u­ tativ ity ) is m ore congenial to his enterprise than subject-object sentence form , w hich tends to be iconic both of tim e relations (left-to-right) and of process (cause—result). Thus, though N ew ton’s own prose is not in p o in t of fact as highly passivized as, say, m ost m odern social-science prose, we can see him as conducting, w ith w h at m eans syntax offers, a struggle w ith the inbuilt m etaphysics of his language.

6. Two Conclusions Two points of general in terest em erge from the preceding section. One concerns functions of the passive, the o th er the n a tu re of g ram m atical know ledge. 6.1. Scholarly consensus nam es three functions for the passive: (1) it m akes agentless sentences possible, (2) it particip ates in con­ trolling functional sentence perspective, and (3) it yields certain aesth etic and rh eto rical effects. In (1), the passive is useful to a speaker w hen (a) the agent is unknow n to him , o r (b) it is indefinite, or (c) it is not present in his m ind, o r (d) he feels no need to nam e it because it is known, or (e) he does not w ish to nam e it. In (2), passivization m ay th em atize the g ram m atical object and/or rhem atize the agent. In (3), the follow ing uses are cited in the literatu re: (a) to provide variety by a lte rn a tin g w ith the active, and (b) to facilitate link­ ages.55 Of (1), (2), and (c), the rhetorical function (3) has had the least a tten tio n p aid to it. In section 5.1 above I have tried to show th at this function is m ore w idespread th an is recognized in m odern linguistics and rhetoric. M uch of the tim e, passivization is sim ply a w ay of m oving constitu en ts around in a sentence un d er the d ictatio n of a w id er rh eto rical principle. Analysis th a t attaches a

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great deal of w eight to the sem antic roles of the con stitu en ts moved m ay therefore m iss the point. 6.2. In sections 5.2 an d 5.3 we see two different b u t related u n a r­ ticulated in tuitions about the g ram m ar of passives a t work. Sw ift and G ibbon and H um e operate as though deletions of substan tiv e lexical m aterial are m ade in the course of the derivation of the short passive. In th eir rheto rical/g ram m atical schem e, the agent is, so to speak, blocked out; but m atters can be arranged so th a t it will be inferred (recovered) w ith fair accuracy. Thus they m ake of the short passive a vehicle for ironic u n d erstatem en t. W hat enables the read er to recover the agent is of course a com bination of contextual factors and intuitions (to w hich he or she has been guided by the w rite r’s practice) about how the text is to be read, even at a syntactic level. Interestingly, these ironic texts can be fully understood only if w riter and read er share an u n derstanding of how short passives are to be decoded. For p ra c ­ tical purposes, it is irrelevant th a t this shared u n d erstan d in g am ounts to an im plausible rule of gram m ar. All th a t is req u ired is a shared fiction. In the case of N ew ton we see a different enterprise: a yoking of the passive to a project of using agentless sentences to describe a physical universe regarding w hich consideration of agency is to be postponed. The stru c tu re of the N ew tonian short passive says, “B racket off the question of agency." N ew ton's in tu itio n about the short passive therefore seem s to be close to m odern proposals for treatin g it as a sentence w ith a null agent. I am not aw are th a t the field of g ram m atical fictions has been investigated. Yet such fictions certainly reveal them selves a t sev­ eral levels in lite ra ry practice. One w ell-know n phonological fic­ tion is th a t certain sounds have inh eren t m eanings: [u] is d ark o r heavy, [i] is light; [r] is h arsh, [s] gentle; and so forth. In syntax there are a n u m b er of fictions touching on the o rd er of elem ents in lists—for exam ple, in the sentence He stood in the doorway, huge, armed, menacing, the convention is th a t the order of the adjectives stan d s in an iconic relation to the n a rra to r’s o rd er of perceptions. In sem antics, there is the fiction th a t nouns are static, verbs dynam ic. Because fictions like these, w hich are ch aracteristically not

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wholly w rong b u t ra th e r sta n d for m assive oversim plifications of com plex p henom ena, are exam ined by scholars—w hen they are exam ined—for th e ir tru th value alone, they have been dism issed as unfounded a n d the m a tte r has been left a t th at. They deserve m ore co n sid eration. W hen such fictions establish them selves as w idespread sh ared conventions betw een w riters and readers, we are w itnessing pieces of folk g ram m ar th at, a t a pragm atic level, are little different from w h at we usually think of as shared gram ­ m atical know ledge o r langue. They, too, are item s of unconscious know ledge, though not unconscious in the sam e sense th a t g ram ­ m atical com petence is. If we take these fictions seriously, two avenues of exploration open up: in linguistic study, the history of unform alized and p er­ haps u n fo rm u lated notions of how specific g ram m atical construc­ tions work; a n d in literary study, a bestiary of gram m ar, th a t is, a taxonom y of g ram m atica l fictions and the rhetorical and poetic uses to w hich they are put.

The Agentless Sentence as Rhetorical Device (1980)

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oung Robinson Crusoe w ants to go to sea. His father, a wellto-do m erchant, counsels him against it:

I should always find that the calam ities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicis­ situdes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they were not subjected to so many distempers and uneasinesses either of body or mind, as [the luxurious or the indigent]; that the middle station of life was calculated for all kinds of virtues . . . that this way men went silently and smoothly through the world, and comfortably out of it, not embarrassed with the labors of the hands or of the head, nor sold to the life of slavery for daily bread, or harassed with perplexed circumstances . . . nor enraged with the passion of envy . . . but in easy circumstances sliding gently through the w orld.1 The form s I have italicized have this in com m on: they are all m orphologically passive an d capable of taking an agentive byphrase, though in no case is this phrase actually present. For the purposes of this essay, these two properties will define the class of passives.2 The piling up of so m any passives in so short a space clearly differentiates the indirect reported speech of C rusoe's father from the speech of R obinson's own narrativ e. Is there a way in w hich we can in te rp ret this stylistic difference? Let us rew rite the passage w ith the italicized constituents in active form , im agining w hat m ight be "in the m in d ” of the Active ch aracter this new speech defines. In a slightly condensed form , the passage m ight read: God shares the calam ities of life among the upper and lower part of mankind .. . He does not expose the middle station to so many 170

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vicissitudes . . . or subject them to so many distempers . . . He calculates the m iddle station for all kinds of virtues . . . He does not em barrass them with labors . . . or sell them to the life of slavery for daily bread . . . or harass them . . . or enrage them . . . The m ost rad ical step I have taken in rew riting Crusoe's father is of course to in sert "God" as the one w ho sees to it th at the m iddle class has an easy, prosperous life. Does Crusoe's father in fact have "God" a t the back of his m ind? M ight he not be thinking in term s of som e m ore highly ab stracted Being, some personified N atu re o r Providence o r Fate, som e convenient concretization of the-w ay-things-are? The questions are idle: we cannot know. All we do know is, w hoever or w hatever it m ight be, it cannot be expressed in the p a rtic u la r syntactic form Defoe has used: the agentless passive. Let us for the purpose of argum ent e n te rta in the notion th a t behind the choice of the passive-dom inated sequence lay a specific in ten tio n on Defoe's p a rt. W hat m ight such an intention be? The m ost plausible answ er is th a t the passives m ake it possible for him to p resent C rusoe’s fath er w ithout m entioning God or Provi­ dence o r w hatever. Crusoe's father is enabled to describe the lot of a privileged class w ithout acknow ledging th a t anyone or any­ thing privileges th a t class—th a t is, to give an account of bourgeois success w holly in accord w ith the bourgeoisie's contented sense th a t it owes its success to no external force, b u t sim ply to the o rd er of things as they w ork them selves out, to a kind of destiny w ith o u t author. As h isto ry this answ er is not w ithout plausibility. The change­ over from an "active" conception of God's role ("God shares the calam ities of life . . .") to a “passive" agentless conception ("The calam ities of life are shared . . . ”) can very well be taken as m arking the tran sitio n from the personal religious w orld of seventeenthcentury P u ritan ism , whose prose representative is B unyan, to a post-N ew tonian w orld in w hich God has becom e a m ore ab stract p rin cip le of order. One can even proceed to argue th at, insofar as R obinson Crusoe belongs to a trad itio n of conversion narratives, Defoe’s story is ab o u t the grow th from a state of heedless pride, followed by c alam ity (the shipw reck) and sp iritu al crisis (on the island), to a m ore active sense of the fragility of fortune and of G od’s unceasing intervention in the life of m an .3

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Let me now retrace my steps and reexam ine the argum ent I have been conducting. In m y arg um ent I have connected an observation ab o u t the syntax of the passage w ith a thesis about the m iddle class, nam ely th a t in the early flush of success it tended to ignore historical causality. W hat assum ptions have I had to m ake in the process? There are two th a t I w ould like to isolate: first, th a t the sequence of passives constitutes a m eaningful phenom enon; and second, th a t the in tention behind the use of the passive is to avoid m en ­ tioning agency. (I will pass over the historical assum ptions I have m ade, restrictin g m yself to those th a t bear directly on the relation betw een linguistic form and m eaning.) The first assum ption is the easier to deal w ith. R epetition creates p attern and insistence. E ight passive-like form s com ing close on each o th e r’s heels in a text not notable for its deploym ent of the passive m ark a stylistic phenom enon by any definition of style. The question of w h eth er the sequence has any m eaning in its own right is, however, a different one and, I w ould argue, cannot be decided on the evidence of the text considered as an object, not even if the sequence ran to a hundred elem ents. The sequence can be said to "have" m eaning only if we can a ttrib u te an in te n tio n ­ a l l y to it: and such in ten tio n ality can be a ttrib u te d only in the light of o u r u n d erstan d in g of w here the text is going, th a t is, in the light of our developing u n d erstan d in g of its m eaning. For this reason, the question of the m eaningfulness of the passives tu rn s out in fact to be a rephrasing of the second question: w h at the intention behind the use of the passives m ight be, and in p a rtic u la r w hether it is to create, via agentless sentences, a pictu re of an agentless destiny. To provide the groundw ork for an answ er, let m e briefly digress to the trea tm e n t of agency in present-day g enerative-transform a­ tional syntax. There are tw o kinds of passive sentence in E nglish, in one of w hich the logical agent is expressed, in the o th er of w hich it is not. They are represented respectively by 1 and 2:1 1. C alam ities are shared by God am ong the u p p er and low er p a rts of m ankind. 2. C alam ities are shared am ong the u p p er and low er p a rts of m ankind.

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I shall call these sentence types respectively long and short p as­ sives. The active sentence corresponding to 1 is: 3. God shares calam ities am ong the up p er and lower p a rts of m ankind. W hether or not the agent is expressed in the passive form, it m ust be expressed in the active form . How can we describe the syntactic relations of these three sen­ tences to one another? One tem pting account is the following: first, th a t 1 is derived from 3 by the sta n d a rd passivizing tra n s­ form ation; an d second, th a t 2 is then derived from 1 by deletion of the agentive p h rase by God. U nfortunately this account w ill not stand up to rigorous scru­ tiny.4 We have to reg ard 1 an d 2 as having distinct derivations. In p articu lar, we cannot think of the short passive 2 as being derived from the long passive 1 or from anything th a t looks like the active 3. In stead w'e m u st regard 2 as the realization of an underlying form in w hich the (so to speak) m issing agent is not represented a t all, or is rep resen ted only in the m ost ru d im en tary form as being e ith er an im ate o r in an im ate.5 A th eo retical account of the short passive as one in w hich the agent is "never th e re ” can be su pported by other form s of evidence, com parative, historical, and psychological.6 The upshot is th a t the m ost a p p ro p ria te w ay to think of sh o rt passives—the w ay m ost consistent w ith w h at we know about English and about language in general—is as agentless sentences, sentences whose agent is not m erely veiled (but still there behind the veil) or deleted (but once present) or unexpressed (but thought), b u t is actually null, void. The sh o rt passive is the prin cip al m eans language provides to enable us to talk ab o u t acts as though they occurred w ithout agents. (It also happens to be a m ore w idespread form am ong languages th an the long passive.) This does n o t of course m ean th a t w hen a speaker uses a short passive he is bound to a c ertain intention, nam ely to conceive of an act w ith o ut an agent. In the case of Robinson Crusoe, we cannot argue th a t because Crusoe's fath er uses short passives he is th in k ­ ing of a universe w ith o u t an author. A d eterm in ate relation be­ tw een th o u g h t an d syntactic form cannot be supported. The inten tio n ality we a ttrib u te to Crusoe’s father is one we read into him an d read o ut o f his language: it is an act of in terp retatio n . The

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strongest form in w hich we can propose the arg u m en t relatin g form to thought is to say th at the short passive makes possible the reading of C rusoe’s father I have advanced above, a reading th a t it w ould (obviously) have been h a rd e r to advance if he h a d used active form s. N aturally it is difficult to think of acts as occurring w ith o u t agents. We m ight say th at, in requiring th a t a predicate take a subject, the active sentence form expresses a certain preconception th at acts have agents, and th a t the short passive, despite its con­ venience, leaves an uneasy feeling: it opens up an area of vague­ ness th a t can sim ply be skated over (as m ost of us do in everyday usage), b u t th a t can be explored and exploited for th eir own ends by w riters who take seriously the question of w hether language is a good m ap of reality. Thus, although Defoe is usually thought of as having a m erely w orkm anlike a ttitu d e tow ard language, one can argue th a t in the passage discussed above he is using agentless verbs to th eir u tm ost to epitom ize a p a rtic u la r m om ent in the rise of the bourgeoisie. Let me cite tw o additional cases of w riters exploring the rela ­ tions of form and m eaning in the agentless passive. Sam uel B eckett's Molloy w atches a m an taking a dog for a walk. W ithout w arning, the m an picks up the dog and em braces it. From the outside, to Molloy, the act takes on an a ir of the inexplicable, the m ysterious. Why do it a t all? Why do it a t this p a rtic u la r tim e, in this p a rtic u la r place? To soothe his craving for m eaning, Molloy explains to him self th a t the m om ent is "pre-established." In giving this risible pseudoexplanation, Beckett is doing several things: he is (1) raising the question of w ho the agent m ay have been who preestablished the m om ent, (2) raising doubts about a language th a t provides such a glib form for papering over m ysteries, and (3) m easuring the skeptical distance th a t separates him from Leib­ niz (whom he is quoting).7 In H enry Jam es's The Ambassadors, L am bert S trether, out for a day in the country, spies the guilty lovers Chad N ew som e and M adam e de V ionnet boating down the river. "It w as suddenly as if these figures, or som ething like them , h ad been w anted in the picture, h ad been m ore or less w anted all day, and h ad now drifted into sight . . ,"8 The passive wanted, stressed by repetition, has a double signification: (1) The lovers in the boat reveal th a t the ru ral

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scene, considered as a p icture, has in fact been aesthetically in­ com plete u n til this m om ent. (2) The appearance of the lovers solves a m ystery, adds the last piece (the piece th a t w as w anting) to a puzzle w hich S treth er, up to this m inute, has not w anted to a d m it he w ants solved, since life is so m uch easier if lies are believed. In the com plex play th a t Jam es perform s here, the a b ­ sence m arked by the agentless form is the absence of a drive to find out the tru th ; and th a t drive has been suppressed by a h ith erto stro n g er agency, the desire in S tre th e r for the easy, the beautiful, the ro m an tic. W hat is m arked at this in stan t of the n a rrativ e is therefore a m om ent of self-realization a t w hich (to put it sche­ m atically) the m oral agent supplants the aesthetic in Strether. And all w ith o u t S tre th e r's yet being aw are of it: the d ram a takes place in the vacan t aren a w here the agent phrase m ight have been—as good a sy ntactic rep resen tatio n of the unconscious as one is likely to find. The B eckett and Jam es passives are m ost unusual in th eir h id ­ den com plexity: they display an aw areness of w hat the form itself can be m ade to m ean th a t we can properly call m etalinguistic. The v ariety of sh o rt passive I now tu rn to is, in contrast, one th at belongs in less intensive, m ore extended use. I will concentrate on two w orks in w hich the sem antic gaps th a t characterize the short passive are exploited to the extent th a t the short passive becom es a rh eto rical device in its ow n rig h t.9 The first w ork is Sw ift's Argument against Abolishing Christianity (1711), a p a m p h let arguing, on the face of it, against the disestab­ lishm ent of the C hurch of E ngland but, below the surface, p ro ­ testing ag ain st the evolution of the C hurch into a secular political in stitu tio n w ith o u t religious content. Sw ift's vertiginously ironic arg u m en t is deployed behind a m ask. The a u th o r of the p am p h let ap p ears to be an advocate of the m odern m ode of conducting the business of the Church, an d appears to regard w hat traces of C h ristian ity he detects in it as vestigial and old-fashioned. His arg u m en t ag ain st the abolishing of C hristianity is therefore th at the abolishing has already been com pleted, and th a t w hat m odem freethinkers w ould like to see abolished is in fact one of the pillars of secular society. In this sh o rt text there is a vast preponderance of short passives over passives w ith expressed agents; and, in a very real sense, the

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process of reading the text and following the ironic arg u m en t boils down to a ttrib u tin g agents correctly to the passive verbs. There are four groups of agents in the gam e. The first group consists of the people to w hom the p am p h leteer counsels m o d er­ ation, since they already have w hat they w ant: freethinking in te l­ lectuals (Sw ift’s polem ical enem ies); the vulgar m ajority and its p arliam en tary representatives; enem ies of religion and unbeliev­ ers in general; and the C hurch of Rome. The second group consists of the m odern secular Church, its allies in court and com m erce, and the educational au thorities. The th ird group is a constellation of elem ents associated w ith tru e religious belief, correct churchstate relations. Fourth and m ost com plexly in the w orkings of the irony we have the a u th o r of the p a m p h let him self, as defender of the statu s quo; old-fashioned religion as seen through his d isp a r­ aging eyes; and h u m an natu re, as conceived of by h im .10 For an exam ple of the interplay of these various u nnam ed agents, consider the following extract. The p am p h leteer w rites: ’Tis again objected, as a very absurd, ridiculous custom, that a set of men should be suffered, much less employed and hired, to bawl one day in seven against the lawfulness of those m ethods most in use towards the pursuit of greatness, riches, and pleasure, which are the constant practice of all men alive on the other six. [But since forbidden fruit always tastes the sweetest,] the wisdom of the nation hath taken special care, that the ladies should be furnished with prohibited silks, and the men with prohibited wine: and indeed it were to be wished, that some other prohibitions were promoted, in order to improve the pleasures of the tow n.11 It is the freethinkers w ho object; it is the pow ers th a t be th a t suffer; it is the old-fashioned church auth o rities w ho employ and hire. It is the sta te th a t prohibits but th a t also tu rn s a b lind eye so th a t com m erce can furnish; it is the am oral m odern w ho u n d erstan d s the perverse dynam ics of pleasure w ho wishes th a t sta te or church or bo th w ould promote fu rth er prohibitions. I will not explicate any fu rth er the operations of the sh o rt p a s­ sive in the w orking out of this text. R ather, I w ould like to ask w hat conception of the passive we can best p ictu re Sw ift as h old­ ing, or (to p u t it m ore satisfactorily) w h at conception of the passive his practice reveals. If we w an t a p ictu re of Sw ift's text, we can im agine it as a

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puzzle w ith sixty-odd holes or gaps (ellipses). To read the text, to fathom the irony, to be in control of the play of inform ation, we have to be able to fill these gaps (or m ost of them ) correctly. We are able to achieve this because the context of each gap and the unfolding logic of the arg u m en t m ake a correct guess possible in each case. The text is dense enough w ith inform ation around the gaps to com pensate for w h at is not there and to m ake a secure read in g possible. The text is not finally am biguous, though it is cryptic an d an inexperienced read er m ay quite possibly m isread it. The im age of the m issing agent in the Sw iftian passive as a lack or gap, som ething to be filled, an ellipsis leading to irony by m eans of u n d erstatem en t, is a useful one. B ut it is an im age not confirm ed by linguistic investigations (see above) or by our own intuitions of w h at we are doing w hen we use short passives. It is in a case like this, w here a purely linguistic description and a description th a t takes into account the m otive behind the form are at odds, th a t we can m ost clearly see the distinction betw een a syntactic o peration an d a rh eto rical operation whose vehicle is syntactic. Sw ift's agentless passive, conceived of as rhetorical device, seems to be u n d erp in n ed by a conception of how passives w ork th a t is quite ind ep endent of a g ram m atical explanation. Thus we see rh eto ric an d linguistics o perating in the sam e field, explaining the sam e stru ctu res, b u t each doing so in its own term s and according to its own in te rn al logic.12 The o th er m ajo r eighteenth-century exponent of the passive for ironic ends is E d w ard Gibbon. The Decline and Fall o f the R om an Empire, p a rticu la rly those chapters (15, 16, 28) in w hich Gibbon attack s the intolerance and superstitiousness of early C hristianity, em ploys the passive system atically, som etim es for b ro ad er stylis­ tic aim s (the achievem ent of a style m arked above all by p ara lle l­ ism, balance, antithesis), som etim es for m ore specific purposes. The follow ing ex tract is from the "General R eflections” on the dem ise of R om an p ag an ism th a t end C hapter 28. Gibbon assum es the position of C hristian w orshippers convinced th a t the saints in heaven take an in terest in th eir personal w elfare (I quote sentences 6—9 of an eleven-sentence paragraph): [6] Sometimes, indeed, their friendship [that is, the friendship of the saints] m ight be influenced by considerations of a less exalted

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kind: they viewed with partial affection the places which had been consecrated by their birth, their residence, their death, their burial, or the possession of their relics. [7] The m eaner passions of pride, avarice, and revenge, may be deemed unworthy of a celestial breast; yet the saints themselves condescended to testify their grateful approbation of the liberality of their votaries; and the sharpest bolts of punishm ent were hurled against those im pi­ ous wretches who violated their magnificent shrines, or disbe­ lieved their supernatural power. [8] Atrocious, indeed, m ust have been the guilt, and strange would have been the scepticism, of those men, if they had obstinately resisted the proofs of a divine agency, which the elements, the whole range of the anim al cre­ ation, and even the subtle and invisible operations of the hum an mind, were compelled to obey. [9] The imm ediate, and alm ost instantaneous effects, that were supposed to follow the prayer, or the offence, satisfied the Christians of the ample m easure of fa­ vour and authority which the saints enjoyed in the presence of the Supreme God; and it seemed alm ost superfluous to inquire whether they were continually obliged to intercede before the throne of grace, or whether they m ight not be perm itted to ex­ ercise, according to the dictates of their benevolence and justice, the delegated powers of their subordinate m inistry.13 G ibbon’s irony here is very different from S w ift’s: it is com plex b u t not subtle, relying heavily on a connotative diction th a t one soon learns to read w ith reversed values, as it were. The terrific powers of the new C hristian panth eon are described w ith every sign of awe, b u t the surface is so com prehensively und erm in ed th a t one w ould have to be blind indeed to take the passage a t face value. W hat G ibbon describes (and mocks) is not the reality of the new dispensation, b u t how the new dispensation ap p ears to its adherents (sentences 10—11 spell o ut G ibbon’s ow n position u n ­ am biguously). There are several agentless passives in the sentences quoted. It is w orth looking a t sentence 8 in d etail to see how the passive were compelled becom es the pivot on w hich the ab su rd logic of the sentence tu rn s. If we p a ra p h rase the sentence, c u ttin g o u t the ironic inversions, its force becom es clearly to ta litaria n : "E very­ thing is driven by n a tu re to obey the One God. W hoever is not so driven is therefore u n n a tu ra l. Because he is u n n a tu ra l, o th er form s of com pulsion can be freely used on him . W hoever does not yet

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yield is doubly u n n a tu ra l. Therefore, he is open to fu rth er form s of com pulsion."14 The double bind into w hich this logic drives the unbeliever relies on the calculated vagueness of were compelled. How com pelled? W hether the m issing agent is restored in the form of "by in trin sic n atu re" or "by divine agency,” the unbeliever suf­ fers equally: to resist such com pulsion places him or her outside reason, outside the law; th u s were compelled shades over into should be compelled. T hough th ere is not the sam e degree of play w ith alternative agents as in the Sw ift text, the agentless passive here, too, m akes its co n trib u tio n , via u n d erstatem en t, to the irony. In five of the six sh o rt passives in the quoted sentences, the u n stated agents are the C hristian God or the saints or th eir believers. R ichard O hm ann has found a sim ilar p a tte rn of use em erging in C hapter 15.15 C hris­ tian responsibility for the clim ate of fanaticism and intolerance is continually u n d e rstated by being om itted from positions of agency; and, in an ironic context, und erstatem en t becom es em ­ phasis. W hat G ibbon effectively says is: "G ullibility reigned on a scale th a t a ratio n al m odern intelligence can scarcely credit. I need m ake no accusations: I need m erely describe the w orld view of the early C hristians to have them condem n them selves."16 Thus, as in the case of Sw ift, we see th a t the m ost n a tu ra l way of conceptualizing G ibbon's short passive is as a form in w hich the agent is first know n, then om itted for rhetorical reasons, then recovered by the com plicitous reader. W here m odern studies have recognized the agentless passive as a resource of rhetoric, they have tended to see it less as an ironic device th a n as a m eans of evading a ttrib u tio n of agency.17 This is p robably an accurate reflection of m odern usage; b u t how do we explain the historical shift? A naive explanation is th a t the prov­ ince of the short passive is now adays the language of science, politics, an d bureaucracy, ra th e r th an of literatu re. B ut even in the eig h teen th century, the short passive is used w ith m ost com ­ plexity in polem ical prose. F urtherm ore, I w ould argue th at the case of scientific prose is a separate one, since there the short passive serves a serious and autonom ous need.18 A b e tte r expla­ n atio n w ould seem to be th a t the dem ise of sophisticated uses of the agentless passive has to do w ith the decline of irony as a m ode of p o litical arg u m en tatio n , w hich in tu rn has to do w ith the dem ­

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ocratization of the audience. The agentless sentence, as a form th a t says m uch by saying little, is wide open to m isu n d erstan d in g by an audience not a ttu n ed to its nuances. Irony is by n a tu re an aristo cratic mode: it asserts a bond am ong the elite w ho can decode its inverted operatio n s.19 Its sp irit is foreign to the m ode of political debate th a t prevails in m odern dem ocracies. B earing this in m ind, we cannot find it surprising th a t the agentless sen­ tence as an ironic device is m ost thoroughly exploited by such conservative neoclassical w riters as Swift and Gibbon.

Isaac Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language (1982) ritin g in the 1830s, W ilhelm von H um boldt set out the linguistic relativ ity thesis th a t has becom e associated w ith his nam e: the thesis th a t one thinks in form s lim ­ ited an d d eterm in ed by the form s of one’s native language.

W

Since experience and action depend upon m an’s representations, m an lives in relation to objects almost exclusively as language leads him to live. By the very act of spinning language out of himself, he spins himself into language. Thus the national lin­ guistic com m unity [Volk] to which one belongs becomes a circle from which it is possible to escape only insofar as one steps into the circle of another language.1 And elsew here: "The variety of languages is not m erely a variety of sounds an d signs, b u t in fact a variety of w orld view s.”2 Von H u m boldt w rites here as one of a generation of E uropean scholars to w hom the expansion and consolidation of the E uro­ pean colonial em pires w as beginning to reveal the staggering di­ versity of the tongues of m ankind. He also w rites a t the bloom ­ tim e of E u ro pean n atio n alism . T here is thus a certain pan-G erm an in terest a t w ork in the arg u m en t th a t a Volk, defined first of all by a com m on language, should possess, and indeed be locked into, a unique w orld view and w orld experience. Even so, w hen von H um ­ boldt p o stu lates th a t th o u g h t is relative to the language of the thinker, he does so in response to a grow ing body of knowledge about exotic languages a n d the history of language, knowledge w hich jo lted E uropean eth n o cen trism and the classically inherited conception of language as a tra n sp a re n t m edium for thought. One of the directions in w hich von H u m b o ld t’s thinking can be taken leads to Völkerpsychologie, the study of ethnic or national psychologies. Insofar as Völkerpsychologie becam e tainted, partic181

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ularly in the first half of the tw entieth century, w ith the ideology of racism , it was discredited as a serious study. B ut the w ork of B enjam in Lee W horf, who did m ost of his field w ork am ong the Hopi of Arizona in the 1930s, cannot be discredited in the sam e way, even though it can be set in the sam e trad itio n , if only because w h at W horf sought to uncover was not an ethnic Hopi psychology b u t a Hopi w ay of conceiving the universe so deeply founded th a t he could ju stly call it a Hopi m etaphysics. W horf died in 1941. Since then the W horf hypothesis (or von H u m b o ld t-S ap ir-W h o rf hypothesis), nam ely th a t we see n a tu re along lines laid down by our native languages, has had a rough tim e at the hands of philosophers an d linguists (who have argued th at it is circular) and anthropologists and psychologists (who have argued th a t it cannot be verified experim entally).3 There is one field, however, w here the W horf hypothesis is treated as selfevident, even w hen it is not explicitly known. This is the field of literary tran slatio n , w here the task th a t faces the tra n sla to r a t every tu rn is one of carrying across from one language to a n o th e r not so m uch w ords as the system s of assum ptions lying behind those words. The fu rth e r a p a rt the two languages are in term s of linguistic stru c tu re an d shared historical culture, the h a rd e r the task becom es. The tra n sla to r is thus in an even b e tte r position th an the bilingual person to in tu it w h eth er von H um boldt is rig h t to speak of a language as a circle, a closed system , from w hich one can exit only by entering another closed system . For even th a t ideal creature, the fully bilingual person, lives a t any given m o­ m ent w ithin one or the o th er of his languages, not w ithin som e hypothetical h igher language th a t com prehends both of them , and so cannot claim any g rea ter a u th o rity to com pare the differing w orld views they m ight em body th an the stu d en t who approaches these languages from the outside. The m ore com plex acts of tra n s ­ lation, on the o th er h an d , involve the m apping of en tire sem antic contexts from one language to another: the tra n sla to r moves back and forth betw een the circles of the two languages, trying to b rin g w ith him , a t each move, the m em ory o r feel of the sense he wishes to tran slate. The occupation of tran slatio n thus brings the tra n s­ lato r co n tin ually face to face w ith the m ost im m ediate corollary of the W horf thesis, nam ely th a t a full or to tal tran sla tio n is im possible.

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This is not to say th a t the tra n sla to r has continually to confront the p ro b lem in all its uncom prom ising ab stract force. Typically, tran slatio n is as intuitive an activity as the bilingual's sw itch from language to language, or indeed as the process of verbalization itself. For it is a fu rth er corollary of W horf's position—and even m ore clearly of von H u m b o ld t’s—th a t because of the closeness of fit of p a rtic u la r languages w ith p a rtic u la r w orld views, a speaker does not becom e aw are of the m ediatory role of language betw een reality an d m ind except by a considerable intellectual act of selfdistancing: there is norm ally an untroubled continuity betw een n a tu re as he sees it and the term s his language provides to see it in. In his essays on the Hopi language, W horf in effect tries to achieve this self-distancing by standing w ithin the circle of Hopi and, from this stan d p o in t, bringing to consciousness the assum p­ tions ab o u t the universe em bedded in his own language, English, and in Indo-E uropean languages in general. By trying to conceive of tim e through the Hopi verb system , w hich has com plex m odes and aspects b u t no tense, by trying to red istrib u te English cate­ gories of "thing" and "event" according to the Hopi noun and verb classes, he arrives a t a ch aracterizatio n of the m etaphysics im ­ plicit in Indo-E uropean languages: English and sim ilar tongues lead us to think of the universe as a collection of rather distinct objects and events corresponding to words. Indeed this is the im plicit picture of classical physics and astronom y . . . The Indo-European languages and many others give great prominence to a type of sentence having two parts, each built around a class of word—substantives and verbs . . . The Greeks, especially since Aristotle, built up this contrast and made it into a law of reason . . . Undoubtedly m odem science, strongly reflecting western Indo-European tongues, often does as we all do, sees actions and forms where sometimes it might be better to see states.4 Thus on the one h an d we tend to excerpt objects out of the endless flow of n a tu re because we have nouns th a t predispose us to do so, w hile on the o th e r h an d we see actions and forces w here ou r verbs predispose us to see them . The forces and objects created for us by o u r language in tu rn becom e the building blocks of o u r cos­ mology: "N ew tonian space, tim e and m a tte r are no intuitions.

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They are recepts from cu ltu re and language. T hat is w here N ew ton got th e m ” (p. 153). N ew ton em erges in W horf as an exem plar of how one can u n ­ consciously project the stru c tu re of one’s language out on to the stars and then believe th a t the resulting m ap is a true p ictu re of the universe, ra th e r th an a pictu re determ ined by one’s own p a r­ ticu lar linguistic perspective. N ew ton typifies w h at W horf else­ w here calls a “m echanistic way of th in k in g ” w ith its basis in certain features of Indo-E uropean syntax and fu rth er "rigidified and intensified” by the A ristotelian trad itio n in logic (p. 238). E xperim ental testing of W horf s ideas has tended to concentrate itself in the areas in w hich experim ents are easier to design, such as the com parison of sem antic fields in un related cultures. Yet in his discussion of classical W estern cosm ology W horf him self points to a m ore am bitious area of inquiry, an area in w hich one can get beyond lexical contrasts to the scrutiny of the syntactic stru ctu res th at W horf sees as m ore fundam entally determ inative of stru c ­ tures of thinking. The area I refer to is th a t of the texts of classical W estern science, and p articu la rly N ew ton's own scientific w rit­ ings. Here, though one m ay not be able to design tests th a t w ould satisfy the scientific experim enter, one can ask and answ er ques­ tions th a t a t the very least conform to the stan d ard s of dem on­ stratio n accepted in literary criticism . Do we find in N ew ton’s English and L atin the seam less continuity th a t W horf predicts betw een syntax and logic and w orld view, or, on the contrary, are there signs of a w restling to m ake the thought fit into the language, to m ake the language express the thought, signs perhaps even of an incapacity of language to express certain thoughts, or of thought u nable to think itself out because of the lim itatio n s of its m edium ? The case of N ew ton w ould seem to provide a rem ark ab le opp o rtu n ity to test W horf's assertion about the com plicity of IndoE uropean languages in the creation of classical W estern cosm ol­ ogy· The concept in N ew ton th a t I will concentrate on is the concept of force, and in p a rtic u la r gravitatio n al force. A force is an in ta n ­ gible en tity th a t is nevertheless susceptible of precise m easu re­ m ent and m ath em atical trea tm e n t. It is therefore a good exam ple of the kind of phenom enon W horf describes: som ething w hich

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from inside a cu ltu re seem s unquestionably n a tu ra l (p art of n a­ ture), yet w hich from the view point of a w holly different language and c u ltu re m ight seem a culture-bound m etaphysical concept. In his general law of grav itatio n , N ew ton states th a t every two particles in the universe a ttra c t each other w ith a force propor­ tional to th eir respective m asses and inversely proportional to the square of th eir distance a p art. The key w ord here, for m y purpose, is attract. A part from occasions w hen the law is expressed in m a th ­ em atical sym bolism , there is no statem en t of the law in N ew ton th a t does not include the w ord attract or a synonym equally m et­ aphoric. The controversy th a t broke out over the concept of gravity soon after the first edition of the Prirtcipia was published in 1686 centered on this m etaphor. To u n d e rstan d the stren g th of feeling th a t w ent into this contro­ versy, we m ust ap p reciate th a t to leading thinkers of the day like R obert Boyle and C hristian Huygens, the great achievem ent of the tra d itio n of m echanistic philosophy in w hich they and N ew ton w orked w as th a t it had em ancipated itself from the m edieval physics of qualities an d pow ers and no longer needed to call on an im istic ex p lan ato ry principles involving concepts like sym pathy and an tip ath y . In th eir eyes they had created a truly m aterial science w ith a truly em pirical m ethodology. W hen N ew ton pro­ posed his theory of universal gravitation, som e of his contem por­ aries felt they w ere being asked to relinquish the m aterialist basis of th eir science and accept an explanation of the whole of celestial m echanics based on, in E. J. D ijksterhuis' w ords, "a m ysterious force exerted upon each o th er by two bodies separated by em pty space, w ith o u t any intervention of an in term ediary m edium ." This ex p lan atio n seem ed as unscientific, D ijksterhuis continues, “as if N ew ton h a d sta te d th a t the sun generates in the planets a quality w hich m akes them describe ellipses.”5 N ew ton's m ost form idable antagonists were Huygens and Leib­ niz. H uygens called the principle of grav itatio n al a ttra c tio n "ab­ surd": "The cause of such an a ttra c tio n is hardly to be explained by any p rinciple in M echanics.” Leibniz cuttingly described grav­ itatio n al force as "nothing b u t a certain inexplicable, incorporeal virtue" possessed by bodies.6 In a later a ttac k he characterized it as an "occult q u a lity ,” one w hich produced effects w ithout intel­ ligible m eans.7

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The attack on gravity as a “v irtu e ,” an "occult q u ality ,” w ith the im plication th a t New ton w as turning the clock back and retu rn in g to m edieval stan d ard s of explanation, w as a telling one, and by no m eans to be ignored. For if two bodies sep arated by m illions of m iles of em pty space can be claim ed to a ct upon each other, and if nothing fu rth er is proposed regarding the reality of the reciprocal forces exerted by the bodies, then does the theory not in fact a ttrib u te unexplained, occult q u alities to the bodies? Of w hat scientific value is it to say th a t bodies behave as they behave because they are as they are? New ton acknow ledged the force of this criticism in tw o ways. First, in the 1706 edition of the Optics, he floated in a very ten tativ e way the idea th a t space m ight be filled w ith an ethereal m edium w ith unique physical properties, so th a t celestial bodies need no t be claim ed to act upon one a n o th er through a vacuum . B ut this defense w as a w eak one: for one thing, the ethereal m edium w ould have to possess qualities of elasticity and low density so e x tra o r­ dinary as to be incredible. A stronger defense of the theory, on philosophical grounds, w as presented in the G eneral Scholium N ewton added to Book III of the 1713 edition of the Principia. Here N ew ton tried to d elim it the scope of his en terprise in such a way th a t questions about w hether gravity w as "real” or not w ere excluded. He did so by distinguishing betw een “experim ental p h i­ losophy"—w h at we w ould today call experim ental science—w hich proposes an d verifies relations binding bodies of experim ental data, an d philosophy itself, w hich investigates u ltim ate causes. H itherto we have explained the phenom ena of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but we have not yet assigned the cause of this power . . . I have not been able to discover the cause of [the various] properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses;8 for w hatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether m etaphysical or physical, w hether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.9 Thus, though he proposed gravity as one of the "general law s of n a tu re ,”10 he allow ed the possibility th a t it m ight be only a m e­ diate cause. W hat cause m ight lie behind it, however, he declined to discuss u n til this becam e am enable to em pirical observation.

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On the o th er hand, N ew ton did not settle for the position th a t scientific law s sim ply condense regularities in the data, th a t they provide d escription w ith o u t explanation, o r th a t the move from saying th a t two bodies have associated w ith them certain accel­ erations w hich can be described as functions of m ass and distance ap art, to saying th a t the two bodies attract each other, is a move from a nonfigurative to a figurative way of speaking. Indeed, N ew ­ ton concludes the passage I have quoted from by asserting sp ir­ itedly th a t to us it is enough th at gravity really does exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea. As long as N ew ton kept the door open in this way, asserting on the one h an d th a t gravity was sim ply an interm ediate postulate in a chain of causes th a t w ould one day be fully explained, g ra n t­ ing th a t it is an "absurdity" to think th a t bodies can act upon one a n o th er a t a distan ce through a vacuum , acknow ledging th a t to explain p henom ena in term s of "in n ate” properties of bodies achieves n o th in g ,11 yet on the other hand calling gravity "real,” a "law of n atu re," there rem ained a basis of justice in the accusations of H uygens and Leibniz th a t N ew ton was rein stitu tin g a scholastic science of occult qualities. If N ew ton’s w ay trium phed in the eigh­ teenth century, it was not because the objections of these critics had been countered in a decisive w ay b u t because N ew ton's worldsystem p lain ly w orked and therefore it seem ed best, in K oyre’s w ords, to "becom e reconciled to the u n u n d erstan d ab le.”12 Because it brings into focus so clearly questions about the n atu re of cau satio n an d the statu s of scientific explanation, the contro­ versy over g rav itatio n has becom e a cause celebre in the history of science. However, I here take a different approach to the case, viewing the task of expounding the theory from N ew ton’s own perspective: as a question of finding the right words, and specifi­ cally of finding m atter-of-fact, nonm etaphoric w ords. N ew ton in itially intended the first version of Book III of the Principia to be an exposition of his w orld-system aim ed a t the educated read er n o t expert in m athem atics. B ut he w ithdrew this version (w hich he was late r persuaded to publish separately un d er the

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title De m undi systemate) and replaced it w ith a m ore austerely m ath em atical treatm en t, his m otive being “to prevent the disputes which m ight be raised .”13 In his correspondence he co n trasts the m ath em atical language a p p ro p riate to n a tu ra l science w ith “fig­ u rativ e ” p resentations whose language is "artificially a d ap ted to the sense of the vulgar.”14 W hat is revealed in both these instances is an aw areness of the risks involved in popularizing his w ork, in extending its range of readership from a circle of savants to an audience th a t needs to have m ath em atical findings in terp reted to it in figures, th a t is, analogies. Though it is "the v u lg ar” w hose lack of education he blam es for m isunderstandings of his w ork, it is clear th at N ew ton sees such m isunderstandings as arising in­ evitably o ut of figurative in terp retatio n s of his work. I would therefore suggest th a t we see N ew ton’s h esitan t desire to address tw o audiences, savants and w ider public, as having tw o com ponents: not only a desire to have his w ork b e tte r know n, bu t also a desire to get beyond the self-enclosure of the m athem atical principles o f natural philosophy (as his great opus is titled) to n a tu ra l philosophy itself, th a t is, to get beyond statin g the m a th ­ em atical relations betw een idealized bodies to statin g in "real" term s relations betw een elem ents of the physical universe. If we w ant an exam ple of this desired tran sitio n o r tran sla tio n from m athem atics to "real” language—language w ith "real” pow ers of reference to the universe—it is to be found in the move from statin g th a t w ith any two bodies there can be associated forces th at are functions of m ass and distance, to sta tin g th a t any tw o bodies a ttra c t each o th er w ith specifiable forces. The move allow s the read er to anchor his und erstan d in g of gravitation analogically to instances of a ttra c tio n in his own experience, b u t he does so at the risk of a ttrib u tin g agency and even volition to the bodies. The m etaphor o r "artificial a d a p ta tio n ” adds m eaning at the sam e tim e th a t it illu strates; and it is this added m eaning th a t N ew ton saw as the cause of e rro r an d the source of dispute. The com prom ise th a t N ew ton reaches in the Principia betw een the dem ands of rigor and a need to m ake som e concessions to his readership is, broadly speaking, th a t in the definitions, axiom s, and propositions in w hich he follows the exam ple of E uclid, the language rem ain s th a t of pure m athem atics, w hile in the various scholia he m akes room for elucidatory m etaphor. Thus, for ex­

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am ple, in the scholium in w hich he describes the experim ent w ith a spinning vessel of w ater th a t enables him to distinguish absolute from relativ e m otion, he allow s him self to w rite of the vessel's "co m m u n icating” its m otion to the w ater it contains un til the w ater begins to "revolve” and eventually "ascend” the sides of the vessel. This ascent, says N ew ton, “shows its endeavor to recede from the axis of its m otion."15 The m etaphoric term s add an an ­ im istic content to the experim ent: each com ponent p a rt of the experim ent seem s to feel a force act upon it, and then, in conform ­ ity w ith its ow n natu re, seem s to act in turn. In the m ore philo­ sophical scholia, on the o th er hand, in p a rtic u la r the General Scholium to Book III, can one see how N ew ton continually resists the te m p tatio n of the telling elucidatory m etaphor in favor of a style of rh eto ric degree zero as the ap p ro p riate philosophical equivalent of the relatio n al sym bolism of m athem atics. However, there is m ore to the problem of finding an ap p ro p riate n o n m ath em atical language th a n sim ply avoiding m etaphors like attract an d repel. The following exam ples exhibit obstacles faced by N ew ton a t the level of L atin or English syntax, obstacles far less easily evaded. (W here I do not give the original L atin, I im ply th a t L atin and E nglish raise the sam e problem s.) 1. The force w hich retain s the m oon in its orbit is th a t very force w hich we com m only call gravity.16 2. By the force of gravity [the moon] is continually draw n off from a rec tilin ea r m o tio n .17 3. By m eans of c en trip etal forces the planets m ay be retained in certain o rb its.18 4. P articles [of bodies] a ttra c t one an o th er by som e force . . . These p articles . . . are m oved by c ertain active principles such as th a t of gravity.19 The straig h tfo rw ard subject-verb order th a t we see in sentence 1 is the co n struction th a t seem s to cause N ew ton the m ost im ­ m ediate trouble. Though it is possible to produce purely syntactic, nonsem antic definitions of subjecthood (case m arking in L atin, position to the left of the verb phrase in underlying stru ctu re in English), the link betw een syntactic subjecthood and sem antic agency is not easily broken. In English, in p articu lar, the initial resistance m et w ith is th a t the sta n d a rd Subject-Verb-O bject order

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has come to be associated w ith a certain m eaning: it is iconic both of tim e o rd er and of causal order. In N ew ton’s L atin, Subject-V erb o rd er sim ilarly m im es tim e and causation. In sentence 1 the re ­ sistance of this association is not overcom e, w ith the resu lt th a t force is understood as both subject and agent, and the bogey of the occult cause raises its head again: w h at is the being of a force th a t can reta in a heavenly body in its orbit? (Note th a t this a r ­ gum ent has nothing to do w ith the etym ology of retain.) To overcom e this association betw een subjecthood and agency, New ton resorts to the m easure we see in sentences 2, 3, and 4: passivization. A closer analysis of sentence 3 will show how the m easure works. Let us go back to N ew ton’s L atin (Andrew M otte, N ew ton’s English tran slato r, com m its him self to m aking "cen tri­ petal forces" in stru m en tal, a step th a t is not strictly necessary). Lifted o ut of its indirect-speech construction, the relevant p a rt of the L atin reads: 3a. viribus centripetis P lanetae . . . retin eri possunt. Viribus centripetis can here be taken as e ith er agentive ("retained by cen trip etal forces”) o r in stru m en tal ("retained by m eans of centripetal forces”). C om pare 3a w ith the two altern ativ e active form s we m ust im agine behind the sentence: 3b. vires centripeti Planetas . . . retinere possunt 3c. vis X viribus centripetis Planetas . . . retinere potest. In 3b, cen trip etal forces reta in the planets in th eir orbits. In 3c, some unknow n force X retain s the plan ets in th eir orbits, m ediated in stru m en tally through cen trip etal forces. This force X is then to be understood as the hypothetical cause of g rav itatio n al effects. It is a force th a t N ew ton does not w an t to bring into the discussion precisely because it is hypothetical (“H ypotheses non fingo"). The passivized sentence 3a allow s him this indeterm inacy. Sentence 3b com m its him to an agentive in te rp retatio n of grav itatio n and therefore to the occult force charge, w hile 3c brings force X into the open an d creates an obligation to account for it. One m ig h t thus think th a t passive constructions like sentences 2 and 3, w hich M otte faithfully copies from N ew ton, and 4, w hich is N ew ton's own English, precisely su it N ew ton’s purpose in th a t

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they com m it him to n e ith er the agentive nor the instru m en tal reading. Indeed they do su it him ; b u t only as long as his purpose is u n d erstood to be a strateg ic or rhetorical ra th e r than a scientific one— th a t is, to presen t an incom plete theory as persuasively as possible. We ought to be clear about the n a tu re of the am biguity of 3a: w hile it stands u ncom m itted betw een two sem antic in te r­ p retatio n s, it in no w ay brings out the fact th a t the agentive reading an d the in stru m en tal reading are either-or alternatives. In effect, the passive in 3a therefore allows Newton a rhetorically successful evasion of a choice betw een the alternatives of gravity as p rim e cause and gravity as m ediate cause. This account of his thinking m ay be a crude one, b u t it is supported by the trea tm e n t of the question th a t he him self gives in the G eneral Scholium to Book III. W hat we have seen thus far is a dense com plicity betw een thought an d language. This is therefore an ap p ro p riate point to rep eat the key W horfian question: w hether, if he had w orked in a linguistic m edium radically different from L atin and English, N ew ton m ight have been b e tter able to do justice to his thought. One m ig h t suggest, for exam ple, th a t if N ew ton regarded the agentiv e-in stru m ental opposition as a red herring, an opposition forced upon h im by elem en tary linguistic stru ctu res and a t best glossed over by m eans of rhetorical tricks, then w hat he needed for a p ro p er discussion of gravity was a language th a t a t this elem en­ tary level genuinely did not distinguish betw een agent and in stru ­ m ent. Such a language is conceivable, though w hether the rest of N ew ton's physics could have been elaborated in it I do not know: p robably not. B ut if one tries for a m om ent the (m ind-bending) experim ent of locating oneself w ithin such a language, one can see th a t the en tire controversy over occult causes w ould never have occurred, sim ply because from inside th a t language the dis­ tinctions m ade by people like Leibniz w ould have been u n n a tu ra l or even invisible. In an influential essay titled “The Case for Case,” Charles Fill­ m ore has proposed a theory of universal case g ram m ar in w hich agent an d in stru m e n t are tw o of a repertoire of six o r so sem antic relations w hich Fillm ore calls “universal, presum ably in n ate.”20 The question of g rav itatio n indicates how closely the sem antics of agency and in stru m e n tality are bound up w ith philosophical ques-

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tions about causality, questions th at N ew ton undoubtedly w ished to postpone. Fillm ore's suggestion th a t agency and in stru m e n ta l­ ity m ight be innate sem antic relations therefore seem s q u estio n ­ able, w hile the proposal th a t they are universal can be considered only w hen m any m ore of the w o rld ’s languages have been de­ scribed and when such puzzling facts as the close entw inem ent of the m orphology of agentive and in stru m en tal in Indo-E uropean languages (w hich on the face of it w ould indicate th a t the two have not alw ays been distinguished) have been explained.

A fondness for passive structures, in p a rtic u la r for passive stru c ­ tures in w hich the agent is not expressed, has often been p ointed to as ch aracteristic of the English of scientists. For the m ost p a rt this predilection reflects nothing m ore than a preference for an anonym ous group or guild style over an unseem ly d ram a tiz atio n of acts of scientific investigation: "It is observed th a t the p ro p o r­ tion increases . . .” over "I observed th a t the p roportion increases . . .”21 As in the exam ples from N ew ton cited earlier, the passive is preferred because it allow s the elim ination, by neat syntactic m eans, of a sem antic agent felt to be irrelevant to the subject at hand. A nother feature of scientific English often singled out is a fond­ ness for nom inalization. T ransitive Subject-V erb-O bject stru c tu re s tend to be replaced w ith blocks of nom inals linked w ith copulas or prefixed w ith existentials: "Corrosion of u n p ain ted surfaces takes place" replaces "R ust corrodes u n p ain ted surfaces.” In the latter sentence it is the anim istic m etaphorical content th a t is felt to be irrelev ant and therefore elim inated: Subject-V erb-O bject o r­ der holds a th re a t of becom ing a m etap h o r (at the level of syntactic structure) for tran sitiv e action. The overall m ovem ent in m odern science has been tow ard a language p urged of m etaphoric content. We can detect this m ove­ m ent in N ew ton's own language, in w ays th a t are locally ingenious though now here explicitly a rticu lated . The anim istic content of key verbs like attract is properly m etaphorical, w hile the m eaning superadded by Subject-V erb o rder is m etap h o rical in the sense th at it im poses a tem poral-causal o rd er over a syntactic o rd er (thus exem plifying w hat R om an Jakobson calls "the poetry of

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g ra m m a r”22). As we have seen, N ew ton holds him self in consid­ erab le reserve from these m etap h o rical resources. M etaphoric language is alw ays am biguous; m etaphor-free lan­ guage m ay or m ay not achieve the unam biguous one-for-one m ap ­ ping of reality, the no-nonsense "m athem atical p lain n ess” th at stood for the ideal of Bishop S p ra t and the Royal Society of New­ to n ’s day. On the o th er hand, one of the chief ways in w hich science creates new term inology to cover new fields of knowledge is by im porting w ords from elsew here, giving them a new sense, th at is, by m etap h o r (Greek metaphero, "to carry over"). F urtherm ore, som e m etap h o rs in science are, as R ichard Boyd points out, “con­ stitutive of the theories they express, ra th e r than m erely exegetical," in the sense th a t scientists use them to express "theoretical claim s for w hich no ad eq u ate literal p arap h rase is know n."23 We m ay thus p roperly ask w hether a m etaphor-free language in w hich anything significant or new can be said is attain ab le. The usual answ er given to this question is th a t w ords th a t are originally m etap h o rical soon "becom e frozen" or "die” in th eir new senses an d a re thereafter no longer m etaphorical because they are no longer felt to be m etaphorical. The freezing or dying of the m etap h o r is explained as taking place via a process of forgetting.24 B ut there is som ething inherently unsatisfactory about this ex­ p lan atio n , as the history of grav itatio n al theory clearly shows. If w h at d istu rb ed Huygens and Leibniz about the theory, and w hat no longer d istu rb s us, is no m ore than th a t the anim istic m eta­ phoric co n ten t of attract was alive for them b u t has been forgotten by us, and has therefore died or died out or died away, how else can we describe the grow th to acceptance of g rav itational theory betw een the tim e of Huygens and Leibniz and ou r own tim e th an as, in K oyre’s p h rase, a "becom ing reconciled to the ununderstanda b le ”? Can we really assert th a t the tru th of the theory has em erged o u t of the a ttritio n of anim istic term s like attraction in w hich it was originally expressed? If we do so, we are em bracing the m ost rad ical idealism : we are asserting th a t there exists a pure concept of a ttra c tio n tow ard w hich the m ind gropes via the side­ ways process of m etap h o ric thinking, and w hich it a ttain s as the im p u rities of secondary m eanings are shed and language becom es tra n sp a re n t, th a t is, becom es thought.25 The ideal of a p u re language in w hich a pure, pared-dow n, u n ­

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am biguous tran slatio n of the tru th s of pure m ath em atics can be effected deserves m ore extended discussion th an I can give it here. I lim it m yself to pointing out th at this ideal language is very far indeed from the languages of m an as conceived by W horf; for to W horf the least visible stru ctu res of a language, those th a t seem m ost n a tu ra l to its speakers, are the stru ctu res m ost likely to em body the m etaphysical preconceptions of the language com ­ m unity. On the o ther hand, the case of g rav itatio n al a ttra c tio n does not a t all dem onstrate w h at W horf asserts about N ew tonian cosmology as a system , nam ely th a t the key concepts of the cos­ mology em erge sm oothly from , or fit sm oothly into, the stru ctu res of N ew ton's own language(s). Instead we find in N ew ton a real struggle, a struggle som etim es—for instance, in the General Schol­ ium to Book III of the Principia—carried out in aw areness of the issues involved, to bridge the gap betw een the nonreferential sym ­ bolism of m ath em atics and a language too p ro tean to be tied dow n to single, p u re m eanings.

Kafka

Interview

DA: When was the essay on Kafka's "The Burrow" written, and what is its place in relation to your other projects in stylistics? JM C: It was written in 1979—80, when I was still trying to evolve a linguistic stylistics with some kind of critical penetration, that is, a form of analysis that would start with microenvironments, that would be more or less rigorous by the standards of linguistics, and that wouldn’t end up simply telling you over again, in unfamiliar language, what you knew anyway. The crucial investigations on which I built in this essay were by the Canadian linguist Gustave Guillaume: into the relation between the semantics of time and the form of the verb, which, as you know, has to carry most of the burden of time-specification. There is a clear similarity between this essay on Kafka and the earlier essay on Achterberg, in which I was concerned with what I suppose we can call the deep semantics of person, as carried by the pronoun. In this respect the essays go beyond the bounds of what we usually call stylistics. Both Kafka and Achterberg are pushing at the limits of language, and if one hopes to follow them one has to push at the limits of the linguistic disciplines. I know no non-Indo-European language properly. My sense of con­ trast between Indo-European and non-Indo-European is therefore vague. In a larger linguistic perspective, what I have to say about Ach­ terberg and Dutch, or Newton and Latin, or Kafka and German is prob­ ably trivial or, more specifically, myopic. I am sure there are more striking things to be learned about the semantics of person from Japanese, for instance; we have already talked about the Hopi verb and nonlinear time. But projects on that scale belong to philosophers. They demand a level of abstract thinking that I can’t manage. DA: Before turning to the specifics of the essay, let me ask you about your interest in Kafka and in the kind of modernism he represents. He 197

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does not seem to play as large a role in your work as, for instance, Beckett, but there are significant echoes of Kafka in your fiction. The clearest of these is the titular allusion in Life and Times of Michael K, but there seem to be other connections, involving Kafka’s stories: one thinks of the "The Hunger Artist" in relation to K's prodigious capacity for survival, or the torture machine inscribing judgment on the bodies of the condemned in "In the Penal Colony," which brings to mind aspects of Waiting for the Barbarians. In a more general sense, some of your characters (Magda, Michael K) share the condition described by Walter Benjamin as living in a condition of exile within the body: "For just as K. lives in the village on Castle Hill, modern man lives in his body; the body slips away from him, is hostile toward him."1 It is easy to see "The Burrow" as representative of the acute form of modernist alienation one finds in Kafka, and to go from there to Michael K (who even constructs for himself a burrow of a sort). In reviews of George Steiner's On Difficulty (1980) and Robert Musil’s stories, there are further signs of an extended interest in characteristically modernist concerns: the question of whether there is such a thing as an inner speech, which Steiner sees as undergoing a process of attrition since the start of the twentieth century, and the relationship (in Musil) between rationality and irrationality, or consciousness and the uncon­ scious. My question, then, is an attempt to trace the outer limit of your interest in Kafka: to what extent are you able to see yourself— and perhaps aspects of contemporary white South African writing more generally, as an ethical and marginal enterprise— as inhabiting a form of late modern­ ism?

JM C: What engaged me then and engages me still in Kafka is an inten­ sity, a pressure of writing that, as I have said, pushes at the limits of language, and specifically of German. No one who has really followed Kafka through his struggles with the time system of German can fail to be convinced that he had an intuition of an alternative time, a time cutting through the quotidian, on which it is as foolish to try to elaborate in English as in German. But Kafka at least hints that it is possible, for snatches, however brief, to think outside one’s own language, perhaps to report back on what it is like to think outside language itself. Why should one want to think outside language? Would there be anything

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worth thinking there? Ignore the question: what is interesting is the liberating possibility Kafka opens up. In a more general sense, I work on a writer like Kafka because he opens for me, or opens me to, moments of analytic intensity. And such moments are, in their lesser way, also a matter of grace, inspiration. Is this a comment about reading, about the intensities of the reading process? Not really. Rather, it is a comment about writing, the kind of writing-in-the-tracks one does in criticism. For my experience is that it is not reading that takes me into the last twist of the burrow, but writing. No intensity of reading that I can imagine would succeed in guiding me through Kafka's verb-labyrinth: to do that I would once again have to take up the pen and, step by step, write my way after him. Which is another way of saying that while, as I read it, I can understand what I wrote in the essay on Kafka, I couldn't reproduce it today without rewriting it. You ask about the impact of Kafka on my own fiction. I acknowledge it, and acknowledge it with what I hope is a proper humility. As a writer I am not worthy to loose the latchet of Kafka's shoe. But I have no regrets about the use of the letter K in Michael K, hubris though it may seem. There is no monopoly on the letter K; or, to put it in another way, it is as much possible to center the universe on the town of Prince Albert in the Cape Province as on Prague. Equally— and the moment in history has perhaps come at which this must be said— it is as much possible to center the universe on Prague as on Prince Albert. Being an out-of-work gardener in Africa in the late twentieth century is no less, but also no more, central a fate than being a clerk in Hapsburg Central Europe. But behind your question about Josef K and Michael K and the forms of alienation they experience I detect a presumption that must, for Kafka's sake if not for my own, be laid bare. It is that Josef K is alienated as a clerk in Hapsburg Europe, or, closer to the bone, that Josef K is alienated as a sign and a traceable consequence of the social, cultural, religious, and political marginality of Franz Kafka himself. We open up here a field of argument about the relations between a writer and his society that it would take days even to reconnoiter. So why don't we just assume we have done that, and let me go on to name a set of coordinates in that field, which I do in the form of a question. What is left of Franz Kafka after the alienation of Josef K has been explained in terms of Kafka's marginality? What is left of Michael K after he has been explained in terms of my marginality in Africa? Is it not

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what is left after that interrogation that should interest us, not what the interrogation reveals? Is it not what Kafka does not speak, refuses to speak, under that interrogation, that will continue to fuel our desire for him (I hope forever)? I recognize that you qualify and textualize alienation by calling it modernist alienation. But in doing so don't you implicitly set up the pair postmodern-modern (or perhaps anticanonical-canonical), as you earlier set up the pair Africa-Europe, and use the first member of each pair not only to relativize the other but also to mark it? For these pairs are never neutral: one is the positive pole, one the negative, and we all know who falls under the negative nowadays. The direction of your questioning is undoubtedly interesting: does serious contemporary writing by whites in South Africa not inhabit a position we can call late-modernist? (Do I detect the qualifier merely late-modernist hanging in the air?) But before I respond I want to position myself. For I do not wish to respond from the marked or negative position, to embrace ethicalism or anything else from a position in the dialogue that is already marked as the position of the negative, the position of the mere. So, for instance, the last thing I want to do is to defiantly embrace the ethical as against the political. I don’t want to contribute, in that way, toward marking the ethical as the pole with the lack. I neither claim nor fail to claim that my reservations open up for me a third position. I neither claim nor fail to claim that there can be a third position. I do say that if I speak from a pole-position, from the negative pole, it is because I am drawn or pushed there by a force, even a violence, operating over the whole of the discursive field that at this moment (April 1990) we inhabit, you and I. Is this mere maneuvering, mere time-wasting? I don't believe it is. I believe one has a duty (an ethical duty?— perhaps) not to submit to powers of discourse without question. Having got through the preliminaries (but the preliminaries contain what I most want to express), let me say that I see "alienated," as applied to Kafka and Musil and Rilke and Eliot and Faulkner and Joyce and the other exceedingly diverse characters we lump together as mod­ ernists, as a rather fuzzy term with a heavy polemical content. I can see some sense in applying it to Kafka or to Eliot, at least at one stage of Eliot's life, with careful qualification in each case. Further than that I am dubious.

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DA: You assimilate my question, I believe, to a pattern of evaluations it does not necessarily choose. Perhaps I should have spelt out a position more clearly. Let me try to do so now— it will involve entering the field of cultural politics to which you have referred. I agree there is violence, but I disagree with your account of its effects. As I understand it, the position on modernism of which you are sus­ picious is the Lukacsian one which carries an endorsement of realism; but there is also the position developed by Adorno, which treats mod­ ernism as a historically appropriate and critical tradition. (I am thinking especially of Adorno's essay on commitment, which argues— with ref­ erence to Kafka and Beckett—that it "is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads."2) There is similar disagree­ ment today on the subject of postmodernism, although I think there is probably, in this case, a majority opinion which regards Anglo-American or metropolitan forms of postmodernism as only feebly anticanonical, as little more than a cultish accommodation to "late capitalism." Being politically correct in relation to South Africa, then, can mean (and has meant) the reverse of the evaluations you have taken to be dominant. Modernism, with its ethical dimension and its basic faith in the powers of representation, can be seen as appropriate for a marginal literature in a context such as this one, and postmodernism can be seen as tainted with irrelevance and indulgence.3 One of the ways to resist the powers of discourse, as you put it, is to bring new evidence to bear on the polarities. Without wishing to enter into discussion about what postmodernism is, I would claim that argu­ ments concerning the subversive potential of postmodernism cannot be decided in advance, since postmodernism is by no means a homogeneous movement originating solely from the metropolitan center. I would dis­ tinguish, then, at the very least, between Anglo-American forms of postmodernism, on one hand, and postcolonial forms on the other (of course, not all forms of postcolonial literature may be described as post­ modern). I would also argue that it is possible to see postmodernism as continuing some of the concerns of modernism, ethical concerns among them, into new situations. It is not difficult to imagine that there will be forms of postmodern literature and cultural politics that, in due course, will free themselves of the taint of Eurocentric indulgence (the historical shifts you mention might just carry such a possibility as well). So I think critical discussions of postmodernism and postcolonialism will break new

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ground on these questions. But let me go back to the question of marginality, back to Kafka, in order to qualify my earlier remarks. It ought to be possible, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari do in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, to discuss what I called alienation— and I used the term in a very specific sense— not only as a place, the place of marginality, but also as a practice, a practice in which one speaks both within and to the dominant culture or "major" language— in terms that the dominant culture cannot immediately assimilate. The challenge of a "minor" liter­ ature is that it changes the rules of the game: writing in German, in Prague, with a Jewish background, Kafka releases new potentialities. In such a reading, then, Kafka is not symptomatically "placed," but rather, a new receptive context is opened up to him.

JM C: You are right, it is with the Lukacs of Studies in European Realism in mind, and the judgment he hands down on writers like Kafka and Joyce, that I responded to your question. I happen to think Lukacs’ judgment wrong, conditioned by more than a little moralistic prejudice; nor do I think much of what he has to say about Tolstoy and Balzac. Nevertheless, the general position Lukacs takes on what he calls realism as against modernist decadence carries a great deal of power, political and moral, in South Africa today: one's first duty as a writer is to represent social and historical processes; drawing the procedures of rep­ resentation into question is time-wasting; and so forth. So please forgive me for overhastily and unfairly assimilating your question to a dominant discourse. I am not sure I would agree with the statement that Anglo-American or metropolitan forms of postmodernism are merely (that word again!) cultish, an accommodation to "late capitalism." Romanticism was cultish in its day, modernism was cultish: movements that capture the public imagination attract hangers-on, and hangers-on swell out the sideshows, the cults. It is true that a great deal of the energy of contemporary writing comes from the postcolonial peripheries of the Anglophone world. Yet I would be wary of setting up too clear an opposition between exhausted metropolis and vigorous periphery. To an extent the metro­ politan center has run out of steam, to an extent the ex-colonial subjects are running the show. But to an extent also, with electronic communi­ cations, the old opposition metropolis-periphery has lost its meaning; and to an extent the success of "international" writers (a telling word!)

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flows from a metropolitan taste for the exotic, provoked and catered to by the entertainment industry. Returning to Kafka: I have no objection to thinking of alienation as not only a position but a practice as well. From that point of view, alienation is a strategy open to writers since the mid-eighteenth century, a strategy in the service of skepticism. What I balk at is the common understanding of alienation as a state, a state of being cut off not only from the body of socially dominant opinion but also from a meaningful everyday life (this is implicit in Marx's account of the worker who loses touch with what his hands are fabricating), and even (in the old-fash­ ioned psychological sense of the term) from oneself: alienation equals madness or at least woundedness; art becomes the alienated artist's private means, his private vice even, for turning lack and woe into gain. DA: Turning to the essay itself, I would like to ask you about "The Burrow" as an exemplary experiment in narrative construction. In the essay you speak of the "failed narrative ruses" of the story, which involve Kafka's attempts to do away with the distance separating the time of the events narrated from the time of narration, and to collapse everything into a cyclic and iterative present. As you point out, such a project can't be sustained, but the resources of narrative seem to make it possible. What claim are you making here for the capabilities either of narrative, or of writing more generally? JM C: Let me first distinguish what I think Kafka's concern is in "The Burrow" from whatever is generalizable from that story as a parable about writing. Kafka's concern is with the experience of a breakdown of time, of the time-sense: one moment does not flow into the next— on the contrary, each moment has the threat or promise of being (not becoming) a timeless forever, unconnected to, ungenerated by, the past. One can choose to regard this as a symptom of psychological breakdown in the man Kafka, but only at the risk of dismissing as pathological every so-called mystical intuition. Leaving Kafka behind now, let me say two things. The first is that by its nature narrative must create an altered experience of time. That experience can be heady for both writer and reader. For the reader, the experience of time bunching and becoming dense at points of significant action in the story, or thinning out and skipping or glancing through nonsignificant periods of clock time or calendar time, can be exhilarat­

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ing— in fact, it may be at the heart of narrative pleasure. As for writing and the experience of writing, there is a definite thrill of mastery— perhaps even omnipotence— that comes with making time bend and buckle, and generally with being present when signification, or the will to signification, takes control over time. You asked about claims for the capabilities of narrative, and this is one claim I make. My other observation is about self-referentiality—the absorption, in radical metafiction, of reference into the act of writing, so that all one is left with on the page is a trace of the process of writing itself. This is obviously another capability of writing. But its attractions soon pall: if we are talking about narrative pleasure (and I'm not so ascetic as to wish to dismiss narrative pleasure), writing-about-writing hasn't much to offer. DA: Let me follow up with a similar question, which will again involve my linking the essay and Michael K. In the essay you speak of Kafka's project as a struggle with time, "time experienced as continual crisis." The anxiety this entails is about self-preservation. This is closely related to K's struggle in the novel to survive the relentless and corrosive march of history. In Michael K, it is not the moment of enunciation that is at issue, as in “The Burrow," but utterance (what can be said rather than the moment of saying it); but the problem of self-preservation in both situations makes them analogous. I would take this further with respect to the novel. Although enunci­ ation in Michael K is not rendered problematic, there is still an allegorical sense in which K (and "K" is a reminder of this) represents something within writing itself. K could be the element within textualization that is beyond calculation or control, that continually eludes textualization (al­ though paradoxically, textualization brings the elusiveness into being). There is therefore a good deal of truth in the medical officer's interpre­ tation of him as an allegory "of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence within a system without becoming a term in it."4 (I am aware of a certain metafictional trap here, which has to do with K's resistance to the medical officer's interpretation— an extension of his resistance to history. The trap consists in the fact that my reading of K is already encoded, and to an extent undermined, in the medical officer's attempts to contain K. However, I do not believe the novel "plays its hand" in a metafictional preempting of interpretation— something you were skeptical about in Nabokov, some years ago.)

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My question is this: Does the book itself not involve an attempt to hold up K's resistance, which I have interpreted as the resistance implied by the open-endedness of writing, as symbolically valuable in itself? Or to put it more strongly, a marginal freedom residing within textuality is turned back upon the process of history (by which I mean, at this point, the history made up by readers in their collective interpretations), and offered as something extraordinary and valuable? K's resistance, and the resistances of writing, in other words, are elaborated to the point where they acquire a social meaning and value. (It would be a small step from here to Foe, where similar questions are handled with some reserve.) JM C: I am immensely uncomfortable with questions— like this one— that call upon me to answer for (in two senses) my novels, and my responses are often taken as evasive. To defend against that judgment I suppose I should, as a preliminary step, explain my difficulties, explain myself, spell out my position with regard to answering for. But my difficulty is precisely with the project of stating positions, taking positions. So what I am about to say will be difficult for me— difficult for, again, in two senses. Let me talk first about the subjective experience of writing a novel and the subjective experience of answering questions about it. The ex­ perience of writing a novel is, above all, lengthy. The novel becomes less a thing than a place where one goes every day for several hours a day for years on end. What happens in that place has less and less discernible relation to the daily life one lives or the lives people are living around one. Other forces, another dynamic, take over. I don't want to sound silly, to talk of possession or the Muse, nor on the other hand do I want to be drearily reductionist and talk of a bag called the unconscious into which you dip when you can't think of what to say next. But whatever the process is that goes on when one writes, one has to have some respect for it. It is in one's own interest, one's own very best interest, even one's material interest, to maintain that respect. In contrast, as I talk to you today, I have no sense of going anywhere for my answers. What I say here is continuous with the rest of the daily life of a writer-academic like myself. While I hope what I say has some integrity, I see no reason to have any particular respect for it. True or false, it is simply my utterance, continuous with me; whereas what I am doing when I am writing a novel either isn't me or is me in a deeper sense than the words I am now speaking are me. You ask me to comment on Michael K. When I listen to novelists

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talking about their books, I often have the sense that they are producing for the interviewer a patter that has very little to do with the book they intimately know. I might even call their response alienated, alienated as a more or less baffled, more or less self-protective measure. I am as capable as the next man of producing an alienated response. But I would feel less of a sellout if I said something like the following: I decline, if only because to do so is in my best interest, to take up a position of authority in relation to Michael K. What Michael K says, if it says anything, about asserting the freedom of textuality, however meager and marginal that freedom may be, against history (history, as you say, as a society's collective self-interpretation of its own coming-into-being) stands by itself against anything I might say about what it says. What I say is marginal to the book, not because I as author and authority so proclaim, but on the contrary because it would be said from a position peripheral, posterior to the forever unreclaimable position from which the book was written. (I might even venture: the author's position is the weakest of all. Neither can he claim the critic's saving distance— that would be a simple lie— nor can he pretend to be what he was when he wrote— that is, when he was not himself.) What do I say, then? That your question relies on a questionable distinction between textual and real heroes in fiction. That all heroes in fiction are textual; only some fictions are more self-conscious than others about their own textuality. If one takes Michael K seriously as a hero, a paragon, a model, it can only be as a hero of resistance against— or rather, withdrawal from or evasion of— accepted ideas of the heroic. But insofar as this resistance claims a social meaning and value, I see no great distance between it and the resistance of the book Michael K itself, with its own evasions of authority, including its (I would hope successful) evasion of attempts by its author to put a stranglehold on it. DA: Yes, there are conceptions of authorship that need to be addressed in the way you have done here, conceptions that are reproduced unwit­ tingly in my question. But I need to say that I do not distinguish between textual and real heroes. I have learned the lesson that all heroes are textual. What my question suggests is that textuality is itself a metafictional referent in Michael K. K is therefore not only the integral, fictional being who withdraws and resists, because he is specifically marked with the signs of textuality and intertextuality. This marking goes further than

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the acknowledgment I might make as a reader that K is a textual phe­ nomenon. If I am right in this reading, then I am obliged to ask myself what the symbolic value might be of establishing textuality as a refer­ ent— hence my remarks about upholding the freedom of textuality against history. But you have reminded me that I need to take respon­ sibility for this reading. I do so, and readily acknowledge that I might have learned this particular lesson by absorbing more deeply what Wait­ ing for the Barbarians has to say about signification and closure. JM C: There is a moment in Michael K at which Michael hides away while a group of guerrillas camp beside ''his" dam. He is tempted to come out into the open and ask to join them, but in the end he doesn't. This is, I suppose, the most politically naked moment in the novel. If one reads the novel simply, K offers himself as a model either of modest prudence or of cowardice masquerading as commitment to a humbler function (one of his reasons or rationalizations for not joining, as I remember it, is that someone has to stay behind and grow pumpkins for the men in the front line: the context tempts one to read humble as noble, growing pumpkins as more important than shooting people). Why doesn't K go off with the guerrillas? Why doesn't he abandon his dam and his pumpkin patch, head off into the night with the donkey train and its sacks of mortar shells, hide in the Swartberg, blow up trains, ambush army convoys, and eventually get killed in action? In a more sophisticated form, this became the question Nadine Gordimer asked in her review of the novel.5 What kind of model of behavior in the face of oppression was I presenting? Why hadn't I written a different book with (I put words in her mouth now) a less spineless hero? To a reader taking this line, much of the text of Michael K is just one fancy evasion after another of an overriding political question: how shall the tyranny of apartheid be ended? In this perspective, the moment when the text turns in upon itself and begins to reflect upon its own textuality is thus simply a moment of evasion. The question of why K does not go off with the guerrillas and the question of why textuality is given a symbolic value become the same question. How do I respond to such readers? One writes the books one wants to write. One doesn't write the books one doesn't want to write. The emphasis falls not on one but on the word want in all its own resistance to being known. The book about going off with the guerrillas, the book in the heroic tradition, is not a

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book I wanted-to-write, wanted enough to be able to bring off, however much I might have wanted to have written it—that is to say, wanted to be the person who had successfully brought off the writing of it. What, then, do I want-to-write? A question to prospect, to open up, perhaps, in the present dialogue, but not to mine, to exploit: too much of the fictional enterprise depends on it. Just as it is not productive to discover the answer to the question of why one desires: the answer threatens the end of desire, the end of the production of desire. DA: Allow me to turn briefly to your review of Musil's Five Women. There are several things here that would strike a chord in readers of your fiction, such as Musil's attitude to the relationship between the rational and the irrational, or the notion that "things think themselves out within us," or the currency of forms in certain historical situations. What has been your relationship with Musil? JM C: I first came across Musil in my early twenties, and read him in a state that I would now call bemused. I read Rilke too in much the same state and at much the same time. I experienced Musil's prose, or the prose of his middle period at any rate, as a kind of music in which quite simple ideas gradually lost all recognizable shape as they were protracted, in a process of slightly altered repetition, metamorphosis, inch-by-inch accretion, to quite vo­ luptuous lengths. I think of my own prose as rather hard and dry; but there remains in me a tug toward sensual elaboration— toward the late-Romantic sym­ phony and away from the two-part invention, say. For the rest, Musil stands for me as a model of an intelligence turned, however desperately, on the fin de siecle. DA: You spoke earlier about the capacity of narrative to alter one's experience of time, and in the Kafka essay you contrast historical and eschatological conceptions of time in "The Burrow." (Your procedure, incidentally, is close to that formalized more recently by Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative, where it is argued that in the final analysis, narrative discourse— both history and fiction— provides "allegories of temporality," different accounts of what it means to live in time.)6 Your fiction deals with this question, to the point of allowing the narrators to reflect directly on their experience of temporality. Starting at a point where she says, "A day must have intervened here," Magda,

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who inhabits an “everlasting present," is brought gradually into conflict with a historical sense of time: "Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me."7 In Barbarians, the Magistrate inveighs against Empire for turning away from the “ recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons" and creating "the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe."8 Through Michael K, the medical officer discovers that he has been wasting his life: "I was wasting it by living from day to day in a state of waiting, that I had in effect given myself up as a prisoner to this war."9 In this aspect of the novels, are you giving life to ideas about the experience of time in a place like South Africa, or is it rather that the present tense (and first person) in the utterance of these narrators leads to the recurrent discovery of a dialectical opposite, that is, historical time— the sweep of past, present and future— as a chasm that threatens to engulf the self? JM C: The either/oryou present does not exhaust the possibilities. Never­ theless, yes, time in South Africa has been extraordinarily static for most of my life. I think of a comment of Erich Auerbach's on the timeexperience of Flaubert's generation, the generation that came to maturity around 1848, as an experience of a viscous, sluggish chronicity charged with eruptive potential. I was born in 1940; I was eight when the party of Afrikaner Christian nationalism came to power and set about stopping or even turning back the clock. Its programs involved a radically discon­ tinuous intervention into time, in that it tried to stop dead or turn around a range of developments normal (in the sense of being the norm) in colonial societies. It also aimed at instituting a sluggish no-time in which an already anachronistic order of patriarchal clans and tribal despotisms would be frozen in place. This is the political order in which I grew up. And the culture in which I was educated— a culture looking, when it looked anywhere, nostalgically back to Little England— did nothing to quicken time. So I am not surprised that you detect in me a horror of chronicity South African style. But that horror is also a horror of death— and here we come to the second part of your either/or. Historicizing oneself is an exercise in locating one's significance, but is also a lesson, at the most immediate level, in insignificance. It is not just time as history that threatens to engulf one: it is time itself, time as death.

Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafka's "The Burrow" (1981) afka’s story “The B urrow ” begins: “I have com pleted the construction of m y burrow and it seems to be successful.”1 The position in tim e of the speaker, the creatu re w hose life has been devoted to the building of this perfectly secure hideaw ay, seems to be clear: he speaks (or w rites) from a m om ent a fter the com pletion of the b urrow b u t not so long after it th a t final ju d g ­ m ent on its success can be given. F u rth er inform ation in the next few pages helps to situ ate the fictional now of his u tteran ces as belonging to “the zenith of m y life” (325), w hen he is nevertheless "growing o ld ” (326), "getting on in years" (327). The tim e encom passed by his act of storytelling, beginning at this m om ent, is not, however, sim ply the tim e th a t m ight be taken to u tte r the thirty-five o r so pages of the text: although there are no typographic breaks to m ark breaks in the tim e of n a rra tio n , there is a t least one point (343) w here the n a rra tio n is in te rru p te d by sleep. As for the tim e depicted by the n arrativ e, all I shall say as a first ap proxim ation is th at, aside from passing references to a faroff tim e of apprenticeship (for exam ple, 357), it ap p ears to cover life in the burrow (w hich it depicts as largely d om inated by habit), to include and pass beyond the m om ent a t w hich the first w ords of the text are u ttered , and to continue as far as the m om ent a t w hich the last w ords are u tte red , a m om ent a t w hich the tim e of n a rra tio n and the tim e of the n a rra tiv e are identical. B ut the relations betw een the time o f narration (the m oving now of the n a rra to r's utterance) and the time o f the narrative (referential time) tu rn out to be far m ore com plex and indeed baffling, the m ore closely we read the text. The first approxim ation to the reading of tim e-relations I have given above glosses over the p ro b ­ lem of fitting the p a tte rn of h a b itu al life in the bu rro w into a tem poral continuum ; and a ttem p ts to refine the approxim ation

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bring us face to face in the end w ith not only a n arrativ e stru ctu re b u t also a re p re se n ta tio n of tim e th a t cannot be com pressed into a ratio n al m odel. T here are num erous passages in K afka’s fictional works an d notebooks th a t reveal a preoccupation w ith the m eta­ physics of tim e. It is above all in the stories “The Country D octor” an d “The B urrow ,” however, th a t we have representations of an idiosyncratic feel for tim e. As we m ight expect, such stories nec­ essarily brin g Kafka into conflict not only w ith the tim e-conven­ tions of fictional realism (which rest on a N ew tonian m etaphysics) b u t also w ith the conception em bedded in (and, in the W horfian view, p ro p ag ated by) the tense-system of his language. In this essay I am concerned to explore the relations betw een the verb-system of G erm an (which, in the features I shall be com ­ m enting on, is very close to the verb-system of English), the n a r­ rativ e (and n a rra to ria l) stru c tu re of “The B urrow ,” and the con­ ception of tim e we can postulate Kafka held in 1923. In the first section of the essay I a tte m p t little m ore than to persuade the read er th a t the task of laying out the events of the n arrativ e in sequential tem poral o rd er is rid d led w ith difficulties. In the second section I discuss the w ork of tw o scholars w ho have recognized these difficulties an d a tte m p te d to overcom e them . In the th ird section I outline a d istinction betw een tw o features of the verb, tense an d aspect, th a t are often confused, and suggest how u p ­ holding the distin ctio n m ay aid us in our reading. And in the final section I a tte m p t to explain the tim e-schem e th a t “The B urrow ” represents, in both senses of this am biguous phrase. There is nothing in the first three long p arag rap h s of the text to conflict w ith the tim e an d tense conventions of retrospective firstperson n a rra tio n . B ut w ith the fourth p arag rap h it begins to be­ com e m ore difficult to situ ate the now of the act of n arratio n in tim e. Let us take up this p ara g rap h in som e detail. In the Castle Keep I assemble my stores . . . The place is so spacious that . . . I can divide up my stores, walk about among them, play w ith them . . . That done, I can always . . . make my calculations and hunting plans for the future, taking into account the season of the year. There are times when I am so well provided for that in my indifference to food I never even touch the sm aller fry that scuttle about the burrow . . . (328)

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The present here is an iterative, h a b itu al present, w ith a cycle of seasons and even years. It sometimes seems risky to make the Castle Keep the basis of defense . . . Thereupon I m ark off every third room . . . as a reserve storeroom . . . or I ignore certain passages altogether . . . or I choose quite at random a very few rooms . . . Each of these new plans involves of course heavy work . . . True, I can do [it] at my leisure . . . But it is not so pleasant when, as sometimes happens, you suddenly fancy, starting up from your sleep, th at the present distribution of your stores is completely and totally wrong . . . and m ust be set right at once, no m atter how tired or sleepy you may be; then I rush, then I fly, then I have no time for calculation; and although I was about to execute a perfectly new, perfectly exact plan, I now seize whatever my teeth hit upon and drag or carry it away, sighing, groaning, stum bling . . . Until little by little full wakefulness sobers me, and I can . . . return to my resting place . . . (329) There is no question th a t this episode too is iterative, typical, recurrent, an d th a t the now out of w hich the n a rra tiv e is u tte re d is situ ated w ithin these recurrences: episodes of panic are p a rt of the life of the creature, they have occurred in the past, they are expected to recur. Then again there are times when the storing of all my food in one place seems the best plan of all . . . and so . . . I begin once more to haul all my stores back . . . to the Castle Keep. For some time afterwards I find a certain comfort in having all the passages and rooms free . . . Then I usually enjoy periods of particular tranquility . . . until at last I can no longer restrain myself [bis ich es nicht mehr ertrage] and one night [eines Nachts] rush into the Castle Keep, mightily fling myself upon my stores, and glut myself . . . (329-331) Here we see th a t n a rra tiv e w ith difficulty sustains the illusion of an iterativ e present w hen the actions th a t recu r are im pulsive, unforeseen, an d unforeseeable, w hen the speaker is a t the m ercy of forces he cannot control o r p red ict. Thus sentence 1 below, in co n trast to sentence 2, strikes us as b izarre a n d perhaps u n g ra m ­ m atical: 1 1. Every m onth I im pulsively ru n about the streets naked. 2. Every m onth I ru n about the streets naked.

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The only w ay to dom esticate sentence 1 is to read it as a gen­ eralizatio n a b o u t behavior over p a st m onths, cu lm inating in the p resen t m om ent a t w hich the sentence is u tte red ("Every m onth for the p a st x m onths I have im pulsively run about the streets n ak ed ”). It is m ost b izarre w hen it is read as u tte red w ithin an iterativ e p resen t (“My h a b it is im pulsively to run about the streets naked every m o n th ”). The cause of conflict is of course th a t for a speaker to take up his stance w ithin an iterative present m eans, to the listen er who, so to speak, unrolls the cycle of the iterative on to a p a st—p resen t—future continuum , th a t the speaker not only m akes a generalization ab o u t his p ast behavior b u t also predicts his fu tu re behavior; and the act of prediction conflicts w ith the notion of the im pulsive. Kafka does n o t unequivocally provoke this contradiction in the passages I have quoted. N evertheless, both when the burrow ing cre atu re sta rts out of his sleep and rushes and flies (eile, fliege) to relocate his provisions, and w hen "one n ig h t” he rushes (stürze) into the Castle Keep to glut him self, the verbs carry connotations of the im pulsive, the uncontrollable, the unpredictable, and there­ fore sit uneasily in a n a rra to ria l fram ew ork of iterated tim e. T here are tw o altern a tiv e w ays of explaining w h at is going on here. The less rad ical explanation is this: G erm an, like English, lacks a specific m orphological form to signify iterative action. The n o n iterativ e (punctual) sense of the verb is the sem antically u n ­ m arked form , in co n tra st to the m arked form of the iterative sense. (This is perh aps no m ore th an a consequence of the relative infre­ quency of the iterativ e sense.) Therefore unless a sequence of verbs is sy stem atically interspersed w ith iterative m odifiers (som etim es, every day, . . .) o r (in English) is given w ith an ap p ro p riate m odal (will, used to, . . . ), the verbs tend to be read as unm arked, th a t is, n o n iterative. In o th er w ords, it requires a continual pressure of em phasis in the w ritin g to m ain tain iterative tim e. Of course, the m ore this em phasis has to be repeated, the clum sier it sounds. So ra th e r th an m ain tain the em phasis throughout, Kafka som e­ tim es (for exam ple, in the last two passages quoted) dramatizes a typical event from the iterativ e cycle and so perm its the reading to slip back for a w hile into the unm arked, noniterative mode. This rhetorical explanation thus in terp rets the problem atic verb sequence in term s of the pragm atics of “w hat w orks” for the reader, as m anifestations of the w rite r’s artfulness. There is no

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doubt th a t this explanation can be "m ade to w ork” for the se­ quences I quote and for others I m ention below. My reservations about explanation along these lines will becom e c learer later, when I argue th at, ra th e r th an being an obstacle to un d erstan d in g , the p ro b lem atic sequences em body a conception of tim e th a t is central to K afka's enterprise. For the m om ent let m e sim ply ob­ serve th at, "success” in w riting, like beauty, being essentially undem onstrable, som e rhetorical coaxing or intim id atio n , o r both, is required from the com m entator to establish any arg u m en t th a t a p a rticu la r strategy in a text "w orks,” th a t it is “successful w rit­ ing," indeed th a t it is a "strategy of w ritin g ” a t all. The second and m ore radical explanation is th a t the conception of tim e th a t reigns in "The B u rro w ” is truly ab erran t, th a t it can be dom esticated only w ith a degree of rhetorical violence a m o u n t­ ing to trad u ction, and th a t it is b e tte r understood as the reflection of a tim e-sense th a t does not draw a line betw een iterative and noniterative senses of the verb, or does not draw the line in the usual place. This is the explanation I will be exploring. However, before doing th a t let m e indicate the pervasiveness of difficult tense-sequences. I quote in leapfrog fashion to highlight the verbs. To regain my composure after such lapses I make a practice of reviewing my burrow, and . . . frequently leave it . . . It is always with a certain solemnity that I approach the exit again . . . [for] it was there that I began my burrow . . . Should I reconstruct this p art of my burrow? I keep on postponing the decision, and the labyrinth will probably rem ain as it is . . . Sometimes I dream that I have reconstructed it . . . and now it is impregnable . . . [The] nights on which such dream s come to me are the sweetest I know . . . So I m ust thread the torm enting complications of this labyrinth . . . whenever I go out . . . But then [dann] I find myself beneath the mossy covering [of the entrance] . . . and now [nun] only a little push w ith my head is needed and I am in the upper world. For a long time I do not dare to make that movement . . . I then cautiously raise the trap door and slip outside . . . (331— 333). The tim e of u tteran ce of the first p a rag rap h here is clearly the sam e as a t the beginning of the story: a present tim e after the com pletion of the burrow , a point from w hich the creatu re looks back to a cycle of h a b itu al p ast behavior and forw ard to a future in w hich the b urrow w ill probably not be reb u ilt. B ut again, w hen

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he enters into closer description of his iterative excursions from the burrow , the now of n a rra tio n shifts and becom es the m om ent (though w h at the sta tu s of th a t m om ent is we have yet to decide) a t w hich he leaves the burrow . This becom es p articu larly clear in the p a ra g ra p h th a t follows. . . . I know . . . th at I do not have to hunt here [hier] forever . . . so I can pass my tim e here quite without care . . . or rather I could, and yet I cannot [vielmehr, ich könnte es und kann es doch ‘n icht]. My burrow takes up too much of my thoughts. I fled from the entrance fast enough, but soon I am back at it again [schnell bin ich vom Eingang fortgelaufen, bald aber komme ich zurück]. I seek out a good hiding place and keep watch on the entrance . . . At such times it is as if I were not so much looking at my house as at myself sleeping . . . In all my time I have never seen anyone investigating the actual door of my house . . . There have been happy periods in which I could alm ost assure myself that the enmity of the world toward me had ceased . . . The burrow has probably protected [schützt] me in more ways that I thought [gedacht habe] or dared think while . . . inside it.2 . . . Sometimes I have been seized w ith [bekam] the childish desire never to return to the burrow again, but to . . . pass my life watching the entrance . . . [But] w hat does this protection which I am looking at here from the outside [die ich hier beobachte] am ount to . . . ? . . . No, I do not watch over my own sleep, as I imagined; rather it is I who sleep, while the destroyer watches . . . And I leave my post of observation and find I have had enough of this outside life . . . But I have never [nicht] been able to discover . . . an infallible method of descent. In consequence . . . I have not yet summoned the resolution to make my actual descent [ich bin . . . noch nicht in den wirklichen Eingang hinabgestiegen3], and I am thrown into despair at the necessity of doing it soon . . . I tear myself free from all my doubts and . . . rush to the door . . . but I cannot . . . The danger is by no means a fanciful one, but very real . . . If [an enemy] were actually to arrive now . . . if [it] were actually to happen, so that at least . . . I might in my blind rage leap on him [and] . . . destroy him . . . but above all—that is the m ain thing— were [sic] at last back in my burrow once more, I would have it in my heart to greet the labyrinth itself with rapture; but first I would . . . w ant to rest . . . But nobody comes . . . (334-337) The tense sequence is itself labyrinthine. The M uirs try to follow its tw istings an d turnings, b u t there are unavoidable m om ents

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when they have to choose betw een progressive and nonprogressive English form s {die ich hier beobachte becom es "w hich I am looking at here" ra th e r th an "which I look at here") and betw een perfect and p reterite (bin fortgelaufen becom es "fled" ra th e r th an "have fled"). There is no way, in fact, of tran slatin g the passage w ith o u t com m itting oneself from m om ent to m om ent to an in te rp re ta tio n of its tim e-structure, in p a rticu la r of the situ atio n in tim e of the m om ent a t w hich the n a rra to r speaks: are the events beheld from the perspective of the now of the first sentence of the story—"I have [now] com pleted the construction of my burrow "—w hich I w ould m ake the present tense here a so-called historical present; or has the m om ent of n arra tio n shifted decisively, for the tim e being, to a tim e out in the fresh air w here the burrow ing creatu re w aits indecisively, unable to venture the descent back into the earth? In fact this passage puts the question m ost starkly. "Ich bin . . . noch nicht in den w irklichen E ingang hinabgestiegen," says the creature. If the m om ent of u tteran ce of this sentence is the m om ent of u tteran ce of the text, then the creatu re is now literally trap p ed out in the open. This lengthy quotation should be enough to show th a t the de­ tailed progression of tense-sequences indeed raises puzzling p ro b ­ lems. W ithout quoting a t quite such length, let me point to oth er places w here the problem is unavoidable. The creatu re is "now ” outside his burrow . "For the p resent . . . I am outside it, seeking som e possibility of retu rn in g . . . con­ fronted by th a t entrance over there [dort] w hich now [jetzt] lite r­ ally locks an d b ars itself against me" (339, 340). The deictics em ­ phatically m ark the m om ent of n a rra tio n as a m om ent outside the burrow . "And then . . . I approach the en tran ce [and] . . . slowly descend" (341). The now of n a rra to ria l tim e shifts w ith the now of n a rra ted tim e: tim e elapses both in the progress of the text an d in the w orld outside the entrance of the burrow , and "now" en­ trance is achieved. The earlier irresolution and incapacity to de­ scend are overcom e by sheer exhaustion. “Only in this state [of exhaustion] . . . can I achieve my descent" (341). B ut the re tu rn to the burrow rejuvenates him . "It is as though at the m om ent when I set foot in the burrow I had [hätte] w akened from a long . . . sleep." He sets about tran sp o rtin g the spoils of his h u n tin g to his Castle Keep. W hen this task is com pleted "a feeling of lassitude overcom es me" and he sleeps (342-343).

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Though there is no b reak in K afka’s m an u scrip t a t this point,4 there is a gap in n a rra te d tim e. "I m ust have slept for a long tim e ” (Ich habe w ohl sehr lange geschlafen), the n a rra tio n continues.5 This second p a rt of the story concerns the m ysterious w histling noise th a t the cre atu re hears in his burrow . Again the now of the n a r­ ratio n seem s to be cotem poral w ith the now of the action; b u t again th ere are u n settlin g passages in w hich the now seems to reveal an iterativ e face.6 On the o ther hand, the noise is unam b ig ­ uously described as som ething "th at I have never h eard before” (was ich nie gehört habe) (347)—an iterative retu rn of the noise seem s to be ruled out. W hen the first researches into the origin of the noise fail, the creatu re revises his plans and speaks of a future of intention: "I in ten d now to a lte r m y m ethods. I shall dig a . . . trench in the direction of the noise" (348). B ut this new plan brings no solace, for "I do n ot believe in i t ” (349). The reason for this m istru st of "reaso n ab le” future projections w ould, in an iterative tim e, be th a t th eir failure has already been experienced. In the, so to speak, blinkered p resen t of the text the cause of his own hopelessness rem ains obscure to the n a rra to r. Even if we read the entire second p a rt of the story as linear and n oniterative, there are iterative cycles w ithin it. Sometimes I fancy that the noise has stopped . . . sometimes such a faint w histling escapes one . . . one thinks that the whistling has stopped forever. I listen no longer, I jum p up . . . (350) If, on the o th er hand, we read this p a rt as iterative, then the sequence I have quoted becom es p a rt of the iterative present: n eith er G erm an nor E nglish appears to have a m echanism a t the level of stru c tu re of the verb phrase for indicating cycles w ithin cycles. "It m ay h appen [kann . . . geschehen] th a t I [man] m ake a new discovery” (351): th a t the noise is grow ing louder. The shift from ich to m an is m ain tain ed for m uch of the rest of the paragraph, in conform ity w ith the new hypothetical m ode of the narrative. It seem s im possible to square this m ode w ith a noniterative u n d er­ stan d in g of the n a rra tiv e unless one grants to the n a rra to r the effective position of a fictional creator, som eone toying w ith se­ quences th a t m ay or m ay not be inserted into the narrative. W hile this possibility cannot be dism issed absolutely, there is nothing

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else in the text to su p p o rt the notion th a t the operations of w riting are being so radically unm asked. On the other hand, if one u n d e r­ stands the n a rrativ e as iterative, then the hypothetical sequence fits in as one th a t m ay or m ay not occur in a given iteratio n . As the creatu re m oves ab o u t his burrow investigating the noise, new ideas, new plans, new conclusions occur to him , all in tu rn abandoned as useless. Why does he not rem em ber them from previous iterations, w hy does he e n te rta in them again if they are proved ineffective, w hy does he experience surges of hope and despair? The answer, a t one level, is th a t he is in som e sense condem ned to these iterations, and th a t p a rt of being condem ned (as the exam ple of Sisyphus m ight teach) is th a t the to rm en ts of hope are p a rt of the sentence. W hat should interest us p articu la rly in an investigation of tense and tim e, however, is th a t the in ability to learn from p a st failure is a reflection of the fact th a t the ite ra ­ tions are n o t ordered: none of them being earlier in tim e than any other, no iteration encom passes a m em ory of an earlier one. "N othing . . . approaching the p resent situ atio n has happened before; nevertheless there w as an incident not unlike it w hen the burrow w as only beginning" (355); and the creatu re digresses into a past-tense account of an episode from his "ap p ren ticesh ip .” The tem poral perspective has reverted unam biguously to th a t of the opening of the story: a now in the tim e of n a rra tio n w ith a linear p ast behind it and a linear future before it. The last pages of "The B urrow ,” after this episode, are resigned, valedictory in tone. The creatu re retires to his Castle Keep, to his store of food, and aw aits “the b e a st,” dream ing of the peace of "the old d ay s” (358). P erhaps it is possible th a t the beast has never h eard him , in w hich case there is hope. "But all rem ains u n ­ changed” (359). The ex trao rd in ary tim e stru c tu re of "The B urrow ” has been com ­ m ented on by num erous scholars. I should like to discuss two of the m ore perceptive of these com m entaries. In her essay "K afka's E tern al Present," and again in h er book Transparent M inds, D orrit Cohn discusses p eculiarities of tim e an d tense in Kafka.7 About “The B u rro w ” she w rites: The anim al—midway through the story—seems to "forget” the iterative nature of his account and begins to tell of . . . the

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appearance of the hissing sound. Up to this point the anim al has described his habitual subterranean existence in durative-iterative present tense . . . [After this point] the static time of the first part of the story . . . becomes an evolving time, its durative tense a punctual tense . . . The speaker who surveyed his sovereign realm in durative present tense [is] transform ed into a monologist who sim ultaneously experiences bewildering events and ar­ ticulates them in a punctual present tense. . . . This [tem poral] structure corresponds exactly to Kafka's paradoxical conception of hum an time, which is based on a denial of the distinction between repetitious and singular events. For him, as he once affirmed aphoristically, "the decisive moment of hum an development is everlasting." "The Burrow,” by exploiting the am biguities of a discourse cast in the present tense, reflects this paradox in its language as well as its meaning. If the crucial events of life happen not once, but everlastingly, then the dis­ tinction between durative and singulative modes of discourse is effaced: the durative silence always already contains the hissing sound, and the destruction it brings lies not in a single future moment, but in a constantly repeated present.8 The discussion of pages 334—337 of "The B urrow " above should m ake it clear th a t Cohn's division of the story into a first p art, in w hich "tense" is durative-iterative, and a second p a rt, in w hich it is p u n ctu al, is too neat: shifts occur too frequently for h er gener­ alization to hold. Consequently, w hile she is rig h t to characterize K afka's tim e-conception as "paradoxical [and] . . . based on a denial of the distin ctio n betw een repetitious an d singular events," she goes too far w hen she claim s th a t this distinction or opposition creates a structure in any m eaningful sense. There is no clear correspondence betw een, on the one hand, durative-iterative ten ­ ses an d life before "the decisive m om ent" (the s ta rt of the hissing) and, on the other, the arriv al of "the decisive m om ent" an d sin­ gulative tenses. Cohn does, however, point in a fruitful direction in identifying the am biguities of present-tense verb form s as the form al field whose ex p lo itation m akes the higher-level paradoxes of "The B ur­ row" possible. B ut th ere is a certain flaccidity in the argum ent th a t K afka's "denial of the distinction betw een repetitious and sin g u lar events" is sim ply “reflected" in the language of the story. For "The B urrow " does not "efface" the distinction betw een "du-

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rative and singulative." The m ost we can say is th a t a t certain points in the text w here we w ould expect the one form we en­ counter the other, and vice versa. If the distinction were indeed effaced, if the durative and singulative form s were used in te r­ changeably, the result w ould very probably be nonsense. The p ro b ­ lem is precisely th a t in tu itio n (w hich m ay m islead) suggests th a t there is system behind the a b e rra n t usage; an d o u r critical task is one of probing intu itio n by analysis. The conclusion I com e to happens to be quite close to Cohn's: the story is indeed d om inated by "a constantly repeated present." To reach th a t conclusion, how ­ ever, requires not only a tig h ter scrutiny of the text b u t also a principled u n d erstan d in g of the use one m ay m ake of privileged insights such as the aphorism of K afka’s th a t Cohn quotes. In a study based on a m ore m inute exam ination of tense se­ quences in "The B urrow " th an C ohn’s, H einrich Henel arrives a t a sim ilar ch aracterizatio n of the tem poral situ atio n of K afka's creature: th a t it is "an endless condition." Henel recognizes from the sta rt the p a rtic u la r h erm eneutic problem s posed by a text in w hich so elem entary a linguistic category as tense, not easily reduced to o th er term s, becom es the object of the w rite r’s play: "W hat kind of p resent occurs as a given point is determ in ed by tone an d context; b u t w h at tone is ap p ro p ria te and w h at context is perceived depend on how one u n d erstan d s the present."9 In H enel's reading, the story falls into tw o m ain p a rts w ith a short linking m iddle passage. In the first p a rt the use of the presen t is in d eterm inate: "Often it sounds as if a unique m om ent in the here and now is intended, yet the d o m inant im pression is of the iterative . . . Past definite and non-recurring events are rep o rted in the p reterite, b u t for the m ost p a rt e arlier an d now m elt into an endlessly expanding condition." In the second p a rt the m eaning of the present tense changes. Past is clearly distin­ guished from present, and the thoughts and activities of the beast proceed in tem poral order . . . The narrator now keeps step w ith the events represented, and the present tense he employs denotes at each point of the narration a different, later present. While the present of the first p art fuses with an untranscended past, the present of the second part moves consistently forward and merges into an indefinite future. The effect is in both cases the same: an eternal condition is represented.10

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Thus, like Cohn, Henel is concerned to sm ooth out, by an act of generalization, the difficulties presented by the tense sequences. In his read in g the tim e of the first h alf of the story is, by and large, iterative, the tim e of the second h alf is not. But, we can ask, is the m ode of generalizing from the to tality of d ata the correct m ode of arg u m en t to em ploy here? Are we concerned to form ulate laws th a t cover m ost of the d a ta —th a t is, statistical generalizations— or law s th a t explain detailed variations, law s whose m odels w ould be rules of g ra m m a r? 11 My aim here is to elucidate the tem poral system of the story on the basis of usage which, despite its a p ­ p earance of ab errance, I m ust sta rt by assum ing to have some kind of in tentional unity. For this reason I do not find it enough to say, as Henel does, th a t the present tense in “The B urrow ” “fills no less th an five distin ct functions” w ithout carrying the analysis fu rth er.12 This classihcatory step is only a stage in analysis, w ith no ex p lan atory pow er in itself. The m ore im p o rtan t stage is the one a t w hich the question is answ ered: Is there a coherent tim esystem in w hich these five functions can be said to participate? In o th er w ords: Is there a tem poral coherence to the story, or does the m ind b ehind the story shift from one tem poral subsystem to another? H ith erto I have used the w ord tense ra th e r loosely to designate the elem ent of verb inflection th a t m arks tim e-relations. I m ust now refine the notion of tense by distinguishing betw een the two ele­ m ents of verb inflection w ith tem poral functions: tense and aspect. The theory of the verb on w hich I base m y discussion of “The B u rro w ” is the description first outlined by G ustave G uillaum e in Temps et verbe (1929) and subsequently developed in his published lectures of 1948-49. A G uillaum ean description of the English verb system has been given by W. H. H irtle .13 (I am not aw are of any co m p arab le study for the G erm an verb.) In G u illau m e’s theory, it is not possible to describe the system of tense an d aspect in term s of a single m odel of tim e, nam ely the fam iliar u n id irectio n al arrow of infinite tim e of N ew tonian phys­ ics. The verb system instead rests upon two sim ultaneous and com plem entary w ays of conceiving tim e: as universe tim e, a lim ­ itless lin ear tim e along whose axis any event can be situated; and as event tim e, the span of tim e th a t an event takes to achieve itself.

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Though in theory event tim e can be infinitesim al—th a t is, the event can be purely punctual, w ith no interval betw een beginning and end—this state is rarely reached in the h u m an w o rld .14 Verbal aspect is a system of representing event tim e. Once this m ental rep resen tatio n has been achieved, in G uillaum e's theory, the system of tense serves to com bine the representations of event tim e an d universe tim e. How does aspect represent event tim e? It conceives of the event as taking place in tw o phases: a coming-to-be phase extending over successive in stan ts, followed by a result phase during w hich no fu rth er developm ent o r actu alizatio n of the event can take place. D epending upon at w hat point of the tem poral continuum the verb intercepts event tim e, different aspectual results are achieved. In English, the p rim a ry aspectual opposition is betw een intercepting event tim e a t som e in stan t (w hich m ay be the final instant) of the com ing-to-be phase, an d intercepting it du rin g its afterm ath . The tw o aspects th a t result are, respectively, im m anent and transcendent. Interception: immanent aspect

Interception: transcendent aspect

Figure 5 A d iagram (Figure 5) m ay elucidate these concepts. H ere the continuum extending infinitely from p a st to nonpast represents universe tim e; and the section BE represents event tim e, from beginning to end, w ith a com ing-to-be phase and a result phase. D epending on w h eth er event tim e is in tercepted during the form er or the la tte r phase, we have verb form s of im m an en t aspect ("he is running," "he ru n s,” "he ran") o r verb form s of tran scen d en t aspect ("he has run"). (We see from these exam ples th a t aspect is independent of the past-present tense distinction.) How are iterativ e verb form s—form s whose iterativ e m eaning

Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafka's “The Burrow Bi Ei B2 E2 past

■ . .

Bj

Ej

...

B

223

Bn En E

non-past

Figure 6 is signaled by nonsyntactic m eans—represented in such a schem e? Here the im p o rta n t thing to recognize is th at, though an iterative form m ay be th o u g h t of as sh o rth an d for a succession of single eVents each w ith a beginning and an end (for exam ple, "he runs [every day]"), it does not in tercep t the result phase of any of these single events, an d a t m ost m ay or m ay not intercept only the resu lt phase of th eir totality. Thus in Figure 6, w here each p a ir Bi an d Ej rep resents the beginning and end of a typical iterated event i, the form s "he ru n s/ran [every d ay],” "he is/was running [every d ay ],” rep resen t an intercep tio n in the com ing-to-be phase of event 1, w hereas "he used to ru n [every d a y ]” represents an interception in the resu lt phase of the to tality of the iterated events, th a t is, after E n. Therefore, w ith o u t loss of generality we can condense Figure 6 to Figure 7, in w hich the iterated events are represented w ith o u t in d ividual resu lt phases. Bi B2 B3 El E2

__________ I past

i

...

Bj Bj+1 Ej-1 Ej

· · ·

Bn En-1 En

[ ____ :__ J_______ :... ;.......... i__________

B

E

non-past

Figure 7 There is one m ore p oint to recognize about iteration. Though in the d iag ram s thus far I have represented the event th a t is iterated as a single event (for exam ple, "I r u n ”), in "The B urrow ” it is m ore often a sequence of events of som e length (for exam ple, "I m ust th read the torm en tin g com plications of this lab y rin th . . . w hen­ ever I go out, and I am both exasperated and touched when, as som etim e h appens, I lose m y se lf. . . B ut then I find m yself beneath the m ossy covering . . . ” [33]). It is the whole of this sequence of subevents (going out, threading, losing myself, being exasperated and touched, finding myself, . . .) th a t is iterated and th a t is rep resen ted in Figure 7 by the event (Bi, Ei).

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Now w ithin the total iterated event (Bi, Ei), m orphological m eans of tim e-specification are m ore im poverished th an u n d er norm al (noniterated) circum stances. This is because w hat is u n d er norm al circum stances a tense m ark er w ith a secondary aspectual function (for exam ple, the null m orphem e 0 of run, w hich norm ally m arks the verb as present in tense and m arks iterativ e aspect only w hen syntactically reinforced, as in "I ru n every d a y ”) is now charged p rim arily w ith m arking iterative aspect, so th a t tim e relations have to be specified by syntactic m eans. In the passage quoted above, the relative order of subevents is rep re ­ sented iconically, by the sequence of the signifiers ("I lose m yself . . . then I find m y self”), and by the logic of syntactic relations ("I am . . . exasperated . . . w hen . . . I lose m y self”), ra th e r th an m orphologically. This excursus on iterativ ity m ay help us to distinguish betw een the stru ctu re of tim e in "The B urrow ” and the system of tense and aspect through w hich, in p a rt, th a t stru c tu re is realized, and thus to unravel, at least a t a form al level, som e of the com plexities of the n arrativ e. For closer analysis, consider pages 333—341, from the em ergence of the creatu re into the fresh a ir to his descent back into the burrow , a passage in w hich the tim e stru c tu re is perhaps m ore bew ildering th an anyw here else in the story. Scrutinizing these pages closely, we find an a ltern atio n betw een two varieties of tem poral experience, each w ith an associated n arrativ e point of view. The ground bass of the passage is: (1) the iterative experience of em erging from the burrow , enduring the pleasures and terrors of life above, not being able to reen ter the burrow , then finally reentering it. The iterativ ity of the experience is signaled by so-called present-tense (in fact iterative-aspect) verb forms w ith associated adverbials (som etim es, usually, and so on). In Figure 7 the tim e segm ent of this experience is (Bi, Ei) and the m om ent of n a rra tio n from w hich it is described is outside any (Bi( Ei), th a t is, beyond E. B ut there are reg u lar tran sitio n s from (1) into: (2) the tim e of the ite ratio n experienced from the inside, w ith a past and an unknow n future of its own. In term s of Figure 7, it is as if the stru c tu re of (Bi, Ei) were identical w ith th a t of (B, E), and therefore as though the iterative n a tu re of the experience becam e invisible or w ere erased from know ledge. There are two form al devices above all th a t achieve tran sitio n s of this kind: (a)

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overt p ast and future verb-form s, w hich have the effect of nor­ m alizing the null m orphem e 0 of the unm arked form as a present tense ra th e r th a n an iterative aspect m arker (as, for exam ple, in the context “he ra n . . . he will ru n ,” “he ru n s” is read as a presenttense form ); (b) em phatically em ployed deictics like now, this, here, w hich, since they locate the n a rra tiv e relative to the tim e and place of its n a rra tio n , serve to introduce the now of n a rra tio n inside (Bi, Ei). • The m ovem ent of these pages is thus a continual slide from an outside view of the cycle safety-danger-safety to an inside view in w hich danger is experienced from the inside and from w hich it seem s im possible to re a tta in safety, followed by an a b ru p t and tem p o rary re tu rn to the safer outside view. This back-and-forth occurs n o t only a t the level of the n a rra to r’s experience; it is also explicitly th em atized in the passage as a "problem .” It is possible to m inim ize this th em atizatio n and to read it as sim ply a private joke of K afka's, a w ry reflection on the experience of w riting one­ self into a corner. B ut it is also possible to read it as a bringing to explicitness of a fundam ental experience of tim e w ith w hich the story continually w restles a t a form al level. Unable to sum m on the resolution to ree n ter his burrow , the creatu re says: "For the p resen t . . . I am outside it seeking som e possibility of returning, and for th a t the necessary technical devices [technischen Einrichtungen] w ould be very desirable" (339). Among the m ost desirable devices w ould be, of course, a passage from the dangers of (B, E) to the safety of (Bj, EO (the sw itching pow er of the 0 tense/aspect m ark er w ould be such a device). Two pages later: "And then, too exhausted to be any longer capable of thought . . . I . . . slowly descend . . . Only in this state . . . can I achieve my descent" (341). As long as consciousness has been in control, the creatu re has been unable to achieve this tran sitio n from above to below and has rem ain ed stuck in a condition th a t is not only unendurable b u t logically im possible: the iterative form s have already prom ised th a t ascent and descent form a cycle; therefore, the creatu re can­ not rem ain stuck halfw ay. E xhaustion and incapacity for thought are the sole m eans th a t overcom e the argum ents (or ratio n aliza­ tions) of the conscious m ind th a t keep him from his burrow ; they also co n stitu te the ab su rd “technical device” th a t solves the prob­ lem of getting stuck during the cycle. W hat can be read in the

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m ode of realism as a piece of ra th e r inept deus ex m achina psy­ chologizing can also be read in the m ode of text-construction as a flattening of the distance betw een n a rra to r and n arra ted , till the adventures of the creatu re seeking a way into his b urrow becom e identical w ith the adventures of the signifying subject seeking to find a w ay to keep the n a rra tiv e m oving. As H enry Sussm an writes: The voice of the anim al is . . . also the voice of construction [of the burrow, of the text], the voice of the rhetorical constructs employed in this particular production. . . . The reader is asked to believe in the concurrence of the text with the actions which the anim al claims to be perform ing a t the moment. If for no other reason than because these actions are m ediated by a w ritten text subject to time in different ways than the unidirectional thrust of experience, this presum ption is ab­ surd. The narrative confines itself, nevertheless, on the basis of this Active tem poral immediacy, to a now which is rem arkably resistant to revisions to the past or projections into the future. The anim al thus becomes the agent of a tem poral paradox, that the now, capable of feeding upon itself endlessly, is wider-reach­ ing than both the past . . . and the future.15 Sussm an is rig h t to ch aracterize tim e in "The B u rro w ” as p a r­ adoxical. B ut the ab ility of the now to feed upon itself endlessly is not paradoxical a t all as long as we distinguish betw een a now of n a rrativ e tim e (which tracks the process of feeding) and a now of n a rra te d tim e (th at w hich is fed upon). The paradox lies else­ where: in the a p p aren t identity—if we rely upon the signals given by verb form s—of the texture of tim e in the n a rra te d now of (Bj, Ej) an d the m om ent of n a rra tio n . It is this paradox th a t Kafka brings into prom inence a t the m om ent w hen, too “exhausted" to play any longer w ith the riddle itself, he cuts through the knot and p u ts the creatu re back in the b u rro w .16 It w ould be foolhardy to dism iss out of h an d the possibility th a t "The B u rro w ” is incom plete, an d th at one of the things Kafka m ight have done h a d he com pleted it to his own satisfaction m ight have been to regularize a t least som e of the m ore b izarre tense sequences, o r to create gaps in the text ("chapter b rea k s”) to in ­

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dicate lacunae in the tim e of n a rra tio n .17 N evertheless, one's p ro ­ cedure as a critic m u st be to test the possibility th a t the text as it stands is open to in te rp retatio n ; only if no in te rp retatio n can be given should one fall back on the explanation th a t the text is in som e sense a t fau lt. In this section of the essay, therefore, I suggest how the rep eatedly broken, in te rru p te d iterative present m ight be u n d erstood in the context of the whole of the story. The sta te in w hich K afka's creatu re lives is one of acute anxiety (one w ould call it irratio n a l anxiety if there were any reliable opposition betw een ratio n al and irratio n al in his universe). His w hole life is organized around the burrow , his refuge against an attack th a t m ay come at any m om ent and w ithout w arning. The key notion here is w ithout warning. A w arning is the sign of a tran sitio n from peace to its opposite. S trictly speaking, the a rt of reading w arn in g s is purely prospective, future-directed: a sign recognized retrospectively as having been a w arning is no longer a w arn in g , for it can no longer w arn. A w arn in g is the sign of a tran sitio n . In "The B urrow ,” however, tim e does n o t m ove thro u g h tran sitio n phases. There is one m o­ m ent an d th en th ere is a n o th er m om ent; betw een them is sim ply a break. No am o u n t of w atchfulness will reveal how one m om ent becom es another; all we know is th a t the next m om ent happens. Sim ilarly, Zeno pointed out, before an arrow reaches its targ et it m ust reach halfw ay to its target; before it reaches halfway, it m ust reach a q u a rte r of the way; and so forth. To reach its target it m u st pass thro u g h an infinity of states; and to pass through an infinity of states m u st take an infinity of tim e. Zeno m ight have added: conceiving the flight of an arrow in this w ay as a succession of m om ents, we can never u n d erstan d how it gets from one m o­ m ent to the next, we can never in teg rate its m om ents into a single flight. We know th a t this p aradox (w hich he did not necessarily arrive a t via Zeno) preoccupied Kafka. In "The G reat Wall of C hina” he describes the m essenger w ho takes thousands of years and m ore to bring a m essage from the em peror. In "The Next Village" a lifetim e m ay not be long enough for a journey to the next village. In "A dvocates” flights of stairs expand b eneath the searcher's feet. The m ystical correlate to the p aradox is a tim e incom m ensurable w ith h u m an tim e in w hich m a n ’s life occupies a m ere instant, yet

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eons of which can fit in the interstices betw een tw o h u m an m o­ m en ts.18 Time in “The B u rro w ” is discontinuous in a strictly form alizable sense. Any m om ent m ay m ark the b reak betw een before a n d after. Time is thus a t every m om ent a tim e of crisis (from Greek krino, "to separate, to divide"). Life consists in an a tte m p t to an ticip a te a danger th a t cannot be a n ticip ated because it comes w ith o u t transition, w ithout w arning. The experience of a tim e of crisis is colored by anxiety. The task of building the b urrow itself re p re ­ sents a life devoted to trying to still anxiety, n a tu rally w ith o u t success; for w ithout w arning "the enem y" is in the burrow . (Here I suggest th a t it w ould be naive to think th a t the w histling is a w arning an d th a t "the enem y" is som e beast th a t the read er does not get to see, ra th e r along the lines th a t Dora D ym ant suggests; for by the end of the story the arch itect of the burrow clearly recognizes th a t a break betw een before and after has arrived, the clearest sign of this being th a t the lead-up tim e th a t once looked innocent now looks in retro sp ect like a tim e of w arning. This does not of course m ean th a t there w ill only be a single foe, a single danger, a single before an d after: in theory "The B urrow " is infin­ itely extensible.) We trea t the p ast as real insofar as present existence has been conditioned or generated by it. The m ore indirect the causal de­ rivation of the present from a p a rtic u la r p a st becom es, the w eaker the p ast becom es, the m ore it sinks to w ard a dead past. B ut w ith Kafka it is precisely the pow er of each m om ent to condition the next th a t seem s to be in question. Som eone m ust have been telling lies about Josef K., b u t no backw ard exploration of tim e will reveal the cause of the accusation against him . Gregor S am sa finds h im ­ self one m orning transform ed into a gian t insect, why an d how he will never know. Betw een the before and the after there is not stage-by-stage developm ent b u t a sudden transform ation, Verwandlung, m etam o rp h o sis.19 A com m on strategy of the first-person intelligence a ttem p tin g to u n d erstan d the processes of tim e is to take up its stance in a present m om ent (ideally the m om ent of tran q u illity w hen "I take up my pen to w rite") th a t stands for the cu lm ination of a certain past, in o rder to retrace the history leading up to this m om ent. Both p a rts of B eckett's Molloy, for exam ple, take up this stance in

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an explicit way. The first sentence of "The B urrow ” seem s to p rom ­ ise a sim ila r project: “I have com pleted the construction of my b u rro w an d it seem s to be successful." B ut the project tu rn s ou t to be rid d led w ith problem s. W here are we to locate this privileged m om ent of success an d security: before, after, o r during the recital of events in an d aro u n d the b urrow th a t occupies pp. 325—343 and term in ates in the sta te of sleep from w hich the creatu re is aw ak­ ened by the w histling? As I have tried to show in the first section, any p u tativ e tem poral ordering of events at a detailed level be­ com es honeycom bed w ith inconsistencies and in ternal contradic­ tions. There is no sm ooth course of n arrativ e developm ent th a t will lead from beginnings to the present m om ent of n arratio n . Betw een then and now is alw ays a break. It is from this vantage th a t the logic of iterative n arrativ e be­ com es clear. Failing to trace the present to roots in the past, K afka's n a rra to r em barks on a series of projects to w rap up the p ast as a ro und of h a b it th a t includes the p resent and, insom uch as it is rep eated, projects into the future. "I assem ble my stores . . . I can divide up m y stores, w alk about am ong them , play w ith them . . . T h at done, I can m ake m y calculations and h unting plans . . . " (328): this is typical of the c reatu re's discourse. The crucial move, in G uillaum e's term s, is aw ay from universe tim e tow ard event tim e, aw ay from lin ear past-present-future tense organiza­ tion to w ard a cyclic aspectual organization of tim e. This move—w hich I w ould call a ruse—is intended to capture the relatio n of p a st to present to future by trapping them all in an iterativ e pseudopresent. B ut as we have seen, the ruse contin­ ually fails. The pseudopresent of iterativ e/h ab itu al aspect contin­ ually breaks dow n as the events signified w ithin (Bi, Ei), the typical tim e gap, p ersist in organizing them selves into successivity, into tim e, into tense, a n d then in collapsing in the persistent ru p tu re of the tim e o rd er th a t characterizes Kafka. There is no way of getting here from there. By talking in term s of failed n arrativ e ruses I m ay give the im pression th a t K afka is in som e sense against, above, and supe­ rio r to the n a rra to r of “The B urrow ,” th a t if he does not know w h at a successful n a rra tiv e strategy m ight be he is a t least aw are of the fu tility of the n a rra to r's strategy. This picture w ould entirely falsify the story. W hat we have in “The B urrow ,” rather, is a stru g ­

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gle—n ot only the rep resen tatio n of the struggle b u t the struggle itself—w ith tim e experienced as continual crisis, an d experienced at a pitch of anxiety th a t leads to a ttem p ts to tam e it w ith w h a t­ ever m eans language offers. The entire linguistic co n stru ct called "The B u rro w ” represents the stilling of this anxiety; the m ajo r m etaphor for the linguistic construct is the b u rro w itself, b u ilt by the labors of the forehead (328). B ut this p a rtic u la r burrow , "The B urrow ,” could not have been b u ilt in a language th a t did not provide so easy a m eans of gliding from tense to aspect as G erm an (or English) does. Thus, w ith o u t denying the to ta l im p lication of Kafka in the story, it should be possible to recognize th a t the p a rticu la r form the story takes rests heavily on a p eculiarity of language. We can steer this course w ithout com m itting ourselves to the extrem ism of e ith er the W horfian thesis th a t linguistic stru c ­ tures determ ine thought or the line ch aracteristic of som e R ussian form alists th a t the literary text is in som e sense p red eterm in ed by its devices.20 I can spell out m y position in a different way by isolating my point of disagreem ent w ith D orrit Cohn, whose Transparent M inds contains the m ost carefully w orked-out observations on the re la ­ tions of tim e to n a rra tiv e point of view in the story. Cohn recog­ nizes the "illogical” n atu re of its tem poral structure; b u t this stru c ­ ture, she says, corresponds exactly to Kafka’s paradoxical conception of hum an time, which is based on the denial of the distinction between repetitious and singular events. For him , as he once affirmed aphoristically, "the decisive m oment of hum an development is everlasting.” "The Burrow," by exploiting the am biguities of a discourse cast in the present tense, reflects this paradox in its language as well as its meaning. If the crucial events of life happen not once, but everlastingly, then the distinction between durative and singulative modes of discourse is effaced: the durative silence always already contains the hissing sound, and the destruction it brings lies not in a single future m oment, but in a constantly repeated present.21 The aphorism q u o ted by Cohn is both obscure an d pregnant; b u t I am not sure th a t it lends itself to quite the p o in t Cohn is m aking here. It comes from the notebook of O ctober 1917, an d occurs after a p arab le whose gist we m ight express as follows: We

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die a t every m om ent, b u t blindly do not recognize o u r death and are sp a t back into life. K afka goes on: “From a certain point on, there is no m ore tu rn in g back. This is the p oint to be reached.” And then: “The decisive [entscheidende] m om ent of h u m an devel­ opm en t is everlasting [immerwährend]. Therefore, those revolu­ tionary sp iritu a l m ovem ents th a t declare everything before th em ­ selves null are rig h t, in th a t nothing has yet happened." The next ap h o rism is: "H um an history is the second betw een two steps of a trav eler.”22 The passage as a w hole therefore contrasts two kinds of aw are­ ness of tim e. The first, w hich we can call historical aw areness, im putes reality to a p ast th a t it sees as continuous w ith the pres­ ent. The second, w hich we can call eschatological, recognizes no such continuity: there is only the present, w hich is alw ays present, sep ara ted from Ing ard en 's "dead p a s t” by a m om ent of ru p tu re, the entscheidende Augenblick. Hence the paradox th a t history is over in "a second,” w hile the p resent m om ent is "everlasting." To say, as Cohn does, th a t "the crucial events of life happen not once, b u t everlastingly,” therefore m isses the point. There are no “crucial ev en ts” as opposed to o th er events: there is only w h at is hap p en in g now, and this is alw ays crucial 23 Sim ilarly, although the linguistic opposition of durative to singulative cannot really be effaced w ith o u t causing a general collapse of language, the conceptual opposition betw een the two—an opposition th a t be­ longs to w h at I have loosely called the historical sense of tim e— is b ro u g h t into doubt by a linguistic practice th a t steps perilously along the b rin k of contradiction, confusion, and nonsense. Thus by the end of the story the silence does indeed, as Cohn says, "alw ays co n tain the hissing so u n d ,” and w hatever the noise sig­ nifies is indeed already here "in a constantly repeated p re se n t” (which I w ould ra th e r call an everlasting present). B ut this does not go far enough. W hat is m issing from Cohn's account is a recognition of the rad ical trea tm e n t Kafka gives to narrative tim e. For the everlasting present is nothing b u t the m o­ m en t of n a rra tio n itself. Now th a t the n a rra to r has failed tim e and again to dom esticate tim e by using strategies of n arrativ e (th at is, strategies belonging to historical tim e), his stru ctu res of sequence, of cause a n d effect, collapsing each tim e a t the “decisive m o m en t” of ru p tu re w hen the p ast fails to ru n sm oothly into the present,

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th a t is, now th a t the construct of n a rrativ e tim e has collapsed, there is only the tim e of n a rra tio n left, the shifting now w ith in which his n a rra tiv e takes place, leaving behind it a wake (a text) of failure, fantasy, sterile speculation: the ram ifications of a b u r­ row whose fatal precariousness is signaled by the w histling th a t comes from its point(s) of ru p tu re.

Robert Musil's Stories of Women (1986)

n 1924 R obert M usil published a collection of stories titled Three Women, the spinoff of work on a novel about the last years of the H absburg E m pire th a t began to appear, in in­ stallm en ts, in 1930: The M an w ithout Qualities. For readers d au n ted by this m ost essayistic of novels, full of thinking, em pty of ideas (because, to its author, it was the m ark of a poet to be open to ideas b u t to hold none), unfinished and perhaps unfinishable, a novel th a t asks its central question—w h at Europe is to believe in now th a t it has ceased to believe in history—in a m ode of irony an d artifice, Three Women m ay provide a m ore convenient in tro d u ctio n to the m atu re Musil. The m ost considerable of these three stories, “Tonka," draw s on an un h ap p y en tan g lem en t from M usil's own youth (it is rem ark ­ able how directly this reserved, ironical m odernist transposed the events of his life into his fictions). A young m an from a well-to-do A ustrian fam ily form s a liaison w ith a sim ple Czech girl, Tonka. He takes h e r off to Berlin, w here they set up house together. Then Tonka falls p reg n an t. Worse, it appears she has con tracted syph­ ilis. The c alen d ar proves her lover cannot be the father, and the doctors in sist it is im possible he could have infected her. Yet she persists in h e r story th a t she has know n no o th er m an. Such is her evident sincerity th a t h e r lover asks him self w hether there m ight not be such a thing as im m aculate conception (and im m aculate venereal infection). B ut u ltim ately he lacks the will to believe her. “The w om an loved is [not] the origin of the em otions apparen tly aroused by her; they are m erely set behind her like a light . . . He could not bring him self to set the light behind Tonka."1 He tends the girl as she grow s sicker and uglier, does w hatever is called for, in a certain sense cherishes her; so th at, after h er death, he feels his conscience to be clear, and can even tell him self

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he is a b e tte r person for the experience. Only for an in sta n t does the veil fall: Memory cried out in him: "Tonka! Tonka!” He felt her, from the ground under his feet to the crown of his head, and the whole of her life. All that he had never understood was there before him in this instant, the bandage that had blindfolded him seemed to have dropped from his eyes—yet only for an instant, and the next instant it was merely as though something had flashed through his mind. In this fable, whose u n h u rried , c ircu m stan tial opening seem s to m ark it as of the tam est G erm an dom estic realism , ab o u t a girl who though probably lying is also innocent and a m an w ho fails an im possible test, M usil found a perfect vehicle—perhaps, finally, a little too perfect, too schem atic—for a co n stan t them e of his: the u nbridgeability of the gap betw een the ratio n al and the irratio n a l, betw een the m oral, based alw ays on the exam ple of the p a st an d therefore on calculation, and the ethical, calling for a leap into the future. M usil’s thinking m ain tain s a rem arkably stra ig h t trajecto ry from his precocious first novel, The Confusions o f Young Torless (1906), u n til his death in 1942. At the core of his thinking is an idea expressed m ost succinctly in a m ath em atical m etap h o r (Mu­ sil was train ed as an engineer). There is an infinity of ratio n al num bers, th a t is, num bers th a t can be w ritte n as the ratio of tw o whole num bers. There is also an infinity of irratio n a l num bers, num bers th a t can n o t be expressed as any such ratio. B ut th eir tw o orders of infinity are not com parable. The infinity of irratio n a ls is “greater" th an the infinity of ratio n als. In p articu lar, betw een any two ratio n als, no m a tte r how close, lies a clu ster of irratio n als. Stepping from one ratio n al to the next, as we do every day, is, in Torless' figure, like crossing a bridge whose piers are joined by som ething th a t does not “really ” exist. To live an d function in the w orld of the ratio n al, we m ust d elib­ erately banish from aw areness the irratio n a l th a t lies dense u n d e r our feet an d ab o u t us. We m u st accept a convention regarding w hat is to be trea te d as belonging to the real w orld. Such a convention will define everyday language (here M usil is close to his A ustrian co ntem porary W ittgenstein). However, M usil p ro ­

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ceeds, accepting the fact of a linguistic contract should not m ean th a t we are co m m itted to the repression of the irratio n al. Like Ulrich, the hero of The M an w ithout Qualities, we can m ain tain a certain reserve tow ard the real w orld, a living sense of altern ativ e possibilities. This reserve defines one as w hat U lrich calls a "possib ilitarian ," som eone p rep a red to exist in "a web of haze, im ag­ inings, fantasy and the subjunctive m ood," to live a "hovering life" w ith o u t ideological com m itm ent, to be "w ithout qualities," som e­ one w hose n a tu ra l m ode w ill be the m ode of irony ("W ith me," said M usil in an interview , "irony is not a gesture of condescension b u t a form of struggle"). W ith so keen a sense of the role of repression in the form ation of cu ltu re, one m ight im agine th a t M usil w ould have found Freud congenial. B ut in fact M usil m ain tain ed a lifelong reserve tow ard Freud, w hom he reg ard ed as fundam entally m istaken in assum ing th a t the unconscious, the repressed irratio n al, o r w hat M usil pre­ ferred to call, m ore vaguely, "the other condition," is accessible to the language of ratio n ality . In a certain sense M usil’s psychology is m ore rad ical th an Freud's. To M usil—a positivist in this re­ gard—psychology, in su b m ittin g to the rules of logic and causality th a t govern the ratio n al, confines itself to the rational: "the o th er condition" is sim ply outside its scope. To en ter "the other condi­ tion" one m u st ab an d o n the m odel of science (Wissenschaft), whose in stru m e n t is logic, and take up the m odel of poetry (Dichtung), whose in stru m e n t is analogy. In M usil's eyes, Freud comes to his deepest insights w hen he operates not as a scientist b u t as a "pseudopoet." This is not the only reason w hy Musil kept his distance from Freud. To a novelist w ith an analytical interest in the d ark er causes of the breakdow n of E uropean liberal institutions, the pow er th a t F reud a ttrib u te d to fixed structures in the psyche seem ed all too close to the pow er a ttrib u te d by nineteenth-century G erm an historicism to the past, betraying psychoanalysis as no m ore th an a co n tin u atio n of historicism by o th er m eans. In a d ­ dition, there m ay be—as K arl Corino has argued—a certain w ill­ fulness in M usil’s a ttitu d e , a decision to close his eyes to psycho­ analysis because it th reaten ed to superannuate the ethicalm etaphysical analysis of the passions he was m ore com fortable w ith.

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D raw ing a clear line, therefore, betw een the province of Wissenschaft and the province of Dichtung, M usil set out to explore, as Dichter, the subm erged, “o th e r” condition. The th ree stories of 1924 present people on the edge of revelation, a t the p o in t of giving—or of draw ing back from giving—them selves to an "o th e r” kind of aw areness. "Tonka” is a study in ethical cow ardice. D espite its sim ple n a rrativ e surface, it is the subtlest of explorations into the will to blindness, a w ill th a t is alw ays behind his p ro tag o n ist's need to believe the girl's unbelievable story, and therefore alw ays hidden from him . In the absoluteness of his sickness, and therefore in the absoluteness required of any rem edy for it—conversion ra th e r th an cure—we have a fu rth er h in t of why the secular science of Freud w as unacceptable to Musil. In "The Lady from P o rtugal,” an uneasier piece of w ork w ith blocks of highly w rought prose m arking places w here M usil is w riting his way out of trouble, the m iracle, am biguous and ab su rd though it is, takes place before our eyes: the love betw een a jealous older m an and his young wife is restored by the exem plary d eath of a m angy, filthy kitten, w hich both of them obscurely feel to be Christ. In "G rigia” a geologist w orking in an isolated valley high in the Tyrol has an affair w ith a p easan t w om an, a w om an of the earth w ith an an im al's nam e, through w hich he a ttain s release from the w orld, from life itself, into a m ystical love of his faroff wife. M usil is never less th an com m anding in the ease w ith w hich he moves betw een sense-experience, sensuous thought, and a b stra c ­ tion, m uch like the w rite r he m ost adm ired am ong his contem ­ poraries: Rilke. In his diary he wrote: "It is not the case th a t we reflect on things. R ather, things think them selves out w ithin us." The line of his prose, w hen he is w riting a t his best, as in "Tonka" and m any p a rts of The M an w ithout Qualities, traces a m ind p u sh ­ ing gently b u t unrem ittin g ly at the bounds of the h ith e rto know n. No case history in psychopathology gives us as eerie a sense of inhabiting m adness as the chapters of The M an w ithout Qualities given over to the sex-killer M oosbrugger. M usil's power, here and elsew here, seem s to flow from an effortless ab ility to an n ih ilate his selfhood and en ter the Other. Pondering this life of his, Moosbrugger had slow interior talks with himself in which he gave the same weight to the unstressed

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syllables as to the stressed. It made for a quite different life-song from the song one usually heard . . . It is hard to find an expression for the unity of being he at times achieved. One can think of a person’s life as flowing along like a stream . But the movement that Moosbrugger felt in his life was like a stream flowing through a great, still lake. While it pushed forward it was also mingling backward; the actual progress of life just about disappeared. Once, in a half-waking dream , he had the feeling he was wearing the Moosbrugger of his life like an old coat; he opened it a little, now and again, and the most wondrous lining came gushing out in forest-green waves of silk. This having been said, however, there rem ains in the stories a certain am o u n t of lofty gesturing tow ard m ystical love, transcen­ dent consum m ation. We see this in "G rigia” and "The Lady from P o rtu g al”; it is also the w eakest feature of the earlier story "The Perfecting of a Love.” N onetheless, "The Perfecting of a Love” is an audacious piece of sustained poetic intensity, and one of the key texts of G erm an m odernism . Som e fifty-five pages in length, it w as the outcom e of tw o years of fevered work by its author. It is the story of a w om an, Claudine, who "perfects” h er love of her h u sb an d by giving herself w ith relu c ta n t voluptuousness to acts of sexual self-abasem ent w ith a stran g er she has no feeling for, a com placent m iddle-aged philanderer. By the end of the brief liai­ son C laudine feels she has reached a state of m ystical liberation, "a sta te . . . like giving herself to everyone and yet belonging only to the one beloved.” As M usil’s p riv ate papers m ake clear, the story is based on an infidelity of his wife-to-be, M artha M arcovaldi. S tartin g as an a tte m p t to explore his own feelings of jealousy, it becam e a som e­ w h at grandiose plea for m ystical adultery (in a 1913 essay Musil w ent further, looking forw ard to a tim e w hen "bipolar erotics" would be o utdated), b u t also perhaps (and this is a kind of possi­ bility th a t M usil’s n a rra tiv e treatm en t, locked on to Claudine's in n er life, does not allow to em erge into articulation) an effort to take over the w o m a n ’s sexual experience—by w riting it, by becom ­ ing its a u th o r—an d thereby strip it of its disturbing autonom y. "The Perfecting of a Love” was h a rd to w rite, I w ould guess, because it p resented a real, and u ltim ately ethical, challenge to the in teg rity of M usil’s enterprise, the enterprise of yielding him ­ self to the processes by w hich thought thinks itself out, analogi­

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cally or paralogically, in m etaphors, likenesses, sim ilitudes. The rhythm s of C laudine’s m editatio n (if hers is indeed the voice of the text) invite us to lapse into lulled w ill-lessness as they lead us along w h at M usil w ould la te r call “the m axim ally laden p a th . . . the w ay of the m ost gradual, im perceptible tran sitio n s,” from contented m a rita l rectitu d e to perverse ab andonm ent. C laudine’s story gives several fin-de-siecle tw ists to the C hristian teaching th a t as long as the soul is pure it cannot be h a rm e d by violations perform ed upon the flesh. The first tw ist takes place when C laudine offers h er body to violation, the second w hen she gives herself w ith o u t reserve, yielding h er will as well as h er body. The test, we are to presum e, is w h eth er she can m ain tain an u ltim ate kernel of selfhood untouched by the m arty rd o m of the flesh. B ut C laudine is aw are of, and does not rep u d iate, an u ltim a te stage of perversion the doctrine can undergo: the active seeking out of violation, to rtu re, and death as m eans to negative tra n ­ scendence. To h er h u sband she confesses a fascination w ith the inner experience of a psychopath she calls G., later to be re-em ­ bodied as the enigm atic M oosbrugger in The M an w ithout Quali­ ties. "I think . . . he believes his actions are good," she says. In m ore ways than one, “The Perfecting of a Love” is an exercise in thinking the u nthinkable. M usil’s later a ttitu d e tow ard this story—w hich appeared in com pany w ith the m uch inferior "T em ptation of Q uiet V eronica” in 1911—is an interesting one: though it rem ained the only one of his works he could b e ar to reread, he dissuaded friends from venturing upon it. It was so obscure, he said, so m uch a m a tte r of "the a rtis t’s arcana," th a t the ord in ary rea d er w as all too likely to respond w ith "revulsion." W hat M usil is here defending against, I suspect, has less to do w ith "arcana" a layperson m ight m isu n ­ d erstan d th an w ith being identified w ith the m oral position C lau­ dine arrives at, a position to w hich M usil is driven, however, by his decision to m ake the w om an's distu rb in g experience his ow n. In the language of M usil's older rival in the exploration of the underlife of polite Viennese society, the "pseudopoet” Freud, the scandal of the story lies in the w ish it betrays in its w rite r to occupy and a u th o r the u ltim ately fascinating scene of intercourse, su p p lan tin g the usurper, the bearded stra n g er of Claudine/M arth a's story.

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In one of the dualism s M usil accepts as a prem ise and then seeks to overcom e, m an and w om an stan d to each other in the relation of ratio n al to irratio n al, W issenschaft to Dichtung. In the years 1906—1911, his first years w ith M artha M arcovaldi, M usil can be th o u g h t of as a lte rn a tin g betw een a daytim e self devoted to science and a n ig h ttim e self increasingly steeped in M artha, in reim agin­ ing, th ro u g h the m edium of an eroticized fem ale sensibility th a t he half-adopted, half-created, her life before she m et him . W hen we set side by side R obert's project of im aginatively living M artha, and M arth a's project, after R obert's death, of editing and p ublish­ ing his m an u scrip ts, in places tam p erin g w ith them —a project of becom ing his a u th o r—we have an as rem arkable a dyadic literary household as any since the Tolstoys. M usil's only im p o rta n t poem , "Isis and Osiris" (1923), is about a sister an d b ro th e r w ho devour each other in a love feast. It is a m yth th at, as M usil la te r cam e to see, held The M an w ithout Qualities in em bryo; an d The M an w ithout Qualities, as we have it, drifts to an end in the retre a t of Ulrich and his sister Agathe into m ystical incest, a species of androgyny, M usil's last m etaphor for "the o th er condition." We usually think of The M an w ithout Qualities as an unfinished novel. B ut, like E zra Pound's Cantos, a n o th er w ork w ith epic am bitions, The M an w ithout Qualities had alread y begun to founder in the 1930s, as history began to move so fast an d w ith such d evastating effect th a t it b u rst the capacity of lite ra ry form s to hold it. M usil’s progress w ith the work, after the p u b licatio n of P a rt I, becam e slow er and slower. The shell provided by his tenuous plot w as too fragile and ironic a m a tte r for the tim es; p erh ap s the priv ate peace of Ulrich and Agathe w as the best to be hoped for, u n d er the circum stances.

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Interview

DA: The question of the self's presence to the self has engaged you for a long time. The choice from the beginning, in Dusklands, of first-person, present tense narration, implicitly dramatizes the problem of self-knowl­ edge. It is therefore not surprising that you should address the question in your nonfiction, as in your substantial and challenging essay on confes­ sion. How did the essay come about? JM C: I see myself in this essay getting away from microenvironments and taking on broader critical themes (though I must say that what I like best on rereading it is the part where I trace Tolstoy’s engagement with the semantics of verb morphology). At the time I wrote it (1982-83) it was the most ambitious piece of criticism I had ventured on. But the length of the Kafka essay had already surprised me. I had thought of myself as a miniaturist, and my fiction certainly supported this view; whereas what was now coming from my pen was long to the point of being prolix. Part of the reason for this prolixity is that I do not have a "field" as a literary scholar. Most of my critical essays have followed after raids into territory strange to me, often into foreign linguistic territory. What saves them from being mere academic tourism is that I do what scholarly homework I can. In practice this entails that I rehearse for my own benefit arguments familiar to specialists but new to me. This is particularly true when it comes to arguments in philosophy. The essay we are talking about contains more than enough of the reinventing of philosophical wheels. The essay came out of a rereading of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, two novelists for whom my admiration remains undimmed. I read them on what I take to be their own terms, that is, in terms of their power to tell the truth as well as to subvert secular skepticism about truth, getting behind skeptical ploys to get behind them ("What is truth?”). I accept Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, in their different ways, as writers of real philo­ 243

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sophical sophistication, or rather, since "sophistication" carries the wrong overtones, of real philosophical power. If there is a sense in which my reading of them "on their own terms" is not simply a repeat of the reading they were accorded in the West during their own day— as ge­ niuses of rough realism from the Russian backwoods— it lies in treating them as men who not only lived through the philosophical debates of their day with the intensity characteristic of an intelligentsia held down under censorship, but also were the heirs of a Christian tradition more vital, in some respects, than Western Christianity. Whether my overall thesis can be sustained in debate with philosophers I have no idea. But I do see the capacity to push self-analysis through to its limits— analysis not of one’s self but of the self, the soul— in both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as greater than in a purely secular thinker like Freud. DA: Reviewers have often commended your work, in old-fashioned language, for its penetration into the "psyche." In this essay, though, there is a certain reserve about psychological description, even about psychoanalysis. Would you agree? JM C: Freudian psychoanalysis has scientific ambitions, and science has no ethical content beyond a blind commitment to follow wherever its researches take it (I hasten to add that this blindness of science is, paradoxically, what is most admirable about it: science in the service of a social or political goal is above all dreary). What psychoanalysis has to say about ethical impulses may be illuminating (I give as an instance the link Freud points to between pity and destructiveness) but is ultimately of no ethical weight. That is to say, whatever one thinks the psychological origins of love or charity may be, one must still act with love and charity. The outrage felt by many of Freud's first readers— that he was subverting their moral world— was therefore misplaced. This is, I trust, a Dostoevskian point. Dostoevsky's underground man makes his life, his life story, out of psychology, psychological self-analysis. Stavrogin, in The Pos­ sessed, does something similar but more radical by treating himself as an abandoned soul, a soul that can therefore be used as material for an experiment, as Frankenstein did with an abandoned body. Dostoevsky's ethical critique is that these are merely ways of making oneself into the hero of a story for the modern age— merely ways of being interesting.

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If one believes that stories must aspire to more than merely to be interesting, then one must go beyond psychology. Does this mean that I am anti-Freudian? Far from it— the traces of my dealings with Freud lie all over my writings. Does it mean that the essay we are talking about is anti-Freudian? Yes, to the extent that it sets itself against the old-fashioned Freud, the Freud who wrote, for instance, the essay on Dostoevsky and parricide. Similarly I see Tolstoy exercising a right, or rather a power, to assert his own reading of The Kreutzer Sonata against subversive readings such as one might imagine coming from the old-fashioned Freud. But whether my argument in this case has enough power I don't know. "Failed" works are always difficult to work with, The Keutzer Sonata particularly so because of its impatience with the entire category of “accomplished" works (that is of course the theme it asserts: down with Beethoven, down with art).

DA: I have a question about your relationship as a novelist with literary and critical theory. There is a tendency in the criticism of your fiction to approach it as "allegorized theory." Although all your writing could hardly be described as antitheoretical, I doubt such a description would please you; nevertheless, let me put the question to you, and I do so in the context of your relationship with deconstruction. In the essay there is some direct engagement with deconstruction, in your comments on de Man's analysis of Rousseau's Confessions and on Derrida's notion of the "epoch of supplementarity." It is logical that you should bring deconstruction to bear on the analysis of confession where the problem of the self's residence within language is so visible; but despite this, in both instances you imply that you find the arguments valuable but ultimately (and paradoxically) too large, too incautious. Outside of this essay, there is surprisingly little sustained reference to deconstructive theory or criticism. By contrast, it seems (and this is why I say "surprisingly"), in the fiction you seem willing or able to exploit the resources of deconstruction more easily: in Barbarians, the unstable and inconclusive features of signification feature prominently; Michael K is himself a kind of Derridean trace (refusing to occupy a fixed place in the system); and in Foe, most pertinently, the tongueless Friday is a guardian of significant silence or absence. Is this a fair observation— that is, can one say that in the nonspecific manner of fiction, you are able to move relatively freely within the

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deconstructive mode? If so, what might this imply about the resource­ fulness of theory to the writing of fiction? JM C: Your observation is quite right. I feel a greater freedom to follow where my thinking takes me when I am writing fiction than when I am writing criticism. One reason is that, as I have said before, I am not a trained philosopher (and contemporary criticism has become very much a variety of philosophizing). Not only that: I tend to be rather slow and painstaking and myopic in my thinking (in fact, in most things I do). I don't think or act in sweeps. It would be pointless for me to try to rethink Dostoevsky in Derridean terms or— what would interest me more— rethink Derrida in Dostoevskian terms, because I don't have the mind for it, to say nothing of the philosophical equipment. Another reason for what strikes you as a paradox has to do with the two discursive modes. Stories are defined by their irresponsibility: they are, in the judgment of Swift's Houynhnhms, "that which is not." The feel of writing fiction is one of freedom, of irresponsibility, or better, of responsibility toward something that has not yet emerged, that lies some­ where at the end of the road. When I write criticism, on the other hand, I am always aware of a responsibility toward a goal that has been set for me not only by the argument, not only by the whole philosophical tradition into which I am implicitly inserting myself, but also by the rather tight discourse of criticism itself. If I were a truly creative critic I would work toward liberating that discourse— making it less monological, for instance. But the candid truth is I don’t have enough of an investment in criticism to try. Where I do my liberating, my playing with possibilities, is in my fiction. To put it in another way: I am concerned to write the kind of novel— to work in the kind of novel form— in which one is not unduly handicapped (compared with the philosopher) when one plays (or works) with ideas. DA: A more straightforward question, also on the subject of theory. It is curious that there is little significant reference to Foucault in your nonf­ iction, since Foucauldian themes seem prominent in the novels. Certainly, one could read fruitfully from Discipline and Punish to Michael K, or from The Archaeology of Knowledge to Barbarians. In Foe the Foucault of "What Is an Author?" is apposite, especially in Susan's struggle with the author-function, with Foe as Other. Is Foucault a significant influ­ ence?

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JM C: Foucault's shadow lies quite heavily over my essays about colonial South Africa (I think in particular of the essay on anthropological writings about the Hottentots that forms part of White Writing). He is also very much a presence behind the essays on censorship I have been working on recently. But no, there is not much evidence of Foucault in my strictly literary essays. I find what Foucault has to say about forms of writing whose bearing on, or use by, power is immediate, more striking than what he says, or than what I can imagine him saying, about literary forms whose relations with power, as forms, as practices, are less direct. DA: The essay on confession argues that there comes a point when the confessant cannot look to further self-analysis for release. You attribute the more satisfying account of the end of confession to Dostoevsky, where it is implied that what is required finally is grace, for which there is no secular equivalent. To an extent, Foe stages the "endless chain" of self-consciousness discussed in the essay, though in metafictional terms. Each new section gets behind the preceding one until, at the point of closure, we have an unnamed narrator who seems to stand for the narrative function per se. (In the essay, you raise the question of the degree to which writers are willing to treat the complexities of confession as embedded in narrative itself; in an earlier version of the section on Rousseau— given as an inaugural lecture at the University of Cape Town— you stress the discur­ sive “economy" of confession.1) The one constant in Foe, marking the limit of self-knowledge in Susan's case and overwhelming the narrator at the novel's close, is Friday. There is finally no metafictional preempting of Friday's power. This power is largely that of silence; perhaps it is the power of an unwritten but potentially transfiguring text. The closest the narrator comes to defining what is called "the home of Friday" is that it is the "place where bodies are their own signs.''2 Could you comment on the importance of the body in your fiction? What is the function of this consciousness of the body in bringing an end to Susan's confessional discourse, as well as to the process of meta­ fictional self-scrutiny? JM C: If I translate your question into practical terms, it becomes a question about closure: how does a novel that is as much^ajijiTteiTO^ation of authority as Foe is find an end for itself? Dostoevsky, in Notes from

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Underground, faces a comparable question and produces a rather unin­ spired solution: an "editorial" postscript saying that the text we have is ncomplete. Endings of this kind, endings that inform you that the text should be understood as going on endlessly, I find aesthetically inept. However peremptory the ending of Foe, it is at least an ending, not a gesture toward an ending. But, translated into my terms, your question can take a second form, as a question about power: is representation to be so robbed of power by the endlessly skeptical processes of textualization that those repre­ sented in/by the text— the feminine subject, the colonial subject— are to have no power either? Am I too fanciful as seeing this as a restaging of the Dostoevskian confrontation between faith and skepticism (between Tikhon and Stavrogin, for instance)? For Susan Barton, the question takes care of itself: the book is not Foe's, it is hers, even in the form of the trace of her hunt for a Foe to tell it for her. But Friday is the true test. Is his history of mute subjection to remain drowned? I return to the theme of power. The last pages of Foe have a certain power. They close the text by force, so to speak: they confront head-on the endlessness of its skepticism. Friday is mute, but Friday does not disappear, because Friday is body. If I look back over my own fiction, I see a simple (simple-minded?) standard erected. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not "that which is not," and the proof that it is is the pain it feels. The body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt. (One can get away with such crudeness in fiction; one can't in philosophy, I'm sure.) Not grace, then, but at least the body. Let me put it baldly: in South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body. It is not possible, not for logical reasons, not for ethical reasons (I would not assert the ethical superiority of pain over pleasure), but for political reasons, for reasons of power. And let me again be unambiguous: it is not that one grants the authority of the suffering body: the suffering body takes this authority: that is its power. To use other words: its power is undeniable. (Let me add, entirely parenthetically, that I, as a person, as a person­ ality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous de­ fenses against that being-overwhelmed, and, to me, transparently so.)

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You asked me earlier on about psychology, about my lack of interest in the psychological as a field for fiction to exercise itself in. I come back to the question of endlessness. The self-interrogation of Montaigne, of Rousseau, of the earlier Tolstoy, carries on by other means a religious tradition of self-examination and confession: soul-searching turned into psychologizing. Freud, both in his role as confessor to his patients and in his self-interrogation, fits into the tradition, as do I in these interviews. All of us, both great and small, face the problem of how to bring our confession to an end; not all of us have the power to accept, pessimis­ tically (Freud) or with equanimity (Derrida, it seems), the prospect of endlessness. Against the endlessness of skepticism Dostoevsky poses the closure not of confession but of absolution and therefore of the intervention of grace in the world. In that sense Dostoevsky is not a psychological novelist at all: he is finally not interested in the psyche, which he sees as an arena of game-playing, of the middle of the novel. To the extent that I am taken as a political novelist, it may be because I take it as given that people must be treated as fully responsible beings: psychology is no excuse. Politics, in its wise stupidity, is at one with religion here: one man, one soul: no half-measures. What saves me from a merely stupid stupidity, I would hope, is a measure of charity, which is, I suppose, the way in which grace allegorizes itself in the world. Another way of saying this is that I try not to lose sight of the reality that we are children, unreconstructed (Freud wouldn't disagree at this point), to be treated with the charity that children have due to them (charity that doesn't preclude clear-sightedness). DA: What you say about the body and the authority of suffering brings me to your most recent novel, Age of Iron. Here, "Friday" is no longer mute, though whether there is any voice that can address adequately the trauma of South Africa in the late 1980s, in the period of the States of Emergency, remains in question; as Elizabeth Curren says, “To speak of this . . . you would need the tongue of a god.''3 Nevertheless, there is speech, and there is a dramatic assumption of authority on the part of the oppressed. In the face of this, Elizabeth's questioning (her skepticism about hero­ ism, her discomfort over her daughter's uncompromising rejections) is implicitly confessional, for it runs the risk of undermining or undervaluing the work of restitution. What releases Elizabeth, finally, is death; in fact,

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the pact she enters into (or allows herself to fall into) with her Angel of Death, the derelict Vercueil, seems increasingly to represent the promise of absolution as the novel develops. In this resolution, are you not close to the Dostoyevskian principle of grace? JM C: It is 28 July 1990 today, and Age of Iron has yet to be published, though you have read it in manuscript. I am still too near its writing— too near and too raw— to know what to think of it. But let me take up the two terms history and authority and, at the risk of traducing Eliza­ beth, comment on them in the light, or in the shadow, of my aftersense of the book. Elizabeth Curren brings to bear against the voices of history and his­ torical judgment that resound around her two kinds of authority: the authority of the dying and the authority of the classics. Both these authorities are denied and even derided in her world: the first because hers is a private death, the second because it speaks from long ago and far away. So a contest is staged, not only in the dramatic construction of the novel but also within Elizabeth's— what shall I say?— soul, a contest about having a say. To me as a writer, as the writer in this case, the outcome of this contest— what is to count as classic in South Africa— is irrelevant. What matters is that the contest is staged, that the dead have their say, even those who speak from a totally untenable historical position. So: even in an age of iron, pity is not silenced. What is of importance in what I have just said is the phrasing: the phrases is staged, is heard; not should be staged, should be heard. There is no ethical imperative that I claim access to. Elizabeth is the one who believes in should, who believes in believes in. As for me, the book is written, it will be published, nothing can stop it. The deed is done, what power was available to me is exercised. As for your question about absolution for Elizabeth, the end of the novel seems to me more troubled (in the sense that the sea can be troubled) than you imply. But here I am stepping onto precarious ground, or precarious water; I had better stop. As for grace, no, regrettably no: I am not a Christian, or not yet.

Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky (1985) n Book II of his Confessions, Augustine relates the story of how, as a boy, he and som e friends stole a huge load of pears from a n eig h b o r’s garden, stealing them not because they w anted to e at them (in fact they fed them to hogs) b u t for the pleasure of co m m ittin g a forbidden act. They were being "gratuitously w an­ ton, having no inducem ent to the evil b u t the evil its e lf . . . seeking nothing from the sham eful deed b u t the sham e itself . . . We were asham ed not to be sham eless."1 In the tim e-before of w hich the Confessions tells, the robbery brings sham e to the young A ugustine’s h eart. But the desire of the boy’s h e a rt (the m atu re m an rem em bers) is th a t very feeling of sham e. And his h e a rt is not sham ed (chastened) by the knowledge th a t it seeks to know sham e: on the contrary, the knowledge of its own desire as a sham eful one both satisfies the desire for the experience of sham e and fuels a sense of sham e. And this sense of sham e is b o th experienced w ith satisfaction and recognized, if it is recognized, by self-conscious searching, as a fu rth er source of sham e; an d so on endlessly. In th e “num berless halls and caves, in the innum erable fields an d dens an d caverns of m em ory" (X.xvii; p. 217), the sham e lives on in the m atu re m an. “Who can unravel such a tw isted and tangled knottiness? It is unclean, I h ate to reflect upon it" (II.x; p. 60). A ugustine's p light is truly absym al. He w ants to know w hat lies at the beginning of the skein of rem em bered sham e, w h at is the origin from w hich it springs, b u t the skein is endless, the stages of self-searching req u ired to a tta in its beginning infinite in n um ­ ber. Yet u n til the source from w hich the sham eful act sprang is confronted, the self can have no rest. Confession is one com ponent in a sequence of transgression, confession, penitence, and absolution. A bsolution m eans the end

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of the episode, the closing of the chapter, liberation from the oppression of the m em ory. A bsolution in this sense is therefore the indispensable goal of all confession, sacram en tal or secular. In contrast, transgression is not a fundam ental com ponent. In Au­ gustine's story, the theft of the pears is the transgression, b u t w h at calls to be confessed is som ething th a t lies behind the theft, a tru th about him self th a t he does not yet know. His story of the pears is therefore a twofold confession of som ething he knows (the act) an d som ething he does not know: "I w ould . . . confess w hat I know about myself; I w ill confess w hat I do not know about m yself . . . W hat I do not know about m yself I w ill continue not to know u n til the tim e w hen 'm y darkness is as the noonday' in thy sight" (X.v; p. 205). The tru th about the self th a t w ill bring an end to the quest for the source w ithin the self for that-w hich-isw rong, he affirm s, w ill rem ain inaccessible to introspection. In this essay I follow the fortunes of a n um ber of secular confes­ sions, fictional and autobiographical, as th eir authors confront or evade the problem of how to know the tru th about the self w ithout being self-deceived, and of how to bring the confession to an end in the sp irit of w hatever they take to be the secular equivalent of absolution. A certain looseness is inevitable w hen one transposes the term confession from a religious to a secular context. N ever­ theless, we can d em arcate a m ode of autobiographical w ritin g th at we can call the confession, as d istinct from the m em oir an d the apology, on the basis of an underlying m otive to tell an essen­ tial tru th about the self.2 It is a m ode practiced at tim es by M on­ taigne,3 b u t the m ode is essentially defined by R ousseau’s Confes­ sions. As for fictional confession, this m ode is already practiced by Defoe in the m ade-up confessions of sinners like Moll Flanders and Roxana; by our tim e, confessional fictions have come to con­ stitu te a subgenre of the novel in w hich problem s of tru th -tellin g and self-recognition, deception and self-deception, come to the forefront.4 Two of the fictions I discuss, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata, can strictly be called confessional fictions because they consist for the g reater p a rt of representations of confessions of a b h o rren t acts co m m itted by th eir n a rra to rs. Ippolit T erentyev's “E x p la n atio n ” in The Idiot is a d eath b ed apologia w hich soon engages in the problem s of tru th an d self-knowledge th a t characterize confession. Finally, Stavro-

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g in ’s confession in The Possessed raises the question, left in abey­ ance since M ontaigne’s tim e, of w h eth er secular confession, for w hich there is an a u d ito r o r audience, fictional o r real, b u t no confessor em pow ered to absolve, can ever lead to th a t end o f the chapter whose a tta in m e n t is the goal of confession.5

Tolstoy It is the second evening of a long train journey. Conversation am ong the passengers has tu rn ed to m arriage, adultery, divorce. A gray-haired m an speaks cynically about love. He reveals his nam e: Pozdnyshev, convicted wife-killer. His fellow passengers edge away, leaving him alone w ith the unnam ed narrato r, to w hom he now offers to "tell everything from the beginning.” Pozdnyshev’s confession, as repeated by this n arrato r, constitutes the body of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata (1889).6 Pozdnyshev’s story is of a m an w ho lived his life in an "abyss of e rro r” concerning relations w ith wom en, and w ho finally u n d er­ w ent an "episode” of pathological jealousy in w hich he killed his wife. Only later, a fter being sent to prison, did it happen th a t "m y eyes [were] opened an d I [saw] everything in quite a different light. E verything reversed, everything reversed!” (233). The m o­ m ent w hen everything becom es reversed (navyvorot', "turned in ­ side out") is the m om ent of illum ination th a t opens his eyes to the tru th an d m akes tru e confession possible. The confession on w hich he em barks in the tra in thus has tw o sides: the facts of the "epi­ sode,” w hich have already of course come out in court, and the tru th ab o u t him self to w hich his eyes have since been opened. Telling the la tte r tru th , in tu rn , is closely allied to denouncing error, a sta te of e rro r in w hich, in his opinion, the entire class from w hich he com es still lives. W ith his a ir of ag itatio n , the funny little sound he m akes (half cough, h alf broken-off laugh), his strange ideas ab o u t sex, and the history of violence b ehind him , Pozdnyshev is plainly an odd c h ar­ acter, an d one w ould n o t be surprised if the tru th he told were at odds w ith the tru th understood by the quiet, sober a u d ito r who later retells his tru th to us. We w ould not be surprised, in oth er words, to find ourselves reading one of those books in w hich the speaker believes him self to be telling one tru th while to us it slowly

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em erges th a t som ehow an o th e r tru th is being told—a book like N abokov’s Pale Fire, say, in w hich the n a rra to r believes he is speaking for him self b u t we are all too easily able to read him against him self. Let m e begin by sum m arizing the tru th as Pozdnyshev sees it, allow ing him to speak in his ow n voice.

Pozdnyshev's Truth As a child of m y class, I received m y sexual in itiatio n in a brothel. Experience w ith p ro stitu tes spoiled m y relations w ith w om en for­ ever. Yet w ith "the m ost varied and horrible crim es against w om en” on m y soul, I w as w elcom ed into the hom es of m y peers and p erm itted to dance w ith th e ir wives and daughters (239). I becam e engaged to a girl. It w as a tim e of sensual prom ise heightened by allu rin g fashions in clothes, by rich food, by lack of physical exercise. O ur honeym oon brought disillusionm ent, and m arried life turned into an altern a tio n betw een bouts of anim osity and bouts of sensuality. W hat we did not u n d erstan d w as th a t the anim osity we felt for each o th er was a protest of ou r "hum an nature" against being overpow ered by ou r "anim al n a tu re ” (261). Society, via its priests and doctors, sanctions u n n a tu ra l p ra c ­ tices: sexual intercourse during pregnancy and lactatio n , c o n tra ­ ception. C ontraception was "the cause of all th a t happened later,” for it p erm itted m y wife to move am ong strange m en "in the full vigor of a thirty-year-old, well fed and excited w om an w ho is not bearing ch ild ren ” (281, 283). A m an n am ed Trukachevski, a violinist, cam e onto the scene. Led by "a strange and fatal force,” I encouraged his friendship w ith m y wife, and "a gam e of m u tu a l deception" began. He and my wife played duets, I seethed w ith jealousy b u t kept a sm iling front, m y wife w as excited by m y jealousy, w hile an "electric cu rren t" flowed betw een her and him (293—294). In retro sp ect I now see th a t playing m usic together, like dancing together, like the closeness of sculptors to fem ale m odels or of doctors to fem ale patients, is an avenue th a t society keeps open to encourage illicit liaisons. I left hom e on a trip b u t kept rem em bering som ething T rukach­ evski's b ro th er once said: he slept only w ith m arried w om en be­

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cause they w ere "safe,” he w ould not pick up an infection. Over­ come w ith jealous rage, I raced hom e. Trukachevski and m y wife were playing duets. I b u rst in upon them w ith a dagger. T rukach­ evski escaped. My wife pleaded, "There has been nothing . . . I sw ear it!" (328). I stab b ed her. In prison a "m oral ch an g e” took place in m e and I saw how m y fate h ad been determ ined. "H ad I known w hat I know now, every­ th in g w ould have been different . . . I should not have m arried at all" (328, 334).

Tolstoy's Truth In 1890, in response to letters from readers asking "w hat I m ea n t” in The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy published an "Afterw ord” in w hich he spelled out w h a t he "m e a n t” as a series of injunctions. It is w rong for u n m arried people to indulge in sexual intercourse. Peo­ ple should learn to live n a tu ra lly and eat m oderately; they w ould then find sexual abstinence easier. They should also be taught th at sexual love is "an an im al state degrading to a hum an being.” C ontraception an d the practice of intercourse during lactation should cease. C hastity is a sta te preferable to m arriage.7

The Other Truth "of" Pozdnyshev If one reread s the story of Pozdnyshev, however, stressing elem ents o th er th an those elem ents Pozdnyshev and the Tolstoy of the "A fterw ord” choose to stress, one com es up w ith another tru th . I could allow this altern a tiv e tru th "o f” Pozdnyshev to speak in its own voice from its ow n "I." B ut then I m ay be read as prejudging the case by asserting the sam e a u th o rity for this second voice as for the first, the voice Pozdnyshev believes to be his own. So let me w rite the o th er tru th sim ply as som ething postulated "o f” or "about" Pozdnyshev, som ething extracted from his utterances yet not the tru th he avows in his ow n person. In the ballroom s and draw ing room s of Pozdnyshev’s class a convention reigns: no one is to look beneath the "carefully w ashed, shaved, p erfu m ed ” exteriors of young m en to see them as they are in th e ir filthy naked n o ctu rn al debauches w ith p rostitutes. An­ o th er convention says th a t th ere are two kinds of w om an, decent

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w om en an d pro stitu tes, even though on occasion decent w om en dress like p rostitutes, w ith “the sam e exposure of arm s, shoulders and breasts, the sam e tight skirts over prom inent b u stles.” In fact, wom en dress to kill. Pozdnyshev: "I am sim ply frightened [by them ]. I w ant to call a policem an and ask for protection from the peril" (239, 244, 249). Pozdnyshev gets m arried and goes on a honeym oon. The expe­ rience is disillusioning: he com pares it to paying to en ter a side­ show at a fair, discovering inside th a t you have been cheated, b u t being too asham ed of your gullibility to w arn o th er sightseers of the fraud. He thinks p articu larly of a sideshow advertising a bearded w om an th a t he visited in Paris (251). As for intercourse, it leads to h a tre d and thence u ltim ately to killing. The killing goes on all the tim e. “They are all killing, all, all." Yet even w hen a w om an is pregnant, w hen "great work" is going on w ithin her, she p erm its the entry of the m ale in stru m en t (261, 263). Then com es Trukachevski, w ith his "specially developed poste­ rior," his "springy gait," his h a b it of "holding his h a t against his tw itching th ig h .” Though Pozdnyshev dislikes Trukachevski, "a strange an d fatal force led m e not to repulse him . . . b u t on the contrary to invite him to the house." Trukachevski offers to "be of use" to Pozdnyshev's wife, and Pozdnyshev accepts, asking him to "bring his violin and play [zgraf'] w ith m y wife." "From the first m om ent [their] eyes m e t . . . I saw th a t the anim al in each of them asked, ‘May I?' and answ ered, 'O h yes, certainly'" (286, 295, 294, 293, 296). Racing hom e to trap the couple together, he exacerbates his jealousy by im agining how Trukachevski sees his wife: "She is not in h er first youth, has lost a side-tooth, and there is a slight puf­ finess about her," b u t at least she w ill not have a venereal disease. Pozdnyshev's greatest anguish is th a t "I considered m yself to have a com plete right to h er body . . . and yet a t the sam e tim e I felt I could not control th a t body . .. and she could dispose of th a t body as she pleased, an d she w anted to dispose of it not as I w ished h e r to" (315, 318). Creeping up to the room from w hich the m usic comes, Pozdnyshev fears only th a t they w ill "p art h a stily ” before he gets there and so deprive him of "clear evidence" of th eir crim e. As he is about to stab his wife, she cries out th a t there "has been n o th ­

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ing." “I m ight still have h esitated , b u t these last w ords of hers, from w hich I concluded ju st the opposite—th a t everything had h appened—called forth a reply," an d he kills h e r (322, 326). This collage of ex tracts from Pozdnyshev's text literally tells a different story from the one he tells. This story is of a m an who sees the p h allu s everyw here, peeking m ockingly o r bulging th re a t­ eningly from the bodies of m en and wom en. He m arries in the hope of learning the sexual secret (the w om an's beard) b u t is disap p o in ted . He im agines sexual intercourse as a probing by the vengeful p h allu s after the life of the unborn child, w ith w hom he identifies, w ith in the m other. At the thought th a t his w ife/m other’s body does not belong to him alone, he feels the anguish of the Oepidal child. He tries to solve the problem by giving her to the th reaten in g rival (whom he sees as a w alking phallus), thereby retain in g m agical control over the couple; w hen they do not enact the scene he h a s prescribed and p erm itted them , he loses control an d flies into m urderous rage. We h e a r Pozdnyshev speak this "other" tru th about him self if we stress a certain chain of elem ents of his text and ignore those elem ents he w an ts us to a tte n d to—his visits to prostitutes, his m eat diet, a n d so on. No doubt we can read th ird and fourth tru th s o ut of the text by the sam e m ethod. B ut m y argum ent is not a rad ical one involving an infinity of interp retatio n s. My argum ent is m erely th a t Pozdnyshev and Pozdnyshev's interlocutor and Tol­ stoy an d Tolstoy's public operate w ithin an econom y in w hich a second read ing is possible, a reading th a t searches in the corners of Pozdnyshev's discourse for instances w here the tru th , the "un­ conscious" tru th , slips out in strange associations, false ratio n ali­ zations, gaps, contradictions. If the "unconscious" tru th of Pozdnyshev is anything like the one I have outlined, then Pozdnyshev's confession becom es one of those "ironic" confessions in w hich th e speaker believes him self to be saying one thing b u t is "in tru th " saying som ething very different. In particular, Pozdnyshev believes th a t since the "episode” his eyes have been "opened" a n d he has a tta in e d a c ertain knowledge of him self both as individual and as representative of a social class th a t qualifies him to say w h at w as "wrong" w ith him and is still wrong w ith his class (whose representatives, all b u t one, refuse to h ear the diag­ nosis an d move to an o th e r carriage). B ut the true tru th "of"

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Pozdnyshev tu rn s out to be th a t he knows very little about him self. In p articu lar, w hile he knows th a t “h ad I know n [then] w h a t I know now . . . I should not have m arried a t a ll,” he does not know why he should not have m arried o r why he killed his wife. Yet the peculiar thing is th a t this incom petent diagnostician is given ex­ plicit su p p o rt by Tolstoy as a u th o r in his “A fterw ord”: w hat Pozdnyshev believes to be w rong w ith society, says Tolstoy, is indeed w h at is w rong. Little I have said thus far about The Kreutzer Sonata is new. "The conventions w hich govern it are confused," says D onald Davie. “The read er does not know 'w hich w ay to take it.' Nor, as far as we can see, was this am biguity intended by the author. It is th ere­ fore a grossly im perfect w ork.”8 “Broken-backed" is T. G. S. C ain’s verdict: a "m agnificently handled n a rrativ e of the m oral decay of a m arriage . . . introduced by, and p a rtly interw oven w ith, an obsessively unintelligent, sim plistic series of generalizations . . . spoken by Pozdnyshev b u t . .. undoubtedly endorsed by Tolstoy.”9 Both the com m ents of Davie an d Cain and m y com m ents above point to a problem of m ediation. A confession em bodying a p a t­ ently in ad eq uate self-analysis is m ediated through a n a rra to r who gives no h in t th a t he questions the analysis, and the analysis is then reaffirm ed (as "w hat I m e a n t”) by the a u th o r w riting outside the fiction. These m ediators of Pozdnyshev are too quickly sa tis­ fied, one reflects: it is all too easy to read another, “deeper" tru th in Pozdnyshev's confession. Yet w hen one looks to Pozdnyshev him self for evidence th a t he is distu rb ed by the strain of a rtic u ­ lating one tru th w ith one voice ("consciously") w hile an o th e r tru th speaks itself "unconsciously,” one finds nothing but the cryptic sym ptom of the preverbal half-cough, half-laugh, w hich m ay sig­ nal strain b u t m ay equally well signal scorn; w hen one looks to the n a rra to r for signs of a questioning a ttitu d e , one finds only silence; an d w hen one looks to Tolstoy one finds belligerently sim plistic su pport for Pozdnyshev’s tru th . At all levels of presen­ tation, then, there is a lack of reflectiveness. The Kreutzer Sonata presents a n arrativ e, asserts its in te rp retatio n (its truth), an d as­ serts as well th a t there are no problem s of in terp retatio n . A w illed belief th a t things are one w ay w hen they are an o th e r way is a form of self-deception. W hether Pozdnyshev is self-de-

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ceived an d w h eth er the n a rra to r is deceived are questions the text will n ot answ er. For the question "Is Pozdnyshev self-deceived?" can only m ean "Is Pozdnyshev a rep resen tatio n of a self-deceived m an?" an d the text does not reflect on this point. W hether the n a rra to r is deceived o r not by Pozdnyshev one cannot know, since the n a rra to r is silent. B ut it is m eaningful to p u t the question of w h eth er Tolstoy him self, as w rite r and self-aw are self-critic, is, at best, self-deceived when, by asserting th a t Pozdnyshev is a tru st­ w orthy critic of society, he im plies th a t Pozdnyshev u nderstands his own history, and therefore th a t his confession can be tru sted to m ean w h at he says it m eans. For, in the first place, there is a p leth o ra of biographical evidence th a t the h a b it of keeping a diary in the p e cu lia r circum stances of the Tolstoy household brought Tolstoy every day face to face w ith the tem ptations of deception an d the pro b lem s of insincerity and self-deception inherent in the diary form an d in confessional form s in general.10 And second, the focus of the psychology of the novels of Tolstoy's m iddle period is as m uch on m echanism s of self-deception as on anything else. W hat m u st su rp rise one, w ith this background in m ind, is th at Tolstoy should w rite a w ork so blank as The Kreutzer Sonata on the am bivalences of the confessional im pulse and the deform a­ tions of tru th b ro u g h t ab o u t by the confessional situation, a situ ­ ation in w hich there is alw ays som eone confessed to, even if, as in the p riv ate diary, the n a tu re of this O ther m ight be left unde­ fined, in suspension. A round neith er the confession w ithin the confession (Pozdnyshev's presen tatio n of his diaries to his fiancee) nor the confession of Pozdnyshev to the n a rra to r is there any fram e of questioning. Ju st as one effect of seeing the light has been to m ake it easy for Pozdnyshev to discard his earlier self, to regard th a t self w ith o u t sym pathy, so it w ould seem th a t the effect of "knowing the tru th " has m ade it easy for the Tolstoy of 1889 to tu rn his back on the e arlier self who h ad regarded the a tta in m e n t of tru th as perilously beset w ith self-deception an d com placency, an d to see the pro b lem atics of tru th -tellin g as trivial com pared w ith the tru th itself. One m ight say th a t The Kreutzer Sonata is n ot only open to second an d th ird readings, b u t is carelessly open to them , as though Tolstoy w ere indifferent to gam es of rein ter­ p reta tio n th a t m ight be played by people w ith tim e to w aste. Thus

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The Kreutzer Sonata seem s to m ark the repudiation by Tolstoy of a talen t whose distinguishing feature was a capacity “to know him self,” as Rilke says, "right into his own blood."11 Pozdnyshev’s life falls into a before and an after, the before being "an abyss of e rro r,” the after a tim e of "everything reversed." His tem poral position in the after gives him , in his own eyes, the com plete self-knowledge th a t W illiam C. Spengem ann finds c h a r­ acteristic of the "converted n a rra to r,” whose know ing, converted, n arratin g self stands invisibly beside the experiencing, acting self he tells a b o u t.12 On Pozdnyshev’s conversion experience the text is silent except to say th a t aw areness comes after “to rm e n ts” (235). Still, as long as we continue to read The Kreutzer Sonata as the u tteran ce of a converted self, ra th e r th an as a fram e for a schedule of pronouncem ents (“ab stain from pro stitu tes, ab stain from m eat, . . ."), we can continue to seek in the text traces of the sense of truth-bearing th a t comes to the converted n a rra to r w ith the a t­ tain m en t of w hat he believes to be full u n d erstan d in g of the past. To confirm th a t this sense of truth-em bodying selfhood—and indeed the process of the conversion experience itself—w as of acute in terest to Tolstoy, we m ay tu rn not only to A nna Karenina but also to a docum ent w ritten ten years before The Kreutzer So­ nata. A Confession is, in the m ain, an analysis of a crisis Tolstoy passed through in 1874, w hen reason told him th a t life w as m ean ­ ingless and he cam e close to suicide, till a force w ith in him th a t he calls "an instinctive consciousness of life" rejected the conclu­ sions of his reason and saved h im .13 The language in w hich Tolstoy sets out this contest of forces is w orth exam ining in detail. Though associated w ith reasoning, the condition of m ind th a t leads him to "[hide] aw ay a cord, to avoid being tem p ted to hang m yself . . . and [cease] to carry a g u n ” is described as a passive state, "a strange state of m ind-torpor . . . a stoppage, as it were, of life" (29—30, 24). Conversely, the im pulse th a t saves his life is not sim ply a physical life-force b u t partakes of the intellect: it is "an inkling th a t my ideas were w rong," a sense th a t “I [had] m ade som e m istake"; it is "doubts" (72, 76, 77). And though the im pulse is finally nam ed as "an instinctive con­ sciousness of life," it is accom panied by "a to rm enting feeling, w hich I can n ot [in retrospect] describe otherw ise th an as a search ­

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ing after G od” (109). Thus the opposition is not betw een a clear an d overw helm ing conviction th a t life is absurd, and an instinctu ally based anim al drive to live: error, the drive to death, is a gathering sluggishness, like the running down of life itself, w hile the saving tru th springs from an instinctive intellectual pow er th a t obscurely m istru sts reason. The second force does not clash w ith the first an d defeat it. S trictly speaking, there is no conflict. R ather, there are tw o states of m ind sim ultaneously present, the one a d eath -directed stoppage of life th a t sim ply happens (na menya stall naxodit' m inuty snadala nedoumeniya, ostanovki iizni: "it hap p en ed th a t I w as seized over and over w ith m om ents of puzzlem ent, stoppages of life”), the o th er a m istrust, a caution; and, for reasons th a t reason cannot fathom , the tide reverses, the second slowly begins to supervene, the first begins to dissipate. One is n o t w rong to detect a certain philosophical scrupulous­ ness in this account. T here is another, conventional kind of lan ­ guage Tolstoy m ight have slipped into to describe this conversion experience, a language in w hich the self chooses selfishly to follow the voice of reason b u t is then saved from erro r by another voice speaking from the h e art. This w ould be a language of the false self and the tru e self, the false self being rational and socially condi­ tioned, the tru e self in stin ctu al and individual. In Tolstoy there is no such sim ple dualism of false and true selves. R ather, the self is a site w here the will goes through its processes in ways only obscurely accessible to introspection. It is not the self, or a self, th a t reaches o u t to w ard God. R ather, the self experiences a reaching-out (iskaniem Boga, "a searching after God”). The self does not change (change in the m iddle voice sense of change-itself); rather, a change takes place in the site of the self: "When and how the change took place in m e [soverSilsya vo mne etot perevorot] I could not say ” (114). Insofar as it gives an answ er to the question of w hat the con­ dition of tru th fu ln ess is like, then, A Confession says th a t it arises out of an attentiveness an d responsiveness to an inner im pulse th a t Tolstoy calls an im pulse tow ard God. The condition of tru th ­ fulness is n ot perfect self-knowledge b u t truth-directedness, w hat the p e asa n t in A nna Karenina calls "living for one’s soul,” in w ords th a t come as a blinding illu m in atio n to Levin.14 In his skepticism

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about ratio n al self-knowledge, in his conviction th a t m en act in accord w ith inner forces in ways of w hich they are not aw are, Tolstoy rem ains in sym pathy w ith S chopenhauer;15 w here he p a rts com pany w ith Schopenhauer is in identifying the im pulse tow ard God as one of these forces. All of Tolstoy's w riting, fictional an d nonfictional, is concerned w ith tru th ; in the late w ritings the concern w ith tru th overrides all o th er concerns. The restless im patience w ith received tru th s, the struggles to uncover the grounds for a state of truthfulness in the self th a t are com m on to both the Levin sections of Anna Kar­ enina an d the la te r autobiographical w ritings, have left on one read er after a n o th er the im pression of "perfect sin c erity ” th a t M atthew Arnold reco rd s.16 Com m on to b o th the au tobiographical Confession and late stories like "The D eath of Ivan Ilyich” is the crisis (a confrontation w ith his own death) th a t brings ab o u t an illum ination in the life of the central c h arac ter th a t m akes it absurd for him to continue in a self-deceived m ode of existence. T hereafter he m ay or m ay not live on as a (lim ited) w itness to the tru th . The sense of urgency th a t the crisis brings about, the re­ lentlessness of the process in w hich the self is strip p ed of its com forting fictions, the single-m indedness of the quest for tru th ; all these q ualities en ter into the term sincerity. One w ould therefore expect th a t a fiction in confessional form would provide Tolstoy w ith a congenial and adequate vehicle for the lite ra tu re of tru th th a t he w anted to w rite—th a t is, a fiction centering on a crisis of illum ination, retrospectively n a rra te d by a speaker (now a tru th -b earer) ab o u t his earlier, (self-)deceived self. B ut w h at one finds instead in The Kreutzer Sonata is a lack of interest in the p o ten tial of the confessional form in favor of a n ­ other, dogm atic notion of w h at it m eans to tell the tru th . In con­ sequence there occur tw o crippling silences in the text. The first is the silence about the conversion experience, an experience in which, as the exam ple of Tolstoy's own Confession show s, the in n er experience of being a tru th -b e are r is felt m ost intensely by co n tra st w ith the previous self-deceived m ode of existence. Silence ab o u t this experience thus entails a failure of d ram a tiz atio n . The second and m ore serious silence is th a t of the n a rra to r. Since Pozdnyshev's confession is a n a rra tiv e m onologue characterized by new ­

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found self-certainty, the function of doubling back and scrutinizing the tru th fu ln ess of the tru th enunciated by Pozdnyshev m ust, faute de miewc, fall to his auditor. His a u d ito r perform s no such function, thereby im p licitly giving his support to the notion of tru th th a t Tolstoy him self presents in the "Afterword": th a t tru th is w hat it is, th a t there a re m ore im p o rtan t things to do than scrutinize the m ach in atio n s of the w ill a t w ork in the u tte re r of tru th . This a u th o rita ria n position denies, in the nam e of a higher tru th , the relevance of in terro g atin g the in terest of the confessant in telling the tru th his way: w hatever the w ill behind the confession m ight be (ultim ately, thought Countess Tolstoy, a will in Tolstoy to get a t her), the tru th transcends the w ill behind it. The tru th also tran scen d s the suspicion th a t "the tru th transcends the w ill behind it" m ight be w illed, self-serving. In other words, the position taken up in The Kreutzer Sonata, both in the fram ew ork of in terp retatio n w ith w hich Tolstoy surrounds it and in its own lack of arm am en t ag ain st other, u n au th o rized readings, o th er tru th s—a lack of a r­ m am ent th a t one m ust finally read as contem ptuous, disregard­ ing—is one of sh o rt-circuiting self-doubt an d self-scrutiny in the nam e of an autonom ous tru th . Because the basic m ovem ent of self-reflexiveness is a doubting an d questioning m ovem ent, it is in the n a tu re of the tru th told to itself by the reflecting self not to be final. This lack of finality is n a tu ra lly experienced w ith p a rtic u la r anguish in a w riter as truthdirected as Tolstoy. The endless knot of self-awareness becom es a G ordian knot. B ut if it cannot be loosened, there is m ore than one way of c u ttin g it. "M an cuts the G ordian knot of his life, and kills him self sim ply for the sake of escaping from the to rtu rin g inw ard co n trad ictio n s produced by intelligent consciousness, w hich has been c arried to the last degree of tension in o u r day,” Tolstoy w rote in 1887.17 A lternatively, m an can cut the knot by announcing the end of doubt in the nam e of the revealed tru th . B ut this m aneuver, follow ed by Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata, raises its own problem . For w hatever a u th o rity a confession bears in a secular context derives from the statu s of the confessant as a hero of the lab y rin th w illing to confront the w orst w ithin him self (Rous­ seau claim s to be such a hero). A confessant who does not doubt him self w hen th ere are obvious grounds for doing so (as in

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Pozdnyshev's case) is no b e tte r th an one w ho refuses to doubt because do u bt is not profitable. N either is a hero, n eith er confesses w ith authority.

Rousseau The im p act on Tolstoy of reading R ousseau for the first tim e is well known. For a w hile, as a youth, he w ore around his neck a m edallion w ith R ousseau's p icture. "There would be a certain justice," w rites V. V. Zenkovsky, “in expounding all of Tolstoy’s views as v ariations on his R ousseauism —so deeply did this R ous­ seauism influence him to the end of his life."18 R ousseau's Confes­ sions first im pressed Tolstoy for “the contem pt for h um an lies, and the love of tru th " they revealed, though in la te r life he deliv­ ered to M axim Gorky his verdict th a t "R ousseau lied and believed his lies."19 The te rra in of tru th , self-knowledge, and sincerity w here Tolstoy spent so m uch of his w riting life w as m apped out by Rousseau, and it is only here and there th a t Tolstoy goes fu rth er th an R ousseau in exploring it. The Confessions begin: “I am com m encing an undertak in g . . . w ithout p re c e d e n t. . . I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a m an in all the tru th of natu re, and th a t m an myself." R ousseau goes on to im agine him self app earin g before God, book in hand, saying: "I have show n m yself as I was: m ean and contem ptible, good, high-m inded and sublim e . . . I have unveiled m y inm ost self."20 The task Rousseau sets him self is therefore one of to tal self­ revelation. Yet one m ight at once ask how any o ther rea d er of the book of R ousseau's life save all-know ing God can know th a t he has truly told the tru th . R ousseau’s first defense is th a t he passes the test M ontaigne fails: w hereas M ontaigne "pretends to confess his defects" b u t confesses only "am iable" defects (Book X; II, 160), he, Rousseau, is p rep ared to confess to defects th a t bring sham e upon him , like the sensual pleasure he takes in being b eaten by a w om an (Book I; I, 13). This defense does not, of course, answ er the charge th a t he m ay believe he is telling the tru th , yet be self-deceived. H ere his response is th a t his m ethod in the Confessions is to detail "everything th a t has h appened to me, all m y acts, thoughts and

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feelings” w ith o u t any stru c tu re of in terp retatio n : "it is [the rea d ­ e r’s] business to collect these scattered elem ents and to determ ine the being w hich is com posed of them ; the result m ust be his work" (Book IV; I, 159). And if this response seem s evasive (if it does not answ er the charge of selective recollection, for instance), Rous­ seau ’s position is as follows: I may om it or transpose facts, I may make mistakes in dates, but I cannot be deceived in w hat I have felt or w hat my feelings have prom pted me to do . . . The real object of my Confessions is, to contribute to an accurate knowledge of my inner being in all the different situations of my life. W hat I have promised to relate is the history of my soul; I need no other memoirs to write it faithfully; it is sufficient for me to enter again into my inner self. (Book VII; I, 252) R ousseau’s position is th u s th a t self-deception w ith respect to p resen t recollection is im possible, since the self is tran sp aren t to itself. Present self-know ledge is a donnie. How does this position w ork out in practice? Here let us turn to the oft-discussed story of the theft of a ribbon told not only in Book II of the Confessions b u t also in the fourth of the Reveries. W hile em ployed as a m anservant, R ousseau steals a strip of rib ­ bon. The rib bon is found in his possession. Rousseau claim s th a t the m aid serv an t M arion gave the ribbon to him , an d repeats the charge to h e r face. B oth Rousseau and M arion are dism issed. R ousseau com m ents: "It is not likely th a t she afterw ards found it easy to get a good situation"; he w onders darkly w hether she m ight not have done aw ay w ith herself (Book II; I, 75—76). Though rem orse has w eighed on him for forty years, Rousseau w rites in 1766, he has never confessed his guilt till now. The act w as "atrocious," and the spectacle of poor falsely accused M arion w ould have changed any b u t a “b arb aro u s h e a rt.” N evertheless, the purpose of the Confessions w ould not be served if he did not also try to p resen t the inner tru th of the story. The inner tru th is th a t "I accused h er of having done w hat I m eant to do," th a t is, he accused M arion of having given him the ribbon because it w as his "in te n tio n ” th a t he should give M arion the ribbon. As for his failure to re tra c t his lie w hen confronted w ith M arion, this w as

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the result of an “unconquerable fear of sham e." "I was little m ore than a child": the situ atio n was m ore th an he could handle (Book II; I, 75-77). Paul de M an distinguishes two strain s in this story: an elem ent of confession whose purpose it is to reveal a verifiable tru th , an d an elem ent of excuse whose purpose it is to convince the rea d er th a t things are and w ere as Rousseau sees them .21 Though de M an errs in asserting th a t the tru th one confesses m ust in principle be verifiable (one can confess im pure thoughts, for exam ple), his dis­ tinction betw een confession pro p er and excuse does allow us to see why confessions of the kind we encounter in Rousseau raise problem s of certain ty not raised by confessions of fact. The act of theft was bad, says R ousseau, b u t there was an intention behind it th at w as good, and therefore the act was not entirely b lam e­ worthy. Sim ilarly, the act of blam ing M arion w as bad, b u t it w as caused by fear and was therefore to som e extent excusable. R ous­ seau's self-exam ination ceases a t this point. B ut the process of qualification he has in itiated can be continued further. How can he know th a t th a t p a rt of him self w hich recalls the good in tention behind the b ad act is not constructing the intention post facto to exculpate him ? Yet on the o th er h an d (we m ay im agine the a u ­ tobiographer continuing), we m ust be careful to give the good in us as m uch credit as the bad: w h at is it in m e th a t m ight w ish to m inim ize good intentions by labeling them post-facto ra tio n a li­ zations?22 Yet is a question like the last one not precisely the kind of question I w ould be asking if I were trying to shield m yself from the knowledge of the w orst in m yself? And yet . . . To get to the "real" tru th of the ribbon story, de M an moves p a st a balancing of the claim s of good intentions against those of b ad acts to a scru tin y of the language of confession. "The obvious satisfaction in the tone an d the eloquence of the passage . . . the easy flow of hyperboles . . . the obvious delight w ith w hich the desire to hide is being revealed"—these features of tone all indicate th a t "w hat Rousseau really w an ted is n eith er the ribbon n o r M ar­ ion, b u t the public scene of exposure w hich he actually gets." B oth the theft an d the b elated breast-beating thus conceal R ousseau's "real" desire to exhibit him self. And if self-exhibition is the real m otive, then the m ore crim e there is, the m ore concealm ent, the m ore delay over revelation, the b etter. The “tru ly sham eful" desire

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th a t R ousseau is too asham ed to confess is the desire to expose him self, a desire to w hich M arion is sacrificed. And, de M an points out, this process of sham e and exposure, like the process of confes­ sion an d qualification, entails a regression to infinity: "each new stage in the unveiling suggests a deeper sham e, a g reater im pos­ sibility to reveal, and a greater satisfaction in o utw itting this im possibility."23 It is p erh ap s naive of de M an to w rite of "w hat Rousseau really w a n te d ” as if th a t w ere historically know able. It m ay also seem incautious to base in te rp retatio n on an analysis of features of style. However, in the la tte r respect de M an has the a u th o rity not only of R ousseau b u t of R om antic poetics behind him . From an early m erely an ticlassical position th a t finds in sincerity, understood as a tru th fu l relatio n of the w rite r to him self, a su b stitu te for an ap p ren ticesh ip to the classics,24 R om anticism moves rapidly to the fo rm u la of K eats th a t reverses the entailm ents: not only does tru th en tail beauty; beauty entails tru th , too. From here it is not far to the position th a t poetry creates its own, autonom ous sta n ­ d ard s of tru th .25 The notion th a t the a rtist creates his own tru th takes a p a rtic ­ ularly rad ical form in the Confessions, since Rousseau is working in a m edium —autobiography—w ith closer ties to history, and to referential c riteria of tru th , th a n to poetry. We can conveniently trace the stages by w hich Rousseau feels his way tow ards this position if we follow the them e of exhibitionism in the Confessions. In Book III Rousseau describes a series of sexually exhibitionistic acts he perform ed as a youth. The description of these acts is itself, of course, a kind of exhibitionism . W hat m otive do these two form s of self-revelation have in com m on? Jean Starobinski suggests an answ er: both represent a recourse to the "m agic p o w er” of "im m ediate sed u ctio n ”: the subject reaches out to others w ith o u t leaving him self; he shows w h at he is like w hile rem aining him self an d rem ain in g w ith in him self.26 R ousseau's self-revelations in fact alw ays have in view the goal of w inning love and acceptance. Self-revelation offers the tru th of the self, a tru th th a t others m ight be persuaded to see. Thus, in the w ords of S tarobinski, whose analysis of Rousseau's exhibition­ ism I follow, "the Confessions are on the m ost im p o rtan t account an a tte m p t to rectify the e rro r of others and not an investigation

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of a temps perdu. R ousseau's interest . . . begins w ith the question: Why does this inner feeling . . . not find its echo in the according of im m ediate recognition?" For this persuasive in ten t to be c arried out, a language (Venture) m ust be invented to ren d er the unique savor of personal experience, a language "supple enough and v a r­ ied enough to tell the diversity, the contradictions, the slight de­ tails, the m inuscule nuances, the interlocking of tiny perceptions whose tissue constitutes the unique existence of Jean-Jacques."27 R ousseau's ow n com m ent on this stylistic project is as follows: I will write w hat comes to me, I will change [my style] according to my hum or w ithout scruple, I will express everything I feel as I feel it, as I see it, w ithout affectation, w ithout constraint, w ith­ out being upset by the resulting medley. Yielding myself sim ul­ taneously to the memory of the impression I received [in the past] and to present feeling, I will give a twofold depiction of [je peindrai doublement] the state of my soul.28 The im m ediacy of the language Rousseau projects is intended as a gu aran tee of the tru th of the past it recounts. It is no longer a language th a t dom inates its subject as the language of the h is­ torian does. Instead, it is a naive language th a t reveals the confessant in the m om ent of confession in the sam e in stan t th a t it reveals the p a st he confesses—a p a st necessarily becom e uncer­ tain. In S tarobinski's form ulation, we are m oving from the dom ain of truthfulness, w here confession is still subject to h istorical ver­ ification, to the dom ain of authenticity. A uthenticity does not de­ m and th a t language reproduce a reality; instead it dem ands th a t language m anifest its "own" tru th . The distance betw een the w rit­ ing self and the source of the feelings it w rites about is abolished— this abolition being w h at distinguishes a u th en ticity from sincer­ ity—for the source is alw ays here and now. "E verything takes place, in effect, in a present so p u re th a t the p ast itself is relived as present feeling.”29 The first p rereq u isite is thus to be oneself. One is in d an g er of not being oneself w hen one lives a t a reflective distance from oneself (a revealing reversal of values for autobiog­ raphy). L anguage itself therefore becom es for Rousseau the being of the au th en tic self, an d appeal to an exterior "tru th " is closed off. F urtherm ore, the only kind of rea d er who can judge betw een tru th

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an d falsity in R ousseau w hile accepting—even if only provision­ ally—the prem ises of his confessional project, m ust be one like de Man, w ho tries to detect in au th en tic m om ents in Rousseau via in au th en tic m om ents in his language. De M an’s analysis of the ribbon episode depends on the prem ise th a t confession betrays in au th en ticity w hen the confessant lapses into the language of the Other. Thus, though de M an accuses Rousseau of (self-)deception on the basis of the “satisfaction" he detects in his tone, a "delight" in his ow n revelations, the satisfaction an d delight are them selves detected in "eloquence" an d "an easy flow of hyperbole,” th a t is, in features of language th a t do not belong to Rousseau. R ousseau is not speaking (for) him self; som eone else is speaking through h im .30 W ithout contesting this identification of auth en ticity w ith tru th , we m ay seem to have as little hope of giving the Confessions a second read ing as we have of giving The Kreutzer Sonata a second reading w ith o u t contesting Tolstoy's a u th o rita ria n tru th . De Man is able to give a second reading of the ribbon episode only by detecting an d exploring a fissure in the text, a lapse of authenticity. As long as his language rem ains his own, Rousseau w ould seem to rem ain sole a u th o r of his own tru th . To show th a t there is an altern ativ e road to a second reading of R ousseau's text, via m om ents of inconsistency ra th e r than via m om ents of false style, I should like to take up a passage in w hich R ousseau discusses his a ttitu d e tow ard m oney (Book I; I, 30—32). Here R ousseau presents him self as "a m an of very strong pas­ sions," w ho u n d er the sway of feeling is capable of being "im pet­ uous, violent, fearless." B ut such fits are usually brief. He soon lapses into "indolence, tim id ity ,” overpow ered by "fear and sham e," em b arrassed by the looks of others to such an extent th at he w ould like to hide. N ot only are his desires lim ited by his indolence an d tim idity: the range of his tastes is also lim ited. "None of m y prevailing tastes center on things th at can be b ought,” he w rites. "Money poisons a ll.” "Women who could be bought for m oney w ould lose for m e all th eir charm s; I even doubt w hether it w ould be in me to m ake use of them ." “I find it the sam e w ith all pleasures w ith in m y reach; unless they cost me nothing, I find th em in sip id .” Why should m oney poison desire? The explanation R ousseau

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offers is th a t for him the exchange is always an unfair one. "I should like som ething w hich is good in quality; w ith m y m oney I am sure to get it b ad [fe suis stir de l’avoir mauvaise]. If I pay a high price for a fresh egg, it is stale; for a nice piece of fruit, it is unripe; for a girl, she is sp o ilt.” This first explanation, w hich blam es the egg or the fruit or the girl, is not su p p o rted by the facts (the only girl he ever buys is not "spoilt”; rath er, Rousseau is im potent).31 The p h rase "I am sure to get it b a d ” is m ore revealing: in com parison w ith w h at he w ants, w hat he buys (not w h at he gets) is sure to be bad/unripe/spoilt. "Unless [pleasures] cost me nothing, they are insipid." The p ro p h ­ ecy th a t w h at I buy is sure to be b ad is self-fulfilling. R ousseau now gives exam ples of how he experiences the tra n s­ action of buying. He goes to the pastrycook's a n d notices w om en laughing am ong them selves a t "the little glutton." He goes to the fruiterer's b u t sees passersby w hom his shortsightedness tu rn s into "acquaintances." "Everyw here I am intim id ated , re stra in e d by som e obstacle; m y desire increases w ith m y sham e, an d a t last I re tu rn hom e like a fool, consum ed w ith longing, having in my pocket the m eans of satisfying it, a n d yet not having the courage to buy anything." W hat is it th a t the eyes aro u n d him th reaten to know an d laugh a t w hen he w alks into a shop? Is it w h at he w ants (to buy)? Is it the act of asking? Is it the act of proffering m oney? In stead of pursuing an answ er, Rousseau m akes a typically veering and re­ tractin g m otion. As the read er follows the story of his life, he says, an d gets to know his "real tem peram ent, he w ill u n d e rstan d all this, w ith o u t m y taking the trouble to tell him ." To the entire syndrom e he gives the label of an "ap p aren t inconsistency [con­ tradiction]," nam ely "the union of an alm ost so rd id avarice w ith the g reatest co ntem pt for money." For avarice the excuse is th a t "I keep [money] for a long tim e w ith o u t spending it, for w an t of knowing how to m ake use of it in a w ay to please m yself [faute de savoir Vemployer a ma fantaisie]”; a n d he a t once goes on to d istin ­ guish betw een the possession of m oney (where m oney becom es "an in stru m en t of freedom ”) an d the pursuit of m oney (where it is "an in stru m en t of slavery"), a distinction th a t neatly nullifies the vice of avarice he a d m itte d to a m om ent ago.

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Why is it th a t he has no desire for m oney? His answ er is th a t m oney can n o t be enjoyed in itself, w hereas “betw een the thing itself an d the enjoym ent of it there is [no interm ediary]. If I see the thing, it tem p ts me; if I see only the m eans of possessing it, it does no t. For this reason [done] I have co m m itted thefts, and even now I som etim es pilfer trifles w hich tem p t m e, and w hich I prefer to take ra th e r th an ask for.” The logic of this passage is w orth scrutinizing. As Starobinski rea,ds it, R ousseau is giving an exam ple of how "m oney poisons a ll.”32 B ut if we p a ra p h rase R ousseau's logic accurately, it reads as follows: "I desire the thing b u t not the m eans th a t leads to it; therefore, I steal the thing b u t not the m eans,” not: "I desire the thing b u t not the m eans, therefore I take (steal) the thing so as not to use the m ean s.” To the question "Why steal a t a ll?” this passage gives no b e tte r explanation than: "I prefer to take ra th e r th an ask for.” N or does R ousseau push the exploration of his a ttitu d e s tow ard m oney any further, though he retu rn s to the topic several tim es in the Confessions.33 Since R ousseau m akes no headw ay in explaining his "apparent inconsistency,” and since the illum ination he prom ises the read er does not, a t least for som e readers, ever arrive, let me try to give my ow n ex planation of the com plex of behavior he describes. A ttending less to his reflections than to the shop scenes he de­ scribes, we note th a t w hat offends Rousseau is the openness and legitim acy of m onetary transactions. By going into the shop and saying "I w an t a cake” and proffering money, he is acquiescing in a m ode of trea tin g his own "I w a n t” th a t effectively "poisons” it. It is b ro u g h t into the public, equalized w ith the "I w a n t” of every Tom, Dick, and H arry w ho enters the shop; it loses its uniqueness: it becom es know n (by all the know ing eyes) in the sam e m om ent a t w hich he loses control of the term s on w hich he w ants it known; it becom es spent on a public scale of sous and francs. To Rousseau, his ow n desires a re resources as long as they rem ain unique, hid ­ den—in o th er w ords, as long as they are potentially confessable. B rought into the public eye, they are revealed to be m erely desires like everyone else's. The system of exchange th a t agitates Rous­ seau, the system he will not p a rticip a te in, is thus one in w hich his desire for an apple is exchanged for an apple, via the public

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m edium of money; for every tim e such an exchange takes place the desire loses its value. Sham efulness and value are thus in te r­ changeable term s. For—in the econom y of confession—the only unique ap p etites, the only appetites th a t co nstitute confessable currency, are sham eful appetites. A sham eful desire is a valuable desire. Conversely, for a desire to have a value it m ust have a secret, sham eful com ponent. Confession consists in a double m ove­ m ent of offering to spend "inconsistencies” an d holding back enough to m ain tain the “freedom " th a t com es of having capital. This process of half-revealing and then w ithdraw ing into m ystery, a process intended to fascinate, is neatly exem plified in the passage as a whole. If buying is unacceptable because it places desire on a public scale (such being the n a tu re of money), stealing, though it, too, reveals the equivalent of the desire in the object stolen, has its com pensations in replacing the revealed, and no longer sham eful, desire w ith a crim e—itself confessable currency; an d bringing into being the m ystery of w hy he steals w hen he can afford to buy, the very m ystery th a t he introduces an d then w ith d raw s from solving. I do not wish to advance the reading I have given as the tru th th a t R ousseau ought to have told about money, b u t did not or could not, ju st as I do not w ish to advance the reading I have given of Tolstoy’s Pozdnyshev as the tru th th a t Pozdnyshev failed to see ab o u t him self. Indeed, one of the m inor functions of these rereadings is to bring the notion of the tru th into question. On the o ther hand, there seem s to me a n arro w er yet m ore productive direction to follow a t this p oint th an the D erridean line of arguing th a t the idea of tru th belongs to a certain epoch, the "epoch of su p p lem en tarity ,” th a t the idea enables a p ractice of w riting by functioning as a kind of "blind spot" tow ard w hich w riting moves by an endless series of "su p p lem en ts” th a t co n tin ­ ually defer tru th .34 The readings th a t Rousseau and Pozdnyshev have given them selves, a n d the rereadings I have given them , insofar as these rereadings have justified them selves in the nam e of the tru th , are certainly D erridean supplem ents; an d the decon­ struction of the practices I have followed in rereading Rousseau an d Pozdnyshev could certainly lead to a "b etter,” "fuller" p a ir of new readings; an d so on to infinity. B ut the point D errida m akes is relevant to all tru th -o rien ted w riting; w hereas the point I w ish

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to argue is th a t the possibility of reading the tru th “behind" a true confession has im plications p ecu liar to the genre of confession. R etu rn in g to The Kreutzer Sonata an d R ousseau’s Confessions, we m ay note th a t we have passed through a sim ilar progression in each case. A crim e is confessed (m urder, theft); a cause or reason or psychological origin is proposed to explain the crim e; then a rereading of the confession yields a “tru e r” explanation. The ques­ tion we should ask now is: W hat m ust the response of the confes­ san t be tow ards these o r any o th er “tru e r” corrections of his confes­ sion? The answ er, it seem s to me, is th a t to the extent th a t the new, "d eep er” tru th is acknow ledged as true, the response of the confessant m ust co n tain an elem ent of sham e. For eith er the confessant w as aw are of the deeper tru th b u t was concealing it, in w hich case he w as deceiving his confessor; or he was not aw are of the deeper tru th (though now he acknowledges it), in w hich case his com petence as a confessant is in question: w h at was being offered as his secret, the coin of his confession, w as not the real secret, w as false coin, and a de facto deception has occurred, w hich is fresh cause for confession.35 I have considered thus far the hypothetical case of a Pozdnyshev or a R ousseau w ho, confronted w ith a reading of his confession th at yields a "deeper" tru th th an the one he has acknow ledged, acknow ledges the new tru th and shifts his ground. In such a case, we m ight ask, w here w ill the confessant stand his ground? For, in principle, if we have given one rereading of his story we can give a second. If the confessant is in principle p repared to shift his ground w ith each new reading as long as he can be convinced th a t it is " tru e r” th an the last one, then he is no m ore th an a biographer of the self, a c o n stru cto r of hypotheses about him self th a t can be im proved on by o th er biographers. In such an event, his confession has no m ore a u th o rity th an an account given by any o th er biog­ rap h er: it m ay proceed from knowledge, b u t it does not proceed from self-know ledge. W hether the confessant yields to the new tru th about him self depends on the n a tu re of his com m itm ent to his original confes­ sion. The m ore deeply he has avow ed the tru th of this confession, the m ore deeply its tru th has becom e p a rt of his personal identity. Yielding subsequently to the new tru th entails dam age to th at identity. In the case of a Pozdnyshev o r a Rousseau the dam age is

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p articu larly acute, since p a rt of the being of each is th a t he has becom e a confessant, a truth-teller. Alternatively, the confessant m ay refuse to yield to the new tru th , thereby adopting precisely the stan d of the self-deceived subject w ho prefers not to avow the "real” tru th of him self to himself, an d prefers not to avow this preference, and so on to infinity.36 In this case, how can he tell the difference betw een him self an d the self-deceived confessant, the confessant whose tru th is a lie, since both "believe" they know the tru th ? A th ird altern ativ e is to confess w ith an "open m ind," acknow l­ edging from the beginning th a t w hat he avows as the tru th m ay not be the tru th . B ut there is som ething literally sham eless in this posture. For if one proceeds in the aw areness th a t the tran sg res­ sions one is "tru ly ” guilty of m ay be heavier th an those one accuses oneself of, one proceeds equally in an aw areness th a t the tran sg res­ sions one is "truly" guilty of m ay be lig h ter th an those one accuses oneself of (Rousseau is explicit about the la tte r kind of aw areness in his own case: see note 22). To be aw are of oneself in this pos­ ture—w hich follows inevitably from having an open m ind on the question of one's own truthfulness—is already m a tte r for confes­ sion; to be aw are th a t the posture is not a guilty one (because it is inevitable) is a m a tte r for fu rth er sham e and confession; an d so on to infinity. W hat I have w ritten thus far indicates th a t the project of confes­ sion w hen the subject is a t a heightened level of self-aw areness and open to self-doubt raises in tricate and, on the face of it, in­ tractab le problem s regarding truthfulness, problem s w hose com ­ m on factor seem s to be a regression to infinity of self-aw areness and self-doubt. It is by no m eans clear th at these problem s are visible to the Rousseau of the Confessions o r the Tolstoy of The Kreutzer Sonata. B ut to tru st th a t evidence of such an aw areness m ust necessarily surface in the text, w hen it is precisely not in the interest of e ith er w riter to b e ar such aw areness, w ould be incau­ tious. All we can say a t this stage is th a t the problem s are no t articu lated . For the tim e being we are in the position of H um e, who, confronted w ith an interlo cu to r w ho claim s u n m ed iated knowledge of him self (and therefore—though this is not in H um e— knowledge of his own tru th ), has no recourse b u t to break off the discussion for lack of com m on ground.37

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Dostoevsky Confessions are everyw here in Dostoevsky. In sim pler cases Dos­ toevsky uses confession as a w ay of allow ing a ch aracter to expose him self, tell his ow n tru th . The confession of Prince Valkovsky in The Insulted and Injured (1861), for exam ple, is little m ore th an an expository m eans of this kind.38 Even in this early novel, however, an elem ent of g ratuitousness creeps into the confession: the free­ dom of revelation is not strictly necessitated by dem ands of plo t­ ting or m otivation; its frankness is not strictly in character. In the later novels the level of gratuitousness m ounts to the extent th a t one can no longer think of confession as a m ere expository device: confession itself, w ith all its a tte n d a n t psychological, m oral, epi­ stem ological, and finally m etaphysical problem s, moves to the center of the stage. Though in o th er critical contexts it m ay be fruitful to tre a t confession in the m ajor novels as, on the one hand, a form of m asochism or a vice th a t Dostoevsky finds typical of the age,39 or on the o th er as one of the generic form s yoked together to m ake up the D ostoevskian novel,40 I propose here to single out three of the m ajo r confession episodes, in Notes from Underground, The Idiot, an d The Possessed, and ask how the problem of ending is solved w hen the tendency of self-consciousness is to draw out confession endlessly. Notes from Underground (1864) falls into two p arts, the first a d issertatio n on self-consciousness, the second a story from the n a rra to r’s p ast. Though both p a rts can be thought of as confes­ sions, they are confessions of different kinds, the first being a revelation of personality, the second the revelation of a sham eful history. In the first and m ore theoretical p art, however, self-reve­ lation is subsum ed u n d er a w ider discussion of w hether it is pos­ sible to tell the tru th ab o u t oneself in an age of self-consciousness or “hyperconsciousness,” the disease of w hat the unnam ed n a rra ­ tor calls "our u n fo rtu n ate nineteenth c e n tu ry ” and of St. Peters­ burg, "the m ost a b stra c t and intentional city in the whole w o rld .” The "laws of hyperconsciousness,” w hich dictate an endless aw are­ ness of aw areness, m ake the hyperconscious m an the antithesis of the no rm al m an. Feeling no basis in certainty, he cannot m ake decisions an d act. He can n o t even act upon his own self-conscious­ ness to freeze it in som e position or other, for it obeys its own

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laws. N or can he reg ard him self as a responsible agent, since accepting responsibility for oneself is a final position. (This is not, of course, to say th a t he blam es him self for nothing: on the con­ trary, he blam es him self for everything. But he does so in a reflex m otion orig inating in the law s of self-consciousness.)41 So m uch for theory. B ut before em barking on his own sham eful rem iniscences, the narrato r-h ero invokes the precedent of R ous­ seau. I want to try the experiment whether one can be perfectly frank . . . Heine m aintains that a true autobiography is alm ost an impossibility, and that man is bound to lie about himself. He considers that Rousseau alm ost certainly told lies about himself in his confessions, and even intentionally lied, out of vanity. I am convinced that Heine is right. (35) In his own case, on the other hand, he will have no readers and therefore, he asserts, will have no tem p tatio n to lie. The project of not lying is p u t to the test m ost severely in the story of his relations w ith the young p ro stitu te Liza. After a night of "vice . . . w ithout love," he recounts, he w akes up in h e r bed to find her starin g intently at him . Feeling uncom fortable, he begins to talk w ith out forethought, urging h er to reform and offering to help her. Why is he doing this? he later asks him self. He explains it as “sport," the sport of “tu rn in g h e r soul upside dow n and breaking h e r h eart." However, he has an inkling th a t w h at a ttra c ts him is "not m erely the sport" (82, 91). The next day the “loathsom e tr u th ” daw ns on him th a t he has been sentim ental. His reaction is to begin to hate Liza; neverthe­ less, he cannot forget the “pitiful, distorted, in ap p ro p riate sm ile” she w ore as she gazed a t him . “Som ething w as rising up, rising up continually in my soul, painfully, refusing to be a p p eased ” (94, 97, 96). A short w hile la te r Liza visits him to take him up on his prom ise. W ith a feeling of “horrible spite" he em barks on a cruel confession. All the tim e he w as m outhing fine sentim ents, he says, he w as inw ardly laughing a t her. For, having been h u m iliated by his friends, he had tu rn ed on h e r as an object to h u m iliate in tu rn . All he h ad w anted w as “sport." Now she can "go to hell." Surely she realizes th a t he will never forgive h er for com ing to his a p a rt­

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m ent an d seeing the w retched conditions in w hich he lives? He is bound to m ake h er suffer, since he is "the nastiest, stupidest, pettiest, ab su rd est and m ost envious of all w orm s on earth"; and for eliciting this abject confession, for hearing him speak "as a m an speaks . . . once in a lifetim e," she m ust be punished even m ore; an d so forth (106—108). At first Liza is taken aback by his “cynicism ”; then, surprisingly, she em braces him , as if it has daw ned on h er th a t he too is unhappy. He is overw helm ed. "They w on't let me—I c an 't be— good!" he sobs in h er arm s. Alm ost a t once, however, he begins to feel asham ed to be in a "crushed and h u m iliated ” position (107, 109). In his h e a rt flares up a feeling of m astery and possession. My eyes gleamed with pas­ sion, and I gripped her hands tightly. How I hated her and how I was draw n to her at th at minute! The one feeling intensified the other. It was alm ost like an act of vengeance! At first there was a look of am azem ent, even of terror on her face, but only for one instant. She warmly and rapturously embraced me. (110) In the "fever of oscillations” typical of hyperconsciousness (11), his next moves are alm ost predictable. (1) He presses m oney into Liza's h an d to in d icate th a t she rem ains a w hore to him ; then, w hen she leaves, (2) he rushes a fter h e r “in sham e and despair," reflecting, however, (3) th a t the real cause of his sham e is the "bookishness" of this gesture. He gives up the chase, persuading him self (4) th a t a feeling of outrage will "elevate and purify" the girl. He feels pleased w ith this form ulation and (5) despises him self for being pleased (112—113). At this p o in t the story of Liza com es to an end: "I don't w ant to w rite m ore from 'u n d erg ro u n d ,'" the n a rra to r says. However, his text is followed by an "authorial" note: "The ‘no tes’ of this paradoxicalist do not end here . . . He could not resist and continued them . B ut it also seem s th a t we m ay stop h e re ” (115). The su m m ary I have given of the "Liza" confession is not a disin terested one. I have em phasized those m om ents a t w hich som ething com es up out of the n a rra to r's depths th a t he does not u n d erstan d even in the retro sp ect of fifteen years. P art I has p re ­ p ared us for a confession in w hich no m otive will be hidden from the light of hyperconsciousness, in which Rousseau will be ex­

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ceeded in frankness. Those m om ents a t w hich the n a rra to r does not u n d erstan d him self therefore have a peculiar status: eith er they w ere n ot understood fifteen years ago w hen he was acto r in his story, an d now are recorded w ith o u t interrogation by him in the role of confessant; o r they are now given a retrospective ex­ planation, b u t an explanation odd not so m uch for being false as for being final, th a t is, for not being subjected to the endless regression of self-consciousness (I shall give an exam ple below). Specifically, we m ight w an t to question the "Liza" confession a t the following points. 1. If it is "sp o rt” to h u m iliate Liza, w h at m otivates the n a rra to r th at is "not m erely the sp o rt”? 2. "Som ething was not dead w ithin me, in the depths of my h eart an d conscience it w ould not die . . . Som ething was rising up, rising up continually in my soul, painfully, and refusing to be appeased. I retu rn e d hom e com pletely upset; it was ju st as though som e crim e w ere lying on my conscience" (96). W hat is the nam e of the "som ething," an d w h at is the n a tu re of the crim e? 3. "They w o n 't let m e—I c a n 't be—good!" he sobs, u tte rin g w ords th a t seem to com e from a stra n g er w ithin him . W hat does the u tteran ce m ean? One reading is th a t he is continuing his "sp o rt” w ith Liza, p retending to be torm ented an d unhappy. An­ o th er is th a t the voice from w ithin is the repressed voice of a b e tter self w hich "they" w o n 't allow to em erge. 4. In Liza's em brace he passes through a ra p id series of states of feeling rem ark ab le for th eir am bivalence. T hough cryptically expressed, these include: triu m p h th a t he has got his aggressive confession off his chest w ith o u t incurring a rebuff, a desire to set his seal on this victory by sexually possessing the girl, an d an abiding w ill to h u m iliate h er even further. There is no doubt th a t he an d she have the m akings of the sadom asochistic couple so com m on in Dostoevsky. B ut the account I have ju st given rests only on the rep o rt he gives of his ow n inner sta te and of w h at he reads on Liza's face; an d w h at she reads in his face (he in tu rn reads from h er face) aw akes in h er first am azem ent an d te rro r b u t then rap tu ro u s response. Is she m isreading him , seeing "tru e ” love w here she should read sadistic desire? In a sense, yes: the burden of his ridicule of h er is th a t she is a bad rea d er w ho has m isread him from the beginning as being

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sincere w hen he is not. B ut one m u st rem em ber th a t as a w riter of his ow n story he is in a privileged position to dictate readings. His "N otes" d ictate a reading in w hich Liza is duped in the brothel as well as in his a p a rtm e n t. N ot only is he the w rite r of his story; he also plays the leader in the two dialogues he has w ith Liza, asking h e r questions, telling h e r who and w h at she is. Only one ju d g m en t of hers on h im gets reported: "You speak exactly like a book” (86). For the rest, h er reading of him is m em orialized in his "Notes" only in the two looks: the "wide-open eyes scrutinizing me curiously an d persistently" to w hich he wakes up in her room (77), an d the look in his a p a rtm e n t th a t reads passion in his face. Not m uch m ateria l from w hich to infer h er reading of him . Yet we have a fair idea of w h a t h er w ide-open eyes see: a m an who has p aid his m oney an d sp en t tw o hours in h e r bed having sex w ith h e r "w ithout love, grossly and sham elessly” (77). H er com ­ m ent th a t he speaks like a book is accurate too. Can we be con­ vinced, then, th a t she m isreads him w hen he says he w ants h er to escape p ro stitu tio n , a n d again w hen he says he feels passion—or p erh ap s even need—for her? The possibility seem s open th a t Liza has a know ledge of, o r a t least an insight into, the n a rra to r th a t he, as teller of his ow n story, cannot afford to acknowledge: and th a t from this p oint of vantage (point of advantage) the three m om ents of perception he allows to Liza are flaws in the texture of his story. It w ould be naive to propose a reading of the story—filled out from Liza's three m om ents and from the m om ents a t w hich a voice speaks u nbidden from w ithin him —in w hich the hero em erges as "in tru th " an unhappy, self-torm ented young m an long­ ing for a w o m an's love yet afraid to expose his longings. There is an irony a t the h e a rt of Notes from Underground, b u t the irony is not th a t its hero is n o t as b ad as he says he is. The real irony is th at, w hile he prom ises a confession th a t w ill outdo Rousseau in tru th fu ln ess, a confession he believes him self fitted to m ake be­ cause he is afflicted w ith hyperconsciousness to the u ltim ate de­ gree, his confession reveals nothing so m uch as the helplessness of confession before the desire of the self to construct its own tru th . It is w o rth going back to P art I of the Notes to see w h at the hero has to say ab o u t desire. The enlightened 1860s view, he says, is

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th at desire obeys a law, the law th a t m an desires in accord w ith his own advantage.42 B ut the tru th is th a t every now and again m an will desire w h at is injurious to him self precisely “in o rd er to have the rig h t to desire for h im se lf” w ith o u t being bound by any law. And he desires th a t freedom from d eterm in atio n in o rd er to assert "w hat is m ost precious an d m ost im p o rtan t—th a t is, o u r personality, our individuality" (26). The p rim al desire is therefore the desire for a freedom th a t the hero indentifies w ith unique individuality. The question one m ight im m ediately ask is: How does the su b ­ ject know th a t the choices he m akes, even "perverse” choices th a t bring him no advantage, are truly undeterm ined? How does he know he is not the slave of a p a tte rn of perverse choices (a p a th o ­ logical p a ttern , perhaps) whose design is visible to everyone b u t him ? Self-consciousness w ill not give him the answ er, for selfconsciousness in Notes from Underground is a disease. W hat is diseased ab o ut it is th a t it feeds upon itself, finding behind every m otive an o th e r m otive, b ehind every m ask an o th e r m ask, u n til the u ltim ate m otive, w hich m ust rem ain m asked (otherw ise the endless regression w ould be ended, the disease w ould be cured). We can call this u ltim ate m otive the motive for unm asking itself. W hat the u n derground m an cannot know in his self-interrogation, therefore, is w hy he w ants to tell the tru th about himself; an d the possibility exists th a t the tru th he tells ab o u t him self (the perverse tru th , the tru th as a story of perverse "free” choices he has m ade) m ight itself be a perverse tru th , a perverse choice m ade in accord w ith a design invisible to him though p erh ap s visible to others. We are now beyond all questions of sincerity. The possibility we face is of a confession m ade via a process of relentless self-unm asking w hich m ight yet be not the tru th b u t a self-serving fiction, because the unexam ined, unexam inable principle behind it m ay be not a desire for the tru th b u t a desire to be a particular way. The m ore coherent such a hypothetical fiction of the self m ight be, the less the re a d e r’s chance of know ing w h eth er it is a true confession. We can test its tru th only w hen it co n trad icts itself or comes in to conflict w ith som e "outer,” verifiable tru th , b o th of w hich eventualities a careful confessing n a rra to r can in theory avoid. We w ould have no grounds for doubting the tru th of the u n d erground m a n ’s confession, and specifically of his thesis th a t

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his u ltim ate quality is consciousness, if there w ere not im perfec­ tions in the surface the confession presents, m om ents, for exam ple, when the body u n d e r stress em its w ords like "I c a n 't be good," signs of an unexam ined underlying struggle. It w ould not be surprising, if the n a rra to r’s confession were a lying, self-serving fiction, th a t the repressed tru th should break through its surface, p a rticu la rly a t m om ents of stress, in the forms of stirrin g s of the h e art, intim ations of the unacknow ledged, u t­ terances of the in n er self, o r th a t the tru th should soon be re ­ pressed again. W hat is disappointing about Notes from Under­ ground, if we think of it as an exploration of confession and tru th , is th a t it should rely for its own tru th not only upon the re tu rn of the repressed a t the level of the acting subject (the hero of the story of Liza) b u t also upon a lack of subsequent censorship a t the level of the n a rra tin g subject (the hero telling the story of him self fifteen years later). It is as though the one process th a t is not subjected to the scrutiny of self-aw areness is the n arrativ e process itself. By p resenting the story of his relations w ith Liza as, in snatches, the story of two autonom ous selves (Liza being allow ed her own say, h e r ow n looks), by reporting the voice from u n d er­ ground th a t spoke w ithin him fifteen years ago, the n a rra to r m akes it easy enough to read an o th er tru th , a "better" tru th , th an the one he is telling. Is the naivete th a t allow s the voice of the "other" tru th to go uncensored evidence of a secret, devious appeal to the rea d er th a t the n a rra to r does not acknowledge? C ertainly he p re­ sents the question of w h eth er his story is a "public" or a "private" confession in an am b iv alen t way: it becom es, in effect, a pseudo­ public b u t "really" priv ate docum ent.43 B ut the Notes end in d eter­ m inately. The paradoxes of self-consciousness could indeed go on forever, as the a u th o rial coda says in excuse. Nevertheless, the questions I have raised rem ain not only unansw ered (it is not in th eir n a tu re to be answ ered) b u t unexplored. Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground has not found a solution to the problem of how to end the story, the problem whose solution M ichael H olquist rightly identifies as the great achievem ent of his m ature years.44 The Idiot (1868-69) is in several ways a book about last things. One thinks of the references to the Book of Revelation and the H olbein p ain tin g of the dead Christ, of Ippolit Terentyev’s con­ frontation w ith his ow n im m inent death, and of the m any stories

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of the last m om ents of condem ned m en. The pervading sense th a t there is a lim it to tim e affects a ttitu d e s tow ard confession too: there is m uch casting around after an adequate confessor, and im patience w ith confessions th a t are not serious. The m ajo r confessional episodes in The Idiot are the gam e of truth-telling a t N astasya Filippovna's, and Ip p o lit's “E x p lan a­ tion.” There is, however, an episode I w ish to take up first th a t succinctly expresses som e of the philosophical problem s of confes­ sion. Keller, “overflowing w ith confidence and confessions," com es to Prince M yshkin w ith sham eful stories about him self, claim ing to be deeply sorry yet recounting his actions as though p roud of them . The Prince com m ends him for being "so ex trao rd in arily truthful" b u t asks w h at m ight be the m otive behind his confession: does he w an t to borrow m oney? Yes, confesses Keller, "I p rep ared my confession . . . so as to pave the way . . . and, having softened you up, m ake you fork out one hu n d red and fifty roubles. D on’t you think th a t w as m ean?”45 We recognize th a t we are a t the beginning of a p o tentially infi­ nite regression of self-recognition and self-abasem ent in w hich the self-satisfied candor of each level of confession of im pure m otive becom es a new source of sham e and each tw inge of sham e a new source of self-congratulation. The p a tte rn is fam iliar from Notes from Underground and is fam iliar to the people of The Idiot, w ho readily spot the w orm of vanity in the self-abasem ent of others, and barely react w ith indignation w hen it is pointed out in th em ­ selves. At the kernel of the p a tte rn lies w h at M yshkin calls a dvoinaya mysV, literally a "double th o u g h t,” b u t w h at is p erh ap s b e tte r im agined as a doubling back of thought, the c h aracteristic m ovem ent of self-consciousness (346). It is a double thought in K eller to w an t sincerely to confess to M yshkin for the sake of "spiritual developm ent" w hile a t the sam e tim e w anting to borrow money; it is the doubling back of thought th a t underm ines the integrity of the w ill to confess by detecting behind it a w ill to deceive, an d behind the detection of this second m otive a th ird m otive (a w ish to be ad m ired for one’s candor), and so on. M yshkin thus identifies in "double th o u g h t” the m alaise th a t renders confession pow erless to tell the tru th and come to an end. In fact, M yshkin does m ore th an diagnose the m alaise. “Everyone

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is like th a t,” he says: he, too, has experienced double thought. But the recognition th a t double thinking is universal is itself a double thought, as M yshkin a t once recognizes: “I couldn’t help thinking . . . th a t everyone is like th at, so that [tak 6to\ I even began p attin g m yself on the b a ck ” (m y italics). The very m ovem ent of recognition thus e n trap s him in the syndrom e. This p o in t is w orth stressing. B oth K eller and Lebedev (who m akes a confession to M yshkin a page or two later) directly a d ­ dress the question of w hy they choose the Prince to confess to. Q uestions of the sp irit in w hich confession is m ade and of the adequacy of the confessor can no longer be ignored after the p a rty gam e of confessions (173-187), w here, after a round of confessing the w orst actions of th eir lives, the partygoers are left feeling asham ed and unsatisfied, and Totsky's cynical com m ent th at confession is only "a special form of bragging” seem s to be vindi­ cated (173). K eller and Lebedev give identical explanations for their choice of M yshkin as confessor: he w ill judge them "in a h u m an way" (po-delovedeski, "like a m an"). Further, being not wholly a m an b u t an idiot, “sim ple-m inded” (as K eller explicitly calls h im [345]), a m ouse (mys), he is not engaged in the all-tooh u m an gam e of using the tru th for his own ends. He is a being n eith er godlike in severity (though Aglaya Yepanchin expresses her m isgiving th a t in his devotion to the tru th he m ay judge w ith o u t "ten d ern ess” [465]) nor m anlike in subjecting tru th to desire. In choosing M yshkin to confess to, K eller and Lebedev are therefore seeking—though obscurely and for im pure, "double” m o­ tives—forgiveness ra th e r th an judgm ent, Christ ra th e r than God. We m ay set in c o n tra st against this ideal confessor-figure the p a rty guests w ho find them selves acting as confessors to Ippolit T erentyev's "E x p lan atio n .” Even before Ippolit has begun reading out his confession, som e of his auditors have form ed th eir own ideas ab o u t w h at his act of public confession, as such, m ight imply. M yshkin sees it as a device Ippolit has created to force him self to carry o ut his suicide; Rogozhin, on the contrary, sees it as a way for Ip p o lit to com pel his au d ito rs to prevent his suicide. Thus both see his confession as in the service not of tru th b u t of a deeper desire (to die, to live). As for the confession itself, it w restles w ith its own m otives in a w ay w ith w hich we are by now fam iliar in Dostoevsky. First,

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claim s Ippolit, his confession will be “only the tr u th ” because, since he is dying of tuberculosis, he can have no m otive for lying (in o th er w ords his confession is w ritten in the shadow of last things). Second, if th ere is anything false in the confession his auditors are bound to pick it up, since he deliberately w rote the docum ent in h aste and did not correct it (the argum ent from au th en ticity of style taken over from Rousseau). Third, w hile he is aw are th a t his confession m ay be thought of as a m eans to an end, a w ay of justifying him self or asking forgiveness, he denies eith er of these as a m otive. Being, as it were, on the scaffold, and therefore privileged, he asserts his right to confess sim ply "because I w an t to ”; and he asserts his rig h t to assert such a m otiveless, "free" confession against any im p u tatio n of a m otive. His confes­ sion belongs to last things, it is a last thing, and therefore has a statu s different from any critique of it. The sincerity of the m otive behind last confessions cannot be im pugned, he says, because th a t sincerity is guaranteed by the d eath of the confessant. The sincer­ ity of any c ritiq u e of him , on the o th er hand, can and should be subjected to the endlessness of criticism . His au th o rs im pugn his m otive for a m otive of th eir own; they do not w ant to know the tru th about life and death, and to this end are p rep ared to im pose upon him the silence and doubleness th a t m ust follow w hen si­ lence is taken for acquiescence: "There is a lim it to disgrace in the consciousness of one's ow n w orthlessness an d pow erlessness be­ yond w hich a m an cannot go, and a fter w hich he begins to feel a trem endous satisfaction in his ow n d isgrace” (452). The tru th his auditors do not w an t to h e ar is th a t there is no life after d eath and th a t God is sim ply "a huge and horrible tara n tu la " (448). His suicide is therefore an assertion of his freedom not to live on the "ridiculous te rm s” laid dow n for m an (453). The arg u m ent presented by Ippolit is thus th a t in the face of death the division of the self broug ht about by self-consciousness can be transcended in, and the endless regression of self-doubt overtaken by, an overriding w ill to the tru th . The m om ent before death belongs to a different kind of tim e in w hich tru th has at last the pow er to a p p ea r in the form of revelation. The experi­ ence of tim e out of tim e is described m ost clearly in M yshkin's epileptic seizures, w hen, in the last in stan t of c larity before d ark ­ ness falls, his

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mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light. All his agitation, all his doubts and worries, seemed composed in a twinkling, culm inating in a great calm, full of serene and harm onious joy and hope, full of understanding and knowledge of the final cause . . . These m oments were precisely46 an intense heightening of awareness . . . and at the same time of the most direct sensation of one's own existence to the most intense degree. (258—259) Reflecting on such m om ents, M yshkin thinks of the w ords "There shall be tim e no longer” (259). W ith these w ords Ippolit later prefaces his confession. The m o m ent in w hich earth ly tim e ends, self-doubt ceases, the self is in teg rated , and tru th is known, recurs in M yshkin's stories of executions. In one of these stories (86—88) he tells of the ex trao r­ d in ary richness w ith w hich the condem ned m an experiences the m ost m u n d ane details of life. In an o th er (90-93) he im agines a m an on th e scaffold w ho in his last m om ent "knows everything.” L ater M yshkin has his ow n experience of the "blinding inner lig h t” th a t floods the soul of the m an un d er the executioner’s knife (268). Ippolit claim s to be on the scaffold as m uch as any of M yshkin’s condem ned m en. From this position of privilege he wishes to b eq u eath to m ankind his "truth," w hich he im agines as a seed th a t m ay grow to have great consequences. Specifically, he hopes th a t his d eath m ay have m eaning in a m eaningless universe if he can sow in the m inds of m en the idea of a philosophical suicide like his own. B ut does Ipp o lit “rea lly ” have the privilege of tru th ? The prog­ nosis of d e ath w ith in a m onth has been pronounced by a m ere m edical stu d ent; Ippolit is by no m eans on his deathbed; and m ost of the guests a t the p a rty respond to his "E xplanation" "w ithout disguising th e ir an noyance” (454), taking it as a ploy by a vain young m an to w in atten tio n . They decline to take his vow to kill him self as sincere. He, in tu rn , refuses to take th eir indifference to his confession as sincere indifference, reading it as pressure to force h im to go thro u g h w ith the suicide. Faced w ith a suddenly ridiculous situ atio n in w hich he and his auditors have becom e like poker players each trying to outbluff the other, in w hich, if he kills him self, he m ay be doing so out of spite or frustration, and in w hich the m ost u rg e n t' dem and th a t he spare his life comes from Lebedev, w ho does not w an t a m ess on the floor, he pu ts a

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pistol to his head and pulls the trigger, only to find the gun not loaded. W hat had sta rte d as a project in philosophical suicide degenerates into a chaos of lau g h ter and w eeping. The question of w h eth er or not Ippolit had a privileged, "true" insight into life and d eath is re-enunciated by K eller in a new and b an al form : did he forget to load the pistol or w as it all a trick? The farcical end of the episode reasserts the problem Ippolit claim ed he h ad transcended, the problem of self-deception and of the endless regression of self-doubt. The project of suicide as a way of g u aranteeing the tru th of one's story w ith the u ltim a te paym ent of one's life w ithers u n d e r the corrosion of R ogozhin's com m ent: "T hat's not the w ay this thing ought to be done" (423). It ought to be done, Rogozhin im plies, w ith o u t an "explanation," w ithout a w hy and w herefore, in m uteness and obscurity. The explanation, the privileged tru th p aid for w ith death, is in tru th a seed, a w ay of living on after death: it therefore casts into d oubt the sincerity of the decision to die. The only tru th is silence. The d ream th a t Ippolit recounts in his confession deepens the paradox. Ip p o lit dream s th a t he tells a m an to m elt all his gold down an d m ake a coffin, then dig up his "frozen” baby and reb u ry it in the golden coffin (446). The dream is based on a real-life incident in w hich Ippolit has done a good deed for a stranger, thinking of his deed as a seed cast abroad into the w orld. In the com plex condensations of the dream , the eighteen-year-old Ippolit is the frozen baby, the "E xplanation" the golden coffin; p lan ted in the ground like a seed, the dream foretells th a t the baby w ill not be resu rrected (im m ediately after the dream Ippolit thinks of the Holbein p ain tin g of the dead Christ, a C hrist w ho w ill never rise). Speaking, like the u nbidden u tteran ces of the hero of Notes from Underground, from a "deeper,” "truer" level of the self, the dream reveals Ip p o lit's doubt about the fertility of his "seed” and u n d e r­ m ines the privileged tru th -sta tu s of the "E xplanation" of w hich it constitutes a p a rt.47 The poetic effect of the d ream is pow erful. However, ra th e r th an read the dream as a privileged tru th com ing from "w ith in ” Ippolit—a procedure th a t w ould unquestioningly assign to the unconscious the position of source of tru th —I w ould ask here, as I asked in Notes from Underground, w hy these confessants fail to censor from th eir confessions traces of a "deeper" tru th th a t con­

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trad icts the tru th they seek to express. One answ er m ight be th at, tran sferrin g into first-person self-narration the sam e "M enippean” m ixture of genres th a t characterizes his novels as a whole—a m ixture including philosophical exposition, confessions, and dream s—Dostoevsky tre a ts the self-betrayal of the n a rra to r as a purely form al issue th a t only a m undane realist w ould take seri­ ously. The q uestion rem ains troubling, however. We continue to feel th a t w hen Dostoevsky falls back on a univocal “in n er” tru th , he betrays the interro g atio n of notions of sincerity th a t he o th er­ wise carries out via a rigorously conscious dialectic. The u n d erg ro u n d m an sits dow n to w rite his confessions vaguely oppressed by m em ories from the past, otherw ise bored and idle. He w ill tell his stories to soothe himself; he w ill tell the tru th because, unlike R ousseau, he will be w riting for his own eyes alone. This is as far as his exam ination of his m otive for confessing, the sp irit in w hich he confesses, an d the significance of an a u d i­ ence, goes. It is precisely these questions th a t The Idiot brings into prom inence. Confession, in The Idiot, can be m ade only to an a d eq u ate confessor; and even Prince M yshkin, the Christlike m an, tu rn s o u t to be in ad eq u ate, unable to absolve the confessant (as he is u n ab le to rescue him self) from the spiral of double thought. As for the sp irit of confession, The Idiot says, it is ridiculous to believe th a t the tru th can be told as a gam e, a w ay of passing tim e. No a ct of w ill seem s able to com pel the tru th to em erge, not even the w illing of a m om ent of illum ination via the w illing of one's ow n death, since th a t will m ay itself be a double thought. Dostoevsky's critiq u e of confession is clearly bringing us to the brin k of a conception of tru th -tellin g as close to grace. Dostoevsky takes his next, an d last, steps in the exploration of the lim its of secu lar confession in The Possessed (1871—72). There are tw o episodes th a t concern us. Kirillov, like Ippolit, plans to kill him self to sow a seed of tru th in the m inds of m en. The difference is th a t K irillov actually kills him self; and the focus of in terest is n ot on the explanation he gives for his suicide (the seed)—an explanation full of savage, grandiose, blasphem ous un reaso n 48—b u t on the a ctu al suicide. However, the questions of w h eth er Kirillov scrutinizes his own m otives for presenting his m anifesto for suicide (one hesitates to call it a confession), and of w h eth er he is subject to self-doubt and

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self-deception, becom e alm ost m eaningless, since the novel allow s no access to his m ind. The scene of his suicide is presented through the eyes of the younger Verkhovensky (it is an irony typical of the book th a t while K irillov thinks he kills him self to assert his free­ dom , he is all the w hile being nudged tow ard suicide by Verkho­ vensky). It is thus through gesture, posture, and external detail th at we m ust read, as far as we can, the last m om ents of Kirillov, "grasp[ing] him self,” as Rene G irard says, "in a m om ent of v e rti­ ginous possession,"49 trying to achieve self-transcendence through death. Taking up a cryptic posture behind a cupboard in a dark room , Kirillov enters a trancelike state, his eyes "quite unm oving and . . . starin g aw ay a t a point in the d istan ce” (635). He seem s, if one reads him correctly—w ith M yshkin’s readings of condem ned m en a t the back of one’s m ind—to be w aiting for the in sta n t to arrive w hen the self is entirely p resent to the self an d tim e ceases, in w hich to blow his b rain s out. In this reading, K irillov goes fu rth er th an any o th er c h arac ter in Dostoevsky in the cu ltiv atio n of death as the sole g u aran tee of the tru th of the story one tells of oneself. B ut we m u st rem em ber th a t Kirillov in his last ho u r is more and m ore a m ad m an and a beast (his last action before killing him self is to b ite Verkhovensky), *md th a t the reading from outside forced upon us by Dostoevsky perhaps signals th a t K iril­ lov’s consciousness is conscienceless, inhum an, unreadable. The c h ap ter "At T ikhon’s,” excluded from the serialized version of The Possessed by the editor of the R ussian Herald and la te r excluded by the a u th o r from the sep arate edition of the novel, resum es the skeptical interrogation of the confessional im pulse. Stavrogin, visiting the m onk Tikhon, shows him a p a m p h let he plans to d istrib u te confessing to a crim e against a child; b u t soon Stavrogin's m otives for offering the confession fall u n d er scrutiny, an d becom e in tu rn a subject of confession. Stavrogin recounts his offense (an unspecified sexual crim e fol­ lowed by a provocation to suicide) w ith o u t explanation of the m otive, unless "being b o red ” (705) counts as an explanation. In ­ stead of an exploration of m otive, w hich so easily—as we see in R ousseau—shades into self-justification, we have an insistence by Stavrogin on his ow n guilt and responsibility (704, 705, 711). Even when, years later, the child begins to a p p e a r to him in visions, he insists th a t these visions are not involuntary: he is responsible for

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them , he sum m ons them up of his own accord, though he cannot help doing so (717). The im age of the child is thus not an em an a­ tion of a guilty "inner" o r “unconscious" self: the sam e self th a t co m m itted the act com pulsively confronts itself w ith its guilty m em ory; th ere is no distinction betw een a self th a t intends and a self th a t acts.50 S tavrogin's act is understood as an abom ination by b o th Stavrogin him self and Tikhon. W hat Tikhon opens to question, how ­ ever, is th e m otive b ehind S tavrogin's desire to publish his guilt. In terro g atio n of this m otive, exteriorized in Tikhon's interrogation of Stavrogin, takes the place of the interiorized self-interrogation we are accustom ed to in first-person confessional n arratives. In in terro g atin g it, Tikhon opens up the gap Stavrogin has sought to close betw een the subject's self-knowledge and the tru th . The en co u n ter betw een Stavrogin and Tikhon (717—730) consists of a double testing. All the w hile Tikhon tests the tru th of the series of m otives S tavrogin claim s for m aking public confession, Stavrogin tests T ikhon’s adequacy as a confessor. He w ants Tikhon to prove his pow er to absolve by seeing through the u n tru th s proposed by S tavrogin him self to the tru th beyond. B ut ju st as there tu rn o ut to be lim its on the kind of penance and the kind of forgiveness S tavrogin is p rep ared to accept, there tu rn out to be lim its on th e kind of tru th Tikhon is to be allow ed to see. Specif­ ically, S tavrogin is n o t p rep ared to p e rm it Tikhon to trouble a certain kernel of id en tity he w ishes to claim for him self. Thus despite his readiness to forgo any rig h t to explain his crim e and excuse his g uilt—a readiness w hich gives the im pression th a t he w ants ab so lute tru th and true absolution—Stavrogin's confession becom es a gam e w hose essence is th a t certain lim its will not be transgressed, though the con testan ts w ill p retend to each oth er and to them selves th a t there are no lim its. It is thus a gam e of deception an d self-deception, a gam e of lim ited tru th . Tikhon ends the gam e by breaking the rules.51 The id en tity S tavrogin is determ ined to assert is th a t of great sinner. He p resents his crim e against the child as all the m ore co n tem p tib le—great in its co n tem ptibility—because its m otive was so idle, its passion so flat. Tikhon suggests th a t so m ean and yet so p reten tio u s a crim e m ight deserve only laughter, and coun­ sels S tavrogin to u n d ertak e quiet penitence ra th e r th an seek "m ea­

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sureless suffering.” Tikhon thus draw s into question the scale on w hich S tavrogin thinks of his crim e and his p unishm ent. Stavrogin w ants "m easureless suffering" to be prescribed for him as a sign th a t his guilt is m easureless; and the m easurelessness of his guilt m ust follow from the b an ality of the evil of his crim e. Tikhon places before S tavrogin's eyes the possibility th a t he m ay m erely be a dissolute, rootless a risto c ra t w ith Byronic pretensions who w ants to a tta in fam e by the short cut of com m itting an easy abom ination and confessing it in public. It is im p o rtan t to note th a t Tikhon does not presen t this account to Stavrogin as the truth about him , since by th a t act Tikhon w ould be presenting him self as a source of tru th w ithout question. He presents it as a possible tru th , a possibility th a t Stavrogin w ould have to confront if he were seriously p ursuing the tru th ab o u t him self in a p rogram of sp iritu al self-interrogation (just as Tikhon would have to exam ine his own m otives for m inim izing the scale of S tavrogin's evil in the course of his ow n self-scrutiny). Thus Tikhon cuts sh o rt the bad infinity of one regression of self-con­ sciousness—a regression m ore clearly typified by such self-abasing b reast-beaters as M arm eladov and Lebedev, in w hom the sham e­ lessness of the confession is a fu rth er m otive for sham e, an d so on to infinity, th an by Stavrogin, whose version of the regression is th at the m eanness of his act is a kind of greatness, and the m ean­ ness of this conscious trick a fu rth er kind of greatness, an d so on— to replace it by a n o th er regression of self-scrutiny th a t has the potential to extend to infinity b u t also has tru e p o ten tial to end in self-forgiveness. Self-forgiveness m eans the closing of the chapter, the end of the dow nw ard spiral of self-accusation whose depths can never be plum bed because to decide to stop a t any p oint by an act of w ill, to decide th a t guilt ceases a t such-and-such a point, is itself a potentially false act th a t deserves its own scrutiny. How to tell the difference betw een a "true" m om ent of self-forgiveness an d a m o­ m ent of com placency w hen the self decides th a t it has gone far enough in self-scrutiny is a m ystery th a t Tikhon does not elucidate, leaving it, perhaps, to the sp iritu al adviser “of such C hristian w isdom th a t you and I could h ard ly u n d erstan d it" to w hom he recom m ends S tavrogin (729)—though if one has read Dostoevsky attentively one m ight guess th a t this m onk w ould never a rticu la te

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the difference, on the principle th at, once articu lated , the differ­ ence w ould invoke efforts to incorporate it into a new gam e of deception an d self-deception; further, th a t to articu late a decision not to a rtic u la te the difference could sim ilarly becom e p a rt of a game; an d so on to infinity. The endless chain m anifests itself as soon as self-consciousness enters; how to en ter into the possession of the tru th of oneself, how to a tta in self-forgiveness and transcend self-doubt, w ould seem , for stru c tu ra l reasons, to have to rem ain in a field of m ystery; and even the dem arcation in this field, even the specification of the stru c tu ra l reasons, would sim ilarly have to rem ain u n a rticu la te d ; and the reasons for this silence as well.

The End of Confession The end of confession is to tell the tru th to and for oneself. The analysis of the fate of confession th a t I have traced in three novels by Dostoevsky indicates how skeptical Dostoevsky was, and why he w as skeptical, ab o u t the variety of secular confession th a t Rous­ seau and, before him , M ontaigne attem p t. Because of the natu re of consciousness, Dostoevsky indicates, the self cannot tell the tru th of itself to itself and come to rest w ithout the possibility of self-deception. True confession does not come from the sterile m onologue of the self or from the dialogue of the self w ith its own self-doubt, b u t (and here we go beyond Tikhon) from faith and grace. It is possible to read Notes from Underground, The Idiot, and S tav ro g in ’s confession as a sequence of texts in w hich Dostoevsky explores the im passes of secular confession, pointing finally to the sacram en t of confession as the only road to self-truth. In a long review of A nna Karenina th a t appeared in his Diary o f a Writer, Dostoevsky praises Tolstoy for the "im m ense psycholog­ ical analysis of the h u m an soul" conducted in the novel. This depth of insight he sees exem plified in the episode of A nna’s near-fatal illness, d u rin g w hich Anna, Vronsky, and K arenin "rem ove from them selves deceit, guilt and crim e" in a sp irit of "m utual all­ forgiveness," only to find them selves em barked after Anna's recov­ ery on a d ow nw ard p a th into "th a t fatal condition w here evil, having taken possession of m an, binds his every move, paralyzes every desire for resistance."52 In the case of K arenin, the pity, rem orse, an d lib eratin g joy he feels in forgiving Anna are not proof

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against the sham e he experiences w hen he retu rn s to society in the role prescribed for him : th a t of h u m iliated husband, "a laugh­ ing-stock” (Anna Karenina, p. 533). F irst he feels self-pity, then a sham eful suspicion th a t in forgiving Anna he m ay have expressed not the generosity of the self he aspires to b u t the w eakness and perhaps im potence of the self he does n o t w a n t to be. Thus in­ trospection allow s him to deny w h a t he had e arlier experienced as a lib eration of his true, b e tte r self in the nam e of a new tru th , "deeper” in the sense th a t it underm ines the e arlie r one. This "deeper” tru th is of course, in tru th , a self-serving self-deception th a t (in Tolstoy’s com m entary) allow s K arenin to "forget w h at he did not w a n t to rem e m b e r” (548): in so purely secular a c reatu re ("He was a sincere believer, interested in religion p rim a rily in its political aspect" [538]), self-scrutiny is an in stru m en t not of the tru th b u t of a m ere w ill to be com fortable, to be well thought of, and so on. The question usually asked about The Kreutzer Sonata is: How, after the "im m ense psychological analy sis” th a t typifies A nna Kar­ enina (1874—1876), and in p a rtic u la r the analysis of the m ove­ m ents of self-deception we find there, could Tolstoy have gone on to w rite so naive and sim ple-m inded a book, in w hich the tru th th a t the tru th -teller tells em erges as a b ald series of dicta ab o u t controlling the appetites? Before we accept the question in this form, however, we ought to recall three things. The first is th a t in Anna Karenina we already have the spectacle of a truth-seeker who, though as rid d led w ith self-doubt as any, finds tru th n o t via the lab y rin th ine processes of self-exam ination b u t in illu m in atio n from outside (in Levin's case, the sudden illu m in atio n of a p eas­ a n t’s words). The second is th a t there is no argum ent th a t w ill succeed in outflanking the u n d erg ro u n d m a n ’s assertion th a t selfconsciousness works by its own law s, one of w hich is th a t behind each true, final position lurks a n o th er position tru e r and m ore final. From one point of view this is a fertile law, since it allow s the endless generation of the tex t of the self exem plified by Notes from Underground. From a n o th er p oint of view, th a t of the hungerer after tru th , it is sterile, deferring the tru th endlessly, com ing to no end. The th ird thing to b e a r in m ind is th a t the kind of transcendence of self-consciousness to w hich Dostoevsky points as a w ay of com ing to an end m ay not be available to a ratio n alistic,

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ethical C hristian like Tolstoy, w ho can find the tru th in sim ple, unselfconscious people b u t is skeptical of a way to tru th beyond self-consciousness th ro u g h self-consciousness. W ith these considerations in m ind, we can perhaps rephrase our question in a w ay m ore sym pathetic to the la te r Tolstoy, as fol­ lows: To a w rite r to w hom the psychology of self-deception is a not u n lim ited field th a t has for all p ractical purposes already been conquered, to w hom self-doubt in and of itself has proved m erely an endless tread m ill, w h at p o ten tial for the a tta in m e n t of tru th can th ere be in the self-interrogation of a confessing conscious­ ness? T here can be little do u b t th a t Tolstoy was capable of m aking Pozdnyshev's confession psychologically "richer" or "deeper" by m aking it am biguous—indeed, m aterial for creating such am b i­ guity alread y lies to h an d in the text—b u t (one m ust im agine Tolstoy asking him self) to w hat end? Thus, after all the m achinery has been set up (the n arra to r, ready to play the p a rt of in terro ­ gating an d in terro g ated Other, the train of clues pointing to a tru th th a t questions and com plicates the tru th the confessant as­ serts), we see (I speculate now) disillusionm ent, boredom w ith this p a rtic u la r m ill for cranking tru th out of lies, im patience w ith the novelistic m otions th a t m ust be gone through before tru th m ay em erge (a tru th th a t anyhow alw ays em erges as provisional, tain ted w ith do u b t from the processes it has gone through), and a (rash?) decision to set down the truth, finally, as though after a lifetim e of exploring one h ad acquired the credentials, am assed the au th o rity, to do so.

Obscenity and Censorship

Interview

DA:. What occasioned the essays on Lawrence and censorship? JM C: During 1986 I spent a semester at Johns Hopkins University. One of the terms of my appointment was that I deliver a public lecture on literature and the law. I thought at first I would talk about censorship, not only because that is the obvious point where the law intersects literature but also because, coming from South Africa, I had had firsthand acquaintance with state censorship. However, doing my homework, reading what had been said about censorship in the past, I found plenty of what I would call case histories, plenty of heated expression of opinion, but little of what I would call thinking. I stored this information for future reference, and for the lecture fell back on another topic, a rather obvious one: D. H. Lawrence and Lady Chatterley's Lover. I regard Lawrence quite highly as a writer but have always been put off by his defenders, by their moralistic cant. One doesn't hear so much of that cant nowadays, but I had had a bellyful in my youth, when Lawrence was still a contro­ versial figure. I decided I would talk about Lawrence as a transgressor not of the law but of taboo, decorum. I approached Lawrence's sexual mysticism from a particular angle: with my reading of Sarah Gertrude A/lillin at the back of my mind, and the pseudoscience of degeneration that was so much in the air in the early decades of the century.1 So my focus became Lawrence's discussion of taint, a key term in the discourse of degeneration, just as taint became the key word for Lawrence himself in his reading of Swift. The guiding metaphor of the essay is of reading as sniffing out: one detects in the text, conceived of as a spectrum of odors, what the nose desires to discriminate. The sniffer-out-in-chief in society is, of course, the censor; and my own reading of Lawrence is very much a matter of sniffing out. Let me be candid. I did not know how to end the essay. As it stands, the last paragraph strikes me as extraordinarily lame. But I don't see how to improve the essay— how to end it properly or, alternatively, how to 297

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continue it. This blankness of mine disturbs me. What is it a sign of ? What am I refusing to see (to smell)? Two years later, back in South Africa, I became involved in an unfore­ seen and unsettling public disagreement with Nadine Gordimer over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. Rushdie had been invited to lecture in South Africa and had accepted: the disagreement was over whether, in the light of various menaces to his life (I am speaking of the time before sentence of death was passed on him by Khomeini), the invitation should be withdrawn. I argued that it should not. In retrospect I think Gordimer, in her prudence, was right, I was wrong. But the nagging question came back: why was it so hard to think of anything interesting to say about censorship? Did the discussion of censorship simply belong to politics? I began work on what was intended to be a single essay exploring the question but soon turned into a series of essays.2 DA: How has your own work been treated by the censorship apparatus in this country? JM C: The 1970s were a time of fairly harsh censorship in South Africa, the 1980s, broadly speaking, a time of liberalization. I began publishing fiction in 1974. If we distinguish between the practical effects of cen­ sorship and the psychic effect it exercises simply by being in the air as a threat, then at a practical level I hardly suffered at all. A consignment of one of my books was briefly impounded by the customs; a poem was banned when the entire issue of the magazine in which it appeared was banned; that was the sum of it. I have never had the authorities turn their full attention on me as happened to Andre Brink or Athol Fugard or Nadine Gordimer or Etienne Leroux. I regard it as a badge of honor to have had a book banned in South Africa, and even more of an honor to have been acted against punitively, as Fugard and others were offi­ cially, and Brink and others unofficially. This honor I have never achieved nor, to be frank, merited. Besides coming too late in the era, my books have been too indirect in their approach, too rarefied, to be considered a threat to the order. My own attitude toward censorship is what you would expect in any middle-class intellectual. I don't like censorship; where it exists, I would like to see it abolished; I think being a censor is an ignoble occupation. At the same time I suspect it would be a pity if all boundaries were to disappear: in an abstract way I think there ought to be bounds to what

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is licit, if only as a way of making it possible to be transgressive. Should we go to the lengths of creating or approving an apparatus of censorship to maintain such bounds? I don't think so: you create a tail that then begins to wag the dog. Still, it's a sign of cultural life— of a kind— when books are denounced from the pulpit or in the legislature as blasphemous or licentious— denounced for transgressing the Law. Those are my thoughts on censorship itself: not very interesting and perhaps even jejune. But then, the general debate is an uninteresting one, failing to rise above the level of the political in the worst sense. It remains stalled at the level of (to use a good Flaubertian word) betise, stupidity. Last year [1989], then, I left the pros and cons of censorship aside and turned my attention to trying to understand the dynamic of that stupidity, a dynamic which dictates that instead of becoming more and more pointed and conclusive, debates about censorship should become more and more dull and heated and endless. Why should this be so? My ambition became to say something intelligent about stupidity and the seeming inevitability of stupidity. A thoroughly hubristic ambition. DA: In the essay on South African censorship, you address the question more or less on its own terms, leaving out what it means to write under censorship. In an earlier exchange you mentioned the intensity censorship produces: you were speaking about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but one could also mention the dissidents of Eastern Europe before 1989. All South African writers face this question, in one way or another. How have you been affected by it? JM C: Being subjected to the gaze of the censor is a humiliating and perhaps even enraging experience. It is not unlike being stripped and searched. But at the same time it is a sign that one's writing is being taken seriously: seriously, that is, in the stupid way characteristic of the censor, who has only two words in his lexicon: Yes and No. (But who would desjre the censor's Yes?) Writing under threat of official censure concentrates the mind wonderfully. I have no doubt that the intensity, the pointedness, the seriousness of Russian writing from the time of Nicholas I is in part a reflection of the fact that every word published represented a risk taken. Mutatis mutandis, I would say the same about much postwar writing from Eastern Europe. I would be more ambivalent about South Africa, or at least about English-language writing from South

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Africa, simply because the ease with which books can be published abroad renders the actual powers of the South African censor rather vacuous. Nevertheless, no one can deny the pointedness and seriousness of the best of South African writing since 1948. The existence of cen­ sorship laws and a costly punitive apparatus (there were once many more censors in the Soviet Union than members of the Writers' Union; I have no doubt that in the heyday of the system censors outnumbered writers in South Africa, even it we count only government-appointed censors) is an undeniable sign that one's work is taken seriously in the highest quarters. What writer in the United States or Britain could make the same claim? But writing under threat also has uglier, deforming side effects that it is hard to escape. The very fact that certain topics are forbidden creates an unnatural concentration upon them. To give one example: when it was forbidden to represent sex between blacks and whites, sex between blacks and whites was widely written into novels. Now that the ban has gone, the sex scenes are gone. I have no doubt that the concentration on imprisonment, on regimentation, on torture in books of my own like Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K was a re­ sponse— I emphasize, a pathological response— to the ban on repre­ senting what went on in police cells in this country. DA: When a generation of black writers in South Africa was forced into silence in the 1960s, the censorship system itself was less significant than the direct application of security legislation in the form of personal bannings, "listing" people for membership in banned organizations, the issuing of one-way exit permits resulting in forced exile, and so on. When, in the early 1970s, you wrote your essays on the work of Alex La Guma (who later came to represent the African National Congress), presumably you had to go to some trouble to circumvent the system, simply to lay hands on the novels. Does this other form of censorship not deserve an acknowledgment here? JM C: The censorship laws in South Africa have always had two prongs, as you point out. On the one hand there have been the laws administered by the Publications Control Board; on the other there have been the measures taken against writers, against books, against publications in general, under the security laws. La Guma's writings were banned under security legislation. Such bans were more draconian, and harder to get

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reversed, than bans under the Publications Act. La Guma did indeed, within South Africa, become a nonperson. Here was, one might plausibly argue, the most substantial writer the Western Cape had produced, yet hardly anyone in Cape Town had read him. I obtained his books from East Berlin, where they had been published (in English) in the 1960s. I have them on my shelves, still in the brown paper wrappers I used to disguise them. What is the point here? That La Guma's books were published, albeit in East Germany; that his books could be obtained, albeit with difficulty; that.he could be read, albeit at a risk. One can indeed maintain, as you do, that the generation of black writers of the 1960s to which La Guma belonged was forced into silence. But one can maintain so only loosely. I think of other writers of La Guma's generation who went into exile and then could not find publishers for their work. Who was forcing them into silence? I balk at applying the word censor to a publisher who rejects a book because he believes there is no market for it. Two decades later, when interest in South Africa was at a high, they readily found publishers for their resurrected manuscripts. Censorship stifles books that have been written; only loosely can one say that it stifles books that might have been written.

The Taint of the Pornographic: Defending (against) Lady Chatterley (1988) n 1960 Penguin Books decided to republish Lady Chatterley’s Lover, w hich in B ritain h ad circulated only clandestinely since the late 1920s. In response, the Crown announced th a t it w ould prosecute. The affair w as conducted in a thoroughly gentlem anly way as a test case for the newly ratified B ritish Act on Obscene Publications (1959). The essential feature of this act w as th at, for the first tim e in B ritish law, literary value w as accepted as a criterion. Courts w ere in stru cted th at, although a p a rtic u la r w ork m ight "tend to deprave and co rru p t persons likely to read it" (the definition of obscenity), there should be no conviction "if it [was] proved th a t publicatio n . . . [was] justified as being for the public good on the grounds th a t it [was] in the interests of science, literatu re, a rt or learning, or any o th er objects of general concern." C ourts were req u ired to ad m it the evidence of expert w itnesses to literary or other value. The defense of Lady Chatterley w as conducted by a legal team w ith the resources of the Penguin em pire behind it, able to call in a stream of em inent w itnesses to the m erits of the book. The prosecution, by co n trast, e ith er could find no rep u tab le w itnesses to su p p o rt its case, or deem ed it im politic to call such w itnesses. W hat did the expert w itnesses say? The Bishop of W oolwich recom m ended Lady Chatterley to C hristians: “W hat Law rence is trying to do is to p o rtray the sex relationship as som ething essen­ tially sacred," he said. From the stan d p o in t of C hristian theology, said the ed ito r of the London Churchman, it w ould be "m isleading" to replace w ords w ith asterisks if such w ords referred to "activities . . . essential for all h u m an life." "By reading Lady Chatterley," suggested the d irecto r of religious education for the diocese of B irm ingham , "young people will be helped to grow up as m atu re an d responsible people."1

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[The gamekeeper] stroked her tail with his hand . . . "Tha’s got a nice tail on thee," he said, in the throaty, caressive dialect. "Tha’s got the nicest arse of anybody. It’s the nicest, nicest wom an’s arse as is! . . ." His fingertips touched the two secret openings to her body, tim e after time, w ith a soft little brush of fire. “An’ if tha shits a n ’ if tha pisses, I'm glad. I don't w ant a woman as couldna shit nor piss."2 In his ow n expert com m entary on the book, Law rence w rites: The words that shock so much at first don’t shock at all after a while . . . We are today . . . evolved and cultured far beyond the taboos which are inherent in our culture . . . The evocative power of the so-called obscene words m ust have been very dangerous to the dim-minded, obscure, violent natures of the Middle Ages, and perhaps are still too strong for slow-minded, half-evoked lower natures today . . . [But] culture and civilization have taught us . . . [that] the act does not necessarily follow on the thought.3 In his b rig h t, progressive dism issal of taboo, Lawrence is invok­ ing the backing of the anthropology of his day, the anthropology of J. G. Frazer. In p articu lar, Law rence is using the notion of survivals, w hich Frazer takes over from H enry B urnett Tylor. S u r­ vivals are "custom s . . . w hich have been carried by force of h ab it into the new society . . . an d . . . thus rem ain as proofs and exam ples of an older condition of culture out of w hich the new er has evolved."4 Taboos on w ords for body p arts, body products, physical acts are, then, according to Law rence, survivals from a less highly evolved stage of o u r culture. W hat h a rm is there in such survivals? Why should we be icon­ oclasts of the old taboos? The answ er b o th Lawrence and the ex p ert w itnesses give is th a t to m ain tain linguistic taboos is to m ain tain an a u ra of sham e around w hatever the w ords stand for, to the u ltim a te d e trim e n t of society. “Fifty yards from this court," testified the critic R ichard H oggart, I I heard a m an say “fuck" three times as he passed me. He was speaking to him self and he said “fuck it, fuck it, fuck it" . . . He [was using] the word as a word of contempt, and one of the things Lawrence found most worrying was that the word for this im ­ portant relationship had become a word of vile abuse . . . [Law-

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rence] wanted to re-establish the meaning of [the word], the proper use of it.5 Despite th eir high m oral tone, it is h a rd to take the arg u m en ts of the defense seriously. Indeed, it is h a rd to read through the tria l record w ith o ut a sneaking sym pathy for the prosecution. For, as we read, it becom es m ore an d m ore clear th a t the prosecution is fighting w ithout w eapons. Who, in 1960, w ould dare take the w itness stan d an d declare th a t he or she h a d been depraved or co rru p ted by reading a book? We have to go to the stuffiest, m ost venerable forum s to find the old fo rth rig h t language still in use. In the wake of the acq u ittal of Lady Chatterley, the House of Lords debated a m otion th a t the w ritings of D. H. Law rence be ban n ed in perpetuity. "I hold a very strong view ,” said Lord Teviot, w ho proposed the m otion, "on giving u n b rid led licence to everybody in the country, a n d I am very anxious lest o u r w orld becom e depraved an d indecent, to p u t it m ildly.” Lady Chatterley, he w ent on, was a "disgusting, filthy affront to ord in ary decencies.”6 In the end Lord Teviot was placated by his colleagues a n d w ith ­ drew his m otion. B ut the House agreed th a t Lady Chatterley w as an u n fo rtu n ate business from beginning to end. Lord Gage sum m ed up: Lady Chatterley was "in very b ad ta s te ”; it w ould certainly not be "very becom ing" io find it in the bookstalls. As for the clerics w ho had lent them selves to the defense, th eir tes­ tim ony evoked only "a considerable sense of the rid icu lo u s.”7 I take Lord G age’s position to be a representative conservative one, nam ely th a t Lady Chatterley offends against decorum on a fairly gross scale. The problem for the Lords, however, is th a t rules of decorum depend on social consensus. W hen consensus does no t exist, the upholders of decorum m ust e ith er im pose th eir rule o r else w ithdraw . T here is no logic, no body of evidence by w hich decorum can plead for and justify itself. As the etym ology of the w ord tells us, decorum covers things of the rig h t hand, as opposed to things of the left hand. It belongs to the m ost arch aic p o larity of all. Its essence is th a t it is tacit. It m arks off a dom ain of silence, and preserves silence ab o u t how the boundaries of th a t dom ain are determ ined. D ecorum can therefore be gestured tow ard b u t not codified. It cannot be w ritte n into law. It cannot be the subject of the law because it lies, if anyw here, behind the law.

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Hence the dism ay in the House as the Lords began to realize the full im p lications of the 1959 act. By creating an overriding criterion of "the pub lic good," to be atteste d to by "the expert w itness," the act dem ands th a t decorum plead for itself. If the Lords shake th eir heads over the role the church played in the acq u itta l of Lady Chatterley, it is because the church ought surely to u n d e rstan d th a t there are m atters one does not debate: com ­ m an d m en ts, sta n d a rd s of decorum , taboos. For taboo, too, has no defense a g ain st being questioned. The b arriers raised by taboo aro u n d w ords and objects are like the em peror's clothes: as soon as the first sm all voice is raised, the scales fall from the eyes of the crow d and everyone sees th a t the em peror is naked. Law rence was rig h t w hen he said: If you read the forbidden w ords w ith the eye of a child, you w ill see they are like any other w ords. W hat Law rence d id not go on to say was: B ut we are not children. W hat Lord Gage deplores is the spectacle of churchm en p retending dis­ ingenuously to be children, playing a gam e in w hich the Crown, like the em peror, is m aneuvered into claim ing the taboo is clothed in reason. The taboo never is. Let us now tu rn to Lady Chatterley's Lover, th a t is, the th ird version of L aw rence's story, an d to the various defenses Law rence w rote of it. The story Law rence tells is of the wife of a m em ber of the E nglish aristo cracy w ho has an affair w ith one of the servants of the estate, falls p regnant, and decides to ru n off w ith her lover. The intercourse of Lady C hatterley w ith the gam ekeeper tra n s­ gresses a t least three rules: it is adulterous; it crosses caste bound­ aries; an d it is som etim es "u nnatural," th a t is, anal. Let m e elab­ orate on the second an d th ird of these transgressions. T hough we speak of the B ritish u p p er class, w ith regard to E d w ard ian E ngland it w ould be b e tte r to speak of an up p er caste, p a rt of a p an-E uropean u p p er caste in the tw ilight of its days, ch aracterized inter alia by endogam y and asym m etrical rules of sexual relations: m en m ay freely cross caste boundaries in th eir sexual contacts, b u t for w om en this is interdicted, or, in the lan ­ guage of the caste, "not done." The rationale for the interdiction, as we m ig h t expect, involves the notion of pollution: w om en carry the blood of the caste, and the bloodstock is polluted w hen it is invaded by the blood (or sem en, w hich, in the language of pollu­

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tion, is the sam e thing) of a m an of low er caste. This interdiction is clearly enunciated by S ir Clifford C hatterley w hen he tells his wife he will give his nam e to any child she bears as long as she exercises h er "n atu ral instin ct of decency and selection” an d does not allow "the wrong sort of fellow [to] touch [h er]” (LCL, 49). W ith reg ard to the th ird transgression, the gam ekeeper M ellors not only has intercourse w ith the lady of the m anor b u t also sodom izes her. F urtherm ore, M ellors’ ex-wife spreads the news th a t he is a sodom ist. Connie C hatterley is thus know n all over the d istrict to have h ad w h at used to be called a "crim e against n a tu re ” co m m itted upon h er body—a crim e whose transgressive natu re was m arked, in the B ritish penal code of the 1920s, by draconian penalties, even for m an and wife. Besides the transgressions I have nam ed, there is a fourth. M el­ lors pollutes Connie’s m ind (I use the language of the tim e) by instructing h er in the use of taboo w ords. In the V ictorian m y th ­ ology of pollution, "bad language” is the speech of a polluted m ind. The only class of w om en in whose m ouths bad language is ex­ pected to occur are "fallen w om en,” w om en in a state of u n re ­ deem ed defilem ent. M ellors' transgression is to teach a w om an bad language. Bad language is harm less am ong m en—w hen M el­ lors and Connie's fath er m eet, the la tte r jovially applies taboo w ords to his d au g h ter (LCL, 321)—b u t blasts the innocence of wom en and children.8 (The phenom enon of m en's language for­ bidden to w om en and w om en’s language forbidden to m en is of course well atteste d in the lite ra tu re of taboo.) Law rence called Lady Chatterley a "tender and phallic novel.”9 There is obviously intended to be tenderness betw een the lovers. B ut tenderness is represented w ithin a fable about possession. Mellors uses the phallus, and the phallic m ale w ord, to m ake Connie his own. He leaves the sign of the phallus upon h er in such a w ay th a t she can re tu rn n eith er to h er h u sb an d no r to h er caste. She becom es a devotee of the cult of the phallus: "The strange w eight of the balls betw een his legs! W hat a m ystery! . . . She felt the slow, m om entous, surging rise of the phallus again, the oth er power. And h e r h e a rt m elted out w ith a kind of aw e” (LCL, 197198). B ut is L aw rence’s phrase "tender and p h a llic ” not an oxy­ m oron? W hat tenderness is possible u n d e r the rule of the phallus?

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The an sw er m ay p erh ap s be th a t tenderness is possible as long as the sexual p a rtn e rs are both p a rticip a n ts in the cult, th a t is, as long as the m an is the p riest ra th e r than the god (the w ord m ade flesh) of the phallus, and the celebratory act is conducted by m an and w om an under the phallus. This is, I think, the im plication of the scenes in w hich the p h allu s is alienated from M ellors by being addressed (as "thou"), decked w ith flowers, and so forth. Perhaps the sh arp est difference betw een Lady Chatterley and Law rence's o th er big novel of the period, The Plumed Serpent, is th a t in the la tte r Law rence toys w ith the idea of m an/husband as godhead. I will re tu rn la te r to the place of the phallus in Lady Chatterley. But let m e now tu rn to the series of prose pieces th a t Law rence w rote after Lady Chatterley, largely to counter charges th a t he w as a p o rnographer. I refer to the introduction to the private edition of Pansies (1929), to the essay "Pornography and Obscenity" (1929), to the in tro d u ctio n to the 1929 book of paintings, and to the p a m p h let A Propos o f Lady Chatterley's Lover (1930).10 According to Law rence in these pieces, the origin of the porno­ graphic im ag in atio n lies in an excrem ental experience of sex. W hat does this m ean? He explains as follows. In "healthy" hum an beings, two kinds of flow take place: an excrem ental dow nw ard flow, in w hich form is dissolved and living m a tte r becom es dirt; and a sexual u p w ard flow th a t is both procreative and formcreating (see, for exam ple, LCL, 316). In “degraded" h u m an beings, however, the in stin ct to hold the polarities a p a rt has collapsed, and all the flow of the body is dow nw ard and decreative, issuing in d irt. Sexual play becom es a play w ith dirt; the body of the w om an becom es the d irt the m an plays w ith; sex, for the m an, becom es an act of soiling. “Com m on individuals of this sort have a disgusting a ttitu d e tow ards sex, a disgusting contem pt of it, a disgusting desire to in su lt it. If such fellows have intercourse w ith a w om an, they triu m p h an tly feel they have done h er dirt" (SLC, 38-39). This is L aw rence's p ictu re of the degraded or fallen state. W hen and how did the fall take place? W ith considerable tentativeness Law rence situ ates it in the tim e of E lizabeth I. The shock of epi­ dem ic syphilis on E ngland, p articu la rly on the aristocracy, he suggests, resulted in a "ru p tu re in h u m an consciousness.” "The

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pox en tered the blood of the nation . . . After it had entered the blood, it entered the consciousness.” Why should syphilis and no o th er disease have left this legacy? Because nothing can equal the "horror" of the realization th a t the issue of the sexual act m ay be a tain t on the u n born (SLC, 54, 55, 57). In Law rence's speculative fantasy, then, a fter a certain h istorical m om ent there is a fear th a t m ale seed m ay be tain ted . The seed m ay be bad, the seed m ay be dirt: ejaculation becom es p a rt of the excrem ental flux. From here it is a short step to L aw rence's next figure of sex in a fallen state. Sexual desire is no longer itself desired, b u t becom es a su p p u ratin g w ound in the body. The w ound itches, is scratched, does not heal, oozes d irt, and adds its q uota to the dow nw ard, excrem ental flow. S cratching is an o th er nam e for m astu rb atio n , "perhaps the deepest an d m ost dangerous c a n ­ cer of our civilization"; it m arks the self-enclosure of p u re subjec­ tivity, an d is reflected in an a rt of pu re subjectivity (here Law rence is very likely thinking of Proust an d Joyce, though he does not nam e them ) (SLC, 40-42). W hat is the rem edy? "The way to tre a t the disease is to com e out into the open." We m ust have "a n a tu ra l fresh openness about sex" (SLC, 40). Specifically, we m ust restore the fallen W ord, the W ord th a t has becom e "unclean." "To-day, if you suggest th a t the w ord arse was in the beginning, an d was God and w as w ith God, you w ill . . . be p u t in prison . . . The w ord arse is as m uch god as the w ord face." The villain is the m ind. The m ind, h atin g the body, has tu rn ed the old body-w ords into scapegoats and driven them from consciousness. Now they h a u n t the m argins of consciousness like jackals o r hyenas, undying. They m ust be read m itted . The "taboo" m u st be lifted. If not, we w ill rem ain a t the level of sav­ ages. "The kangaroo is a harm less anim al, the w ord shit is a harm less w ord. Make eith er into a taboo and it becom es d an g er­ ous. The result of taboo is insanity." As evidence Law rence cites the case of Jo n a th an Sw ift, whose m ind was "poisoned" as if by "some terrib le constipation" by the thought th a t "Celia shits" (SLC, 28-30). Are we m istaken if we detect som ething dow nw ard and decreative in the flow of L aw rence's ow n language here? Let us look fu rth er into the case of Lawrence.’s Sw ift, w ith his poisoned m ind.

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There are tw o poem s of S w ift’s in w hich the phrase "Celia sh its” occurs. They are ab o u t young m en who play the idealizing gam e of p asto ral love, b u t find them selves unable to contain w ith in the lim its of the p a sto ral the full reality of the beloved, body functions and all. The tw o poem s belong to a group of four, all w ritten about 1732 (a decade before Sw ift was declared of unsound m ind and placed u n d e r guardianship), w hich have attain ed a m ild notoriety as the "ex crem en tal” or "scatological” group.11 In the first of the "Celia shits" poem s, the sw ain steals into C elia’s dressing room and discovers w ith dism ay th a t soiled u n ­ d erw ear and m akeup lie behind the ethereal front she presents in public. Pressing on w ith his exploration of her secret w orld, he gropes in the com m ode and fouls his hand in the pan. This expe­ rience unhinges him : in his tain ted im agination the sight of a w om an henceforth alw ays calls up the sm ell of excrem ent. In the second poem —a slig h ter piece—the sw ain (a stu d en t w ho him self lives in circum stances of considerable squalor) finds th a t there is no place for "the blackest of all fem ale deeds" in his Arcady, and sim ilarly falls to raving. In a straig h tfo rw ard reading, these poem s w arn against ideal­ izing the body, ag ain st closing the eyes and nose to the dow nw ard flow th a t is proof of its an im al natu re. W hat is repressed from consciousness inevitably re tu rn s to h a u n t us; the d irt whose ex­ istence is denied retu rn s as d irty thoughts, dirty language. The poem s p resen t them selves as the w ork of a critic and m oralizer who sets him self a t an explicit distance from the idealizer w ith his fragile defenses ag ain st reality .12 Law rence m isrem em bers and m isquotes the poem s so badly, ignoring this distance, th a t one w onders w hether he knew them a t first h an d o r had sim ply heard of them from his friend Aldous H uxley.13 B ut let us take the m ost interesting case, w hich is th a t Law rence has given Sw ift a reading of genius, seeing through the screen Sw ift has erected in order to be able to represent a personal excrem ental crisis w ith o u t the nakedness of overt confession. W hat, then, is S w ift’s disguised n arrativ e? A hand is plunged into a d ark hole and com es out sm elling of excrem ent; from hand via nose, the excrem ental ta in t invades and poisons the m ind, as vengeance for p e n etratio n of the w o m an ’s sanctum .

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But Vengeance, goddess never sleeping, Soon punished Strephon for his peeping. His foul im agination links Each dame he sees with all her stinks. (119-122) Law rence com es back to these poem s of S w ift’s several tim es in the late 1920s, alw ays in order to hold Swift up as a terrifying exam ple of w hat can happen if a taboo is taken to h e a rt.14 "The w ord shit is a harm less w ord. Make [it] into a taboo and it becom es dangerous. The result of taboo is insanity.” L aw rence’s Sw ift m akes contact w ith his m istress' excrem ent, is flooded w ith con­ tagion, an d goes m ad. Therefore—w hat? Therefore, says Law ­ rence, we m ust destroy the excrem ental taboo, not naively, as L aputans w ould do, by bringing the substance itself into the open, b u t sym bolically, a t one rem ove, by u tte rin g the w ord shit, thereby purging the m ind of the signified of the w ord, nam ely, the idea of shit-as-contagion. W hat strikes me is th a t the reading Law rence gives the poem , w hether we regard it as gross o r inspired, is one th a t could be given only by a read er w ho has been touched o r tain ted by som e­ thing in the poem . W hat touches L aw rence's m ind, w hat takes control of his reading of Swift, is the idea of excrem ental tain t: denouncing Sw ift in his essays and an ath em atizin g the excrem en­ tal taboo, Law rence denounces and anathem atizes the idea of ta in t itself. The m oral Law rence claim s for his tale of a com m ode—th a t shit ought to be ju st a w ord like any w ord—is a non sequitur. The m oral he is really a fter is th a t only a m ind already tain ted can be touched by tain t. Its converse is th a t it ought to be possible for an u n tain ted m ind to u ndertake any exploration w hatsoever of the body w ithout suffering self-punishm ent. The question Law rence does not face is: Is the very reading he gives Swift not m ade possible by a sharp nose for tain t, a nose belonging to one ac­ quainted w ith tain t? Is any reading a t all possible to a m an w ith ­ out a nose? W here w ould such a m an begin reading? How w ould he know, for exam ple, th a t the point of en try into Sw ift's poem is line 112, the w ord " ta in t”? Is there not a direct connection betw een reading, curiosity, and a nose for dirt? In a society w ith o u t in te r­ dictions or violations, w ithout the Law—if such a society is im ­ aginable—w ho w ould w ant to re a d o r w rite?

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(Parenthesis: in evolutionary biology, th a t region of the cortex w hich in low er m am m als is given over to olfactory discrim ination, in hom o sapiens assum es the function of a b strac t discrim ination. To p u t it a n o th e r way: w h at in anim als is called sm elling is in h u m an beings called analytic thinking.) So m uch for L aw rence's Sw ift. I w ould now like to tu rn to L aw rence's Chaucer. Som ew here betw een C haucer an d Shakespeare, says Lawrence, th ere o ccurred a "grand ru p tu re . . . in hum an consciousness" after w hich "the real n a tu ra l innocence of C haucer w as im possible." "N othing could be m ore lovely and fearless th an C haucer,” w hereas "already Shakespeare is m orbid w ith fear” (SLC, 54, 57, 53). B etw een C haucer an d Shakespeare falls the break: syphilis and the consequent secret h o rro r of sex. I do not w an t to com m ent on this as a piece of history or literary history, b u t to relate it to the enterprise of Lady Chatterley. The story of the rich, im potent noblem an w ith the lusty young wife w ho escapes from the m anor house for bouts of energetic intercourse w ith the gam ekeeper is m aterial m ade for a Geoffrey Chaucer. In C haucer's hands, one can im agine, the m aterial w ould be treated com ically, w ith m om ents of baw dy: after appropriately ironic apologies for cherlish speche o r vulgarity, we m ight even expect to have the lady's queynte, the gam ekeeper’s sely thinge, the g reat p leasure of th e ir swyving referred to w ithout circum locution. W hether in C haucer’s version the lad y ’s h eart w ould "m elt out of h er w ith a kind of aw e” a t the "slow, m om entous, surging rise of [the gam ekeeper's] p h a llu s” is a n o th er question. Law rence talks of C haucer’s "n atu ral innocence.” He is right, in this sense: C haucer has available to him a trea tm e n t of sex, comic w ith o u t being dem eaning, th a t seem s not to have been available by L aw rence's day and p erh ap s had not been available for a long tim e. Yet C haucer stan d s for m ore th an this w istful ideal in Law ­ ren ce’s m ythology. He stan d s for a tim e before the fall w hen the sexual an d the excrem ental retain ed th eir opposed polarities, w hen the excrem ental taboo h ad not yet touched the m ind w ith its contagion. To return to Chaucer, to return to innocence can therefore m ean e ith er of tw o things. I am not sure th a t Law rence alw ays distinguished the two, and I am entirely convinced th at no one involved in the Lady Chatterley tria l did.

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The first gloss is th a t to retu rn to C haucerian innocence m eans to re tu rn to a tim e before taboos on the rep resen tatio n of sex. It m eans freedom to call a spade a spade. It m eans retu rn in g to the true names o f things, p articu la rly to the “sim ple and n a tu ra l” ob­ scene w ords th a t have been driven out and now h a u n t the m argins of the im agination. S trictly in terp reted , this gloss is indefensible. It ignores the com plex play of high and low styles, courtly and dem otic speech in Chaucer: it a ttrib u te s to him a language w ith o u t levels or reg isters.15 O liver M ellors m ay call a spade a spade, b u t Geoffrey C haucer certainly does not. On the contrary, he adverts to it w ith a great variety of m etaphors and m etonym s. And if it appears th a t the slipping and sliding of m etaphors and m etonym s around body p arts, body products, and interbody acts has accel­ erated since C haucer's tim e, the explanation is in large p a rt sim ply th a t linguistic records grow m ore volum inous as we approach the present. The second and m ore interesting reading of Law rence's m yth of Chaucer is th a t C haucer stands for an age before the specifically excremental taboo touched sex, th a t is, before the nam es of sexual p arts and the nam ing—and, by contagion, perform ing—of clean sexual acts had the excrem ental taboo laid over the trad itio n a l taboos, thereby becom ing dirty.16 A re tu rn to C haucer w ould then require the a n n ih ilatio n of the excrem ental taboo. Though it is difficult to square this reading w ith all of Law rence's w ritings of the 1928—1930 period (for instance, w ith his denunciation of all taboos as survivals of savagery), it seem s to me the reading th a t m akes m ost sense of w h at Law rence is up to in Lady Chatterley. I would therefore like to re tu rn to the novel—and to the tria l—and look a t a key episode, the episode of anal intercourse. This scene (LCL, 280—281) was the occasion for som e rich h e r­ m eneutic com edy a t the tria l as, w ith o u t him self calling a spade a spade, prosecuting counsel sought to persuade an u ncom pre­ hending ju ry th a t som ething obscenely filthy was going on behind the screen of L aw rence's h y perm etaphoric prose.17 There is little one need say about the episode itself. Connie is subjected to a rite of initiation. She dies a "poignant, m arvellous death" as the last of "organic sham e" is bu rn ed from her, and em erges reborn, "a different w om an.” The an n ih ilatio n of sham e is achieved by the phallus, w hich "hunts [sham e] out" in “the core

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of the physical ju n g le .” To h e r surprise, Connie discovers th a t w hat she has in h e r h e a rt alw ays desired has been the "piercing, con­ sum ing, ra th e r aw ful sen su ality ” of the act. Clearly there is a w ay of reading the episode in line w ith the account (the ratio n alizatio n ) Law rence provides in the essays of the late 1920s. The excrem ental taboo is destroyed in its lair. The god-phallus disap p ears into the lab y rin th of the underw orld, hunts out the m onster, slays it there, and em erges triu m p h an t. W here I find the novel and L aw rence’s exegesis a t odds is over the question: w hat is the fate o f the monster? In the essays, the arg u m en t is th a t, once the pow er of the excrem ental taboo has been broken, we can begin to retu rn to a C haucerian state of linguistic, an d u ltim ately sexual, innocence. In the novel the a r­ gum ent seem s to be th at, having passed through h er rite of pas­ sage, Connie has becom e one of the purified, the reborn, the elect. W hat do the purified do the night after th eir initiation? Is the "piercing, consum ing, ra th e r awful sen su ality ” of sodom y lost to them once the taboo (m arked by sham e) has been destroyed? Do they sim ply re tu rn to the practice of a genital rite, purified, how­ ever, of excrem ental tain t? O r m ay the rite of the hunting and slaying of the m o n ster be perform ed again and again, night after night, by the god-phallus? I am asking a question ab o u t the d u rab ility of the taboo: Is the taboo an n ih ilated once it is transgressed?18 The sam e question m ight be asked of the a ct Law rence claim s to be perform ing in bringing Lady Chatterley into the w orld, nam ely, purifying the language of the tribe. Once the tabooed representations have been b ro u g h t into the light of day, does the taboo die, o r is the slaying of the taboo to be acted o u t again and again, ritually? Does letting Lady Chatterley go free m ean the beginning of the end of dirty books o r the beginning of a stream of d irty books? The an sw er Law rence gives in his essays is clear: it m eans the end of taboos, the end of d irty language, the end of d irty books. B ut w h at does Lady Chatterley itself say? In the reading I have been giving, Lady Chatterley is a tale about the transgression of b oundaries—sexual boundaries and sexualized social bound­ aries—a tale whose local tensions and d ram atic force depend on the continuing viability of taboos. Taboo is a necessary condition of its existence. The sexual econom y of the lovers, the d ram atic

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econom y of the tale, even the econom y of the book Lady Chatterley, as an act of transgressive speech in the real w orld, depend on the v itality of taboo. The book is opened; after long deferrals, after m any pages, the lovers are unclothed, th eir bodies explored, th eir tru th at last told; and the book is closed. B ut the book w aits to be reopened, re-explored. E ach tim e it is reopened, the lovers sta n d before us again, ready for the prescribed unclothing, the p re ­ scribed explorations. W hatever taboos w ere vanquished in the first traversal of the text are there again, revived. Even bans th a t have long lost th eir m an d ate reassum e a shadow y force in the pages of certain old books. The strings of E m m a B ovary's corsets w histle like snakes as she disrobes; while th a t m om ent retain s its scan­ dalous power, we know th a t som ething has been evoked, som e­ thing is being transgressed. Does this reading tu rn Lady Chatterley into pornography? Is it the reading of a tain ted im agination? "Pornography,” said Law rence, "is the a tte m p t to insult sex, to do d irt on it" (SLC, 37). "To do d irt on": a euphem ism for to sh it on. Pomographer w as a w ord whose ta in t Lawrence struggled h a rd to escape. He invented a creature nam ed Jo n ath an Sw ift, "de­ graded" m an in extrem is, touched him w ith the ta in t of doing d irt on sex, an d banished him to a m adhouse, from w here, like a jackal or a hyena, he continued to h a u n t the m argins of L aw rence's im agination. T urning on a body of w riting come to erotic life u n d e r his pen, Law rence, or the Sw ift in Law rence, did d irt on it after the act. Denying its transgressiveness, explaining it away, he ended by b etraying the book's pro p er mysteria.19

Censorship in South Africa (1990)

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he P ublications Act (1975) of the R epublic of South Africa, as am ended in 1978, allow s for a publication to be found "u n d esirab le” in term s of any of the following criteria:

(a) it is "indecent or obscene or offensive or harm ful to public morals"; (b) it is "blasphemous or offensive to the religious convictions or feelings" of a "section"; (c) it "brings any section . . . into ridicule or contem pt”; (d) it is harm ful to inter-section relations; (e) it prejudices security, welfare, peace and good order; (f) it discloses part of a judicial proceeding in which offensive m aterial is quoted.1

In 1980 J. C. W. van Rooyen, professor of crim inal law a t the U niversity of P retoria, was appointed ch airm an of the Publications Appeal B oard created u n d er the term s of the act, succeeding Hon. J. H. Snym an. Van Rooyen is the a u th o r of two books on the South African censorship system : Publikasiebeheer in Suid-Afrika (1978) and Censorship in South Africa (1987). These are au th o ritativ e works w ritte n by a pro p o n en t of the system , by no m eans an ideologue b u t ra th e r a law yer an d office-bearer concerned th a t the law should be ratio n ally and consistently in terp reted and equi­ tably applied. If we w ish to study the South African system of p u b licatio n control, therefore, there is no b e tter place to sta rt than w ith van R ooyen's exposition of its w orkings.

Objectivity, Impersonality, Impartiality "The need arose for a com prehensive book to be w ritten on the ap p licatio n of the P ublications Act, and som eone h ad to do the 315

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w ork,” w rites van Rooyen in his 1987 preface. "So I set about w riting th is book . . . despite m y m isgivings” (CSA, vii). These w ords set the tone for w h at follows. Censorship in South Africa presents itself as a book w ritten n o t o u t of desire b u t o u t of duty. The m arks of the censor’s desire on its pages are few and far betw een (though not wholly absent). In fact, van Rooyen's vision of the Publications Appeal Board (hereafter the PAB) is of a com ­ m ittee of technocrats in the field of m orality and intergroup re ­ lations, th eir own personalities subm erged in th eir w ork. "The ideal is th a t the [PAB] should be seen to be an objective and independent arbiter." Its a ttitu d e should be "not th a t of a perse­ cutor [sic] b u t th a t of an a rb ite r w ho weighs all the relevant interests ag ain st each other." Even in the sensitive area of state security, "the p u blications com m ittees and the PAB are a rb ite rs whose function is not to restore order or to defend the country, b u t to strike a balance betw een the opposing interests" (CSA, 16, 51, 106). The notion of the censor as an a rb ite r betw een contending social forces is close to the h e a rt of van Rooyen's philosophy. "A b a la n c ­ ing of in terests has becom e the hallm ark of control [of p u b lica­ tions] in the R epublic: general o r sectional in terests are co n tin ­ ually w eighed against m inority interests." Even the lowly publications com m ittees should be set up, in his view, in such a way th a t "each com m ittee represents diverse interests." After su m ­ m arizing (rath e r briefly) som e of the principal positions in the philosophical debate about censorship, van Rooyen even goes to the extent of taking up the position of a rb ite r betw een the philos­ ophers: since "legal philosophy is divided on [the subject of] the basis of control," he opts for a "m oderate," th a t is, m iddle-ground, approach (CSA, 3, 16, 8-9). N evertheless, reading van Rooyen's two books attentively, one can recover a subm erged history of clashes of personality and com prom ises over sta n d a rd s in the corridors of the censorship bureaucracy. The e arlier book, w ritten w hen the noise of the b a ttle provoked by M inister Connie M ulder over E tienne L eroux's Magersfontein, O Magersfontein! still hung in the air, defends M ulder’s intervention and represents the PAB as ad judicating betw een (Af­ rikaans) com m unity opinion and the sta n d ard s of a m inority of intellectuals.2 In the second book there is no such fo rth rig h t de­

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fense of the h andling of the Magersfontein affair, w hich can in retrospect be seen as a m in o r w atershed in the history of censor­ ship in S outh Africa, m arking a split betw een the conservatives in the N ational P arty an d m iddle-of-the-road academ ics an d intel­ lectuals, rep resen ted by the Akademie vir W etenskap en Kuns (Academy for Science and Art). Instead, we have a discreet account of an evolution aw ay from Judge S n y m an ’s fiction of the "m an of b a la n ce ” as the re a d e r w hose sensibilities should be taken into account, th e "reasonable reader/view er w ho is not hyper-critical o r over-sensitive," w hose "tolerance” should not be "transgressed”, to w ard the "likely reader-view er” of the w ork u n d er scrutiny. This new touchstone, together w ith an increased role for advisory com ­ m ittees of experts an d (not least) the retirem en t of Judge Snym an in favor of van Rooyen him self, m ark 1980, in van Rooyen’s ac­ count, as th e beginning of a new, m ore ratio n al, less confronta­ tional d isp ensation (CSA, 56—57, 9—10). If there is one feature of the present-day Publications Control system th a t em erges from van R ooyen’s w ritings as a source of personal p rid e, it is the sta n d a rd of im personality the system has a ttain e d . This im personality is not to be confused w ith objectivity. Van Rooyen know s all too well how futile it is to seek objectivity in the are n a of m orals. "It cannot be argued th a t the concepts of indecency, obscenity, offensiveness o r harm fulness are objective concepts w hich exist a p a rt from any consideration of the likely readers/view ers.” Hence the im portance to him of the likely-reader test. By in terro g atin g this hypothetical read er's response to a book, an an sw er to the question of w h eth er it gives offense can be reached th a t will be independent of the censor's personal reaction. This reponse w ill not, of course, serve as the sole criterion of w h eth er it should be suppressed. B ut it will becom e one of the elem ents betw een w hich the censor, in his role as social m ediator, m ay then proceed to ad judicate. "Academ ically,” w rites van Rooyen, the problem is not one of defining a "reasonable m a n ,” b u t sim ply of finding "a solution w hich is reasonable in the light of all com peting interests" (CSA, 60, 13). B etw een the reigns of Snym an and van Rooyen the essential difference can thus be sum m arized in the opposition reasonable reader versus likely reader. In the phrase "the reasonable re a d e r” there is a clear ideological content, one th a t van Rooyen rejects;

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the likely reader, on the o th er hand, is a p robabilistic concept, value-free. B ut it is not the content of the tw o opposed term s on w hich I w ish to concentrate. R ather, I w ish to ask w h at is involved in the kind of reading th a t both Snym an and van Rooyen propose, a reading via an interposed reader. (For we m ust rem em ber th a t the PAB’s procedures have never included identifying real-life re a ­ sonable or likely readers an d polling th eir opinions.) I w ill argue th a t the procedure involves distancing the self from being of­ fended. B ut before we can e n te r th a t discussion w e m ust be m ore sure about w hat being offended is.

The Offensive Clause (a) of the Publications Act proscribes publications th a t are "indecent or obscene or offensive or harm ful to public m o rals.” Clause (b) proscribes, inter alia, publications th a t are "offensive to the religious convictions or feelings" of a section of the population. Clause (c) proscribes publications th a t "[bring] any section . . . into ridicule o r contem pt." Van Rooyen calls the language of the act "vague” and holds it to be the first task of the PAB to give a specific m eaning to it.3 Although in discussing offensiveness "we are w orking w ith subjective feelings,” there is also a “ju dicial offensiveness” w ith a lim ited m eaning; sim ilarly w ith the term s ridicule and contem pt.4 Again: "Each of the term s (e.g., 'in d ecen t,' 'obscene') em ployed by the Act has . . . a ju rid ical m eaning . . . The ju risd ictio n al postulates of obscenity, offensiveness, harm fulness an d blasphem y are the basic issues w hich m ust u ltim ately be addressed" (CSA, 11). W hat does van Rooyen have to say about these notoriously difficult term s? He m akes the follow ing observations, w hich are based som etim es on legal precedent, som etim es on his ow n best judgm ent. 1. "It cannot be argued th a t the concepts of indecency, obscenity, offensiveness or harm fulness are objective concepts w hich exist a p art from any consideration of the likely readers/view ers” (CSA, 60). This is van R ooyen’s clearest statem en t on the subject, an d m arks his m ost forthright divergence from the touchstone of the "reasonable read er.” His reasoning, though not given, is clear: there is no w ay of defining the reasonable reader, in a context of

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censorship, except as the read er who eith er does or does not pass the test of finding publication X or Y indecent/obscene/offensive/ harm fu l. Thus the definition of the indecent/obscene/offensive/ harm fu l rem ain s circular. The likely reader, on the o th er hand, to the ex ten t th a t he has an objective existence outside the censor’s m ind, allow s the possibility of noncircular definition. 2. M aterial becom es indecent/obscene/offensive/harm ful w hen the control re a d e r’s tolerance is transgressed" (CSA, 56—57). 3. "No w ord is u ndesirable in itself . . . The criterion is . . . w h eth er [the w ord] is used in a m an ner t h a t . . . is in fact ‘offensive’ as defined in [legal p reced en t]” (CSA, 79). Since the precedent to w hich van Rooyen proceeds to refer cites the potential of words to cause repugnance, m ortification, pain, the test is again one of how w ords affect a reader/listener. 4. E verything obscene is indecent, b u t not vice versa. N everthe­ less, "a com m on c h aracteristic of the [two] term s seem s to be the b latan tly sham eless intrusion upon th a t w hich is private (usually sexually) by w hatever is horrifying, disgusting, lascivious, lewd, depraving o r c o rru p tin g .” Again, "obscene m aterial is m aterial w hich . . . blatantly violates p rivacy” (CSA, 53, 11). Leaving aside the p ro liferation of defining term s, none of w hich contributes to­ w ard defining the indecent/obscene, we m ay not th a t van Rooyen introduces here the notion of intrusion upon or violation of privacy, of w hich I w ill have m ore to say below. 5. Offensive in the context of religion does not "m ean m erely som ething th a t displeases, b u t . . . som ething th a t is repugnant, th a t m ortifies or p a in s” (CSA, 54). 6. "The m eanings of the term s ‘rid icu lin g ’ o r 'bringing into con­ te m p t’ [in clause (c)] are circum scribed. O rdinary scorn or p olit­ ical criticism is not sufficient for a finding of undesirability. The m aterial m u st be degrading, hu m iliatin g or ignom inious” (CSA, 100). H ere we move aw ay from the hypothetical likely read er to w h at I will call the targ et read er or targ et group. A publication is not banned, of course, on the m ere testim ony of m em bers of the targ et group th a t they have felt degraded, hum iliated o r ignom i­ nious: again a reading is done by the censor in the person of the targ et reader. Thus the procedure—a reading via a displaced read er—is no different from the usual test for offensiveness. It should be clear by now th a t to van Rooyen, “Is X offensive?”

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can only m ean “Does the likely rea d er of X find X offensive?” The censor’s task, as he sees it, is to identify the likely reader, read X as i f it w ere being read by its likely reader, and then introduce the resu lt of this inquiry as one am ong several considerations to be w eighed up and ad judicated am ong before a decision is reached. Nevertheless, van Rooyen does not regard the likely rea d er and his responses w ith o u t curiosity. (How could he, one m ight ask?— the likely read er is, after all, in the real w orld, the censor him self.) As we see u n d er item 4 above, w h at the read er finds indecent or obscene is, in van R ooyen’s view, w h at intrudes b latan tly on his privacy. Van Rooyen, to say nothing of the PAB itself, has m uch to say on the relation betw een privacy, p articu la rly sexual privacy, and obscenity. In its ju d g m en t on Magersfontein, the PAB de­ nounces the “excessively filthy language” of the book and its ref­ erences to “m astu rb atio n , loss of virginity, contraception . . . o r­ gasm s, periods, sex organs and ailm ents of the prostate" as “an intrusion into the respect [of the individual] for sexual p riv acy ” (Publikasiebeheer; 18). “At the basis for the protection accorded [by the law] to sexual relationships lies the respect for privacy and dignity,” w rites van Rooyen in his own person. “At the basis of control of the a rts ” lie (inter alia) “respect for the privacy of the sexual act [and] for the privacy of the nude h u m an body" (CSA, 65, 3). It seems to be no accident, however, th a t the PAB, in its ju d g ­ m ent on Magersfontein, identifies the outrage of the rea d er as a m a n ’s outrage (“The b ro ad public . . . personified in the average m an [gemiddelde man]") and elsew here identifies w h at is outraged by such obscenity as a m an 's feeling for w om an's honor: “The average m an puts a high p rem ium on the sexual privacy of w om an”; the PAB objects to “the dishonor of the fem ale b o d y ” (CSA, 18, 59). I am by no m eans suggesting th a t van Rooyen and the PAB defend only the privacy of the fem ale body from rep re ­ sentation; b u t as the censor, in van Rooyen's account, is req u ired to read on behalf of the average m an (here) or the likely rea d er (elsewhere ) to p ro tect th a t p e rso n ’s respect for privacy (a respect for the privacy of others as well as his own) from offense, so he m ust also p ro tect from outrage a .m a n 's feeling th a t a w o m a n ’s body should be p rivate. The censor acts for the m an, who feels for others and/or for the w om an; and w ho may, indeed, him self be

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displaced so far from his own b e tte r self th a t his b e tte r self needs to be rep resen ted by another.5 A double o r trip le or quad ru p le displacem ent, therefore, in the nam e of privacy. How well does the arg u m en t sta n d up in legal logic th a t ob­ scenity consists in an in tru sio n into (or, in van Rooyen's form u­ lation, a b la ta n t violation of) the privacy of the individual? The basis of the notion of privacy, argues D. N. M acCormick, lies in a desire to be able to seclude ourselves. B ut if the essence of obscenity and indecency is the “public revelation, display, de­ piction or d e scrip tio n ” of certain m atters, then it is h a rd to see how such acts can be understood as intrusions on the privacy of others. It is p a rticu la rly h a rd to see obscenity in a book as an in tru sio n in to privacy, since (1) reading a book is an act of choice, an d (2) th e book can be closed and the intrusion ended. In fact, in obscene displays it is ra th e r the case th a t the people perform ing the acts are w aiving th eir own privacy. M acCormick therefore concludes th a t “offensive obscenity" an d “offensive intrusions on p riv acy ” are “entirely different categories and types of w rong" except in certain areas of overlap.6 In o th er w ords: c ertain obscene acts can be construed as inva­ sions of privacy; certain invasions of privacy m ay be obscene; b u t obscenity in general is not an invasion of privacy, an d it is not possible to argue, as van Rooyen does, th a t the general ground for acting against obscenity is to pro tect the privacy of the citizen (or the reader). W hatever it is th a t is protected in the process of b anning books, if anything is indeed protected, has yet to be pinned dow n. Ju st as the kind of reading van Rooyen describes is a displaced reading, the kind of arg u m en t he conducts is an argum ent by displacem ent. All definition is, of course, a displacem ent. In a d ictio n ary each w ord is defined by being displaced on to a subset of the o th e r w ords in the dictionary. N evertheless, displacem ent runs th ro u g h his text (and indeed through the censor's text in general) like w ildfire. W hat is being displaced?

Protecting Others Van Rooyen situ ates censorship (or “publications co n tro l”) in South Africa in the context of an Anglo-American debate in the area of m orals about the rights of the individual vis-a-vis the

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dem ands of society. He sees the poles of this debate as occupied by, on the one hand, Patrick Devlin, arguing for the c o m m u n ity ’s right to p ro tect its stan d ard s, and, on the other, H erbert H a rt an d R onald Dworkin, arguing for the p rio rity of individual rights. Van Rooyen him self claim s to follow "a m oderate a p p ro a c h ” betw een these poles (CSA, 8—9). N evertheless, as he expands upon his a p ­ proach, it becom es clear th a t he is closer to Devlin th an to H art. (It is w orth noting th a t w hen van Rooyen w rites th a t Devlin im ­ poses a "stricter te s t” than H art, the stric te r test is one th a t has to be passed by the book, not by the argum ent for its suppression. In effect the book is guilty until it proves itself innocent. Van Rooyen gives no sign of being aw are of this bias in his language.7 Van Rooyen concedes th a t the state cannot and should not leg­ islate m orality ("m orality finds its source in m an h im se lf”). B ut he proceeds to define m orality as "the sum total of rules w hich society has developed to regulate m a n ’s behavior to w ard s o th e rs” (CSA, 2), th a t is, to give it the kind of definition th a t D w orkin distinguishes as "anthropological” an d therefore w ith o u t any nec­ essary m oral base.8 Van Rooyen proceeds: "Should the basis of control not . . . be sought in the protection of in terests w hich underlie m orality?"—th a t is, w hich underlie m o rality as ju st de­ fined (CSA, 2-3). This is precisely Devlin's position: th a t the p rin ­ ciple underlying the enforcem ent of m oral stan d ard s—a principle w hich itself is not a moral standard but on the contrary rationally defensible—is the right of a society to take w hat steps are necessary to p ro tect its organized existence. Thus when van Rooyen claim s for him self a "m oderate" position, it is not a position m ediate betw een D evlin’s functionalism and the lib ertarian ism of H art and Dworkin (who in this respect both follow J. S. Mill), b u t ra th e r m oderate in the sense in w hich H a rt uses it, nam ely, m oderate by com parison w ith the extrem e posi­ tion th a t the enforcem ent of m orals is a good in itself. To H a rt, the "m oderate thesis" is th a t "a shared m orality is the cem ent of society,” an d a breach of m oral principle is therefore "an offense against society as a w hole.9 It is this kind of m oderation th a t H a rt a ttrib u te s to Devlin, and it is this kind of m oderation th a t van Rooyen follows. The divergence betw een Devlin and van Rooyen on the one h a n d and H art an d Dworkin on the o th er rests on a disagreem ent ab o u t

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w h at sort of thing m orality is. To the form er, m orality is no dif­ ferent from a system of m ores whose basis m ay be understood as e ith er shared, custom ary, an d unquestioned (constituting w hat Dw orkin calls "anth ro p o lo g ical” m orality) or else political, th a t is, depending on the expressed will of society. (Devlin and van Rooyen diverge, of course, w hen it comes to identifying how so­ ciety expresses its will.) To the latter, true m orality m ust include a yet-to-be-defined elem ent of value lacking in m ere custom ary ru les.10 In p a rticu la r, w hen the public claim s to be condem ning som ething o r o th er in the nam e of m orality it m ay be expressing nothing m ore th an "passionate . . . disapproval."11 Of course, says Dworkin, the legislator m ust take account of w h at presents itself as a m oral consensus am ong the public. But before such a consensus can claim the status of "a consensus of m oral conviction," it m ust provide proof in the form of "m oral reasons or arg u m en ts w hich the average m em ber of society m ight sincerely an d consistently advance."12 O therw ise we are talking not ab o u t ju stice b u t about politics. Van Rooyen paraphrases this arg u m en t of D w orkin's (the judge/censor’s decision m ust not be based, he says, on "parroting and not relying on a m oral conviction of [his] own"), b u t the gloss he gives to the argum ent reveals th a t he has not u n derstood its force and is in his own way "parroting": “This m eans th a t sound objective reasons m ust be given" (CSA, 1). On the contrary, it is precisely because "objective reasons" cannot be advanced to prove th a t one holds a belief w ith conviction th a t Dworkin has to include the criterion of an unverifiable sincerity. The question th a t Dw orkin only half-faces and van Rooyen does not face a t all is w h eth er people know w hether convictions they hold are sincerely held. Dw orkin assigns to his legislator the task of ad ju d icatin g betw een sincere and insincere m oral beliefs. It is no w onder th a t Devlin, a law yer ra th e r than a philosopher, chooses the m ore m atter-of-fact distinction betw een m oral beliefs th a t are m erely held and m oral beliefs th a t are loudly and persistently expressed.13 Clause (a) of the Publications Act nam es four categories of p u b ­ lication th a t m ay be found undesirable: the indecent, the obscene, the offensive, and the harm ful to public m orals. From the preced­ ing discussion it is clear th a t the fourth category differs from the o th er three. The concepts of indecency, obscenity, offensiveness,

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and harm fulness can indeed, as van Rooyen says, be given a m ean ­ ing only relative to a specific reader/view er (CSA, 60). B ut harm fulness to public morals cannot be defined in a relative m anner. The censor here m ust e ith er act on his ow n initiativ e to p ro tect w hat he defines as public m orals or take his cue from public protest. No displacem ent of reading is possible; the censor's po­ sition is inescapably political. One of the m ost frequent criticism s of the Publications Appeal Board has been th a t its theory does not accord w ith its practice. The "rhetoric" of the PAB in defense of freedom of speech, w rites G ilbert M arcus, has been "both im pressive and seductive . . . [but] an analysis of [its] decisions reveals th a t its stated co m m itm en t to these guiding principles is often fragile." "Decisions . . . are often strikingly inconsistent . . . w ith the professed guiding p rin ­ ciples. C ertain decisions seem to be devoid of principle a lto ­ gether.”14 This is not the place for case-by-case analysis of the PAB's decisions over the years. N evertheless, let m e cite one in­ stance: the banning of Helen G urley B row n's H aving it All “as a result of its advice to w om en to use ex tra m a rita l sex in the p ro ­ m otion of a career." This decision, cited by van Rooyen (CSA, 71) as an illu stratio n of the criteria used by the PAB, also presents the PAB behaving not in its claim ed role as a rb ite r betw een com peting interests b u t in an a u th o rita ria n D evlinian role of g u ard ian of public m orals. B ut it is not in the area of m orals th a t the a u th o rita ria n ism of the South African censorship system em erges m ost clearly. In the area of security as m uch as in the a rea of m orals van Rooyen asserts a nonideological function for the PAB: "The publications com m ittees and the PAB are arb iters whose function is not to restore o rd er or to defend the country, b u t to strike a balance betw een the opposing interests" (CSA, 106). Yet an exem plary decision on the rep resen tatio n of the police cited by van Rooyen reveals the PAB bending the law. The question: Is a w riter of fiction p erm itted to bring the police into ridicule or contem pt? The a n ­ swer: "Although the police force is not regarded as a section of the population [as req u ired by clause (c) of the Publications Act], it was decided th a t the rendering of the police ridiculous or con­ tem p tib le in this book w as intended to prejudice state security,

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the general w elfare an d good o rd er w ithin the m eaning of [clause (e)]" (Publikasiebeheer, 118).

Censors and Writers The tru th is th a t the censors played a highly p artisa n role in South African in tellectual life in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, it can a t least be said th a t they did not give rein to partisan sh ip . In his ow n account of the period, van Rooyen acknowledges th a t "tension betw een au th o rs and a large section of the public reached a crisis p o in t betw een 1960 and 1978." He im plicitly blam es this tension on the conservatism of South African public life, even on a conservative re a c tio n .15 "In 1980, however, m atters changed. The PAB, u n d e r the c h airm an sh ip of the acting ch airm an [th at is, van Rooyen him self]," passed Magersfontein. A new policy allow ing "strong p ro test" w as adopted "based on the philosophy th a t it is often in the interests of state security to p erm it the expression of pent-up feelings an d grievances" (CSA, 15—16). In practice this has m ean t th a t literary m agazines (and indeed other publications) "w ith a so p h isticated likely readership have been found to be not u n d esirab le in spite of poem s and o ther m aterial expressing h atred against the au th o rities. Such publications were regarded as useful safety-valves for pent-up feelings in a m ilieu w here they w ould be u n derstood not as a call to political violence b u t as a literary experience" (CSA, 115). As a m easure of the cooling of tem pers we m ay contrast his account above, w hich presents itself as level-headed crisis-m an­ agem ent, w ith the highly confrontational response of the PAB to those Afrikaans intellectuals w ho h ad testified on behalf of M a­ gersfontein: The point at issue is w hether the position of the literary scholars [,letterkundiges] regarding unsavory language (however revolting [vieslik]) can really be justified. The law protects the morals of the entire public [gemeenskap]. The Appeal Board wishes to state expressly that, according to its assessment of the com m unity view [gemeenskapsopvatting] of public morals, this approach of the literary scholars is at odds w ith the Publications Act . . .

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The general opinion of the literary scholars is th at the goal of the book is to satirize the folly, the bravado, the vanity and moral decline of our own age against the background of an heroic past. Nevertheless, the central question rem ains w hether the public . . . is prepared to tolerate the m anner in which this goal is attained . . . (Publikasiebeheer, 14-16) The PAB concluded: The w riter built into [his] novel excessive filthy language, exces­ sive idle use of the Lord’s name, vulgar references to excretion, m asturbation . . . [This novel is] highly regarded by literary scholars. The broad public, however, as personified by the aver­ age man, regards the use [of such language] as an infringement of the dignity of the individual and an invasion of his respect for sexual privacy. (Ibid., 18) Magersfontein was therefore banned. In a double sense of the term , we see the PAB here deciding for the public: both deciding in favor of the public seen as the a n ta g ­ onist of the intellectuals and deciding on behalf of th a t public. The PAB u n d er J. H. Snym an acted as b o th cham pion of the public (a public whose feelings it assessed according to its own m ethods and then em bodied in a fiction called "the average m an") a n d a rb iter betw een the public and the intellectuals in a cause c6l&bre th at it did as m uch as any o th er p a rty to set up and stage-m anage. In the first role—the role th a t the Board un d er van Rooyen claim s to have dropped—the PAB a t least acted in accord w ith its essen­ tially conservative principles. In the second role too, in persisting to claim the role of arbiter, van Rooyen has kept alive the notion th a t there is a contest to a rb itra te —or, in his own term s, th a t the interests of w riters and the interests of the public are a t odds. Van Rooyen is very clear ab o u t the m atter: the 1978 am en d m en t to the act th a t created com m ittees of experts gave recognition, he writes, to the "m inority rights of lite ra tu re, a rt and language." "I have described these as ‘m inority rig h ts,'" he goes on, "since there is little do u bt th at, were a referendum to be held as to the value which should be given to these interests, m ajority opinion w ould deny them recognition” (CSA, 9). Thus if the PAB u n d er J. H. Snym an c o n stitu ted intellectuals in South Africa as a m inority,

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van Rooyen, in a ttrib u tin g to it m inority “rights," perp etu ates its co n stitu tio n as a m inority. N or is the kind of aggressive em otionalism th a t breathes from the 1977 ju d g m en t on Magersfontein, rendering the body th a t gave the ju d g m e n t so suspect in the role of arbiter, w holly absent from the p o st-1980 PAB. In his 1978 book van Rooyen does not h esitate to c h aracterize certain instances of obscenity as the em anations of sick m in d s.16 T hough we see little of this in the 1987 book, there rem ain pron ouncem ents in the area of politics th a t reveal a very specific p o litical position. I cite a few. N adine G ordim er's Burger s Daughter "contains various a n ti­ w hite se n tim en ts” (CSA, 100). Wessel E b erso h n ’s Store up the Anger “dealfs] w ith alleged atro c­ ities co m m itted by the security police” (CSA, 103). In 1984 the series Roots w as banned because "a su b stan tial n u m b er of likely view ers w ould identify w ith the cause of the oppressed A m erican slaves" (CSA, 104). "The legislature has over the years enacted law s w hich m ake it an offense to h a rm . . . relations betw een the races" (CSA, 102). W ith reg ard to these several pronouncem ents we need only ob­ serve th a t w hile G ordim er’s dialogue includes racial insults, m ost of them d irected ag ain st Afrikaners, to say th a t the book “co n tain s” these in su lts is m isleading ; 17 th a t it is possible for a w ork of fiction to deal w ith atro cities or w ith allegations of atrocities b u t not, logically speaking, w ith alleged atrocities; th a t w hile the logic of the decision on Roots is im peccable, van Rooyen seem s to m iss entirely the force of rep o rtin g it (or of having to rep o rt it). In the case of the sta te m e n t about “law s w hich m ake it an offense to h arm . . . relatio n s betw een the races,” van Rooyen seem s breathtakingly b lin d to the im p o rt of w h at he says. Such p ronouncem ents serve only to confirm M arcus' view th a t "the assessm ent of factors such as 'th e security of the S ta te ' w ill inevitably be bound up w ith the personalities, background an d general life experience of the m em bers of the Board. 'S ta te Secu­ rity ’ . . . involves an em otional dim ension w hich often precludes ratio n al d e b a te ."18 We m ight add: an em otional dim ension to w hich the p a rtic ip a n ts are blind.

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Paranoia The fu rth er we explore the phenom enon of censorship, the m ore pivotal we find attribution to be, specifically the a ttrib u tio n of blam e, an d the dynam ic th a t blam ing initiates, a dynam ic of blam ing and counterblam ing. It is h a rd not to be sucked into this dynam ic, im possible not to be touched by it: those w ho claim to observe it judiciously or scientifically m ay be the m ost deceived. N or do we step outside the dynam ic sim ply by acknow ledging its existence. It has its own inevitability. P aranoia gives rise to p a ra ­ noia. At the close of his m ajo r case study of p aran o id fantasy, the case of Judge Schreber, Freud 0006*0018 the (phantasm al?) suspi­ cion th at his brand-new theory of the etiology of p aran o ia can already be detected in outline in S chreber's autobiographical m em oir an d therefore is not original. Since I neither fear the criticism of others nor shrink from criti­ cizing myself, I have no motive for avoiding the m ention of a sim ilarity which may possibly damage our libido theory in the estim ation of many of my readers . . . I can nevertheless call a friend and fellow-specialist to witness that I had developed my theory of paranoia before I became acquainted with the contents of Schreber's book.19 In both its (unm otivated?) occasion and in its hand-on-heart style this asseveration surely betrays paranoia; o r else seeing p a ra ­ noia everyw here, even in Freud, belongs to a perception th a t has been touched by p aran o ia. The p rin cipal m anifestation of S chreber's p aran o ia is an endof-the-w orld fantasy. D iscussing this fantasy and the general ques­ tion of the p a ra n o iac ’s relation to the w orld, F reud gives his sup p o rt to the explanation th a t p a rt of p aran o ia is a general de­ tachm ent of libido from the w o rld .20 The form th a t this general detach m en t of libido from the w orld has taken in the psychohis­ tory of the w hite S outh African in the tw en tieth century has been an inability to im agine a future for him self, a relinquishing of an im aginative grasp of his future; it m anifests itself in an end-ofthe-w orld fantasy whose expression in political discourse has been in a fantasy of a "total o n slau g h t” of hostile pow ers against the South African state, an onslaught in w hich no m eans, even the

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m ost unsuspected, go unused. Though the censorship laws a n te ­ d ate to tal-o n slau g h t talk, they are an expression of total-onslaught thinking, an d the construction of a bureaucracy of censorship en tru ste d w ith the task of scrutinizing every book, every m agazine, every film, every record, every stage perform ance, every T -shirt to a p p ear in the land is w h a t we can legitim ately call a m anifestation of p aran o ia. The subject I address is not the political discourse of w hite S outh Africa. If one w ere in search of traces of paran o ia in the discourse of to ta l onslaught, one w ould not in the first place go to J. C. W. van Rooyen's books on the censorship a p p aratu s. But, sim ply because he is self-evidently not p aran o id (but rem em ber: in the p aran o id m ode everything th a t is self-evident is suspect) in his ow n person, it is w orthw hile to trace in his pages the evidences of the p aran o id discourse he m ediates—a discourse th a t shows every sign of being contagious. W hat evidences do we find? At one end of the spectrum , we find insults—for instance, the a ttrib u tio n s of sickness of one variety or an o th er th a t van Rooyen e ith er him self m akes or quotes approvingly. In the m iddle of the spectrum , we find self-censorship—in the interest of presenting a cooler, m ore judicious face—from the 1978 to the 1987 volum e. At the o th er end, we can cite the overall enterprise—to w hich van Rooyen is loyal—of a b stractin g judicial authority, including the censorship system , from interrogations of its a u th o rity and from the dynam ic of blam e, eliding it from th a t discourse in advance, by m eans of w h at one can call the m etarule of contem pt: certain form s of b lam e (including the present one?), certain questionings of authority, are ruled inadm issible un d er penal sanction and form no p a rt of the record ("No person shall insult, disparage or belittle any m em b er of the Publications Appeal Board, or do anything in relation to the Publications Appeal Board w hich if done in relation to a co u rt w ould con stitu te contem pt of c o u rt”).21 The entire a r­ gum en t of the 1987 book—th a t the PAB occupies a position of a rb ite r betw een contending interests—can be seen as an effort to place the censorship outside the p aranoid dynam ic of blam ing. B ut the u ltim a te and all-pervasive sym ptom of paranoia lies in the m echanism s of denial, projection, and displacem ent in van Rooyen's texts to w hich I have pointed above. Offense, taking-

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offense, alw ays belongs to someone else: the m an in the street, the m an in the street taking offense on behalf of som eone else, w om an or child, an d so forth. W hen F reud draw s up his table of the transform ations of inadm issible im pulses th a t paran o iacs p e r­ form , the projective tran sfo rm atio n is the first.22 The projection "He is persecuting m e ” ("He is p a rt of the o n slau g h t”) is, L acan observes, immediate: there is no reflection, and the efforts of the paran o iac to explain his move as an act of judgm ent (as van Rooyen's tw o books do) o r to proclaim it an act of judgm ent (as the Publications Act itself does) founder u n d e r the suspicion of being retrospective or prospective rationalization. The suspicion th a t the censor acts on the basis of u n a d m itte d im pulse belongs to the m ode of paran o ia. It is answ ered by the suspicion of the censor, also p aran o id , th a t the call for the end of censorship in the nam e of free speech is p a rt of a plot to destroy the state. Polemics aro u n d censorship soon fall into a p aran o id m ode in w hich every argum ent presented by the o th er is seen as a m ask for a hidden hostile intention. Once p aran o id discourse is entered upon an d its dynam ic takes over, the intentions of the o th er cannot b u t be hostile, since they are co n stitu ted by one’s own projections. The entry into p ara n o ia is in fact an entry into an au to m atism . There can be no clearer illu stratio n of this th an the fact th at, of all the pathologies, paran o ia has been the m ost am enable to a r­ tificial sim u lation. Thus a co m p u ter program em bodying a system of "beliefs" to be pro tected an d a set of defense m echanism s for protecting them has sim u lated interactive p aran o id discourse (th at is, the discourse of a p aran o id p atien t w ith a th erap ist) so convincingly th a t it has passed T uring tests: qualified observers (in this case psychiatrists) were unable to tell w hether they w ere listening in to the verbal behavior of a h um an being or an a u to m ­ a to n .23 P aranoia has in fact a double c h arac ter th a t has alw ays struck observers as paradoxical. On the one h an d it m anifests itself in behavior whose ratio n ale is not a p p aren t to the outsider. On the o ther it presents a highly in tellectual front, a front of ra tio n ality or p seudorationality. It is highly ju d g m en tal, though its ju d g m en t is w ithout a p p aren t logic. For this reason classical (pre-Freudian) psychiatry focused on the question of ju d g m en t in p aran o ia, tre a t­

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ing p a ra n o ia as a syndrom e whose essence it is th a t "[the faculty of] ju d g m en t [becom es] p e rv e rte d ."24 B ut w h at, in a psychoanalytic context, is judgm ent? In his 1925 p a p er on negation and denial, Freud discusses the relation of ju d g m en t to p rim a ry in stin ctu al im pulses. "Judging is a contin­ uation, along lines of expediency, of the original process by w hich the ego took things into itself o r expelled them from itself, accord­ ing to the p leasu re principle." This original process rem ains com ­ pulsive (and, in the sense in w hich I have used the w ord above, autom atic), governed by the pleasure/unpleasure principle, u ntil "the creatio n of [a] sym bol of n eg atio n ” is achieved. This "No" m arks the lib eratio n of thinking from the prim itive alternatives of in co rp o ratin g and expelling. Thus we can take "No" both as the m ark (the b irth m ark ) of language and as the first speech of the Freudian unconscious. "There is no stronger evidence th a t we have been successful in o u r effort to uncover the unconscious," contin­ ues Freud, "than w hen the p a tie n t reacts to [an in terp retatio n ] w ith the w ords 'I d id n 't think th a t,' o r 'I d id n 't (ever) think of th a t.'"25 This com m ent is usually scrutinized—indeed, is scru ti­ nized by Freud him self—as perhaps a piece of logical sleight-ofhan d on the a n aly st's p a rt: "If the p a tie n t agrees . . . then the in te rp retatio n is right; if [not] . . . th a t is only a sign of resis­ tan c e ."26 B ut we should retu rn to Freud's w ords: w hen we h ear No, we know for c ertain th a t the unconscious speaks. Or: we know for certain th a t it is the unconscious speaking. The question I have raised is w hether the adm it-or-condem n ju d g m en t th a t w e call censorship continues to bear, as its first and instinctive m om ent, a p rim itiv e incorporative-or-expulsive c h ar­ acter. It requires only the slightest of shifts of logical angle (a shift ch arac teristic of the p aran o id m ode, w hich seem s to see the sam e w orld as the "norm al" observer does, though a t a b izarre angle) for the censorship law s them selves to com e into focus as a set of conditions and tests th a t have to be passed not so m uch by the w ords u n d e r scrutiny as by the judge's prim itive Yes/No im pulse in response to them . From this p o in t of view, w ords and judgm ent are on the sam e level: u n d er suspicion, on the defensive. The (paranoid) w isdom of the law is th a t society m ust guard itself on all sides: ag ain st its defenses too. Freud assigns the defense of the ego (which, a t least in his e arlier account of the psychological

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ap p aratu s, he sees as "the d o m in an t m ass of ideas," whose analogy at a social level we m ight call ideology) to a function th a t he calls the censorship. The defenses th a t guard the ego "are not ju st unconscious in the sense th a t the subject is ignorant of th eir m o­ tive an d m echanism , b u t m ore profoundly so in th a t they presen t a com pulsive, repetitive and un realistic aspect w hich m akes them com parable w ith the very repressed against w hich they are stru g ­ gling."27 In th is discourse, the discourse of criticism (from the verb krino, to accuse, to bring to trial), I place censorship u n d er suspicion. As I place it u n d er suspicion of hiding its true n atu re, of being a paran o id act, my criticism itself cannot escape from the p aran o id dynam ic of judging, blam ing, expulsion. N evertheless, I quote a South African judge on the "prim itive urge in m ankind to p ro h ib it th a t w ith w hich one does not ag ree” (Ju stice Rum pff, 1965, quoted in CSA, 1). If we look a t the discourse of law and legal philosophy as it confronts the subject of the offensive, we encounter again and again a process of rationalizing displacem ent, as though there were a fear of confronting the offensive itself. I have already pointed to the processes of displacem ent in van Rooyen's texts. Here is the sam e process a t w ork in the w riting of the m ost r a ­ tionalistic of all w riters on offense, Jerem y B entham . The law, says B entham , should define no act as an offense "w hich is not liable, in som e w ay or another, to be d etrim en tal to the com m u­ nity." The test of m ischievousness is utility. "An action . . . m ay be said to be conform able to the principle of u tility . . . w hen the tendency it has to augm ent the happiness of the com m unity is g reater th an any it has to dim inish it.” By a process of ab strac tio n the thing itself, or the w ord onto w hich it has been displaced, becom es an offense, w hich is then ab strac te d into the class "d et­ rim e n t” an d entered as a term in the calculus of utility. Does the chain of displacem ents stop w ith utility? Yes, prom ises B entham : "The p rinciple of u tility n eith er requires nor ad m its any o th er reg u lato r th an itself."28 Sim ilarly Dworkin prom ises th a t his chain of displacem ents w ill end in the principle of sincerity. One hears the protest: B ut th a t is how reason works: reason works by displacem ent. Yes: b u t the reasoning of p ara n o ia sees th a t w ork from another, a shifted angle: w hat presents itself as reason is displacem ent in disguise. Reason cannot explain p a ra ­ noia to itself, explain it away. In p aranoia, reason m eets its m atch.

South African Writers

Interview

DA: "Necessity is blind only insofar as it is not understood." Marx's proposition, you suggest, is intrinsic to the development of Alex La Guma's oeuvre. But we can also allow it to represent the historical vision and political optimism of a generation of South African revisionists. The perspectives of this movement, in historiography, social theory, and social history, had established an unrivaled authority on the South African academic left by the end of the 1970s. In cultural politics— or the branch of it influencing the reception of the novel— the consequences of this movement involved a general acceptance of realism as the form capable of producing the approved analyses of historical forces. In October 1987 you felt compelled to object publicly, in an address at a book festival in Cape Town, to the tendency in South Africa for fiction to be absorbed into historical discourse, to become, as you put it, a mere "supplement" to the more earnest business of history-writing. If I represent you correctly, you were making a claim for the specificity of fiction, for its ability not only to follow its own rules but also to change the rules, to the point of "demythologizing history," as you put it. You were establishing, at any rate, a clear line of division between the nature and purposes of history and those of fiction, or certain kinds of fiction. I am not pointing to a contradiction between your initial reading of La Guma and your objection years later to the appetitive drive of South African historicism— this would be to falsify nearly two decades of history, both personal and national. Rather, I want to ask you to reflect on the distance separating these moments; in particular, I would like you to describe the situation out of which the La Guma essay developed. We can understand the past only from a consciousness of the present: from that point of view, it is curious, you will agree, that someone who by 1987 is arguing for the distinctiveness of fictionality as against history should, in 1974, have followed La Guma— a South African Marxist pro­ ducing social realism— down a path marked out by Hegel, Marx, Lukacs, and Sartre. Two things, at least, seem noteworthy here: that you were 335

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involved with this tradition so early (radical historicism in South Africa became consolidated only later), and that you should have abandoned it almost as quickly as you took it up. JM C: An interesting question. Let me try to say how I today see my work on La Guma as having come about. I left Texas to accept a job at the State University of New York in Buffalo. My situation at that time— 1968— was quite precarious. Strictly construed, the terms of my visa were that I should depart the United States and use my American education for the betterment of my own country. But I had no desire to return to South Africa, particularly as I now had two children, both born in the United States. I petitioned the Immigration and Naturalization Service for permission to stay and, when my petition failed, petitioned again, and so forth, hanging on from month to month. I had left South Africa to be part of a wider world. But now I discovered that my novelty value to the wider world, to the extent that I had any novelty value, was that I came from Africa. In Buffalo I was invited to offer a course on African literature. I had of course read the betterknown South African writers, none of whom I regarded as of world status. But to prepare for the course I reread them, more carefully, and read too what was available in the United States from the rest of Africa. The drama, particularly West African drama, seemed more interesting than the poetry or fiction, though nothing truly gripped me. Nevertheless, I taught the course— in fact taught it a couple of times. I doubt that it changed any of my students' lives. I mention this because the La Guma essay emerged from a rather resigned perception that, if I were going to stay on in the United States, it might well have to be as an Africanist, that is, as a specialist in a peripheral and not very highly regarded body of literature. Rereading the La Guma essay today, I detect something in it that may be invisible to you: a tension between asserting the particularity of South African lit­ erature and asserting the amenability of South African writing to Euro­ pean standards of judgment; or, in more immediate terms, a tension between wanting to validate the profession of Africanist and wanting to create a space in African studies for a person with my rather European tastes. But why address La Guma rather than, say, Thomas Mofolo— a more interesting case— or Es'kia Mphahlele— a more complex person— or Dug-

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more Boetie— a more engaging writer? Why La Guma, a committed Communist, a man who ended his life as the ANC representative in Cuba? Perhaps because with La Guma I was on home ground. La Guma wrote about the Cape; whereas the rest of South Africa has always felt like foreign territory to me. I cannot stress too strongly how directionless I was in those days. I was thirty years old and had published nothing. I had left England at a time when the war in Vietnam was getting more and more horrible, to voyage into the belly of the beast. The Americans I lived and worked among, fine people, generous, likable, liberal in their values— I made some of my most enduring friendships among colleagues and students in Buffalo— were nevertheless as little able to halt the war machine as liberal whites at home were able to halt the forced removals. Whatever my private feelings, I was as complicit in the one case as in the other. I tested the possibility of retreating to the sidelines. I was offered jobs in Canada and Hong Kong. At the last minute I turned both down. Why? A certain fatality, perhaps, a will to remain in crisis. A real resolution would have been to hurl myself bodily into the anti-imperialist struggle (I use that language in a spirit of irony; yet what other language is there?). But the picture of myself marching to the fray— I, with my craving for privacy, my distaste for crowds, for slogans, my almost phys­ ical revulsion against obeying orders, I who by dint of utterly uncharac­ teristic, single-minded cunning had got through four years of high school without doing military drill— the picture was simply comic. Why that revulsion? I can only say that violence and death, my own death, are to me, intuitively, the same thing. Violence, as soon as I sense its presence within me, becomes introverted as violence against myself: I cannot project it outward. I am unable to, or refuse to, conceive of a liberating violence. Is this pathological? Is it the sign of a blockage? I can only reply that such a diagnosis, whether Freudian (repression, overzealous acceptance of the law of the father) or Marxian (inaction in the service of real but unacknowledged interests), makes no difference to me. I cannot take it seriously. I cannot but think: if all of us imagined violence as violence against ourselves, perhaps we would have peace. (Whether peace is what we most deeply want is another story.) Or, to explain myself in another way: I understand the Crucifixion as a refusal and an introversion of retributive violence, a refusal so deliberate, so conscious, and so powerful that it overwhelms any reinterpretation, Freudian, Marxian, or whatever, that we can give to it.

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I think you will find the contest of interpretations I have sketched here— the political versus the ethical— played out again and again in my novels. In Buffalo, anyhow, I tried to find an imaginative (an imaginary) place for myself in the Third World and its narratives of itself. I read Cesaire and Senghor and Fanon; I read Lukacs on the duties of realism; I even read Chairman Mao ("The purpose of our meeting today is to ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people . . . and that they help the people fight the enemy with one heart and one mind"— I'find this passage underlined in my copy of Mao On Literature and Art, purchased in 1969. In what spirit could I have done the underlining?). I began work on Dusklands. Sadly, Lukacs and Mao proved of no help there. But at least I dipped my toe in the waters of Marxism by writing in what was intended to be a positive spirit about the novels of a native South African Marxist. In the end (to complete the Buffalo story) I became embroiled in a protest action on campus, my political patrons dropped me like a hot potato, and I had to depart the United States. Thus was the problem settled for me. I followed my wife and children back to South Africa. I am not happy with the La Guma essay. Save for a moment or two (for instance, in the discussion of Alan Paton) it lacks intellectual urgency. It is academic in a bad sense of the word. I was wrong to make my case for La Guma rest on Lukacs. Lucacs' category of what he calls critical realism hinges, when you test it, on a naive criterion of the writer's sincerity. I was right to label La Guma excessively literary: as Flaubert observed, popular literature tends to be the most literary of all. Nor do I read Zola in a Lukacsian way any more. Instead I am captivated by Zola’s absorption in the plethora of things in the world. DA: Since the La Guma essay, you have said relatively little about black South African literature. Why? JM C: For a number of reasons. What writing I have done about contem­ poraries of mine has tended to be occasional, mainly in the form of commissioned book reviews. The substantial work I did on South African literature before my recent (1990) essays on Brink and Breytenbach was White Writing, which concentrates on the 1920s and 1930s. White Writing isn't about writing by people with white skins but about Euro­

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pean ideas writing themselves out in Africa, so there is no reason why Sol Plaatje and Thomas Mofolo shouldn't have fallen within its purview. But, frankly, I don't have much of substance to say about Plaatje or Mofolo, just as I haven't much of substance to say about N. P. van Wyk Louw. And then, discourse about what people are writing in South Africa slides so easily nowadays into discourse about what people ought to be writing. It's an arid discourse that I take no joy in, particularly when it slideslips into polemics. DA: In "Into the Dark Chamber," you are concerned mainly with the morality of representing torture; behind this question is a larger one, though, about the authority in South Africa of ethical judgment itself. At the end of the essay you project forward to a time when "all human acts . . . will be returned to the ambit of moral judgment,” when it will “once again be meaningful for the gaze of the author, the gaze of authority and authoritative judgment, to be turned upon scenes of tor­ ture.” If your argument is partly about how South Africa disables its writers, how its pain and social fractures leave them without adequate vantage points from which to speak, then perhaps it is possible to see this situation as similar to, or at least continuous with, that of the poet or painter of landscape described in White Writing, who cannot imagine a "peopled” world, or a society "in which there is a place for the self." In each of the essays in White Writing, you unravel a discursive and ideological structure operating with various degrees of "blind force," as you put it, on the spokespersons of literary-colonial culture. If contemporary white South African literature has come further than this, then it has been better at subverting colonial traditions than at replacing them with the imaginative possibility of a moral community. Would you agree? JM C: I agree with every word you say; I hesitate only in the face of the shadow of an implication which, perhaps mistakenly, I detect behind your observation that, while white South African writers have successfully subverted the colonial view of things, they have not taken the step of imagining a possible "moral community” in their native country. The implication whose shadow I seem to see is that imagining such a possi­ bility is a duty that falls upon writers (white or black or neither white nor black), one they have failed to perform. And my hesitation is not in

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relation to the notion of the duty itself (that is another story for another occasion; I will accept it as given in the present argument), nor in relation to the failure to perform that duty, but in relation to the question of where the duty comes from. To me, duty can be of two kinds: it can be an obligation imposed on the writer by society, by the soul of society, by society in its hopes and dreams; or it can be something constitutional to the writer, what one might loosely call conscience but what I would tentatively prefer to call an imperative, a transcendental imperative. All I want to say here, in this tiny demurral, is that I would not want to favor the first definition unhesitatingly over the second. DA: Yes, I take the point of the demurral. Could you elaborate, though, on the "transcendental imperative"? I ask because although your work is antiheroic, declining the role of herald to a reconstructed social order, it also seems to project, at a much deeper level, a certain faith in the idea, or the possibility, of an ethical community. (As an instance, I would cite the powerful dramatizations in Age of Iron, of the failure of com­ munication between Elizabeth and some of the black protagonists.) JM C: “Herald" is an interesting word in this context. "O f uncertain origin," the OED tells me, but certainly not related to "hero." Elizabeth Curren ruminates a great deal about what would constitute heroism in contemporary South Africa; but Age of Iron is perhaps more about heralds than about heroes. There is, in the first place, Vercueil, whom Elizabeth recognizes as, or makes into, a herald of death. But there is also the entire performance (in an Austinian sense) of the book itself as the message of someone speaking from the jaws of death, as a backward herald, so to speak, a herald looking and speaking back. Much of the book is in fact taken up with the question of whether performative conditions for messengerhood are met (conditions involving authority to speak, above all). I'll not rehearse the question of whether Elizabeth has the right to speak or should simply shut up, and get to your question. I don't believe that any form of lasting community can exist where people do not share the same sense of what is just and what is not just. To put it another way, community has its basis in an awareness and acceptance of a common justice. You use the word faith. Let me be more cautious and stay with awareness: awareness of an idea of justice, somewhere, that transcends laws and lawmaking. Such an awareness is not absent from our lives. But where I see it, I see it mainly as flickering or dimmed— the

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kind of awareness you would have if you were a prisoner in a cave, say, watching the shadows of ideas flickering on the walls. To be a herald you would have to have slipped your chains for a while and wandered about in the real world. I am not a herald of community or anything else, as you correctly recognize. I am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations— which are shadows themselves— of people slipping their chains and turn­ ing their faces to the light. I do not imagine freedom, freedom, an sich; I do not represent it. Freedom is another name for the unimaginable, says. Kant, and he is right. DA: Reading your reviews of Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, and Breyten Breytenbach together, it is easy to draw the conclusion that although your relationship with the work of each of these major South African figures is obviously sustained and significant, it is with Breytenbach that you have a certain affinity. I have in mind the formal influences that shape his work, but also his willingness to allow the process of writing to take him, as it were, beyond the point of apprehending the real. Is this observation fair, to you and to the other writers? JM C: Yes, I think so. If I must try to specify in what spirit I read these three, I would say it is above all in a spirit of sympathy. I believe I know from the inside some of what, in their very different ways, they have confronted and sometimes overcome, sometimes failed to overcome. If I am closer to Breytenbach than to Gordimer (I'll leave Fugard aside— I am not particularly receptive to theater), it is, as you say, because Brey­ tenbach accepts more easily than Gordimer that stories finally have to tell themselves, that the hand that holds the pen is only the conduit of a signifying process. If I have reservations about Breytenbach, they would be aesthetic and moral at the same time: that, at least in his prose, he gives in too easily to the narcissism that always imperils self-writing— narcissism and prolixity. His poetry is another story. DA: Much of Breytenbach's struggle has been with Afrikanerdom, its self-representations and their hold over him. To what extent have you shared— or been made to share— in that struggle? JM C: No Afrikaner would consider me an Afrikaner. That, it seems to me, is the acid test for group membership, and I don't pass it. Why not? In the first place, because English is my first language, and has been

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since childhood. An Afrikaner (primary and simplest definition) is a person whose first language is Afrikaans (I will come to the catch in a moment). In the second place, because I am not embedded in the culture of the Afrikaner (I have never, for instance, belonged to a Reformed Church) and have been shaped by that culture only in a perverse way. What am I, then, in this ethnic-linguistic sense? I am one of many people in this country who have become detached from their ethnic roots, whether those roots were in Dutch South Africa or Indonesia or Britain or Greece or wherever, and have joined a pool of no recognizable ethnos whose language of exchange is English. These people are not, strictly speaking, "English South Africans," since a large proportion of them— myself included— are not of British ancestry. They are merely South Africans (itself a mere name of convenience) whose native tongue, the tongue they have been born to, is English. And, as the pool has no discernible ethnos, so one day I hope it will have no predominant color, as more "people of color" drift into it. A pool, I would hope then, in which differences wash away. But "Afrikaner" is not just a linguistic/cultural label. It is also an ideological term. That is to say, since the 1880s it has been a word hijacked by a political movement, first primarily anti-British, later primarily antiblack, calling itself Afrikaner Nationalism. In that process, "Afrikaner" became an exclusive classification. People who spoke Afrikaans as their first language but did not meet further racial, cultural, and political criteria were not accepted as Afrikaners. Hence the expulsion from the fold of the over two million Afrikaans-speakers who were not "white." For this reason many South Africans who qualify linguistically to wear the label "Afrikaner," most of them "Colored," today refuse to wear it. But the label is also one that certain white Afrikaans-speakers have dropped: Breyten Breytenbach, whom you mention, provides an exam­ ple, at least at a certain stage of his life. But, thirdly, "Afrikaner" is a name; and naming and making a name stick is above all, as we know, an exercise in power. A child is born wild; we name it to subjugate it. Am I, in these terms, an Afrikaner? The answer must be that I am not in a position to make an answer. At best I can contest whatever answer is given. But do I desire to contest that answer? In my heart I am so sick of contestation— contestation and the spectacle of contestation. The whites of South Africa participated, in various degrees, actively or passively, in an audacious and well-planned crime against Africa. Afrikaners as a self-defining group distinguished

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themselves in the commission of that crime. Thereby they lent their name to it. It will be a long time before they have the moral authority to withdraw that brandmark. There are nuances on which they might want to insist— for instance, that the crime doesn't belong to the post-1948 period alone, or even to the twentieth century alone, but is continuous with the entire enterprise of colonialisrp— but they lack the power to impose those nuances, and anyway the nuances carry no moral weight. Is it in my power to withdraw from the gang? I think not. Breytenbach may have the power, but only because he first paid a price. More important, is it my heart's desire to be counted apart? Not really. Fur­ thermore— and this is an afterthought— I would regard it as morally questionable to write something like the second part of Dusklands— a fiction, note— from a position that is not historically complicit.

Man's Fate in the Novels of Alex la Guma (1974) The Writer in South Africa By the late 1960s, in reaction against a degree of overestim ation of African w riting by the literary establishm ents of E ast and West, a skeptical reassessm ent of its achievem ent w as in full sw ing am ong African intellectuals. The harshest critics w ere w riters them selves. Thus Wole Soyinka: The curiosity of the outside world far exceeded their critical faculties, and publishers hovered like benevolent vultures on the still foetus of the African Muse . . . The average published w riter in the first few years of the post-colonial era was the most cele­ brated skin of inconsequence ever to obscure the true flesh of the African dilem m a.1 And on South Africa in p articu lar, Lewis N kosi’s judgm ent was: With the best will in the world it is impossible to detect in the fiction of black South Africans any significant and complex talent which responds with both the vigor of the im agination and suf­ ficient technical resources to the problems posed by conditions in South Africa.2 In the case of South Africa the outcom e of the debate is crucial. So m uch of the intelligentsia is in prison or in exile, so m uch serious w ork has been b an n ed by the censors, th a t the w ork of black S outh African w riters has becom e a kind of em igre lite ra tu re w ritten by outcasts for foreigners. There can thus be no argum ent, as in independent Africa, th a t a vital if crude n atio n al school of w riting will eventually both educate and be educated by its a u ­ dience, for the w ork of the South African exile is deprived of its social function and indeed of the locus of its existence in a com ­ m unity of w riters an d readers. At his desk he m ust generalize the 344

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idea of an audience from a "yotl” to an indefinite "they.” A criterion of tim elessness m ay com e to seem the only one th a t can justify him , for his w ork prom ises to find a place for itself only by tra n ­ scending the w orld an d the age out of w hich it grows. If he has been exposed to the universities, then E nglish academ ic criticism , w ith th e tra d itio n of Coleridge, Arnold, and E liot behind it, m ay u n d erp in his re tre a t w ith a critical ideology. Thus we find Nkosi censuring a w rite r (Bloke M odisane) for lacking a "pow er for so re-ordering and for so tran sm u tin g the given social facts th a t we can detect an underlying m oral im agination a t w ork."3 If he cannot live by these consolations, the w riter m ust cultivate stoicism and a lite ra tu re of w itness, seeing him self m inim ally: as the m an who acts, in S a rtre ’s w ords, "in such a way th a t nobody can be ignorant of the w orld and nobody m ay say th a t he is innocent of w hat it's all a b o u t”;4 w ith, all the w hile, an eye on his m oral relation to his obsessive story: is he m erely fondling his w ound?

Alex la Guma Alex la G um a was born in Cape Town in 1925. For m uch of his life he has been involved in resistance activities. He was one of the 156 accused in the notorious T reason T rial of the 1950s, and later spent years u n d er house arre st and in detention. He left S outh Africa in 1966. His first novel, A Walk in the N ight (1962), ap p eared in N igeria and later in B ritain and the U nited States. A nd a Threefold Cord (1964) and The Stone Country (1967) w ere published in E ast B erlin. In the Fog o f the Seasons’ E nd appeared in London in 1972.5 La G um a cam e to the novel via journalism and slice-of-life story­ w riting. The obvious influences on his style are Am erican: the p o p u lar crim e and low-life story, w ith behind it the natu ralism of Jam es Farrell an d R ichard W right, and, further back, the protest novel of U pton Sinclair. The natu ralistic-d eterm in istic influence is p lain in A Walk in the Night, w ith its large cast of negligible ch aracters driven to th eir various fates by social forces beyond th eir u n d erstan d in g . In the next three novels we see protagonists exerting th e ir w ill m ore and m ore to grasp th eir fate and even­ tually, we are given to hope, to m aster it. In this sense the novels becom e progressively m ore political. N evertheless, Z ola’s ideal of

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a novel w ith the certainty, the solidity, and the practical a p p li­ cation of a w ork of science can be discerned, if we look carefully enough, behind all La G um a’s w ork. His novels are recognizably the p roduct of som eone w ho has served an apprenticeship in the short story: they come close to observing the unities of space and tim e, an d th eir ch aracters are largely from a single m ilieu, the Colored w orking class and underw orld of Cape Town. W hites a p ­ p ear m ainly as police officers and prison guards: The Stone Country specifically develops a m etap h o r of South Africa as a prison in which prisoner and ja ile r are bound to each o th er by H egelian chains, and for the m etap h o r a nom inal w hite presence is suffi­ cie n t.6 U ntil the fourth novel black African ch aracters are few and m inor. La G um a does not offer a representative social p an o ram a. For sim plicity I therefore call his antagonists Black and W hite.

Naturalism and Tragedy A favored m ode am ong w hite S outh African w riters has been tragedy (though Afrikaans w riters have given m uch a tten tio n to the m ythographic revision of history). Tragedy is typically the tragedy of in terracial love: a w hite m an and a black w om an, or vice versa, fall foul of the law again st m iscegenation, or sim ply of w hite prejudice, and are destroyed or driven into exile. The overt content of the fable here is th a t love conquers evil through tragic suffering w hen such suffering is borne w itness to in art; its covert content is the apolitical doctrine th a t defeat can tu rn itself, by the tw ist of tragedy, into victory.7 The tragic hero is the scapegoat who takes our punishm ent. By his suffering he perform s a ritu a l of expiation, and as we w atch in sym pathy our em otions are purged, as A ristotle noted, through the operations of pity an d terror. We leave the th ea te r or close the book w ith new acquist Of true experience from this great event, With peace and consolation . . . And calm of m ind, all passion spent. Religious tragedy reconciles us to the inscrutable dispensation by giving a m eaning to suffering an d defeat. As tragic a rt it also confers im m ortality: O edipus and L ear m ay be destroyed by the

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gods, b u t we resu rrect them “r itu a lly on ou r stage. An annual Shakespeare festival is as ritu a lly ap p ro p riate as E aster. B ut necessity is blind, says M arx, only insofar as it is not u n d er­ stood. W ith Zola the novel becom es a laboratory in w hich m an is the subject of the experim ents an d in w hich the new M arxian and D arw inian law s of fatality are traced. The law s of heredity and environm ent th a t send Clyde Griffiths to the electric ch air are unfolded in an experim ental novel by Theodore D reiser called An American Tragedy. Clyde's fall still aw akens tragic pity an d terro r in us, b u t it also aw akens righteous anger and tu rn s it upon so­ ciety.8 To this extent n a tu ra lism politicizes tragedy. T here is a second m ajo r transform ation of tragedy in m odern tim es. In the d ram a of crim e detection the inscrutable order of the gods has becom e a rem ote b u t benign tem poral o rd er ruled over by the police, the u p sta rt hero has becom e the crim inal challenger of the law, and the intelligence of the tragedian (the oracle, the Tiresias-figure) has been em bodied in the detective in v estig ato r w ho sniffs out the tragic erro r (clue) and thence u n ­ ravels the line of the crim in al hero's tragic fate. This a u th o rita rian m oral inversion (the hero now evil, the gods good) holds our sym ­ p ath y by an equivocation: the investigator is presented as a p ri­ vate eye or lone agent nom inally distinct from the police gods, the crim in al is invested w ith the trappings of diabolical pow er (m in­ ions, infernal m achines, an underw orld em pire). W hat religious tragedy, n a tu ra listic tragedy, and the crim e story have in com m on are the idea of a reigning order and the idea of fatality. W hat religious tragedy and n a tu ra listic tragedy have fur­ th er in com m on is the evocation of pity and terror. W hat is unique to religious tragedy is ritu a l catharsis. W hat is unique to n a tu r­ alistic trag edy is its rebelliousness. W hat is unique to the crim e story is its evocation of not pity and te rro r b u t exultation at the fate of the transgressor. The crim e story has a reactionary political form ; religious tragedy is apolitical o r quietistic. The predom inant exam ple of religious tragedy in S outh Africa is Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country. A young African comes to the city, falls am ong bad com panions, kills a w hite, and is hanged. The fathers of the dead m en console an d learn to respect each other. The hero who bears the blow s of fate is here doubled in the persons of the two fathers; we sh are th e ir suffering as they share each other's suffer­

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ing, in p ity and terror. The gods are secularized as the pitiless justice of the law. N evertheless, P aton's fable bears the in v arian t content of religious tragedy: th a t the dispensation u n d er w hich m an suffers is unshakable, b u t th a t ou r pity for the hero-victim and our te rro r at his fate can be purged by the ritu a l of ree n ac t­ m en t.9

A Walk in the N ight A Walk in the N ight is a tragic story, b u t in w h at way? A young black, M ichael Adonis', is sacked for talking back to his w hite forem an. Angry, drunk, and barely responsible for the act, he kills a harm less old w hite. He sneaks away, seen only by a couple of loitering gangsters. A second young black, a sm alltim e thug nam ed W illieboy, enters the dead m a n ’s room , is surprised there, loses his head, and runs away. A sadistic w hite police officer, R aalt, gets on his trail and guns him down. Adonis is blackm ailed into joining the underw orld. The m ainspring of the plot is retrib u tio n . The death of the old w hite is literally fatal: his room is a fatal nexus, he w ho enters is doom ed. An offense has been com m itted against the secular divin­ ity of the law, an d the law, through its police agents, w ill exact its penalty. Who pays does not seem to m a tte r—Adonis or his double W illieboy. W illieboy is the unlucky one, the one w ho is seen an d rem em bered. The agent who goes after him happens to be in a m urderous m ood. R eading of W illieboy’s d eath we feel the tragic em otions of p ity and terror, p ity for his youth and ignorance, terro r because we too m ay be black, unlucky, o r both. Thus far the book seem s to read like an inversion of the crim e story (the h u n te r is in the wrong), th a t is, like a second inversion of the original tragic schem e (our sym pathies rem ain w ith the hero defeated by the now secularized police-gods). If this reading were a com plete one, its political m eaning w ould be th a t m an suffers u n d er an inscru tab le secular authority, b u t th a t the em o­ tional turm oil created by ou r w itnessing his suffering can be purged by the ritu a l therapy of a rt. However, the reading is not com plete. The core of retrib u tiv e tragedy is m odified by two po­ litical criticism s of Adonis/W illieboy visible a t the level of the stru c tu re of the novel.

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1. Modes of life th a t do n o t cap itu la te to a u th o rity b u t are not p red ato ry are p o rtray ed in tw o perip h eral characters. One is Joe, a harm less youth w ho lives by handouts and by scavenging along the seashore as the aboriginal coast-dw ellers of southern Africa had done. Joe stan d s for an obsolete collectivist, com m unal ethic; it is he w ho tries to stop Adonis’ d rift tow ard the underw orld (74). The second is Franky Lorenzo, a stevedore who lives in the tene­ m ent w here the killing takes place an d who stands up briefly ag ain st R a a lt’s bullying (62—63). Lorenzo's wife falls preg n an t annually. He lam ents this, not realizing, as she obscurely does, th a t his people's stren g th lies in num bers and th a t a new gener­ ation m ay see a new daw n. Lorenzo stands for a p ro letariat as yet unaw are of its pow ers. 2. N ecessity is b lind only insofar as it is not understood. The elem ents of a political explanation of the situ atio n of Adonis/ W illieboy are p resen t in the novel, b u t the hero is blind to them . T here are, for instance, elem ents of a global political perspective. The novel is set in 1950 o r 1951. Adonis m eets a m an in a b a r who refuses to listen to political talk (subject: "W hites act like th a t because of the c a p ita lis’ system "), dism issing it w ith the catchph rase "Those b a stard s all com e from R ussia” (17). This m an refuses to a d m it any connection betw een w hite terrorism (a lynch­ ing in the U.S. South) an d internecine black violence (a knife fight in the Cape Town ghetto). A few hours later W illieboy m akes a drunken a tta c k on th ree A m erican sailors for crossing the sexual color bar, is b eaten off, m eets the m an from the b a r in a dark alley, an d m ugs him . The clues tow ard a political in terp retatio n of this ironic sequence are there, b u t only the god's eye of w riter or re a d er can see them . We can p e n etrate fu rth er into the political m eaning of the book if we ask w h a t forces m ake for stab ility or instability in La G um a's ghetto. The action of the book represents a violent disturbance, lasting ab o u t tw elve hours, of a precariously stable social system . At the end of the action the system retu rn s to an equilibrium perhaps m arginally m ore precarious th an before. This equilibrium is, how ­ ever, of a p ecu liar kind, a sta b ility only of the ghetto vis-a-vis the rest of the city, and m ain tain ed only by sh u ttin g the ghetto off from the city. The ghetto itself seethes w ith in tern al violence.

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R aalt's police com panion clearly advocates the principle of clo­ sure: “I d o n ’t like any trouble . . . Let these h o tten to ts kill each o th er off" (39). W hat detonates the action is the victim ization of Adonis by his forem an. He is enraged an d takes out his rage on the old w hite. The killing occurs inside the ghetto, w hich th u s fulfills its sta b i­ lizing function of absorbing the consequences of unequal blackw hite contact. There is an u nsettling feature of the killing, how ­ ever: the old m an is a w hite living in the ghetto, w here he should not be, as the norm ative second police officer again notes (61). He m ixes the categories white and ghetto-dweller, thereby draw ing R aalt into a confusion of roles: he becom es b o th godlike avenger of the law (white) and p rac titio n er of street w arfare (black). This alarm s his orthodox com panion, w ho sees him as a dysfunctional psychotic m acho who will “do som ething violent to one of those black b a stard s and as a resu lt o u r superiority w ill suffer" (39). His fears are w ell-founded. W hen R aalt shoots dow n W illieboy, the w atching crow d th reaten s to un ite and attack. To the police this is a m om ent of anarchy, to the crow d a m om ent during w hich the anarchy of the ghetto is overthrow n. B ut the m om ent passes, the status quo ante returns: “They w avered for a w hile and then surged forw ard, then rolled back, m u tterin g before the cold dark m uzzle of the p isto l” (86). The crow d disperses, the police drive aw ay w ith the dying W illieboy. The book com es to a close on three night images: a cockroach em erges to lap up the vom it (victory for the pred ato ry w ays of the ghetto); the scavenger Joe m akes his w ay to the sea and the “beckoning hands" of the seaw eed (end of the old com m unal fellow-feeling); and Lorenzo's p reg n an t wife lies w aiting for daw n feeling "the knot of life w ithin her" (prom ise of the future) (96). There is nothing tragic in the system of punish m en ts we see here: it is sim ply oppression. Only w hen we get dow n to the level of individual lives does the question of fate reappear: w hy does an innocent m an have to open a door on a corpse an d then run into a cop w ith a grudge? Is there not an arb itrarin ess in the sequence th a t m u st eith er seem incredible to us or lead us back to the sources of a tragic view of life? The old m an dies because Adonis is sacked. Adonis is sacked w ith im punity because he is black and m ay not belong to a trad e union. W illieboy dies because a black m u st die because R a a lt’s

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unfaithful wife c an n o t be p u nished w ith im punity because she is w hite. These are tw o of the causal chains we find in the book. A notable feature of such chains is asym m etry: a chain of violence m ay begin in the w hite city or the black ghetto, b u t it m ust end in the gh etto an d its last victim m ust be black. Thus w hen a black w om an is unfaithful, a black m an kills a black m an (the anecdote on 17-19); w hen a w hite w om an is unfaithful, a w hite m an takes o ut his gun an d kills a black m an (R aalt and W illieboy). Causal chains like these are visible to w riter an d read er b u t not to the ghetto. W hen two chains of causes converge on W illieboy an d claim h im as th e ir double victim , w h at looks to the rea d er like a specific case of b a d luck (the im probable b u t clearly definable convergence) looks to the crow d an d to W illieboy him self like in scru tab le b ad luck, the w ay things are in the ghetto. T hat is, w hereas the ghetto is still a t a prep olitical stage in its conception of fate, w rite r an d rea d er can see laws of fatality a t w ork, can conceive of fate natu ralistically . As to the question of the a rb i­ trarin ess of the convergence, we should recognize th a t by calling a plot a rb itra ry we m ean th a t it is conceived in the interests of neatness, im posing on the subject an aesthetic shape th a t does not fit. (If by calling a p lo t a rb itra ry we m ean sim ply th a t it has a low sta tistica l p ro b ab ility of occurring in "real life,” we stan d for a degraded sta n d a rd of the real.) B ut the plot of W illieboy’s doom , action as m eaning, follows only too closely the contours of political reality. The p lot is not a rb itra ry but, in Georg Lukacs’ term , "ex­ trem e.” To Lukacs the great achievem ent of nineteenth-century R ussian realism w as the discovery of th at extreme expression of clearly revealed social determ inants which makes possible a true typicality, far beyond the mere average . . . The prim ary, essential means of transcending the average is to create extreme situations in the midst of hum drum reality, situations which yet do not burst through the narrow framework of this reality as far as social content is concerned, and which, by their extreme character, sharpen rather than dull the edge of social contradictions.10 W hat distinguishes the realism of A Walk in the N ight from the "critical re a lism ” of L ukacs’ great trad itio n (Stendhal, Balzac, Tolstoy, Thom as M ann) is th a t a t the end of the book we are back nearly w here we sta rte d . The realist assum es "change and devel­

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opm ent to be the p ro p er subject of lite ra tu re /’ w hereas a "basically static ap p ro ach to re a lity ” belongs to the n a tu ra listic novel.11 This useful distin ction allow s us to p inpoint the m ajor technical diffi­ culty La G um a m u st have faced com posing his novel, one w hich, it seem s to m e, he resolved inadequately. On the one h an d , the u rb an Colored population of South Africa in the early 1950s, a tim e of ra m p a n t reaction, w as politically fragm ented, cancered w ith crim e, an d lacking in consciousness of the m echanism s of oppression o perating against it. Any fictional account of the ghetto closing ranks against the police w ould have been a falsification of reality. On the o th er hand, the chaos of W illieboy’s last day on earth ren d ered u n m ed iated through W illieboy's eyes w ould have m issed L ukacs’ "change and developm ent" and issued in little m ore th an the diffuse pathos of low tragedy. La G um a's solution, technical an d epistem ological, is to locate change an d develop­ m ent not in the w orld of his ch aracters b u t in his read er's syn­ thesizing intelligence, as it puts together the elem ents of a p a tte rn too scattered for the ch aracters to perceive: the ch aracters call it bad luck; the rea d er sees not fate b u t oppression. An altern ativ e La G um a m ay have contem plated w ould have been to develop Lorenzo, the m an who tries to unify the tenem ent against the police an d whose unb o rn child is linked w ith the daw n, as a cen tral intelligence w ithin the novel. For reasons of his own he did not. He chose a n a rrativ e point of view above the w orld of his ch aracters, the point of view of a sp ectato r w atching people act out th eir lives ("I am m y fa th e r’s spirit, doom ed for a certain tim e to w alk the night," recites the old m an, an actor, to Adonis before he dies) (28) an d savoring the b itte r ironies of crim e and p u n ish m en t in a sta te in w hich Law and Crim e overlap. For irony is all he can inject to com pensate for the dullness of a w orld w ithout consciousness, aptly im aged in the roach eating vom it in the dead of night. T ow ard his w orld La G um a feels m uch like the F laubert w ho w rote, “I execrate ord in ary life. I have alw ays w ith ­ draw n from it as m uch as I could. B ut aesthetically I w an ted . . . to get hold of it to the very b o tto m ."12 P aragraphs of A Walk in the Night are given over to fascinated catalogues of "ordinary life”— "m assed sm ells of sta g n an t w ater, cooking, ro ttin g vegetables, oil, fish, d am p p la ste r an d tim ber, unw ashed curtains, bodies and stairw ays, cheap perfum e an d incense, spices an d half-w ashed

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kitchenw are, urine, anim als and dusty c o rn ers” (48)—as though by inventorizing the w orld he could dispose of it. La G um a's first novel, despite its insight into the dynam ics of pow er and its con­ cern to un m ask fate, displays a fastidiousness tow ard the m aterial w orld th a t accords w ith the gulf it establishes betw een life and the intelligence th a t m akes o rd er of life. “A class can acquire class consciousness only if it sees itself from w ithin and w ithout a t the sam e tim e ,” says S artre, w ritin g ab o u t the relatio n betw een the w riter and his class of orig in .13 In his second novel La G um a confronts the task of apprehending life from the inside.

A nd a Threefold Cord In A nd a Threefold Cord the Lorenzo figure is developed into the cen tral ch aracter. He is nam ed Charlie Pauls, a casual laborer w ith p are n ts and b ro th ers to support in a desolate shantytow n on the o u tsk irts of Cape Town. In the course of a few days Pauls takes three heavy blows: his fath er dies, his teenage b ro th er kills a girl, and the ch ildren of the young w idow he loves are burned alive. As he tries to m ake sense of his fate, his m ind keeps turning to the w ords of the fellow w orker who gave him his first political lesson: "If all the stuff in the w orld w as shared out am ong everybody, all would have enough to live nice . . . People got to stick together an d get this stuff.” Pauls's frightened a u d ito r responds w ith the lesson of the m aster: "Sound alm ost like a sin, th at. Bible says you m u stn ’t covet o th er people’s things . . . T h a t’s com m unis' things. Talking against the governm ent" (83). B ut Pauls is now well on his w ay out of the dead end of every-m an-for-him self, and the a ct of knocking dow n a w hite police officer is a fu rth er g reat step in his psychic liberation, setting free a h u m iliated rage th a t in the no rm al course of events w ould have been turned upon him self an d the black com m unity. The police wage the psycholog­ ical w arfare of the double bind; the black m an m ust eith er stand silent w hile his w om an is insulted o r stand up for him self and be punished. Pauls cuts the knot by h ittin g the officer and escaping in the dark. His brother, on the o ther hand, is still caught in the lab y rin th of in tro v erted violence. Believing th a t his girlfriend has broken the taboo and slept w ith a w hite m an, he kills her. The w hite m an in question is nam ed M ostert, and as Pauls is a

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developm ent of Lorenzo, he is a developm ent of the m urdered old actor. He ru ns a service statio n and junkyard across the highw ay from the shantytow n—m ost of the shanties are in fact b u ilt w ith junk from his yard. He spends lonely days starin g to w ard the shanties "past the petrol p um ps w hich gazed like petrified sentries across the concrete no-m an’s-land of the road," b u t rem ains "trapped in his glass office by his own loneliness and a w retched pride in a false racial su p erio rity ” (67). Pauls suggests th a t he come over one evening, h in tin g th a t he can find him a girl. He wavers, m akes tan g en tial contact on the outskirts of the sh an ty ­ tow n w ith the girl who is killed, and retreats. B oth boundary-crossings—by the acto r in A Walk in the N ight and by M ostert here—eventuate in crim e and punishm ent. In nei­ th er case does the w hite cause the crim e; but, willy-nilly, his alien presence p recip itates the release of destructive rages th a t are p a rt of the em otional stru c tu re of oppression. Both set in disequili­ b riu m the finely balanced system of oppression and in troverted black violence, and balance is restored only w hen Justice follows the chains of causes to th e ir ends and executes W illieboy and Ronnie Pauls. T hroughout the novel it rains. R ain dom inates the lives of the characters. Pauls visits M ostert to beg scrap to p a tc h a leaky roof; his visit eventuates in his b ro th e r’s death. The children are incin­ erated w hen they upset a stove th a t burns all day to dry out th eir shanty. R ain, and rain falling on dereliction, are the stru c tu ra l equivalent in this novel to the sq u alo r of A Walk in.the Night. The rain is a condition of life th a t exerts its oppressive w eight equally on all the poor. It is a condition w hich has not lifted by the tim e the book ends b u t w hich, in the n a tu ra l course of things, w ill. This allows the im age of hope w ith w hich the book closes: "Charlie Pauls stood there and looked into the driving rain . . . He saw, to his surprise, a b ird d a rt suddenly from am ong the patchw ork roofs of the shanties and h ead straig h t, stra ig h t into the sky” (169).

The Stone Country In The Stone Country the Lorenzo-Pauls figure is fu rth er developed. His nam e is now George Adams, he is politically active, and he

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has ju st been picked up in a Security Police trap . We follow him through his first few days in the “stone country" of jail aw aiting trial. H ere he rediscovers the law of the jungle, w hich he hates because it rem inds him of his slum childhood, and w hich he fights because of the an arch ic individualism it fosters. By standing up to the prison guards and by sharing his food an d cigarettes he m anages to pierce the defensive cynicism of the prisoners, one of w hom defends h im against the prison bully, an o th er of whom , a teenage killer, is m oved from inhu m an fatalism to the first stir­ rings of affection. Thus in his quiet way Adams introduces fellow feeling am ong this forgotten crim inal population. W here La Gum a's e arlie r pro tag o n ists w ere still learning, Adams is teaching. Adam s has tw o kinds of enem ies: the thugs who run the netw ork of te rro r in the prison, and the guards. The guards, though sadistic by tem p era m en t (124), rem ain aloof from the prisoners in day-today contacts. Only in the excitem ent of recap tu rin g an escapee do they let them selves go in an orgy of violence. Custodial violence eru p ts a t the borders of the stone country, w here prisoners try to cross into freedom . As long as the borders are protected, the p ris­ oners' in tro v erted violence w ill do the gu ard s' w ork for them . Thus the guards w ink a t the activities of the prison bullies b u t m ark down Adam s, w ho tries to channel the prisoners' em otion in an o u tw ard direction, as a troublem aker. Tow ard violence Adam s' a ttitu d e is am b iv alen t. W hen he arrives the prisoners invest him w ith the spurious glam or of the saboteur and prom ote him to the prison aristo cracy as “an equal, an expert from the up p er echelons of crim e" (39). B ut in his own eyes he is only an organizer, som eone who has read and thought and gone to m eetings and now “did w h at you decided w as the rig h t thing" (74). He is grateful to the p riso n er w ho fights on his behalf, b u t also saddened: "W hat a w aste; here they got us fighting each o th er like dogs” (74). W hile Adams tries to bring unity, three prisoners in an isolation cell are saw ing thro u g h th e ir w indow bars. D uring the night they clim b onto the roof. H ere th eir precarious treaty breaks down and each m akes his in dividual break for freedom . Two succum b to panic an d vertigo and are retaken; the ru n t of the group escapes. "A threefold cord is not quickly broken," runs the epigraph to La G u m a’s second novel.

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In the Fog o f the Seasons' End The them e of La G um a's oeuvre clarifies itself further: the grow th of resistance from the aim less revolt of individuals w ith o u t allies or ideology (anarchy, crim e) to the fratern al revolt of m en who u n d erstan d and com bat oppression, psychological an d physical. And a Threefold Cord reflected the daw n of a m an 's conception of him self as a political creature; in The Stone Country the first cracks in the chaotic, defensive individualism of the oppressed ap p eared and alliances began to sprout; In the Fog o f the Seasons’ E nd presents both the political conception of m an 's fate an d the fra ­ tern al alliance as accom plished facts. The alliance is a p ro letarian one, though it has sym pathizers am ong the bourgeoisie and intel­ ligentsia; its ideology is an eclectic M arxism . Thus, although the novel has a m ain c h arac ter who is continuous w ith figures from the e arlier novels, it is, at the level of stru c tu re at w hich ideas an d th eir em bodim ents e n te r into conflict, m ore a p p ro p riate to speak of a nascent collective resistance as the new protagonist. Beukes is the nam e of the new Lorenzo-Pauls-Adam s figure. He is a cell leader in the u nderground of the late 1960s, b u t old enough to have h ad experience of trad e unionism an d passive resistance. The novel follows him through a long day du rin g w hich he dis­ trib u tes illegal strike leaflets. The following day, at a rendezvous w ith his im m ediate superior, E lias Tekwane, he is betray ed by an unknow n inform er. He escapes, w ounded; Tekwane is c ap tu red and dies u n d er police to rtu re. Som e days la te r we find Beukes engaged in organizing tran sp o rt for guerrilla recruits. One of the volunteers, he discovers happily, is Isaac, a young m an from his cell, also b etray ed and also on the run. The stru c tu re of oppositions am ong the three personages w ithin the collective protagonist is com plex. Tekwane has his faith p u t to the u ltim ate test; Beukes escapes, preserves his anonym ity, b u t is th reaten ed by loss of faith in him self an d the m ovem ent. Tek­ wane dies, Isaac takes up the struggle. Isaac looks forw ard to arm ed resistance, Beukes backw ard to the old politics of rallies and speeches. B ut in th eir collectivity they have found a response to the h u m iliations of th eir personal life stories. In tro v erted rage and violence have been transform ed into organized struggle. The street w arfare of the ghetto exists only m utedly in the im age of

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children holding up passersby w ith toy guns (61). The w hite en­ emy, on the o th e r h an d , has grow n to live vicariously on the violence of new s rep o rts and gossip, and these reveal in p a rtic u la r the m u rd ero u s co ntradictions of the introverted nuclear family. W hile the w hites feed on fantasy, Beukes, up against the police, undergoes a reverse m ovem ent: "The to rtu re cham bers and the th ird degree [are] transferred from celluloid strips in segregated cinem as to the real w orld" (25). His very w orst fantasies are re­ alized; the fairy-godm other fantasy of the triu m p h of the weak and oppressed through the force of th eir faith has to be discarded. Chief am ong the virtues dem anded of the revolutionary, he dis­ covers, is the "granite" of the life and death of Tekwane. "These days one could not depend only on faith: the a p p aratu s of the Security Police scraped aw ay faith like stra ta of soil until they cam e to w h at was below. If they reached crum bly sandstone, it was splendid for them . It was the h a rd granite on w hich they foundered" (131). The action of the novel catches Beukes, Tekwane, and Isaac at a tim e w hen d an g er forces them to confront th eir own fears. Thus Beukes, into whose soul the iron has not yet entered, undergoes n ig h tm ares of defeat in w hich his p reg n an t wife is disem bow eled (children in La G um a stan d for the future: the novel closes on an im age of ch ildren in the sunlight). B ut the n a tu re of the collective is to b rin g o u t the best in the weak. Beukes is fortified by his relatio n w ith the g ran ite of Tekwane. Isaac suffers a w him of chance—his b etray al—b u t finds an avenue th a t enables him to tu rn it to positive action. Tekwane is taken to the lim its of resis­ tance u n d e r to rtu re b u t there finds fortitude in h allucinated vi­ sions of the long history of African resistance. (And Beukes, passing a cast of a B ushm an in an ethnographic m useum , also recognizes an ancestor, "the first to fight" [14].) B eneath this new o ptim istic w riting the old fatal p a tte rn can still be m ade out on the palim psest. The young Tekwane comes o ut of P ato n ’s Cry, the Beloved Country and Doris Lessing's "H un­ ger,” an d is thereby saddled w ith a freight of tragic connotation, religious an d n atu ra listic. The disaster of the collective sprouts from a m ysterious canker, the tra ito r in its body. Beukes is saved from c ap tu re by luck (a stra n g er w ith a w ound m uch like his is picked up). N evertheless, Tekwane is finally not the tennis ball of

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the stars b u t a hero w ho engages his death in full consciousness of its m eaning, and his killers are agents not of an in scru tab le o rd er b u t of a d esperate regim e whose end he sees: “You are reaching the end of the road and going dow nhill tow ards a g reat darkness, so you m u st take a lot of people w ith you" (6), he tells his to rtu rers. Tekw ane’s suffering and death are unrolled in c h ap ­ ters th a t form a high p o in t in La G um a’s w riting and w hose achievem ent it is to dem ystify the to rtu re cham ber, inner san ctu m of the terro ristic state.

Achievement La G um a’s achievem ent is to p resent a p articu larly lucid descrip­ tion of the resu lta n ts of w hite oppression in self-destructive black violence an d to em body his novels a grow ing political u n d e rsta n d ­ ing of the process in the consciousness of a developing p rotagonist. His four novels do not cohere closely enough to form a tetralogy, b u t read in sequence th eir political m eaning is qu ite plain . They p o rtray a Colored w orking class th a t initially has little conscious­ ness of how its energies are redirected against it by its ru lers as the anarchic force of crim e. The representative of its best qu alities grows from a puzzled stevedore to a laborer w ho has begun his psychic liberation, to a declassed activist, a t first cautious, then freed for arm ed struggle by a heroic African exam ple. P lotting and ch aracterization are deliberate enough to leave the unco m m itted read er p erh ap s resentful of La G um a’s p alpable design, b u t as social taxonom y the ch aracterizatio n m ust be acknow ledged to be rich in insight. However, style is the great betrayer. La G um a is the in h erito r of the w orst excesses of realism . In a p a ra g rap h like the follow ing from A Walk in the N ight—and h ard ly a page of this book passes w ithout indulgence in the like—we see h im strain in g after an effect no o ther th an literariness itself. The room was as hot and airless as a newly opened tomb, and there was an old iron bed against one wall, covered with un­ washed bedding, and next to it a backless chair that served as a table on which stood a chipped ashtray full of cigarette butts and

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burnt m atches, and a thick tumbler, sticky with the dregs of heavy red wine. A battered cupboard stood in a com er with a cracked, flyspotted m irror over it, and a small stack of dog-eare books gathering dust. In another com er an accumulation o empty wine bottles stood like packed skittles. (25-26) This is not only the in te rio r of a certain room b u t an in terio r w ith the fingerprints of L iteratu re all over it, an in te rio r heavy w ith affect. The slum s of A Walk in the Night, the shanties of A nd a Threefold Cord, the cells of The Stone Country, the depressed suburbs of In the Fog o f the Seasons’ End, are all rendered in this style. The style has a double signification. First, it is La G um a's W riter’s Union c a rd .14 B ut also, m ore specifically, it is a style in w hich a single em p h atic gesture is repeated over and over; . . . an old iron bed . . . unw ashed bedding . . . a backless ch air . . . a chipped a sh tray . . . cigarette butts . . . burnt m atches . . — everything n am ed is nam ed w ith its ow n gesture of repudiation. The signification of the passage is not a room and its details, b u t ra th e r a room plus h o rro r of the room . Sim ilarly for the slum s, the shanties, the cells, the suburbs. La G um a's w orld, so overflow­ ing w ith things, is nonetheless not an objective w orld, for the things them selves are overflowing w ith the w riter's subjectivity. The sam e holds tru e for people. Four of the prison officials in The Stone Country are described in individual detail. Here are extracts from the descriptions. “His pink face was thin and h a rd as the edge of a pot-lid, and the eyes revealed no expression" (18). “He had . . . a puckered m outh th a t w as m erely a pink orifice, and little blue eyes, flat as pieces of glass" (22). “He had a plum p, sm ooth, h ealth y pink face . . . the eyes were pale and w ashed-out an d silvery, m uch like im itatio n pearls, and cold as quicksilver" (61). "He h ad a dry, b rittle face like crum pled pink tissue-paper w ith holes to rn in it for eyes" (68). Such repetition gives the guards aw ay as n ot four d istin ct alien m en b u t a single threatening figure. The th re a t is not in the figure, for the figure is th rea t. In the sam e way the slum , the shanties, the cells, the suburbs are La G um a’s h o rro r of them . H ere there is no evolutionary developm ent in La G um a. E ach of his novels exposes us to a long-sustained shudder of revulsion—a revulsion th a t m ust confess in places to being m erely fastidious. It is this posture of rejection, em blem atized at

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the m om ent w hen George Adams pushes aside his prison food (56), th a t brings La G um a closest to the F laubert who confessed his execration of “ordinary life." The less interesting side of this pos­ ture is its expression of alienation from the m aterial w orld. The m ore interesting side is a repetitiousness th a t becom es excessive and even obsessive, the testam en t of one m an's h o rro r of a de­ graded w orld.

Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State (1986) hen a colony is founded, w rote N athaniel H aw thorne, "am ong [the] earliest p ractical necessities [is] to allot a p o rtio n of the virgin soil as a cem etery, and another p ortion as the site of a prison." Prisons, those "black flowers of civilized society," burgeon all over the face of South Africa. They m ay not be sketched o r photographed, un d er th re a t of severe penalty. I have no idea w h eth er law s against the representation of prisons exist in o th e r countries. Very likely they do. B ut in S outh Africa such law s have a p a rtic u la r sym bolic a p p ro p ria te ­ ness, as though it is decreed th a t the cam era lens m ust sh a tte r at the m om ent it is train ed on certain sites; as though the passerby shall have no m eans of confirm ing th a t w hat he saw, those bu ild ­ ings rising o ut of the sands in all th eir spraw l of gray m onotony, was n ot a m irage or a bad dream . The tru e explanation is, of course, sim pler. The response of S outh Africa's legislators to w hat d istu rb s th eir w hite electorate is usually to o rd er it out of sight. If people are starving, let them starve far aw ay in the bush, w here th e ir thin bodies will not be a reproach. If they have no work, if they m igrate to the cities, let there be roadblocks, let there be curfews, let there be laws against vagrancy, begging, and sq u attin g , and let offenders be locked aw ay so th a t no one has to h e a r o r see them . If the black tow nships are in flam es, let cam eras be banned from them . (At w hich the g reat w hite electo rate heaves a sigh of relief: how m uch m ore bearable the new scasts have becom e!) Is ap arth eid about segregation of blacks o r segregation of the poor? Perhaps not an im p o rtan t ques­ tion, w hen blacks and the poor are so nearly the sam e. C ertainly there are m any lands w here prisons are used as dum ping-places for people who sm ell w rong and look unsightly and do not have the decency to hide them selves away. In S outh Africa the law sees

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to it as far as it can th a t not only such people b u t also the prisons in w hich they are held becom e invisible. The h e ad q u a rte rs of the Security Police in Johannesburg, in a square fittingly nam ed after B a lth azar John Vorster, onetim e prim e m in ister of the R epublic an d p a tro n u n d er w hom the se­ curity police grew to th eir p resent bad em inence, is an o th e r site th at m ay not be photographed. Into this building untold scores of political prisoners have been taken for interrogation. N ot all have retu rn ed alive. In a poem titled “In D etention," C hristopher van Wyk has w ritten as follows: He He He He He He He He He He He He He He

fell from the ninth floor hanged himself slipped on a piece of soap while washing hanged himself slipped on a piece of soap while washing fell from the ninth floor hanged himself while washing slipped from the ninth floor hung from the ninth floor slipped on the ninth floor while washing fell from a piece of soap while slipping hung from the ninth floor washed from the ninth floor while slipping hung from a piece of soap while washing

B ehind the so-called suicides and accidental deaths to w hich van Wyk alludes here, behind the cursory postm ortem s by governm ent functionaries, the bland, unlikely inquest findings, lie the realities of fear, exhaustion, pain, cruelty. One can go about one's daily business in Johannesburg w ithin calling distance (except th a t the room s are soundproofed) of people undergoing the u tm ost suffer­ ing. "It is no different from w alking p a st a child-brothel. It is no different from w alking p a st an ab atto ir. These things hap p en . These things a re done.” Perhaps. Perhaps these things are done all the tim e, all over the place. B ut there is a certain sham elessness in doing them in the h e a rt of a great city, a sham eless c h a ra c te r­ istic of all the security operations of a state w hich asserts th a t its own survival takes precedence over the law an d u ltim ately over justice. Van W yk's poem plays w ith fire, tap-dances a t the p o rtals

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of hell. It com es off because it is not a poem about death b u t a p arody of the barely serious stock of explanations th a t the Security Police keep on h an d for the m edia. In 1980 I pub lish ed a novel (Waiting for the Barbarians) about the im p act of the to rtu re ch am b er on the life of a m an of con­ science. T orture has exerted a dark fascination on m any o th er S outh African w riters. W hy should this be so? There are, it seem s to m e, tw o reasons. The first is th a t relations in the to rtu re room provide a m etaphor, b are an d extrem e, for relations betw een au ­ th o ritaria n ism an d its victim s. In the to rtu re room u nlim ited force is exerted upon the physical being of an individual in a tw ilight of legal illegality, w ith the purpose, if not of destroying him , then a t least of destroying the kernel of resistance w ithin him . Let us be clear ab o u t the situ atio n of the prisoner who falls u n d er suspicion of a crim e against the state. W hat h ap pens in V orster S quare is nom inally illegal. Articles of the law forbid the police from exercising violence upon the bodies of detainees except in self-defense. B ut other articles of the law, invoking reasons of state, place a protective ring around the ac­ tivities of the security police; and the rigm arole of due process, w hich req u ires the p riso n er to accuse his to rtu rers and produce w itnesses, m akes it futile to proceed against the police unless the la tte r have been exceptionally careless. W hat the prisoner in effect knows, w h at the police know he knows, is th a t he is helpless ag ain st w h atev er they choose to do to him . The to rtu re room thus becom es like the b ed ch am b er of the pornographer's fantasy, w here, in su lated from m oral or physical restrain t, one hum an being is free to exercise his im agination to the lim its in the per­ form ance of vileness upon the body of another. The fact th a t the to rtu re room is a site of extrem e hum an ex­ perience, accessible to no one save the p articip an ts, is a second reason w hy the novelist in p a rtic u la r should be fascinated by it. Of the c h a ra c te r of the novelist, John T. Irw in, in his book on Faulkner, w rites: "It is precisely because [he] stands outside the dark door, w an tin g to en ter the dark room b u t unable to, th a t he is a novelist, th a t he m ust im agine w hat takes place beyond the door. Indeed, it is ju st th a t tension tow ard the dark room th a t he can n o t e n te r th a t m akes th a t room the source of all his im agin­ ings—the w om b of a rt." To Irw in (following Freud b u t also H enry

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Jam es), the novelist is a person who, cam ped before a closed door, facing an insufferable ban, creates, in place of the scene he is forbidden to see, a rep resen tatio n of th a t scene, and a story of the actors in it and how they come to be there. Therefore, m y question should not have been phrased: Why are w riters in South Africa draw n to the to rtu re room ? The dark, forbidden c h am b er is the origin of novelistic fantasy p er se; in creating an obscenity, in enveloping it in m ystery, the state u nw ittingly creates the precon­ ditions for the novel to set about its w ork of rep resen tatio n . Yet there is som ething taw dry about following the state in this way, m aking its vile m ysteries the occasion of fantasy. For the w riter the deeper problem is not to allow him self to be im paled on the dilem m a proposed by the state, nam ely, e ith er to ignore its obscenities o r else to produce representations of them . The tru e challenge is: how not to play the gam e by the rules of the state, how to establish one's own authority, how to im agine to rtu re an d death on one’s own term s. The w riter faces a second dilem m a, of a no less subtle n atu re, concerning the person of the to rtu rer. The N urem berg trials and, later, the trial of Adolf E ichm ann in Jerusalem presented us w ith a paradox in m orality: a stupefying disproportion betw een the pigm y sta tu re of the m en on tria l an d the enorm ity of the crim es they h ad com m itted. H ints of the sam e paradox have surfaced a t the tw o inquests in South Africa (those on Steve Biko and Neil Aggett) at w hich m em bers of the security police have briefly em erged from th eir native darkness into the public gaze. How is the w rite r to represent the to rtu rer? If he intends to avoid the cliches of spy fiction, to m ake the to rtu re r n eith er a figure of Satanic evil, nor an a cto r in a black comedy, no r a faceless functionary, nor a tragically divided m an doing a job he does not believe in, w h at openings are left? The approaches to the to rtu re ch am b er are thus riddled w ith pitfalls, and m ore th an one w rite r has fallen into them . For ex­ am ple, in A Ride on the Whirlwind, a novel dealing w ith the 1976 uprisings, Sipho S epam la w rites: "Bongi's frayed bodice w as ripped off exposing the fullness of h er tu rg id breasts an d pointed teats to the beastliness of the tw o cops . . . Cold-bloodedly, the cop undid the pliers on the one nipple and placed it on the other. Bongi scream ed, tears pouring dow n h er soft brow n skin.” Sepam -

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la clearly succum bs here to erotic fascination. He also m akes his to rtu rers b o th all too Satanic ("dem onic" is his w ord) an d all too easily h u m an : "The young cop w as sick . . . He lived w ith sub­ terran ean stream s in his m akeup . . . He suffered from dual p e r­ sonality. The n a tu re of his w ork w as such th a t to survive he de­ veloped a sp lit perso n ality .” A considerably stro n g er book about the sam e historical events is M ongane S e ro te ’s To Every Birth Its Blood. Serote declines the false issue of w h eth er the to rtu re r is m an or devil. He lim its him self to the physical experience of to rtu re and, m ore im portant, takes on the challenge of finding w ords adequate to represent the terrib le space of the to rtu re cham b er itself. A m ixture of deodorant smells and paper, tobacco, old furniture, turned into a single smell, which characterizes all the places whose functions are proclaim ed by notices, where warnings bur­ den walls, counters and filing cabinets, where the sweat, tears, vomit and blood of many many people, who came and went, who never made it out of the doors, leave their spirits hanging in the air, which can never ever be cleaned. T here is a certain dark lyricism to this w riting, a lyricism even m ore strongly evident in Alex La G um a's In the Fog o f the Seasons’ End, a n o th er novel about resistance and torture. Since the tim e of F laubert, the novel of realism has been vulnerable to criticism of the m otives behind its preoccupation w ith the m ean, the low, the ugly. If the novelist finds in squalor the occasion for his m ost soaring poetic eloquence, m ight he not be guilty of seeking out his sq u alid subject m a tte r for perversely literary reasons? From the beginning of his career, La G um a—a neglected w rite r w ho died in 1985 in exile in C uba—ra n the risk of im m ortalizing a Cape Town of seedy slum s a n d d ripping rain in a prose of som ew hat lugubri­ ous grandeur. In his p resen tatio n of the w orld of the security police, no m a tte r how m uch he insists on its banality, its lack of depth, th ere is a tendency to lyrical inflation. It is as though, in avoiding the tra p of ascribing an evil gran d eu r to the police, La G um a finds it necessary to displace th a t grandeur, in an equivalent b u t negative form , onto th eir surroundings, lending to the very flatness of th e ir w orld hints of a m etaphysical depth: "Behind the polished w indow s, the gratings an d the G overnm ent paintw ork,

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was a n o th er dim ension of terror. . . . Behind the p icture of n o r­ m ality the cobw ebs and grim e of a spider reality lay hidden." Presenting the w orld of the in te rro g ato r w ith a false p o rten ­ tousness, a questionable dark lyricism , is not a fault lim ited to South African novelists: the sam e criticism m ight be leveled against the to rtu re scenes in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle o f Algiers. I am not arguing th a t the w orld of the to rtu re r should be ignored or m inim ized. I w ould not w ish th a t we did not have B reyten B reytenbach’s True Confessions o f an Albino Terrorist, w hich con­ tains som e searching explorations, based on personal experience, of the sp iritu al sphere in w hich the police live, h u m an beings who find it possible to leave the breakfast table in the m orning, kiss th eir children goodbye, and drive off to the office to com m it ob­ scenities. B ut B reytenbach's book is a m em oir. It does not m a tte r if a t one m om ent B reytenbach exhibits a canny suspiciousness about the w ish to get behind the security police (get behind the walls, get b ehind the dark glasses, find out th eir innerm ost se­ crets), yet a t o th er tim es literally lets his poetic im agination go, to fly deeper an d deeper into the lab y rin th of the security system , tow ard "the inner sanctum . . . w here the a lta r of the S tate [the scaffold] is erected [in] the final h e a rt of loneliness." Because it is an interim report, a p a rtia l biography of a phase of B reytenbach's life, True Confessions does not have to solve the problem th a t troubles the novelist: how to justify a concern w ith m orally d u ­ bious people involved in a contem ptible activity; how to find an ap p ro p riately m inor place for the petty secrets of the security system ; how to tre a t som ething th at, in tru th , because it is offered like the G orgon’s head to terrorize the populace and paralyze resistance, deserves to be ignored. Although the w ork of N adine G ordim er is never w ith o u t a po­ litical dim ension, it contains no direct tre a tm e n t of the secret w orld of security. B ut th ere is one episode in p a rtic u la r th a t, in an indirect way, addresses the sam e m oral problem s I have been trying to p u t m y finger on. I refer to the episode of the flogging in Burger's Daughter, an episode th a t harks back to the fam ous ep i­ sode of the flogging of the horse in Dostoevsky's Crime and P un­ ishment. Rosa B urger is driving around, h alf lost, on the outskirts of the

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black tow nships of Johannesburg, w hen she com es upon a fam ily of three in a donkey cart, the m an flogging the donkey in a drunken fury. In a frozen in sta n t she beholds the infliction of pain broken away from the will that creates it; broken loose, a force existing of itself, ravishm ent without the ravisher, torture w ithout the torturer, ram page, pure cruelty gone beyond the control of the hum ans who have spent thousands of years devising it. The entire ingenuity from thumbscrew and rack to. electric shock, the infinite variety and gradation of suffering, by lash, by fear, by hunger, by solitary confinement—the camps, concentration, labor, resettlem ent, the Siberias of snow or sun, the lives of Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, Kathrada, Kgosana, gullpicked on the Island . . . How is Rosa B urger to react? She can p u t a h alt to the beating, bring h e r a u th o rity to b ear on the driver, even have him arrested and prosecuted. B ut does this m an—"black, poor, b ru taliz e d ”— know how to live o th e r th an by bru tality , doing u n to others as has been done u n to him ? On the o th er hand she can drive p ast, allow ­ ing the to rtu re to continue. But then she m ay have to live w ith the suspicion th a t she passed by out of no b e tter m otive than a self-regarding reluctance to be thought "one of those w hites who care m ore for an im als th an people.” She drives on. And a few days later leaves South Africa, unable to live in a country th a t poses such im possible problem s in dayto-day living. It is im p o rta n t not to read the episode in a narrow ly sym bolic way. The d riv er and the donkey do not stan d respectively for to rtu re r an d to rtu red . "T orture w ithout the to rtu rer" is the key phrase. Forever and ever, in R osa’s m em ory, the blow s will rain dow n an d the beast sh u d d er in pain. The spectacle comes from the in n er reaches of D ante’s hell, beyond the scope of m orality. For m o rality is h u m an , w hereas the tw o figures locked to the cart belong to a dam ned, dehum anized w orld. They p u t Rosa B urger in h e r place: they define h er as w ithin the sphere of hum anity. W hat she flees from , in fleeing South Africa, is the negative illu­ m ination they bring: th a t there exists an o th er w orld parallel to hers, no fu rth e r aw ay th an a half-hour's drive, a w orld of blind force an d m u te suffering, debased, beneath good and evil.

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How to proceed beyond this dark m om ent of the soul is the question th a t G ordim er tackles in the second h alf of h e r novel. Rosa B urger retu rn s to the land of h er b irth to join in its suffering and aw ait the day of liberation. There is no false optim ism , on her p a rt or on G ordim er's. R evolution w ill p u t an end n eith er to cruelty an d suffering, nor perhaps even to to rtu re. W hat Rosa suffers and w aits for is a tim e w hen h u m an ity will be restored across the face of society, and therefore w hen all h u m an acts, including the flogging of an anim al, w ill be retu rn e d to the am b it of m oral ju d gm ent. In such a society it w ill once again be m ean­ ingful for the gaze of the author, the gaze of a u th o rity and a u th o r­ itative ju d g m ent, to be tu rn ed upon scenes of to rtu re. W hen the choice is no longer lim ited to either looking on in horrified fasci­ nation as the blow s fall or tu rn in g one's eyes away, then the novel can once again take as its province the w hole of life, and even the to rtu re ch am ber can be accorded a place in the design.

Athol Fugard, Notebooks, 1960-1977 (1984) thol F ugard's Notebooks are the record of eighteen years of creative life, covering a period from the early 1960s, when F ugard first tried his hand at a novel, gave it up, and de­ cided "I am a playw right," to the late 1970s, w hen he had estab ­ lished him self as a playw right of in tern atio n al sta tu re .1 They trace the im p act of day-to-day events upon him , the slow process by w hich kernels of tru th crystallize from m em ories, and the som e­ tim es h altin g and painful grow th of his plays out of these kernels. As a record of the in n er experiences of a self-aware and a rticu late creative consciousness, they are of absorbing interest, and we should be grateful to Fugard and his editor, M ary Benson, for m aking them public. The Notebooks are, however, m ore than this. They are also the au to b io g rap hy of a m an of intelligence and conscience who chose to rem ain in South Africa a t a tim e w hen m any fellow w riters were opting for (or being forced into) exile. F ugard's choice m eant, am ong o th er things, th a t he w ould m ake his life am ong those juxtaposed scenes of p lacid com fort and desperate poverty th at belong to present-day S outh Africa, and continually be brought face to face w ith the question of his relationship w ith a ruling o rd er ch aracterized by a rem arkab ly loveless a ttitu d e tow ard its subjects (or som e of them ), an a ttitu d e of lovelessness th a t som e­ tim es extends to atrocious callousness. F ugard's pleasure in the beauty of S outh Africa, an d p articu la rly of the E astern Cape coast, w here he lives—a pleasure th a t he com m unicates in passages of g litteringly precise description of its sights and sounds and sm ells—is therefore repeatedly subverted by "the nausea brought on by read in g the new spapers," by bouts of “dum b and despairing rage at w h at we are doing." This revulsion leads in tu rn to doubts ab o u t the value of his a rt, w hich seem s to be founded on m aterial

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privilege, to be personal in its nature, to be only am bivalently com m itted to tangible political goals. How to com m it him self w ithout losing his integrity as an a rtist becom es a central preoc­ cupation of the notebook entries of the mid-1960s. “The h o rro r of w h at this governm ent a n d its policies have done to people . . . has built up such an abyss of h a tre d th a t a t tim es . . . I [have] been quite p rep ared to take the ju m p an d destroy—b u t, so far . . . the com pany of executioners rem ains loathsom e,” he w rites in 1968. "I c an 't think of any m oral dilem m a m ore crucifying th an this tt one. Yet fidelity to his subject m a tte r—w hich we m ay broadly define as the a ttem p ts of people to retain th eir self-respect in a degraded social o rder—m akes him suspicious of an a rt yoked too closely to a political program . In Boesm an and Lena, he asserts, w h at en­ gages him is the "m etaphysical" predicam ent of the couple ra th e r than a “political [or] social” one. He reserves his ju d g m en t on Sizwe B ansi Is Dead because he feels th a t it "[walks] the tightrope betw een poetry and p ro p ag an d a.” The route he follows out of his crisis of conscience is to take upon him self (following S artre) the task of bearing witness. "The tru th [m ust] be told . . . I m ust not b e ar false w itness.” "My life has been given its order: love the little grey bushes,” by w hich he m eans, love the insignificant, the forgotten, the unloved. Against a system whose own degradation he m easures by the degradations it im poses on others (at one point he goes fu rth er an d suggests th a t the u ltim a te an d un w ittin g victim s of a regim e of degradation are its p erp etrators), Fugard opposes an ethic of love. "South Af­ rica's tragedy is the sm all, m eager portions of love in the h earts of the m en w ho w alk this beautiful la n d .” "People m ust be loved.” "I love m an for his carnality, his m ortality. It is a h a rd love—a big love—an d I m ust still grow .” "W hat is Beauty? The result of love. The ugliness of the unloved th in g .” This p ro g ram of w itness and love is carried out from a position w hich Fugard explicitly—at least in the early 1960s—identifies w ith th a t of C am us’s S tranger, or O utsider. He records a "clim ac­ teric” in his life: sittin g in a courtroom one day w itnessing the processes of S outh African law, he realizes th a t w h at is taking place before him has little to do w ith justice, th a t (m ore signifi­ cantly) all h u m an law has its origin in a position of com prom ise;

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his own position, he decides, m ust henceforth be founded on a rejection of com prom ise, an d therefore on a rejection of the m oral claim s of the law. A lthough the outsider status th a t he hereby assum es com es u n d e r considerable stress as pressure m ounts upon him from the left to engage him self politically (or rather, since F ugard's a rt is an engaged a rt, to allow the term s of his engage­ m ent to be d eterm in ed for him by the political struggle), he never really deserts it, p a rtly because it allow s him the autonom y he needs as a w riter, p a rtly because it gives definition to his p ersistent sense of him self as “not ‘rea lly ’ belonging, of being a ‘stran g er,’" no m a tte r how m uch he som etim es wishes to becom e a "sub­ scrib er.” During 1962 an d 1963 Fugard in fact undertook a system atic reading of C am us, and the form ative influence of Cam us on his own th o u g h t is clear. "W ould be happy to spend the next ten years deepening m y u n d erstan d in g and appreciation of this m an," he w rites. "O verw helm ed by C am us.” The stance of w hat he calls "Heroic Pessim ism ," by w hich he characterizes his own work, comes to h im from this reading, as well as such injunctions to him self as "Live p rep a red for d e a th .” B ut Cam us is only the chief in a long roll of intellectual influ­ ences ch arted in the Notebooks. From his cottage a t Schoenm akerskop, Fugard kept well a b reast of intellectual currents: there are notes on F aulkner an d K azantzakis and Robbe-G rillet, B recht and Genet, Pound an d Lowell and Pasternak, Jung and Laing and the Zen thinkers, all of w hom can be show n e ith er to have helped him define his own position or to have pointed him in new directions. The m ost absorbing pages of the Notebooks are those in w hich Fugard explores the cu rren ts of his own creativity and the genesis an d unfolding of his plays. “I've alw ays know n th a t in my w riting it is the d ark tro u b led sea [of the unconscious], of w hich I know nothing, save its presence, th a t [has] carried m e,” he w rites. L ater he co n tem p lates a project of w riting a notebook parallel to one of his plays in w hich he hopes to trace every stage of its creation— a project, in o th er w ords, for a m ore system atic version of the Notebooks we have—a n d then w ryly dism isses it for its “naivete”: he is too m uch " a d rift” in the "deep and dark c u rre n ts” of his creative unconscious, he realizes, to be able to c h art th eir depths. This confidence in his own unconscious processes leads to an

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u n tro u b led acceptance of periods in his creative life th a t ap p ear from the outside to be infertile, as well as to a c ertain intellectual passivity. Nothing, ever, in my life seems to stem from my asking a question and needing an answer. My consciousness of self and the world around me is, most times, the best times . . . as smooth and solid as the sea tonight . . . I don't think I live negatively—the impulse to write is a vigorous, affirmative one, but it never has its origins in the need for answers. So often the paradox in writing: discover your beginning when you reach the end. Insofar as the Notebooks m ake clear a m ethod or p a tte rn in Fugard's playw riting, it is one of w orrying for m onths and som e­ tim es years at a subject, often a subject suggested by a real-life encounter, u n til the im age, the kernel out of w hich the play w ill eventually grow, em erges w ith "a life of its own, a tru th bigger th an itself." M uch of the book is devoted to recording the quest for these im ages of "tru th . . . [w hich] w hen it comes, flashes back like lightning, through all th a t [has] preceded it." Of his poetics, Fugard w rites: "I strive quite consciously and deliberately for am biguity of expression . . . My w hole tem p era ­ m ent inclines m e to be very unequivocal indeed. T hat is not dif­ ficult—b u t it w ould be at the cost of tru th ." "D arkness is . . . an essential help to the truly poetic im age." M ade in 1969—1970, these statem en ts serve to rem in d us of how strenuously Fugard has striven to deploy the poetics of m odernism over a field th a t m ight seem to belong only to social realism ; this deploym ent, w hen it is successfully achieved, is w h at gives his w ork its uniqueness. Out of his o rien tatio n tow ard the h idden and irratio n a l com es the succinct and pow erful form ulation by w hich in 1976 he c h a r­ acterizes his art: "A m an m ust have a Secret, an d as a resu lt of th at an Act w hich takes others by su rp rise .” There is less about theater, and about F ugard's experience in th eater in B ritain a n d the U nited S tates, th an ad m irers of his plays m ight expect. The m ain reason is th a t the Notebooks w ere w ritten in S outh Africa du rin g spells of privacy; gaps in the ch ro ­ nology m ark his absences abroad. B ut the Notebooks do record the excitem ent and d isap p o in tm en ts of his w ork w ith black th e a te r

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groups in the Port E lizabeth tow nships, thoughts on the staging of his plays, records of conversations w ith the actors John K ani and Yvonne B ryceland, and com m ents on the n atu re of th eater th a t illu m in ate his ow n creative practice. Thus: "One of the rea­ sons . . . w hy I w rite for the stage . . . [is] the C arnal R eality of the acto r in space and tim e. Only a fraction of my tru th is in the w ords.” We m u st p resum e th a t Fugard did som e editing of his own before he passed the notebooks over to M ary Benson in 1979. N evertheless, there rem ains m uch th a t is autobiographical in a personal w ay—criticism of his ow n "self-indulgence, self-pity, ro­ m anticism ," of his evasive and confused treatm en t of the beggars w ho h a u n t all good liberals, of his “incurable inability to say 'N o,'" of the "an archistic, destructive core to [his] being.” There are dark intervals w hen he records “alm ost total loss of all sense of v alu e” or, on the last page of the Notebooks, “inner agony . . . death in life . . . the to tal extinction of m y creativity . . . I have feared for my sanity." T here are also glim pses of Fugard poring for hours over rock pools, experiencing the "electric, orgiastic" pleasures of spearfishing, angling along the coast. (“Zen and the a rt of angling. Every cast a cast into your soul.") M ary B enson has supplem ented the Notebooks w ith several pages of useful notes and a glossary of South African term s. By and large these a re adequate, though Benson is m istaken in th in k ­ ing th a t the Afrikaans verb moer has anything to do w ith m urder. There also seem to have been m isreadings of F ugard’s text. E liot did not w rite a poem called "The Rack," no r is it likely th a t Fugard called B eckett and Ionesco "ab su rd ities.” One is h ard ly en titled to criticize a w riter for w h at he has chosen to w rite o r not w rite ab o u t in his priv ate notebooks. N evertheless, there are points a t w hich one wishes Fugard had pushed his th in k ­ ing an inch or tw o further. The notion of the n a tu ra l dignity of all life, m ost of all h u m an life, is a keystone of F ugard's thought. At the h e a rt of the evil of w hite baasskap or Herrschaft in South Africa, in F u g a rd ’s view, is its desire not only to use the black m an as a tool for its ow n m aterial gain, b u t to strip him of all dignity in the process. The ruling o rd er has thus literally becom e an order o f degradation: no black m an finds a place in society till he has passed the rite of being "tau g h t a lesson" and abased.

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I have no quarrel w ith such an analysis, as far as it goes. B ut Fugard, not an Afrikaner, is close enough to the A frikaner to know th a t the h u m iliatio n of the weak by the strong has been a c h a r­ acteristic p ractice of the A frikaner w ithin his own culture, a p ra c ­ tice und erp inned by a perhaps p erverted reading of scrip tu re th a t inordinately em phasizes a u th o rity an d its converse, abasem ent. The hum bling of children by p aren ts, of stu d en ts by teachers, and generally of the younger by the older (the u n in itia te d by the ini­ tiated)—hu m bling th a t does not cease till face has been lost—is p a rt of the life experience of m ost Afrikaners, and is kept alive, against liberalizing counterforces, by such in stitu tio n s as the arm ed forces, w hich reach into m ost w hite households. There are m any a u th o rita ria n societies on earth, b u t A frikanerdom strikes one as a society in w hich castratio n is allotted a p a rticu la rly b la ta n t role. Fugard knows the castratin g urge behind South Af­ rican baasskap, knows th a t the castrated , the unloved, usually takes his place a t the forefront of the castrato rs. Does he guess, too, th a t in probing the ap p aren tly p eripheral phenom enon of h um iliation he is com ing close to the h e a rt of the beast? It w ould be interesting to know. From the fact th a t the Notebooks begin to tail off after 1973 we m ay infer th a t F ugard's im pulse to keep this form of diary has w aned, an d th a t there will be no second volum e. We m ust th ere­ fore take w h at we have as a record of a phase in F ugard's life th a t has closed, a phase in w hich, in a sp irit of total engagem ent, he searched in daily experience and in books for the germ s of tru th . Even the rea d er only sketchily fam iliar w ith F ugard's plays will find it an absorbing experience to follow him on his search.

Breyten Breytenbach, True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist and Mouroir (1985)

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ou th of the city of Cape Town lies a tran q u il, alm ost ru ral, su b u rb nam ed (after the wine) Tokai, and zoned for w hite oc­ cu p atio n only. Driving through Tokai you pass, on your right, forest and vineyard, on your left com fortable houses w ith spacious law ns and gardens. Then at a certain point the sub u rb an idyll ends, giving w ay to a m onotonous gray w all ten feet high, be­ hind w hich you can glim pse w atchtow ers and blank-faced b u ild ­ ings. This is Pollsm oor, a m axim um -security prison, the hom e at one tim e of B reyten B reytenbach, poet, painter, and convicted "ter­ rorist." The True Confessions o f an Albino Terrorist is the story of how B reytenbach cam e to be in Pollsmoor, w hat he did there, and how he d e p a rte d .1 B reyten B reytenbach w as born in 1939 into an ord in ary sm all­ tow n A frikaner fam ily. One of his brothers becam e an officer in the S outh African arm ed forces, a n o th er a w ell-known journalist. Brey­ ten b ach 's com m ents on his brothers give an idea of how far he has m oved from his origins. The first he calls "a trained (and enthusias­ tic) killer,” the o th e r "a fellow traveller of the [security police], w ith decidedly fascist sym pathies." Breyten, the m averick of the family, early m ade a nam e for him self in literary circles, and cam e to be seen as the leading poetic talen t of his generation. Even after he left S outh Africa, took up residence in Paris, m arried a w om an who would be called in Afrikaans anderskleurig, "of a n o th er color” (m eaning of a color o th er th an w hite), and involved him self in the a n tia p a rth e id m ovem ent, he rem ained the idol of m uch of the Afri­ kaans lite ra ry w orld. In 1973 he obtained official dispensation to visit his hom eland. Audiences a t poetry readings gave him and his wife a rap tu ro u s welcom e. The w ord in the a ir was "reconcilia­ tion." The p rodigal son w ould yet retu rn , the breach w ould be healed, and all w ould be well. 375

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The next tim e B reytenbach visited South Africa, circum stances were different. He h ad shaved off his beard, and he carried a p ass­ p o rt identifying him as C hristian G alaska, citizen of France. His m ission was to re c ru it m em bers to Okhela, a resistance o rg an iza­ tion th a t h ad already em barrassed the W est G erm an governm ent by stealing classified docum ents an d revealing details of m ilitary cooperation betw een Bonn and Pretoria. T ipped off by an inform er in Europe, the S outh African security police kept "Galaska" u n d er surveillance for a w hile, then closed in and arrested him . At the end of a tria l conducted in surprisingly subdued term s, B reytenbach was given a stiff nine-year sentence. (In True Confessions he claim s th a t the au th o rities reneged on a deal to let him off lightly in retu rn for not conducting a p o litical defense.) He spent tw o years in isola­ tion in P reto ria C entral Prison, a spell from w hich he em erged w ith his sanity m iraculously un im p aired , followed by five years in Pollsmoor. In 1982 he was released and flown off to France. The B reytenbach case has troubled and continues to tro u b le Afri­ kaners. B reytenbach took the position from the beginning th a t he had gone into exile, th a t the reasons for his exile w ere political, and th a t only changes th a t w ould bring all political exiles hom e w ould bring him hom e. A frikaner public opinion, on the o th er h an d , p a r­ ticularly liberal opinion, preferred to see his defection as a fam ily m atter, a g enerational q u arrel w ithin the greater A frikaner fam ily, to be sorted out w ithin the family. To those w ho hold this view it re ­ m ains possible for B reytenbach to be a great Afrikaans w riter while still adopting the stance of a rebel. But in True Confessions B reytenbach spells out his position anew. He is not a rebel b u t a revolutionary, in will if not in deed. And he is no longer one of the family. To be an Afrikaner is a political definition. It is a blight and a prov­ ocation to hum anity . . . I do not consider myself to be an Afrika­ ner. To be an Afrikaner in the way they define it is to be a living in­ sult to whatever better instincts we hum an beings may possess. Given his unequivocal rejection of his A frikaner b irth rig h t, why should B reytenbach have received from the police and prison a u ­ thorities the odd touches of indulgence, m ixed in w ith the usual harshness and cruelty, th a t we find described in this book? B rey­ tenbach suggests th a t Red Cross and other in te rn atio n al observers

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exerted a c au tio n ary influence on his jailers. His own deliberately unheroic a ttitu d e (“Be p lia n t and weak w hen you have to. Cry if you m ust") m ay have co n trib u ted , too. B ut I think th ere is a deeper reason. Prisoners in South Africa are not p e rm itte d to conduct econom ic activities from w ithin jail. B reytenbach is a professional p a in te r and w riter. The letter of the law w ould have been on the side of the auth o rities if they had p ro ­ hibited h im from p ain tin g or w riting in prison. In fact he was given perm ission to w rite, though not to p aint. The works he w rote in prison, M ouroir am ong them , were taken into custody as they were com pleted an d retu rn e d to him on his release. The censors have a l­ lowed the p ub licatio n of these works in South Africa. The public buys an d reads them . They are honored w ith literary prizes. Why? B reytenbach w rites: People who absolutely rejected me and my ideas and what my life stood for but who, perhaps from an obscure sense of uncom forta­ bleness, if not guilt, and also, surely, because of a true concern for my work, applied to the m inister to allow me to continue writing. "For the sake of Afrikaans literature.” Was it a way for some of them to establish in their own minds their evenhandedness? Perhaps. The fact is th at, by the stan d ard s of the Afrikaans liter­ ary tra d itio n , B reytenbach is a great poet. He is a poet, m oreover, whose em otional m akeup includes feelings of passionate intim acy w ith the S o uth African landscape th at, Afrikaners like to think, can be expressed only in Afrikaans, and therefore (here comes the sinis­ ter tu rn in the reasoning) can be experienced only by the Afrikaner. Closeness of fit betw een land and language is—so the reasoning goes—proof of the A frikaner's natural ow nership of the land. (Ideas like these are not new: natural congruence betw een a people, a lan­ guage, an d an a n cestral landscape is a com m onplace of G erm an R om anticism .) T here is a considerable com m unal investm ent in p resen tin g the Afrikaans literary trad itio n —a tradition, let it not be forgotten, th a t is the occasion for a vast echoing ideological dis­ course in classroom s and cu ltu ral organs—as speaking w ith a sin­ gle voice on the subject of the land. There is a certain interest, even for official, e stab lish m en t Afrikaans culture, in seeing B reytenbach as th e b e a re r of a ta le n t th a t he cannot, despite him self, betray; and to view his politics as an ab erratio n th a t does not touch his poetic

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soul. There is an in terest in not acknow ledging th at there can coex­ ist in a single b rea st both a belief in a u n itary dem ocratic S outh Af­ rica and a profound Afrikaans digterskap, poetness. Hence the notion th a t the “te rro rist” in B reytenbach can be in ­ carcerated and punished w hile the poet in him can be left free. By acting as though B reytenbach m ust be a radically divided person­ ality, one self a poet to be saved, the o th er self a tra ito r to be con­ dem ned, the g reater A frikaner fam ily preserves its belief (and p e r­ haps does so sincerely and in good faith) th a t the language, the m ystical nation-essence, is greater th an the fallible vessels who b ear it. The em brace of the Afrikaner, stony yet loving, finds its expres­ sion in the insufferable intim acy forced on B reytenbach by his se­ curity police in terrogators, in w hich com passion and cruelty seem a t tim es pathologically intertw in ed (“I am convinced th a t som e of the people they have killed in detention probably died w hen the in ­ terro g ato r w as in a paroxysm of unresolved frustrations, even th a t the in terro g ato r killed in an aw kw ard expression of love and sym ­ p a th y ”). The in terrogators feed upon, and therefore depend upon, th eir prisoners. B ut B reytenbach extends the scope of the H egelian m aster-slave dyad. W hat is the difference, he asks him self, betw een the "true confession” he u tters into a m icrophone in Palerm o in 1983 (eventually to becom e this book) and the "true confession” his interrogators dem anded in P retoria in 1975? Are not both of them answ ers to the question "W hat is the tru th of your m ission to S outh Africa?”? Before the interrogator, before the m icrophone, before the b lank page, B reytenbach finds him self in the sam e position, starin g a t him self. So he develops the m irro r as the m aster m e ta ­ p hor of his book; and the m ost in teresting passages are the d ia ­ logues he conducts w ith the figure in the m irror, w hich is variously the cruel interrogator, the "true" B reytenbach, and the dark brother-A frican: "I see you now as m y dark m irror-brother. We need to talk, b ro th er 1.1 m ust tell you w hat it was like to be an a l­ bino in a w hite land. We are forever u n ited by the u ltim ate know l­ edge of the d epravity m an w ill stoop to. Son of Africa. Azanians." To his "dark m irro r-b ro th e r” B reytenbach expresses his m isgiv­ ings ab o u t the postrevolutionary S outh Africa of the future, w hich he foresees w ill fall u n d e r a no less to ta lita ria n regim e th a n the present one, and his b ittern ess again st the "fat, in stitu tio n alized

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friends in the lib eratio n m ovem ent" w ho sent him off on his fool­ h ard y m ission in the first place. B itterness em erges even m ore strongly in his ju d g m en ts on w hite S outh Africa: "Let th a t bloated village of civil servants and b a rb a rian s [Pretoria] be erased from the face of the earth ." As he observes, one of the effects of prolonged isolation is to kill off p a rts of you, "and these p a rts will never again be revived.” W hat w ill survive of B reytenbach’s True Confessions, I think, is not the n a rra tiv e of cap tu re, interrogation, and im prisonm ent, ab­ sorbing enough though th a t is, nor the apologia he gives for his quixotic foray into the fortress of the enem y, valuable though th at is for its analysis of the appeal of direct political action to the intel­ lectual. A feature of B reytenbach's poetry is th a t it stops at nothing: there is no lim it th a t cannot be exceeded, no obstacle th a t cannot be leaped, no co m m an d m en t th a t cannot be questioned. His w rit­ ing ch arac teristica lly goes beyond, in m ore senses than one, w hat one h ad th o u g h t could be said in Afrikaans. The pages of True Confessions th a t sta n d out, th a t could have been w ritten by no one else, are those in w hich he tries to feel his w ay into the experience of the condem ned m an, into the experience of death itself, and then into the m o ral w orld of the m en w ho o rd er deaths, build prisons, carry o u t to rtu res, and then into the very interio r of the m ad th in k ­ ing of "secu rity” itself. M ouroir w as w ritte n during B reytenbach's prison years. It is a m ore su b sta n tia l w ork th an True Confessions, b u t m ore difficult, and p ro b ab ly of less general appeal. In quality it is variable. S u b ti­ tled "M irrornotes of a Novel," it consists of thirty-eight pieces, som e short, som e long. Som e are no m ore th an jottings. O thers are profoundly im pressive in th eir evocation of a term inal landscape, a landscape from beyond the w ar, w here children go about giving birdcalls to lure the fled birds back to the earth. Though certain fragm ents are linked closely enough for us to follow an erratic, dream like n a rra tiv e line through them , we w ould be h a rd p u t to form the pieces into the skeleton of any conceivable novel. We are b e tter advised to read the book as an assem blage of stories, p a ra ­ bles, m ed itations, and fragm ents, som e of them centering on the them es of im p riso n m en t, death , and freedom , others linked by the recu rren t figures of the m irro r and the lab y rin th (the title of course plays on mourir, to die, and miroir, m irror). It is not too fanciful to

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conceive of the text th a t B reytenbach has left us as a kind of Ar­ iad n e’s th rea d th a t he spins behind him as he advances through the lab y rin th of his fictions (and his dream s) tow ard a m eeting w ith the m onstrous O ther w ho is also both the self in the m irro r an d d eath. B ut a m erging w ith the m irror-self is not achieved, the h e art of the lab y rin th is not a ttain ed . Instead, as in Jean C octeau’s O rpheus films, the surface of the m irro r becom es a hole of entry into an o th e r world, into yet an o th er b ran ch of the lab y rin th . Thus we find B rey­ tenbach's text m oving forw ard by a continual process of m etam o r­ phosis, p articu la rly a m etam orphosis of landscape. Though the process seem s dream like, the forw ard m ovem ent is purposeful, the m otivations are not obscure, the connections are p resent on the surface or not too far ben eath it. It is a form of w riting th a t pays its respects to Kafka an d Nabokov (one of B reytenbach's a lte r egos is called G regor Sam sa). In technique it owes m uch to the nouveau ro­ man, though its focus is less on surfaces, as in R obbe-G rillet an d Claude Sim on, m ore on interiors and the properties of interiors: darkness, softness, w etness. N evertheless, B reytenbach’s voice is clearly his own. The w eakest sections are those in w hich B reytenbach w orks in the m ode of the p arab le. W hen he deprives him self of the g enera­ tive, m etam orphosing pow ers of language an d follows the m ore linear p a th of irony, the end results are thin. His irony gains bite only w hen he tu rn s it on him self, as in his story about the rad ical w riter who gives a press conference a t the Rom e a irp o rt before flying off to join the lib eratio n struggle in S outh Africa: “N ot in sa­ lons and ivory tow ers w ill revolutions be m ade. Purification in the struggle. Self-sacrifice. Freedom ! (Liberty!) . . . Fierce fire in the p u ­ pils before the lashes are lowered." How to w rite a revolutionary lite ra tu re is a question to w hich M ouroir retu rn s several tim es. One story deals w ith a w rite r who gives in to the pleas of friends an d com m ences a conventional b o u r­ geois tale of su b u rb an adultery. Soon he discovers how h a rd it is to carry on w ritin g w hen one's p an ts are soaked in horse blood. N evertheless he plods on, in g athering darkness, till the fictional w orld he has created tu rn s nasty, takes on a life of its own, an d rends him . The bloody horse alluded to here becom es a com plex, a m b iv a­ lent, and recu rren t sym bol in M ouroir as a whole. In the richly

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m eaningful cover B reytenbach (designed for the Afrikaans edition, a naked pink (albino?) figure (the artist?) passes by a b a rred w in­ dow, his head covered (replaced?) by the huge eyeless severed head of a horse: stalking horse, T rojan horse; also M inotaur, m irror-taurus, figure of death from the dead center of the labyrinth; also the ludicrous counterim age of the w arlike, passionate centaur. A w ord m u st be said about the tran slatio n . There exists no Afri­ kaans edition of True Confessions. The edition we have m ust be ac­ cepted as a w ork w ritte n in E nglish by B reytenbach. However, tell­ tale solecism s indicate th a t B reytenbach is translating, and som etim es m istran slatin g , from an Afrikaans original. Mouroir, on the o th er hand, ap p eared in S outh Africa in 1983 in an edition p artly in E nglish b u t m ainly in Afrikaans. Since no tra n sla to r is nam ed in the prelim in aries to the Am erican edition, we are ju sti­ fied in inferring th a t B reytenbach again did some or all of the tran slatio n ; and the recurrence of idiosyncratic m istranslations tends to confirm this conclusion. W hile the tran sla tio n of p a rts of M ouroir is little short of m as­ terly, in o th er p a rts it is nothing short of inept. Exam ples: “And then he w ent aw ay w ith the c an cer” (instead of “And then he died of c an cer”); "w ire o b sta cle ” (instead of "barbed-w ire entan g lem en t”); "sucking b lack ” (instead of “pitch-black”); "a sentence of g rass” (in­ stead of "a strip of g rass”). These m istranslations em erge from a cursory check of a few odd-sounding passages. A careful check w ould, I am sure, produce hundreds m ore. Should the a u th o r’s re ­ sponse be th a t w h at I call m istran slatio n s are in fact creative re­ workings, I w ould have to reply th a t w h at we have been given to read rem ain s a poor su b stitu te for the original.

Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture (1989)

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his collection of w ritings by N adine G ordim er includes an autobiographical m em oir, travel pieces, polem ics on censor­ ship, reflections on significant S outh African figures, and a variety of w ritings on the place of the w riter in South A frica.1 Among this last-m entioned group are several m ajor interventions in the cu ltu ral life of S outh Africa; my atten tio n will be devoted alm ost exclusively to them . As Stephen C lingm an em phasizes, in his editorial in troduction here an d in his book on G ordim er's novels (The Novels o f Nadine Gordimer, 1986), G ordim er m ust be read against the background of her tim es. (I w ould qualify this by suggesting th at, since G or­ dim er is uncannily prescient about shifts in historical m ood, we should also read h e r against the background of w hat is/was on the point of happening.) Thus, for exam ple, the first of her m ajor essays, "A W riter's Freedom ," dating from 1975, seem s to foresee 1976 and the pressure for com m itm ent th a t p o st-1976 S outh Africa w ould bring to b e ar on the w riter. W hat is a w riter's freedom ? It is “his right to m ain tain and publish to the w orld a deep, intense, priv ate view of the situ atio n in w hich he finds his society . . . He m ust take, and be g ranted, freedom from the public conform ity of political in te rp retatio n , m orals an d tastes." And w h at does a "private view" m ean? G or­ dim er is clear: "The tru th as he sees it." The m ost obvious th re a t to this freedom is official censorship. But a "m ore insidious" th re a t comes from the w riter's "very aw are­ ness of w h at is expected of him ": "conform ity to an orthodoxy of opposition." This is the p a rtic u la r problem , as G ordim er sees it, of black S outh African w riters. On these w riters the pressure to ­ 382

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w ard conform ity extends down to the level of language, d em and­ ing th a t they w rite in "the jargon of struggle." Though G ordim er takes h er analysis of the dem ands of the South African situ atio n no fu rth e r here, she has sketched the contending dem ands—of a rt and politics, of Europe and Africa—th a t are m ore fully explored in the la te r essays (as indeed they are in h e r novels). B ut, as if responding to the revolutionary w riter im p atien t w ith ars longa an d the kind of practice h e r own w ork represents, she does p u t forw ard the exam ple of Ivan Turgenev, the (to her) ex­ em plary rea list w ho was able to subordinate his personal political beliefs to the dem ands of his a rt to such a degree th a t his readers could n ot tell w h eth er his sym pathies lay w ith the progressive c h aracters in his novels o r w ith the reactionaries. "His friends, ad m irers an d fellow progressives stopped short, in th eir u nder­ stan d in g of his genius, of the very thing th a t m ade him [a genius]— his scrupulous reserve of the w riter's freedom to reproduce tru th an d the reality of life even if this tru th does not coincide w ith his own sym pathies." An a d m irab le ideal. But, how ever m uch inspiration the lonely figure of Turgenev could provide for a w riter of G ordim er’s gen­ eration, he w as not, perhaps, the m ost ap p ro p riate figure—a cosm opolite, a rom antic, and, in the best 1840s sense of the w ord, a lib eral—to hold up as an exem plar to im patient young black w riters p o st-1976. G ordim er does not m ake th a t move again. The next m ajo r essay in the book, and the m ost closely argued, is "Relevance an d C om m itm ent" (1979). G ordim er retu rn s to the subject of co m m itm en t. For the black artist, she w rites, “relevance . . . is the suprem e criterion." "Struggle is the state of the black collective consciousness an d a rt is its w eapon.” W hen the w riter gives in to pressure to use this w eapon w ithin an orthodoxy, the resu lt is usually agitprop, "a phony sub-art." B ut hope enters w hen a second co m m itm en t is joined to the com m itm ent to relevance: a co m m itm en t to create a new language and a new a rt for the people. B ut w h at of the w hite w riter? The fact th a t blacks now no longer offer w hites the prom ise of a shared and equal future (one should rem em b er th a t this essay was w ritten during the ascendancy of

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Black Consciousness thinking am ong black intellectuals) creates new in n er difficulties for him . Exploitation, which the blacks experience as their reality, is some­ thing the white artist repudiates, refuses to be the agent of . . . The black creation of new selfhood is [therefore] based on a reality he, as a white, cannot claim and that could not serve him if he did since it is not of his order of experience. If he is to find his true consciousness, express in his work the realities of his place and time, if he is to reach the stage where com m itm ent rises within him to a new set of values based on those realities, he has to adm it openly the order of his experience as a white as differing completely from the order of black experience. Once he has come to this realization, the w hite w riter will have to find his ow n w ay to reconnect his a rt to "the to ta l reality of the d isintegrating present." In rethinking his own a ttitu d e s and con­ ceptions he m ust aspire to the sam e relevance and the sam e com ­ m itm en t as the black w riter to a future com m on indigenous cu l­ ture. In th a t process he m ust find som ething to replace "the daem onic forces of disintegration w hich both drove him into a l­ ienation an d w ere his su b ject.” The best-know n and m ost controversial of the essays is "Living in the Interregnum " (1982). Here G ordim er sta rts by defining u n ­ am biguously h e r h istorical and social position: she belongs to a "segm ent” of the w hite population preoccupied n eith er w ith ru n ­ ning aw ay nor m erely surviving, b u t on the co n trary hoping to have "som ething to offer the future." Specifically, the question for her is: "How to offer one's self." The in terregnum , she says, quoting Antonio G ram sci, is a tim e when "the old is dying an d the new cannot be born; in this in te r­ regnum th ere arises a great diversity of m orbid sym ptom s." The interregnum is "not only betw een tw o social orders b u t betw een two identities, one know n and discarded, the o th e r unknow n an d un d eterm in ed . . . The w hite w ho h as declared him self or herself for th a t future . . . does not know w h eth er he will find his hom e a t la st.” During the interregnum , literary sta n d ard s, like everything else, are confused. G ordim er ad m its she finds it h a rd to accept the reigning com pulsory eg alitarian ism of black a rt ("All blacks are

Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture

385

brothers; all b ro th ers are equal; therefore you cannot be a b e tter w riter th an I a m ”). She cannot accept th a t the truly gifted w riter should have to deny his gifts, o r th a t he should have to bow to an orthodoxy of ag itp ro p . B ut, she goes on, the problem is that agitprop . . . has become the first contempo­ rary a rt form that many black South Africans feel they can call their own. It fits their anger . . . I know that agitprop binds the artist with the means by which it aim s to free the minds of the people . . . But how can my black fellow w riter agree with me . . . ? There are those who secretly believe, but few who would assert publicly, w ith Gabriel Garcia M&rquez: "the w riter’s duty—his revolutionary duty, if you like—is to write well.” The black w riter in South Africa feels he has to accept the criteria of his people because in no other but the comm unity of black dep­ rivation is he in possession of selfhood . . . The black w riter is “in history” and its values threaten to force out the transcendent ones of art. The white, as w riter and South African, does not know his place "in history” at this stage, in this time. In the m o st personal declaratio n in the book, she continues: "There are tw o absolutes in m y life. One is th at racism is evil . . . The o th er is th a t a w rite r is a being in whose sensibility is fused [a certain d u ality of the in w ard and o u ter reality], and he m ust never be asked to su n d er this union. The coexistence o f these absolutes often seems irreconcilable w ithin one life, for me . . . The m orality of life a n d the m orality of a rt have broken out of th eir categories in social flux. If you cannot reconcile them , they cannot be kept from one a n o th e r’s th ro ats, w ith in you” (em phasis added). S im ply to em brace the role of dissident is no longer enough, for thereby the w hite w rite r rem ains "negatively w ithin the w hite ord er.” He has to "declare him self positively as answ erable to the o rd er struggling to be b o rn .” G ordim er believes herself to have entered into this com m itm ent, an d believes th a t h e r w riting since 1975 o r so reflects it. Yet, while co m m itted to finding a place “in history,” she asserts her alle­ giance to "values th a t are beyond history. I shall never give them up. n As to h er politics in a b ro ad e r sense, she nails h er colors to the m ast. She can no longer believe in the capacity of W estern capi­ talism to bring social ju stice to Africa. She recognizes how cruelly

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com m unism has betrayed its prom ise, b u t asserts nevertheless th a t there is socialism and socialism ; she pins h er hopes on the kind of politics represented by P oland’s Solidarity. The last essay in the group on w hich I co ncentrate is "The Essential G esture” (1984). After taking sw ipes a t “self-appointed cu ltu ral co m m issars” a b ro ad who decide for the w rite r w hat his duties are a t hom e, an d a t interview ers suspicious of anyone who is not in jail, G ordim er retu rn s to the question of "black w riters [being] expected to prove th eir blacknesss as a revolutionary con­ dition by su b m ittin g to an u n w ritten orthodoxy of in te rp retatio n and rep resentation in th eir w ork,” and is happy to rep o rt th a t "m any black w riters of q u ality . . . have [now] begun to negotiate the rig h t to th eir own, inner in te rp retatio n of the essential gesture by w hich they are p a rt of the black struggle.” I have em phasized a single concern—the place of the w riter in S outh Africa—in a single group of G ordim er’s essays. Besides these, The Essential Gesture includes travel essays, a valuable m em oir of h er youth, "A B olter and the Invincible S um m er,” and m any m in o r pieces interesting in th eir ow n right, including the well-known early essay, "W here Do W hites Fit In ? ” (1959), w here she w rites: "I m yself fluctuate betw een the desire to be gone—to find a society for m yself w here m y w hite skin will have no b earing on my place in the com m unity—and a terrible, o b stin ate and fearful desire to sta y ”—how m uch she has changed in th irty years, and how m uch rem ained the same! This is a book about w riting and the duties of the w riter b u t not really a book of criticism . G ordim er is not interested in criticism as such: though h e r roots as a w riter are in E uropean realism and m odernism , I am not aw are of any extended discussion by h er of w riters from this trad itio n . H er critical w riting is, in a specific sense of the w ord, occasional: m ost of the pieces d atin g from after 1970 sta rte d th eir lives as lectures or addresses. W ithout neces­ sarily being egocentric, she is m ore interested in herself th an in o ther w riters: in herself as the site of a struggle betw een a tow ering E uropean trad itio n and the w hirlw ind of the new Africa. H er intelligence is p ractical ra th e r th an theoretical, h e r in terest in o th er w riters a p ractical in terest in w h at she can learn from them and use for h e r own purposes.

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N evertheless, G ordim er is a form idable presence on the South African in tellectual scene, com bining as she does a w ide field of reference, an acute, no-nonsense m ind, and a Shelleyan feeling for the stirrin g s of histo rical currents. My sense is th a t she is not m uch read in the Afrikaans com m unity, in p a rt perhaps because she has never dem o n strated m uch sym pathy for the Afrikaner. (There are o th e r w ays of p u ttin g this. One would be th a t she has from the beginning seen through the m ore genial and engaging form s of self-presentation em ployed by the Afrikaner.) If this sense is accurate, it is tim e th a t Afrikaans readers woke up: not only because G ordim er has behind h er an oeuvre th a t constitutes a m ajor piece of historical w itness, an oeuvre greater th an the sum of its p arts, one th a t will be read years after the interregnum ou t of w hich it has em erged has passed into dust, b u t because the road th a t in tellectuals of conscience in the Afrikaans com m unity are a t this m o m en t traveling is a road th a t G ordim er herself passed along years ago. Anna A khm atova speaks of the a rtist as "a v isito r from the fu tu re ” (G ordim er quotes her a t the end of one of h er essays). G ordim er, in the S outh Africa of the 1970s and 1980s, has been such a v isito r from the future. It is a sta tu re th a t she has created for herself by year after year of close listening and intense work: silence and cunning w ith o u t exile. T hat sta tu re has come, of course, a t personal cost, though no w ord of reg ret o r self-pity breathes from the pages of this collec­ tion. The gifted young social satirist of Friday’s Footprint had before h e r the prospect of quite a different and m ore attractiv e life th an the life in the belly of the w hale th a t the historical G ordim er has chosen for herself. Thus, for instance, though som e of the pieces rep rin ted here are polem ical—against the South Af­ rican censors an d m ore generally against ap arth eid —they provide no evidence th a t G ordim er has an appetite for polem ic. I suspect th a t she sees this kind of w riting as a job som eone has to do: since there is no one b e tte r fitted than she to do it, she does it, and does it well (everything she does she does properly, thoroughly: her sta n d ard s are never less th an professional). B ut she does not thrive on strife. She is not even, in a fundam ental sense, a political w riter. R ather, she is an ethical w riter, a w rite r of conscience, who finds herself in an age w hen any transcendental basis for ethics (as for

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aesthetics) is being denied in the nam e of politics. “The m orality of life an d the m orality of a rt have broken out of th eir categories," she w rote in 1982. “If you cannot reconcile them , they cannot be kept from one an o th er's th ro ats, w ithin you." It is a struggle for the reconciliation of public an d p riv ate th a t this book ch arts.

Retrospect

Interview

DA: We began these conversations by talking about autobiography, and it seems appropriate to return to that point in this final exchange. You spoke then of the open-endedness of autobiography and brought it into line with other forms of writing. At this stage, as you look back over the whole project, I want to ask you to reflect on where it has taken you: what are the moments of crystallization, the breaks or continuities, that the dialogue has enabled you to address, and what additional thoughts do you have on the nature of autobiography itself? JM C: Let me return to what I was saying about autobiography as a biographical activity. Biography is a kind of storytelling in which you select material from a lived past and fashion it into a narrative that leads into a living present in a more or less seamless way. The premise of biography is continuity between past and present. Even the biography of crisis— for instance, so-called conversion narrative— doesn't deny this continuity. Conversion narrative may present the reborn self as having utterly superseded the past self; but it thematizes the discontinuity as something that could not have come about naturally, that could be the result only of divine intervention. What sets autobiography apart from other biography is, on the one hand, that the writer has privileged access to information and, on the other, that because tracing the line from past to present is such a selfinterested enterprise (self-interested in every sense), selective vision, even a degree of blindness, becomes inevitable— blindness to what may be obvious to any passing observer. All autobiography is storytelling, all writing is autobiography. In these dialogues you have asked what I, in my blind way, have seen as I look back over the past twenty years of writing; and now you ask what I see when I look back over the dialogues themselves. I must reply that more and more I see the essay on Tolstoy, Rousseau, and Dostoevsky emerging as pivotal. Why? For two reasons. One, that 391

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Retrospect

there I see myself confronting in a different genre— the essay— the very question that you have faced me with in these dialogues: how to tell the truth in autobiography. Two, that I find the story I tell about myself has a certain definiteness of outline up to the time of that essay; after that it becomes hazier, lays itself open to harder questioning from the future. What was going on in the essay? In the present retrospect I see in it a submerged dialogue between two persons. One is a person I desired to be and was feeling my way toward. The other is more shadowy: let us call him the person I then was, though he may be the person I still am. The field of their debate is truth in autobiography. The second person takes the position I have sketched above, but in a more extreme version: there is no ultimate truth about oneself, there is no point in trying to reach it, what we call the truth is only a shifting self-reappraisal whose function is to make one feel good, or as good as possible under the circumstances, given that the genre doesn't allow one to create freefloating fictions. Autobiography is dominated by self-interest (continues this second person); in an abstract way one may be aware of that selfinterest, but ultimately one cannot bring it into full focus. The only sure truth in autobiography is that one's self-interest will be located at one's blind spot. In the terms brought into prominence in the essay, the debate is between cynicism and grace. Cynicism: the denial of any ultimate basis for values. Grace: a condition in which the truth can be told clearly, without blindness. The debate is staged by Dostoevsky; the interlocutors are called Stavrogin and Tikhon. Standing on the hillock or island created by our present dialogue, let me tell you, in the retrospect it provides, what the story of the past twenty years looks like when I make that story pivot on the essay on confession, written in 1982-83. In the first half of this story— a story spoken in a wavering voice, for the speaker is not only blind but, written as he is as a white South African into the latter half of the twentieth century, disabled, disqualified— a man-who-writes reacts to the situation he finds himself in of being without authority, writing without authority. In this first half he reacts: he does not engage with his situation at a philosophical level. The realization that he is disabled comes early, or so the evidence seems to say, when he looks back over his life, filling in the story. As a teenager, this person, this subject, the subject of this story, this I, though he more or less surreptitiously writes, decides to become, if at all possible,

Interview

393

a scientist, and doggedly pursues a career in mathematics, though his talent there is no more than modest. How do I read this resolve? I say: he is trying to find a capsule in which he can live, a capsule in which he need not breathe the air of the world. All his life he has lacked interest in his environment, physical or social. He lives wherever he finds himself, turned inward. In his juvenile writings he follows in the steps of Anglo-American modernism at its most her­ metic. He immerses himself in Pound's Cantos. He admires Hugh Kenner above other critics. He admires Kenner's range of knowledge, his wit (which he is, alas, too plodding to imitate), but also the sangfroid with which Kenner ignores a whole range of experience: as for living, let the servants do that for us. At the age of twenty-one he departs South Africa, very much in the spirit of shaking the dust of the country from his feet. When in the mid1960s he quits computers in favor of an academic life— a life-saving decision on his part— it is to literature very narrowly conceived as an object of study that he turns. He writes a formalistic analysis of Beckett, concentrating on texts from a period in Beckett's life when Beckett too was obsessed with form, with language as self-enclosed game. Does he grow homesick for South Africa? Though he feels at home neither in Britain nor in the United States, he is not homesick, nor even particularly unhappy. He merely feels alien. Let me ("me") trace this feeling (of alienness, not alienation) further back in time. A sense of being alien goes back far in his memories. But to certain intensifications of that sense I, writing in 1991, can put a date. His years in rural Worcester (1948-1951) as a child from an Afrikaans background attending English-medium classes, at a time of raging Afri­ kaner nationalism, a time when laws were being concocted to prevent people of Afrikaans descent from bringing up their children to speak English, provoke in him uneasy dreams of being hunted down and accused; by the age of twelve he has a well-developed sense of social marginality. (People of his parents' kind are thundered at from the pulpit as volksverraaiers, traitors to the people. The truth is, his parents aren't traitors, they aren't even particularly deracinated; they are merely, to their eternal credit, indifferent to the volk and its fate.) His years in Worcester are followed by adolescence in Cape Town, as a Protestant enrolled in a Catholic high school, with Jewish and Greek friends. For a variety of reasons he ceases visiting the family farm, the place on earth he has defined, imagined, constructed, as his place of

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origin. All of this confirms his (quite accurate) sense of being outside a culture that at this moment in history is confidently setting about en­ forcing itself as the core culture of the land. Sociologically, it helps, perhaps, to think of him in his late teens as a raznochinets, in the line of Turgenev's Bazarov and those hordes of young men in Dostoevsky's novels with their pallid faces and burning eyes and schemes to change the world— as a socially disadvantaged, socially marginal young intellectual of the late British empire. Disadvan­ taged? Well, perhaps not disadvantaged. But by the standards of the white middle class, unadvantaged. His parents have no foothold in either Afrikaans or English social circles. They have unending financial troubles. He pays his own way through university doing odd jobs, if only because he is too squeamish to witness his mother’s sacrifices. Politically the raznochinets can go either way. But during his student years he, this person, this subject, my subject, steers clear of the right. As a child in Worcester he has seen enough of the Afrikaner right, enough of its rant, its self-righteousness, its cruelty, to last him a lifetime. In fact, even before Worcester he has perhaps seen more of cruelty and violence than should have been allowed to a child. So as a student he moves on the fringes of the left without being part of the left. Sympathetic to the human concerns of the left, he is alienated, when the crunch comes, by its language— by all political language, in fact. As far back as he can see he has been ill at ease with language that lays down the law, that is not provisional, that does not as one of its habitual motions glance back skeptically at its premises. Masses of people wake in him something close to panic. He cannot or will not, cannot and will not, join, shout, sing: his throat tenses up, he revolts. This is the person who, in a slightly maturer version, goes to Texas to resume his studies in literature. I don’t want to disparage the formalistic, linguistically based regimen he prescribed for himself for the fifteen years thereafter. The discipline within which he (and he now begins to feel closer to I: autre biography shades back into autobiography) had trained himself/myself to think brought illuminations that I can't imagine him or me reaching by any other route. But the essay on confession, as I reread it now, marks the beginning of a more broadly philosophical engagement with a situation in the world, his situation and perhaps still mine. It is best read, I think, side by side with Waiting for the Barbarians. The novel asks the question: Why does one choose the side of justice when it is not in one's material interest to do so? The Magistrate gives the rather

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Platonic answer: because we are born with the idea of justice. The essay, if only implicitly, asks the question: Why should I be interested in the truth about myself when the truth may not be in my interest? To which, I suppose, I continue to give a Platonic answer: because we are born with the idea of the truth. That is Part One, as I see it today, in the light of all that has passed between us. I'll stop there.

Notes

Editor's Introduction 1. John Leonard, "Beckett Safe from Computers.” The New York Times Book Review 19 August 1973: p. 27. My thanks to Lindsay Waters, Shaun Irlam and Derek Attridge for their comments on earlier ver­ sions of this introduction. 2. J. M. Coetzee, “Samuel Beckett’s Lessness: An Exercise in Decompo­ sition,” Computers and the Humanities 7, no. 4 (1973), 195-198. 3. A measure of Coetzee's success is the awards his fiction has received. Internationally, he has won the Geoffrey Faber and James Tait Black Memorial prizes (for Waiting for the Barbarians), the Booker-McConnell and Jerusalem prizes and the Prix Femina Etranger (for Life & Times o f Michael K), and the Sunday Express Book of the Year award (for Age o f Iron). In South Africa, he has won the Mofolo-Plomer prize (for Dusklands) and the CNA prize (for In the Heart o f the Country, Barbarians, and Michael K). Coetzee is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an honorary fellow of the Modem Languages Associa­ tion of America, and a Nobel nominee. 4. J. M. Coetzee, Foe (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986), pp. 135-136. 5. This account might be compared with Coetzee's own, "Retrospect.” A complete bibliography of Coetzee’s writing is to be found in K. Goddard and J. Read, eds., J. M. Coetzee: A Bibliography, National English Literary Museum Bibliographic Series no. 3. (Grahamstown: National English Literary Museum, 1990). 6. Nadine Gordimer, “Living in the Interregnum,” in The Essential Ges­ ture: Writing, Politics, and Places (London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 261— 284. The phrase is from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, which Gordimer cites in her epigraph to July’s People: "The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms" (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). 7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Introduction to Leopold Sedar Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie n&gre et malgache de langue frangaise (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1948); reprinted in What Is Litera­ 397

398

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

Notes to Pages 6-28

ture?and Other Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart o f the Country (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1977), p. 138. C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, ed. George Savidis, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 17-18. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 12. J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981), p. 133. J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times o f Michael K (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983), p. 160. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Theory in the Margin: Coetzee's Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe!Roxana,” in Consequences o f Theory: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987-1988, ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); reprinted in English in Africa 17, no. 2 (October 1990), 1-23. Coetzee, Foe, p. 157. J. M. Coetzee, Age o f Iron (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1990), p. 137. Theodor Adorno, "Commitment,” in Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukäcs, Ber­ tolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics, trans. and ed. Ronald Taylor (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 194.

Interview 1. J. M. Coetzee, "Statistical Indices of ‘Difficulty,’” Language and Style 2, no. 3 (1969), 226-232. 2. J. M. Coetzee, Review of Wilhelm Fucks, Nach allen Regeln der Kunst, Style 5, no. 1 (1971), 92-94. 3. J. M. Coetzee, "Samuel Beckett’s Lessness: An Exercise in Decompo­ sition,” Computers and the Humanities 7, no. 4 (1973), 195-198. 4. J. M. Coetzee, "Surreal Metaphors and Random Processes," Journal of Literary Semantics 8, no. 1 (1979), 22-30. 5. Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 132. 6. J. M. Coetzee, “Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the Primacy of Art," University o f Cape Town Studies in English 6 (1974), 1-7. 7. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters, trans. Jane B. Greene and M. D. Herter (New York: Norton, 1945-1948), vol. 2, pp. 373-374.

Notes to Pages 31-43

399

The Comedy of Point of View in Beckett's Murphy 1. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 38. 2. A convenient way of selecting 100 sentences randomly is to use five­ digit random numbers to give page number and sentence number. For obvious reasons, we should exclude from consideration Suk’s prophecy (32-33) and the chess game (243-244). 3. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 126. 4. Samuel Beckett, "Bram van Velde,” in Proust/Three Dialogues (Lon­ don: Calder, 1965), p. 125. 5. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 291. 6. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: Dutton, 1960), p. 16. The Manuscript Revisions of Beckett's Watt 1. There are several changes between the Olympia Press edition of 1953 and the Grove Press edition of 1959 (which I use here), most notably the omission of Arsene's pet duck: compare pp. 49-50 of the former with p. 45 of the latter. The revisions are not particularly thorough— there remains an unexplained reference to the duck in the 1959 edi­ tion (p. 80), finally disposed of only in the French translation—but I have taken the 1959 edition as Beckett's final word in English. 2. Samuel Beckett, Watt (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1968). The transla­ tion is by Ludovic and Agnes Janvier "in collaboration with the au­ thor.” This was Beckett’s first collaborative translation of a major work since he and Patrick Bowles had translated Molloy in 1955. 3. On "being properly born,” see Addenda, p. 248. The story of Larry Nixon’s birth, purely digressive in Watt (12—15), is an amplification of the story of the birth of Knott in the first draft. The recurring decimal in the song in Watt (34) represents the number of weeks in 2080, the year in which A Clean Old Man will first raise a laugh. The title Beckett gave to draft A was Poor Johnny Watt. 4. See "The Comedy of Point of View in Beckett’s Murphy. ” The quotation is from Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 122. Samuel Beckett and the Temptations of Style 1. Samuel Beckett, "Imagination Dead Imagine" (1965), in No’s Knife (London: Calder, 1967), p. 161. All the translations quoted from in this essay are Beckett’s own.

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Notes to Pages 44-69

2. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 291. 3. Samuel Beckett, Ping, in No’s Knife, p. 168. 4. Samuel Beckett, Lessness (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970), p. 21. 5. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 120. 6. Beckett, quoted in Lawrence E. Harvey, “Samuel Beckett on Life, Art, and Criticism,” Modem Language Notes 80 (1965), 555. 7. Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louis Bonenfant, 12 December 1856, in Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), vol. 2, p. 652. 8. Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, 16 January 1852, ibid., p. 31. 9. Beckett, quoted in Niklaus Gessner, Die Unzulänglichkeit der Sprache (Zurich: Juris, 1957), p. 32n. 10. Richard N. Coe, Beckett (London and Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1964), p. 14. 11. Samuel Beckett, “Three Dialogues," in Proust/Three Dialogues (Lon­ don: Calder, 1965), p. 103. 12. Of his friend Bram van Velde, Beckett writes that he is "the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world”; "Three Dialogues,” p. 125. Interview 1. Marcellus Emants, A Posthumous Confession, Library of Netherlandic Literature, vol. 7, ed. Egbert Krispyn (Boston: Twayne, 1975; reprint, London: Quartet, 1986). 2. Besides Achterberg's "Ballade van de gasfitter,” the translations are: Hans Faverey, seven poems from Chrysanthen, roeiers (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1977), in Writing in Holland and Flanders 38 (1981), 35-38; three poems from the same volume, together with Sybren Polet, "Zelfrepeterend gedieht," and Leo Vroman, "Gras Hooi,” in Dimension: Contemporary German Arts and Letters, special issue, 11, 1 (1978), 46-51, 130-141, 178-181. Achterberg's "Ballade van de gasfitter" 1. Gerrit Achterberg, "Ballade van de gasfitter," in Verzamelde gedichten (Amsterdam: Querido, 1967), pp. 833-847. Achterberg (1906-1962) is generally recognized as the most influential poet of his generation in the Netherlands. First published in 1953, the "Ballade" reiterates a theme that dominates Achterberg’s poetry from the 1930s to the early 1950s: the death of the beloved and her recall through the power of the poetic word. The "Ballade” is the most ambitious work of a poet

Notes to Pages 70-73

2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

401

who otherwise specialized in short, tightly constructed poems col­ lected in successive volumes of Cryptogramen. See particularly Anthonie Donker, "Het experiment van de gasfitter," Critisch Bulletin 21 (1954), 160-167; Andries Middeldorp, "De tragedie van de gasfitter,” in Nieuw commentaar op Achterberg, ed. Bert Bakker and Andries Middeldorp (The Hague: Bakker, 1963), pp. 175—188; Kees Fens, "De onoverwinnelijke gasfitter,” Raster 2 (1968), 157-170 and Raster 3 (1969), 197-208 (hereafter cited as Fens); K. Meeuwesse, "Bij Achterbergs ballade van de gasfitter,” Ons Erfdeel 13 (1970), 19— 23 (hereafter cited as Meeuwesse); Stanley M. Wiersma, "Gerrit Ach­ terberg, Gasfitter," Christian Scholar’s Review 1 (1971), 306-317 (in­ cluding a translation) (hereafter cited as Wiersma). There is a detailed exegesis of the "Ballade” in A. F. Ruitenberg-de Wit, Formule in den morgenstond (Amsterdam: Querido, 1968), pp. 113—135. Sharing no common ground with this reading, I have made no use of it, nor have I consistently tried to carry across in my translation that polysemy which, read systematically, opens the poem to a Jungian interpreta­ tion. Roman Jakobson, Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Russian Language Project, 1957), p. 2; Emile Benveniste, "La Nature des pronoms,” in Probl&mes de linguistique generate (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 254, 256. See Meeuwesse, p. 19; Wiersma, p. 307. See Meeuwesse, p. 178. Benveniste, "La Nature de pronoms," p. 252. Wallace Stevens, "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," in Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1955), pp. 395-396. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. R. G. Smith, 2d ed. (Edinburgh: Clark, 1959), pp. 3, 24, 21, 16, 34; idem, Between Man and Man, trans. R. G. Smith (London: Fontana, 1961), p. 246.1 call Buber’s I—Thou a myth advisedly (Buber does not use the term). It is an "in the begin­ ning” myth, both ontogenetic and phylogenetic, a myth of the fall into the quotidian from an original state of relation, as pp. 18-22 and 24-28 of I and Thou make clear. Buber, I and Thou, p. 3. These characteristics of the You emerge from linguistic analysis of the occurrences of the pronoun "you" (Achterberg's gij/u, properly "thou," here translated as "You") in the poem. These occurrences include two where "you” is part of "we.” (The notation 9/6 stands for sonnet 9, line 6; and so forth.) a. "You must have made your entries from the rear” (1/1). The verb is marked for inferential modality. (The Dutch says literally, "You

402

Notes to Pages 73-74

have reached the houses from behind," but this is an a posteriori inference from the appearance of You in each windowframe.) b. "You appear and reappear” (1/4), "You vanish” (1/5). The relation between the sentence pairs You appear [to me] I see you and You vanish [to me] I do not see you is ergative: the second is in each case a causally transformed version of the first. The You is the object of the gaze of the /. c. “As if You could escape me" (2/8). That is, "You cannot escape me. w d. "The apple-hawker lures You" (1/11). The modality of the sen­ tence is hypothetical, and being lured is by definition involuntary. e. "Indoors with You” (2/1). The I and the You are in a relation of locativity. f. "I . . . see You standing" (2/2-3). The pseudoactivity (in fact the mere locativity) of the You is attested only by the gaze of the I. (This emphasis is even stronger in the original, literally "my eyes . . . see you stand.”) g. "We grow murky" (2/5). The relation between the sentences We grow murky [to each other] We see each other murkily [that is, do not see each other clearly] is again ergative. There is reciprocity, but it is a reciprocity of incapacity. h. "You and I can keep our incognito" (2/9). "Keep” (= continue) is a dummy verb (that is, a verb absent from the deep structure) carrying a progressive aspect marker. The underlying sentence is "We do not know each other." i. "You are gone” (4/7). The You is absent. In the original, lines 67 read literally, "I turn with an explanatory gesture toward You, but You are no longer there." The (absent) You marks the direc­ tion of orientation of the /. j. "The higher I ascend, the wider space/yawns between You and me" (9/1-2). The spatial relation between I and You is defined by the activity of the I. 11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New

Notes to Pages 74-75

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

403

York: Washington Square Press, 1966), p. 59. See also p. xxxviii of the translator's introduction. Imagery of the leak in being occurs elsewhere in Achterberg’s oeuvre. "Gehenna" (1953) begins: "I am the weak spot in the universe[,]/ the hidden leak" (Verzamelde gedichten, p. 789). The gasfitter's crisis is literally an experience of nothing, "a vacuum" (11/5). The following seven parallels are notable: The blessing of Jesus by God (Matthew 3:17); the blessing of the gasfitter by his supervisor (sonnet 5) The inner torment of Jesus, followed by resignation to the will of God, and sleep of the disciples (Matthew 26:38-46); evasiveness of the gasfitter before his supervisor’s commands, followed by flirtation with escape, and sleep of the concierge (sonnets 5-7) The mocking of Jesus and the ascent of Calvary; the mocking of the gasfitter by the maid and his ascent in the elevator (sonnet 8) Jesus’ moment of doubt on the cross (Matthew 27:46); the gasfitter’s admission of failure (sonnet 9) Acclamation of the Lamb by a host “of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” (Revelations 7:9-10); scorning of the gasfitter by a host “of every nation, race, and tongue" (sonnet 10) The descent from the cross and the burial of Jesus (Matthew 27:5860); the descent of the gasfitter in the elevator and his journey “un­ derground” (sonnet 10) The ascent of Jesus to the right hand of God (Mark 16:19); the return of the gasfitter to his supervisor and his dismissal (sonnet 11) Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), p. 187; idem, Training in Christianity, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), pp. 127, 131. Rudolf Bultmann, "What Does It Mean to Speak of God?" in Faith and Understanding, vol. 1, trans. Louise P. Smith (London: SCM Press, 1966), p. 53. Gabriel Marcel, “I and Thou," in The Philosophy o f Martin Buber, ed. Paul A. Schilpp and Maurice Friedman (London: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1967), p. 44. Buber’s reply to Marcel—that there is a dis­ tinction between the Thou that I "mean” and the word that I say— misses Marcel’s point, which is that language does not preserve the stress of intention. See Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” ibid., pp. 705706. Eugene Ianesco, quoted in George Steiner, After Babel (London: Ox­ ford University Press, 1975), p. 185. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 412.

404

Notes to Pages 75-89

18. "The women say . . . the language you [women] speak is made up of signs that rightly speaking designate what men have appropriated. Whatever they have not laid hands on . . . does not appear in the language you speak. This is apparent precisely in the intervals that your masters have not been able to fill with their words of proprietors and possessors, this can be found in the gaps, in all that which is not a continuation of their discourse, in the zero, the 0, the perfect circle that you invent to imprison them and to overthrow them”; Monique Wittig, The Guerill&res, trans. D. Le Vay (London: Pan, 1972), p. 123. The 0, the circle, the hole are symbols of that which male authori­ tarian language cannot appropriate. 19. See Fens, pt. I, 162-165, and pt. II, 198-199. 20. In chapter 3 of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Alice and the fawn walk lovingly together through "the wood where things have no names.” At the edge of the wood the two beings recover their lost names "fawn” and "human child.” "A sudden look of alarm came into [the fawn’s] beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.” 21. "The cords of all link back,” wrote Joyce, back along all the geneal­ ogies of names to Adam, who issues out of the black hole of the void with God’s maieutic help; Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 38. 22. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chap. 36. 23. The puzzling question of why this sonnet alone, of the sequence 1— 12, is dominated by the past tense, is debated in the essays cited in note 2 above. I find none of the explanations I have read convincing, but have none of my own to offer. 24. Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, 16 January 1852, in Corre­ spondence, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), vol. 2, p. 31. 25. Samuel Beckett, "Three Dialogues,” in Proust/Three Dialogues (Lon­ don: Calder, 1965), p. 103. 26. S. Dresden, "Horizontale poezie," in Bakker and Middeldorp, Nieuw commentaar o f Achterberg, p. 21. 27. Wiersma, p. 315. The original reads: Hoe hoger of ik stijg hoe groter wordt de ruimte tussen u en mij. Het leven voelt zich door nikkel en door staal omgeven. Het bouwsel komt geen klinknagel te kort. Hier zit geen gas. God is het gat en stort zijn diepten op mij uit om te beleven aan een verwaten fitter hoe verheven hijzelf bij iedere etage wordt.

Notes to Pages 89-108

405

Verdieping na verdieping valt omlaag. Ik weet niet waar of wat ik moet beginnen. Misschien schiet me een laatste woord te binnen als ik hem naar de eerste oorzaak vraag. Een schok gaat door mij heen. Ik moet er uit en geef het over aan zijn raadsbesluit. Quoted by permission of Stichting Willem Kloos Fonds, The Hague. 28. Wiersma, p. 309. The First Sentence of Yvonne Burgess' The Strike 1. Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” trans. James E. Irby, in Labyrinths, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1962), p. 43. A Note on Writing 1. Roland Barthes, "To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” in The Languages o f Criticism and the Sciences o f Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eu­ genio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), p p .134-156. 2. Ibid., p. 142. Interview 1. J. M. Coetzee, "The Great South African Novel," Leadership SA 4 (1983), 74—79; idem, "The White Tribe," Vogue, March 1986, pp. 490491, 543-544; idem, "Tales of Afrikaners," New York Times Magazine, 9 March 1986, pp. 19-22, 74-75, reprinted in Reader’s Digest, August 1986, pp. 19-26, and in Fair Lady, 28 May 1986, pp. 66-69, 130, 132— 133. 2. In "The Burden of Consciousness in Africa." Captain America in American Mythology 1. Captain America and the Falcon, published in New York by Marvel Comics Group, a division of Cadence Industries Corporation. The period of Captain America's life dealt with in this essay is 1972-1974, when the script was written by Steve Englehart and the artwork done by Sal Buscema (occasionally by Alan Lee Weiss). Inking, lettering, and coloring were done by house personnel. References of the form 164/12 are to issue 164, page 12. 2. Freud: "The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a

406

Notes to Pages 110-136

surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface”; The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), p. 16. In a footnote to the 1927 English translation, Freud adds: "I.e., the ego . . . may be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body” (ibid). 3. “Performance principle: the prevailing historical form of [Freud’s] reality principle ... Libido is diverted for socially useful performances in which the individual works for himself only in so far as he works for the apparatus”; Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (London: Abacus, 1972), pp. 42, 48. 4. Issue 179 (November 1974) deals with Captain America’s reactions to the Watergate scandal. The Burden of Consciousness in Africa 1. The film The Guest (1977) was directed by Ross Devenish and starred Athol Fugard. 2. Leon Rousseau, Die groot verlange (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1974), p. 384. 3. Ibid., p. 380. Four Notes on Rugby 1. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Rou­ tledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), p. 7. Triangular Structures of Desire in Advertising 1. Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965); hereafter cited as DDN. 2. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1972), trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 3. Rene Girard, To Double Business Bound (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 66; hereafter cited as DB. 4. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840), trans. Henry Reeve, ed. Richard D. Heffner (New York: New American Library, 1956), p. 194. 5. Max Scheler, Ressentiment (1915), trans. B. Holdheim (New York: Free Press, 1961), pp. 60-77. 6. Fred Inglis, The Imagery o f Power: A Critique o f Advertising (London: Heinemann, 1972).

Notes to Pages 148-150

407

The Rhetoric of the Passive in English 1. Richard Ohmann, "Prolegomena to the Analysis of Prose Style” (1959), in Essays on the Language o f Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), p. 405. 2. In this early essay Ohmann is still working in the tradition of Euro­ pean Stilforschung. Behind the certainty that a continuous path can be traced back from syntactic pattern to epistemology lies an organicist conception of the literary work such as we find in Leo Spitzer: "The lifeblood of the poetic creation is everywhere the same, whether we tap the organism at 'language' or 'ideas,' at 'plot' or at 'compo­ sition'”; Linguistics and Literary History (Princeton: Princeton Univer­ sity Press, 1948), p. 18. 3. Ernest Hemingway, "Che ti dice la patria?” in Men without Women (New York: Scribner's, 1927), pp. 109-110. 4. We may later revise our reading and see Hemingway's narrator as someone holding back powerful emotions, particularly a sense of the pity of it all. A tension between these two conceptions of the narrator, tough and tender, may be what Hemingway wants us to experience. But this dual sense arises out of a full reading of the stories and can only be read back afterward into the affectlessness of the sentences quoted. 5. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Modern Li­ brary, 1924), 1.1. E. M. Cope comments that by a science Aristotle understands "a systematic and rational procedure, governed by the general rules derived from experience, but distinguished from mere practical skill . . . by the apprehension of cause ... and the recognition of general principles”; An Introduction to Aristotle’s Rhetoric (London, 1867), p. 135n. 6. Ian Watt, "The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors,” in Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903), ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 470. 7. Roger Fowler, "Style and the Concept of Deep Structure,” Journal o f Literary Semantics 1 (1972), 17. 8. Richard Ohmann, "Mentalism in the Study of Literature,” in Proceed­ ings o f the Conference on Language and Language Behavior, ed. Eric M. Zale (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968), p. 194. 9. Walker Gibson, Tough, Sweet, and Stuffy: An Essay on Modem Amer­ ican Prose Styles (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), p. 123. Julia P. Stanley expands on this observation: "Either we choose the active voice because it places the speaker in a position of having to accept responsibility for her assertions, or we choose the

408

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

=

Notes to Pages 150-154

passive voice because it is more ‘objective,’ placing the responsibility for the validity of our assertions on some unspecified ‘generic’ per­ son”; "Passive motivation,” Foundations o f Language 13 (1975), 37. See Roman Jakobson, "Quest for the Essence of Language,” Diogenes 51 (1965), 28. Aldo Scaglione, The Classical Theory o f Composition (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1972), pp. 3—4; R. H. Robins, Ancient and Mediaeval Grammatical Theory in Europe (London: Bell, 1951), pp. 34, 40, 66. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. Η. E. Butler, 4 vols. (London: Heinemann; New York: Dutton, 1920), vol. 1 ,1.iv.28-29. Robins, Grammatical Theory, pp. 40n, 66. The basic classification of devices in classical rhetoric is into tropes and figures. The precise line of demarcation between the two is vexed and has always been; see Richard Lanham, A Handlist o f Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 101, for discussion. It makes no difference to my argument which class hy­ perbaton is taken to fall into. Quintilian, the most encyclopedic of the rhetoricians, is hesitant in his classification of the device: see Institutio oratoria, vol. 3, VUI.vi.62-67 and IX.iii.24. See Scaglione, Classical Theory o f Composition, pp. 76-86. Paul de Man, "Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3, no. 3 (1973), 28. Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory o f Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), pp. 103-106. K. Hasegawa, “The Passive Construction in English,” Language 44 (1968), 230-243. Robert Friedin, "The Analysis of Passives,” Language 51 (1975), 384405. J. R. Hust, "The Syntax of the Unpassive Construction,” Linguistic Analysis 3 (1977), 31-63; Joan Bresnan, "A Realistic Transformational Grammar,” in Linguistic Theory and Psychological Reality, ed. Morris Halle, Joan Bresnan, and G. A. Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978). C. L. Baker, "Syntactic Theory and the Projection Problem,” Linguistic Inquiry 10 (1979), 533-581. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. with, 38b, 40. V. S. Khrakovsky, "Passive Constructions,” in Trends in Soviet Theo­ retical Linguistics, ed. Ferenc Kiefer (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973). For an attempt to define the passive along these lines, see Vilem Mathesius, A Functional Analysis o f Present-Day English on a General Linguistic Basis (1961), ed. Josef Vachek (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 107-114, and particularly Mathesius’ range of examples.

Notes to Pages 155-159

409

25. Bresnan, "Realistic Transformational Grammar,” pp. 14—23. 26. Noam Chomsky, "Remarks on Nominalization," in Studies on Seman­ tics in Generative Grammar (The Hague: Mouton, 1970). 27. George O. Curme, Syntax (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1931), p. 446. 28. Dwight Bolinger, "Syntactic Blends and Other Matters,” Language 37 (1961), 366—381; Jan Svartvik, On Voice in the English Verb (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), pp. 159-163. 29. Jerrold J. Katz and Paul Postal, An Integrated Theory o f Linguistic Descriptions (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964), p. 80. 30. Joseph E. Emonds, A Transformational Approach to English Syntax (New York: Academic Press, 1976), pp. 69-74. 31. Khrakovsky, "Passive Constructions"; Irene Warburton, "The Passive in English and Greek,” Foundations o f Language 13 (1975), 563-578; John Haiman, "Agentless Sentences,” Foundations o f Language 14 (1976), 19-53. 32. J. Wackemagel, Vorlesungen über Syntax (Basle, 1926); Khrakovsky, "Passive Constructions." 33. The evidence for 3 is summarized in Bresnan, "Realistic Transfor­ mational Grammar,” pp. 44-45. 34. Charles N. Li and Sandra A. Thompson, "Subject and Topic: A New Typology of Language,” in Subject and Topic, ed. Charles N. Li (New York: Academic Press, 1976). 35. Basic here is used in the strict sense of E. L. Keenan in "Towards a Universal Definition of 'Subject,”’ in Li, Subject and Topic, p. 307. 36. Charles Fillmore, "The Case for Case," in Universals in Linguistic Theory, ed. Emmon Bach and Robert T. Harms (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), p. 58. 37. Vilem Mathesius, "On Linguistic Characterology” (1928), in A Prague School Reader in Linguistics, ed. Josef Vachek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), p. 66. 38. J. Firbas, "Non-Thematic subjects in Contemporary English,” Travaux linguistiques de Prague 2 (1966), 244—245; Wallace L. Chafe, Meaning and the Structure o f Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 219-222. 39. Leslie Butters, "Thematization and Topicalization: Their Functioning in Movement Tranformations in English,” Cahiers linguistiques d’Ottawa 5 (1977), 80-83. 40. Ian Watt argues that Augustan irony insists on differences of social rank by dividing its readers into an elite who can decode it and a mob who are mystified by it. It is thus a defense erected by aristo­ cratic sensibilities against middle-class encroachments; "The Ironic Tradition in Augustan Prose from Swift to Johnson,” in Restoration

410

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

=

Notes to Pages 160-167

and Augustan Prose, ed. James R. Sutherland and Ian Watt (Los An­ geles: University of California Press, 1956). The outstanding exception to my generalization about novelists is Henry James. See, for example, The Ambassadors, pp. 307—308. Ohmann is explicit on the psychological reality he attributes to syn­ tactic structures: "Quite literally the structures and forms in a literary work can only be forms—be realized as forms—in some mind. It follows that literary criticism is a study of mental structures"; "Mentalism,” p. 209. Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall o f the Roman Empire (1781), ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vols. (London and New York: Dent, n.d.), II, 28. David Hume, An Inquiry concerning Human Understanding (1758) (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1955), p. 140. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, III, 205. Since with can govern an agentive in Hume’s English, we have a kind of structural pun here: as an agentive phrase, with miracles forms a pair with by any reasonable person; as an adverbial phrase it forms a pair with without one. On the interpretation of parallelism, see the important observations of Roman Jakobson in "Linguistics and Poetics” (1958), in Essays on the Language o f Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R Levin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), as well as Jakobson’s numerous essays on poetic texts. Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729), in Satires and Personal Writings o f Jonathan Swift, ed. W. A. Eddy (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 26. Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild (1743) (London: Cass, 1967), p. 9. David Hume, The History o f England (1762) (London, 1789), p. 368. According to Svartvik, the number of passives per 1,000 words av­ erages 23 for science writing, 13 for writing in the humanities, 9 for everyday speech, and 8 for fiction; On Voice in the English Verb, p. 152. See, for instance, A. E. Darbyshire, A Grammar o f Style (London: Deutsch, 1971), pp. 87—88. G. W. Turner, "The Passive Construction in English Scientific Writ­ ing," AUMLA 18 (1962), 181-197. R. S. Westfall, Force in Newton s Physics (New York: Elsevier, 1971), p. 336. Isaac Newton, De mundi systemate liber (London, 1728), p. 3; A Treatise o f the System o f the World (1731) (London: Dawson, 1969), p. 5. The sources for these lists are as follows. (1) L. Kellner, Historical Outlines o f English Syntax (London: Macmillan, 1892), p. 224; Otto Jespersen, The Philosophy o f Grammar (London: Allen and Unwin,

Notes to Pages 170-175

411

1924), p. 167; Khrakovsky, "Passive Constructions," p. 72; Mathesius, A Functional Analysis, p. 107; Chafe, Meaning and Structure, p. 219; Haiman, "Agentless Sentences," p. 50. (2) Kellner, p. 224; Jespersen, p. 167; Mathesius, "On Linguistic Characterology,” p. 62; Fillmore, "The Case for Case,” p. 58; A. C. Partridge, Tudor and Augustan English (London: Deutsch, 1969), p. 134; Chafe, p. 221; R. W. Langacker and P. Munro, "Passives and Their meaning," Language 51 (1975), 820; Li and Thompson, "Subject and Topic,” p. 463; Warburton, "The Passive in English and Greek,” p. 571; Robert S. Kirsner, "On the Subjectless 'Pseudo-Passive’ in Standard Dutch," in Li, Subject and Topic, p. 389; Haiman, p. 50. (3) Kellner, p. 224; Jespersen, p. 168; Mathesius, A Functional Analysis, p. 107. Note that in the case of (2) I combine "topicalize” and "give prominence to" under "thematize."

The Agentless Sentence as Rhetorical Device 1. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719), ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 6. I have modernized the spelling. 2. Thus statal predicates as well as actional passives may fall into my class of passives, as long as they can plausibly take an agentive phrase. For justification of this treatment, see Jan Svartvik, On Voice in the English Verb (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), pp. 159-163. 3. See Maximilian E. Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). 4. See Jerrold J. Katz and Paul Postal, An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964), pp. 79-80. 5. See Joseph E. Emonds, A Transformational Approach to English Syntax (New York: Academic Press, 1976), pp. 69-74; Katz and Postal, Inte­ grated Theory, p. 80. 6. See V. Khrakovsky, "Passive Constructions," in Trends in Soviet The­ oretical Linguistics, ed. Ferenc Kiefer (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973); John Haiman, "Agentless Sentences," Foundations o f Language 14 (1976), 19—53. The psychological evidence is summarized in Joan Bresnan, "A Realistic Transformational Grammar," in Linguistic Theory and Psychological Reality, ed. Morris Halle, Joan Bresnan, and G. A. Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978). On the relative frequency of short and long passives, see Khrakovsky, p. 24. 7. Samuel Beckett, Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 12. 8. Henry James, The Ambassadors, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 307. 9. The basis of the distinction I draw between a stylistic device and a

412

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

Notes to Pages 176-180

rhetorical device is that, whereas the former may be peculiar to a single text, the latter has general application and can be said to form part of a rhetorical system. The notion of system is fundamental to the Aristotelian conception of rhetoric: see Rhetoric I.i. Of the 74 passives in a text of some 6,000 words, only 6 have an expressed agent. Two do not fall into any of the groups I have defined. For the four groups the counts are, respectively, 40, 15, 4, 7. Jonathan Swift, An Argument against the Abolishing o f Christianity, in Satires and Personal Writings o f Jonathan Swift, ed. W. A. Eddy (Lon­ don: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 11. I have modernized the spelling. See Paul de Man, "Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3, no. 3 (1973), 27-33. Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall o f the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vols. (London and New York: Dent, n.d.), Ill, 213. Gibbon’s footnote to the sentence glosses his meaning: "At Minorca, the relics of St. Stephen converted in eight days 540 Jews; with the help, indeed, of some wholesome severities, such as burning the syn­ agogues, driving the obstinate infidels to starve among the rocks, etc." Richard Ohmann, "Mentalism in the Study of Literature,” in Proceed­ ings o f the Conference on Language and Language Behavior, ed. Eric M. Zale (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968). Some of the de­ tails of Ohmann's analysis have been rendered obsolete by develop­ ments in grammatical theory, but the argument as a whole retains its force. See Harold Bond, The Literary Art of Edward Gibbon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 126. See Walker Gibson, Tough, Sweet, and Stuffy: An Essay on Modem American Prose Styles (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), p. 123; A. E. Darbyshire, A Grammar of Style (London: Deutsch, 1971), pp. 87-88; Julia P. Stanley, "Passive Motivation,” Foundations o f Lan­ guage 13 (1975), 37. In my essay “The Rhetoric of the Passive” I argue that, particularly in the prose of Newton, we see agentless sentences used as means for representing physical processes in regard to which the question of agency or cause is to be held in abeyance, outside the terms of the discussion. See also G. W. Turner, "The Passive Construction in En­ glish Scientific Writing," AUMLA 18 (1962), 181-97. See Ian Watt, "The Ironic Tradition in Augustan Prose from Swift to Johnson," in Restoration and Augustan Prose, ed. James R. Sutherland and Ian Watt (Los Angeles: University of California, 1956).

Notes to Pages 181-189

413

Isaac Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language 1. Wilhelm von Humboldt, "On the Differentiation of the Structure of Human Language and Its Effect on the Spiritual Development of the Human Race" (1830—1835), in Werke, vol. 3: Schriften zur Sprachphi­ losophie, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1963), pp. 433-434. 2. Wilhelm von Humboldt, "On Comparative Philology in Relation to the Various Epochs of Linguistic Evolution" (1820), ibid., p. 19. 3. See Robert L. Miller, The Linguistic Relativity Principle and Humboldtian Ethnolinguistics (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 103-120. 4. Benjamin L. Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings, ed. John B. Carroll (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956), pp. 240244. 5. E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization o f the World Picture, trans. C. Dikshoom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 479. I am indebted to this work for my sketch of the seventeenth-century back­ ground. 6. Quoted in ibid., p. 480; my translation. 7. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, letter of 1711, quoted in Alexander Koyre, Newtonian Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 141. 8. "Hypotheses non fingo." On the sense of hypotheses, and for an argu­ ment that fingo is better translated "feign," see ibid., pp. 36-39. 9. Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles o f Natural Philosophy, 3d ed., trans. Andrew Motte, translation rev. Florian Cajori (Berkeley: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1934), pp. 546-547; hereafter cited as Motte—Cajori. 10. Isaac Newton, Optics (New York: Dover, 1952), Book III, query 31 (p. 401). 11. Isaac Newton, letter of 1692, quoted in Dijksterhuis, Mechanization, p. 488. 12. Koyre, Newtonian Studies, p. 163. 13. Motte-Cajori, p. 397. 14. Newton, quoted in Rolf-Dieter Herrmann, "Newton's Positivism and the A Priori Constitution of the World," International Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1975), 207. 15. Motte-Cajori, p. 10. 16. Isaac Newton, Principia, Book III, prop. IV, scholium (Motte-Cajori, p. 409). 17. Ibid., prop. IV (Motte-Cajori, p. 407).

414

Notes to Pages 189-208

18. Isaac Newton, De mundi systemate (London, 1728), sec. 3; MotteCajori, p. 551. Newton’s Latin reads: "viribus centripetis Planetas in orbibus certis retineri posse” (p. 3). 19. Newton, Optics, Book III, query 31 (pp. 389, 401). 20. Charles Fillmore, "The Case for Case,” in Urtiversals in Linguistic Theory, ed. Emmon Bach and Robert T. Harms (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), p. 24. 21. The growth in the use of the passive is discussed in G. W. Turner, “The Passive Construction in English Scientific Writing," AUMLA 18 (1962), 181—197. Turner points to the evolution from the solitary scientific investigator to the team of investigators, and the resulting anonymity of the investigating agent, as an additional reason for the proliferation of agentless sentences. 22. Roman Jakobson, “Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry,” Lin­ gua 21 (1968), 597-609. 23. Richard Boyd, "Metaphor and Theory Change,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 360. 24. See, for example, Ian G. Barbour, Myths, Models and Paradigms (Lon­ don: S.C.M. Press, 1974), p. 44. 25. This is the Aufhebung of metaphor proposed by Hegel in The Philos­ ophy o f Fine Arts. See Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology,” New Lit­ erary History 6 (1974), 5-74, particularly 24-25.

Interview 1. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (1955), ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 126. 2. Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, Ber­ tolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics, trans. and ed. Ronald Taylor (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 180. 3. Neil Lazarus, "Modernism and Modernity: T. W. Adorno and Contem­ porary White South African Literature," Cultural Critique 5 (1987), 131-155. 4. J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times o f Michael /£( Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983), p. 228. 5. Nadine Gordimer, "The Idea of Gardening,” New York Review o f Books, 2 February 1984, pp. 3, 6. 6. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

Notes to Pages 209-221

415

7. J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1978), pp. 79,80. 8. J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981), p. 133. 9. Coetzee, Life & Times o f Michael K, p. 216. Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafka's "The Burrow" 1. Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, ed. Nathan Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), p. 325. Be­ cause the Muir translation is the standard one, I use it throughout in this essay except at points where the Muirs, perhaps baffled by Kaf­ ka’s unusual tense sequences, attempt to smooth out the time struc­ ture by silent emendation. I have indicated in notes all departures from the Muir translation, in most cases through reference to the German text edited by J. M. S. Pasley in Der Heizer. In der Strafkolonie. Der Bau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). Pasley’s text is based on a fresh reading of Kafka’s manuscript and improves on the text given by Max Brod in Franz Kafka, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5 (New York: Schocken, 1946). For a cautionary word about Pasley’s text, however, see Heinrich Henel, “Das Ende von Kafkas Der Bau,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 22 (1972), 22-23. 2. The Muir translation reads: " . . . while I was inside it.” 3. I follow the Brod text here. The Pasley text is in error; see Henel, "Das Ende," p. 23. 4. See Henel, "Das Ende,” p. 7. 5. Although the Muirs translate the next few verbs as preterites, they are present in form in the German. 6. For example: "In such cases as the present it is usually the technical problem [of tracking down the noise] that attracts me" (344); "often already I have fallen asleep at my work" (348); (when he begins to shovel soil) "this time everything seems difficult” (350). 7. Dorrit Cohn, "Kafka’s Eternal Present: Narrative Tense in ‘Ein Lan­ darzt' and other First-Person Stories,” PMLA 83 (1968), 144-150; idem, Transparent Minds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 8. Cohn, Transparent Minds, pp. 195—197. 9. Henel, "Das Ende," p. 6, 5. 10. Ibid., pp. 5—6. 11. The cases I cite in note 6 above are enough to indicate that Henel’s conclusions are generalizations rather than laws, in the sense in which I use the terms. His generalizations are further weakened by

416

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

Notes to Pages 221-226

a habit of selective quotation. For example, he writes of a “wholly new, hitherto never before grasped resolution" at which the creature arrives, “nämlich von dem Leben im Freien ‘Abschied zu nehmen,’ ‘niemals mehr zurückzukommen,' und der ‘sinnlosen Freiheit' auf immer den Rücken zu kehren” (p. 6). The paradox Henel does not face here is that even this decisive-sounding resolution is given in a form wholly compatible with an iterative time, as fuller quotation reveals: “Und ich habe Lust, Abschied zu nehmen . . . und niemals mehr zurückzukommen . . . Gewiß, ein solcher Entschluß wäre eine völlige Narrheit, hervorgerufen nur durch allzu langes Leben in der sinnlosen Freiheit" (pp. 121—122 in Pasley; pp. 335—336 in the Muir translation). It is the content of the phrases Henel quotes that leads him to think of the resolution as making a break in the cycle; but the paradox is precisely that in this story every irruption into the cycles of time is so ambiguously presented in temporal form that it seems at least capable of being absorbed into the cycles. Henel, "Das Ende," p. 4. "As present proper, it describes an occurrence achieving itself in the now; as historic present an earlier occurrence; as iterative present a present occurrence that has happened in the same way or a similar way fairly often; as progressive present likewise a present occurrence which extends into an indefinite, perhaps end­ less future; and finally the present can serve as a form of inner monologue" (ibid.). Gustave Guillaume, Temps et verbe (Paris: Champion, 1929); idem, Legons de linguistique, vol. 1, ed. Roch Valin (Quebec: Laval, 1975); W. H. Hirtle, Time, Aspect, and the Verb (Quebec: Laval, 1975). For discussion of this point see Bernard Comrie, Aspect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 42—43. Henry Sussman, "The All-Embracing Metaphor: Reflections on Kaf­ ka’s ‘The Burrow,'" Glyph 1 (1977), 104, 106. In the same part of his essay from which I quote, Sussman, however, gives a characterization of narrated time in the story that ignores the complexities of time and aspect I have tried to outline, in particular the “dissolve" from (B, E) to (Bj, Ej), followed by reversion. Thus Sussman's following argument, central to his reading of the story, is so much the weaker: "In having recourse only to the here circum­ scribed by the construction and the now in which the work of con­ struction goes on, or at least is contemplated, the voice of the text abolishes the ‘subject’ which is presumably its source and master. Although the ruminations of the animal are always in ‘self'-interest, in the absence of any subject, the self becomes the self of language, whose existence, like the concept of the animal, defines the negation

Notes to Pages 227-231

17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

417

of the (human) self” (104—105). It is irrelevant for the moment whether the self is "the self of language” (Sussman’s thesis) or the self of narration (as I would prefer): all that concerns me here is that Sussman’s argument is not well founded. In the postscript to his edition of the story, Max Brod, on the authority of Dora Dymant, writes that Kafka completed "The Burrow,” and that in the pages lost from the end the creature met his death in a fight with his enemy. However, Heinz Politzer argues cogently that there is no good reason to depend on Dora Dymant’s word and that the evidence points more strongly to the conclusion that Kafka himself destroyed the final pages, finding them unsatisfactory. See Max Brod, "Nachwort," in Kafka, Gesammelte Schriften (New York: Schocken, 1946), vol. 5, p. 314; Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), p. 330; Henel, "Das Ende,” pp. 15—16. Kafka did not prepare the manuscript for publication. We may therefore suppose that it never underwent a final revision. See the notebook entry for 11 December 1917, in which Kafka writes of the moment of expulsion from paradise as a moment eternally repeated, yet as belonging to a time that "cannot exist in temporal relation" to human time; Gesammelte Werke: Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande, ed. Max Brod (New York: Fischer/Schocken, 1953), p. 94. I take the description of the derivational relationship of past to pres­ ent from Roman Ingarden, Time and Modes o f Being, trans. Helen R. Michejda (Springfield, 111.: Thomas, 1964), p. 117. On the experience of the present in Kafka, see further Max Bense, Die Theorie Kafkas (Cologne and Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1952), p. 62; Jörg Beat Honegger, Das Phänomen der Angst bei Franz Kafka (Berlin: Schmidt, 1975), pp. 29-31. See, for example, Roman Jakobson: "It is the predominance of me­ tonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the so-called ‘realistic’ trend"; Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals o f Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), p. 78. See also Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), p. 195. Cohn, Transparent Minds, p. 197. Kafka, Hochzeitsvorbereitungen, pp. 73—74. Quite aside from the lit­ erary-biographical problem of relating the journal entry to a story written some six years later, we should be wary of erecting large interpretative edifices upon journal entries that may be no more than fleeting, partial insights developed in greater precision by the fiction. Cohn perhaps places too much reliance on this particular entry in her reading of "The Burrow." For a caveat against abstracting the

418

Notes to Pages 231-252

thoughts Kafka notes down in his journals from the particular density of the experiences they arise from, see Maurice Blanchot’s essay "La Lecture de Kafka,” in La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 9— 19. Blanchot writes: "The Journal is full of remarks that seem con­ nected to theoretical knowledge . . . But these thoughts . . . relapse into an equivocal mode that does not allow them to be understood either as the expression of a unique happening or as the explication of a universal truth” (p. 10). 23. Cohn’s paraphrase would fit more comfortably over Kafka's medita­ tions, in the same notebook, on the eternal return of the expulsion from paradise (Hochzeitsvorbereitungen, p. 94); that is, they describe a mythic present. I would suggest parenthetically that part of the reason for Cohn's failure to push her conclusions far enough may lie in her reliance on the treatment of the present in Harald Weinrich’s Tempus. Weinrich treats the "historic present" as an "als ob" for a past time and as a component of a "Metaphorik der Tempora." It is, however, precisely the metaphoricity of the narrative present that Kafka is bringing into doubt in this story. See Weinrich, Tempus: Besprochene und erzählte Welt (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964), pp. 125-129; Cohn, "Kafka’s Eternal Present," p. 149. Robert Musil's Stories of Women 1. Quotations are from Robert Musil, Five Women, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (1966; reprint, Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1986). This volume incorporates two stories by Musil not included in the 1924 collection, Three Women; hence the different title. Interview 1. J. M. Coetzee, Truth in Autobiography, 3 October 1984, University of Cape Town (pamphlet). 2. J. M. Coetzee, Foe (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986), p. 157. 3. J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron (London: Seeker Warburg, 1990), p. 91. Confession and Double Thoughts 1. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Albert C. Outler (London: SCM Press, 1955), II.iv,ix; pp. 54-55, 59; hereafter cited in the text. 2. In a useful essay in definition, Francis R. Hart describes confession as “personal history that seeks to communicate or express the essen­ tial nature, the truth, of the self," apology as "personal history that

Notes to Pages 252-259

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

419

seeks to demonstrate or realize the integrity of the self,” and memoir as "personal history that seeks to articulate or repossess the histor­ icity of the self.” Thus "confession is ontological; apology ethical; memoir historical or cultural"; "Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography,” in New Directions in Literary History, ed. Ralph Cohen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 227. For example, in the essays "Of Exercise or Practice” (Book II, chap, vi) and "Of Presumption” (Book II, chap. xvii). Montaigne expresses his intention to "see and search myself into my very bowels" in Book III, chap. v. Michel de Montaigne, Essays, trans. John Florio (London, 1891), p.430. See Peter M. Axthelm, The Modem Confessional Novel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). I use the term confessor to denote the one to whom the confession is addressed and the term confessant for the one who confesses. It is worth noting that Oswald Spengler, quoting Goethe’s lament over the end of auricular confession brought about by Protestantism, sug­ gests that it was inevitable that after the Reformation the confessional impulse should find an outlet in the arts, but also that, in the absence of a confessor, it is inevitable that such confession should tend to be "unbounded"; The Decline o f the West, trans. Charles F. Atkinson (Lon­ don, 1932), II, 295. Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), p. 233. Where I give the Russian, I quote from "Kreitserova sonata," in L. N. Tolstoi, Sochineniya, IV (Berlin, 1921), pp. 160-293. Subsequent references appear in the text. Leo Tolstoy, "An Afterword to The Kreutzer Sonata,” in Essays and Letters, trans. Aylmer Maude (London, 1903), pp. 36, 38. Donald Davie, "Tolstoy, Lermontov, and Others,” in Russian Literature and Modem English Fiction, ed. Donald Davie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 164. T. G. S. Cain, Tolstoy (London: Elek, 1977), pp. 148-149. On becoming engaged, Pozdnyshev (like Levin in Anna Karenina) hands over his intimate diaries to his future wife, who reads them with horror. Tolstoy draws in both novels on the episode in his own life when he gave his intimate diaries to his fiancee, Sonya Behrs. In his biography of Tolstoy, Henri Troyat describes the part the diaries played in the marriage. Quoting an entry from 1863 ("Nearly every word in his notebook is prevarication and hypocrisy. The thought that she [Sonya] is still here now, reading over my shoulder, stifles and perverts my sincerity"), Troyat comments that the "private

420

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

Notes to Pages 260-264

confessions” the couple made in their diaries "unconsciously turned into arguments of prosecution and defense” against each other. As Tolstoy's fame grew and it became clear that his diaries would one day become public, the question of what he might write in them became a matter of strife, his wife on occasion denouncing him in her diary for insulting her in his diary. In the last year of his life Tolstoy kept a secret diary, which he hid in his boot (his wife ferreted it out while he was asleep); Troyat, Tolstoy, trans. Nancy Amphoux (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 371, 397, 366, 718—719, 902, 917. Countess Tolstoy regarded The Kreutzer Sonata as neither a freefloating fiction nor a sermon but a personal attack "directed against me, [mutilating] me and [humiliating] me in the eyes of the whole world." She wrote a novel in response, denouncing Tolstoy, the preacher of celibacy, as a sexual brute, and was barely restrained from publishing it (Troyat, pp. 665-668). Rainer Maria Rilke, letter of 21 October 1924, in Henry Gifford, ed., Tolstoy: A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 187. William C. Spengemann, The Forms o f Autobiography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 15. Leo Tolstoy, My Confession, in My Confession and The Spirit o f Christ’s Teaching, trans. N. H. Dole (London, n.d.), p. 77; hereafter cited in the text. Where I give the Russian, I quote from Ispoved’ (Letchworth: Prideaux Press, 1963). The title can be rendered Confession or A Confession (there is no article in Russian). Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (Harmonds­ worth: Penguin, 1954), p. 829. Man “knows himself in consequence of and in accordance with the nature of his will, instead of willing in consequence of and in accor­ dance with his knowing"; Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, 4th ed. (London, 1896), I, 378. Matthew Arnold, "Count Leo Tolstoi," in Essays in Criticism, 2d series (London, 1888), p. 283. Leo Tolstoy, Life, trans. Isabel F. Hapgood (London, 1889), p. 70. V. V. Zenkovsky, A History o f Russian Philosophy, trans. George L. Kline (London: Routledge, 1953), I, 391. Quoted in Cain, Tolstoy, p. 9; Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences o f Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev, trans. Katherine Mansfield, S. S. Koteliansky, and Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1968), p. 30. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, anonymous translation, 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1931), I, 1; hereafter cited in the text. Where I give

Notes to Pages 266-269

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

421

the French, I quote from Oeuvres completes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), vol. 1. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 280. This strategy is common in Rousseau. For example: “Far from having been silent about anything or suppressed anything that might have been laid at my door, I often found myself tending to lie in the contrary sense, and accusing myself with too much severity rather than excusing myself with too much indulgence; and my conscience answers me that one day I will be judged less severely than I have judged myself"; “Quatrieme Promenade,” in Oeuvres completes, p. 1035; my translation. De Man, Allegories of Reading, pp. 285-286. See, for example, Wordsworth’s second “Essay upon Epitaphs” (1810): "Where [the] charm of sincerity lurks in the language of a tombstone and secretly pervades it, there are no errors of style or manner for which it will not be, in some degree, a recompense”; Prose Works, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), II, 70. See, for example, T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921): “A philosophical theory which has entered into poetry is established, for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and its truth in another sense is proved”; Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 118. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Plon, 1957), pp. 214—215. Ibid., pp. 228, 240. Annales, quoted in ibid., p. 243. Starobinski, Rousseau, p. 248. Though it is an easy eloquence that betrays Rousseau here, the lan­ guage of the Other from which he more often strives to free himself is the language of La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, and Pascal. “The great prose writers of seventeenth-century France,” writes Margery Sabin, "established an authoritative language of psychological de­ scription which drew strength precisely from the public character of language.” Rousseau carries his protest against this language of feel­ ing, says Sabin, down to “every level of the work, even to the impli­ cations of syntax and the meanings of individual words.” She goes on to give an exemplary analysis of Rousseau’s style in his description of his feelings for Mme. de Warens, where phrases “circle” the elusive feeling rather than pinning it down. “If his emotion remains elusive,

422

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

Notes to Pages 270-275

confusing, paradoxical—well, the style argues, that is the true nature of his inner life”; English Romanticism and the French Tradition (Cam­ bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 19, 29. The episode is recounted in Book VII (I, 261, 292-294). Starobinski comments that Rousseau first uses “the principle of im­ mediacy" to clarify his psychology, but that almost at once this prin­ ciple “takes on the value of a superior justification, of a moral im­ perative" of higher validity than “ordinary rules of right and wrong" {Rousseau, p. 132). In fact the principle is not given a moral coloring in the passage I am considering. For example, in the discussion of his “miserliness” during his time with Mme. de Warens, or of his dislike of giving money for sex (Books V, VII; I, 188, 261). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 157, 163— 164, 245. It might be objected that I draw too sharp a line between being aware and not being aware of the "deeper” truth, ignoring the gradations and subtleties of self-deception that stretch between the extremes of innocence and mendacity. But, as Michel Leiris for one recognizes, the autobiographer takes on himself in the same way that the torero takes on the bull: there are no excuses for defeat; Manhood, trans. Richard Howard (London: Cape, 1968), p. 20. For this account of the mechanism of self-deception I im indebted to Herbert Fingarette, Self-Deception (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 8687. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest Mossner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 300. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Insulted and Injured, trans. Constance Garnett (London, 1915), pp. 240-251. This is in essence the position taken by Alex de Jonge in Dostoevsky and the Age o f Intensity (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1975). De Jonge's thesis is that many of Dostoevsky’s confessants—Valkovsky, Marmeladov, and Svidrigailov among them—are adherents of a “cult of intensity" founded by Rousseau, who exploit the masoschistic plea­ sures of self-abasement. De Jonge sees Dostoevsky as a psychologist of confession exploring the ways in which people with no sense of self, no sense of guilt, no interest in the truth, use self-revelation as an instrument of power and pleasure (pp. 175—176, 181, 186—187). Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the Dostoevskian novel is a form of Menippean satire, a mixture of fictional narrative with philosophical

Notes to Pages 276-286

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46. 47.

423

dialogue, confession, hagiography, fantasy, and other usually incom­ patible elements. In addition, says Bakhtin, Dostoevsky exploits the old European tradition of the carnival, where customary social re­ straints may be dropped and utter frankness may reign in human contacts; Problems o f Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Man­ chester: Manchester University Press, 1984), chap. 4. To Bakhtin the confession is thus in the first place a structural element of Dostoev­ sky’s fiction, though he goes on to explore a "dialogic" attitude toward the self in Dostoevsky’s first-person narrators, the self becoming its own interlocutor (chap. 5). Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, in Notes from Under­ ground and The Grand Inquisitor, ed. and trans. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: Dutton, 1960), pp. 6, 8, 9, 16, 8; hereafter cited in the text. The metaphor of self-consciousness as a disease is a common­ place in Europe by the 1860s. "Self-contemplation . . . is infallibly the symptom of disease,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1831: only when "the fever of Scepticism" is burned out will there be "clearness, health”; "Characteristics,” in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (Lon­ don, 1899), vol. 3, pp. 7, 40. See also Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Roman­ ticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness,”’ in Romanticism and Conscious­ ness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 46-56. On Part I of Notes from Underground as a critique of the Nihilism of the the 1860s, see Joseph Frank, “Nihilism and Notes from Under­ ground,” Sewanee Review 69 (1961), 1-33. "I wish to declare . . . that if I write as though I were addressing readers, that is simply because it is easier for me to write in that way . . . I shall never have readers" (35). "Metaphysical concern for the end of Man is realized in the most formal attributes of the structure of [Dostoevsky’s] novels, the nar­ rative shape. And this is so because he was among the first to recog­ nize that what a man might be could not be separated from the question of what might constitute an authentic history”; Michael Holquist, Dostoevsky and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 194. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. David Magarshak (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), pp. 344-346; hereafter cited in the text. Where I give the Russian I quote from Idiot (Kishinev, U.S.S.R.: Kartya Moldovenyaske, 1970). I have amended Magarshak's translation slightly, rendering imenno as "precisely” rather than "merely." The paradox of the seed probably comes from John 12:24: "Except a

424

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

Notes to Pages 287-302

corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." The verse is quoted in The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (London, 1927), I, 320. “There will be full freedom when it will be just the same to live or not to live . . . He who will conquer pain and terror will himself be a god . . . Every one who wants the supreme freedom must dare to kill himself . . . He who dares kill himself is God”; The Possessed, trans. Constance Garnett, with a translation of the chapter "At Tik­ hon’s” by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York: Modern Library, 1936), pp. 114-115; hereafter cited in the text. Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer­ sity Press, 1965), p. 276. However, the paradox inherent in the notion of self-compulsion stands. And, at the moment of stress when Stavrogin confesses "the whole truth," namely that he wants to forgive himself, and asks for "measureless suffering," Dostoevsky returns to a dualistic psychology in which an “inner” self utters itself: Stavrogin speaks "as if the words had again issued from his mouth against his will” (727). Insofar as the metarule of the game is that the rules should not be spelled out—in fact that it should not be spelled out that there are any rules, or any game—the account of the mechanisms of self-de­ ception given by Fingarette neatly describes the game (see note 36 above). Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Diary of a Writer, trans. Boris Brasol (London: Cassell, 1949), II, 787-788. Interview

1. J. M. Coetzee, "Blood, Taint, Flaw, Degeneration: The Novels of Sarah Gertrude Millin," English Studies in Africa 23, no. 1 (1980), 41-58; reprinted in Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture o f Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 136—162. 2. "Andre Brink and the Censor," Research in African Literatures 21, no. 3 (1990), 59-74; "Censorship and Polemic: The Solzhenitsyn Affair,” Pretexts 2, no. 2 (1990), 3-36; "Breytenbach and the Censor," Raritan 10, no. 4 (1991), 58-84. The Taint of the Pornographic 1. C. H. Rolph, ed. The Trial of Lady Chatterley (London: privately printed, 1961), pp. 70-72, 89-90, 159.

Notes to Pages 303-312

425

2. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (New York: Modern Library, 1957), p. 252; hereafter cited as LCL. 3. D. H. Lawrence, A Propos o f Lady Chatterley's Lover (London: Man­ drake Press, 1930), pp. 9-10. 4. Tylor, quoted in Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis o f Concepts o f Pollution and Taboo, rev. ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 13. 5. Rolph, Trial, p. 98. 6. Ibid., pp. 253, 255. 7. Ibid., p. 265. 8. The force of "bad language" that the gamekeeper exerts on Connie is clearest in the first version of the story. In one episode, Parkin/Mellors derides Connie’s word "lover" and confronts her with himself as her "fucker." "‘Fucker!’ he said, and his eyes darted a flash at her, as if he shot her"; The First Lady Chatterley (London: Heinemann, 1972), p. 108. This aggressive verbal act is directed not only by Parkin at Connie: as Evelyn J. Hinz points out, the baring of obscene words is also a baring of the teeth by Lawrence at his (British) readers; "Por­ nography, Novel, Mythic Narration: The Three Versions of Lady Chat­ terley’s Lover,” Modernist Studies 3 (1979), 41. 9. D. H. Lawrence, Selected Letters, ed. Diana Trilling (New York: Farrar, Straus, Cudahy, 1958), p. 275. 10. For the first three, see D. H. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (New York: Viking, 1966), pp. 26-30, 32-51, 52-67; hereafter cited as SLC. 11. Jonathan Swift, "The Lady’s Dressing Room,” "Cassinus and Peter,” "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed," and "Strephon and Chloe"; Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 448-466. 12. For a detailed reading along these lines, see T. B. Gilmore, "The Comedy of Swift's Scatological Poems," PM LA 91 (1976), 33-41. 13. Lawrence writes: "There is a poem of Swift's . . . written to Celia, his Celia—and every verse ends with the mad, maddened refrain: ‘But— Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”' (SLC, p. 29). Huxley published his essay on Swift in 1929. See Aldous Huxley, On Art and Artists, ed. Morris Philipson (New York: Harper, 1960), pp. 168-176. 14. D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 28 December 1928, SLC, p. 26; Introduction to Pansies, SLC, p. 29; A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, p. 14. 15. See David Burnley, A Guide to Chaucer’s Language (Norman: Univer­ sity of Oklahoma Press, 1983), chap. 8. 16. At this point Lawrence writes most clearly under the influence of

426

Notes to Pages 312-318

Frazer. To Frazer, what characterizes the savage is a failure to distin­ guish between unholiness and uncleanness. As Mary Douglas points out (Purity and Danger, pp. 10-11), by relegating uncleanness to the kitchen and bathroom, Christianity makes it a m atter of (secular) hygiene, leaving holiness as a purely moral/spiritual category. From this point of view—which Lawrence, with his nonconformist Chris­ tian background, seems to share—to revive what ought to be a m atter of simple hygiene as a taboo with the force of religion (or superstition) behind it, is precisely a throwback to savagery. 17. Rolph, Trial, pp. 221-224. At least one observer came away convinced that the jury failed to understand the prosecution’s innuendos. John Sparrow, "Regina vs. Penguin Books Limited,” Encounter 18, no. 2 (February 1962), 35-43. 18. Georges Bataille: "Organized transgression together with the taboo make social life what it is. The frequency—and the regularity—of transgressions do not affect the intangible stability of the prohibition since they are its expected complement . . . just as explosion follows upon compression. The compression is not subservient to the explo­ sion, far from it; it gives it increased force." Bataille quotes Sade: "The best way of enlarging and multiplying one’s desires is to try to limit them"; Death and Sensuality, anonymous translation (New York: Walker, 1962), pp. 65, 48. 19. This verdict essentially repeats Henry Miller’s. Reading Lady Chatterley as an obscene book, rejecting the notion that any justification of obscenity can or should be given, Miller concludes that it is “a pity . . . that Lawrence ever wrote anything about obscenity, because in doing so he temporarily nullified everything he had created”; The World o f D. H. Lawrence (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1980), pp. 175— 177. Censorship in South Africa 1. J. C. W. van Rooyen, Censorship in South Africa (Cape Town: Juta, 1987), p. 7; hereafter cited as CSA. 2. As van Rooyen presents the story, Mulder's intervention had nothing to do with his own feelings. As responsible minister, "he does not choose sides, but simply refers the book to the Appeal Board when uncertainty arises as to whether the decision of the [relevant] com­ mittee was right [juisY; Publikasiebeheer in Suid-Afrika (Cape Town: Juta, 1978), pp. 13—14; hereafter cited as Publikasiebeheer. 3. CSA, 7. In calling its language vague, van Rooyen by no means intends criticism of the Act.

Notes to Pages 318-323

427

4. Publications Control Board, "Die tweede beslissing oor Magersfontein, O Magersfontein!” Standpunte 33/4 (no. 148) (1980), 11. 5. "Even though [the average man] might, in an unguarded moment, laugh at or become interested in the [reading] matter in question, his actions very often differ from his ideals of what should be allowed to be published and distributed”; Publikasiebeheer, 64. 6. D. N. MacCormick, "Privacy and Obscenity," in Censorship and Ob­ scenity, ed. Rajeev Dhavan and Christie Davies (London: Martin Rob­ ertson, 1978), pp. 83-93. 7. Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement o f Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); H. L. A. Hart, Law, Liberty and Morality, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seri­ ously (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). Dworkin points out that what appears to be a single argument in Devlin is in fact two arguments. The first is that society has a moral right to protect itself by imposing its standards on those who dissent, particularly when the public persistently voices feelings of "intoler­ ance, indignation and disgust” on the issue. Dworkin labels this ar­ gument "intellectual sleight of hand”: since "nothing more than pas­ sionate public disapproval is necessary” before the organs of the state are called into action, we are not in the area of morals at all but of politics (pp. 242-245). For this reason he dismisses it. The second argument Dworkin identifies in Devlin states that a society has a right to protect its central social institutions against acts that the vast bulk of its members disapprove on moral principle. One premise of this argument is that legislators must follow "any consensus of moral position which the community at large has reached" because this is a m atter of "democratic principle" (Devlin, p. 17). But in fact this argument fails too, says Dworkin, because Devlin uses the notion "moral position” in a merely "anthropological sense." "It remains possible that this common opinion is a compound of prejudice . . . rationalization . . . and personal aversion (represent­ ing no conviction but merely blind hate ...)" (Dworkin, pp. 253-254). 8. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, p. 254. 9. Hart, Law, Liberty and Morality, pp. 48-49. 10. Ibid., p. 58. 11. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, p. 24. 12. Ibid., p. 258. 13. In making inner conviction one criterion of true moral belief, Dworkin diverges from Mill, who identifies unreasoned inner conviction with mere opinion: "The contest between the morality which appeals to an external standard, and that which grounds itself on internal con­

428

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

Notes to Pages 324-329

viction, is the contest of progressive morality against stationary—of reason and argument against the deification of mere opinion and habit”; quoted in John C. Rees, John Stuart M ill's On Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 45. Alexander Welsh argues powerfully that the political philosophy of J. S. Mill, and in particular his belief that conflict results from in­ adequate knowledge, was a determining influence on Freud’s concep­ tion of censorship. Like Mill, Freud saw social rather than political constraint as the enemy. In The Interpretation of Dreams, the topics subjected to censorship are much the same as those not addressed freely in social intercourse: sex, aggression, ambition, negative judg­ ments; John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 63; Alexander Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 352—353. Gilbert Marcus, "Reasonable Censorship?" in Essays on Law and So­ cial Practice in South Africa, ed. Hugh Corder (Cape Town: Juta, 1988), pp. 353, 356. Van Rooyen writes of a "tide of conservative reaction" that had by that time subsided in Britain and the United States but, by impli­ cation, had not yet subsided in South Africa (CSA, 14-15). "A sickly [sieklike] treatment of sex." An instance of digital manipu­ lation of a woman’s sex organs is "perverse,” part of "a sickly and morbid treatment of the sexual." Of a novel in which a murderer castrates his victim and leaves his testicles in his mouth: "Something of this kind belongs in a book about psychiatry. To give these revolting descriptions in fiction amounts to a dehumanization and bestialization of man" (Publikasiebeheer, 17, 18, 81). Sickness/health is a wellestablished metaphor in South African legal discourse as it seeks an object on to which to displace the undesirable. In 1972, for instance, the chief justice identified as his moral touchstone "the average mod­ ern reader with a healthy mind” (CSA, 56). For Gordimer's own comment on these charges, see Nadine Gordimer et al., What Happened to Burgers Daughter (Johannesburg: Taurus, 1980), pp. 22-23. Marcus, "Reasonable Censorship?” p. 352. Sigmund Freud, "Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Ac­ count of a Case of Paranoia” (1911), in Pelican Freud Library, vol. 9, ed. James Strachey and Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 218; hereafter cited as "Paranoia.” Ibid., pp. 213-214. CSA, 147. As an instance of the extension of this metarule to the day-

Notes to Pages 330-345

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

429

to-day operations of the censorship itself, I cite an extraordinary judgment dating to 1971, which van Rooyen quotes in no spirit of criticism. The court prohibited a play in which interracial sex was favorably presented, not on the grounds that the play itself repre­ sented indecent/obscene/offensive/harmful acts but on the grounds that it brought the law against performing certain acts (namely inter­ racial sexual acts) into contempt (Publikasiebeheer, 124). On the entire question of the authority of moral judgments, see R. W. Beardsmore, who argues persuasively that "in morality the notion of being in a better position to judge lacks sense”; "The Censorship of Works of Art,” in Philosophy and Fiction, ed. Peter Lamarque (Aberdeen: Ab­ erdeen University Press, 1983), p. 102. "Paranoia,” pp. 200-201. Far from taking Freud’s little table of trans­ formations lightly, Jacques Lacan argues that it is a powerful explan­ atory account; De la psychose paranoiaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalite (1932) (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 261-262. See Kenneth M. Colby, Artificial Paranoia: A Computer Simulation o f Paranoid Processes (New York: Pergamon, 1975); Margaret A Boden, "Freudian Mechanisms of Defense: A Programming Perspective," in Freud: A Collection o f Critical Essays, ed. Richard Wollheim (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1974), particularly pp. 252—253, 263—264; William S. Faught, Motivation and Intentionality in a Computer Sim­ ulation Model o f Paranoia (Basel: Birkhauser, 1978). Lacan, De la psychose paranoiaque, p. 293. Sigmund Freud, "Negation” (1925), in Standard Edition, vol. 19, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), p. 239. Freud, in a 1937 paper quoted by J. Laplanche, and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language o f Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), pp. 262-263. Ibid., pp. 139. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles o f Morals and Legislation (1823) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), pp. 205, 3, 23.

Man's Fate in the Novels of Alex la Guma 1. Wole Soyinka, "The Writer in the African State," Transition, no. 31 (1967), 12. 2. Lewis Nkosi, "Fiction by Black South Africans,” in Introduction to African Literature, ed. Ulli Beier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 211. 3. Ibid., p. 212.

430

Notes to Pages 345-359

4. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman (Lon­ don: Methuen, 1967), p. 14. 5. The editions used in this essay are: A Walk in the Night (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967); And a Threefold Cord (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1964); The Stone Country (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1967); In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (London: Heinemann, 1972). La Guma published one more novel before his death in 1985: The Time o f the Butcherbird (London: Heinemann, 1979). 6. Lewis Nkosi develops the same metaphor in the story "The Prisoner," reprinted in African Writing Today, ed. Ezekiel Mphahlele (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Comparing the two treatments, one can see that La Guma's allegiance belongs to an earlier literary generation than Nkosi’s does. 7. See Alain Robbe-Grillet, "Nature, Humanism, Tragedy,” in For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 49— 75. Robbe-Grillet's epigraph is from Roland Barthes: "Nothing is more insidious than tragedy.” 8. "Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of what­ soever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the secret cause”; Stephen Dedalus in Portrait o f the Artist as a Young Man, pt. 5. 9. The doubling of the hero complicates the structure. Each of the herovictims acts as audience to the other, each is purged in and by the process of the other's suffering, and the reading audience is disen­ franchised by having its catharsis embodied in the drama. This de­ velopment is at least consistent with the nonparticipatory nature of book-reading. 10. Georg Lukacs, Studies in European Realism, trans. Edith Bone (Lon­ don: Hillway, 1950), pp. 170, 171. 11. Georg Lukacs, The Meaning o f Contemporary Realism, trans. John & Necke Mander (London: Merlin, 1962), pp. 34, 35. 12. Gustave Flaubert, letter of October 2, 1856. Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), II, 635. 13. Sartre, What Is Literature? p. 75. 14. Roland Barthes describes how the style of nineteenth-century French realism, with its "spectacular signs of fabrication," came to be adopted first by the petit bourgeoisie as a favored style for their reading m atter and later by socialist realist writers. See "Writing and Revolution,” in Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968), pp. 67—73.

Notes to Pages 369-382

431

Athol Fugard, Notebooks, 1960-1977 1. Athol Fugard, Notebooks, 1960—1977, ed. Mary Benson (New York: Knopf, 1984). Breyten Breytenbach, The Confessions of an Albino Terrorist and Mouroir 1. Breyten Breytenbach, The True Confessions o f an Albino Terrorist (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985) and Mouroir (New York: Far­ rar, Straus and Giroux, 1984). Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture 1. Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture, ed. Stephen Clingman (Jo­ hannesburg: Taurus; Cape Town: David Philip, 1988).

Sources and Credits

"The Comedy of Point of View in Beckett’s Murphy." First published in Critique 12 (1970). "The Manuscript Revisions of Beckett’s Watt." An abridged version of an article first published in Journal o f Modem Literature 2 (1972). Copy­ right Temple University. Quotations courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. "Samuel Beckett and the Temptations of Style.” First published in Theoria, no. 41 (1973). "Remembering Texas." First published as "How I Learned about Amer­ ica—and Africa—in Texas" in the New York Times Book Review, 15 April 1984. The original text has been restored. "Achterberg’s 'Ballade van de gasfitter’: The Mystery of I and You." First published in PM LA 92 (1977). Copyright Modem Language Associa­ tion of America. "The First Sentence of Yvonne Burgess’ The Strike." First published in English in Africa 3 (1976). "A Note on Writing." First published in Momentum: On Recent South African Writing, ed. M. J. Daymond, J. U. Jacobs, and Margaret Lenta (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1984). Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech. Delivered in Jerusalem in April 1987 on the occasion of receiving the Jerusalem Prize. "Captain America in American Mythology." First published in University o f Cape Town Studies in English, no. 6 (1976). "The Burden of Consciousness in Africa.” First published in Speak (Cape Town) 1, no. 1 (1977). “Four Notes on Rugby." First published in Speak 1, no. 4 (1978). "Triangular Structures of Desire in Advertising.” First published in Crit­ ical Arts (University of the Witwatersrand) 1 (1980). "The Rhetoric of the Passive in English.” First published in Linguistics 18 (1980). “The Agentless Sentence as Rhetorical Device." First published in Lan­ guage & Style 13, no. 1 (1980). "Isaac Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language.” First published in Journal o f Literary Semantics 11 (1982). "Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafka’s ‘The Burrow.”' First published as 433

434

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"Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafka’s ‘Der Bau”' in Modem Language Notes 96 (1981). "Robert Musil's Stories of Women." A review of Robert Musil’s Five Women first published in the New York Review o f Books, 18 December 1986. Copyright © Nyrev, Inc. "Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky." First published in Comparative Literature 37 (1985). "The Taint of the Pornographic: Defending (against) Lady Chatterley.” First published in Mosaic 21, no. 1 (1988). “Censorship in South Africa.” First published in English in Africa 17 (1990). "Man’s Fate in the Novels of Alex La Guma.” First published in its present version in Studies in Black Literature 5 (1974). "Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State." First published in shorter form in the New York Times Book Review, 12 January 1986. Review of Athol Fugard, Notebooks, 1960-1977. First published in New Republic, 9 April 1984. Review of Breyten Breytenbach, True Confessions o f an Albino Terrorist and Mouroir. First published in New Republic, 11 March 1985. Review of Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture. First published in Die Suid-Afrikaan, no. 24 (December 1989).

Index

Achterberg, Gerrit, 57-61, 69-90, 197 Adams, Henry, 26 Adorno, Theodor, 201 Advertising, 127-138 American literature: gothic tradition in, 111-114; mythic reading of, 108, 110-114 Aristotle, 149, 346 Augustine, Saint, 251-252 Autobiography, 17-19, 105, 391-395 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 422n40 Barrow, John, 117 Barth, John, 87, 92 Barthes, Roland, 62, 94, 105, 430nl4 Bataille, George, 426nl8 Beardsmore, R. W., 428n21 Beckett, Samuel, 1, 19, 20, 21-23, 26, 31-49, 51, 86-87, 198, 228, 393; pas­ sive construction in, 174 Bentham, Jeremy, 332 Benveniste, Emile, 71, 94 Blanchot, Maurice, 417n22 Boetie, Dugmore, 336 Borges, Jorge Luis, 92 Bourne, George, 20 Bresnan, Joan, 141, 155 Breton, Andre, 22, 91 Breytenbach, Breyten, 341, 342-343, 366, 375-381 Brink, Andre, 298 Buber, Martin, 72-74 Buffalo, State University of New York at, 336-338 Bultmann, Rudolf, 74 Burchell, William, 19 Burgess, Yvonne, 91-93 Captain America, 107-114 Carroll, Lewis, 404n20

Censorship, 297-298; and morals, 321324; and paranoia, 328-332; in South Africa, 298-301, 315-332 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 62, 66-67, 86, 98-99, 104, 130-131, 133 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 86, 311-312 Chomsky, Noam: and passive construc­ tion, 153-154; and universal gram­ mar, 52, 104 Cocteau, Jean, 380 Coetzee, J. M.: biographical data, 1921, 25-26, 29, 50-53, 141, 197, 297, 392-395; and film, 59-60; as novel­ ist, 249; and postmodernism, 3-4, 56, 62-63; professional career, 1-13, 397n3; as South African writer, 4, 12-13; and structuralism and lin­ guistics, 23-25; and universal gram­ mar, 52, 104 writings: Age o f Iro n , 11-12, 249250, 340-341; on Beckett, 25-27; on censorship, 297-298, 338; "Confes­ sion and Double Thoughts," 243250; D u sk la n d s, 5-6, 19, 21, 22, 2627, 28, 52, 58, 142-144, 243, 338, 343; Foe, 10, 58, 143, 146, 205, 245, 246, 247-248; In the H ea rt o f the C o u n try, 6-7, 58-62, 198; L ife & T im es o f M ic h a e l K , 9-11, 58, 142143, 198-199, 204-209, 245, 246, 300; poems, 19, 22; on popular cul­ ture, 103-104; on South African writers, 335-341; stylistic studies, 21—23, 197; translations, 57, 75-86; W a itin g fo r th e B a rb a ria n s, 8-9, 104105, 141-143, 198, 207, 209, 245, 246, 300, 363, 394; W h ite W ritin g , 23, 58, 106, 338, 339 Cohn, Dorrit, 218-220, 230-232 Confession (genre), 251-253, 291 Conrad, Joseph, 47 435

436

Index

Cricket, 122 Criticism, literary, 105-106, 243, 246 Defoe, Daniel, 146, 252; passive con­ struction in, 170-174 de Jonge, Alex, 422n39 de Man, Paul, 152, 266-267, 269 Derrida, Jacques, 245-246, 249, 272273 Devenish, Ross, 115-120 Devlin, Patrick, 322-323, 324 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 37-38, 131-132, 243250, 252, 275-292, 392 Dworkin, Ronald, 322-323, 332 Eliot, T. S., 86, 421n25 Emants, Marcellus, 57 Faverey, Hans, 57 Fielding, Henry, passive construction in, 164-165 Fillmore, Charles, 158, 191-192 Fingarette, Herbert, 422n36 Flaubert, Gustave, 47, 86, 130, 314, 338, 352, 360, 365 Ford, Ford Madox, 19-20, 31 Foucault, Michel, 246-247 Freud, Sigmund, 108, 235-236, 238, 244- 245, 249, 328, 363 Fugard, Athol, 115-120, 298, 341, 369374 Gibbon, Edward, 146; passive con­ struction in, 159-163, 164-165, 168, 177-180 Girard, Rene, 104-105, 127-138, 288 Gordimer, Nadine, 207, 298, 341, 366368,382-388 Grammar: and meaning, 147-149; uni­ versal, 52, 104 Guillaume, Gustave, 197, 221-224, 229 Hart, Francis R., 418n2 Hart, Herbert L. A., 322-323 Hegel, G. W. F., 131, 378 Hemingway, Ernest, 148-149 Henel, Heinrich, 220—221 Herbert, Zbigniew, 67 Holquist, Michael, 281

Hume, David, 274; passive construc­ tion in, 164-165 Huygens, Christian, 185-186, 187 Ingarden, Roman, 231, 417nl9 Inglis, Fred, 136-138 Interview (genre), 64-66, 205-206, 249 Irwin, John T., 363-364 Jakobson, Roman, 71, 192-193, 417n20 James, Henry, 409n40; passive con­ struction in, 174. See a lso American literature Joyce, James, 430n8 Kafka, Franz, 197-204, 210-232 Kant, Immanuel, 341 Kenner, Hugh, 393 Kierkegaard, Sören, 74-75 Kundera, Milan, 66-67, 98 Lacan, Jacques, 29-30, 65 La Guma, Alex, 300-301, 335-338, 345-360, 365-366 Language and reference, 70-73, 91-93 Lawrence, D. H., 297, 302-314 Leavis, F. R., 136-137 Leibniz, G. W., 145, 185-186, 187, 191 Leiris, Michel, 422n35 Leroux, Etienne, 298, 310, 316-317, 325-327 Lessing, Doris, 357 Linguistic relativity principle, 143144, 181-184, 191, 230 Louw, N. P. van Wyk, 339 Lukäcs, Georg, 201-202, 338, 351-352 MacCormick, D. N., 321 Mao Tse-tung, 338 Marais, Eugene, 115-120 Marcel, Gabriel, 74 Marcus, Gilbert, 324, 327 Marcuse, Herbert, 110 Marx, Karl, 335, 347 Mauriac, Claude, 92 Metaphor, 192-194 Mill, John Stuart, 427nl3 Miller, Henry, 426nl9 Millin, Sarah Gertrude, 297

Index Modernism and postmodernism, 8688,198-203 Mofolo, Thomas, 336, 339 Montaigne, Michel de, 249, 252, 253, 264,291 Mphahlele, Es'kia, 336 Musil, Robert, 198, 208, 233-239 Nabokov, Vladimir, 27-29, 31, 87, 254 Naturalist novel, 346-347 Neruda, Pablo, 22 Newton, Isaac, 143-146, 184-194, 197; passive construction in, 165-167, 168,190-191 Nkosi, Lewis, 344-345, 430n6 Ohmann, Richard, 146, 147-148, 150, 159-163, 164-165 Passive construction, 149-169; and Bresnan, 155; and classical rhetoric, 150-153; and Prague School, 158, 408n24; and topicalization, 158-159; and transformational syntax, 153— 154,172-173 Passive construction, uses of, 159-169, 170-180; by Beckett, 174; by Defoe, 170-174; by Fielding, 164-165; by Gibbon, 159-163, 164-165, 168, 177180; by Hume, 164-165; by Henry James, 174; by Newton, 165-167, 168, 190-191; in scientific prose, 165-167, 192-194; by Swift, 164165,168, 175-177, 179-180 Paton, Alan, 97, 338, 347-348, 357 Plaatje, Sol, 339 Polet, Sybren, 57 Popular culture, 103-104 Pound, Ezra, 239, 393 Propp, Vladimir, 23 Quintilian, 151,408nl4 Richardson, Samuel, 66 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 27-28, 236 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 380 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 249, 252, 263, 264-274, 276, 277, 279, 284, 291 Rousseau, Leon, 118-119 Rugby, 121-125

437

Sabin, Margery, 421n30 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 59, 74, 105, 131, 345,353 Scheler, Max, 134 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 262 Sepamla, Sipho, 364-365 Serote, Mongane W., 365 Simon, Claude, 380 Snyman, J. H., 315, 317, 326 South Africa: and Afrikaner ethos, 374; censorship in, 298-301, 315-332; cultural politics of, 335; ethnic iden­ tity in, 341-343; life in, 96-99, 248; literary criticism in, 63-64, 95; po­ lice and prisons, 361-368, 375-378; and white mythology, 115-120; writ­ ers in, 66, 98-99, 198-200, 338-340, 344-345; writing in, 64, 66-68, 209, 335, 339-341 Soyinka, Wole, 344 Spengler, Oswald, 419n5 Sport and play, 124-125 Starobinski, Jean, 267-268, 271 Sterne, Laurence, 86 Stevens, Wallace, 72, 75 Stylistics, 22, 141-142, 197 Sussman, Henry, 226 Swift, Jonathan, 39, 146, 246, 297, 308-311, 314; passive construction in, 164-165, 168, 175-177, 179-180 Texas, University of, 26, 52-53 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 132 Tolstoy, Leo, 239, 245, 249, 252, 253264, 269, 272-274, 291-293 Translation: practice of, 88-90; theory of, 182-183 van Rooyen, J. C. W., 315-327, 329330, 332 van Wyk, Christopher, 362-363 von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 143, 181-183 Vroman, Leo, 57 Watt, Ian, 146 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 182-184, 194. See a lso Linguistic relativity princi­ ple Whorf hypothesis. See Linguistic rela­ tivity principle

438

Index

Wiersma, Stanley M., 88-89 Wittig, Monique, 404nl8 Wordsworth, William, 421n24 Writing: under censorship, 291-300; fiction, 203-204, 205, 246; and mid-

dle voice, 94-95; and torture, 363368 Zola, Emile, 338, 345-346, 347

"The interviews are seiious colloquies, and they illuminate the exis they discuss, but above all they give a strong impression of the author on his own view of what he is trying to do. One is left with an impression of a deeply informed mind. Coetzee is a writer of international stature, far above mere regional interest, and we can hardly help being interested in his being an Afrikaans-speaking South African. This is a book of distinction." - Frank Kermode Nadine Gordimer has written of J. M. Coetzee that his "vis on goes to the nerve-centre of being. What he finds there is more than most people will ever know about themselves, and he conveys it with a brilliant writer's mastery of tension and elegance." Doubling the takes us to the center of that vision. These essays and interviews, documenting Coetzee's longtime engagement with his own culture, and with modern culture in general, constitute a literary autobiography of striking intellec­ tual, moral, and political force. Centrally concerned with the form and content of fiction, Doubling the Point provides rigorous insight into the significance of certain writers (particularly modernists such as Kafka, Musil, and Beckett), the value of intellectual movements (from structuralism and structural linguistics on through deconstruction), and the issues of political involvement and responsibility— not only for Coetzee's own work, but for fiction writing in general. In interviews prefacing each section of the book, Coetzee reflects on the essays to follow and relates them to his life and work. In these interviews editor David Attwell, remarkably well attuned to his subject, prompts from Coetzee answers of extraordinary depth and interest.

An internationally acclaimed novelist, J. M. Coetzee is a professor of general literature at the University of Cape Town. His books include Waiting for the ,ia B b sr Life & Times of Michael K, and, most n recently, The Age of Iron.

H arv a r d U n i v e r s i t y Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

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