Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market and the Gift 9781442688643

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Beyond Primitivism
Part 1: After Strange Goods: The Economic Unconscious of Imperialist Modernity
Part 2: Multiplying the Public: Abject Modernism and Its Institutions
Part 3: The Parodic Shaman: Imperialist Modernity and the Blackened Gift
Part 4: The Impure House: Re-imagining Aboriginal Modernity
Conclusion: Modernism and Utopia
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

MODERNIST GOODS: PRIMITIVISM, THE MARKET, AND THE GIFT

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GLENN WILLMOTT

Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market, and the Gift

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TO R O N TO P R E S S Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-08020-9769-9

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Willmott, Glenn, 1963– Modernist goods: primitivism, the market and the gift / Glenn Willmott. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9769-9 1. English literature – History and criticism. 2. Primitivism. 3. Modernism (Literature). 4. Capitalism and literature. 5. Economics and literature. 6. Politics and literature. I. Title. PN441.W55 2008

820.9

C2007-907216-X

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

vii

Introduction: Beyond Primitivism

3

Imperialist and Aboriginal Modernities Commodities, Gifts, and Goods 13 Stoker’s Abject Kin 23

7

Part 1: After Strange Goods: The Economic Unconscious of Imperialist Modernity 43 Yeats’s Proper Dark 43 Lawrence’s Profane Work Lovecraft’s Doubles 80 Conrad’s Desertions 96 Structure and Style 122

71

Part 2: Multiplying the Public: Abject Modernism and Its Institutions 131 Part 3: The Parodic Shaman: Imperialist Modernity and the Blackened Gift 161 Eliot’s Savage Possessions 161 Woolf’s Fugitive Rites 193 Beckett’s Unnamable Magic 199

vi

Contents

Part 4: The Impure House: Re-imagining Aboriginal Modernity 209 Amatory Modernisms 209 Joyce’s People 228 H.D.’s Heritages 250

Conclusion: Modernism and Utopia 261 NOTES

279

WORKS CITED INDEX

325

311

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank my colleagues and students at Queen’s University, and those who kindly hosted me at the Université de Montréal, for listening and responding to trial bits and pieces of this project, as well as the Four Directions Aboriginal Centre at Queen’s and the Modernist Studies Association, whose annual conferences over several years have indirectly nourished it. I am also grateful for the patient assistance offered by research librarians at Queen’s University and at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, as I am particularly to Ms. Alex Ward of the National Museum of Ireland, for a tour and discussion of its holdings of Dun Emer artifacts. In preparing my writing for publication, I am indebted to Ms. Jill McConkey for much appreciated editorial support and critical sense, and to UTP and ASPP manuscript readers for their wisdom and frankness. I specially thank Professor Cory Willmott at the University of Illinois, who guided me at the inception of this project to a wealth of resources on economics and anthropology, and Professor Yaël Schlick at Queen’s, for invaluable personal and intellectual support throughout the project, and for her unerring readerly insights at its final stage. The research presented in this book was carried out with the aid of a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Excerpt of ‘Calypso’ by HD (Hilda Doolittle), from Collected Poems, 1912– 1944, copyright © 1982 by the Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpt by HD (Hilda Doolittle), from Hippolytus Temporizes & Ion, copyright © 1927, 1937 by Hilda Aldington, copyright © 1985, 1986 by Perdita Schaffner. Reprinted

viii Acknowledgments

by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpt by HD (Hilda Doolittle), from Tribute to Freud, copyright © 1956, 1974 by Norman Holmes Pearson. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

MODERNIST GOODS: PRIMITIVISM, THE MARKET, AND THE GIFT

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Introduction: Beyond Primitivism

In 1927, when the wealthy philanthropist Charlotte Mason employed Zora Hurston to collect Southern black folklore for her, the pair signed a legal contract unusual in the history of modernist cultural exchange. Both disabling and productive for the black writer, and both degrading and rewarding for the white contractor, the legal agreement captures what deep down was at stake in the larger economy of modernist goods that will be surveyed in the following pages. Mason’s officiously stated, notarized contract with Hurston is unusual because – unlike her arrangements with Langston Hughes and others in the New Negro movement – it clearly distinguishes its form of exchange from philanthropy in explicitly hiring the services of Hurston at a monthly salary as a collector of folklore, whose product will be the exclusive property of her employer. Exercising such control, Mason wished to protect such property from assimilation and degradation to the materialistic wasteland she perceived in white culture itself – a fate she considered threatened black writers themselves. The contract is unusual for its ironies, then, but also exemplary – merging the familiar machinery and dangers of the marketplace with an idiosyncratic spiritual mission, supposedly antagonistic to it. Did Mason appropriate Hurston’s work? Did Hurston appropriate the work of her informants? To what ends? The meaning and status of the intellectual property regulated by this contract must always float uncomfortably between multiple owners and the economic and social formations straddled by them. By the time Mason met Hurston, she was already an established philanthropist, a devoted donor to ‘primitivist’ cultures, first Native-American, more recently Negro, since the turn of the century. Hurston’s biographer Valerie Boyd has pointed out that she signed a conventional contract

4 Modernist Goods

for a research assistant, while John Stewart, in a close reading of the economic nature of Harlem Renaissance patronage, agrees, arguing that Mason, despite her notoriously intimate, intrusive relations with writers, does not behave as a patron in any traditional sense, but rather as a businesswoman.1 In other words, Mason has long wished to cultivate what she calls ‘primitivism’ through conventional philanthropic mechanisms, but by 1927 cultivation is no longer enough, and she wants returns. She wants not only to assist, but to own, the culture she collects. Moreover, she is eccentric enough to want to own it in some ‘primitivist’ sense she held alien to the marketplace, yet realistic enough to know she cannot thereby assimilate herself to the actual worlds of Hurston’s black storytellers. What does this misfit desire to own culture mean? Stewart details Mason’s increasing desire to surreptitiously ‘author’ the work of her indebted writers, yet to remain curiously disarticulated from literary and publishing institutions: she forbids Langston Hughes from naming her in his book dedications or acknowledgments, and forbids all the writers she funds from naming her in public. ‘Mason’s motives for supporting Hughes and other writers like Hurston and Locke,’ Stewart carefully observes, ‘lay not in any desire for fame, immortality or recognition, but in her will to control in some way writers who could provide the kind of work she wanted to see produced. She wished to have agency concerning his subject and style, to wield power over aspects of their authorship in a manner that developed and perpetuated her idea of the primitive.’2 To put it bluntly, she wants to be a black writer while knowing well that she isn’t; she wants to produce black literature while remaining indifferent to its literary marketplace and perhaps even to any public. She wants to possess the ‘primitive,’ and to make it feel her own – she will literally domesticate it, bring it home (her writers are called her ‘children,’ she is their ‘Godmother’), not racially through affiliation with its genealogical body but materially through its heritage goods. Hence the unusual cross-cultural, crossracial contract: the ‘primitive’ is not only a transferable mind or spirit or world view or sensibility; it is an agency and a thing. In securing intellectual property that Hurston acquires from others (via a complex range of non-commodity transactions) in her domestic vault, Mason is able to produce from her commodity transaction with Hurston a further change in its property status. What she wished to do with it is not clear, but simply being its custodian is key. Henceforth it will have no market value, but one that links its spiritual value specially to the

Introduction 5

owner, as she supposes it originally did before collection. As such it will resist re-commodification (Mason scorned any expression of ‘primitivism’ that seemed to her to consort with profane, white interests and institutions). Thus, this newly domesticated heritage property will mimic for her a ‘primitive’ economy, in which such property is an inalienable sign of an individual’s identity and social meaning, and grounds the symbolic order of a powerful, if fictively constructed, new community (in this case, all Mason’s protégés, white, brown, and black, by whom she must be recognized by the name Godmother, a formation I will shortly categorize as a modern House). The Floridians’ and others’ heritage stories are now Mason’s stories – not Hurston’s, not the anthropologists’, not the world’s. Leave salvaging to others. Mason clearly wants to reverse assimilate herself via this property, to revive the wasteland of white society in person, not merely culturally but materially, as the self-fashioned elder and matriarch of a new, cross-racial tribe. For she isn’t finally interested, as all accounts of her intrusive, passionate relations with her ‘children’ show, in the goods – in appropriation, for which the black writers would only be a means – but in the novel affiliations those goods will mediate and secure with her employees and dependents themselves – in what I will call a modernist ethnogenesis. Paradoxically, however, and surely with a touch of abjection, she will use her formidable commodity resources and array of market instruments to accomplish these ends. Mason’s apparent motivation, a feeling that one lacks culture itself, and must appropriate or build it anew, is curiously broad and amorphous. Are all modern peoples with non-capitalist heritages, whether caught in the enclaves of slavery or colonialism, the only ‘cultured’ ones? This is a rhetorical question. Mason’s own bourgeois society is cultural, in that it symbolically organizes work, needs, and desires. But it is fair to judge that Mason would never imagine Hurston using her training to collect folklore from Mason herself, because she wouldn’t think of her society as holding a common creative heritage, nor any individual as a reliable informant. For the bourgeois modern, exotic others are the only ones seemingly free of that culturally corrosive anomie, of alienation and deracination, which would seem to afflict the modern West with a multiform spiritual malaise and to threaten a sort of cultural extinction. Is the last possible cultural act of the marketplace, therefore, to muster resources in order to speculate upon its own non-market future, to transvalue the agencies and things of realms it has enveloped in exploitation and commodification, into utopian

6 Modernist Goods

goods of its own? This would appear to be Mason’s exemplary gambit, and in the pages that follow, to be the symptomatic gambit of a modern primitivism. I will suggest that such a gambit is less fantastic or delusive than might first appear, insofar as it bridges market and non-market economic forms in order to imagine a genuinely non-capitalist modernity, and insofar as non-capitalist heritages alive in the modern day, such as black and Native-American traditions, really do provide, in their struggles with imperialist market-driven institutions, instructive models for such an imagination. As such, the record of modern primitivism may be seen to be deeply ambivalent, rather than simply reactionary. The record is also idiosyncratic: modern primitivists, who discovered simultaneously something called culture and their lack of it, could only resort to the tangle of their particular lived experience and geopolitical vortices. Hence there is no blueprint for the politics or affect of modern primitivism in the pages to follow, only a set of coordinates suggested by broad changes in economic and private life that have attended liberal imperialist modernization in the English-speaking world, within which self-styled attempts to restitute culture, to make it new for good or ill, may be compared. In order to develop this claim, I will need a keyword for noncapitalist heritages in all their multiform diversity, one that keeps in view not only their reproduction through various kinds of economically defined spheres and enclaves, but also their historically conflicted relationship to an alienating and expansionist – in practice, during this period, imperialist – logic of the modern marketplace. I will call such heritages ‘aboriginal,’ as distinct from ‘imperialist,’ so that I may refer both to those many social formations designated aboriginal by common usage and to those that operate similarly according to primarily gift rather than commodity economies, and are caught in the same historical machinery. As such, aboriginal heritages may be found not only in tribal realms exotic or marginal to the West, but also in economic and social enclaves within it, which have in common what I will later call an ethnogenetic resistance to capitalist values and their imperialist media. Such resistance will, in this study, as in Mason’s imaginary yet real ethnogenetic production of a Park Avenue longhouse, never simply be for good or ill. But its utopian value is that aspect of an imperialist heritage itself that is most obscure today, and worth some trouble to emphasize.

Introduction 7

Imperialist and Aboriginal Modernities Modern history in this light is constitutively aboriginal – not only on its colonizing frontiers, but also in the ineradicable, inner struggles of an imperialist West that is far from historically unitary or socially homogeneous. In a way that is only more or less veiled, only more or less contested, depending on who and where you are, modern life is at core an aboriginal experience, and modernism – so I will argue – may be grasped as a form of aboriginal expression. I must admit it is infelicitous to appropriate the ‘aboriginal’ as such in reference to the West, where it currently plays a political role as an identity distinct from the ‘settlercolonist.’ My expanded usage has its failings, if differences in historical experience and cultural systems are thereby confused and flattened out, and the stakes in such experience forgotten. I will try to avoid these pitfalls by mediating between general economic and social categories and the irreducible particularity of individual writers and their modernist projects, as suggested above. Meanwhile, the heuristic value of an expanded usage for ‘aboriginal’ here, in the context of a literary study, has another political role to do with critical practice: we have learned as scholars of all kinds not to lock notions of aboriginal history and culture (in the common usage sense) into categories of the past, yet we seem to have sequestered them anyway, on discursive reserves from which they now carry on a dialogue with a modernity still too often conceptualized as antithetical, misappropriating, or simply wrong about them. Hence Native Studies, one of the most important fields of new scholarship and radical institutional challenges, is routinely considered a kind of knowledge applicable only to Native-authored literature; and despite those elements that are of wider ethical purpose (regarding human, animal, literary, or other realms not exclusively Native), Native Studies has yet to be much consulted when non-Native writers are at stake. But why not? This book is the result of trying to do so; it is the attempt of an author whose political imagination has been influenced by first-wave Native Studies, and who has sought languages of cultural analysis provided by contemporary anthropology, to discern in modernism a literature of aboriginal, not only imperialist, crisis. The variable meaning and stakes of this crisis may hardly be noticed, or may inundate our lives, but I believe they are everywhere. If the aboriginal is modern, however, then we have systematically to think of modernism in all its diversity, even as an outgrowth of

8 Modernist Goods

imperialist heritage, as an expression of equally diverse aboriginal modernities. We have to carry the implications of an embattled or degraded, exotic or endemic, aboriginal present farther than has heretofore been done, into the notions of modernity and modern art themselves, whose notorious history of imperialism, on the one hand, and whose very primitivism, on the other, are too readily supposed to stand austerely in contradistinction to it. To do so is to plunge immediately into that mire just named: primitivism. For it seems unavoidable that I will here affirm, like a primitivist, what a hotly criticized exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984–5 proclaimed to be the ‘Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.’3 This ‘universalizing allegory of affinity’ was proclaimed everywhere in the exhibition, says ethnographer James Clifford, but explained nowhere. It vaguely suggested an ‘allegory of kinship’ drawn from ethnography, while it masked, on the contrary, an evacuation of all values and meanings from objects, excepting aesthetic ones. Here modernism appears to be defined by a ‘primitivism’ that is really a projection of its own aestheticism, and is characterized by a vague ‘search for “informing principles” that transcend culture, politics, and history.’ For example, says Clifford, ‘a three-dimensional Eskimo mask with twelve arms and a number of holes hangs beside a canvas on which Joan Miró has painted colored shapes. The people in New York look at the two objects and see that they are alike.’4 Primitivism is the discourse of a cultural appropriation, then, in which modernism transvalues things according to, as Simon Gikandi puts it, its own ‘aesthetic ideology.’ And this ‘allegory of affinity’ is still, writes Gikandi in 2003, ‘the reigning paradigm in the study of modernism and primitivism.’5 Is this true, and if so, how can we avoid it? The first question requires something of a detour, as the notion of ‘primitivism’ is too various in usage to so easily get a handle on. Gikandi moves back and forth between primitivism in visual art and in literature as if these distinctions made no difference to his argument; Picasso is presented as exemplary for both. Yet how do we correlate this with a seductive alternative argument, coming from the side of art history, that modern primitivism was none other than ‘a desire to overthrow the literary with the visual’?6 For it is undoubtedly true both that primitivism in literature has been almost entirely indifferent to the ‘primitive’ as a category of form, which was Roger Fry’s paradigmatic claim, and that form remains the privileged sign of ‘affinity’ diagnosed by Clifford above.7 For example, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) has typically

Introduction 9

been thought exemplary of the influence of her friend, Picasso, for its translation of cubism – associated via Picasso with an originary ‘primitive’ influence – from the visual arts into a comparably abstractionist literary form. But Tender Buttons has not typically been thought an example of primitivist writing. If anything in her work can be considered primitivist, it is perhaps her ‘Melanctha’ (1909), which Michael North reads as ‘racial ventriloquism’ and ‘racial masquerade.’ But even here, North does not argue for the kind of affinity enshrined by an aestheticist ideology, and rather emphasizes the significance of the black speaker as meaningful content, and the images and values associated with it as content, in order to register the novel’s modernist form.8 Indeed, instances of primitivist form in literature – such as the ‘down-home blackface diction’ of an e.e. cummings poem discussed by Rachel Blau DuPlessis,9 or any number of modernist works influenced by early jazz or blues – are more likely to present a particular ‘primitive’ form because of a host of explicit cultural values – unrepressed sexuality, closeness to nature, isolation from bourgeois economy, holistic sensibility, empowering spirituality, existential suffering, non-alienating community – associated with it, rather than despite them. Primitivism in modernist literature is not motivated by quite the same ‘allegory of affinity,’ proper to a formalist and mystifying aesthetic ideology, that Gikandi claims generally to be the rule. Nevertheless, the hasty list of cultural values associated with literary primitivism above should give pause, and suggest that a somewhat different allegory of kinship, no doubt akin to the one I have been discussing, has certainly haunted modernist literature. And Gikandi speaks of it, too, in the form of an unanswered question: ‘How do we transcend the established doxa that it was through the acquisition of the “mythical method” or “mystical mentality” inherent in primitivism that, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, art was made possible for the modern world? What is the source of this idea, the unquestioned notion that the art of the primitive emerged from a mystical, preconscious mentality and found its ideal form in myth?’10 This is the supposed affinity of tribal and modern instinct, for lack of a better word. By instinct, I mean access to some deep and non-rationalist mode of being, spiritual, sexual, or social, that enables a more holistic and less repressed or oppressed individual life. In Eliot’s time, this affinity was expressed via interests in the universal animism codified in aboriginal myths (across archaic, tribal, and modern cultures) catalogued and explored for his generation by the immensely influential Edward Tylor and

10 Modernist Goods

James Frazer; by ideas of mythic thinking later propounded by scholars such as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Ernst Cassirer; by racialized ideas about ‘primitive’ sensuality and sexuality; and by the powerful connection of myth, archetype, and sexuality in the increasingly popular psychoanalytic discourses of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Hence, when we think of modernist primitivism, we are more likely to think of what D.H. Lawrence has to say about spirituality or sex in The Plumed Serpent (1926), than of how he says it. It comes as no surprise, then, that Michael Bell, in a rare survey of literary primitivism, touches hardly at all upon the possibility of literary forms drawn from (or supposed to be drawn from) aboriginal cultures, on the model of Picasso and the African masks he viewed at the Trocadero. Rather, Bell finds in modernism the pursuit of a ‘primitive sensibility.’ This is the representation, either in a realist psychological register of narrative, or in a lyric allusive register in verse, of ‘precivilized feeling and thought’ – which is to say, the representation of animism. So far is this subjective sensibility, this instinct, from having any particular objective correlative that ‘we are concerned here not with the mythical objects or stories themselves,’ Bell tells us, ‘but with the primary mode of response to the external world and to human nature from which all the particular mythic forms derive.’ 11 He accordingly studies modernist writing with or without any explicit reference to aboriginal people or heritage. This bold statement of an allegory of affinity, here expressing an instinctual rather than aesthetic ideology, goes to the heart of the bond between primitivism and modernism at large. It accounts for a great diversity of primitivist expression: the oceanic feeling felt by Virginia Woolf’s and D.H. Lawrence’s characters, as well as the lust and horror felt by Joseph Conrad’s characters and by Eliot’s figures; or the racialized sensuality and sexuality made into a fetish in texts as diverse as flowed from the pens of Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway, and William Carlos Williams. To enumerate such instances is to be reminded of what is so striking about ‘Melanctha’ and other ‘ventriloquized’ writings mentioned above, that such instinct is a fantasy projection, a cultural construction or convention. Like North, and many other critics working in this area, it seems we cannot but abandon any notion of authentic affinity articulated in the ‘primitive sensibility,’ and rather, at best, try to show how such (fictive) constructions are used self-reflexively or otherwise ambivalently, thereby retaining a radical edge to the politics of

Introduction 11

modernism. The ensuing logic plays out like this: Regarding the primitivism of author X, let us say, (a) it’s just a fiction, true, but the fiction is being revealed as fiction and knowingly messed with as fiction; (b) this enlightens our understanding of the cultural codes by which we understand not only aboriginal others, but any others as well as our normative selves; and (c) this work of enlightenment will not diminish our negative assessment of the primitivism projected upon or implicitly referred to an other by author X, but it will weigh equally in the ethical balance. This line of thinking, which is of course postmodernist in the stake it places in the suspension of the real represented by literature and in the political effectiveness of the code, has produced persuasive studies of deconstructive or otherwise radically self-reflexive primitivists,12 of male versus female primitivists,13 of Euro-American versus NativeAmerican primitivists,14 and of Euro-American versus African-American primitivists.15 Even Bell prefigures this logic when, at the end of his survey, he announces that ‘the entire anthropological background of the preceding discussions … is highly questionable,’ but that ‘both anthropologists and creative writers have projected their versions of the primitive onto the strictly unknowable past and from our point of view what matters is not the scientific validity of either but the common area of intent and intuition that has made cross-fertilization possible.’16 In following this line of logic, present-day critics writing on primitivism take their point of departure from the more strongly stated and central assertions of Marianna Torgovnick’s pioneering 1990 study of primitivism in modern literature, the arts, Freud, and ethnography, Gone Primitive. Torgovnick takes primitivism to be a discourse built of ‘tropes’ brought into being by and for a ‘Western sense of self and other,’ with the result that ‘the primitive can be – has been, will be (?) – whatever EuroAmericans want it to be.’17 And for her, too, these wants can go beyond ‘hegemonic’ interests and even radically challenge them.18 It would seem fair to conclude that the ‘reigning paradigm in the study of modernism and primitivism’ in literature is an allegory, not of affinity, but of alienation. I mean this in double but overlapping senses. The first is Brechtian: critics draw our attention again and again to mask-wearing, ventriloquizing, and the performativity of self, while the conventionality of the masks, the voices, and the gestures is made explicit and tendentially or manifestly open to other and conflicting codes. Modernist primitivism is simply primitivism played out with its own estrangement effects. The second sense of alienation draws on the more common usage: I mean the resignation on the part of current

12 Modernist Goods

scholars to a tacitly unrepresentable difference between archaic and aboriginal social forms and heritage arts and the primitivism that is supposed to represent them. Modernist primitivism, however valuable its radical relationship to imperialist European and American cultures, cannot be measured against ethnographic knowledge; for it is alienated from, rather than akin to, the lives and cultures it seeks to emulate. This allegory of alienation is easily recognizable as a mirror inversion of the allegory of affinity. Its danger is to reify otherness as implacably as the latter does instinct. In answer to the problem posed by Gikandi’s critique of primitivism, then, I would suggest that in a way, a negative image or shadow of the ‘allegory of affinity’ continues to reign today. The monster itself may have been slain, but modernism remains a divided kingdom, seemingly unable to enter into exchange with or even meaningfully to speak of what is other to its own culture, what remains other to the discourses (from the conservative to the avant-garde) of its imperialist and capitalist heritage. Such a situation may itself be viewed as a type of primitivism, crossing cultural divides only to assimilate or exclude. If as literary scholars we are to insist, however, that modernism is an expression of aboriginal as well as imperialist modernities, then we need to admit a view of the relationship between aboriginal and imperialist social formations that will register what they share, without descending into the mysticism of instinct or confining ourselves to one-sided codes. An alternative view of relationships between aboriginal and imperialist cultures presents itself as soon as we approach them from the terrain of current anthropology. Far from ‘the tribal’ and ‘the modern’ failing to communicate with each other, each locked within unique and incommensurable logics, it is generally recognized that the two have always been composed of elements of each other, criss-crossed and transformed by each other’s histories and symbols. The tribal is the modern. A paradigmatic statement of this view, and touchstone for much recent ethnography, is Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other. Fabian argues that a modern imperialist ideology, with which anthropology has often been complicit, has assigned a different ‘time’ to its own ‘body politic,’ which is the present, and to its conquered aboriginal populations, which is the past. As a result, aboriginal peoples of the modern period are not considered to really inhabit or constitute modernity; they can never be modern without ceasing to be themselves. Against this notion, of course, one should recognize that aboriginal peoples – most of whose histories have in any case evolved together

Introduction 13

with imperialist histories of social, technological, and economic modernization – are equally modern. And whatever obstacles and possibilities grow out of the global present toward future ways of life, are growing not only out of the powerful social formations of an imperialist heritage but also out of those, often less powerful yet decidedly consequential, of aboriginal heritages. This means that our very sense of the ‘new,’ which is so bound up with modernism, must include what I have called ‘aboriginal modernity’ – all those forms of social life and memory that have been categorized as ‘past’ – if the ‘new’ is really to be grasped in all its diversity and power. I shall return to the implications of this imperative more generally at the end of this book. Here I will pursue its implications for primitivism understood as a discourse of translation between apparently unlike or uncommunicative alternatives: imperialist and aboriginal cultures. For it is surely not a stable, primitive identity with the other that is claimed by the modernist primitive, but a more mercurial mediation, the ability to enter into so as to bring back forms and values from realms of the other. The paradigmatic statement is again T.S. Eliot’s: ‘And as it is certain that some study of primitive man furthers our understanding of civilized man, so it is certain that primitive art and poetry help our understanding of civilized art and poetry. Primitive art and poetry can even, through the studies and experiments of the artist or poet, revivify the contemporary activities … [The artist is] the most and the least civilized and civilizable; he is the most competent to understand both civilized and primitive.’ Eliot’s statements are made in the context of a review of an anthology of Native North American songs and chants, and it is significant that translation is his point of critique: ‘When the translator uses the word “beauty,” the contemporary poet wants to know the Navajo equivalent for this word, and how near an equivalent it is. Also, to what extent is an “interpretation” allowed to diverge from a “translation”? The poet and the anthropologist both want to be provided with these data.’19 But why? What is at stake for the poet as for the anthropologist? What is it that the modernist writer needs thus to mediate and translate, between modern empire and the social formations it would conquer, that goes under the name ‘primitive’? Commodities, Gifts, and Goods We may take our starting point from that anthropological tradition which itself has to do with a fundamental kind of mediation or

14 Modernist Goods

translation: the study of material and symbolic exchange in aboriginal economies. In his influential book of 1925, The Gift, Marcel Mauss sought to describe an archaic type of economy – and, by extension, a radically different type of culture – organized around gifts rather than commodities. In this tradition, the term ‘gift’ has a special meaning. Briefly stated, gifts always signify the social identity and power of their original owner or owners; the latter remain spiritually involved in them, and may even retain a claim over them. Thus gifts, even if materially detachable from the person, are inalienable as opposed to alienable objects. Chris Gregory calls them personified, as opposed to objectified, for this reason.20 Georg Lukács had made the second process a cornerstone of Marxist philosophy: persons are objectified in commodities actually, through the alienation of labour, as well as ideologically, through reification.21 Gregory invokes this Marxist principle in order to counterpose to it the alternative economic regimes that are of interest to anthropologists following Mauss: things are personified in gifts because they are valued from the point of view of consumption rather than production – which is to say, from the point of view of human reproduction, as understood by all its kinship forms and symbols. This distinction helps us to understand why the act of giving gifts is not directed to the production of marginal profits between persons or groups important only as independent buyers and sellers, as is ideally true of commodities, but is directed to the institution and manipulation of a complex system of social rights and obligations between persons or groups important for their social and cultural roles. The point of gift exchange, says Marilyn Strathern in The Gender of the Gift, is not to produce incremental wealth but to produce new social relations, new dependencies and affiliations.22 For many anthropologists, as for Mauss himself, the economic and cultural differences between gifts and commodities are ultimately moral and political, and provide the basis of a radical critique of, or social imagination profoundly different from, capitalist modernity. The present study is no exception, although Strathern’s powerful analysis of different forms of oppression and domination realized by actually existing societies organized by the gift foregrounds an important critical perspective: the value of economic and cultural comparisons is as little served by a romantic idealization of non-capitalist heritages as it would be by simple-minded condemnation of the multitudinous liberal social transformations unleashed by capitalism in the West. The critical value is in what may be learned

Introduction 15

from either and translated into the contingencies of any reader’s present situation as an imaginative and practical politicization in his or her locale – a project which clearly extends beyond the visible limits of scholarly writing. I will not here retrace, from Mauss to the present, the rich tradition of arguments about what Mauss really meant, what his informants really meant, what gifts really are, and whether they really do offer a radical alternative to contemporary capitalist culture.23 Some of these arguments will be referred to in subsequent pages. The only perspective to be rejected at the outset is one that would see the difference claimed between notions of gift and commodity as a kind of mystification to be deconstructed; such is occasionally inspired by a misreading of Jacques Derrida’s work in Given Time, an essay which addresses a philosophical notion of the pure gift having little relevance to postMaussian ethnographic usage and hence refrains from engaging any contemporary scholarship in that field. It is from that field that I will need, as a starting point, to synthesize a global model of symbolic exchange mindful of Fabian’s critique, one that is sensitive to current ethnographic knowledge and thus suitable to the historicist notion of aboriginal modernity I propose. To that end, a useful model may be drawn from recent revisions of the institution of the gift by Annette Weiner and Chris Gregory. In Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange, Gregory continues the tradition initiated by Mauss of using a comparative model of economic exchange to challenge the inevitability and desirability of capitalist culture as an imperialist – hegemonic and expansionist – force in modern history. But in so doing, he does not regard gifts and commodities as exclusive classifications for any given object, nor assume that they classify past versus present, or Western versus non-Western societies. He also subdivides Mauss’s ‘gift’ category into inalienable detachables, which are properly gifts, and inalienable keepsakes, which he calls goods. Examples of goods include household relics, stories, and land. Goods, gifts, and commodities are distinguished by the roles they play in three basic social institutions: House, Market, and State. This institutional triangle provides a base upon which to build a language of translation or mediation between aboriginal and imperialist modernities. Gregory explains: Material [as well as intangible] objects of use to people, such as land, rice, rupees, dollars, cowries, silver, and gold, are transformed into marked

16 Modernist Goods social forms such as gifts, commodities, and goods, and the process through which they acquire these values are institutions such as the Market, the House, and the State … A material object such as silver is now a commodity, now a gift, now a good depending upon the specific context of a transaction. If commodities are those values that arise as things pass from House to Market, then gifts are those values that pass between Houses and goods the inalienable keepsakes that are stored within a single House.

While it is perhaps simplest to think of the Market as the place of the commodity, and the House as the place of gifts and goods, it is best not to forget the institutional background that defines these things in terms not of place but of process. The ‘Market’ refers to institutions of alienable commercial exchange, material and speculative. Where we find a modern ideology that fetishizes the Market process in place of processes of House and State, Gregory names it free-market anarchism. While ever contested, this remains an ideological reference point of capitalist culture. Meanwhile, the ‘State’ is the realm of token money, ‘created by marking commodities such as gold, silver, copper, or paper with a sign such as $, £, ¥, Rs and recognising the product so created as legal tender within a clearly defined territory.’ Though not discussed by Gregory, a modern ideological fetish of the State may perhaps be similarly discerned where State practices of territorializing, legitimating, and legislating value conversions in place of processes of House and Market are recognizably totalitarian. This has been an enduring fear and temptation among capitalist cultures. Finally, the ‘House … can be defined as a corporate body who owns an estate consisting of land, tools and livestock, and intangibles such as family stories, names, titles, religious powers, and character.’24 What modern ideology would, in complementary fashion, fetishize the House in place of the Market and State? Tribalism? Clannishness? Or more simply, domesticity? Intriguingly, it may be impossible to speak of an ideology of the gift: Strathern has shown that for Melanesian gift societies there can be no ideology in the familiar sense of concealment or mystification of real social relations, even where there is oppression or domination. Rather, the gift there operates according to an aesthetic of explicit alternation between eclipsing and revealing different social realms through their differently gendered images.25 This leads to three general lessons to bear in mind when thinking of gifts, Houses, and societies. First, neither Houses nor gifts, though machinery for the production of new relations embodied in material signs (of property

Introduction 17

and use), need be homogeneous, undifferentiated by groups or realms having different powers, or symmetrical in such powers. That the House is a kind of body-snatching or robotic, unitary organism is a modernist fantasy shortly to be considered, when I discuss the ethnogenetic figure of the vampire. That the House might also be considered an aesthetic construct reminds us too that identity in House societies has more to do with contingent bonds of image and fiction than with any systemic policing of real genealogy or blood. The modernist Houses to be encountered in this book are all flagrant fictions and fantasies, however seriously offered, however concrete their institutional realization. Such fiction may produce a unitary aesthetic or a dialogic one, whatever its roots in existing aboriginal modernity. An important, because typical, differentiation within the politics of House-dominated societies, which is also reflected in modernist writing, is that in them the role and power of women as producers and exchangers of things is fundamental. Even House-dominated societies ruled mostly by male chiefs, Annette Weiner has argued at length, maintain a direct and intrinsic political role for women, in their agency as producers of key symbolic goods and as lynchpins (as sisters and mothers rather than wives) in matrilineal power structures. The key category of gifts and goods produced by women is that of ‘cloth’ or ‘soft’ properties – especially woven things. Such things include not just textiles but texts, an intangible fabric of words, of sacred stories, that, akin to material relics, ground and articulate the powers and roles of their family guardians. A House is articulated, not exclusively but intrinsically, by women’s heritage. This ‘soft’ heritage may be grasped as political in the fullest sense of the word, for Strathern has already argued that political organization of men and women’s lives does not hierarchize male above female agency, or public above domestic realms.26 This gendered dimension of the House is neither universally significant in non-capitalist societies, nor does it rule out scenarios of domination. Yet it will play into the Houses modernists will build. The triangular combinatoire of House, Market, and State – all coexisting in some form in modern societies – admits of limitless, uniquely historied manifestations. For heuristic purposes, I am calling ‘aboriginal’ any cultural formation whose social values and organization of power are primarily regulated by institutions of the House. This appears to be the case for many self-identified indigenous peoples around the world, but belongs as well to the archaic, European pre-histories of imperialism, and perhaps persists in so-called folk and other subcultures

18 Modernist Goods

that have historically been alienated by reason of geography, race, or class from full participation in Market and State. In addition, the territorial connotation of ‘aboriginal’ reminds us of the ‘supreme good’ of most House-dominated societies, the land.27 As for the complementary term, ‘imperialist’ would of course refer, at least in theory, to hegemonic regulation by either Market or State; but the present study will assume that for the actual social grounds of British and American modernism, modernity is ‘imperialist’ to the degree that it is conditioned by an expansionist Market (the State never attaining the triumphant totalitarian power it does in some parts of Europe).28 The overlapping nature of these categories cannot be mistaken. For example, to say that most modern Euro-American metropolitans are conditioned by an imperialist modernity, and are instructed in metropolitan life by an imperialist heritage, is not to deny the existence of House or State institutions, or the felt importance of their gifts or goods. It is rather to acknowledge the greater political force in shaping and distributing social power, and in setting the terms of social change, of Market institutions. Under such conditions, House and State powers are pushed into increasingly limited spheres (hence the shrinking of the once extensive and powerful aboriginal House to the metropolitan nuclear family and its private, domestic horizon; or the weakening of the national republican State before the business imperatives of a global elite). In aboriginal modernity, on the other hand, all three institutions weigh heavily on all aspects of social and individual life, where, as a rule, the heritage of the House continues to structure myriad aspects of property and land rights, political roles, cultural values, and individual identity. Yet the Market has wrought great changes, and will continue to do so. The State, moreover, has in many cases developed or intervened to structure modern aboriginal society in profound ways – for example, among conquered New World peoples, by instituting unique types of national citizenship with exceptional rights, by defining land ownership through a history of treaties and court decisions, by defining who is and is not legally indigenous, and by creating new forms of tribal government. Indigenous peoples in Canada, at least up to mid-century, were considered not independent citizens but wards of the State. Aboriginal and imperialist modernities, then, mark different but deeply intertwined historical experiences and cultures. Indeed, if we acknowledge that neither refers to a fixed social form, but to a field of related and often divergent institutions, then we may recognize

Introduction 19

aboriginal modernity and imperialist modernity to be variations on a single historical struggle, one that continues to be evident everywhere around the world: the rise of the Market over House and State. Viewed from this angle, which is ultimately that of globalization, aboriginal modernity does not represent a simple alternative to imperialism, nor is it exclusive to indigenous peoples, though these have suffered it most cruelly. Aboriginal modernity rather comprises a field of struggles and possibilities that lie repressed, to be renegotiated on a daily basis, within a hegemonic, imperialist modernity itself. I will identify this area of repression as one belonging to a distinct level of the political unconscious of Western modernism, one in which incommensurable economic modes compete for authority. This is to extend the concept of a political unconscious developed by Marxist cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, for whom it refers to the repressed experience of conflict between large-scale contending social forces and material relations proper to the regnant mode of production of a given locale and historical period – where this conflict is, moreover, variously displaced and expressed in literature. Jameson cites patriarchy as the ‘oldest’ mode of production in a long series which survive to a greater or lesser extent into the present world dominated by the most recent mode, that of late capitalism.29 Jameson’s Marxian program is to emphasize what may be distinguished as the social political unconscious of capitalist histories, which refers to the internal, dialectical contradictions produced by capitalist modes of production themselves, such as class struggle. I use social as a restrictive term because, in the view of anthropologist Marilyn Strathern to which I will return below, relations between modes of production themselves may not be grasped socially, as structurally related within some concept or image of an organized society.30 The critical tradition that has studied the expression, overt or unconscious, of intrinsic social relations of capitalist society is one that I wish in the following study of a modal or economic political unconscious to depart from, not to replace it, but to complement it. A common Marxist impulse has been to view modes of production as progressive historical stages: one needs to get over them.31 Instead, I aim to celebrate all those who have refused to do so – or, more specifically, those who have turned literature into a radical expression of the persistence, the possibilities, and the powers of the House as a profound, if often darkly perceived, good. This, I will argue, is the common work of modernism as a heterodox expression of imperialist heritage.

20 Modernist Goods

A step in this direction has been taken by Douglas Mao in his study of the centrality of ‘objects’ in modernist writing. Objects are keys to modernist aesthetic and political ideologies alike, he suggests, because they appear as embodiments of creative processes and private or social values that are radically alternative to the ideologies of production and commodity value proper to the modern Market. Modernist objects seek to escape the Market, for example, in their often insistently unrepresentable, intimate meanings (what I will call their inalienability), or conversely in their social value as cultural heritage, binding the living to the dead and the unborn (what I here call goods). While Mao thus enters into the dim, complex interiority of such objects, exploring with a compelling rigour and sensitivity the feelings and ideas housed therein, the present study aims to reveal systems rather than objects, and so to come at the same problem from its opposite, structuralist direction. In so doing, and to celebrate what good is imagined there, is not to indulge in nostalgia or exoticism for this or that preferable society, so that the aboriginal becomes indeed merely another primitivist example or model, but to seek to decompose more thoroughly how values and identities are produced, and at what cost, in a history of globalization that is deeply heterogeneous in its very modernity, if no less dangerous or immiserating, than perspectives based on capitalist economic vocabulary have heretofore allowed. The historical argument assumed by this book is that aboriginal modernity registers the dwindling or struggling, asymmetrical power of the House with respect to Market and State, for peoples of either indigenous or settler-invader heritages. The literary argument is that for the latter heritage, the economic unconscious of this historical experience is expressed in modernism, indeed so extensively (though, of course, not exclusively) as to define it. The ways in which this economic unconscious may be expressed are twofold: 1 The discourses of the House and its countervailing forces are directly expressed, because the economic unconscious is mediated by the writer or poet’s situation in a modern aboriginal history where the House manifestly contends with Market and State. This is the situation for many modern indigenous writers, but those of a non-indigenous heritage may also immerse themselves in such situations, becoming what have been called ‘border-workers’ between aboriginal and imperialist social formations.32 Examples of the first group would include many indigenous oral narratives, such as

Introduction 21

those told by the Haida elder Skaay to Franz Boas’s student, John Swanton, and all other literature by indigenous writers that mediates contemporary imperialist history and legendary knowledge; paradigmatically, the poetry and stories of Pauline Johnson, the best-known and most widely disseminated Native North American writer of the early twentieth century.33 Examples of the second group would include T.E. Lawrence’s masterpiece of modernist border-work, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922–6) and Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (1947), both of which attempt to ‘make it new’ by finding mediating words for – and grounding these in actual work for – aboriginal realms within empire. Moreover, there is another group akin to the first, consisting of oral and literary arts belonging to peoples whose aboriginal culture is based not upon indigeneity but upon a radical alienation within imperialist society. I am thinking here of Chip Rhodes’s understanding of the role of a subaltern, non-capitalist slavery heritage as central to a modern African-American culture.34 Zora Neale Hurston is an example, both for her publication of Southern black folklore in a variety of literary modes, and for her theatrical and musical projects in collaboration with other artists. It may be noted that as a whole, this category of literature admits of overlaps with that described below; the modernist border-worker, especially, tends to abjection. 2 Alternatively, the discourses of the House and its countervailing forces are displaced or abjected, most typically into varieties of antimodernism, tourism, and primitivism. Primitivism is the ideological mystification (as past, as exotic, and as instinctual) of nonetheless genuine and ineradicable traces of the modern House. Tourism, to adapt Dean MacCannell’s famous analysis, may be understood as a spectral commodification of the House in the safely alienated realm of leisure recreation, including reading. Confronted, says MacCannell, by an experience of modernity as ‘alienating, wasteful, violent, superficial, unplanned, unstable and inauthentic,’ and haunted by a ‘generalized anxiety about the inauthenticity of interpersonal relationships,’ ‘modern man has been condemned to look elsewhere, everywhere, for his authenticity, to see if he can catch a glimpse of it reflected in the simplicity, poverty, chastity or purity of others.’ And appropriately enough, this takes place by way of displaced (because alienated and commodified) forms of the House, where, for example, ‘the individual act of sightseeing is probably less important than the ceremonial ratification of authentic attractions as objects of

22 Modernist Goods

ultimate value.’35 Antimodernism, which includes but reaches beyond primitivism and tourism, refers to the idealization of any remote, exotic, or past culture as more gratifying, natural, or authentic than is felt to be available to modern life.36 I have distinguished between displacement and abjection because the first has the effect of defusing the political and psychic charge of the repressed House, while the second has the effect of fanning it into conflagration. Again, in the complex layerings of art, these are not exclusive forces. Taken as a diverse and interrelated whole, this realm of displacement or abjection is the situation we find characteristic of nearly all canonical modernists, and many other modern writers as well. The present study will concern group (2) rather than group (1), excepting self-identified border-workers, because literary scholarship on Native and black writers in this period is already sensitive to the concept of aboriginal modernity elaborated here: for me to discuss ways in which varieties of ‘traditional’ non-capitalist cultural forms interact destructively or productively with ‘modern’ liberal capitalist ones would hardly add more than a new vocabulary to an existing critical consensus regarding the full creative modernity – especially as we now regard the plethora of regional modernities across the planet – of non-European, non–settler-colonist peoples. My focus on white, imperialist heritage writers, on the other hand, is strategic, and aims to affirm this consensus by building further bridges to it. No such bridge will be quite alike. In seeking out an economic unconscious of modernism in the following discussions, I will be mainly concerned with the manner in which institutions of the House – those which set up gifts and goods, native land, kinship, and women’s production, so to determine values, goals, and social relations – become displaced or abjected by writers whose own conflicted heritage (always in some sense both aboriginal and imperialist) is mediated by the particulars of biography and situated ideology. Readings of abjection in modernist writing are not new, and in the pages that follow I will draw on some of the work of those who have preceded me in this approach. At the start, however, the language of displacement and abjection I invoke here demands some clarification. When speaking of displacement, I am referring to the common Freudian logic of the dream, or equally of the uncanny, according to which repressed psychic contents are paradoxically confronted yet diverted, expressed yet concealed, and symbolized yet not recognized for what

Introduction 23

they symbolize. This displacement is repressive. It creates egos, objects, and screens. In distinguishing abjection from this well-known process, I am relying on Julia Kristeva’s notion of what sometimes resembles a displacement of unacknowledged psychic contents, but is driven by a different and more primal part of our psyches than is Freudian repression. Abjection signifies differently and is radically unstable. It disintegrates egos, objects, and screens. Since it is psychologically prior to all Freudian (as well as Lacanian) forms of displacement, it cannot appear alone in art, which is itself a form of Freudian displacement and belongs to a mature, post-Oedipal world of the self. In art, abjection erupts from beneath, as it were, into imaginary and symbolic realms, into the dream logic of the text. Stoker’s Abject Kin It will be helpful now to turn to an example that stands as a prototype of the fragile or torn repressions in modernism I have just described; where it is possible, in other words, both to register the multiform displacements of a modern political unconscious, and to reach deeper into its work of abjection. In Dracula (1897), Bram Stoker reinvents the vampire as just this layered entity, and produces one of the great mythic figures – one is tempted to say gods or demi-gods – of modern times. In his Introduction to a recent edition of the novel, David Rogers calls Dracula ‘a text that both exposes the particular anxieties of its immediate period and marks a vital moment in the paradigm shift that defines the modern age’; he then displays the novel as a vortex of largely unconscious representations of modern transformations, conflicts, and crises in individual psychology, social class, scientific and belief systems, and especially gender. His conclusion, widely shared, is that Dracula himself represents, in his multiform perversity, all ‘those forces and implications of impending social change’ that Victorian men feared were undermining ‘the authority of an hierarchical, class-structured society that empowered propertied men at the expense of all groups.’37 Across a wide variety of new historicist readings, Dracula appears as the diabolical avatar of modernity itself, in any of its diverse or even contradictory, liberal and radical manifestations. Against this modern god, who brings the aporias and ironies of the modern novel in his wake, is arrayed the accumulated forces of nineteenth-century conservatism, in the shape of heroes who call themselves knights, and of a rearguard attempt at generic re-containment in moralized romance.

24 Modernist Goods

But there is a counter-intuitive flavour to this argument. If Dracula is all that is most radically and threateningly modern, if indeed he predicts the sway of new identities and forces in the twentieth century, why is he represented as so intransigently archaic and primitive? The answer, it would seem, is that Dracula is an archetype specifically of modern decadence. He embodies a sense of modernity as both the disintegration of history imagined as progress, and its malign irruption as catastrophic regression. From this view, Dracula shares the horror of Mr Kurtz. There is no doubt a powerful truth to this symbolic chain. But as we shall see, Dracula’s primitivism is not so easily assimilated to the simply wild, savage, or Dionysian paradigms of decadent primitivism. There is in him, perversely, too much law – he is hemmed in on all sides by occult rules and regulations, so that we are almost sorry for his relative lack of freedom; just as we might see in him, also, too much good – if we take seriously the perverse fact that he can only restore his vampiric energies in symbiotic relation to the good in general, and to holy soil in particular. I will return to these points in a moment, where I will suggest an alternative view of the modern vampire as a displaced figure of the economic unconscious, into which the above modern ‘crises’ are additionally condensed. To do so, however, the conventional psychoanalytic reading of the novel must be clarified. When it is read according to any of the historical allegories surveyed above, the modern vampire is to be considered uncanny: he or she represents something both unfamiliar, because threatening yet safely buried, or surfacing only in disguise, and familiar, because constitutive of the self and its world. There is no need to rehearse the Oedipal register of the text. Critics agree that Dracula is extraordinarily erotic, that it lavishly articulates what contemporaries would have found transgressive in sexual practice and gender identity, and that the killing of Dracula corresponds well to the killing of that Oedipal father to whom pleasure (in the mother) belongs, along with the introjection of his (prohibitive) authority and power. This latter condition, which for Freud explained the creation of the superego from the energies of the id, explains why it is common to see the rather stiff, masterful, fatherly, good Dr Van Helsing, in Rogers words, not only as Dracula’s ‘opposite’ but his ‘double.’38 Moreover, it has been possible to read into Dracula Freud’s own sociological version of the Oedipal phase, by mapping the conflict between Dracula and the heroic male group, which is motivated by a struggle to possess women’s bodies, against Freud’s theory of the primal horde, the killing of its bad

Introduction 25

patriarch, and the introjection of the bad patriarch’s authority (and repressive containment of his desires) by the community of his sons, so marking the evolutionary turn from barbarism to civilization.39 At the same time, a pre-Oedipal register has also long been recognized in a more obscure layer of the text. Here, though critics rarely put it so baldly, Dracula is not the bad father but the primal mother. The child’s prohibited desire for the mother is frustrating, and the angry energy can be turned to hostility against the mother herself, spurning her, vilifying her; hence Dracula is both mother and monster, an object of primal wish and primal aggression. The famous episodes in which Dracula gives suck to Mina at his breast – for blood, of course, rather than milk, yet explicitly likened to milk and meant to nurture her as ‘flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin’ – capture this conflicted structure in a single image.40 Phyllis Roth has suggested that the primal maternal bond, associated as it is with desire and pleasure, is in Stoker’s work a psychological layer that mediates contemporary social fears regarding the New Woman and female sexuality.41 From a Freudian point of view, then, specifically modern crises in gender, race, and class are negotiated by the anxious self by condensing them into a kind of all-purpose figure of horror – safely Other yet thrillingly uncanny – that signifies both transgressive desire and its fearful suppression. Yet, I have already raised the problem of a modern vampire hedged about by law and rooted in the good and sacred, which hardly suits either the picture of the merely pleasure-principled and tyrannical, Oedipal father, or the undifferentiated, oceanic feeling one might expect, following Freud, to be associated with the primal mother. Looking more closely at the symbolic chain that organizes these signs of the vampire will reveal yet another kind of displacement at work. Surely the most striking problem with Dracula is his need to rest and restore himself, diurnally, not only on the sacred soil of Christian burial, but on his own native earth dug up and hauled in huge boxes from the Carpathian mountains to London, then distributed amongst various residences to extend his mobility. The sober yet faintly comical necessity of moving these boxes of earth wherever Dracula goes, rendered in uncompromising detail, and of reclining paralysed within them, seems to look forward to the absurd predicaments of Samuel Beckett’s world rather than to the misty frights of genre horror (and its humour becomes explicit in the homologous tale of the sailors’ souls lugging their tombstones to heaven).42 What could possibly justify such a burden?

26 Modernist Goods

The answer is simple: Dracula, like the aboriginal peoples whom he represents in displaced form, lives by virtue of his land. He cannot be uprooted from it, but must remain symbiotically attached to it, in order to survive. His Carpathian home, an archaic agrarian and wilderness landscape, is itself symbolic of a pre-capitalist Europe. And when he moves to London, he must urbanize himself even as he literally brings his land – and we shall see, an entire, alternative social and economic structure – along with him. Van Helsing, in his imperfect English, explains: ‘With the child-brain that was to him he have long since conceive the idea of coming to a great city. What does he do? He find out the place of all the world most of promise for him. Then he deliberately set himself down to prepare for the task … He study new tongues. He learn new social life; new environment of old ways, the politic, the law, the finance, the science, the habit of a new land and a new people who have come to be since he was.’43 Not only does Dracula face the Herculean task of modernizing, across hundreds of years, his archaic self and heritage, and without losing those archaic roots, but the need to do so is presented as an act of desire and choice, indeed of long gestation – as if the aboriginal-metropolitan trajectory fitted a psychological and historical continuum, rather than a break or turn. For Dracula, tradition and modernity are not opposed terms, but lead naturally into each other. Not that it works out so easily: the moving of the boxes of earth around the city seems like a parody of immigrant, old-world ‘baggage,’ which emphasizes rather than resolves the conflict between metropolitan migrations and indigenous roots. Stephen Arata is surely right to see in Dracula a thinly veiled displacement of racial fears, in which immigrants threaten to reverse colonize the metropolis.44 But there is an important economic parallel to this. The plot itself, from the outset right up to Dracula’s ultimate failure, is set in motion by a process of moving house from his feudal domain to real estate purchased on the open market. On this level, the novel may be read as a legal-historical allegory, roping off England for an idealized capitalist modernity against Continental (or, more cryptically, colonial) backwardness, instituting land as an alienable commodity as opposed to an inalienable good. For Dracula, land is what Gregory calls a good. It is a supreme good, in the sense that it is the one possession that Dracula cannot do without, that he must take with him when he moves his home. It is further marked as aboriginal in two ways: it is literally his indigenous soil; and it is not merely sentimental, but imbued with a sacred force, a spirit.

Introduction 27

The latter is also felt in the animistic magic of Dracula, for whom all of nature – especially its occult, spiritual depths – seems to be coextensive with himself and his powers. Van Helsing again explains this, crediting to Dracula the pagan spiritual forces possessed by a shaman: ‘With this one, all the forces of nature that are occult and deep and strong must have worked together in some wondrous way. The very place where he have been alive, Undead for all these centuries, is full of strangeness of the geologic and chemical world.’ He goes on to specify strange powers in the four elements, as well as a quintessence: ‘something magnetic or electric in some of these combinations of occult forces which work for physical life in strange way.’ Everywhere his emphasis is clear: these are not transcendental forces, but are inseparably both natural and spiritual, belonging to ‘physical life’ yet unseen or unrecognized. Spiritual, then, but belonging to nature and the body. In the same passage, Dracula is described physically as the ideal type of a savage warrior – having his ‘iron nerve,’ ‘subtle brain,’ brave heart, and perfected ‘vital principle.’45 Thus Dracula’s heresy is a pagan one. He embodies the animistic powers that the founders of modern anthropology, Stoker’s contemporaries Edward Tylor and James Frazer, considered the essence of ‘primitive’ beliefs and the key to understanding aboriginal societies.46 Dracula’s home in a wasteland and his wish to inhabit ‘a new land where life of man teems till they are like the multitude of standing corn,’47 culminating in a procession carrying his coffined body, and his decapitation, even suggests a perverse inversion of Frazer’s key myth, famously cited by T.S. Eliot as the basis of The Waste Land twenty years later, of a god representing the life principle who must be retrieved magically from death and dismemberment, in order to heal the land. The displaced aboriginal image of an animistic nature we find in Dracula, with its sacred view of the land, explains that peculiarity of the modern vampire mentioned above, the need for the vampire’s land to be holy – for the land to be the proper medium or threshold for the soul (the Christian burial ground, as Van Helsing and the others conceive it). This is a direct appropriation of the spiritual nature of the land from Christian to aboriginal, and here vampiric, modes of valuation. In a study focused on religious motifs, Christopher Herbert has shown that the struggle that dominates and organizes Dracula is between a mode of life based on pagan animism and one based on Christian transcendentalism; that is, between a spiritual realm that is ultimately distinct from, and antithetical to, the physical, and one that

28 Modernist Goods

pervades the physical and natural as an inalienable essence. As if taking to extremes Fabian’s notion of the time of the Other as dead to the present, this Other pagan ‘life’ must be considered dead even as it appears to persist; so it is ‘undead.’ The Undead in Dracula depend upon the unity of nature and spirit, of soul and body; the Christians in the novel insist upon severing the two, even to the ugly point of ‘butcher work’ wrought upon beautiful women, apparently alive, to liberate their transcendental souls.48 In fighting over the soul, as alternatively earthbound or transcendental, the heroes and villains must fight over the land itself – which is to say, whether land is sacred as an (occult) mediator for nature as spirit, or as a (holy) threshold for the division of nature from spirit. The modern vampire threatens to reappropriate the signs of the sacred to the occult, to bring spirit literally down to earth – or, more precisely, to keep it there. What is true for the land is true for blood (which John Frow has discussed as an exemplary sign in Western cultures of the inalienable non-commodity).49 Blood is viewed by the vampires as inalienable, the very medium of general and individual life (as we see in Mina’s mingling of senses with those of Dracula after their mutual transfusion), and by the Christians as alienable (to be left behind without loss, when the soul is ready for the afterlife, or given as a non-personified object, when donated to vampire victims). The vampiric cry, ‘the blood is the life! the blood is the life!’50 certainly expresses a demonic inversion of the Christian doctrine, but only at a secondary, displaced level; beneath is the straightforward logic of the symbolic chain linking it to an animistic belief – seductive as the novel’s women themselves – in the unity of all physical and spiritual life. This chain leads us from the aboriginal logic of land as a good to that of blood and other gifts. When Dracula first speaks, it is in the language of house and gift, of hospitality. The irony of the gift exchange is obvious: ‘Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely. And leave something of the happiness you bring.’ And this battening of the horror, this persistent pinning of his threatening irony, upon hospitality is doubled in Dracula’s first speech, not as himself but in the guise of the calèche driver, who similarly speaks in order to offer hospitality in the form of gifts. That Dracula’s irony, the collision of two sets of meaning – ‘ours’ and his – takes hospitality as its ground is not accidental, for vampires are associated with the gift as a mode of spiritual relationship, on the model of an aboriginal hierarchy. ‘You will not pass me by, will You, dear Master,’ pleads Renfield, ‘in Your distribution of

Introduction 29

good things?’51 That the vampire gives as well as takes is emphasized in the transfusions between Dracula and Mina, as well as in the insistence of the text that vampire victims feel compelled to surrender their blood freely; it is not merely taken from them, but in an important, and eroticized sense, offered up. The exchange of blood (as life, as spirit) produces their kinship; literally, their blood relationship to each other, which is also spiritual, occult, magical. ‘And you,’ Dracula tells Mina, ‘their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin.’52 Dracula is the patriarch and elder of them all. At the same time, however, women have a curiously primary role in vampirism. Dracula has himself frequently been regarded as an oddly feminine, androgynous, or bisexual being.53 Apart from Dracula, the other five vampires, four of whom set obstacles in the way of the male heroes’ struggle (the fifth saved before she can do so), are women. But these women’s mysteriously central work in the (physical-spiritual) reproduction of vampires – as opposed, for example, to a priesthood of men – is never clearly explained, and seems to stand out as yet another trace of the symbolic order of the House displaced into a vampiric realm.54 When looked at from the perspective of displacement, in which the transgressive imagination of the House as an aboriginal modernity – a House in the City – is allowed to surface in strange or uncanny form, Dracula poses some challenges to the Freudian readings outlined above. As noted, Dracula, for all his magical powers, is constrained by innumerable laws that hem vampires from all sides – laws that come from somewhere else, without any explanation. These may be recognized as laws of the House: of the home and hospitality; of regulation by natural cycles; of relation to the land as a supreme good. Such laws are the final horizon of the vampire in the novel, and require no justification. But as soon as we take a step back from the text, we can guess from whence, for Stoker, it all comes. For his mother ‘immersed’ him, says Rogers – or as blood of her blood, we might well think of a transfusion – ‘in the rich folk culture and superstitions of his native Ireland.’ Recent scholarship has confirmed but not detailed this Celtic influence – with the significant exception of Charlotte Stoker’s belief in earthly spirits such as banshees – and has also documented Stoker’s adult interest in collecting folklore.55 I will return to these influences farther along, but what is particularly suggestive to note here is that Charlotte Stoker was also an active social reformer on behalf of women, the disabled, and the poor. In her, an aboriginal heritage and a challenge

30 Modernist Goods

to the status quo went together – just as for the apparently less progressive author of Dracula. The expatriate Bram Stoker’s economic unconscious is not an abstraction, then, but an ambivalent product of Irish history in its long, partly insulated, but largely colonial relationship to the British Empire. John Paul Riquelme has documented a popular trope of the vampire in political cartoons that pit Irish nationalists against English power. In one, Charles Stuart Parnell, the famous political leader in the cause of Home Rule, here significantly shown as president of the Irish National Land League – the group struggling for peasant sovereignty over the land – is shown as a vampiric bat swooping down upon a sleeping Irish victim.56 But such appropriations of the folkloric vampire can be played out negatively or positively. Alison Milbank finds in Stoker’s first novel, The Snake’s Pass (1890), a Celtic ‘blood sacrifice’ to ‘Maeve, the Mother/Lover who requires the death of her sons to fructify the land,’ which was also appropriated by contemporary Irish nationalist ideology.57 It is increasingly difficult not to see vampiric, primitive Transylvania as a return of the repressed, of a modern aboriginal Ireland. Yet The Snake’s Pass is quite different in this respect, that the villain of the story is an avatar of the Market as a transformative force within a peasant community still bound ideologically to feudalism, resigned to a benign aristocracy under whom peaceful, mutually supportive social relations may flourish. This villain is the local ‘Gombeen Man,’ an avaricious money-lender whose ruthless actions uproot families from their land and break them apart from each other (and perhaps a source for Ezra Pound’s stock term of invective).58 A money-lender is also the villain of Stoker’s early novella about an Irish emigré to London, The Primrose Path (1875), which suggests the importance of the intersection of economic modes and ethnic heritages for Stoker. But these latter two cannot be lined up with each other in any stable way, for the Market villains share no ethnic or class identity: in the novella, the usurer (who first baits the protagonist with a gift he is obliged, by the law of hospitality, to accept, before luring him into large debts) is an English city-dweller; in the novel, he is an Irish farmer, and explicitly distinguished from city usurers as more lawless, and mysteriously bound to his country soil.59 There is no economic or ethnic identification, in either story, that is not clearly intended as a parable of their complicity in the different spaces of the modern. But the Market has no concrete alternative, and is pinned rather to moral alternatives, in both of these worlds Stoker imagines before the arrival of Dracula.

Introduction 31

To say that an economic unconscious works in Dracula through displacement is to point to the more indirect and uncanny expression of what may well be deeply desired, and felt as a possibility – the dominance of the House, and here specifically the precarious persistence of pre-capitalist Celtic heritage, social and cultural traditions as supreme goods – in a series of signs or objects of fantastical otherness (i.e., not real, nothing to worry about in the real world) and evil (i.e., not to be recognized as desirable, but prohibited). Its subversiveness, then, looks backward as much as forward, to social heritage as much as to social invention. Yet to speak so much of desire in Dracula is surely to evade the overwhelming effect of a register of the text that is anything but erotic. I am referring not only to the tedious earnestness of Van Helsing and his ‘knights’ – whose reiterated, sombre expressions of faith would render any excitation limp – but of the main figure of fear itself, Dracula. His description is hardly the stuff of erotic fantasy, even sadomasochistic. Placed together with a thin, aquiline nose, deep-set eyes, ‘peculiarly arched nostrils,’ ‘lofty domed forehead,’ ‘hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere,’ ‘very massive’ eyebrows that almost meet in the middle, a pronounced overbite, and pointy ears, Dracula’s celebrated red lips surely emphasize his lack of an erotic physiognomy, rather than reveal it. Apart from conventionally aristocratic features, which serve to mark his archaic power, these details are not so much frightening as repellent. Lest we ascribe this to aged decay, here is Stoker’s description of a more youthful Dracula: ‘The mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.’60 Even the red lips, alone, are anything but objects of desire. This anti-erotic layer is evident in the highly sexualized vampires too, who never stabilize as seductive objects but continually fall back into a repellent physiognomy, voice, and bodily appearance. Even conventionally erotic signs may be evacuated, and regarded as duplicitous. Hence Lucy’s ‘diabolically sweet’ voice prompts Seward’s desire, but her ‘voluptuous smile’ contributes only to his loathing. This duplicity extends to the famous scene in which Lucy is killed, which critical consensus tells us is orgasmic: ‘The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips.

32 Modernist Goods

The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam.’61 If this is orgasmic, it is certainly drained of conventional eroticism, so impenetrable is the envelope of alienation effects: the distancing of the vampire from us as an uncategorizable, apparently inhuman, writhing, frothing ‘Thing.’ How do we do justice to this insistent register of repulsion that again and again anaesthetizes desire? It is far too strong to seem the mere byproduct of repressed sexual desire, especially since that desire is, on the contrary, so freely and graphically expressed in the novel. Repulsion seems more than a wily servant to desire; it has a force of its own. How, then, can we reconcile the anti-erotic repulsions of Dracula with the repression of desire for the primal mother, and the symbolic chains it drags through fin-de-siècle history, so powerfully revealed by Freudian readings? ‘There are lives not sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects,’ and these other lives are abject, claims Julia Kristeva, when she revises the heritage of Freud and Lacan in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.62 Kristeva introduces the concept of abjection to describe a layer of psychic conflict and development of the subject that precedes both Freud’s Oedipal stage and Lacan’s mirror stage, and which, like them, persists deep in the lifetime of the self. It is characterized by horror or fear, rather than desire; by horror of things too unpredictable or volatile to be fixed upon as objects; and by subjects similarly unstable. Scholars of Gothic literature have already put to work the power of Kristeva’s theory in reading Dracula, even to the extent of entirely replacing Freudian and Lacanian models.63 My view is that the latter models still have great explanatory force, and describe an undeniable register of the novel that importantly mediates, like a switchboard, all kinds of repressions and displacements arising in response to specific elements of social change unleashed by liberal capitalist modernity. Indeed, the most sophisticated of these readings, I believe, still offers the most carefully historicized view of Stoker at a very particular intersection of Irish social formations and heritages. This is Joseph Valente’s cubist portrait of Dracula as a symbolic assemblage of the myriad conflicting imaginary ethnic and political identities lived by Stoker as a ‘metrocolonial’ Irish nationalist, and projected as good/evil or us/them binary figures by his less peacable contemporaries on all sides of the Irish Question. For Valente, the slaying of the vampire enacts a kind of talking cure, and enacts a psychic liberation

Introduction 33

from varieties of both Irish and British thraldom to imaginary ‘blood consciousness’ of any sort, whether Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Irish, or other, insofar as these enclose themselves in class, ethnic, or geopolitical garrisons.64 To put this another way, Valente turns the standard Freudian reading of Dracula as a projection on its head by exposing the degree to which the vampire and the narrative itself are already working through and articulating racist and imperialist projections as such, and to reduce either of them to the imaginary identities required by a merely allegorical unconscious (of the kind, Dracula = ‘x’ or Dracula = ‘y’ in the repressed ethnic, class, racial, imperialist, or patriarchal cultural formation) is to miss the whole point of Stoker’s sly, unremitting critique of such cultural dichotomies as themselves imaginary projections – and, indeed, to replicate the problem. To present Dracula this way, Valente must play down, when they cannot decisively be undercut, those puritanical discourses of the good and the pure that surge through the novel and indeed Stoker’s writings generally. But it is possible to view such compulsion to purity from another angle, without reverting to a merely repressive interpretation, since the urge to purity is but the flip side to the recoil of repulsion in Kristeva’s pre-Oedipal, hence pre-moral category of abjection. I will return to Valente’s argument after sketching in this other psychological register, which also connects what I have called the anaesthetic to the aboriginal currents in the text. In the vortex of modernity, the abjection of vampirism has another rhythm, neither repressive nor curative, and so works to different ends, in the expression of an economic unconscious. A brief sketch of Kristeva’s theory will set the stage to review its applicability to Dracula. As a stage in childhood life, abjection occurs when the infant first realizes a separation between itself and its mother. Up to this point, the child has experienced something like the primal undifferentiation postulated by Freud, except that for Kristeva this state is not amorphous but is already shot through with forms and structures – the rhythms of social and somatic life that filter through to the symbiotic child. This rhythmic space she calls the chora. If we speak of a primal wish, then, to return to a maternal unity, we are speaking of a condition that is already and variously regulated. Hence my earlier insistence upon the laws which control the vampires, which may now be seen as traces of the maternal chora: they are represented not as moral or institutional laws, as laws of the Father, but as cosmic regulations, mysteriously emanating from the horizons of nature itself – rhythms instinctively obeyed.

34 Modernist Goods

The chora is a world of the self that, when abjected as an Other, remains marked by such regulating structures. The child will find the milk sour, or the touch too rough, or something else unpleasant, and will make a break, will push away, will develop an inchoate, somatic sense of ‘I’ versus ‘Other,’ even though not yet able to conceive of or perceptually to fix upon the image of a separate self as object, or separate mother as object. Nor, of course, are there yet words available to categorize or stabilize such distinctions. ‘Within our personal archeology,’ Kristeva says, we find the abject in ‘our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling’ (13). The abject is therefore paradoxical in its expression. It generates separations, or exclusions, between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ but finds it impossible not to inhabit both sides. It is pre-symbolic but generates a kind of primal, one-of-a-kind sign, however unstable: that, the pushedaway or thrown-out, the ab-ject, the excluded. Kristeva provides the following scenario to help visualize abjection: I imagine a child who has swallowed up his parents too soon, who frightens himself on that account, ‘all by himself,’ and, to save himself, rejects and throws up everything that is given to him – all gifts, all objects. He has, he could have, a sense of the abject. Even before things for him are – hence before they are signifiable – he drives them out, dominated by drive as he is, and constitutes his own territory, edged by the abject. A sacred configuration. Fear cements his compound, conjoined to another world, thrown up, driven out, forfeited. What he has swallowed up instead of maternal love is an emptiness, or rather a maternal hatred …

But the horror of loathing is perhaps secondary, for a deeper emotion is revealed when abjection turns against that cherished object, the self. The deepest horror is felt in loathing charged with loss: ‘The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being. There is nothing like abjection of self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded.’65 From the process of abjection, then, a separation between I

Introduction 35

and Other emerges in which the I remains an unstable identity, having neither imaginary wholeness nor symbolic individuation, while the Other is spurned (yet wanted, in the special sense of primal desire), even as it seems everywhere to invade, permeate, and regulate the I. Indeed, the relationship will be imagined as a contagion, an infection, a sullying. The rhetoric of abjection evokes the unclean versus the clean. Turning to the modern vampire, we find a monster of the abject. Writ large is the fact and fear of contagion of the clean by the unclean, of a clean sacred ‘emptiness’ (Van Helsing’s transcendental soul) by the unclean material body of the chora; writ large is the permeability, through flows of blood, of I and Other; of the Other as maternal, as loathsome, and as mysteriously gratifying yet oddly undesirable; and of the Other as an unstable object (in its shape-shifting and volatility, and perhaps gender). ‘I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear,’ says the sleeping or somnambulist victim of his vampire. And just before he falls asleep: ‘unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere “modernity” cannot kill.’66 But if this vampire is also a figure of the economic unconscious, then what does it mean specifically to abject the House? I have already suggested that the economy of the House, determined by land, stories, other goods and the logic of gifts, and the symbolic production of women, is via the vampire displaced into signs and objects of fantastical and evil otherness. I would like now to undo this reading, for I am not at all sure that repression works so well, that displacement – from transgressive, latent content to safe, manifest representation – is clearly what is going on. For one thing, the unreal, fantasy status of vampirism cannot be taken for granted, but is contingent and conventional. Not only are Stoker’s vampires modelled on existing folk traditions, in which contemporaries such as his mother still believed (and perhaps, as for Celtic folklorists like W.B. Yeats, were all the more passionately revived, in opposition to an increasingly scientific world view), but Stoker’s characters earnestly produce standard rationalist arguments to authenticate them (or, at least, their possibility) in the face of such scientism. There is no reason to think that Stoker, nor many of his readers, could easily brush off the vampire as fantasy because of its supernatural status. This is true even where belief in vampires does not exist; vampires may simply stand in for another, perhaps ineffable, spiritual thing. If the vampire, or at least

36 Modernist Goods

the spiritual otherness which it represents, is granted a possible reality, then it will not serve very well as a safe haven for displaced anxieties – and, given its horrific nature, perhaps more so the contrary. Horror for Freud is associated, via the uncanny, with fear of castration, and this fear has no evident analogy with the enveloping, misty, multiplying, shape-shifting fears of contagion and permeation. Against these other fears, the phallus – itself threatened more by a scattering, by an indiscernability, by an inability to separate itself out as a privileged object, to mark the borders of gender or the stability of signs, than by risk of exclusive appropriation or loss – is prominently asserted. Another problem with displacement in vampires is suggested here, one already noticed in readings of the abject: Dracula fails to stay still as an object, but is always on the verge of manifestation as something else, or as some gaseous matter in-between; he is neither conventionally male nor female, but something of both, in horrific form. There is a further multiplicity: the more Dracula succeeds with his plan, the more vampires are generated by him, and the more our cathected ‘object’ becomes a diffuse, collective one. The horizon is total, the life world itself a vampiric object or aesthetic, without fixed distances and opaque borders by which displacement and its corollary, repression, might be achieved. Why should the House be expressed through this particular kind of primal upsurge, this particular ‘archaic economy’67 erupting into the modern text? I will offer two mutually reinforcing reasons for this, one based on Kristeva’s own historicizing view of abjection, the other on the totalizing quality remarked above. Kristeva considers abjection to be the basis of all religious beliefs and institutions. She devotes considerable discussion to anthropological literature on taboos, rites of defilement, and notions of sin. It might seem at first unsurprising, therefore, that the House, which predominantly organizes aboriginal societies, should be expressed via that psychic layer which constitutes its own system of beliefs. But this is a mirage, because abjection is the root of all religious beliefs, even of all symbolic orders; one cannot really predict a special association with the House, or with aboriginal belief systems, on this basis. More to the point is that abjection not only ‘accompanies all religious structurings,’ but ‘reappears, to be worked out in a new guise, at the time of their collapse.’ This is the case, says Kristeva, with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that is, with the rise of modernism. Modernism,

Introduction 37

she argues, in the wake of compromised, uncertain, conflicted views of the sacred, is uniquely prone to the abject: In a world in which the [normative, symbolically constituted] Other has collapsed, the aesthetic task – a descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct – amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless ‘primacy’ constituted by primal repression. Through that experience, which is nevertheless managed by the Other, ‘subject’ and ‘object’ push each other away, confront each other, collapse, and start again – inseparable, contaminated, condemned, at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable: abject. Great modern literature unfolds over that terrain …

Kristeva says that modernism is managed by the (collapsed) Other because its writing remains a symbolic process. But this process will be uniquely vulnerable to repressed structures, such as the rhythms of the chora and divisions of the abject. Indeed, the ‘very logic of the symbolic’ must ‘conform’ to them.68 Modernism must try to generate or restore a symbolic order of the Other – from the ground up, as it were. Such a view invites us to see Dracula as modernist in this special sense, elaborating a process of abjection, specifically along the lines of two warring, but uncannily identical, sacred systems. Christopher Herbert has provided an exhaustive view of this self-collapsing religious conflict, yet while this brings us closer to an answer, we still do not know why the House – as opposed, in Kristeva’s account, to merely religious systems that may be associated with it – must be abject. I find a key in Rosemary Jackson’s suggestive idea of the Dracula ‘myth,’ which extends before and beyond Dracula itself to create a binary typology of the fantasy register of modern literature. Whereas her complementary term, the Frankenstein myth, refers to fears of the self becoming ‘other through a self-generated metamorphosis,’ in the Dracula myth ‘otherness is established through a fusion of self with something outside, producing a new form, an “other” reality (structured around themes of the “not-I”). This [myth] centralizes the problem of power … and is far less easy to “contain,” far more disturbing in its countercultural thrust. It is confined not to one individual; it tries to replace cultural life with a total, absolute otherness, a completely alternative self-sustaining system.’69 What Jackson so strikingly reminds us of, here, is that the modern vampire is not an object, nor a chain of

38 Modernist Goods

signs, but a world. So, too, the House. The House has no figure or sign; it is made of diverse signs and relationships. The economic unconscious must appeal to that layer of the psyche where structures or even partial worlds, rather than objects, emerge in and out of each other and contend. Repression will not do. The repressed House, as ethnogenetic field rather than object or event, unable simply to be displaced into either, falls deeper into the totalizing arena of the abject. What can it mean for an abject world to be represented in a symbolic form? It is here that Joseph Valente’s view of Dracula as a hybrid symbolic figure of the imaginary Irish, and of the novel as a corresponding political articulation of Irish domestic sovereignty and ethnic hybridization in ‘domestic cosmopolitanism,’ may be turned on edge, in order to reconcile the bewildering array of geopolitical and ethnic valences uncovered by Valente in Dracula’s composition with the deeper continuum of a vampiric House discussed above. This continuum surfaces in Valente’s ultimate case study for the ‘Utopian possibilities’ of the novel: Mina Murray Harker. Mina’s transitional state of being, between the living and the undead – plainly a temporal metaphor of ‘mixed’ blood – defies any easy or absolute correlation between ethnic status and ethical stature. What is more, this transitional state affords Mina access to a privileged moral and political vantage in its own right: her multiple identifications allow her a more prismatic understanding and thus a finer strain of empathy than has been attained heretofore in the novel. Mina alone has a glimmer of the irrevocable linkage between knight-errants of Little England and the nightstalkers of Transylvania, and this awareness, while a suspicious, identificatory effect of her enthrallment to Dracula, paradoxically proves the means of individual, group, and even national deliverance from him.

Thus, Mina not only doubles the ethnic hybridization that is the novel’s imaginary evil and symbolic cure, but, in becoming a kind of improved vampire, is also the only one able to enact this psychical and ethical transition. In this way, she emerges as a new kind of symbol raised out of abjection itself. She affirms and reverses the very ‘contamination’ of kinship and inalienable exchange that Dracula darkly signifies: ‘As opposed to building herself up through acts of incorporation, the masculinized, colonial form of aggrandizement favored by Renfield and his master, she secures enhancement through an outpouring and divestment of the self, a strategy that requires her to

Introduction 39

remain within the moment, as it were, of interdependency and exchange.’ As such, Mina embodies an ‘ethics of alterity,’ a ‘radical’ ‘ethics/politics of connectivity’ whose structure of inalienable transactions and whose doubling of the vampire surely reveals traces of the House, but from a new angle.70 If Dracula now appears as a monstrous alienation and abstraction of the sovereignty of the House, another echo of the bad father, Mina would appear to express its alternative ethics, so that only a reunification and transformation of the two can effect the ‘Utopian possibilities’ suggested above. In a sweeping new historicist reading, Valente pins down the diverse layers of an ‘Irish’ identity through which this transformation is expressed: Mina is simultaneously a Victorian mother, Magna Mater, and Mother Ireland. Moreover, her sudden assertion of unfeminine agency at the novel’s turning point (which contradicts the role the men have given her and so seems already to express vampire blood), her reverse appropriation of Dracula’s gift of strange kinship (or more precisely, her obliging his reciprocation) in order to overcome him, is woven together with the narrative’s persistent allusion to the ‘Plan of Campaign, a scheme undertaken between 1886 and 1890 for the Irish tenantry to secure the right of collective bargaining through systematic rent strikes and boycotting,’ and to build allies in the English political and public sphere.71 This explicit parallel between anti-imperialist history and primitivist fantasy produces a Mother Ireland figure that is far from conventional, because its stereotypic baggage of the feminine, suffering, sentimental woman/Celt/Christian/ Irish cancels out in the representation of an active project for selfdetermination by colonized people and an ethics that demands self-sacrifice to a collectivist, cross-class, cross-denominational, crossethnic national politics. Yet there is so much earnest righteousness in Dracula, and if that is too controversial a claim, at least too obsessive a reiteration of distinctions between purity and unwholesomeness (as throughout Stoker’s writing), that it seems too much to believe that Stoker slyly fabricated Dracula to be a thoroughly ironic figure of ‘blood consciousness,’ and created Mina, as a newly forged agent of domestic cosmopolitanism, to be the merely instinctual student of such irony (the knowledge put on with his power). There is likely a register of the novel at which this ironic drama is performed, but it may help to see Dracula as a less deliberate creation as well, as an abject figure of the sovereignty of the House – absurdly reduced, as it were, to empty

40 Modernist Goods

mastery of a spontaneously generated ‘blood’ kin – and to see Mina as something new, and no longer abject, crystallizing out of its very economy of inalienable exchanges. This may be a less abstract proposition than it sounds. Here is H.D.’s representation of D.H. Lawrence (as Rico) in her roman-à-clef, Bid Me to Live (1960), in the role of a frightening but cerebrally seductive, vampiric mentor: ‘He had written about love, about her frozen altars; “Kick over your tiresome house of life,” he had said, he had jeered, “frozen lily of virtue,” he had said … “come away where the angels come down to earth,” “crucible” he had called her, “burning slightly blue of flame”; “love-adept”’; his words are ‘burning in her head, blue fire.’ ‘There, suddenly in a second, he was stamped on her mind, the flame of the red beard, aggressive, horn-symbol, horn of plenty. The mouth showed the teeth … teeth to tear, to devour.’ Does she love him? No, but she is swept away by his passion, for ‘it was [Rico] who had taken her away (cerebrally)’: ‘He is part of the cerebral burning, part of the inspiration. He takes but he gives.’ Yet she will turn the tables on his gift: ‘Rico could write elaborately on the woman mood, describe women to their marrow in his writing; but if she turned round, wrote the Orpheus part of her Orpheus-Eurydice sequence, he snapped back, “Stick to the woman-consciousness, it is the intuitive woman-mood that matters.” He was right about that, of course. But if he could enter, so diabolically, into the feelings of women, why should not she enter into the feelings of men?’72 This, of course, is the very strategy Mina discovers to turn upon Dracula. The proposition I will conclude with here, but return to more fully in discussions of James Joyce and H.D., is that one precipitate of modernist abjection is the antithetical figure Kristeva calls the imaginary father, an androgynous figure who is the child’s point of transference toward the desire of the mother, and who facilitates a break from abjection to a form of love that will be a building block toward a nonviolent bearing in the modern world. For Kristeva, this ‘amatory’ development comes with an unconventional ethics similar to the ‘ethics of connectivity’ in which Valente sees Stoker affirm not an ‘ethos or politics of identity, but rather one of doubleness or alterity: the undecidable otherness of every single person to the particular collective(s) and context(s) in which they nevertheless belong,’ a self-hybridizing awareness that renders us, in the phrase Valente borrows from Kristeva, ‘strangers to ourselves.’73 From this perspective, the novel does not so much dispel a host of imaginary identities that can only be

Introduction 41

grasped – with a postmodern bias – as monsters of identity to be slain by symbolic self-abandon and play, as it does restore from an abject ground zero a new kind of imaginary transference, the very ethnogenetic icon that Stoker discovers in his modernist, vampiric transformation of Mother Ireland. It is perhaps well to remember that the arena of psychic life that Jacques Lacan called imaginary identification is not, because of its structure of misrecognition, merely a kind of false consciousness to be stripped away by adepts of the symbolic; it is not, because ineradicable, a kind of original sin. On the contrary, the positive value and even utopian role of pre-Oedipal arenas in our psychic and social life have long been explored, and by feminist writers, in particular; hence feminist perspectives are fundamental to the present study. The pre-Oedipal arenas dramatized by Kristeva will here find a sociological platform in anthropologist Maurice Godelier’s premise regarding gifts, goods, and commodities: ‘I think that, if I had to assign primacy, I would say that it is the imaginary that dominates the symbolic rather than the other way around. For sacred objects and valuables are first and foremost objects of belief; their nature is imaginary before it is symbolic because these beliefs concern the nature and the sources of power and wealth, whose content has always been in part imaginary.’74 How abjection plays out in the literary forms and concerns of modernist writers will be further explored in the parts to follow. My procedure throughout will be as above with Dracula: not to aspire to a new reading of a given text, but if possible to set existing understandings of it in new relationship. The goal is to illuminate the logic of an economic unconscious in the agonized depths of modernism. Stated as a theory, such a thesis cannot be anything but wildly speculative – and indeed relies on psychoanalytic and philosophical notions that are themselves never finally verifiable, except by the accumulation and plausible interpretation of case studies. Hence the organization of this book will be as a series of exhibits drawn from the modernist avantgarde, ranging as widely as possible in order to demonstrate empirically the assertions made so far. There will also be an itinerary to these exhibits. In the first part, I will discuss four writers whose work each exemplifies what I call alternatively liberal and conservative ways that an abject House is expressed, and alternatively extroverted and introverted ways that an abject self is expressed, across the variety of modernisms. In the second part, I consider the material cultures of modernist writing, rather than form and content, as expressions of aboriginal modernity. In the third part, I return to close readings of

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writers in order to look specifically at the role of the gift in relation to representations of modern history as cultural morbidity and extinction. In the fourth and final part, I consider what happens when writers pass beyond abjection to arrive at what I will call, following Kristeva, an ‘amatory’ aesthetic of the modern House. A brief conclusion reflects on the utopian limits and possibilities of the modernist imagination of the House and its gifts.

1 After Strange Goods: The Economic Unconscious of Imperialist Modernity

Yeats’s Proper Dark The image of a vampiric Charles Parnell against the background of finde-siècle nationalism and neo-Celticism leads one immediately also to think of Yeats. In conjuring Yeats, a question left unbroached in the Introduction now returns insistently to demand explanation: if an economic unconscious subtends modernism, as I have claimed, then how does one account for the fully conscious and quite direct representation of aboriginal heritages such as we find in the Celtic revival, in other antimodernist investments in pre-capitalist ‘folk’ traditions, and in all those other, obvious kinds of ethnographic primitivism to be found in modernist culture? Is it not mistaken to speak of an unconscious whose latent forms appear so manifest? Exploring Yeats’s understanding of Irish Celtic heritage – which, as a reader of Frazer, he was always willing to combine with other archaic discourses – in relation to his political concerns will help clarify this apparent problem, and establish a kinship between Yeats and the more populist author of Dracula. On the one hand, of course, the aboriginal heritages of Celtic Ireland, both learned and invented by Yeats, are an enduring presence in his work right from its symbolist beginnings through to the more idiosyncratic developments that mark his relationship to high modernism. On the other hand, parallel to this is Yeats’s ongoing interest in Irish nationalism and, at least from 1913 through the 1930s, in Parnell signally, both as a mythic figure and as the marker for an historical turning point in his political imagination.1 In ‘Parnell’s Funeral,’ the best known of these figurations and the title poem of his 1935 collection,

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Parnell is seen in a Frazerian avatar, alluding to Cretan ritual and myth, of Adonis – the demi-god sacrificed to assist the creative rebirth of the wasteland, under the aegis of the Magna Mater, an archaic mother goddess. In the ritual imagination of this poem, the ‘Great Mother … cut[s] out his heart,’ yet subsequent nationalist leaders fail to partake of it, and the land remains waste: ‘Had de Valéra eaten Parnell’s heart / No loose-lipped demagogue had won the day, / No civil rancour torn the land apart,’ and in repetition, ‘Had Cosgrave eaten Parnell’s heart … Had even O’Duffy – but I name no more – their school a crowd.’2 Drawing sustenance from Parnell’s blood in order to recreate Ireland might appear Eucharistic as well as pagan; but the primitivist image of eating the heart itself, combined with the pagan heritage drawn from Frazer, point squarely to the latter. As in Stoker, the House appears in the shape of a vampire. And those followers of the vampiric House have their immortality, their strangely unliving, Undead being, celebrated in Yeats’s famous vision of hearts that ‘Too long a sacrifice’ and ‘excess of love’ have caused to be ‘Enchanted to a stone / To trouble the living stream,’ to be ‘changed, changed utterly’ so that ‘A terrible beauty is born.’3 Unlike Stoker, Yeats is unambiguously on the side of the vampires. In his militant nationalist play written with Lady Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), the Old Woman who represents Ireland is a kind of vampire: Many that are red-cheeked now will be pale-cheeked; many that have been free to walk the hills and the bogs and the rushes will be sent to walk hard streets in far countries; many a good plan will be broken; many that have gathered money will not stay to spend it; many a child will be born and there will be no father at its christening to give it a name. They that have red cheeks will have pale cheeks for my sake, and for all that, they will think they are well paid.

And ‘they shall be alive forever,’ she sings as she departs. She is raiding the families of peasants for children to fight and die in her name, wandering from house to house. Paradoxically, however, it is the wanderer who represents the House, and the family that represents its suppression: the Gillane household is organized by the Market logic of the father’s pitiless self-interest, the son preparing for a wedding that will maximize their gains from the exchange of son and bride wealth. Whereas, the Old Woman explains her ‘trouble’ to the sympathetic

After Strange Goods 45

wife: ‘Bridget. What was it put you to wandering? Old Woman. Too many strangers in the house … Bridget. What was it put the trouble on you? Old Woman. My land that was taken from me.’4 The meaning of the play is straightforward: if British imperialism has stolen our land and corrupted our House, we must reclaim our land and pre-imperialist heritage, and we may look to our aboriginal heritage – those legends and songs that encode the social authority of gifts (here of hospitality and blood) and goods (here of land) – in order to do so. This was the project of what Yeats called a romantic nationalism, which based itself in the land and people, and at the subjective root of these, in an indigenous, Celtic-inspired imaginative life. But this project had a limited presence in his long writing career, barely entering the twentieth century. By then, Maud Gonne, the woman he passionately loved, the militant nationalist, and the leading actress in such plays as The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan – hence the central performer, for Yeats, of the aboriginal modernity whose imagination he sought collectively to realize – had after all ‘not understood his aims for Ireland and Ireland itself seemed not to want the new culture he and his friends were creating.’5 Looking back from 1907, Yeats considered that the ‘new culture’ had already foreseen its end at the very moment he had emerged as a published poet, with the disgrace and death of Parnell at the outset of the 1890s. In Parnell’s ‘shadow,’ he saw the rise of a bourgeois nationalism interested only in the material, Market advantages of Home Rule – ‘small shopkeepers’ and ‘clerks’ to whom ‘immediate victory, immediate utility, became everything.’6 By 1913, Parnell’s own, far-reaching gift to his people’s ‘children’s children,’ of ‘loftier thought, / Sweeter emotion, working in their veins / Like gentle blood, has been driven from the place,’ and with the death of John O’Leary – the leader of the turn-of-the-century movement to which Yeats allied himself, also heroized in his poems – the Irish House is absorbed into the Market world of the Gillanes: ‘What need you, being come to sense, / But fumble in a greasy till / and add the halfpence to the pence … Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave.’7 ‘If we would create a great community – and what other game is so worth the labour? – we must recreate the old foundations of life,’ Yeats wrote in a preface to Lady Gregory’s translations of Irish legends.8 As the context suggests, these foundations are in part (and for Yeats, perhaps, in essence) an imaginative heritage, a realm of soft Celtic goods. ‘There is still in truth upon these great level plains a people,’ he

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responds to another of her books, ‘a community bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and poems which have grown out of its own life, and by a past of great passions which can still waken the heart to imaginative action.’9 Of what do these passions and actions consist? The great passions, for Yeats, are ever exemplified in the passion of self-sacrifice, the gift of one’s self to one’s people. ‘If any one would give me help he must give me himself, he must give me all,’ says the Old Woman of Cathleen ni Houlihan.10 But as we have seen, this gift is allied to others in his work, to a discourse of gift exchanges that mark belonging and obligation to a ‘people,’ a ‘community.’ Where Yeats concludes by speaking of imaginative possessions, above, he begins by recalling (at the prompt of Lady Gregory’s book, itself understood by Yeats as a good) a ‘low blue hill’ in the Galway Plains. ‘I asked the old countryman about it, and he told me of strange women who had come from it, and who would come into a house having the appearance of countrywomen, but would know all that happened in that house; and how they would always pay back with increase, though not by their own hands, whatever was given them.’11 Because the return gift is mediated by others, the relationship between debtor and creditor is not calculated between individuals, but between the individual and the community. The spirit women embody a tradition of hospitality, of gifts as economic and social regulators between selves and others, in an aboriginal economy; the women are its magical sign, a legendary good. And they come metonymically from another good, the land. Yeats’s attempt to create, through his own writing and with others, a ‘great community’ out of such ‘imaginative possessions,’ is symptomatic of what I have called an economic unconscious. What is unconscious or latent content is not the Celtic or other specified archaic elements, but the traces of an economy of the House which, axiomatically, I take to persist in modern imperialist life and memory (for example, in the domestic economy of family and especially childhood experience, or in intimate relations of love or hate), however embattled or penetrated those may be by metropolitan or capitalist cultures. The lure of the Celtic is here the promise of a whole world – as against an increasingly hedged-in and vulnerable private sphere – where the House may be more fully lived. This domestic enclave, along with the feudal heritages still at work in metrocolonial life – what Terry Eagleton will call a ‘public counter-culture’ – find reflection as larger, normative life worlds in such ‘folk’ enclaves as the subsistence economy communities of remote, rocky Aran, sought out for its Gaelic mentors by

After Strange Goods 47

Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Synge, and many others of the period.12 The Celtic as such is a sign in a more powerful discourse belonging to that unconscious, which is canny enough – or insatiable enough – not simply to cast up a fantasy of historical regression as utopia, but to demand the image of something less easily seen through and dismissed, something historically possible and new. Yeats does not hope, in other words, to recreate an archaic Ireland; his ‘great community’ is either an aboriginal modernity that he can envision, to be forged by a romantic nationalism whose political and economic dimensions are created by his activist compatriots, or it is one that he cannot envision, but only predict, because this concrete possibility has dissolved. These are two different trajectories, two different ways in which the political desire I am considering here – driven deep into want itself – flows out into aesthetic form. Before taking up each of these trajectories in turn, I must pause to sketch out the terrain of the abject into which the analysis has moved. Recall that Kristeva sees modern literature unfolding ‘in a world in which the Other has collapsed,’ and ‘the aesthetic task – a descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct – amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn’ in the primal process of abjection.13 The modernist task always descends from its ‘masterful images,’ as Yeats put it, to ‘where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.’14 It is a descent from the unsatisfying to the foul, and from the representable to the felt. There, says Kristeva, the self wanders in a kind of wasteland in which the symbolic order itself must be reconstructed, always in search of an adequate map, or adequate language, with which to represent want – that primal, impossible desire into which modernists pour a fragile and exhausted, political unconscious. In speaking of collapse, Kristeva is speaking not of the primal or abject Other, but of the later Other constituted by adult social life. This thesis should not seem strange, since the notion of modernism arising out of the collapse of a workable symbolic order – in secularism, in multiple and uncertain value systems, in modern urban life and warfare – is a familiar one. To this may be added the equally familiar Marxist antithesis, that modernism arises in response to the totalizing world of the Market and its reifications. These antithetical views of the Other, in which the symbolic order is either overly determining or not determining enough, is either falling apart in our hands or imprisoning us in its walls, are for Kristeva, as for Marxism, only seemingly contradictory. The crisis that brings about

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a return to the abject has two variants: ‘Too much strictness on the part of the Other, confused with the One and the Law. The lapse of the Other, which shows through the breakdown of objects of desire. In both instances, the abject appears in order to uphold the “I” within the Other.’15 This collapse suggests the twin condition of Irish identity at the end of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, Declan Kiberd tells us, ‘Ireland after the famines of the mid-nineteenth century was a sort of nowhere, waiting for its appropriate images and symbols to be inscribed in it. Its authors had no clear idea of whom they were writing for.’16 On the other hand, the famine itself remained a symbol of a toostrict symbolic order, one whose ruthless power persisted – and whose English canon remained the most powerful measure of literary and didactic value. In Yeats, we see this twin crisis personalized, where the ‘lapse’ of the Other, in its capitalist dimension, is in failing to provide him with worthy objects of desire. He longs for what he cannot have, for what only some other, past or future society might produce, with its different imagination of what is worth producing and why, and how. Hence, as we shall see shortly, the affinity he claims with William Morris. He feels adrift in a world without goods, hence without standards of value, in persons as in objects; he tries to imagine what a world of goods and its gifts would be like. Yet he also feels the suffocation of the Other in its imperialist dimension, as restraining him arbitrarily within the scope of its own lapse. He must assert an I, a self that has no accredited language for itself, against the psychic disintegration produced by the exhaustion of objects of desire in the dominant symbolic order and by the masterful, even violent assertion of the reigning power (we are forced to recall, with Yeats in The Countess Cathleen, and in the hungry abjection of Stoker’s world, the ruthlessness of imperialist and capitalist interests in the Great Famine). Hence the abjection that expresses itself in Yeats’s powerful attachment to loathing, to hatred as a subversive force,17 and to the renewal of Celtic heritage less as a utopian object of desire than as a suffering, shadow-drenched foundation out of whose ‘tragic feeling’ such objects might again be constructed.18 In Yeats, therefore, we see Kristeva’s ‘tireless builder,’ that abject ‘deviser of territories, languages, works’ who ‘never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines … constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh,’ and whose space ‘is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and

After Strange Goods 49

catastrophic.’19 The ‘great community’ hungered after by Yeats is constructed out of this shifting process. And though it may seem always to risk falling back into the ‘rag and bone shop of the heart’ – that is, into narcissism – this image, born of the restless reinvention of language, is never simply that. For abjection is the ground of modernist production, not its conclusion. The two trajectories in Yeats’s political imagination, sketched out above, have their basis in different resolutions to the abject. In the case of his ‘romantic nationalist’ work, a descent into the abject clears the ground for an alternative Oedipal drama, in effect, a new and subversive reality principle; while in the case of what may be called his avant-garde nationalist work, a descent into the abject leads to the illumination of primal want as a political force. My discussion of Yeats will proceed by looking at these in turn, and placing them in the context of his poetic development. There is in Yeats a register of the economic unconscious which evades the abject altogether, and indulges in that deepest Freudian layer of wish fulfilment: the utopian world of primal (maternal) unity and contentment that is mostly to be found in his early poetry, but continues to glimmer in the more self-abandoned moods of his later work. It is characterized by a world of blissful, inward turning, untroubled dream. Its most famous expression is in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (1890), but we recognize it in one of his last poems, ‘Politics’ (1939). In ‘Politics,’ the speaker is unable to ‘fix’ his attention on political discussions, which all run together in confusion (Roman, Russian, Spanish), and is instead silently captivated by ‘that girl standing there’: ‘O that I were young again / And held her in my arms,’ is all that he can think, or want, or say (to himself).20 This narcissistic paradise, a utopia that denies the social, in politics and in communication, is everywhere in Yeats’s early work. In ‘Innisfree,’ of course, it is a pastoral rather than erotic isolation – yet heard ‘in the deep heart’s core,’ it is similarly a subjective, and even more markedly internal, withdrawal.21 The pair of poems chosen to open his Collected Poems (1933), ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ and ‘The Sad Shepherd’ (both 1889), combine the pastoral and erotic dream withdrawals cited above. The first poem declares at the outset that ‘The woods of Arcady are dead, / And over is their antique joy,’ yet recovers what is lost in ‘words alone’ – words told to a sea-shell, whose echo, returning to the speaker, promise comfort. ‘There is no truth / Saving in thine own heart,’ this explicitly narcissistic fantasy insists, so ‘Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.’22 Despite its starting point in a lament, the poem achieves its ‘happy,’

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paradisal condition in part by its generic grounding in the simple, unified, natural life thematized by pastoral itself, and in part by an affirmative turn toward the primal narcissistic dream life, which allows for ‘glad singing’ of ‘mirthful songs’ capable of undoing or denying death itself. The ‘sad’ shepherd of the second poem is a mirror of the first, except that the promised comfort of the seashell, whose narcissistic role is rendered yet more explicit, is compromised by its failure to articulate the story or wish of the speaker, and changes ‘all he sang to inarticulate moan / Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him.’23 Hence even this ‘sad’ antithesis to primal paradise arises from the structure of primal fantasy, as the intimation of that loss of (the language of) self which shadows its horizon. Most primal fantasy at least hints at both pleasure and fear involved in regressions to a pre-individuated life. We see them fused, for example, in Yeats’s early play The Shadowy Waters (1900), whose Celtic hero, Forgael, is a poet who discharges his men and sails alone (but in the arms of a similarly impassioned woman) beyond the reach of social life, as if literally into the ‘wildering whirls’ of the ocean – that is, to some paradisal existence beyond the powers of language to represent. ‘The world drifts away,’ says his beloved: ‘We are alone for ever, and I laugh … Bend lower, that I may cover you with my hair, / For we will gaze upon this world no longer.’ And so incorporated in the woman’s body, ‘gathering Dectora’s hair about him’ in a final tableau, Forgael concludes: ‘And knitted mesh to mesh, we grow immortal … and dreams, / That have had dreams for fathers, live in us.’24 Even the ‘father’ figure is here diffuse, multiple, and internalized, drawn wholly within a ‘life’ outside life. An impossibly circular, collapsed, boundariless genealogy has been discovered for the self. Even so, if Yeats implicitly means his audience to place all this back in the Cuchulain lore from which it is drawn, the play may silently look forward to the birth of this culture hero, Dectora’s son, as if such no-exit were his very condition of possibility. Yeats’s powerful investment in a dream world finds its language not only in the Irish landscape, as in Innisfree, and in Irish Celtic heritage, as in The Shadowy Waters, but in another cultural heritage in which the House remains far more powerful than in imperialist modernity: the Hindu. This was a lifelong interest. In his writing, it may be encountered most explicitly in his early ‘Indian’ poems – where it is indulged before his ‘subject-matter became Irish’25 – and in his later enthusiasm for and published introductions to the work of Indian mystical writers.

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Recent scholarship has focused on the political implications of Yeats’s interest in Rabindranath Tagore, in particular, because of their shared identities as national poets in parallel contexts of nationalist struggle against British imperialism in Ireland and Bengal.26 An Indian Innisfree is imagined, for example, in ‘The Indian to His Love’ (1889): The island dreams under the dawn And great boughs drop tranquility; The peahens dance on a smooth lawn, A parrot sways upon a tree, Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea. Here we will moor our lonely ship And wander ever with woven hands, Murmuring softly lip to lip, Along the grass, along the sands, Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands27

Here we meet again the island, the world apart from the world, the paradisal bliss, the explicit narcissism, the imagery of self woven with other, and the ‘murmuring’ borderline of language itself. In the dramatic poem ‘Anashuya and Vijaya,’ the setting is explicitly a ‘Golden Age,’ yet again in a world apart – a temple in a garden in a forest. Here Yeats, as if seeking an objective correlative in dramatic gesture for his lovers’ solitary, dream-laden dialogue, draws upon a ritual language of gifts and the land. The temple priestess prays for the land, but at the same time and indistinguishably, for her lover. Her lover brings a ritual gift of rice with his love. Again, the ‘Indian’ discourse expresses the primal fantasy and the want of a meaningful, life-determining House. The same project is apparent in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1925), where it drives a more elaborately historicist and dialogic aesthetic, but with equally indeterminate results. Forster’s Aziz is an abject Muslim hero of the gift (even accused of a kind of vampirism, of which perhaps spiritually, in his desire for universal kinship, he is perhaps guilty), while the extended, ethnographic account of the Hindu Krishna ceremony with which the novel closes offers, in a ‘divine mess’ of sensual gifts that mirrors the derailed state of the plot, an abject narrative climax that refuses any general or ‘definite image,’ yet gives birth to ‘strange thoughts,’ ‘awakening in each man, according to his capacity, an emotion he would not have had otherwise.’28

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The logic of Yeats’s Indian displacement is clarified in what he later had to say about Tagore. ‘We fight and make money and fill our heads with politics – all dull things in the doing – while Mr. Tagore,’ says Yeats, ‘like the Indian civilization itself, has been content to discover the soul and surrender himself to spontaneity.’ Here we meet again the paradisal world apart, where the soul communes with itself, free of all regulation by others, or simply dissolves into the unity of an ideal other, the people. On the one hand, it is an uncanny subjective world that Yeats finds he has ‘dreamed of all my life long,’ and, on the other hand, it is a kind of social return of the repressed: ‘A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into his imagination; and yet we are not moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own image … or heard, perhaps for the first time in literature, our voice as in a dream.’29 No doubt it is futile to try to reconcile the idea of a literature expressing a whole civilization with one expressing, apart from war, economics, and politics, merely the soul. The contradiction belongs to the political ‘partial blindness’ that Elleke Boehmer has attributed to Yeats’s and other modernists’ idealization of ‘alternative conceptual systems believed to be regenerative,’ which they found in colonized societies.30 Yet, as the contradiction suggests, the fantasy depends upon, and does not merely block, this political otherness. The economy of the House is here visible under the disguise of a literary or imaginative tradition, which is envisioned as a ceaseless exchange of non-commodity gifts across an entire society, a process which itself defines a people, ‘a common mind.’31 ‘The work of a supreme culture,’ says Yeats of Tagore’s poems, ‘they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition … has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble.’32 The social realm of the House has been displaced into a literary tradition and, as with Ireland in this register of Yeats’s work, shorn of struggle in order to crystallize as a primary, utopian fantasy. A first sight of the abject, and a more complex articulation of Yeats’s economic unconscious, may be glimpsed in his recognition of the limits to this primal fantasy: Why should I like to imagine that ‘I know nothing but the novels of Balzac, and the Aphorisms of Patanjali?’ Yeats accuses himself. ‘Is it that whenever I have been tempted to go to Japan, China, or India for my philosophy, Balzac has brought me back,

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reminded me of my preoccupation with national, social, personal problems, convinced me that I cannot escape from our Comédie humaine?’33 The question easily extends to his double relation to Celtic heritage itself, in its registers of primal versus abject fantasy. Or again, in terms of his bifurcating passions for tranquility and violence. It is now possible, having acknowledged the thin yet durable thread of a primary fantasy in Yeats’s writing, to focus instead on that condition of abjection which increasingly takes over from that fantasy’s evident inadequacy for the politicized Yeats of the 1890s forward. This Yeats must, as all commentators agree, descend into a new realism. He must go to work in the muck of the social world his Celtic bards had sought to escape, in order to create a new society they might inhabit. Indeed, descent into a world of others, and of strife, is an important new motif in his plays, as is labour in his poetry. ‘We must labour to be beautiful,’ says a ‘beautiful mild woman’ in the poem ‘Adam’s Curse’; to which the poet struggling with his writing replies, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing / Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.’34 Here the poet acknowledges that imagination does not transcend the world of mundane work, of struggling against obstacles to get it right. Love itself is not spontaneous, but requires such labouring. Even if we do not assume that the poem is addressed to Maud Gonne (the other woman, and beloved, in the poem), the universal claims of the religious motif authorize us to extend the theme of labouring for perfection to the ‘fine thing’ Yeats wants to make of Ireland under romantic nationalism. The same theme introduces another poem more explicitly about Ireland and its heritage, ‘To Some I Have Talked with by the Fire.’ Here the poet contrasts the work of having ‘wrought out … fitful Danaan rhymes’ with the dream, while at work, of shared folk stories by the fireside. The fine thing, beautiful and perfect, is here the legendary Danaan paradise. But the work of the poem is devoted to a middle region, of which this paradise lies on some far side, unrepresentable. This interposed space is not the narcissistic one of a world apart, but is marked by others and by history. We are reminded of Parnell, and of the patriots of ‘Easter, 1916,’ in this poem’s ‘dark folk who live in souls / Of passionate men, like bats in dead trees,’ who are associated with an ‘embattled flaming multitude’ whose ‘clashing … sword-blades make / A rapturous music, till morning break / And the white hush end all but the loud beat / Of their long wings, the flash of their white feet.’ 35 This spirit battle, somehow connected to the hearts of ‘passionate men,’ and bringing

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a peace whose edges only can be visualized, may be read as an allegory of the nationalist struggle – as Yeats conceived it, wrought not only by a paradisal imagination but also by passionate and violent labour. The poem is plunged into the abject by the inadequacy of hard-wrung, ‘fitful’ rhymes to compensate for the implied absence of a satisfying, normative symbolic order – the collapse of a colonial Other, discussed above. Hence, what should be bright appears dark; what should be beautiful appears bat-like, loathsome; what should be living appears dead; what should be tranquil appears violent. Moral distinctions go astray in dreams ‘never bent / Under the fruit of evil and of good.’ Yeats implies that for us (as opposed to the fairy beings of the Danaan shore), a fine world can only be created in a descent that compels horror equally with desire. The primal fantasy is now screened off by the frustrated, self-defensive logic of hatred that is abject. Yet only out of such a dynamic, shifting ground – for Kristeva, the very begetter of languages – may be constructed a new symbolic order. One must set narcissism aside – or more properly, work directly through and beyond narcissism – in order to bend one’s will to a new reality principle, which is to say, to a sacrifice of oneself to the demands of others and of labour that will compromise the satisfaction of primal desires yet better realize them when channelled into love. That love is the private eros maximized, for Freud, in social life generally; and for Yeats similarly intertwined in his Celtic themes, of personal love and ‘love of country.’36 To work through narcissism, rather than straying indefinitely in its abject crucible, one must be drawn toward the imaginary or the Oedipal, to a further stage made possible by an identification with an other outside the I-Other, self-mother realm. In romantic nationalism, Yeats found an Oedipal father, a social authority to which he would have to bend his aloof will and subordinate his dreamy, inwardpulling desires. Parnell and O’Leary, like Balzac, are Oedipal figures, asserting a reality principle to which Yeats will submit – as long as this reality principle itself is effective, rather than another figure of exhaustion or collapse. But what is the ‘reality principle’ of romantic nationalism? Freud used the phrase to refer to a universal psychic mechanism, with application to a generalized ‘civilization.’ But Herbert Marcuse, historically refining Freud’s notion, suggests that to every civilization belongs its own mechanisms regulating work and pleasure. To each society, its own reality principle. For Marcuse, the reality principle proper to the modern age, to what I have been calling imperialist

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modernity, is excessively repressive, demanding too much work and suffering for too little or ephemeral pleasures: he called it a ‘performance principle,’ based on ‘surplus repression.’37 I will argue that in the economic unconscious of modernism, we typically find not only a resistance to this capitalist regime (a familiar feature), but may also encounter the expression of alternative reality principles proper to aboriginal modernity. We see this alternative most clearly in The Countess Cathleen, one of Yeats’s most important plays, first published in 1892 and repeatedly revised by him (extensively so in 1895, 1901, 1912, and 1919). The plot may be summarized briefly: A famine devastates the land, and two demons posing as merchants offer to buy the souls of the peasants in return for their lives. The aristocratic Christian heroine sells her own soul to free theirs. A Celtic bard who loves her wants her to escape to an idyllic world apart with him, and later tries to sell his own soul in mere despair. In the end, the heroine’s soul is denied to the demons by the sudden appearance of angels, who whisk her away to God. What is perhaps most remarkable about this play is the way that it illuminates in its major revisions – before and after the collapse of Yeats’s romantic nationalism – the difference between an ability to construct a new reality principle in a socially engaged play, and an inability to do so which leaves him closer to ‘where all the ladders start,’ and announces another political register of his work. In the 1892 play, the famine world presents an unambiguous, dystopian image of the world of commodity capitalism. In order to live, the starving peasants are forced literally to sell themselves: they must alienate in a commodity transaction those possessions which define alienability itself, and hence should be ipso facto inalienable, their very souls. The rationale of the Market is thus signalled on the level of theme, but also in action, in the lengthy fourth and penultimate scene, in which the merchants’ call to ‘Come, deal,’ or to ‘deal, deal, deal,’ is a refrain repeated fourteen times, as the peasants haggle over the gold value of their souls.38 But according to the wise elder mother figure, Oona, who is also the main conduit of Celtic lore for Cathleen, this new investment of their lives in merchants’ gold will not help them. Famine is one of ‘three things no doctor cures’; the other two are love and loneliness.39 Hence, the famine has two parallel significations, between which a high-voltage political charge is generated. At the historical and material level, the famine is an enduring sign in Ireland of a failure of Market and State powers in imperialist modernity to provide a

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livable organization of needs, desires, and submissions (hence a tolerable reality principle). The famine is a key sign in the agit-prop, practical politics of the play. At the psychic level, however, the famine is a figure of want, and is recognized in dreams: ‘Now all folk dream / From being so hungry,’ Oona tells us.40 The famine represents a primal hunger that cannot be satisfied in the alienated world of commodities, and rather demands some whole new life world, the language for which we must descend into dreams (as she says, to the very roots of eros and narcissism) to discover. That this will be the life world of an aboriginal modernity is signified in the character and actions of Cathleen. Cathleen’s actions in the play insistently posit the value of the inalienable possession, and especially the gift, against that of the commodity. She gives her feudal wealth freely to the peasants in order to help them survive, and in order to prevent their selling their souls. When this wealth is lost, she sells her own soul in exchange, in small part for gold (to prevent the peasants selling their souls again), and in large part for the release of the souls already sold, a reversal of their previous exchanges.41 Apart from this allegorized version of gift exchange, Yeats provides a more mundane instance in a scene he added to his original folk source material, which, while providing little to the fairy-tale plot, is the most beautiful and subtly moving of the play.42 In it a gardener and shepherd arrive to report the theft of fruits and livestock. Unlike such characters in a Shakespeare play, who function merely to register the protagonist’s change of condition, these characters do more. After their report, Cathleen invites them to tell what they know of the famine generally. With a shock, for we were ready at this point for them to exit, we see them as ‘themselves.’ They have their own knowledge, unconnected with their work, which they are also willing to give to Cathleen. In return, Cathleen asks them to stay for food or drink before returning to work. Her material gifts are social, creating bonds; they define a relationship of duty between persons, of help to each other. Yeats gracefully dramatizes the relationship between Cathleen and her workers as based on gifts of knowledge, labour, and things, and in a hospitality (domestic as opposed to merely efficient, bureaucratic) setting. The relationship idealized here is, like its feudal source, hierarchical rather than egalitarian; this is not inconsistent with aboriginal economies. But it is not exploitative: its economy organizes the hardship of work for pleasure and the least repressive construction of identity. The gardener’s pears and apples are not alienable but personal, ‘daily in [his] love’: ‘The rounding and

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ripening of his pears and apples, / For him’s a long heart-moving history.’ The herdsman is granted a similar proprietorship. ‘You must have risen at dawn to come so far,’ Cathleen tells him, then offers a double-entendre: ‘Keep your bare mountain – let the world drift by.’43 That she thinks of herself as guardian rather than owner of her land and its products is signalled by her feeling of obligation to use these possessions for collective rather than individual welfare. That she is a woman, and is doubled in the mother figure, Oona, is consistent with an aboriginal view of women’s power and deconstruction of a domestic/ public political binary, and is akin to other such women C.L. Innis calls the ‘presiding and providential’ spirits of country places, where a utopian social community is imagined: E.M. Forster’s Mrs Wilcox, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Ramsay, and Yeats’s own Lady Gregory.44 But why is Cathleen also a Christian heroine? She is intended by Yeats to exemplify a fusion of the Christian and the Celtic. Throughout the final scene, Cathleen feverishly prays in a chapel offstage, unseen; at the end, she is claimed by Heaven. But she has also been nursed on Celtic lore by Oona, and this is given more stage time and presence, where Oona sings of Fergus in scene 2, and the two speak of Oisin, Adene, and others. One might see this split heritage, Christian and pagan, as a bifurcation in fantasy of a hidden third term, a single aboriginal complex. To the neo-Celtic side belongs the sign of the aboriginal and an animistic sense of the permeation of all things by spirit or dream, which is to say, by personality: an inalienably spiritladen, rather than emptily material, world. But in the play’s fantasy structure, this world is also beyond good and evil, and approaches narcissism. The double edge is apparent in the bard Kevin’s offer of his soul to the demon merchants. He asks for nothing in return; it is offered as waste. He does not want his soul because it cannot live without Cathleen’s. His offer of himself is a gesture of despair, responsible to nobody but himself. Yet the merchants cannot accept it, simply because it is inalienable – ‘We cannot take it, for it is hers.’45 To the Christian side belongs the morality of the House, its ethics of debt and obligation to others. Cathleen’s actions appear to stem from a dreamy nature capable of seeing herself in the midst of an animated, personified world, yet able to reject the Celtic bard’s narcissistic relationship to that world in favour of a morality of interdependence. I insist on the fantasy structure of this Celtic-Christian splitting because it is clearly not a matter of two conventional traditions coming together in Yeats’s imagination, but of his displacing two dimensions of a single aboriginal

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complex – the animation or personification of an object world, and the view of persons (objects) as embodying social relations – into multiple symbolic chains. This fantasy structure has the function of separating out the Oedipal mechanism by which the repressed House is reworked into a new reality principle. Cathleen’s sense of moral duty – which springs from her submission to, and identity within, a Christian discourse – is what leads her to reject the narcissistic purity of the gifts and goods proper to Kevin’s neo-Celtic world, and to descend into the ugly, demonic commodity world of the merchants. She is willing to go to Market to sell everything she owns, including her soul, for the good of her people. The belief in inalienable possessions is a dead letter without the ethics of obligation and kinship. In the House they are interdependent, but Yeats separates them under ‘Celtic’ and ‘Christian’ signs. The ‘Christian,’ then, is here specifically that which forces the House into relation with the Market. Or properly, taking account of the utopian tendency of the plot, it is that which subordinates the powerful Market to the interests of the House. In this romantic nationalism, Yeats did not seek to imagine a world like Morris’s socialist utopia, apart from the commodity Market. Rather he sought to undo the exploitative power of the Market as he perceived it under modern imperialism, by drawing a new horizon around it, by accommodating it to a reimagined, syncretic Irish heritage of the House. This utopian project, evident as well in Cathleen ni Houlihan and in the O’Leary and Parnell poems already discussed, is yet marked by its fragile birth from abjection: the manifest signs of aboriginal modernity are condensed into the narcissistic, wandering, and despairing realm of the poet figure, who remains severed from the restorative justice of his ideal woman’s world. The woman herself, who bears the burden of properly reproducing the cultural goods that will save her people, must sully herself by descending to the ‘polluted place’ of the demon merchants’ dealings, then die.46 Kristeva’s lesson regarding abjection is that it is always a starting point, always pregnant with new possibilities: ‘In abjection, revolt is completely within being. Within the being of language. Contrary to hysteria, which brings about, ignores, or seduces the symbolic but does not produce it, the subject of abjection is eminently productive of culture. Its symptom is the rejection and reconstruction of languages.’47 Marcuse struggled with the political significance of fantasy, because he saw it both as the origin of revolutionary desire, and as a realm of

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primal wish, of the Innisfree kind, that could not tolerate any relationship to the real. Fantasy and the reconstruction of an historical reality principle – or cultural revolution – seemed cut off from each other. Kristeva solves this problem in her theory of abjection, in which primal fantasy plunges the subject, not into a frozen state, but into a volatile process, out of which new languages, new accommodations between language, desire, and power, may emerge. Yeats at one time believed that he belonged to a concrete political and cultural movement to which he might contribute – out of his very narcissistic pleasures and horrors, rather than despite them – the primal ‘reconstruction of languages’ that Kristeva calls ‘productive of culture.’ ‘Nor may I less be counted one, / With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,’ says Yeats, in an early poem looking ahead to nationalist struggles, ‘Because, to him who ponders well, / My rhymes more than their rhyming tell / Of things discovered in the deep’ where ‘elemental creatures … hurry from unmeasured mind / To rant and rage in flood and wind.’48 Until the first years of the twentieth century, he believed that the new languages he forged – which I have been arguing were, from their abject ground zero, symbolic constructions of an economic unconscious, and utopian languages for an aboriginal modernity – were developments of the peculiarly passionate psychic life, and symbolic heritage of such passions encoded as goods, of an aboriginal Ireland. ‘One thought always possessed me very strongly,’ wrote Yeats in 1907: New from the influence, mainly in the personal influence, of William Morris, I dreamed of enlarging Irish hate, till we had come to hate with a passion of patriotism what Morris and Ruskin hated … [W]ere we not a poor nation with ancient courage, unblackened fields and a barbarous gift of self-sacrifice? Ruskin and Morris had spent themselves in vain because they had found no passion to harness to their thought, but here were unwasted passion and precedents in the popular memory for every needed thought and action …49

The English have lost the cultural goods, and lack the ‘passion’ for supreme gifts, needed to transform the unsatisfying commodity world into something better. Ruskin and Morris give themselves in vain, but Yeats’s gift may be reciprocated. For Yeats the reason is plain: Ireland can draw on a modern aboriginal heritage that continues, however painfully, to reproduce the social imagination needed to defy the alienations of a Market society. He carefully avoids associating himself with

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Morris’s socialist politics, presumably because he affirms the hierarchical status systems and religious passions of the feudal and Celtic heritages he knows, as opposed to the predominantly egalitarian and secular Marxism of his time. No need for Yeats to imagine a socialist utopia, nor think to bring it closer by advising ‘painters to paint fewer pictures upon canvas, and to burn more of them on plates,’ in Ireland – where archaic passions for the land and its symbolic heritage still exist.50 Not that he won’t burn a plate or two himself. But such goods are valuations, not things, and hence his insistence upon an archaic passion that will flood canvas or plates, books or legends, English or Gaelic, and render them equally Irish and revolutionary. In his own reinvention of a Norman castle as Thoor Ballylee a decade later, Yeats will eat from orientalist and earthenware plates, repose on Arts and Crafts furnishings, write upon a rustic trestle table, and contemplate a six-hundred-year-old Japanese sword while armed men hunt each other, and Ireland, outside the walls; and be thus engaged in the same hunt within, via the impassioned domestic property he would call a ‘permanent symbol of my work.’51 So while he differs as to the solution, he agrees about the problem, and assimilates Morris into his bricolage House for passions that seem untimely only in England. He also cites Morris as one of four authors fundamental to him, because ‘he gives me all the great stories, Homer and the Sagas included.’52 Morris and Yeats share a love for these aboriginal epics that fuels their political projects. But Yeats feels that only in the aboriginal modernity of Ireland – evoked in romantic nationalism, not as a mere political system but as an entire web of alternatively founded and organized economic, imaginative, and emotional habits under the sign of archaic passion – is the revolution possible. Its seductive force must have been felt by Bram Stoker, too, when Yeats gave his friend an inscribed copy of the 1892 Countess Cathleen, and he began the years of research that would bring about the totalizing vampire myth of Dracula. When in the early years of the twentieth century, Yeats perceives the failure of this revolution, its new reality principle – of an Irish symbolic order in which Market is subordinated to House – built up from Irish history and legend, dissolves. Its traces flare in Cathleen ni Houlihan and persist in poems such as the later nationalist elegies. But the change is strikingly registered in Yeats’s revisions to The Countess Cathleen after 1901, where he alters and builds up the binary opposition between ‘Celtic’ and Imperialist paradigms, alters and diminishes the role of the ‘Christian’ one, and so severs any possible relationship

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in that play between House and Market. Its closure is no longer Oedipal and tragic, but is instead rescued from abject incurability by a fanfare of imaginary triumph. On the one hand, the Market is no longer the place that demons and martyrs struggle to control; it is now irredeemable, identified with evil itself: ‘We travel for the Master of all merchants,’ say the demons.53 On the other hand, the renamed bard, Aleel, now embodies both Celtic and Christian belief, while the ethical paradigm is suspended, rendered futile or ambivalent: ‘Leave all things to the Builder of the Heavens,’ Aleel cries as Cathleen prepares to sign the merchants’ contract. ‘I have no thoughts; I hear a cry – a cry,’ replies Cathleen, who now has no habit of ethical action but only a vague pity to motivate her. ‘I have seen a vision,’ Aleel reproves her, ‘under a green hedge, / A hedge of hips and haws – men yet shall hear / The archangel rolling Satan’s empty skull / Over the mountain tops.’ Aleel has more gravity to his argument than had Kevin, who recognized only his own despair, not divine providence. Aleel can actually promise to Cathleen a transformed world, not just a world apart. But this world is apocalyptic; we recognize in it an imaginary resolution of good over evil, of desire over the real, the purely transcendental and ‘complete’ image of a utopia beyond life. Indeed, Yeats now adds an explicitly apocalyptic ending, a full-scale supernatural battle between angels and demons. ‘The Almighty wrath at our great weakness and sin / Has blotted out the world and we must die,’ an Old Man says in the ensuing darkness, before a ‘visionary light’ suggests a new dawn.54 But why is Cathleen bereft of her ethical habit? Because Yeats has also cut out the scene in which her interdependent relationship with the peasants is established, her dialogues with the gardener and herdsman. The later play becomes a transcendental romance. The suppression of the ethical dimension of the House, and the new imaginary separation between House and Market as realms of darkness and light, heaven and hell, is enforced by Yeats’s addition of an Orpheus allusion: ‘I must go down, down – I know not where,’ Cathleen says, having repeatedly instructed the poet: ‘go, / And silently, and do not turn your head. Good-bye; but do not turn your head and look; / Above all else, I would not have you look.’55 Cathleen is a figure of ritual defilement, and becomes taboo. She traverses the abject, not so much to alter the condition of a people, to display a new way of doing things, but to display the abjection of self, the horror of mortal reality tout court, that belongs to a saint. This process is even clearer in the inverse imaginary drama of Purgatory (1939), in which

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the same separation is enforced, but the descent is an utter failure as opposed to an utter triumph, and the ‘presiding and providential spirit’ of the land and home, the central woman figure, just as in The King of the Great Clock Tower (1935), is never able to speak. Yet, while Cathleen ni Houlihan thus registers a new crisis in Yeats’s political imaginary, and a renewed collapse into the abject, the imaginary solution produced in such grandiose terms is not typical of his work, and apart from its rare inversion in the nihilism of Purgatory, hardly persists. What new languages, then, emerge from this collapse? What takes over from romantic nationalism? The turning point is easy to mark. Beginning in 1907, Yeats shifts his investment from the language of a romantic nationalism, in whose symbolic field he was but one player among others, to that over which he has sole creative authority: his own slowly evolving languages of historical antithesis – from their earliest articulation in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, which turns Yeats’s drama from tragedy to farce, to the first version of A Vision in 1925 and its subsequent revisions, to their abject collapse in the last poems.56 Having lost faith in an antithesis between the State he imagined for Ireland and the imperialist Market, Yeats lost faith in politics generally – insofar as politics meant investment in the State as ally to his desires or compulsions, to his love and hate, in response to an alienated modernity. Yet an intensely political imagination persists under the cover of a newly complex, this-worldly fantasy of social change. In particular, he imagines that his contemporary world – dominated by alienation to some ultimately intolerable point – will cause the House to arise and destroy it, as a dialectical ‘return of the repressed’: When I stand upon O’Connell Bridge in the half-light and notice that discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark and I am certain that wherever in Europe there are minds strong enough to lead others the same vague hatred rises; in four or five or in less generations this hatred will have issued in violence and imposed some kind of rule of kindred. I cannot know the nature of that rule, for its opposite fills the light; all I can do to bring it nearer is to intensify my hatred.57

This is not a purely transcendental victory, nor is it, he subsequently makes clear, a State victory. Even so, one cannot dismiss the invitation to fascism, in which a fiction of the House is reified in State form,

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which is ironically made possible by scorn of the State as a failure of politics itself. The invitation remains ambiguous: he will spend the rest of his career writing and rewriting the visionary logic according to which we might see this process in concrete terms. Yeats’s vision of historical antitheses, of which the above prophecy is the modern, forward edge, is idiosyncratic and labyrinthine, a whirling, open-ended field of conical forms which combine, confront, and create psychical qualities, and give restless rise to countless interpretations and predictions of social formation. In this vision he conforms, ever more irremediably, to Kristeva’s ‘exile who asks, “where?”’: ‘The space that engrosses the [abject self], the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, catastrophic. A deviser of territories, languages, works, the [abject self] never stops demarcating the universe whose fluid confines … constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh.’58 Nor is the schema of the vision anything but another one of these scaffoldings or ladders, Yeats admitted, ‘stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawings of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi’ that help ‘to hold in a single thought’ an ideal unity of ‘reality and justice.’59 Yet in his writing, this unity is never present or concrete, and evades us. It exists at no point – of the many points of the system explicated by Yeats in A Vision, or expressed in his poetry or drama – but is asserted only in a structural sense that can never be lived. Moreover, the structural vision itself is too ‘harsh’ and ‘incomplete,’ and must give way, in Yeats’s later feeling, to a more fluid ‘Unity of Being’ that is not ‘distant and therefore intellectually understandable, but imminent, differing from man to man and age to age, taking upon itself pain and ugliness, “eye of newt, and toe of frog.”’60 This returns us to the abject ground of refuse and ravings in ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion.’ In the last poems, Yeats dismisses such conceptual figures as the Fool and Blind Man as but circus animals, and affirms only the situational, momentary ‘dream’ in which they are created; in a narcissistic dialogue, he confesses that his ‘theme’ of ‘one clear view’ in which ‘all’s arranged,’ is lost, dissolving again into nought ‘but a dream’; and the ‘high talk’ of the poet he pictures as a farcical stilt-walking.61 Even the direct effect of his vision upon his poetry and plays – of spirits, fools, masks, bodies, husks, wisdoms, principles, faculties, and so on – cannot be said to be mechanical and unifying, as against his early work, but if anything more incoherent and open-ended.

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Into this abject world, into its disorderly, dream-begetting, violenceand repulsion-filled wastes, the economic unconscious is channelled. Out of it must arise some new language of the House – as kindred, as maternal, as rooted in goods and gifts. In Yeats’s later writing, this language is closest to the restless deconstructions and reconstructions of the abject. The House may be figured only as that which emerges from the abject. ‘When a kindred discovers through apparition and horror that the perfect cannot perish nor even the imperfect long be interrupted, who can withstand that kindred,’ says A Vision, and ‘the next divine influx [will] be to kindreds’ (53). That these kindreds belong to the economy of the House, and are articulated out of abjection, is most clearly illuminated in Yeats’s late play The Herne’s Egg (1938). This play more than lives up to Yeats’s assessment of it as ‘the strangest wildest thing I have ever written,’ and its very idiosyncracy as a symbolic assemblage reveals a strong drive to create new languages, identities, and spaces, even if these evoke grotesque laughter or horror. The plot draws on Celtic figures and Yeats’s interests in the Trojan War nexus of Greek legends. A Celtic warrior, Congal, celebrates a pause in his endless war with an enemy king by stealing the eggs of a bird god, the Great Herne, to eat at a shared feast. The offended bird god’s priestess and mortal bride, Attracta, substitutes a hen’s egg for Congal’s herne’s egg. Enraged, and thinking the enemy king is responsible, Congal slays him, restarting the cycles of bloodshed. Now seeing the trick, however, he condemns Attracta to be raped by seven warriors, including himself. Later, she claims that she remains pure, and all but Congal confess to having dissembled. She nevertheless calls upon the Great Herne to punish the men by reincarnating them ‘down a step or two / Into cat or rat or bat, / Into dog or wolf or goose.’62 Congal’s punishment is similar, but more elaborate. He is called to a mountain top where a Fool, inspired by the bird god, armours himself with a cauldron lid, a cooking pot, and a roasting spit, and tries to kill him. The Fool fails, but Congal, wishing to assert his will to the end, throws himself on the spit, and dies. Despite Attracta’s last-minute effort to give him a better future, Congal is reincarnated as a donkey. The play reflects Yeats’s pessimistic view, by the 1930s, of Irish political struggles as petty and schismatic. This view pervades his nationalist elegies of the same period, which I discussed at the outset. In the farcical joke which constitutes the first scene, and in an uncannily Beckett-like exchange, the warriors of Connaught and Tara are seen to

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be mere parasites upon the life of war, forgetful of any reason for fighting other than routine. Congal is a violent, pure will, and he wars not for a kindred but for himself, or for nothing. Hence the hero, if we may call him that, is a nihilist ‘fool,’ which is what we are told his transformation symbolizes.63 The siege of Tara is missing the motivation of a kindred Helen, then, but it is not missing its Leda. The priestess Attracta is a sacred bride of the bird god, who is able to declare at the end, ‘I lay in the bride-bed, / His thunderbolts in my hand,’ and ‘I share his knowledge.’ If we restrict ourselves to the play’s closing laughter, and Attracta’s servant’s pronouncement – ‘All that trouble and nothing to show for it, / Nothing but just another donkey’ – we will feel ourselves locked in the logic of the abject (which is troublingly metafictional) and all the ladders pulled down.64 Yet that is not all there is. There is a life for the House in this play, whose exploration will complete my discussion of Yeats and add the last twist to my borrowings from Kristeva. A first observation is that in the world of the play, women are the mediators of value, of the sacred. The bird god has only priestesses as intermediaries with mortals, and the priestesses have young women as disciples. In scene 2, when the young women come to Attracta, two things happen: the young women kneel and offer gifts of farm produce, and in exchange, Attracta takes on the role of prophetic matchmaker, telling them whom they shall marry. Sacred knowledge is here explicitly defined in a nexus with women as symbolic producers, gift exchange, and the organization of kinship. The herne’s eggs themselves have conventionally been read as signs of a new being or community, not yet representable. We may understand them, in this context, specifically as the signs of an aboriginal modernity that cannot yet be visualized. It is true that in one sense, ‘nothing’ happens but the birth of another fool in a foolish world: the House and State worlds remain separate (the State being corrupted by alienation in the figure of stolen eggs, that is, of sacred children, inalienable possessions comparable to the souls of The Countess Cathleen). On the other hand, the fantasy, encoded in the plot, of the House killing off this corrupt State (by way of domestic tools associated with the peasantry and with women – pot, lid, and spit) enacts a real power in the abject world (however farcical, mundane) of the House. Yeats tempts us to wonder how that power might be evoked in alternative ways. The final scene leaves us waiting for yet another figure to emerge, one beyond the scope of the plot. Attracta says that her coupling with the Great Herne produced nothing for the mortal world; instead,

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‘there’s a work / That should be done, and that work needs / No bird’s beak or claw, but a man, / The imperfection of a man,’ and she hastily asks her servant, a wise clown figure, to lie with her.65 The lines refer just as readily to the servant and the ‘work’ of coupling, as they do to some wider resolution to the warring violence of the land, and to a hero who might bring such change. Either way, the timing is wrong: Congal is changed to a donkey before he can be reborn as a higher being. Like the priestess, we must wait for another chance. What may be grasped from this is a sense of the Other – a centre of signs, values, and satisfactions – as incomplete, as divided and desiring in itself. We see it in the problem of timing and alternative births, but also in the strangely erotic self-division of the subject of descent, the abjected god, into two figures: Attracta and the Great Herne, one of which is representable, the other not. It may be that what we encounter here, at some faintly utopian margin of the abject, is a form of desire that would redeem the political unconscious from its cycles of hate. For this open-ended Other – this erotic bifurcation of an abject Other – closely resembles the archaic ‘coagulation of the mother and her desire’ that Kristeva calls the imaginary Father. The name is schematic, really, because the imaginary Father is neither gendered nor personifiable (nor, one should add, an effect of the later mirror stage). It is something like a flow from elsewhere, from some other structural plane or place, that ‘rises up or intervenes both before the accession to language and before the imposition of sexual difference,’ in order to open up a space within primary narcissism, or within its abject crisis, that will turn the child toward the love of an other.66 Kristeva claims to follow Freud in finding the cultural image of the imaginary Father in Frazer’s central aboriginal god, the animistic principle of life whose mortality must be ritually enacted and reversed, and who seems to represent a jouissance that Freud himself could not understand – the ‘light-suffused face of the young Persian god,’ Mithras.67 An abject collapse of the Other, therefore, is turned to ecstatic possibility by intimations of a complete pleasure fantastically available through the windy cracks of an incomplete world. ‘Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement,’ sings Crazy Jane, another aboriginal priestess figure, ‘For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.’68 She is a figure of ecstasy wrought directly from abjection (not from escaping it in a heavenly mansion, as the Bishop proposes to her). Norman Jeffares and A.S. Knowland make an insightful link between this affirmation of a torn,

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incomplete, existential Other and the refrain which ends Yeats’s play A Full Moon in March (1935).69 In this play, yet another narrative of sacred female descent, a Queen who has refused all suitors finally dances with the severed head of a ragged swineherd she acknowledges as lover. ‘Why must those holy, haughty feet descend / From emblematic niches?’ asks the chorus; and of visionary ‘pitchers’ filled with ‘time’s completed treasure,’ what, they ask, ‘do they lack?’ The single answer is the refrain, ‘Desecration and the lover’s night.’70 That love which is worth anything must be achieved in desecration and darkness. Similarly, in ‘The Statues’ (composed 1938–9), ‘we Irish, born into that ancient sect / But thrown upon this filthy modern tide / and by its formless, spawning, fury wrecked,’ are able to ‘Climb to our proper dark’ toward a beautiful image of Cuchulain.71 This image is literally the statue commemorating the Easter rebellion of 1916, and represents to Yeats the utopian desire of his romantic nationalism, eroticized here as an image on which are ‘pressed at midnight’ the ‘live lips’ of loveimpassioned youth. Its utopian promise is affirmed, if not fully realized, because the Irish (recalling the contrast with the English, and Morris’s politics) are uniquely able, as ‘Under Ben Bulben’ (composed 1938–9) reminds us, to ‘Cast [their] mind on other days’ in order to find the ‘profane perfection of mankind’ – that perfection figured in the work of artists up to the ‘confusion’ of the modern age, and in Ireland’s ‘seven heroic centuries.’72 In ‘The Statues,’ this perfection is recognized in the heritage of Cuchulain. My reading here dovetails with Nicholas Miller’s recent argument that Yeats in his middle and later work uses the figure of Cuchulain, and Celtic heritage generally, to write an ‘erotics of memory.’ As against a ‘compensatory, commemorative constitution’ of Irish political identity, which has fastened itself to a rigid, ahistorical ideal of the tragic Celt, Yeats and other Irish modernists offer ‘counter-memorials’ that draw on the same heritage to thrust the past into the present as a volatile mix organized by desire rather than by the ‘stabilizing, controlling images’ of historical knowledge.73 The result is an image of the past (in the present) as unfinished, corrigible, and situational. Miller frames this argument by insisting, along with Yeats critic John Foster and other recent modernist scholars, that modernism is radical in its reinvention of tradition, not its dissociation from it. For Miller, modernism is radical not for some naïve, futuristic commitment to the new in defiance of the past tout court, but conversely for its harder work of memory, transforming our very selves by transforming our

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relationships to history and heritage.74 The same claim has been made in reverse, by Kiberd, in denying the simple primitivism of Irish nationalism at the fin de siècle: it fused Celtic heritage together with a progressive practice. ‘The argument [between imperialists and Revivalists] might seem to have been conducted in familiar terms of tradition versus modernity, but this was not quite so: at a deeper, more interesting, level, the debate was about how best to modernize … The Gaelic League did indeed wish to revive Irish as a prelude to a recovered national pride and economic prosperity, but its methods – mass democratic action, workers’ education, mingling of the sexes on a basis of equality at free classes and summer schools – were anything but conservative.’75 Yeats emerged from an Ireland struggling, not to return to the past sung by the bards, but to construct a future in which the heritage of imperialist modernity – Enlightenment liberalism and its vast institutional and ideological field – remains motivated and justified by this past, remains indebted to it as a supreme good. What Yeats described about the Irish peasants in terms of passion and symbolic heritage, then, is not to be grasped as a force of regression, but as a peculiarly modern possibility. The very modernity of the Irish Revival, observes Terry Eagleton, is its marginal reproduction as a modern antithesis in the uneven (or imperialist) expansion of modern history. ‘Precisely because of their backwardness, certain forms of collective cultural consciousness, later to be associated with “progressive” currents of thought, were able to spring up in [Gaelic] impoverished spots far earlier than they did in England itself … It is not, then, a question of the convivial yet melancholic Celt with a song on his lips and a tear in his eye, one hand wrapped around the ale-jug and the other thrust out in affable welcome to the stranger. It is a question of the way in which, in family-based agrarian communities, personal and social relationships are less easily separable than they are in the marketplaces or political institutions of modernity … Matters of property, marriage, inheritance, moral authority, social welfare, emigration, social obligation and the like are still partly interwoven with custom and kinship.’76 Kiberd, too, has attested to the survival of family and land as systems of value persisting and opposed to imperialist domination.77 Eagleton has even spoken of this aboriginal economy as constituting a ‘public counter-culture’ in colonial Ireland.78 It is this public heritage that spoke most immediately to Yeats. No doubt it spoke ambivalently through his Anglo-Irish formation, even as, I have argued, it would resonate as an economy with that of domestic life.

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What emerges in his work, I have argued, is a modern aboriginal heritage whose material and practical dimension neither achieves a realist footing nor is swept utterly away, but is confined restlessly, ambiguously, explosively – and I have introduced Yeats’s and Kristeva’s common term, ecstatically – to the shifting situations and constructions of a remembering, dreaming, lived present. What I wish to suggest is utopian about the electrification, if I can put it that way, of the abject or ecstatic memory by the charge of a repressed aboriginal modernity, depends upon this deconstruction of a false opposition between modernity and tradition. A certain kind of modern alienation, Eagleton reminds us, is not so bad: ‘Those who idealize such [archaic social] set-ups forget that the personalizing of power can mean the whim of the patriarch, the coerciveness of kinship, the claustrophobia of bickering, begrudging communities, the arbitrary sway of custom and tradition’; while it is ‘these forms of authority which modernity seeks to overturn, severing personal from social relations, the affective from the economic, so that men and women may be released into an impersonal public arena in which they have, in theory at least, rights to equality and autonomy quite independent of tribe or pedigree.’79 Perhaps, then, a properly utopian answer cannot be to imagine an ideal social state, a set of harmonizing laws and customs that would reconcile these seemingly antithetical, modern political desires. One cuts through the dilemma by thinking with Kiberd, down beneath desire to the abject roots of the self in relation to an Other which must radically be re-imagined, and resymbolized, as an unfinished project bequeathed by the collision of imperialist and aboriginal modernities. The modern ‘republican ideal,’ says Kiberd, did not try to force Irishness into the straitjacket of a Celtic ghost; its ideal was no less open-ended than ‘the achieved individual, the person with the courage to become his or her full self’: The imperialists were not to be thought of as different, so much as aborted or incomplete individuals. By a weird paradox, their incompleteness was evidenced by their polished surface, their premature self-closure which left them at once incomplete and finished. The glossy, confident surface indicated a person immune to self-doubt and therefore incapable of development. The Irish self, by contrast, was a project: and its characteristic text was a process, unfinished, fragmenting. It invited the reader to become a co-creator with the author and it refused to exact a merely passive admiration for the completed work of art.80

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With this situation in mind, we are less likely to be shocked by Barbara Seuss’s translation of the ‘social construction of identity’ in Yeats’s vision into ‘contemporary feminist and postcolonial terms,’ as ‘a form of syncretistic gender and ethnic hybridity.’81 The latter may belong to a world far from the one Yeats wished for, but if my argument is right, it is a world plausibly imagined by the world he wished for, in which consciousness is to be grasped as conflict, not identified with knowledge. And this grasp is supplied by a ‘tradition’ forgotten or repressed by imperialist modernity: The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to be so busy whether at work or at play that all is forgotten but the momentary gain. They find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from Lethe’s wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation of reality, tradition offers us a different word – ecstasy.82

It is in this ecstatic register, magnetized by the eros of a ‘profane perfection of mankind,’ that Yeats’s economic unconscious, having travelled through the realm of abjection, finds its only durable and empowering expression. No doubt history continues like Congal to cycle endlessly through pain, violence, and futility, for as the ‘The Gyres’ tells us, ‘beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth’ until we can only ‘look on’ and ‘laugh in tragic joy.’ Yet the Irish – whom Yeats feels tied with him to archaic life, ‘dear’ to the ‘Rocky Face’ of that history – may descend into Christian tomb, Celtic night, or ‘any rich, dark nothing,’ to ‘disinter / The workman, noble and saint,’ and bring to new, unimaginable life, that profane perfection so loved by Yeats’s nationalist heroes, and by Yeats’s later priestesses and women prophets.83 If it must be that only out of hatred shall a new kindred, and indeed a new symbolic order, arise, it must also be out of love, since only the latter, for Freud and Kristeva alike, sets in motion the electricity of desire, and the Oedipal sublimation and selfsacrifice upon which new cultures are built. Yeats’s elitist commitments and fascist interests remind us that no such novelty, perhaps no such love, is necessarily to be admired. Yet his extroversion, the indeterminacy and vulnerability of his love and vision alike, of his very passion, must be acknowledged progressive. Yeats will circle and circle around this progressive love as he will his hate, an animating aesthetic that is real yet deprived of the language of the Other, praising it.

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Kristeva sees this primal imaginary orientation of the self revealed only in a ‘few rare flashes’ amidst the predominantly abject world of modern literature.84 But in the remainder of this study, it will appear that among modernists writing in English, such an artifice of ecstasy is no mere flash. Lawrence’s Profane Work In 1932, W.B. Yeats invited the legendary war hero T.E. Lawrence to join the newly formed Irish Academy of Letters. ‘I am Irish,’ responded Lawrence when he accepted the nomination, ‘and it has been a chance to admit it publicly … It’s not my fault, wholly, if I am not more Irish: family, political, even money obstacles will hold me in England always. I wish it were not so.’ Lawrence was the illegitimate child of an Anglo-Irish landowner and Scottish governess who left Ireland before he was born. Yet Lawrence had remained for many years a legal heir to family wealth, and recently wished legally to reclaim his father’s name, Chapman, to purchase family land in Ireland, so ‘that it should be kept in the line,’ and to ‘dig myself in there.’ His commitment to an Irish identity was also inspired by a close relationship with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw that had grown through the 1920s. He even thought that if he were to write a biography, it would be of the Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement. Yet Lawrence did not always wish to appear Irish, and in 1920 his complaint regarding the American popularizer of the Lawrence of Arabia myth is revealing: ‘I am sitting still while he calls me an Irishman, and a Prince of Mecca, and other beastliness, and it seems hardly possible to begin putting it straight.’85 Beastly, it would seem, because in Lawrence’s Britain, the Irishman and the Arabian Prince are both prominent clichés of the racialized primitive. Yet in 1920, and certainly for Lawrence, it is impossible to overlook other associations evoked equally by the Irish and the Arabian: those of two prominent nationalist movements waged violently, and with ambivalent outcome, against a self-interested imperialism, and also of two attractively magical or exotic, aboriginal heritages. Lawrence had, after all, devoted his life in extraordinary fashion to ideals wrought out of both its cultural heritages and its political interests. How, then, could he wish so simply to dissociate himself, not merely from such imprecision,86 but from the horror inspired by these identities? His desire and awe before the Arab will be fused, in his writing, with revulsion: this alter ego becomes both the

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utopian vehicle of want, and an abject sign of a self that cannot identify with that vehicle and yet stabilize its name – the mark of its kinship, of itself as cultural property. Readers of Lawrence know that these rings circle wider and wider, for beastliness, uncleanness, horror – and their self-reflexive effect, self-disgust and shame – are found everywhere in his language, in public and private, in literature and out. This language does not restrict itself to stable moral or racial categories, but flows across all boundaries, to express horror at others, at himself, and even at the ‘beastly book’ for which he is famous.87 It is this thoroughgoing abjection, and its inevitably troubling effects in social practice, in political desire, in subjectivity, and in language, that here make Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (1922–6) an exemplary modernist text. The thought of Yeats and Lawrence sitting side by side may seems curious only at first sight. Both came from prominent Anglo-Irish families, both greatly admired William Morris and aspired to revive archaic cultural practices contrary to the norms of a bourgeois world, and both supported the nationalist revolutions of a colonized people. In Lawrence too, I will suggest, an economic unconscious worked through fantasy ideals and abjection. Yet Lawrence was a greater literalist of the imagination: ‘Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a new nation, to restore a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts.’ Lawrence’s political goal, ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ was utopian, but constrained by what he deemed achievable through post-war political negotiation.88 In Seven Pillars Lawrence is eloquent in his critique of an imperialism whose aims are tawdry and methods fraudulent. He advised a lecturer on the Arab Revolt: ‘My objects were to save England & France too, from the follies of the imperialists, who would have us, in 1920, repeat the exploits of Clive and Rhodes. The world has passed by that point. I think, though, there’s a great future for the British Empire as a voluntary association.’89 In part, Lawrence’s adherence to a ‘voluntary’ commonwealth was consistent with nationalist revisions of British imperialism around the world; in part, it was merely practical, for he knew that a withdrawal of all European powers was simply not going to happen, as European industry had too many material interests in the

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region, and the Arabs lacked the military strength and organization directly to contradict these interests. Hence Lawrence pushed, as advisor to Sherif Feisal at the 1919 Peace Conferences, for Arab selfgovernment – a new political entity constructed either, if the Sherif of Mecca prevailed, under the conservative banner of Pan-Arab Unity, or, if the influence of Lawrence and Feisal prevailed, by no ‘madman’s notion’ of unity, but as a loose association of diverse, ‘small states’90 representing different peoples, geographies, and economies, under the umbrella of the British Commonwealth (the latter to foster modernization and resolve regional disputes). After several years, Lawrence felt that something like this had been achieved, but he allowed Seven Pillars to remain dominated not only by lacerating images of post-war European ruthlessness in setting aside Arab claims, but also by a ubiquitous mood of shame and revulsion at those expedient yet knowingly empty promises of independence for the Arabs in return for their wartime efforts, of which Lawrence was the chief mediator, and on which those claims stood. In Seven Pillars, after writing of the ‘dream-palace’ that was his goal, Lawrence complains: ‘So high an aim called out the inherent nobility of [the Arabs’] minds, and made them play a generous part in events: but when we won, it was charged against me that the British petrol royalties in Mesopotamia were become dubious, and French Colonial policy ruined in the Levant. I am afraid that I hope so. We pay for these things too much in honour and in innocent lives.’91 Lawrence’s words resonate eerily today. In Seven Pillars, his rhetoric of abjection, filtered through his neo-medievalism, fills these words with a peculiar force. It is British imperialism itself that has lost its ‘honour’ and descended into shame, as Lawrence does over and over again, as if ritualistically, in his desert life; while conversely, an archaic Arab ‘nobility’ flowers. The one State is dominated by the material interests and ruthless impersonality of the Market; the other remains wedded to the ‘generous’ economy of the House. These paradigms are conveyed nearly entirely by detailed concrete description of persons, things, and events, rather than by commentary; Lawrence’s self-reflexive voice is mocking and ironic rather than analytic. The impression left by this autobiographical Ulysses may be conveyed by what Lawrence said of Arab comrades whose portraits, by Eric Kennington, were commissioned for Seven Pillars: ‘He was drawing odd people, who are very impatient of those they think fools, men without ties, or duties, or claims, rank individualists who cling to their barren country that

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they may owe nothing to any man, and be owed nothing in return.’ Paradoxically, unfortunately, and shamefully, it is precisely such independence, such normative alienation, that allows Lawrence to smash his own household gods (tentative as they already are) and assimilate to the House world of Bedouin society. And it is not a matter of race. ‘The Arab townsman or villager is like us and our villagers, with our notion of property, our sense of gain and our appetite for material success. He has our premises, as well as our processes.’ The stern realm of the gift that Yeats and other Celtic Revivalists found in the people of the barely habitable, desert rocks of Aran, Lawrence found in the Arabian ‘men of the desert.’92 Hence, too, Lawrence’s compatibility with the anti-capitalist, fellow Irishman Bernard Shaw, and the witty half-seriousness of a gift from Shaw to Lawrence that memorialized the kinship in their political projects: a custom-printed copy of Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism with a new title page renaming his socialist exposition, ‘The Foundations of the seven pillars, being the word of a western prophet to the deliverer of Damascus.’ While Lawrence disclaims an Arab identity for himself, he does assimilate himself, however abjectly, to this gift economy. Indeed, the dedicatory poem configures his entire wartime career as a personal gift exchange between a beloved – a young man, Dahoum, with whom he lived before the war – and himself. ‘I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands / and wrote my will across the sky in stars / To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house, / that your eyes might be shining for me / When we came.’ This gift is revealed as a return for ‘your gift,’ in the final verse.93 In keeping with this contract, Lawrence following the war resists entering into the market economy of his own society: he pleads to remain in the army and air force as a form of literal bondage or indenture to the State. And, most importantly, Seven Pillars informs us, ‘for my work on the Arab front I had determined to accept nothing.’94 This held true, and extended not only to public honours, but to any payment or monetary reward for what he had to say or write about the war. Within his lifetime, sales of the rare copies of Seven Pillars and of its popular abridgement, Revolt in the Desert (1927), offered him a sizeable fortune, yet he stuck to his principles and for many years scraped by as a soldier on very modest means (royalties from Revolt went to an RAF charity fund). This took some effort, for he was hemmed in on all

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sides by his own commodification: in the cinema and the press, and by collectors scooping up even his most insignificant letters.95 Yet, since the subtitled, historical ‘triumph’ narrated by Seven Pillars is everywhere undercut as compromised, unclean – ‘beastly,’ in Lawrence’s prim slang – so is the book, which is presented selfreflexively as an abject gift, a gift whose redemption in a ‘new heaven and a new earth’ has not been realized, and whose dedicatory recipient is dead. The affiliation of Lawrence and the Arabs, founded on the personal exchange between Lawrence and Dahoum, is represented in ‘our work, the inviolate house,’ but when Dahoum dies, and the imperialists swarm in, the work is broken and disfigured: ‘Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house, / as a memory of you. / But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished: and now / The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels / in the marred shadow / Of your gift.’ The failure of the ‘new heaven and new earth’ historically to emerge entails the failure of its proper epic. ‘The epic mode was alien to me, as to my generation,’ he tells us in Seven Pillars: ‘Memory gave me no clue to the heroic, so that I could not feel such men as Auda in myself. He seemed fantastic as the hills of Rumm, old as Mallory.’ There is a faint hope, however, in this lack, in failure itself, just as there is, I have been arguing, in the radical descent, below the ruins of the reigning symbolic orders, to abjection: ‘To the clear-sighted, failure was the only goal. We must believe, through and through, that there was no victory, except to go down into death fighting and crying for failure itself, calling in excess of despair to Omnipotence to strike harder, that by His very striking He might temper our tortured selves into the weapon of His own ruin.’96 There is no triumph for the imperialist – no new culture, no seven-pillared temple – without vertiginous, disorienting, symbolic self-ruin. ‘Love builds from excrement,’ wrote Yeats, and ‘freedom is a profane, not a saintly body,’ wrote Lawrence.97 Debates regarding Lawrence’s importance to the war have long exercised themselves over his contribution to British military victory.98 Yet he was at least as much an extraordinary agitationpropagandist and diplomat, travelling thousands of miles crisscrossing the Middle East to win various peoples’ leaders to a federated cause, to a new political idea, as he was a military strategist. There is no question that, from this perspective at least, his activity did significantly forward the project of Arab self-government and

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counter-imperialist history in the Middle East. There are two sides to this activity about which he felt ambivalent: 1 Ethnographic: When living with Arabs, he trained himself to listen carefully to all stories and talk about families and tribes, learning as much about current kinship structures and power relations as possible, in any given region. ‘Get to know their families, clans, tribes, friends and enemies, wells, hills, and roads. Do all this by listening and by indirect enquiry. Do not ask questions. Get to speak their dialect of Arabic, not yours,’ he advised his fellow officers.99 And he learned about and assimilated himself to Bedouin customs of speech, dress, and hospitality, so that he could be recognized, and have influence, in Arab society. But given his early commitment to Morris and to medieval arts (his lifelong ambition, derailed by the war, was to run a small press committed to reviving pre-industrial book arts), and corresponding scorn for bourgeois commerce and values, it is predictable that Lawrence should have valued this aboriginal heritage far more profoundly than for merely instrumental reasons. He knew he was not or could not be a Bedouin, yet he appears to have displaced his deep desire to live a life alternative to his imperialist modernity into the opportunity to act as a Bedouin. Lawrence is a kind of authentic primitivist: an artist who assimilated himself, without deception as to the limits of doing so, to the modern currency of aboriginal practices, and took an acknowledged place in Bedouin society, in order to resolve his own, imported problems. 2 Political: He did this, however, not merely to satisfy some narcissistic drive (though also that), but out of an overriding sense of indebtedness – whether to Dahoum, or to some more primal identification, distantly lost, and disguised in Arab skin and dress. He wished to build, not on his own but collectively with Arab leaders, a world in which the ‘lost influence’ of an Arab aboriginal heritage would carve out a new and utopian realm of freedom from the pettiness and oppression he saw regnant in imperialist modernity. In this sense, his primitivism is authentic; it enables him to take an acknowledged, responsible part in the reproduction of an aboriginal heritage, not divorced from but intrinsic to the modern social and political life of a people. However much he lives in a fantasy world – and curiously, as a dreamer by day, because he does so – he is also a type of the ‘border-worker’ described in my Introduction.

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About his ambivalence regarding the second, political aspect, I have said enough. About the first aspect, he felt ambivalent because his own sense of self was radically undermined by the discovery of its impossible affinity with an other: The efforts for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time, I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only. Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith. I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do.100

This is another instance of what Kristeva has called the collapse of a symbolic Other, and its consequent hollowing out and setting adrift of identity, an identity henceforth able to distinguish itself only in regressive relation to a primal, abject Other. Echoing Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Lawrence reflects early in the war on his assumption of a wartime authority that ‘disgusted my thought-riddled nature. I felt mean, to fill the place of a man of action; for my standards of value were a wilful reaction against [my British fellows], and I despised their happiness.’ This hostility has a chance to play itself out during the war when Lawrence, in Arab dress, refuses to humble himself or stand aside (to do so would be ‘mean’ or ‘contemptible’) for a group of British superiors, and instead stares at them with a ‘blatant’ eye, ‘burned crimson and haggard with travel.’ Eric Kennington’s cartoon of this incident emphasizes the slightness, darkness, yet obtrusiveness of Lawrence, like something improper that refuses to be shut out of sight, beneath the tall, powerful frames of the admiral and general. Lawrence approved greatly of Kennington’s satirical insight into his abject, ‘mock-heroic’ self-representation.101 Lawrence’s rhetoric of abjection runs deep in the many things (British, Arab, or other) which he scorns as loathsome or shameful, in Seven Pillars and elsewhere, as well as in his sense of a (purifying but impossible) absence of identity – or a (shameful but practical) multiple identity. His ‘imitation’ of an aboriginal nationalism, to which he was a ‘stranger’ and a ‘godless fraud,’ nonetheless offered ‘delivery’ from an abject emptiness, from a ‘hatred and eternal questioning of self.’ At other times, his reflecting and acting ‘selves would converse in the void; and then

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madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments.’102 This volatile identity is reflected, too, in Lawrence’s changes of name. When he learned the details of his illegitimacy after the war, he realized that Lawrence might not have been his legal name, and indeed that he had no legal name. Lawrence was his mother’s name, which, itself not legally given, was a result of an affair between his grandmother and an employer’s son named Lawrence. His father’s name was Chapman, and though he became interested to know if his birth records gave him as a Chapman, he never heard the name until after the war, and never managed legally to adopt it. In 1922 he assumed the name Ross, and in 1927 legally changed his name to Shaw. That Lawrence could revel in the fluidity of names – and valorize the heterogeneity of Arab dialects as opposed to standard English – is evident when the publisher of Revolt tried to pin down the correct Arabic names and spellings of people and places, including of Lawrence himself. In response, Lawrence overflowed with playful contempt for ‘scientific systems’ that would transliterate such identities into standard English. Called upon to rectify the inconsistency between the author’s being addressed as Ya Auruns or Aurans, he replied, ‘Also Lurens and Runs: not to mention “Shaw.” More to follow, if time permits.’ The ambiguous ‘Sherif Abd el Mayin,’ who elsewhere in the typescript ‘becomes el Main, el Mayein, el Muein, el Mayin, and el Muyein,’ Lawrence congratulates for his indeterminacy: ‘Good egg. I call this really ingenious.’103 The evidence of abjection in language, self-identity, and historical project that I have argued leads in exemplary fashion to the modernist invention, difficulty, and peculiar illumination of Lawrence’s text is not difficult to connect to a Kristevan psychic itinerary. Jeffrey Meyers has pointed out the uncanny resemblance between Lawrence’s experience of his mother, as an overwhelming, penetrating identity, both attractive and repulsive, and of his rape at Deraa, the main turning point in Seven Pillars, where he discovers that ‘the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost.’ ‘She is monumental really: and so unlike you,’ Lawrence tells Charlotte Shaw, another mother figure: ‘Probably she is exactly like me … Her letters are things I dread … I think I’m afraid of letting her get, ever so little, inside the circle of my integrity: and she is always hammering and sapping to come in.’104 From this and other psychological evidence, Meyers diagnoses a ‘sexual pathology’ whose symptoms are familiar in writing about Lawrence: ‘his hatred of the

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body, masochism, fear of his mother, revulsion from heterosexual love, and his homosexuality.’105 Lawrence felt that his father had also been engulfed by the ‘voracious mother,’ as Jonathan Rutherford puts it, ‘who he feels has entrapped him in her power and denies him his identity.’ Merely to be touched, confessed Lawrence, is to suffer a ‘loss of integrity,’ which meant that heterosexual love was doubly (as corporal, as female) horrible: ‘I’m too shy to go looking for dirt … I wouldn’t know what to do, how to carry myself, where to stop. Fear again: fear everywhere.’106 These are the powers of horror restlessly invented by the self creating its first and desperate signs of itself, by rejecting the Other as repulsive, as impurity, in a primal maternal scene. Hence, conversely, Lawrence’s restless search for ‘cleanliness’ is in Seven Pillars, as Meyers observes, manifestly also a death wish. Even the desert, its Arabs, and the actions of the Revolt itself, are both too clean and too unclean to cure Lawrence. The self must distinguish itself from beastliness, in the recoil of fear or horror, yet at the same time must fail utterly to detach or alienate itself: the integrity of the self, which is cleanliness, can only be found at the imaginary limit of nothingness or death. But if the beating and rape at Deraa is the psychological core of Seven Pillars, the love for Dahoum, and the powerful language of gifts with which he is associated, also persists, hardly even symbolic but exerting some uncanny tug, like a mirage clinging to the margins of the text. If the Other may indeed be deconstructed in abjection, and bring on its own ruin, then it would seem that Lawrence’s love, and his appreciation not for cleanliness but for beauty, not for integrity but for exuberance, cannot belong to that movement, but instead to some curtailed or unrepresented possibility. This, I would suggest, points to a utopian register of the text, and seduces us to identify with the author in his passage right through the abject heart of this explicitly narcissistic book – ‘I took upon myself, as I describe it, a mock primacy’ – to arrive, in his ironic absence, at ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ about which the book can only, abjectly, ‘stammer.’107 In a letter to Vyvyan Richards, a college friend with whom he had planned to start up a press based on the aesthetic and labour principles of William Morris, M.D. Allen has noticed that Lawrence alludes to a passage from Morris’s socialist utopian novel, News from Nowhere (1890): ‘My bodyguard of fifty Arab tribesmen, picked riders from the young men of the desert, are more splendid than a tulip garden.’ Allen notes that the same comparison is made in Seven Pillars, and comes

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from Morris’s primitivist description of the non-Market utopians: ‘The majority … were young women clad … not mostly in silk, but in light wool most gaily embroidered; the men being all clad in white flannel embroidered in bright colours. The meadow looked like a gigantic tulip-bed because of them.’108 While Allen finds in this allusion an example of Lawrence’s interest in the past (as opposed to Morris’s hopes for the future), it is clear enough that for Lawrence, the freedom he seeks will be a gift from the past to the future, mediated by the ruins of the present. The Bedouin Arabs may appear as primitivist types, but akin to Morris’s utopians, they are present in – and are representable in – Seven Pillars because of their work for the future. Lovecraft’s Doubles ‘How many dream-Arabs have the Arabian Nights bred!’ effused the master of modern weird fantasy, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, to Robert Howard, the creator of Conan, the hero of imaginary Cimmeria, of Bran Mak Morn the Celtic warrior, of oriental tales, and other pulp fantasy. ‘I ought to know,’ Lovecraft explained, ‘because at the age of 5 I was one of them! I had not then encountered Graeco-Roman myth, but found in Lang’s Arabian Nights a gateway to glittering vistas of wonder and freedom. It was then that I invented for myself the name of Abdul Alhazred, and made my mother take me to all the Oriental curio shops and fit me up an Arabian corner in my room.’109 This alter ego, Abdul Alhazred, would shadow Lovecraft’s later writing life, appearing repeatedly in his weird fiction as the author of a deeply mysterious, occult book that is cryptic guide and key to the horrifying truth of the cosmos. Lovecraft’s retrospective claim to this fantastic, primal identity recurs in private and public statements about himself, as much a fixture in his self-conception as in his fictional landscape.110 It is conventionally primitivist in every respect: associated with dark or tragic insight, with a non-capitalist, non-European heritage, and with an archaic history cut off from any representation of an Arab modernity (even of Islam).111 This primitivist type is also abject: mad, wandering among ‘evil spirits and monsters of death,’ and somehow authoring a text that is both horrifying and outside or prior to language, the Necronomicon. We are told that the original title of the Necronomicon is ‘Al Azif – azif being the word used by the Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos’d to be the

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howling of daemons.’112 This insect sound, hardly language, yet somehow signifying, defying representation yet encoding terror, is surely the double of that precarious, post-realist style which, mise-en-abyme, conveys the terror that readers of the pulp Weird Tales came to expect under the name Lovecraft. The words of another fictional alter ego, the writer Randolph Carter, reflect this abject doubling, and not without suitable self-abjection regarding the clumsy, degraded language with which one must confront a ruinous, charnel, vampiric world: We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying ground in Arkham, and speculating about the unnamable. Looking toward the giant willow in the cemetery, whose trunk had nearly engulfed an ancient, illegible slab, I had made a fantastic remark about the spectral and unmentionable nourishment which the colossal roots must be sucking in from that hoary, charnel earth; when my friend chided me for such nonsense and told me that since no interments had occurred there for over a century, nothing could possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an ordinary manner. Besides, he added, my constant talk about ‘unnamable’ and ‘unmentionable’ things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author.113

The difficult to visualize, tactile images of sucking, of permeation, of disintegration; the insistence upon self-reflexive negatives (unnamable, unmentionable); the obliteration, engulfing, or beyonding of spatial boundaries; and the affects of fear and repulsion define Lovecraft’s style, and interminably prepare us for whatever may yet be worse. Yet so does the archaic setting of colonial America, which, for the selfdescribed royalist Lovecraft, is the American image of the aristocratic realms variously idealized by Yeats and Lawrence. As we shall see, this ideal functions for Lovecraft in precisely the same way, as an imaginary world of his ancestral House that will itself open up, dissolve into, or be permeated by racially and geographically remote, primitivist doubles. For the primitivist alter ego, Abdul Alhazred, and what may be called an alter liber, the Necronomicon, are twin symptoms of the political unconscious of a writer who takes us, from the narcissistic crisis of abjection exemplified in Yeats, in an opposing direction to that of the politically engaged Lawrence. Like Lawrence, Lovecraft founded his writing upon (or equally, unsettled it by) a powerful, pervasive expression of the abject, through

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which flowed the repressed possibilities and alterities of the House. This similarity is occasioned, it is tempting to deduce, by the likenesses of Lovecraft’s and Lawrence’s personal histories: both lost their fathers when young, both felt their mothers as permeating and powerful presences in their lives, and both claimed some kind of aristocratic heritage, feeling distant from and contemptuous of a materialistic, moneymaking world. Lovecraft, an American, felt that his identity and heritage came from a pre-Revolutionary New England, with genealogical roots in ‘unmixed English gentry.’114 Yet he was compelled to create an Other heritage, which spills out of the opened graves and dusty attics of New England: a tissue of interconnected legends, spirits, gods, and places that has been called the Cthulhu Mythos, after one of its monster figures that originates in a pre-historical, pre-human world, and is fetishized by primitive peoples. Lovecraft claims to have discovered the latter ‘idea of the artificial pantheon and myth-background represented by “Cthulhu,” “Yog-Sothoth,” “Yuggoth,” etc.’ when he encountered in 1919 the invented myth worlds and pagan cultures of Lord Dunsany, the Anglo-Irish fantasy writer and dramatist associated with Yeats and the Irish Revival.115 And it is appropriate that the Celtic is itself absorbed by Lovecraft into the ‘weird’ background of Cthulhu, when this titanic darkness emerges in the modern day and, among the ‘cases of panic, mania, and eccentricity’ spawned around the world, is a plenitude of ‘wild rumour and legendry’ in ‘the west of Ireland.’116 Lovecraft’s Other heritage, then, is a kind of second-order or reflexive fantasy, in which aboriginal heritage is even further displaced and alienated from aboriginal modernities. This suits Lovecraft’s aestheticism, according to which the only value in aboriginal heritage is not a greater truth or justice, but a greater spur to decadent, imaginative freedom.117 Meanwhile, the Necronomicon is the ‘hideous and unmentionable’ book that, along with its own recurring doubles in Lovecraft’s fictional worlds, mediates this Other heritage in all its forms – or cryptically resists doing so – and is ultimately a self-reflexive doubling of Lovecraft’s own horror-filled and enigmatic gift to us in print.118 Perhaps the most sly and provocative of such narcissistic recontainments, because self-reflexively implicated in modernist anthropology, is a doubling of the Other found by Leif Sorensen in Lovecraft’s story ‘The Shadow out of Time’ (1936). This is a complex tale in which a man who has telepathically exchanged bodies with an archaic, pre-human being – in order to provide a native informant record for an archaic Other library whilst this being collects participant observer

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data in our own world – later discovers his own record, in his own handwriting, as an artifact of this Other culture in an archaeological dig.119 Lovecraft’s fetishism of the abject results in an obsession with unrepresentable otherness which, nevertheless, holds up a mirror to the self. Another important doubling may be found in a paradoxical figure who recurs in Lovecraft’s fictional world, who is ‘messenger’ for the ‘blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other gods’ of an indifferent, meaningless cosmos: Nyarlathotep.120 Like Alhazred, a messenger of the abomination of message, and like him too, marked by an archaic, orientalist name, Nyarlathotep offers to the nameless narrator of one story a revelation that showcases, in a series of grammatical fragments, merely one damned noun phrase after another, the fusion of the abject (the unwholesome, the unclean, the defiled, the repulsive) with metaphysical vision: A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods …121

In Lovecraft’s fictional worlds, the revelation is rarely so total or explicit. Typically, a decadent or morbidly curious hero unearths (often literally) the traces of an archaic (often secretly surviving) society or religious system centred on the worship of some horrifying icon of this alternate reality. It is this icon, and the rituals, manners, tastes, habitation, geography, and appearance of the primitive people, which convey the horror. Though at one remove, this primitivist horror is perhaps the more abject for its uncanny penetration of the human and the self. The so-called Cthulhu Mythos, then, is not presented and does not function as a genuine metaphysical system, but rather as the imaginary (in the Lacanian sense) but indexical sign of a reality that in modern religion and science remains repressed. For Lovecraft, where modern cultures attempt to repress and displace an awful existential

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truth of things, his invented primitive cultures do acknowledge this truth – yet typically the latter, like the ill-fated people of Leng in Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, also mistakenly reify it as a barbaric master or fate, as a justification of social structure, and as ethical principle. This is always the true savagery or primitivism unveiled by Lovecraft’s imagination: the anti-aesthetic, violent culture of decadence that results from worship of horror as an inhuman order, as an ethical code. Significantly, this is also a mistake to which modernists are prone: ‘We know now what a futile, aimless, and disconnected welter of mirages and hypocrisies life is; and from the first shock of that knowledge has sprung the bizarre, tasteless, defiant, and chaotic literature of that terrible newer generation’ represented by T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. Yes, one cannot not be modernist, for to crawl ‘placidly on with apparently unshaken faith in Longfellow, Tennyson and the other bourgeois idols, at a time when Ben Hecht, James Joyce, James Branch Cabell, T.S. Eliot and their fellows are besieging the very citadel of orthodox aesthetics’ is intolerable ‘torpor.’ But to reify the abject ‘welter’ in stylistic mimicry, and for thus to idolize it, ‘from the chromatic sensation-vortices of the imagists to the frozen mental detritus of Mr. T.S. Eliot and his followers,’ is equally inadequate.122 Hence, Lovecraft pursues an imaginative trajectory opposite to that of Lawrence. Lawrence is a dreamer by day: the abjection of what I have called an economic unconscious is expressed in border work, in radically conceived action for an aboriginal modernity. He does this by producing an alternative reality principle (of sacrifice, of love, of social praxis) from the fragments of House he has shored, in his intimate and fastidious way, against imperialist ruins. He affirms aboriginal heritage as coeval with other modern heritages, and as a producer of modernity itself. He is a figure come alive from the utopian imagination of Yeats. In contrast, Lovecraft must fetishize a dreaming by night – a fetish that is reflected, ironically, in the creation of an abject Other heritage which must not be fetishized, a desperately displaced fetish that is recognized self-reflexively, so in deeper abjection, only in such rare flashes as we find parodically in ‘The Hound.’ This is so because, for him, aboriginal heritage not only cannot be coeval with modernity, neither can it be affirmed as more than a web of illusion in the past itself. Simply, the House cannot exist as a social order in the past, present, or future (and conversely, it can persist as a private, consoling, inward illusion equally in the past, present, and future, far removed from the real workings of society). The House, indeed the good, is

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imaginary, transcendental, and without social extension. The social alterity of the House is consequently displaced, in Lovecraft’s changing political imagination, first into the imaginative mastery of the apolitical, decadent Individual, thence into the imaginative leisure of an aristocratic fascist State, and finally to the imaginative freedom of a meritocratic socialist State. I will now focus on one cycle of tales to see how this works. I will not wish to discount their utopian energy, but to show how it is blocked and recontained by those ‘masterful images’ Yeats warns the writer of – here, fetish images of abjection itself. The cycle in question is the Randolph Carter short stories, ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’ (1920), ‘The Unnamable’ (1925), ‘The Silver Key’ (1926), and ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ (1932–3), and, in particular, the novella, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926–7).123 We just met Randolph Carter in the opening sentences of ‘The Unnamable,’ discussed above. In Dream-Quest, Carter is never described in waking life, only in dream. The plot is easy to summarize, curious though it is. Carter has dreamed three times of a ‘marvellous city,’ then never again (155). Drawn to this dream image as to nothing else, he must now descend and pass through the Gate of Deeper Slumber, and enter a vast, dream world in which he will search for and confront directly the gods who have alienated him from the dreamed city. Like Odysseus, Carter wanders and goes astray, struggling with monstrous antagonists and forming unexpected alliances, journeying to underworlds and to higher worlds, and discovers something of the nature of civilized as opposed to barbaric life before arriving, in some sense, at his home and destination. Unlike Odysseus, the physical Carter is asleep in the room of a flat in modern Boston, going nowhere. Further curiosities about the tale may be listed briefly: (a) there is a peculiar hush to the tale, for it is narrated entirely without direct dialogue, and includes direct speech only exceptionally, at its climax, in the voice of the god Nyarlathotep; (b) there are multiple and conflicting realms of gods, for the gods Carter seeks (and never meets), though called the Great Ones, are only local gods, condescended to by transcending and ultimate ‘Other Gods’ as the ‘mild gods of earth’;124 (c) though thronged with human, animal, and other life forms, there is not one woman or even any being directly represented as female, in Carter’s interactions with his dream world. I will not dwell on the abject horror that everywhere permeates or penetrates this narcissistic world – whose privileged binaries, true to

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Kristeva’s pre-Oedipal model, are not good and evil, but clean and unclean, wholesome and unwholesome, delightful and loathsome. I will restrict my focus to signs of the House to be found there. The most human part of the dream world is a Morris-like, neo-medieval utopia of quaint rural scenes, architecturally awesome cities, and sailpowered tradeships. There we find the principal conflict for Carter in dream, which is not moral but aesthetic. The peoples of these lands live by an economy that is strictly in barter of things for things, and their values lie in beauty and pleasure. The world of the good traders, for example, is described in this way: ‘Carter was glad to see that she was a barque of wholesome men, with painted sides and yellow lateen sails and a grey captain in silken robes. Her cargo was the fragrant resin of Oriab’s inner groves, and the delicate pottery baked by the artists of Baharna, and the strange little figures carved from Ngranek’s ancient lava. For this they were paid in the wool of Ulthar and the iridescent textiles of Hatheg and the ivory that the black men carve across the river in Parg.’ In contrast, the world of bad traders and their ‘black galleys’ deserves its full description: The mouths of the men who came from [a black galley] to trade were too wide, and the way their turbans were humped up in two points above their foreheads was in especially bad taste. And their shoes were the shortest and queerest ever seen in the Six Kingdoms. But worst of all was the matter of the unseen rowers. Those three banks of oars moved too briskly and accurately and vigorously to be comfortable, and it was not right for a ship to stay in port for weeks while the merchants traded, yet to give no glimpse of its crew. It was not fair to the tavern-keepers of Dylath-Leen, or to the grocers and butchers, either; for not a scrap of provisions was ever sent aboard. The merchants took only gold and stout black slaves from Parg across the river. That was all they ever took, those unpleasantly featured merchants and their unseen rowers; never anything from the butchers and grocers, but only gold and the fat black men of Parg whom they bought by the pound. And the odours from those galleys which the south wind blew in from the wharves are not to be described … Dylath Leen would never have tolerated the black galleys had such rubies been obtainable elsewhere, but no mine in all earth’s dreamland was known to produce their like.125

The contrast with the good traders (and people) is insistent and clear: the dark galley traders exchange a single commodity, rubies, only for gold (which suggests, as against the exchange of artisanal and local

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rarities, the general, alienable commodity of currency and the value ‘standard,’ in Lovecraft’s day, of capitalist forms of exchange); and for slaves, strongly marked as another commodity (workers viewed without person or spirit, as alienable bodies, priced per pound). I have italicized Lovecraft’s redundant emphasis upon the narrow, utilitarian mode of exchange, the aesthetically unpleasant nature of the men (alike their ship and trade goods), the concealment and confinement of labour, and the failure to buy local goods. The latter repetition turns out to set up a subsequent irony, later revealed: the slaves are purchased not for labour, but as food. In a further, less predictable irony, the unseen rowers turn out to be the masters – emblems, perhaps, of capitalist power over sheer mechanism – while the traders turn out to be mere managerial slaves. The traders turn out to be the idolatrously nihilistic people of Leng mentioned above, and their masters weird moon creatures, themselves associated ritualistically with the abject Other Gods. What is notable here is the fantasy of a land – to which these traders are definitively alien – that is ruled by an exchange economy as remote as possible from the values of the Market, and recalling rather, in its valuing of things inspired by certain artistic or regional qualities, the inalienable gifts of the House. This economy is also recalled in twin debts of service upon which turn the two great battles of the tale. In the first instance, when Carter is abducted by the black galley creatures for some horrible end, he is rescued by a hoard of cats. The cats explain to him that his known sympathy for cats – as against creatures, reminding us of the black galley masters, that would like to devour them – and, in particular, his giving a portion of milk to a kitten in dreamland, has led to a debt of alliance: the grandfather of the kitten is the ‘leader of the army,’ and ‘recognized the prisoner as a sworn friend of his kind on earth and in the land of dream,’ and so wages the battle on his behalf.126 A similar debt of service follows, neatly reversed, in a second instance: Carter is trapped in an underworld of dream and is rescued by hideous ghouls, one of whom he recognizes as a friend once on earth. Ghouls, to be sure, are terrible and slumping, with ‘unmentionable idiosyncrasies,’ evoking Carter’s ‘natural loathing.’ Yet his friendship with the ghoul once known as Richard Pickman, a Boston ‘painter of strange pictures,’ produces another formal alliance. The prehistory for the alliance is in part a shared interest in what Carter elsewhere called the unnamable: the painter has a ‘secret studio in an ancient and unhallowed alley near a graveyard’ and has learned, and taught

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Carter, to speak the ‘disgusting meeping and glibbering’ language of ghouls. But the alliance is also grounded in a shared recognition of the value (however abjectly degraded, in the realm of death and terror) of a pre-Revolutionary New England heritage. Carter, also a Bostonian, finds Pickman in his ‘present habitation,’ seated on a ‘tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary Burying Ground in Boston,’ and Pickman later provides Carter with the ‘slate gravestone of Col. Nehemiah Derby, obiit 1719, from the Charter Street Burying Ground in Salem,’ which he must use as a lever to open the door that will release him to upper dreamland.127 These gravestones are heritage signs that symbolically bind Carter and Pickman to each other and to patriarchal roots in an archaic land. Pickman aids Carter, and in a reversal of the episode with the cats, it is Carter who now recognizes a debt, and will later return the gift by putting aside his own quest in order to wage a great battle on behalf of three ghouls captured by the black galley creatures. While a reader might be tempted to view the ‘good’ in the DreamQuest as beautiful and innocuous, a displaced paradigm for the House, and the ‘bad’ as ugly and predatory, corresponding to the Market, the novel denies such romance, and forces upon us a finer, rather unexpected distinction. In Kadath, the House-Market binary is traversed by, rather than defined by, both moral and abject categories. We are never asked to believe that ghouls are really quite friendly, or that they are morally good souls if only you get to know them; it is only that they recognize a shared heritage and economy of debt (i.e., gift) with Carter. They belong as completely to the paradigm of abject, unspeakable horror as does so much of dreamland, including the black galley creatures. The plot of the tale, then, tells us this: if Carter wishes to find his utopian city, he cannot remain in the pleasant, Morris-like lands of upper dream, but must descend into the ‘abyss’ or underworld of dream itself, where he will encounter both the ultimately abject body – unrepresentable, wormlike, ‘loathsome and overfed’ monsters burrowing in the abyss – and the kinship relations of the House displaced into the abjected, chivalric code and pre-Revolutionary genealogy possessed by the ghouls, whose sustenance is the generations of the dead.128 Indeed, Maurice Lévy has already made this alarming connection: in Lovecraft’s work, ‘it is by heredity that the monstrous acts’ – heredity is the medium of his ‘horrors.’129 The abjection of a social world ruled by kinship is the heart of his fantasy. Yet where are the women, who in aboriginal modernity may be more visible in producing its relations and values? It is true that, as in ‘The

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Unnamable,’ an abject, horror-affirming heritage is sometimes attributed to ‘the whisperings’ of ‘grandmothers,’ but more often women are as strictly silent and unseen as in the Dream-Quest.130 In ‘The Silver Key,’ Carter is an older man who loses his key to dreamland and must revisit his decayed colonial country house, and the ghostly presences of his great-uncle and his hired man, in order to return to the childhood moment when the key was found. The structure of this tale suggests the answer to the mystery, for at the depths of despair, by ennui born of the superficial pleasures and pursuits of his modern world, a change comes over him that will be marked by a curious gender distinction: For years [his] slumbers had known only such twisted reflections of every-day things as the commonest slumbers know, but now there returned a flicker of something stranger and wilder; something of vaguely awesome immanence which took the form of tensely clear pictures from his childhood days, and made him think of little inconsequential things he had long forgotten. He would often awake calling for his mother and grandfather, both in their graves a quarter of a century. Then one night his grandfather reminded him of the key … Before Carter awaked, the gentle visitant had told him where to find that box [containing the key]; that carved oak box of archaic wonder whose grotesque lid no hand had raised for two centuries.131

Carter calls on both mother and grandfather, custodians of his childhood (and hence, of his experience of the economy of the modern House, still holding sway over the private family sphere). Both mother and grandfather are marked by this primal desire, a calling out from the world of dream, to a world that promises such radical alterity not only to normal reality, but to its normal unconscious. Again we see the deep abjection, deeper than the construction of an unconscious, deeper than dream; rather, the foundation of these, to which the modern dreamer must descend. Yet there is a difference here: only the grandfather responds. The mother is drawn into the circuit of primal desire, recognized as a key figure – yet she remains silent and is thrust from the plot. The solution to the problem of the vanishing woman of the House, then, is that in Lovecraft’s fantasy, she is cast out, abjected, so absolutely as to hover at the margins as the truly, strictly unnamable. The woman producer of values and relations, in this abjection of the House, is

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deprived even of the sublimated signs of literary abjection. This designifying abjection of woman, and her displacement nevertheless (of course) into signs of horizon, envelopment, and permeation, is revealed explicitly in a rare, direct linkage between woman, earth/nature, and abjection in Lovecraft’s 1919 poem ‘Mother Earth.’ The poem begins, ‘One night I wander’d down the bank / Of a deep valley, hush’d and dank, / Whose stagnant air possess’d a taint / And chill that made me sick and faint,’ then continues to accumulate images of terror and despair as the speaker, ‘crouched within a rocky cleft,’ finds a lichenobscured ‘outline’ of an unreadable ‘ancient story’ referring to the inhuman life pre-existing and persisting in human history. The double vagina of moist valley and cleft reinforces the female coding of the landscape. The morbid, horrible world associated with her is synaesthetically repulsive, and its abjection is again played out in a primordial struggle with language. ‘I am the voice of mother earth,’ the poem concludes, ‘From whence all horrors have their birth.’132 The gender difference marked here, and played out across Lovecraft’s fiction, returns us to the initial distinction I drew between fantasies of a purely Other world and of a primitivist mediator of it – both abject. The former is coded female, the latter male. In ‘The Silver Key,’ for instance, the double vagina (or perhaps vagina-womb) is again encountered: Carter must take the key to a secret cave on his ancestral lands, then enter a yet further secret cavity at its far end, in order to use the key to his dreams. Such a displacement of the House woman into a strictly occult, hidden power, and her loss of personhood, suggests an imaginary barrier that Lovecraft erects out of his abjection, and a desperate deepening of his narcissism that leads to a peculiar misogyny. The Other heritage that must always be recognized and can never be escaped, yet will never directly be named, is the burden of this ultimately abjected trace of the woman. In her, the suppressed experience of the House is shunted into the powerful yet unsymbolizable real of death. This is, in fact, consistent with Kristeva’s double view of (a) the abject Other in its imaginary origin as an illusory or misrecognized, all-powerful, and totalized comprehension of the primal mother, and (b) the abject as ‘death infecting life,’ as an ‘imaginary uncanniness and real threat’ that ‘beckons to us and ends up engulfing us’ from the ‘border of my condition as a living being.’ 133 Woman, whose name is forced to coincide with this border, is hence unrepresentable yet present as an imaginary power. Just so, the otherness of the House which she mediates is barred from constructing an alternative language

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for itself, and remains curiously empty – just like the marvellous city of Carter’s farthest reaching dreams, which is curiously replete with architecture and gardens of sensual splendour, yet awaits him eerily depopulated.134 We see this narcissism, too, in the claustrophobic silence typical of Lovecraft’s style, in which direct dialogue and direct speech itself are almost never represented (an exception which proves the rule is found in ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter,’ where direct dialogue merely renders the inability coherently to communicate, not face-to-face but over a field telephone, the ‘horror’ experienced by Carter’s friend from the depths of an abyssal tomb).135 The political unconscious that gives life to Lovecraft’s abject world remains locked in this narcissistic dead-end. Thus Lovecraft fetishizes, if Yeats merely laments, the ‘foul rag and bone shop’ into which all symbolic ladders collapse. The abject family romance that expresses such temperamental and aesthetic differences is a suggestive reorganization of Lovecraft’s own family relations. When Howard was only three years old, his father contracted syphilis and moved permanently to a sanitarium, where he died when the child was eight. His grandfather, his mother’s father, was a wealthy industrialist who then supported the mother and only son, and became a surrogate father – and aristocratic ideal – for young Howard, until he too died, and his wealth crumbled. Howard then lived alone with his mother, Susan, for fifteen years until 1919. During this period, Susan’s mental health deteriorated until she was diagnosed with ‘traumatic psychosis’ and hospitalized in the same sanitarium her husband had entered twenty-five years earlier; she died there in 1921. Howard then married a fellow writer, recording with relish the mood of his wedding night, when he wrote a new story for Weird Tales: ‘I let myself loose and coughed up some of the most nameless, slithering, unmentionable horror that ever stalked cloven-hoofed through the tenebrous and necrophagous abysses of elder night.’136 The marriage soon failed, after which he lived first with one, then with the other, of his mother’s surviving sisters, replicating the elder woman–bachelor man domestic dyad of his youth, until his death in 1937. No unambiguous records exist of Lovecraft’s relationship with his mother, but it must have been fuelled by intense and contradictory emotion, aggravated by her mental condition. She was observed to ‘lavish’ both love and hate upon him, and alternately to idolize and to find him ‘hideous.’137 Her doctors apparently recorded a ‘psycho-sexual contact’

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between mother and son, suggesting that the typical Oedipal break had not occurred.138 Lovecraft himself describes his mother as ‘devastating’ toward him, and alludes to her powerful, permeating role in his life when reporting her illness: ‘I am obliged to look forward to a long and dreary interval wherein home will be but half a home for want of its dominant figure … My nerve strain seems now to be manifesting itself in my vision – I am frequently dizzy, and cannot read or write long without a blurring of sight or a severe headache. Existence seems of little value, and I wish it might terminate!’139 The extremity of emotion is natural. What is particularly significant is the recognition of his mother as the ‘dominant’ half of a whole, without whom life seems empty – an idea that would be expressed in extraordinary terms upon her death: ‘Psychologically I am conscious of a vastly increased aimlessness and inability to be interested in events; a phenomenon due partly to the fact that much of my former interest in things lay in discussing them with my mother and securing her views and approval. This bereavement decentralises existence – my sphere no longer possesses a nucleus, since there is now no one person especially interested in what I do or whether I be alive or dead.’140 This imaginary mother is linked, in the earlier quotation, to two motifs in Lovecraft’s style: the vertigo of conscious perception and blurring of sensory images experienced by so many of his abject protagonists (thus a rupture in the imaginary); and their estrangement regarding language (a crisis in the symbolic). We may now see how powerfully these motifs come together, for example, in ‘Mother Earth,’ a poem written in the year of Susan’s removal to the sanitarium: the woman is not a distinct, separate identity, but an enveloping, totalizing space (and persisting, primordial time) of womb and tomb, while also difficult of perception, difficult to read, and the source of ‘all horrors’ revealed to the wandering self. This master image (or image of masterful resistance to image) of the abject Other becomes in Lovecraft’s tales – and especially in Dream-Quest, where such wandering finds an epic form – the revelation of an Other heritage whose content, as we have seen, is drawn from the economic unconscious of a House-Market opposition. The utopian politics of this quest is dedicated both to the construction of an alternative world, in which House and Market have different limits and powers, and the recontainment of this world in an abject, narcissistically totalized image of the inhuman, the Other as morbidity and death. This doubleness is evident in the curious resolution of the narrative, when Carter rediscovers his utopian dream city. On the

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one hand, the recontainment is evident in the contrast between this solipsistic space and the thriving, populated, Morris-like utopias of a more accessible dream land which are said to be, in relation to the marvellous city, unsatisfying. Only these secondary utopias are defined by the sway of House over Market and State forms. The preference for a utopia of one – in which all relations of kinship, gender, and economy are made to disappear – functions in an actually existing modern Market as a deeply conservative impulse. This impulse is one with Lovecraft’s own trajectory in political commitment, from apolitical decadence, to fascism, to totalitarian socialism. In political discussions, he routinely expressed an abject view of the world as an essential, horrifying chaos, and of the individual imagination – a realm of willed artifice and illusions – as sole source of value. The latter realm is the place of the House, an inheritance of images of order and the good, of what makes life worth living, that is completely illusory yet a necessary fiction. ‘The world is to each man only a rubbish-heap limned by his individual perception,’ Lovecraft tells us in his essay on Lord Dunsany, and to redeem it we can only ‘artificially invent limitations of consciousness and feign a pattern of life common to all mankind – most naturally the simple old pattern which ancient and groping tradition first gave us.’ The modern artist views ‘life correctly as a series of meaningless pictures,’ but invests it ‘with all the ancient formulae and saws which like frozen metaphors in language have become an integral part of our cherished heritage of associations.’141 The political expression of abjection can only be negative or decadent: ‘There is no such thing – and there never will be such a thing – as good and permanent government among the crawling, miserable vermin called human beings,’ he announces in a small magazine in the year of his mother’s death.142 Inspired by Nietzsche, he believed that an ideal State, if it would not mediate such values or languages of the good, might simply, if ruthlessly, carve out the leisure space for their possibility: We realise that all conceptions of justice and ethics are mere prejudices and illusions – there is no earthly reason why the masses should not be kept down for the benefit of the strong, since every man is for himself in the last analysis … Our modern worship of empty ideals is ludicrous. What does the condition of the rabble matter? All we need to do is to keep it quiet as we can.

94 Modernist Goods What is more important, is to perpetuate those things of beauty which are of real value because involving actual sense-impressions rather than vapid theories … It is for us to safeguard and preserve the conditions which produce great abbeys, and palaces, and picturesque walled towns, and vivid sky-lines of steeples and domes, and luxurious tapestries, and fascinating books, paintings, and statuary, and colossal organs and noble music, and dramatic deeds on embattled fields … these are all there is of life; take them away and we have nothing which a man of taste or spirit would care to live for.143

The only State form that promised this, in Lovecraft’s view, was fascism. Like Ezra Pound, and for the same reasons, he was immediately drawn to Mussolini and more cautiously to Hitler, and was able to affirm the suspension of law and brutality of violence claimed by fascism with zeal. What is important to see in this political fantasy, become ideological reality, is the displacement of the utopian House into a negative political form (imaginary, subjective, accidental, illusory, ephemeral) of the masterful, narcissistic self – ‘for himself in the last analysis’ – and the investment of the State with the radical practical power to install itself as a totalitarian alternative to modern Market society. In later years, Lovecraft softened his views enough to prefer a socialism that would provide equal opportunities for self-development and a more just distribution of social welfare, but he would retain the totalitarian political aspects of fascism in order to control the production and preservation of the aesthetic good. In any case, the State is for Lovecraft the imaginary House stripped down to the mere fact of power, while the symbolic remainders of the House are locked away in aesthetic illusion: a nightmare cleavage of theory and practice. My final view of Yeats pictured him at an abject crossroads, whose antithetical possibilities for development are here exemplified by Lawrence and Lovecraft. In the former, abjection is the condition out of which an imagination of the State – and one’s active debts and services within that State – may be infused with the economic unconscious of the House. This led, in Lawrence’s imagination as well as in his practice, to a decentralized, heterogeneous view of culture, and to an autobiography that is a record of historical and social change. By way of contrast, Lovecraft can articulate an alternative world of the House only be denying its reality tout court, so severing it absolutely from the social and practical worlds of Market and State.

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But Lovecraft’s writing would be less interesting, and less compellingly abject, if it offered nothing more than this reactionary resolution to its modern crises of self and society. I earlier hinted at a double edge to the resolution of the Dream-Quest. The verso of the narcissistic, evaporated House of dreams may turn out, from another angle, to be its perverse reality. For I have withheld the narrative closure: after having searched to the very depths and boundaries of inhuman, extraordinary fantasy for this elusive utopia, Carter finally discovers (from Nyarlothotep, in the only use of direct speech) that it is nothing more than a composite memory of real places from his childhood in the country and cities of New England. With a shock, we realize that while Carter must indeed dream – and dream deeply – to achieve this recognition, he does not have to dream to realize it. When he awakes at the end, and looks out of the window of his Boston apartment, he sees his utopia in the very same city in which he had disconsolately fell asleep. We are invited to read this closure in one of two ways. Either Carter now sees the same unalterable, modern city selectively, according to his subjective fancy (in effect, lives an escapist illusion); or he sees the city no longer as a hardened, reified world, but poised on a trajectory of inheritances and possibilities, and vulnerable materially and practically to the shaping of his own heritages and imagination. The first is perhaps the more plausible, but also the weaker reading: the narrative has already taken care to dismiss just this kind of nostalgic and solipsistic escapism in the figure of another dreamer, Kuranes, whom Carter meets laden with ennui at the fulcrum of the narrative structure. The second reading cannot be justified by any textual evidence of Carter as a man of action in the waking world, and seems implausibly foreign to Lovecraft’s carefully introverted, imaginative universe. Indeed, this introversion is extensively analysed in the ‘The Silver Key,’ where Carter affirms an absolute ‘cleavage from the world.’144 Lovecraft pushes his narrative to just this brink in its logic, whereby the city seems to demand – like the ghouls of his dream – the hero’s active engagement, his power to inform reality with fantasy. Yet both demand and response are denied direct representation, and fall into a new kind of silence. Here, the shattering silence of the waking life, of the ‘what happens next,’ which is the very point of the tale but is, at last, jarringly denied to the reader – marks a plenitude of possibility, rather than constriction. We have little idea what the future will hold for Carter and his utopian city, but we know that its elements are, though scrambled, available. Utopia has already occurred. Its structure

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and goods have already been experienced in a disconnected fashion, which fantasy restructures rather than merely invents. When Carter awakes and opens his window, he confronts the awesome possibility – silent and terrifying, perhaps, but as Kristeva suggests, energized by jouissance – of such a re-composition in his actually existing modernity. An economic unconscious provides its signs. Conrad’s Desertions In the previous three sections, I hope to have cast light on an abject expression in the constitutive layers of a wide domain of modernist writing. My aim has been to show how this deep structure bears the particular burden, there, of an economic unconscious, which is to say, of tensions and compensations brought into being by a characteristically modern repression of persistent and real, if pushed into a corner and degraded, experiences of the House. At the same time there is no template for modernist abjection, or for its political unconscious: they neither achieve the same form for any author or work, nor cast out the same possibilities of transformation. Every work has its own structural and diachronic peculiarities. I will introduce here, and clarify in the following section, a schematic way of understanding these possibilities. They are never exclusive of each other in a given text, or for a given author, as I have endeavoured to show; yet to make the theoretical scheme clearer, I will mark these possibilities with the names of authors in which they have been most influentially developed. In Yeats, I intended to survey a range of shifting and alternative forms, while from this field of possibilities I singled out, in the work of Lawrence and Lovecraft, two divergent trajectories. While the present study is mainly devoted to more canonical modernists, the slighter corpus of these two writers, and the powerful homogeneity of their respective styles, has allowed me to develop them as exemplars. Lawrence shares the abjection of self with the later Yeats; that is, abjection disintegrates Lawrence’s identity into multiple masks and forms, drawn from and dispersed among others. Indeed, among these masks he feels freed from himself, insofar as the latter form is caught in an empty circle of narcissistic self-reflection. In his rejection of a single name, and insistence upon multiple names – as he tells us, never to find a fixed form – he verily embodies Yeats’s vision of selves, anti-selves, and masks. Yet despite a shared revolutionary impulse,

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Lawrence’s political vision is antithetical to that of the later Yeats: he chooses the barrack over the tower, and mechanical labour over a more leisurely professional career; he acts on behalf of liberal and democratic ideals. In direct contrast, Lovecraft shares the conservative politics of the later Yeats, but cannot break the narcissistic closure of self that would allow radical identifications with others (with alterities drawn from and dispersed amidst the abject ruins of the Other) to flood into the constitution and representation of the I. These permutations can be mapped out structurally, in a way that will relate the political to the personal mechanisms of the modernist text. Before I do so, it will help to consider the one remaining combination, which would form the opposite number to Yeats: the radical liberal critique articulated by Lawrence together with the narcissistic deadlock of Lovecraft. For this, we may turn to Joseph Conrad. Conrad has perhaps already come irresistibly to mind. His work seems to combine the realist adventure of the dreamer by day – in all its geopolitical and ethnographic texture – that we find in Lawrence, with the heart of darkness – the brooding rhetoric of horror, and obscure languages of the unnamable – that we find in Lovecraft. The hero of Lord Jim (1900), who takes military command of a Malaysian people in order to liberate and unite them, but also to appropriate their material resources for British commerce, is an uncanny, prophetic double of Lawrence in Arabia. Yet he is just as surely plunged into the murky, equivocal shadows of Lovecraft’s world – the self and, indeed, the word, as a ghostly thing. Furthermore, Conrad sought to imagine a wider community, however resistant to representation, that was both active in such adventures and capable of gazing inwardly to its horror, which reminds us of similarly elite communities in Lawrence and Lovecraft – for it was all male. To be of this community was to be, in Marlow’s occult phrase, ‘one of us.’145 The honourable British and Arab soldiers, the New England patriarchs and monsters of dream, and the white men at the frontiers of empire and their Native doubles, worldly princes like Dain Waris, all belong to insistently masculinist expressions of an economic unconscious. Nor is it surprising, finally, that Conrad’s orphaned childhood and déclassé heritage echo the family stories of Lawrence and Lovecraft.146 While Kristeva makes quite clear from her numerous literary examples that modernist abjection is triggered by modern social conditions rather than by individual family histories, the overdetermination of the

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latter in writers studied here is remarkable. In her readings of modernism, Kristeva merely adapts Freud’s own view of artistic expression to the realm of the abject: the collapse of the Other in modern social life triggers a regressive abjection (i.e., into the ruins and origins of symbolization), which is then sublimated (i.e., submitted to symbolic order after all) in the work of literature. One should never be fooled by the illusionistic impression that modernist art is simply abject. It is a carefully crafted, if imperfectly mastered, expression of the abject. However, this social and literary process may well dig down into an individual history in which abjection already plays a part, so that the stressful layers of personal and social history come explosively together. One begins to wonder why this overdetermination, while not ubiquitous, is so typical of modern writers. Is there a broader social basis for the abject crises of these personal histories, after all? We should not forget that individual family histories have their own social bases in the politics of the domestic and private spheres, and in the sexual politics which organize and entangle the lives of men and women – often oppressively for the latter. The stories of Lawrence and Lovecraft, whose mothers appeared to them dominating and frightening, may well belong to a kind of second-generation discourse of hysteria. One may speculate, in other words, that not only is a cultural politics formed around the real and imaginary conditions of ‘hysterical’ women – as is now well understood, of women pushed to psychologically miserable or intolerable extremes by their constraints and degradations in a patriarchal MarketState – but there is, too, a second-order politics that may take shape around the children of hysteria. The ‘hysterical’ mother, for such writers, could refer both to narratives of individual women so affected (private sphere dynamics) and to narratives of social forces that produce both ‘hysteria’ and the mystifying explanations surrounding it (cultural formation), if we bear in mind the psychoanalytic fluidity of the pre-Oedipal mother as Other. Jean Rhys makes this connection in her modernist remapping of a classic expression of nineteenth-century hysteria as a field of conflicting family and social forces in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The autobiographical intertext of Rhys’s fin-de-siècle colonial childhood and move to England – which, like a mythical method, gives order to the geopolitically and psychologically heterogeneous elements of the new narrative – marks this novel as one looking back to the troubled world of a modernist rather than Victorian period.147 Abjection, from this angle, is a modernist child of hysteria.

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At first glance, it would seem that the young Conrad, whose mother died in Russian exile when he was eight, could not have developed an abject mother/Other relationship. And the fact that his father died four years later, together with the public connection of his father with Polish nationalism, has perhaps led to an over-valuation of Conrad’s tensionridden investment in symbolic fathers. Yet posed against the powerful losses of his mother and father was the early and lifelong centrality of his maternal uncle and legal guardian, Tadeusz Bobrowski. Conrad’s relationship with Bobrowski was most intimate (acknowledging a suicide attempt to him, for example, that he would conceal from others), and Conrad was greatly indebted to him financially. Bobrowski, too, would obviously bear a strong and direct association for Conrad with his mother. Unfortunately for Conrad, Bobrowski was a practical man who disapproved of sentiment, art, or ideas if they might impede the progress and stability of mundane, material concerns. This made for a relationship as inevitably conflict-ridden as it was close. Such a family situation already suggests, therefore, the conditions of an abject regression: the destruction of the Oedipal family and the collapse of its modes of authority and dependence into a single figure, one whose power must be both assimilated and rejected, both drawn upon and held at a distance by this more romantic, wayward youth. And as we are instructed in Lord Jim, the romance is already abject: the spirit of adventure, of a mode of action transcending the material and mundane, is both instinctively necessary to the romantic, and a recognized illusion. It is an abject spirit, an empty spirit, of separation or exclusion rather than, in the ironic words of Lawrence’s subtitle, of triumph. This is also the modern Polish spirit that is Conrad’s heritage. Geoffrey Harpham has constructed a powerful argument that the ‘spirit of Poland’ is peculiarly a national spirit at once archaic and modern, and so represents a heterodox view of the nation and nationalism in modern times. ‘Anachronistically modern in its golden age, Poland was now, at the beginning of modernity, anachronistically regressive.’148 Moreover, this national heritage is a self-contradictory and situational form marked by displacements and deferrals of meaning and identity. For our purposes, Harpham’s argument is most interesting when turned on edge: the archaic, superceded ‘modernity’ of the Polish nation offers the symbolic resources of an alternative modernity, one whose configuration of House, Market, and State is incompatible with imperialist modernity. Its present-absent identity, not quite able to separate itself from a constitutive reference to other

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peoples yet insistent upon some transcending difference, is to be explained by its abjection: the nation that was, but was not allowed to be; that was ruthlessly carved up and exploited by surrounding, permeating powers, as by the twin, monstrous horrors Conrad saw in Germany and Russia, and that nevertheless insisted upon its name, as upon some barely imaginable negation, a tabula rasa, ‘wiped clean’ by being ‘wiped out.’149 That this abject heritage is everywhere in Conrad’s work is Harpham’s central and surprising point, and one that I gratefully import to the present context. The gender coding of this heritage identity or spirit is not selfevident. Harpham sees the ‘Polish spirit’ as a ‘Fatherland’ identified by Conrad with his father. Conrad never says or implies this, and Harpham draws the conclusion from Conrad’s reminiscences of walking alone at the head of a large, public funeral for his father, which honoured the ‘fame of his fidelity’ to Polish nationalism.150 This is a powerful image, yet Conrad’s father himself wrote insistently and eloquently of Poland as an abject motherland: In our Motherland life is hard and sad, For her breast is crushed by tombstones … Into an abyss our eyes gaze, For nowhere, nowhere can Poland be seen!151

As in Lovecraft’s work, the mother is both everywhere and nowhere, identified with real horror yet with nothing. She is unsymbolizable, yet displaced into wandering, abject, self-collapsing symbols. She appears to be a figure of the mother who, in Mary Jacobus’s reading of Freud, is expressed not in the content of fantasy but in its interpretive structure.152 Indeed, Harpham begins his study with a poem written by Conrad’s father, ‘To my son born in the 85th year of Muscovite oppression, a song for the day of his christening,’ which foresees the importance gender will play in Conrad’s later writing: Baby son, may this christening Give you strength to live, To look bravely into shadows […] when God allows Poland to rise from the grave, Of captivity – our only Mother

After Strange Goods 101 Hushaby, my baby son! […] Bless you, my little son: Be a Pole!153

Harpham is surely right to identify Conrad’s father, and in a curious way, the male solidarity of ‘one of us,’ with this ghostly presentabsence, for the same reason that the imaginary patriarchy of Lovecraft’s pre-Revolutionary America is curiously identified with the heritage of horror whose gender is either undifferentiated or female. Woman, in the abject mother, mother earth, and motherland, is identified with death – and hence in Kristeva’s theory, with a strictly unsymbolizable, if writable, real. A misogynist, and not merely ideologically but instinctively and desperately homosocial world, may be recognized as the manifestation of an abject taboo. This taboo is a repulsion and exclusion that marks – even as it must admit as a sign of an imaginary totality, that of an archaic, maternal authority at the foundation of subjectivity and language – an Other which threatens to invade or undo the ‘clean’ boundaries of the self.154 Conrad does not name Poland as motherland or fatherland. Yet the gender associated with his consistent displacement of the abject Other is apparent if one looks more closely at the funeral account: ‘That bareheaded mass of work people, youths of the University, women at the windows, school-boys on the pavement, could have known nothing positive about him except the fame of his fidelity to the one guiding emotion in their hearts. I had nothing but that knowledge myself; and this great silent demonstration seemed to me the most natural tribute in the world – not to the man but to the Idea.’ One cannot but help notice the prominence of the unspecified ‘Idea,’ and its absoluteness as the ‘one guiding emotion’ that they share. In Conrad, where we find absolute ideas, emotions, and faith holding sway, impervious to other knowledge or to their own ignorance, is in women (and, significantly, in people marked as primitive). In Heart of Darkness (1899), we find an uncanny parallel between the mourning of the Intended, ‘illumined’ in the darkness ‘by the unextinguishable light of belief and love,’ and the Polish mourners: ‘She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering … I saw her and [Kurtz] in the same instant of time – his death and her sorrow – I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together – I heard them together. She had said with a deep catch of the breath, “I have

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survived” – while my strained ears seemed to hear distinctly, mingled with her tone of despairing regret, the summing-up whisper of his eternal condemnation [“The horror! The horror!”].’ This fictional mourning prepares us to descend into the explicit, Lovecraftian horror of the woman’s house, just as in the Polish motherland of Conrad’s father’s verse: ‘I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold.’155 The silence of the Intended’s mourning, of the African mistress’s mourning, and of the Polish mourners at the remembered funeral all suggest a realm of obligation (tributes, memorials, fidelities) stemming from a mysterious, abject, feminized source. And like the Intended, who is triumphant that Kurtz’s ultimate pronouncement is her name, this source is identified with narcissism. Conrad’s community of men, as in Lovecraft, defines itself against this narcissism: they are marked in the first instance simply by their collectivity and self-sacrifice. They submit to a corporate body, to solidarity, as ‘one of us.’ The very vagueness and multiplicity of meanings possible to ‘us,’ let alone an implicit ‘them,’ may thus be seen as a proper and paradoxically quite clear effect of that mobile priority of abjection simply to exclude, to purify, to draw boundaries for an unidentified I against an unidentified Other. In Conrad, such boundaries are everywhere formed and reformed, yet they are most memorably drawn between illusion and truth, in such a way that truth is always further peeled back and divided again into illusion and truth, until all that can be discerned (as in Marlow’s last view of Jim) is a blur, or (as in Kurtz’s last ravings) a murmur. This restless boundary making, this obsessive repulsion of illusion without destination, this abject flight is masculinized, the work of men who live on the edges of life, in shadows, in mutual darkness, like ghosts. Meanwhile, the narcissistic, saving illusion that threatens to swallow it up cannot ultimately be escaped, for it is also real – like the double voice of the Intended, which it is Marlow’s duty to encounter and listen to, and which expresses the narcissistic penetration of an imaginary Other into abject flight itself, the totalization of the horror as a truth identical to a primal, selfluminous, totalization of pleasure. Hence, women may be monstrous in Conrad’s work, but they are never the central symbols of horror; rather, they flicker, as in Lovecraft’s work, at the very threshold of the unnamable, as gatekeepers normally silent or unseen. In Heart of Darkness, this feminization of a hieratic

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narcissism, one that looks inward and sees all, takes the explicit shape of two Fates, the sombre women knitting black wool in the Company offices. The young one is mysteriously able to see Marlow without looking up or breaking her self-absorption: ‘The slim one got up and walked straight at me – still knitting with downcast eyes – and only just as I began to think of getting out of her way, as you would for a somnambulist, stood still, and looked up.’ The older one later casts him a glance: The swift and indifferent placidity of that look troubled me. Two youths with foolish and cheery countenances were being piloted over and she threw at them the same quick glance of unconcerned wisdom. She seemed to know all about them and about me too. An eerie feeling came over me. She seemed uncanny and fateful. Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes.156

These are sacred doubles of the erotic figures of Kurtz’s Intended and African mistress: like priestesses, they introduce initiates to the unknown and to the ultimate limit of death, at the same time that they guard some total, ‘seen-everything’ knowledge (indeed, in the knitting women’s glances, ever collecting and adding unto it, with a worldweary, transcendental indifference). And, like the other women, they are fixed to their place; in a sense, contrasted with the men at sea, in flight, they are identical to place – its inarticulate, ominous, abject sign. By way of this feminized abjection, the place – the house, the land, the aboriginal motherland – is comprehended as real yet unsymbolizable. The writing of the real, which Kristeva says is the semiotic or presymbolic articulation of self and social forms in sacred (ritualized) abjection, is here transferred from the body of the woman to the body of the place – to the land or goods which in aboriginal heritage are already linked with women’s knowledge and productivity. This intersection of ideas is captured with almost allegorical directness in an episode of Lord Jim – one so evidently important to Conrad’s imagination that he effectively rewrote it into a much longer scene in Nostromo (1904): the hero adrift, in pitch darkness, at sea. In Lord Jim, the episode occurs when Jim is with the officers of the Patna in one of its boats, the storm has faded, and the Patna is no longer in sight. Here in the boat, Jim is confronted with his awful, intolerable affiliation with the officers, with his unexpected identity as a betrayer. Being one of

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them, being a deserter, is not only a moral failing – the failure to live by an expected ethical code – but to become a thing so vile as to be nearly inhuman. Consider this portrait of the captain: Red of face, only half awake, the left eye partly closed, the right staring stupid and glassy, he hung his head over the chart and scratched his ribs sleepily. There was something obscene in the sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast glistened soft and greasy as though he had sweated out his fat in his sleep. He pronounced a professional remark in a voice harsh and dead, resembling the rasping sound of a wood-file on the edge of a plank; the fold of his double chin hung like a bag triced up close under the hinge of his jaw. Jim started, and his answer was full of deference; but the odious and fleshly figure, as though seen for the first time in a revealing moment, fixed itself in his memory for ever as the incarnation of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love.157

Repulsiveness is neither simply symbolic or symptomatic, here, of a prior moral problem. What is vile, base, stupid, obscene, and almost nauseating to behold seems to arise out of some primal realm of its own, horribly absolute. It is not symbol, but incarnation. Moreover, its inhumanness, suggested here by an inanimate voice and gaze, is developed in a later, farcical description of the captain as ‘something round and enormous, resembling a sixteen-hundred-weight sugar-hogshead wrapped in a striped flannelette, up-ended’ on the floor, leading an observer to fail to recognize ‘the thing was alive.’ The tonal difference between the two grotesque descriptions is significant: on land, the horror of the figure is contained by a socially normative, satirical perspective, one that can keep its distance; at sea, the horror of the figure seems more absolute because no Archimedean point can be found beyond it, excepting one created by an instinct of recoil. When Jim says, having landed in the boat, ‘it was as if I had jumped into a well – into an everlasting hole,’ we are reminded of Carter’s fall into the great abyss of dreamland, pitch dark and similarly inhabited by inhuman, gigantic, slimy, and amorphous fellow creatures.158 And Jim’s words here, ending in ‘everlasting hole’ and followed by suspension points, come at the very end of chapter 9 in Lord Jim and seem to introduce, as if merely to expand upon that one image, the entire boat-adrift-at-night episode of chapter 10. These are the monsters with whom he is unexpectedly forced to identify, even as he continues to push their loathsomeness away, insisting with naïve instinct, but confused language and reason, upon his difference.

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Night comes, then, upon Jim and his horrible companions in the small boat at sea. Earlier, at night on the Patna, Jim had looked upon the sea and been ‘penetrated by the great certitude of unbounded safety and peace that could be read on the silent aspect of nature like the certitude of fostering love upon the placid tenderness of a mother’s face.’ Later, in the boat, the sea remains dark and silent, but the womb turns to tomb, and primal love to primal violence, the death drive: ‘I was ready,’ Jim confesses: ‘After the ship’s lights had gone, anything might have happened in that boat – anything in the world – and the world no wiser. I felt this, and I was pleased. It was just dark enough, too. We were like men walled up quick in a roomy grave. No concern with anything on earth … Nothing mattered.’ As Marlow will make clear, the encompassing, nurturing fantasy of primal unity with the mother – with a fantastically totalized, creating, caring, and parenting ‘world’ – is unfortunately sundered for Jim, and results in his strange identification (in ill-will, in anomie, in violence) with those who horrify him, at the same time that these figures merely incarnate the absurd freedom and indifference of an unrepresentable ‘immensity.’ Jim’s abhorrence of this Magna Mater, now hideously unmasked – for she has re-created the world for these men (such a careless mother) as a ‘fiendish and appalling joke’ – merely takes the Patna officers as its momentary focus. Marlow explains: When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, has taken care of you. It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination … [And in this shipwreck] there was something abject which made the isolation more complete – there was a villainy of circumstances that cut these men off more completely from the rest of mankind, whose ideal of conduct had never undergone the trial of a fiendish and appalling joke. They were exasperated with [Jim] for being a half-hearted shirker: he focussed on them his hatred of the whole thing; he would have liked to take a signal revenge for the abhorrent opportunity they had put in his way.159

Yet the idea that this ‘whole world’ is either a blissful, penetrating, encompassing mother or an abhorrent, consuming, encompassing abyss – images, in Kristeva’s terms, respectively primal and abject – are both narcissistic fantasies. They are recto and verso, in want and fear, of an imaginary, totalized, phallic mother.

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Such metapsychological language allows us to sort out, too, Marlow’s contradictory feelings throughout the novel: his sympathy with Jim, according to which he seems to affirm Jim’s authenticity or representativeness, along with his analytic distance from Jim, when he is frequently irritated with and even condemning Jim’s deviations from what is right and proper. Marlow sympathizes with the authenticity of Jim’s abject fantasy: all identities, orders, and codes are indeed destroyed and rebuilt on the shifting, divisive, ground of narcissistic repulsion. The abject separation of the self – the very survival of the self as an I – is predicated on an instinctive, irrational, unsymbolizable desertion, a ‘jump’ from the ‘whole world’ that has cradled it into an abyss that merely folds back over and encompasses the fleeing self, as a whole world, once again. ‘In the destructive element immerse,’ intones the solitary Stein, echoing the ghoulish morbidity of Lovecraft’s New England kin as well as their hieratic aestheticism.160 Marlow, however, like Stein, achieves an analytic distance from this abject narcissism: the imperative is to immerse, not to drown. This distinction is most clearly visible when Marlow interrupts his own report of Jim’s account of the boat at sea at night: ‘“I don’t think any spot on earth could be so still,” [Jim] said. “You couldn’t distinguish the sea from the sky; there was nothing to see and nothing to hear. Not a glimmer, not a shape, not a sound. You could have believed that every bit of dry land had gone to the bottom; that every man on earth but I and these beggars in the boat had got drowned.” [Jim] leaned over the table with his knuckles propped amongst coffee-cups, liqueur-glasses, cigar-ends. “I seemed to believe it. Everything was gone and – all was over …” he fetched a deep sigh … “with me.”’ Marlow sat up abruptly [to address his listeners …] ‘Hey, what do you think of it?’ he cried with sudden animation. ‘Wasn’t he true to himself, wasn’t he? His saved life was over for want of ground under his feet, for want of sights for his eyes, for want of voices in his ears. Annihilation – hey! And all the time it was only a clouded sky, a sea that did not break, the air that did not stir. Only a night, only a silence.’161

For the sun and the day, the sea and the Patna are still there. Land and us are there, and a trial waits. The boat at sea at night offers a narcissistic, false image of totality – not quite a unity, but an abject, penetrating horror of a world that must be repulsed (that is not me)

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even as it is all there is. This narcissistic mistake – to be is to be perceived (by me) – leads Jim to a suicidal despair. If Jim had not been helped by Marlow and Stein, he might have remained locked in a horribly real parody of the same desperate narcissism, an abject Crusoe, ‘perched on a shadowless rock, up to his knees in guano,’ the sun motionless above his head, holding a gun to the heads of slaves shovelling birdshit for entrepreneurs beyond the horizon, and only the ‘empty’ sky and sea ‘as far as the eye could reach.’162 Instead, Jim embarks on his adventure in Patusan. Patusan represents the land as a good. With uncharacteristic conventionality, Marlow effuses over the ‘land’ as the sacred place of home, of kin, as the guardian of values. He explains his obligation to help Jim as the prompting of a conscience about to return to its English soil, where it will be held to ‘account’: ‘We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends – those whom we obey, and those whom we love, but even they who have neither, the most free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties, – even those for whom home holds no dear face, no familiar voice, – even they have to meet the spirit that dwells within the land under its sky, in its air, in its valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and in its trees – a mute friend, judge, and inspirer.’163 The land is the place of kin, but also, a good in itself, a social as well as existential ground of affiliations (friend) and values (judge and inspirer). The land, and not just any land but, in particular, a non-urban, non-metropolitan place of ‘nature’ and of them – those dark-skinned peoples who in Conrad’s jungles and forests live closer to it – is the strongest and metonymic sign of the House in Conrad’s fictional world. The sea, known to us, is both the abject revelation of the imperialist Market as a collapsed Other (the relentlessly volatile world of capitalist trade and imperialist conflict and conquest), and the vehicle to this alternative, aboriginal modernity in the land, a modern chiasmus of heritages and practices that is able to evolve, if tentatively, at a remove from the modern imperialist State. Hence, Jim wishes to ‘hang on’ in Patusan, as opposed to his earlier ‘jump.’ He wishes to put down roots, and the very land seems to offer this upon his arrival: ‘The immovable forests rooted deep in the soil’ face him as the mobile sea disappears from view, while ‘his opportunity sat veiled by his side like an Eastern bride.’164 The association of kinship with the land is eventually literalized by his de facto marriage to Jewel, a woman who has grown up in Patusan (but, like Jim, without blood kinship there), and by his equally powerful, brotherly bond with Dain

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Waris, son of the mercantile patriarch Doramin (who is himself, in Conrad’s overdetermined world, brother-bonded with Stein). Certainly, Conrad is at pains to distinguish his novel’s archaic social bonds of honour and obligation – the stuff of nineteenth-century antimodernist, chivalric romance – from indigeneity. The land does not have to be one’s birth land; one’s affiliations do not have to be blood relations. The land is the good of a House also defined by kinship-type relations which determine identity, social status, and power (chivalric bonds becoming the model for entrepreneurial bonds between men – again, us – sceptical of both State and Market ambitions, the bad slave-drivers and moneygrubbers of Conrad’s world). But kinship does not have to be determined by indigeneity. More precisely, kinship does not have to be determined by the land as place of birth; rather, in a circular logic, it can be determined by the sacrifices one makes to the land in the role of new kin or ‘friend.’ Not born in Patusan, Jim naturalizes himself with gifts of political counsel and military leadership which bring peace to the whole society. In return, he gains the people’s trust, even that of his enemies,165 and is thus accepted into, and holds a definitive place in, the new stability of their multicultural realm. Hence, what is said of him in Patusan is what could not be said of him aboard the Patna, that he himself becomes, by the gift of himself, a good, a sustaining property of others: ‘All his conquests, the trust, the fame, the friendships, the love – all these things that made him master had made him a captive, too. He looked with an owner’s eye at the peace of the evening, at the river, at the houses, at the everlasting life of the forests, at the life of the old mankind, at the secrets of the land, at the pride of his own heart; but it was they that possessed him and made him their own to the innermost thought, to the slightest stir of blood, to his last breath.’166 This is the kind of modern aristocrat Yeats dreamed of. This is the same feeling expressed in the moving account of Conrad’s father’s funeral: the Polish aristocratic landowner, ever possessed in spirit, and finally in body, by the Idea of his land and people. Like unto Poland, Conrad tries to imagine the complex historical creation of a land that is at once (a) modern, in economic means and systems and in cultural heterogeneity and non-insularity, (b) an aboriginal good, as the reproduced (by acts of honour and sacrifice) and reproductive (as a unique place that is a synecdoche for the power of the House) source of values and kinship bonds, and (c) counter-imperialist, in its requirement of having a borderland distance from regions of homogeneous colonization or domination by imperialist commerce

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and war machines, and in its tragic frailty before them. Like Lawrence, Conrad dreams of a world in which the modern State and Market operate with all their familiar subtlety, complexity, technology, range, and vigour, yet bend to the values and social organizations of the House. Out of abjection, out of the collapse of the Other, which is both internal – the flaw inherent in the exemplary youth, Jim – and social – the ugliness of the Patna officers, of entrepreneurs like Chester and Robinson, of Gentleman Brown, all of whom express a nihilistic, narcissistic distillation of the alienation and aggression of the Market and of the colonizing armies of the imperialist State – arises the need for a new reality principle, a new architecture of self and social development. Patusan is the utopian fantasy of an aboriginal modernity. Yet something gets in the way of this romance. Gentleman Brown arrives, uncannily, as a strange yet familiar doubling of Jim, and the land is torn apart. After considerable violence, its twin avatars of modern youth, Jim and Dain Waris, are dead, and Patusan is shorn of the future imagined for it. Brown is evidently a figure of Market and State, minus House: he is brilliantly calculating, he is a powerful, diplomatic rhetorician, and he has an endless appetite not only for the wealth but the land of others. He wishes first to ‘steal’ the ‘whole country’ of Patusan, and then, when its ‘jungle town’ defies him, to destroy it utterly. He is a double of Jim because his personality is grounded in an abject crisis. He lives in the nightworld of an appalling joke. His response, however, is to lash back, to take revenge upon the world as such.167 This ambition proves more powerful than Jim’s. It is true, Jim’s final act does affirm the House economy to which he has submitted himself – his sacrifice to Dain Waris’s father affirms a law of retaliation that reproduces the kindred rather than individual value of Dain Waris, and the social rather than affective bonds between the three men. His final glances at the surrounding people, the ethnogenesis of whom he has been both producer and produced, solicit this reproduction of personal value. Yet the youth who will inherit this symbolic act and carry it into the future are nowhere to be seen – or, if hidden in the crowd, are swallowed up by narrative silence. In a sense, this inheritance shifts its ground to that of the storytelling situation which frames the novel: Marlow produces the narrative of Jim, and also of Patusan, to be henceforth remembered by us, his worldly, male listeners on the veranda. Yet neither are these listeners the young, the productive. They give us scant cause for optimism with respect to Marlow’s gift: ‘My last

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words about Jim shall be few,’ he tells them: ‘I affirm he achieved greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds. I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations to feed your bodies.’ Starved, that is, because of their single-minded devotion to the materialist values and practical logics of imperialist modernity.168 The pessimism of Conrad’s work, the overwhelming sense that imperialism will continue to make war, make money, and increasingly colour in its maps, without the horizons of meaning provided by the House, is more than just a moody obstacle in the way of his anti-imperialist, utopian imagination. It is rooted in the very crisis of narcissism that produces, as it does for Lovecraft, a world of shadows and doubles, a style harried by blurring and collapse, unable to sustain differentiation and distinction. Although the utopian register I indicated above is there, it is subsumed, as it is in Lovecraft, by a powerful, imaginary recontainment in a totalizing articulation of self. The abject is recontained by the I. Not, to be sure, with the superficial simplicity of a Randolph Carter, but in the spectral identification of Lord Jim with Marlow, with us, and indeed with all the ghosts half-alive and half-dead from an inevitable abyss. ‘You all remember something! You all go back to it. What is it?’ begs Jewel of Marlow. ‘You tell me! What is this thing? Is it alive? – is it dead? I hate it. It is cruel. Has it got a face and a voice – this calamity? Will [Jim] see it – will he hear it? In his sleep perhaps when he cannot see me – and then arise and go.’ And Jewel is right. He does hear its call, he does go. Marlow feels the power of her words: ‘Thus a poor mortal seduced by the charm of an apparition might have tried to wring from another ghost the tremendous secret of the claim the other world holds over a disembodied soul … The very ground on which I stood seemed to melt under my feet … My part was to speak for my brother from the realm of forgetful shades.’ This universal identification of Jim, Marlow, Brown, and imperialist modernity itself as the multiform yet homogeneous entity of an abject abyss – and as ‘fate’ – reorganizes the deferrals and displacements, and closes off the open-endedness and unsatisfied wants, of the abject in a single, all-consuming, blurry unity.169 The unity presents itself to us in a masterful ‘I,’ marked not by face or name, but by voice and gender: the abject narrator created by Marlow’s words. The now sedentary, pessimistic Marlow, telling his tale in the pitch dark to ignorant men, a double of Jim in his dark boat at sea. The same Marlow whose double is also Stein, whom we see in the final words of the novel

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preparing to die, waving his hand good-bye, not to a people or land, but to his museum of dead flight. Upon this blackened abyss all Conrad’s men float, in Harpham’s phrase, in ‘aboriginal homosociality.’170 Yet if the aboriginal land – the Eastern bride – is feminized, so is the sea, the immensity of nature, the dark abyss that appears to be its antithesis. The latter feminization signifies the collapse into ruins, the horror, the regression to a moment of freedom that is always desertion; the matrix of an appalling joke. Yet the former feminization signifies the unexpected possibilities of value for self and world that result. We must not make the same mistake as those adventurers who, hearing only the name and personal value to Jim of the Jewel of Patusan, confuse the pre-eminent, inalienable House value of a newly produced kinship world for Jim, with the alienable Market value of a commodity. It is an ideal possession, a locally significant good, and perhaps the sign of an aboriginal modernity yet to be born. The other is, like Jewel’s downtrodden, maddened mother, her abject creator. In this context, the fate of Jewel offers a kind of key to the utopian register of the text. She too leaves Patusan, and ends up leading a ‘soundless, inert life’ in Stein’s house, like the shadow cast by this solitary figure, and so the shadow of a shade. In other words, she is reabsorbed into the abject nightworld of imperialist modernity, into the blockage – and male mastery – of its narcissistic withdrawal. The most appalling joke of all in this story is that, despite so many appalling transformations, nothing changes. Jim deserts neither us nor them but more insidiously, culture itself, reifying heritage as so much romance – either generic romances, universally, anonymously authored by a popular culture (his summer reading) or more inventive romances authored by an autonomous group or individual (perceived as opportunities by Stein and Marlow, and produced and lived by Jim in Patusan). The proclivity to see the production or reproduction of culture as a matter of singular authorship, either by the individual self or by society as an abstract whole is, according to Marilyn Strathern, a powerful feature of Market ideology. Conrad’s brilliance is to see the mirroring of all such romances in the imperialist romance, and to stage this as tragedy. Yet he also eclipses what Strathern observes about the gift economies she studies: the possibility of multiply authored selves and of societies authored only in semi-autonomous, diverse parts to which such selves multiply belong.171 (Compare Joyce’s Leopold Bloom or H.D.’s Ion.) Why judge Jim, as does Marlow, for the way he makes his life, rather than for the

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way others with whom he lives and dies make their own lives with yet others? Why judge agency according to a property notion, that of an abstractly unified, ultimately alienable Patusan, rather than to ideas of relation, of a Patusan that survives Jim, in which, indeed, he may remain a kind of inalienable possession? The death of Jim is the death of his autonomously authored romance, equally of Patusan as such, both utopian projects falling solitary into silence. Both Patusan, then, and Conrad’s Poland in Harpham’s rendering, ultimately offer abject heritages – and ones unable, moreover, to imagine their inheritors. If Conrad is the epic poet of deterritorialization, as Stephen Ross has suggested, he conflates his epic with elegy, and his culture-building with mourning. Conrad memorializes, as if in advance, the degradation and defeat of an alternative future. If the political conclusions drawn here from Jim and from Patusan seem themselves too exotic, one may turn to the more complex political world of Nostromo – in which the titular hero plays a smaller but equally significant role – for confirmation. The narcissistic recontainment of anti-imperialist imagination that I have sketched out in Lord Jim is in Nostromo more explicit and concrete. The hazy mirrorplay of shades, shadows, and distorted doubles that troubles the style of Lord Jim and is rooted in Marlow’s voice and perspective is in the later novel shattered (there is no longer any place for the unity of us) and its problems diverted into the more explicit register of plot. The comparison is most telling in the parallel scene in which Nostromo, Decoud, and Hirsch drift uncertainly in the pitch dark in a small boat on the rainy waters of the ocean gulf. Here, too, men are plunged into a soundless ‘circumambient darkness in which the land, sea, sky, the mountains, and the rocks were as if they had not been.’172 It is so dark that the men cannot see their hands before their faces, much less each other. Nostromo is in the boat because he has been entrusted to remove his employer’s stock of silver from the reach of the state government that is hoping to appropriate it, to control the mine, and to dominate the region. Nostromo is not politically motivated, but his identity, exactly like that of Jim, depends on the trust of others. He is trusted to perform this heroic deed, so he will do it; if he did not, his identity, his value to himself and others, and so his place in the social order, would evaporate. Decoud is a journalist and ‘exotic dandy of the Parisian boulevard,’ ‘a man without faith and principles.’ Yet he is swept up in the turmoil of civil war, a rhetorician hoping to put his talents to work as

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head of state, no less, for a breakaway republic. His motive is not political but personal. By creating a separate state, he will be able to preserve the life – material and cultural – of the woman of the native gentry he adores. The woman is his passion, his butterfly, to preserve in the ambient dark of anomie and war. The new nation, serving this solitary passion, will be an ‘evil flower’ like all other modern states, and its citizens, no doubt, his semblables and frères.173 Hirsch, the third man, is a stowaway, coiled in fear at the opposite end of the boat, at first undiscovered by the others. He is unconcerned with any notions of identity, pride, or passion. He embodies a crude survival instinct, stupid and abject, akin here to the Patna officers; and, like those officers, he is perceived as a physically grotesque it, a repulsive thing. For these three men, the boat at sea at night conveys the same illusion of an evaporation of the land. As in Lord Jim, this feeling of floating in physical and perceptual darkness produces a corresponding sense of desertion, and of social and ethical unmooring. When Nostromo quenches a candle he has lit to read the compass, ‘it was to Decoud as if his companion had destroyed, by a single touch, the world of affairs, of loves, of revolution, where his complacent superiority analysed fearlessly all motives and all passions, including his own.’ If Decoud’s ‘intelligence’ is here undone, so is Nostromo’s moral sense, for this is the turning point that will lead to Nostromo’s betrayal of the trust placed in him and his appropriation of the silver (a character development to whose implausibility my discussion will return). We are prepared for that turning point by Nostromo’s own words following the candle’s extinction: ‘No! there is no room for fear on this lighter. Courage itself does not seem good enough. I have a good eye and a steady hand; no man can say he ever saw me tired or uncertain what to do; but por Dios, Don Martin, I have been sent out into this black calm on a business where neither a good eye, nor a steady hand, nor judgement are any use …’ He swore a string of oaths in Spanish and Italian under his breath. ‘Nothing but sheer desperation will do for this affair.’

In order to maintain his sense of self, the trust placed in him, he must degrade himself, for the task he has been given requires nothing but stupid will. ‘The perfect form of his egoism’ is maintained, abjectly, against all sense or nonsense. A string of verbal violence, displaced from English, hardly audible, signals this collapse of a symbolic

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Other and his devotion to a pure production of self in the ambient, oceanic darkness.174 However, Nostromo and Decoud are allowed further revelations in the boat that change their view of the apparently overwhelming darkness. When Decoud discovers that he may be rescued by the enemy forces and executed, rather than dying an unknown death there at sea, he breaks the illusion: ‘The darkness of the gulf was no longer for him the end of all things. It was part of a living world since, pervading it, failure and death could be felt at your elbow. And at the same time it was a shelter. He exulted in its impenetrable obscurity. “Like a wall, like a wall,” he muttered to himself.’175 As in Lord Jim, the land, the social world, are there – meaningful and demanding, even in the destruction of meaning and the futility of demands. The darkness is no longer a permeating, boundariless whole, but a division, a wall between selves and parts of a world. The darkness has been felt as an abject degradation to both men, who feel their various symbolic worlds, political and moral, collapse, and their selves cast adrift as pure will, clinging to the silver. The silver is for each a sign of their value – to the mining company for Nostromo, to the revolution for Decoud – that must be saved; to each it is a curiously powerful remnant of a shattered or embattled system, an ultimate sign of their obligation or debt to others, however uncertain or absurd. An abject, narcissistic crisis is overcome, then, in this recognition of a world of walls, of darknesses that divide rather than engulf a social life. Conrad provides a parable for this character development by having Nostromo and Decoud discover, much to their surprise, another person right there in the darkness of the boat: Hirsch. When Decoud gives Hirsch water to drink, ‘holding up the can to his lips as though he were [his] brother,’ Nostromo realizes that he cannot kill Hirsch to preserve their safety. Society, here under a sign of kinship, is never so far away. We might have expected a happy ending from these night thoughts, but the outcome produced by Conrad is even more pessimistic than for the similar episode in Lord Jim. Narcissism returns by way of a character doubling that is analytic rather than blurry. By the time Decoud and Nostromo reach land again, they feel ‘completely estranged’: the ‘common danger brought their differences in aim, in view, in character, and in position, into absolute prominence in the private vision of each. There was no bond of conviction, of common idea; they were merely two adventurers pursuing each his own adventure, involved in the same imminence of deadly peril. Therefore they had nothing to say to

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each other.’176 A revelation of the inevitability of a social world and of its authoritative aspect as a guiding, judging Other, is undone by a more subtle narcissism of cure – of a reality principle that constitutes the self with identity and purpose only to alienate it, to make it unsustainable except as a defiant – again, tendentially abject – personal romance. Unfortunately, such adventures, such romances, require others to affirm them, and while it is attractive to believe that Decoud dies ‘striving for his idea’ of revolution, ‘the truth’ is that he dies ‘from solitude.’ Left alone on an island with the silver, Decoud falls into another narcissistic funk. It is textbook abjection: Decoud caught himself entertaining a doubt of his own individuality. It had merged into the world of cloud and water, of natural forces and forms of nature. In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part. Decoud lost all belief in the reality of his action past and to come. On the fifth day an immense melancholy descended upon him palpably. He resolved not to give himself up to these people in Sulaco, who had beset him, unreal and terrible, like jibbering and obscene spectres. He saw himself struggling feebly in their midst, and [his beloved noblewoman] Antonia, gigantic and lovely like an allegorical statue, looking on with scornful eyes at his weakness.177

The social world on land that promises to integrate Decoud, as with Nostromo earlier, also destroys him. It is figured as a ghostly, loathsome, incoherent abyss, watched over by an enormous, scornful goddess. It is uncertain whether this second-order narcissism – there is a social world of others and demands out there, but they are meaningless, insubstantial, unreal, like oneself – has really the status of an illusion for Conrad, or has in fact the authenticity of a modern fate. I say modern, because the silver which marks the symbolic integration of the self into society in war-torn Sulaco seems to be selected by Conrad both as a symbol of a modern imperialist Market – the symbol of Gould’s entrepreneurial mastery, the raw material of coinage (the sign of currency, required for capitalist exchange), and in Conrad’s day a fixed standard of monetary value – as well as a symbol of the House – as we see in Nostromo’s own guardianship of the silver as a good that fixes his social position in Sulaco, and in an earlier, powerful episode in which he tears silver buttons from his jacket to pay, before the eyes of his people, a symbolic debt to a lover, and restore her and their trust in

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him. But the silver seems fated to sully and betray these latter meanings when it becomes a medium through which Decoud and Nostromo are able to ‘exchange’ value systems, reinvesting the silver with new meanings no longer romantic or revolutionary, but abject and alienated. Silver becomes the fixed standard of romantic illusion and abject authenticity alike. In that sense, it obscurely affirms the indifferent, alienating logic of the Market. To this, the House (Nostromo) and the State (Decoud) must, in mutual degradation, submit. Decoud dies in exaggerated self-pity, an unexpected double of the Hirsch portrayed paralysed by fear, curled up in the boat. As for Nostromo, he does not commit suicide, but he does drown forever his identity as the people’s hero and trusted servant. He crawls out of the waters of the gulf into a barren landscape populated with moneydriven, gringo ghosts, and begins a new life as a one of them – as a selfserving, no longer entirely trustworthy, entrepreneur. He gives up his guardianship of the silver for its private ownership. This transformation of character is so incredible that Conrad tries to prepare the reader for it with many pages of hints at Nostromo’s interior crisis and unknown depths. To my mind, it still rings false. Conrad builds Nostromo from the start as a man indifferent to wealth and politics, whose only care is his status with rich and poor alike. As his nickname suggests, his identity is given by, like Jim possessed by, the demands or needs of others: he is ‘our man.’ All that is important to Nostromo is to fix his place in the world, echoing Marlow in Lord Jim, ‘by fidelity to a certain standard of conduct.’ Moreover, this ethical conduct – of duty, of service, of hard labour, of deeds that demand reciprocation in trust and status rather than remuneration – is firmly associated here with the House. We first meet Nostromo when his adoptive family is besieged in their small hotel, Casa Viola, during a violent uprising. His surrogate father, a Garibaldino scornful of ‘nonpolitical’ revolutions, is sure that Nostromo is ‘thinking of the casa all the time,’ which his wife denies: ‘He think of the casa! He! … I know him. He thinks of nobody but himself.’ This reproach is the constant antagonistic theme of the powerful mother-son relationship. She accuses him of thinking only of himself, not of his casa (suggesting at once his home, his house, and his marriage or family), while he proves she is wrong (as the beginning of the next chapter reveals, when he is protectively watching the hotel all along) yet also right, for he does indeed strive to separate himself from her: ‘It concerns me to keep on being what I am,’ is all he can say to fend her off. ‘Leave my soul alone,

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Padrona, and I shall know how to take care of my body.’178 He antagonistically separates himself, not by contradicting (like a typical teenager) but by reproducing his relationship with her and with the casa – his duty, his obligations, his status – in the troubled, public world outside the family. The House has been cultivated in Nostromo by his surrogate mother. Teresa is a dominating, maternal figure he addresses as Padrona, with whom he has ‘an intimacy of antagonism as close in its way as the intimacy of accord and affection.’ While Teresa wishes Nostromo to marry her daughter and make money – in other words, to turn the House inward to domestic ends – Nostromo gives himself to an outside world, ‘taking [his] pay out in fine words from those who care nothing about [him].’ The masterful mother, with whom he has an abject, antagonistic, but intimate relationship, is yet again the vehicle of an abject House, one pushed into the degraded because devalued world of mere domesticity. Nostromo’s dialectical response – an abject instinct merely to differentiate himself, to mark himself off from this mother, with whom he is nevertheless still continuous in identity – is to put the values (the heroism, the obligations, the status) of the House to the service of the Market (Gould) and later the State (Decoud). But Nostromo does not expect, as Marlow puts it of Jim, that his ‘ideal of conduct’ will undergo ‘the trial of a fiendish and appalling joke,’ that he is fated to become a traitor in a world of normalized betrayal. When Nostromo later crawls out of the sea, he can agree with his late mother after all. In ‘self-derision,’ in ‘disgust,’ in ‘a revulsion of subjectiveness, exasperated almost to insanity,’ he knows that ‘his fidelity had been taken advantage of,’ that his own gift of trust, to those who should return their trust to him, has been betrayed. He is to his self-interested masters not an inalienable gift (of self, of labour), nor a personal relation, but a consumable – a utilitarian thing, a ‘kept’ dog that hunts and fights for them, to be dispensed with when it has served its purpose.179 For schematic reasons, then, one can understand Nostromo’s nihilistic transformation into a banal, not quite above-board businessman. What is unconvincing is Conrad’s inability to imagine for Nostromo either the desire to find some more worthy social formation than that created by Gould’s mining company, or the initiative to try to create one in what is, after all, a volatile land. Nostromo can only think: Gould or nothing. Or to put it more accurately: although the silver is available to be valued in different ways, once it can no longer ‘pin’ the

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service of the degraded House to an exploitative, imperialist Market, it seems the only alternative valuation is that it become private capital for Nostromo’s rather unheroic new career as a trader – an unexpected double of the similarly wandering, abject Hirsch, in a barren, Market world. Yet it must surely bother the reader that this fatalist is a man also described as having ‘a peculiar talent when anything striking to the imagination has to be done,’ and one clearly, in the self-conscious epic patterning of the text, drawn as a modern Ulysses, a polutropon, a man of many ways, able to turn situations unexpectedly to advantage, in his troublesome quest to restore his home and state.180 Conrad labours to shut down this subjective vitality by reiterating Nostromo’s simplicity. Yet he also shuts down existing social possibilities by setting up a clear antithesis between authentic and inauthentic revolutions: Costaguana is forever in turmoil as a result of the inauthentic, ‘military’ kind,181 while an authentic, political revolution is either doomed to failure (if we accept as such the project nominally headed by Decoud), or, more significantly, it is shut up in the ineffectual, domestic world of the casa, in an estranged imagination, and in the past: the liberal nationalist revolution of the Garibaldino. Collapsing all of these latter figures of a doomed Idea into one is the hazy, mysteriously dominating figure of Emilia Gould. All possibilities in Nostromo seem to collapse, then, into narcissistic doubles of each other – whether represented as such, that is, as characters turned inwards upon illusions of self and society unsupported or unconfirmed by others, or in the very architecture of the novel, in which character developments that begin as distinct types at last converge in an uncanny mirroring of abject doubles. The Odyssean homecoming must always be abject. We see this confirmed, too, in Conrad’s notorious meditation on the world as a fateful machine: There is a, – let us say, – a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! – it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled … The most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself: made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart … You can’t interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion that you can’t even smash it … It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions – and nothing matters.182

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This imagining of the gigantic, cosmic machine as a woman – that is, as a knitter, like those in Heart of Darkness – and as a permeating power who ‘knits us in and knits us out’ recalls the phallic, omnipotent mother at the centre of abject horror. Her avatars in Nostromo are Teresa Viola, Antonia Avellanos, and Emilia Gould: all deified women who inspire men with their values, their ethical purpose, the bases of their action in the world, yet these only as particular narcissistic illusions, Ideas, which must ultimately collapse back into the deeper primal narcissism and horror of an abject Magna Mater. Now, while I have dwelt upon the depressing plot closure of Nostromo, I have overlooked its actual narrative ending, where we are reminded that the Nostromo formed of the House and given to the Market and State – the epic, culture-building polutropon who might have turned the struggles in his land to a new form of aboriginal modernity – is not so vanished as we think. Though he is dead. After his death, his nihilistic eulogist, Dr Monygham, approaches the island where the silver is cached and the Violas have made their new, even more isolated home. As his boat floats in the night below the island’s cliffs, Dr Monygham sees the anguished figure of Linda above. Linda is the daughter who incarnates the passion, gloom, and scorn of her idealistic casa, has inherited her mother’s voice, and has taken her mother’s place following her death.183 Teresa had planned with Nostromo that he marry Linda, but after Nostromo appropriates the silver and descends into the unheroic banality of corruption, he betrays her for Teresa’s younger, more tractable daughter. At the novel’s end, Linda stands alone, a black silhouette at the top of a cliff, crying, ‘I shall never forget thee. Never! … Never! Gian’ Battista!’ Nostromo is remembered at last by the name associated with Teresa and her casa: Gian’ Battista. The name suggests that he yet heralds, if he cannot bring forth, a better world to come. It is the persistence of this name, and the fact that it will be remembered not only by Linda, but by the land for which she at last speaks, ‘from the Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of the horizon,’ that marks the inalienable spirit, the gift of himself, his ‘genius.’ The cry of his name across the land is ‘sinister,’ arising as it does from his death, but we are told that it is nevertheless his ‘greatest’ and ‘most enviable’ triumph, a symbolic legacy. Against the cloud ‘shining like a mass of solid silver’ on that horizon, the ‘genius of the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores’ endures.184 This last image stands at the threshold of a sequel that Conrad cannot cross and write, but can invite the reader to desire and to imagine. It

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converges with the utopian demands made by Conrad’s political essay contemporary with Nostromo, ‘Autocracy and War’ (1905), in which his despair is not quite so fatalistic. ‘Il n’y a plus d’Europe,’ he laments: ‘there is only an armed and trading continent’ whose imperialist ambitions render war, in Europe and the rest of the world, the ‘principal condition’ of modern life. His political analysis of this situation is explicit and psychological. As individuals, we are all prompted to action because action provides ‘the illusion of a mastered destiny.’185 This kind of illusory mastery he contrasts with the less powerful and less seductive mastery provided by mere ‘wisdom and self-knowledge’ – in other words, by a modern tragic recognition that neither self nor world can be mastered, can be made transparent, coherent, or whole. The problem with States is that their corporate identity is most easily mirrored in action rather than the ‘inner life,’ and ‘the only form of action open to a State can be of no other than aggressive nature.’ This is the line of reasoning that leads to Conrad’s fatalism. Yet he cautiously affirms another kind of future. The ‘true peace of the world’ may yet be found, not merely in the fragile interstices of global war, behind one inward-facing wall or another, ‘like a beleaguered fortress’: it may appear, ‘let us hope, [more] in the nature of an Inviolable Temple’ built ‘on less perishable foundations than those of material interests.’ Thus, where Conrad needs an architectural image, he reaches for one his readers will likely associate with archaic or pagan religion: a temple that will institute a system of values, of a way of life alternative to imperialist modernity. We have already met this image in the allusive title of Lawrence’s memoir. What Conrad’s temple institutes is similarly ‘wisdom,’ an ambiguous category to which he returns, in a slightly more optimistic mood, toward the end of his essay: The common ground of concord, good faith and justice [in the West] is not sufficient to establish an action upon; since the conscience of but very few men amongst us, and of no single Western nation as yet, will brook the restraint of abstract ideas as against the fascination of a material advantage. And eagle-eyed wisdom alone cannot take the lead of human action, which in its nature must for ever remain short-sighted. The trouble of the civilized world is the want of a common conservative principle abstract enough to give the impulse, practical enough to form the rallying point of international action tending towards the restraint of particular ambitions.186

Conrad here predicts that a ‘conservative principle’ must restrain the progressive – which for him, we must recall, means expansionist and

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imperialist – actions of the modern State. Yet this principle cannot be found in mere wisdom as a kind of distanced reflection; it must be found in the existing passions of social life; it must be not only conceptual but also ethical, drawing on a system of production of values. It is conservative because it is not expansionist: the identity of the State is not to be evaluated by its material growth, or by the Enlightenment evolutions of liberalism and rationalism, and historiographies of wars, which are its measures. Conrad’s utopia is a rather complacent place, where material progress is subordinate to ethical constraints that privilege the ‘inner life.’ In this image of a static, unambitious commonwealth, Conrad’s deeper primitivism reveals itself: the conventionally devalued, ‘static’ nature of aboriginal life, which privileges the duties of the House over the ambitions of the Market, is now loaded with supreme value, and transferred from an image of the past – the old, the exotic, of the primitive – to that of a curious, hybrid, virtual present or future, in which the inalienable properties and affiliations of the House return to haunt the Market in every corner of its conquest. Here, women are not marginal figures but mark the intersection, as Ruth Nadelhaft has insisted, of the personal or familial with the social or political (and share a point of reference in Conrad’s own mother).187 Here, too, distinct aboriginal heritages, inflected by primitivism, continue to provide the language – like Linda’s voice, conveying Nostromo’s identity – to express a ‘common’ or composite ethics ‘abstract enough’ to embrace the diverse and multicultural societies represented with such prescience in novels like Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, and Nostromo. As Michael Levenson has so aptly shown in Heart of Darkness, the bearers of this new ethics must both eschew the hegemonic forms of modern social bonding – the wasteland of the imperialist capitalist Other – and also spurn the nihilistic oblivion of an instinct-driven, unrestrained will to power – the primal narcissism indulged by Kurtz, who like the vacuum-creature encountered by The Beatles’ yellow submarine, voraciously consumes everything, including himself. Turning a cold eye upon both societal values and selfabandon, then, Conrad invites us to recall a different kind of interiority: new values will ‘ascend from the psychic abyss.’ In Lord Jim and Nostromo, he performs a politically elaborate and explicit unfolding of Levenson’s claim that this psychic abyss leads to a ‘beyond within,’ a confrontation with alternative social formations which may be met with, at least in part, by travelling to the frontiers of imperialist modernity.188

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The same truth must hold for the interiorities generated by aboriginal modernity, which must absorb the power of social formations larger than traditionally racial or ethnic fictions or images of the aboriginal House. The ‘conservative’ anti-imperialism of existing, particular forms of the House will have to generate a culturally liberal, ‘abstract’ form that is internationalist and intercultural. Hence Conrad insists, as I have pointed out, upon productive racial, ethnic, and religious mixtures in his fantasy representations of aboriginal lands and women. Such a futuristic realm of the House appears all the more plausible, if Stephen Ross is right, and modern imperialist powers are themselves in the process of breaking up in these novels, to give way to the newer, more fluid forms of a decentred, global capitalist empire. In that case, it follows that a correspondingly more supple, decentred aboriginal heritage of the House must be sought or ‘invented’ (to borrow Conrad’s word, regarding his new ethics, in ‘Autocracy and War,’ 449), in order to generate social bonds across racial and cultural borders, thus to preserve a broad-based, ethical antithesis to the domination – and also, why not, the persistent pleasures and utility – of the modern, international Market. That House would continue to be defined in relation to the Market. So it is that while Conrad typically discounts aboriginal heritages as lowly and abject, he depends on them to mark the threshold of a redeemed world, an aboriginal modernity whose Inviolable Temple, now nowhere ‘in sight,’ might arise from the deserted floor-plan of the Casa Viola. Structure and Style It is now possible to schematize some of the forces at play in abjection and a modern political unconscious. Where figures and voice of the self are represented, two antithetical patterns have emerged: in one pattern, the abject self finds its artistic sublimation in an imaginary, masterful I of the mirror stage, so that the restless separations and boundary-drawing and language-founding (hence, as Kristeva says, culture-building) drives of the self are recontained in a play of narcissistic doublings; in the other pattern, the abject self finds its artistic sublimation in the symbolic circuitry of a new reality principle, in which this very narcissistic I is shattered by self-reflection and analysis anchored in social alterity, that is, in a vulnerability to the sign- and value-producing propriety of others, which produces an open-ended, unresolvable play of personae or masks.

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The first pattern may be considered introverted, since its effect is to reproduce the outer world as a horrifying recurrence of imaginary shadows and ghosts of a totalized, internal form of the abjected self. This is the pattern of the vampire myth – not of Stoker’s novel, precisely, but of its popular zombie simplification, in which self and other lose their individuality and become repetitions of each other and of some living-dead power. The popular horror film of 1956, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, based on Jack Finney’s 1955 novel, is the archetype of this fully imaginary vampirism, in which the vegetation myth, the principle of life alienated from life, is significantly and uncannily brought to the foreground as a horribly homogeneous mothering power. The second pattern, on the other hand, may be described as extroverted, for it opens up the self not only to the scarred ruins of an existing symbolic regime, but to the suppressed remnants and fragments of degraded symbolic orders that now offer themselves, among all the detritus of the abject, for renewed personal valuation and inventive cultural integration. Such renewed valuation of abject symbols will appear perverse, just as their cultural integration will often appear demonic.189 On the one hand, then, is an antithesis between introverted and extroverted sublimations of the abject in modernist writing. I have chosen Conrad and Lovecraft to represent abject introversion, and Yeats and Lawrence to represent abject extroversion. Again, I do not mean to suggest that these processes cannot coexist in the work of a single author, or indeed in a single text, although I have reached for the minor figures of Lovecraft and Lawrence for the very reason that their writing best exemplifies something like pure forms. In general, abject introversion and extroversion operate as contradictory registers in the personal imagery of any text – in the sublimation of the abject I – producing different effects of mood and meaning. There is also, on the other hand, an antithesis in the social imagery of a text – in the sublimation of the abject Other – which tugs reading in yet another direction. This is where the economic unconscious, released in abjection, does its work. The initial repression and liberating abjection of the House can, similarly to the case of the signification of self just described, be managed primarily by either imaginary or symbolic orders, and with similarly closuring or open-ended results. Where the abject House is newly recognized in imaginary terms, it appears as the unifying figure of a social totality. The most powerful expression of this imaginary resurgence of the House is in fascism, but is found elsewhere in the attraction of diverse totalitarian dictatorships, populisms, or even religious institutions offered as ethnically or

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spiritually pure, utopian alternatives to the cultural and moral heterogeneity and urban estrangements generated by modern Market societies. The House, in this case, is projected into a total social form of the State. One can easily sympathize with the desire to model a nation State upon House rather than Market modes of value production and regulation, yet the modern State, which provides Market currency within multicultural and multi-regional borders, and must negotiate between actually existing and historically diverse forms of the House, cannot justly impose the kind of unity upon its patchwork of social formations that any given House imposes upon its individual members. This resolution of an economic unconscious in a discourse of the State is therefore a dangerous abstraction: it is a bloated and impossible, inevitably brutal, displacement of the aboriginal House, which will perforce, ironically, violate the very kinds of fluid economic and affiliating bonds normally created between modern aboriginal societies, and must crush to one standard of measurement the spiritual view of inalienable relations in people and things upon which these societies are based. Such a totalizing, imaginary solution for the abject Other may be called conservative in the following sense, that the House as State is closed to ideological, hence political, difference and change. It is antidemocratic, imagining one family, one genealogy, one father, for all. Indeed, the State as such merely reproduces modern imperialism – as James Joyce would complain of Yeats and of Irish nationalism – in another guise. Yeats and Lovecraft have been my examples of this conservative tendency in abjection.190 Where the House is not displaced into an imaginary form – into a masterful fantasy needing to be backed up, at the limit, by political and military apparatuses of the modern imperialist State – and rather seeks out a symbolic sublimation, it is possible to find a less oppressive and more fully utopian working out of the abject Other. Here the abject heritage of aboriginal modernity is relayed into new symbolic chains that must seek what Conrad called ‘abstract’ principles of political cohesion, while embracing that cultural heterogeneity which is the very sign of the persistence of the House under Market globalization. What State form can mediate Houses, can supply the currency of exchange and arbitration between them? To what ‘abstract’ reality principle must the abject House, in an imperialist wasteland, give birth? This symbolic solution for the abject Other may be called liberal, for in contrast to the conservative tendency, and like the talking cure, it is by

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definition open to ideological, and hence political, transformation. Its imagination of the State will be anti-imperialist and generally democratic – yet typically wary of nationalism, and cosmopolitan in its investments. Conrad and T.E. Lawrence have been my examples of this liberal tendency in abjection. These two broad categories of sublimation – the representation of an abject I in personal imagery, and of an abject Other in the social imagery of an economic unconscious – may themselves be opposed, not as logical antitheses but as topics or themes (not yet so coherent as to be discourses) whose articulation in modernist writing seems to require their being staged against each other. Yeats, for instance, is by most standards a cultural conservative, yet his relentless bracketing and masking of self, carried away by an implicit and often explicit jouissance, makes such conservatism paradoxically unimaginable. Conrad, however, offers a reverse instance of the same staging of self versus social vision, where it is his fatalistic reproduction of abject ghosts and doubles at the level of character development that undermines the articulation in his narratives of any liberal transformation of the world. This larger opposition, with its antithetical poles, can best be visualized by way of a diagram, in a logical square whose possible pairs, each with its own tension, form cardinal points corresponding to differing orientations in modernist writers and texts. These points mark the different ways that an economic unconscious proper to imperialist modernity, encountered in abjection, is tentatively sublimated – that is, articulated in the counter-normative, inventive styles of avant-garde writing (see fig. 1). It is tempting to sort and sift every modernist writer – or for each writer, every phase of development, characteristic mood, or individual text – into one or another of these categories; or, indeed, to wonder about the relationship of these to modernist writers who may not fit at all, if such may be found. In this diagram, I restrict myself to referring, emblematically, only to those writers to whom I am able to give in this book some substantial discussion, and moreover only to the aesthetic tendency that this study finds strongest in their work. On the face of it, such a diagram seems to confirm Fredric Jameson’s judgment that modernism depends on ironies whose aesthetic suspension in the production of style traps the radical imagination and, at worst, vitiates political commitment and engagement. That critique is consonant with Strathern’s concerns, mentioned in the previous section, if the romance of singular authorship that afflicts the political thinking of imperialist modernity is understood to include the romance

Figure 1 T.E. Lawrence Barnes H.D. Joyce

Conrad Woolf Beckett Stein

LIBERAL * Other = Symbolic House * Anti-Imperialist Discourse of State

EXTROVERTED * I = Symbolic Project in Abjection * Personae, Masks

INTROVERTED * I = Imaginary Unity and Containment of Abjection * Shadows, Doubles

CONSERVATIVE * Other = Imaginary Unity and Mastery of House * Totalitarian Imagery of State Lovecraft Lewis Eliot

Yeats Pound Fitzgerald D.H. Lawrence

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of individual productions of style. And it may particularly be true, as Jameson sees it, of the modernist heritage of the post-war decades.191 Yet the structure presented here is not as stable as it appears, and does not suggest any singular fate for the ideology of modernism, or for the many and various modernist goods valued in a literary and educational institutions as both commodities and heritage. Admittedly, if there is anything universal to modernism, it is perhaps to be found in the ironies that must be generated by the writer to express the cardinal conflicts and tensions peculiar to the abject structure, diagrammed here, of an economic unconscious. Such irony may be an explicit rhetorical effect, or it may be a more elusive matter of tone, as Peter Nicholls has interestingly suggested. Nicholls argues persuasively for a general modernist form of irony, even in a book that offers to map out a diverse array of historical and aesthetic movements and that announces the plurality of modernism in its title.192 His archetype of the modern ironist is Charles Baudelaire, and his principal exhibit is a poem written to a ragged street singer in the mid-1840s, ‘To a Red-Haired Beggar Girl,’ included in Flowers of Evil (1857). In this poem, the poet praises the physical beauty of the impoverished girl, and imagines her as a legendary queen. Nicholls observes that the impoverished poet’s apparent identification with and sympathy for the girl is countered by a voyeuristic, objectifying distance, and by the ‘cruel’ insinuation that ‘in fact she is nothing without the artifice of his poem to commemorate her.’ The divergence between (1) the claim to have recognized a transgressive social bond, and so to ‘abolish the social distance’ between the self and the (economically, culturally, or sexually) other in what Levenson calls the beyond within, and (2) the need to sunder this bond, to ‘objectify’ and ‘eliminate’ this other in the interests of a narcissistic, aesthetic autonomy, gives rise to the specifically tonal irony Nicholls considers modern.193 From the perspective reached in the present study, this irony would seem to express a felt contradiction between, on the one hand, new emotional and identificatory freedoms released in abjection, in a collapse of social discourses of the Other, and, on the other hand, the narcissistic crisis of primal individuation and horror of a primal Other into which the abject self is thrown (the two diagonal axes represented in figure 1). This is best illustrated by returning to Baudelaire’s encomium.194 Nicholls justly observes that Baudelaire values the beggar girl for her naked body, which the poet takes great pleasure to undress for his

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readers. But Nicholls does not admit the conceit of the poem, which is precisely to dress her up again, in a fantasy not merely of beauty (her nakedness, the poet says, is already beautiful) but of an aristocracy which extends, rather than inverts, the ancien régime imagery. The girl is a beggar: she lives at the margins of a commodity world, on charity, on gifts. By inverting the beggar into the ‘queen’ or reine de roman, the poet is merely pursuing the same paradigm, revealing the verso to the beggar’s pre-capitalist world as he imagines it – an absent, now fictional world of beggars, peasants, nobles, and kings – made remote under the patina of an eighteenth-century diction. Thus, whether in slippers or sabots, she casts the same allure over the poet of an abject persistence of the House, eroticized here as nakedness – a sign, for the grimly playful poet, both of loathsome dispossession and of radical possibility. Hence, to imply as Nicholls so insightfully does, that the girl’s aristocratic costume is a mere appropriation of her body into the wardrobe of the poet’s aestheticizing mind, is to illuminate only one side of the poem’s irony, and to underrate the nostalgic economy which unites this wardrobe to the beggar’s own, both of them in conflict with the Market world in which the poet lives (and writes). If Nicholls’s reading of mere appropriation were comprehensive, we would expect the poet to indulge in a fantasy, not only of undressing her, but of sexual conquest. The opposite occurs: the beggar-queen is envisioned as a powerful, self-possessed woman who beats off the men who would touch her, toys with the advances of her suitors, and holds them bound ‘beneath her laws.’ Hence, what seems to begin as a voyeuristic, masterly appropriation, swiftly turns into a masochistic vision of failed appropriation, and a fascination with the figure of an all-powerful yet fickle woman. While it is natural, then, to think of this misogynist poet’s ideal aristocrat as male, it is important to consider this ideal alongside its counterpart, the abject aristocrat as woman – a figure of the Other that alluringly demands men’s tributes, gifts, and submission; as something that provokes a cruel, apparently sacred yet transgressive, demonic form of bonding with others. It is an image, in short, of the abject House. What may begin in the ironic undercutting of transgressive sympathy by self-serving cruelty – of identification by objectification – ends by breaking apart objectification itself, and the poet’s own self-regard, in the crucible of the abject. Caught in the circuitry of a now double irony, then, we circle ironically back to identification and sympathy – no longer as sentimental and romantic affirmations of clear-cut humanist ideals,

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but rather as the expression of a more occult, and obscurely threatening, fascination of a want on the part of the poet. The general point to be made about modernist irony, then, is this: a binary structure built, as we see it here, on the quicksands of abjection, it can neither hang us between the horns of a clear-cut alterity of perspectives, nor seduce us to the authority of a tacit or barely spoken, alternative discourse. Instead, the ironic effect is synthetic and open-ended. In this sense, it is dialectical: it launches us toward an alterity yet to be realized, built on the ruins of irony itself. No wonder, then, if an abject irony more readily strikes us as a strangely suggestive, somewhat disturbing matter of tone, rather than as a clear and consistent rhetorical structure. It evades definition as a symbolic form. Therefore it is possible to find something more than aesthetic transcendence in the cruelty of Baudelaire, and to find what Nicholls calls a ‘truth’ that does not require all ‘bonds of sociality’ – which is to say, not only those normative bonds of the Market or State, but also those recognized here as abject fragments of the House – to be ‘destroyed.’ Restoring this historical and economic differentiation to the term ‘sociality’ – again, along the lines of Strathern’s critique, applied here to an imperialist modernity that is itself uneven, or multiple, in social formations and modes of authorship – means to break apart Baudelaire’s stability as an example of the ‘making a representation of the feminine the means by which to construct an ironically anti-social position for the writer.’195 For what is supposedly ‘antisocial’ may here express a partial recognition of alternative social forms. In modernist irony, one might say, an inherited romantic contradiction between self and society is turned on edge, and both – in their profound forms of narcissism and utopia – are henceforth to be thrown ironically against the unstable signs of a beyond within. Where such irony troubles our notions of what constitutes authorship in the production and reproduction of society, and lays the groundwork for a representation of persons, groups, and classes as images of multiple, enchained relations rather than autonomous identities, then style may be grasped as a radical form of consumption, a difficult form of symbolic enchainment, rather than a production of singular genius. But this is to look to the far side of the abject – as abjection in the expressive organization of literature de facto already does – and so beyond the horizons of modernisms. Confronted by the diagram in figure 1, then, my reader may be reminded of the wave of structuralist theory which produced such

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models, and which deserves its share of critical suspicion, at least for the sense of totality, stasis, and closure they suggest. Yet I have tried to show that such a model – intended to be so broadly applicable as to be general to a period, but not universal – may be dynamic rather than static, and allow for its own obsolescence. Another way to put this would be to say that abjection, where its passions are sublimated in writing, is always also beyond abjection as a static or self-contained structure. Hence modernism, if I am correct about its grounds in an aesthetics of abjection, must be similarly, ‘already beyond’ modernism as a unified cultural field. My model is intended, therefore, to mark a general moment in an uncertain and incomplete process. This sense of it is, I hope, best expressed in my ambivalent reading of individual authors. A more pressing concern is what might seem the abstraction of the structuralist model from the material grounds of literature, as if ‘deep structure’ were illuminated only by shining a light way down into the vertical shafts of individual texts. In my readings, I have so far mentioned the media and instititutions of modernist writing as facets complementary rather than integral to my reading of texts; yet that is not enough. The matter must be considered in its own right, rather than in the context of case studies, because some general ideological assumptions too readily inhere in it that I will explore in the following part.

2 Multiplying the Public: Abject Modernism and Its Institutions

Lawrence Rainey has justly warned that arguments about the politics of literary production ‘derived solely from the reading of literary texts,’ without attention to ‘the institutions that mediate between works and readerships, or between readerships and particular social structures,’ are based on an act of faith that can easily go awry.1 In his Institutions of Modernism, he takes great pains to reconstruct the publishing practices of some key modernist writers normally considered to have rebelled against the commercialized literary institutions of bourgeois modernity. These writers are Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and H.D. What emerges from Rainey’s documentary study of these writers is their relationship to a new kind of literary commodity that became normative in the restricted sphere of modernism. I will shortly argue that it is typical, not normative. This is a speculative commodity, an investment rather than a mere consumable, whose temporal deferral of commercial value (in an exchange for profit) allows for an interval in which value can be construed in a paradoxically contrary way, according to the aristocratic institutions (of patronage and limited-circulation, luxury editions) and ideology (of contempt for mere commercialism and mass entertainment, as opposed to elite cultivation and aesthetic refinement) which modernists such as Pound wished to make new. As Rainey puts it, If one could neither go back to reconstruct the aristocracy of the salon nor go forward to embrace the egalitarianism of the commodity, what solution was there? The answer, paradoxically, was to do a little of both at once: to reconstruct an aristocracy, but to do it within the world of the commodity – to accept, in other words, the status of art as a commodity,

132 Modernist Goods but simultaneously to transform it into a special kind of commodity, a rarity capable of sustaining investment value. Or, to reformulate this, the answer to the leveling effect precipitated by a consumer economy was to defer consumption into the future, to transform it into investment … whose value will be realized only in the future.2

The practice of creating such commodities is built upon three principal institutions: a revived patronage system whose patrons are interested investors, little magazines that assimilate literary texts to an art market and are themselves collector items, and limited or deluxe book editions produced as investment and collector items. This practice extends beyond the way that a text is commodified, to the way an author himor herself is commodified. For it was typical among now canonized writers that they received stipends from interested patrons, who viewed such expenditures as speculative investments in the labour (in the means of production, as a one-person industry), rather than directly in the products, of the writer. One thing stands out as peculiar about this network of ‘modernist’ investment institutions: a text does not have to be read by patrons, editors, or publishers in order to be accorded its special value. This, says Rainey in his most striking argument, was the case with The Waste Land, which was eagerly positioned at the centre of modernist poetry by patrons, editors, and publishers all competing for the status or value that they gambled might accrue to their collections or other Market institutions, before any of them had read a word of it. The commodity form hollows out the meaning of its objects, referring all value to the superficial plane of numerical prices and profits. The speculative commodity – the ‘aristocratic’ form reconstructed inside the commodity world – bears alternative values only by grace of the temporal gap between investment and return. Rainey calls this gap ‘an evanescent moment – a breathing space in the present, a space from which [modernism] could formulate its powerful critique of commodity capitalism, even as – and at the same time as – it mortgaged that critique in the future.’3 The publications of The Waste Land and Ulysses demonstrate this paradox most clearly, and stand as icons at the centre of Rainey’s study. This may not surprise us, at least in the case of Eliot’s work, where the same paradox is staged on the level of content, in his feelings and concepts of time and value, mortality and redemption (to which I shall return in part 3). The institutional architecture Rainey provides, however solid and finely detailed, is yet also, as Paul Delany observes, ‘too monolithic.’

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Delany reminds us both that (a) the Market in the modern period functioned as a more heterogeneous and less dystopian realm for the production of modernist writing than Rainey imagines, and (b) the Market is in any case only part of the economic story, for the Market existed alongside, and even itself generated, powerful modern systems of ‘prestige’ as opposed to ‘monetary’ value. Delany wishes to insist upon the liberal values and processes instituted by Market practices, that are, in their way, the lifeblood of modernist writing – of its vital new forms and perspectives, of its very subjectivity. What is new and challenging emerges, not from a negative ‘gap’ in the Market alone, but from a structured, historically situated intersection of Market and House systems that he analyses as semi-autonomous Market ‘segments.’ Nevertheless, he agrees with Rainey that ‘modernism is closer to a final stage of capitalism than a genuine site of opposition to it,’ and that the modernist production of ‘prestige’ values looks forward ‘implicitly to a settlement day when status tokens from the one market are cashed out for banknotes from the other.’ This teleology, too, I would suggest, is overly monolithic. My argument will be that modernism indeed occupied a heterogeneous economic field, but one that resembles what Marilyn Strathern has called the alternating segmentation rather than hierarchical structuration in the public and political life of a gift economy – so lacking any single privileged sphere where culture is produced for the whole, or where an abstract notion of the public could be constructed. In this field, modernist writers were able to produce values and so symbolically to underwrite social practices that did indeed offer genuine alternatives – not to the Market tout court, but to the Market’s domination of values and power in the economy of imperialist modernity. In turning now to consider abject modernism in its institutional forms, it will be helpful to begin by returning to those writers discussed in the previous sections. An instructive place to start will be the small press begun in 1902 by Yeats’s sister Elizabeth at Dun Emer Industries, the Dun Emer Press (from 1908, the Cuala Press), which involved the entire Yeats family – emotionally and financially – for decades. The Dun Emer and Cuala presses produced finely crafted, limited editions of books and other printed products. These included first editions of nearly all of Yeats’s work, for which he gave exclusive rights as soon as the press was set up. Yeats’s practice of publishing expensive limited editions of his new work at Dun Emer first, and only subsequently trade editions, is a pattern that Rainey claims was

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‘adopted,’ via Yeats’s new protégé, Ezra Pound, as ‘an indispensable instrument’ of ‘the emerging English avant-garde.’ Rainey accords Dun Emer this centrality yet does not dwell on its institutional finances or values, except to assimilate it to the practice of Yeats himself as one of a host of ‘constituencies that were not merely indifferent but even hostile to the socialist impulses that had animated Morris.’4 A closer look at those financial and ethical investments, and productive activities, in the Dun Emer and Cuala Industries will complicate this picture, at the very least, and provide a model by which the other institutions of modernism discussed by Rainey and Delaney may be reconsidered. Dun Emer Press was part of Dun Emer Industries, a small artisinal workshop founded by Evelyn Gleeson for the making of embroideries, tapestries, hand-press printed products, and other craft objects, located in a house in Dublin county. Gleeson returned from London to Ireland in 1902 inspired by the contemporary movement for the emancipation of women, to start up factories for ‘the training and employment of Irish girls.’5 She also shared with Elizabeth and Lily Yeats, who became partners in the business, a dedication to the values of the Arts and Crafts movement combined with the ‘desire to contribute in some practical way to the Irish Revival.’ In the 1890s, the Yeats sisters had become close to the Morris family in London. Lily had been a student, then assistant embroiderer, to May Morris; and Elizabeth had become interested in Emery Walker’s book art for William Morris’s Kelmscott Press and his own Doves Press, and apprenticed herself in this craft. Three powerful value systems, none of them reducable to the rationale of the marketplace, came together in the formation and institutional life of Dun Emer: the politicized aesthetics of Morris, the feminist practices of the women’s movement, and the nationalism of the Irish Revival. That Dun Emer was an ethnogenetic project, building a new community with a set of values inspired by William Morris, rather than a profit-oriented venture is evident in its very conception as a ‘settlement,’ for which people must be ideologically suited, and ready to submit to ‘articles of the Society’ drawn up by Gleeson. The education of women defined its productivity (since this lagged far behind its institutionalization and cultural value for men), not merely its creation of objects. Existing philanthropic efforts to improve the material life of the working class operated according to the mediation of commodity wealth, through ‘getting the poor to produce things the rich could buy,’ via ‘instruction [that] was de haut en bas.’ For Dun Emer, the

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‘emphasis was on developing the creative impulse and the appreciation of beauty,’ and with handwork to ‘regenerate’ the worker and her society. Not only at Dun Emer. In 1904, with the support of a government grant, one Dun Emer instructor with some initial trainees travelled to teach handicrafts in Glenbeigh and Killarney. Gleeson herself regularly gave lectures around Ireland, and Elizabeth Yeats published a popular magazine article calling for the artistic training of children.6 Dun Emer itself was a centre for classes in Irish language, painting, and design. Irish language was itself treated as a kind of revived, counterindustrial craft, just as Irish textile work held a symbolic place in Irish nationalism. In an Irish Language Week Demonstration in 1905, Dun Emer paraded a working loom. The same year, a spinning wheel was presented as a tribute to the nationalist organizer-activist Maud Gonne.7 Such conflation of signs of the domestic and the public may seem strange, but as the name ‘settlement’ suggests, the ‘industries’ were not merely a workplace or even school but an attempt to build a new kind of home, individual and national. The name ‘Dun Emer’ means Emer’s stronghold. Emer is ‘Cuchulainn’s wife in the old Irish epic … renowned, among other things, for her beauty, for her wit and for her skill in needlework and the domestic arts.’8 Cuala, the name chosen by the Yeats sisters, is the Gaelic form of Coole, an homage to another powerful woman and cultural icon, Lady Gregory. To name the new factories that will give young women new skills and status as producers in culture and society after Emer, this legendary weaver of words and threads, is no mere rhetorical patination, as Annette Weiner’s study of modern aboriginal women as key producers of gifts and goods should remind us. The inalienable labour and spirit of the women – and in another register, of the land – is emphasized in Dun Emer’s first comprehensive prospectus in 1903: Everything as far as possible, is Irish: the paper of the books, the linen of the embroidery and the wool of the tapestry and carpets. The designs are also of the spirit and tradition of the country. The education of the work-girls is also part of the idea, they are taught to paint & their brains and fingers are made more active and understanding; some of them, we hope, will become teachers to others, so that similar industries may spread through the land. Things made of pure materials, worked by these Irish girls must be more lasting and more valuable than machine-made goods which only

136 Modernist Goods serve a temporary purpose. All the things made at Dun Emer are beautiful in the sense that they are instinct with individual feeling and have cost thought and care.9

Dun Emer products are ‘instinct’ with the spirit, the mana of their producers, which cannot be alienated from them; the products are to be kept. This mana is no ineffable personality but a multiple web of social relations woven into themselves and their work from Dun Emer and beyond. Women are not only to be the vehicles of an Irish spirit embedded in the objects of production. They are to be its vehicles in an institution of elders and youths apprenticed to such production, which will reproduce itself as a new social and industrial form across the new nation. It is this institution – with its nationalist and feminist, rather than monetary, aims – that the buyer of a Dun Emer product is solicited to pay into. The model is a gift rather than commodity exchange. An exchange of money for object here means, for the buyer, the acquisition of a good – or, perhaps, an investment in a speculative good, a national heritage yet to be securely legitimated – and for the maker and seller, the acquisition of means to reproduce and expand its social institution, rather than to accumulate capital. In this sense, Dun Emer’s and Cuala’s books would be valued the same way as their other products, many of which, such as towels and clothing, would have little or no resale value, and would likely change hands as gifts or inheritances between family members. A parallel is found in literary production that is theatrical rather than published. An Abbey Theatre playbill featured advertisements for neo-Celtic textile and jewellery industries, linking the value of these craft goods with the more ephemeral – either social (in the event), or intellectual (in the comprehension) – effect produced by dramatic experience.10 Theatre lays bare the value of these possessions as goods rather than commodities. The acquisition of a book as gift or good rather than a commodity would certainly be the interest of Yeats’s own family and their nationalist circles. But this was not exceptional. Both Dun Emer and later Cuala presses explicitly advertised the incentive to buy from them as a form of nationalist and social-reformist donation – for example, exhorting its very large share of overseas buyers, in difficult times, to support ‘Home Industries’ on ‘patriotic and artistic grounds,’ and appealing to them to ward off the threat of unemployment to the Dun Emer ‘girls.’11 Of course, the presses specialized in literature by Irish writers. But it included in its notion of a modern national heritage – thanks

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to the cosmopolitan interests of W.B. Yeats – works from non-Irish literatures. Rabindranath Tagore’s play The Post Office was issued by Cuala in 1914, after being performed by Irish players in London. Pound’s translation work Certain Noble Plays of Japan was issued in 1916 and marked by a striking colophon, dating its publication ‘in the year of the Sinn fein Rising.’ Such semiotic fusions under a nationalist rubric serve to underscore the speculative nature of the good as a workin-progress, formed of ideas and values in the – juxtapositional, even ideogrammatic – making. Nor was this cosmopolitan mixing of sources a unique influence of the poet. The embroideries by his sister explicitly combined Irish landscape references with Japoniste, English Arts and Crafts, and MiddleEastern aesthetics, while Gleeson’s rugs assimilated Early Christian Celtic ornamentation to Art Nouveau. Such fusions were typical of the neo-Celtic fashion industry of the time. Even neo-Celtic ‘folk’ clothiers, catering to a middle- and upper-class fad in the early years of the century, were able to draw freely on the current craze for Egyptian tunic and headdress designs, since the garb of Emer or Cuchulain was a matter of speculation.12 Such fusions marked, even at this superficial extreme, a discrepancy between mainstream Irish Revival culture and the kind of grim, ethnically cleansed vision of the Citizen later portrayed by Joyce. Dun Emer’s utopian goal was not, unfortunately, realized. But in its early years the Industries had thirty young apprentices, and quickly became ‘a way-station, almost a rite of passage, for many young women involved in nationalist cultural enterprises: future writers, painters, Sinn Féin activists and Abbey actresses served their time there.’13 In this way, it did indeed, as Gleeson’s prospectus forecast, ‘spread through’ a portion of Ireland, including its metropolitan centre, as a social product, and influence the development of ‘the land’ more generally. Cuala Industries, which hived off the embroidery and printing works under the direction of the Yeats sisters, was not an activist cooperative in the style of Dun Emer. But it remained committed to an allfemale staff and a nationalist agenda. When we look at the financial structure of either small press, we find that neither operated in a way conducive to Market aims. Yeats’s first volume was priced at 10s. 6d. (7s. 6d. for advance subscribers). A typical trade novel would cost only 6s., while a cheap mass-market edition would cost 1s. At less than double the cost of a trade book, then, the Dun Emer book remained within

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the range of the conventional buyer, rather than dedicating itself to a new breed of elite commodity investors. Perhaps we might expect this first book to have been priced low, as a lure or test product, but from 1902 to the modernist watershed year of 1922, the typical prices set by Dun Emer and Cuala for Yeats’s new works only went up by 2s., and with scant deviation; for example, Seven Poems and a Fragment, published in 1922 and of comparable length to previous volumes of poetry, was offered for 10s. 6d. Hence prices set by Dun Emer and Cuala were not especially sensitive to Yeats’s own increasing value in the wider Market, and even when the resale value of the presses’ books became a point of pride, they did not strive to capitalize on their investment value. Nor did the presses shift their production toward more opulent, value-added products; their style was an unchanging, almost ascetic one, using boards of bare appearance with simply printed or glued paper titles on the outside, and unbleached rag paper, simple Caslon type, and normally no ornamentation apart from a pressmark, on the inside. Instead, Dun Emer and later Cuala limped along, typically with slow sales, a constant threat of financial ruin, and regular recourse to begging help (with great ingenuity – a friendly commercial printer donated a local dairy’s butter paper offcuts to be recycled as embroidery design templates).14 What held the press together financially, in the long run, was not individual political and aesthetic commitment, but its mediation by a family. With his two aunts, his father, his grandfather, his uncle, and his mother all giving substantial money or labour to the press, Michael B. Yeats tells us, Cuala was very much ‘a family affair’ and a constant presence in the home. The family thought of the press as a sacrifice or duty given to sustain a mode of production not reducible to Market values: ‘On the one hand its very existence presented a constant threat of some financial disaster, on the other hand it was an enterprise of such literary and artistic importance that everyone was willing to endure a good deal of family tension and inconvenience in order to preserve it.’15 With W.B. Yeats making several significant donations to the press from earnings elsewhere, and a large share of buyers motivated by nationalist sentiment or family obligations, it is fair to say that the press survived more as a consumer of commodity gains than as a producer. It is deeply misleading, then, both to reduce the significance of Dun Emer and Cuala in modernist culture to a satellite of Yeats’s own conservative literary practice, and to regard even this practice as a simple degradation of Morris’s utopian challenge to the capitalist culture of

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imperialist modernity. Such institutions plausibly offered an aesthetic and political model for Pound, if indeed he was to promote their normalization in the literary practice of modernism, as its central mode of publication (flanked by the little magazine and the trade book). But perhaps, one suspects, these Irish presses are exceptional to, rather than formative of, the commodity institutions revealed by Rainey; perhaps Yeats’s influence upon Pound, in this regard, is a red herring. Do we enter some purer commodity world when we look at other writers and small publishers? A key figure here is the buyer. As we saw in the life of Dun Emer and Cuala, the buying and selling of books is only one ‘institutional’ moment in the life of a book, considered as an economic object. On the other hand, property that is given or that is kept, as anthropologists remind us, remains an important element in the production and reproduction of social values and powers. The buyer may also be a giver or keeper. Only by ignoring the social value of giving or keeping, and of the changing social life of objects themselves, can one insist upon the commodity form as the essence or fate of modernist texts. Rainey says that modernists recognized that ‘to live completely outside market relations was no more possible than breathing without air’ (my emphasis). This is likely true, but Rainey seems to conclude that one therefore had to live completely inside market relations, and that modernists saw this as their fate: ‘They entertained no illusions about utopian alternatives … One could temporize, hold [market relations] at bay, gain time – but no more. When the moment of reckoning came, as inevitably it must in a capitalist order, modernism found pragmatic means to marshal those relations in its own behalf.’16 But what is the ‘moment of reckoning’? When does it occur? Why is it a capitalist one? Why is it not a moment realized in some other social realm? The apocalyptic and teleological rhetoric of a day of reckoning and workings of fate suggests that the Market has here the status of a transcendental rather than historical structure. We see this, too, in the publisher’s prices and resale values cited by Rainey to illustrate the collectors’ and investors’ market in modernist books. These are important numbers, but they are generated by people who value the same objects in other, unquantifiable ways. Why should these monetary values, among all possible values that motivate rare book collection, be considered uniquely meaningful, the record of a singularly consequential public sphere? Can it be assumed that all collectors are merely investors in commodity speculation – that collectors buy cheap in order to sell dear, rather than to give or to keep?

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The same view of the Market as ultimate authority is advanced by Paul Delany, even while he provides a more complex picture of the coexistence of monetary and prestige values in modern British society.17 For Delany, the monetary values of the Market are liberal, for they legitimate reason and the use of dialogue in a people’s sorting out of social exchanges and powers, rather than the passions and the raw use of force supposed by Delany (with a touch of primitivism) to determine a conservative, aristocratic tradition (the economic and cultural heritage of one form of the House). To the prestige values of the latter, which reduce all exchanges, and hence social relations and politics, to hierarchical situations of ‘begging’ or ‘domination,’ the more (socially, not economically) egalitarian Market, with its system of mutual ‘persuasion,’ may well offer a welcome alternative. In any case, the latter’s authority is final, for the modernists’ challenge to commodification and the levelling of art to popular taste must itself return to the Market as a new form of consumption: ‘Modernist works, even if they arrived at the market more intermittently and by a more circuitous route, ended up as commodities’; this was their ‘ultimate destination.’ This was not a bad thing: modernists needed to be legitimated by the Market at some point, for otherwise – and here Delany’s assumptions recall Rainey’s – they would lack a sense of usefulness or ‘productivity’ in a public realm. Only the Market provided to modernists a realm where they could be and feel socially consequential. I shall discuss modernists’ rather different view of a multiple public world in a moment. But apart from the Market, what about prestige values? ‘The avantgarde resembles other prestige system proto-markets (marriage, sports, literary criticism), Delany tells us, that look implicitly to a settlement day when status tokens from the one market are cashed out for banknotes from the other’ (my emphasis).18 The teleology of this view, to say nothing of its curious, self-reflexive cynicism, is powerfully limiting. My point, a simple one then, is this: we must certainly acknowledge the usefulness or necessity, even the good, of the Market as a social institution in modernism, but that does not mean that, our idealistic footing in Art crumbling, we must jump to the other side of an imaginary abyss, and affirm the Market’s hegemony over other economic institutions as an ultimate authority or fate, good or bad or in-between. What is left out of the picture in a view of the Market as the judgment day of modernism is the role of its audiences as producers of alternative values, and thus, the continued – if still limited and occulted – power of all systems of value production based on the House and its marginalization.

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Adrienne Wexler insists, in her study of modernist patronage, that avant-garde modernism was able to support itself upon the rise of an ‘avant-garde audience’ wanting to distinguish itself from popular audiences. This distinction was made possible by the ‘difficulty’ of modernist writing, whose cultivation was not only personal and stylistic but, in the creation of a market niche and status community, also practical and rhetorical. The status associated with appreciating what commercial life does not appreciate – the status accorded, in a selfreflexive cultural move, to persons who choose to value things in ways antithetical to Market reason – was embedded in modernist texts by readers and owners.19 The collector, from this perspective, cannot merely be a commodity investor, but must also be a buyer and guardian of a new form of cultural prestige. Such prestige may well carve out a realm of value that exists parasitically upon the back of capitalist imperialism, even as it scornfully distances itself from modern capitalist values and practices; this is what Delany has so convincingly shown of the rentier culture from which modernism’s new audience emerged. He even considers the possibility of ‘productivity’ in this parasitic world. Rentiers ‘too perform work of a sort, as pioneers of new kinds of consumption that will become normative when increased income and leisure permit.’ As patrons – along with buyers, I presume, on a more modest scale – rentiers are investors ‘in the transformation of public taste,’ and their reward is in ‘literary prestige rather than money,’ in gaining ‘a position of honour in the living pantheon of modernism.’ It appears that for Delany, this new form of productivity folds back into the Market, where its ‘privileged consumption … anticipates the development from leisure class to mass tourism’20 – the search for aura and authenticity in the work of others that has itself, as Dean MacCannell has ingeniously shown, been commodified as a restless and impuissant, modern experience. Nevertheless, apart from this Market trajectory, the question persists: is a speculative investment in culture-building on the part of patrons or book and magazine buyers to be judged, in some final instance, by its commodity values? The great interest of modernism is perhaps, rather, that while various kinds of economic institutions and systems are thrust away or tangled together or both, there is no possible consensus as to a final instance whereby the social value of texts – that is, the extent to which the institutions of modernism produce, via its literary objects, new social values, statuses, and relations – may be judged. The reason for this is nowhere better revealed than in Delany’s compelling

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description of the relationship in modernism between economic practice and literary heritage: In both Joyce and Pound, we observe an imaginative ambition to pile up riches; to combine comprehensiveness and fineness of detail to achieve works that aggregate in themselves every formal and thematic resource of their literary era … [Conventionally realist] novels, written for the market, were unproblematic representations of everyday life that were immediately re-circulated as literary commodities. Modernist masterworks, in contrast, issued from a tertiary mode of production in which pre-existing representations were accumulated and re-combined in order to create new values – a process that, both in the financial and literary systems, took place at a remove from the markets that provide for primary needs of consumers. Modernist production is no longer the representation of a coherent social reality, but a piecing of shards into a structure whose value depends on the labour of reconstruction devoted to it by its author. The ineluctable secondariness of this imaginative work leaves the author with the task of restoring a shattered inheritance, to make it yield something on which to live.21

I propose that this ‘piecing of shards’ is as true of modernism’s content and form as it is true of its systems of production and institutions of value, none of which function as a ground or final instance of meaning for the others. The economic institutions of modernism, in other words, are symbolic systems which belong to the same abject crisis discussed by Kristeva on the level of content and form. They become subject, for individual authors and buyers of texts, to the same collapse of authority, the same release into a world of partial forms and partial powers, of Market, House, and State, all newly consequential yet vaguely threatening, overwhelming one’s stable identity as genuine producer (if artist or patron) or repository (if buyer) of cultural goods. The public without institutional coherence, says Conrad, is a monster of the abject: A public is not to be found in a class, caste, clique or type … Le public introuvable is only introuvable simply because it is all humanity. And no artist can give it what it wants because humanity doesn’t know what it wants. But it will swallow anything … It is an ostrich, a clown, a giant, a bottomless sack. It is sublime. It has apparently no eyes and no entrails, like a slug,

Multiplying the Public 143 and yet it can weep and suffer. It has swallowed Christianity, Buddhism, Mahomedanism, and the Gospel of Mrs Eddy. And it is perfectly capable from the height of its secular stability to look down upon the artist as a mere windlestraw!

Joyce expresses the same thing: Something really comic could be written about the subscribers to [Ulysses] – a son or nephew of Bela Kun, the British Minister of War Winston Churchill, an Anglican bishop and a leader of the Irish revolutionary movement. I have become a monument – no, a vespasian [i.e., a urinal].22

But from this sublime voracity, in whose eyes the artist is as nothing (or worse), the artist must, as Delany says, make a living. The solution can only be to embrace the very diversity of value systems and institutions – those scattered in greater or finer shards across the open expanse of the modern quest for purpose and wholeness – to which the diversity of the marketplace (what Delany calls market segmentation) attempts to open itself, but cannot replace. The author wanders this expanse of hungry barrenness, consolatory closets, and cherished waste, a symbolmaking apparatus unable to fit itself to the right social machine, a widget for an absent engine. The condition is at once liberating and degrading. Untenable systems of value may be thrust from one’s selfregard, yet in the absence of external validation, degradation looms behind every symbolic labour, beyond every utopian horizon. No economic institution – among Market, House, or State – provides sanction to these culture-builders: they are abject, economic wanderers. Thus do modernists destroy the cherished antinomy of Enlightenment thought – and if Nancy Armstrong is right, of the novel as its mediating genre: the public sphere and the private life. The public dissolves and multiplies into a field of decentred, semi-communicating modes and sectors of social imagination and reproduction, including state, workplace, leisure, and domestic realms; and the individual talent, cartographer of its unending relations, into its restless, androgynous bard. What one should expect, at this level of modernist authorship, is inconsistency in practice, exhilaration of motive, and detachment in spirit, as writers move restlessly among ways of valuing their work, and ways of establishing social bonds that enable such valuations. Such wandering is sublime or exhilarating because free, and if Kristeva

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is right, allows for a kind of jouissance. But such liberal freedom can also bring resentments or betrayals – unstable turns of affiliation. Do we not see this biographically when Eliot, for example, in moving to Faber betrays his indebtedness to the Woolfs by ignoring reprint rights he has given to Hogarth Press for The Waste Land, or by luring Herbert Read away from Hogarth to Faber?23 An inconsistency or mixture of motives and practices is the basis of both the uncanny powers, and also the disappointing limitations, of modernism as a cultural field, which would influence later generations. A closer look at the various kinds of relationships that writers such as Yeats, Conrad, Pound, Joyce, and Eliot created with one patron, the Irish American John Quinn, will reveal in this mixture, its ambivalent, open-ended process. Quinn was a lawyer, a collector of craft and art objects, books and manuscripts, a patron of venues such as the Little Review, and an impresario for Irish culture in America. In 1915, Quinn offered to buy manuscripts from Yeats at a fixed rate per word, comparable to the rates he had already negotiated with Conrad. Delany has described Quinn’s patronage as ‘more opportunistic, more directive, and closer to the market’ than others: ‘Quinn took for granted the implicitly commercial relation between patron and producer in the visual arts. However much the patron might consider himself a friend and benefactor to the artist, at the end of the day a material object changed hands at a price set by negotiation.’24 And Quinn was certainly a friend: Yeats counted him one of the two men closest to him in his life (the other was George Russell). This was an emotional and intellectual bond, of course, but it found practical and material expression. Quinn not only invested his money in Yeats, he worked tirelessly for many years on his behalf – most notably, arranging his publishing contract with Macmillan in 1903, organizing his first American lecture tour in 1903–4, helping out to collect legal evidence for Maud Gonne’s divorce trial in 1905, and entering the fray when a schism rocked the Abbey Theatre in 1908. Nor was his exchange of money for manuscripts itself free of non-commercial motives. The arrangement was made to support Yeats’s father, a painter with no income, who had already begun to depend heavily on Quinn after choosing to live in New York from 1914 to his death in 1922. Quinn and his companion, Jeanne Robert Foster, who had befriended yet unhappily supported the man, handled all that was necessary upon the father’s death, including arranging a local burial and sorting out his possessions. Quinn’s payments to Yeats’s father significantly exceeded his balancing payments by manuscript,

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and when Yeats won the Nobel Prize in 1923, he undertook to pay off this debt. It would be misleading, then, to suggest that Quinn’s economic relationship with Yeats was opportunistic. It was compounded of monetary interest, nationalist fervour, artistic respect, and strong personal friendship, and he gave his money and labour to Yeats and his family again and again without a return on financial investment being in any way a spur to duty or final reckoning. Yet financial interests are there too, and when we look at Quinn’s relationship with other writers, we see a similar if less intense mixture of passions and interests: his legal battles against the censorship of Ulysses and attempts to arrange its publication in the United States, bracketed by his purchase and resale by auction of a Ulysses manuscript (decried by Joyce, who clearly saw his book as an inalienable possession that should be kept, rather than a commodity to be impersonally exchanged for monetary value); his assistance to Eliot with the American publication of The Waste Land, and his receipt from Eliot of a manuscript of the poem as a gift. A range of gift and commodity exchanges thus characterizes Quinn’s relations with modernist writers, and a mixture of interests that are irreducible, in any final instance, to commodity values alone. It is doubtful that against his great variety of energetic investments in Irish and modernist lives, Quinn ever realized, or wished to realize, financial resale gains that would justify all this impassioned activity in commodity terms. Undoubtedly, he made more productive use of the Market in his professional work as a corporate attorney and in conventional financial investments. Quinn is not exceptional. If one thinks of other modernist patrons such as Lady Gregory, Annie Hornimann, Harriet Weaver, Scofield Thayer, Nancy Cunard, or Bryher – however one understands their various commercial, aesthetic, and political interests – one has no better success attributing a Market logic, ‘at the end of the day,’ to their manifold labours and investments.25 Objects in an economy are not stuck in one type of valuation or another; they do not belong to this or that economy in some final reading. Rather, they pass through various kinds of exchange and acquire different kinds of value from their owners. Nor do persons act finally in a singular public sector that is supposed uniquely to produce the wider experience of a people. Patrons are no less complicated than buyers, and have left their traces as such in a public record; we can only assume that the unrecorded lives of individual buyers – whether mere readers, dealers, collectors, or speculative investors – were as

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diverse and multiform in their own interests (I will return to this claim with respect to Ulysses in part 4). Nor can we assume that this diversity is not importantly productive in social contexts apart from the public realms produced by the mass market. This assumption is made by Rainey, for whom the ‘public sphere’ addressed by the Market is the unique place of ‘social exchange’ and ‘social dialogue’: In different but complementary ways, the careers of Pound and H.D. attest to the risks that attended the modernist creation of a counter-realm to the public sphere. In H.D.’s case, it led to a withdrawal from genuine social exchange, a retreat into the complacency of the coterie and solipsistic reverie; in Pound’s case, to an attempt to bypass social dialogue through a direct but wholly imaginary rapport with the charismatic figure of the ideal patron, a figure whose person is transformed into a spurious substitute for the body politic. They are exemplary fables of modernism’s fate.26

Yet a counter-realm may have social form and power, without being identical to the public sphere in general. In the picture of modernism’s ‘fate’ quoted above, those systems of production and reproduction of value alternative to the Market, as social systems, are eclipsed. On the contrary, the social life of objects, including modernist texts, is surely more fluid and complex. Pound’s ‘rapport’ with Benito Mussolini may have been imaginary, but his activism, in concert with fascist affiliates (not the public or body politic, but surely a powerful counter-realm to it), was real enough.27 Similarly, H.D. or Joyce may have been sheltered from the need to address a wide reading audience, but this does not mean that their coteries were in themselves mere gaps in some homogeneous social fabric. These coteries – as the pioneer producers, consumers, and exchangers of speculative cultures of the future – are surely among those social forces that have helped, especially in communication with educational institutions, to legitimate a normatively liberal world in which the challenges of oppressed constituencies and nonimperialist heritages must increasingly be mediated on their own terms. To make such a broad claim is to reject the assumption made by Rainey, that the politicized recovery and dissemination of H.D. after 1970, while having its own merits, is little relevant to, and hardly an outgrowth of, the very different institutions of modernism in which she flourished before 1950.28 If one considers the challenges to patriarchal or heterosexual normativity that lesbian patrons and coteries

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allowed H.D. and Djuna Barnes to develop in their writing – challenges of social content that are symbiotic, as it were, with their particular avant-gardist styles in relation to literature – it should be clear enough that small, estranged groups may produce symbolic objects that will continue to bear important value in later and larger cultural formations. The rentier elites worked to build the heritage of later, more powerful, non-rentier communities. When Rainey notes that H.D.’s patron, Bryher, ‘actively helped Walter Benjamin leave Berlin in 1933,’ and from 1939 to 1940, via Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, who had told her of his difficult situation, gave him ‘gifts’ of money and used her ‘influence on his behalf,’29 we see very clearly that Bryher’s coterie was neither a realm separate from other coteries, nor a solipsistic bubble isolated from social engagement, but a looser network of aesthetes, idealists, and rebels of great variety, whose literature – texts by Joyce, H.D., and others – was in part generated as an immediately required heritage, a hasty accumulation of cultural goods suddenly required to express and to justify a broad range of anticonventional values and practices. This activity may be admired with circumspection, without being idealized: recent scholarship has explored the ‘patriarchal family economy’ that is able to persist in the H.D. circle, and I have already stressed the subversive rather than egalitarian aesthetics, and mixed rather than simply progressive practices, of modernist re-imaginings of the House.30 To argue that the mixed economic culture of modernism entails consequential social forms is also to place emphasis upon Delany’s suggestion, which I earlier translated into a stronger claim, that the rentier class is productive. The ‘work’ they have to do, in his view, is ‘to prevent change.’ Such work may be reactionary or progressive, unthinking or inventive. Like the country house saved from ‘the red tide’ of newer ‘dwellings that are merely passed around by the marketplace and torn down when they cease to be profitable,’ the objects valued by the rentier class are to be preserved, kept carefully as goods.31 In the case of the bourgeois rentier, such cultural goods may be cherished, not as signs of the guardian’s own family history, but as the signs of family history in general – that is, in an ethnogenetic imagination, the mnemonic signs of aboriginal goods – as a desirable, alternative system of value. ‘The rentier is a preserver of the aura, the precious “spirit of place” that is threatened by the onrushing chaos of modernity … The rentier does not build but she guards the ancestral rites, like the pigs’ teeth in the elm at Howards End.’32 Delany is not idealistic about

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this pseudo-aristocratic, sacred mission. He does not endorse Forster’s early view that change is ‘almost always for the worst’ and that digging in one’s heels to prevent it is laudable. Yet is such pastoralism typical of the modernist avant-garde? If the role of the rentier is to reproduce aboriginal values – and the goods that express them – in the face of Market values, this need not imply an ideological resistance to change tout court, any more than does the reproduction of Market values. To identify the production and reproduction of inalienable possessions – the gifts and goods of House economies – with preventing change is to see them only in terms of their resistance to or infringement upon the hegemony of Market systems, that is, as preventing Marketdriven change. A wider view of changes possible to an aboriginal modernity, or indeed any internal differentiation within realms of the House, is lost from view.33 Whether or not modernists wanted their texts to be valued as commodities and exchanged for profit in the marketplace, they also, and arguably primarily – insofar as promising to change cultural values themselves – wanted their texts to be kept as goods and given as gifts along the disenchanted margins of an imperialist modernity. They produced deluxe books, for example, not only as rarities that would increase in financial value, but also as beautiful objects that were the repository of hand-made (personal rather than machine) work, and imbued with the creative spirit of the writers and makers. The greater labour-time required for such editions would be irrelevant to their value in a speculation-driven marketplace. From this perspective, it would be difficult to overstate the utopian influence of William Morris on Yeats, Pound, and the modernist avant-garde, in the kinds of institutions brought so convincingly to light by Rainey, and provided with a class genealogy by Delany. Yet Morris’s values are not definitive of House productions, and I have tried to highlight how in the Yeats and H.D. circles, nationalism, feminism, or anti-racism can also play significant roles. To further open up the field of modernist institutions apart from the Market, it is instructive to look at the two more marginal writers considered so far, T.E. Lawrence and H.P. Lovecraft. Lawrence was long dedicated to Morris’s example, and if war and financial ups and downs had not derailed it, his intention was to live as a rentier and run a small, not-for-profit Arts and Crafts press. At one level, the publication of Seven Pillars of Wisdom follows the institutional pattern mapped out by Rainey. It was published first in a limited, deluxe edition (privately printed in 1926) and shortly thereafter, under

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the title Revolt in the Desert, in an abridged, trade edition (by Jonathan Cape in Britain and Charles Doran in America, in 1927). The deluxe edition was lavishly illustrated by contemporary artists commissioned by Lawrence, linking the book to the culture and the economy of modern British art. ‘The process of gathering [these] illustrations,’ Wilson tells us, made Lawrence ‘one of the most significant private patrons’ of contemporary art in Britain. His aim was clearly aesthetic rather than ornamental or documentary, and he regularly warned the subjects of his commissioned portraits that conventional expectations may be offended: ‘You may not like the result,’ Lawrence advised one of them, ‘but it will be Art (with a capital A).’34 The artist Eric Kennington, who agreed to the largest commission and travelled to the Middle East at his own expense in order to draw his portraits from life, exhibited the resulting work at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1921 (with a catalogue preface by Lawrence); the larger collection for Seven Pillars was exhibited for sale at the same gallery (with an added preface by Shaw) in 1927. The edition of the book in which this art was included was limited to 170 copies, and priced very high at 30 guineas; even the trade book was high, at 30s (and was itself issued in deluxe and cheaper editions). Everyone wanted to make a killing from both the new artmarket style buyer and the trade buyer, for sales were ensured by Lawrence’s fame as a romantic hero of the empire. Moreover, all editions quickly rose in value in the second-hand market, along with already collectable letters and manuscripts. Within weeks the market value of the private press edition increased tenfold. In a sort of parody of the hidden economic adventures of Eliot’s masterpiece, it was Lawrence’s announced ambition that Seven Pillars be bought, and generate financial income, without ever being read – without ever having a public presence other than monetary. ‘I’m aiming at a public that will pay but not read … plutocrats should be of that sort,’ he attested, and when no ‘public rumour’ or reviews came forth, he exulted.35 Lawrence surely wanted his book read – but by whom? He, too, had his elite readership in mind, one constituted as a community apart from a public defined by the Market and popular interests alike. His was a coterie defined by the elite detachment, not of a freely constituted bohemian class parasitic upon the Market, but of a civil service class cultivated in various wings of the State, military and bureaucratic. This class was similarly characterized by aristocratic and bourgeois rentiers, in whose close-knit network Lawrence was able to establish himself as a result of his own rentier family culture, his social

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life at Oxford, and his Colonial Office, political advisor, and military officer connections growing out of the war. This coterie of aristocratic and political elites, which reached as high as Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, was fused in Lawrence’s life with his circle of artist friends, including Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves, Augustus John, and Paul Nash. The fusion was an awkward one, but if we take care to consider Lawrence’s enduring commitments to the utopianism of Morris, which saw society transformed by the insinuation of art into other value systems, one can see the power he hoped to spark by bringing the two groups together. Just as he assumed that his portrait subjects would be displeased by an (abject) modernist aesthetic, he could predict that they and other readers would be displeased by the portrayal of himself as an (abject) heroic type of themselves, insofar as they are British-identified, ethical actors in the world. How else may we understand Lawrence’s care, as if under strict protocols of a House economy, that his monarch, George V, receive the first copy of Seven Pillars, knowing that the book expresses – indeed, takes as its central trope – the shame of destroyed integrity and duplicity of purpose, represented so explicitly as a condition of British imperialism, and figured so grotesquely in the rape in Deraa? How did Lawrence imagine the King (and given Lawrence’s fame, it would be fair to expect this) digesting such a book, or Winston Churchill, in the latter’s own words, ‘[lying] all day and most of the night cuddling’ it? Not, surely, as passive consumption. The reactions of Lawrence’s artistic and literary circle – from which, significantly, he solicited comments before showing it to military or political friends – reveal that he considered Seven Pillars to bear a message both deeply serious and horribly absurd, and hence, necessarily distorted in form, a kind of abject violation of style itself. Lawrence was gratified that Kennington ‘was moved to incongruous mirth,’ and produced a series of cartoon-style drawings for certain episodes, ‘pricking the vast bladder of my conceit.’ He similarly agreed with Vyvyan Richards, the friend with whom he had long planned to set up a Morris-style press in the country, that the book was ‘more splendid for its very broken imperfection,’ and as one of the ‘titan class,’ had to be written ‘with a strain that dislocates the writer, and exhausts the reader out of sympathy. Such can’t help being failures, because the graceful things are always those within our force.’ This merely replays on the level of style, of course, the abject theme of Seven Pillars itself: to those who think clearly, failure is the only goal. This is a serious goal,

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and Kennington’s mirth belongs to a profound and disturbing revelation. ‘It was written in dead earnest,’ he told his third early reader, Edward Garnett, ‘I think it’s all spiritually true’; to which Garnett replied: ‘Supposing you heard a new composer and recognized at once in the fibres of the work that he was doing something nobody had done before … I feel somehow that your analysis of life may carry us further: there’s a quality in your brain that suggests a new apprehension of things, or rather a very special apprehension of things that will be lost to us if you don’t communicate it to us.’ This is just what a writer who aims to ‘make an English fourth’ to the proto-modernist works of Melville, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche wants to hear.36 However one judges the consequences of Seven Pillars being circulated by this artist and State coterie, one may see in it the fascinating production of a modernist speculative good – a new and abject heritage object – for an institutional elite at a distance from the Market, and a public sector with an active role in social history. The trade book, Revolt in the Desert, at first glance little more than a self-bowdlerized, adventure-tale spin-off of Seven Pillars, also deserves comment. Here, too, there is more than meets the eye. This edition was the result of a gradual capitulation to financial need, which included Lawrence’s resignation to the sale of serial and film rights in America. As I earlier mentioned, the profits from these sales went entirely to a Royal Air Force Trust, which, once the bank overdraft required for the limited edition had been repaid, used the considerable income to administer a charity for families of war veterans. Even with this trade edition, then, Lawrence carefully controlled the way that his literary work entered the Market, and made sure that it also operated in institutions alternative to the Market. The trade edition is nearly a third of the length of Seven Pillars, for it cuts a dilatory and reflective narrative down to mere action and adventure. He did not wish so to sanitize or commercialize his story, but it was the ethical price he had to pay to realize it in the elite and vanguard form he desired. On the other hand, he hesitated to publish even the latter, both because he feared libel suits and because he loathed to reveal his own degradation by rape in Deraa, which he felt to be too integral to the narrative as a whole to suppress. What overcame these hesitations was a combination of reassurances (assuaging fears of libel and affirming the literary value of the work), and the conviction that a privately published, limited edition to subscribers would never be read by the larger public, and remain an event only for his elite coterie of artists and political and military insiders.

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There is no doubt, then, that Lawrence desired both that the general public would never read Seven Pillars of Wisdom and that his message would be conveyed, such as it was, to highly educated men in the cultural and political elite, whose ideas and tastes regarding the turbulence of recent history, or the ambivalences of self-regard and cultural identity, would shape the society of the future. The title refers to a building yet to be constructed – or reconstructed. From the beginning, he had conceived Seven Pillars as a kind of modern epic, a ‘titanic’ book about social purpose, individuality, action, and values, comparable to The Brothers Karamazov, Thus Spake Zarathustra, and Moby Dick. In 1925 he lamented that he had failed to realize a modern style, and that ‘to bring it out after Ulysses is an insult to modern letters.’37 It is intriguing to speculate what may have been the effect upon Lawrence of reading Bloom’s journeying to and fro around Dublin in Joyce’s postcolonial reimagining of an Irish social history and heritage – a photograph exists of Lawrence still rereading his first-edition Ulysses against the monastic backdrop of his Indian barracks, like Joyce in self-imposed exile – upon the narrative of his own journeyings to and fro across the desert, in the making of a postcolonial Arabia. He gave many copies of Seven Pillars away (the first went to Windsor Castle, with the subscription cheque politely returned), just as he gave from his art collection to the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery. He clearly thought of his book as a peculiar sort of State good, an important contribution to national heritage, yet too abject, too ambivalent, to disseminate its values in the open. Lawrence felt himself to be a real-life version of Marlow’s Jim, a figure of profound shame and cultural instability, yet somehow ‘one of us,’ and demanding a place and a hearing, if only in the dark of night, from men composing the power elite of his world.38 It is instructive to turn finally to Lovecraft, in order to find that an avant-garde challenge to conventional form and taste, and to a public commodity Market, is not restricted to canonical modernism and the airy realms of wealthy elites. The ambivalences and inconsistencies of high modernism may be found replicated at this lower level of culture, for which pulp fiction stands veritably as an icon over a realm that modernists liked to envisage as thoroughly possessed by the values of the Market. Yet Lovecraft’s fiction, however lacking in literary refinement, was experimental in form as well as in content, and intended to be so in direct confrontation with general commercial tastes. Like Conrad and Lawrence and so many modern writers, Lovecraft agonized about the commodification of literary art and valorized a style

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that would resist it, would be determinedly unpopular. And this valorization was no passive ideal. He cultivated a multiform institutional practice – with its hinge point, indeed, in a kind of coterie – that would concretize and reproduce the non-Market social realms required to validate such literature. In this practice, the institution of pulp is central: it is a Market circuitry that works to define the goods of a coterie in terms of genre, to distribute these goods as commodities to a wider public sector, and to provide professional income to writers. Yet though pulp is virtually the only professional medium in which Lovecraft published, it would be just as misleading to see it as the key to his literary practice, as it would be to see it as an icon of massmarket literature. It will be helpful, then, to look briefly at the nature of pulp media, before considering it in relation to Lovecraft’s writing and the larger domain of his literary economy. The pulp fantasy magazine was an institutional complement and successor, in America, to the dime novel (in Britain, to the Penny Dreadful) which flourished at the turn of the modern century. The dime novel offered serialized stories in popular genres, including fantasy and science fiction. Despite its name, it generally looked like a newspaper in format, came out weekly, had press runs in the hundreds of thousands, was sold mainly by subscription, and had profit margins of less than a penny per copy. For the last two reasons, a rise in postal rates shortly before the First World War destroyed at one stroke the ubiquity of this popular form. The pulp magazine took its place, largely because its format was designed for retail sales – in shops and newsstands – rather than for subscription. It comprised a mixture of short stories and other items along with serialized novels, and its smaller, magazine format took advantage of a new, inexpensive colour printing technology to feature attention-getting cover art. The pulp magazine was itself supplanted, as a popular medium, by the advent of cheap paperbacks and television.39 Pulp magazines may seem distant from the institutions of modernism, and indeed they embodied important differences, but even so they were not as detached from them as one might think. David Earle has shown significant overlap between both audiences and authors of pulp and modernist publications, and that the pulp medium itself allowed for poetic innovations in language that made them closer kin than would appear. The pulp magazine in which Lovecraft published nearly all his work, Weird Tales (1923–54), was created like other pulps strictly as a financial venture. Its founder was an entrepreneur who produced a

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variety of genre pulps, including detective and humour magazines. Weird Tales specialized in horror, and so represented among other pulps merely another segment of a diversifying modern Market. But Weird Tales was also markedly different, for it was able to incubate, under the shadow of Lovecraft himself, a differently constituted elite niche, one carved out of the economic underside of society, which would prove the sowing ground for a new form of coterie. This was an elite brought together by taste as well as ideology. In the first year of publication, a twenty-three-year-old Lovecraft sent the editor of Weird Tales five stories, all of which were accepted and printed. But what Weird Tales published first, in advance of any of his stories, was Lovecraft’s cover letter. In it he claims to have ‘a habit of writing weird, macabre, and fantastic stories for my own amusement,’ and to have sent those enclosed under the pressure of his friends: I have no idea that these things will be found suitable, for I pay no attention to the demands of commercial writing. My object is such pleasure as I can obtain from the creation of certain bizarre pictures, situations, or atmospheric effects; and the only reader I hold in mind is myself … Should any miracle impel you to consider the publication of my tales, I have but one condition to offer; and that is that no excisions be made. If the tale cannot be printed as written, down to the very last semicolon and comma, it must gracefully accept rejection. Excision by others is probably the reason why no living American author has a real prose style … Most of the stories [in Weird Tales], of course, are more or less commercial – or should I say conventional? – in technique, but they all have an enjoyable angle … However, one doesn’t expect a very deep thrill in this sophisticated and tradesman-minded age. Arthur Machen is the only living man I know of who can stir truly profound and spiritual horror.40

Emerging from the rhetorical hauteur of a twenty-three-year-old Lovecraft is a provocative intersection of ideas about the value of his style. Here are three of them: 1 A separation is staged between the commercial and public world (here a monolith) and a non-commercial and private realm. This private realm coyly presents itself as a place of power – the power of detachment, of a cavalier, aristocratic will, so complacently selfish as to hint of the perverse. Here too we find pleasure – a pleasure marked as purely individual in quality, and hidden from the

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public, as outré, outside the sensory range and symbolic codes of the culture industry and its mass audience. There is a powerful voyeuristic pleasure promised to the reader, of transgressions to be hungrily consumed. Yet there is also the subtler pleasure, for the reader, of abject identification with this voice, which denigrates its own presence in pulp, wishing to remain pure and other to the very medium in which it uniquely speaks, constructing an imaginary, absent scene – that of private self and circle of friends – where it is supposed to be genuinely present. In this voice, we thus find an imaginary mastery of self achieved in thrusting aside the Market and its similarly imagined social unity – but achieved too, paradoxically, in abject submission to the loathed thing itself. Thus, Lovecraft inaugurates the idea of a style that expresses, not merely the idea of horror, but its institution in a social world: the horror of Market hegemony, and the degradation of alternatives to it as undesirable, themselves to be scorned (you won’t want my writing, and only a perverse miracle – a lapse of Market reason and social norms – would allow you to publish it). Not one letter or dot may be altered. Style insists upon a writing that is inalienable from its author – as if it were being lent out and shared, rather than sold and consumed. The editor of Weird Tales was quick to see the lure of such paradoxical transgressions. ‘Despite the foregoing, or because of it,’ he printed in response to the letter, ‘we are using some of Mr. Lovecraft’s unusual stories’ in issues to come.41 This proved an understatement. 2 The style of horror must be grasped as exceptional. The ‘bizarre’ is no mere matter of content or taste, but rather belongs to a material craft, to another kind of work of language, created at a fantastic, shadowy remove from the reader, the pulp magazine, and the Market. Individual style, issuing from this dark, silent abyss, becomes a necessarily abject sign of an entire mode of production beyond social acceptance. Indeed, horror is style. The paradox offered to us, of an unpopular style that is for that very reason strangely seductive, dovetails with the paradox of the popular genre itself, of pleasure elicited from repulsion and fear. Lovecraft wishes henceforth to link the latter, psychological condition to the former, social condition as a genuine test of genre – or, more accurately, of the subversive value of the genre. What is most striking, in the present context, is the homology that emerges between horror and modernism: to resist the popular, to confront a wasteland and create

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new values, leads as inevitably to horror (for Lovecraft) as it does to avant-gardism (for canonical modernists). ‘Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto,’ proclaims a subsequent letter by Lovecraft published in Weird Tales: ‘Wild and “different” as they may consider their quasi-weird products, it remains a fact that the bizarrerie is on the surface alone; and that basically they reiterate the same old conventional values and motives and perspectives.’ In contrast, in a perfect echo of Eliot at his darkest: ‘One can’t write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses theme and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror – for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.’42 3 The realm of value and authenticity is a flickering one. Sometimes it appears void, as in the quotation immediately above. Sometimes it appears purely private and individual, as in the solipsistic image of the writer writing to read himself. At other times it appears private and intimate, as in a small circle of friends. The idea of an elite few is suggested, too, by the reference to Machen as the ‘only living man I know’ who actually produces such new values and experiences, those of a deep and spiritual, rather than superficial horror. Others obtain entrance to the coterie because, for some incredible reason, they recognize and appreciate such values. The reader of Weird Tales is invited not merely to indulge a popular taste, but to join an elite community, an obscure counterculture. All this might have remained a phantasm associated with Lovecraft’s style alone, and his letter an advertisement merely for the five Lovecraft stories that remained to be published, or barely better, for the new submarket segment of a particular pulp author. But Weird Tales turned this letter into a manifesto for the genre itself, seizing the opportunity to publish it in its inaugural year, and to hale the unknown writer as a ‘master’ of the genre. The letter was quickly followed up, in five out of six subsequent issues, by a battery of stories by Lovecraft (the sixth having also a story by his wife, Sonia Greene), as well as further letters from him commenting on weird fiction. These stories were yet newer:

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the five stories first accepted by the magazine were held back to be used subsequently (the last appearing in 1926). In other words, the image Lovecraft provided, both of himself as a writer and of horror as a genre, were appropriated by Weird Tales as the icon and ideology of a market niche. Henceforth, whether or not its other stories lived up to Lovecraft’s theory, they might be read, valued, and enjoyed from the fantasy position of the outsider which that theory allowed (and with that extra, transgressive thrill not available elsewhere). Weird Tales acknowledged this special investment in Lovecraft by consistently paying him higher rates per word than other authors. Perhaps the magazine foresaw its transformation, in a matter of years, from a disposable commodity of fleeting value and durability, to a commodity of increasing value to fan-collectors in a second-hand market, with the added status of a subcultural good. Lovecraft was appropriated by pulp fiction in order to define a market niche precisely comparable to those fashioned by the modernist avant-garde: that of an elite group recognizing itself in a taste for styles, sensations, and values that are degraded in the public eye, and too private or individualistic for commercial viability. Eventually, this elite would concretize itself in different forms, the largest being genre fandom, which was committed to producing such alternative values by a range of parallel, non-professional means. ‘The fields of fantasy, horror, and science fiction have attracted legions of fans who are not content to read and collect the literature but must write about it and its authors, and publish – often at considerable expense – small magazines or books devoted to the subject. There is no analogous fan network in the fields of detective fiction or the Western, even though the first of these fields certainly attracts a far larger body of fans than does weird fiction,’ and the second was by far the dominant one in the popular media of Lovecraft’s day.43 From fan letters, a more restricted coterie emerged from the nexus of Lovecraft and Weird Tales comprising readers who were also writers. To the latter, Lovecraft was not only a symbolic figure, but actively engaged with them. He corresponded with numerous aspiring writers (some of whom would become well known), often carefully reading and making suggestions regarding drafts of stories sent to him. Many considered him to be an elder and master from whom to learn their craft. Thus fandom, in providing an organization for exchanges between reader-writers and other reader-writers, touches upon an even larger institution out of whose peculiar economy Lovecraft was first able to

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emerge, and which remained a vital context for his literary practice: the amateur press. While we may think of amateur publication as a solitary, local, or occasional activity, in Lovecraft’s day there were large, nationwide membership organizations with complex governing structures which brought writers into contact with each other, made each other’s self-published journals known to each other, sent out regular newsletters, and held annual meetings.44 The idea was that a member would submit a piece of writing to an amateur journal listed by another member, who would in turn send out copies of the journal to other members. The two largest organizations – the National Amateur Press Association and the United Amateur Press Association – counted less than three hundred members each (and with significant overlap), giving rise to small circles of writers and editors who were each other’s readers and, in course of time, friends. As in the professional press, women were prominent writers, and here they were also editors of small journals (such as Sonia Greene) and held eminent positions in the governance of the institutions. Such circles nurtured Lovecraft’s development as a writer – he was published in a number of amateur journals, including his own, before turning professional – and provided the model of a non-commercial institution in which writers, editors, and readers produced, distributed, and exchanged literary and journalistic writing. Lovecraft served in various official positions for both organizations from 1915 onward. This social network of non-commodity exchanges was for Lovecraft a realm superior to the professional press of the paying public, allowing the development of a more detached and refined literary art. In a letter to the United Amateur in 1920, he proclaimed the aims of the UAPA to be ‘the development of its adherents in the direction of purely artistic literary perception and expression; to be effected by the encouragement of writing, the giving of constructive criticism, and the cultivation of correspondence friendships among scholars and aspirants,’ and ‘the revival of the uncommercial spirit; the real creative thought which modern conditions have done their worst to suppress and eradicate.’ The alternative economy of amateur literature was effected not only by these non-commercial modes of production, distribution, and consumption, but by the organization of literary education: ‘The United aims to assist those whom other forms of literary influence cannot reach,’ Lovecraft writes in the same letter: ‘The nonuniversity man, the dwellers in different places, the recluse, the invalid, the very young, the elderly … It is an university, stripped of

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every artificiality and conventionality, and thrown open to all without distinction.’45 An interesting offshoot of this practical goal was a small amateur writers group that Lovecraft helped to organize in a largely Irish, working-class section of his hometown of Providence. Dun Emer, done differently. All in all, the institution of amateur publishing offered to Lovecraft a place for social and literary production and exchange – an active realm of value creation and preservation – sheltered from and alternative to the Market. It was a considerable institution as such, and capable of reaching profoundly into the ethical and libidinal life of any individual already alienated from the values and structures of public life. In 1921, Lovecraft would confess that he came to ‘amateurdom’ a lonely ‘misfit in the larger world of endeavour,’ reduced ‘close to the state of vegetation.’ It gave him ‘a renewed will to live; a renewed sense of existence as other than a superfluous weight,’ and offered ‘a sphere in which I could feel that my efforts were not wholly futile’: ‘For the first time I could imagine that my clumsy gropings after art were a little more than faint cries lost in the unlistening void.’46 If the amateur press gave Lovecraft an ethical structure and reason to live, the pulp magazine gave him the generic code by which to translate this alternative economy, beyond one institution, into the unfolding, abject vision of a fantasy world. Ironically, this vision cycled through another non-Market institution in order to find its way to commodification – and a grim way it was. In 1939, at the outset of the war, the United States government printed a selection of stories from a collection published by Arkham House – then an obscure small press devoted to Lovecraft, who had died two years earlier – for distribution to the Armed Forces. The edition, bristling with prohibitions against sale or resale, declares itself to be ‘U.S. Government property’ published by a non-profit wartime organization. Lovecraft’s commodity value, in post-war years, depended upon this unexpected conversion into a rather grisly State gift. While his value to the State was ephemeral, the soldiers’ imaginations so inspired did endure, and a new public addressed via Market domains.47 The purpose of my discussions of writers’ literary institutions has been to extend the normative models provided by Rainey and Delany, in order to show the importance of non-Market economic structures both in a range of literary practices beyond these models, and also within them in the variety of value consecrations in an object’s history. The commodity stage is only one reference point, however necessary,

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in a range of value-creating practices and institutions in modernism, by which goods and gifts are reconstructed – for good or ill, in a fascistic or democratic spirit – in the multiple public interstices of a Marketdominated society. Such reconstructions may well seem ephemeral in form and value, seem ungrounded in an enduring institution, and so linger in the chiaroscuro of the abject – in horror at the vulnerability, the cursed changeability of all valued things.

3 The Parodic Shaman: Imperialist Modernity and the Blackened Gift

Eliot’s Savage Possessions T.S. Eliot famously suggested that to understand the modern world, it was necessary to understand aboriginal heritages. Apparently juxtaposing materialist to spiritual knowledge, he contended that scientific views of the mind and physical organism such as those offered by Freud and Fabre must be complemented by an understanding of ‘the medicine man and his works.’ The artist or poet is uniquely able to achieve this understanding because ‘he is the most conscious of men; he is therefore the most and the least civilized and civilizable’ and ‘the most ready and the most able of men to learn from the savage.’1 It is particularly to be noticed that whereas Eliot chooses a figure of the warrior to satirize an inauthentic figure of the aboriginal – the ‘whooping brave, with his tale of maple sugar, as a drawing-room phenomenon’ – he selects the shaman as his unique example of authentic aboriginality, from whom genuinely we should learn. Thus a rhetorical correlation is established between the exemplary teacher and the exemplary learner – the shaman and the poet. It is one thing to wish to learn from a shaman, and quite another to wish to be one. Yet I will argue that Eliot and other modernists meant to do something like the latter. This is hardly contentious to claim of Pound or H.D., perhaps, but for those I will identify with Kenneth Lincoln’s notion of parodic shamanism, the recognition is trickier. Even in this article, for example, where Eliot objects to romantic idealizations of the ‘primitive,’ he confidently floats the idea that ‘primitive art and poetry can even, through the studies and experiments of the artist or poet, revivify the contemporary activities’ of art and poetry.

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Revivify is a strong word to use: to restore to life, or to imbue with a new life. Whether it evokes a raising of the dead or a rebirth, this action on the part of the shaman-educated poet is strikingly akin to the regenerative magic that is sought in The Waste Land and crossreferenced there to Eliot’s anthropological library. Yet here it is unambiguously a power of the poet – in part as mediator of an aboriginal heritage whose vital or spiritual world is the province of the shaman, and in part as a contemporary scholar and researcher – with the two roles converging in the poet as doctor. The poet seeks to restore a spiritual vitality, a new production of value, to a social world whose symbolic order seems exhausted, drained of life or drained of the value of life, sterile. I will argue that this aim need not be so mystically vague or vaguely vitalist as it first appears. In addition, Eliot tells us that the poet must not abandon the inclusive, critical methods of science for a narrow credulity toward values at hand: rationalist critique and spiritual commitment must, as in the coupling of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, walk and talk and change together.2 What does this appropriation of the shaman mean? Is it possible to accept Eliot’s implication, and somehow to identify him and other imperialist heritage modernists with aboriginal shamans, or to identify their poetry – ‘made new,’ in Pound’s formula – with aboriginal heritage? Such an argument has already found strong expression. ‘Imagine a contrast neoprimitively radical,’ says Kenneth Lincoln, when he invites readers of Sing with the Heart of a Bear to compare the lives and works of Sitting Bull and Emily Dickinson in nineteenth-century America. ‘So-called savage and civilized, male and female,’ the NativeAmerican leader, wrapped in public oratory, war, politics, and Lakota magic, and the New England poet, her proto-modernist lyrics hidden away like a paper coterie, would seem to offer contemporary icons of irreconcilable differences between aboriginal and imperialist modernities and their modes of expression. Yet this surprising comparison only seems, says Lincoln, to ‘stand for true alterity.’ Sitting Bull and Dickinson are also profoundly akin: ‘They are related internally by native spirits and poetic voices, “word senders” sui generis with singing bear hearts.’ In this sense, they stand for an unconventional kinship, and in a book which ‘cross-refers Anglo-American and American Indian literatures’ in order to draw ‘coalitional ties across territorial boundaries,’ this web of kinship will figure Pound and other modernists centrally – both directly, as ‘neoprimitive’ singers with bear’s hearts whose poetics in part issue from and in part converge with modern Native literature,

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and self-reflexively, as models for the critic’s own, ‘neomodernist’ view of literary history.3 Can Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Moore, and other modernists be justly assimilated to the vortex of aboriginal modernity, which for Lincoln defines the cultural fusions and mixing of twentiethcentury America? In the remaining parts of this book, I hope to demonstrate that this is so, and that the claim is less outlandish than it might seem. And its pertinence extends beyond the nationalist literary history celebrated by Lincoln to a wider literary terrain which I survey more generally in the light of House, Market, and State institutions in imperialist modernity. To begin with, then: singing with the heart of a bear. What does this mean? For example, how are Dickinson and Sitting Bull alike? They both draw, Lincoln tells us, ‘from natural voices and native visions.’ Natural voices refers to an animistic world, a world of nature identified as a spiritual ecology and totality, in which all things ‘chant.’4 This chant passes through the aboriginal visionary and modern poet alike: ‘All “word senders,” as the Sioux say, are moved by a totemic world (Ojibwa, “my fellow clansmen”) of animal guardians and spirit powers … Sitting Bull’s prophetic meadowlark and yellowhammer, Emily Dickinson’s “plashless” bird-as-butterfly and buzzing fatal fly were winged messengers to these sibling visionaries – harbingers, muses, daemons, spirits, native gods.’ That the voices are ‘natural’ – those of birds and bees, not mineshafts and motorcars – seems to be an important if questionable indicator here of aboriginal poetry. In a reading of Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro,’ Lincoln finds that ‘an ancient nature blossoms from the dank roots and rails of the city,’ and the poet’s voice reaches ‘back to the masses, back to the common tribe.’ Here ‘natural voices’ are released from uniquely urban machines and moods, making us unsure what unnatural voices would be. The same mysticism of the ‘natural’ affects an earlier claim, that Native-American ‘art … is a native good, not so much personally made or made up, as naturally given and passed through the artist.’5 What ‘natural’ seems to express and to screen out here, all at once, is a process of production or transfer – a good that becomes a gift, or a gift that becomes a good. This simple element of a House economy is named as a value, but obfuscated as a social structure by recourse to a mystical nature – uncannily reminiscent of the invisible hand of the Market – in which things ‘personally made or made up’ seem to have no power or place. Hence, while Lincoln provokes us to see an aboriginal modernity produced, not without great struggle against the grain of the times, by both

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Sitting Bull and Dickinson, it is prudent to read between the lines of his own, antimodernist discourse of nature. We must do so, too, with the other half of Lincoln’s aboriginal formula, ‘native vision.’ By this he appears to mean an attention to the local, to the place where roots are sunk – not with the nostalgic, unifying eye of the regionalist, but with the sensibility of a modernist, open to the intersecting and ‘mixed-blood’ lives, histories, and tongues of the local as a vortex.6 This vision results in an ‘ethic’ of reciprocity, he says, whereby ‘natives give and take environmentally within the biosphere.’ Again, nature arises as a transcendental economy in which humans take part, not one they construct themselves. No doubt there is a natural ecology within whose system of generation and transfer humans must organize their own speculative production and negotiated exchange (in other words, their own economy ruled by language, by a symbolic order), but we should not confuse the two, ecology and economy, nor lose sight of the modern House as a built environment necessarily integrated with other economic modes, rather than an idealized, ‘natural’ alternative. Such cautions are minor ones, after all, once we grasp Lincoln’s central insights into the convergence of modernism and the poetics of aboriginal heritage. ‘Why a bear?’ he asks. Because bears have long been viewed as uncannily inhuman – that is, like humans but not humans. The bear is an other who must always remain on the far side of what a human is, or what I am, while at the same time standing right at the borderline, holding up a mirror. Put another way, the bear is a human that is absolutely other – a kind of archetype for all the othernesses, across borders of sex, family, nation, language, or race – that divide the human itself. The bear walks all these lines, an ultimate translator, constructing ‘near rhymes’7 in a vortex of radicals and differences, like Stephen and Bloom, making new the kinships latent in the tangled roots of modern places. ‘The omnivorous bear,’ Lincoln tells us, is ‘an “ideogram of man in the wilderness,” so like humans, yet different, “the prototype of the wild animal” in all of us. Tribal seers would not disagree. To sing with a bear’s heart that is different, çanté mató keçaça, is to connect with the native within, the oldest kinship of human, nature, and language.’ Moreover, to sing with a bear’s heart is to sing specifically as ‘medicine-men’ do, with ‘a heart that is different’ because ‘“familiar words take on an occult meaning”’: ‘This thickening and deepening of “ordinary” language through chant is what we otherwise call poetry.’8 Like the shaman, the modern poet

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uses sympathetic identification to produce a language that is at once more general (because earthbound and inclusive) and more elite (because its glue is possession by the other) than everyday speech. Lincoln has no difficulty showing that modernist poets, by example or by accident, dedicate themselves to the economy and aesthetics of aboriginal heritage as such. I say ‘by accident’ to refer to poets like Emily Dickinson, of whom it would be absurd to claim they were self-styled shamans, or even influenced by aboriginal heritage as it had been absorbed into the public domains of imperialist modernity. Such a poet comes to build a ‘native poetics’ from scratch, Lincoln usefully suggests, out of the misfortune of ‘historical disillusion’ rather than a direct, ‘visionary tradition.’ The self-constructed shaman of imperialist modernity is one that has been forced, by historical dispossession of his or her own, ‘native good,’ to reinvent the shaman as an alienated, virtual identity, ‘driven by appetite and exclusion to reinvent order through disorder.’9 But this, says Lincoln, is itself a type in aboriginal heritage: the Trickster. ‘Deviant from the tribal priest, parodic of the shaman, this crafty outsider improvises from chaos, disjoining then rejoining arthritic social patterns … The native stranger must steal back what was stolen through exile and colonial appropriation – lineage, language, land, cultural love – never to be given up freely (if not by gift, then by theft, the go-between hazards).’ We are readily reminded of the other native stranger wandering creatively and destructively among the detritus of social form – the abject poet, with whom this Trickster of disillusion here merges. And it should be emphasized that this shamanic parody is sacred rather than mocking: such improvisations are creative, sympathetic identifications with him or her, not copies. Yet accident is not all. Aboriginal heritage was also feverishly explored and translated into a larger public domain, and did serve as direct influence and example to many modernist writers. One of Lincoln’s most compelling exhibits is the very book that provided Eliot the opportunity, in a review for The Athenaeum in 1919, to make the shamanic observations discussed above – George W. Cronyn’s The Path of the Rainbow: An Anthology of Songs and Chants from the Indians of North America (1918). Despite Eliot, Lincoln shows that the book is deeply interwoven with the writers and venues of American modernism, and an abiding basis for later literary history. In it, we find a ‘native “power to move us,”’ along with ‘native metaphors and tribal wisdoms,’ and are asked to recognize it, not as a sham ‘drawing-room

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phenomenon,’ but as a new heritage good of coeval aboriginal modernity, ‘an initial cornerstone to our multicultural diversity and ancient rootedness in this good land.’10 It is neither Native heritage, nor imperialist parody, but, according to Lincoln’s theme, an exemplary fusion. Yet Eliot’s statement in ‘War Paint and Feathers,’ though it is more articulate than any other concerning his modernist appropriation of aboriginal heritage, conceals the way that this heritage, filtered through anthropology, emerged as a language for poetry. Eliot would have us believe, with his army of scholarly names and citations, that the shaman enters modern poetry as a construction of science; the shaman is to be approached with scholarly data and analysis, not romantic ideals. This authentic shaman, consecrated by anthropology speaking as a science, is suited to a tradition of reading Eliot (and modernism) as engaged in disillusioned, secular critique. This is the burden of Eliot’s most influential contemporary reader, F.R. Leavis, when he asks his audience of 1932 to recognize the modern world as one in which the mingling of cultures, the new range of historical knowledge, and the inadequacy of any ‘one tradition [to] digest so great a variety of materials,’ has resulted in a ‘break-down of forms and the irrevocable loss of that sense of absoluteness which seems necessary to a robust culture’: The part that science in general has played in the process of disintegration is matter of commonplace: anthropology is, in the present context, a peculiarly significant expression of the scientific spirit. To the anthropological eye beliefs, religions, and moralities are human habits – in their odd variety too human. Where the anthropological outlook prevails, sanctions wither. In a contemporary consciousness there is inevitably a great deal of the anthropological … 11

Leavis accordingly reads The Waste Land as a poem without a guiding myth, only a recurrence of mythic fragments that play out as formal leitmotifs in a musical, not mythic, unity. We are invited to see the poem’s scientific, cold eye – its disenchanted cultural relativism – as an expression of symbolic and ethical processes intrinsic to modernity itself. Leon Surette is right to question the privilege this kind of reading has gained up to our own day: ‘The novelty that distinguished the modernists from the Romantics and Victorians – and is easily mistaken for cultural relativism – was their discovery of non-European cultural forms of expression. This discovery has been erroneously identified with the ethnographic work of the anthropologists, rather than with

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the mythographic and archeological theories of Creuzer, Wagner, and Nietzsche as it ought to be. And it should be remembered that all of these speculators shared a belief in the psychic unity of the human species. Far from being relativists in matters of culture or psychology, they were universalists.’ Such universals are expressed as a deep truth, far from demystification or deconstruction, in Eliot’s and other modernists’ writing – contrary to the apparent ‘misreading’ or ‘misprision’ of Eliot by those later generations through whom modernism became canonical.12 The real significance of anthropological knowledge, says Surette, was not scientific but ideological. It was appropriated to another discourse: the occult. Surette convincingly establishes what surface phenomena would suggest – that among the range of modern discourses devoted to non-materialist values, anthropology, and folklore more generally, were less directly and profoundly assimilated to the vocabulary of modernism than were varieties of the occult. In other words, Leavis should have recognized the occultist rather than scientific spirit, and occult schemata rather than musical form, as bases of unity in The Waste Land and its modernist kin. Surette finds two principal reasons for this appropriation. One is the wave of various modern discourses – including Nietzscheanism, Marxism, anthropology and positivism generally, and occultism – that ‘perceived Christianity as a common antagonist’ in the attempt to understand (or to change) notions of self and value in contemporary culture.13 Like occultism, the study of aboriginal heritages seemed to promise to reveal a spiritual order alternative to a Christian doctrine felt to be inadequate in whole or in part to modern experiences and desires. The other reason, and the more specific one, is the similarity between pagan and occultist notions of history as cyclical: both oppose the notion of history as a narrative of progress, of civilization just getting better and better, and prefer what Surette, following Jeffrey Perl, calls an A-B-A pattern of this-worldly historical degeneration and restoration, in which civilization gets worse and worse until its proper form is revived on an archaic model. In this occultist appropriation, however, Surette sees two transformations wrought upon anthropological knowledge of the time. First, the materialist interpretation that guides, for example, Frazer’s work in comparative religion is dropped, and an esoteric meaning takes its place. Frazer argues that Adonis rituals were deluded attempts to respond to material needs (for food and warmth), and that, in general, shamans were simply bad scientists (without whom, however, in

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Frazer’s Hegelian appreciation, an improved science could not arise). But occultists reinterpret these rituals as genuine spiritual practices. They believe in the shaman’s magic, if on their own terms. They read ‘myths as accounts of transcendental experiences that have been esoterically concealed beneath an exoteric surface.’14 This means that the social and political functions of rituals and myths – in large part, the very House institutions that I have wished to foreground – are shorn away (as historically contingent, as exoteric media) from a spiritual model that henceforth becomes a metaphysical abstraction. This process mirrors, I might add, the larger, programmatic separation of Native peoples, assumed to be dying in social life and assisted in this process by dispossession and assimilation, from their Native cultures, assiduously transported to State museums to be cared for as disembodied spiritual, ethical, or national goods. The second transformation wrought by the occult is to reinterpret A-B-A history itself as a merely exoteric form of individual spiritual regeneration or rebirth. Surette finds that spiritual rebirth, or ‘palingenesis,’ in which the occult initiate dies to an older, lower form of life and is reborn into a new, higher one, is a key motif in modernist literature. It is represented, in the main, either as a metamorphosis or as a divine marriage.15 Here it is the temporal order of aboriginal life, not its social relations, that is shorn away by occultism. These ideological transformations of aboriginal heritage cannot be gainsaid, nor their conservative potential dismissed. But I hope to demonstrate in my readings throughout the traces of an equally significant history, in which such appropriative work does not proceed without its own motivation by an economic unconscious to reinvent subversive forms of the House; nor frequently is it without deeper, genuine commitments to aboriginal heritages themselves. In short, I will suggest that the occult acts as a popular and viable discourse for what Lincoln calls the trickster or parodic shaman – the poet who feels bereft of, or can only rummage as a scholar or doctor of philosophy in, the traces of aboriginal societies in cosmopolitan Europe or America. This is to affirm but invert Surette’s argument, which establishes the significance of occultist discourses in modernism while diminishing the significance of anthropology. I propose that the two are not merely alternative but, in the strange chemistry of the modernist imagination, complementary influences. Such can readily be demonstrated in Surette’s central exhibit, the influence of Jessie Weston upon The Waste Land. He argues persuasively that Weston should not be assumed to be a scholar in anthropology, nor an

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academic scholar at all, as has long been the custom. Rather we should recognize her occultist credentials and the occult aims and ideology of From Ritual to Romance, and Eliot’s direct translation of her occultist discourses into his poem. What we find in The Waste Land, to put it briefly, is not fragments of pagan myth, but a unifying structure of initiation ritual as understood by modern theosophy. From the perspective of modern theosophy, pagan myth is significant only as the code for a purely individual and transcendental experience. All the aboriginal and archaic materials recorded by anthropology are merely exoteric means to an esoteric end, historical fuel to be burned up like so much wood in a transcendental fire. This last process has two forms, corresponding to initiation into lower and higher mysteries. Initiation into lower mysteries involves a confrontation with mortality and horror of physical, ‘generative’ life; initiation into higher mysteries involves an erotic transcendence in sacred, ‘spiritual’ marriage with divinity. Surette suggests that both forms of initiation originally formed the basis for The Waste Land, but that Pound edited out nearly all of the higher mystery. The occultist unity of the poem, in other words, has been itself occulted in the poem finally published by Eliot. As a result, the revelatory and positive discourse, which belongs to esoteric transcendence, has been witheld, leaving behind only the lower horrors. The exoteric plots and props of ‘fertility cult’ folklore associated with the Fisher King and Grail legends, still strewn about the poem, circle and collapse upon themselves and are abjectly literalized: sex is mere sex, desire is mere appetite, death is mere emptiness. Surette speculates that for Eliot, the occultism of theosophy, via Jessie Weston, offered a kind of formal ‘framework’ in which to represent – ‘rhetorical[ly]’ rather than credibly – the confusion and decay of spiritual order in modern life.16 Surette’s remarkable reinstatement of Weston at the centre of Eliot’s project in The Waste Land, and his reading of occult ritual and occultist history as foundations in the poem, are not to be disputed. But nor can the relationship of Eliot’s interest in anthropology – much greater than his interest in the occult – to his use of Weston and the occult be swept aside as if it were a mere smokescreen. Surette works unnecessarily hard to relegate the Fisher King and Grail materials, and fertility ritual elements generally, to the ashcan of Frazer’s ‘positivistic’ as opposed to esoteric reading.17 In this view, Frazer’s work can only be important as an appended database for Weston’s esoteric discourse, to be roughly appropriated to the same occult ends. But it would be difficult

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to extend this argument to all of the anthropological work Eliot interested himself in, which was similarly concerned with myth, ritual, and spiritual understandings. So we may reasonably doubt whether the conflict between anthropological science and occult fantasy – or, in terms specific to The Waste Land, between archaic fertility rites and modern transcendentalism – is as polarized as we are invited to see it from Surette’s perspective. Some examples will elucidate what I mean. Surette tells us that the first episode of the draft version of The Waste Land sent to Pound, which episode was entirely edited out by him, ‘fits Weston’s account of the occult or “higher mystery” elements in the Grail legends better than anything that has remained’ in the poem. It tells of a bath and meal at a brothel, followed by the refusal of a desired girl. This ‘sexual episode,’ he says, contrasts ‘with the despair, guilt, violence, and indifference’ of the other sexual episodes. While not suggesting transcendence, it nevertheless ‘jars with the fertility cult motif of barrenness thought to govern the canonical poem.’18 But it is surely questionable to associate the ‘fertility cult motif’ with barrenness only, and not with the more positive sexual experience suggested in the removed episode. The fertility ritual, as both Weston and Frazer saw it, involved a narrative which included moments (and historical practices) both symbolic of barrenness and of sexual reproduction – indeed of copulation, but I will return to this point shortly. Here, the ‘folklore’ does not pertain merely to the lower mysteries, but to the higher as well. For Frazer as for Weston, spiritual meanings were expressed through ritual practices and mythic narratives. For Weston, these meanings were transcendental; for Frazer, along with the anthropology of his day, they were animistic (even if he did not believe in such animism himself). The second episode considered by Surette is the hyacinth girl. Here, a conventional reading of ‘spiritual paralysis’ seems forced upon an experience of unbearable beauty, dissolving into ineffable revelation, and it is surely preferable to read the episode, with Surette, as an erotic transcendence, an occult palingenesis. This reading finds a ready context in the neoplatonic erotics of Dante’s spiritual visions, which are important to Eliot in this poem and elsewhere. But in reading the hyacinth girl in this way, must one simply dispense with Frazer and fertility cults, as belonging to a different order of symbol?19 Again, there seems no reason to dissociate the social and political implications of Frazer’s interpretation from the spiritual ones in Eliot’s poem, since these have a common basis in animism. Indeed, the hyacinth stands

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out prominently as a chapter unto itself in the very volume of The Golden Bough cited by Eliot in his notes, where the flower is linked to Adonis rituals of sterility and fertility – as a motif, not of barrenness, but of rebirth. The same indifference to Frazer’s work leads Surette to claim that in another excised episode, the notion of ‘sexual appetite’ leading ‘to transcendence,’ even so far as sanctifying prostitution, is ‘difficult to make … fit the fertility cult paradigm,’20 despite Frazer’s lengthy commentaries on sacred prostitution, a ritual activity fulfilling both spiritual and social functions, in temples associated with the AdonisAphrodite cult and its correlatives – all in the same volume recommended by Eliot in his Waste Land notes. Yet elsewhere, Surette asserts that the palingenesis narrative of the draft version of ‘Death by Water’ has ‘no parallel in either Weston or Frazer,’ despite Frazer’s reiteration, in The Golden Bough, that the major annual Adonis rituals typically had at their centre the burial at sea of the Adonis effigy (just as Osiris, for example, was drowned in the Nile and recovered in the Delta), which was to be reborn and give new life (as an archaic rain god – not irrelevant to the drought conditions lamented in the poem). Hence it is easy to agree that sexual episodes in The Waste Land exemplify ‘the loss of sanctity suffered by eros in modern culture and society’ rather than ‘sexual dysfunction,’ but it would be too hasty to think that in doing so we are also replacing an anthropological or folkloric interpretation with an occult one.21 Surette’s initial observation regarding modern occultism should here be recalled: the occultism of interest to Eliot and other modernists typically appropriates and transforms its sources in archaic, pre-Christian heritages into ahistorical codes for individual transcendence. I am not so sure that Eliot does not buy into this appropriation, and see the occult, if not as something to be taken utterly seriously, then at least as a degraded reflection, a grotesque distortion wrought by degenerative history, of a sensual and spiritual truth once possessed by earlier religious lives. And possessed, paradigmatically, by the ‘medicine man’ whom he would mimic. If in The Waste Land the medicine man appears as the ridiculous but undeniably prescient Madame Sosostris, it is because Eliot requires that he appear in a parodic, abject form that marks his very alienation from modern culture; a figure that expresses the degradation, I will argue, of the forms and values of the modern House. ‘Tell her I bring the horoscope myself,’ she says, in a commonly overlooked closure to this episode. ‘One must be so careful these days.’22 The horoscope, like the poet’s work, must not be indifferently surrendered to a mediating

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system – an untrustworthy other identified with alienated as opposed to intimate realms – and rather will involve a relay of initiates who make exchanges of knowledge and craft person to person, under carefully controlled circumstances. The ridiculous aspect of a secretive economy between the ladies satirized here is a sign of that other economy’s displacement and degradation with respect to the barren, Market norms of modern imperialist society. As my claim that something like the architecture of the House is represented in The Waste Land and functions as a key to its moral structure, may seem to lack the light touch that such a poem requires, I will approach it with the help of some recent critics. David Chinitz, in his study of Eliot’s fascination with popular art forms, draws on over two decades of critical interest in Eliot and anthropology in order to make a series of now familiar observations: (1) Eliot sustained a special interest in anthropology, from at least his student years at Harvard to the early 1920s; he read widely, including such diverse and influential scholars as Tylor, Durkheim, and Lévy-Bruhl, and he read closely, writing reviews of anthropological literature and citing it frequently in his other prose.23 (2) He scorned conceptions of aboriginal and archaic cultures based upon popular stereotypes (whether sentimental or derogatory). (3) For him, anthropology was not limited in range to tribal societies, but blended with his understanding of classical Greek and Indian cultures, insofar as all of these ancient societies were bound by powerful ritual traditions. (4) Eliot’s positive interest in the ‘primitive’ is a commitment to the possibility of recovering a ritual tradition for the modern West, to replace that which has been lost or degraded over centuries of change. Why? Because ritual is that cultural activity and form in which art, religion, and communal participation come together as one. Aesthetic pleasure need not be autonomous from social duty, utility, or power; nor from religious definitions of moral ends and values; all are united in the ‘primitive homogeneous community.’24 Chinitz, like most other critics who have studied Eliot’s interest in anthropology, cannot read the primitivism of The Waste Land ironically: the spiritual failure expressed in the poem does not arise from the inadequacy or degeneracy of the aboriginal rituals cited as integral to it. Rather, the problem is how to find a modern correlative for such rituals, how to reinvent them in the metropolitan and industrial worlds of the early twentieth century. One possible correlative, which interests Chinitz, would merge the rhythms of poetry with the collective medium of drama, whether on the popular stage of the middle- or

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lower-class music hall, or on the more elite stage of Eliot’s later verse plays. In this desire to fuse poetry and drama in a conception of revitalized, public ritual informed by pre-capitalist cultural heritage, Eliot is one with Yeats. At different times, Eliot thought he glimpsed the ideal of a primitive community in the feverish pleasures of the music hall, in the heterodox manners of the British uneducated classes, in the scarred remnants of the American Old South, in pre-capitalist farming or fishing communities, and elsewhere – although too, for Eliot, these were all obsolete or obsolescent cultural margins. He sought in such images (only rendered ‘masterful,’ to recall Yeats’s term, in his prose) the end of alienation in a unified culture. This was in part an inwardly directed, totalitarian desire: the desire to submerge himself – a continual surrender, extinction, and self-sacrifice – in an organic community.25 This had an ethical dimension, which was to render the act of production (to borrow from Douglas Mao’s careful argument) rich and meaningful, so that personal genius would merge with public activity, to the contrary of Marxian alienated labour, in the creation of things of value.26 But what kind of real, mundane world can we imagine for this organic worker? How might it be different from the modern world that confronted Eliot after the First World War? What is missing from recent views of Eliot’s poetry is anything but the vaguest idea of how such a modern community – as a social practice, not merely an individual emotion, regarding objects and others – is represented in the content of the poetry. It is easy enough to discover in his poetry the feeling, the experience, desired: communal longing, unification of sensibility, work with sacred value, objects with personal richness. We can also see this desire expressed stylistically, in the citation of popular genres and speech patterns. In The Waste Land, we can surely identify longings for a profound connection with others and for doing something worthwhile, a thirst for value that comes from a world of others and is transcendent for the self. Traces of drama, the music hall, lower-class pub milieux, Asian religions, the passion of martyrs, offer a variety of fragments of some such world, none of them entirely coherent, all of them seeming only to mark an otherness, without telling us how that otherness works or why. Does Eliot really just want a feeling, not a culture? In other words, is Eliot’s investment in ‘ritual,’ despite his vaunted anthropological learning, reducible to the all-too-familiar projection of a vaguely homogeneous folk? We should probably admit ‘primitive’ religion as a master discourse in The Waste

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Land, but beyond some vague notion of unity, some unseen flip-side to social alienation, we have yet to gain an idea of this other terrain of the sacred, as the religious mapping of a modern social world, that does not slip through the fingers into darkness. Yet Eliot insists: to understand the modern world, we must learn from the ‘medicine man and his works.’ To write of the modern world, as Joyce does in Ulysses, we must bring to it, not the formless jelly of primitivist emotion, but the ordering principles of archaic myths. He asserts that aboriginal heritage can help us to analyse and to represent the modern world, not to escape it. For this analytical work, the vague notion of an organic community is clearly unsuited, and though Eliot surely idealizes the cultural homogeneity of aboriginal society, he has other cards up his sleeve. This is the place to recall what I have discussed as the House economy of aboriginal heritages, in which the gift or inalienable possession is central, and to propose that ‘primitive’ spirituality and its ritual forms be understood as a practical and ethical, rather than merely transcendental and mystical, realm of House experience represented in or even mimicked by modernist literature. Indeed, it would seem that some kind of animistic view of the world is latent in the House economy, whose reproduction of values can be thought of as a modest polytheism of the object and verbal world. Gifts are textual or material objects produced with the understanding that they embody a kind of spiritual force – mana in one example – and are spiritually inalienable from their typically multiple producers or keepers. I follow Strathern’s suggestion that such an understanding be grasped as an aesthetic rather than ideological construction, because relations of production are not necessarily mystified, and may even be explicit. As such, gifts are never produced or sold with the idea of accumulating surplus value, hence all-purpose capital for further exchange and accumulation of material wealth, but rather with the idea of extending new social relations and obligations, and establishing specific social statuses, roles, and powers. The production of gifts is, indeed, a mode of non-alienated work in which spiritual systems, practical industry, political order, and aesthetic aims are integrated. Eliot and his anthropological sources – along with the many contemporary moderns who more simply idealized ‘primitive’ organic community – were not wrong about that. After years of immersion in such ideas, it would be surprising if Eliot did not express something of this sociological view, rather than a simply mystical or positivist one, of spiritual life in The Waste Land. This is laid bare in the climax of the poem, when the thunder speaks.

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It is too seldom recognized – though perfectly explicit – that the thunder’s voice is tied to the coming of the long-awaited rain, and hence, in ritual terms, the restoration of fertility. In this ritual context, of course, fertility means the revival of physical life inseparable from the revival of spiritual life – the affirmation of what makes life worth living, what makes life distinct (as it is not elsewhere in the poem or ritual) from death. Spirituality in this affirmative (but not necessarily, as we shall see, moral) sense simply refers to the reconstruction of values that will be felt to be, as Eliot’s magus puts it in another poem, ‘satisfactory.’27 In Part V, ‘What the Thunder Says,’ the cock crows at the end of the chapel episode: Co co rico co co rico In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust Bringing rain28

The lightning prepares us for the sound of thunder. Nor may the sceptic admit any question of a dry electrical storm, for the wind is here doubly laden with water: itself damp, it brings rain. There is nothing tentative or equivocal in this statement. Does this seem surprising, after the seemingly endless repetition of aridity in the poem to this point? I think that, for some readers, the sudden appearance of rain is too unexpected, so unmotivated by the poem, to be plausible, and must be ignored or (with some difficulty) ironized.29 Yet this is how rain comes, if we recall the opening of the poem, also in a mountain setting: ‘Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers. / Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee / With a shower of rain.’ In the published poem, the final line of the chapel episode, ‘Bringing rain,’ is unpunctuated (as opposed to the previous verse paragraph), so that the first lines of the thunder episode seem a continuation of it: Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves Waited for rain, while the black clouds Gathered far distant, over Himavant. The jungle crouched, humped in silence. Then spoke the thunder30

The continuity is plain enough: the climactic moment is being dilated and so emphasized by a kind of cinematic effect, as, with a shift in

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location but continuity of climate, we begin again in the empty moments just before rain, and are surprised again at its sudden herald. This continuity is even more explicit in the manuscript edited by Pound, in which three suspension points follow ‘Bringing rain’ in order explicitly to tie the episodes together as a mere shift of vantage point in the same narrative, just as they are used by Eliot earlier, in Part III.31 Now the reader is ready to hear what the thunder will say, and, I will suggest, may discern therein the desire for a practical and worldly package of cultural regulations, as opposed to a more strictly transcendental revelation. In his prose of this period as in his post-conversion years, Eliot remains deeply attracted to the full alterity of those societies whose sacred rites he raids for models of aesthetic order and religious feeling. This is first fully articulated in After Strange Gods (1934), in which he attacks, over and over again, those religious systems (Protestant, occultist, and idiosyncratic) he considers to have divorced spiritual life from the rest of life (a version of dissociation of sensibility). Here and in later writings, he maintains that any religion, including that Eastern philosophy from which he borrowed in The Waste Land, can be understood only in the context of its living culture, rather than as a stand-alone, portable system of beliefs.32 The Indian scholar G. Nageswara Rao has made the compelling argument that Eliot’s decision to insert seven Sanskrit words – including the first two words the reader encounters, Ganga and Himavant, chosen despite the availability of well-known anglicized forms – indicates his insistence upon the alterity of the Hindu context and, in particular, the intertextual network set up by them in Indian rather than in English cultures. An intriguing example of this alterity is the concluding line, ‘Shantih, shantih, shantih,’ which conveys not only a message, according to Nageswara Rao, but an experience which depends upon chanting the words ‘in the proper way with the right accent and intonation,’ an experience evidently dependent upon an alien education, as well as the aims of that education. The words belong, in particular, to the practical genre of prayer, and are ‘recited at the end of all ritual chants, generally on auspicious occasions.’33 Eliot is not only appropriating an unconventional idea, then, but also an unconventional public and spiritual function for poetry. P.S. Sri has commented that the Upanishad teachings that form the climax to the poem mark the beginning of a gradual and enormous shift in Eliot’s poetry from an esoteric attraction to Buddhist asceticism and its renunciation of the temporal,

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phenomenal world (as expressed in ‘The Fire Sermon,’ for example) to the more mundane ‘acceptance of life’ and ‘tolerance’ for ‘humanity in this world’ taught by Vedanta. This shift culminates in his last two plays, which are ‘built around the close-knit structure of the family, sanctifying the life of the householder rather than that of the contemplative mystic.’34 Eliot did not idealize Hindu cultures. He believed their aboriginal heritage to be fragmented by its own, peculiar path to modernization, its rituals and ways of life compartmentalized into functions and caste to such an extent that the practical religion of the ‘populace’ and the esoteric one of various ‘adepts’ became as alienated from each other as ‘two nations.’35 We can assume that Eliot would not wish such alienation to speak through the rain clouds that renew modern life in his poem, and that he perceived in Asian aboriginal modernity a social and symbolic mixture more deeply buried in his own modern heritage. Yet the political unconscious that reaches for a Hindu mask nevertheless selects a highly idealized one, no realist performance of the House, however abjectly – parodically, tragically, inadequately – the mask is worn. The thunder’s injunctions fall from the sky as imperatives which strike us at first catechistically, clearly meant to recall or reveal a set of values that, in the poet’s answers at least, can only emerge from uncomfortable regions of memory and desire (newspaper obituaries, vague memories of kin, and the legally defined property of one’s estate). ‘Give, sympathise, control’ is the translation in Eliot’s notes. These injunctions are each easily readable in a practical sense, but not one that reproduces familiar moral imperatives. The first is: ‘DA / Datta: what have we given?’ In both DA and Datta we hear, of course, archaic echoes of the Latin roots of ‘to give’ itself; it is as if Eliot wishes immediately to identify the three words, to remind us that our own language has obscure affiliations with another way of life. At the same time, the reader has already been prepared for the gift as a welcome contrast to the wasteland commodity – the fingered currents of the Smyrna merchant, the ‘profit and loss’ the drowned Phoenician leaves behind in Part IV.36 Yet whereas Eliot’s reader certainly, and ourselves likely, will then expect to hear something about Christian charity, the poet describes something that refuses to be assimilated to such familiar moralities of the gift. At first one reads in vain for an object, for what is given. We may conclude, and only by inference, that it is the self – but in what sense is unclear. Eliot’s words throw all the emphasis on the gift as a peculiar

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process and feeling, and this is far from a feel-good experience: it is awful, blood-shaking. The gift is a passionate ‘moment’s surrender’ which a sterile public life, ‘an age of prudence,’ can neither ‘retract’ nor understand. It sounds sexual, and likely has its source, most critics agree, in Eliot’s loss of sexual innocence either with Vivienne HaighWood or with Jean Verdenal. The image of the gift, in a modern example sought by the poet, as erotic surrender seems an odd fit with the economic and moral connotations set up by the poem. But the very gift as such, and as the basis of renewed values and life itself (in the fertility ritual paradigm), is here insisted upon: ‘by this, and this only, we have existed.’ On the one hand, this should remind us of the sacred prostitution which, in Frazer’s work, belongs to the rituals of Adonis (and of the related, occult notion of divine marriage). On the other hand, the erotic ‘surrender’ viewed specifically as a gift of ourselves to another is perfectly understandable as the consecration of an obligation to that person: the self-transcendence of erotic feeling is channelled into the self-sacrifice required for duty to lover or marriage partner. This is nothing less than duty, the ideal so prominent in Conrad, but glimpsed from the subterranean underside, from the passionate energies that Eliot believed lay beneath spiritual life and its rituals. The latter needed to be recovered if that life – and here, no vague organic life but specifically the social form of interpersonal duty, the gift as a form of obligation rather than a commodity, as an inalienable indebting of oneself to another rather than an exchange for personal pleasure or gain – were to be revived. Eliot turns commonplaces upside down to suggest that the Protestant ethic, the ‘prudence’ of Weber’s capitalists, is really a form of social irresponsibility and spiritual degradation. In the modern age, real duty must reach down, with ‘awful daring,’ to repressed, passionate roots, where eros and spirit live as one. It is well known that Eliot changed the order of the three teachings in the Upanishad in order to place the gift first. I believe that the order is of descending priority – in other words, that sympathy and control are secondary to an anthropological notion of the gift expressed as a basic economic, ethical, and spiritual concept in ‘DA / Datta.’ We may deduce this, in part, from the need to understand the gift as such in order to interpret the verses concerning sympathy and control that follow – which is to say, as a unified ethical system, rather than odds and ends of good behaviour. The priority in Eliot’s mind is more clearly expressed in the manuscript of the poem, where ‘Datta’ appears

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entirely in capital letters, while ‘Dayadhvam’ and ‘Damyata’ do not. This priority of emphasis is not accidental, but extends to the penultimate verse, which in manuscript reads: ‘Datta. Dayadhvam, damyata.’37 Perhaps Eliot thought better of the emphasis in revision, but it is more likely that he preferred to regularize the typography of the Sanskrit words, to distinguish the thunder sound, and to make the rhythm of the final repetition continuous and incantatory, a metrical echo of the closing ‘shantih.’ Sympathise, too, has its conventional meanings for Eliot’s audience – consistent, ironically, with the notion of giving as charity that is brushed aside in the prior verses. Here, the quotation from F.H. Bradley that Eliot provides in his notes tells us how to interpret sympathy: it is sympathy for others to the extent that you and they are alike trapped in the illusion of existential isolation (and, as is clear from the reference to Dante’s Ugolino, of spiritual alienation). If the reader has not read Bradley, the fact that such isolation is an illusion with immoral consequences is abundantly clear from the reference to Ugolino, to which the Bradley reference is itself appended. Ugolino, is in the lowest circle of hell – that of treachery to one’s country or community. He has watched his sons die, and himself died, of starvation, locked in a prison tower by a fellow traitor. What Dante learns from him is not that we are all locked in ourselves, in our own senses and interests, but that if we act as if we are, we will bring misery to ourselves and to others. Ugolino fails to make a proper surrender or gift of himself to others: it is a bond betrayed, a gift taken back, hence devalued. Moreover, in knowingly betraying his country, he inadvertently betrays his blood kin, who die as a result. That he is blind to his constitution by and for others, but the pilgrim and reader is not, is an effect of Dante’s horrific aesthetic justice. The political ambivalence of this vision may be measured by the mystification of Dante’s own clan warfare as a conflict not endogenous to House dominated societies, as must surely have been the case, but extrinsic to House relations, as if the other in the House, or the other House, must be purged – in Eliot’s inheritance of Dante, projected into the self-alienations of the Market and its decadent history, a proleptic culture hero. That Ugolino is a failed father as well as a failed citizen is confirmed by the allusion to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, which establishes a parallel. Coriolanus, as all critics seem to agree, is relevant here because he betrays his people, having been betrayed by them, and consequently finds himself isolated, welcome to neither friend nor enemy. Why,

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then, would Coriolanus appear in Eliot’s poem, not in a state of misery, similar to Ugolino, but on the contrary, according to one of Eliot’s keywords, revived: ‘aetherial rumours / revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus.’38 The only point at which, in Shakespeare’s play, the abused Roman Coriolanus can be considered to have been restored to his proper life is at the play’s climax, when his enemy army threatens the gates of his home city. At this point, his mother pleads with him to respect his bonds with family and country, and to forgo the likely conquest. For a brief time, his violent anger subsides, and in making political peace and recovering his family role, he indeed feels revived. This is the final development of his character. That enemy forces then murder him as a betrayer perhaps explains why these bonds prove too weak, too ‘aetherial’ an element of his mother’s representation of how things stood, to hold things together in their briefly ideal shape before the plot comes to its violent end. The function of the Ugolino and Coriolanus allusions, therefore, is to force us to associate the word ‘sympathise’ with a social commitment to land and kin, rather than with a personal emotion. Ugolino and Coriolanus are after all both political figures, and we are asked to understand sympathy, too, in these terms, as an ethical relationship to the bonds we are born with and those we contract. Sympathy is the inner recognition, experienced here with tragic feeling, of the inalienability of these bonds – of the ineradicable spiritual presence of others to us. This implies an image of the self as produced by and producer of multiple relations which an aesthetic of tragic fate is designed to narrate and reveal. For this vision, the gift here provides the medium and language. The third injunction, referring to control, hardly requires elucidation. Once gift and sympathy are grasped in relation to an aboriginal social practice, it is clear why control of the whims or appetites of the ‘heart’39 is necessary. Without self-control, the individual becomes what North American Native peoples most fear in their modern legends: a thing of unpredictable, insatiable appetites, an omnivore and cannibal, a wayward and lone spirit, a windigo. House economies depend on life lived in the security of debt, not of accumulation. The animistic world is a shimmering ecological flux from which we must always take, and to which we must give in return, inalienable as well as alienable powers and possessions. Animism provides the basic religious code for an ongoing process of codependent adjustment and adaptation – seasonal and accidental – between ourselves and others

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and between ourselves and our habitats. Control refers to self-control, the urges of the personal ‘heart,’ and implicitly to those cultural forms which restrict them (for example, taboos) and direct them to productive ends in an aboriginal economy (for example, rituals integrated into forms of religious education, judicial deliberation, or political organization). In Eliot’s poem, the three thunder crashes which bring life-renewing rain are merely three forces – easily mapped upon the primal instincts, developmental desires, and mature consciousness of Freudian tradition – of the self in the domain of the House. Damyata or ‘control’ is spoken to the urges, dayadhvam or ‘sympathise’ is spoken to the desires, and datta or ‘give’ is spoken to the conscience, by a shamanic voice that must at once idealizingly, mockingly, evasively, and seriously parody an aboriginal modernity alien to it. If all this is so, then why, one might object, is Eliot at the same time so obsessed by transcendental experiences distinct from, if not even in revulsion against, physical and social life? In The Waste Land, as in his other poems up to 1922, it seems that Eliot inclines toward solitary, transcendental experiences he associates with ‘primitive’ religious practice, and hardly touches upon social contexts. Meanwhile, if he is serious about his respect for and commitment to the life-giving promise of aboriginal heritages, why is he so persistently willing to drown aboriginal references in the irrationalist mode – all that dancing and drumming; orgies with Bolo, bamboo-trees, and tom-toms – of the popular primitivism he outwardly abhors, rather than more informed discourses? Even classical literature is drawn, by apeneck Sweeney, into this degraded vortex. I suggest that the degradation of aboriginal reference, on the one hand, and strategy of purification in the transcendental, on the other, may be seen as two sides of the same problem (and solution) in the economic unconscious of his art. In order to see how this can work, and so do justice to Eliot’s insistent expression of superiority, mockery, or revulsion toward what was so crucial to his own modernist sense of revitalized cultural value and religious spirit, he must be freed from association with a cliché of cultural relativism. This cliché surfaces, for example, when Chinitz draws on Jeffrey Perl and Michael Levenson to argue that ‘philosophically,’ Eliot ‘was always a thorough-going relativist,’ and that his ‘anthropological relativism’ specifically, his ‘awareness of cultural differences,’ allowed him to ‘perceive the contingency of apparently permanent truths and natural categories.’ From this basis, Chinitz goes on to argue that ‘primitive communities’ offered a revolutionary model for

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modern society that would free culture from ‘the twin plagues of skepticism and alienation,’ a model also to be found in some forms of popular culture.40 The problem here is a generalization that avoids the racial and ethical beliefs that always ranked, for Eliot, some cultures above others (which after conversion, moreover, would adapt itself to a notion of historical progress). When Eliot wants us to admit that no single culture should be seen at the ‘summit of human evolution,’ or that ‘the difference between our own culture and an alien culture is different from the difference between culture and anarchy, or culture and pseudo-culture,’ these are not relativist propositions, but attacks on any thinking that would regard cultural difference starkly as a binary opposition, rather than a continuum.41 This continuum need not be morally homogeneous. In a series of lengthy essays on culture beginning with After Strange Gods, Eliot makes his view of this continuum clear, and I will suggest that what he says there readily applies to his earlier poetry – perhaps growing out of The Waste Land itself. After Strange Gods concludes with a critique of what he calls the diabolic or daemonic element in the writing of D.H. Lawrence; it is an example against which Eliot will counter, as a ringing end to his lectures, the chastisements and warnings of Ezekiel against the false prophets and idolatry of the Son of man. In this context, Eliot writes: Against the living death of modern material civilisation [Lawrence] spoke again and again, and even if these dead could speak, what he said is unanswerable … In contrast to Nottingham, London, or industrial America, his capering redskins of Mornings in Mexico seem to represent Life. So they do; but that is not the last word, only the first. The man’s vision is spiritual, but spiritually sick.

Lawrence, the canonical modernist writer who made the most sustained effort to appropriate aboriginal heritage to a new, revitalizing idea of the modern, is an important ally for Eliot, because Lawrence finds in aboriginal heritage an authentic Life or spirituality missing from imperialist modernity. After the negative mockery of ‘capering redskins,’ one is surprised by Eliot’s double turn, an affirmation followed by a qualification: ‘so they do’ represent Life, against the ‘living death’ of the modern wasteland; yet that is not the ‘last word, only the first.’ What he means is that aboriginal heritage, as Lawrence rightly represents it, confronts us with a fully spiritual life that we

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must – if we are to waken from the materialist stupor of present-day civilization – learn again to live. We must – but we must further realize a good as opposed to evil or ‘sick’ spirituality, the latter being a kind of primitive default: It would seem that for Lawrence any spiritual force was good, and that evil resided only in the absence of spirituality. Most people, no doubt, need to be aroused to the perception of the simple distinction between the spiritual and the material … But most people are only very little alive; and to awaken them to the spiritual is a very great responsibility: it is only when they are so awakened that they are capable of real Good, but that at the same time they become first capable of Evil. Lawrence lived all his life, I should imagine, on the spiritual level; no man was less a sensualist.42

The conflicted tone of After Strange Gods is explained here: while Eliot saw himself allied with other modernist writers in trying to revive a spiritual wasteland, he saw these others, on the whole, as blind to the daemonic possibilities of spiritual apprehension. Eliot nearly alone insists upon a need first to revive a spiritual life and then to control it with a distinct moral system. The first process is passionate, sensual, violent, and … primitive. The second process is rational and deliberative; it depends upon a historicizing view of moral codes and practices, and the burden of individual choice. Daemonic modernism – Eliot cites Lawrence and Hardy – is the result of the spiritual animation of the world suddenly releasing itself into view all around one, and from hidden recesses inside one, terrifyingly free of conventional moral restrictions, just like the spectral, shadowy lives ceaselessly flowing from the throat of the earth in Lovecraft’s dream worlds. Eliot insists that we must admire rather than condescend to those great modern writers who are able to achieve – against the banality of their times – even so savage a spirituality. Another example of such a writer is Baudelaire, who, Eliot instructs us a year or two before these lectures, is ‘the greatest exemplar in modern poetry’ of a ‘complete renovation’ of language (the revitalization of the wasteland theme is here again a myth by which he organizes literary history) – while ‘his renovation of an attitude towards life is no less radical and no less important.’ Despite Eliot’s unbridled moral condescension to and even repugnance for writers like Baudelaire and Lawrence, his immense respect for them – as contributors to a new modern heritage – is equally forthright and sincere. Even the outright

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evil embraced by the daemonic Baudelaire is nonetheless a spiritual life, stranded on the sterile plain of modern living death: So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good; so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist … Baudelaire was man enough for damnation … In all his humiliating traffic with other beings, he walked secure in this high vocation, that he was capable of a damnation denied to the politicians and the newspaper editors of Paris. Damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation – of salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it at last gives some significance to living.43

This kind of salvation, this kind of ‘life,’ is exactly the kind Eliot attributes to Lawrence’s aboriginal Mexicans, and the kind that animates more generally his own primitivist figures drawn from his knowledge of aboriginal heritages. Drawing such lines between the healthy and the sick, the restless, impossibly abject, parodic shamanry of Eliot’s work becomes explicit: Mr. Yeats’s ‘supernatural world’ was the wrong supernatural world. It was not a world of spiritual significance, not a world of real Good and Evil, of holiness or sin, but a highly sophisticated lower mythology summoned, like a physician, to supply the fading pulse of poetry with some transient stimulant so that the dying patient may utter his last words. In its extreme self-consciousness it approaches the mythology of D.H. Lawrence on its more decadent side. We admire Mr. Yeats for having outgrown it; for having packed away his bibelots and resigned himself to live in an apartment furnished in the barest simplicity.

Good riddance to poetry ‘stimulated by folklore, occultism, mythology and symbolism, crystal-gazing and hermetic writings.’44 Here the modern poet is explicitly a kind of medicine man, raising the dead into spiritual life – but life of the ‘wrong’ kind, and still morbid. If only Yeats could do this with the right supernatural world, summoning a higher mythology. He must learn from the medicine man, but he must (in the language of ‘War-Paint and Feathers’) improve upon him. He may find cultural inspiration and a poetic model in the folklore and so on of aboriginal heritages, but he must also thrust them away, in the end to live in a bare room, like the purified poet imagined by the abject

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Eliot. This process is uncannily like the parodic shamanry enacted by The Waste Land, which recapitulates primitivist Christian martyr figures, anthropological themes, and occult discourses glimpsed elsewhere in Eliot’s poetry, all abjected, all morbidly stimulating without fully reviving the dying pulse of the poem; yet because the poem cannot remain, at last, like Yeats’s room completely pure or bare, it turns to the alien language of the Upanishad for its proper magic. The two-step process, by which modern culture must first be revived by primitivism then cleansed and organized by a morality unknown to it, is the ruling principle of Eliot’s later thoughts on culture and politics. On the brink of the Second World War, in ‘The Idea of a Christian Society,’ he will argue that the evil of totalitarian society is the evil of a ‘pagan’ spiritual culture – Baudelaire or the capering redskin no longer as marginal first steps in spiritual renovation, but as iconic monsters of mass society. ‘The tendency of totalitarianism,’ he warns us, ‘is to reaffirm, on a lower level, the religious-social [i.e., organic] nature of society.’45 Totalitarianism is to be seen as a renovated spiritual culture, but without morality. It is the only conservative alternative – apart from a Christian society that Eliot has difficulty envisioning – to the unsustainable chaos of the modern world. Indeed, Eliot comes to imagine the most dystopian future as a kind of aboriginal modernity: an industrial ‘mob’ controlled by ‘mass suggestion’ – an unconscious rather than deliberative spiritual life – rather than genuine religion. What we must learn from totalitarianism is not that it is the opposite of all we presently stand for (which is merely chaos) but that it expresses a necessary, if horribly ‘stunted,’ corrective to it.46 The proper recovery of aboriginal heritage is spelled out in the penultimate paragraph of his essay: Without sentimentalizing the life of the savage, we might practise the humility to observe, in some of the societies upon which we look down as primitive or backward, the operation of a social-religious-artistic complex which we should emulate upon a higher plane. We have been accustomed to regard ‘progress’ as always integral; and have yet to learn that it is only by an effort and a discipline, greater than society has yet seen the need of imposing on itself, that material knowledge and power is gained without loss of spiritual knowledge and power.

Here again is the two-step process. In aboriginal heritage we find an organic society we should emulate, but we must do so on a ‘higher

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plane.’ This is no cultural relativism: the ideal of progress is explicitly put forth, though it is unconventionally conceived as a process that requires reaching backwards to recover for the present what has been abandoned in its past. Indeed, the theory nakedly revealed here is nothing but a simple, historical dialectic: thesis in spiritual life; antithesis in material life; synthesis and transformation of the two, it is hoped, in some kind of Christian modernity (however imperfect). Evoking the animistic spirituality of aboriginal heritages, Eliot here continues: The struggle to recover the sense of relation to nature and to God, the recognition that even the most primitive feelings should be part of our heritage, seems to me to be the explanation and justification of the life of D.H. Lawrence, and the excuse for his aberrations. But we need not only to learn how to look at the world with the eyes of a Mexican Indian – and I hardly think that Lawrence succeeded – and we certainly cannot afford to stop there. We need to know how to see the world as the Christian Fathers saw it; and the purpose of reascending to origins is that we should be able to return, with greater spiritual knowledge, to our own situation.47

Again, we are asked to learn from aboriginal heritages, for we may gain from them spiritual knowledge and a model for an organic society in which all things, human and non-human, are systematically represented with spiritual value. Yet to ‘stop there’ is unthinkable. We are again exhorted to organize our new spirituality by assimilating it to a Christian morality distinct from aboriginal religion, and superior to it. How superior? Eliot’s answer reflects on his sense of modern political as well as aboriginal life: ‘We need to recover the sense of religious fear, so that it may be overcome by religious hope.’ Aboriginal spirituality is fear without hope; it is the roots of religious feeling, of what makes life worthwhile, confronted as an abject terrain, an animated, total, creative darkness threatening the self even as it restores its life. Hope is the mark of separation, of salvation from evil, of redemption from the world, of clear boundaries and ultimate purification. In his last essays on culture, Eliot would reiterate this two-step, abject appropriation of aboriginal heritage: ‘What is wanted is not to restore a vanished, or to revive a vanishing culture under modern conditions which make it impossible, but to grow a contemporary culture from the old roots.’ Such a secondary culture will be an imperfect version of the first – insofar as ‘the sort of identity of religion and culture which we observe amongst peoples of very low development cannot

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recur except in the New Jerusalem.’ Aboriginal heritage is necessary to life, but necessary only as an abstraction or appropriation to the ‘conditions’ of modern imperialist development. Otherwise, the ground plan for a New Jerusalem can only ironically be realized as a slipping back into the Heart of Darkness, a fearful alterity that swallows up the self, a sort of cannibal culture.48 Eliot’s curious attraction to and repulsion from aboriginal heritages, as well as his contradictory scorn for and deployment of degrading primitivist tropes, is therefore explained by the two-step view of religious renewal I have quickly surveyed. This imagined historical process corresponds, moreover, to the ritual processes both of individual occult initiation into ‘lower mysteries’ described by Surette, and of public Adonis effigy ceremonies described by Frazer. Both are dramas of confrontation with death, viewed as a condition in which life is alienated, from which confrontation the recovery or renewal of life is sought. This correspondence may be explained very simply with recourse to Kristeva, as based in an apprehension of the roots of religious and cultural life – what Eliot simply defines as what makes life worth living, the roots of value creation – in abject registers of the self.49 This push-me-pull-you pattern of abjection for cultural reconstruction explains Eliot’s apparent inconsistencies – explains why, together with an insistent valorization of aboriginal heritage and an extraordinary commitment to scholarly openness and understanding of the new anthropology, his compulsive degradation of aboriginal reference, on the one hand, and strategy of purification in the transcendental, on the other, operate as two negative sides to the same problem, or twin solutions, in the economic unconscious of his work. The profound fusion of the primitive, the religious, and the abject in Eliot’s poetry has been brought to light by Laurie MacDiarmid, who integrates recent histories of criticism in these three areas.50 It is worth pausing to look at criticism devoted to abjection alone. The abject register in The Waste Land, for example, is evident in Ronald Bush’s powerful reading of a restless, pathological ‘progression’ in the opening lines of ‘The Fire Sermon’: It takes its dominant tone from a series of surrealistic images in which subconscious anxiety, as in a bad dream or a psychotic delusion, is projected onto human and non-human objects. Harry, in The Family Reunion, describes it this way: ‘I could not fit myself together: / When I was inside the old dream, I felt all the same emotion / Or lack of

188 Modernist Goods emotion, as before: the same loathing / Diffused, I not a person, in a world not of persons / But only of contaminating presences.’ But what Harry describes, the opening of ‘The Fire Sermon’ presents. In it, emotional fantasies, sometimes of self-loathing, extend through a series of unconnected images in a medium where ego-integration seems to be non-existent.

The verses move, says Bush, toward a ‘horrified fascination with the process of decomposition’ in which ‘the rat’s living body merges with a corpse’s and the “speaker” apprehends himself first as rotting and sodden flesh, feeling “naked on the low damp ground,” and then as dry bones, rattled by the rat’s foot as he was rattled before by the cold wind’; then concludes with the ‘ineffectual gesture’ of washing performed by the two prostitutes.51 It would be difficult to imagine a better example of the horror of contamination, morbidity, and disintegrating boundaries between life and death that are the symptoms of the abject. Kristeva’s theory is articulated as a key to Eliot’s work by Maud Ellmann as well as more recent critics like Tim Armstrong, who uses Eliot’s complaint that ‘our family never was taught mental, any more than physical hygiene, and so we are a seedy lot,’ as a reference point in Eliot’s intersecting interests in corporal and aesthetic purification.52 Ellmann’s work is important for the present context because she emphasizes both the sexual coding of the abject as feminine – the ‘very principle of unguency’ which enthrals as it repells – and the ‘ritual’ nature of the abject poet’s morbidity, ‘repeating death as if it were desire,’ rehearsing ‘his own death as he conjures up the writings of the dead, sacrificing voice and personality to their ventriloquy’ in a ‘ritual of its own destruction.’53 Abject ritual, misogyny, and morbidity are more clearly seen in relation to Eliot’s appropriation of aboriginal heritage by MacDiarmid. MacDiarmid is able to make closer connections between the desire for a revived spiritual life and its contradictory abjection, and the misogyny that figures the mother, and the Earth Mother, as a site of horror. In this context, Eliot’s abject appropriation of hysteria – hysteria, that is, of a second order, observed from without as a terrible yet contaminating, assimilated condition – is readable by MacDiarmid in the continuum of his abject religious martyr poems; another common denominator being the erotic intensity of an abject jouissance. If we follow this scheme, it makes sense that the last woman to appear in The

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Waste Land is kin to bats crawling head downward – alluding to the vampire women who prompt the traveller to doubt Dracula’s benevolence, and to follow the animal-man climbing upside down to his chapel, where he must lie in sacred earth. Far from being a simply negative figure, the ultimate woman in The Waste Land seems similarly to lead the poet to envision the very Chapel Perilous where the cock will announce the coming rain.54 The abject refers to a condition of revulsion, fear, horror, anger, and violence toward some power viewed as totalizing and engulfing the self. It originates in a child’s narcissistic attempt at individuation from what appears the undivided attention of a phallic mother. The symptoms of abjection are a totalizing sense of horror and a restless movement to purify or distinguish the self, along with a continuously collapsing distinction between self and other and the terrible jouissance of a blurring of differences generally. To recognize Eliot’s primitivism as abject is to see in Eliot’s fascination with ‘primitive’ spirituality a profound desire – or not even a desire, but something like a social and economic fantasy from whose existential mesh a distinct object of desire cannot really separate itself. This would be a total desire, in other words, pointing to a basis for the production of values themselves; so neither precisely a mere desire nor an instinct, in the Freudian tradition, but what Kristeva calls a want. When Eliot’s fascination with the ‘primitive’ descends into the abject, its expression becomes organized by this profound want and its attendant horrors (loss of self, loss of worth, loss of boundaries). A modern spirituality, therefore, is achieved both (1) in a horrible, abject descent into the impure, the androgynous, the mongrel – the cosmopolitan? – from which the roots of religion must grow, says Kristeva, and in which the claim of alternative economies (as alternative ways of producing and conceiving the production of value) can assert themselves; and also (2) as a new kind of purification, an evasive transcendentalism, which must thrust aside, reject, scorn as sick, as intolerable, the very conditions of its material possibility. This pattern recalls a writer on the other side of the cultural divide: H.P. Lovecraft. Indeed, Eliot and Lovecraft share some uncanny resemblances. In life, both grew up with mothers they felt to be overwhelming presences and authorities even into their adult years; both evinced neurotic problems, suffered mental breakdowns, and had sudden, unsuccessful marriages with women who also suffered breakdowns; both found modern metropolitan life ugly, and cultivated

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partly imaginary New England aristocratic identities; and both affirmed reactionary political and racial views against the diversity of liberal modernity. In writing, both developed new literary styles too odd, and perhaps too acrid, for mainstream publication; both, in very different ways, were to understand the task of modern literature as a confrontation with the ‘unknown terror and mystery in which our life is passed,’ together with the need to ‘to dislocate, if necessary, language into meaning’; and to this end, both infused aboriginal appropriations with a mixture of misogyny and desire.55 Their class and institutional lives were utterly different, but they shared a sense of the abject as a strange yet irresistible refuge from the chaos or banality that greeted their coming of age in imperialist modernity. Returning to The Waste Land, it is now possible to argue that the discourse of the House affirmed in ‘What the Thunder Said’ provides no happy ending, because it does not escape the powerful current of abjection sweeping through the poem. The affirmation is to be sure constructive – the poet’s culmination of fragments is shored against ruins – but for the cosmopolitan speaker, the construction cannot be inhabited: Eliot is no more Hindu than he is German or Phoenician, and his modernist ritual of self-sacrifice, the cosmopolitan poem, remains a parodic pastiche of aboriginal culture. In his prose, there is no question that Eliot is increasingly explicit in his commitment to conservative values of the House: on the social level, to the priority of groups defined by blood relation; on the economic level, to the priority of a spiritual ecology that binds human and natural worlds together, rather than to material development and profit as ends in themselves; and on the political level, to the priority of regionally based clan cultures as opposed to the power of nation states or multinational empires.56 In his poetry, however, the prophet of such a commitment is abject: he is ‘throbbing,’ unstable and permeable, like the poem’s Tiresias, and also like the sick prophet of Hermann Hesse’s book – translated at Eliot’s instigation upon reading it in the asylum at Lausanne, as In Sight of Chaos – he is possessed by the spiritual unwholesomeness of his world. Hesse’s description of the sympathetic magic of the modern writer, his possession by a collective morbidity, indeed his possession by second-hand hysteria, is cited in Eliot’s notes to ‘What the Thunder Said.’ Eliot reiterated this ‘sick’ shamanic figure – echoing Hesse’s example of Dostoevsky and revealing again his own identification with it – in ‘London Letter,’ contemporary with The Waste Land, which sees Dostoevsky’s epilepsy and hysteria as integral to his

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literary vision.57 With this figure in mind, we may return to Eliot’s later diagnosis of D.H. Lawrence, quoted above – ‘The man’s vision is spiritual, but spiritually sick’ – and see in it not only a lacerating selfdiagnosis, but the full force of his parodic ambivalence toward his own attempt to revive in modern poetry the cultural practice of an aboriginal House. It is predictable, too, that this House, which in imperialist modernity is heavily marked by the maternal in its marginalization to a domestic sphere, should be shot through in Eliot’s case with his own powerfully abject, love-hate, wanting-rejecting relationship to a phallic mother – the apparent trigger of his mental breakdown and rest cures, during which most of The Waste Land was composed. The significance of a sick or possessed shaman figure finds an irresistible correlation in the fertility ritual literature used by Eliot: it is the figure of the Healer, Doctor, or Medicine Man discussed by Jessie Weston in ancient Hindu fertility ceremony and supposed by her to persist in Grail legends. In the present context, however, this figure is able to restore life less evidently by herbal remedy, the focus of Weston’s commentary, than by sympathetic or contagious magic.58 Eliot’s possessed shaman would seem to re-enact alienation from the Earth Mother and her healing vegetation (now seen as impotent, felt as cruel), to mimic the voyage of the corpse of Adonis, to mimic in somatic experience his voyage to the land of the dead, and so draw the evil of spiritual morbidity, sterility, and death into himself in order to release the forces of life to others. This figure is more explicitly modelled on Frazer’s slain priest of Nemi, the central figure in his title myth of the Golden Bough, who similarly mimics the dying fertility god in order to set the cycle of life again in motion; and modelled too on this priest’s cognates explored in Adonis, Attis, Osiris, the particular volume recommended by Eliot as elucidative of his poem.59 This remains a speculative leap to make, yet it is consistent, at least, with Maud Ellmannn’s view of Eliot as a ‘prince of morticians’ (a phrase from Pound), whose poetry enacts a ritual possession by voices of the dead and a ritual death of the self.60 A concept that helps to clarify the particular kind of spiritual action represented by the parodic priest or prophet of death under discussion here, and in economic terms – a concept which Eliot may well have encountered – pertains to a special category of gift with a variety of forms in Hindu heritages. This type of gift is called dan. Dan is a gift of material objects and money given by the family of an ill-omened or deceased person to a specially designated caste person or priest, in

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order to transfer evil spirits infecting the person to a separate place. Like the notion of the gift developed in Strathern’s study of Melanesian societies, dan is the objectification of a relation, though a relation that can reach beyond social relations to those between humans and the non-human world. Its evil or inauspiciousness signifies the risks of enchainment to otherness in a world grasped as a ceaseless weaving of relationships.61 One example of dan is the ‘sin-infested’ gifts transferred to ‘Mahabrahman funeral priests, who enjoy the anomalous status of impure and highly inauspicious Brahmans,’ and who are responsible for the souls of the deceased while they change their form from ghost (pret) to ancestor (pitr). Of course, this ritual is not one of the Adonis types of death and resurrection studied by Frazer, yet it is a variation upon it: a dying out of, then reviving within, a body of kin. Like Frazer’s priest of the Golden Bough mentioned above, the ritual is one of identification or possession by the spirit estranged from life. The Mahabrahman funeral priest ‘perform[s] the dangerous rituals involving pret that last for eleven days after death,’ and ‘accepts the highly dangerous gifts [dan] in the name of the deceased person’s ghost … The givers of dan identify the Mahabrahman with the ghost of the deceased.’ The priest, in the eyes of the family of the deceased, is a kind of martyr, who by virtue of receiving the gift of dan is possessed by, contaminated by, the accumulated sins, evils, or inauspiciousness possessed by the ghost, of which the emerging ancestor will henceforth be purified. The priest sees himself this way as well: ‘Many liken themselves to a sewer through which the moral filth of their patrons is passed, a sewer which becomes a cess-pit from which one may contract leprosy and die.’62 This kind of funeral priest suggests a general model for the modern poet – as one sympathetically possessing and possessed by the sick spiritual life of his community – in Eliot’s verse and prose. The possession is similarly professional, and functions by way of an exchange. His living-dead metropolitan public, walking in tired circles, transfers to him the broken, emptied-out, estranged fragments of its cultural goods – for the poet, in this manner, his literary heritage. These once powerful aboriginal sources of community practices and individual life-meaning have been degraded, in Eliot’s world view, by bourgeois capitalist expansionism and liberal beliefs. Like the black cloth, black shoes, and black model of a water buffalo in the dan of an ill-omened Indian child,63 the literary heritage handled by Eliot’s parodic shaman appears as an assemblage of transvalued, degraded quotations, blackened by mockery and morbidity – not because the

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goods themselves are to be reviled, but because we are to comprehend their meaning together with their contamination, their impotence under a malign spiritual condition. It is a dangerous role for the Doctor poet, who in order to heal his community must mediate and mimic this very morbidity of verbal and literary meaning. I do not mean that Eliot deliberately created modern poetry as dan, but that his parodic shamanry set up an echo chamber in which myriad forms of aboriginal economy come to resonate. Among these latter forms, I suggest that the Indian funeral priest responsible for the blackened soul, the soul estranged as such from his or her kin, the soul alienated in a kind of underworld for the unassimilated individual, shows us a form of modern House ritual that echoes precisely the ritual Eliot wanted to create in his notion of poetry at the time of The Waste Land. Recall his desire, quoted at the outset of this section, to learn from the aboriginal shaman in order to ‘revivify’ modern art and poetry. He is not any modern shaman, but one specially devoted to restoring to life a dead or zombified literary and cultural heritage. If the modern poet is this kind of shaman, then modern poetry will be this kind of dan – a gift which is abject, like the House itself, because it is a marginalized gift, an impuissant good, restored to an ambiguous spiritual life, a blackened sacredness, in the Market realms of imperialist modernity. For rhetorical purposes, one could say that Eliot spoke most profoundly – in the ritual drama of Adonis, the objective correlative for a modern shamanry that Eliot found in Frazer – through a mimicry of the corpse lost to the underworld. This is to circle back to Surette’s argument that The Waste Land enacts an initiation ritual into the ‘lower mysteries’ of mortal life, and to sketch into the shadows of this occult paradigm the abject ground upon which aboriginal economies of the House are confronted and created as the very purpose of a cosmopolitan poetry’s sympathetic magic. Woolf’s Fugitive Rites At quite a remove from Eliot, at least temperamentally and politically, is Virginia Woolf, who nevertheless offers another example of the modernist writer as parodic shaman in a sympathetically morbid mode, wearing the mask of the dying god. I am thinking of that register of her work explored most rigorously in The Waves (1931), a register in which the normal social condition for individuals is emotional isolation and

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alienation, broken only by epiphanic moments of communal ritual – the parties in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), The Waves, and other novels, or the dramatic production in Between the Acts (1941). The party, and in particular the ritual of sharing food – the feast – persists as the hollowed out shell of an aboriginal rite, an engine of spiritual creation disconnected from other social machines and left to produce for the departing individual, social effects that wither when the hour has passed. What is expressed most starkly in The Waves is a world of estranged individuals whose work has ambiguous value, whose pleasures are sterile, and whose bonds are too readily narcissistic. It is the same world Woolf began to explore in the English travellers in her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), whose youth wish to see themselves at the height of happiness, yet cannot quite fool themselves, and gaze with an inner chill and melancholy upon a forest tribe in South America. It is the same world, also, to which belong those living dead envisioned as crowds and types by Eliot, except that Woolf sees them from the inside out, as passionate, sensitive, often quietly desperate individuals. Their voices are the voices of the dead wishing for the life of the House, a life made significant and made social by inalienable possessions, those of word and thing and body, and their personal exchange. As if in direct riposte to Eliot’s dessicated Waste Land, and with multiple allusions to that poem, The Waves seeks its revivifying waters in human depth as opposed to transcendence. Yet an economic unconscious moves here too, through the abject. Woolf chooses a Grail hero, Percival, who will double as an Adonis figure: a principle of ‘youth and beauty’ who will die and must be reborn within the memory and imagination of his survivors, in order to give their lives more than private or ephemeral community and meaning. Confusingly, but true to the logic of the abject, the creation of unity and value that Percival represents is not easily separable from its opposite, or indeed its origin, in the ‘waves’ of a threatening, fragmenting flow of passion, of ‘action.’ Percival’s presence is primal and ambivalent: ‘Love, hatred, by whatever name we call it, this globe whose walls are made of Percival, of youth and beauty, and something so deep sunk within us that we shall perhaps never make this moment out of one man again.’ The loss of his presence will evoke a feeling that similarly encompasses ‘pain and jealousy, envy and desire,’ and is ‘something deeper than they are, stronger than love and more subterranean.’64 The figure of Percival is not symbolic merely of an historical idealism, an imperialist romance shattered by the violence of the

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modern era, but of a modern sacredness, an aboriginal religious figure dragging in his wake a feudal heritage inconsistent with imperialist modernity; in this respect, he is akin to the medieval heroes of William Morris and, like T.E. Lawrence, may stand less for an imperialism Woolf despised than for an aboriginal modernity she wished, as a Grail parody, to create. Deeper than love and hate, envy and desire, is want, the abject wish both to dissolve the boundaries between self and other (as everywhere in Woolf’s ritual festivals and feasts) and to purify oneself, to affirm one’s individual voice and being. The power of Percival’s presence – and the memory of his presence – functions ever so briefly to destroy the modern feeling of alienation and ambivalence of work, and to bring the characters together in a ritual sharing of food, words, even of unspoken thoughts and values. Then, work is set aside, an economy of gifts emerges, and claustrophobically narcissistic bonds are abandoned for more unpredictable, possibly generative ones. Moreover, childhood is powerfully linked to these possibilities, because a non-working childhood such as we find in The Waves is a formative realm dominated entirely by House relations, even within a modern imperialist culture. Yet the consequences of such realms and rites in The Waves remain at best tentative and internalized, at worst, disconnected and fugitive. What is abject about the apparently radiant Percival is figured in primitivist terms – indeed in Frazerian terms – as aboriginal, and is linked with death. This abjection is perceived most acutely by the morbid type among his survivors: Rhoda. Percival is a figure of life both whose work – his passionate ‘action’ – and whose death will occur in India, a land which is figured as far away, dark, and savage. India is something like the underworld from which this Adonis figure, and modern English culture, must be resurrected. In the feeling of unity created by Percival, says Rhoda, are ‘forests and far countries on the other side of the world,’ are ‘seas and jungles; the howlings of jackals and moonlight falling upon some high peak where the eagle soars’ – images that embrace darkness and savagery. Imagining Percival at the shadowy ‘outermost parts of the earth … India for instance,’ she sees that ‘the world that had been shrivelled, rounds itself; remote provinces are fetched up out of darkness; we see muddy roads, twisted jungle, swarms of men, and the vulture that feeds on some bloated carcass as within our scope, part of our proud and splendid province.’65 There is no representation of culture or economy in this abject picture of India, only crudely primitivist clichés: swarms and howlings. Yet

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when Louis and Rhoda’s thoughts harmonize a few moments later in the feast, an Adonis ritual of death and fertility takes shape. ‘Horns and trumpets’ ring out, ‘leaves unfold,’ and ‘there is a dancing and a drumming, like the dancing and drumming of naked men with assegais.’ The fire and blood imagery accumulated by Louis mixes with the ‘green boughs and flowering branches’ of the ‘festival’ Rhoda envisions, whose ‘great procession’ sees a Percival figure, ‘the beloved,’ festooned with flowers and leaves. Rhoda and Louis affirm each other’s sense that ‘death is woven in with the violets,’ and that ‘we, who are conspirators, withdrawn together to lean over some cold urn, note how the purple flame flows downwards.’66 Woolf’s insertion of a dying god fertility ritual, replete with the dancing and drumming savagery that seems explicitly to parody Eliot, is jarring in the urbane setting of this novel. It reveals the extent to which she too cannot help but struggle between fragments of actual knowledge of aboriginal heritage, borrowed from Eliot’s Frazer, and a pull to abjection which renders them in primitivist horror, in order to build, however awkwardly or ephemerally, a language of aboriginal modernity that might speak through her cosmopolitan British milieux. The same ambivalence is found in the archaic social register of Between the Acts, which ends with the cyclical revelation of prehistoric time as modern time – and of both as brutal and fearful, yet restorative of social bonds and productivity: Before [Giles and Isa] slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night … The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks. Then the curtain rose. They spoke.67

The abjection of this proper closure, its invasion of an animal or cavedwelling world as one free of alienation and sterility, functions as an imaginary precedent for the goods of aboriginal life that must be muddied as they enter the novel’s code, by horror, by darkness, violence, and the fear – suggested so explicitly by the words of Conrad – of uncontrolled passion. Thus encoded is a pre-civilized ‘natural’ life that lies on a continuum, suggested by the ekphrastic Outline of History,

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with the later imperial history of Miss La Trobe’s play and the yet later present day recorded at the bourgeois-appropriated great house. In the midst of this ambivalent, dangerous darkness, the novel’s characters are suddenly able to enact their own dramatic performance. In the darkness together, they inescapably live a repetitive dramatic event, like a primitive rite, that in Miss La Trobe’s play was able only momentarily to bring characters together. The new life that might be born from that darkness is uncertainly meaningful: a new fox or vixen, merely, in a renewed darkness, or something else? Miss La Trobe is aware of the degraded nature of her work and product: ‘Glory possessed her – for one moment. But what had she given? A cloud that melted into the other clouds on the horizon. It was in the giving that the triumph was. And the triumph faded. Her gift meant nothing. If they had understood her meaning; if they had known their parts; if the pearls had been real and the funds illimitable – it would have been a better gift.’68 The play, of course, is not a commodity but a communal labour whose material exchanges are intended to produce transitory gifts – relations of respect and obligation to others (limited here to their pleasure on that day) – and perhaps goods too, a heritable knowledge of others in their roles in an interconnected community. The gift is degraded in Miss La Trobe’s view, and perhaps in Woolf’s as well, because the ‘pearls are not real’: what is valuable has no legitimacy beyond the dramatic rite alienated into consumer compartments of art or entertainment. The only meaning is in the form of the act degraded and drained of meaning, the act of the gift itself. Magical forms denied content. Feasts with fugitive satisfactions. Ethnogenic shadow play. Hence, too, the depersonalization of Giles and Isa in the novel’s closure: their individual meaning is not subject to reform. Their selves remain clouded, estranged by their narcissistic preoccupations, so that the nocturnal bedroom embrace that redeems them, and is the novel’s half-terrible, constricted revelation of a persisting world of the House, must strip itself of the trappings of individual identity, home, and state, to wear the skins of animals. What Woolf seeks here – like Willa Cather in her mesa stories – is an aboriginal modernity denuded of all actually existing aboriginal cultures, in order to represent an abstraction of the House, of socially productive and authoritative gifts and goods, that might somehow be snuck into the prehistoric back door of modern imperialist heritage. Woolf and Cather, along with H.G. Wells and Winsor McCay, were proleptically postmodern in this respect, that the prehistoric cave-dweller

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and dinosaur proved to compel a stronger fascination of the uncanny than did the indigenous peoples of the world, as the modern century progressed. In all, the living dead take ritual possession of the artist, who through such mimicry yearns for a revivified life, a new future, and specifically, a future creativity and productivity that does not feel sterile or devalued, that would make of the forgettable play a communal rite, that would make of the country property a great house, that would dive dangerously down for and give away ‘real’ pearls. If others do not play their roles properly in this rite, its social magic will be felt in incoherent moments, in untransferable, untranslatable experiences of multiplicity and relation, and will fail. So Woolf’s characters will remain locked, ironically, in narcissisms it is their every wish to escape. So, too, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, a parody of aristocratic difference, of antimodern vitalism, dies alone, a death by water. So, too, Eliot’s Tiresias returns from his underworld of buried memory transfigured by the friend or lover rediscovered there, yet remains a solitary fisher-king, focused on the pain he finds echoed in Arnaut Daniel. In all cases, the other great figure in Frazer’s fertility rite, the lover of the dying god, the Aphrodite or Astarte to Adonis, the Cybele to Attis, the Isis to Osiris, is inadequate to or absent from the modernist shamanic parody. In Frazer’s study, the lover goddess is not only the one responsible for rescuing the alienated god from death and the underworld, but is also a principal figure of worship herself. Indeed, many of the actual rites Frazer describes in the work cited by Eliot were connected with temples devoted to this female god, and his archaeological literature dwells upon this connection. In a self-critical leap which displays the best of Frazer’s Hegelian, cumulative, and selfcorrecting method (rather than its abstraction and ready speculation, for example), Frazer concludes the masculine-titled Adonis, Attis, Osiris with a chapter, ‘Mother-Kin and Mother Goddesses,’ devoted to the thesis that male dying gods are, after all, only secondary in importance to those mother and lover goddesses who bring them into the world through birth or (once returned from the underworld) through marriage. Frazer’s explanation for this priority of the female god – in her forms as earth mother or as redeeming lover – is for once in his work sociological: it is a religion found principally in matrilineal societies, where the organization of social powers and heritage property via mothers and sisters leads to a spiritual economy that recognizes the generation of value as a narrative in which brother-sister bonds and mother-son bonds are continually threatened and must continually be

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reconstituted and reaffirmed. Annette Weiner needed to circumvent decades of patriarchal scholarship in order to regain a comparably gendered perspective on aboriginal economies. If we bear in mind this missing element in the general narrative of Frazer’s rite, and look for it in the parodic shamanry I have been illuminating here, it will be clear why I have begun with Eliot and other bearers of dan. The dying god mimicked by the modernist writer is only the existential centre of a larger, sociological and spiritual economy invented or revived by aboriginal parody – the vehicle for the latter’s mundane experience and representation. As such, all modernist shamanry must contend with this voice – whether to be possessed by it (the living dead), to inherit and learn from it (the doctor), or to love it and break its narcissistic shell (the lover). Writers as disparate as Eliot, Fitzgerald, and Woolf are specialists in the first kind of magic. They may suggest kinds of healing, they may offer solutions, that remain to this day ambiguous and matter for controversy. But they set out in terrifyingly bare form a spiritual and social problem to be solved. This is why, I believe, writers such as Eliot and Woolf can be profound influences upon writers of divergent values and temperaments. Whatever may be said about their very different conservatisms, these writers’ possession by a ‘heart of darkness,’ and in particular by an economic unconscious unbound from its chains therein, by a spirit that is both saving and daemonic, is the first move in an unplayed game, or the first act in a modern literary rite, to which others will feel compelled to respond. The writer who takes this daemonic role to its furthest, most relentlessly abject, its most openly narcissistic, and also its most perversely affirmative threshold is Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s Unnamable Magic If a social world is present in his work, it is typically an unsympathetic and unproductive one: it is rendered either as a wasteland of selfinvolved wanderers – as in the nouvelles (1946), the novel Molloy (1951), and the film Film (1964) – or, more frequently, of static figures fixed within fantastic prisons, deserts, or abysses – as in the novels Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953), the plays Endgame (1957) and Happy Days (1962), and the later fictions ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ (1965) and ‘Ping’ (1966). In The Unnamable, the narrator describes himself as a kind of bloated body fragment fixed in a dark abyss, as if

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buried alive yet monstrously conscious, the victim of ceaseless projections of himself, his identity, and his condition. The underworld of The Unnamable is an archetype in Beckett’s work, in which the self represented in the narrative voice cannot maintain clear boundaries between perception and fancy, self and other, or life and death. It is a narcissistic underworld, in which the reader is plunged into the near solipsism, not of an undifferentiated self or expansive oneness with the world, but of an agonized duplicity, an abject self, a being striving selfreflexively to identify itself both in its world (as adequate image, story, and name) and against it (as repulsion chained to compulsion, as erratic voice, as the unnamable). That this condition is morbid is evident in Beckett’s recurrent images of bodily fragmentation, injury, malfunction, decrepitude, and entombment. Yet while morbid, this underworld affords narcissistic pleasures of the kind Molloy indulges when he sucks luxuriously upon stones, or Mahood feels when he cheerfully affirms the ‘satisfaction of savouring a well-earned rest,’ having become, at the end of his wanderings, largely immobile, a limbless torso with a sterile penis, decaying on sawdust in a large jar in the chiaroscuro of a seedy backstreet.69 The living-dead of Beckett’s works at first seem to resist any revivification, any call to flourish in a less loathsome, a brighter, and more valuable existence. The last thing a Beckett character desires is to be rehabilitated. This morbid affirmation can extend beyond the self to the human totality. When in the dying world of Endgame Clov finds himself scratching at a flea, Hamm cries out in alarm: ‘A flea! Are there still fleas? […] But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him, for the love of God!’70 We see this stubborn morbidity with similar clarity in a parody of the Adonis rite in Molloy. Here, in Angela Moorjani’s reading, the disabled vagrant Molloy is joined to a Magna Mater figure in the woman Lousse, with whom he buries a dog described repeatedly as like a child to her. Various elements of Frazer’s fertility ritual of the dying god (here, dog) are parodied by Beckett in this episode: chiefly, Molloy is threatened with the fate of Osiris, to be torn bodily to pieces, though unlike the god because he tries to run away from, rather than rule, his fellows; and once rescued by Lousse, he several times explicitly identifies himself with the buried child-dog, and so with the Adonis counterpart to the Magna Mater. Lousse also combines figures of the mother and lover for Molloy. Yet in the episode Molloy does not undergo any transfiguration, nor does the world around him. He leaves Lousse much as he had arrived. The seasons

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change, but the cycle is merely vegetative. Some flowers pop up, fertilized by the dead dog, but the human world to which Molloy returns is without new life. The sexual coupling of Molloy and Lousse, blended in the narrative with another, that of Molloy and the withered Ruth – Molloy is ‘tempted to think of them as one and the same old hag’ – is sterile. Molloy is not even sure that they are not men, and his couplings with them unwittingly rectal.71 In this farcical, failed rite, it seems that Molloy’s world is another wasteland, yet one whose thunder is no more revelatory or generative than the gas which ‘escapes my fundament on the least pretext.’ Certainly, when Molloy leaves Lousse and a fine rain begins to fall, he is inspired only to use Lousse’s vegetable knife to ‘set about opening my wrist.’72 The emptiness, regression, or rejection of productivity that is everywhere in Molloy, and is a contamination that spreads self-reflexively from content to form – from story to voice and from voice to writing – is reflected in the waste landscapes and bare rooms Beckett evokes in his plays and many of his fictions. Place itself seems spare, emptied out, deprived of fertile ground for the generation of plots, intrigues, passions, or quests that would grip, guide, and give identity to the realist character. It is certainly tempting to think of Beckett’s narratives as predominantly abstract from particular place, as uprooted and occupying some more general, transitive, or existential condition, whether that condition is broadly modern or yet more broadly human. The especially stark, minimal settings of his plays are not meaningfully here or there; they are somehow everywhere, ineluctable. To assert this much is only to acknowledge the extent to which Beckett’s work is inscribed within two powerful universalizing currents in modern thought – depth psychology and existentialism. From this perspective, to borrow the vocabulary of Anthony Giddens, the meaning of such abstract texts – their meaning as textual mechanisms travelling across a global space – appears disembedded.73 The flip side to this perspective is a particular view of subjectivity, one abstracted from the whirl of historical social life, as Beckett’s proper terrain, and one that becomes the abject terrain of writing itself.74 There could be nothing further from a modern aboriginal literature. Yet, in his biography of Beckett, Anthony Cronin insists upon the significance of the young man’s regular, long walks alone or with his father in the low-mountainous countryside around his family home near Dublin.75 Along with the unremarkable plains and rough sea strand to which they descend, these desolate highways would appear

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to be the insistently returned-to geography of Beckett’s work, from its most realist depiction, arguably, to its most abstract, and this despite his subsequent lifelong residence in Paris. In a book comprised equally of photographs and printed text called The Beckett Country, Eoin O’Brien has shown this persistent locus quite convincingly. Nor is this locus innocent with respect to the paradoxical bleakness yet sublimity that informs Beckett’s literary landscapes. O’Brien reveals that Beckett’s representation of his native landscape is deeply ambivalent.76 According to Cronin, Beckett could even find it ‘terrifying’: writing in a letter to a close friend about one such walk, Beckett says he was ‘reduced almost to incontinence by the calm secret hostility’ of a mountain pass, and had to run down to the nearest town.77 However, while O’Brien likens this region to the landscape traversed (and not) by the disoriented wanderers in Waiting for Godot (1953), and places the caption ‘Father and son on a mountain road to nowhere’ beneath a wintry highway scene, Beckett himself always had an ordinary start and end point to these walks: his family house. And just such a domestic reference point is a hinge upon which turns his novel trilogy, to which I will shortly return. Perhaps like other students of modern literature, I began by reading Beckett’s sparse landscapes the way I did Eliot’s wasteland, as a severed or uprooted kind of world, tethered to an existential chaos or to an intertextual, semiotic slippage, to a universal condition rather than a particular place: this readerly absolute was the dark, cosmopolitan romance of modernism. But why not read Beckett’s work as rooted in that particular Irish land, that particular home? If this native reference were insisted upon, would the interest of a play like Endgame or a novel like Molloy collapse to the plane of a merely biographical or regionalist passion? Would it not begin to align Beckett rather improbably with Yeats, whose investment in indigenous land and culture Beckett found regressively ‘antiquarian’?78 Of all canonical modernists, with the possible exception of Gertrude Stein, Beckett writes with the most resolute – one might justifiably say compulsive – resistance to the kind of readily delimited, realist decoding of language that might produce the signification of land, self, and home that we need, no matter how complex our historicism, to recognize the particularity of a domestic and native place, and indeed, of the kind of aboriginal economy I have been arguing is so powerful a structure and content in modernist writing. Beckett specifically accused the Irish Revival poets of being blind to or repressing a modern ‘breakdown of the object’ and ‘rupture of lines of communication’ that had

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rendered their evocation of indigenous presence invalid. Contrarily, ‘the artist who is aware of this may state the space that intervenes between him and the world of objects; he may state it as no-man’sland, Hellespont or vacuum, according as he happens to be feeling resentful, nostalgic or merely depressed. A picture by Mr Jack Yeats, Mr Eliot’s “Waste Land,” are notable statements of this kind.’79 In a famously sweeping statement, Beckett championed an art that would ‘weary’ of the mere ‘field of the possible’ or ‘plane of the feasible’ and instead prefer: ‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.’80 This sense of a language without an object – as thing, event, location, or self – recurs in Beckett’s work, and in Molloy finds an axiomatic formula: ‘there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names.’81 Yet Beckett does not merely insist on the unnamable; he also insists, paradoxically, on a mysterious ‘obligation’ to express and to name, and in the famous last words of the trilogy, to ‘go on’ doing so. In this sense, Beckett’s apparently nihilistic program for ‘expression’ can be read more positively as an echo of Miss La Trobe’s affirmation in Between the Acts of literature as a symbolic act that will retain, no matter how degraded or emptied of moral or conceptual message, even of emotional effect, the obscure value of a strange, formal practice – the perverse insistence of a gift. Indeed, I will argue in the paragraphs ahead that it is possible to discern in Beckett’s work a startlingly clear, if abject, aboriginal modernity: an economy of the inalienable, of social obligations that baffle repression and survive marginalization as the unnamable. It is as if Beckett’s voice were possessed by the corpse or ghost of this economy, and must walk the pages with his vagrants, unable to function productively or offer any message that is not contaminated with farce or distastefulness. In the blackened realism of Beckett’s literary dan, people, actions, and things appear as a series of ghostly unlucky gestures, as a return of the repressed in form only, drained of the lifeblood of meaning and value. In the homecoming plot of the novel trilogy, kinship, sexual desire, economies of possession and exchange, and the land are knotted together in a tight imagery. This is an unambiguous pattern in the novels, and also elsewhere in Beckett’s work. To perceive it, one must read closely and in context rather than relying, as I have done so far, on the seduction of the epigram. Consider the opening paragraph of Molloy: ‘I

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am in my mother’s room,’ begins the narrative. ‘It’s I who live there now.’82 This is a curious beginning with respect to all that follows, for it seems to place the narrator in a stable location, a primary frame for the subsequent chameleonic transformations of the narrative. Uncharacteristically, Beckett does not ever explicitly undermine this perspective, which remains marked as a special kind of position, an assimilation of the narrator to his natal and native places of origin. The speaker is even permitted here to foresee the entire tripartite narrative structure of the trilogy and to prefigure its closure: ‘This time, then once more I think, then perhaps a last time, then I think it’ll be over, with that world too. Premonition of the last but one but one.’ Beckett had originally planned only two novels. When he wrote the third, he revised this initial sentence, adding ‘then perhaps a last time’ and another ‘but one’ to its prediction. True, when the trilogy does end, it ends in a way that allows us (but does not require us) to reconsider the initial ‘mother’s room’ and its speaker as yet another fantasy cast up by a mobile, indeterminate subjectivity: ‘I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story.’83 But even if we take the initial, framing voice of the ‘mother’s room’ to be undone in this way, here at the very end and nowhere else, then we must still consider its fantasy nature to be primary to everything else expressed. For it would still be the first, the persistent, and the last image of the self and its location, superimposed as it is over the whole narrative and its closure, enveloping it. The initial narrator is thus marked by a primal fantasy that is, moreover, elaborated as the novel gets further under way. The maternalnative situation is developed through a series of substitutions and displacements characteristic of the symbolic slippage of Beckett’s prose style. The narrative moves from association to association, creating a loose weave of related ideas. It begins in his mother’s room with a simple exchange with the outside world: pages for money. Every Sunday a visitor comes to take away the narrator’s written pages in exchange for money. The relegation of this exchange to a time conventionally both for religious observance and for leisure, considered together with the commodity nature of the exchange, suggests that the pages are produced for a culture industry which, from the perspective of the mother’s room, is rather sterile: ‘So many pages, so much money’ is the reigning logic of value. And this regularized exchange

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alone causes the narrator to admit, ‘Yes, I work now.’ Yet this recognition, when extended beyond the conventional form of the exchange and tested against an idea of work that includes methods and motivations, soon falls apart, for ‘I don’t know how to work anymore,’ he reflects, and ‘I don’t work for money.’ What is important here is that the exchange is not reciprocally recognized. It may function as a commodity exchange for the visitor, but it does not do so for the narrator, because he does not produce pages with their exchange value as a goal. He does not work or write for money, and what he does work or write for remains unnamed. He does not ‘work’ in any normatively understood way. One senses that the name for his labours, the language of work, is what fails him. Is it merely irrational, or is there an alternative logic to this work? The question of work then slips into the question of another exchange, the narrator’s own substitution for his mother. ‘I have her room. I sleep in her bed. I piss and shit in her pot. I have taken her place. I must resemble her more and more.’ This exchange, founded on personal inheritance, immediately makes the narrator connect family and labour as realms of gift or obligation: ‘It seems to me sometimes that I even knew my son, that I helped him. Then I tell myself it’s impossible. It’s impossible I could ever have helped anyone.’ This ghostly other economy, only dimly real, somehow experiential or operative yet ineffable or unthinkable, then fades right back into that of his writing-work as a problem of language: ‘I’ve forgotten how to spell too, and half the words.’ The narrator refers again to a logic of obligation just before the Molloy narrative begins, when he tells us regarding the ‘dim things’ of which he will speak: ‘It’s not goodbye. And what magic in those dim things to which it will be time enough, when next they pass, to say goodbye. For you must say goodbye, it would be madness not to say goodbye, when the time comes.’ In one sense, it is goodbye, for the narrator’s mysterious imperative is ‘to speak of the things that are left, say my goodbyes, finish dying.’ Yet these goodbyes must remain unrealized or inadequate: they cannot be articulated, cannot be exchanged, cannot find proper symbolization, and must be displaced and deferred in a long process of failure to articulate an obligatory relationship to the past, to what is lost in Beckett’s time and language. The parody of shamanic possession undertaken by the narrator, here another kind of funeral priest, is evident in this ritual departure and sacrifice: not to restore a proper life, but to enact a proper death.

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On the basis of this interpretation, it is possible to discern a series of oppositions in the opening paragraph which align the narrator’s I with a maternal identity and inheritance, a domestic location, an economy of gifts and goods, and an existential concern with value as the product of personal duration (the compulsive drift of writing and uncertainty; the impossible ‘help’ of kin), as opposed to an outside world aligned with a depersonalized identity, a commodity economy, and disembedded systems of impersonal time and value (the anonymous regulation of writing and what matters; the routine ‘help’ of an ambulance or ‘vehicle of some kind’ required to return the narrator to his mother’s room). This structural analysis can be expressed in a chart: I mother room inside home

they this man who comes every week world outside home

work as obligation transfer of goods time as duration

work for money exchange of commodities clock time

reproduction of kin

reproduction of society

death as motive

death as obstacle

beginning as here uncertainty

beginning as elsewhere indifference

impossibility

routine

So powerful is the obscure logic that connects gifts, obligation, and labour with a maternal and native location, that even while the mother and self imagined by the narrator are subsumed in a symbolic chain of forms ‘fading among fading forms,’ this logic is insisted upon as primal to these forms.84 It comes to signify the particular form of an abiding desire or want, not the form of an abiding identity. It may be impossible to realize, yet the antithesis to impossibility is not the possibility of something else; rather, it is an indifference that will anaesthetize us in advance to the very want for possibility. It may be uncertain, yet the antithesis of uncertainty is an anaesthetic routine that deadens the want for a valuable or creative direction.

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So it is that Beckett’s narrative logic will often circle back, not to a stable image of a mother or a self, but to a primal fantasy of want that I have called maternal and native. This abject fantasy, I will suggest, expresses the narrator’s submission to an alternative social totality, one eclipsed by the symbolic order available to him. This can be demonstrated, for instance, on the level of plot, in the doubling of Molloy’s and Mahood’s journeys. The trilogy’s narrative begins with the ‘unreal journey’ of Molloy to his mother and native city, in a setting that recalls the barren highlands documented by O’Brien, on ‘a road remarkably bare’ amidst ‘enormous fields’ above ‘treacherous hills.’ The same plot returns in another form with Mahood’s journey, similarly circling, similarly compulsive, and similarly physically disabled, to his maternal home near the end of the trilogy. This doubled plot unfolds a theme announced early on: ‘If I’m ever reduced to looking for a meaning to my life, you never can tell,’ predicts the narrator while thinking of his mother and his birth, ‘it’s in that old mess I’ll stick my nose to begin with.’85 By this circumlocution the narrator suggests both the primal nature of the maternal relationship and its abject resistance to naming. Mahood’s journey ends with its narrator forced fantastically to ‘flounder’ in the ‘muck’ of his family’s decomposed organs, amidst which he is tempted to imagine his ‘mother’s entrails’ as both beginning and end to his journeys.86 It need hardly be said that this maternal-native return is a mysteriously obligatory rather than happy one. The only satisfaction to be wrung from such momentary plot closures in the trilogy must be had from the fulfilling of an obscure debt – an empty gesture of spiritual return, in which the spiritual value is daemonic, without ethical or social function. Such closures are ephemeral because abject want is fixed not upon an object but upon a world – and in the economic unconscious, a world informed by the structure of a suppressed economy – and hence has no objective correlative in any particular figure of a mother, a son, a family, a landscape, or other signs and images of the maternal and native. While the abject register in Beckett’s work is sporadically diminished in subsequent decades, and the figure of the mother in general is presented with less misogyny and greater sympathy and power, he remains obsessively the writer of gifts, debts, and obligations in a symbolic order in which none of these adequately signify. Beckett is a parodic shaman possessed by the alienation or loss, not of a particular mother or native land, but of an aboriginal economy whose broken threads remain tangled in the progress of imperialist

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modernization. The parody is enacted specifically in Beckett as a salvage ethnography of the self: the modernist recognizes the dim traces of another economy buried in his or her own history, yet cannot meaningfully articulate and hence cannot affirm its presence as anything but an abject, totalizing force breathing through the cracks of social and mental life. It may be horrifying, and so may be its threat to our language and our selves. Even so, it is eagerly embraced by Beckett’s characters and narrators – and I think by ourselves, his readers – as strangely preferable to that deadened world of ‘so many pages, so much money,’ however well stocked the latter may be in pleasures and possibilities.87 Thus Beckett salvages from the recesses of his Dublin home and family the still glimmering, darkly ambivalent, empty shells of a magical world: ‘In the end it was magic that had the honour of my ruins,’ Molloy’s narrator tells us, ‘and still today, when I walk there, I find its vestiges.’88 Do we not feel this magic too? The modernist text functions here as a ritual machine, one that brings back to life, in the restricted terms of a self-consciously performative work of art, a parodic shamanry, the experience of a real psychic and social economy that an imperialist modernity has alienated as mere fantasy.

4 The Impure House: Re-imagining Aboriginal Modernity

Amatory Modernisms Spellbound by modernist rituals of the speaking corpse, by the sympathetic magic of death, and by narcissistic origins of the fertility of self in a mesmerizing absence, one might easily forget that Frazer’s Adonis, at least, had help. Where is the divine sister and lover, Aphrodite, Astarte, Isis, in the abject structure of parodic shamanry? Is she a Victorian mirage, a myth of feminine therapy to be dispelled along with the other soft, bourgeois sentiments – or, at worst, of feminine decadence? Such works as Beckett’s trilogy and The Waste Land seem to join the modern mob observed by H.D., which in an imaginary, masculinist re-containment of its abject energies, turns against women to ‘shout out, / your beauty, Isis, Aset, or Astarte, / is a harlot; you are retrogressive.’1 I will argue that such modernists find their greatest difficulty in representing – in allowing such representation to pass some deep censor – an erotically charged sign of the other whose love will pull down the impossible vanity of abjection, who will translate parody into value, and lead the reader out of the wastelands of modern narcissistic crisis. In the following pages, I will again sketch out the abject registers of the modernist text and its animation by an economic unconscious; again I am concerned with a return of the repressed House. Yet I will not here pursue the implications of that abjection. Instead, I will try to cast light on a rather different, amatory register that takes abjection as its regressive precondition only in order to move beyond it to a new subjectivity and a new social world. This new register is where the modern House finds representation as an ethical rather than parodic ideal.

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Can we escape the abject so easily? Kristeva herself provides the key to this door. In her work subsequent to Powers of Horror, she gradually illuminates the dimensions of yet another pre-Oedipal layer in the psychology of self. This is the realm in which the abject duality of the threatening, overwhelming mother and the horrified self is broken into by a third party, one who brings the gift of love, a gift eccentric to the agonistic economy of the abject mother and I. This third party is not the stern Oedipal father who will set up the reality principle (for Freud) or symbolic order (for Lacan) in order to secure and supervise the ego in social and individual development, but a loving imaginary father who will draw the self toward a field of desire that fractures power and appropriates and affirms the very modes of dependence and selfalienation that had loomed as external forces – in fact, had been reified – in the abject figure of the Other. In her search for a cultural expression of this loving, imaginary father, Kristeva follows Freud to a pagan source identified by Frazer with Magna Mater religion and as a type of Adonis: Mithra.2 ‘The sun-drenched face of the young Persian god has remained incomprehensible to us,’ writes Freud, yet it is not so to the less stern Kristeva, for whom this god is precisely what is overlooked or repressed in Freud’s conservative view of self and society. It is the sublimated figure (in symbol and social ritual) of the ‘refulgent jouissance,’ the ‘warm but dazzling, domesticated paternity’ of an internal imaginary father, the ‘playful and sublimational’ source of imagination itself, and of the possibility of ‘multiple and varied destinies for paternity’ eclipsed by modern patriarchy.3 Yet Kristeva is not talking simply about men. She offers the term imaginary father for its structural coherence with an existing Oedipal discourse, and insists that it is a gender-neutral place holder: a third party who is defined only by the desire of the mother, to be defined simply as ‘a coagulation of the mother and her desire.’ This is ‘the most archaic unity’ that the self may ‘retrieve’ as an image. The ‘fathermother conglomerate’ invokes the first transference and primary identification for the developing self, yet this identification is not with an object, an object of desire, but with a larger field or process grasped as an imaginary ideal, a condition whose form is not merely specular but flows across ‘the entire gamut of perceptions, especially the sonorous ones.’ Hence Mithra, here an Adonis figure, is himself described as no more than the sign of a primal ‘transference to the site of maternal desire,’ a site where the self must confront ‘the indication that the

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mother is not complete but that she wants … Who? What? The question has no answer other than the one that uncovers narcissistic emptiness; “At any rate, not I.”’ The key here is to be found in an image of ideal unity as incompletion, and of paternity (or maternity) as androgyny, two dimensions of a social heterogeneity mediated by this image, with which the primal self identifies in order to break the vicious circle of an abject individuation driven by purity and independence. Hence Kristeva’s Adonis is not simply helped by Aphrodite, or Osiris by Isis, in a narrative of masculinized regeneration. On the contrary, Adonis and his story are here merely a way of unfolding the love of Aphrodite, of understanding Aphrodite as the nodal point of a primary comprehension of social bonds. Adonis is a figure of her desire, and the narrative relationship between the two in religious heritage may be read, not as a way of constituting Adonis as a certain life principle, but as a way of constituting Aphrodite as a kind of socially foundational lover – of recovering the repressed ‘phantasm’ of the imaginary father as a particular structure of desire, a ‘non-oedipal disposition’ of jouissance encoded in the rituals and institutions of an archaic society.4 In the amatory register of texts I shall begin to discuss at the end of this section, I will aim to bring to light such figures of the imaginary father. These will combine images of androgyny with a diffuse (nonOedipal) libido not confined to sexual objects, an agency associated with social bonds, and an ethical value asserted in contrast to the nihilist tendency of the abject. But first, more needs to be acknowledged about the role of this perhaps too easily idealized figure, or semiotic mode, in a modern political unconscious. Because the imaginary father is a phantasm (or in art and ritual, even a symbol) of the erotically charged complex of dependency and obligation involved in the very first symbiotic condition of mother and child, its transferences or identifications will be marked by an economy of dependencies and obligations that are no longer comprehended merely through drives, but through imaginary and ultimately symbolic orders. Dependency is a keyword in Kristeva’s amatory discourse, and cannot be dissociated from her hopes for a less violent, happier society. As Kelly Oliver observes, the imaginary father is a ‘fantasy of re-union’ that ‘takes the place of the real union with, dependency on, the maternal body,’ specifically the maternal body in its experience of penetration by an other and site of ‘her jouissance, her satisfaction.’ As such, the fantasy ‘embraces alterity and difference in

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an imaginary wholeness. It is not that one becomes the other, or that both disappear. Rather, the combination provides complete satisfaction, which fills any gap between them. Alterity becomes a pleasurable excess rather than a painful gap.’5 If sublimated in social practice, this leads to what Kristeva elsewhere calls a ‘desirable dependency.’6 The flip side of dependency in this identificatory process, this erotic disposition, is obligation. The non-Oedipal ‘ethics’ of the imaginary father is similarly founded on a primal symbiosis that ‘sets up one’s obligations to the other as obligations to the self and obligations to the species,’ and arises from ‘the ambiguity in pregnancy and birth between subject and object positions.’7 In other words, Kristeva theorizes a natural gift economy, based on exchanges of inalienable gifts and debts, as a primal, if partial and ephemeral, form of the developing self. This should not surprise us, because Kristeva has characterized herself as precisely the kind of parodic shaman discussed in the previous part. She seeks to reinstate as a worthy image of the social, in a world she sees locked in narcissistic crisis, a ‘sacred’ economy of value according to which we recognize the other as an erotic knot of existential dependencies and obligations lodged in our very selves. ‘I am convinced that this new millennium, which seems so eager for religion, is in reality eager for the sacred. By this I mean the human desire to think (not in the sense of calculating but of questioning) that distinguishes human beings from other species and thus, a contrario, brings them closer to them … The [pre-Oedipal realm of the] semiotic, with its maternal dependencies, seems to me to be the distant horizon to which thought gains access when it tries to think of itself at the borders of physis and being immersed in it.’8 The sacred is here the thinking or symbolization of our deep implication – at the level of the semiotic and the amatory sublimations still patterned upon it – in an animal and presumably wider nature. It is an attempt to reinvent animism without gods and spirits, only passions and values.9 The resurrection of this pagan god, the legitimation and consecration of his mother/lover as his redeemer, or rather the conflation of the two in an androgynous palimpsest, will be the basis for Kristeva’s own critique of modernity, and for the thin strand of hope she holds out for a better future. For the departure of a ‘loving father’ from the imaginary life of the modern world – from a religious perspective, as a condition of secular culture – has according to Kristeva produced a modern self that cannot secure the ‘psychic space’ in which to cultivate, through primary identification, the imaginary idealizations and

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subsequent objects of desire that allow it to flourish as a creatively social being.10 The stern Oedipal father operating alone becomes a mere agent of the death drive, of violence and aggression. Hence the symbolic order becomes an empty mechanism: its words are deprived of imaginary force because desire itself is deprived of adequate identifications. Thus is born the modern Narcissus, ‘potential but empty of desire,’ whose ‘thought escapes him [while] his speech appears to him as empty as his body.’11 Kristeva has spoken bluntly about this crisis of self as a social crisis: ‘I believe we are experiencing a disintegration of “Our” civilization, and thus of the social bond in general and the lover’s bond in particular.’12 The disintegration may even be rendered in appropriately abject imagery, as a kind of death in life, from which the psychoanalyst, the secular shaman, strives to recover us: the ‘amatory principle is indispensable for a body to be living rather than being a corpse under care.’13 Kristeva’s story of the modern is a story primarily of the wane of those religious discourses that once sublimated into social codes the role of the imaginary father – or, putting it another way, a story of the erosion of a public ‘lover’s discourse’ in the rise of Western secular culture.14 Although she sees the experiences of maternity and of multicultural public life as grounds for a new or renewed, uncanny revelation of the archaic ‘psychic space’ from which new lovers’ discourses may grow, her principal solution to the modern crisis thus described is to seek a secular ‘variant’ for the missing religious imaginary father (here as the complex of maternal desire and dependency).15 It should be no surprise that she finds this alternative discourse in psychoanalysis itself, whose relationship of transference between analyst and patient is the basis of a cure. For readers outside the orbit of psychoanalytic practice, Kristeva’s assertion of clinical practice as a uniquely redemptive institution in modern, multicultural society will seem plausible but itself somewhat confined or alien – perhaps no less utopian than the older idea of a redemptive proletarian solidarity. What seems an overly psychologizing solution to modern discontent would seem to have its source in the reading of modernity itself as a religious history. The issue here is not whether Kristeva is right or wrong, but whether her particular emphases, those inevitably constituted by her own imaginary commitments, in short her loves, are adequate to a study of modernity as a period concept. If the modern question is Where is the imaginary father? then we must seek farther afield for answers.

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For the purposes of the present study, Kristeva crucially identifies the discontent of modern life to be founded – for whatever reasons of historical social change – on a missing imaginary father. At the cultural level, as I have noted above, this lack is described as an erosion, an actual absence of an imaginary force and figure in the symbolic mechanisms of the Other in which the self finds its identity and social value. At the primal or regressive level, however, the imaginary father is not lacking but repressed – and that by the Oedipal complex through which all must pass toward mature selfhood.16 It is possible to reconcile these two accounts, of the absence of the cultural imaginary father and the repression of the primal imaginary father, if we imagine a social field in which lovers’ discourses persist, yet are marginalized, contained in private or leisure spaces, and devalued as foundations of social structure. The imaginary father may thus persist with only a weak, compartmentalized value for the modern self in crisis. It is only absent as a discourse of public solidarity. It is repressed insofar as it may be recognized as a social form at all, and must rather be forgotten or displaced into some safe, unrecognizable form, an object fantasy (like brand loyalty), unthreatening to a modern self constituted merely as the violent, abject I of a stranded and beleaguered, yet ruthlessly driven reality principle. The great significance of Kristeva’s diagnosis of modernity for the present study lies in this hypothesis, that contrary to all other accounts that see the terrors of modernity originating from some overly strict, overly powerful father inflated and transposed into the dehumanized authorities of monolithic culture industries or political states, she sees all the latter only as unstable and fragmentary symptoms of a deeper dysfunction in an overly liberal modernity, a new secular dispensation in which the futile compensations for an imaginary father on the part of a culture industry lead to a flowering of diverse liberties and pleasures, yet without satisfaction or sense of meaning, and without defence against a death drive that pushes one to the brink of the abject, as the only recourse to self-assertion, at every point in its signifying chain. Against the powerful yet increasingly counter-intuitive rhetoric of a monolithic culture industry tending toward totalitarianism, Kristeva today confirms the discourse of a chaotic culture industry announced by Marshall McLuhan, in which a raging storm of images of desire are produced in order to drive social agency continually into Market relations, and to extend into a whirlwind of industrial and spectacular objects a shattered, fragmented body in search of eroticization everywhere, but

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encountering beneath every veil only a bewildered dissatisfaction fed by morbid violence.17 In this scenario, love is grasped only in a socially unproductive, displaced form in specialized sexual objects, where such displacement is the very pattern of Market creation of new needs.18 A restrictive genital sexuality is the transcendental signifier for a totalizing logic of consumer desire, and for a symbolic order experienced as ever more tolerant or unconventional, yet paradoxically monotonous and desperately empty. Against this terrible condition, Kristeva imagines alternatives based in the archaeology of self. Her project is to recover for the modern world a language of the imaginary father, and thus to make good on an age of ‘varied destinies for paternity’ and multiple ‘amatory styles’ proper to the self as an ‘open system.’19 But how can we rethink this situation, if we wish to look beyond the fallout of religious history and the promise of psychoanalytic practices? Fredric Jameson sketches out this modern liberal condition of a hollowedout Oedipal father and a repressed eros in a usefully general way: The basic development in the light of which all of Freud must be rethought is the collapse of the family, the disappearance of the authoritarian father, that is, of oppression at the level of the cellular family unit. With this liberalization, the Oedipus complex and the superego themselves are greatly weakened, so that the apparently liberated individual is at the same time denied that path toward genuine psychic individuality once offered him by the revolt against the father … On the social level, the overt burden of societal repression and enforced sublimation is withdrawn: the older restraints, characteristic of a period of ‘primitive accumulation of psychic capital,’ have given way to ‘repressive desublimation,’ in which the society of sexual abundance encourages overt but specialized sexual activity as a way of reducing conscious unhappiness within the system, of foreclosing conscious dissatisfaction with the system … On the political level, the withdrawal of the right to revolt against the father is reproduced as a disappearance of any effective possibility of negating the system in general. The weakening of the class struggle, the assimilation of the working classes into the bourgeoisie, is the objective condition for this universal neutralization; and with the extension of the media, the very content and gestures of revolt are exhausted, in the sense in which television performers speak of the ‘exhaustion’ of their raw material through overexposure … Not censorship, but the transformation into a fad, is the most effective way of destroying a potentially threatening movement or revolutionary personality.20

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Along with an erosion of religious beliefs and artistic practices that in the past have instituted a lover’s discourse, then, is a material history of Market liberalization of the social sphere that will gradually dissolve class and gender barriers, that will increasingly tolerate diverse conservative as well as novel ways of life, as long as the Market itself – whose only anathema would be a love that works toward values and bonds that are not alienable as commodities, would not therefore ‘desublimate’ or channel eros into the somatic thrills offered by genital satisfaction and media sensation – regulates the symbolic order. To the question that remains rather etherial in Kristeva’s historiography, then – why is the imaginary father missing, and the tyrannical father so ambivalent, in the modern world? – this strand of Marxist thought provides a concrete answer. Now, to historicize in a complementary fashion the notion of ‘varied destinies for paternity’ as a field of cultural conflict and possibility, a field that will come into play in post-abject representations of the modern House, it is helpful to turn to the work of the Freudian Marxist who here occasions Jameson’s panoramic view of a repressive liberal modernity: Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse viewed modern civilization through the eyes of Freud as a delicate, perhaps impossibly fragile, balance between drives for pleasure, which must be sublimated into mutually beneficial social relationships and productive work of all kinds, and drives for destruction, which must be channelled into the repressive and regulatory mechanisms that thrust all directly self-satisfying, anti-social desires from the conscious and rational world of the self. In Freud’s view, the satisfaction of pleasure is the only thing worth living for – that is, the feeling of happiness – yet as a drive in the real world of social life its realization is essentially double-edged and paradoxical: it is both the basis of social bonds, of the love that unites us in families and communities, and the greatest threat to those bonds, as the unruly, basically narcissistic passion for self-gratification. Do we do just what we want to do (and follow the pleasure principle), or do we do what others want us to do in order to get along (and follow the reality principle)? Both courses offer pleasure, but the second is gained at the expense of repressing the first. For this reason, all civilization is repressive, because all social bonds are produced by repressing primal lusts. Repression is a good thing. Marcuse goes this far with Freud, then parts ways. Repression is good, says Marcuse, but not all repression is the same: different societies, in different times and places, will have different ways of instituting repression, of creating and regulating social bonds,

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of channelling and interpreting drives and desires. Modern civilization, says Marcuse, suffers under regimes of surplus repression, repression that is not merely working to create social bonds, but to create specifically the alienated social bonds and producing-consuming ‘merry-go-round’ (I borrow Kristeva’s image) of a market-dominated world. Surplus repression is merely another name for the hollowed-out, one-dimensional, stern father of Kristeva’s modernity: the dysfunctional repressive father, an Other both overly strict and overly vulnerable, whose fragility is continually broken by the abject. For Marcuse, surplus repression is the singular ‘father’ of imperialist modernity, of a society in which the Market is the institution in which values and social bonds are produced. But are there alternative fathers, ‘varied destinies for paternity,’ possible? Against surplus repression, Marcuse posits the need for a reconstruction of the self that will produce a new kind of ‘father,’ a new kind of institution of the relationship between drives, desires, and repression, between the pleasure principle and reality principle. The only way to begin such a reconstruction – and here again he is in line with Kristeva – is to stage a regression of the self to those primal layers of subjectivity that are formed before the modern Oedipal father enters and controls the scene. The only realms in which such regression may take place, argues Marcuse, are in fantasy and memory. And also: in fantasy and memory expressed in art, which retains some freedom, if immediately powerless, in modern society. What does Marcuse expect to find there? He expects two things. One is simply negation, the intransigent dissatisfaction of a drive for pleasure that has been stunted and repressed, unable to flower into the eroticization of a whole individual and social world, a drive that consequently, if expressed, can only say ‘no’ to the narrower sexualizations and alienations of modern life. The other thing is the possibility, more hypothetical, of rebuilding oneself out of this regression on a different path, with fantasy now lived, not as direct realization (which Marcuse calls utopian in the bad, impossible sense), but as the basis of identification and sublimation in a reality principle and repressive machinery that are subservient to the fullest expression and satisfaction of pleasure drives. This new ‘father,’ opposed to the ‘rationality of domination’ of surplus repression, represents a ‘rationality of gratification.’21 This is none other than an avatar of the loving or imaginary father identified by Kristeva, whose erotic effects are what make the repressive and other machinery set up by the Oedipal father at once

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meaningful and tolerable. Marcuse anticipates Kristeva in calling for a regression to primary narcissism as the starting point for an alternative modernity: Beyond all immature autoeroticism, narcissism denotes a fundamental relatedness to reality which may generate a comprehensive existential order. In other words, narcissism may contain the germ of a different reality principle: the cathexis of the ego (one’s own body) may become the source and reservoir for a new libidinal cathexis of the objective world – transforming this world into a new mode of being. This interpretation is corroborated by the decisive role which narcissistic libido plays, according to Freud, in sublimation … [whereby] all sublimation would begin with the reactivation of narcissistic libido, which overflows and extends to objects. The hypothesis all but revolutionizes the idea of sublimation: it hints at a non-repressive [i.e., non-surplus-repressive] mode of sublimation which results from an extension rather than a constraining deflection of the libido.22

For Marcuse as for Kristeva, a regression to primary narcissism opens up the possibility of a renewed construction of identification with the desire of the Other, a construction that will not only release transgressive desire but, more importantly, reorganize and ‘extend’ erotic drives into new forms of sublimation that will underpin all subsequent developments at the level of the ego, its social bonds, and its symbolic order. Marcuse posits an historical institution of the organization of drives and desires that, contra Freud, would allow the pleasure principle to flourish more expansively and freely as a result of a certain mode of sublimation, more so than it would not only where locked down by surplus repression, but also where it might be expressed in asocial and unthinking, direct gratification. The latter historical condition is what Marcuse tends unfortunately to associate with ‘primitive’ societies, whose social life he supposes to be too simple to require much organization or thought at all, it being ‘immediate and “natural.”’23 Marcuse is generally anxious not to seem to be advocating aboriginal modes of life as offering practical solutions for modern crises; such solutions are rather to be built upon the liberal foundations laid down by capitalism itself. Aboriginal modernity is unimaginable to Marcuse, an implicit contradiction in terms. Hence, aboriginal heritage bears the burden of representing for Marcuse a

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regression without return. It has the same status as fantasy and primal memory, and is associated with primal symbiosis and undifferentiation. For him, the imaginary father must be found elsewhere, in a landscape of self-reflexively ‘modern’ signs. Marcuse will find this alternative social order in the New Left, counterculture, and liberation movements of the sixties, and in the new social movements of the seventies, all as diverse new social formations that oppose the ‘rationality of domination’ and seek to eroticize the range of human association and productivity according to a ‘rationality of gratification.’ Perhaps it is the seeming implausibility of revolution arising from such limited fields of subjective transformation that has all but erased the name of Marcuse from cultural theory in the present day. Criticism of Marcuse has fastened either on his inability to characterize a revolutionary subject (no longer a class) in actually existing society, or on the inadequacy of his doing so in terms of a diverse and questionably politicized bohemia. But what Marcuse here left unsatisfying and indeterminate has been given startling new form by his handful of readers today, one that I will argue is not only indispensable to contemporary theory on the Left but has its seeds in the expression of an economic unconscious in the modernist work of art. Marcuse identifies a ‘rationality of gratification’ with his Marxist idealism because the latter promises to preserve the technological sophistication and liberal diversity of modern society while abolishing – from both work and play – the narcissistic crisis of an untenable cultural authority on the brink of abject collapse, which means in real life terms, alienated bonds and exchanges on the brink of neurotic dysfunction. I will quote Gad Horowitz’s summary of Marcuse’s view, because he properly foreshadows the primitivist paradigm to which I shall later return: When the burden of necessary labour is reduced to a minimum, when it is freely assumed as a means of sustaining the ‘order of gratification,’ when the ‘stupefying, enervating, pseudo-automatic jobs of capitalist progress’ are abolished, when the libidinal relations among workers extend from the realm of free time to that of necessary labour and when labour is not carried out by persons who have been subjected to surplus repression of the drives and narrow specialization of ego activities – under these conditions it is no longer ‘alienated labour’ in anything like the same sense as in class society … Unpleasurable work in a free civilization would be like the

220 Modernist Goods unpleasurable work of primitives – though necessary, it cannot be called alienated. It is the minimally unpleasurable work which is made possible by basic as opposed to surplus repression. Though it does not become identical with play, it is not sharply differentiated from play. Necessity does not disappear into freedom, but converges with freedom … One man’s technological apparatus can become another man’s Forest.24

Horowitz captures the sociological force of the erotic implications of the imaginary father as the sublimated basis for a ‘free civilization.’ Here, not only will ‘sexuality [tend] to “grow into” Eros – that is to say, toward self-sublimation in lasting and expanding relations (including work relations) which serve to intensify and enlarge instinctual gratification,’ but this ultimate eroticization of life, for Marcuse, is signally to be recognized in the non-alienation of labour and exchange.25 Indeed, one may justifiably see here a reversal of the imperialist penetration of alienated relations of the Market into every sphere of life, in a utopian counter-movement, a flowing permeation of the pleasure drive, and of inalienable relations (the primal transferences that Kristeva shows us identify the self with a web of interdependency and differences, of inalienable gifts and debts charged by desire), across the same total field. In the simplest sense, alienation is nothing more than the failure to recognize oneself in others, and others in oneself. It is this failure that can only be repaired by regression to primary identification, to the imaginary father as a figure of maternal desire, where the self may internalize as identity and ideal an image of symbiotic, heterogeneous, interdependent, and therefore proto-ethical pleasure. The figure thus dovetails suggestively with Marilyn Strathern’s discussion, evoked in my Introduction, of an aesthetic of the multiply gendered self and its relational identity in gift societies. Kristeva will think about such primal ethics in her notorious derivation from maternal self-other experience: herethics. Marcuse will approach the same ethical terrain as ‘libidinal morality,’ which he associates with a universal, pre-Oedipal mother-child relationship and, as an historical institution, with an archaic matriarchal society, supposing them both universal.26 He envisions the end of alienation achieved as a revelation, via erotic transference and its continuously unfurling sublimations, of the inescapable ecology of self. The end of alienation is the beginning, therefore, of the economy of the House, whose consecration of a total field of human

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and non-human kinships and exchanges in the form of inalienable values can only proceed from a primary identification in this sense, or rather, cannot flourish if deprived of it. Conversely, the beginning of alienation may be none other than the marginalization of the House as the network of social, political, economic, religious, and aesthetic practices all of which reproduce the order of non-alienated relations by subjecting the self to a continual process of identification with the uncanny spiritual systems of family, people, gifts, and goods. It may be concluded that the history of the deprival of an imaginary father in cultural life is not one of religious erosion, merely, but belongs to the long history of marginalization of the House by Market modes of social formation in imperialist modernity. The expression of this deprival, as a return of the repressed, will understandably begin in the abject failure of culture as it stands, yet also make possible the generation of new sublimations in which the imaginary father, and new kinds of modern culture, may be articulated and lived. This is not Marcuse’s conclusion, of course. Yet Marcuse is the only influential Marxist thinker to point in this direction, in particular by his unique insistence upon memory as ‘a potent weapon,’ in Martin Jay’s words, that will replace ‘the praxis of a revolutionary proletariat’ at the fulcrum of social change. Memory is a faculty able to bridge primal regressions of the kind Kristeva advocates in the institution of psychoanalytic practice with practices of historical remembrance and reproduction of heritage. What is crucial to Marcuse’s emancipatory theory is not the memory of past suffering that must either fuel class struggle or from which we must awake – or that produces trauma, which is the way we often speak of memory today – but is the memory of past happiness and well-being, whether looking back to early childhood in the individual life, or to earlier forms of social life which offered satisfactions and imposed demands unlike to the present. The two latter possibilities merge in Marcuse’s Freudian assumption that both social historical and individual childhood pasts persist as forceful if repressed, archaic layers of the modern self. Jay has retraced the centrality of memory in Marcuse’s work from his earliest writings of the 1930s to his last in the 1970s, where he finds it represented as a mental activity able to bring repressed pasts – patterns of pleasure not tolerated by modern society – into the conscious realm of deliberation and analysis. The remembrance of these archaic patterns of the pleasure

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drive, because of their unique, Archimedean standpoint outside the culture and psychology of surplus repression, are a ‘precondition for the achievement of a utopian future’: Insofar as recollecting a different past prevents men from eternalizing the status quo, memory subverts one-dimensional consciousness and opens up the possibility of an alternative future. Moreover, it does so in a way that avoids the traditional bourgeois and social democratic ideology of history as evolutionary progress … In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse approvingly quoted Benjamin’s observation that clocks were shot at during the July Revolution as evidence of the link between stopping ongoing temporality and achieving revolutionary change … In a true utopia, ‘time would not seem linear, as a perpetual line or rising curve, but cyclical, as the return in Nietzsche’s idea of the “perpetuity of pleasure.”’ Memory, by restoring the forgotten past, was thus a model of the utopian temporality of the future.27

Yet against what can only be called a drive toward the identification of pre-capitalist historical pasts not only as fantastic spurs but as structural models for the future, there is ironically a progressivist, evolutionary element embedded in Marcuse’s discourse of modernity that proves just too irresistible, so that his symbolic pursuit of revolutionary change cleaves always to the side of the individual past, to internal primal fantasy and regressive memory, leaving the electric charge that should run between memory and history in the form of social memory and heritage potential but disconnected. It is true, he will occasionally attempt to fill that unilluminated space with a feeble, cartoon image of the supposedly homogeneous, natural life proper to the primitive. Jay suggests that Marcuse abandoned the historical side of his narrative altogether as soon as he realized that Freud’s own historical narrative, on which his own was unfortunately based, failed to be confirmed by modern ethnography.28 John O’Neill, in the most far-reaching critique of Marcuse relevant to the present study, moves back one step in order to see Marcuse, in a chain of patriarchal thinkers including Freud, dismissing or repressing the institutional specificity of archaic, precapitalist pasts because of the symbolic centrality to them of women. The ethnographic text that haunts this patriarchal tradition, both informing it and requiring erasure, is a nineteenth-century study of matriarchy and matrilineal societies by J.J. Bachofen, which argues that Western civilization knew, between its origins in a loosely organized

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hetaerism and more recent forms of patriarchy, a universal, intermediate stage of mother right, a matriarchal organization.29 Heterism supposes some kind of primal horde in which sexual reproduction, social relations, and economic exchange are entirely unregulated by codes and laws (this is something closer to the anthropoids presented as our ancestors in Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey [1962] than to any tribal culture). But matriarchy imposes new restrictions, encodes morality and laws, and sets up economic regimes and religious ideologies. In setting up the matrilineal laws of marriage, gift economy of dowries, and legal and religious heritages associated with the cultivation of the land, what Bachofen and O’Neill call matriarchy is none other than an idealized image of the House. Its significance to us here is its representation of an original culture preceding (and perhaps fragmentarily subtending) the patriarchal imperialist forms succeeding it; and in this original culture as a formative Other, an original subjectivity – one bound by law in the service of eros. The image Bachofen provides of this archaic social form is crucial to Marcuse’s theory, O’Neill argues, because it draws the outlines of a society constrained by laws and repressions, yet in the service of a primal morality devoted to erotic bonds. Its religious symbol is the Magna Mater understood as a mystery, which is to say, as a transcendental identification along what could be called the othering trajectories and exchanges of a libidinal animism – an imaginary father, or site of maternal desire, in nature. Here the image converges with Frazer’s paradigm, for this matriarchy found an enduring icon in modern Western culture in the figure of Isis, not only as rescuer of Osiris, but as matriarch and culture-builder. Bachofen’s study, which O’Neill argues Marcuse absorbed only in fragmentary form via Freud, ‘provides the missing institutional background to Marcuse’s utopian appeal for a libidinal morality.’30 Whatever may be conjectured about the roots of ancient social history, modern aboriginal societies are not predominantly matriarchal or matrilineal. Such a gynocentric ‘institutional background’ is unlikely to be universal, and is perhaps best regarded as a simplified and idealized, gender-coded bricolage of actual archaeological and ethnographic signs and images – neither mere projection, then, nor impartial documentation – that is itself a motivated construction of the economic unconscious proper to imperialist modernity. Not all modernist figures of the androgynous ideal fail to challenge patriarchy by screening off this institutional background. Prophetically for the present study, O’Neill quotes James Joyce’s Ulysses as a text that

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inserts the androgynous ideal into a struggle between patriarchalpatrilineal and erotic-matrilineal institutions. The artist-intellectual figure of Stephen Dedalus, later in the novel to affiliate himself with the androgynous figure of Bloom, affirms an archaic maternal social perspective as the vehicle for Joyce’s ironically modern disenchantment of patriarchy itself: ‘Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical state, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction.’31 We have already met the ‘void’ of this surplus repressive paternity in Kristeva’s discussion of the modern loss of psychic space, in the hollowing out of imaginary identification from the symbolic order. It is no surprise that Stephen, in search of a loving father, will find him in the androgynous Bloom. But this is to anticipate the following section. Suffice it here to note that Kristeva, like O’Neill, evokes Joyce when she wishes to call up literature as a field in which the imaginary father may symbolically be recovered.32 This, then, is the central problem in Marcuse: a politicized insistence upon memory, combined with a forgetting of its historical institution as heritage and of its real contents. Whereas Freud already ‘represses the maternal as the always-regressive origin’ of a necessarily patriarchal civilization, so degrading and dismissing the social formations presented by Bachofen, Marcuse does not bother even with these, and instead ‘completely psychologizes the historical location of matriarchal values as the source of critical utopianism.’33 Hence, while O’Neill attaches tremendous importance to Marcuse’s utopian ideal – an attempt to find the practical grounds to rebuild an imaginary father or rationality of gratification in the modern world – he urges us to leave Marcuse’s progressivism behind in order to seek examples consistent with the restrictive laws and social complexities of modern civilization in the past itself. O’Neill draws upon Bachofen to propose a utopian return to modes of memory, value-creation, and social exchange instituted by real matrilineal societies. Such historical antecedents – not, he says, entirely lost to the imperialist past but persisting in fragmentary ways, for instance, in the evolution of family law – are not significant merely as imaginary negations of the modern status quo, but as practical forms for its institutional reconstruction. He asks us to rethink

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modern gender relations along these lines; for example, in the modernist ideal of androgynous creativity. While this ideal may seem consonant with feminist emancipation, O’Neill argues, it may in fact preserve, if lodged in an idea of holistic subjectivity or genius, an inner ideal of parthenogenesis (self-birth) upon which patriarchy depends for its patrilineal ideology of value production, and consequently thrust aside actual women as well as modes of relation, erotic and biological, identified with maternity. Rather than idealizing in this way, via either Marcusian or more broadly postmodern pathways, the heteraic abandon and oceanic wish-fulfilment that are mere vague, negative images expressed by a patriarchal unconscious, we should recognize in these images a further screen beyond which to glimpse the deeper historical and individual repressions alike of a maternal ethic neither anarchic nor oppressive. Only this recognition will allow us to confront ‘the institutional basis for the civilizing function of utopian phantasy.’34 O’Neill invites us to reread Marcuse with aboriginal modernity, rather than subjectivized primitivism, revealed as the dialectically restored basis of his utopian political subject. This corrective to Marcuse need not affirm, for present purposes, either Bachofen’s evolutionary anthropology or any necessarily emancipatory conditions of such an ‘institutional basis,’ while it enables the convergence of Marcuse and Kristeva pursued here, in order to yield a usable critical language for the amatory register in modernist writing. For in this convergence shines forth an historical category of the House as a return of the repressed, not only in the explosive forms released by imaginary abjection, but in the new cultural forms of a rationality of gratification. To get a handle on this image of aboriginal modernity, we can apply the above dialectical corrective to Marshall McLuhan’s primitivist figure of the Global Village. This is likely the best known cliché of a utopian escape from imperialist to aboriginal ways of life scripted for the modern Western world. Here, too, the figure is one of progress through regression, yet here too it is marred by a primitivist forgetting of aboriginal history and modernity in the fantastic assumption of the tribal village as a realm of heteraic deregulation and libidinal abandon. Yet nothing prevents us from restoring to the figure of the Global Village its knowable, institutional depth, from which it can uniquely claim to spin out a utopian alternative to the organization of cultural diversity and media power prevailing today. We may reimagine the Global Village as a political realm that regulates not only all the older needs and desires of relatively autonomous tribal groups

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but the newer facts of busy migrations and multicultural habitats, no longer according to an ethic of surplus repression geared toward the domination of nature through production as an end in itself (in which diverse cultures are competing factories and fantasies related to each other only by a parthenogenic ethic of productivity in a depthless symbolic order), but according to an ethic of erotic sublimation geared toward identification with (life meaning within) a newly imagined, kindred world. To this end, we need not choose between bohemia, the New Left, feminism, or other social movements (all options offered by Marcuse) or even a pessimistic withdrawal to Theory itself, in order to discover the revolutionary grounds of an emancipated modernity.35 Nor must we find them restricted to the new environmentalist movements that would institute a view of humanity and nature as an interdependent economy that will survive only if the productivity ethic and parthenogenic repression of the earth, whose violence to the natural world is an increasingly intimate symptom and public spectacle, is transcended, and new drives and symbolic regulations prevail.36 All of these political alternatives may be viewed as the more or less durable, more or less effective productions of a House economy in diverse settings of the modern world. Marcuse may be remembered, then, as the chronicler of the flaring up of an economic unconscious in shifting forms from the 1950s to the present, and equally as having captured, in theoretical tableaus, the modality of coalition-building between such forms, revealing in coalition-building an erotically driven displacement of localized ideologies and projects by the common yet uncanny recognition of transgressive, non-affirmative modes of desire in the subversions of an other.37 Indeed, Marcuse may turn out to be a prophetic theorist of the very vagueness of the Left, of its paradoxical mixture of ideological fragmentation and shared ethical feeling. These would have their roots in a modern return of the repressed imaginary father, whose economic demands – what O’Neill calls a maternal ethic, Marcuse a libidinal morality, and Kristeva a herethics – are both incommensurate with predominating institutions of value and exchange, and also resistant to aesthetics of ethnogenetic closure and violence in conservative House forms.38 To return now to my initial proposition: the aboriginal modernity of the House, however diverse and ambivalent in practice, is the enduring institutional foundation, in an imperialist modernity suffering from the narcissistic crises described so well by Kristeva, of a utopian economy – one based on the desires, needs, and transferences

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engaged by an imaginary father as maternal complex – that would restitute a ‘rationality of gratification’ in the place of domination. In this utopian projection of a Global Village, understood as a return of the repressed House in the new industrial technology, information media, and social relations spawned by late capitalism, both work and play are permeable by signs of non-alienated relations and a kind of absolute fetishism, in which everything is metonymized by a latent amatory content. This is the horizon glimpsed so often in the utopian imaginings of modernism, which are able to climb out of their abject nightworlds by creatively rethinking the institution and production of pleasures and loves. This should be retrospectively evident, I think, in the texts considered so far, and here I will touch upon what strikes me as its starkest expression: in the funereal dystopia of surplus repression created by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, nothing seems simply to transcend the truth of his Eliotic incantation, ‘we are the dead,’ but the gesture of a woman’s arm and the song of a thrush.39 Both arm and thrush are emblems of an erotic expression that transcends sexuality and isolated pleasure, and they mediate alliances between characters who resist Big Brother. The arm gesture is introduced in Winston’s dream of Julia, where it is a desexualized but intensely pleasurable image that ‘seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought’ represented by Big Brother. The gesture occurs in real life when he meets Julia, and is linked with the ‘enveloping, protective gesture of the arm’ of his mother in his last sight of her, where it is wrapped hopelessly but with unshakable compassion around his dying sister; the latter image, in turn, echoes the similarly futile but loving arm gesture of the war victim described in Winston’s first diary entry.40 Hence the arm gesture is a kind of feminized metonym for a deliberative agency and social bond antithetical to those instituted by Big Brother, yet it is a metonym that in the novel fails to find its completed object – its properly utopian, big mother. Winston’s mother’s actions (and Julia’s and the other women’s) stem from ‘private’ standards and ‘primitive’ emotions, themselves based in love, and are expressed in ‘private loyalties’ and ‘individual relationships’ that lift them ‘clean out of the stream history’ into primitivism proper.41 Winston first feels a kind of love uncontaminated by the violence of Big Brother when he feels his own arm about the waist of Julia, after hearing a thrush sing. Winston had ‘watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no

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rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?’ The joy of the music is infectious, in some profoundly transgressive way, and it produces a new alliance between Winston and Julia. It also reminds us, because it doubles the question he asks of his own diary, that he cultivates his memory because he is committed, not to its subversive truth, but to subversive pleasure. The memory of the bird is the last image shared by the lovers before they are captured and separated by the Party. The infectiousness of this subversive pleasure, that has no final addressee or form, is conveyed in Winston’s ultimate memory of his family laughing over a game of Snakes and Ladders, an image that in the most pessimistic move of the novel, seems to be released only at the moment when it, too, can be alienated and dismissed.42 All these ephemera – abolished for the protagonist as soon as memory itself (the basis of Marcusian revolution) is appropriated by a machinery of mastery that has become an end in itself – nevertheless remain in the memory of the reader. Orwell constructs us, his real-world readers wherever they are, as the inheritors of goods from the fictional dead.43 No modernist more directly than he envisions a joy that resists domination to be a product less of raw instinct than of carefully reproduced memory and heritage. This glimmer of a subversive inheritance turns to radiance in the work of James Joyce and H.D., where the imaginary father is not only revealed beneath the work of repression but is liberated – specifically through what seem compulsively or perversely pursued cultivations of memory – as a vital, joyful force in their visionary rewriting of modern community. Here the amatory register of the text takes shape in a leafing out of dependencies and obligations, gifts and goods, that criss-cross ideas of self and nation, to produce new genealogies of modern kinship. Joyce’s People If Leopold Bloom is abject, here pictured in his outhouse, there fending off anti-Semitic abuse, all the while clothed in mourner’s black, taking the part of a cuckold, then he is an image of degradation and defilement only ironically, from other characters’ perspectives. The hero of Ulysses (1922) becomes intimate to his readers, on the contrary, as a strange, ambulatory cryptogram of pleasure, a mundane vortex, a banal yet radiant node or cluster from which, through which, and into

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which diverse pleasures are constantly rushing. Kidneys are not forced nightmarishly upon him; he revels in them. Any interpretation that would isolate Bloom’s erotic value – say, as a fully eroticized body, or as work made pleasurable, or as pleasurable openness to intellectual exchange, or as empathy and compassion, or even as matrimonial love – would miss what is most radical in his characterization, which is precisely the liberation of libidinal sublimation into an indeterminate diversity of forms and expression, from the ephemeral to the consequential, from the personal to the political. The same liberation of a rationality of gratification (or subversion), rather than any particular gratification (or subversion), is expressed in the shifting styles of the novel. Bloom is the epic hero as imaginary father, the androgynous coexpression of mother and father, the heterogeneous circuitry of desire and relation beyond the self with which the self makes an identificatory alliance, one that will be posited for Stephen Dedalus on a nonviolent, compassionate, libidinal parallelism of their very differences from each other. Bloom is like Stephen associated with an economy of gifts and debts. Indeed, the whole of Ulysses, if Mark Osteen’s closely argued study is right, may be seen as a tapestry of variations on themes of gift and commodity exchanges and their ideologies. What I can present here will rest on what Osteen has established, with two differences in interpretation: (1) While Osteen views Stephen generally as an expression of the ‘spendthrift,’ non-Market side of Joyce’s person, the one throwing gifts in all directions, and Bloom as the expression of his more stingy, restrictive, ‘bourgeois’ side, the one more resentful and calculating, I will rather emphasize the expression of a gift economy not only in both protagonist figures but as that which enables their reciprocal recognition as imaginary kin. (2) For an anthropological authority, Osteen relies on literary scholar Lewis Hyde’s dualistic interpretation of gift versus commodity economies in The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1983), which was the most prominent appropriation of economic anthropology for literary scholars at the time of Osteen’s writing, and may still be. Hyde argues convincingly that modern arts are involved in both gift and commodity economies (as well as a larger thesis regarding art in general, which need not be debated here). He also emphasizes the erotic register of this involvement, and so lays the groundwork for my own and others’ studies of economic diversity in literary production. The usefulness of Hyde’s approach falls apart, however, from the perspective of current

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anthropological discourse, because it traps the two economic modes in a logos/eros dualism, indeed a familiar patriarchal dualism in which the latter is feminine, the former masculine, and, accordingly, the gift is irrational, libidinal, and unrestrained, while the commodity is calculated, reasoned, and controlled. This dualism has no basis, and rather counter-evidence, in the observations of current anthropology (and even in Mauss’s founding work) regarding societies primarily organized by gifts and goods; indeed, the dualism is a primitivist one. (We see this echoed in literary approaches today which take the surrealist Georges Bataille, who considered gift economies to be defined by abandon and excess, as a methodological authority.) The adoption of Hyde’s theories by Osteen results in a reading which aligns the gift with a kind of primitivist lack of restraint (Joyce as helplessly generous, careless with money and property), on the one hand, and with a feminized body (Joyce ventriloquizing Molly Bloom), on the other. Indeed, Osteen is too good a reader of Joyce to rest easy with Hyde’s antimony, and restlessly reconstitutes it as a mixture, conflict, or tension within figures such as Stephen, Bloom, and Molly. The limitation of this compromise solution is seen in the kind of general conclusion Osteen reaches regarding the combination of a ‘fluid gift economy’ and the bourgeois Market practices of ‘shrewdness, frugality, and selfinterest’ expressed in Molly and in the writing of ‘Penelope’ itself. The latter, he says, ‘embraces both power and generosity, both profit taking and gift giving.’44 These antinomies – power and generosity, taking and giving, fluidity and self-interest, etc. – have no grounds as such in ethnographic knowledge, of either aboriginal or imperialist modern societies. But do they in Joyce? In re-treading some of the economic ground already mapped out by Osteen, I will similarly consider Joyce’s figures as actors in a mixed economy of mixed heritages, but draw on House and Market concepts developed by anthropologists who, arrayed against such primitivism, attempt to re-politicize the logos of the gift as a tactical opportunity reproduced, however ambiguously or ambivalently, in aboriginal modernity. Bloom’s various loans and his donation to Dignam’s widow tacitly complement Stephen’s own abject and more explicitly anti-imperialist economic identity. What is the ‘proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s mouth?’ asks Mr Deasy: – I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. I paid my way. Good man, good man.

The Impure House 231 – I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life. Can you feel that? I owe nothing. Can you? Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties. Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings. Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob Reynolds, half a guinea, Kohler, three guineas, Mrs McKernan, five weeks’ board. The lump I have is useless. – For the moment, no, Stephen answered. Mr Deasy laughed with rich delight, putting back his savingsbox.45

The imperialist’s ideal is shallow but also pathetic, imagining the self as an island whose economic fantasy of freedom from obligations turn, with the resonant phrase ‘I owe nothing,’ into plain, self-willed alienation. Yet Stephen’s own ironic evaluation, ‘Good man, good man,’ sits uneasily against the discouraging thought that the lump of coin in his pocket will not allow him to pay back his own debts. While Joyce’s passage clearly satirizes the Irishman who has assimilated an imperialist ideology of the marketplace, and quietly suggests that it is perhaps not such a bad thing to belong to a tangle of loans and debts that characterizes Stephen’s life with his friends, Stephen is nevertheless dejected by the asymmetry of his dependence, and has no words with which to defend himself. That this economy is spiritual as well as material, that it permeates social relations, becomes apparent when we learn the words he has used, in the concision of a telegram, to explain to Mulligan why Mulligan has betrayed their friendship (again with typographic emphasis by Joyce): ‘The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.’ At first glance, this seems irrelevant to the event that divided the pair, Mulligan’s flippant reference to Stephen’s mother’s death.46 Yet for Stephen, this event (in keeping with Mulligan’s bantering style and easy existentialism) reveals Mulligan’s estrangement from a personal connection to friends like Stephen. Mulligan is a ‘sentimentalist,’ one who values his personal relationships with a veneer of affection, beneath which there are no strings attached. He loves persons as alienable things. Stephen’s implicit critique here of a personal assimilation of the Market receives more extended attention in subsequent discussions in the Library, where he takes the ‘capitalist’ and ‘rich countrygentleman’ Shakespeare to task for his will (the ‘secondbest’ inheritance he wills to his wife) – one of the most important forms of modern gift, perhaps the

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last major institution in imperialist heritage to perform an exchange of goods between the living and the dead. Stephen contrasts what he characterizes as a niggardly betrayal of his wife with the example of Aristotle, who ‘when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays tribute to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress.’ To this ideal figure of an aboriginal House economy, Stephen goes on to juxtapose both the capitalist-minded Shylock, in which Shakespeare simply mirrored himself (yet masked as a villainous other, a Jew), and the martial heroes of the history plays, who Stephen caustically sees ‘sail[ing] fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking enthusiasm.’ By the time we return to Bloom, whose financial activities are in the end revealed to be motivated by a desire to increase forms of gift and inheritance to his family after his death, we have come full circle to find the proper, elective ‘father’ for the young poet.47 The meeting of the drunk Stephen and the wandering Bloom in nighttown reveals the chain of imaginary transferences that binds them. Bloom calls Stephen’s name to rouse him, and is at first confused with Haines, the ‘black panther vampire,’ whose image inspires in Stephen a desperate longing to escape his degraded world – the same living-dead world of Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen, a song from which he now sings (and whose theme of buying and selling of souls he cites in the Shelter).48 However much scorn and ridicule Joyce heaps upon some features of the Celtic Renaissance, the mystical, aestheticized, aboriginal utopia of the early Yeats is here the setting for the climax of the novel, where Stephen and Bloom have alike been brought to their lowest, and the plot turns toward the world that flows from them and around them as a new symbolic alliance. The song Stephen chants is that sung by the escapist Bard, ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ As he finishes, he ‘stretches out his arms’ as if to grasp the ‘white breast … dim’ of the sea that earlier on the Strand he associated with a mother goddess – an ambivalent yet idealized image (see also his remarks on Anne Hathaway in the Library) that in the figure of his own deceased mother is one of irreparable loss. If the narrative ended here, its identification of an aboriginal past and culture with an irrecoverable past and female power, and with the antimodernist longings of the alienated artist, would spell nothing but a familiar modernist primitivism. But it is not incidental that Stephen reaches out to the image of Fergus for the image of his mother, because that figure operates for him as the very coagulation of male and female described by Kristeva in the

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imaginary father. This androgynous identification is playfully expressed by Joyce in Bloom’s misunderstanding of the murmured song: ‘In the shady wood. The deep white breast. Ferguson, I think I caught. A girl. Some girl.’ Bloom’s misidentification of Fergus as a woman is ironically close to the mark. The androgynous chain bleeds into Bloom’s description of Stephen himself: ‘Face reminds me of his poor mother.’ The endpoint in the chain is the person who here unexpectedly (to Stephen) responds to the hopeless outreach of his arms and song, for Fergus, for the mother – Bloom himself, who sees in Stephen a fantasy vision of his beloved son, and lifts him up and takes him on his way.49 But this evocation of Yeats and folk tradition as a redemptive landscape will inevitably recall Bloom’s meeting with a self-proclaimed representative of the nationalist Celtic revival, the violent, bigoted Citizen of the Tavern, who plays the role of the giant Polyphemos to our milder, more civilized hero. In other words, for Joyce it is Bloom, rather than an abject warrior or rough beast, who might answer Yeats’s historical longing for what I have called an aboriginal modernity. But if this is so, then a new primitivist figure must be imagined that will differentiate itself from the stark ugliness presented in the Citizen, and offer to both Stephen and Bloom a kind of confirmation of their alliance in yet another metaphorical father figure. This ancestral figure, the Eumaios of a later episode, will have to combine the symbolic and imaginary traces of both men, and express the kind of House, the meaning of identity and kinship, their bond embodies. This will be the sailor who mocks the nationalist ideals of the Shelter’s keeper – a man rumoured to have assisted in the terrorist assinations in Phoenix Park in 1882. In a ‘lengthy dissertation’ that ‘monopolis[es] all the conversation’ with his ‘axe to grind,’ the keeper builds a thesis that would cleanse an essential Irish identity from all foreignness. His concluding ‘advice to every Irishman,’ Joyce tells us, ‘was: stay in the land of your birth and work for Ireland and live for Ireland.’ These are but ‘lurid tidings’ to the sailor, who alone dares to deflate them: ‘Take a bit of doing, boss.’50 Against an embittered, essentialist ideal of autonomous Irish identity, and its narrow-minded prohibition upon travel, the sailor – who turns out to be quite a ham – holds the Shelter audience gripped in fascination and delight as he discourses upon his foreign travels, mixing exotic anecdotes with tall tales. Indeed, he so thoroughly performs himself and his life (insisting, for example, that his audience examine his official discharge document, naming him ‘W.B. Murphy, A.B.S.’ – a document drawn from a pocket that soon

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reveals itself to be a kind of ‘repository’ of props for his various stories)51 that everything about him undoes any sure distinction between truth and fiction. What remains authentic about him is the pleasure he gives in his stories, as well as the sense he gives to Bloom that they do mediate some kind of experience, if not in a realist way: ‘He could spin those yarns for hours on end all night long and lie like old boots,’ Bloom reflects, but then corrects himself: ‘Yet still, though his eyes were thick with sleep and sea air, life was full of a host of things and coincidences of a terrible nature and it was quite within the bounds of possibility that it was not an entire fabrication though at first blush there was not much inherent probability in all the spoof he got off his chest being strictly accurate gospel.’ The life of the sea is somehow the truth of the sailor’s fiction, and its nameless ‘things’ and ‘coincidences,’ filtered through ‘sleep and sea air,’ can only find authentic form in a deeply ambivalent – but here also pleasurable – play with language.52 Or rather, while the truth is here identical with the performance, it is also to be judged as such, as an aesthetic and political act. It is at this level of value that the sailor trumps the keeper, who is, after all, a similarly self-conscious and ambiguous performer of his personal and national identity. That Murphy functions in Ulysses to link the economy of the gift to a modernist sense of truth as performative is a conclusion similarly reached, along another path, by Osteen, who joins other readers in seeing the sailor as ‘Joyce in disguise’ because he is an allegory of the modernist as counterfeiter.53 But it is possible to pursue further his narrative function in the story, and the primitivism of his rustic comedy. The sailor is a parodic primitive, a flagrantly uncouth character whose stories climax when he tears his shirt open to expose an elaborate tattoo that itself performs with an artful twitching of muscles. When he produces from his pocket a postcard image of tribal people in South America, it becomes a centre of attention for all in the Shelter, and an object of study for Stephen and Bloom ‘for several minutes, if not more.’ It portrays a ‘group of savage women in striped loincloths, squatted, blinking, suckling, frowning, sleeping, amid a swarm of infants (there must have been quite a score of them) outside some primitive shanties of osier.’ Upon the image is printed, ‘Choza de Indios. Beni, Bolivia.’54 The postcard might have presented itself as an anthropological record of an other, of a people seemingly most foreign to the crowd at the Shelter; the fascination displayed by the crowd suggests in part why the keeper’s isolationist cultural program will ‘take some doing.’ But Bloom notices, in turning the postcard over, that the card

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has been mailed to a Sr. Boudin in Chile, rather than to Murphy. This rather undermines the authority of Murphy’s story, that he has ‘seen maneaters in Peru,’ and that his ‘friend’ sent this picture of them. There is also, of course, the confusion of Peru and Bolivia, which begins to raise questions not only about what Murphy says, but about what the image shows. Who are these people, really? Must they be from Peru or Bolivia, even? Might not the photograph be of nearly any shanty of impoverished indigenous women, packaged for the exotic tastes of the Galeria Becche (shopping arcade) which is Sr. Boudin’s address? The documentary evidence thus dissolves back into the fictional performance of Murphy himself, and along with it the quintessentially abject, primitivist figure of the unnamable cannibal mother. The recto-verso logic of Bloom’s subsequent reflection on the possibility of promoting tourism to the Irish (both within Ireland and beyond) is linked to this ambiguous status of the postcard: ‘Interesting to fathom, it seemed to him … was whether it was the traffic that created the route or vice-versa or the two sides in fact. He turned back the other side of the card picture and passed it along to Stephen.’ 55 Does the desire for the other create the means of representation, or the means of representation create the desire for the other? The medium the message, or the message the medium? There is no doubt here that the primitive is as much the product of the postcard, as the postcard is a record of the primitive. Yet the very performance of the primitive as such, as self-conscious parody, requires some unrepresented experience of difference, some perverse identification – the postcard, claimed to be a gift, probably in origin a commodity, has become along with his discharge document and stiletto a personal keepsake, a good – that attests to the sailor’s cosmopolitan rather than provincial resources in a construction of self and value. Hence the sailor may be seen as a protean, androgynous avatar of the sea-mother confronted by Stephen on the Strand, one who makes the most of the self-fictionalizing ‘impostures’ of the names (of the father) that Stephen discusses here with Bloom and earlier with his fellow scholars at the Library.56 Stephen might well learn from the seaman what in the Library he says Socrates learned from his wife and from his mother, both ‘dialectic,’ which there allows him to navigate beyond, by transforming and synthesizing, the modern false alternatives of ‘a sense of beauty’ and ‘a sense of property,’ as well as ‘how to bring thoughts into the world,’ the understanding of productivity via feminized languages of inalienable genealogy or indebtedness rather

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than masculinized parthenogenesis.57 Against the mere barbarism of the Citizen, then, the sailor represents Joyce’s ideal of the true modern primitive, whose working life is indistinct from his person or his pleasure, and whose social interactions (and, indeed, impossible representation of self) are designed to involve and include, rather than divide and expunge, a diverse cultural and sexual world, in a kind of uncanny personal unity. The narrative function of Joyce’s Eumaios is to mediate the perspectives and interests of Bloom and Stephen, still hardly more than strangers at this point, and enable their affinities (love of beauty, hatred of violence, curiosity regarding the different, openness to the new, and a drive to play with vision and language) to reveal themselves. In shared response to this self-theatricalizing primitive, a kind of sympathy emerges, glimmering uncannily through the pair’s differences: an appreciation of performance itself as an imaginary and semiotic principle. Thus Bloom is legitimated as Stephen’s imaginary father. In this context, it is worth noting another alternative father figure, for Murphy doubles an historical figure who similarly made captivating speeches challenging the notion of Irish political identity, standing on the very same spot, several years later. This was James Connolly, the socialist Easter Rising leader and founder of the Workers’ Republic declared in 1916, who made speeches here (today memorialized by a statue a few feet from the plaque memorializing the same location in Joyce’s novel) because the working-class headquarters of the revolutionary nationalists, Liberty Hall, stood just across the road from the cabman’s shelter – giving the location a strong political and historical association. Though Joyce’s intentions are unknowable, it is unlikely that he did not consider the powerful political charge, in Dublin memory, of this location when choreographing the first stage of an affiliation between Stephen and Bloom. That an economic unconscious of the marginalized House is channelled into this imaginary father figure I have already suggested above, regarding Bloom’s and Stephen’s own desire to (or feeling of obligation to) enmesh themselves in networks of gift and debt which for them are personalized and social rather than material and practical, as a way of being embedded in Dublin itself. To this may now be added their shared attitudes to work as indistinct from personal creativity and from non-work activities and pleasures – in short, as nonalienated labour. Yet one might well ask whether the elective rather than consanguine Bloom-Stephen alliance, and the heterogeneous community epitomized in Bloom’s definition of a nation as ‘the same

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people living in the same place,’58 are consistent with the notion of House, and of aboriginal modernity in House societies, developed in this book. If it were not for the scorn continually heaped upon liberal individualism in the novel, one might think Joyce’s own modern liberalism part and parcel of the Market relations of capitalist culture, rather than the resurgence of House relations from an economic unconscious. But this dichotomy is false. For while the House may well be a conservative institution, its values and obligations should not be too hastily confused with clannishness or blood loyalty, much less an opposition to individual agency and choice. It is useful here to return to the original definition of House proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, upon which all later interpretations, including Chris Gregory’s employed in the present study, are based. The House refers to a social formation quite different from family, lineage, clan, tribe, or village. It is constituted, economically, as a heritage: ‘a corporate body holding an estate made up of both material and immaterial wealth, which perpetuates itself through the transmission of its name, its goods, and its titles down a real or imaginary line, considered legitimate as long as this continuity can express itself in the language of kinship or of affinity and, most often, of both.’59 The principal point here is that a ‘language of kinship,’ rather than kinship as a biological fact, gives the House its coherence. Lévi-Strauss is responding to an ethnographic record that increasingly reveals biological kinship rules and regulations, not to mention the more general image of a rigidly static institutional life of which these are mechanisms, to be a fantasy of the modern anthropologist. In her genealogy of the House concept, anthropologist Susan Gillespie affirms its continuing usefulness for this very reason: ‘Ethnographic descriptions have dispelled the notion that prescriptive and proscriptive kinship “rules” govern social life. Kin ties are acknowledged to be optative and mutable rather than established at birth or marriage, and “fictive” relationships can be considered just as legitimate as “biological” ones.’60 Against the primitivist stereotype of robotic individual regulation arise the observed facts of individuals making socially and historically significant choices, and using a ‘language of kinship’ – rather than, for example, the language of liberal individual rights – to do so. If kinship is a language and its expression a kind of fiction, then the House itself is not an institution unified by an essential set of customs driven by blood and marriage, but is the reverse, a set of alliances and customs held contingently together, from one moment to the next, by its reproduction and

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interpretation of heritage, and negotiation and distribution of wealth. The House has ‘no singular form of affiliation’: ‘Descent and inheritance may flow through either or both parents depending on circumstances; endogamy and exogamy may coexist; postmarital residence is contingent on a number of factors; and marriage patterns, exchange relations, co-residence, or shared labour may be the primary determinants of social relationships, rather than their outcomes.’61 In short, the House is a dynamic, pragmatic, and semiotic social structure. It is also a comparative social category, one that transcends Western and nonWestern boundaries, applicable to modern Native people of the Pacific Northwest as well as to medieval Europeans; this aspect of the definition persists in Gregory’s non-primitivist, comparative model of House, Market, and State, and in the work of a host of new ethnographies of modern and Western social forms and groups.62 These ideas form an important part of the politics of my own argument, since the category of House, and the notion of aboriginal modernity, do not need to confine us to a regressive social ideal, to the celebration of a ‘traditional’ way of life that may be the opposite of emancipatory.63 For Lévi-Strauss, the House does not function as just any kind of fiction. It is specifically a ‘fetish’ in the Marxist sense, because it ‘projects an outward façade of unity’ that ‘masks underlying tensions and conflicting loyalties’ for a people who must live together but have conflicting interests and obligations, both as individuals and as groups, as a result of the heterogeneity and contingency of House membership produced by ‘cross-cutting’ lines of alliance and descent.64 The House is thus uniquely among social forms, not a set kind of relationship itself, but the ‘objectification of a relation’; its solidity is ‘illusory’ and in practice justifies conservation as well as change.65 This concept of House converges precisely with Strathern’s argument that gift economies are regulated by aesthetic rather than ideological objectifications. But an aesthetic or ‘language of kinship’ may be oppressive or not, racialized or not, sexist or not. What if we imagine a ‘language of kinship’ being deployed knowingly as a language, and its ‘illusory’ community created knowingly as illusion – that is, by the person whose métier is the knowing mimesis of their world in words? The fetish becomes art, and no less real. This is the self-reflexive, microcosmic fetish that Joyce produces, I would argue, in Ulysses and its cross-cut couples, fictive kinships, and imaginary descents. The rejection of patriarchal genealogy by Stephen, the election of Stephen as a kind of son by Bloom, the imagination of

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maternal descent by Molly, and, more generally, the heterogeneous community announced by Bloom as the proper form of the nation, are none of them uniquely the projections of a liberal capitalist society, except from a primitivist perspective that is blind to any form of historical dynamism or destiny outside the Market form. They are just as readily the assertions of a modern House that Joyce would construct for Ireland, or at least as its possible future in 1904. Indeed, given the insistence of a gift economy and non-alienated work that are bound to these bits and pieces of imagined community, the House is the more plausible. To see the novel in this way is additionally helpful in sorting out some of the ambiguity in Joyce’s own remarks on Irish nationalism and modernity. His famous remarks on the heterogeneous heritage yet unique identity of Ireland come quite clear: Our [Irish] civilization is an immense woven fabric in which very different elements are mixed, in which Nordic rapacity is reconciled to Roman law, and new Bourgeois conventions to the remains of a Siriac religion. In such a fabric, it is pointless searching for a thread that has remained pure, virgin and uninfluenced by other threads nearby. What race or language (if we except those few which a humourous will seems to have preserved in ice, such as the people of Iceland) can nowadays claim to be pure? No race has less right to make such a boast than the one presently inhabiting Ireland.

So far, it seems that Joyce might be heading in a post-national direction, toward some cosmopolitan or individualist ideal. But Joyce wishes to preserve the idea of national identity: Nationality (if this is not really a useful fiction like many others which the scalpels of the present-day scientists have put paid to) must find its basic reason for being in something that surpasses, that transcends and that informs changeable entities such as blood or human speech. The mystic theologian who assumed the pseudonym of Dionysius the Areopagite said somewhere that ‘God has arranged the limits of the nations according to his angels’ and this is probably not purely a mystic concept. In Ireland we can see how the Danes, the Firbolgs, the Milesians from Spain, the Norman invaders, the Anglo-Saxon colonists and the Huguenots came together to form a new entity, under the influence of a local god, one might say. And although the present race in Ireland is second-rate and backward, it merits some consideration as it is the only one in the entire Celtic family that refused to sell its birthright for a plate of lentils.66

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The new conception of national identity is at first delinked from Celtic blood and language, then attached to an aestheticized image of metaphysical difference: Ireland has a unique purpose and good in the divine order of things, but, we are told, we must translate this out of mysticism. It has its ‘local god,’ but not literally so. He insists on an image of essential Irish difference, but without yet saying to what reality the image attaches. Then comes an explanation: the essence is historical. What is Irish is, at least in part, the ethnogenic way in which the various groups he lists came together, as a ‘new entity.’ Multiculturalism and cultural conflict are thus embedded by Joyce in his own myth of what Stephen calls the ‘same people’s’ identity and origins. Yet there is more: the closing sentence in this sequence tacitly assimilates this very heterogeneity to Celticism itself. The effect is not to erase the welter by superimposing a new image of a single person, a Celtic family member, on top of it. The effect is more surprising, which is to transfer Joyce’s modernist myth of (multiple, historical, processual) origins and identity to Celticism, and hence to the reigning icon of Irish heritage and imperialist resistance. This impure Celt (reminiscent of the sailor Murphy) is not surprisingly, then, also unique in refusing ‘to sell’ its very origins as such, its heritage as an inalienable possession. Here we see Joyce, as in Ulysses, reaching for the category of the inalienable possession, specifically the agonized field of the nation as inheritance, to express a utopian resistance to the values of the modern imperialist Market. I say utopian, because here as in Ulysses this resistance is not anchored in an imagined individualism or elitism, in the alienated identity of a genius aesthete or bohemian coterie. Rather it is grounded in a struggle over public memory, and indeed the nature of the public itself as constituted by text and memory. When Joyce says that he strove not only to ‘put the great talkers of Dublin into my book,’ but also ‘what they forgot,’ he gives us the blueprint for his new heritage myth – one that will be inclusive, offer an improved memory, a fuller and more empowering inheritance.67 This ‘new entity’ and its literary memory, this imaginary body, looms over the novel, lovingly reconstructing even the squabbles in a tavern or library rather than simply mocking or upbraiding them. This lover of memory for its own sake, or rather for the sake of a witness to a community in progress, is of course Joyce’s fetish, his reinvented House: The legitimacy and status of the house qua house often derives from the acknowledgment of ties to illustrious founders, usually house ancestors;

The Impure House 241 ancestor veneration itself is a ‘historicist’ means for ‘implementing dynamic options in social life.’ Authority for actions in the present is based on precedence extending back into a legendary or even primordial past. Descent in the biological sense is only one component of a larger concern for shared origin, which serves to localize and bind a social group.68

Just as the House as fetish, we are told, uses the language of kinship to represent the community as a vast body animated by ancestral spirits – by the blood of history as witnessed by memory and interpretation – so too does Ulysses imagine Dublin a vast sensual body whose mundane verbal exchanges continue to reanimate shades of the past (the ghost of Parnell, among many less famous in 1904) as imaginary presences with negotiable meanings.69 Joyce explicitly sees Irish identity as real, but unarticulated – or rather badly articulated either as an imperialist cliché or a racialist fantasy. He therefore aims to remember a new range of ancestral spirits, from the fictional but plausible Bloom to the actual Parnell (both, one must note, associated with transgressive love relationships), that are ethnically and socially diverse, yet still historically unique in their uneasy synthesis. Irish identity is real because one cannot alter the past of a place, only remember or forget it. Stephen feels this burden: history is something haunting, nightmarish, yet for him as ineluctable as the visible and audible. When Stephen tells Bloom, rather testily, that ‘Ireland must be important because it belongs to me,’ we must not read this as a claim to appropriate Ireland to some free artistic individualism, for he adds: ‘We can’t change the country.’70 This is the ‘birthright’ he struggles with, for better or worse, his inalienable possession. To put this inheritance as inheritance into words is Joyce’s project. Ulysses in its homeward journey encodes a new language of kinship: one of multicultural memory, of an aggregate community based on gifts and debts, of ineluctable obligation rather than owing nothing, and of reverse appropriation of imperialist heritage and Market forms to these ends (there is after all room for Shakespeare, just as for the buying and selling of books). An inclusive heritage and a heritage of obligation, of commitment – but to what? The answer is everywhere in Ulysses: to the love of music, of talk, of baths, of sex, of work, and so on and so on; to the branching, leafing, and blossoming of a satisfying future. This assertion recalls the ‘androgynous’ nexus of pre-Oedipal ‘sensuous joys of polymorphous perversity’ that Suzette Henke, among others, has seen in Bloom, the epic hero come to set his House in

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order.71 I have argued that in Ulysses this imaginary father is the conduit for a political unconscious that would reproduce a modern House. Yet at least two other critics, Lois Cucullu and John Xiros Cooper, have seen the sensually liberated Bloom as a symptom rather of the Market. Yet others have seen Ulysses, the book itself, in the same light. I will return now to this area of critique, in order to suggest that its limitation is not descriptive (since Joyce’s text does express, and his book does participate in, the social forms of a Market economy), but theoretical, based as it is on a primitivist dualism between House and Market as mutually exclusive forms, both temporally and spatially. Cooper sees the sexual liberations of Ulysses, as in modernist bohemia generally, to be products of a modern liberalism achieved by the Market – one that is today, moreover, no longer avant-garde but mundane. The key social form of this Market modernity – its ‘language of kinship,’ we might say – is the ‘pure relationship.’ He draws this concept from the social theorist Anthony Giddens, and finds its most powerful models in the passionate, unconventional love relationships announced by Wuthering Heights and codified by Women in Love. As opposed to the externally and collectively authorized rules and regulations Cooper supposes to define the bond between traditional individuals, in modern ‘pure relationships’ individuals form bonds that are internally referential and self-governed. This comes about because the Market tends to abolish any given social forms as too restrictive, too awkwardly general, in favour of contingent, contractual forms devised on the spot to serve a purpose. Social structure is a dizzying, variegated whirl of creation and destruction carried on over a void, by individuals freed from social constraints to develop themselves, and their relationships, however they can. Bloom is an icon for this new Market life, according to Cooper, more than a symbolic resistance to it. Cooper paints the ‘pure relationship’ against the backdrop of a grand historical narrative supplied by Lawrence Friedman, the modern transition from a ‘vertical’ society of ‘hierarchical authority – attachment and loyalty to parents, priests, political leaders, patriarchs, matriarchs, and so on’ – to a ‘radical horizontalizing of social relations.’ While Friedman attributes this transition to the development of communications media, Cooper attributes it to the Market: ‘The market eviscerates older vertical bonds because they stand in the way of the horizontal bliss of buying and selling and of the commodification process in general. And this process takes in the self as easily as it takes in the object … Hierarchy, ancestor worship, and vertical loyalties of blood and kinship are the

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enemy for this new order of things. Chosen, not inherited, attachments (once called loyalties), the new bohemias of like-minded individuals, and the fabrication of selves sketch the outlines of capitalist society and culture.’72 Cooper reminds us of this transition again and again, always in similarly stark terms. Tradition always appears in the heavy robes of an intransigent, authoritarian social form, while the Market blasts through it with the inhuman energy of Ariel, a thing of force more than form, and with disintegrating effects. Hence, against the pressure, the corrosion, the permeation, the cascades, the engine-power of the Market in history, are ranged feeble bulwarks of the settled, the inertial, the entangling, the restrictive, the monolithic in traditional society.73 The one is unstoppable, the other is doomed. ‘Where some of these ancient communalist traditions still remain as I write … it is only a matter of time before they too lie in ruins.’74 Aligned with this grand narrative is a transition from values, norms, practices, identities, and social forms that are simply given, that is, considered natural and unquestioningly inherited, to those that are chosen, that is, ceaselessly constructed and agonizingly negotiated. Cooper agrees with Friedman that modernity must be grasped as the antithesis of a world of social restriction in which individual agency and consciousness are, as in some Orwellian dystopia, the mere armatures of some centralized, circular, unchanging groupthink: ‘Relationships in traditional families, clans, tribes, societies are organized around hierarchical or vertical authority structures in which there are settled lines of dominion that run from top to bottom and back again. Clearly set out reciprocal rights and obligations address the relations among the different social levels. In vertical society, individual identity is more strictly regulated – your place of birth, your gender, your family’s traditional occupations, and the government of a particular kinship system determine to a very large extent sense of self and of the available menu of probabilities in the life span.’ In ‘market-driven society,’ however, we enter ‘the republic of choice.’75 Here, the only social form that fends off atomized chaos is the ‘pure relationship.’ It is characterized by ‘commitment,’ which Giddens says ‘replaces the external anchors that close personal connections used to have in pre-modern societies’; by ‘intimacy’; by ‘trust,’ which ‘cannot be taken as “given”’ and must rather ‘be worked at’ and ‘won’; and by ‘recognition,’ which ‘begins in the mutually affirming responses to each other’s self-identity’ and is ‘expanded’ by ‘self-exploration’ and ‘intimacy.’76 The very same dualisms run through this definition, using

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the traditional automaton, whose self remains unexplored and whose relationships are dictated like doctor’s prescriptions, as a primitivist foil for the modern one. The importance of Ulysses, says Cooper, is to have understood and ‘comprehensively enacted’ this new dispensation: ‘The liberation of human energies in the context of a radical individualism is accompanied by a loosening of the social bond. The novel traces Bloom’s and Stephen’s attempts to find again a coherent network of communal relations, those which are given, but cannot satisfy, because they are no longer vital or significant, and those which are created and sustained by the conscious effort of the participants.’ The fragile, ambiguous, elective relationship between Bloom and Stephen is to be grasped as a ‘pure relationship’ in this sense. Moreover, because it cannot anchor itself in external social forms, it must do so only in the interplay of isolated, abstracted ‘forms of consciousness,’ whose larger community may have an imagined but no real institutional form (apart from the Market).77 Hence, in Ulysses we find ‘an abstracted, or more strictly an immanent, pattern of relationships, not the lived relations of possibly actual historical actors and communities, but disembedded and re-presented as myths or transhistorical typologies, of Bloom as the Wandering Jew, of man and woman, father and son as primordial relations. We still have a family, but a family as myth, not a family you can go home to. The total effect is of human relations without human contact and free radicals of character searching for each other through a phantasmagoria of myth.’78 This is hardly good news for those like myself who would see in Bloom and Stephen’s relationship, on the contrary, the representation of a social form embedded in Irish heritage as Joyce wishes to mediate it (via all the talkers) and remember it (via what they’ve forgotten). But from the perspective of the present study, Cooper’s characterization is based on an unjustified dichotomy between the given and the worked, the fixed and the mutable, the scripted and the conscious. The desolate view of the ‘pure relationship’ is deepened by Cooper’s view of Bloom himself, whom he sees as a product of Market nihilism, a twin to Musil’s ‘man without qualities’ who has ‘any qualities he cares to take on,’ indeed a chaos of qualities. What Bloom ‘lacks is a principle of order that organizes them into a practical hierarchy of values.’79 Is it really true that Bloom appears to have no ‘practical hierarchy of values’? If this were so, would he not be an inconsistent personality, not only morally but also in other codes of value? I find

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Bloom rather consistent in his aesthetic tastes, his sense of duty, and his moral evaluations. And these have their roots in the ‘external anchors’ of an Irish heritage that Joyce wishes to show encoded, too, in the speech and manners of other Dubliners, and to memorialize in his book. Yet Cooper’s nihilist type and author of ‘pure relationships’ does exist in Joyce’s novel: it is Mulligan. Here we do have a man with no ‘practical hierarchy of values,’ whose values therefore collapse into whatever momentary wants he may feel, financial, affective, or otherwise, values that may betray themselves from one situation to the next, as he finds exigent. Here is the true Nietzschean Market type, and even bohemian type, forced out of the modernist closet by Cooper’s study. Mulligan is initially paired with Stephen because they share a sceptical view of institutional norms and ideas. Making theatres of themselves, loving quotation and costume, they are caught up in a process of youthful self-fashioning. Yet Mulligan makes and remakes himself and his relationships with crude disregard for the feelings, values, and needs of others entrusted to them. His is an alienated self-fashioning; to him, everything outside the self is an alienable resource. Stephen, as I have said, feels compelled to reckon continuously with what he owes to others, and they owe to him; he is obsessed with genealogy and inheritance. His self-fashioning is embedded in persons and things that cannot be alienated from their history. His insistence upon the presence of history and biography in Shakespeare’s texts is a case in point: the literati accept Shakespeare’s work as an abstraction from time and place, while Stephen sees it as an imperialist inheritance that conveys a host of ambivalent values, from Shakespeare’s time right down to the present. The world outside the self is a world of gifts and responsibilities, haunted by the values and feelings of others. A different example may be drawn from Bloom. While Cooper argues that Bloom is an icon for the Market-driven ‘multiplication or collage of selves, not as an evolutionary development, one thing emerging from another, but as semi-autonomous elements juxtaposed in a blank space,’ nothing could be further from what Joyce painstakingly attempts to trace in Bloom’s own self-fashioning. If Bloom were such a ‘blank space,’ he would not retain Jewish heritage as a part of his identity. In the Tavern, at home with Stephen, and elsewhere, we see that being in Stephen’s phrase ‘a horrible example of free thought’ does not arise from a jettisoning of his Jewishness; he is like Stephen, indeed, the ‘ghost’ of his own ancestors, both in his external persecution by

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others and in his internalization of a history of persecution (an inheritance of family knowledge and perhaps reading) in a creed of multicultural tolerance and political non-violence.80 He twice identifies himself as both Irish and Jewish,81 and in both cases the identification is linked with historical knowledge, political ideals, and moral judgments. His multiplicity is not collaged over a void, then, but emergent from family and national heritage. It is worth labouring somewhat to root out the primitivist groundplan of Cooper’s argument, because what is then left over remains a daring and insightful corrective to any view of modernism as isolated from the social forms and values of imperialist modernity and its Market domination. If I have argued that the House, rather than the Market, is the central economic form that Ulysses encodes in its epic ambition, this is merely to open up the context of imperialist modernity to its own irreducible multiplicity – at minimum, its particular triangulation of House, State, and Market as institutional forms. According to the modern malaise diagnosed by Kristeva, we moderns too easily lose or lack an imaginary father, that site of heterogeneous identification, of imaginary transference, above which the restless displacements of the symbolic order are suspended. This is the psychological ailment of a ‘world in which the Other has collapsed,’ due either to excessive ‘strictness’ or mere ‘lapse,’ but it is also the beginning of all ‘great modern literature.’82 My argument has been that an economic unconscious has released itself in the figure of an imaginary father in Bloom, and beyond Bloom in Ulysses’ others, in order to articulate a new Other. Yet there is in Ulysses, in bohemia, and in modernism unquestionably, as we have seen in earlier parts, figures of self and forms of social life that do not evoke this imaginary solution, even as they take a resistant stance toward the Market values of imperialist modernity. It is these figures and forms that Mulligan represents. He is just as much a figure of intellectual and sexual freedom, and more so of theatrical multiplicity, as Bloom. Yet he liberates his ideas and appetites only in order to dehumanize those on whom he depends for them. In modernist works that seek the imaginary father-mother-lover, this figure of chaotic, selfish impulses, who cannot properly identify with anyone but a narcissistic void in himself, will be the typically abject villain. In Ulysses, Mulligan seems after all left to the margins, and we are invited to celebrate Joyce’s re-imagination of a people – his people – in the House relations of Bloom, Molly, and Stephen. But this plot need not be a romance, and Mulligan might not have been left so far from its

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centre. A tragic poet of this alternate scenario, of the abject defeat of the imaginary lover, is Djuna Barnes, who returns again and again to the figure of the sexually liberated, polymorphous perverse egoist as the emblem of a seductive yet oppressive alternative to a more genuinely alternative, satisfying social life.83 In Nightwood (1936), a textbook case of the kinship between bohemia and the Market described by Cooper, this abject figure is the lesbian Robin Vote, whom her lover, Nora Flood, both desires for her terrifically animal, free sexuality, and distrusts for her inhuman lack of any ‘practical hierarchy of values.’ All the characters but for Nora and Matthew O’Connor mirror Robin in these ways, and all are caught up in exuberant, theatrical selffashioning tinged by the abject. Yet this novel belongs to the present discussion, rather than previous ones, because the figure of an imaginary lover, though nothing but a compulsion, a feeling of debt without a creditor, of possession without possessor, is all that endures the abject wake of a destructive plot, and is what simply grips us. Robin betrays Nora’s love by failing to reciprocate her imaginary transference: ‘She is myself,’ Nora says, but Robin cannot reply; she gives herself to others as if Nora were forgotten, merely the person sitting at home, rather than embodied in herself.84 Hence the imaginary lover, which we come to know through Nora’s desire, is evoked as imaginary, as an empty mirror turned aside. Nora wants her House to be reflected there – not her own home, but specifically Nora and Robin’s home, the contract initiated at the circus when Robin says, ‘I don’t want to be here’ without knowing where she might go, and Nora takes her home, ‘as if [Robin] were aware, without conscious knowledge, that she belonged to Nora, and that if Nora did not make it permanent by her own strength, she would forget.’ And she does forget. Her indebtedness, in Stephen’s telegraphic phrase, is that of a sentimentalist. Robin like Mulligan is demystified, a betrayer, but no Bloom arrives to lift Nora out of despair and engage her in a series of intellectual and material exchanges born of love or inviting trust.85 In free fall toward the abject, but refusing to forget love, Barnes suspends us in the melancholia of an empty House.86 Yet Barnes claims this House for women. This stands in contrast to the sexual politics of Ulysses. For all its radical imagination of a world unassimilated to imperialist modernity, ‘we need to be cognizant,’ Lois Cucullu reminds us, ‘of what makes Joyce’s representation of the modern subject and metropolitan epic possible,’ which is the appropriation of the domestic discourse and authority of a woman, ‘couchant Molly,’

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by her ‘consort, cultural Bloom: the one stays in bed, the other canvasses the metropolis; one is desire incarnate and the other, humanity ascendant. In this doublet, not only is the affective realm being conveyed to Bloom’s male provenance as was the case with Gabriel’s in [the final section of] “The Dead,” but, as a corollary, so also is procreative sex being transformed and along with it the maternal function … Bloom’s increase in affect works by Molly’s diminution. With her gain in sexual potency and corresponding loss in social authority, there is also a noticeable decline in motherly beneficence as this capacity is also ceded to her husband.’ Though Cucullu’s depiction of Molly as ‘reduced to the bedroom’ overlooks the spaces she inhabits in her professional life, and of her monologue as depthless ‘garrulity,’ a ‘random and repetitive discursivity,’ is not entirely fair (especially in ostensible contrast to Bloom), her general point is a compelling one. Molly is certainly not granted the kind of social interests or authority that we find articulated by Stephen, Bloom, and the many other Dublin men they meet. Her representation is perhaps a site of conflict for Joyce, a struggle to do justice to this central character as full person, as animated by his utopian social vision as the others (so the proper lover-sister in the cosmogenic pair), while sacrificing her to the abject drive, a thing of nature, that will instead clear the field for this vision: In Ulysses, enveloping woman in a miasma of desire and remanding her to bed, consistent with Joyce’s epistolary exchange with his mother and with his fictional representations of Emily Sinico and Gretta Conroy, conveys the social matrix, under the guise of a contrived female weakness and/or natural excrescence, over to new oversight and expertise. The end result is to make possible a new source of cultural authority and mobility, Bloomian humanism, and a new form of cultural practice, Stephen’s art – of which both Joyce is artificer. Embedding domestic woman in nature allows him to assimilate the domestic woman’s affective authority as humanism and to reterritorialize the social realm as culture.87

Just how striking and disturbing this dichotomy is can be seen in a gendered contrast homologous to that of Molly and Bloom, which I have already discussed: the postcard of the necessarily silent, sleepy ‘savage women’ and their ‘swarm’ of babies in contrast to the loquacious sailor who interprets them to his own people. To explain why Joyce must sever the domestic realm from the feminine, and appropriate it to the service of a new, cosmopolitan ideology

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of a patriarchal elite, Cucullu resorts to a view of modernity similar to Cooper’s: the full expansion of the Market favours a polymorphous perverse liberation of desires and values. The culture of consumption is a vast circuitry of commodified desires, which is in Bloom’s sensual diversity and mobility, and in Molly’s words and body, clothed in Nature. I will not repeat in full my objection that such regressions and liberations are identifiable with the Market only along one line of flight for the abject modernist, the Mulligan type. This type, I believe, is rightly to be seen at the core of modernist entanglements in the imperialist Market, and we must learn from it; but to see it as uniquely essential or triumphant, as the deep structure of modernist culture, is to bow down to a capitalist fatalism that is mythic. When Cucullu indicts Ulysses for ‘denigrating’ the popular culture that is the lingua franca of the humanist Everyman its author wishes to embrace, and for appropriating it, by contrast, to produce a text and readership that consecrates a new bourgeois elite, she must sense the uncertain support these claims have in the content of the novel, for she clinches her argument with a materialist turn: ‘Lest we doubt the monopoly of competence and the production of a cosmopolitan class to exercise that competence, we have Lawrence Rainey’s research that traces the publication of Ulysses.’88 She also cites Rainey as an authority on the commodification of modernism generally, and characterizes Ulysses as a ‘commodity right from the start,’ as if it had no other economic life.89 I have already explored some logical problems with Rainey’s Market fatalism. Unfortunately, a more careful study of the readership of Ulysses has undermined even Rainey’s materialist description of the life of this book. Correcting Rainey’s assertion that Ulysses was produced and purchased primarily as a commodity for market speculation, hence for commercial value, Edward L. Bishop has shown that the book was bought primarily to be read, and, in general, by diverse (and some unexpected) groups motivated by decidedly non-commercial values. Among the many values attributed to this book by such groups, I would argue, is the value as a good that for a particular group (bohemian, queer, socialist, aestheticist, or whatever) expressed its values and encoded its manners and practices.90 And like a hieratic mask or language similarly valued, such a good may become not only a text to be read but a position from which to speak and hear, as Mark Morrisson has closely argued, with the production of new and alternative public spheres wrought in great part from Market institutions themselves.91

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From an institutional perspective, however, Joyce’s sexual-political division of the ‘couchant’ Molly and ‘cultural’ Bloom is admittedly jarring, since we immediately see both Joyce and Ulysses surrounded by women patrons, publishers, journalists, and artists who are closer akin to Bloom than to Molly, and give their labour to the novel’s publication and promotion. Indeed, if there is a ‘couchant’ figure in this scenario, it is the dejected Joyce, dependent on the professional efforts of women like Harriet Weaver, Margaret Anderson, and Sylvia Beach to translate his private garrulity into a cultural event. This is also exactly what Barnes does for the Left Bank raconteur, Dan Mahoney, when she immortalizes him as the bedridden, Irish Tiresias of Nightwood. Layered into this figure, moreover, is Barnes’s early obsession with J.M. Synge and her many parodies and appropriations of Synge’s primitivist Irish voices in her dramatic work, so that Dr O’Connor is both a figure of the cosmopolitan deject and a persistence of the noble savage. Of course, who is really ‘couchant’ and who ‘cultural,’ the male or female writer, is a false question assuming an image of cultural singularity. In reality, we see a proliferation of sometimes competing figures of mediation and appropriation, as male and female writers build overlapping, multiple artist and intellectual coteries and multiple circles of literature owners and readers, partly inspired by but not entirely regulated by the ethnogenetic projects of their writing. These modernist publics are more particularly understood as new kinds of communities of affiliation, according to Alice Gambrell’s persuasive response to Raymond Williams and Edward Said, which I will here extend beyond artist groups to those who possess and read modernist literature for the indeterminate array of reasons discussed in part 2. Such communities, says Gambrell, may creatively free themselves from strict patriarchy, while producing and securing new, masculinist aesthetics of domination comparable to those in non-patriarchal tribal societies.92 Yet other imaginative ethnogeneses, which neither replicate the cultural/couchant dichotomy of male modernism, nor parody it or invert it in a gynocentric aesthetic, may also emerge. Here the work of H.D. is exemplary. H.D.’s Heritages An alternative scenario to those of Joyce and Barnes just sketched out is for the ‘couchant’ figure to reverse the flow and appropriate the authority of her ‘cultural’ mediator, and this is what we see literally

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depicted in H.D.’s ‘Writing on the Wall’ (1945–6; republished in Tribute to Freud [1956]). Susan Stanford Friedman has seen this text among a constellation of works following H.D.’s analysis with Freud, including her great meditation on heritage, history, magic, and modernity in the amatory register, The Gift (composed 1941–4). This constellation marks a turning point in her aesthetic, political, and self-understanding, and makes possible such remarkable, feminist modernist transformations of epic heritage as Trilogy (1944–6) and Helen in Egypt (1961). A full-dress deconstruction of the couchant woman–cultural man dyad that is exemplary in Ulysses – and the mythical method it comes to represent in a canonical modernism codified by Eliot – is found in the ‘Callypso’ verses belonging to the same transitional period. Here, as Friedman and Adalaide Morris have pointed out, the hero modernized by Joyce is viewed as himself an amatory betrayer of what I have called the crudely instrumentalist, Mulligan type, a manipulator of commodities rather than gifts.93 Ironically, in other words, a modern Odysseus restores his House by alienating Callypso and appropriating her gifts. ‘She gave me fresh water in an earth-jar, / strange fruits / to quench thirst, / a golden zither / to work magic on the water,’ begins Odysseus’s long list of her gifts to him, to which Callypso responds, ‘He has gone, / he has forgotten; / he took my lute and my shell of crystal – / he never looked back –’ while Odysseus blithely continues his enumeration, and Callypso concludes: ‘– for man is a brute and a fool.’94 This exchange that fails to be an exchange (neither hears the other) recalls, in its spare style and movement between the delicate and the harsh, the tone of the later Yeats. The abject heroes and paralyzed priestesses of Yeats’s later drama are here seen from a reverse perspective, one that H.D. will be able to work through toward a sexually decentred, as opposed to patriarchal, restoration of the modern House. If male modernists typically aimed to restore the House along with an imaginary identification with maternal desire and authority (via the imaginary father), they generally wished to keep symbolic authority to themselves. This symbolic authority is reclaimed by a female modernist who will not only look to repressed history and experience for a renewal of values, but will also be their writer. This writer will produce texts that will function as commodities, gifts, and goods, and will be produced in alternative public spheres of women publishers, buyers, writers, readers, and activists whose Market aspect, the economic evidence would suggest, is itself a resource to and transvalued by the motives of a gift economy.95

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Fortunately, I need not argue again what Adalaide Morris has so influentially demonstrated, that the personal, poetic, and political project basic to H.D.’s life and work is the cultivation and maintenance of a modern gift economy. The gift and all its variations – debt, sacrifice, reciprocity, tribute, inheritance, heritage, keepsake, and so on – are evidently the thematic warp strings upon which H.D. weaves her diverse colours, drawn from the depths of memory unlocked by psychoanalysis and by the archaic heritages revealed by modernist anthropology and classicism. Morris does not take much notice of Market realms, such as the rentier culture illuminated by Delany, to which this gift economy was definitively tied. But she does discuss the new kinds of kinship, and language of kinship, that H.D. produces in parenting her child, Perdita, as a kind of gift or inalienable possession shared among other parents (and it will shortly be clear why this has literary significance): For H.D., the child was never primarily hers, much less [the presumed biological father, Cecil] Gray’s or [the legal father, Richard] Aldington’s, but rather the nexus of the group Rachel Blau DuPlessis has called her ‘sufficient family.’ In naming her daughter for [her companion of youth] Frances Gregg and passing her on to Bryher [her current companion, who legally adopts Perdita], H.D. bound past and present together and firmed her new alliance with Bryher through shared responsibility for the child. When Bryher married Kenneth Macpherson, Macpherson took the place of the father in this unconventional but tenacious family of four. In many groups outside Western twentieth-century white middle-class culture, child keeping was a shared responsibility, part of the flux and elasticity of kinship networks. The adults who cared for Perdita (including, variously, Bryher and her parents, H.D.’s mother and Aunt Laura, Kenneth Macpherson, and Silvia Dobson) constitute H.D.’s chosen kin.

One cannot rush to idealize such a family as happier, more caring, or more egalitarian for its members, yet its differences from the norm are profound.96 Perdita here lives – as do her doubles in all the boy and girl children of H.D.’s post-Freudian narratives – a kinship structure of the modern House, one built of ‘pure relationships’ perhaps, but not of alienable Market properties and exchange. Remarkable here is not an undertow of nihilist alienation that would drag such intimacies into symbolic flows of a Market niche, but, on the contrary, an imaginary logic of gift and obligation that would resist the appropriation of name

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and identity to the discretionary capital of any transcending authority, whether of the patriarch or the liberal individual. In seeking authority, or simply legibility, for this kind of kinship, H.D. reaches for the mythical method. Morris observes that H.D.’s choice of the name Perdita alludes both to Shakespeare and to the Koré/Persephone version of the Adonis myth, and that the myth of ‘Koré’s yearly return to Demeter … reinforces the sense that a child is a gift bestowed at the will of larger powers, a notion central to H.D.’s fictional recreations of her child’s conception. In all her fictional renditions of the birth of her child, the apparent father is a veil or double for a ‘Father who art in Heaven,’ usually designated as the sun god Helios/Apollo. This child was fathered by ‘some sun-daemon … God, her lover,’ H.D. summarizes [in Asphodel], and as such it stands as a visible token of an exchange that circulates between and ties together divine and material worlds.’97 This new language of kinship has little meaning unless we understand that in H.D.’s modernist lexicon, ‘divine’ refers both to a spiritual absolute and, at a mundane level, to the mandarin distance, abstraction, and even inhumanity of the artist fated to perceive and record both the joys and horrors, the freedoms and repressions, of the modern world. The sun god is not a figure of the Oedipal father, but exactly as in Barnes’s work, he is the failed symbol of an imaginary father, a rule-breaking, libidinal, androgynous lover and liberator who is yet also a betrayer. The most famous avatars of this sun god in H.D.’s life and writing are D.H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound. And through this back door of betrayal, in bohemian disguise, creeps the masculinism of an older patriarchy. Indeed, in Pound’s work, imperialism too is able to creep in, as the ruthless warrior of fascist ressentiment: an effect of the economic unconscious, in which the House, the non-alienation of work and social relationships so central to Pound, is rebuilt neither in abjection nor sublimation, but symbolically displaced into the figure of a totalitarian State to which the Market will be subservient. Jill Scott has nicely traced this degradation of the sun god in H.D.’s work in tandem with a recovery of a mother-goddess figure. Scott sees the sun god becoming essentially counter-productive, and masculine figures generally receding in importance; but this does not square so easily with H.D.’s continued idealization and love for sungod figures (in Helen in Egypt, for example, the chain of Helen’s lovers, who seem necessary to her vision of love and social change).98 In H.D.’s pre-Freudian writing, the sun god appears as a kind of semi-repressed fusion of Oedipal and pre-Oedipal fathers, yielding the

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terrifying ideal of an explosively erotic, yet brutal or cavalier, cryptopatriarchal lover. Yet in her post-Freudian writings, as Friedman observes, H.D. is able to separate these two psychic layers, and to affirm behind the stern patriarchal father what Friedman calls the ‘wounded’ father, a nurturing, loving, feminized ‘father/lover.’99 What Friedman describes is, of course, what Kristeva calls the imaginary father, and the imaginary father – rather than an awkward mixture of the primal mother and phallic/castrated fathers – is clearly the transference H.D. realized with Freud. This she was able in subsequent work to symbolize in a modern language of kinship and economy of the House, in order to pass on ‘a pacifist message for the wars of nations and sexes alike.’100 We find the skeleton of this story in H.D.’s first major work following analysis with Freud, her translation of Euripides’ Ion (1937). Here, again, is a wasteland drama: the mother’s house remains barren and is threatened with extinction (and this a spiritual heritage, not only a biological race) until her lost son may be named and restored to it. The mother, Queen Kreousa of Athens, has abandoned the child out of shame after herself being abandoned, pregnant, by the god Apollo. To complicate matters, Apollo has secretly provided for the boy and now gives him to the king as a son to replace the lack of issue in his marriage with Kreousa. Unfortunately, because the king and the son are not Athenians, father and son both appear as usurpers in Kreousa’s eyes – the end of her own House and its appropriation by another. Murders are plotted and the stage given over to violence and fear, but the conflict is resolved when Ion and Kreousa recognize each other as mother and child: Kreousa is able to describe the keepsakes she left in a basket with the infant Ion. The king is never the wiser, yet it is he who names the boy Ion, ‘first,’ because he is instructed that the first boy he meets coming from the Delphic temple will be his son. What this whole plot does is consecrate a matrilineal institution as an erotic and economic rather than simply genealogical discourse. For the king, the first-born rather easily becomes the first-met. The language of kinship that allows for this is articulated by female mediators of the sun god (the Delphic oracle and later Athena). It has its lexicon in the contents of women’s memory (Athena, the Delphic priestess, and Kreousa) and in maternal goods (the basket of child’s keepsakes, especially an elaborate, unfinished weaving therein). Athena’s role as a deus ex machina is important because she appropriates on the divine level, as does Ion on the mundane, the erotic power of the sun god to

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the practical and ethical survival of a gynocentric House. The appropriation of the sun god, which for H.D. represents not only the erotic passion signified in the plot but ‘music, and inspiration,’ is therefore a Joycian sublimation in reverse: a cultural Molly drawing inspiration from a couchant Bloom. The restored House, here, is no less than Ionian culture itself, of which Ion will be the origin and Athena henceforth a patron goddess: ‘a new culture,’ H.D. tells us, ‘an aesthetic drive and concentrated spiritual force’ in which the ‘conscious mind of man [has] achieved kinship with unconscious forces of most subtle definition.’101 Thus we meet again the Marcusian utopia of libidinal reason, in which repression serves as a relay in the sublimation and flowering of the unconscious in the conscious world, rather than as surplus repression. A small statue of Athena is the central figure among Freud’s antiquity collection of ‘Gods’ that ‘other people read: Goods’ that participates in the central gift exchange between Freud and H.D. in Tribute to Freud, and H.D.’s association of Athena with reason in Ion was singled out for praise by Freud.102 Yet while Freud characteristically opposed reason to passion, H.D. appropriated it to passion: Athena ‘steps forth’ as ‘intellect, mind, silver but shining with so luminous a splendour that [Ion] starts back, confusing this emanation of pure-spirit with that other, his spirit-father [Apollo].’ We, too, must shake this confusion. The ‘power of the goddess,’ Athena, is a cultural force, one to whom we must turn in violent times, as opposed to the ‘beauty and the cruelty of her brother,’ the sun god, whose passion must be affirmed yet controlled and directed. The House elder Kreousa is likened to Athena, and even when impassioned by fear or hate, she is not the ‘savage’ which a ‘much-quoted critic’ sees in her, but for H.D., a model of divine intellect.103 Hence, while some readers may be tempted to think of H.D.’s utopian vision as one locked in a primitivist (cultural) or regressive (psychological) nostalgia, one that bars itself by definition from modern social history,104 I would propose the contrary: H.D.’s emphasis on a heterodox reason and intellect – not opposed to passion, love, or eros – to be realized in the gift economy and kinship language of a modern House formation points to what I have called an aboriginal modernity that reproduces an authentically historical alternative to imperialist and patriarchal habits of domination.105 The new language of kinship that enveloped H.D.’s own daughter and gave birth to a utopian culture in Ion has its most elaborate articulation in the ‘autobiographical fantasy’ The Gift, in which H.D. fictionally recreates her childhood relationships with parents and kin, her

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Moravian heritage, and, at the centre of this heritage, a ceremony of exchange between Native-American and Moravian communities that consecrated, on the basis of its so-called love feast, a new, utopian American culture.106 The latter flourished in peaceful, multicultural communities before its genocidal extinction by violent, repressive groups from both Native and Moravian sides – just like the Ionian ‘absolute achievement of physical perfection by the spirit of man’ before its destruction by barbaric conquest, and ‘the world sank into the darkness of late Rome and the Middle Ages.’107 In The Gift, H.D. traces the violence of the modern era – its two world wars and its newly patriarchal and fascist expressions of domination – to the betrayal of this gift exchange between indigenous and settler peoples. Both the loving contract and the violent betrayal are emblematic of the modern world as a contact zone between imperialist and aboriginal economies, filled with risk and possibility. In this sense, H.D. creates the most powerful mythic expression of the economic unconscious explored in these pages. The struggle of the House as a real heritage to survive in social practice, in subjective memory, in art as mundane ritual, and in the inalienable work of women, is given direct symbolization. H.D. not only imagines her child self in The Gift to be the product of a new family romance – one that liberates the imaginary father and gift-bearing mother (from the imperialist culture dyad of patriarchal father and abject mother) – represented in Tribute to Freud and Ion, but she imagines her the product of a deeper, historical kinship text in which her identity marries the Moravian with the Native-American. She herself inherits the name of Morning Star, the Shawanese woman who exchanges names with the Moravian Anna von Pahlen in the love feast around which the historical narrative turns, as part of her Moravian heritage. ‘There was something very important about exchanging names because the inner band of Indians believed the name a person had, was somehow another part of him, like a ghost or shadow and Anna von Pahlen was to have the name of Paxnous’ wife, who was Morning Star in English but she had the Indian words for it, written with notes of music to show exactly how it sounded’ (the morning star is, not incidentally, Venus or Aphrodite-Isis, the lover of Adonis-Osiris and renewer of life).108 If Joyce marries the Celt to the Jew in modern Irish heritage, in the modern American heritage H.D. weds the European to the Native. Both modernists reconstruct memory, against patriarchal blindness and violence, and against a wider imperialism, as a healing, national good.

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Whereas Joyce seems poised, however, to reiterate the couchantcultural sexual antithesis in the children, Stephen and Milly, H.D. collapses it in a unified third image that she sees as its real historical progeny – the libidinal reason, the social beauty, of the child, not as social liberator, but as post-liberatory healer. This image is most striking in Helen in Egypt, where the imaginary father discovered by H.D. (in herself) in Freud is cast, not as a rival for the transgressive sun-god figure (here the warrior, Achilles), but as the sun god’s child with Helen: Euphorion is described as an androgynous mixture of the child Helen with the child Asklepios, the legendary founder of medicine, whose Homeric epithet, ‘blameless physician,’ H.D. gives to Freud, and whose magical drugs belong also to Kreousa’s and hence Ionian heritage.109 This modern child, born of transgressive desire and patriarchal destruction, whose own language of parentage is a language of memory and analysis, is presented as a healing rather than dominating rationality of the future – and one with which we, readers and children of the book, are invited to identify.110 Did H.D.’s writings become consequential gifts, as she intended, in her war-torn world? Georgina Taylor has convincingly shown that H.D. participated in a women’s public sphere of open discussion and debate on contemporary and women’s issues in an international periodical press, and that H.D.’s work particularly dramatizes the degree to which this sphere – unlike that of modernist men – directly engaged with and responded to the end of the 1930s and the new World War.111 It is perhaps easier to see H.D.’s assimilation to this or to a larger public field as occasional and communal in significance – as in her film roles, where she is a performer in a collective project – rather than as grand gestures of an individual cultural authority. Admittedly, as ‘H.D.’ she was not very well known. Adrienne Rich recalls that while H.D. would later become important to her, when Rich began to write poetry in the late 1940s and early ’50s, she ‘knew H.D. only through anthologized lyrics,’ ‘her epic poetry was not then available’ to her, and she does not even mention H.D.’s prose fiction or essays.112 This is curious, since the three sections of the wartime epic, Trilogy, not to mention prose and other writings, were all accessible to a student like Rich in major university and public library holdings even at this time. What is more likely is that the academic-critical canon, still very much a masculinist apparatus, rated H.D. low on its scale of value and rendered her uninteresting in advance, preferring poets like Marianne Moore, who did not threaten the patriarchal ego, ‘who was maidenly,

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elegant, intellectual, discreet,’ and ‘kept sexuality at a measured and chiseled distance in her poems’ (though, ironically, Moore was a friend and promoter of H.D.’s work).113 In the later 1950s and early ’60s, H.D. would have won new attention as an author simply from the publication of a series of important books with wide distribution, including from Grove Press, Selected Poems of H.D. (1957), Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal) (1960), and Helen in Egypt (1961); and from Pantheon Books, Tribute to Freud (1956). Grove Press, the American publisher of Beckett, has its own cultural authority as a late modernist venue in this period, and is perhaps in part responsible for inserting what Rich called H.D.’s ‘anti-war and woman-identified poetry’114 in the heritage of a ’60s generation – she was also read and admired by Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Allen Ginsberg115 – that in America lived through its own harrowing wartime experience, struggles for basic liberal rights, and bohemian countercultures. It is perhaps necessary for historical conditions themselves to change before some goods (repositories of value, to be kept as symbolic bases of identity and practice; in modernism, especially the speculative goods of an avant-garde) such as H.D.’s literary achievement can transfer across social realms, and become consequential in the struggles for social stability or change of an era. Taylor argues that the wartime public sphere of women writers and readers was deeply engaged in tearing down illusory boundaries between public and private knowledge and experience.116 But Rich reminds us that the liberatory movements of the 1960s served as partly negative preconditions – exactly like the crypto-patriarchal, liberatory sun gods of H.D.’s writing117 – for that very tearing-down to move symbolically to centre stage in women’s radical culture: By the end of the 1960s an autonomous movement of women was declaring that ‘the personal is political.’ That statement was necessary because in other political movements of that decade the power relation of men to women, the question of women’s roles and men’s roles, had been dismissed – often contemptuously – as the sphere of personal life. Sex itself was not seen as political, except for interracial sex. Women were now talking about domination, not just in terms of economic exploitation, militarism, colonialism, imperialism, but within the family, in marriage, in child rearing, in the heterosexual act itself. Breaking the mental barrier that separated private from public life felt in itself like an

The Impure House 259 enormous surge toward liberation … And in the crossover between personal and political, we were also pushing at the limits of experience reflected in literature, certainly in poetry.118

It is easy to see how H.D.’s work would be valued as an extraordinary heritage for such a project. Her writing, like that of Joyce and other modernists, pushes memory, experience, and study of the modern House beyond abjection into love – into erotic sublimation as a social and polymorphous, rather than personal and pure, basis for values, practices, and identities. The abstract nature of H.D.’s own mythological lexicon, like the local lexicon of Joyce’s 1904 Dublin, is mirrored in the strangely abstract and unique nature of their texts themselves as symbolic goods: Trilogy and Ulysses become uncanny household gods, seducing us to the possibility of post-imperialist history, while also demanding that the sheer oddness of Joyce and H.D., their own alterity to us (in sexuality, ethnicity, religious outlook, historical experience, tastes, etc.), be exemplary rather than incidental, and find a home there with us. In rethinking the significance of a writer’s work in an economy of gifts and goods, one is forced with Morris to consider such ‘ongoingness’ of the meaning of H.D.’s work – its afterlives in other media and literary creations – as essential to its (modernist) intentions, to its radical (if not easily commodifiable because bereft of a singular owner’s signature) reproduction of literary value.119 John Xiros Cooper writes that in Montreal in 1967, owning a copy of Ulysses meant nothing more than membership in a fantasy community, one realized only ‘in his own head.’120 I like to think that for every experience like this, no doubt genuine, there was another in 1967 just as real, in which the reader planned to hold that thick book in the air and stop men’s bullets whizzing across the jungle or campus – or, more to the point, of course, imagining that it might begin to stop them, as a symbol of a better world institutionalized as a good, as one object among others that concretized the value of new languages by which to share that utopian imagination with others in a multiple public field charged with (not fantasized, and after all consequential) political discussion and protest. Such goods can only accumulate value today when, as Fredric Jameson predicted in 1984, ‘the dreary realities of exploitation, extraction of surplus value, proletarianization, and the resistance to it in the form of class struggle, all slowly reassert themselves on a new and

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expanded world scale.’121 The cultural revolution that Cooper shows us is emergent in modernist bohemia and normative in the liberalizing sixties has done nothing to stop the globalization of exploitation and its therapeutic culture industry. Yet it has rendered this exploitation transparent, a machinery now to be justified as the product of rational force or choice rather than racial or sexual nature.

Conclusion: Modernism and Utopia

It is now fruitful to address some ambiguities that may have surfaced along the way, and to draw some general conclusions regarding modernism, political economy, and literary critique. (1) I have echoed warnings not to idealize the gift or House, yet I have insisted on their utopian political value in modernism, one that remains relevant today. How can something non-ideal, or in any way incomplete or inadequate, be asked to hold up a utopian banner? (2) For an application of political economy to literature, I have depended upon diverse and what may seem conflicting theories, drawing upon contemporary Marxist theory, a new institutionalist criticism educated by neoclassical economics, as well as post-Maussian anthropology. How does such syncretism escape contradiction? (3) Of modernism, I have acknowledged its heterogeneity, sometimes using the plural form, but I have also argued for a very general feature of modernism that might justify the singular. Is there a singular modernism in this argument, and if so, what does it exclude? The first two questions are facets of the same problem. The gift economy is not here taken to be ideal in that I do not view it as a transcending and sufficient form, economic or social. As Jack Amariglio and David Ruccio have argued, there has been a temptation to essentialize the gift economy, to view the gift in isolation from other economic forms, as the totalizing, all-important symbolic action in a given society. A similar problem arises, they pointedly observe, in post-Marxist theories of a symbolic, libidinal, or general economy which have drawn on anthropology or psychoanalysis or both: in attempting to escape an essentialist Marxism, these theories institute their own reductive essentialisms, and share an uncanny similarity with the

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neoclassical economic approaches which they otherwise contest.1 The present study attempts to move to a multiple perspective upon political economy and the symbolic actions produced in literature and its institutions. If contradictions in literary interpretation arise from this, therefore, they reflect the real multiplicity in the ways we value ourselves and things, rather than an inconsistency in some idealized, monolithic approach to the politics of literature. If we wish to purge ourselves of the desire for a single-principle model of political economy, I suggest, we might do worse than begin with Chris Gregory’s tripartite scheme of House, Market, and State, upon which I have based the present study. What is perhaps easier to envision here, at the end of the study as opposed to the beginning, is that each of these three categories is not so much a fixed social form as a situational response to its own heritage and to those reproduced by the other two. The specific forms of House, Market, and State are all determined by the ‘baggage,’ for good or ill, they bring from their own unique historical heritage and to each other. The radical liberalism of the imperialist Market is one such potential good recognized by this study, as is the authority of women’s work in the aboriginal House; though neither may be found universally or utopian in themselves. The future outcome of the inner drives and complex relationships in modern Houses, Markets, and States cannot possibly be predicted, and any teleological version of Market history, whether Marxist or neoclassical, must be illusory.2 This view might appear irreversibly to undermine the notion of utopia, which must evidently depend upon some idea of prediction, even if this remains only a narrative precondition for its rewriting as prescription. For if we accept this multiple view, there can be no general critical language of utopia. However, it is still possible to characterize such a language where it is specific to the global village that has emerged out of modern capital and empire. The language of modern utopia, I would suggest, can only be a situated language of the opportunity, realized via the creative reproduction of House forms, to maximize our joys and pleasures (diversely sublimated in sex, art, work, morality, and so on) in the expansion of social justice (that is, while minimizing the institutional violence or oppression that produces our guilt and fear – the gated communities and luggage inspections, mental and actual – in our relation to others, to strangers increasingly recognized as reciprocally modern). Such a language will always clothe itself – contra Marx’s memorable imagery in the Eighteenth Brumaire, so often

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unthinkingly repeated – in the symbols of present and past cultural formations, because memory of non-exploitative relationships and how they work, rather than fantasy desire for them as mere negation, is central to the basis of utopia as an alternative reproduction of identifications and values. To say this is to affirm and revise Marcuse’s important insistence on memory, in order to range individual memory of family relations (especially those safeguarded in the unconscious) alongside both the individual memory of non-exploitative institutions degraded or marginalized in imperialist modernity as well as the social memory, embedded in media, of heritages associated with them. This is how I would interpret the axiom offered by Simon Zadek in his closely argued, cross-disciplinary study of the economics of utopia, that any ‘concrete utopia’ is the ‘recalling of the experience of non-exploitative relationships,’ whose communication will involve a jarring of memory that is ‘experiential’ rather than merely conceptual. Instead of imposing a new, universal idea of the good society, in other words, a utopian text will have little direct translatability to one’s own situation (it is not yet another disembedded mechanism to arrive on the shores of the local from some intellectual centre elsewhere). Instead, the utopian text will resonate across individual and local situations as an allegorical vehicle for the sensually experienced, individual return of degraded, forgotten, or repressed realities free of exploitation (that is, free of those instrumental or alienated relationships, normalized by the Market ideology of imperialist modernity, which cause human degradation or suffering).3 In order to understand this utopian memory work, in language media, of personal and heritage reproduction, it is best seen not only as it is determined by its particular situations and locations in the planetary expanse, but also relationally, as an unfinished and shape-shifting process of expression with respect to other situations and their peoples: roots may grow vertically, but they draw horizontally. To describe both the need for and mechanisms of such a process, I have relied on Kristeva’s compelling meditations upon amatory discourse, and the uncanny identification of multicultural others as strangers-to-ourselves. Utopian memory is necessarily impure: in liberating our imaginary identifications (in instituting our maternal desires), we perforce open ourselves to an uncanny regression that dissolves our proprietary ideas of ourselves and opens us at once both to the strangeness of ourselves to ourselves, and to the strangeness of others to themselves, with whom we must

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now paradoxically, in this new humanistic turn, identify.4 Hence Joyce and H.D. imagine ethnic mixture at the very heart of utopian possibilities for modernity. Yet these are not conversion narratives: it is absurd to think that Joyce wishes Ulysses to convert us to his particular mixture of Irish and other cultural affiliations, or that H.D. wishes The Gift to convert us to some mixture of Moravian and Native-American creeds. Just so, no reader is tempted to refashion her- or himself as one of the Celtic Bretons whom Wyndham Lewis parodically ethnologizes (as strangers to themselves), and in this rare example, the utopian mode refuses the emotional closures of love or pleasure: no matter how violently Lewis’s ‘wild bodies’ perform their modern House, the deep seduction of a life lived for such performance, in which neither deprival nor aggression is vanquished, only fear – the fear intrinsic to mere liberalism, that human meaning is inadequate – is what allies his most unsentimental folk with Joyce’s colonial Dubliners and H.D.’s early Americans. What is initiated in all cases is a global mise-en-abyme of impure identifications, a vortex into which our own mixtures, real and fictional, remembered and potential, are ineluctably drawn and creatively reproduced. In simplest form, what justifies the utopian value I attach to the politically indeterminate modern House is an historicist relationality, admittedly broad: it is utopian to re-imagine the House without degradation or violence to the goods of the modern Market and State – dangers we know too well, for example, in the various totalitarianisms based upon authoritarian elites, or in those terrorist movements driven by reactionary, anti-liberal-humanist values. I do not call forth the House as a singular ideal form, therefore, but as a suppressed, dysfunctional, or embattled general form whose utopian value lies in its specifically modern social functionality as a possible practical horizon for, not fantasy substitute for, the liberal institutions and heritages of Market and State. Its modern context is integration with the liberal heritage of planetary organization of imperialist modernity, to which it may bring an expanded sense of the ecological and amatory inalienability (i.e., in the total sublimating machinery of global media, always producing and reproducing erotic desires and identifications) of all persons, beings, and things from each other, where the liberalizing ideology of the Market has itself already rendered exploitation increasingly transparent, more and more psychically unsatisfying, and just as brutally reproduced as ever. From Marcuse, again, I draw the notion of surplus repression as a compelling explanation for the modern mind that can so far justify this

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exploitation and invest all its hopes and values in the fetish of productivity. Yet in keeping with the extension of Marcuse’s theory above, I would emphasize less the surplus repression of libidinal energies in a restricted, genital sexuality than in the claustrophobic machinery of productivity itself (which he rather takes for granted). If we shift our attention to the latter and look into its shadows, we may see the ghosts of the House whose imaginary economies have all along stubbornly blocked the inalienable transactions upon which Market power is accumulated, and without which no identification with a community, human, ecological, or cosmic, may be embedded in social or individual memory. As a result, I suggest that any modern language of utopia has had to (and will have to) learn from aboriginal modernity itself – from societies and enclaves still struggling to maintain a horizon of values and social imperatives reproduced by forms of a modern House, in a history of contested sovereignty, assimilation, and colonization – if it is to turn to a practical language of social change that would break us out of our inherited imperialist binds. Such a proposition refers not only to the utopian register of the literature under study, but also to the interpretive theory and critical practices brought to it. Hence, this study strives to respect a new political imperative in cultural studies and institutional practice: ‘Always Indigenize!’ This slogan is Len Findlay’s rallying cry ‘to thought and action on the grounds that there is no hors-Indigène, no geopolitical or psychic setting, no real or imagined terra nullius free from the satisfactions and unsettlements of Indigenous (pre)occupation.’ Such grounds are transhistorical, but the ethical imperative is modern. It conveys utopian possibilities for modern institutional change, Findlay reminds us, because indigenous heritages convey rationalities heterodox to ‘Eurocentric, instrumental reason,’ and oppose ‘the latter’s arbitrariness and connections to injustice.’5 The slogan, which ‘could usefully apply to all social relations throughout the Americas,’ and whose utopian register invokes ‘possible foundations for a genuinely postcolonial society,’ has been amplified by Yup’ik scholar Shari Huhndorf and specifically fed back into the Marxist project advanced by Fredric Jameson, whose exhortation to ‘Always historicize!’ is deliberately recalled and played upon. What this means for literary criticism, Huhndorf suggests, is that ‘colonial politics, in its various manifestations’ – the institutional shape of imperialist modernity – be regarded as the ‘absolute horizon’ of interpretation in literary and cultural studies.6 This is not to substitute, in some narrow way, colonial for class struggle, but to see them

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bound together as points of friction mutually produced by a deeper struggle between the organization of identities and values by aboriginal and imperialist social formations and their economic heritages. My argument throughout, then, has been that from one perspective, modernism may be understood as the first, sweeping historical movement in modern imperialist heritage – in the literature canonized as goods – that ventures toward and sometimes breaches the frontier between imperialist and aboriginal modernities. Modernism at once expresses the culture of expansionist, capitalist Western development and obsessively recollects from this culture’s own marginalized experiences, memories, or heritages the shards of non-capitalist social forms and practices (techniques of imaginary valuation of self, others, objects, and world itself) that this culture has thrust from its realism (its symbolic order). Modernist memory works implicitly or explicitly in concert with an uncanny recognition of fragments of alien symbols for similarly functional forms and practices in the societies of nonWestern aboriginal modernity, those recorded (most often with a primitivist blindness to the modern and historical) in the writings of modern folklore and anthropology. As is all too clear from the texts I have discussed, this expression is not reflexive and direct. Rather it emerges in the distorted, displaced, inverted, and abjected symbolic forms and acts of what I have called an economic unconscious – in the literature, that is, of a political unconscious of modern struggle, an asymmetrical one, between House and Market claims upon the self, its needs, wants, and desires. Huhndorf, in appropriating Jameson’s methodology to the ‘indigenizing’ project, reminds us that since ‘culture is an inherently ideological process that can perform a range of complicated operations with regard to its social subtext, including “production, projection, compensation, repression, [and] displacement,”’ the ‘political and ideological work of texts is rarely transparent’ and ‘the task of the critic is to illuminate the vexed relationships between culture and its subtext, showing, for example, the ways that literary works repress or symbolically “resolve” social conflicts.’7 A final illustration will reveal how extraordinary this distortion can be, and apparently as a result of, rather than despite, some direct contact with the work of a modern aboriginal culture. This is Rupert Birkin’s utterly fantastic and monumental projection, in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1921), of the ‘primitive’ upon the idea of modernity, achieved by rewriting the ‘primitive’ itself as a result of modern

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degenerate history, indeed as the uncannily present sign of its future. At first, Birkin is chided for his appreciation of an African carving, for against the prejudice that would see it in evolutionary terms as artistically crude or naïve, he argues the contrary, seeing it as the ‘supreme’ product of ‘centuries and hundreds of centuries of development in a straight line.’ Later he recalls another African carving: It was a woman, with hair dressed high, like a melon-shaped dome. He remembered her vividly: she was one of his soul’s intimates. Her body was long and elegant, her face was crushed tiny like a beetle’s, she had rows of round heavy collars, like a column of quoits, on her neck. He remembered her: her astonishing cultured elegance, her diminished, beetle face, the astounding long elegant body, on short, ugly legs, with such protuberant buttocks, so weighty and unexpected below her slim long loins. She knew what he himself did not know. She had thousands of years of purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge behind her. It must have been thousands of years since her race had died, mystically: that is, since the relation between the senses and the outspoken mind had broken, leaving the experience all in one sort, mystically sensual. Thousands of years ago, that which was imminent in himself must have taken place in these Africans: the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and productive happiness must have lapsed, leaving the single impulse for knowledge in one sort, mindless progressive knowledge through the senses, knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution, knowledge such as beetles have, which live purely within the world of corruption and cold dissolution … There remained this way, this awful African process, to be fulfilled. It would be done differently by the white races. The white races, having the arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow, would fulfil a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation … Birkin thought of Gerald. He was one of these strange white wonderful demons from the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery.8

Here the ‘primitive’ is rewritten entirely by the Market: it is the supreme cultural expression of specialization and materialist knowledge, of beetle-like instrumental reason. And naturally, its counterpart is the ‘white demon’ capitalist magnate, Gerald Crich.9 In a powerful, abject inversion of the seductiveness of aboriginal difference, then, Birkin thrusts a fatalistic vision of the Market future upon aboriginal modernity itself. He refuses to consign the aboriginal to the past, yet

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fixes it in the present as a sign of the (internal, imminent) end, rather than the (external, actual) contestation, of imperialist modernity. This historical inversion constitutes the utopian crisis of Lawrence’s novel, and is mirrored in the love plot. What Birkin wants (which, despite the novel’s title, is at the centre of its development) is, on the one hand, a relationship that is non-hierarchical, non-possessive, and open to each individual flourishing in their own way, yet, on the other hand, is mediated by a strictly observed, ritualized obligation in the form either of a homosocial Bruderschaft or of a heterosexual, legal and sacramental marriage. These tensions between ritualized obligation, creative flourishing, and non-hierarchical power belong, of course, to the imaginary and institutional domain of the House. But as with aboriginal art, Birkin will also contradictorily express this seductively ‘pure relationship’ in Market terms (as Cooper has so well shown), ranging choice against obligation and rationalist individuation against amatory identification. As a result, everything is continually pulled down into the abject, where fragments of the House are fused with the Market: desirable obligation is overwritten by abject complusion, and love by alienation. ‘A life lived together, in the horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction, was repulsive … The hot narrow intimacy between man and wife was abhorrent. The way they shut their doors, these married people, and shut themselves in to their own exclusive alliance with each other, even in love, disgusted him. It was a whole community of mistrustful couples insulated in private houses or private rooms, always in couples, and no further life, no further immediate, no disinterested relationship admitted: a kaleidoscope of couples, disjoined, separatist, meaningless entities of married couples.’ This vision of alienated love under the regime of surplus repression is allied with the primitive and with woman, whom Birkin sees as a monstrous, modern Magna Mater.10 In Lawrence’s work, it is difficult to find a symbolic resolution of the agonies released by this economic unconscious. But the plot form that demands that women make a choice in order to absolve men of their own historical creation is after all suspiciously instrumental, and too weak to bear the weight of its own utopian language of kinship and House. Still, that language is unearthed and open to view, however shattered or disfigured, and its strange gleam gives the novel its compelling force. But if modernism may be seen from this angle, as a vast and variegated proliferation of symbolic resolutions, however weak, to the economic unconscious of imperialist modernity, how may one see it also

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as a contact zone with aboriginal modernity itself? Jameson’s view of modernism bears an unexpected clue to this question. In an early essay, he sets out a theory of modernism that predicts his subsequent explanation of generic innovations (as symbolic resolutions to changing historical conditions) from romance to realism to modernism in The Political Unconscious (1981). Realism, he tells us, is the secular decoding of experience that had once been understood in the sacred or cosmological terms of myth and subsequently romance; its model is obviously Cervantes’ Don Quijote, and it remains the normative way in which literature creates meaning – that is, in an ‘historical thinking’ as a ‘way of making things yield up their own meanings immanently, without any appeal to transcendental or magical outside forces’ – throughout the nineteenth century. Realism is produced by capitalist society just as myth is produced by ‘primitive’ and romance by ‘barbaric’ or feudal societies. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, this decoding process finds it has to roam an empty world in increasingly futile search of beleaguered or concealed transcendental adversaries, and the realist world itself has hardened into a vast terrain of social and psychological ‘facts,’ the fatalistic world of seemingly inhuman, historical forces and dead matter articulated by naturalism. This is ‘the moment of emergence of modernism, or rather, of the various modernisms, for the subsequent attempts to recode the henceforth decoded flux of the realistic, middle-class, secular era are many and varied.’11 The notion of an artificial, parodic, or improvisational, yet utterly serious sacred or magical recoding of the modern imperialist construction of ‘reality’ accords well with the argument of this book, and points as well to the relevance, which I have not been able to consider here, of Kristeva’s linking of abject and amatory semiotics to religious discourse and to the role of the sacred in modernism generally. For my purposes, what is essential is the sole general conclusion Jameson is able to draw from this diversity of impromptu recodings of the sacred, which becomes in his view the uniqueness and coherence of (imperialist heritage) modernism as an historical and aesthetic category: it follows, from the very notion of a recoding of secular reality or of the decoded flux, that all modernist works are essentially simply canceled realist ones … Let me suggest, in other words, to put it very crudely, that when you make sense of something like Kafka’s Castle, your process of doing so involves the substitution for that recoded flux of a realistic narrative of

270 Modernist Goods your own devising … I think it’s axiomatic that the reading of such a work is always a two-stage affair, first, substituting a realistic hypothesis – in narrative form – then interpreting that secondary and invented or projected core narrative according to the procedures we reserved for the older realistic novel in general.12

Here Jameson points to an indeterminate array of such ‘realist hypotheses’ that we construct as a result of our individual formation and commitments. Yet more recently, he has modified his modernist narrative in a way that suggests that modernist texts may guide our realist hypotheses in a certain direction and even to a revolutionary confrontation with our understanding of the real. This is the direction of what he calls ‘the Absolute,’ a catch-all phrase that ‘stands for whatever extra-aesthetic justifications are finally evoked’ as a ‘transcendental motivation, an appeal to something outside the practice in question and enveloping it.’13 The Absolute emerges in Jameson’s account as a ‘recoded’ appeal to the ethical value of art, here the modernist work of art. Its ‘something outside’ refers to a real external condition for which no public language is available to make it generally representable – in a world in which, in other words, all languages are henceforth understood to be no more nor less than private or minor languages of one kind or another (in the secular decoding of languages themselves as historical and contingent objects). The Absolute, in this sense, is a (parodic, because necessarily borrowed, fragmented, or provisional) transcendental sign of modernist impurity: an impurity both of the ‘realist core’ or ‘pretext’ that is at once cancelled for the purposes of representation (what he calls the modernist taboo) and thereby as if magically called forth, and also of the ‘extraliterary’ commitments and engagements of writers themselves, those explicitly ‘tarnished by politics,’ such as Pound and Eliot, and all others whose production of new social roles for themselves is intrinsically politicized.14 The general formula that I would propose for modernism as a critical concept, specific to Western imperialist heritage, is this: the cancelled realist texts of the many modernisms, which is to say, all those uncreated consciences and realities suspended in solution, for every reader, in the witch’s cauldron of a recoded public field, are all versions of aboriginal modernity. Not, to be sure, actually existing aboriginal modernity – in the grips of which modern indigenous peoples strove and continue to strive to envelope the powers and media of imperialist heritage in the imaginary relations, and real satisfactions, of so many

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modern Houses. I mean a latent aboriginal modernity: the object of a utopian realist narrative in each modernist text, which can only be constructed anew by each reader, and by each reading, in various ‘private’ or local or group (perhaps, all fragments of marginal House), all in fact diversely public, languages. When we read Women in Love, for example, we not only need to try to reconstruct some hypothetical realist narrative that makes sense of what Birkin and Ursula want (not, emphatically, what they merely need or desire), but we must gradually confront the fact that there is nothing there in the text to reconstruct: the construction must come from our own resources, our own conspiring with the text. How else do we interpret the Absolute recoding of Birkin and Ursula’s new relationship? In their new, shared commitment to each other, He sat still like an Egyptian Pharaoh, driving the car. He felt as if he were seated in immemorial potency, like the great carven statues of real Egypt, as real and as fulfilled with subtle strength, as these are, with a vague inscrutable smile on the lips. He knew what it was to have the strange and magical current of force in his back and loins, and down his legs, force so perfect that it stayed him immobile, and left his face subtly, mindlessly smiling. He knew what it was to be awake and potent in that other basic mind, the deepest physical mind. And from this source he had a pure and magic control, magical, mystical, a force in darkness, like electricity.15

This feeling obviously enough duplicates the ‘mindless’ physicality achieved by the moderns and primitives alike of the novel, and indeed turns Birkin himself into a ‘carven’ totem of the internal combustion engine. We must work hard to reconstruct some realist basis for this utopian moment, as distinct from the degraded world of anomie and will-to-power represented by Gerald and Gudrun. What, really, is Birkin supposed to represent? The magical and primitivist language cancels any such realist explanation emerging from the text itself, even as it demands it from the reader. But Ursula’s perspective soon rescues us from this dilemma: ‘Strange, he was. Even as he went into the lighted, public place he remained dark and magic, the living silence seemed the body of reality in him, subtle, potent, indiscoverable. There he was! In a strange uplift of elation she saw him, the being never to be revealed, awful in its potency, mystic and real. This dark, subtle reality of him, never to be translated, liberated her into perfection, her own perfect being’ (my emphasis).16 Here, the same recoding process, but with

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a twist. In Gerald’s world, everything is translatable into everything else: it is a world of instrumentality in which anything may be subordinated to, and derive its meaning from, something else. Not so here. The utopian world that Birkin and Ursula, as the image of a depersonalized yet autonomous couple, require that we hypothesize for ourselves, in whatever lexicon of memory and heritage comes to hand, is a (plausible) realm of social experience in which possession and obligation (here recoded under the signs of a magical fulfilment and perfection, in a mutual exchange of passion) have been freed from appropriation and instrumentality (these now scorned as the decoded content of mere love). A modern utopia is here one of radically incommunicable personal and social realities, of amatory identifications and languages of kinship that have no general symbolic form. Unlike the brightly lit, alienable sensuality of the modern (and the African, the bad primitive), the utopian sensuality of the modernist (and here Lawrence introduces the Egyptian and also the Greek, his good primitives) is local and inalienable, a sensuality that flourishes only in the dark shadows and afterworlds of imperialist public space. An aboriginal modernity is what we must hypothetically construct, as a utopian realist narrative, in order to explain to ourselves exactly what kind of actual social world Birkin and Ursula live and struggle in, so to achieve this historically unprecedented feeling of universal autonomy, obligation, and pleasure. Is a notion of utopian realism self-contradictory? Not if we return to the prescriptive literary aesthetics of Georg Lukács, who dismissed what seemed the narrow and subjectivist limitations of the modernist avant-garde in favour of a transparent, totalizing genre of historical fiction representing the conflicts and possibilities, social and psychic, of modern society. Perhaps the latter, hypothetical modernism, in canonical literary history manifestly the loser, is after all the unwritten, dialectical product of the modernist reading contract itself, which produces a plethora of local or minor languages of kinship, of the modern House – a host of new realisms, or fragments thereof, limited only by the utopian condition that they must plausibly adapt their renewal of sensual value and social justice to the multiple heritages and ineradicable socially constituted differences of a planet inextricably lashed together by capitalist and imperialist history. This process is exemplified in the style and fate of an ur-modernist text referred to many times in this study, that serial essay comparable to Pound’s Cantos in cumulative ambition, The Golden Bough. Marc

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Manganaro has demonstrated with startling clarity the strange new rhetorical authority constructed by Frazer in this text, which combines an incorrigibly inclusive, cumulative accretion of ‘facts’ (story upon story, footnote upon footnote) with a self-reflexive, ambiguous, even contradictory rhetoric of cohesion (commentary upon commentary, theory upon theory). Such an authority appears too protean and selfeffacing to contest, yet it is firmly grounded in an ideology of salvage ethnography and a progressive evolutionary history.17 Like so many modernists after him, Frazer appropriates the living artifacts of aboriginal modernity to his own struggle with imperialist culture and heritage, and in so doing both releases into modern culture the symbolic shards of concrete utopia (the parodic images of its own repression, struggle, and liberation in a different history, which may now demand a reorganized symbolic order, a new realism) and reproduces the very instrumental relationship to modern aboriginal cultures themselves that is the colonialist and class basis of exploitation. Modernist authority, therefore, is both as self-entrenching as Manganaro suggests, and also self-consuming, for it constructs its authority, as it does its style, through the cancellation of a conventional authority that must be hypothetically evoked by the reader from extrinsic resources. This paradox suggests how Frazer’s work can itself be appropriated by so many subsequent writers, yet dramatically rewritten by them – whether by a polytheist, fascist Pound, a Christian, democratic Eliot, or a mystic, feminist H.D. – in terms that Frazer himself would hardly have affirmed. The subtle awkwardness of this Frazerian appropriation in the contact zone with aboriginal modernity, which must labour to de-realize and assimilate the intolerable, raw symbolic presence of the Other that is lodged in its objective, ‘non-fiction’ prose to a transcending subjective mystery and problem (to modernist psychology and authority), can be approached in the reverse direction, too, if we look to a very different but equally influential proto-modernist text whose generic contract, as a dream vision, instead begins in subjective fantasy and moves just as duplicitously toward an intolerable realism. This is William Morris’s utopian narrative News from Nowhere (1891), whose vision of aestheticized labour and community freed of surplus repression recalls my allusions to Morris throughout and looks forward in the Marxist tradition to Marcuse. Here, again, we find the writer drawing freely on non-capitalist institutions of the House – from medieval social forms to Norse folklore and Greek legend – in order to script a

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utopian transcendence of imperialist modernity. And again, actually existing aboriginal modernity is cancelled out. The only point in a novel of many monologues at which a monologue is broken off, the only moment of speech censorship and a properly uncanny one, is when the elder Hammond has been describing at some length the ruthless violence and cultural degradation wrought by the imperialist ‘opening up’ of new markets – that is, colonization – around the world: ‘Ah,’ said the old man, pointing to the Museum, ‘I have read books and papers in there, telling strange stories indeed of the dealings of civilization (or organized misery) with “non-civilization”; from the time when the British Government sent blankets infected with small-pox as choice gifts to inconvenient tribes of Red-skins, to the time when Africa was infested by a man named Stanley, who –’ ‘Excuse me,’ said I, ‘but as you know, time presses; and I want to keep our question on the straightest line possible …’18

The straightest line turns out to be an historical narrative that pits Market class and State forms against each other until utopia is finally achieved, with never a glance to those actually existing societies struggling to maintain the power of social institutions that Morris can only appreciate symbolically, in the dream distances of the past. Nevertheless, as I have argued above, the symbols have an imaginary allure that transcend this narrative authority. The fantasy aboriginal modernity that Morris constructs is a good deal more convincing, paradoxically, than the contorted realist historical narrative he invents to show how it was able to emerge from his present day. For us, the transition narrative must be shucked off like the obsolete part of a machine, to be reinvented or recoded on our own realist terms, while the fantasy register retains its powerful, uncanny magic. Modernism is, then, in my construction of its imperialist heritage, both singular and plural. I have argued, following Jameson, that it may be unified as an historical category by that aesthetic dance described above, between an impure aestheticism and a cancelled realism, yet I have wished to see its expression arising from the depths of a political unconscious that is not informed merely by Market and State institutions – that is, not only in the social figure of class struggle. I have preferred, following the lead of post-Maussian anthropologists, to add a third dimension to this model: the House, its patterns of symbolic and social reproduction and its material and ideological conflicts with

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imperialist modernity. This is, therefore, an impure Marxism, not quite aligned either with class-based economic critique or with a post-Marxist critique that would take flight from class and material production into an othered realm of the sign (that is, as Victor Li reminds us, into a new primitivism). The proposed theory is confessedly totalizing to the extent that any modern cultural product may be seen against such a broadly sketched, historical background as the economic unconscious is here considered to express. Even modernism, which I take to be a very broad range of abject or amatory expressions of this political unconscious, those that seek to cancel or destroy and yet spectrally or virtually to rebuild, and however incompletely, the reality principle of imperialist modernity, is unlimited in its diversity, and hence an extremely loose category. However, the usefulness of such a category is formal, and hardly begins to touch upon the extraordinary heterogeneity of purposes, values, and relationships that a plural understanding of modernisms as a loose tissue of incommensurable political and aesthetic essays in the art of the modern age – an understanding required by the very aesthetic of multiple, situated languages discussed above – continues to unconceal, to lament, and to celebrate. The entire definition of modernism proposed above is meaningless, however, where imperialist ‘reality’ has not been internalized as a norm and naturalized as fate – in which, by the same token, there is no economic unconscious. This would be the case for writers belonging to modern aboriginal societies, whose work demands alternative critical approaches than those developed here. For example, Leif Sorensen has argued that in his novel The Surrounded (1936), métis writer D’Arcy McNickle not only represents ‘Native American culture as a full participant in modernity’ rather than constituted merely by past tradition, but furthermore ‘theorizes a dynamic Native American culture that behaves like a modernist poet, articulating fragments into a coherent form’ as an ongoing process.19 It is tempting to recall Joseph Valente’s vision of restlessly hybridizing and criss-crossing classes, ethnicities, races, and faiths in the ‘metrocolonial’ spaces of Dracula, when confronting McNickle’s Reservation, where Spanish, French, English, Protestant Christian, Catholic Christian, American, Canadian, and a variety of indigeneous Native heritages all coexist in and between ‘Indians.’ Yet there is no vampire in The Surrounded, and taking the culture of aboriginal modernity explicitly as an object of repression and awakening for the protagonist – and as a literary technique, reverse appropriating ethnographic storytelling to a pattern of gift exchanges between hybrid

276 Modernist Goods

kin of the Reservation’s modern House – its narrative is a modernist deformation of the bildungsroman rather than the romance.20 This narrative of reverse appropriation is possibly the most important allegorical narrative written today, where we seek languages of multicultural affiliation in the long, uncertain, humanist struggle for a social justice without which we cannot live to feel our mundane labouring for beauty a properly shameless one. In making this last claim, I would re-emphasize my working definition of aboriginal as a social and historical category not identical with Native or indigenous, with which it overlaps. Aboriginal modernity opens beyond indigeneity onto such vast and variegated social and literary histories as the African-American and Black-Atlantic, whose formations are one with the class history of the imperialist Market, yet embedded nonetheless with non-imperialist heritages of pre-slavery origin, in many renewed and syncretic forms. The flourishing of such alternative, ‘folk’ modernisms in African America has been charted by David Nicholls, who sees in Zora Neale Hurston’s embedding of folklore performance in labourcamp life a direct representation of the modern political value of transformed, pre-imperialist heritage practices.21 Hurston worked to reverse appropriate the methodological objectivity and comparatist ideals of modern anthropology (from mentor Franz Boas), and the principal genres of imperialist literary heritage (the novel, the opera, etc.), to a new cultural project: to accord pan-cultural authority to the intricately differentiated, complex, and communally satisfying heritages of the House embedded in and acting through African-American local stories, communal manners, and occult religions.22 No parody here: Hurston was, after all, a multiply accredited medicine woman.23 And no hint of the abject, except, as in Joyce and H.D.’s work, as an external shadow, a nightworld cast over the fertile ‘muck’ of a flourishing life. That modern social justice begins in this post-culturalist knowledge – in local heritage as an open form, in dialogue with a planetary economy and its migratory and media flows – is what Tea Cake needs to learn in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), when he fails to follow the Seminoles rather than the ‘bossman’ before the flood. ‘Indians don’t know much uh nothin’, tuh tell de truth. Else dey’d own dis country still.’24 Even though Tea Cake and Janie have mediated an affiliation between American and Bahaman communities in the ‘muck,’ and enriched the lives of both, when it comes to looking across a greater, racial divide, the imperialist logic of the ‘bossman’ is depressingly (and in the plot, fatally) reproduced. Tea Cake learns too

Conclusion 277

late that no culture is an island. Yet unlike in the ‘life of men,’ where such too pure dreams are launched and forgotten in the flood of a decoded reality, the novel tells us that women remember, and like dreamers of the day, they ‘act and do things accordingly.’25 Returning home, Janie plants the seeds Tea Cake was unable to, ‘for remembrance,’ and concludes: ‘Ah’m back home agin and Ah’m satisfied tuh be heah. Ah done been tuh de horizon and back and now Ah kin set heah in mah house and live by comparisons.’26 This is a hard-won, nearly unenviable satisfaction, yet a spellbinding one. Hurston’s call to pull in our widest, most far-flung and unexpected horizons ‘like a great fish-net,’ and truly to live by comparisons, not merely to collect them, asks for a prodigious act of ongoing memory that will make, or make new, an inalienable and uncanny modern heritage. To fully remember history as a personal and internal, and social and external, comparative, dialogic possession – rather than to awaken from it, only to dispense with it as a reified traditionalism or primitivism having no place in a better future – is perhaps the ultimate utopian desire of the many modernist writers considered in this study.27 It is also the modest aim of this study, insofar I have tried to learn from aboriginal modernity by indigenizing my own imperialist heritage, in an attempt to complement the work already proceeding in modern literatures traditionally excluded by it. To make it new, as Ezra Pound said interpreting an ancient Chinese inscription, is to revalue the presence of the past as a vast and heterogeneous, aboriginal struggle for ‘thy true heritage,’ and in this wider sense, to ‘always indigenize.’28 This heritage of struggle is perhaps the unique gift of modernism as a whole, and begins to answer the problem stated so eloquently by Paul Tillich: The untruth of utopia is its false view of man, and insofar as utopia builds on this untruth in its thought and action it can be dealt with only to the extent that it is shown that the ‘man’ it presupposes is, in fact, unestranged man. Here utopia contradicts itself, for it is precisely the utopian contention that estranged man must be led out of his estrangement. But who will do this?29

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Notes

Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11

Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 160; Stewart, ‘Benevolent Economies,’ 69. Stewart, 73. See the catalogue edited by William Rubin. Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 190, 191. Gikandi, ‘Picasso, Africa,’ 471 (and see 466). Connelly, Sleep of Reason, 113. See Roger Fry, ‘The Art of the Bushmen’ (1910) and ‘Negro Sculpture at the Chelsea Book Club’ (1920), in Flam and Deutch, eds, Primitivism, 41–6 and 145–7. Fry argues that African art is distinguished by a pure freedom of form and a direct translation of perception into craft – that is, without the mediation of anatomical concepts or ideals. North, Dialect of Modernism, v. He argues that Stein’s primitivism depends upon a dialectical oscillation between a realist representation of black sexuality, and a self-reflexive articulation of that representation as conventional (70–2); the same argument applies on a formal level to her imitation/ invention of black dialect (72–5). My point is that such ‘conventions’ or stereotypes must be understood as contents of Stein’s text, as a realm of signs and associated values outside the text to which her language refers us, in order for the (now dialectically understood) modernist form to be realized. DuPlessis, ‘“Darken Your Speech,”’ 59. Gikandi, ‘Picasso, Africa,’ 475. Bell, Primitivism, 7. Key to the study of literary primitivism are ‘animism, natural piety, and the rituals through which they are expressed’ (11). I view the latter two, in primitivism, as qualities of the first.

280

Notes to page 11

12 For example, compelling arguments have been made by Boehmer, in ‘“Immeasurable Strangeness,”’ that writers such as Joseph Conrad, Leonard Woolf, and W.B. Yeats produced texts that radically dissented from imperialist cultural norms as a result of their authors’ contact with some indigenous ‘other world of meaning,’ no matter how they understood that meaning; by del Gizzo, in ‘Going Home,’ that Ernest Hemingway’s normative sense of self and sexuality was assisted to performative deconstruction by a similar contact; and by Gluck, in ‘Interpreting Primitivism,’ that modernist primitivism played challengingly with the codes of the primitive purveyed by mass culture. In addition, in ‘Tribal Drums,’ Rawson supplies an historical context for this self-reflexive primitivism, in the discourse of existentialist ‘authenticity.’ 13 See the illuminating discussion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, H.D., and Nella Larsen by Rado, ‘Primitivism, Modernism, and Matriarchy.’ A quite different study of women primitivists, Hackett’s Sapphic Primitivism, is nevertheless grounded in the same postmodernist logic. An interesting variation is Irving’s suggestion that immigrant women figured in primitivism as bearers of a counter-normative ideology of instinct (Immigrant Mothers, 99–100). 14 See Phillips, ‘Performing the Native Woman.’ 15 See the excellent study by DuPlessis, ‘“Darken Your Speech,”’ and Rhodes’s discussion of DuBose Heyward and Nella Larsen in Structures of the Jazz Age. 16 Bell, Primitivism, 65. 17 Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, 8, 9. Important exceptions to this critical tradition include the work of Carr, who argues in ‘Imagism and Empire’ that imagism’s debt to non-Western and archaic lyric forms belonged to an authentic intermixing of cultural forms in the global currents of modernism (and hence to a radical transformation of normative European and American aesthetic forms which play a role in a challenge to imperialism). See also Bush’s fine article, ‘The Presence of the Past,’ on ethnographic discourses studied by T.S. Eliot as ‘ideologically conflicted’ in relation to imperialist norms (25) and as gradually moving away from primitivist fantasy. 18 Hence Gone Primitive develops double and ambivalent readings of its primitivist examples. As Torgovnick says in her introductory note, most of the book ‘cumulatively develop[s] a model of primitivist discourse as yearning for the dissolution of hierarchies and of the binary categories so deeply embedded in Western thought and culture’ (253n17). North’s study, more historicist in approach and engaged with a greater range of literary texts and milieux, provides a new ground for all such postmodern studies, with

Notes to pages 13–19

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31

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the singular exception that, in his reading of Stein, he appears ingeniously to re-establish an authentic affinity between tribal ritual art and metropolitan modernist texts. If Stein manipulates conventional tropes of sexuality and dialect, the first ‘objectionable’ and the second ‘clearly inauthentic,’ it is however to reveal and ‘revel in’ the conventionality of, and accumulated contradictions between, all such normative codes – inviting the imagination radically to challenge them, and to enjoy doing so (Dialect of Modernism, 70, 76). But this ‘code-switching’ is itself proper to the function of the African mask, with which it now shares an affinity – neither aesthetic nor intuitive, but dialectical. The tribal mask and Stein’s text are thus truly akin. North relies primarily on Henry Louis Gates’s understanding of the African mask in relation to verbal masquerade to make this argument. However, whether this new affinity is itself a playful manipulation of codes by Gates, itself a critical mask – North calls Gates’s use of it a ‘metaphor’ (72) – is a question that renders a politicized distinction between authentic and inauthentic representation of Others moot, and must shift the ground to a question of rights and cultural property (of who can speak for the truth of the African mask, recreating de facto its cultural heritage; and who cannot). While valid, this is not the method I will follow. Eliot, ‘War-Paint and Feathers,’ 122. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities, 41; and for the argument behind these descriptors, 29–40. Lukács, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,’ in History and Class Consciousness, 83–222. Strathern, Gender of the Gift, 143, 164. A penetrating critique of some key contributions to this debate is given by John Frow. Gregory, Savage Money, 13–14. See Strathern, Gender of the Gift, 156–7, 167, 189–90, 205–6, 319, 326. Strathern, 318, 326. Gregory, Savage Money, 74. Gregory argues that land is the supreme good of an agrarian society, but the notion is equally applicable to hunting and gathering societies that map out territory guardianship and use according to family rights. I recognize that this generalization may not hold for semi-autonomous regions with State powers in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 99. Strathern, Gender of the Gift, 318–19. In the ‘expanded Marxian framework’ that Jameson promotes, ‘the transformation of our own dominant mode of production must be accompanied

282

32

33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Notes to pages 20–9 and completed by an equally radical restructuration of all the more archaic modes of production with which it structurally coexists’ (Political Unconscious, 100). Academic ‘border work’ has been used to describe scholarly work on Native culture or society by non-Native intellectuals that is not conceived or practised in isolation from direct social or political engagement with Native communities themselves. The concept is effectively defined by Haig-Brown in ‘Border Work’ and by Hulan and Warley in ‘Cultural Literacy.’ On Skaay, see Bringhurst, Story as Sharp as a Knife, esp. 269–71; and StrongBoag and Gerson, Paddling Her Own Canoe, for a thorough discussion of Johnson. Rhodes, Jazz Age, 179, 183ff. MacCannell, Tourist, 2, 14, 41, 14. On antimodernism, see Lears, No Place of Grace. Rogers, Introduction to Dracula, viii, xiv. This is the edition to which I will refer in subsequent citations of Stoker’s text. Rogers, xv. For this reading, see Astle, ‘Dracula as Totemic Monster.’ Stoker, Dracula, 234, 239. Roth, ‘Suddenly Sexual,’ 113. Stoker, Dracula, 57. Stoker, Dracula, 267. See Arata, ‘Occidental Tourist.’ Stoker, Dracula, 266. On animism as the basis of myth, see Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2:285ff. Stoker, Dracula, 266. Stoker, Dracula, 309. Frow, Time and Commodity Culture, 104–6. Stoker, Dracula, 118. Stoker, Dracula, 15, 11, 86. My thesis runs directly counter to that of Franco Moretti, for whom Dracula represents capital, and the logic of the Market in general. While compelling, I find Moretti’s thesis weak in details. He must work hard to convince us that a man with no servants, who does menial work himself, is an exemplary bourgeois monopoly capitalist. Just as it is difficult to accept that the dusty pile of treasure found in Dracula’s castle represents accumulated capital, rather than the reverse, money kept out of circulation, along with the ‘chains and ornaments, some jeweled but all of them old and stained’ (Stoker, Dracula, 41; not quoted by Moretti), akin to household keepsakes, status symbols recalling victories. His claim that Dracula sucks ‘just as much as is necessary and never wastes a drop,’

Notes to pages 29–36

52 53

54

55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

283

which is supposed to prove him ‘a saver, an ascetic’ (91), hardly squares with the image of a bloated, gorged, drooling leech offered by the text itself (quoted later in my discussion). His central quotation from Marx, which describes capital as dead labour, ignores the applicability of this, and much of Moretti’s subsequent vampiric description, to heritage goods and gifts as well (91). Finally, Moretti’s vampire-as-capital reading, by his own admission, fails to resonate in any but a blandly structural way (a relationship between metaphor and fear) with his recapitulation of a maternal return-ofthe-repressed (104–5). Yet with this latter psychological construct we may readily associate the vampire-as-gift. Stoker, Dracula, 239. See Craft, ‘Kiss Me.’ Drawing on Craft’s seminal essay, Showalter sees the vampire as an exemplary image of ‘sexual anarchy’ that has remarkably endured into the late twentieth century (Sexual Anarchy, 179–84). It may be because, as Marie Mulvey-Roberts has suggested, the vampire functions to displace modern reactionary fears of women’s power into an aboriginal discourse of menstrual taboo. This would assume that aboriginal discourse, at the general level she addresses through Frazer (‘Dracula and the Doctors,’ 78–9), is homologous to modern imperialist patriarchy. Rogers, Introduction to Dracula, ix; Haining and Tremayne, Un-Dead, 44, 150–1. Riquelme, ed., Dracula, 371, 376. Milbank, ‘Powers Old and New,’ 13, 26. Pound often attacked those he disliked as Gombeen men, and while he may have learned the term from his Irish circle of writer friends, it is not unlikely that he knew Stoker’s figure itself, for ‘The Gombeen Man’ chapter was published separately in Irish nationalist writer Justin McCarthy’s Irish Literature, an omnibus modern anthology published four years before his arrival in London in 1908. Stoker, Snake’s Pass, 26–7; on The Primrose Path, see Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, 36. Stoker, Dracula, 16–17, 44. Stoker, Dracula, 175–6, 179. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 6. See Hogle, ‘Counterfeit Gothic.’ Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, 18, 83. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 5–6. Stoker, Dracula, 33, 32. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 15.

284

Notes to pages 37–48

68 69 70 71 72 73

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 17, 18, 15. Jackson, Fantasy, 59–60. Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, 129, 127, 131, 130. Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, 136. H.D., Bid Me to Live, 138–9, 54, 84, 57, 67, 62. Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, 10. In this view, Mina is not principally an echo of Stoker’s ambivalent, symbiotic identification with a powerful mother in Charlotte Stoker, but of transferential affiliations with intimate or amatory mentor figures like Lady Wilde and Walt Whitman. On Stoker’s relationships with these two, see Murray, Shadow of ‘Dracula,’ 64–6, 195–6. 74 Godelier, ‘What Mauss Did Not Say,’ 9–10.

Part 1: After Strange Goods 1 In 1933, Yeats attested that one of the three ‘public controversies’ that had ‘stirred his imagination’ was the debate surrounding Parnell (following his public disgrace, due to accusations of an affair with a married woman). It stirred his imagination because he was concerned that Parnell be remembered for his ‘good will’ and ‘service’ to Ireland, while scorning the ‘frenzy of detraction’ offered by Parnell’s own political movement and the ‘lying accusations’ of his enemies (Yeats, Poems, 593–4). 2 Yeats, Poems, 279–80. 3 Yeats, ‘Easter, 1916,’ in Poems, 180–2. 4 Yeats, Variorum Plays, 229, 222–3. 5 Jeffares, Introduction to Selected Plays, 7. 6 Yeats, ‘Poetry and Tradition’ (1907), in Essays and Introductions, 259. 7 Yeats, ‘To a Shade’ (1914), in Poems, 110; ‘September 1913’ (1914), in Poems, 108. 8 Yeats, preface to Irish Myths and Legends, 22. 9 Yeats, ‘The Galway Plains’ (1903), in Essays and Introductions, 213. 10 Yeats, Variorum Plays, 226. 11 Yeats, ‘The Galway Plains’ (1903), in Essays and Introductions, 211. 12 Eagleton, Crazy John and the Bishop, 73. 13 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 18. 14 Yeats, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ (1939), in Poems, 347–8. 15 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 15. 16 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 115. 17 Joseph Hassett argues that Yeats’s hate is the very basis of his creativity and is rooted in his relationship with his father. Of special relevance here is Hassett’s view that, like the Other that brings on the abject crisis, this

Notes to pages 48–56

18

19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

285

father was to Yeats both a violent authority figure (29, 34) and a fickle, inadequate one (33). Yeats, ‘Poetry and Tradition’ (1907), in Essays and Introductions, 259. Yeats’s belief in the tragic as opposed to comic nature of the Celtic imagination, and its roots in a world of strife as opposed to peace, was long-standing. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8. Yeats, ‘Politics,’ in Poems, 348. Yeats, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree,’ in Poems, 39. Yeats, ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd,’ in Poems, 7–8. Yeats, ‘The Sad Shepherd,’ in Poems, 9. Yeats, The Shadowy Waters (1907), in Variorum Plays, 338–9. I have quoted the earliest published ‘acting version’ there considered, yet it was begun in 1895 and first published as a dramatic poem in 1900 (see Jeffares, introduction to Selected Plays, 3n2). Yeats changed ‘fathers’ to ‘father,’ in the last line, sometime after 1912. Yeats, Poems, 589. See Boehmer, ‘“Immeasurable Strangeness.”’ Yeats, ‘The Indian to His Love,’ in Poems, 14. Forster, A Passage to India, 285. On Aziz and gifts, see 69, 114, 158. Yeats, ‘Gitanjali (Song Offerings)’ (1912), in Essays and Introductions, 393–4, 392. Boehmer, ‘“Immeasurable Strangeness,”’ 106. All this is to be opposed to the literary tradition or ‘mind’ as it remains locked within the alienated time for private leisure or reflection, which is Yeats’s reception of Tagore: ‘Reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants … I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me’ (‘Gitanjali [Song Offerings]’ [1912], in Essays and Introductions, 390). Yeats, ‘Gitanjali (Song Offerings)’ (1912), in Essays and Introductions, 390. Yeats, ‘The Holy Mountain’ (1934), in Essays and Introductions, 448. Yeats, ‘Adam’s Curse’ (1904), in Poems, 80–1. Yeats, ‘To Some I Have Talked with by the Fire’ (1893), in Poems, 49. Yeats, ‘Ireland and the Arts,’ in Essays and Introductions, 204–5. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 32. Yeats, Variorum Plays, 124–44. Yeats, Variorum Plays, 44. Yeats, Variorum Plays, 158. Yeats, Variorum Plays, 144–6. Yeats’s source for the Cathleen story was ‘The Traders in Souls,’ a short tale published in The Shamrock, 5 October 1867. The bard is also his addition.

286 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Notes to pages 57–67 Yeats, Variorum Plays, 52, 60. Innis, ‘Modernism, Ireland and Empire,’ 142. Yeats, Variorum Plays, 136. Yeats, Variorum Plays, 150. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 45. Yeats, ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ (1893), in Poems, 50. Yeats, ‘Poetry and Tradition’ (1907), in Essays and Introductions, 248–9. Yeats, ‘Ireland and the Arts,’ in Essays and Introductions, 204–5. Yeats, quoted in Hanley and Miller, Thoor Ballylee, 24. The actual assimilation of Asian to Irish heritage is not, for Yeats, far-fetched: in his 1924 Preface to The Cat and the Moon and Other Poems, he describes ‘an odour, a breath, that suggests to me Indian or Japanese poems or legends’ in his work and others’, and wonders why he, Lady Gregory, Synge, and others have been ‘interested mainly in something in Irish life so old that one can no longer say this is Europe, that is Asia.’ Yeats wrote The Cat and the Moon using a Japanese dramatic form, about a sacred well near Thoor Ballylee that began working miracles again following a Gaelic League procession in its honour. Yeats, ‘Louis Lambert’ (1934), in Essays and Introductions, 447. Yeats, Variorum Plays, 37 (see also 41). Yeats, Variorum Plays, 151–3, 167. Yeats, Variorum Plays, 125, 91. Jeffares calls attention to this turning point in his introduction to Selected Plays, 10. Yeats, ‘A General Introduction for My Work’ (1937), in Essays and Introductions, 526. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8. Yeats, A Vision, 25. Yeats, ‘A General Introduction for My Work,’ in Essays and Introductions, 518. Yeats, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion,’ in Poems, 347; ‘Man and the Echo’ (1939), in Poems, 346; ‘High Talk’ (1938), in Poems, 343. Yeats, Variorum Plays, 1033. Yeats, Variorum Plays, 1018. Yeats, Variorum Plays, 1032–3, 1040. Yeats, Variorum Plays, 1040. Kristeva, quoted in Berry, ‘Feminist Refiguring,’ 233. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 59; see also Berry, ‘Feminist Refiguring,’ 231. Yeats, ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’ (1933), in Poems, 259–60. Jeffares and Knowland, Commentary, 252.

Notes to pages 67–74

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70 Yeats, A Full Moon in March (1935), in Variorum Plays, 989. 71 Yeats, ‘The Statues’ (1938–9), in Poems, 336–7; and see Finneran’s note for lines 25–26, in Poems, 678. 72 Yeats, ‘Under Ben Bulben’ (1938–9), in Poems, 326–7. 73 Miller, Erotics of Memory, 131, 147. 74 ‘From Joyce to Yeats to Conrad, from Barnes to Stein to Woolf, what unites the extraordinary diversity of modernist writing is the vitality (or as Marjorie Perloff has put it, the eros) with which its creators handle history. In light of such work, modernism’s alleged “denial” of history appears to be something of a critical shibboleth …’ (Miller, Erotics of Memory, 7). In this spirit, John Foster argues that the politics of the Irish Revival and the emergence of high modernism are closely related (Colonial Consequences, 44–59). 75 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 133–4. 76 Eagleton, Crazy John, 72–3. 77 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 101–2. 78 Eagleton, Crazy John, 73. 79 Eagleton, Crazy John, 73–4. 80 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 119–20. 81 Seuss, Progress and Identity, 33. 82 Yeats, quoted in Seuss, Progress and Identity, 35. 83 Yeats, ‘The Gyres’ (1938), in Poems, 293. 84 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 59. 85 Quoted in Wilson, Authorized Biography, 896, 789–90, 931, 625. 86 Lawrence had learned of his Irish roots a year previously (Wilson, Authorized Biography, 621). Of course, he was not Arabian royalty, but he may have been considered an Emir. He told this in person to King George V, in the context of turning down a knighthood. Because he persistently refused to accept military honours – either from the British because he abhorred their motives, or from the Arabs because he felt that he had betrayed them – his invention of the title is very unlikely (577). 87 Quoted in Wilson, Authorized Biography, 727. 88 Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 23. 89 Quoted in Tabachnick, Lawrence, 65. 90 Wilson, Authorized Biography, 607. 91 Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 23. 92 Lawrence, Preface to Catalogue of an Exhibition, 14, 15. 93 Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 9. There is undoubtedly an allegory intended by the poem, but the priority of the personal exchange is emphasized not only by the conceit, but by Lawrence’s concluding confession – ‘the strongest motive throughout had been a personal one, not mentioned here’ (Wilson,

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94 95 96 97 98

99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

111 112 113 114

Notes to pages 74–82 Authorized Biography, 684) – and by similar statements elsewhere, as in 1919: ‘I’m going to tell you exactly what my motives in the Arab affair were, in order of strength: (i) Personal. I liked a particular Arab very much, and I thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present’ (Tabachnick, Lawrence, 63). Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 23. Wilson, Authorized Biography, 623–4, 924–5. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 9, 565, 422. Lawrence, Preface to Catalogue of an Exhibition, 15. Military analysis can reinforce the abject view of Lawrence developed here. Juan Alonso Aldama has used the rhizome theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to argue that the modern guerrilla warfare of which Lawrence was the first theorist defies any clear structure of ‘narrative’ meaning (and, rather, sets up a terrifying field of shifting suggestion and possibility that defies interpretation or decoding, hence predictability, on the part of the enemy) and draws a radical, practical power from this semiotic instability. See ‘El desierto del sentido,’ 65–6. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 352, 416; Wilson, Authorized Biography, 36–7. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 30. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 284, 327–8; Wilson, Authorized Biography, 684. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 564, 30. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 19, 20. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 456; Lawrence, quoted in Meyers, Wounded Spirit, 118. Meyers, Wounded Spirit, 125. Rutherford, Forever England, 83; Lawrence, quoted, 84. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, 22, 23. Allen, Medievalism of Lawrence, 168n17; on Lawrence’s plans to run a press on the model of Morris, see Wilson, Authorized Biography, 64–5. Lovecraft, letter to Robert E. Howard in 1932, quoted in Joshi, Lovecraft: A Life, 19. See, for example, a letter written to Howard two years earlier, in Joshi and Schultz, eds, Visible World, 207; or Lovecraft’s own autobiographical essay of 1933, bearing the abject title ‘Some Notes on a Nonentity’ (Joshi, ed., Miscellaneous Writings, 558). See Lovecraft’s pseudo-historical ‘History of the Necronomicon,’ in Miscellaneous Writings, 52. Lovecraft, ‘History of the Necronomicon,’ in Miscellaneous Writings, 52. Lovecraft, ‘The Unnamable,’ in Lurking Fear, 82. Joshi, H.P. Lovecraft: A Life, 7.

Notes to pages 82–9

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115 Lovecraft, ‘Some Notes on a Non-Entity,’ in Miscellaneous Writings, 561. 116 Lovecraft, ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ in Call of Cthulhu, 146. 117 This argument is most explicit in Lovecraft’s ‘Lord Dunsany and His Work,’ in Miscellaneous Writings. See also his letter to August Derleth in 1930: ‘You require certain landmarks like your beloved hills and riverbends – and it is only a step from this requirement to the need of a certain alignment with the natural traditions and folkways of the social and geographical group to which one belongs. One does not have to take these traditions and folkways seriously, in an intellectual way, and one may even laugh at their points of naivete and delusion – as indeed I laugh at the piety, narrowness, and conventionality of the New-England background which I love so well and find so necessary to contentment. But however we may regard such a pattern intellectually, the fact remains that most of us need it more or less as a point of departure for imaginative flights and a system of guideposts for the establishment of the illusions of direction and significance’ (Joshi and Schultz, eds, Visible World, 233). 118 Lovecraft, letter to Robert E. Howard in 1932, in Joshi and Schultz, eds, Visible World, 207. 119 Sorensen, ‘The Eldritch Horror of Ethnography.’ 120 Lovecraft, Dream-Quest, in Witch House, 157. 121 Lovecraft, ‘Nyarlathotep,’ in Call of Cthulhu, 33. 122 Lovecraft, ‘Lord Dunsany and His Work,’ in Miscellaneous Writings, 110; [President’s column], National Amateur, 3; Preface to White Fire, 7. 123 The last story is largely the conception of E. Hoffman Price, and is based on a draft by Price reluctantly revised by Lovecraft for publication as a co-authored work. 124 Lovecraft, Dream-Quest, in Witch House, 224. 125 Lovecraft, Dream-Quest, in Witch House, 173, 164 (my emphasis). 126 Lovecraft, Dream-Quest, in Witch House, 162, 172. 127 Lovecraft, Dream-Quest, in Witch House, 185, 184, 185, 187. 128 Lovecraft, Dream-Quest, in Witch House, 186, 185. 129 Lévy, Study in the Fantastic, 74. 130 Lovecraft, ‘The Unnamable,’ in Lurking Fear, 83. Of three tangential references to females in Dream-Quest, it is not surprising that two are to unnamed nurses associated with lost, idyllic childhoods; the third is to ‘daughters of men’ wedded by ancient Earth gods (Witch House, 202, 245, 161). The latter symbolization belongs to the abject register, for it refers to the mournful wisdom of demi-gods inhabiting a city entirely of black stone, at the human frontier of ruined wastelands. The former evidently belongs to the primal mother, but whether as wish-fulfilment or a more

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131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146

147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157

Notes to pages 89–104 complex register is unclear, because the context of the memories and their role in the narrative structure is ambivalent. Lovecraft, ‘The Silver Key,’ in Witch House, 257. Lovecraft, ‘Mother Earth,’ in Dark Brotherhood, 94–5. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3–4. Lovecraft, Dream-Quest, in Witch House, 155. Lovecraft, ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter,’ in Call of Cthulhu, 12. Lovecraft, quoted in Server, Pulp Fiction Writers, 179. Joshi, Lovecraft: A Life, 85. Joshi, Lovecraft, A Life, 195. Lovecraft, letter to Rheinhart Kleiner in 1919, in Joshi and Schultz, eds, Visible World, 86, 84. Lovecraft, letter to Rheinhart Kleiner in 1921, in Joshi and Schultz, eds, Visible World, 85–6. Lovecraft, ‘Lord Dunsany and His Work,’ in Miscellaneous Writings, 110, 111. Joshi, Lovecraft: A Life, 321. Lovecraft, letter to James Morton in 1923, in Joshi and Schultz, eds, Visible World, 117. Lovecraft, ‘The Silver Key,’ in Witch House, 257. Conrad, Lord Jim, 32, and often subsequently repeated. The aristocratic identification apparently clung to Conrad, for when he settled his family in England, he rented land in the country from Ford Madox Ford and ‘modeled himself as an English gentleman’ (Orr and Billy, eds, Conrad Companion, 5). This accords with Kristeva’s account of the similarity, yet difference, between hysteria and abjection (Powers of Horror, 45). Harpham, One of Us, 20. Harpham, One of Us, 30. Conrad’s views of Russia and Germany are developed in his 1905 essay ‘Autocracy and War.’ Harpham, One of Us, 33; Conrad, quoted, 2. Apollo Korzeniowski, quoted in Harpham, One of Us, 3. See Jacobus, First Things, 6, 8. Apollo Korzeniowski, quoted in Harpham, One of Us, 1 (original emphasis). On a ‘writing of the real,’ see Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 74–5; on taboo, see 61ff, and especially the section on ‘maternal authority,’ 71–2. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 73. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 13, 14. Conrad, Lord Jim, 15.

Notes to pages 104–23 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180

181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189

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Conrad, Lord Jim, 27–8, 84. Conrad, Lord Jim, 12, 91. Conrad, Lord Jim, 162. Conrad, Lord Jim, 86. Conrad, Lord Jim, 126. Conrad, Lord Jim, 167–8. Conrad, Lord Jim, 179, 185. Conrad, Lord Jim, 189. Conrad, Lord Jim, 188. Conrad, Lord Jim, 280, 283, 282. Conrad, Lord Jim, 170. Conrad, Lord Jim, 239–40, 240. Harpham, One of Us, 132. Strathern, Gender of the Gift, 157–9, 322–3. Conrad, Nostromo, 220. Conrad, Nostromo, 195, 201, 191. Conrad, Nostromo, 231, 252. Conrad, Nostromo, 237. Conrad, Nostromo, 247. Conrad, Nostromo, 408, 409. Conrad, Nostromo, 37, 27, 30, 213, 215. Conrad, Nostromo, 213, 91, 342, 345. Conrad, Nostromo, 193. ‘He was a man of resource and ingenuity,’ the novel tells us: ‘He had the gift of evolving safety out of the very danger’ (433). Conrad, Nostromo, 22. Conrad, letter to Cunninghame Graham in 1897, quoted in Nadelhaft, ed., Nostromo, 24–5. Conrad, Nostromo, 429–30, 433. Conrad, Nostromo, 462–3. Conrad, ‘Autocracy and War,’ in Nadelhaft, ed., Nostromo, 449, 447. Conrad, ‘Autocracy and War,’ in Nadelhaft, ed., Nostromo, 446–7, 449 (my emphasis). See Nadelhaft, Introduction to Nadelhaft, ed., Nostromo, 12–13, 22. Levenson, Fate of Individuality, 53, 12, 56. Regarding the perverse, I am referring to Poe rather than Freud. Regarding the demonic, I am thinking of Goethe’s famous description of it, quoted by Georg Lukács in his twentieth-century attempt to define the modern: ‘It was not divine, for it seemed irrational; it was not human, for it had no reason; not devilish, for it was benificent; not angelic, for it often allowed

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191 192 193 194 195

Notes to pages 124–36 room for malice. It resembled the accidental, for it was without consequence; it looked like providence, for it hinted at hidden connections. Everything that restricts us seemed permeable by it; it seemed to arrange at will the necessary elements of our existence; it contracted time, it expanded space’ (Theory of the Novel, 87). The connection between Yeats and fascism is among his readers a concern long established on convincing grounds, and I have not thought it necessary to do more than constellate it here. A good study of Yeats’s politics in this regard, and of readers’ responses to it, is provided by Freyer in W.B. Yeats and the Anti-Democratic Tradition. Jameson, Archeologies of the Future, 177–9. Nicholls, Modernisms, 4. Nicholls, Modernisms, 1–4. See Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil, 168–73, for the French text and English translation referred to in my discussion. Nicholls, Modernisms, 22, 3.

Part 2: Multiplying the Public 1 Rainey, ‘The Cultural Economy of Modernism,’ 34. This article usefully draws upon and presents the thesis of Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism, but restricts itself to a period stretching from 1912 to 1922 and hence omits his polemical reading of H.D. from an institutional perspective. 2 Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 39. 3 Rainey, Institutions of Modernsim, 105–6, 41. 4 Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 100. 5 Miller, Dun Emer, 13. 6 Pim, ‘Dun Emer,’ 18, 20, 21; Lewis, Yeats Sisters, 85. 7 Lewis, Yeats Sisters, 49; Larmour, ‘Dun Emer Guild,’ 25. Gonne’s wheel is kept by the Westport Historical Society, co. Mayo, a gift of her husband’s family. 8 Miller, Dun Emer, 13. When the Yeats sisters severed their press from Dun Emer Industries, they regretted having to lose the name. ‘Cuala,’ according to Elizabeth Yeats, was ‘the old Irish name of the Baronies of South Dublin & North Wicklow’ (quoted, 64); it was also a form of Coole, the name of Lady Gregory’s domain. 9 Evelyn Gleeson, quoted in Miller, Dun Emer, 15. 10 Abbey Theatre playbill, n.d., collection of the Sligo Co. Museum, Sligo. 11 Miller, Dun Emer, 68.

Notes to pages 137–46

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12 Larmour, ‘Dun Emer Guild,’ 25; on clothing, conversation with Alex Ward, Assistant Keeper, Art and Industrial Divisions, National Museum of Ireland. 13 Foster, Yeats: A Life, 1:275. 14 Lewis, Yeats Sisters, 73. 15 Michael Yeats, quoted in Miller, Dun Emer, 7–8. 16 Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 170. 17 Delany, Literature, Money and the Market, 3–4. 18 Delany, Literature, Money and the Market, 153–4, 152, 159. 19 Wexler, Who Paid for Modernism, 7–8. 20 Delany, Literature, Money and the Market, 130, 159, 130. 21 Delany, Literature, Money and the Market, 152. 22 Joseph Conrad, quoted in Wexler, Who Paid for Modernism, 48; James Joyce, quoted, 66–7. 23 Delany, Literature, Money and the Market, 170. 24 Delany, Literature, Money and the Market, 159–60. 25 For example: Annie Hornimann purchased the buildings that would house the Abbey Theatre in 1904, rebuilt and redecorated them for that purpose, and let it free of rent to the company. In return, the company was required to keep seat-prices high enough to restrict the class of the audience (Foster, Yeats: A Life, 1:320, 323). Harriet Weaver was motivated, according to her biographers, primarily by moral and psychological interests to support avant-garde writing, principally in the small magazine The Egoist and in her living stipends to Joyce from 1914 to his death (Wexler, Who Paid for Modernism, 64). Scofield Thayer and his partner at The Dial went through agonized negotiations with Eliot to purchase first publication rights for The Waste Land, in the end for the extraordinary sum of $2,150 US. It is difficult to see this as primarily a financial investment. No doubt it would increase the prestige of The Dial, encourage better sales, and perhaps, at a very general remove, enhance the value of modernist art collections held by the two owner-patrons. Yet as a venue for the promotion of avant-garde art – for example, by Picasso and Brancusi, in the same issue with The Waste Land – their journal merely duplicated what the much larger-market Vanity Fair was already doing more effectively. Meanwhile, it is unlikely that such literary patronage could realize any significant financial returns to the journal itself, even speculative, given the deficits amounting to $220,000 from 1920 to 1922 (Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 88, 94, 96). 26 Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 170. 27 Pound’s gifts of books to the fascist leader in Rimini, their reception as a cultural gift, and the return to Pound’s own sense of prestige, is a good

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32 33

Notes to pages 146–8 example of such a non-Market affiliative exchange in such a public realm (see Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 136–8). See Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, chapter 5. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 167. Vandivere, ‘Schisms of Birth.’ The assumed alternatives of regressive, pseudo-aristocratic preservation of the big house and its substitution by commercially driven housing development descends from the same market fatalist imagination. The big houses important to Yeats, for example, Lissadell and Coole, have complex histories of State, regional association, and private philanthropic ownership and management in which Market, State, and House economies overlap and are largely guided by House heritage aims on the part of local communities. Delany, Literature, Money and the Market, 139–40. The casualty of this way of thinking is that, while launching a salutary critique of the Foucauldian, monolithic view of domination as the only ‘glue holding societies together,’ Delany ends up characterizing the culture of the modern (and apparently timeless) House in just this way. The monetary culture of the Market opposes reason and persuasion to domination and submission in the prestige relationships of an aristocratic heritage (Literature, Money and the Market, 4). We are even asked to see the expansionist wars and brutalities of modern imperialism as expressions uniquely of imperialism’s aristocratic heritage – and the interests of the Market as opposed to these. The ‘love of domination’ flourished where there was no ‘rational expectation of profit,’ because the profits from foreign investment were greatly exceeded by the costs of colonial administration and defence (66, 67). Indeed, war only occurs when ‘man is no longer content to be homo economicus’ (93). Not only is this argument infelicitous in the wake of recent American wars fuelled by Market interests, it ignores what Delany himself admits – that imperialist profits did exceed investments for a power elite, and that the balance was paid by a largely non-investing population, through taxes and soldiers’ lives (68–9). The Market, even on his evidence, is at least one motor behind the expansionist violence of modern imperialism. Yet even if it were not, the primitivist image of prestige culture as structured merely according to a barbaric, Foucauldian economy, rather than a modern aboriginal one (for good or ill), results in a homogenization of all non-Market economic institutions as false alternatives. We should view the Market with more favour, Delany tells us, because ‘to lament the imbrication of modernism with market capitalism can only be fruitful if things can be imagined otherwise: that modernism could have preserved

Notes to pages 149–59

34 35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

295

its literary qualities while basing itself on some other economy.’ As for Rainey, the sole example of thinking otherwise is to be found in Pound’s fascism: ‘Rainey himself has shown how Pound tried to do just that by approaching Mussolini as a state patron in 1923–24; comment on the outcome of that initiative is superfluous’ (157). What does require comment, is why we should accept Pound’s fascism as the type of all House institutions in aboriginal modernity. Wilson, Authorized Biography, 675, 684. Wilson, Authorized Biography, 729, 781. Wilson, Authorized Biography, 684–6, 677. Wilson, Authorized Biography, 676, 767. According to Wilson (734–6), Lawrence began to train himself in a distinctly modern writing style in 1924, when he sought and implemented the Poundian advice offered him by E.M. Forster (to remove all vagueness, to simplify, to ensure that poetic and reflective modes are justified as the unique means for what they have to convey). Having just completed A Passage to India, Forster visited Lawrence in his small country home several times to help him with his revisions. ‘In Lawrence’s mind, the destruction of his sense of integrity [in Deraa] seemed to reflect the moral degradation he had accepted during his wartime role with the Arabs,’ and this affected his relationship with men of influence (Wilson, Authorized Biography, 668; and see 676). This brief history is drawn from Roberts’s introduction to The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 1–3. Lovecraft in Joshi and Schultz, eds, Visible World, 120–1. The letter appears in Weird Tales 2.2 (September 1923): 81–2. Joshi, Lovecraft: A Life, 298. Lovecraft in Joshi and Schultz, eds, Visible World, 121–2. The letter appears in Weird Tales 3.3 (March 1924): 89–92. Joshi, Lovecraft: A Life, 536. About amateur press organizations with which Lovecraft was involved, see Joshi, Lovecraft: A Life, 98–105. Lovecraft, quoted in Joshi, Lovecraft: A Life, 103, 104. Lovecraft, quoted in Joshi, Lovecraft: A Life, 101. The popular success of Lovecraft’s fiction is posthumous, and follows in part on the steady growth of fans (including small magazines devoted entirely to him), in part on the anthologizing and collecting of his stories in trade publications, and in part on the hard work of his unofficial literary executor, the writer August Derleth, who promoted Lovecraft’s work to trade publishers and who, with Donald Wandrei, started the Arkham Press

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Notes to pages 161–71 in order to get all of his literary work into print, including selected letters, as well as memoirs by other writers. During his lifetime, Lovecraft’s only monographs were one or two small-press booklets of his stories, including a deluxe edition akin to the archaic Cuala style.

Part 3: The Parodic Shaman 1 Eliot, ‘War-Paint and Feathers,’ 122. 2 My immediate reference is to the ‘Ithaca’ chapter of Ulysses, in which the ‘artistic’ tendency in Stephen is viewed in relation to the ‘scientific’ tendency in Bloom (Joyce, Ulysses, 798). My broader, implicit reference is to Michael Bell’s argument regarding ethical commitment and scepticism in Literature, Modernism and Myth. 3 Lincoln, Heart of a Bear, 12, 17–18, 12. 4 Lincoln, Heart of a Bear, 22, 3; see also 54. 5 Lincoln, Heart of a Bear, 21, 58, 3 (emphasis on ‘naturally’ is mine). 6 Lincoln, Heart of a Bear, xviii. 7 Lincoln, Heart of a Bear, 58. 8 Lincoln, Heart of a Bear, 7, 4. 9 Lincoln, Heart of a Bear, 42, 45. 10 Lincoln, Heart of a Bear, 42. 11 Leavis, New Bearings, 78, 80. 12 Surette, Birth of Modernism, 252, 258. 13 Surette, Birth of Modernism, 93–4. 14 Surette, Birth of Modernism, 31. 15 Surette, Birth of Modernism, 50, 15. 16 Surette, Birth of Modernism, 278. 17 Surette, Birth of Modernism, 267. 18 Surette, Birth of Modernism, 263–4. 19 Surette, Birth of Modernism, 267. 20 Surette, Birth of Modernism, 271. 21 Surette, Birth of Modernism, 271. The latter alternative is most sharply stated where Surette comments on his survey of ‘elements of the draft version Eliot gave to Pound that support a reading of sexual activity in the symbolism of the hieros gamos of the mysteries, as opposed to that of Frazerian fertility cults’ (270), as if the hieros gamos (sacred marriage) had no substantial exposition in Frazer’s work, and might not be there interpreted from non-Frazerian perspectives available to Eliot in other anthropological texts he had read. 22 Eliot, The Waste Land, in Collected Poems, 54.

Notes to pages 172–84

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23 Ronald Bush has produced an intriguing study of Eliot’s juvenile interests in ‘primitive’ culture, ‘The Presence of the Past,’ which includes a concise summary of turning points in scholarship on Eliot and anthropology, 375–6n6. 24 Chinitz, Cultural Divide, 72–3. 25 The words are borrowed from Eliot’s declaration in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) regarding his relationship to literary tradition (see The Sacred Wood, 52–3). 26 In Solid Objects, Mao argues that modernists swallowed aestheticism into a moral project by making the production of art, rather than the consumption of art, a redeeming type of work (38–9). 27 Eliot, ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1927), in Collected Poems, 100. 28 Eliot, The Waste Land, in Collected Poems, 68. 29 A typical example of such imposed irony is found in the otherwise attentive and indispensable companion to the poem by Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 95. 30 Eliot, The Waste Land, in Collected Poems, 53, 68. 31 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 76. The reference to the published version is to Collected Poems, 62. 32 For an example of Eastern religion seen in this light, see Eliot’s critique of Irving Babbit’s ‘purified’ and ‘canned’ Buddhism, in Idea of a Christian Society, 181–2. 33 Nageswara Rao, Peace Which Passeth Understanding, 63–4, 73. 34 Sri, Eliot, Vedanta and Buddhism, 123. 35 Eliot, Definition of Culture, 26, 29. Eliot argues that Hindu religious culture has, like the English, suffered a cultural disintegration. The form and history of this fragmentation are different, however, as they are a result of religious functions undergoing separation and ‘ossification into caste’ (26). His view is consistent with anthropological arguments regarding the history of caste reaching into the 1980s (Raheja, Poison in the Gift, 251–2). There is no reason to believe Eliot might not have held a similar understanding of Indian society much earlier, when he studied it at Harvard. 36 Eliot, The Waste Land, in Collected Poems, 75, 65. 37 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 76, 78. 38 Eliot, The Waste Land, in Collected Poems, 69. 39 Eliot, The Waste Land, in Collected Poems, 69. 40 Chinitz, Cultural Divide, 76–7, 80. 41 Chinitz, Cultural Divide, 77. 42 Eliot, After Strange Gods, 64–5. 43 Eliot, Selected Prose, 234–6.

298 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Notes to pages 184–200 Eliot, After Strange Gods, 50, 48. Eliot, Idea of a Christian Society, 73; see also 52. Eliot, Idea of a Christian Society, 53, 51. Eliot, Idea of a Christian Society, 81. Eliot, Definition of Culture, 53, 67; paraphrases from 71, 41. On culture as what makes life worth living, see Eliot, Idea of a Christian Society, 27; that culture cannot exist without religion is a recurring theme in his essays. MacDiarmid’s argument in Eliot’s Civilized Savage builds on Crawford, Savage and the City. Bush, Study in Character and Style, 60, 62. Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, 69. Ellmann, Poetics of Impersonality, 98 (see also 106–7), 109. Eliot’s draft version of The Waste Land makes the connection to Stoker’s Dracula even more explicit, where not bats but ‘A man [crossed out, replaced by:] form’ crawls head downwards down the wall (Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 74). Eliot, ‘London Letter,’ 330; and ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), in Selected Prose, 65. See, for example, Eliot, Idea of a Christian Society, 80–1; and Definition of Culture, 43–4, 52, 55, 58. Eliot, ‘London Letter,’ 331. Weston, Ritual to Romance, 101–4. There is a suggestive connection between Weston’s herbal Healer and Eliot’s poet as a possessed Doctor: in the RigVeda she finds a ceremonial poem that identifies the Doctor as the father of the Poet. The Doctor himself identifies his herbs as the ‘little mothers’ that will restore life to the dead (102). See Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 72–8, on possessed prophets, and 285–7 on ritual mimicry of the dying god. Ellmann, Poetics of Impersonality, 100, 109. Raheja, Poison in the Gift, 43. Gregory, Savage Money, 65–7. Gregory, Savage Money, 64. Woolf, The Waves, 142, 145. Woolf, The Waves, 145, 137. Woolf, The Waves, 140–1. Woolf, Between the Acts, 219. Woolf, Between the Acts, 209. Beckett, Three Novels, 69, 327–8. Beckett, Endgame, 33.

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71 Beckett, Three Novels, 59, 56. 72 Beckett, Three Novels, 30, 61. 73 For a definition of disembedding mechanisms, see Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, 21–9. The concept is elaborated throughout the book, and serves as a key sociological distinction between what I have been calling institutions of modern aboriginal and modern imperialist societies (which Giddens calls pre-modern and modern). 74 Beckett’s work becomes emblematic of such aesthetic confinement in Fredric Jameson’s depiction in Singular Modernity of a ‘late modernism’ that is both (a) alienated from the more open-ended and politically embedded self-fashioning of modernists from the turn of the century to the 1930s, and (b) the imaginative ground for a subsequent, canonical aestheticization of ‘modernism’ as a concept. My own study seeks to reveal a continuity across this period break, in which what I have named an economic unconscious expresses itself in the abject explicitness of modern House as opposed to other modern economic forms. 75 Cronin, Beckett, 30. 76 O’Brien, Beckett Country, 68–71. 77 Cronin, Beckett, 31. 78 Beckett, Disjecta, 70. 79 Beckett, Disjecta, 70. It is noteworthy, however, that Beckett could speak with pleasure about such estranging distances in the work of the same artist. He said of Jack Yeats’s A Morning (1935–6), which he prized among his collection: ‘It is nice to have Morning on one’s wall … that is always morning and a setting out without the returning’ (letter of 7 May 1936, collection of Trinity College Dublin, MS 10402). It is also significant that the only other Yeats work he owned at the time was an early print of a Western Ireland street scene, Corner Boys (1910), in which two men converse in front of a wall postered variously with announcements for a theatre performance showing fighting gondoliers, a public sale of farm land, and a ‘great meeting’ of the ‘people’ – suggesting that while the distances between the events and the town men, and between the events themselves, are striking and ambiguous, they are also enchained in volatile economic and social relations belonging to the years leading up to the wars of independence, and consequential. 80 Beckett, Disjecta, 139. 81 Beckett, Three Novels, 31. 82 Beckett, Three Novels, 7. All subsequent references are to 7–8. 83 Beckett, Three Novels, 414. 84 Beckett, Three Novels, 17.

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Notes to pages 207–13

85 Beckett, Three Novels, 16, 8–9, 19. 86 Beckett, Three Novels, 323, 324. 87 To return to an earlier example: however sterile the relationship between an unregenerate Adonis and a flat-chested, manly Magna Mater may be in Molloy, we likely remain enchanted by their union in a fantasy world of exchanges without gain, toil without work, leisure without recreation, time without clocks, and love without sentimentalism (I discuss this last distinction in part 4). 88 Beckett, Three Novels, 39. Part 4: The Impure House 1 H.D., Trilogy, 5. The lover figure is heterosexual and female only in Frazer’s and the modernists’ normative cultures; compare the relationship of Orpheus to Eurydice, or Demeter to Persephone. 2 Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 1:298. Mithra is a sun god born of AstarteAphrodite (1:303, and see note 5), and so shares the earth mother and son pattern of worship attached to Attis-Adonis. Frazer believes that an individualistic transcendentalism also makes Mithraism, in its contempt for earthly life and orientation toward an afterlife, like early Christianity. Kristeva, however, here seems interested only in the existential vitality, the life-principle, of the figure that connects it to what Frazer calls the ‘gentler’ worship of Adonis (1:298). 3 Kristeva, Tales of Love, 45–6. 4 Kristeva, Tales of Love, 41, 40, 46. 5 Oliver, ‘Kristeva’s Imaginary Father,’ 53. 6 Kristeva, Interviews, 73. 7 Oliver, ‘Kristeva’s Imaginary Father,’ 59. 8 Kristeva, Portable Kristeva, 447. 9 Ewa Ziarek has noted the implication of animism in Freud’s notion of the uncanny, where it is an archaic survival that haunts modernity, in order to explain Kristeva’s understanding of modern social bonds (‘Uncanny Style,’ 13). In Julia Kristeva, Noëlle McAfee similarly insists upon Kristeva’s debt to Freud’s notion of the uncanny as a return of the repressed archaic mother, rather than to his parallel (and to him, more important) notion of it as a return of the repressed authority of the Oedipal father, especially in the formation of an overly strict superego (49). 10 Kelly Oliver explains this rather complex problem clearly: ‘Without the support of the imaginary father – the mother’s love – we will be devoured by abjection rather than become autonomous … We become the borderline

Notes to pages 213–22

11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

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between drives and symbols. The borderline speaks of desire, but the discourse is empty, laden with drives that pass through repressive censorship because the words do not signify. The discourse is experienced as empty even though it is full of drives and affect representations. Thus, the structure of the metonymy of desire is in place, but the narcissistic structure of what Kristeva calls the “metaphor of love” is broken … For Kristeva it is an archaic transferential imaginary identification which moves the would-besubject away from the mother and into the Symbolic. This imaginary Third, the imaginary father, is the missing addressee in and for whom the translation of drives into language has meaning [Tales of Love 50]’ (‘Kristeva’s Imaginary Father,’ 56). Kristeva, Tales of Love, 375. Kristeva, Interviews, 68. Kristeva, Tales of Love, 382. Kristeva, Interviews, 68–9. Kristeva’s development of a ‘herethics’ based in maternal experience is in the essay ‘Stabat Mater’ (Tales of Love, 234–63). The uncanny revelation prompted by the assimilation of the foreigner to the experience of national identity is the subject of Strangers to Ourselves. Both experiences open up the self to its own otherness, and suggest ways of understanding interpersonal bonds not exclusively regulated by the symbolic law of Oedipal formations. Kristeva, Tales of Love, 47. See McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride. See Kristeva, Tales of Love, 373, 375. Kristeva, Tales of Love, 46, 277, 381. Jameson, Marxism and Form, 109–10. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 157; see also 223–4. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 169–70. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 210; see also 152. Horowitz, Repression, 185. The internal quotation is from Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 29. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 222. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 228–31. Marcuse associates matriarchy with the institution of a ‘maternal’ superego called the super-id. He directly criticizes Freud’s assumption that such an institution must be forgotten or repressed ‘in a mature civilization’ (230), yet exerts himself, in contradiction to his own theory, to dismiss it as a form of libidinal expression incommensurate with basic repression. Jay, ‘Reflections,’ 37. The internal quotation is from Marcuse, Five Lectures, 41. Jay, ‘Reflections,’ 37.

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Notes to pages 223–7

29 For the matriarchal and matrilineal outlines of the ‘mother right’ stage and its connection to eros, see Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, 71–2; on the priority of Isis over Osiris, 89; on a primal morality based on maternal love, 79; and on the Magna Mater as the origin of culture, 86–7. 30 O’Neill, ‘Marcuse’s Maternal Ethic,’ 102–3. 31 Joyce, quoted in O’Neill, 110; the quotation, from ‘Scylla and Charybdis,’ can be found in Joyce, Ulysses, 266. 32 Kristeva, Tales of Love, 48. 33 O’Neill, ‘Marcuse’s Maternal Ethic,’ 102. 34 O’Neill, ‘Marcuse’s Maternal Ethic,’ 105. 35 From this perspective, the seeming incoherence of Marcuse’s various indications of a realized revolutionary subjectivity is the mark of his commitment to the situational nature of its reproduction in practice, rather than its apocalyptic realization in a single class or movement. That Marcuse must be read for his articulations of utopian practice connected to existing institutions and their conflicts, rather than theoretical blueprints, is suggested by Jameson in Marxism and Form (108) and provocatively developed by Shierry Weber Nicholsen in ‘The Persistence of Passionate Subjectivity.’ 36 Two recent collections of essays on Marcuse, those edited by Abromeit and Cobb, and by Bokina and Lukes, have included sections on Marcuse’s contemporary relevance devoted entirely to ecological theory and politics. See Nicholsen’s compelling account of the reasons for this conjunction (‘Passionate Subjectivity,’ 160–1). 37 On Marcuse as a theorist of a politics of coalition-building, see the contributions of Angela Davis and Douglas Kellner to the collection by Abromeit and Cobb. The attempt to perceive a revolutionary subject in a such a heterogeneous identity is also found in Kristeva’s constellation of commitments to modes of ‘revolt’ associated concretely with ‘small things’ rather than ‘grand theories,’ and with the Left as a tradition defined not by ‘content or principle’ but by the de-naturalization of culture and a rebuilding made possible by psychological journeys to those roots of symbolic formation that condition ‘the acquisition of culture and knowledge’ (Interviews, 15, 174). 38 On the irreducibly various and ambivalent politics, especially for women, of a wide range of both capitalist and non-capitalist societies, see Pasternak et al., Sex, Gender, and Kinship, 285–90. 39 These images are quite distinct from the commodified and apparently reified memorial pleasures that fatally trap Winston in Charrington’s shop – which Patricia Rae has argued are parodies of Eliot’s own fragments of pre-capitalist nostalgia (‘Mr. Charrington’s Junk Shop,’ 210–11).

Notes to pages 227–35 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

303

Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 10, 33, 131, 167, 170–2. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 171–2. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 130, 230, 309. I am indebted to Patricia Rae for pointing out the ethnographic register in Orwell’s text. This is, I believe, a double register represented by Winston and the narrator. When Winston goes to a pub like a field anthropologist to interview a prole, he is disappointed with the results. After several lengthy questions and answers, he concludes that ‘the old man’s memory was nothing but a rubbish-heap of details,’ and that proles in general are ‘like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones’ (Nineteen EightyFour, 95, 96–7). Yet this is Winston’s fault: he is unable to escape his imaginary conflict with the abstractions promulgated by Big Brother as opposing truths and memories. In fact, it is clear that the old man gives rich answers to his questions. For example, in picking upon a seemingly irrelevant detail in Winston’s characterization of the old capitalist class, the old man interjects: ‘Top ’ats! … Funny you should mention ’em. The same thing come into my ’ead only yesterday, I dono why. I was jest thinking, I ain’t seen a top ’at in years. Gorn right out, they ’ave. The last time I wore a top ’at was at my sister-in-law’s funeral. And that was – well, I couldn’t give you the date, but it must’a been fifty year ago. Of course it was only ’ired for the occasion, you understand’ (93). What Winston misses in his push for class analysis is the ritual of mourning and memorialization, the obligations of the extended family, and the role of clothing as sacred rather than secular code, all of which resonate darkly against the very world Winston is struggling to delegitimate. Ironically, the man’s chain of associations works by the same associative logic that we see holds Winston’s own memories, fantasies, and production of subversive identity and value together throughout the narrative. Osteen, Economy of ‘Ulysses,’ 424, 425. Joyce, Ulysses, 23, 37. Joyce, Ulysses, 255, 8. Joyce, Ulysses, 261, 262–3; on Bloom’s financial plans, 852–5. Joyce, Ulysses, 731. Joyce, Ulysses, 701–2, 702–3. Joyce, Ulysses, 741–2. Joyce, Ulysses, 720, 721. Joyce, Ulysses, 734–5. Osteen, Economy of ‘Ulysses,’ 371. Joyce, Ulysses, 721. Joyce, Ulysses, 725.

304 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Notes to pages 235–46 Joyce, Ulysses, 717, 265–71 (see esp. 269). Joyce, Ulysses, 262, 243. Joyce, Ulysses, 430. Lévi-Strauss, Way of the Masks, 174. Gillespie, Introduction to Beyond Kinship, 1. Gillespie, Introduction to Beyond Kinship, 7. Lévi-Strauss, Way of the Masks, 174. For a critical survey of oppressive conditions imposed by ‘traditional’ societies, see Pasternak et al., Sex, Gender, and Kinship, 287–90; for a Marxist perspective, see Eagleton, Crazy John, 73–4. Gillespie, Introduction to Beyond Kinship, 8. Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Gillespie, ‘Lévi-Strauss,’ 30. Joyce, ‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’ (1907), in Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, 118–19. Joyce, quoted in Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 329. Gillespie, Introduction to Beyond Kinship, 12. On the House conceived as a body, see Gillespie, Introduction to Beyond Kinship, 17, and ‘Lévi-Strauss,’ 46–7; on the habitation of ancestral spirits, see Gillespie, Introduction to Beyond Kinship, 12, as well as Kirch, ‘Temples as “Holy Houses,”’ who notes that houses once lived in may be left to their ancestral spirits and so become temples. The pattern of a house in which ‘resides the spiritual essence of the cosmogenic primal pair, a brother-sister couple’ (Kirch, 105), suggests both an expression of the Adonis-Aphrodite fertility myth, and a rationale for Joyce’s own ‘primal’ couple of Molly and Leopold Bloom in the Irish House imagined by Ulysses. Joyce, Ulysses, 748. Henke, Politics of Desire, 106. Cooper, Culture of Market Society, 26. See Cooper, Culture of Market Society, 8, 11, 13, 18, 79–80, 83, 147. Cooper, Culture of Market Society, 80. Cooper, Culture of Market Society, 26, 167–8. Cooper, Culture of Market Society, 143–4. Cooper, Culture of Market Society, 168–9, 175. Cooper, Culture of Market Society, 176–7. Cooper, Culture of Market Society, 165–6. Joyce, Ulysses, 23, 21. Joyce, Ulysses, 431–2, 746–7. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 15, 18.

Notes to pages 247–9

305

83 In Ladies Almanack (1928), this figure is also a lesbian, modelled on a prominent Left Bank patron, the expatriate heiress Natalie Barney. In Ryder (1928), the figure is male, modelled on the writer’s father, Wald Barnes. 84 Barnes, Nightwood, 127. Robin is figured as a somnambule who instinctively withdraws into a mysterious nightworld to which Nora has no access. When Nora senses ‘a company’ entering with Robin ‘unaware,’ singing through her in popular songs Nora does not know, altering her very voice, revealing in her life a ‘foreign land’ that she has ‘no part in’ (57), Robin resembles Cooper’s image of the Market self as an open channel for ‘inputs, throughputs, and outputs,’ without durable identity (45). 85 Hence the book centres on Nora, not so much as a character, but as an imagination powerful enough to glimpse a Third Party denied symbolization. As readers it is difficult to love any character in Nightwood, but we do learn to love, with uncanny passion, Nora’s love – Nora, love me, instead! – and to wonder whether its limits are really metaphysical, as O’Connor affirms but she cannot. If this strangely demanding love seduces the reader to position herself or himself – in the mechanics of wish-fulfilment fantasy – as its object, then one may speculate that the unexpected power of Barnes’s novel is to force the reader to fill the empty position of the imaginary father vacated by all its characters, and so to produce a curious, new relationship between reader and text. Arguably, this is what Ulysses too, in its milder but just as subtle and more complex passions, invites from the reader. 86 I refer here to Kristeva’s analysis of melancholia in relation to love and abjection in Black Sun. 87 Cucullu, Expert Modernists, 144–5, 149, 151. 88 Cucullu, Expert Modernists, 152, 153. Yet Cucullu is the first critic I have encountered to have refined the oft-repeated grudge that Bloom himself could not read the novel. She astutely speculates that ‘we could imagine Leopold doggedly struggling through it, provided, of course, he could lay his hands on [a copy],’ while we ‘could not easily imagine Molly (or any female character in the novel for that matter)’ doing so. I might add that this would align Bloom with, rather than distinguish him from, the majority of readers of the first edition, whom Cucullu identifies as a new ‘expert’ elite (153). 89 Cooper, Culture of Market Society, 178, 202, 264n3. 90 Osteen has also summarized the variable, gift and commodity values that Joyce himself gave to copies of Ulysses in his exchanges with friends and patrons (Economy of ‘Ulysses,’ 29–30). The book as an inalienable extension

306

91 92 93 94

95 96

97 98 99 100 101

102

103 104

Notes to pages 249–55 of the author himself came home to Joyce when he puzzled over Peggy Guggenheim’s invitation to a celebration of her marriage to Laurence Vail; they were virtual strangers to him, but, explains Rainey, she had bought one of the first-edition Ulysses (Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 68). Joyce felt it more profoundly when he cried out his heart to Nora, away in Galway, and pleaded with her: ‘O my dearest, if you would only turn to me even now and read that terrible book which has broken the heart in my breast and take me to yourself alone to do with me what you will!’ (Joyce, quoted in Bishop, ‘Garbled History,’ 35; emphasis mine). Morrisson, Public Face of Modernism, 10. Gambrell, Women Intellectuals, 22–7. Friedman, Psyche Reborn, 238; Morris, How to Live, 133. H.D., Collected Poems, 395–6. I have chosen to follow H.D.’s spelling of Calypso, rather than its editorial regularization (see Collected Poems, 619). On the notion of a modernist ‘counter-public sphere’ of women writers and readers, see Taylor, H.D. and the Public Sphere. Julie Vandivere has attempted rightly to de-romanticize the Bryher-H.D. family formation, though on (perhaps necessarily) slight evidence of its patriarchal (via Bryher) and other problems. Morris, How to Live, 125. Scott, Electra after Freud, 135–7. Friedman, Penelope’s Web, 340–2; on the general pattern, see 293–313. Friedman, Penelope’s Web, 342. H.D., Hippolytus Temporizes & Ion, 234, 254. H.D. appears to read classical literature as the pure expression of a gift economy, whereas Richard Seaford, in Money and the Early Greek Mind, convincingly argues that Attic tragedy, in particular, expressed tensions between ideologies produced by a new Market economy and those belonging to an older gift economy (see his discussion of short-term Market transactions as opposed to longterm House transactions, 14–15, and his brilliant readings of scenes involving transvalued gifts and goods in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon [148–9] and Euripides’ Electra [153]). A similar, more complex reading could be applied to Ion, but this would not alter what H.D. found most valuable in it. H.D., Tribute to Freud, 11, 194. The Gods-Goods pun is a leitmotif in the text that belongs to a complex material and spiritual gift exchange between H.D. and Freud; for its origin, see 11. H.D., Hyppolytus Temporizes & Ion, 254, 257, 203, 214–15. For a recent and forceful articulation of such criticism of H.D., see Edmunds, Out of Line, 12–13, 89–90.

Notes to pages 255–8

307

105 This is the place to acknowledge Ariela Freedman’s caution that we not rush to idealize the social realm of the gift, in general or in H.D.’s work, since ‘the gift is not necessarily benevolent’ (‘Gifts, Goods and Gods,’ 191). Freedman raises pertinent questions concerning H.D.’s assimilation and displacement of the Jewish heritages of Freud’s values and ideas in her own syncretic Christian ideology, though her claim that H.D. positions herself as a (conventionally Christian) speaker of the spirit rather than the letter (186–7), and consequently dematerialized understanding of gifts and goods (and kinships), is debatable. 106 ‘Autobiographical fantasy’ is the way H.D. described her weaving together of memoir, confession, history, and fiction in the sprawling, ideogrammic structure of prose works only loosely tied to the cohesive plot of narrative form or discourse of essay form (H.D., quoted in Morris, How to Live, 139). 107 H.D., Hyppolytus Temporizes & Ion, 257. 108 H.D., The Gift, 163. 109 The epithet is applied to Freud in the dedication of Tribute to Freud, 1. The healing and poisonous drugs of Asklepios are insistently present in Ion as the heritage of Kreousa, whose story is told (Hyppolytus Temporizes & Ion, 218–19) as well as depicted on the textile keepsake left by her in Ion’s basket (246), and used in her failed plot to murder him (220). 110 Like the sun god, the androgynous youth figure remains quite important to H.D.’s vision (and retains its place in the kinship economy described by Morris). Cassandra Laity’s brilliant tracing of this figure’s decline in H.D.’s writing may be interpreted as a shift in narrative perspective and lyric identification rather than as a substitution of ideals. 111 Taylor, H.D. and the Public Sphere, 155. 112 Rich, Poetry and Prose, 171n6. 113 Rich, Poetry and Prose, 171, 168. 114 Rich, Poetry and Prose, 244. 115 Friedman and DuPlessis, eds, Signets, xiii. 116 Taylor, H.D. and the Public Sphere, 179. 117 The breaking point for this surpassing of this masculine figure finds its icon in the seductive and magical – yet finally asocial and intolerable – man who defined ‘beat’ for the language of the sixties: the Dean Moriarty created by Jack Kerouac. In this novel, a new vision of the Beat, of secular beatitude, is set in unresolved conflict with community, represented by, but not limited to, an abject language of kinship with women. See Dean’s martyrdom before a trial of women accusers (160–2) and his betrayal of the narrator (248–9) in On the Road.

308 118 119 120 121

Notes to pages 259–67 Rich, Poetry and Prose, 248–9. Morris, How to Live, 13. Cooper, Culture of Market Society, 185 (and see 183–5). Jameson, Ideologies of Theory, 208. Jameson here argues that the sixties were ‘an immense and inflationary issuing of superstructural credit; a universal abandonment of the referential gold standard; and extraordinary printing up of ever more devalued signifiers,’ and at the period’s end, ‘with the world economic crisis, all the old infrastructural bills then slowly came due once more; and the 80s will be characterized by an effort, on a world scale, to proletarianize all those unbounded social forces that gave the 60s their energy, by an extension of the class struggle, in other words, into the farthest reaches of the globe as well as the most minute configurations of local institutions (such as the university system)’ (208). The truth of this insight can only be appreciated, I suggest, if it is mediated by the memory, not the forgetting, of actual if fragile victories against masculinist and racist institutions that have altered the language in which this new class struggle may be recognized and fought as a transparently economic conflict.

Conclusion 1 Amariglio and Ruccio, ‘Literary/Cultural “Economies,”’ 389, 387. 2 It is axiomatic here that Marxism can only speak meaningfully in a model of the present cultural economy that is (a) spatially multiple (for example, in Chris Gregory’s tripartite model, which he calls radical-humanist in politics), and (b) temporally non-fatalistic (for example, in the varying values attributed to the same object under the aegis of coeval institutions produced, reproduced, and traversed by life trajectories of persons and things). 3 Zadek, Economics of Utopia, 144, 150–1, 246. 4 For an excellent analysis of Kristeva’s development of these ideas, see Ziarek, ‘Uncanny Style.’ 5 Findlay, ‘Always Indigenize!’ 309, 314. 6 Huhndorf, ‘Indigeneity, Colonialism, and Literary Studies,’ 29, 32, 31. 7 Huhndorf, ‘Indigeneity, Colonialism, and Literary Studies,’ 31. 8 Lawrence, Women in Love, 81, 265–7. 9 Gerald ‘conceived the pure instrumentality of mankind. There had been so much humanitarianism, so much talk of sufferings and feelings. It was ridiculous. The sufferings and feelings of individuals did not matter in the least. They were mere conditions, like the weather. What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the individual. As a man as of a knife: does it cut

Notes to pages 268–76

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

21

22

309

well? Nothing else mattered. Everything in the world has its function, and is good or not good in so far as it fulfils this function more or less perfectly’ (Lawrence, Women in Love, 233–4). Lawrence, Women in Love, 208–9. Jameson, Ideologies of Theory, 128–9. Jameson, Ideologies of Theory, 129–30. Jameson, Singular Modernity, 163. Jameson, Singular Modernity, 120, 168. On the breakdown of a public sphere (always, in any case, class-based) into private and minor languages, see Ideologies of Theory, 130–1, and Singular Modernity, 203–4. On taboo and impurity, see Singular Modernity, 126–8 and 160. Lawrence, Women in Love, 335. Lawrence, Women in Love, 336. Manganaro, Voice of Authority, 18–61. William Morris, News from Nowhere, 140–1. Sorensen, ‘Different Fragments, Different Ruins.’ A comparable example is found in the writing, especially Legends of Vancouver (1911), of Mohawk ethnographer, short-story writer, and poet Emily Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). I am grateful to curator Paula Whitlow and assistant Ginger White of the Chiefswood National Historical Site, where Johnson’s home, the only surviving pre-Confederate Native mansion in Canada, has been restored, for their generous time and helpful information. The latter included pointing out the Johnson family’s interest in William Morris’s ideals and cultivation of Morris-style decor, visible in original wallpaper, rugs, and furnishings. See my discussion of her work from a literary economic perspective in ‘Modernism and Aboriginal Modernity.’ David Nicholls, Conjuring the Folk, 62. See also Nicholls’s discussion of Paul Gilroy’s examples of alternative economic modernities in this context, in which modernization should be understood to add to, rather than replace, the socially and culturally productive modes of production (e.g., subsistence farming) developed before industrialization (10–11). I refer to Boas’s political aims for ethnographic collection, to combat ideologies of racial inferiority or superiority and demonstrate the equal abilities and complexities of different peoples, as well as to Hurston’s own attraction to comparative cultural anthropology as a discipline that allowed her to see her own black folk culture where once she had borne it unconsciously, ‘like a tight chemise’ (quoted in Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 115). On Hurston and Boas, see also Hemenway, Hurston, 88–93; Christopher Douglas has given the most detailed account of the significance of Boasian critical ideology in Hurston’s work, supporting the general points made here.

310

Notes to pages 276–7

23 Hurston’s initiations into hoodoo and voodoo are told in Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). See also Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 157, 175. 24 Hurston, Their Eyes, 148. Despite the pervasive development of Christianity in modern African-American heritage, Hurston asserted that pre-Christian culture was primary: ‘A careful study of Negro churches, as conducted by Negroes, will show, I think[,] that the Negro is not a Christian, but a pagan still’ (quoted in Hemenway, Hurston, 92–3). 25 Hurston, Their Eyes, 1. 26 Hurston, Their Eyes, 182. 27 Hurston, Their Eyes, 184. 28 The phrase ‘make it new’ is the title of one of Pound’s essay collections (1934) and is found elsewhere in his writings, most notably in Canto LIII, together with the original Chinese characters, for which Carroll F. Terrell provides the following commentary relevant to this study: ‘Ch’êng T’ang, who reigned 1766–1753 B.C., founded the Shang dynasty (1766–1122). He was a model king who subordinated every passion and feeling to the good of his people. In time of drought he coined money so the people could buy grain, but there was no grain to buy until his sacrifices were accepted by Heaven and rain fell. On his washbasin he inscribed the admonition, “Make it new”’ (Companion to the Cantos, 205). ‘What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage’ belongs to a refrain in Pound’s Canto LXXXI. 29 Tillich, ‘Critique and Justification of Utopia,’ 299. My proposal herein is to break away from the binary logic of utopia and primitivism originating in the Renaissance, and still lodged deep in Marxist tradition, which has been so powerfully historicized and deconstructed by Christian Marouby in Utopie et primitivisme.

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Index

Abbey Theatre, 136–7, 144, 293n25 abject (defined), 23, 32–5 aboriginal (defined), 6–7, 17–18 Allen, M.D., 79–80 Amariglio, Jack, 261 amateur press, 158 amatory writing (defined), 209, 215, 225 Anderson, Margaret, 250 Anderson, Sherwood, 10 animism, 9, 27, 28, 57, 66, 163, 170, 174, 180, 186 antimodernism (defined), 22 Arata, Stephen, 26 Arkham House, 159, 295–6n47 Armstrong, Nancy, 143 Armstrong, Tim, 188 Bachofen, J.J., 222–5 Balzac, Honoré de, 52–3, 54 Barnes, Djuna, 247, 250 Barnes, Wald, 305n83 Barney, Natalie, 305n83 Bataille, Georges, 230 Baudelaire, Charles, 113, 127–9, 183–5 Beach, Sylvia, 250

Beckett, Samuel, 25, 64, 199–208, 209, 258; Endgame, 200, 202; Molloy, 199–208; The Unnamable, 199–200, 207; Waiting for Godot, 202 Bell, Michael, 10, 11, 296n2 Benjamin, Walter, 222 big houses, 57, 294n31 Bishop, Edward L., 249 Boas, Franz, 21, 276 Bobrowski, Tadeusz, 99 Boehmer, Elleke, 52, 280n12 Boyd, Valerie, 3 Bradley, F.H., 179 Brecht, Bertolt, 11 Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights, 242 Bryher, 145, 252 Bush, Ronald, 187–8, 280n17, 297n23 Carr, Helen, 280n17 Cassirer, Ernst, 10 Cather, Willa, 197 Chinitz, David, 172, 181 Churchill, Winston, 150 Clifford, James, 8 commodity (defined), 14, 15–16 Connolly, James, 236

326 Index Conrad, Joseph, 10, 96–122, 123–5, 142–4, 178, 196, 280n12; Heart of Darkness, 24, 101–3, 119; Lord Jim, 97, 103–12, 113, 114, 121, 152; Nostromo, 103, 112–20, 121; The Secret Agent, 121 Cooper, John Xiros, 242–7, 259–60, 268, 305n84 Cronin, Anthony, 201–2 Cronyn, George W., 13, 165–6 Cuala Press, 133–9, 296n47 Cucullu, Lois, 242, 247–9 cummings, e.e., 9 Cunard, Nancy, 145 dan (defined), 191–2 Dante Alighieri, 179–80 Delany, Paul, 132–4, 140, 141, 143, 144, 147–8, 159, 252 Deleuze, Gilles, 288n98 del Gizzo, Suzanne, 280n12 Derrida, Jacques, 15 Dickinson, Emily, 162–5 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 77, 151–2, 190 Douglas, Christopher, 309n22 Dun Emer Press, 133–9, 159 Dunsany, Lord, 82, 93 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 9, 252 Durkheim, Emile, 172 Eagleton, Terry, 46, 68, 69, 304n63 Earle, David, 153 economic unconscious (defined), 19, 20–1, 46 Edmunds, Susan, 306n104 Eliot, T.S., 9, 13, 27, 84, 131, 156, 161– 93, 199, 251, 270, 273, 280n17; The Hollow Men, 227; later essays on culture, 182–7; The Waste Land, 132, 144, 145, 149, 166, 168–81, 185,

187–8, 190, 193, 194, 198, 203, 209, 293n25 Ellmann, Maud, 188, 191 Fabian, Johannes, 12, 15, 28 fascism, 70, 85, 93–4, 123, 146, 160, 253, 292n190, 293n27, 295n33 fertility myth. See Frazer, Sir James G. Findlay, Len, 265 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 198–9 Forster, E.M., 51, 57, 147–8, 295n37 Foster, John, 67, 287n74 Frazer, Sir James G. (and fertility myth), 10, 27, 43–4, 66, 167–71, 178, 187, 191–3, 194–6, 200, 209–11, 223, 253, 256, 272–3, 283n54, 296n21, 304n69 Freedman, Ariela, 307n105 Freud, Sigmund, 10, 11, 22–3, 24, 25, 32, 36, 49, 54, 66, 70, 98, 100, 161, 181, 189, 210, 215–16, 218, 222–4, 251, 254–5, 257 Friedman, Lawrence, 242–3 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 251, 254 Frow, John, 28, 281n23 Fry, Roger, 8, 279n7 Gambrell, Alice, 250 Garnett, Edward, 151 Gates, Henry Louis, 281n18 Giddens, Anthony, 201, 242, 243 gift (defined), 14, 15–16 Gikandi, Simon, 8, 9, 12 Gillespie, Susan, 237, 240–1 Gilroy, Paul, 309n21 Gleeson, Evelyn, 134, 135, 137 Global Village (McLuhan), 225–7 Gluck, Mary, 280n12 Godelier, Maurice, 41 Goethe, J.W. von, 291n189

Index 327 Gonne, Maud, 45, 53, 135, 144 good (defined), 15–16 Greene, Sonia, 156, 158 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 44, 45–6, 47, 57, 135, 145, 286n51 Gregory, C.A., 14, 15–16, 26, 237–8, 262, 308n2 Grove Press, 258 Guattari, Félix, 288n98 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 40, 131, 146, 161, 228, 250–9, 273, 276, 280n13; ‘Callypso,’ 251; The Gift, 255–6, 264; Helen in Egypt, 257; Ion, 111, 254–5; Tribute to Freud, 251, 256; Trilogy, 209, 251 Hackett, Robin, 280n13 Haigh-Wood, Vivienne, 178 Hardy, Thomas, 150, 183 Harlem Renaissance, 4 Harpham, Geoffrey, 99–101, 111 Hassett, Joseph, 284n17 Hemingway, Ernest, 10, 280n12 Henke, Suzette, 241 Herbert, Christopher, 27, 37 Hesse, Hermann, 190 Hogarth Press, 144 Hornimann, Annie, 145, 293n25 Horowitz, Gad, 219–20 hospitality, 28, 29, 46, 56, 194 House (defined), 15–18, 237–8 Howard, Robert E., 80 Hughes, Langston, 3, 4 Huhndorf, Shari, 265–6 Hurston, Zora Neale, 3–5, 21, 276–7 Hyde, Lewis, 229–30 hysteria, 98, 188, 190 imaginary father (defined), 40, 66, 210–15

imperialism (defined), 18 Innis, C.L., 57 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (novel and film), 123 Irving, Katrina, 280n13 Jackson, Rosemary, 37 Jacobus, Mary, 100 Jameson, Fredric, 259–60, 265–6, 281n31; on Freud and liberal society, 215–16; on Marcuse, 302n35; on modernism, 125–6, 269–70, 274, 299n74; political unconscious, 19 Jay, Martin, 221–2 jazz, 9 Jeffares, Norman, 66 Johnson, Pauline (Tekahionwake), 21, 309n20 Joyce, James, 40, 84, 124, 131, 142–4, 146, 255, 293n25; Dubliners, 248; Ulysses, 73, 111, 132, 137, 145, 152, 164, 174, 223–4, 228–51, 256–7, 259, 264, 276, 296n2 Joyce, Nora, 306n90 Jung, Carl, 10 Kennington, Eric, 73, 77, 149–51 Kerouac, Jack, 307n117 Kiberd, Declan, 48, 68, 69 Kirch, Patrick, 304n69 Knowland, A.S., 66 Kristeva, Julia, 41, 70, 221; abjection, 23, 32–7, 47–8, 54, 58–9, 63, 69, 71, 77, 78, 86, 90, 96, 97–8, 101, 103, 105, 122, 142–3; on amatory writing, 40, 42, 225, 263; imaginary father, 40, 66, 210–18, 224, 226, 232, 246, 254; the sacred, 65–6, 187–9, 269. See also abject; hysteria; imaginary father; narcissism; want

328 Index Lacan, Jacques, 23, 32, 41, 83, 210 Laity, Cassandra, 307n110 Lawrence, D.H., 10, 40, 182–4, 186, 191, 253; Women in Love, 242, 266– 8, 271–2 Lawrence, T.E., 21, 71, 81, 82, 84, 94, 96–8, 109, 123–5, 195; Revolt in the Desert, 74, 151; Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 72–80, 99, 120, 148–52 Leavis, F.R., 166–7 Levenson, Michael, 121, 127, 181 Levi, Carlo, 21 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 237–8 Lévy, Maurice, 88 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 10, 172 Lewis, Wyndham, 63, 264 Li, Victor, 275 Lincoln, Kenneth, 161–5, 168 Little Review, 144 Locke, Alain, 4 Lovecraft, H.P., 80–97, 98, 148; and Conrad, 100–2, 104, 106, 110, 123; and Eliot, 183, 189–90; and literary institutions, 152–9; and Yeats, 124 Lukács, Georg, 14, 272, 291n189 MacCannell, Dean, 21, 141 MacDiarmid, Laurie, 187–8 Machen, Arthur, 154, 156 Manganaro, Marc, 272–3 Mao, Douglas, 20, 173 Marcuse, Herbert, 54–5, 58–9, 216– 28, 255, 263–5, 273 Market (defined), 15–16, 18 Marouby, Christian, 310n29 Marxism: critical theory, 14, 19, 47, 173, 216, 219, 221, 238, 265, 273; critique and advancement of herein, 261–3, 275, 308n2; historical tradition, 60, 167, 236

Mason, Charlotte Osgoode, 3–6 Mauss, Marcel, 14, 15, 230 McAfee, Noëlle, 300n9 McCay, Winsor, 197 McLuhan, Marshall, 214, 225 McNickle, D’Arcy, 275–6 Melville, Herman, 151–2 Meyers, Jeffrey, 78–9 Milbank, Alison, 30 Miller, Nicholas, 67, 287n74 Miró, Joan, 8 Moore, Marianne, 257–8 Moorjani, Angela, 200 Moretti, Franco, 282–3n51 Morris, Adalaide, 251–3, 259 Morris, May, 134 Morris, William, 48, 58, 59–60, 67, 72, 86, 88, 138, 148, 150, 195, 288n108; arts and crafts, 60, 76, 79, 134, 309n20; News from Nowhere, 79–80, 93, 273–4 Morrisson, Mark, 249 Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, 283n54 mythic thinking, 9–10 Nadelhaft, Ruth, 121 Nageswara Rao, G., 176 narcissism: abject, 63, 90–1, 94–5, 110, 112, 122, 127, 189, 194–5, 209, 246; modern crisis, 129, 211–13, 218–19, 226; primal, 49–53, 209, 246; working through, 54, 58, 66, 96–7, 102–7, 114–15, 122, 199 New Woman, 25 Nicholls, David, 276 Nicholls, Peter, 127–9 Nicholsen, Shierry Weber, 302n35 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 93, 151–2, 167, 222, 245 North, Michael, 9, 10, 280–1n18

Index 329 O’Brien, Eoin, 202, 207 occultism, 167–71 Oliver, Kelly, 211, 300n10 O’Neill, John, 222–6 Orwell, George, 227–8, 243 Osteen, Mark, 229–30, 234 Parnell, Charles Stuart, 30, 43–4, 45, 53, 54, 58, 241, 284n1 Pasternak et al.: Sex, Gender, and Kinship, 302n38, 304n63 Path of the Rainbow, The, 13, 165–6 performativity, 11, 165–6, 177, 188 Perl, Jeffrey, 167, 181 Picasso, Pablo, 8–9, 10, 293n25 Poe, E.A., 291n189 postmodernism, 11, 225 Pound, Ezra, 30, 131, 134, 137, 142, 144, 148, 161, 170, 176, 191, 295n37; and gift economy, 253, 293n27, 295n33; and history, 277; and politics, 94, 146, 253, 270, 273 Quinn, John, 144–5 Rado, Lisa, 280n13 Rae, Patricia, 302n39, 303n43 Raheja, Gloria Goodwin, 297n35 Rainey, Lawrence, 131–4, 139–40, 146–8, 159, 249 Rawson, Claude, 280n12 Rhodes, Chip, 21 Rhys, Jean, 98 Rich, Adrienne, 257–9 Riquelme, John Paul, 30 Rogers, David, 23, 24 Ross, Stephen, 112, 122 Roth, Phyllis, 25 Ruccio, David, 261 Rutherford, Jonathan, 79

Said, Edward, 250 Schaffner, Perdita, 252–3 Scott, Jill, 253 Seaford, Richard, 306n101 Seuss, Barbara, 70 Shakespeare, William, 179–80, 231–2, 245, 253 Shaw, Charlotte, 71, 78 Shaw, George Bernard, 71, 74, 149– 50 Showalter, Elaine, 283n53 Skaay (Haida elder), 21 Sorensen, Leif, 82, 275 Sri, P.S., 176 State (defined), 15–16, 18 Stein, Gertrude, 8–9, 10, 202, 279n8, 281n18 Stevens, Wallace, 10 Stewart, John, 4 Stoker, Bram, 43, 48, 60; Dracula, 23– 41, 44, 123, 275, 282–3n51, 298n54; The Primrose Path, 30; The Snake’s Pass, 30, 283n58 Stoker, Charlotte, 29, 35, 284n73 Strathern, Marilyn: gifts and aesthetic vs. ideological objectification, 16, 174, 220, 238; gifts and power, 17, 133; gifts and production of relations, 14, 192; heterogeneity of ‘society’ and ‘authorship,’ 19, 111, 125, 129 Surette, Leon, 166–71, 187, 193 Synge, J.M., 47, 250, 286n51 Tagore, Rabindranath, 51, 52, 137, 285n31 Taylor, Georgina, 257–8 Terrell, Carroll F., 310n28 Thayer, Scofield, 145, 293n25 Tillich, Paul, 277

330 Index Torgovnick, Marianna, 11 totalitarianism, 94, 123–4, 185, 253. See also fascism tourism, 21, 141, 194, 235 Tylor, Edward, 9, 27, 172 Valente, Joseph, 32–3, 38–9, 40, 275 Vandivere, Julie, 306n96 Verdenal, Jean, 178 Walker, Emery, 134 want (defined), 34 Weaver, Harriet, 145, 250 Weber, Max, 178 Weiner, Annette, 15, 17, 135, 199 Weird Tales, 91, 153–7 Wells, H.G., 197 Weston, Jessie, 168–71, 191 Wexler, Adrienne, 141 Williams, Raymond, 250 Williams, William Carlos, 10 Wilson, Jeremy, 149 Woolf, Leonard, 144, 280n12 Woolf, Virginia, 10, 57, 144, 193–9; Between the Acts, 194, 196–8, 203; Mrs Dalloway, 194; The Voyage Out, 194; The Waves, 193–6 Yeats, Elizabeth, 133–4, 135 Yeats, Jack B., 203, 299n79 Yeats, Lily, 134 Yeats, Michael B., 138

Yeats, W.B., 35, 43–71, 123–5, 280n12; and Beckett, 202; and Eliot, 173, 184; and T.E. Lawrence, 71–5; and literary institutions, 133–9, 144–5, 148, 173, 184, 202; and Lovecraft, 81, 84–5, 91, 94, 96–7; ‘Adam’s Curse,’ 53; ‘Anashuya and Vijaya,’ 51; The Cat and the Moon, 286n51; Cathleen ni Houlihan, 44–5, 46, 58, 60, 62; ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion,’ 63; The Countess Cathleen, 45, 48, 55–8, 60–1, 65, 232–3; ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,’ 66; ‘Easter, 1916,’ 44, 53; A Full Moon in March, 67; ‘The Gyres,’ 70; The Herne’s Egg, 64–6; ‘High Talk,’ 63; ‘The Indian to His Love,’ 51; The King of the Great Clock Tower, 62; ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree,’ 49; ‘Man and the Echo,’ 63; ‘Parnell’s Funeral,’ 43–4; ‘Politics,’ 49; Purgatory, 61–2; ‘The Sad Shepherd,’ 49; ‘September 1913,’ 45; The Shadowy Waters, 50; ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd,’ 49–50; ‘The Statues,’ 67; ‘To a Shade,’ 45; ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times,’ 59; ‘To Some I Have Talked with by the Fire,’ 53; ‘Under Ben Bulben,’ 67 Zadek, Simon, 263 Ziarek, Ewa, 300n9