Oedipus against Freud: Myth and the End(s) of Humanism in 20th Century British Lit 9781442687158

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations Used in Citations
Introduction: Oedipus Before Freud: Humanism and Myth in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine
1. Oedipus Against Freud: The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism
2. Anti-Humanists at Colonus: The Oedipus Myth in Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot
3. Dystopian Oedipus: Freudianism and Totalitarianism in Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Malcolm Lowry
4. Freudful Mistakes in Sphinxish Pairc: Oedipal Humanism and Irish Nationalism in W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett
5. Oedipus Que(e)ried: Humanism, Sexuality, and Gender in E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf
Conclusion: Oedipus Reconsidered: Humanism as a Post-Structuralist Narrative in Christine Brooke-Rose and Zadie Smith
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

OEDIPUS AGAINST FREUD: MYTH AND THE END(S) OF HUMANISM IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITISH FICTION

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Contents iii

BRADLEY W. BUCHANAN

Oedipus Against Freud Myth and the End(s) of Humanism in Twentieth-Century British Literature

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

iv Contents © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4157-0 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Buchanan, Bradley W., 1970– Oedipus against Freud : myth and the end(s) of humanism in twentiethcentury British literature / Bradley W. Buchanan. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4157-0 1. English literature – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. Oedipus (Greek mythology) in literature. 3. Humanism in literature. I. Title. PR478.M96B83 2010

820.9'384

C2010-900710-7

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 Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents v

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Abbreviations Used in Citations ix Introduction: Oedipus Before Freud: Humanism and Myth in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine 3 1 Oedipus Against Freud: The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism 21 2 Anti-Humanists at Colonus: The Oedipus Myth in Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot 49 3 Dystopian Oedipus: Freudianism and Totalitarianism in Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Malcolm Lowry 71 4 Freudful Mistakes in Sphinxish Pairc: Oedipal Humanism and Irish Nationalism in W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett 93 5 Oedipus Que(e)ried: Humanism, Sexuality, and Gender in E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf 123 Conclusion: Oedipus Reconsidered: Humanism as a PostStructuralist Narrative in Christine Brooke-Rose and Zadie Smith 149 Notes 171 Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my profound appreciation to the advisors and mentors I met at Stanford University who have kept in touch with me as this project has evolved over the past dozen years: Professors David Halliburton, Herbert Lindenberger, Marjorie Perloff, and Michael Tratner. Their faith and encouragement has sustained me as I have gone through round after round of fresh research and revisions, and their example as scholars and teachers has reminded me of why I wanted to become an academic in the first place. I am also deeply grateful for the moral support offered to me by my colleagues at California State University, Sacramento, in particular our esteemed Department Chair, Professor Sheree Meyer. Without the collegial and supportive atmosphere she has fostered, I might never have felt able to take the time to revisit this project as persistently and extensively as I have done. I would also like to thank Richard Ratzlaff, my editor at the University of Toronto Press, for his wisdom and enthusiasm. I feel immensely fortunate to have such a keen-eyed and even-keeled editor, and I wish every scholar could be as blessed in this regard as I have been. I was also greatly aided in the completion of this book manuscript by a Research and Creative Activities Grant from California State University, Sacramento. Finally, I owe an undying debt of gratitude to the immensely talented and endlessly insightful Kate Washington, who has suffered through much, edited most, and read all of what you see here. It will take me the rest of my life to repay her for her help with this project, but since she happens to be my wife, I hope to have ample opportunity to do so.

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Contributors ix

Abbreviations Used in Citations

1984 AG AV BNW CD CPP CSS D E ES FFC FUPU FW GLD ID IMH JCW LJ LS M MB MWD OE PM ROO S SC SH

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four Lewis, Apes of God Yeats, A Vision Huxley, Brave New World Freud, Civilization and its Discontents Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays Forster, Collected Short Stories Joyce, Dubliners Beckett, Endgame Lacan, Écrits: A Selection Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious Joyce, Finnegans Wake Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams in Basic Writings Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare Joyce, Critical Writings Forster, Longest Journey Lacan, Language of the Self Beckett, Molloy Woolf, Moments of Being Lawrence, The Man Who Died Beckett, Our Exagmination Lawrence, Paul Morel Woolf, A Room of One’s Own Lacan, Seminar Lewis, Self Condemned Joyce, Stephen Hero

x Abbreviations Used in Citations

SL SP STT TG THRU TM TTL TU U UV W WG WT YCP YCW

Lawrence, Sons and Lovers Eliot, Selected Prose Brooke-Rose, Stories, Theories, and Things Woolf, Three Guineas Brooke-Rose, THRU, in the Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus Wells, The Time Machine Woolf, To the Lighthouse Beckett, The Unnameable Joyce, Ulysses Lowry, Under the Volcano Beckett, Watt Beckett, Waiting for Godot Smith, White Teeth Yeats, Collected Plays Yeats, Collected Works

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OEDIPUS AGAINST FREUD

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Introduction: Oedipus Before Freud: Humanism and Myth in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine

Out of the dull strength and power of the animal the human spirit tries to push itself forward ... The Sphinx propounded the well-known conundrum: What is it that in the morning goes on four legs, at mid-day on two, and in the evening on three? Oedipus found the simple answer: a man ... just as the famous Greek inscription calls to man: Know thyself. G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 360–1

At the start of the twentieth century, professional performances of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus were forbidden in England; the most recent amateur performance of Sophocles’ work there had taken place in 1877 at Cambridge, where it was offered in the original Greek, not in English. In 1904 Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree had hoped to stage Oedipus’s tragedy in London, but was denied permission by the Lord Chamberlain’s office; the ban prompted playwright Henry Arthur Jones to publish a pamphlet protesting censorship and the decision to ‘Gag Sophocles!’ The authorities were afraid of what Sir John Hare, member of the Advisory Board on Stage Plays, termed the potentially ‘injurious’ effects of presenting a play concerned with incest (quoted in MacIntosh, Tragedy in Performance,’ 295). A controversy ensued, and Sophocles’ Oedipus play was mentioned repeatedly in a weighty report on the Joint Select Committee on Censorship deliberations (MacIntosh, ‘Tragedy in Performance,’ 296). In 1910 a licence to perform Oedipus the King was grudgingly granted, and in 1912 Gilbert Murray’s translation of Sophocles was used as the basis for an innovative London production of Oedipus Rex by the Austrian director Max Reinhardt. This production, billed (erroneously) as ‘the first perform-

4 Oedipus Against Freud

ance of the play in England since the seventeenth century,’ caused a sensation, and ended up touring for a number of years afterwards; according to Fiona MacIntosh, ‘English audiences were overwhelmed by what they saw’ (MacIntosh, ‘Tragedy in Performance,’ 301). In such a climate, it is little wonder that Oedipus became a preoccupation for British modernists; his tragedy represented what their prudish Victorian forebears wished to hide about classical culture, aesthetics, family life, and sexuality. It is also not surprising that most scholars of British modernism have seen Oedipus solely in the context of incest and parricide, given the well-known suppression of a play with these disturbing transgressions as its basis. It may nevertheless seem a large leap from uncovering this suppressed classical hero to believing that his image held the secret of all of human nature, but a number of writers at the start of the twentieth century took precisely this view, the most famous of them being Sigmund Freud. Many have assumed that Oedipus’s centrality in twentieth-century literature is therefore either a testament to the universality of incestuous and parricidal urges (as Freud would have it), or the result of a Freudian fad among modernist writers. Such views, however, ignore the special qualities of the Oedipus myth itself, which in many of its classical and philosophical iterations thematizes and problematizes the same universalizing humanistic movement that it has been supposed to bolster and legitimate. This book will argue that Oedipus’s story has a much more interesting, complex, and critical relationship to the tradition of human knowledge than a straightforward Freudian view of its meaning would suggest. Moreover, it will show that Freud’s theories were not so much the spur for a sudden burst of allusions to Oedipus as another sign of the renewed interest in Oedipus that was (as we shall see) well under way by the time the notion of the ‘Oedipus complex’ (a phrase not coined until 1910) was articulated.1 The British modernist fascination with Oedipus may occasionally have taken the form of a reaction to censorship (as it did in the case of W.B. Yeats, which will be discussed in more detail in chapter 4), and of a reaction to Freudian claims about Oedipus’s centrality, but it had deep intellectual roots. As we will see, before censorship reared its head in Britain, and before Freud published his account of the appeal exercised by Oedipus (in his 1900 book The Interpretation of Dreams), philosophers, anthropologists, and novelists had put Oedipus at the centre of humanist discourse, and saw him both as a symbol of human self-awareness and as a symptom of the flaws and limits in the exercise of rationality.

Introduction: Oedipus Before Freud 5

In the view of many classical scholars, this tradition of Oedipal humanism goes all the way back to Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, in which Oedipus boasts of his intellectual prowess and sneers at the sacred, prophetic wisdom of Tiresias, who has access to superhuman secrets, including the truth about Oedipus’s own divinely chosen fate. For instance, Bernard Knox has argued that ‘For Sophocles and the fifth century [BC] the problems of human destiny, of divine will and prediction, presented themselves in a bewildering variety of subtly different forms’ (Knox, Oedipus at Thebes, 33–4). Knox reminds us that Protagoras, originator of the maxim ‘Man is the measure of all things,’ was Sophocles’ contemporary, and suggests that Oedipus Tyrannus embodies a major anxiety shared by many at the time: a suspicion that human intelligence was usurping divine prerogatives. Knox posits that ‘the intellectual progress of Oedipus and Jocasta in the play is a sort of symbolic history of fifth-century rationalism’ (Knox, Oedipus at Thebes, 47–8). Thus, when G.W.F. Hegel, in his posthumously published Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1835), identified Oedipus as a paradigmatic hero of humanistic self-awareness, he was not indulging in fanciful theorizing; he was picking up on a recurrent theme that many classical scholars have remarked upon. Following both in Hegel’s footsteps and in the wake of this classical tradition, the nineteenth-century German anthropologist J.J. Bachofen linked Oedipus to what he sees as the culturally traumatic but necessary transition from animistic, matriarchal natureworship and superstition to an enlightened patriarchal humanism: ‘Oedipus marks the advance to a higher stage of existence. He is one of those great figures whose suffering and torment lead to higher human civilization, who, themselves still rooted in the older state of things, represent the last great victim of this condition and by this same token the founder of a new era’ (Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, 181–2). For Bachofen, it is Oedipus’s humanism that makes him unable to accept his inevitable recognition of the incestuous prehistory of humanism and patriarchy; after all, in Bachofen’s view Oedipus’s crimes weren’t even perceived as problematic before the advent of humanism and patriarchy severed humans from their ‘telluric’ or chthonic roots as children of the soil, since before Oedipus’s Promethean discovery of human sexual reproduction, paternity was of no consequence. Bachofen’s theories may seem outlandish, but they have been echoed by Claude Levi-Strauss, who describes Oedipus as the representative of mythic, autochthonous humans who have the ‘universal characteristic’ of not being able to

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walk, or walking only ‘clumsily’ (The Savage Mind, 215) because of a lingering connection between them and the earth from which they were made. Indeed, for Levi-Strauss, the entire Oedipus myth ‘has to do with the inability, for a culture which holds the belief that mankind is autochthonous ... to find a satisfactory transition between this theory and the knowledge that human beings are actually born from the union of man and woman’ (Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 216). For Bachofen, Oedipus’s apotheosis as a humanist hero comes when he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, since ‘The Sphinx is an embodiment of tellurian motherhood; she represents the feminine right of the earth in its dark aspect as the inexorable law of death ... the Spartoi, who have only a mother and are engendered by the dragon of the dark depths, recognize the Typhonian Sphinx as their ruler’ (Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, 181). Thus, Oedipus’s triumph is one in which ‘the spectacle of man gradually transcending the bestial in his nature may offer firm ground for a confident belief that through all vicissitudes the human race will find the power to complete its triumphant journey upward from the depths, from the night of matter to the light of a celestial-spiritual principle’ (Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, 185). Bachofen’s optimistic reading of the Oedipus story is a product of his account of the struggle between earlier, earth-centred powers of Mother Nature and the later stage of abstract masculine spirituality in ancient Greek myths, and he asserts that what he terms the ‘gradual development’ of patriarchal humanism is ‘particularly meaningful’ in that ‘it corresponds to a historical advance of human institutions’ (Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, 185). Others have cast some doubt on the value of the humanistic ethos represented by Oedipus. Friedrich Nietzsche’s reading of the Oedipus story in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) argues that in Oedipus’s case the ‘edge of wisdom’ is ‘turned against the wise man,’ a state of affairs that suggests an uncomfortable possibility: that human ‘wisdom’ is ‘a crime committed on nature’ that will lead to self-destruction (Nietzsche, Birth, 61). Picking up on Nietzsche’s insights, Jean-Joseph Goux has examined Oedipus in the context of other ancient Greek narratives, and has found important links between him and the intellectual power that defined human identity for many in antiquity. According to Goux, the myth of Oedipus is not representative of what he calls ‘a more regular and more fundamental narrative structure’ – in other words, the structure of the ‘monomyth of royal investiture’ in ancient

Introduction: Oedipus Before Freud 7

Greece (Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher, 5). In this older ‘monomyth,’ the hero ‘has to hurl himself inside [a] beast, has to penetrate it, let himself be ingurgitated so he can proceed to kill the monster and come back to the light of day’ (Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher, 45). This combat does not merely show that the novice hero is worthy of his kingly status; it also radically alters his character and transforms him from a human being into something more than that. As Goux puts it, ‘The novice is killed, swallowed up by the primordial animal, but at the same time he kills the animal heroically; he ends up by putting on the animal’s skin, appropriating its strength and all the qualities it symbolizes’ (Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher, 48). Of course, by his intellectual prowess, Oedipus avoids this violent, brutalizing initiation, and is thus left with hubristic confidence in the integrity of his human identity, a stance that will become untenable when it becomes clear that he has violated two of the most basic laws of most human societies. For Goux, as for Nietzsche, Oedipus’s fate is a warning that the attempt to isolate and define human nature through the use of reason is likely to produce self-deception and, ultimately, to bring disaster. Thus we can see a fascinating question taking shape: is Oedipus the triumphant humanist who uses his mental powers to define humanity and embodies our drive for freedom from superstition and fate, or is he the doomed, deluded figure whose humanistic faith in rationality and self-determination was his great flaw? Or, most puzzlingly of all, is he both at once? This book addresses these questions by exploring Oedipus’s role as both a humanist and an anti-humanist hero in modernist and postmodernist British literature. This focus on humanism as a major component of modernism might seem counter-intuitive, given that modernism so often describes itself as an explicitly anti-humanistic movement. For instance, the arch-modernist T.E. Hulme railed against humanism, which was responsible for what he called ‘the state of slush in which we have the misfortune to live,’ and expressed a hope that he would witness ‘the break up of the Renaissance humanistic attitude’ in his own lifetime (Hulme, Speculations, 80). This hope was largely realized, at least where literary modernism was concerned, as Tony Davies has noted, ‘the impulse behind literary modernism betrays an authentic antihumanism, indeed a revulsion against the human’ (Davies, Humanism, 48). Of course, intellectually informed, dispassionate anti-humanism and ‘revulsion’ against human beings themselves are not necessarily the same things, but, as we shall see, these two stances tend to merge in the work of writers

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such as D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, and T.S. Eliot. Still, what emerges with surprising power from many anti-humanistic writers is the degree to which they return to similar tropes – above all, Oedipal ones – in their quest to prove their own absolute difference from the Freudian theories that, as we shall see, they so dislike. As Kate Soper has shrewdly observed in her book Humanism and Antihumanism, ‘Antihumanism’ often ‘secretes a humanist rhetoric’ (Soper, Humanism and Antihumanism, 128), and this is nowhere more remarkable than in the many attempts by British writers to break decisively with humanism (especially in its Freudian modes) over the course of the twentieth century. Yet before one can break with anything, it must be defined with a reasonable degree of coherence, and the basic tenets of humanism, though not necessarily accepted by all, were relatively familiar to most educated Britons, especially those of literary inclinations, by the end of the nineteenth century. The discourses of science, archaeology, anthropology, and psychology had combined to produce a strong cultural confidence in the capacity of educated people to understand human beings’ shared evolutionary history and inner lives, as well as to understand the ways in which their various historical roots and religious practices may have obscured the common ‘nature’ shared by all, even supposedly primitive peoples. For our purposes, humanism must be defined in a way that would have been known to authors writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that represents most versions of humanism that have gained widespread recognition. Thus, we may cite J.A. Symonds’s account (taken from his 1877 book The Renaissance in Italy: The Revival of Learning) of what he calls the ‘essence of humanism’ as consisting ‘in a ... perception of the dignity of man as a rational being apart from theological determinations, and in the further perception that classic literature alone displayed human nature in the plenitude of intellectual and moral freedom’ (Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, 52). Symonds also deems humanism to be ‘an attempt to find the point of unity for all that had been thought and done by man, within the mind restored to consciousness of its own sovereign faculty’ (Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, 52). Thus for Symonds the humanist project, from the Renaissance through to the end of the nineteenth century, is a secular attempt to find a common thread in human nature that has been ‘restored’ to a full appreciation of the source of its true strength and uniqueness: the mind.

Introduction: Oedipus Before Freud 9

A clear indication that British writers had begun to look for Oedipally inflected ways to question the humanist project articulated by Symonds is apparent as early as H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. This ground-breaking science-fiction tale was published in 1895, coincidentally the same year in which Freud’s first widely read book – Studies in Hysteria, co-authored with Josef Breuer – appeared in German and thus well before Freud’s famous Oedipal theory had been formed or could have gained currency.2 Although Wells had no Freudian inspiration for his novella, he nevertheless uses the Oedipus myth to deal with the same questions of human identity and intellectual power that, as we have seen, have accompanied Oedipus since Sophocles’ time. Wells casts his protagonist in The Time Machine as an unwitting Oedipus who must unravel a riddle about the nature and destiny of human civilization; his ‘Time Traveller’ encounters a large stone structure he dubs a ‘Sphinx’ as soon as he arrives in the future: ‘As the columns of hail grew thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It was very large ... in shape something like a winged sphinx ... the sightless eyes seemed to watch me; there was the faint shadow of a smile on the lips’ (TM 18). Like Oedipus, who reads a human meaning into the riddle about a many-legged creature posed by the Sphinx, the Traveller sees this strange stone object as a hint about humanity’s development: ‘I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and the full temerity of my voyage came suddenly upon me ... What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?’ (TM 18). Such anxieties colour his perception of the Eloi, the first humans he encounters, and he is determined to solve the riddle that their mixture of laziness, idiocy, and prosperity seems to pose. However, the Traveller must put aside his formerly unified view of human nature after he encounters the cannibalistic Morlocks and begins to register the multiplicity of the human condition in this remote future. The Traveller suspects that human nature has not simply been divided; it has destroyed itself and spawned two essentially inhuman races: ‘Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals’ (TM 39). Although the Eloi’s childlike appearance produces a human affection in the Traveller, it is quite otherwise with the Morlocks, whose appearance alone is enough to disgust him. When he first comes face to face with a Morlock, the Traveller calls it

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an ‘animal’ (TM 37) and later even terms it a ‘human spider’ (TM 39), a phrase that suggests that they seem to be the product not simply of evolution but of a sinister sort of species mixing. Despite his obvious animus against the Morlocks, however, the Traveller cannot entirely deny their human ancestry: no matter how ‘nauseatingly inhuman’ (TM 47) these pale, voracious creatures are, he realizes that ‘this bleached, obscene, nocturnal thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages’ (TM 39). The wish to annihilate these nightmarish creatures brings out a kind of inner monster in the Traveller himself, as he confesses: ‘I longed very much to kill a Morlock. Very inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing one’s own descendants! But it was impossible, somehow, to feel any humanity in the things’ (TM 56). The language of this self-reproach is telling; if not seeing ‘humanity’ in one’s descendants makes one feel ‘inhuman’ in one’s own right, then humanity becomes a function of perception, not of being or even of acculturation. Despite this confession, and regardless of his eventual disillusionment with the idea of ‘the Advancement of Mankind’ (TM 76), Wells’s hero never ceases to believe that his own origins in the ‘ripe prime of the human race, when Fear does not paralyse and mystery has lost its terrors’ (TM 49) set him decisively apart from both the timid Eloi and the devouring Morlocks whom he encounters in the remote future. He makes no secret of his appetite for meat and his evident enjoyment of the ‘succulent giving of flesh and bone’ (TM 62) during his fights with the Morlocks, yet he never consciously recognizes the cannibalistic impulses he clearly shares with them. Indeed, he longs to murder these creatures precisely in order to deny his kinship with them. If the Morlocks’ cannibalism is an obvious demonstration of the human capacity to devour itself physically, the role played by fire in the novella points out the ways in which a similar process can be said to take place on an intellectual level. John Huntington points out that ‘In The Time Machine fire defines civilized humanity’ (Huntington, Logic, 47), and as the Traveller himself says, ‘I don’t know if you have ever thought what a rare thing flame must be in the absence of man’ (TM 59). Indeed, later in life Wells described human intelligence as ‘a match that man has just got alight’ (quoted in Williamson, H.G. Wells, 37). Matches therefore stand for the Traveller’s modern idea of a human nature based on mental achievement: it is significant that the Morlocks are cowed by fire (which perhaps reminds them of their former humanity and curbs their cannibalistic appetites); by contrast,

Introduction: Oedipus Before Freud 11

matches delight the elfin Eloi, who dance with pleasure when the Traveller lights them. Yet the fire quickly gets out of hand and threatens to consume the whole civilization the Traveller encounters; indeed, the Traveller escapes just in time into his recovered Time Machine, leaving the rest of the planet to burn. In emphasizing the volatility of such a symbol as fire, Wells implies that anything on which humanism may be based (control of or affinity with fire, in this instance) is in constant jeopardy of escaping and wreaking havoc on those who deem themselves its owners. As if to reinforce this pessimistic view of humanism’s intellectual potential, the Traveller wonders at ‘how brief the dream of the human intellect had been’ and laments the fact that, from what he has seen in the future, the intellect has ‘committed suicide’ (TM 65). In an epilogue to the novella written after the rest of the book had appeared, the narrator of Wells’s tale, a listener who has heard the Traveller tell his story, indicates that the Traveller ‘thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the glowing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end’ (TM 76). Despite the fact that the two future realms visited by the Traveller after his encounter with the Morlocks and the Eloi contain no traces of human life or civilization in any form (all we see are monstrous butterflies, crabs, and vegetation), the narrator himself is unwilling to be disturbed by the Traveller’s adventure or his opinions. Instead, the narrator attributes the Traveller’s gloomy view of human progress to a pre-existing pessimism on his part; he claims that ‘the question’ of ‘the Advancement of Mankind’ had been ‘discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made’ (TM 76). To the narrator ‘the future ... is a vast ignorance,’ and he looks forward to what he calls ‘the manhood of the race’ in which the Sphinx-inspired ‘riddles of our own time’ will be ‘answered’ and its ‘wearisome problems’ solved (TM 76). As he says, ‘I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man’s culminating time’ (TM 75–6). Although Wells affords his audience some relief by giving an optimist the final word, he identified a good deal more with his pessimistic Oedipal protagonist than with his blithe narrator. In an article entitled ‘On Extinction’ (published in 1893), Wells maintains that there is ‘no guarantee in scientific knowledge of man’s permanence or permanent ascendancy’ (quoted in Griffith 85), and until the end of his life Wells

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was tormented by the problem of how humanity would survive. In his essay ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique,’ Wells looks forward to reaching ‘the eugenic phase’ of history when ‘humanity may increase very rapidly in skill, mental power, and general vigor’ (quoted in Williamson, H.G. Wells, 30). This note of optimism is somewhat desperate, and in fact stems from his deeply held conviction that ‘the order of nature’ has no more ‘bias in favor of man than it had in favor of the ichthyosaur or the pterodactyl’ (quoted in Williamson, H.G. Wells, 27). Indeed, it is perhaps only because Wells felt humanity to be under such a severe threat of extinction that his eugenic fantasies occurred to him in the first place. In this respect, Wells was very much a child of the nineteenth century, when paranoid theories of overpopulation and its political consequences were rife. In fact, Wells’s use of the Oedipus figure as a hero with special insight into human development was itself anticipated, and very likely directly influenced, by the nineteenth-century popular scientist Thomas Henry Huxley’s invocation of the Oedipus myth. In Huxley’s essay on ‘natural inequality,’ he observes, ‘The population question is the real riddle of the Sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found an answer’ (Huxley, Collected Essays, 328–9). Thus it is not surprising that when Wells does return to ponder the demise and revival of humanity, his vocabulary owes a good deal to the Greek idea of tragedy and hubris. For instance, at the end of his life Wells urges us (in the face of perennial uncertainties about the future of humanity) to ‘fall back on the structure of the Greek tragic drama and think of life as the Protagonist trailing with it the presence of an indifferent chorus’ (Wells, Last Books, 73). Even more strikingly, he cannot resist reintroducing Oedipus himself to dramatize his argument that evolution has ‘endowed’ people with ‘a tenacity of selfassertion’ that refuses to accept their eventual death as a species: ‘We want to be in at the death of Man and to have a voice in his final replacement by the next Lord of Creation, even if, Oedipus-like, that successor’s first act is parricide’ (Wells, Mind at the End, 19). Here we may finally have the strongest clue to why Wells made his Traveller bear a strong resemblance to Oedipus: Oedipus represents both the human effort to reinvent itself anew with each succeeding generation and the inevitable destruction that attends this quest. Wells did not write another Oedipal novel. He had other themes to explore and more pointed social commentaries to make; he was absorbed by world politics, by the reform of sexual mores, and by sci-

Introduction: Oedipus Before Freud 13

entific discoveries. Moreover, his huge and varied output of novels and prose writings shows that, until the final reckoning of Mind at the End of Its Tether, he was increasingly inclined to ignore the intractable nature of the human predicament he lays out in The Time Machine. He was too much like his own Time Traveller, in other words, and was too busy pondering the riddle of the Sphinx to stop to wonder whether it was worth solving. Nevertheless, in The Time Machine Wells has fictively pre-empted Freud’s identification of Oedipus as a representative of human desire and its unacceptable unconscious symptoms. Wells’s use of Oedipal motifs – Sphinxes, riddles, broken taboos – to dramatize both the conscious and unconscious aspects of the human psyche is almost proto-Freudian. Perhaps because of these parallels, both The Time Machine and The Interpretation of Dreams have become seminal models for their respective genres: many see The Time Machine as the original science-fiction narrative, and The Interpretation of Dreams spawned modern psychoanalysis. In a sense, they also have a similar status as foundational Oedipal texts for modernism: neither book can be ignored if we wish to write an accurate history of the role of Oedipus in twentieth-century British literature. Yet it is precisely because of their influential roles that we should not ignore the differences between these two versions of Oedipus; by exaggerating the same Oedipal traits (curiosity, intelligence, selfassertiveness) that make the Time Traveller heroic and central, Wells uses the character to cast doubt on the humanity he is supposed to represent, whereas Freud remains a committed humanist. That is, Freud wants to affirm human solidarity through a universal theory of sexual desire, and implicitly threatens us with unbridled infantile urges if we dispense with the taboos that make this solidarity possible. For his part, Wells sees enough savagery and confusion within even the nonsexual aspects of human nature to justify the dissolution of the concept of humanity altogether. As we shall see, twentieth-century British writers move unpredictably between these two extremes, in ways that depend on many factors: historical, familial, biographical, and philosophical. No two such authors feel exactly the same about Oedipus or about human nature, and most of them change their minds decisively about one or both. It is therefore difficult to generalize about Oedipus’s true place in twentieth-century British literature as a whole, even once we have moved beyond the Freud-influenced superficiality of most accounts of his function and seen him as a humanist hero. Oedipus’s complex history made the typically modernist practice of using myth

14 Oedipus Against Freud

to comment on modern life especially arduous both for modernists and for their successors; by invoking him, they necessarily conjured up deep personal associations as well as ancient cultural memories of his fate, even as they strove to bring him face to face with – and to pit him against – his Freudian incarnation. One broad reason for the Oedipally inflected modernist animus against Freudian humanism is obvious enough: Freud’s account of the appeal exercised by Oedipus, first publicly articulated in his 1900 book The Interpretation of Dreams, has dominated the popular idea of Oedipus since it appeared, and has marginalized all other mythic narratives (indeed all other developmental narratives whatsoever). Freud’s claim that ‘King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and wedded his mother Jocasta, is nothing more or less than a wish-fulfillment – the fulfillment of the wish of our childhood’ (ID 308) also set an uncomfortable proposition at the heart of humanism: that deep down we all desire incest and parricide – sex and violence realized within the confines of the nuclear family – and thus are at odds with some of the basic laws that govern most human communities. Thus Freud’s theory has had two distinct and possibly mutually destructive effects: it has founded a new branch of humanistic enquiry, and it has suggested that this new mode of enquiry will reveal unacceptable truths about ourselves if we take it seriously. It is therefore tempting to say that Freud did for the twentieth century AD what Oedipus seemed to do for the fifth century BC: he defined the humanistic intellectual project by his example, and he offered an unwitting warning about the consequences of humanism. There is even a biographical basis for comparing Freud – who felt that he had solved the riddle of the unconscious – to the hubristic Oedipus, who thinks that he has avoided his fate and solved the riddle of the Sphinx. Richard Kuhns gives us a telling account of the final stages of Freud’s obsession with the Oedipus myth: ‘When Freud was fifty years old he was honored by his colleagues with the presentation of a medallion on which was engraved Oedipus confronting the Sphinx; on the reverse was Freud himself’ (Kuhns, Tragedy, 59). The inscription on this medal was a quotation from Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus: ‘He who answered (as if through divination) the famous riddle and was indeed a most mighty man.’ Kuhns points out that the link to Oedipus has a ‘private significance’ for Freud, who was deeply ‘moved – even shaken’ by the inscription on the medal, which according to Kuhns articulates ‘that which Freud thought about himself: that he was the

Introduction: Oedipus Before Freud 15

solver of a riddle, the deepest that was ever put to humankind, by humankind, and that his solution was the inevitable outcome of genius that had foreseen its destiny, since Freud had marked that very sentence from the tragic drama’ (Kuhns, Tragedy, 59). Perhaps Freud had seen that his work was part of the essentially Oedipal (and therefore doomed) project of human self-definition and self-discovery. Even if Freud’s reported maxim that ‘Man is not master in his own house’ were taken to be representative of his overall attitude, it would be difficult to dispute either Freud’s credentials as a humanist or the centrality of his work to contemporary human self-understanding. For one thing, Freud has been appropriated by the humanist project; Lionel Trilling, for instance, noted that ‘Nowadays there is scarcely a humanistic discipline ... that has not been touched by Freud’s ideas’ and terms Freud ‘one of the very greatest humanistic minds’ (Trilling, Beyond Culture, 78–9). Many critics, Trilling foremost among them, have, in Daniel T. O’Hara’s words, seen Freud as ‘the last representative of the tragic view endemic to the Western in its classical ... and humanistic incarnations’ (O’Hara, Lionel Trilling, 184). These ‘tragic’ implications aside, Freud’s schematization of the human psyche (dividing it up into id, ego, and superego, for instance) has been interpreted as a stabilization of human identity, and a diagnosis of its universal structure. Thus Erich Fromm argues that ‘Freud ... starts out with the assumption of the existence of ... a universal man ... someone about whose structure generally valid and empirical statements can be made’ (Fromm, Crisis of Psychoanalysis, 30). It is possible to read Freud’s appropriation of Oedipus’s story as another manifestation of his wish for a universal theory of human nature; Oedipus’s status as an intellectual hero may have made him irresistible for Freud, given the latter’s ambitious and unprecedented project of bringing the dark, irrational, or unconscious into the relative daylight of conscious examination. Freud was ambivalent about this link between himself and Oedipus as an intellectual hero, however, as we can see when Freud offers a summary of what he took to be the traditional understanding of Sophocles’ play: ‘The Oedipus Rex is a tragedy of fate: its tragic effect depends on the conflict between the all-powerful will of the gods and the vain efforts of human beings threatened with disaster; resignation to the divine will, and the perception of one’s own impotence is the lesson which the deeply moved spectator is supposed to learn’ (ID 308). As Freud suggests, Oedipus’s tragedy is a firm rebuke to human

16 Oedipus Against Freud

intellectual hubris, and a reassertion of divine power. Freud was at first unwilling to accept this mythic lesson, of course, because his own project was a heroic attempt to expand human self-awareness to encompass, mitigate, or indeed avert the sexual problems and mishaps that it had once been our fate to endure. Indeed, for many twentiethcentury British writers, Freud’s inability to use myth as a means of selfcriticism suggests that his project is ultimately flawed, if not entirely undermined, by what postmodern novelist Christine Brooke-Rose calls ‘a blind spot in your youdipean discourse’ (THRU 675). Hence there is a determined attempt on the part of many of these authors to invoke Oedipus’s pre-Freudian identity as a corrective to Freudian myopia. Here a sceptic might ask what British modernists knew of previous interpretations of Oedipus, or of the Sophoclean texts. There is no single answer to this question. Some, like E.M. Forster, read Sophocles in the original; some, like Lawrence, read Nietzsche and various translations of Sophocles; and some, like T.S. Eliot, read Hegel; yet it is almost always difficult to say where or how these authors first formed a decisive impression of this ancient myth. Still, what emerges most notably from their engagements with Oedipus is that many of them wished passionately to dissent from Freud’s views on the subject. For some – Wyndham Lewis, for instance – if being human meant recognizing one’s incestuous urges, then perhaps inhumanity was a better option. In dissenting so passionately from Freud’s form of humanism, however, modernists often only entangled themselves even further in Oedipal paradoxes. To rebel against Oedipal tropes by positing some new theory of their own superhuman nature or destiny re-enacted Oedipus’s own willful blindness. In any event, these authors could not challenge Freud’s claims on scientific grounds, and most had no alternative theoretical model to propose, even as they frequently attacked the humanist and Oedipal project of self-understanding. Oedipus was too imposing a figure to ignore, and Freud was too persuasive to refute directly. Instead, the modernist authors this book considers dramatized Oedipus’s failure in ways that attempted either to alter our picture of essential human nature, inching it away from Freud’s model, or else to negate the human itself as a useful category. The modernist writers I discuss created Oedipal characters, but not to bolster Freudian theories, nor to revert to earlier Hegelian or Nietzschean views of Oedipus. Rather, they used Freud as their foil for an interrogation – via Oedipus – of what makes us human, or what fails to do so.

Introduction: Oedipus Before Freud 17

This interrogation was in part driven by a strong competition between literature and psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century, as both sought to define human nature to itself. As psychoanalysis rose in the period, the border between it and literature began to break down, as we realize almost as soon as we begin to investigate the mythic roots of Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex. Indeed, Freud seems to have begun to formulate his Oedipal idea in reaction to the literary fashions and cultural trends of his time. Before going on to formulate his famous view of the universal psychological meaning of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, Freud discussed the state of modern tragic literature: Modern authors have ... sought to achieve a similar tragic effect [to that of Oedipus Tyrannus] by expressing the same conflict [between human will and divine power] in stories of their own invention. But the playgoers have looked on unmoved ... The modern tragedies of destiny have failed of their effect. If the Oedipus Rex is capable of moving a modern reader or playgoer no less powerfully than it moved the contemporary Greeks, the only possible explanation is that the effect of the Greek tragedy does not depend upon the conflict between fate and human will, but upon the peculiar nature of the material by which this conflict is revealed (ID 308).

In this passage, one gets a sense of how Freud’s mind worked: through imaginative, intuitive leaps that have a good deal in common with the strategies of poets and novelists, rather than in orderly, rational empirical channels. Moreover, we see that behind Freud’s rediscovery of myth lay dissatisfaction with the cultural products of the day. In this respect, Freud is much like the literary British modernists; indeed, it is tempting to regard him simply as one more modernist voice in the twentieth-century chorus of Oedipal reinscriptions of the humanist project. To yield entirely to this temptation would be foolish, however, since Freud’s influence on twentieth-century British intellectual culture is undoubtedly vast, especially where Oedipal narratives are concerned. Yet the pervasiveness Freud’s Oedipal humanism has obscured the fact that British writers such as Wells and Forster wrote works that engaged with the Oedipus myth before Freud was well known in Britain. Few have asked why Wells chose Oedipus as a

18 Oedipus Against Freud

model for his Time Traveller. Fewer still have noted that well before Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, translated by A.A. Brill, was published in English in 1911, a second Oedipally charged novel, E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey – discussed in chapter 5 – had also appeared (in 1907). Even in the case of D.H. Lawrence, the British modernist writer most closely linked to Freud, we find an unexpected complication: Lawrence was interested in Sophocles’ Oedipus plays before he had heard of Freud, and rewrote unpublished drafts of his famously Oedipal novel Sons and Lovers to make it less humanistic, and thus less compatible with Freudian ideas. Many scholars of Anglo-American modernism, however, have read references to Oedipus through an exclusively Freudian lens, overlooking the figure’s engagement with broader humanist themes. Thus, the undeniably Oedipal characters and themes in major twentieth-century works of British literature such as D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake have been radically misunderstood. One symptom of the failure to understand the importance of Oedipus’s pre-Freudian significance for modernist scholarship may be seen in the work of Lionel Trilling. Trilling wrote about Freud, modernism and the Oedipus story separately, but never explored the relationship among them, despite Trilling’s view that Oedipus was potentially foundational for humanism. For Trilling, Oedipus is ‘a man whose pride, courage, and intellect suggest an ideal of mankind’ and sees his ‘destiny’ as evincing ‘the peculiarly human pain of remorse and self-reproach’ (Trilling, Prefaces, 7). Trilling even recognizes that Oedipus is ‘subject to an order of things which does not proceed by human rules and is not susceptible to human understanding’ (Trilling, Prefaces, 7), but his treatment of modernist writers such as Forster and Joyce fails to apply these Oedipal lessons, even where Oedipus is plainly relevant, as in Forster’s story ‘The Road from Colonus.’ In part, Trilling may have been uncomfortable with the anti-humanist message of modernist Oedipal narratives; as Stephen Tanner puts it, Trilling ‘was a traditional humanist’ who was at odds with his own ‘intellectual environment,’ which (in Tanner’s words) was ‘committed to modernism’ and thus anti-humanistic in tendency (Tanner, Lionel Trilling, 125). Had Trilling been less committed to affirming Freudian humanism, he might have been able to connect what he knew to be Oedipus’s anti-humanistic side to the similarly anti-humanistic tendencies in modernism.

Introduction: Oedipus Before Freud 19

This book’s project is to remedy such oversights by exploring the full significance of Oedipus’s presence in modernist literature, and dealing comprehensively with the threat to humanism that modernists attempted to pose (or, on occasion, to defuse) through their use of Oedipal tropes. Freudian humanism will be the most appropriate reference point to use with regard to writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, since their attacks on humanism are primarily motivated by antagonism towards Freud. Others, such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, are less overtly hostile to Freud, as we shall see, and are thus correspondingly less eager to discard humanism entirely in their engagements with Oedipus. Later modernists such as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell take the centrality of Freudianism to twentieth-century life for granted, but in doing so posit an even more radical erosion of humanistic values than their predecessors imagine: texts such as Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four demonstrate that any humanistic theory or approach, including Freud’s, can be manipulated into serving a profoundly dehumanizing political agenda. Postmodern novelists such as Christine Brooke-Rose and Zadie Smith move beyond Freud in their theorizations of Oedipus’s ongoing relevance to the emerging discourse of post-humanism, which proves to be an extension of humanism and its paradoxes, rather than a true replacement for humanism. The argument that follows thus provides a clear answer to those who have wondered what the Freudian conception of Oedipus is really doing in modernist British literature: We will see that Freud’s model of Oedipal desire and development is serving as a model – or, for some, a caricature – of a new kind of humanism by which modernists are both fascinated and repelled. The assimilation and repulsion that characterizes modernists’ treatment of Freud itself paradigmatically re-enacts an Oedipal aspect of humanism itself; a determination to escape from fate, whether it be ordained by the gods or encoded in one’s unconscious desire, produces an assertion of independence, followed by a tragic recognition of one’s own blind spots, a violently antisocial reaction, a period of exile and confusion, and a return to a more modest but nonetheless compelling vision of humanistic continuity, even if this continuity is merely formal. If the chapters that follow do not tell this story in precisely this sequence, that is because few writers consciously see their careers or eras as both Oedipal and representatively humanistic, part of the grandiose metanarrative above. This book’s chapters attempt,

20 Oedipus Against Freud

rather, to do justice to the complexity of each author’s engagements with Oedipus and humanism instead of fitting each one into an overarching historical pattern. Nevertheless, the argument of this book is a historical one, in that it does not attempt to fix the concept of ‘humanism’ for once and for all. Thus, its method strives to be consistent with what Stephen Yarbrough has termed ‘postmodern humanism,’ which is necessarily historical, since ‘it is in the very nature of humanism that it be different for every place and time’ (Yarbrough, Deliberate Criticism, 19). If Yarbrough is right that his formal version of ‘humanism’ is always ‘historicism’ (Yarbrough, Deliberate Criticism, 3), then there is no reason why this study of Modernism should not be called a humanistic enterprise. Indeed, Yarbrough’s articulation of what he calls ‘the burden of humanism’ seems an appropriate caveat for a study of such a complex subject: ‘to know before one begins that whatever position one takes will ultimately be erroneous’ (Yarbrough, Deliberate Criticism, 14).

Ontario 21

1 Oedipus Against Freud: The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism

Sigmund Freud’s account of the appeal exercised by Oedipus, first publicly articulated in his 1900 book The Interpretation of Dreams, has dominated both the popular idea of Oedipus in the twentieth century and the scholarly view of the role of Oedipal characters in modernist literature. This is understandable, since Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex undoubtedly exerted a widespread influence over the mythic imaginations of writers in Britain in the early twentieth century. The work of D.H. Lawrence may be more frequently linked to Freudian ideas than that of any other British modernist – a link that is tenuous at best, misleading at worst. However, as we have seen in the introduction, the nature of many British modernists’ reactions to (and against) Freud’s picture of Oedipus has often been misunderstood, in part because scholars have assumed that Freud was the source of the modernist interest in Oedipus in the first place. Nowhere are the problems of such an assumption more obvious than in the case of D.H. Lawrence, whose views about Oedipus have largely been obscured by this unexamined connection. Lawrence’s upbringing made him especially sensitive to the Freudian assertion that all boys have incestuous and parricidal urges; the conflicts between his father, a rough-hewn, hard-drinking coal miner, and his mother, a sensitive, emotionally demanding woman with an above-average education, often drove the young Lawrence to side with his mother. His sometimes stormy childhood gave Lawrence the raw materials for his quasi-autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers (published in May of 1913), which most readers assume is a perfect model of the Freudian ‘family romance’ because of its frequent use of Oedipal tropes. Yet the truth about Lawrence’s Oedipal inspiration is

22 Oedipus Against Freud

much more complex: for instance, Lawrence’s initial belief in Oedipus’s importance was very likely not derived from Freud at all, but rather directly from Sophocles’ plays and from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Moreover, once Lawrence became aware of Freud’s theories in 1912, he rewrote the Oedipal themes of Paul Morel, the early draft version of Sons and Lovers, in unexpected, previously underexplored ways that evince his deep mistrust of Freudianism, as well as his growing scepticism about any attempt to define human nature. For Lawrence, as for many later British writers, Oedipus is much more than a simple archetype of incestuous or parricidal urges: he is a humanistic hero whose unintended fate casts doubt on the human capacity for self-knowledge, and whose heroism lies in his disregard (conscious or unconscious) of the limitations that frustrate ordinary human beings. In this respect, Lawrence may well be termed ‘post-humanist’ (the term Jeff Wallace employs in his book D.H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman), but his rejection of humanism often seems more like a reaction to Freud than a considered, coherent position. Indeed, some of Lawrence’s most enduring work is so tinged with Oedipal overtones that it can hardly remain entirely separate from the humanistic tradition that it seems to reject; indeed, in Lawrence’s last novel, The Man Who Died, he returns to both Oedipus and humanism with unexpected ardour. Lawrence, Frieda, and Freud Although much has been written about the Oedipal themes in Lawrence’s work, few scholars have noticed that Lawrence’s obsession with Oedipus clearly predates his first encounter, in March of 1912, with Frieda Weekley (later Lawrence), who is generally credited with having both introduced him to Freudian ideas and piqued his interest in Oedipus. (A.A. Brill’s English translation of The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1911, and it is very unlikely that Lawrence had previously encountered Freud’s work in German.) This scholarly oversight is surprising, since there are many indications of Lawrence’s strong early interest in the myth. In a letter from 3 March 1911, Lawrence wrote of his obsession with Sophocles and other ancient dramatists: ‘Who can alter fate, and useless it is to rail against it. When I get sore I always fly to the Greek tragedies: they make one feel sufficiently fatalistic, Im [sic] doing Oedipus Tyrannus just now – Sophocles ... These Greek tragedies make one quiet and indifferent’ (Lawrence,

The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism 23

Letters, 1:235). In another letter, written on 26 April 1911, Lawrence called Oedipus Tyrannus ‘the finest drama of all times’ (Lawrence, Letters, 1:261), an opinion he apparently voiced to many of his acquaintances: Helen Corke recounts that Lawrence told her that ‘there was no drama to compare with Oedipus Rex’ (quoted in Nehls, D.H. Lawrence, 1:142). So what did Lawrence see in Oedipus before he had met Frieda or read Freud’s Oedipal theory? The obvious place to begin answering this question is Gilbert Murray’s Oedipus, King of Thebes, a verse translation of Sophocles’ play that was published in 1911, in time for Lawrence to have read it before meeting Frieda.1 Sophocles’ commentary on humanity’s attempts to define itself, while reflected in all competent translations of the play, is featured particularly prominently in Murray’s version. Murray’s Oedipus shows himself to be a humanist in his moral orientation, musing that ‘no work so grand / Hath man yet encompassed, as, with all he can / Of chance or power, to help his fellow man’ (Murray, King, 12). Here he shows that assisting his fellow human beings is the highest possible achievement he can imagine, implying his estrangement from theocentric religious beliefs. Moreover, once Tiresias accuses Oedipus of parricide and incest, Oedipus openly opposes the divine forces that have doomed him to such crimes. Evidently trying to show that human will and intelligence can resist and circumvent divine or supernatural agency, Murray’s Oedipus brags to Tiresias of his success at solving the riddle of the Sphinx: ’Twas scarce a secret, that, for common men ... No fowl, no flame, No God revealed it thee. ’Twas I that came, Rude Oedipus, unlearned in wizard’s lore, and read her secret, and she spoke no more.

(Murray, King, 14)

Here Oedipus boasts that his ‘rude,’ ‘unlearned’ human intelligence has bested the supposedly greater powers of Tiresias, a sacred initiate into divine mysteries. Having solved the riddle, however, Oedipus no longer qualifies as a ‘common’ man as he asserts; indeed, as if to affirm his sudden separateness from the rest of humanity, Jocasta addresses Oedipus as ‘Lord of Men’ (Murray, King, 27). Yet in Murray’s version Oedipus’s very greatness lays the foundation for his exile from humanity; he is so confident in his innocence

24 Oedipus Against Freud

and self-awareness that he vows, if proven guilty, to exile himself from human society altogether: No man, kin Nor stranger, any more may take me in; … Out of all vision of mankind away To darkness let me fall.

(Murray, King, 26–7)

When Oedipus realizes his crimes, the Chorus in Murray’s translation identifies Oedipus with the human condition once more, asking: ‘What thing that is human more / Dare I call blessed?’ (Murray, King, 39). Yet in this very instant Murray’s Oedipus is also asked to transcend his humanity since, as a messenger puts it, ‘He hath more burden now than man may endure’ (Murray, King, 42). Here is the paradox of Oedipus’s fate: in embodying the human predicament, Oedipus attains a kind of superhuman status. Similarly, Oedipus attains an apparently untenable level of knowledge: the Chorus consequently resolves to place its faith in divine revelation rather than human deductive power: ‘Be God, not man, my guide’ (Murray, King, 28). Yet even though Oedipus is ultimately humbled, his successful quest to uncover the truth behind the mysterious plague on Thebes disproves Jocasta’s claim that No human thing Born on earth hath power for conjuring Truth from the dark of God.

(Murray, King, 23)

Murray’s version of the play suggests that human intelligence can indeed uncover truth, though it may horrify and disgust our moral natures. Murray’s account of Oedipus’s self-contradictory identity, and his centrality to both human self-knowledge and the downfall of human nature, finds an exact parallel in Lawrence’s own description of Oedipus and other tragic heroes in his 1914 study of Thomas Hardy: Oedipus, Hamlet, Macbeth set themselves up against ... the unfathomed moral forces of nature, and out of this unfathomed force comes their death ... Had Oedipus, Hamlet, Macbeth been weaker, less full of real, potent life, they would have made no tragedy; they would have ... contrived some arrangement of their affairs, sheltering in the human moral-

The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism 25 ity ... But being, as they are, men to the fullest capacity, when they find themselves, daggers drawn, with the very forces of life itself, they can only fight till they themselves are killed. (Lawrence, Phoenix, 1:420)

Here Lawrence sums up the paradox of Oedipus’s fate: he simultaneously embodies both the human separation from nature (being a man ‘to the fullest capacity,’ as Lawrence puts it) and the tragic hero’s discontent with ordinary ‘human morality.’ Oedipus shows us that those who are the most typically ‘human’ are doomed, since human morality cannot accept human nature. Such a reading of Oedipus’s fate may also have been derived from Nietzsche, who saw Oedipus as the embodiment of ‘Dionysiac’ selfdestructive wisdom (Nietzsche, Birth, 61), reflected in Oedipus’s relentless inquisitiveness about Laius’s death. Lawrence, who had read much of Nietzsche’s work by 1911, might well have been struck by the passage in which Nietzsche makes incest a precondition for Oedipus’s riddle-solving skill: ‘the legend of Oedipus suggests that “where prophetic and magical powers have broken the spell of present and future, the rigid law of individuation, and the real magic of nature, some enormously unnatural event – such as incest – must have occurred earlier as a cause”’ (Nietzsche, Birth, 61). We will revisit the question of Nietzsche’s influence later in this chapter, but here we should note that Lawrence would not have needed either Nietzsche or Freud to find a powerful commentary on human nature and destiny in Murray’s translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. We cannot be certain about the nature of Lawrence’s understanding of Oedipus’s relationship to human identity, but plainly, concerns about human knowledge (and the desirability thereof) were on Lawrence’s mind when he first met Frieda Weekley. In her autobiography, Frieda writes of her first meeting with Lawrence: ‘He said he had finished with his attempts at knowing women ... We talked about Oedipus and understanding leaped through our words’ (F. Lawrence, Not I, 4). Frieda’s account implicitly links Oedipus’s and Lawrence’s frustrated attempts to understand human nature (in this case, women’s), but this connection has gone largely unexplored. Most scholars have assumed that Freud’s theories were the spur for this exchange, and yet, as Elaine Feinstein points out, it is not at all clear (from Frieda’s account, or any other) whether Lawrence and Frieda discussed Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex, Sophocles’ plays, or both (Feinstein, Lawrence and the Women, 77). We do not know who first

26 Oedipus Against Freud

brought Oedipus into the conversation, or which of Lawrence’s female acquaintances he was denouncing. Lawrence’s emotional life was in turmoil at this stage: he had just broken off his engagement to Louie Burrows, was carrying on a desultory affair with Alice Dax, and was receiving adverse criticisms from his former lover Jessie Chambers about his account of their relationship in Paul Morel. Any or all of these women might have brought Lawrence to such a pitch of invective, and the memory of his mother (who died in 1910) could have been haunting him. There is a certain plausibility to the conventional view that Frieda introduced Freud and Oedipus into that first, fateful conversation with Lawrence; Frieda had apparently seen some of Lawrence’s work prior to meeting him (her husband Ernest Weekley had shown her some writing, presumably sections from Paul Morel that Lawrence had lent him), which might have tipped her off about the Freudian/Oedipal themes in his work. Yet it is equally plausible that a troubled Lawrence, seeking Frieda’s sympathy, had compared himself to Sophocles’ Oedipus, and that his identification with this ill-fated hero had struck a chord in her. Yet regardless of how Oedipus’s name first arose, there is no doubt that Lawrence adjusted his portrayal of the Morel family after absorbing the information Frieda offered him about the supposedly universal nature of the mother-son love Freud termed the ‘Oedipus complex.’ We may gauge the tension between Frieda’s view of the Oedipal narrative and Lawrence’s initial understanding of it from Frieda’s September 1912 letter to Edward Garnett. In this letter, Frieda notes that Lawrence ‘quite missed the point in “Paul Morel,”’ though she goes on to say that Lawrence ‘really loved his mother more than anybody, even with his other women, real love, sort of Oedipus; his mother must have been adorable’ (F. Lawrence, Memoirs, 171). Here we see Frieda expressing empathy for Lawrence’s plight as an excessively loving son, and although she clearly disagrees with some aspects of Lawrence’s portrait of the Morels, she finds Lawrence’s relationship to his mother quite understandable, and sees it as ‘real love’ and not as a strange perversion of love.2 Frieda’s objections to Lawrence’s portrayal of his family did not subside as he revised the novel; indeed, they seem to have intensified. As Frieda notes in the same letter: ‘He is writing Paul Morel again, reads bits and we fight like blazes over it, he is so often beside the point’ (F. Lawrence, Memoirs, 171). Many scholars have guessed at the effect of Frieda’s erratic influence on the Oedipal themes of Lawrence’s novel, but (rather surprisingly)

The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism 27

most have assumed that Frieda and Lawrence were in accord as to the implications of Freud’s ideas; for example, John Worthen has speculated that ‘Frieda’s excitement about what she now thought of as the real heart of the novel was because, in Freud’s theory, the child was not rendered abnormal but was naturally dominated by incestuous feelings for its mother and by a desire to murder its father’ (Worthen, D.H. Lawrence, 443). Worthen follows this hypothesis with an account of how learning about Freud’s theory might have galvanized Lawrence: ‘Freud described a pattern which – although Lawrence had known all its details before – he can never have heard articulated so clearly as a theory; it was doubtless some comfort and reassurance to find that he had been thinking along the same lines as a revolutionary European intellectual. It gave him both clarity and distance’ (Worthen, D.H. Lawrence, 443). This view may seem reasonable enough in theory, but when it is juxtaposed with the reality of Lawrence’s many disagreements with Frieda, it becomes obviously inadequate. Lawrence’s Revisions: Paul Morel and Sons and Lovers Until recently, few have had the opportunity to read the early drafts of Sons and Lovers (first entitled Paul Morel) in order to test Worthen’s hypothesis, to judge how this greater ‘distance’ was achieved, or to note the other dramatic changes that Frieda’s influence and Lawrence’s new awareness of the currency of Oedipal themes had wrought on Lawrence’s creative imagination as he finished Sons and Lovers. Fortunately, the second draft of Paul Morel (i.e., the last draft that Lawrence completed before he met Frieda) was published in 2003, and we now have an opportunity to compare it to the finished product. We shall see that, far from bringing the narrative of Paul Morel into line with Frieda’s Freud-influenced views, Lawrence distances the story from Freudian/Oedipal themes, displaces and makes problematic the incestuous overtones of Paul’s relations with his mother, denounces the consequences of such relationships, and rejects the humanistic tone of his earlier draft. As we shall see, Sons and Lovers not only suggests a greater distance between Lawrence and his autobiographical hero than is visible in Paul Morel; the published novel also shows Lawrence wrestling with the very idea that we can know ourselves as human beings, or that we can accept conventional limits on our behaviour or identities. If Freud (filtered though Frieda, where Lawrence was concerned) suggested that to be a normal human being means to be

28 Oedipus Against Freud

Oedipal, then it would seem that Lawrence no longer wished his main (and still very Oedipal) character to be quite so human as before. The text of Paul Morel shows why Lawrence might well have wished for some ‘distance’ from his mother-son love story. Readers will immediately recognize the naked Oedipal wish-fulfilment of its overall narrative: Paul’s father dies and Paul’s siblings get married and move away, so Paul is free to live with his mother Bertha in a cottage, until he meets the married yet sexually available Clara (when the story, tellingly, stalls). Readers will also be struck by the rhapsodic, highly sexualized descriptions of Paul’s love for his mother: ‘[Paul] did not want to kiss anyone, in love, save his mother ... When he kissed his mother, it was as if his heart rose and filled him with the strong blood of love, so that his kiss was close and rare and sacred’ (PM 82). The lyricism of such passages and their unmistakable hint of sexual arousal are largely lost in Sons and Lovers, where Paul’s still-strong affection for his mother is also shared by his brothers, rather than being peculiar to him. Furthermore, in Sons and Lovers, the narrator attempts to link Paul’s predicament to that of other young men (though none outside the Morel family actually fit the description): ‘A good many of the nicest men he knew were like himself ... They were so sensitive to their women, that they would go without them for ever rather than do them a hurt ... Being the sons of mothers whose husbands had blundered rather brutally through their feminine sanctities, they were themselves too diffident and shy ... a woman was like their mother, and they were full of a sense of their mother’ (SL 323). Here the son’s physical desire for the mother is repressed, with the narration instead suggesting that the emotional bond mothers create with their sons is to blame for what Freud would term a failure to resolve the Oedipus complex. In Paul Morel the very Oedipal ‘blindness’ Paul is said to exhibit is a dangerous symptom of the ‘unknown’ nature of his seemingly incestlike relationship with his mother: for instance, when Paul professes his intention never to marry, his first lover Miriam Lievers comments ‘How blind he is’ (PM 83). The narrator endorses her view: ‘He was so blind with his heart, if perhaps wonderfully ‘seeing’ with his brain’ (PM 84). This blindness is a distinctively Oedipal trait: Oedipus gouges out his eyes because, despite his intellect, he has failed to see his own true nature and to prevent his own crimes. In Murray’s Oedipus, King of Thebes, for instance, Oedipus taunts Tiresias for being a ‘blind man’ with ‘blind eyes, ears and heart,’ but Tiresias fires back with much more reason: ‘More blind ... thy words of scorn ... Eyes hast

The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism 29

thou but thy deeds thou canst not see’ (Murray, King, 14–15). When Oedipus blinds himself later in the play, his gesture seems to confirm the justice of Tiresias’s accusations. Lawrence takes the implied parallel between Paul and Oedipus even further. Like Oedipus (who brings about the Theban plague with his unwitting parricide), Paul is the agent of a strange contagion of madness and moral or emotional blindness in Paul Morel; Miriam watches him thrusting a stick into the ground, and absorbs some of his frenzied energy: ‘His endless tearing of the earth with the stick seemed like madness in her brain who watched him,’ and she marvels ‘at the perverse cruelty she got from him. It made her feel sick and blind’ (PM 108). Plainly, like Oedipus, Paul is dangerously ignorant of the energies and fates that drive him, and this blindness makes him a threat to others. In Sons and Lovers, blindness is used very differently indeed, since it is Miriam who is initially said to be ‘blind’ (SL 189), and not Paul. Paul himself is not associated with blindness until his sexual encounter with Clara: ‘The naked hunger ... of his loving her, something strong and blind and ruthless in its primitiveness, made the hour almost terrible to her ... his need was bigger than either her or him’ (SL 397). This blindness is not a moral deficiency; rather, it is a necessary condition of his sexual power, and a conscious symptom of the ignorance one must cultivate in order to put aside human familiarity and achieve sexual bliss. Yet, as in Paul Morel, there is a distinctly Oedipal subtext to Paul’s sex-induced blindness in Sons and Lovers. The parricidal myopia displayed by Oedipus is strongly implied when Paul fights Baxter Dawes and finds his older rival for Clara’s affections at his mercy: ‘he got up and, quite blind, leapt clean under his enemy’s guard ... He was quite unconscious, only his body had taken upon itself to kill this other man’ (SL 410). Paul finally relaxes his hold on Dawes, ‘as he realized what he was doing,’ and blacks out as Dawes kicks him, all the while ‘grunting with pain like a beast’ (SL 410). Paul drags himself home from this bestial encounter, ‘walking blindly,’ with a ‘blind intention’ of reaching his mother (SL 411), and we see that Lawrence has pressed his anti-intellectual rhetoric to the breaking point, where two men fight like animals and yet somehow avoid complete regression by failing to murder each other. It seems as if in Sons and Lovers Lawrence is showing that modern human beings cannot re-enact Oedipus’s crimes on even a symbolic level. They simply know too much about themselves to abandon their self-restraint entirely.

30 Oedipus Against Freud

The Paul of Paul Morel, however, is sufficiently self-aware to sense that there is something wrong with him, as the narrator notes: ‘divorced from the physical, he felt rather like a living spirit, a sort of half-educated angel, than a lover and a man’ (PM 97). This seems to be a product of Paul’s religious education, but we can see that he is struggling hard to overcome his identification with the supernatural or angelic. Indeed, Paul’s own credo is explicitly humanistic, rather than theological; as he says, ‘we are born to do some good here, in the world, and not in an afterlife’ (PM 110). In a similar vein, Paul also voices his admiration for Christ’s human side: ‘It would be cruel, impossible to give up the Resurrection, yet the Christ-man is so much more real, so inspiring. One can feel with a Christ-Man: fancy pitying a God!’ (PM 111). Here Paul seems to be suggesting that religion is only valuable insofar as it offers us human role models and consolations. By contrast, the Paul of Sons and Lovers refuses to acknowledge his place in collective human identity, asking Clara: ‘“Why should I be called ‘Men’ when I’m only myself?”’ (SL 273). Here Paul is plainly speaking for Lawrence, who has apparently abandoned his former faith in humanity. Whereas the narrator of Paul Morel criticizes Miriam for her lack of common ground with other humans (‘She scarcely knew the world at all ... to measure her beliefs by the great human experience’ [PM 93]), no such standards are applied to her in Sons and Lovers. In fact, Paul’s immature habit of personification is blamed on Miriam: ‘Anthropomorphic as she was, she stimulated him into appreciating things thus, and then they lived for her. She seemed to need things kindling in her imagination or in her soul, before she felt she had them’ (SL 179). Though Paul is arguably as guilty of this as Miriam, he later reproaches her for her humanistic, self-centred view of nature: ‘“Can you never like things without clutching them as if you wanted to pull the heart out of them? ... You wheedle the soul out of things”’ (SL 257). Whereas in Paul Morel the connotations of ‘manhood’ are nearly always positive, and any implied attempt to transcend or ignore human limitations is suspect, in Sons and Lovers humanity is an unwelcome restraint on Paul’s identity. We may trace a similar change in Lawrence’s picture of the human through a passage from Paul Morel that was revised in Sons and Lovers – an exchange between Clara and Paul that forms part of one of the many passages that Edward Garnett deleted from the original published version of Sons and Lovers. In Paul Morel, Clara and Paul argue about Clara’s anger at the world and humanity:

The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism 31 ‘Are you always like this?’ he asked. ‘Loathing the very clothes you wear, and the words you speak.’ ‘It’s only the unnatural things,’ she smiled. ‘When things are natural they are beautiful.’ ‘And isn’t man natural?’ he asked. ‘I think not,’ she said. (PM 138)

Here Paul brings up the topic of humanity and its relationship to nature, as if trying to defend the idea that ‘man’ is natural, and thus not worthy of the self-disgust Clara seems to exhibit. In reply, Clara offers Paul something new and intriguing: an explicitly anti-humanistic point of view that holds up nature as preferable to humanity. Paul is evidently curious about this viewpoint, and (rather insensitively) presses her to elucidate her ideas even further by bringing up her husband: ‘Wasn’t Radford natural?’ he bluntly asked. She coloured deeply, looked away from him. ‘We will not discuss it,’ she said coldly. ‘All right – But I think he’s a bit too natural: a bit too near the native beast.’ ‘You can spoil an animal,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. He’d be all right in his place. We’re only mixed up: seven million stages, from the chimpanzee to me then to the poets and the Christs ...’ ‘I think you have not yet learned respect for another person’s feelings,’ she said, coldly. (PM 138)

In this passage Clara prompts Paul to formulate a bold new theory of ‘mixed-up’ human identity in which we infer that there is a continuum of human nature that can accommodate the subhuman, the human, and the divine, though we may note that Paul modestly places himself somewhere between the animal world and the world of poets and Christs. Lawrence liked this passage enough to retain its general outlines in the draft of Sons and Lovers that he sent to his agent. He did revise it, however, and the changes he made are significant: ‘Are you always like this?’ he asked. ‘Loathing the very flesh on your bones, and the words of your mouth.’

32 Oedipus Against Freud ‘It’s only the unnatural things,’ she replied. ‘When things are natural they are beautiful.’ ‘And what isn’t natural?’ he asked. ‘Everything man has made,’ she answered, ‘including himself.’ (SL 314)

Here it is Clara, not Paul, who first brings up the issue of humanity, underlining the originality and suddenness of her attitude; it no longer derives from Paul’s ideas. This version of Paul’s reply makes Clara’s position seem more self-hating; the phrase ‘the very flesh on your bones’ is much more immediate and arresting than ‘the very clothes you wear,’ and ‘the words of your mouth’ is similarly more personal than ‘the words you speak.’ In the later version’s second passage, Paul replies more defensively: ‘But his women made him,’ he replied, ‘Besides, wasn’t Dawes natural?’ She coloured deeply, looked away from him. ‘We will not discuss it,’ she said coldly. ‘All right – But I think he’s a bit too natural: a bit too near the native beast.’ ‘You can spoil an animal,’ she said. ‘Quite so. He’d be all right in his place. We’re only mixed up: seven million stages, from the chimpanzee to me then to the poets and the christs ... ‘I think you have not yet learned respect for another person’s feelings,’ she said, coldly. (SL 314)

Here Paul adds what will become a familiar note in Lawrence’s postFreudian stance regarding humanity’s flaws: they are caused by women (‘his women made him’). Paul also alters his earlier reply to Clara’s statement that ‘You can spoil an animal’ from ‘I don’t know’ to ‘Quite so,’ which is initially puzzling. This change suggests that, at least in Paul’s view, Dawes is indeed an ‘animal’ who has been spoiled, as Clara suggests, whereas Paul’s former answer retreats from this unfair dehumanizing view of Dawes’s nature. It is tempting to read this seemingly minor change as a microcosm of Lawrence’s own shifting responses to Frieda’s challenges, from their first encounter. From merely claiming ignorance of human nature and its secrets (Paul’s ‘I don’t know’ recalls Lawrence’s pre-Freudian admission to Frieda of his own ignorance where women are con-

The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism 33

cerned), Lawrence moves to a more brusque and dehumanizing attitude (Paul’s ‘Quite so’ suggests his acceptance of the proposition that people are merely animals who can be ‘spoiled’). Of course, the outcomes of both versions of this debate are the same: Clara moves away from apparent anti-humanism and pleads for ‘respect’ for her ‘feelings’ as a person, invoking a humanistic ethos to lend her words dignity. Thus we see in both versions a microcosm of the relationship: Clara offers Paul something new, threatening, and potentially liberating – a heady combination of guilt-free sexual pleasure and a way beyond human limitations – but she fails to deliver. In Paul Morel, however, Paul seems less willing to approach the inhuman or subhuman, whereas in the later version he appears more amenable to seeing others as he sees himself: as beings whose humanity is in question. Because of the humanistic attitudes of Paul Morel, Paul’s views on other people’s humanity (or lack thereof) in that text speak volumes for the sexual and gender implications that inhere in his sense of anthropocentric superiority. For instance, Paul dubs each of his sister’s female friends a ‘monster’ and muses: ‘every girl had some violent depths of monstrosity hidden away deep down in her’ (PM 19). It would seem that Paul’s mother has formed Paul’s sole conception of women or girls as humans, and those who don’t measure up to her example are dismissed. Paul thus re-enacts the traditional patriarchal impulse to deny women’s humanity. This dehumanizing attitude towards most women (Gertrude and Miriam excepted) is one of the few continuities between Paul Morel and Sons and Lovers. For instance, Paul denies Clara’s human individuality as he contemplates her swimming: Look how little she is! ... She’s lost like a grain of sand in the beach ... almost nothing among the morning. Why does she absorb me ... What is she after all? ... Here’s the sea-coast morning, big and permanent and beautiful. There she is, fretting, always unsatisfied, and temporary ... She represents something, like a bubble of foam represents the sea. But what is she! (SL 402)

This dehumanizing perception will form the basis for Lawrence’s interest in women; in a 1914 letter to Edward Garnett, Lawrence writes, ‘I only care about what the woman is – what she is – inhumanly, physiologically, materially – ... what she is as a phenomenon (or as representing some greater, inhuman will), instead of what she feels

34 Oedipus Against Freud

according to the human conception’ (Lawrence, Letters, 2:183). This is the mood that prevails in Sons and Lovers, where Paul seems to have achieved the inhuman or post-human perspective that the narrator in Paul Morel can only extrapolate from his perceptions.3 These new themes in Lawrence’s revisions to Paul Morel reveal how once Frieda showed Lawrence the stigma of the Oedipal dynamics exposed so nakedly in Paul Morel, Lawrence made his treatment of the Oedipal situations in the Morel household more objective and less lyrical. Yet this new hardness in dealing with Oedipal tropes comes at a price: Lawrence’s work after 1912 tends bitterly to reject humanity altogether, and to be impatient with the search for universal human characteristics. For Lawrence, Freud’s theory of a universal Oedipus complex couldn’t be true, because human self-knowledge was impossible without self-delusion. Yet Lawrence is plainly not entirely satisfied with his anti-humanist mode of repudiating Freud; in Sons and Lovers he also seeks to displace the blame for the Oedipal situation from young men onto their mothers. For instance, he changes the Morel mother’s name from Bertha to Gertrude, evoking Hamlet’s culpable mother. In Sons and Lovers Gertrude Morel is more responsible for her sons’ overt emotional attachment to her than was Bertha in Paul Morel; Gertrude can scarcely recognize that her son Paul is a separate person: ‘[she] felt as if the navel-string that had connected Paul’s frail little body to hers had not been broken’ (SL 51). Whereas Paul Morel vigorously defends Bertha’s character – we are told that she ‘had no pride of class sticking to her’ (PM 18) and that she ‘had not a grain of vanity’ (PM 63) – in Sons and Lovers Gertrude aggressively criticizes her husband and manipulates her sons. She bitterly resents Walter’s crudity and sensuousness, so that he seems like ‘an outsider’ in his own family (SL 24) and develops a defensive, adversarial attitude towards his sons that brings out their parricidal urges. Anti-Humanism in Sons and Lovers The transformation of Bertha into the less sympathetic Gertrude is a symptom of Lawrence’s increasing misogyny, which no doubt contributed to his anti-humanism, as well as to his obsession with debunking Freudian ideas about incest. In his later work, Lawrence would inveigh against dissatisfied mothers like Gertrude Morel: ‘Here, in her own son who belongs to her, she seems to find the last perfect response for which she is craving ... So she throws herself into a last

The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism 35

great love for her son, a final and fatal devotion, that which would have been the richness and strength of her husband and is poison to the boy’ (FUPU 125). Lawrence blames incestuous feeling (a violation of what he sees as the general rule of ‘sex-aversion’ between parents and children) on mothers, since a ‘woman has not the courage to give up her hopeless insistence on love, and her endless demand for love’ (FUPU 128). Sons and Lovers offers ample evidence for this claim, but it also implies that younger women, such as Miriam, are also responsible for Paul’s problems. Paul Sheehan has claimed that Miriam is ‘possessed by an inhuman force’ that enables her to think past human social limitations, and that this is what makes her so attractive to Paul (Sheehan 108). This claim is not altogether convincing, but it is certainly true that Miriam makes Paul feel as though he is transcending his humanity: ‘It was not the same glow, happiness and pride, that he felt in having his mother in charge: something more wonderful, less human, and tinged to intensity by a pain, as if there were something he could not get to’ (SL 230). This unsatisfied longing makes Paul feel ‘less human,’ for a time, but it soon reverts to a familiar frustration; Miriam initially refuses to allow Paul to explore his animal nature, that is, his sexuality. This aversion to sex is partly a result of Miriam’s status as a self-appointed mother figure: ‘she had ... thought of him secretly as an infant ... he was not a man, he was a baby’ (SL 342). Although we are meant to disapprove of such sentiments, the narrator subtly endorses and underlines them; Miriam, for instance, ‘did not understand’ Paul, ‘any more than a woman understands when she conceives a child in her womb’ (SL 241). Such an image is hardly accidental; the implication is that Miriam harbours the same all-too-human maternal/incestuous passion as Gertrude Morel, and that she therefore represses all sexual feelings. Yet Miriam alone is not responsible for the frustrations inherent in her relationship with Paul, who admits, ‘I can give you a spirit love ... but not embodied passion’ (SL 292). We suspect that the ‘inhuman force’ possessing Miriam is Paul’s own fevered imagination, which cannot satisfy itself with anything merely ‘human.’ In a passage deleted by Garnett, Paul summarizes marriage in mundane terms that clarify why he and Miriam are unsuited to it: ‘If people marry, they must live together as affectionate humans who may be commonplace with each other without feeling awkward’ (SL 292). Paul convinces himself that he Miriam have surpassed such a banal ‘human’ state as marriage, which Lawrence elsewhere describes (in typically Oedipal

36 Oedipus Against Freud

terms) as ‘the great puzzle of our day ... our sphinx-riddle’ (Lawrence, Phoenix, 2:619). The solution to this riddle is to be ‘human,’ but if humanity bears the stigma of incest, as Freud claims, then Lawrence is not sure he wants his characters to retain humanity. Certainly, any woman with maternal tendencies is deemed unsuitable for Paul. Thus Clara Dawes – sexually experienced yet profoundly unmaternal – seems a more promising partner for Paul. Clara initially accepts Paul’s inhuman aspect and sexuality: ‘She loved him for his quick, unexpected movements, like a young animal’ (SL 308). Of course, as with Miriam, Paul inevitably projects his own feelings onto Clara: ‘he loved her, as she balanced her head and stared straight in front of her, pouting, wistful, immobile, as if she yielded herself to her fate because it was too strong for her ... A kind of eternal look about her, as if she were a wistful sphinx, made him mad to kiss her ... his blood kept sweeping up in great white-hot waves, that killed his consciousness temporarily’ (SL 375). Paul is attracted to what he sees as Clara’s capacity to transcend her human limits and become something other; after all, a sphinx is only one-third human, the other parts being feline and avian. Clara offers Paul a chance to get beyond his ordinary human self, as we can see from Paul’s strange account of his sensations during the play he attends with Clara: ‘The drama ... seemed far away inside him. He was Clara’s white, heavy arms, her throat, her moving bosom. That seemed to be himself. Then away somewhere the play went on, and he was identified with that also. There was no himself’ (SL 375). Here Paul’s lust for dissolution seems at times to be a longing for a return to the maternal body; indeed, some have argued that Paul’s view of Clara as inhuman merely evinces his own pre-Oedipal infantile libido. Giles Mitchell, in ‘Sons and Lovers and the Oedipal Project,’ asserts that Paul’s overidentification with Clara’s body (especially parts to which a nursing infant would be closest: throat and bosom) shows ‘his unbornness, his unfallenness’ and claims that this response to her ‘sphinx-like ... creatureliness’ is part of a pattern of infantile, recurrent male denials of the men and women’s common humanity (Mitchell 217). The same conflicts and misunderstandings that paralyse Paul’s affair with Miriam predictably arise between him and Clara. Clara complains that men in love ‘“don’t know that the woman exists”’ and informs Paul disdainfully that ‘“[a]bout me you know nothing”’ (SL 406). When Paul tries to explain his superhuman feelings to her (‘“If I start to make love to you ... I just go like a leaf down the wind”’) she

The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism 37

replies bitterly, ‘“And leave me out of count”’ (SL 407). When they make love, Paul manages to become ‘not a man with a mind, but a great instinct,’ but the narrator reveals that the ‘mechanical effort’ such pleasure entails ruins the thrill (SL 408). Paul’s confused and contradictory views of his own desires as inhuman finally repulses Clara, who recognizes that ‘[t]here was no man there loving her’ (SL 431). She therefore returns to her husband Baxter Dawes. Paul must therefore choose the seemingly inhuman (though perhaps humane) course of euthanizing his mother in order to be free of her for good. Ironically, after she is dead, Paul finally indulges the incestuous urge: ‘He bent and kissed her passionately. But there was coldness against his mouth’ (SL 443). He has left it too late, quite deliberately, and thus he finds his expression of physical love unsatisfactory. Although Paul seemingly escapes his stereotypically Freudian/ Oedipal incestuous fate (in part by leaving his home for the town), he still embodies much of what Lawrence saw in Oedipus. In killing Gertrude, Paul clearly challenges what Lawrence contemptuously referred to in his essay on Hardy as normal ‘human morality’; through him, Lawrence presents a superhuman morality that licenses such unlawful actions. Yet no sooner has Paul taken this superhuman action than his identity implodes: he ‘blindly’ follows his father’s lead and gets drunk repeatedly (SL 457). To resolve his crisis, Paul must reckon directly with his Oedipal self. Thus Paul has a final mystical experience, where he sees himself as ‘one tiny upright speck of flesh, less than an ear of wheat lost in the field’ (SL 464). He is amazed that, although ‘[o]n every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a speck, into extinction,’ he resists: ‘almost nothing, he could not be extinct’ (SL 464). He muses on his mysterious connection to the world beyond himself: ‘So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing’ (SL 420). As Paul’s remark suggests, for Lawrence one only understands oneself when one sees that, qua human being, one is ‘almost nothing.’ Scholars who have noted the anti-humanist theme of Sons and Lovers have tended to focus on the very end of the novel. Mitchell claims that for most of the novel Paul Morel tries to deny his own humanity, but points to the link between Paul’s final situation and the end of Oedipus Tyrannus: ‘When Oedipus at last ceases to run from the ... death which has been pursuing him for so long ... he heals his kingdom. In the final scene ... Paul confronts the certainty of extinction and from this confrontation draws power to live’ (Mitchell, ‘Sons and Lovers,’ 218).4

38 Oedipus Against Freud

Sheehan is much less optimistic than Mitchell, noting that ‘as the closing passages ... indicate, there is no adequate scale for the human. Paul is still daunted by a preterhuman power, by an impersonal and universal force’ (Sheehan, Modernism, 110). Sheehan asks ‘Is there anything to recuperate from this “nothingness” that is, nevertheless, not “nothing”?’ and offers the prospect of an ‘undeceived self-attentiveness’ (Sheehan, Modernism, 111). Sheehan rejects this hopeful possibility, perhaps because (unlike Mitchell) he does not read the novel’s ending against the Oedipus narrative.5 Oedipus, however, provides an obvious role model for a hero who survives an encounter with human ‘nothingness’ precisely because he has finally achieved ‘undeceived self-attentiveness.’ Reading the ending against Oedipus is particularly urgent in light of the context of Oedipal references throughout the novel, and Lawrence’s use of the concept of ‘nothingness’ at the end of his novel6 may well have been influenced by the ending of Murray’s translation, where the Chorus addresses humankind thus: Nothingness, nothingness, Ye Children of Man, and less I count you, waking or dreaming!

(Murray, King, 39)

Sophocles’ Oedipus demonstrates precisely this knowledge of nothingness, of the insufficiency of human nature. It is no wonder that Paul is frightened of his own near-nothingness – he immediately whimpers ‘Mother!’ (SL 464) – yet Paul’s insight is profoundly positive; he humbly accepts his human identity and start of his journey out of an incestuous home life into the wider human world, as symbolized by the town towards which he decides to walk. He has reached the God’s-eye view that his earlier incarnation in Paul Morel can only gesture towards unwittingly, and yet he shows his fearful solidarity with the embattled human condition. No doubt Lawrence himself, in rewriting his autobiographical novel in light of what he knew to be Freud’s theory of Oedipal desire, felt a similar pang of fear and determination. Although he explored ways of rejecting and transcending human nature in Sons and Lovers, he ultimately chose not to excise Oedipus from his work. In fact, for a brief period after the novel’s publication Lawrence even encouraged Freudian readings of both his work and human nature. John Middleton Murry notes that in 1914 Lawrence repeatedly discussed the Oedipus complex with the psychologist Dr David Eder and encouraged

The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism 39

Freudian ideas: ‘Lawrence would take me task for my ... skepticism, and imply that I ... ought to be very concerned about the Freudian theory’ (quoted in Nehls, D.H. Lawrence, 231). Moreover, in his bizarre, pseudo-biblical foreword to Sons and Lovers (written in 1913), Lawrence mentions Oedipus by name, in a context that suggests his confidence that Freud was right in viewing the Oedipus complex as universal: ‘The old son-lover was Oedipus. The name of the new one is legion’ (SL 473). Yet it was perhaps the very success of this strategy that produced a backlash in Lawrence’s thinking. Lawrence Against Freud Freudian interpretations of Sons and Lovers, flawed and superficial though they were, eventually made the book famous, but they also caricatured it as a psychological curiosity and stigmatized Lawrence as a modern-day Oedipus. Not surprisingly, Lawrence never felt quite the same way about Oedipus again. Much of his subsequent writing demonstrates deep, bitter resentment at having been persuaded – whether by Frieda, Freud, or his own liking for Sophocles – to place Oedipus so close to the centre of human nature; not until the 1929 novella The Man Who Died did Lawrence depict such an overtly Oedipal figure. Part of the problem was out of Lawrence’s hands: regardless of the content of Sons and Lovers, Freud’s conception of the Oedipus complex came to dominate popular conceptions of both the myth and the hidden, irrational side of humanity. Unsurprisingly, Lawrence focused his energies on such external factors rather than his tormented emotions about his mother, his father, and Frieda; rather than gouge his own eyes out, Lawrence attacked Freud for popularizing a caricatured version of Oedipal identity. Lawrence’s animus against Freud is strange, on a certain level, since universal application of Freudian theory might have allowed Lawrence to imagine a better, happier, healthier sexual life for humanity – one of his desiderata. After all, why shouldn’t Freudian psychoanalysis teach modern people to learn to avoid the old incestuous traps and thus obviate Paul Morel’s misery? The answer to this question, for Lawrence, lies in the danger of human self-knowledge, which in Lawrence’s view turns modern, self-conscious people into Oedipal figures doomed by attempts to understand themselves and tormented by the fate they have been told awaits them. Lawrence was convinced that the ‘shrieking failure’ (FUPU 246) of modern life was its depend-

40 Oedipus Against Freud

ence on self-consciousness, which in Freud’s work and elsewhere safeguards against the madness Nietzsche celebrates in Oedipus. For Lawrence, self-awareness is merely self-deluded Dionysian frenzy: ‘humanity proceeds to derange itself, to automatize itself from the mental consciousness ... Quite justly do the advanced Russian and French writers acclaim madness as a great goal. It is the genuine goal of self-automatism’ (FUPU 48). Lawrence’s Nietzschean ideas were not always clearly articulated, but they consistently focused on the Oedipus myth. Lawrence claims that ‘The incest motive is a logical deduction of the human reason, which has recourse to this last extremity, to save itself’ (FUP 210). Here Lawrence echoes Nietzsche, who (ignoring the myth’s usual chronology, where Oedipus solves the riddle first and then commits incest) makes incest a precondition for Oedipus’s riddle-solving skill: ‘the legend of Oedipus suggests that “where prophetic and magical powers have broken the spell of present and future, the rigid law of individuation, and the real magic of nature, some enormously unnatural event – such as incest – must have occurred earlier as a cause”’ (Nietzsche, Birth, 61). In a similarly Nietzschean vein, Lawrence argues that the wish to rescue human ‘reason’ itself leads to dehumanization: ‘Man is the undisputed master of his own fate, and captain of his soul. But better say engine-driver, for in truth he is no more than the little god in the machine ... He has invented his own automatic principles, and he works himself according to them, like any little mechanic inside the works’ (FUPU 211). Lawrence has taken Oedipus’s paradox and applied it to Freudianism: the very thing that seemed to define humanity damns it to inhumanity. Yet automatism is not Freudianism’s greatest threat for Lawrence, if we believe with Freud that repressing natural urges is harmful. Lawrence warns us of the dangers of accepting Freudian ideas wholeheartedly: ‘The analyst ... is brought at last to realize that at the root of almost every neurosis lies some incest-craving ... You must admit incest as you now admit sexual marriage, as a duty even ... Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity’ (FUPU 205–6). Here Lawrence even seems to advocate Dionysian self-indulgence and self-annihilation as a response to the picture of human nature offered by Freud; indeed, he occasionally says as much: ‘All that can be done, if the Freudian theory is true, is deliberately to indulge the outlawed desires that lurk in the unconscious’ (quoted in Murry, Son of Woman, 156). Plainly, this would result in the

The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism 41

complete breakdown of human society and any stable picture of human identity – hardly Freud’s intention. Yet it is just this result that Lawrence seems to desire more and more ardently. In 1920’s Women in Love, for instance, the autobiographical character Rupert Birkin calls the concept of ‘humanity’ a ‘huge aggregate lie’ (WL 262) and proclaims, ‘I loathe myself as a human being’ (WL 118). Birkin sees himself as a sort of apocalyptic prophet, and openly declares his wish for the annihilation of human society: ‘Let humanity disappear as quick as possible’ (WL 111). Being determined to distance himself from the Oedipal feelings that define human nature, according to Freud, Birkin also inveighs against women for their maternal selfimportance: ‘Everything must be referred back to her ... the Great Mother’ (WL 200). These outbursts seem motivated by Birkin’s own biliousness, but they can be traced to a common source: for Lawrence, to be human is to be Oedipal, and thus both humanity and the powerful mother who inspires Oedipal love must be discredited or destroyed. In a calmer moment, Birkin tries to explain his denunciations: ‘I should like [people] to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. And they only like to do the collective thing’ (WL 84). This is a recurring idea in Lawrence’s later work; as Lawrence writes in Fantasia, ‘the first conviction that you are me and that I am you’ is a result of the false view that there is such a thing as ‘the oneness of mankind’ (FUPU 25). Without a unifying theory of human nature, individuals could avoid each other’s affections and thus sidestep Oedipal predilections. Even more to the point, Lawrence’s emphasis on individuality inevitably (and deliberately) put him in conflict with Freud, who saw in the sexual urge a ‘victory of the race over the individual’ (Freud, On Sexuality, 341). Lawrence was to reject both Freud’s ideas about incest and his conception of individual growth as a recapitulation of human history; indeed, Lawrence extends his conception of ‘the individual’ to make it a microcosm of all ‘life,’ human or not (FUPU 13). For Lawrence, the history of each individual extends only back to the ‘first fused nucleus of the ovule’ (FUPU 213), and no further. Lawrence even tries to redefine Freud’s central object of study in line with his own views: ‘By the unconscious we wish to indicate that essential unique nature of every individual creature, which is, by its very nature, unanalysable, undefinable, inconceivable’ (FUPU 214). For Lawrence, ‘There is only one clue to the universe. And that is the individual soul within the individual being’ (FUPU 150–1). Thus in his Studies in Classic American Lit-

42 Oedipus Against Freud

erature Lawrence claims that incestuous desires result from incompletely achieved individuality: ‘When the self is broken, and the mystery of the recognition of otherness fails, then the longing for identification with the beloved becomes lust. And it is this longing for identification, utter merging, which is at the base of the incest problem’ (Lawrence, Studies, 76). The result of such theories is that Lawrence displaces the disgust that most people would profess to feel towards the act of incest (which Lawrence did not see as especially repellent) onto the conception of the human. Although Lawrence strives to appear visionary, he frequently seems merely misanthropic, as when he says wistfully, ‘it will be so nice to be alone: not to hear you, not to see you, not to smell you, humanity’ (FUPU 168).7 Yet in this, as in many things, Lawrence was inconsistent. Indeed, towards the end of Lawrence’s life, his many illnesses (including tuberculosis, malaria, and recurrent influenza) took their toll, and his attitude towards his fellow human beings seemed to change. He revisited the Oedipus myth and altered his views in subtle but significant ways. For instance, in his 1925 essay ‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine’ we find a vignette that retells the encounter of Oedipus and the Sphinx in positively cheerful terms: Is there no goal? ‘Oh man! on your four legs, your two, and your three, where are you going?’ – says the Sphinx. ‘I’m just going to say How-do-you-do? to Susan,’ replies the man. And he passes without a scratch. (Lawrence, Phoenix, 2:430)

Here we glimpse Lawrence’s vision of Oedipus after the wave of antihumanism has passed: this representative ‘man’ is not self-obsessed, introverted, or excessively intellectual. Instead he is spontaneous, other-directed, and thoughtlessly absorbed in his goal of visiting a woman, much like the easy-going, anti-messianic Christ of The Man Who Died, as we shall see. This goal allows Lawrence’s Oedipal ‘man’ to escape from the mental excesses associated with Sphinxes in Lawrence’s later work; in a poem entitled ‘Chimaera’ from his book More Pansies, Lawrence writes intellectual women off as ‘sphinxes of self-consciousness’ (Lawrence, Complete Poems, 603). Perhaps Lawrence saw that one way to elude Oedipus’s tragic fate was to avoid taking oneself (or Freud) too seriously.

The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism 43

Saving Humanity Alive: The Man Who Died The light-hearted solution to the problem of Oedipal identity proposed in ‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine’ was not to prove ultimately satisfactory for Lawrence. This is, at least in part, because he often had a nearly messianic sense of self-importance, which he expressed in his letters: ‘this feeling that one is not only a little individual ... but that one is in oneself the whole of mankind, and one’s fate is the fate of the whole of mankind, and one’s charge is the charge of the whole of mankind’ (Lawrence, Letters, 2:302). In such moods, Lawrence links his personal fate to that of humanity, no longer seeing a barrier between these two concepts; as the narrator of Kangaroo puts it, ‘It is the individual alone who can save humanity alive’ (Lawrence, Kangaroo 332). It was in this spirit that Lawrence wrote The Man Who Died, his final major work of fiction. In retelling the story of Christ’s resurrection after the crucifixion, The Man Who Died suggests that its protagonist (referred to simply as ‘the man’) represents the last hope of a human identity once left for dead. The idea of humanity, so long a target of Lawrence’s scorn, cannot be revived without a struggle. At the beginning of part 1, Christ is recovering from what Lawrence had earlier, in a profoundly suggestive phrase, called ‘the calvary of human consciousness’ (FUPU 8). Thus Lawrence’s Christ is nauseated at the thought of human beings: ‘He spoke in a voice of old disgust. Humanity! Especially humanity in authority!’ (MWD 24). Yet death has cured Christ of the ‘old disgust,’ and by the end of part 1 he has recovered his appetite for life with his fellow humans. He regrets having been ‘too much blinded by ... confusion’ to enjoy the world before he died (MWD 62), and says, ‘the time is come for me to return to men’ (MWD 63). His recovery of human identity is still not complete in part 2, when he looks forward to his union with the priestess and thinks, ‘I shall be a man!’ (MWD 141). Lest we confuse this reawakening manhood with mere sexual potency, the narrator refers to Christ’s ‘inner man’ (MWD 142), who is restored to life as his body is reinvigorated. Because Christ, once reborn, has lost hope of being anything other than human, Lawrence’s narrator tells us that ‘The Messiah had not risen,’ implying that he is now just a human being (MWD 48). This new Christ wants to be nothing more than a mere man, yet his identity has been so badly damaged by his former messianic calling that he must be rehabilitated

44 Oedipus Against Freud

gradually by the priestess of Isis, who treats him as if he were the dismembered Osiris who must be reassembled into a new whole. Like Oedipus, Lawrence’s Christ must recover his humanity after having aspired to divine powers and then been reduced to nothingness. Lawrence’s Christ bears the clearest Oedipal markings of any Lawrentian hero since Paul Morel. Just as Oedipus’s feet were pierced and fastened together when he was exposed on Kithairon, Christ’s feet are pierced and his ‘legs ... bandaged together’ (MWD 15). He is much more conscious of these ‘hurt feet’ than of his ‘torn’ hands, identifying his legs with his entire body, just as Oedipus, whose name is often translated as ‘He who knows the foot’ or ‘Swellfoot,’ is identified with his swollen feet; we are told that Christ ‘saw his thin legs that had died’ (MWD 18). When Christ’s eyes open for the first time, after his rebirth, they see only darkness, as if he were passing again through the blind agonies of Oedipus’s life after his awakening to his true nature. Similarly, the wound in Christ’s side is compared to ‘an eye sore with endless weeping’ (MWD 138), an image that irresistibly recalls Oedipus’s gouged eyes and tragic fate. Lawrence’s Christ is also Oedipal in his re-entry into a symbolic maternal womb: after his crucifixion, he must separate himself from the cave in which he has ‘died’ (a sexual pun may be at work here, as with the suggestive word ‘risen,’ used repeatedly). Once Christ becomes acquainted with the priestess of Isis, he spends the night in a womblike cave that recalls the place of his rebirth after the crucifixion. Like Oedipus, he revisits the womb that gave him life in a new, sexual context. The narrator also notes that this highly symbolic cave was once a goat’s den, which underlines the tragic fate Christ is still courting (tragoidia means literally ‘song of the goat men,’ i.e., followers of Dionysus). The priestess is a maternal figure rather than a purely sexual one: she feeds and houses Christ and tends his wounds, and it is little wonder that with her he feels ‘naked as an unborn thing’ (MWD 139). His infantile dependency on her is total, and when she becomes pregnant with his child he leaves, as if in recognition that he, like so many of the fathers in Lawrence’s fiction, cannot compete with a child in a woman’s affections. Despite these freighted hints of a tragic Oedipal destiny, no selfdestructive intellectuality burdens Lawrence’s Christ; like the nonchalant Oedipus in the anecdote from ‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine,’ he goes about his business with a minimum of soul-searching. He seems to have attained the unselfconscious bliss to which previous Lawrentian heroes have aspired. This is not to say that the novella

The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism 45

omits sexual guilt: near the household of the priestess of Isis, a boy slave rapes a girl slave before the watchful eyes of both the priestess and Christ. This boy is a guilty, Oedipus-like figure, ‘blind’ and cringing ‘lamely’ away (MWD 83), and he later becomes a Judas of sorts, betraying Christ by leading Roman soldiers to his hiding place. As these soldiers close in, Christ, Tiresias-like, confronts the sinful boy with his crime and shames him into flight (enabling Christ to escape). Thus the boy, like Oedipus, represents a primal sexual crime that Lawrence wishes to expose and transcend. But his crime is not incest; the rape is a reminder that there are worse sexual acts than incest. The boy’s presence in the text purges Christ of his Oedipal guilt, and, by extension, frees humanity from Oedipus’s fate. Nevertheless, in a departure from Lawrence’s anti-Freudian texts, the story of The Man Who Died seems to correspond to the Freudian description of how the Oedipus complex is resolved. In part 1, Christ encounters his mother but (following biblical precedent) rejects her, saying, ‘I belong to no one and have no connection’ (MWD 58). Instead, he insists that he must ‘ascend to my Father’ (MWD 58), seeming to complete the Freudian prescription for maturity: he separates himself from his mother and identifies with his father. In fact, the Oedipal conflict between father and son, which seemed to have been quelled in part 1, recurs in part 2, where Christ blames his father for concealing the joys of sexual congress with women: ‘“Father!” he said, “why did you hide this from me?”’ (MWD 145). The irony here is pointed, given that Lawrence’s Christ has already reproached himself for having been ‘blind’ to the power and meaning of the female body before he meets the Priestess of Isis (MWD 111), which both underscores his ‘blind’ Oedipal nature and suggests that his later inclination to fault his father is unfair. Having seen how tenaciously Lawrence once tied Freudian theories of the Oedipus complex to human intellectual hubris, it is surprising to find him invoking them in his final use of Oedipal tropes. In one way, however, Freud’s thought was not quite as far from Lawrence’s as the latter would have liked to believe. For instance, in the 1917 essay A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis Freud himself did not view his discoveries as comforting to what he termed ‘man’s self-love,’ since they showed that ‘the ego is not master in its own house’ (Freud, Complete Works, 17:285). Moreover, although Lawrence found Freud’s Oedipal theory deeply problematic, he also benefited from it: on the one hand it seemed to confirm the universal truth of dynamics in

46 Oedipus Against Freud

Lawrence’s own family and emotional life, and on the other it affirmed Lawrence’s pre-existing belief in Oedipus’s centrality as an exemplar of human heroism and self-ignorance. The all-encompassing scope of Freud’s theory, however, offset these benefits. For Lawrence, any totalizing theory of human being was bound to be flawed, since it left no room for dynamic growth or transcendence. To be Oedipal was one thing, but to know that one was Oedipal, and that all other human beings were Oedipal too, was quite another. Conclusion: Lawrence, Oedipus, and the Critics In Freudianism and the Literary Mind (1945), Frederick Hoffman describes the main result of Lawrence’s break from Freud as follows: ‘Lawrence would replace ... the humanism of Western civilization with ... a pantheism which saw a sort of blood unity in the energy of all of nature’ (Hoffman, Freudianism, 172). This assessment is accurate enough for many of Lawrence’s later works, but it does not account for his mixed feelings about humanism, or his return to a Freudian model of individual development in The Man Who Died. Few scholars have understood the Oedipal narrative that drove Lawrence away from humanism and, paradoxically, later induced him to return to it. Scholars have, however, noted Lawrence’s problematic and paradoxical engagement with humanism; for instance, Jeff Wallace detects in Lawrence ‘a human commitment to some kind of posthuman condition’ (Wallace, D.H. Lawrence, 118), and dubs Lawrence a ‘posthuman humanist’ in that Lawrence sees a ‘kinship’ between ‘humans, animals and machines’ in the same way that Donna Haraway would in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 102). Wallace contends that, for Lawrence, ‘the human could only be thought in its dialectical relation to the non-human, the material and mechanical, in line with a twentieth-century epistemology stressing the relativity of all things’ (Wallace, D.H. Lawrence, 239). Wallace’s observations are suggestive, but he largely ignores Freud’s influence on Lawrence’s ideas, even in Sons and Lovers, which he treats rather briefly. Wallace also omits The Man Who Died, Lawrence’s other crucial Oedipal text. Wallace’s neglect of Freud and these works entails a lost opportunity: to better understand why what Wallace terms ‘Lawrence’s deconstruction of the humanist self’ (Wallace, D.H. Lawrence, 215) is often qualified and inconsistent. The other important point that Hoffman and Wallace (like many others) have not recognized is that

The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism 47

Oedipus has played a central role both in humanism and in Lawrence’s ambivalence about it. As we have seen, Oedipus embodies both Western humanism and what Hoffman calls the ‘blood unity’ of ‘nature’ simultaneously. As Jean-Michel Benoist has put it, ‘Oedipus is the first to make the humanist pronouncement; he is also the first to witness its ruins’ (Benoist, Structural Revolution, 123–4). Thus humanism and post-humanism share a single mythic representative in Oedipus, just as they coexist, albeit uneasily, in Lawrence’s work. The critic who has come the closest to engaging with this side of Lawrence’s work is Ed Jewinski, who in his article ‘The Phallus in D.H. Lawrence and Jacques Lacan’ contends that ‘both Lawrence and Lacan reject rationalist humanism’ (Jewinski, ‘Phallus,’ 7). Jewinski jeopardizes this claim to a degree when he adds that both Lawrence and Lacan ‘see the “phallus,” not the “human” as the central issue of mankind’ (Jewinski, ‘Phallus,’ 7). To acknowledge that there is any ‘central’ determinative concept that unites human beings is already a tacit humanism. Jewinski rightly notes that ‘Lawrence and Lacan ... emphasize that the “phallus” should be recognized as a central signifier of every human’s utter and inescapable distinctness, singularity and individuality’ (Jewinski, ‘Phallus,’ 9), but he does not explain why this insistence on ‘individuality’ negates humanism, except as a rhetorical gesture. Lawrence and Lacan want to evade the undesirable connotations of ‘humanism,’ but insofar as they replace humanism with ‘the Phallus,’ their visions seem no less universalizing than Freud’s. Jewinski argues that Lawrence believes that ‘the human is a perverse and monstrous extension of the abstraction called humanity’ (Jewinski, ‘Phallus,’ 7), but one could easily argue that Lawrence’s conception of the Phallus as a sexual symbol and (in a more Lacanian sense) transcendental signifier is equally abstract. Moreover, as Jewinski concedes, ‘the question of what is “inhuman” is left incomplete’ in Lawrence’s work, just as it is in Lacan’s (Jewinski, ‘Phallus,’ 13). This incompleteness is inevitable, since the very concept of the ‘inhuman’ would have no meaning if it were to establish itself entirely outside a humanist perspective. The concluding chapter of this book examines Lacan’s equivocations with humanism (and their relationship to the Oedipus myth) in greater detail; they are every bit as Oedipally charged as Lawrence’s. If Lawrence inspired Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to formulate their powerful critique of Freud in The AntiOedipus, his example may also help to explain some of the paradoxes of Lacan’s thought.

48 Oedipus Against Freud

Unfortunately for Lawrence, he derived little comfort from his insights into the Oedipal situation; his rejection of the lyrical, celebratory tone of his early hymns to mother-son love in Paul Morel led to a violent overreaction against Freud, and to a still more violent recoil from humanism. Lawrence had perhaps learned his Nietzschean lesson about the madness inherent in human self-consciousness all too well, and thus even the positive aspects of Oedipus’s legacy (e.g., his intellectual attainments) were of no significance to him. As Lawrence got older, he believed more and more ardently that ‘we are in sad need of a human theory of relativity’ (FUPU 25), by which he meant that we must recognize that ‘pure knowledge is only ... a tiny bit of the universe, and always relative to the thing known and to the knower’ (FUPU 181). For Lawrence, ‘a human theory of relativity’ would mean accepting that we can have no absolute knowledge of a universal human condition, so that the Delphic oracle’s command to know oneself can no longer be followed; as Lawrence puts it, ‘Know thyself means knowing at last that you can’t know yourself’ (Lawrence, Phoenix, 2:620). The anti-humanistic or post-humanistic lesson Lawrence preaches here about the limits and pitfalls of self-knowledge is also, of course, what many have seen as the basic mythic message of the Oedipus story from Sophocles’ day forward. It was also more or less the same idea that Lawrence expressed to Frieda during their first meeting, when he claimed that he no longer wished to try to understand women. That Lawrence appears to have taken such a long, painful, and embittered detour through Freudian ideas only to reaffirm his original Oedipal, yet pre-Freudian, rejection of humanistic knowledge is one reason that he has been grouped with writers such as Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot, whose complex and often contradictory engagements with Oedipus will be treated in the next chapter.

Ontario 49

2 Anti-Humanists at Colonus: The Oedipus Myth in Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot

There is a particular English modernist sensibility – Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme – which sees as fundamental a separation between the metaphysical and the axiological. All these writers cleave to the ideology of metaphysical man (i.e., his resolute transcendence of animal being) yet ... they regard anthropos as having undergone a downturn ... human beings have not fallen because they are too metaphysical, but rather because they are not metaphysical enough. This ... high-modernist disposition could best be described as ‘metaphysical antihumanism.’ Paul Sheehan, Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, 103–4

In his account of the place of humanism in British modernist narrative, Paul Sheehan groups D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis together in the anti-humanistic ‘alternative tradition of morose modernism’ (Sheehan, Modernism, 104). Yet Lawrence differs profoundly from Eliot and Lewis; he regarded metaphysics and the intellect with deep suspicion, if not scorn, while both Lewis and Eliot had recourse to philosophy in their dealings with the Oedipus myth. Lawrence clearly does not fit Sheehan’s description of ‘metaphysical antihumanism’ in Lewis and Eliot (Sheehan, Modernism, 104). It is thus only to be expected that Lewis’s and Eliot’s reaction to the Oedipus myth and its intersection with humanism differed from Lawrence’s. Furthermore, literary rivalries and temperamental differences among these three isolated, often prickly figures produced a conflict between Lawrence and the two writers this chapter discusses. Whereas Lawrence focused on refuting Freud, Lewis and Eliot initially conflated Lawrence with Freudianism, aiming to discredit both. Yet in so doing Lewis and Eliot

50 Oedipus Against Freud

were merely postponing their own reckonings with Oedipus; both Lewis and Eliot returned to the myth with a vengeance, Lewis in his Self Condemned (1954) and Eliot in his play The Elder Statesman (1958). Lawrence’s engagement with Oedipus and Freud cast a wide shadow over Lewis’s early discussions of the myth. Ever seeking ammunition against fellow writers, Lewis denounced Lawrence’s work because of its apparent Freudian themes; in his autobiographical essay Rude Assignment, Lewis called Lawrence a ‘novelist of genius’ who was capable of writing ‘beautifully’ but who exploited the ‘fashionable’ Oedipus complex (Lewis, Rude Assignment, 114). For Lewis, Lawrence was guilty of Great Mother adoration: ‘The cry of Mr Lawrence (good little Freudian that he has always been) is “back to the Womb” ... it required the directive brain of Freud and others to reveal him to himself’ (Lewis, Paleface, 183–4). Lewis further complains, ‘The motif of the “child-cult,” ... is echoed, and indeed screamed, wept and bellowed, throughout Sons and Lovers’ (Lewis, Paleface, 181), and in the ‘Mithras’ chapter of Snooty Baronet, Lewis satirizes Lawrence’s antihumanism as sexual deviancy that rivals Oedipus’s. Impersonating Lawrence, his narrator writes, ‘Naturally I prefer bulls to men’ (Lewis, Snooty Baronet, 83), and as if to cement his Oedipal crimes, the pseudoLawrentian speaker confesses: ‘I had thrown in my lot for better or worse with Mother Nature. I conducted with herself what could at a pinch have been represented as an incestuous intrigue’ (Lewis, Snooty Baronet, 83). The question of humanism is also part of Lewis’s animus against Lawrence; for instance, Lewis attacks Lawrence for being ‘beneath the spell’ of an ‘emotional, non-human, “mindless” philosophy’ (Lewis, Paleface, 176–7), and claims that for his own part, he ‘would rather have an ounce of human “consciousness” than a universe full of “abdominal” afflatus and hot, unconscious, “soulless,” mystical throbbing’ of the sort he sees in Lawrence (Lewis, Paleface, 196). Although Lewis’s insistence that he does not share Lawrence’s anti-intellectual bias seems genuine, his indictment of Lawrence’s anti-humanist prejudices is oddly prophetic of criticisms levelled at Lewis himself. For instance, Lawrence remarks on Lewis’s habit of exposing ‘the utterly repulsive effect people have on him’ and complains that the latter ‘retreats into the intellect’ to criticize those around him. According to Lawrence, Lewis’s intellectualized view of others can be boiled down to the ‘exclamation’: ‘They stink! My God, they stink!’ (quoted in Pritchard, ‘Wyndham Lewis and Lawrence,’ 141). Like Lewis,

The Oedipus Myth in Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot 51

Lawrence scorns abstractions such as ‘humanity,’ unless attacking another author whom he wishes to portray as even more misanthropic than himself. Not surprisingly, given this mutual distaste, Lewis detested what he called Lawrence’s ‘eloquent wallowing mass of Mother-love and Sex-idolatry’ and condemned Sons and Lovers as ‘hotfoot upon the fashionable trail of incest’ (Lewis, Paleface, 180). Lewis implies that Lawrence was drawn to Freud by the topical obsessions of the early twentieth century, rather than by either a personal obsession or a genuine intellectual interest. As we shall see, this verdict was part of a broader attack on Lewis’s contemporaries and what Lewis deemed their mutually induced Oedipal obsessions. Oedipus and The Apes of God In his satirical 1930 roman-à-clef The Apes of God Lewis suggests that what he called ‘freudian calf-love’ (AG 61) was part of a larger trend towards Freud-induced infantile behaviour rather than a symptom of genuine urges towards parricide and incest. We are treated, for instance, to a love scene between a Mrs Pamela Farnham and her much younger lover Jimmie, during which the narrator diagnoses a general malaise in the baby talk these characters use: ‘Pammie-mammie: the love of babyhood, the return to the womb, the corruption of the cradle’ (AG 204). Far from pointing to a peculiar perversion in Jimmie or his lover (and would-be mother), Lewis ascribes such behaviour to a pervasive climate of Oedipal imitations. Interestingly, this implication anticipates René Girard, who argues in Violence and the Sacred that, in wishing to imitate his father everywhere (a wish that Freud himself mentions and admits), a young boy naturally extends his ‘mimetic desire’ to the sexual realm. The dehumanizing effect of such Oedipal imitativeness is a central theme of The Apes of God, as the novel’s title implies. Geoffrey Wagner has pointed out that in The Apes of God ‘Lewis uses the word “ape” in the sense in which we find it in [William] Hazlitt’s essay “On Shakespeare and Ben Jonson”’ (Wagner, Portrait, 231). Hazlitt, whose name crops up in a scene from the novel, writes, ‘Man can hardly be said to be a truly contemptible animal, till, from the facilities of general intercourse, and the progress of example and opinion, he becomes the ape of the extravagances of other men’ (quoted in Lewis, Men Without Art, 123). Examples of such ridiculous ‘apes’ are plentiful in Lewis’s novel, and are often Oedipal; for instance, would-be artist Daniel Boleyn

52 Oedipus Against Freud

finds himself being seduced by a motherly, pseudo–avant-garde painter named Mélanie Blackwell, who has offered to teach him how to be an ‘ape’ like her. The novelist Julius Ratner provokes ‘paroxysms of maternal lust’ (AG 545) in various women, and an erotically charged mother/child relationship also flourishes between writers and their male scholarly sycophants: ‘Keith of Ravelstone,’ who plays Stuart Gilbert to Lionel Kein’s James Joyce, is described as a ‘foetus’ who is said to have fallen in ‘with that massive elderly scottish lady next to him – that is his wife. She opened her jaws and swallowed him comfortably. There he was once more inside a woman, as it were – tucked up in her old tummy’ (AG 300). These two exist in an ‘erotic-maternal trance’ (AG 300) and ‘Mamma – that is wifey’ and her ‘child-hubby’ collaborate on puff pieces to publicize Lionel Kein’s version of Joyce’s Work in Progress. Keith’s ‘boyish ‘complexes’’ make him especially prone to idolizing the meretricious Kein, who, like Keith’s wife, feels a maternal urge to eat this infant up: ‘Lionel gives him one quick glance, opens his mouth and swallows him’ (AG 303). Although Lewis’s portrayal of Oedipal desire is comically exaggerated, beneath the humour he seems to wish to address serious problems. For instance, Lewis claims that Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex is quite wrong for modern Western European societies: ‘it is the psychology appropriate to a highly communized patriarchal society in which the family and its close relationship is an intense obsession ... It is a psychology foreign to the average European and his individualistic life. The incest-theme is inappropriate to the european [sic] communities, on whom no severe religious restrictions of race or of caste have been imposed’ (Paleface, 208). Yet Lewis sees Oedipal totalitarianism on the rise: in The Apes of God a fascist ‘Blackshirt’ speaks hopefully about ‘the child-parent war’ as the successor to ‘the sex war’ and a compound of the ‘age-complex and the youth-complex’ (AG 531). The fascists in Lewis’s novel hope to harness this intergenerational hostility, of which Freud’s theories, and what Lewis denounced as the ‘child-cult’ in Time and Western Man, are the only evidence. Lewis thus anticipates the themes of Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour, which is very much concerned with the political exploitation of Oedipal energies. There is also an important critique of humanistic enquiry and understanding in The Apes of God. As its title suggests, the novel proposes that Freud’s attempted insight reduces the human ability to create and express itself in language to a subhuman imitative reflex

The Oedipus Myth in Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot 53

indistinct from the abilities of the great ‘apes.’ Artists such as Julius Ratner ‘ape’ or imitate God in their creative ambitions, but Lewis implies that they are animals whose natures have been perverted by a malign divinity. Indeed, Lewis suggests that human beings, insofar as they are ‘human’ at all, are the product of subhuman and superhuman forces. As Daniel Boleyn muses: ‘the last Ape he was ever to meet had been met with – his log was at last a museum of natural history – there was every variety of ape-like creature, to show like Darwin out of what men came – submen and supermen’ (AG 607). In this respect Lewis seems to agree with Irving Babbitt, whose version of humanism (as expressed in Literature in the American College) ‘implies doctrine and discipline, and is applicable not to men in general but only to a select few – it is, in short, aristocratic and not democratic in its implications’ (Babbitt, Literature, 6). In fact, Lewis sounds very like Babbitt (not to mention T.S. Eliot, Babbitt’s most famous student and critic) when he laments that ‘the indefinite expansion of the idea of ... the “human” without limit of time or space’ results in a ‘well-built society’ being replaced by ‘emotional chaos’ (Lewis, Anthology, 40). Similarly, Lewis claimed that what he called ‘Abstract man, that enlightened abstraction of a common humanity’ is a lie (Lewis, Men Without Art, 343). These views motivated Lewis’s initially positive attitude towards Hitler and the Nazis, whose notions of humanity were similarly limited, and they haunted him for the rest of his life. Indeed, they were not truly exorcised until Lewis wrote his last and perhaps most autobiographical novel, Self Condemned, a book that Lewis’s biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, has called Lewis’s version of Oedipus at Colonus (Meyers, Revaluation, 227). Self Condemned and Anti-Humanism René Harding, the hero of Self Condemned, is very similar to Lewis himself: he undergoes the same poverty and isolation that Lewis suffered in Canada, and his wife Hester commits suicide (which Lewis’s wife attempted). They both get into trouble through their writings: Harding’s departure from English academia is precipitated by his supposedly ‘fascist-minded’ book, A Secret History of World War Two (SC 151), the fictional counterpart of Lewis’s often ill-informed and provocative 1930s writings on fascism.1 Through Harding, Lewis dramatizes his former anti-humanistic convictions; for instance, Harding deprecates the mixing of the very ‘nordic’ and ‘latin’ strains he knows

54 Oedipus Against Freud

that he possesses (SC 16), and muses that ‘It is rather a pity that the Italians flooded northern Europe with their humanism’ (SC 102). Like Lawrence’s anti-humanistic (but Oedipal) hero Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers, Harding asserts his autonomy to deny his bond with fellow humans: ‘Most people think collectively ... They have no pretensions to being individuals ... I was a group, a university. But when I wished, or when I felt compelled to cease to be that, I had to isolate myself ... to act upon a heroic plane’ (SL 22-3). For Harding, heroes must be independent, so he leaves England, where he has made a name for himself, to begin anew in Canada. Lewis expresses his anti-humanism in Harding’s work, where, according to Harding’s sycophantic disciple Parkinson, ‘Man is shown as an uncivilizable animal; the inferiority and destructive character of his appetite forbids attempts by the civilized minority to establish a civilized order’ (SL 88–9). A Professor McKenzie (reportedly based on Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan) reproaches Harding: ‘you set yourself against human beings as they are ... [your] position ... makes you a Member of the Party of Superman’ (SL 314). McKenzie speculates about such a superman’s gloomy prospects: ‘The first specimen of this Supermanhood would never be able to breed up a family ... He would almost certainly be destroyed’ (SL 316). Harding initially disputes McKenzie’s claims, but after his wife’s death, the narrator reports that he ‘proceeded to go over, lock, stock and barrel, into what Professor McKenzie had called the Party of Superman’ (SL. 356). This new ‘Party’ sounds like a continuance of Hulme’s classicism with a distressing eugenic component, since, according to Harding, ‘We must train and compress ourselves in every way, and breed an animal superior to our present ... selves’ (SL 356). This is not Lewis’s first discussion of a new, superior species emerging; in The Art of Being Ruled, Lewis (breaking with his former conception of static humanity) looks forward to ‘a new duality of human life (introducing perhaps a new species and issuing in biological transformation)’ that would result from the separation of ‘the masses’ from what Lewis calls ‘the free intelligences of the world’ (Lewis, Art of Being Ruled, 421). Such claims tempt one to break with the laws and social practices that define humanity, and even the reckless Lewis seems to have recognized that human identity requires a minimum level of conformity. Lewis formulates an interesting definition of human identity in his essay ‘Paleface’: ‘a creature who has recognized his willingness ... to abide by a set of rules ... That is all that “human” meant for an early

The Oedipus Myth in Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot 55

Roman or a Greek. A stranger was “abnormal,” susceptible of no rights, and no more “human” than a wild bee or a lion in the forest. – To be beneath the same law – that is to be normal and to be “human”: let that be our definition’ (Lewis, Anthology, 33). By this logic, his own outlaw-like personality as well as his rebellious heroes are outside the human scope. By 1950, when Lewis wrote Rude Assignment, this conception of humanity begins to dominate; according to this more mature, moderate Lewis, there must be ‘no breaking of the human bond at any time’ and therefore ‘Spiritually, as much as physically, there is no one who does not depend on the average’ (Lewis, Rude Assignment, 101). This is bad news for Harding, who, like Oedipus, prides himself on being far above the human average, and sets himself up as a quasi-divine figure. He thus invites a fall from grace as shattering as Oedipus’s; when disaster strikes, Lewis’s narrator makes it seem inevitable: ‘René Harding had stood up to the Gods, when he resigned his professorship in England. The Gods had struck him down ... had humiliated him, made him a laughing stock, cut him off from all recovery; they had driven him into the wilderness’ (SC 406). Yet what has Harding really done wrong? Harding’s doom stems not from his actions, but his inherent character. Like Oedipus, he is a victim of circumstances and his own nature. Oedipus does have a tragic flaw: his blindness to his human fallibility (he is termed ‘blind’ by Tiresias in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, and he blinds himself after Jocasta’s death). Meyers points out that blindness, which increasingly afflicted Lewis himself by the early 1950s, is a ‘central metaphor’ for Harding’s predicament in Self Condemned (Lewis, Revaluation, 227). The snow-reflected light that briefly blinds Harding in Canada demonstrates that this ‘is no land for those with delicate eyes’ (SC 186), and Harding’s insensitivity to his wife rivals Oedipus’s blind faith in his power to transcend fate. After Hester’s death, Harding smacks his head on the cement slab where his wife lies, and thus is afflicted by a mysterious ‘fiery mist’ that moves wherever Harding directs his eyes (SC 405). This strange condition recalls Lewis’s symptoms from a skull tumour,2 and Harding seems to be aware of a medical explanation for his visual malaise: ‘I have had that sense of a hot devouring something inside my skull ... since that day I banged my head’ (SC 405). Harding has numerous other Oedipal characteristics in addition to his strange form of blindness, including elements of a conventionally Freudian Oedipus complex – a touch that would have seemed

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unthinkable to the younger Lewis. In the first few pages of the novel, we see the middle-aged Harding in an infantile position, ‘at his mother’s feet ... like a suppliant, crouched gazing bleakly up into her face’ (SC 16) and expressing regret at having ‘turned out such a problem child’ (SC 21). Despite their disagreements about Harding’s decision to leave England, he and his mother are in deep, almost incestuous sympathy: ‘mother and son drew closer together, like two confederates ... To commune with one another, everyone else ... had to be excluded. René drew up a chair, talking to her softly in the language she still liked best to speak’ (SC 24). Harding’s departure from England also means a separation from his doting mother; it thus corresponds to Oedipus’s attempts to escape his fated crimes of incest and parricide by fleeing his adoptive parents’ home. Harding’s move to North America is a bid for psychological freedom, but, like Oedipus, he succumbs to that which he has tried to avoid. Harding’s ultimately Oedipal fate is underlined by details of the life he and his wife Hester lead in the fictional city of Momaco, in Canada. The Hardings’ hotel is run by a woman and described as a ‘matriarchate’ (SC 206), and their room, a ‘microcosm’ of the world around it, is a metaphorical womb in the ‘mom’ of ‘Momaco.’ Harding’s attitude towards Hester also reveals his Oedipal side and ties it to his disregard for humanism. Once Harding has resolved to do without his mother, he decides that ‘Hester’s obscene person must henceforth be his Muse’ (SC 148). His childish inability to see Hester as a separate human being is remarkable (and reminiscent of Paul Morel’s view of Clara); Harding tells his wife that living at close quarters for three years ‘has made us one person’ (SL 239), and the narrator says, ‘He always forgot that Hester was a human being’ (SL 147). Driven to distraction by Harding’s selfishness, Hester kills herself. Like Oedipus after Jocasta’s suicide, Harding gains prophetic insight: he has disturbing ‘contacts with God’ that result from the ‘degeneration’ of his rational defences against ‘mysticism’ (SC 389). He dubs this new condition ‘Hesteria,’ suggesting once more his Oedipal regression – the word ‘hysteria,’ of course, is derived from the Greek for womb. Like Oedipus confronted with his own guilt, Harding initially fights it, rationalizing his selfish decision to stay in Canada and deeming her suicide an act of ‘insane coercion’ (SC 391). Despite Harding’s self-protective lies, he becomes a stunned automaton, a ‘machine’ (SC 400), even after he has recovered his mental health sufficiently to return to academia. A victim of his own theories, he has been dehumanized by

The Oedipus Myth in Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot 57

his selfish attempts to transcend human limitations. Yet despite Harding’s flaws, Lewis sees his protagonist as a classical heroic figure whose destiny encapsulates Lewis’s view of human nature, just as Oedipus does. Far from associating Oedipus with cheap, fashionable ideas, as he had earlier, Lewis now dignifies this mythic, tragic figure. T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and Oedipus Lewis’s relationship to the Oedipus myth and its intersection with humanism is echoed in the case of T.S. Eliot. Like Lewis, Eliot expressed scepticism and disapproval about both the Freudian theory of the Oedipus complex and the writer he regarded as its chief exponent: D.H. Lawrence. Eliot’s review (published in The Criterion) of John Middleton Murry’s Son of Woman: The Story of D.H. Lawrence (1931) shows Eliot confronting not only Freud and Lawrence, but also the Oedipal story and its centrality to human identity. Eliot concedes that Lawrence strove for the same artistic and intellectual goals that he aimed at himself: ‘Mr Murry quotes a sentence of Gourmont which I have quoted myself: ériger en lois ses impressions personnelles, c’est le grand effort d’un homme s’il est sincère.3 Well, Lawrence tried to do that, certainly, but to my mind he failed completely ... no man of his time was more sensitive; but he could neither leave his sensations alone ... nor could he generalize them correctly’ (Eliot, ‘Review,’ 769). Eliot does acknowledge Lawrence’s powerful tragic centrality and its potentially liberating force: ‘I admit that this is a great tragic figure ... A fateful influence he must have been upon those who experienced his power; I cannot help wondering whether Mr Murry was not compelled to write his book in order to expel the demon from himself’ (Eliot, ‘Review,’ 774). Intent on furthering this image of Lawrence as a tragic or demonic figure, Eliot describes Lawrence in terms that might have been applied to Oedipus: Lawrence ... was a strange mixture of sincerity or clairvoyance with selfdeception – or rather with the effort towards self-deception. Lawrence’s subsequent history, and the history of his novels, is accordingly a record of his various attempts to kid himself into believing that he was right to be as he was, and that the rest of the world was wrong. It is an appalling narrative of spiritual pride, nourished by ignorance, and possibly also by the consciousness of great powers and humble birth. (Eliot, ‘Review,’ 770)

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It is never exactly clear how Lawrence is guilty of ‘ignorance,’ but on one point the review reveals Eliot’s own ignorance: Eliot, who evidently had not read Fantasia of the Unconscious, believes that Lawrence endorsed Freud’s notion of the ‘Oedipus complex.’ Eliot complains that Lawrence was guilty of adopting ‘a crazy theory’ (i.e., Freud’s famous ‘Oedipus complex’) to ‘deal with the facts’ of his life (Eliot, ‘Review,’ 771). In a perverse misreading of Lawrence’s work, Eliot credits Murry, not Lawrence, with demonstrating that Lawrence suffered from ‘the emotional dislocation of a “mother-complex”’ and showing ‘how inappropriate is the common designation of “Oedipus complex”’ (Eliot, ‘Review,’ 770). The irony here is that by ‘mother complex’ Eliot means precisely what Lawrence himself proposed as an alternative to Freud’s theories: the idea that if a child displays incestuous tendencies, this is only because its mother has socialized it to do so, by showering the baby with affection and turning it against its father. To find Eliot accusing Lawrence of adopting a ‘crazy theory’ he in fact rejected is bizarre, the more so because Eliot accords universality to Murry’s notion of the ‘mother complex.’ Similarly, Eliot chides Lawrence for missing out on the timelessness of his own plight and insisting on the modernity of his Oedipal affliction: the ‘mother-complex’ of Lawrence does not seem to me in itself a sign of the times. I find it difficult to believe that a family life like that of Lawrence’s parents is peculiar either to a particular class or to a particular age. Such family life, with such consequences to a sensitive child, can hardly have taken place only in the latter part of the nineteenth century. What is peculiar to the time is the way in which Lawrence tried to deal with his peculiarity. That is what is modern. (Eliot, ‘Review,’ 770)

As seen in chapter 1, Lawrence worked to distance himself from purely ‘modern’ theories such as Freud’s and to link his work back to Sophocles. Eliot’s remarks about the universal, enduring idea of a ‘mother-complex’ seem to be more useful as indications of what was on Eliot’s own mind at the time than as observations about Lawrence. Eliot and his mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot, seem to have had an unusually close relationship, which would explain Eliot’s view of what was universal in Lawrence’s problems. Eliot’s biographer Lyndall Gordon asserts that he was ‘devoted’ to his deeply religious mother; he often thought of her during his disastrous marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood and derived comfort from his memories of her pres-

The Oedipus Myth in Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot 59

ence at his bedside (Gordon, T.S. Eliot, 6). According to Gordon, Eliot’s ‘strongest recorded expression of emotion’ is an inscription in a book he sent to her, which he signed ‘with infinite love’ (Gordon, T.S. Eliot, 6). Yet there was more to this relationship than mere love; Charlotte Eliot wrote devotional verse that addressed ‘man’s redemption’ from ‘despair,’ and influenced her son’s temperament as well as his career (Gordon, T.S. Eliot, 10). She was also a strong advocate of the ideals inherited from her father-in-law, William Greenleaf Eliot, ‘self denial and public service’ (Gordon, T.S. Eliot, 14), and her reformist austerity, coupled with her husband’s opinion that sex was nothing more than ‘nastiness’ (quoted in Gordon, T.S. Eliot, 38), no doubt contributed to Eliot’s later discomfort with his own sexual impulses. Eliot’s horror at what he termed ‘nervous sexual attacks’ (quoted in Gordon, T.S. Eliot, 53) led to a generalized disdain for women; he complains repeatedly in his poetry about their smells; the minute, disgusting details of their bodies (we recall the ‘light brown hair!’ Prufrock notices with alarm); their animalistic natures; and their stupidity. Yet his reaction to people he met in the streets of Paris and London went beyond prudish queasiness: it turned into what Gordon calls a ‘hatred of humanity’ that was no less powerful for being ‘based on a few ... experiences’ (Gordon, T.S. Eliot, 64). During his profound identity crisis, Eliot rebelled against his family’s Unitarian faith in human nature (a faith in tension with their prudery) in favour of a puritanical view of humanity as essentially sinful. Evidently, there was no need of an incestuous theme in Eliot’s childhood; the mere existence of sexuality caused profound unease. Eliot’s most explicit treatment of the Oedipus myth, sexuality, and the family comes in his play The Elder Statesman, but one of his early poems suggests that Eliot was using Oedipus to dramatize some of the difficult issues involved in the relations between men and women. ‘Goldfish’ depicts a character called the Chocolate Soldier (the title of a musical based on G.B. Shaw’s Arms and the Man) who ‘assaults’ the ‘tired Sphinx of the physical’ (IMH 28). This aggressive Chocolate Soldier (Shaw’s Captain Bluntschli is so nicknamed because he carries chocolate into battle rather than ammunition) seems to be an Oedipal (indeed, edible) representative of the human mind asserting its sovereignty over matter (the Sphinx-like ‘physical’ woman) in a debased and violent parody of the Hegelian moment of human self-recognition, as depicted in Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. In the poem, Eliot dismisses the ‘minor problems of the soul’ without much remorse:

60 Oedipus Against Freud I gladly leave the rest to fate And contemplate The aged sybil in your eyes At the four crossroads of the world Whose oracle replies: – ‘These problems seem importunate But after all do not exist.’

(IMH 29)

The ‘oracle’ suggests a wisdom that makes all human philosophical effort futile, because the human ‘soul’ that seems to cause them does not exist. Eliot’s parody of the Oedipus/Sphinx encounter in ‘Goldfish’ continues in The Waste Land with the encounter between the typist (who is also ‘tired’) and the house agent’s clerk, the ‘young man carbuncular’ who ‘assaults’ her. The young man’s pimples link him to the sexually charged plague in Thebes. J.G. Keogh reminds us that ‘the very name of ... Oidi-pous, is related to the Greek word for “swelling” (cf. oedema) and its cognate forms mean “tumour” and “pus”’ (Keogh, ‘O City, City,’ 90–1). Thucydides also described the plague’s symptoms, which sound like those of venereal disease: ‘it at least left its mark on the extremities: it would settle in the genitals, or the hands and feet, and some escaped with the loss of those parts; others, with the loss of their eyes’ (quoted in Keogh, ‘O City, City,’ 91). As Keogh points out, these symptoms correspond with the infected feet and gouged eyes of Oedipus, not to mention the fact that he is ‘sexually polluted as a result of his unlawful contact with his mother’ (Keogh, ‘O City, City,’ 91). The clerk partakes of the pollution that turns modern European cities into versions of Thebes. The typist is not the only female character in The Waste Land who should remind us of the Sphinx; certainly, the questions of the female interrogator in ‘A Game of Chess’ sound like banal and hopelessly vague attempts to force an Oedipus-like man to face the facts about his past and to begin to repent of his sins: ‘Do ‘You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember ‘Nothing?’

(CPP 65)

The man can’t answer the first two questions, and yet his answer to the third one (‘I remember “Those are pearls that were his eyes”’ [CPP 65])

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implies that he, like Oedipus, obliquely recognizes himself and his guilty deeds for what they are, and has blinded himself. Eliot’s quotation from Shakespeare’s Tempest here (from Ariel’s song about the ‘king’ and ‘father’ who seems to have died in a shipwreck) prompts Keogh to ask, ‘Does [the phrase] ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’ also [describe] the fate of a man who answered the Sphinx and prospered, until he asked himself too many questions? And then who paid with his eyes, gouged out by precious brooches?’ (Keogh, ‘O City, City,’ 105–6). Keogh makes a strong case that while there are three likely sources for Eliot’s Tiresias (Homer’s Odyssey, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses), Sophocles’ Tiresias is the one who most clearly establishes a precedent for the all-seeing, monitory figure Eliot makes him in The Waste Land. Keogh recognizes that Eliot uses all of the aforementioned three sources in his poem, claiming for example that ‘while it is still the Tiresias of Ovid who hears the typist’s gramophone music, it will be the Tiresias of Sophocles ... who will hear the live pub music that follows it’ (Keogh, ‘O City, City,’ 104). In this section of the poem, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Oedipus Tyrannus are linked by direct quotations: ‘This music crept by me upon the waters’, And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street. O City city, I can sometimes hear ... the pleasant whining of a mandolin.

(CPP 69)

Keogh notes that Oedipus, faced with Creon’s challenge to his abilities as a ruler, cried ‘O city, city!’ as if to call ‘upon the people of Thebes at a critical juncture for witness and for support’ (Keogh, ‘O City, City,’ 107). Clearly, through both Tiresias and (less obviously) Oedipus, Eliot is calling on humanity to help him face a serious problem. Yet these mythic and literary allusions are more than a disguised cry for help. Sophocles links – almost twins – Oedipus and Tiresias (they both end up as blind, prophetic figures); Oedipus is thus one version of the wrecked royal ‘brother’ that the speaker of The Waste Land is mourning. This would make sense, given the affinities between Oedipus and the Fisher King; both mythic figures rule kingdoms ravaged by plagues linked to their sexual activities. Building on this link, Keogh argues that the line ‘You, hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère’ could well be read as a Tiresian challenge to an Oedipus-like

62 Oedipus Against Freud

figure: the word ‘hypocrite’ derives from the Greek hypocrites (literally ‘answer-man’), a term used in ancient Greece to describe ‘the second actor who balanced a dramatic dialogue’ (Keogh, ‘O City, City,’ 110). As Keogh further points out, ‘When Oedipus made his charges and posed his questions, Tiresias and Creon as hypocritoi responded to the charges, and could counter-claim’ (Keogh, ‘O City, City,’ 110).4 If we imagine Tiresias calling Oedipus a ‘hypocrite lecteur,’ many interesting overtones emerge. First, it was Oedipus who was engaged in a dramatic dialogue with the Sphinx, giving her the answer that caused her to throw herself into the abyss. He read her riddle, making him, in a sense, a ‘hypocrite lecteur,’ and his boast to Tiresias about his success makes it all the more likely that the blind seer might later taunt Oedipus with this Pyrrhic victory. Oedipus also has to ‘read’ (understand) the Oracle’s ‘answers’ about his own fate, though his inability to see his guilt betrays his hypocrisy. Oedipus wants to know who is responsible for the death of Laius, but he won’t accept the testimony of Tiresias. Eliot’s taunt echoes the Baudelairean indictment of the reading public; just as Oedipus didn’t recognize his complicity in the murder that brought the plague, Eliot implies that his poem’s reader ignores his or her implication in the spiritual desolation of postwar Europe. Eliot’s Tiresias tries to awaken the reader’s conscience, just as Sophocles’ Tiresias tries to warn Oedipus about his guilt. Hugh Kenner observes that late in The Waste Land ‘The thunder is telling us what Tiresias did not dare tell Oedipus, the reason for the universal curse’ (Kenner, Invisible Poet, 175), and we might well agree, or suppose that the poem supplements the Sophoclean dialogue between Oedipus and Tiresias.5 In furthering his reading of the poem as an address to an Oedipal figure, Keogh argues that in Sophocles’ day ‘the mother-city had become a goddess, and her children were told to become her lovers’ (Keogh, ‘O City, City,’ 109). Keogh cites Coriolanus (whom Eliot names), reminding us that ‘when Coriolanus is on the point of attacking his mother-city Rome, his wife and his mother ... manage to dissuade him. The metropolis is a sacred personage; any attack on her, likely to involve rape and pillage, was thought to invoke the same taboos as forbad incest’ (Keogh, ‘O City, City,’ 112). Warned by his mother that an attack on Rome would be akin to incest – thou shalt no sooner March to assault thy country than to tread … on thy mother’s womb. (Shakespeare, Coriolanus 5.3.122–4)

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– Coriolanus recoils from such an ‘unnatural scene’ (Shakespeare, Coriolanus 5.3.85) and relents. Even though Coriolanus does not invade Rome, his relationship with his mother, Volumnia, seems sufficiently incestuous to make him a very Oedipal figure indeed. He cannot contemplate any action without seeking his mother’s approval, and his mother is more than complicit in the abnormally strong bond between them, taking credit for his heroic activities, telling him, ‘Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck’st it from me’ (Shakespeare, Coriolanus 3.2.129) and recognizing that ‘There’s no man in the world / More bound to ’s mother’ (Shakespeare, Coriolanus 5.3.158–9). Moreover, her attentions betray an erotic interest that even her rigid authority can’t conceal; in giving unwanted advice to Coriolanus’s wife, Volumnia puts herself in her daughter-in-law’s place with alarming alacrity, speculating, ‘If my son were my husband ...’ (Shakespeare, Coriolanus 1.3.2-3). Coriolanus’s wish to return to Rome and murder its inhabitants is a fitting objective correlative to the Oedipal desires that Freud saw as universal. Eliot judged Coriolanus Shakespeare’s greatest artistic success (along with Antony and Cleopatra), while he deemed Hamlet, for all its psychological interest, a failure.6 As in the case of Eliot’s opinions of Lawrence, Eliot’s verdict seems based more on his private preoccupations than well-reasoned arguments. Once more, some biographical details about Eliot’s relationship with his mother may help us understand why Eliot gave Coriolanus such an important role. Eliot’s mother was, in a sense, a catalyst for the composition of ‘The Waste Land’; Eliot’s most serious breakdown occurred just after one of her visits. The strain of attempting to present an acceptable facade to his mother when he and the volatile Vivienne were growing estranged was too much. Eliot was granted leave from his job, and he underwent treatment in Switzerland for what he called ‘“psychological troubles”’ that, as Gordon remarks, ‘English doctors at that time simply did not acknowledge’ (Gordon, T.S. Eliot, 172). His doctor, Roger Vittoz, advocated mastering painful memories by expressing them instead of trying to forget them. As he was composing and revising The Waste Land Eliot was reliving and expressing the most vivid memories, pleasant or unpleasant, he may have had of his mother and father. Thus the example of Coriolanus, revived ‘for a moment’ in ‘The Waste Land,’ may have consoled him in his familial distress, or at least provided a heroic model of a man who cannot elude his mother’s influence.

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Anti-Humanism, Oedipus, and The Elder Statesman Eliot’s attraction to Coriolanus also lay in the character’s high-handed refusal to compromise with popular opinion and to humble himself in the eyes of the ‘plebeians’ for the sake of a Consulship. Coriolanus’s arrogance is more than an unattractive personal trait; it makes him appear to put the entire category of humanity into question; he is said to be a viper, That would depopulate the city and Be every man himself.

(Shakespeare, Coriolanus 3.1.263–5)

The desire to remake humanity in his own image is partly reminiscent of Oedipus’s solution to the riddle of the Sphinx (whereby all humans are defined, as he is, by their feet), but it is also a kind of superhuman act, a transcendence and betrayal of human nature. As Menenius Agrippa says, Coriolanus ‘has grown from man to dragon’ (Shakespeare, Coriolanus 5.4.56–7), and Junius Brutus too puts a finger (albeit a hostile one) on the superhuman air that Coriolanus cultivates; he behaves As if that whatsoever god who leads him Were slily crept into his human powers, And gave him graceful posture. (Shakespeare, Coriolanus 2.1.219–21)

Coriolanus vows to fight against his ‘canker’d country’ (a description that evokes both the Theban plague and the malaise of The Waste Land) as if he were one of the ‘under fiends’ (Shakespeare, Coriolanus 4.5.89–90), symbolically abdicating his humanity in his vendetta against his fellow Romans. Like Coriolanus, Eliot often seems to have cast off his common humanity in pursuit of a private, misanthropic goal. Eliot’s intellectual development (before his conversion to Anglicanism) is a series of unpleasant encounters with humanistic traditions. Eliot studied but rejected philosophy; he read but mistrusted anthropological accounts of religion, preferring a god whose perfection was undiluted by human traits; he disdained socialism and pragmatism for their focus on human nature. As Gordon puts it, Eliot believed in ‘man’s unlikeness [and] distance from an unknowable deity’ (Gordon, T.S. Eliot, 20),

The Oedipus Myth in Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot 65

and no system of thought that omitted the absolute or the superhuman could satisfy him. Eliot was initially attracted to Irving Babbitt’s exclusive version of ‘humanism,’ but in his article ‘The Humanism of Irving Babbitt,’ he insists that even such a selective humanism is constantly in danger of descending to the ‘animal’ (SP 278). For Eliot, as for T.E. Hulme, ‘there is an absolute, and not a relative, difference between humanism ... and the religious spirit’ (Hulme, ‘Notebook,’ 8); indeed, Eliot sees humanism as ‘the alternative to religion’ and claims that it has in essence ‘suppressed the divine’ to articulate itself (SP 278). This suppression is necessary to humanistic thought because, in Eliot’s view, humanism is ‘essentially critical – I would even say parasitical’ (SP 278–9) and thus is ‘auxiliary to and dependent upon the religious point of view’ (SP 284). As the modernist critique of nineteenth-century humanism came to dominate the British literary scene, Eliot’s fame grew and his need to conceal his contempt for humanity decreased. He openly embraced religious doctrine, deplored the prevalence of ‘free-thinking jews,’ and gained a reputation for being curmudgeonly and unapproachable. As late as 1956, Eliot was saying, ‘perhaps I don’t know much about human beings ... They seem to me pathetic’ (quoted in Gordon, T.S. Eliot, 497). Yet in his career’s final phase, Eliot, like Coriolanus retreating before his own desire to repudiate human bonds, recoiled from his vision of horror and moderated his appalling picture of human depravity and self-destruction. Eliot’s love affair with (and eventual marriage to) Valerie Fletcher may have prompted him to reconsider his long-standing scorn for his fellow humans, and to renew and make explicit his previously concealed, never quite resolved, engagement with the Oedipus myth. Eliot himself acknowledged that his 1958 play The Elder Statesman is a modern recreation of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. The Elder Statesman depicts a confrontation between a retired politician named Lord Claverton (the Oedipus figure, who is much like the elderly Eliot himself) and his old friend Gomez, who blackmails Claverton with a guilty secret from his past. Gomez reminds Claverton that he ‘ran over’ an ‘old man in the road’ (CPP 540), a clear allusion to Oedipus’s murder of Laius at a crossroads. There are differences: the old man in Eliot’s play is not Claverton’s father, as far as we know, and he was already dead by the time Claverton ran him over. Nevertheless, the feeling of guilt that Gomez revives drives Claverton to distraction. He is unable to see his son Michael as a distinct human

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being, always worrying that the curse he himself seems to be under will afflict Michael. His paranoia about Michael’s driving habits is evidence of this trait: ‘I lived in terror of his running over somebody’ (CPP 555). Michael is overwhelmed by a sense of guilt that his father has bequeathed to him: ‘The first thing I remember / Is being blamed for something I hadn’t done’ (CPP 556). This leads him to accept a job with Gomez, who hires Michael against Claverton’s wishes. Gomez does not torment Claverton out of sheer spite, however. Indeed, Eliot is careful to point out the many similarities between the two characters, who have both changed their names and their identities, as we see in this scene: Lord Claverton. Fred Culverwell! Why do you come back with another name? Gomez. You’ve changed your name too, since I knew you. When we were up at Oxford, you were plain Dick Ferry. Then, when you married, you took your wife’s name And became Mr Richard Claverton-Ferry; And, finally, Lord Claverton. I’ve followed your example. (CPP 533)

Changing social spheres and adopting his wife’s name as well as her ‘family influence’ is Claverton’s version of solving the riddle of the Sphinx. While Gomez has had to ‘fabricate ... another personality’ and ‘take another name’ to survive in San Marco, Claverton has done the same to climb the political ranks in England. Gomez resents Claverton’s apparent blindness to the falseness of his own identity, and he tries to awaken Claverton to the reality of his transformation: where I changed my name, there was no social ladder ... I parted from myself by a sudden effort, You, so slowly and sweetly, that you’ve never woken up To the fact that Dick Ferry died long ago.

(CPP 536)

Thus Gomez looks to Claverton to validate his split self: I need one old friend ... who will accept both Culverwell and Gomez – See Culverwell as Gomez – Gomez as Culverwell. I need you, Dick, to give me reality. (CPP 536–7)

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Not surprisingly, given his view of human beings as inherently flawed, Eliot implies that Claverton and Gomez are not unusual in their split identities. Indeed, Gomez sketches Claverton’s career: wealth, a ‘good’ but not happy marriage, a political career, a vague ‘mistake’ that leads to retirement and apparently bad health. Claverton intriguingly terms this ‘an interesting historical epitome’ (CPP 538–9). An ‘epitome’ is a summary or abstract, or a thing that stands for all things of its type. Thus Gomez’s ‘historical epitome’ may be read as a summary of the entire civilization, as a ‘historical’ survey of an era; certainly, Claverton’s semi-invalidism makes him seem typical of Western civilization, for Eliot.7 There are other hints of Claverton’s status as a representative of all modern human beings; for instance, Maisie Mountjoy, one of Claverton’s first lovers (now a widow named Mrs Carghill), recalls a friend’s verdict that Claverton is ‘hollow’ (CPP 549) – an echo of Eliot’s previous work, such as ‘The Hollow Men,’ in which all ‘men’ are deemed ‘hollow’; they are ‘stuffed’ with their own ideas about themselves, which they whisper in ‘meaningless’ voices (CPP 83). As Hyatt Howe Waggoner has put it, for Eliot ‘Modern secular man ... is hollow not simple because he has given up God, but because his own description of himself ... leaves no room for any other than hollow men’ (Waggoner, ‘T.S. Eliot,’ 78). While Eliot clearly still believes that most people are in this condition, he allows Claverton to recognize his own humanity and its connection to that of others. This humanistic epiphany is partly an abdication of Claverton’s former sense of absolute responsibility for his life, but it is also a deserved release into ‘reality’ (a condition Eliot rarely feels humans are worthy or able to encounter): It was not till lately that I found the living persons Whose ghosts tormented me, to be only human beings, Malicious, petty, and I see myself emerging From my spectral existence into something like reality.

(CPP 569)

Claverton realizes that he has not offended God, or the gods; he has merely hurt other people, like Maisie, to whom he can eventually be reconciled. Before Claverton comes to this understanding, however, he testifies to the presence of something suspiciously like Irving Babbitt’s ‘inner check,’ an idea Eliot had once rejected.8 Claverton muses:

68 Oedipus Against Freud What is this self inside us, this silent observer, Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorise us And urge us on to futile activity, And in the end, judge us still more severely For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?

(CPP 545)

Babbitt’s benign internal monitor becomes a self-tormenting principle that both defines and tortures humanity and yet sets up its ultimate redemption. In fact, its presence may acknowledge another aspect of the self-correcting, autonomous nature of human beings (one part ‘checking’ or restraining the other). The Elder Statesman, with its slightly more positive depiction of human beings, finally exorcises Oedipal guilt, clearing the way for the triumph of a vision of human love, which Eliot once thought a mirage. In his attack on Lawrence, Eliot had deprecated anyone who acted ‘As if human love could possibly be an end in itself’ (Eliot, ‘Review,’ 773), yet in The Elder Statesman Eliot (perhaps inspired by his marriage) imagines a mode of spiritual union. Towards the end of his life (he died in 1965), Eliot seems to have derived comfort from human love; the man who upbraided Lawrence for his ‘hopeless attempt to find some mode in which two persons ... may be spiritually united’ (Eliot, ‘Review,’ 772), came to appreciate, even idealize, love unions. In his review of Murry’s book, Eliot mournfully exclaims, ‘What a pity that [Lawrence] did not understand the simple truth that of any two human beings each has privacies which the other cannot penetrate, and boundaries which the other must not transgress’ (Eliot, ‘Review,’ 773). Yet in The Elder Statesman, Claverton’s daughter Monica and her future husband Charles merge their identities: Monica. Already How much of me is you? Charles. And how much of me is you? I’m not the same person as a moment ago. What do the words mean now – I and you? Monica. In our private world – now we have our private world – The meanings are different. (CPP 526)

Charles expresses the fusion of identities in love still more explicitly: ‘we are conscious of a new person / Who is you and me together’ (CPP 583).

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The most important person in Claverton’s life is clearly Monica, and Eliot implies that Claverton saves the principle of love for her by being humiliated (his children learn of his misdeeds and his cowardly attempts to conceal them) and allowing his son to go off with the unscrupulous Gomez. This sacrifice is made worthwhile by Eliot’s new respect for love on its own terms, and by the fact that Monica, like a modern Antigone (cut from very different cloth than E.M. Forster’s Ethel Lucas, discussed in chapter 5) sees her father’s heroism in its final form. She articulates the paradoxical yet somehow heartening truth that in these degrading moments her father, like Oedipus, could ‘become himself’ by ‘becoming no one’ (CPP 583). We get the impression that in this paradox, taken straight from Oedipus at Colonus, Eliot has become reconciled to the human condition after a career proclaiming its depraved inadequacy. In such a context, it would be shocking to invoke incestuous themes, and despite Claverton’s closeness to his daughter, there is no such jarring note in The Elder Statesman. In this respect, Eliot’s play differs from Wyndham Lewis’s retelling of the Oedipus story in Self Condemned, where Lewis follows what he takes to be Lawrence’s lead and alludes to incest very strongly. Against Lewis, Eliot reaffirms the dignity of human nature in The Elder Statesman, where a Christian ethos underlies the authority of a flawed but ultimately benevolent father figure, whose spiritual love for his daughter is more redemptive than a questionable mother-son relationship. Eliot implies a positive side to the Oedipal trade-off: a perfect, non-incestuous fatherly love for a daughter is the reward for Oedipus’s persistence in his quest for human meaning. Such an exchange is no doubt intended as proof of God’s fundamentally loving attitude, a reminder that humanism and Christian faith may have more in common than might first appear. In this respect, perhaps the Oedipus story helped Eliot find a way back to the rejected Unitarian view of human nature. Despite such differences, both Lewis and Eliot overcome their early distaste for Oedipal tropes (based in large part on Freud-influenced misreadings of D.H. Lawrence) by invoking or identifying with the banished, mournful hero of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. No doubt what attracted them was Oedipus’s low opinion of humanity: disgusted by Creon’s appeals, Oedipus asks, ‘Man, wilt thou shrink from nothing? Canst devise / Always a fair front built by subtle lies?’ (Murray, Oedipus at Colonus, 66). This arrogance does Oedipus no harm in his peers’ eyes; when Oedipus dies, his gravesite becomes an effec-

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tive means of self-defence for Athens. The paradoxical message in the play undoes that of Oedipus Tyrannus: whereas in the earlier play Oedipus makes himself unfit for human society by relying too much on his own intellect and disdaining the divine, in the later play he proves useful in the human world by accepting his sacred function as a supernatural protector of Athens. For writers such as Lewis and Eliot, who had expressed anti-Semitic views before the Second World War and, in Lewis’s case, even professed admiration for Hitler, the example of Oedipus’s reacceptance, all the warmer for his earlier transgressions, must have been attractive. Lewis’s and Eliot’s example illustrates Jean-Joseph Goux’s assertion that ‘The mechanism of the Oedipean tragedy can only take on its full meaning for a consciousness that is “reactionary” with respect to the claims of reason, the individual, man’ (Goux, Oedipus, 115–16). Still, Eliot’s and Lewis’s apparently self-serving revisions of the Oedipus story did connect them to a broader human experience: the horrors of the Second World War. The First World War had convinced many that there was indeed something self-destructive at the heart of human nature, but the denouement of the Second World War – the uncovering of the massive scale of Nazi concentration camps, as well as the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – presented still more concrete evidence that humanity was both emotionally and technologically capable of destroying itself. The apocalyptic implications of these developments triggered a new wave of despair at the human situation, and reminded many of the truth in clichés such as ‘man’s inhumanity to man.’ The new threat of mass destruction made it more important than ever to try to imagine a way of being human in a fallen, disgraced, and dehumanizing world. Invoking the plight of the blind, exiled Oedipus allowed writers such as Eliot and Lewis, who had distanced themselves from humankind, to sympathize with the human situation once more.

Ontario 71

3 Dystopian Oedipus: Freudianism and Totalitarianism in Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Malcolm Lowry

The impulse of such modernists as Lawrence, Lewis, and Eliot to react against Freudian theories of Oedipus’s importance by rejecting the idea of human identity altogether would have a lasting impact on the next generation to interpret the Oedipus myth. Writers of the 1930s and 1940s such as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Malcolm Lowry made a strong connection between this trend and the rise of totalitarianism: if intellectuals as influential as Eliot and Lewis were giving up on humanity, then no wonder authoritarian regimes in the Soviet Union, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere sought to repress and coerce their subject populations, as well as to conquer the nations around them. There was good reason to suspect that some modernists were complicit in the global movement towards political repression: Lawrence, Eliot, Lewis, and W.B. Yeats (discussed in chapter 4) all expressed views that condoned tyranny and inequality while condemning human nature as inherently flawed. Later authors such as Huxley, Orwell, and Lowry, who employ Oedipal tropes in their pictures of dystopian or undemocratic societies, do so aware that these mythical tropes had been used to deny or denounce the human freedoms they wished to reassert. Although Lawrence, Lewis, and Eliot were predisposed to draw anti-humanistic conclusions from Freud’s reading of Oedipus, Freud’s later critics have argued that Freud’s theory can justify political authoritarianism. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their groundbreaking work The Anti-Oedipus, argue that there is ‘a conservative or reactionary turning point in Freud, from the moment that he gave an autonomous value to psychic repression as a condition of culture acting against the incestuous drives’ (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-

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Oedipus, 117). For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘the more the problem of Oedipus and incest comes to occupy center stage, the more psychic repression and its correlates, suppression and sublimation, will be founded on the supposedly transcendent requirements of civilization’ (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 117). Authoritarian regimes gain strength from Freud’s theory, according to them, since political oppressors can claim to guard civilized norms while pursuing their own agendas. Indeed, these ‘norms’ create a false picture of desire to justify their own existence, according to The Anti-Oedipus: ‘The law tells us: You will not marry your mother, and you will not kill your father. And we docile subjects say to ourselves: so that’s what I wanted’ (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 114). Some suspicions about Freud’s potentially politically repressive message are well grounded; in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud claims, ‘Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals’ (CD 42). Freud, however, does not pretend that this tyranny of the majority is morally superior; he notes, with Nietzschean cynicism, that the ‘power of community’ is ‘set up as “right” in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as “brute force”’ (CD 42). Freud’s ironic critique of collective humanity is undercut by the fact that his Oedipus theory’s anthropological importance implicitly justifies society’s tyranny over the individual. In Totem and Taboo, Freud posits a ‘primal horde’ of brothers who murder their father and blame the deed on one of their own. Freud goes on to claim that, out of their guilt, these sons ‘created two fundamental taboos’ that ‘had to correspond with the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex’ (Freud, Basic Writings, 917). In other words, human civilization depends on repressing individual desire; without a higher political, familial, or moral authority to frustrate infantile urges, there would be chaos. This is, essentially, the view of those policing the dystopias of Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; these societies are unimaginable without a Freudian world view towards family life. Indeed, Huxley and Orwell suggest that a too-literal application of Freudian thinking to politics and social control dehumanizes those who suffer it. They remain humanists, one might say, while suggesting that Freudianism is at odds with humanism. Malcolm Lowry is a different case, less concerned with defending humanism from Freud and more concerned with suggesting that humanity is doomed.

Freudianism and Totalitarianism in Huxley, Orwell, and Lowry 73

Freudian theories and repressive political systems exploiting them appear in Lowry’s Under the Volcano, but mainly as symptoms of abiding human self-destructiveness or self-delusion. Yet all three texts link patriarchal power and Oedipal crimes, a view that corresponds to Erich Fromm’s central critique of Freud’s analysis of the universality of the Oedipus complex. Fromm argues that in constructing the Oedipus complex around the son’s wish to kill the father, ‘Freud gives universal meaning to a feature that is characteristic only of patriarchal society’ (Fromm, Greatness, 30). Thus, for Fromm, the Oedipus myth is a ‘symbol’ of ‘the rebellion of the son against the authority of the father in the patriarchal family’ (Fromm, Greatness, 34), and thus its supposed ubiquity is misleading; in matriarchal or egalitarian societies, the Freudian Oedipus has no special relevance. These texts suggest hope for a non-Oedipal future for humanity, even if immediate social and political problems cloud that future. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Freud’s role in Brave New World is crucial. Freud is treated as a prophet in this pseudo-paradise; indeed, he is elevated to near divinity, along with Henry Ford (the similarity of their names comes in handy), as the following passage makes clear: ‘Our Ford – or Our Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters – Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life’ (BNW 44). In this society, the Oedipus complex is deemed so dangerous and powerful that it (along with the family structure that produces it) has been eliminated, as far as possible. Children are no longer born to parents but produced in an assembly-line process from fertilized eggs, which are decanted into bottles and subjected to chemical alteration. By controlling a child’s birth and upbringing, and by keeping adults in infantile dependency on a larger social body, Huxley’s imaginary state has assumed the role of parent and robbed the child of Oedipal potentialities. Everyone is so infantile that they still feel as if they are in the womb/decanter. A popular song expresses this pre-Oedipal state: ‘Bottle of mine, it’s you I’ve always wanted! / Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted?’ (BNW 91). The director of London’s central ‘hatchery’ disgusts a group of schoolchildren with the spectre of emotionally suffocating parents: ‘The world was full of fathers – was therefore full of misery; full of mothers – therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism

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to chastity’ (BNW 44). He sums up the plight of past generations vividly: home was as squalid psychically as physically. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, a midden, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the members of the family group! Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children ... ‘My baby, my baby,’ over and over again. ‘My baby, and oh, oh, at my breast, the little hands, the hunger, and that unspeakable, agonizing pleasure ...’ ‘Yes,’ said Mustapha Mond ... ‘you may well shudder.’ (BNW 43)

The people of Huxley’s future have not read Freud, but they have been indoctrinated with a Freud-influenced awareness of the possibility of illicit relations between mother and child. This awareness, manifest in Lenina Crowne’s distaste for the ‘indecent’ spectacle of ‘two young women giving the breast to their babies, the sight of which makes her blush and turn away’ (BNW 130), is exploited to inculcate strong suspicion of any private or emotionally intense relationship. Indeed, any individualized, personalized sexual feelings are branded as essentially incestuous, the language of forbidden passion adisgusting outgrowth of the obsolete maternal love talk: ‘My baby, my mother, my only, only love’ (BNW 49). An ‘only love’ is an incestuous love, in Huxley’s futuristic world, because it works against the social solidarity that is the key to peaceful life. Despite all this revulsion towards the very possibility of Oedipal crimes or Oedipal urges, the mythical figure of Oedipus returns to Huxley’s novel with a vengeance, in the form of John Savage, a man who was born (in the traditional way) into an Indian tribe on a New Mexico reservation. John’s father, the director of the London Hatchery, leaves John to be raised by his mother, Linda, after he has impregnated her in the now unthinkable way. Like Oedipus, John grows up not knowing who his biological father is; he finally, with the help of his mother, learns the truth. He also unintentionally ruins his father by embracing him publicly, kneeling before him, and addressing him as ‘My father’ – Huxley’s satirical rendition of Oedipus’s unwitting murder. Yet John is more Freudian case study than reincarnation of Oedipus; his sensibilities have been formed by a battered edition of Shakespeare he finds (rather improbably) in the squalor around him, and he identifies strongly with Hamlet’s rage about his mother’s marriage to Claudius. He experiences some classically Freudian Oedipal

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jealousy of the native man who sleeps with his mother, spurring his anger with apt quotations from Hamlet: ‘He hated Popé more and more. A man can smile and smile and be a villain’ (BNW 156). Popé is the kind of patriarchal figure singularly lacking in the modern culture of Brave New World, and the perfect focal point for John’s Oedipal rage. John supplements his Oedipal readings from Shakespeare with internalized tribal values and practices; he represents Huxley’s attempt to distil the stereotypical ‘Noble Savage’ and the best of Western humanistic culture (via Shakespeare). Yet these mixed traditions produce an explosive situation. Reading Hamlet intensifies John’s anger towards Popé: ‘it was as though he had never really hated Popé before; never really hated him because he had never been able to say how much he hated him ... These words ... made his hatred more real’ (BNW 157). Huxley’s portrait of John shows how the Oedipus complex is produced partly through natural boyish pride and jealousy and partly through John’s aesthetic enjoyment of Shakespeare’s language. This is no doubt a sidelong jab at Freud, and certainly adds resonance to Huxley’s remark that ‘All that modern psychologists ... have done is to systematize and de-beautify the vast treasures of knowledge about the human soul contained in novel, play, poem and essay’ (Huxley, Music at Night, 292). This remark is not, however, a rejection of Freud’s theories; it is merely an attempt to show that their kind of truth is inferior to that of art. John and his mother eventually leave the reservation with Bernard Marx, an insecure would-be intellectual who seeks approval and social status by parading them as curiosities in London. Yet even once he has encountered the many attractive and available women there, John remains obsessed with his mother. He fondly remembers intimate moments between him and Linda, recalling times when ‘he sat on her knees and she put her arms about him and sang ... rocking him, rocking him to sleep’ (BNW 244). Linda’s behaviour has contributed heavily to John’s fixation; she has been neglectful, sentimental, abusive, and affectionate by turns. For instance, when John was little she slapped him for calling her his ‘mother’ and then, in a matter of moments, repented and kissed him ‘again and again’ (BNW 150). John never understands the nature of his feelings towards Linda, conflating his incestuous desires and violent impulses towards Popé with the trappings of heroism (after all, both traits are found in Hamlet). The fact that such powerful attachments are not normal in a world of Malthusian belts and orgy porgies reinforces John’s tragic self-importance.

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John cannot renounce his mother or sever their emotional connection, and this leads him to censor his lustful impulses, since all his erotic attachments seem charged with his unsatisfied desire for Linda. When he calls Lenina an ‘impudent strumpet’ (BNW 232) he is not only censuring her promiscuous behaviour (which she, ironically, seems to be willing to change for his sake); he is projecting his revulsion at his own lusts. We sense how deeply John’s libido has been repressed when he attends a feely (a futuristic movie that allows spectators to feel the actions onscreen) featuring love-making between ‘a gigantic negro and a golden haired young brachycephalic Beta Plus female’ (BNW 200). No doubt prompted by memories of Linda and Popé,1 John is revolted by this interracial love story; he ‘start[s]’ violently as it begins and later terms it ‘horrible’ (BNW 202), though he is struck by its similarities to Shakespeare’s Othello. Long afterwards, John’s desire for Lenina becomes linked to the mixture of arousal and disgust he experienced at the feely: ‘he felt [Lenina’s] lips soft against his own. So deliciously soft, so warm and electric that inevitably he found himself thinking of the embraces in Three Weeks in a Helicopter. Ooh! ooh! the stereoscopic blonde and aah! the more than real blackamoor. Horror, horror, horror – he tried to disengage himself’ (BNW 229). John seems to identify with the possessive negro just as he had once identified with Popé, and yet he reacts with disgust at the depiction of his incestuous fantasies on the screen (just as he comes to hate Popé). John associates both the blonde Linda and Lenina with the ‘brachycephalic blonde,’ and the link between Lenina and Linda remains strong in John’s mind, even after Linda dies from an overdose: ‘He tried to think of Linda, breathless and dumb, with her clutching hands ... Poor Linda whom he had sworn to remember. But it was still the presence of Lenina that haunted him. Lenina whom he had promised to forget’ (BNW 302). John has successfully transferred his love from his mother to Lenina, but instead of congratulating himself on his more adult object choice he feels guilty for forgetting Linda, especially since he blames himself for her death. John cannot imagine having sexual relations with Lenina before he has exorcised the unconscious incestuous demons that plague him and make him mistrust all sexual activity. These demons determine his everyday reactions to the world he has entered; for instance, he is outraged by the docile subservience of a group of identical Deltas awaiting their dose of drugs. He sees such twins as ‘less than human monsters,’ asking them why they don’t want to ‘be free and men’ and

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challenging them to throw off their dependence on drugged bliss: ‘Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking’ (BNW 254). Here Huxley’s keen sense of irony is working overtime: the Savage accuses the cloned workers of the same infantilism he has barely confronted through his violent, unresolved Oedipus complex. Twins frequently symbolize the results of incestuous activity; René Girard writes, ‘Incestuous propagation leads to formless duplications, sinister repetitions ... In short, the incestuous creature exposes the community to the same danger as do twins ... mothers of twins are often suspected of having conceived their children in incestuous fashion’ (Girard, Violence, 75). Huxley may want to indicate that John associates these twins with his own unfulfilled urges, which he must then repress all the more violently, or sublimate into radical activity (he throws the Deltas’ long-awaited soma out the window). After Linda’s death, the link between her and these twins remains prominent: ‘he had sworn to himself he would constantly remember ... Linda, and his own murderous unkindness to her, and those loathsome twins, swarming like lice across the mystery of her death’ (BNW 296–7). The violence of John’s reactions to London life seems to justify Huxley’s Londoners’ systematic attempts to obliterate the source of such extreme emotions. John’s uncompromising judgments of the twins and others similarly lacking in individuality are deeply at odds with the passive, hedonistic, and collectivist ethos of the world around him; Mond admonishes him that ‘our world is not the same as Othello’s world ... you can’t make tragedies without social instability’ (BNW 263). Many critics have sided with John’s attack on the humanity of the supposedly ‘civilized’ people of this ‘Brave New World.’ Mark Hillegas claims that ‘the conditioned happiness of Brave New World cuts men off from deep experience, keeps them from being fully human’ (Hillegas, Future, 118). The humanistic moral Hillegas draws from the book has been widely accepted; yet Brave New World is more complex than such readings would indicate, and Huxley makes it clear that through John (‘the Savage’) he is exploring problems and fatal flaws within the very ‘human’ condition he is thought to celebrate and defend. John may be the last truly ‘human’ being in Huxley’s dystopia, but he is far from a true humanist, as his revulsion towards sexuality indicates. Dismayed by Lenina’s willingness to sleep with him, John quotes King Lear (4.5.120–1): ‘Down from the waist they are Centaurs, though women all above’ (BNW 233). Sexuality makes animals of human beings, and John cannot stomach such dehumanization. John’s disgust with

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Lenina’s sexuality shows him to be as fatally unaware of his own capacity for sensual excess as Oedipus is that he has committed incest with Jocasta, and this blindness, once it has been dispelled in a druginduced orgy, leads to John’s suicide. John’s response to sexual opportunities seems extreme, and yet for Huxley this impulse to reject a too-casual view of sexual pleasure is admirable, even definitively human. A few years before writing Brave New World, Huxley claimed that ‘Nothing is more dreadful than a cold, unimpassioned indulgence. And love infallibly becomes cold and unimpassioned when it is too lightly made’ (Huxley, Do What You Will, 137). In a 1931 essay, Huxley argues that ‘No reasonable hedonist can consent to be a flat racer. Abolishing obstacles, he abolishes half his pleasure. And at the same time he abolishes most of his dignity as a human being. For the dignity of man consists precisely in his ability to restrain himself ... to raise obstacles in his own path’ (Huxley, Music at Night, 167). Such a view of human dignity is shared by some of Huxley’s characters: Helmholtz Watson and Bernard Marx both strive to overcome the social imperative to indulge oneself, but neither can take the Oedipal conflicts of the now-obsolete nuclear family seriously enough to attain self-control for very long.2 John is the only character who has internalized the taboos needed to regulate (and, for Huxley, to constitute) human behaviour, and artistic expression allows his incestuous and parricidal urges to drive him to an unhealthy prudery that leads to despair and suicide. Yet for most readers John is the focus of sympathy and identification, which leads us to believe that Huxley is forecasting the end of humanity. Before Nietzsche famously foresaw the replacement of humanity by ‘supermen,’ he celebrated Oedipus (in an unpublished manuscript) as ‘the last man’ (quoted in Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives, 156), and this prophecy appears fulfilled in Huxley’s dystopia. The Oedipal ‘Savage’ is, in a real sense, the ‘last’ human being (aside from the primitives on the reservation) in a world of engineered infants. The ‘Bokanovsky process’ circumscribes identity, limiting it to the caste to which each person belongs. Thus, although each individual is a clone, there is no way to generalize about humanity: the species has been fractured into incommensurable sections. All this accords with the dogmas of the new order; as the Director of the Hatchery rationalizes while he gives student visitors their tour, ‘particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils’ (BNW 2). Hence maxims like ‘All men are physico-chemically equal’ (BNW 87)

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reinforce Mustapha Mond’s upper-caste scorn for the idea that humanity itself could be more than a ‘physico-chemical’ category (BNW 55). Because of this new conception of human nature as a ‘physico-chemical’ phenomenon, nobody attempts to give the idea of the human meaning by attaching it to a divinity that might guarantee its sacredness. Mustapha Mond does contemplate the undesirable (though remote) possibility that citizens of the Brave New World might ‘lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere’ (BNW 211), but there is no sign of any such discontent, except from the unconditioned, obdurately Oedipal John. Mond quotes Cardinal Newman’s belief that ‘independence was not made for man – that it is an unnatural state’ (BNW 279), but facilely dissents, arguing that ‘we can be independent of God’ since ‘youth and prosperity’ (Newman’s conditions for independence) are enjoyed by all – until they die suddenly, of course (BNW 279). To many, such a defence might testify to the incoherence of the idea of the human once any superhuman imperative is abandoned. To others, however, Mond’s smug and limited humanism suggests that no conception of the human can afford to ignore death. Aside from the crematoria’s smoke and the early training that encourages children to treat death like a stay in a hotel, death is invisible in the London Huxley imagines; it has no emotional or intellectual force for even exceptional citizens like Marx or Watson. The only person in the novel for whom death has any significance is John, and he affirms his difference only by committing suicide, taking humanity’s last chance with him. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four Brave New World updates the classic ‘telluric’ and pre-patriarchal swamp depicted by Bachofen, where sexuality and procreation are completely detached from each other, and suggests (as Bachofen does) that this condition is profoundly dehumanizing. Yet George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which depicts a pleasure-hating, repressive culture where sexuality is a mere biological imperative governed by Party ideology (witness the Anti-Sex League), shows that this attitude can be equally (if not more) dehumanizing. Both novels share a Freudian obsession: if Brave New World satirizes the difficulty of preserving freedom and dignity when an authoritarian political system acts upon Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex, then Nineteen

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Eighty-Four is a much darker instance of this same genre. Few scholars have noted the centrality of Freudianism to Orwell’s dehumanizing totalitarian society, though Richard Smyer has suggested that the shadowy would-be revolutionary Emmanuel Goldstein’s status as the ‘primal traitor’ in the totalitarian regime’s official ideology links him to ‘the Freudian concept of the primal crime – a prehistoric rebellion involving patricide and the usurpation of the slain father-chieftain’s sexual rights ... by the envious tribal sons’ (Smyer, Primal Dream, 142). Smyer views protagonist Winston Smith’s hatred of Big Brother as similarly Oedipal, and argues that the ‘Golden Country’ central to Winston’s fantasies represents ‘the mother’s body’ (Smyer, Primal Dream, 145). Smyer also suggests that Julia is ‘the longed-for mother’ who provides Winston with a delusive but enjoyable ‘intrauterine serenity’ shattered by the intrusion of the father figure Mr Charrington, who keeps the shop above which Julia and Winston have their illicit encounters (Smyer, Primal Dream, 145). Although Smyer’s reading is underdeveloped, a Freudian reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four is undoubtedly fruitful. The ‘Party’ in charge of Oceania has appropriated the Oedipus complex as a tool of social and political control, using children as informers against their parents. Rather than abolishing the nuclear family, and thus avoiding Oedipal conflicts, as in Huxley’s dystopia, Orwell’s novel shows the tensions between parents and children as energies harnessed by repressive authorities. To avoid having rebellions directed against a father figure (the designation of ‘Big Brother’ sidesteps paternal overtones) children are encouraged to focus Oedipal anger on their biological fathers; as O’Brien boasts, ‘We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer’ (1984 118). Having been raised when the Party’s methods of indoctrination were less efficient, Smith showed few traces of this aggressive Freudian Oedipal identity as a child (his father vanished without explanation before Winston could denounce him). Winston’s later rebellion against Party discipline and ‘Big Brother’ seem like a delayed onset of the Oedipal urges he could not express as a boy. Smith’s relationship with his mother is not explored very fully, but some elements of it can be inferred from Smith’s description of a film he has seen in which a young boy ‘screaming with fright’ cowers with his mother, ‘hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her’ while a helicopter takes aim at them (1984 5).

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This sequence stands in for quasi-incestuous tenderness between Smith and his mother, and hints at Smith’s repressed reaction to his mother’s death. Smith’s dreams enact an unresolved Oedipus complex like that endured by Lawrence’s Paul Morel and Huxley’s John Savage, and they produce a vivid sense of guilt: ‘he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own ... they must die in order that he might remain alive’ (1984 15). This unconscious guilt is no doubt perpetuated by the incestuous overtones that permeate Smith’s life: a maternal figure shows up in Smith’s cell after his arrest; the ‘enormous wreck of a woman, aged about sixty’ ‘seemed immediately to take a fancy to him’ and, finding that they share a last name, exclaims, ‘I might be your mother!’ (1984 101). Smith is also haunted by a strange sexual encounter with a decrepit older woman whom he met in an alleyway; he saw that she was ‘fifty years old at least,’ with no teeth and a face ‘plastered’ thick with paint, but he says, ‘I went ahead and did it just the same’ (1984 31). Like Fromm, who regards a concern with ‘man himself’ as characteristic of ‘the matriarchal order’ (Fromm, Forgotten, 213), Orwell associates motherly women with a vanished humanistic ideal and the possibility of its renewal through revolution. Smith admires the beauty of a woman whose body has been ‘blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing’ (1984 97), and who stands for ‘proles’ and their capacity to challenge the Party: ‘All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers ... everywhere stood the same unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing ... Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings might one day come’ (1984 98). For Fromm, a matriarchal culture that values humanity for its own sake and privileges ‘equality and democracy’ is the appropriate contrast to the totalitarian patriarchal stance, which cares only for the state and obedience to its laws (Fromm, Forgotten, 228). This dichotomy is clearly present in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the single-minded ‘Big Brother’ has a limitless, dehumanizing appetite for power. Faced with this overwhelming figure, Winston cannot achieve truly Oedipal status; he lacks the will, luck, and intelligence to create a real rebellion or even a truly tragic situation, lapsing back into infantile dependence during torture sessions with O’Brien (Big Brother’s surrogate). When O’Brien begins to re-educate Winston into ‘doublethink’ and the Party line, he symbolically replaces the mother Smith still desires; Smith ‘clung to O’Brien like a baby’ (1984 111). As the sessions proceed, Smith loses

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himself as completely as any infant in its mother’s arms: ‘O’Brien was a being in all ways larger than himself. There was no idea that he had ever had, or could have, that O’Brien had not long ago known, examined, and rejected. His mind contained Winston’s mind’ (1984 113). In shifting allegiance from mother surrogates like O’Brien to Big Brother, the ‘embodiment of the Party’ (1984 114) for whom he declares his love at the novel’s end, Smith has matured as per Freud, renouncing access to the forbidden mother and gaining a new relationship with one’s father. Indeed (keeping Deleuze and Guattari’s denunciations of Freud in mind), we may suspect that Orwell models Smith’s pseudo-rehabilitation on psychoanalysis rather than any actual totalitarian regime. Judged by this novel, Orwell’s vision of totalitarianism is of a state infinitely, absurdly interested in the psychological states of its citizens; O’Brien repeatedly (if unconvincingly) affirms the absurd lengths to which he will go to convert a disgruntled minor functionary into a more impressionable citizen. O’Brien acts as a psychoanalyst; he ‘asked the questions and suggested the answers’ during his interviews with Smith (1984 108). He ‘had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish’ (1984 109), and justifies ‘taking trouble’ over Smith simply by saying that he is ‘worth trouble’ (1984 108). This essentially anti-totalitarian attention to a single person may be the vestige of a humanistic legacy that no version of psychoanalysis, however corrupt and manipulative, can abandon altogether. Freud – despite his disturbing allegations about the inhuman nature of infantile urges – still took pains to preserve the idea of the human. Orwell too is reluctant to give up on the category of the human; as Hervé Carrier has argued, ‘Orwell ... is haunted by an ideal image of man, which he wants to defend’ (Carrier, And He Loved Big Brother, 229). As Carrier puts it, ‘Winston Smith is the symbol, albeit an inverted and untenable one, of ... traditional humanism’ (1984 229), and our verdict on Smith’s fate is influenced by his sense of his own humanity. As Smith tells himself, ‘if you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them’ (1984 74). Smith’s embattled sense of his humanity, though a response to his oppressive totalitarian society, is not intended to be an isolated problems; Smith’s situation is remarkably similar to Orwell’s assessment of his own position in what he calls ‘an age in which the autonomous individual is ceasing to exist – or perhaps one ought to say, in which the individual is ceasing to have the illusion of

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being autonomous’ (Orwell, My Country, 134). For Orwell, this condition results directly from mechanization and industrialization, since he believed that ‘the tendency of the machine’ was ‘to make a fully human life impossible’ and that the ‘logical end of mechanical progress’ is to ‘reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle’ (Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier, 233). This last phrase recalls the decanted babies of Huxley’s Brave New World; whether or not this alludes to Huxley’s book, Orwell was clearly interested in previous writers who had diagnosed the same problems he saw assailing humanity. Orwell praised Brave New World and echoed its central message: ‘many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain or difficulty’ (Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier, 225–6). That said, the picture of the future offered by O’Brien, Smith’s apparent ally and eventual persecutor, is more crudely anti-humanistic than anything in Huxley’s dystopia. Moreover, Orwell attempts more systematically to articulate the shortcomings of humanism than does Huxley. O’Brien points to the instability of human nature when he criticizes Winston for his sentimental attitude to proles: You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. (1984 119)

O’Brien’s cynicism is contradictory: he holds that human nature is not bounded by strict limits, and yet he excludes the proles from humanity. Similarly, when Smith’s colleague Syme declares offhandedly that ‘the proles are not human beings’ (1984 24), we suspect he is merely echoing unofficial Party doctrine. Other flaws in the novel’s attack on humanism beg the question of whether such nihilistic views are coherent. On one hand, O’Brien insists that ‘Nothing exists outside human consciousness ... Before man there was nothing’ (1984 117). On the other hand, to shake Smith’s faith in what O’Brien calls ‘The spirit of Man’ (1984 119), O’Brien asks Smith if he thinks he (Smith) is still ‘a man.’ If so, O’Brien tells him, he (like Huxley’s Savage, and like Oedipus, as we have seen) is ‘the last man’ (1984 119); showing Smith his own bedraggled, emaciated body in a mirror, O’Brien literally adds insult to injury,

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saying, ‘If you are human, that is humanity’ (1984 120). The Party, it would seem, wants to reduce the world to controllable human beings and abolish the idea of humanity itself by maltreating them. Smith points to conflicts in the authorities’ attitude to humanity and the ‘proles’: ‘The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage ... But, simultaneously, true to the principles of doublethink, the party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals’ (1984 32). Yet Smith’s intellectual victory over Party ‘doublethink’ does not last, since he is soon forced to abandon his old-fashioned faith in humanity when he faces his worst fear: being tortured with rats. When he is put to this terrifying test, he gives up any pretence of human dignity and reverts to primal self-protection: ‘he was insane, a screaming animal ... There was one and only one way to save himself. He must interpose ... the body of another human being, between himself and the rats’ (1984 126). Winston must dehumanize someone else to save his own sanity, and he chooses Julia as the victim. When he meets her afterwards, both confess their betrayals without surprise or rancour, as if they understand that their former love was untenable and their humanistic ideals absurd. The Party has exposed the fraudulence of their faith in each other, and, by extension, humanity. Orwell is sympathetic to people caught in such anti-humanistic totalitarian states; the title of his essay ‘Inside the Whale’ hints at the best advice Orwell feels he can give to writers in situations like Smith’s: survive, like Jonah, and hope you’ll be coughed up. Orwell predicts that more and more writers will have to adopt this self-protective posture: ‘The passive attitude will come back ... Get inside the whale – or rather, admit you are inside the whale (for you are, of course). Give yourself over to the world-process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you control it; simply accept it, endure it, record it’ (Orwell, Essays, 255). The image of the whale is derived from Henry Miller’s analysis of Anaïs Nin’s work, as Orwell notes: ‘Miller ... compares Anaïs Nin – evidently a completely subjective, introverted writer – to Jonah in the whale’s belly ... a very comfortable, cosy, homelike thought’ (1984 249). This escapist subjectivism is an extension of the womb: ‘The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult ... Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility’ (1984 249). The pre-Oedipal, fetuslike state Orwell imagines is radically apolitical. Nineteen Eighty-Four hints that the sexual energies Orwell would have associated with the writings of Miller and Nin have revolution-

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ary political potential. This is most clearly seen in Winston’s giddy prophecy that Julia’s frank and unsentimental sexual appetites are the perfect vehicle for revolutionary forces: ‘the animal instinct, the simply undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces’ (1984 56). Naïve though this seems by the novel’s end, it recalls Fromm’s celebration of a pre-patriarchal world of sexuality for its own sake, not as part of a patriarchally controlled Oedipal complex. The temporarily subversive relationship between Smith and Julia also anticipates more recent theorists who view the transgressive energies of sexuality as the best antidote to totalitarian power. Like Julia and Winston, Deleuze and Guattari are convinced that ‘real desire’ is ‘revolutionary in its essence’ since it is ‘animal’ in nature and therefore ‘no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised’ (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 116). Of course, this desire is part of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘nonhuman sex’; it exists not in human beings, but in ‘desiring machines.’ Herein lies the problem, since Orwell is too much the humanist to endorse ‘inhuman’ sexual power as an answer to political and social problems. A committed socialist and egalitarian, Orwell would have agreed with Marx that even the rites of sexual attraction show that ‘man’s need has become human ... the other human being, as human being, has become a need for him,’ proving that each human being ‘in his [sic] most individual existence is at the same time a social being’ (Marx, Writings, 303). Unlike Deleuze and Guattari, Orwell sees no revolutionary potential in the desire to escape from Oedipus, humanism, and/or its attendant sexual politics, and thus Julia’s affair with Winston solves nothing; it only makes matters more dire, since they end up denouncing each other. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano The pessimism Orwell evinces is also present in Malcolm Lowry’s 1947 novel Under the Volcano, another Oedipally influenced response to the crisis in humanism provoked by fascism. Critics have noted similarities between Lowry’s protagonist, a drunken British diplomat named Geoffrey Firmin (his name is an anagram for ‘infirm’), and Oedipus; perhaps the best summary is given by Frederick Asals in his book The Making of Malcolm Lowry’s ‘Under the Volcano’: ‘Geoffrey ... is most insistently associated with Oedipus: the dark glasses, the limp, the desire for a “daughter” to “lead him by the hand ... homeward”’ (Asals, Making, 234). Andrew Norton’s article ‘Deconstructing the

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Oedipus Myth in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano’ argues for linking Firmin with Oedipus through their shared attitudes to language. Both scholars show that there is more to Lowry’s engagement with Oedipus than a Freudian reading of the book can account for, yet neither of these perceptive critics has grasped the more profound connection between Oedipus and the larger human predicament Lowry portrays. One of the novel’s three epigraphs comes from Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus: ‘Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man,’ a sentiment that ought to signal a deeper resonance between Lowry’s novel and Oedipus than Lowry’s readers have acknowledged. There are many possible starting points for a new reading of Geoffrey Firmin through the Oedipus story. Lowry’s hero is a sacrificial figure of the sort described by René Girard in his classic study Violence and the Sacred. For Girard, Oedipus is a scapegoat whose death is intended not merely to effect a catharsis, but to avert a wider human tragedy that threatens us through the spectre of collective violence. Girard has described the threat of all-encompassing internecine violence as the root of all tragedy, since it produces what he terms ‘the sacrificial crisis,’ whereby an individual hero must be killed to pacify the group. Girard argues that Oedipus, far from being guilty in his father’s death, is really a victim of this collective state of emergency; one can readily perceive a similar theme in Under the Volcano. The narrator quotes an imaginary newspaper headline that underscores the similarities between Girard’s Oedipus and Lowry’s hero: ‘Firmin innocent, but bears guilt of world on shoulders’ (UV 141). More specifically, Firmin finds himself in Mexico just before the Second World War, where he confronts nascent totalitarianism and political oppression (both leftist and fascist). In the face of the seemingly all-consuming aggression about to be unleashed by war, Firmin is obsessed with finding a formula for transcending the political differences that threaten to tear humanity apart, posing questions such as ‘Is there any ultimate reality, external, conscious, and ever-present, etc. etc., that can be realized by any such means that may be acceptable to all creeds and religions and suitable to all climes and countries?’ (UV 44). Firmin believes that his own efforts cannot stop ‘humanity’ from ‘consuming itself as quickly as possible’ (UV 105), and he is driven to distraction by his pessimism. Lowry’s narrative endorses Firmin’s gloom, suggesting that the volatile political situation in Mexico portends the imminent dissolu-

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tion of human civilization itself; after all, when ‘brotherhood’ has been ‘betrayed’ (UV 111), Freud’s taboos and laws are no longer in effect. The threat of fascism to humanity is described in Freudian/Oedipal terms: children are pitted against their parents and family loyalty has disappeared. Thus it is no surprise that the ‘extirpation of liberal political institutions’ in Mexico becomes tied explicitly to intra-familial violence; we are told that a certain character named Juan has ‘killed his father,’ who in Juan’s view had ‘turned traitor’ (UV 112). The situation in pre–Second World War Mexico, in other words, is not far from that in Orwell’s Oceania. Yet Lowry also anticipates the Girardian suggestion that an individual death – especially of an Oedipal figure – can bring about a wider rebirth. This idea is first presented, albeit somewhat trivially, when a cat named ‘Oedipuss’ dies. In an unusually optimistic mood, Firmin himself suggests that ‘Oedipuss’ is somehow reincarnated in another cat, which he affectionately calls ‘Priapusspuss,’ then ‘Oedipusspusspuss’ (UV 138). This reincarnation suggests that the ‘final attitude of potency’ aspired to by Geoffrey and his wife Yvonne may be attained through Oedipuss’s death and apparent rebirth. Indeed, ‘Priapuss’ symbolizes the rebirth of the entire human race from a threat of disaster, as in this description of Priapuss’s antics: ‘The cat extended a preparate paw for the kill, opening her mouth, and the insect, whose wings had never ceased to beat, suddenly and marvellously, flew out as might indeed the human soul from the jaws of death’ (UV 144). This foreshadowing suggests that we should read the novel’s nightmarish climax as the final movement of a tragedy that will help ‘the human soul’ fly out from the ‘jaws of death.’ Moreover, these details foreshadow the simultaneously apocalyptic and redemptive implications of Firmin’s death, which closely resembles that of the unfortunate Oedipuss. Geoffrey tells Yvonne, ‘Poor old Oedipuss died the very day you left apparently, he’d already been thrown down the barranca [ravine]’ (UV 93). Firmin is also thrown into a ‘ravine’ (UV 376) after he is shot. Cats are not the only other Oedipal creatures who intersect with Firmin’s tragic life; Frederick Asals notes the Oedipal proclivities of Firmin’s younger half-brother Hugh, who usurps Yvonne’s affections. Asals argues that the complexities of the relationship between Firmin and Hugh are symbolized by Hugh’s decision to switch vessels from a ship named Philoctetes, after one of Oedipus’s sons, to a ship called Oedipus Tyrannus. Asals suggests that there is an implied critique of Hugh’s political orientation and his faith in human ‘brotherhood’ in

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Lowry’s portrait of his peregrinations (Asals, Making, 172). Hugh is the novel’s most obvious representative of naïvely optimistic humanism, and he provides a foil for Firmin’s more sophisticated tragic view of humanity. Hugh believes that communism is ‘a new spirit’ that, in the modern world, is ‘playing a part analogous to that of Christianity in the old’ (UV 306). Although Hugh, like Firmin, is ready to play a Christ-like role of sacrificial victim, he is only interested in humankind on the general or theoretical level; as Hugh himself admits, ‘I am willing to give my life for humanity, if not in minute particulars’ (UV 156). This caveat is crucial, since it is a mark of Firmin’s humanism that he accepts every detail of the life around him. Thus Firmin asks, ‘“What have you ever done for humanity, Hugh ... except talk, and thrive on it, until your soul stinks?”’ (UV 314). For Firmin, the ‘minute particulars’ of humanity must be embraced, even if this means courting psychosis. Another complicating factor in the Oedipal situations Lowry presents is Firmin’s difficult relationship with his estranged but still loving wife, Yvonne. When the novel opens, Yvonne has left Firmin in an attempt to revive her acting career; she returns to Mexico to try to reconcile, but finds Firmin increasingly incapacitated and unreasonable. Yvonne is an ambiguous figure who seems to play the roles of the Sphinx, Jocasta, and Antigone in Firmin’s Oedipal drama. This complexity may result from Lowry’s ambivalence about what Yvonne should symbolize; in an earlier short story Lowry also called ‘Under the Volcano,’ Yvonne was Firmin’s daughter (casting her as Antigone to his Oedipus) and Hugh was her lover. The altered family relationships in the novel create tension between Geoffrey and Hugh, and doom the tenuous husband-wife bond. No wonder Firmin is deeply ambivalent towards Yvonne: ‘he wanted Yvonne and did not want her’ (UV 348). To complicate matters further, Yvonne appears willing to take on her husband’s Oedipal burdens, vowing in a letter that ‘I want ... your sorrows in my eyes’ (UV 347). The body part Yvonne chooses is apt, since Oedipus gouged out his own eyes. Firmin is impressed with this letter, despite his addled cynicism (he muses ‘Yvonne had certainly been reading something’ [UV 347]). But the couple’s sudden sympathy comes too late; Firmin is already in the fatal brothel, committed to a tawdry encounter with a prostitute. In a final hallucination that speaks to a basic conflict in Firmin’s sexual desires, he sees Yvonne in the face and body of Maria, the woman he pays for, creating an imaginary image of a woman he can both love and

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possess sexually, both maternal and virginal, as the name Maria implies (UV 349). Firmin’s actual sexual encounter with Maria foreshadows his impending death; indeed, it is a sort of crucifixion: ‘it was this calamity he now, with Maria, penetrated, the only thing alive in him now this burning boiling crucified organ – God is it possible to suffer more than this, out of this suffering something must be born, and what would be born was his own death’ (UV 350). This idea of birth-out-of-death is a consistent theme, involving a wider human transformation from war, genocide, and the threat of apocalyptic weapons into something that transcends this misery. Nevertheless, this nearly eschatological moment is also linked to sexuality. Lowry blames the apocalyptic and totalitarian threats facing the world on sexuality; despite Yvonne’s occasionally benevolent intentions, she and her infidelities (to which Firmin has driven her) play a central role in Firmin’s demise. Yvonne’s multiple identities and sexual transgressions make her the modern equivalent of the women in Bachofen’s matriarchal (and hence, in Bachofen’s view, pre-human) society: promiscuous creatures who can be wives and daughters to the same men. Yvonne’s alleged disdain for humanity seems in line with this status; in one scene, Firmin paradoxically reproaches Yvonne for lacking the hypocrisy he dislikes in Hugh, telling her, ‘you don’t pretend to love “humanity”, not a bit of it’ (UV 314). Yet Firmin also blames Yvonne for not giving him ‘the children’ he says he ‘might have wanted,’ but plainly didn’t (UV 314). Firmin’s critique of Yvonne is rooted in sexism; he implies that, in her wish to identify with her husband and sympathize with his predicament, she has adulterated her feminine identity with masculine attitudes, and thus denied ‘the only natural and good function’ (UV 315). Clearly, Firmin resents the fact that, in his eyes, he has been denied his own patriarchal role by Yvonne, but he also implies that she herself has lost something by this refusal to grant him his rightful patriarchal privilege.3 In her somewhat wistful and enigmatic expressions of compassion towards her husband, Yvonne reminds the reader of the Sphinx in Jean Cocteau’s play La machine infernale, which Lowry quotes directly in his novel; Yvonne is repeatedly juxtaposed to ‘the Sphinx’ (UV 270) and its riddles. In a curious passage Firmin peruses a copy of Cocteau’s play (which is explicitly based on the Oedipus story) and reads this passage, spoken by the Sphinx: ‘“Oui, mon enfant, mon petit enfant ... les choses qui paraissent abominable [sic] aux humains, si tu savais, de l’endroit ou j’habite, elles ont peu d’importance”’ (UV 212). Lowry’s translation

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reads: ‘Yes, my child, my little boy ... Things which appear abominable to human beings, from the place where I live, if only you knew how unimportant they are’ (UV 212). The Sphinx, adopting a maternal tone towards the deranged and remorseful Oedipus, tries to comfort him by seeing his crimes from an inhuman, eternal perspective. Yvonne cannot command such authority, but her desire to help Firmin forget his guilty past is sincere and moving. The trouble is that Firmin cannot solve the riddles she seems to pose. Lowry’s invocation of Cocteau’s play – which he saw while staying in Paris in 1934 – does more than merely suggest Yvonne’s Sphinx-like nature. It also foregrounds a major theme: the dehumanizing effect of language and art. In La machine infernale, a character called ‘Fantome’ (ghost) informs the audience that the play they will see is ‘une des plus parfaits machines construites par les dieux infernaux pour l’anéantissement mathematique d’un mortel’ (quoted in Day 300), that is, ‘one of the most perfect machines ever built by the infernal gods for the mathematical annihilation of a mortal being’ (author’s translation). According to Douglas Day, Lowry saw Under the Volcano in precisely the same way: ‘his novel would be the representation of the destruction ... of a human life’ (Day, Malcolm Lowry, 301); and Lowry told the publisher Jonathan Cape that his novel is ‘a sort of machine: it works too ... as I have found out’ (quoted in Day, Malcolm Lowry, 301). The idea that humans (even authors) can be ‘annihilated’ through a work of literature is powerful and strange, but Lowry took it seriously. Firmin’s strange relationship to language typifies Lowry’s vision of a doomed humanity tormented and dehumanized by its own devices. Struggling against the words of political operatives determined to class him with other ‘undesirables,’ Firmin is possessed by discursive schizophrenia: ‘preposterous things were being said between them again without adequate reason: answers, it seemed to him, given by him to questions that while they had perhaps not been asked, nevertheless hung in the air. And as for some answers others gave, when he turned around, no one was there’ (UV 369). Firmin’s befuddled condition recalls the last stages of Oedipus’s life: the hero who once imagined he was the master of language, the solver of riddles, is reduced at Colonus to a self-questioning voice convinced that human existence has been reduced to ‘nothing,’ as when Oedipus asks himself, ‘So, when I am nothing, then am I a man?’ Andrew Norton, drawing such parallels between Firmin and Oedipus, has examined their attitudes in the light of deconstruction and what he sees as its ‘healthy’ attitude towards language:

Freudianism and Totalitarianism in Huxley, Orwell, and Lowry 91 As Derrida suggests, to accept language blindly is to be trapped by signs. Deleuze and Guattari go even further: to accept myths unquestioningly is to court schizophrenia, paranoia, neurosis. The healthy individual is one who learns to deconstruct the codes, myths, and structures he encounters in order to construct a more flexible, ‘playful’ view of reality. Similarly, Lowry presents the consul as a man colonized by his own ‘infernal machine.’ (Norton, ‘Deconstructing,’ 451)

While Norton is right that Firmin has been ‘colonized’ by the language he appears to be using as a tool, his implication that somehow ‘questioning’ myths enables one to avoid their pitfalls seems naïve, given Lowry’s gloomy picture of the human situation. Lowry offers an extreme response to the challenge posed to humanism by both language and the Oedipus myth; indeed, he suggests that what he calls ‘the human spirit’ can only ‘blossom’ in ‘the shadow of the abattoir’ (UV 91). This implied designation of humans as cattle (which are killed in an abattoir) links Lowry with the anti-humanistic, anti-Freudian views of Deleuze and Guattari. For Deleuze and Guattari, Freud’s Oedipus complex is just another ‘infernal machine’ built to trap us into a false narrative, but rather than assert that humanity can free itself from this tragic fate, the authors of The Anti-Oedipus attempt to abolish the concept of human nature entirely. Thus they ‘make no distinction between man and nature’; for them humanity is merely ‘the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe’ (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 4). Such a characterization is in keeping with the ‘infernal machine’ Lowry sees as the secret hidden in human identity. The fate of the German soldiers ‘burned alive in the furnaces’ on Firmin’s ship (UV 38–9) represents all humanity’s inevitable death in the grip of its hellish, mechanical creations. Similarly, though Firmin is killed by the forces of would-be totalitarianism, Lowry irresistibly suggests that even without such threats, Firmin is doomed by his wish to escape from ‘this dreadful tyranny of self’ (UV 291) Indeed, if the individual human self is a ‘tyrant’ (either in the political sense or in the Oedipal sense of ‘usurper’), then it is hard to hope that totalitarianism may be resisted for long. The complexity of Oedipus’s political status in these three dystopian novels is considerable, but so is that in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. The very title of Sophocles’ play hints at this, though in ancient Greek ‘tyrannos’ means ‘usurper’ rather than despotic ruler. Although Sophocles’ Oedipus can symbolize the eternal human desire for rebel-

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lion against authority and heroic intellectual independence, he is also in some ways the prototypical tyrant. Like a paranoid dictator, Oedipus is convinced that his inferiors are plotting to overthrow him by insinuating that he might be to blame for the plague that assails Thebes. He bullies and berates messengers, priests, and even his oncevalued advisor Tiresias, threatening him with violence if he does not tell Oedipus what he knows about the plague’s causes and then accusing him of treason when he voices his views. Oedipus is determined to stay in power at any cost; in Robert Fagles’s translation, when Creon asks Oedipus ‘What if you’re wholly wrong?’ he answers, ‘No matter – I must rule’ (Fagles, Oedipus, 175). In fact, the catastrophic effects of the self-professedly humanistic Oedipus’s rule in Thebes might well be adduced to support Fredric Jameson’s claim that ‘it is only in the most completely humanized environment, the one most fully and obviously the end product of human labor, production and transformation, that life becomes meaningless, and that existential despair first appears’ (Jameson, ‘Imaginary,’ 251–2). Jameson’s picture of the ultimately nightmarish world produced by ‘the elimination of nature, the non- or antihuman ... everything that threatens human life and the prospect of a well-nigh limitless control over the external universe’ (Jameson, ‘Imaginary,’ 251–2) would also be an apt description of the societies imagined by Huxley, Orwell, and Lowry. In these texts, humans are trapped in worlds created by their own sense of absolute power and authority, as well as by the structures (political, psychological, or linguistic) they have devised for their own benefit. For these writers, however, the idea of Oedipus – far from just another structure for humans to enslave themselves with, as Deleuze and Guattari would have it – is a microcosm of all aspects of the human dilemma; he simultaneously embodies rebellion against authority, symbolizes tyrannical and self-destructive humanism, warns against the dissolution that attends all human endeavours, and reminds us that we want to remain human, despite everything. Thus these authors arguably employ the Oedipus myth in a more complex, mythically apt, and effectively anti- or non-Freudian way than do Deleuze and Guattari.

Ontario 93

4 Freudful Mistakes in Sphinxish Pairc: Oedipal Humanism and Irish Nationalism in W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett

[D]uring the second half of the nineteenth century [tension between father and son] becomes particularly noticeable. Victorian morality and religion had little faith behind them; the father, their defender, had much to answer for, and filial revolt runs like a Wagnerian leitmotiv through the literature of the period. The father is killed, attacked, lost or hunted ... [This theme] is especially prominent in Ireland. Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 22–3

If British writers fearful of totalitarianism portrayed dystopic, authoritarian systems as exploiting the Oedipal complex for their own ends, then Irish writers – working in the shadow of a real colonial regime – found the idea of parricide equally fruitful. W.B. Yeats’s biographer Richard Ellmann has noted the relevance of the parricidal or Oedipal theme for writers in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, including not only Yeats but also J.M. Synge, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett (Ellmann, Yeats, 22–3). Although Freudianism is partly responsible for the seemingly endless recurrence of Oedipal motifs in Irish modernist writing, Oedipus also has unusual political undertones for such writers. If ever a group could be said to suffer from a collective ‘Oedipus complex’ of an entirely asexual sort, it is the nationalist movement in Ireland. The urge to be rid of English authority and to be reunited once again with a maternal homeland (mythic Ireland is frequently feminized and is often referred to as ‘the old woman’) is the subject of much nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish writing, which is often overtly Oedipal in form. Moreover, this Oedipal rebellious streak is often coupled with both an affirmation

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and an interrogation of humanistic principles; in some contexts, Oedipus’s presence suggests that the Irish deserve independence because of their human drive for autonomy, whereas in others Oedipus’s message is that only by rejecting the limits of human identity and morality can the Irish overthrow their paternalistic oppressors. Even aside from its political implications, the Oedipus myth is so prevalent in twentieth-century Irish literature that, for Samuel Beckett, it becomes synonymous with the human need to tell stories and thus create meaning in an otherwise empty universe. Beckett’s Oedipus is a self-consciously parodic, Freudian, and absurdly sexualized version of the hero lauded by Yeats (and, to a lesser extent, Joyce), and thus tends to undercut the political thrust of the long-standing link between Oedipus’s heroism and Irish self-assertion. Yeats and Oedipal Anti-Humanism Yeats was the first writer to connect Oedipus and Irish political life; Yeats’s wish to establish Ireland’s cultural difference from England motivated his interest in Oedipus Tyrannus. Yeats was well aware of the stage ban on Oedipus Tyrannus in England in the first decade of the twentieth century, and in 1909 he approached Gilbert Murray to translate the play. Inspired by the news that Sophocles’ play had been performed at Notre Dame University in the United States, Yeats was eager to stage it in Ireland: ‘Oedipus the King’ was at that time forbidden by the English censor, and I thought that if we could play it at the Abbey Theatre ... we might make our audience proud of its liberty ... Oedipus commits incest; but if a Catholic university could perform it in America my own theatre could perform it in Ireland. Ireland had no censorship, and a successful performance might make her ... say, perhaps, ‘I have an old historical religion moulded to the body of man like an old suit of clothes, and am therefore free.’ (Yeats, Sophocles, 4–5)

Yeats frames his motives in explicitly humanistic terms, arguing that Catholic tolerance is more closely ‘moulded to the body of man’ than English prudery. Oedipus symbolized the repressed, supposedly immoral side of human nature that England could not tolerate; therefore, it could be an organizing principle of a bid for Irish independence. Yeats wanted to put the Oedipal myth at the centre of a newly

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independent Irish national and cultural identity. Yeats’s other recorded reason for wanting to produce Oedipus Tyrannus was that, as he put it, Ireland ‘is in its first plastic state and takes the mark of every strong finger’ (quoted in Foster, W.B. Yeats, 1:334). Yeats’s interest in Sophocles’ play flagged when it was finally performed in London in 1912, and he suspended work on his translation in that same year (he resumed it in 1926, apparently at the behest of his wife). Despite Yeats’s clear political motives, biographers have speculated about more Freudian origins for his Oedipal obsession. According to R.F. Foster, many saw Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats, as ‘cruel’ to his son, showing impatience with the youthful Yeats’s slow academic progress and even ‘pushing him around the room’ (Foster, W.B. Yeats, 1:17). Yeats saw his father as a ‘tyrant’ (quoted in Foster, W.B. Yeats, 1:17), thus opening the door to Freudian theories of parricidal aggression. Such theories may apply regardless of whether Yeats was familiar with Freud, though it is difficult to imagine that Yeats was completely unaware of what Joyce would coyly call ‘the Viennese School.’ Although in his book on Yeats, Harold Bloom asserts that Yeats never mentions Freud, Yeats’s essay ‘Anima Hominis’ alludes to ‘doctors of medicine’ who ‘have discovered that certain dreams ... are the day’s unfulfilled desire, and that our terror of desires condemned by the conscience has distorted and disturbed our dreams’ (AV 46). Yeats, however, embraced such unfulfilled desires, and indeed set about to dramatize and heighten them in A Vision and his poetry. Thus Freudianism seems curiously beside the point where Yeats is concerned: Yeats takes a fundamentally agonistic view of the human psyche that is as remote from Freud’s therapeutic approach as one could imagine. Indeed, Foster argues persuasively that Yeats felt that his father’s strong influence was in fact ‘insufficiently’ tyrannical, suggesting that Yeats would in fact have liked an even more oppressive figure to rebel against, in order to exploit his own Oedipal tendencies more fully (Foster, W.B. Yeats, 1:17). Yeats, then, made Oedipus a central figure in his depiction of Irish political and intellectual heroes rather than using him merely to reflect his own personal obsessions. For Yeats, Oedipus was an admirable figure who had attained his true self, regardless of obstacles or consequences, and he was therefore a fitting role model for the Irish nationalist movement. In trying make Oedipus indispensable to the Irish nationalist self-image, Yeats draws parallels between the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell and the ancient Greek hero. In a

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sense, these parallels are obvious enough: like Oedipus, the Protestant Parnell was an outsider who embodied the aspirations of a people who would eventually treat him as a pariah. His downfall came, like Oedipus’s, because of sexual indiscretion: he was named as one of Catherine O’Shea’s lovers in divorce proceedings brought against her. This affair, acknowledged and publicized, disgraced Parnell in the eyes of many devout supporters, and he died without having won the political autonomy he so desired for Ireland. Parnell’s disgrace exposed the rift between pious Catholics and ardent nationalists, and added to the English perception that the Irish people were racially inferior (and perhaps even subhuman), impulsive, and unreliable. Yeats’s defiant poem ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ challenges those who would read Parnell’s fall as a symptom of Irish degradation to acknowledge his undeniable humanity: Leave nothing but the nothings that belong To this bare soul, let all men judge that can Whether it be an animal or a man.

(YCW 1:320)

These lines may remind us of Parnell’s affinity with Oedipus, as Oedipus bases his identity at Colonus on nothingness. Like Joyce, Yeats saw Parnell’s downfall as symptomatic of Ireland’s moral conformity and mob prudery, but in it Yeats also recognized a destructive principle in Oedipus’s story. Yeats translates a passage from Oedipus Tyrannus: A man becomes a tyrant out of insolence, He climbs and climbs, until all people call him great, He seems upon the summit, and God flings him thence.

(YCW 1:574–5)

While Yeats insists on the need for great leaders in times of unrest, he also makes it clear that the greater their talents, the greater the likelihood of a tragic fall. This fact satisfies Yeats’s taste for dramatic balance, but its proofs gave rise to some bitter remarks that showed his impatience with Irish nationalist politics and its intricacies: ‘Could we create a vision of the race as noble as that of Sophocles ... it would be attacked upon some trivial ground’ (Yeats, Autobiography, 335). Yeats was convinced that most modern Irish nationalist politicians lacked the great abilities he praises in men like Parnell. He says as much in ‘Parnell’s Funeral’:

Oedipal Humanism and Irish Nationalism in Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett 97 Had de Valera eaten Parnell’s heart No loose-lipped demagogue had won the day, No civil rancour torn the land apart. Had Cosgrave eaten Parnell’s heart, the land’s Imagination had been satisfied ... Had even O’Duffy – but I name no more Their school a crowd, his master solitude, Through Jonathan Swift’s dark grove he passed, and there Plucked bitter wisdom that enriched his blood.

(YCW 1:286)

Yeats links the fascist leader General Eoin O’Duffy with the great tradition he admires in Irish politics, and implies that de Valera and Cosgrave lack Parnell’s spirit and passion.1 These troubling comparisons show that, as Michael Steinman has phrased it, ‘Yeats recast all Irish heroism in Parnell’s image’ (Steinman, Yeats’s Heroic Figures, 69). In juxtaposing Swift with Parnell, Yeats also binds both Irishmen the more firmly to Oedipus, whose ‘bitter wisdom’ brought him to the ‘dark grove’ of the Eumenides at Colonus. Swift’s satiric wit and ‘saeve indignatio’ (this Latin phrase, which Yeats treasured, means ‘fierce indignation’) also seem to be prefigured in Oedipus’s prophetic curses: Oedipus ‘raged against his sons, and this rage was noble ... because it seemed to contain all life’ (AV 28). Yeats makes a more explicit connection between Oedipus and Swift in a letter to Ezra Pound. Here he asks, ‘When it was certain that [Oedipus] must bring himself under his own curse did he not still question, and when answered as the Sphinx had been answered, stricken with the horror that is in Gulliver ... did he not tear out his own eyes?’ (AV 28). Yeats’s ‘Blood and the Moon’ describes Swift ‘beating on his breast in sybilline frenzy blind / Because the heart in his blood-sodden breast had dragged him down into mankind’ (YCW 1:241–2). This image marks Swift as a tragic, Oedipal figure, since being part of ‘mankind’ is both cause and symptom of his downfall. This said, Yeats’s interest in Oedipus is not limited to Irish politics; Yeats was deeply impressed with Hegel’s account of Oedipus and human intellectual achievement: ‘Hegel identifies Asia with Nature; he sees the whole process of civilisation as an escape from Nature; partly achieved by Greece, fully achieved by Christianity. Oedipus – Greece – solved the riddle of the Sphinx ... though man himself remained ignorant and blundering. I accept his definition’ (AV 202–3). In Yeats’s Hegelian reading, Oedipus embodies the limits of knowl-

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edge. In ‘The Statues’ he suggests that humans ‘Climb to our proper dark’; an Oedipus-like figure embodies disillusioned wisdom: Empty eye-balls knew That knowledge increases unreality, that Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.

(YCW 1:345)2

Yeats also echoes Hegel’s emphasis on self-consciousness as the basis for all knowledge in his descriptions of Oedipus in A Vision. Yeats implies that Oedipus’s inability to see beyond his own imagination makes him fruitful as a model for the artist: ‘He knew nothing but his mind, and yet because he spoke that mind fate possessed it and kingdoms changed according to his blessing and his cursing. Delphi, that rock at earth’s navel, spoke through him, and though men shuddered and drove him away they spoke of ancient poetry, praising the boughs overhead, the grass under foot, Colonus and its horses’ (AV 28). Such a description suggests the wide-ranging consequences that Yeats hoped for from his preoccupations, be they national, personal, or mythic. Yeats’s hermetic habits of thought were no doubt one reason why, in the fragment ‘Colonus’s Praise’ (published in The Tower), he describes Oedipus as a ‘self-sown hero’ whose ‘self-begotten shape’ gives ‘Athenian intellect its mastery’ (YCW 1:222). Yeats suggests that Oedipus’s self-generated intellectual achievement makes him representative of his era – a distinction Yeats no doubt wished for himself. Yet Oedipus was too important to Yeats to remain a mere point of mythic reference; Yeats integrated the ancient hero into his mystical view of history and human identity. For instance, in A Vision Yeats juxtaposes Oedipus to Christ: ‘What if Christ and Oedipus ... are the two scales of a balance ...? What if every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one sacred, the other secular; one wise, the other foolish; one fair, the other foul; one divine, the other devilish? What if there is an arithmetic or geometry that can exactly ... date the coming of that something?’ (AV 28–9). For Yeats, only Christ can rival Oedipus in importance; he sees them as opposing tips of his historical and mythic gyres. The mention in this passage of the ‘coming’ of a ‘something’ reads as a direct reference to Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming,’ an annunciation of an inhuman, Oedipally inflected creature about to be ‘born’ from the Sphinx-like beast ‘slouching towards Bethlehem.’ Harold Bloom argues that the Sphinx of ‘The Second Coming’ is a ‘harbinger of “laughing ecstatic destruc-

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tion”’ (Bloom, Yeats, 145) reminiscent of Nietzsche’s Dionysian ‘laughing lions.’ Bloom also associates the Sphinx with a deeply Nietzschean ‘human self-doubt’ (Bloom, Yeats, 175), a view consonant with Yeats’s Sphinx as the creature whose riddle itself (rather than Oedipus’s answer) was what ‘called up man’ (AV 151). This Bloomian and Nietzschean version of the Sphinx seems evident in Yeats’s picture of this timeless monster in ‘The Double Vision of Michael Robartes’: On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw ... lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moon Gazed on all things known, all things unknown, In triumph of intellect With motionless head erect.

(YCW 1:325)

Unlike Hegel, Yeats is not content to describe the Sphinx as an image of nature to be tamed or the animal to be made human; Yeats associates the Sphinx directly with an ‘intellect’ declaring itself superior to nature, carrying its head ‘erect.’ Yet the Sphinx’s mixture of human and inhuman identities undercuts such declarations. Indeed, the Sphinx (as Oedipus’s questioner) becomes a focal point of Nietzsche’s goal of dissolving the ‘human’ in order to ‘retranslate man back into nature’ (quoted in Hutter, Nietzsche’s Way, 121). In Yeats’s thought, the Hegelian opposition between Oedipus and the Sphinx is less important than the Nietzschean view that both figures symbolize the uneasy coexistence of the human and the inhuman. Although Yeats’s Oedipus is a ‘self-sown, self-begotten shape’ who ‘thrives’ in the Eumenides’ garden, he is also implicitly compared to ‘the grey-leaved olive tree / Miracle-bred out of the living stone’ (YCP 544). This implication of Oedipus’s mutually exclusive origins (like Christ, he is both self-created and created by divine fiat) seems logically impossible, but to Yeats it makes him all the more representative of human nature; as Yeats puts it, ‘human life is impossible without strife’ between opposing principles (AV 79). Brian Arkins has made a persuasive argument along these lines: ‘Oedipus is the archetypal example of inner duality for Western man, and that ... is why Yeats found him so attractive. For Oedipus ... is an incredibly ambiguous figure, the solver of riddles who cannot solve his own, king and beggar, saviour and scapegoat, sighted and blind, vacillating spectac-

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ularly between knowledge and ignorance’ (Arkins, Builders, 127). This duality in Oedipus’s nature must certainly have appealed to Yeats, who wrote that ‘antithesis ... is the foundation of human nature’ (Yeats, Autobiography 86) and who felt that comprehending and becoming one’s opposite was, paradoxically, the only way to complete oneself. Oedipus’s life and death exemplify what Yeats’s Chorus in Oedipus at Colonus calls the ‘triumph of completed destiny’ (YCP 571). Although Oedipus was central to Yeats’s conception of human nature, he remained a symbol of Ireland’s particular situation. When Yeats resumed his translations of Sophocles in 1926, he believed that Ireland was in the last stages of assimilating various cultural influences, and was finally ready to produce its ‘particular culture’ (AV 205) – of which Yeats himself, naturally, would be a major part.3 Yeats also implies that Oedipus represented Ireland’s situation after having murdered its paternal figure by achieving Home Rule. Yeats’s translations testify to this symbolism; for instance, Yeats’s Oedipus accuses his son Polyneices of having ‘made [Oedipus] a nationless man’ (YCP 564). This phrase would have had an additional resonance in Ireland, which struggled, in the Irish nationalist Robert Emmet’s words, to ‘take [its] place among the nations’ (Emmet, Memoir, 547). Upon learning that his presence is once again desired in Thebes, Yeats’s Oedipus asks, ‘I have been made into nothing; am I to be made into a man once more?’ (YCP 533). Unlike many translators, including Fagles, Yeats downplays Oedipus’s sense of the simultaneity of being both ‘nothing’ and ‘a man,’ and instead makes these conditions sequential, as though for his Oedipus having been exiled made him a ‘nothing’ and being needed again at home made him a ‘man.’ After Oedipus recounts the story of his parentage, he tells of how ‘a man who had drunk too much cried out that I was not my father’s son ... Without consulting my father or my mother I went to Delphi’ (YCP 497). Oedipus’s suspicion that he might be illegitimate drives him to visit the oracle to learn the truth. Yeats’s Oedipus tries to reassure Jocasta: ‘Though I be proved the son of a slave, yes, even of three generations of slaves, you cannot be made base-born’ (YCP 505). The epithet ‘base-born’ is familiar to readers of ‘Under Ben Bulben,’ where ‘Irish poets’ are advised to scorn the newer ‘unremembering’ writers whose works are ‘out of shape from toe to top’ and who are themselves ‘base-born’ (YCW 1:400). Similar concerns about birth are also present in Yeats’s profoundly Oedipal 1938 play Purgatory, a work R.F. Foster has termed ‘Yeats’s

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own Oedipus at Colonus’ (Foster, W.B. Yeats, 2:619). In Purgatory, which is perhaps Yeats’s most disturbing play, Old Man is tormented both by the unpleasant thought of his mother’s eternally recurring sexual union with his drunken, socially inferior father in the afterlife, and by the personal guilt of having murdered his son. The Old Man expresses dismay at his mother’s love for his ‘animal’ father, musing, ‘She should have known he was not her kind’ (YCP 687). Here the Old Man touches on one of Yeats’s major concerns late in life: the forces assailing the purity of Ireland’s old Protestant families. According to Foster, an early draft of the plays even suggested that the Old Man’s mother ‘took a Catholic “man in the yard” for her husband’ (Foster, W.B. Yeats, 2:618). Even in the final version, Foster sees a strong statement that for Yeats ‘a marriage between the [Protestant] Ascendancy and a man of the people meant degeneracy’ (Foster, W.B. Yeats, 2:620). By the time Yeats wrote Purgatory, his political and eugenic views about traditional families and their lands had displaced any former interest in humanism. Indeed, Yeats professed admiration for Nazi Germany’s ‘special legislation,’ which he saw as enabling ‘old families to go on living where their fathers lived,’ but which was in fact part of racist policies aimed at favouring Aryans (quoted in Foster, W.B. Yeats, 2:628). The self-destructive nature of such preoccupations’ is suggested by the Old Man’s murder of his own son, thereby taking upon himself the entire guilt of his degraded and dying lineage. Although his ploy fails to bring him peace (he hears his father’s ghost approaching after the killings), he is convinced that he has done right: he exclaims, ‘Mankind can do no more’ (YCP 689) and he begs God to ‘Appease / The misery of the living and the remorse of the dead’ (YCP 689). Understandably, for Harold Bloom, Purgatory exemplifies the older Yeats’s anti-humanism, and he claims that ‘Sophoclean tragedy’ is the proper context in which to view its sinister message (Bloom, Yeats, 426).4 The difficulty with such a view, however, is that without some reference to humanity, there is no point in the ‘purgation’ the title would lead us to expect; the nature of the purgation was not apparent to T.S. Eliot (who otherwise admired the play). Purgatory cannot be fully understood unless read against Ireland’s Oedipal conflicts. For Yeats the Old Man in Purgatory clearly symbolizes Ireland’s political and social difficulties, and his attempt to end the cycle of Oedipal violence is, in David Lloyd’s words, a wish to ‘put an end to history’ as experienced in Ireland (Lloyd, ‘Poetics of Politics,’ 104). To murder one’s own son is a des-

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perate remedy to the dangers of a Freudian ‘Oedipus complex,’ yet in the violent context of Irish history it may seem symbolically justifiable. The historical ‘nightmare’ from which Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus was so eager to ‘escape’ also drives Yeats’s Old Man to try to be rid of the ‘dream’ that holds both him and his mother captive. As we see in Purgatory, Yeats’s focus had shifted considerably since his first interest in the Oedipus myth. Whereas he began by claiming that Irish leaders and intellectuals such as Parnell and Swift bore an ennobling resemblance to Oedipus, he ends by using the myth’s parricidal undertones to provoke horror. Yeats’s final play brings out a particularly ironic and bitter truth of the Oedipus story and Irish history as he saw it: the very means by which one claims human status (in Oedipus’s case, solving the riddle) end up making one appear the more inhuman (Oedipus’s thereby wins the throne and an incestuous marriage). Thus Yeats’s Old Man, in doing the utmost that ‘Mankind’ can do, betrays the basic laws that make human society possible. Oedipus and James Joyce’s Early Writings The Old Man’s gesture, however, may also allude to Yeats’s somewhat antagonistic relationship to the younger generation of Irish writers to which James Joyce belonged. Indeed, Yeats may have turned his attention to the Oedipus myth deliberately to comment on the rise of this new generation in Irish cultural and political life. Joyce’s friend and rival Oliver Gogarty (the Hellenophilic model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses) convinced Yeats to begin his first adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Joyce’s attitude towards Yeats was little short of openly parricidal in its lack of respect: according to George Russell’s account, on his first meeting with Yeats, Joyce told the poet that he was ‘deteriorating,’ and Yeats himself recorded that Joyce deplored the fact that Yeats was ‘too old’ for Joyce to influence (quoted in Ellmann, Joyce, 102–3). Yeats was, however, influenced by men younger than himself (primarily Ezra Pound), suggesting that Joyce’s conceited remark was less ridiculous than it might seem. Yet such a reading of Yeats adds little to our understanding; it is more fruitful to show how Joyce retained Yeats’s interest in Oedipal tropes while distancing himself from Yeats (and the rest of the Irish literary establishment) in other respects. That two writers with such different views of Ireland and human nature should have employed the same mythic hero speaks for Oedipus’s inescapable influence.

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The young Joyce seem to have drawn (perhaps indirectly) on the Oedipus myth in his first literary production, his juvenile play A Brilliant Career. The play, reportedly modelled on Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, was lost (or, more likely, destroyed) after being praised somewhat tepidly by the critic William Archer. It is intriguing that Joyce should have chosen as his model An Enemy of the People, which critics, including Norman Rhodes,5 have argued is based on Oedipus Tyrannus. Ellmann describes the plot: The hero was, like Stockmann in An Enemy of the People, a young doctor ... He betrays his love for a woman named Angela by finding himself a wife better able to further his career. This move enables him to become mayor of the town. A plague ... breaks out, and the mayor has to combat it. He is greatly aided by an unknown woman who organizes assistance for the sick. In the third act the plague is defeated ... A demonstration of gratitude to the mayor takes place, and in the course of it he is confronted with his unknown coadjutor only to discover it is Angela, now married to a jealous husband ... The doctor sees his brilliant career now turned lusterless; Angela bitterly departs. (Ellmann, Joyce, 79)

Joyce’s play, as Ellmann’s sketch suggests, is caught between the Ibsenist valorization of Oedipal heroism and an older, tragic narrative that seems more in keeping with Joyce’s sceptical attitude towards Irish nationalism. A Brilliant Career seems to be a parable about the dangers of sacrificing ideals for political gain: Angela is the idealized, mythic Ireland the hero renounces to attain his worldly goals. While Joyce may have felt that using Ibsen’s insights to construct his own national allegory in A Brilliant Career was a sufficient advance, the plays fits too neatly into what Joyce no doubt already recognized was an excessively idealized nationalist rhetoric. Yet if the basic plot of Ibsen’s and Sophocles’ plays was surprisingly apt for Joyce’s allegorical treatment of a conscientious individual in the collective frenzy of Irish nationalism, it was perhaps even more suited to expressing the conflicted position of an ambitious artist in the welter of political upheaval that was Ireland in the early twentieth century. Thus the conflict between an independent hero and his destructive (often maternal) surroundings has a deep significance for our understanding of Joyce’s subsequent work and aesthetic pronouncements. The first extant work marked by Joyce’s Oedipal preoccupations is Stephen Hero – named for Joyce’s earliest version of a Greek

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hero/martyr figure whose mythical associations make his human status problematic. Jean-Joseph Goux has described the typical Greek hero’s initiation into ‘manhood’ as ‘a second birth’: ‘becoming a “man” ... in a sense means ceasing to be one’s mother’s child so as to become one’s father’s son ... a powerful vital link, an umbilical cord, must be painfully and irreversibly severed’ (Goux, Oedipus, 42). Thus, a hero must confront and kill a female monster, like the Medusa (Perseus) or the Sphinx (Oedipus), to become properly human. Stephen Dedalus’s explicit wish to ‘to substitute the intellectual navelcord for the maternal’ (SH 13) is a variant on Oedipus, who wishes to detach from his own birth (and its accompanying fate) by destroying a maternal monster. Yet Stephen is not immediately ready to acknowledge this precedent for his heroic path; no doubt speaking for a young James Joyce, he calls ancient Greek drama ‘heroic, monstrous’ (SH 89). Stephen even describes Ibsen as the one writer whose works enable him to silence ‘the monster in him, now grown to a reasonably heroic stage’ (SH 41). Stephen’s quest for artistic and intellectual freedom is thus figured as a search for humanity, an end to his youthful monstrous identity. Stephen’s anxious suppression of his ‘monstrous’ self is also visible in the life of one of Joyce’s most obviously Oedipal men, Mr James Duffy of ‘A Painful Case.’ Many critics have argued that Freudian Oedipal principles govern the vexed relationship between Duffy and Mrs Sinico. Ellen Carol Jones has described the ‘Oedipal economy’ of Duffy’s attitude towards Mrs Sinico: ‘the (m)other is figured as an abjected object, as that which has always already been lost ... the word known to all men, the word that can be spoken only by or through the (dead) body of the mother’ (Jones, Joyce, 13). Garry Leonard agrees, claiming that ‘Mrs. Sinico ... is a maternal figure. She will function for Duffy as what Lacan calls a (m)Other ... In essence, the mother grants an image to the child, but it is an image that he can believe in only because she sees it too’ (Leonard, Reading Dubliners Again, 218). This Oedipal situation is universal, according to Jacques Lacan, who puts the problem thus: ‘the human being only sees his form materialized, whole, the mirage of himself, outside of himself’ (Lacan, Seminar, 1:140). In other words, no one has any internal guarantee of humanity; each person needs an ‘other’ to confirm it from without. Despite the urgency of these psychoanalytic readings, they miss something important about ‘A Painful Case.’ This story, so realistic on

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the surface, retells the meeting between Oedipus and the Sphinx: Mrs Sinico, a married lady frustrated with her would-be lover’s selfabsorbed coldness, throws herself to her death, just as the Sphinx flings herself off her rock after Oedipus has answered her riddle. Like Oedipus eschewing physical combat with the Sphinx, Mr Duffy rejects a sexual encounter with Mrs Sinico and contents himself with words. Mr Duffy, with his abhorrence of ‘anything which betokened physical or mental disorder’ (D 108), is a man of regular habits and inflexible morality, whose austere life is calculated to afford him maximum autonomy. His singleness of mind is disturbed, however, by Mrs Sinico’s eyes, which seem to be ‘steady’ and ‘defiant’ though their gaze is ‘confused by what seemed a deliberate swoon of the pupil into the iris,’ which bespeaks ‘a temperament of great sensibility’ (D 109). The ‘half-disclosed nature’ beneath her ‘prudence’ shows itself as an ‘almost maternal solicitude,’ and prompts her to urge him to ‘let his nature open to the full’ (D 110). The obtuse Duffy finally realizes that he must try to understand the ‘two images’ of Mrs Sinico’s character (D 116), but he is too prudish. Nevertheless, Duffy is briefly intoxicated by her encouragement, and fantasizes that ‘in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature,’ just as she seems in danger of slipping beneath her humanity into a lower ‘nature’ (D 111). He continues to warn his would-be lover about ‘the soul’s incurable loneliness’ and asserts that ‘We cannot give ourselves’ to others or to our animal passions (the ‘nature’ Mrs Sinico strives to unleash); he is certain that as human beings ‘we are our own’ (D 111) and cannot enter into a larger community. Duffy’s experience reverses the situation that led to Parnell’s fall, but with the same result: Duffy ends up every bit as ‘alone’ as Parnell. The story suggests that Ireland affords little choice for would-be lovers; they either break the moral covenant or lose contact with humanity by repressing their desires. After breaking off with Mrs Sinico Duffy buys copies of Nietzsche’s works (in which he might read exhortations to risk transcending the limitations of human nature), but he seems not to have thought much about his aborted affair until he reads a newspaper account of Mrs Sinico’s suicide. When he peruses the squalid details, he feels that his abandonment has been vindicated: ‘The whole narrative of her death revolted him and it revolted him to think that he had ever spoken to her of what he held sacred’ (D 115). Yet he has second thoughts and wanders into Phoenix Park (whose name will, appropriately enough,

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become ‘Sphinxish Park’ in Finnegans Wake), where he and she once walked. Here he asks, ‘Why had he withheld life from her?’ (D 117). Duffy is disturbed by the ‘prostrate’ lovers he dimly perceives; these ‘human figures’ suggest that his own moralizing stance is false and incomplete. He is shattered by the realization that the ‘venal and furtive loves’ sheltered by the park’s underbrush are as much a part of human nature as moral principles or social respectability, and he reproaches himself severely for spurning Mrs Sinico: ‘One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame’ (D 117). His recognition of her full humanity corrects his earlier view that her alcoholism and need for physical gratification showed her to be ‘one of those wrecks on which civilisation has been reared’ – something less than human (D 115). Duffy tries to dismiss Mrs Sinico in ‘pseudo-Nietzschean terms’ (Leonard, Reading Dubliners Again, 224); Duffy cites her lack of ‘purpose’ and her weakness in forming bad ‘habits’ (D 115). Duffy’s disregard for human love bespeaks his wish for a superhuman existence, yet the ending suggests that his refusal to accept humanity predisposes him to suffer the only too-human loneliness that haunts him. The paradox of Duffy’s situation is that he comes to esteem Mrs Sinico as a fully human being only when she appears most base, as a drunken suicide). Her earlier gesture of physical affection is put in proper context as an expression of her thwarted desires, and Duffy recognizes that his self-esteem has depended on his unwillingness to allow her to express her full humanity. Oedipus in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake Although ‘A Painful Case’ explores universal Oedipal dilemmas, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake offer far more complex engagements with Oedipal narratives. Ulysses is the great humanistic anti-Freudian novel of the twentieth century, demonstrating Joyce’s reaction against both Freudianism and Irish provincialism. For instance, Stephen Dedalus’s theory about Shakespeare’s identification with the elder Hamlet (the dead king) rather than with his son directly refutes Freud’s Oedipal interpretation. Moreover, the novel’s theme of the son striving to be reconciled with the father is a powerful counter-argument to the Freudian assumption that there is an intrinsically antagonistic animus in sons against fathers. Leopold Bloom’s ostentatious lack of sexual

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possessiveness concerning his wife may also counter Freudian fatherson Oedipal rivalry; Bloom even goes so far as to try to engage Stephen, his figurative son, to give Molly language lessons. In Ulysses, the father also strives to be atoned with the son; Bloom’s unwillingness to have sex with Molly after the death of his own son Rudy bespeaks paternal guilt that would be aggravated by renewed sexual relations. Far from being eager for a return to the maternal womb of colonial Irish life, Stephen wishes to escape the devouring mother ‘sow’ that he imagines representing Ireland. Stephen is only parricidal insofar as he is an intellectual and an artist; pointing to his head, he says, ‘in here it is I must kill the priest and the king’ (U 481: 4436–7). The novel’s humanist message (‘Love’ is ‘The word known to all men’) has induced readers to see Bloom – the converted Jew who wanders through Dublin affirming the value of human existence – as a representative human figure. Bloom’s obvious link to Odysseus has concealed the centrality of Oedipus in modernist literature, both in Ireland and more broadly. Nevertheless, Oedipus has a significant place in Ulysses, in part because of Buck Mulligan and his connection to John Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (a play with significant Oedipal subtexts). Synge’s play, which provoked a riot at the Abbey Theatre in 1907, features a protagonist named Christy Mahon, who announces that he has killed his father. Christy’s last name, pronounced ‘Man,’ implies that he is a microcosm of humanity (as well as a Christ figure), though Synge’s dialogue was celebrated for portraying the speech of Aran Islanders with a shrewd combination of imagination and fidelity. The absence of any social sanction against Christy for his apparent parricide shocked Irish audiences; Christy wins the peasant women’s hearts by confessing his crime, and it is only when Christy’s father turns up still alive does public opinion condemn this would-be murderer – and then merely as a liar. The implication that Ireland had not internalized what Freud would see as one of the two basic laws of civilized life (the ban on parricide) was enough to cause a scandal on its own, never mind Synge’s depiction of Irish women as violent and lustful. Joyce, then living abroad, quickly heard of the scandal surrounding Synge’s play. Synge’s success in grafting a universal mythic theme, Oedipal parricide, onto a peculiarly Irish situation struck Joyce forcibly. As late as Finnegans Wake, we note Synge-inspired Oedipal details; for instance, ‘Oedipus Rex’ is rendered as ‘oddman rex’ (FW 61: 28), evoking the

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description of Christy given by Synge’s Pegeen: ‘I’m thinking you’re an odd man, Christy Mahon. The oddest walking fellow I ever set my eyes on.’ Christy answers: ‘What would any be but odd men and they living lonesome in the world?’ (Synge, Playboy, 41). Yet Joyce was ambivalent about Synge’s achievement and jealous of his success; Synge had pursued exactly the path Joyce rejected, of remaining in Ireland to write in the speech of peasants. Joyce’s mixed feelings show in direct allusions to Synge in Ulysses, most of which come from Buck Mulligan. He refers to Synge with obsessive regularity, calling Shakespeare ‘the chap who writes like Synge’ (U 163: 510–1), glorying in the fact that Synge blames Stephen for Mulligan’s crude gestures (urinating on Synge’s ‘halldoor’), and imitating the speech of Synge’s Aran islanders (U 164: 558–60). Mulligan pays special attention to Synge’s feet, calling him ‘the tramper’ and describing him as wearing a type of footwear called ‘pampooties’ (U 164: 369–70). Mulligan’s obsession with Synge and with feet links him with Oedipus (‘He who knows the foot’ or ‘Swellfoot’). Mulligan is also linked to Thebes’s plague by his concern with the poor health that afflicts Ireland; he describes his compatriots as ‘Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horsedung and consumptives’ spits’ (U 12, 412-14). The old woman who brings milk to the Tower, who is identified with Ireland as a whole, asks Mulligan’s advice about her health, casting Mulligan in the role of healer and emancipator. As if to further suggest his redemptive status, Mulligan has recently saved a man from drowning. Stephen’s admiration for this feat is accentuated by his own fear of water and the inhuman fluidity of identity it connotes: ‘I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his death. I ... With him together down ... I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost’ (U 38: 327–30). His mother’s death is part of this frightening loss of control, and the humanity of dying people is an additional cause for terror, yet Mulligan has braved this threatened dissolution of selfhood and human identity. Significantly, Mulligan’s ideas about Ireland’s future prospects centre on his nostalgia for ancient Greece; he tells Stephen that ‘if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it’ (U 6: 157–8). A ‘Paradise of pretenders,’ Ireland is a modern Thebes, where Oedipus the usurper has taken power; hence, Stephen calls Mulligan ‘Usurper’ (U 19: 744) after the latter has handed over his key to the Martello tower (the omphalos of their

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would-be Hellenic island). Yet even as Mulligan plans to oust Stephen, he jokingly flatters Stephen, calling him ‘the Übermensch’ (U 19: 708–9) and implying that the two are ‘hyperborean,’ superior to other Irish people. Joyce’s picture of Mulligan’s strategy plays on the Nietzschean idea of the ‘Superman’ while making it clear that this is just another manifestation of the ‘will-to-power’ that people use to displace each other. Mulligan claims a superhuman kinship with Stephen to induce his friend to let down his guard long enough to be exploited. As a contrast to Mulligan’s early mock-heroic but symbolically important status, Simon Dedalus brands Mulligan a carrier of moral pestilence – ‘That Mulligan is a contaminated bloody doubledyed ruffian by all accounts. His name stinks all over Dublin’ (U 73: 63–5) – and looks vaguely forward to this Oedipal saviour’s tragic end: ‘I’ll tickle his catastrophe’ (U 73: 67–8). Of course, Mulligan eludes his ‘catastrophe’; indeed, his comically Oedipal status underlines Hegel’s point that tragedy becomes comedy as history progresses. Joyce implies that (despite Yeats’s perception of a ‘terrible beauty’ in the Irish uprising) his homeland is still a place where, to adopt Yeats’s phrase, ‘motley is worn’ (YCW 180). Thus, when Mulligan enters the library ‘blithe in motley,’ the serious discussion of Hamlet is interrupted, and a comic ‘Entr’acte’ ensues (U 162: 484–5); Mulligan supplants Hamlet in the group’s imagination. Indeed, Mulligan objects to Stephen’s habit of discussing Hamlet, which suggests a competition between him and Hamlet originating in their common Oedipal ancestry. Mulligan is also Stephen’s alter ego: his classical education makes him Stephen’s intellectual equal, and his irreverence towards religion is an extreme version of Stephen’s scepticism. The links between Mulligan and Stephen are accentuated by those between Mulligan and Bloom; although the paternal Bloom disapproves of Mulligan’s parasitical antics, he concedes that ‘Dr Mulligan was a versatile allround man’ (U 507: 287–8). Bloom too is acknowledged by Lenehan to be an ‘allround man’ (U 193: 581), suggesting that the callow Stephen might benefit from imitating his friend’s worldliness, just as he is aided by Bloom’s tolerant attitude. Nevertheless, Mulligan ultimately betrays Stephen by evicting him and abandoning him to the whores and policemen of Dublin’s red-light district, an act that mimics Ireland’s disgusted and hostile reaction to Joyce’s work. Mulligan’s motives for this betrayal remain obscure; his status as an Oedipal usurper rests on

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a basic flaw in human nature as primal and inexplicable as the mysterious sins of the Earwicker family in Finnegans Wake. Indeed, the enigmatic, malignant Mulligan comes to represent the mythic subtext that follows the unwitting Bloom through his wanderings in Dublin, undermining his embattled faith in human perfectibility. Bloom’s mythic precursor, Ulysses, like Oedipus (who realizes that only in becoming ‘nothing’ can he finally become a ‘man’), strategically abandons the idea of his own humanity; while preparing to escape the Cyclops’s lair, he says his name is ‘Noman’ (Odysseus’s name means literally ‘no-man Zeus’ [McHugh, Annotations, 187]). This ‘no-man,’ an embodiment of what Joyce termed ‘the spirit that always denies,’ is a necessary antithesis to the positive force that Joyce once saw in Swedenborg’s ‘celestial man,’ whose eternal ‘angelic life’ issues forth in ‘love and wisdom’ (JCW 221–2). Here, Joyce’s vision of a necessarily divided and conflicted human nature comes close to Yeats’s; Joyce’s essay on William Blake and Daniel Defoe suggests that Joyce, like Yeats, found a source for his conception of a divine and demonic humanity in Blake’s Albion. Richard Ellmann notes that this Blakean figure is an ‘archetypal human being’ who clearly prefigures Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, ‘father of humanity and symbol of everybody in Finnegans Wake’ (Ellmann, Joyce, 319). Thus, to explore the common ground between Yeats’s and Joyce’s versions of Oedipus, and to explain how Joyce’s conception of humanity changes when he begins to foreground the myth itself, requires a turn to the frequently baffling Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s early fiction posits individuation from the mother, a severance of all possible incestuous bonds, as the key to attaining full human status, but in Finnegans Wake this inviolable selfhood becomes less important, and incest returns as a possibility (indeed, a likelihood). As a result of this radically unstable picture of identity, Oedipus’s status in Joyce’s work shifts; whereas previously he had been, at best, a subtext, in Finnegans Wake he becomes a protagonist of sorts – though in Finnegans Wake characters merge into each other and into the landscape, and language and identity seem to be in danger of slipping back into an undifferentiated state where human taboos against incest, for example, are forgotten. Hence the artist-man Shem (Stephen/James Joyce’s surrogate) is described as merging back into primeval chaos; he is ‘transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal’ (FW 185: 34– 186: 1).

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Just as Ulysses rewrites Homer’s Odyssey with modern situations and characters, so the Wake transforms Sophocles’ classic play into a ‘pantaloonade’ called ‘Oropus Roxy’ (FW 513: 21–2). Similarly, Dedalus, Joyce’s archetypal artist, merges with Oedipus to produce a rather less exalted personality named ‘did a piss’ (FW 185: 23), a figure who recalls Buck Mulligan (who ‘pissed’ in Synge’s halldoor). The urinary theme would seem to place Oedipus firmly in bibulous Ireland, but other passages imply that Oedipus hails from the far east: the monarch named ‘Tummer the Lame the Tyrannous’ (FW 71: 16–17) conflates the Asian ruler Tamerlane and Oedipus Tyrannus (both kings were reputedly lame). Oedipus is also the ‘oddman rex,’ or the odd man out, as well as the humanist archetype. Thus the name ‘oddman’ is soon transmuted into ‘Oetzmann’ (FW 66:32), the name of a London furnishing company (McHugh, Annotations, 66). These Oedipally inflected names culminate in ‘Oxmanwold’ (FW 73: 28), a place name that, MacHugh argues, alludes to the name ‘Ostman’ or Viking, and recalls the name ‘Oxmantown,’ which designated North Dublin in the Middle Ages (McHugh, Annotations, 73). The implication that ‘ox’ and ‘man’ might have merged at this place is worth noting, but Joyce’s larger point is that Oedipus, like his hero HCE, is everywhere and nowhere at once. When his sleepy narrator rouses himself to exclaim ‘Pity poor Haveth Childers Everywhere with Mudder!’ (FW 535: 29–30), we must assume that HCE, whose initials are present in this phrase, like Oedipus, has had children with his mother. His omnipresence as a universal tragic hero-victim means that his incestuously begotten children are indeed everywhere. As in Ulysses, however, there is a particularly Irish subtext to the Oedipus myth in Finnegans Wake. We cannot help but recognize the Irish accent proposing a drunken toast to Oedipus: ‘God serf yous kingly, adipose rex! I had four in the morning and a couple of the lunch and three later on, but your saouls to the dhaoul, do ye. Finnk. Fime. Fudd?’ (FW 499: 16–18). This speaker makes the many-legged creature of the Sphinx’s riddle seem to result from excessive drinking (he had ‘four in the morning’ and so on) and thus draws the link between alcohol and the merging of human and inhuman identities that typifies the Wake. The links between the Phoenix Park crimes and Oedipus’s transgressions are obvious (the murder of a male authority figure and illicit, incestuous congress between ‘phaynix cupplerts’ [FW 331: 1–2]), but in renaming the park itself ‘Sphinxish Pairc’ (FW 324: 7) Joyce also invokes the Sphinx, whose riddle has been read as a veiled

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allusion to humans’ sexual origins (the four-legged creature is the mother and father united in intercourse, the three-legged creature is the sexually aroused father, etc.). Why, apart from its mystery, should the Sphinx be so important to these crimes? The answer may lie in the Sphinx’s maternal, devouring nature and its symbolic connection with Irish history. In the Wake, Joyce refers to ‘Cliopatrick (the sow) princess of parked porkers’ (FW 91: 6–7), alluding to his comparison of Ireland with the old sow who eats her farrow: the mysterious Cleopatra is a sphinxlike ‘porker’ who eats her ‘parked’ farrow/pharaoh. This aspect of Ireland is symbolized by Phoenix Park, scene of both political murder and sexual trespass. Yet, as in Yeats’s work, Joyce’s Oedipus does not belong merely to Ireland. His identity (like that of humanity) remains slippery; his name morphs many times, and the riddle he once solved to defeat the Sphinx is revived with fresh ambiguities. In Finnegans Wake we encounter various forms of a riddle initially asked by Shem: ‘when is a man not a man?’ (FW 170: 5). This riddle is asked in various forms, and is evidently what Bernard Benstock calls ‘the logical sequel of the Oedipus riddle’ (Benstock, Joyce-agains Wake, 207), in that it takes the notion of ‘man’ (Oedipus’s solution to the Sphinx’s riddle) and interrogates its ambiguities. Patrick McCarthy too endorses the connection between this riddle and Oedipus’s, noting the irony that ‘Oedipus is able to solve the riddle for man but is unable to see himself clearly – to understand individual man’ (McCarthy, Riddles, 27). The first answer given to Shem’s riddle – ‘when he is a – yours till the rending of the rocks, – sham’ (FW 170: 23–4) – is thus partly the antidote to Oedipus’s tragic answer to the Sphinx; if Oedipus had realized that he would become a ‘sham’ king and husband, he might not have been so confident about evading the fate predicted by the oracle. Because Finnegans Wake substitutes riddles and puns for narrative, one could read the entire text as a gloss on Shem’s riddle, as Brett Bourbon has done in his gloss on the second version of this riddle, which Joyce presents as ‘the first and last rittlerattle of the anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam whenas it is a. Watch!’ (FW 607: 10–12). Bourbon reads this formulation as follows: A ‘nam’ is an inverted man and a name; a ‘nought,’ a negated ought and a knot and a not. ‘[A]nniversea nam nought a nam’ casts this inverted man as ‘anam,’ a mother (ana is Turkish for ‘mother’), the anniverse ... We might rewrite the riddle ... : ‘When is a man [or rather a negated and

Oedipal Humanism and Irish Nationalism in Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett 113 inverted man] or a name not a man or a name [or a nothing] whenas itis a-(blank); but not a thing at all but that which is shown by us reading Finnegans Wake.’ (Bourbon, Finding, 160–1)

Thus, for Bourbon, Joyce posits his own deeply ambiguous text as a precondition for solving the riddle of human identity. Moreover, in Bourbon’s view, Joyce’s puns and riddles lead to an epiphany about the teasingly indefinable nature of a human being; Bourbon, speaking on behalf of the mysterious being Joyce is gesturing towards, writes, ‘I am the unity that is not sayable but nevertheless is. Such asymmetries show as blank limits against and as which we figure and picture ourselves as human. [Finnegans Wake] shows both death and sleep to be such limits, and in doing so deforms language into a similar kind of limit in which we see ourselves by asking what we are when we are not’ (Bourbon, Finding, 162). Such a deformation of language makes it hard to believe that the project of humanism, which depends on the ability of words to show us who we are, is viable for Joyce. As Bourbon puts it, in Finnegans Wake, ‘Every answer to “What does it mean to be human” is a restatement of another riddle’ (Bourbon, Finding, 20). Thus, although Joyce is generally perceived as a humanist, Bourbon suggests that he presents a view of humanity in need of definition by factors it cannot control or understand, and links him to St Augustine, who, in Bourbon’s words, ‘pictured human beings as radically dependent on God, highlighting the fallenness and emptiness of human life’ (Bourbon, Finding, 149). Bourbon’s argument gains resonance when juxtaposed with Lionel Trilling’s dismayed realization that ‘the controlling tendency of Joyce’s genius’ in his later years was ‘to move through the fullest realization of the human, all-too-human, to that which transcends and denies the human’ (Trilling, Last, 55–6). Yet Bourbon and Trilling have forgotten Joyce’s investment in the central humanistic discourse of early twentieth-century literature: Freudianism. Joyce was too well versed in the Freudian assertion that a desire for incest was part of our human nature to abandon the narrative and linguistic possibilities of incest. Yet Joyce’s Wakean version of incest is not primarily the mother-son variety; instead, it centres on father-daughter relationships. This incestuous preoccupation may underlie a curious moment in the Wake, when we encounter a female variation on the riddle discussed above: ‘when is a maid nought a maid’ (FW 495: 6). The

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answer to this riddle about virginity seems to be when a man will ‘go to anyposs length for her’ (FW 495: 6–7). Benstock argues that we should read ‘anyposs length’ as a garbled reference to Oedipus Rex (Benstock, Joyce-agains Wake, 209), and McCarthy fleshes out this point: ‘A more complete interpretation ... becomes possible once the importance of the Oedipal theme is noted: a maid ceases to be a maid when she ... tempts her father (symbolic of all authority figures) to a fall’ and thus loses her virginity (McCarthy, Riddles, 101). While this broad interpretation of the Oedipal theme as incest in general is not wholly persuasive, the importance of the incest motif in the Wake is clear. Indeed, Joyce seems determined to allow ‘everybiddy’ to sleep with ‘everybilly,’ and the ‘freudful mistake’ (FW 411: 36) of incest seems well-nigh ubiquitous. Beckett and Oedipus as a Human Paradigm Joyce’s use of Oedipal and incestuous tropes as a characteristically human element carried over into the work of his sometime secretary and protégé Samuel Becket, who makes Oedipus a touchstone for many of his strange protagonists. Joyce’s attitude towards both Ireland and the Oedipus myth influenced Beckett, who, according to his biographer Deirdre Bair, found in Joyce a sort of ‘surrogate father’ (Bair, Samuel Beckett, 83). Joyce’s damning portrayal of Irish nationalism as a symbolically incestuous force may have prompted Beckett’s decision to abandon Ireland (though he returned often to visit his mother) for France, where he found greater intellectual freedom and artistic stimulation as well as a new language. Beckett’s debt to Joyce should not obscure his distinctive treatment of Oedipus; Beckett sweeps aside the mythic and linguistic disguises that Joyce employs to universalize the Oedipus myth. Beckett rejects humanism out of hand and foregrounds the myth’s incestuous themes, furthering his goal of (as Paul Sheehan puts it) ‘enlarging the inhuman potential of narrative’ (Sheehan, Modernism, 170). As Phil Baker has remarked, ‘the classic Oedipal scenario does not correspond in any simple way with Beckett’s life – on the contrary, he seems to have loved his father and found his mother difficult’ (Baker, Beckett, 40). Beckett’s problems with his emotionally demanding, unliterary mother were serious enough that she could easily have come to represent the devouring sow-like Sphinx of Finnegans Wake. Indeed, Beckett’s Kleinian therapist, a Dr Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, urged Beckett

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(fruitlessly) to avoid returning to visit his mother in Ireland; her strenuous disapproval and inconsistent behaviour caused her son a good deal of misery, especially after her husband’s death. He found it difficult to abandon her, however, since they shared a typically Irish emotional closeness; as Deirdre Bair writes, ‘His relationship with [his mother] was not really so unusual in a country where men tended [in the words of Beckett’s friend George Reavey] “to make sweethearts of their mothers”’ (Bair, Samuel Beckett, 210). What Bair calls ‘the propensity for Irishmen to perform services for and pay attentions to their mothers which are usually reserved for wives’ (Bair, Samuel Beckett, 668) has less to do with incestuous desires than with familial loyalty and the often dismal prospects for marriage in rural Ireland, where families were closely knit and few eligible young women remained so for long. After Beckett had left Ireland and his trying family life, he fell into another sticky domestic situation with the Joyces: Joyce’s daughter Lucia conceived an unrequited love for Beckett, making the relationship between the two writers uncomfortably familial. Beckett’s rejection of Lucia eventually led to a bitter, albeit temporary break with Joyce. Joyce’s blindness and imperiousness made him a model for Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame and an Oedipus at Colonus figure in his own right. Beckett’s use of Oedipal motifs is not only an attempt to mythologize his Irish experiences, but also to come to terms with what it meant to leave Ireland only to find himself under the wing of the greatest modern Irish novelist. As Richard Begam remarks, Beckett’s protagonists often resemble ‘parodic versions’ of Stephen Dedalus, since they are ‘vagrant derelicts who wander from place to place, carrying a stick (instead of an ashplant) and seeking their alter egos’ (Begam 6). This indebtedness to Joyce crops up in intriguing ways in Beckett’s work; for instance, in the ‘Addenda’ to Beckett’s novel Watt, we are told of ‘Watt’s Davus complex,’ an Oedipal condition signalled by his ‘morbid dread of sphinxes’ (W 251). As Phil Baker has noted, the expression ‘Davus Complex’ alludes to the slave in Terence’s comedy Andria who says, ‘“Davus sum, non Oedipus,”’ as if to say, ‘“I am a simple man and do not understand riddles like Oedipus”’ (Baker, Beckett, 182). The development of a ‘neatly inverted “I-am-notOedipus” complex’ (Baker, Beckett, 182) in Beckett’s writing was no doubt a way of diminishing any potential rivalry with Joyce by proclaiming himself unworthy of the Oedipal mastery and riddle-solving ability on which Joyce clearly prided himself.

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Yet there is more at stake in such Oedipal allusions than pride of place among expatriate Irish writers. Beckett’s inability to see himself or his characters in a fully Oedipal role (despite the amply incestuous undertones of his life and fiction) may derive from his unwillingness to accept the universal human nature or destiny that Oedipus represents. While Joyce, like Hegel, insists upon the human centrality of the artist, Beckett praises what he called the ‘deanthropomorphization of the artist’ (quoted in Bair, Samuel Beckett, 191). Furthermore, though Beckett remarked upon Joyce’s Brunonian habit of synthesizing human opposites (exemplified by the reconciliation of the brothers in Finnegans Wake), he did not share it. As Barbara Reich Gluck has argued, Beckett’s characters experience the ‘schism between the two major divisions of man, his exterior and his interior, his body and his mind’ (Gluck 80). The apparent opposites of individuality and universality are also reconciled in Joyce, as Beckett acknowledges in his article ‘Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce’: ‘Individuality is the concretion of universality, and every individual action is at the same time superindividual’ (OE 7). According to Beckett, Joyce’s Viconian position demands recognition that ‘Humanity is its work in itself. God acts on her, but by means of her’ (OE 7). The paradox is that the heroes who would embody the divine totality embodied by the human are doomed to fail; as he says, ‘Humanity is divine, but no man is divine’ (OE 7). As if to point to the absurdity of this Joycean/Viconian system, Beckett is careful to show that Watt is only tentatively a human being; he is a ‘creature that in spite of everything presented a large number of human characteristics’ and is therefore to be called ‘a man’ (W 83). Watt must soon get used to a ‘loss of species’ (W 85); his ‘anthropomorphic insolence’ is of necessarily ‘short duration’ (W 202). Not being Oedipus, Watt can’t be human for long. The anti-humanist Oedipal theme is developed much more explicitly in Molloy, where the protagonist, Molloy, as if parodying Oedipus’s act of ridding Jocasta of her husband Laius (so that he himself can unwittingly take his father’s place in her bed), runs over a dog on his bicycle and is befriended by its lady owner. Molloy, however, openly accepts his Freudian ties to his mother. Whereas Oedipus is, as he thinks, fleeing from his mother and father when he kills Laius, Molloy, as if embracing his Oedipal fate, is happily on his way to his mother when he hits the dog. This ‘dog’ is also a ‘god’ and Molloy recognizes an important substitution: ‘I would as it were take the place of the dog I had killed’ (M 63). The futility of this substitu-

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tion of humanity for divinity has already been suggested: ‘What I liked in anthropology was its inexhaustible faculty of negation, its relentless definition of man, as though he were no better than God, in terms of what he is not’ (M 52). The human ambition of replacing God has been soured by its success, as witnessed in the rise of anthropology; ‘Man’ vanishes into a simple negation of what isn’t quite human. The play on dog/god implies that human identity is that which can read itself as animal or as divine, depending on whether we read forwards or backwards (or whether we see our species progressing or regressing). Beckett also points to the fact that all definitions must take a differential or relational form (‘Man’ is different from animals and from God, yet has things in common with each). Molloy comments on the breakdown of binary oppositions such as that between the ‘human’ and the ‘natural’ world, asserting that, far from being removed from the natural world, ‘man is [a] vast conglomerate of nature’s kingdoms’ (M 151). Individual identities in Beckett’s fiction inevitably succumb to this doubleness, partly because his narrators are so willing to confess their confusions and misapprehensions of others. For instance, Molloy suspects that such a mix-up was partly responsible for his Oedipal crimes; as he says, his mother ‘took me for my father. I took her for my mother and she took me for my father’ (M 21). Beckett hints that these misunderstandings grant Molloy an otherwise forbidden incestuous enjoyment; as Molloy admits, ‘I satisfied a deep and doubtless unacknowledged need, the need to have a Ma, that is a mother, and to proclaim it, audibly’ (M 21). This infantile ‘need’ marks Molloy’s entire existence, since ‘all my life, I think I had been going to my mother, with the purpose of establishing our relations on a less precarious footing’ (M 118). Even if no intercourse has taken place, Molloy’s coarse comments make it clear that he wants his audience to believe otherwise: ‘Look at Mammy. What rid me of her, in the end? ... Ah the old bitch, a nice dose she gave me, she and her lousy unconquerable genes’ (M 108). The Oedipally inflected description of Molloy’s relations with his mother (their precarious ‘footing’) is deliberate; Molloy’s feet are as important to his incestuous urges as Oedipus’s to his dark destiny. Molloy notes that ‘My feet ... never took me to my mother unless they received a definite order to do so’ (M 39) and speaks of his ‘feet obscenely resting on the earth’ (M 31), implying an incestuous link between his feet and the earth. As if commenting on Molloy’s strategic

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alliance with Oedipus, Malone philosophizes about the external manifestations people want as signs of their misery: ‘people are never content to suffer, but they must have ... love, friendship, black sin, and sexual and peptic deficiency for example, in short the furies and frenzies happily too numerous to be numbered of the body including the skull and its annexes, ... such as the club-foot, in order that they may know very precisely what exactly it is that dares prevents their happiness from being unalloyed’ (M 86). Thus the Oedipal clubfoot is imagined as a symptom of a malaise people wish to share; all Oedipal traits in Beckett’s fiction may be read as stigmata voluntarily adopted by those eager to stand for humanity. The Unnamable’s ‘single leg’ and other ‘distinctive stigmata’ mark him as ‘human ... but not exaggeratedly’ (TU 38). This emphasis on feet accords with Beckett’s admission to Roger Blin, the French actor and producer of Waiting for Godot, that the name ‘Godot’ had been suggested by French slang words for boot: ‘godasse’ and ‘godaille’ (quoted in Bair, Samuel Beckett, 382). Painfully tight boots and swollen feet are prominent. Estragon’s problems with his tight footwear strike Vladimir as representative of human suffering and hypocrisy: ‘There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet’ (WG 8). As he and Vladimir discuss the fate of the two thieves crucified with Christ, Estragon notes that his foot is ‘Swelling visibly’ (WG 9). Bair has argued that this boot fetish derived from Beckett’s desire to imitate Joyce: ‘Beckett ... wore ... pumps that were too small because he wanted to wear the same shoe in the same size as Joyce, who was very proud of his small, neatly shod feet ... What is intriguing about this imitative gesture is ... Beckett, suffering terribly from huge corns and terrible calluses, walking only with great pain’ (Bair, Samuel Beckett, 71). Whether the relationship between Joyce and Beckett inspired Beckett’s shoe obsession, it was the basis for his portrayal of the master/slave couple of Pozzo and Lucky, and likely suggested the parallels between Pozzo and Oedipus. At first tyrannical and inquisitive, Pozzo is blinded off-stage, then returns, helpless and pathetic, very much as Joyce himself might have seemed at the end of his life. If Pozzo is Beckett’s Joyce-as-Oedipus, then Vladimir and Estragon are Beckett’s Greek chorus, representing the Theban populace waiting for a scapegoat for their anomie. They read a dark subtext into Lucky’s pathetic dance, which Estragon calls ‘The Scapegoat’s Agony’ (WG 27), and find their symbolic victim in Pozzo when he

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returns in his blind, anguished state. They blame him for the most trivial of things: Estragon. (recoiling). Who farted? Vladimir. Pozzo. (WG 52)

Nevertheless, the blind, humbled Pozzo’s sufferings move Vladimir to exclaim: ‘To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not ... Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!’ (WG 51). Vladimir’s sentimental ambition is not mere kindness or self-dramatization; Pozzo’s symbolic status is so palpable that even the unimaginative Estragon postulates that Pozzo is ‘all humanity’ (WG 54). At first, Pozzo is happy to act the part of the humanistic explorer, encountering Vladimir and Estragon as though they were natives of some remote land: ‘You are human beings none the less ... As far as one can see ... Of the same species as myself ... Of the same species as Pozzo! Made in God’s image!’ (WG 16). Vladimir soon uses Pozzo’s words against him, protesting his treatment of Lucky, a fellow ‘human being,’ as ‘a scandal’ (WG 19). Pozzo answers this accusation by saying, offhandedly, ‘I am perhaps not particularly human, but who cares?’ (WG 20). As soon as the idea of universal human identity ceases to be useful to him, Pozzo disavows it and the responsibilities it seems to confer. The unequal relationship between Hamm and Clov in Endgame (like that between Pozzo and Lucky) carries important Oedipal traces that go beyond simple interpersonal conflict to strike at the heart of human identity. The blind and crippled Hamm is clearly an Oedipal figure and just as proudly ‘inhuman’ as Pozzo tries to be. Displaying an apparently unembarrassed Oedipal aggression, Hamm bullies his father, Nagg, calling him ‘Accursed progenitor!’ (E 9) and denying him food. Yet through the tedium and banality of the play’s dialogue, Beckett makes it clear that without the jealousies and half-buried aggressions Hamm encourages, there would be nothing to say; we should take Hamm seriously when he compares himself to ‘the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three, so as to be together, and whisper together, in the dark’ (E 70). Such clues suggest that Beckett uses Oedipal motifs not because his own desires match those Freud identified with this mythic hero, but

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because Oedipal tropes supply meaning, a commodity in short supply in Beckett’s empty world. As Molloy puts it, ‘if ever I’m reduced to looking for a meaning to my life ... it’s in that old mess I’ll stick my nose to begin with ... that poor old uniparous whore and myself the last of my foul brood, neither man nor beast’ (M 23). Molloy’s interest in his mother is not produced by desire, but by the need for meaning to which he fears he will be ‘reduced’ by his search for a story to tell. This search for something Oedipal to signify is also the closest Beckett comes to affirming human solidarity, but as Paul Sheehan aptly puts it, ‘The Beckettian narrator tells stories not ... to partake in a process of human self-identification, but because he has no other choice’ (Sheehan, Modernism, 172). Indeed, for Beckett humanism itself is inevitably linked to an incestuous desire for regression to infantile certainties. In The Unnamable Mahood describes an unsuccessful lesson: ‘Pupil Mahood, repeat after me, Man is a higher animal. I couldn’t. Always talking about mammals in this menagerie ... Quick give me a mother and let me suck her white’ (TU 69). Here Mahood’s too-persistent wish to suckle is part of his reluctance to give up on humanity as something more than merely a ‘higher animal.’ As Beckett wrote in How It Is, ‘I was young I clung on to the species we’re talking of the species the human’ (Beckett, How, 47). These unmistakable incestuous hints reveal how Beckett attacks the Freudian premise that incest is a natural or universal human urge, not by denying it vociferously (like D.H. Lawrence), but by embracing it with comic resignation and absurdly exaggerating its psychological importance for his characters. They have to believe in their Oedipal desires, or else they will lose their sense of humanity. Therefore, when these peculiar beings express (and occasionally act out) incestuous and parricidal urges, their gloomily self-conscious awareness of the forbidden nature of their acts makes it impossible to believe that they are doing so out of anything other than a sense of duty towards the narratives that they (as quasi-human beings, however unwilling) must wearily retell to keep their unstable identities in order. As we have seen, the Oedipal tropes that Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett deploy touch on Ireland’s political situation, but in the end they explore whether there is a stable human nature for humanism to describe. Yeats accepts the idea of a split in human nature as the very precondition for its existence, and, cheerfully drawing on Oedipus as a model, anticipates violent changes both in Ireland’s historical cir-

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cumstances and in the individual lives of humans. Yeats paints a sometimes terrifying picture of the new, Oedipal era he anticipates as the answer to the Christian epoch, but he nevertheless anticipates the anti-humanist ‘Second Coming’ that will transform humanity. His deliberately controversial, often outrageous forays into eugenics and mysticism are thus symptoms of a very widespread twentieth-century discontent with humanism. Far from being an exception whose ideals of Oedipus’s importance were local, Yeats shares a basic stance with other anti-humanist British writers such as Lawrence, Lewis, and Eliot. Joyce offers a more tolerant and novel view of Oedipus and humanity: he envisages Oedipus as a cosmic, eternally recurring human hero (like HCE) who contains everyone’s tragedy and comedy. Such a character may contain unthinkable incestuous traits and a capacity for concealing his/her true nature in language, but Joyce is content to let the often nightmarish history of this sometimes dehumanized human being proceed. Such an attitude is characteristic; when asked how he felt about Ireland’s thwarted quest for autonomy, Joyce replied, ‘Tell me ... why you think I ought to wish to change the conditions that gave Ireland and me a shape and a destiny’ (quoted in Ellmann, Joyce, 109). Joyce accepts the Irish predicament and the human lot, even if it means embracing an uncongenial destiny, and his allusions to Oedipus reflect his resignation to the human predicament. For Joyce, nothing is gained or lost in human history; everything happens in a ‘commodious vicus of recirculation’ (FW 1: 02) that leaves no important hero or villain behind. Oedipus’s recurrent role in Joyce’s work is neither surprising nor exceptional; the problem expressed in his tragedy is never solved, but it is consistently reintegrated into a larger human narrative, like the vicissitudes of Irish history. For Beckett, neither Yeats’s nor Joyce’s picture of humanity is wholly satisfactory, but both show how narratives about Oedipal heroes who are supposed to represent humanity as a whole break down into incoherence, uncertainty, and futility, making any firm ideas about human nature impossible. Despite the merging identities of his novels’ speakers, Beckett could not accept the harmlessly confused yet somehow universally human figure of HCE in Finnegans Wake. In his two bestknown plays, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Beckett insists instead on the tragic divisions between human beings (master and slave, father, and son or, as some might argue, colonizer and colonized), a division

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that Irish politics, family life, and Beckett’s apprenticeship with Joyce had shown to be intractable. For Joyce and Yeats, an incestuous, parricidal Ireland could be redeemed, rather paradoxically, by being dehumanized (or at least defamiliarized) through language, whereas for Beckett the human condition could not escape its essentially sterile and fatally familiar Oedipal narrative.

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5 Oedipus Que(e)ried: Humanism, Sexuality, and Gender in E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf

Perhaps surprisingly, the modernist writers who engage with the Oedipus myth in the most conventionally Freudian fashion are those who least fit Freud’s behavioural models: a homosexual man, E.M. Forster, and a bisexual (predominantly lesbian) woman, Virginia Woolf. Freudian humanism depends heavily upon the theory of the Oedipus complex, concerning the behaviour and unconscious urges of heterosexual men and boys, yet Forster’s and Woolf’s uses of Oedipus are often compatible with Freud’s own treatment of the story. Such a situation seems paradoxical, especially since the heterosexual male writers we have encountered have rejected, satirized, and/or ignored the Freudian Oedipus. Why should these homosexual writers cling to Freud’s Oedipus, when heterosexual authors tended to shun him? The answer lies partly in their wish to legitimate their marginalized sexual orientations through what they saw as the more tolerant approach of humanism, whether Freudian or classical. If Oedipus was really a humanist hero, as he was for Woolf and Forster, then he represented more than just heterosexual preoccupations; indeed, his incestuous transgression comes to represent all forbidden erotic activities, and his heroic, representative status suggests that we must enlarge our understanding of human sexual nature. Oedipus’s relevance to these writers also has to do with conflicting accounts of his anthropological significance, as articulated by J.J. Bachofen and Jane Ellen Harrison – a classicist and anthropologist familiar with Bachofen, and with whom Woolf was friendly – as well as later writers such as Erich Fromm. As discussed in the introduction, Bachofen saw Oedipus as a humanistic hero whose discovery of his

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incest signalled a transition from chaotic, matriarchal sexual activity to orderly, patriarchal monogamy. Yet Bachofen’s model of Oedipus as a transitional champion of humanistic patriarchy ignores Oedipus’s forced recantation of his arrogant claims in Oedipus at Colonus (witness his remark: ‘So, when I am nothing, then am I a man?’). Harrison notes that Oedipus seeks ‘atonement’ for having ‘unwittingly ... violated the precinct’ of the female, earth-based ‘chthonic divinities’ (the Eumenides) upon arrival at Colonus, which suggests his ongoing affiliation with these maternal presences (Harrison, Prolegomena, 91). Harrison’s view conflicts with Bachofen’s naïvely optimistic and humanistic view. Erich Fromm later amplifies this tentative rejection of Bachofen,1 noting that in ‘the original Oedipus myth ... upon which Sophocles built his tragedy’ it is clear that ‘Oedipus is always connected with the cult of the earth goddesses, the representatives of matriarchal religion’ (Fromm, Greatness, 35). Fromm also questions Bachofen’s assumption that patriarchy is more humanistic than matriarchy, arguing, ‘The principle of matriarchy is that of universality, while the patriarchal system is that of restrictions’ (Fromm, Crisis, 79–80). The differences between Bachofen on the one hand and Harrison and Fromm on the other are unwittingly reproduced in the work of Forster and Woolf, respectively. In ‘The Road from Colonus’ (1903) and The Longest Journey (1907), Forster invokes Oedipal motifs to suggest that male characters must break free from female influences and create their own version of Bachofen’s patriarchal order, albeit a version based on homoerotic relationships rather than conventional patriarchy. Forster’s view of Oedipus seems to have been conceived without any significant Freudian influence. Woolf, conversely, has read Freud, and has concluded that Freud’s Oedipal picture of desire may plausibly apply to all human beings (including women). Yet Woolf tries to use this Oedipal story to destabilize the patriarchal order, suggesting that an Oedipal and patriarchal hierarchy produces an ultimately dehumanizing vision of the world. Woolf embodies the self-critical nature of the humanistic enterprise, as typified by Oedipus: no sooner does humanism define itself but it begins its own auto-critique. As Stephen Yarbrough argues in Deliberate Criticism,2 any humanism that takes its claims to universality seriously seeks to reconcile itself to its opposite and thus risks undoing its own premises.

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E.M. Forster, Freud, Homosexuality, and Oedipus Forster claimed never to have read Freud, and insisted that anything he had learned about Freud’s works ‘had to be filtered’ through others to reach him (quoted in Beauman, Morgan, 321). It seems very unlikely that any word of Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex (as outlined in The Interpretation of Dreams, first published in German in 1900 and not translated into English until 1911) had reached Forster by 1903, when he wrote ‘The Road from Colonus.’ This story’s explicitly Oedipal themes very likely had other origins, both intellectual and biographical; Forster had read Sophocles in school, and, as a boy, had had what his biographer calls a ‘love affair’ with his mother – in fact, he expressed a wish to marry her (Furbank, E.M. Forster, 20). His deeply Oedipal feelings (his father had died when he was very young) may have prompted Forster to mythologize his relationship with her. This vexed, quasi-incestuous attachment had lasting consequences; P.N. Furbank asserts that Forster experienced only ‘infantile’ erotic fantasies for most of his early life, did not know the facts of heterosexual copulation until he was thirty, and suffered from lifelong ‘very strong sexual inhibitions’ (Furbank, E.M. Forster, 78).3 This mother-son bond appears to underlie the overly intense, at times coercive relationship between the Oedipus-like Mr Lucas and his domineering daughter Ethel in ‘The Road from Colonus.’ Like these characters, Forster and his mother had visited Greece together. Forster makes the parallels between his tale and Oedipus’s fate obvious; a minor character named Mrs Forman describes Ethel Lucas as a modern Antigone, and Mr Lucas feels forced ‘to settle down to the role of Oedipus, which seemed the only one that public opinion allowed him’ (CSS 96). At first, however, this role does not suit Mr Lucas, and his visit to Greece is a failure until he comes upon his own private ‘Colonus’ (CSS 99), where he finds a tree split open where a spring gushes from the earth.4 Standing in this tree’s hollow, he has a vision: to him, the tree shows that the human race is the ‘inheritor of the Naiad’s and the Dryad’s joint abode’ (CSS 97). Mr Lucas’s role as an Oedipal figure is to reconcile the elements of human nature symbolized by water and wood. In pursuit of human wholeness, Mr Lucas wishes to spend the night with a Greek family (to his snobbish daughter’s horror): ‘To Mr Lucas, who, in a brief space of time, had discovered not only Greece, but England and all the world and life, there

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seemed nothing ludicrous in the desire to hang within the tree another votive offering – a little model of an entire man’ (CSS 98–9). The tree at the spring symbolizes humanity’s dual nature, which Mr Lucas sees ‘entire.’5 This vision of a newly unified human race is central to Mr Lucas’s epiphany, but it does not last, even though Mr Lucas is determined to embrace it. To realize his vision of a single ‘entire’ human race, Mr Lucas is willing to run the risk of ‘missing the London operas, and upsetting all [his] engagements for the month’ (CSS 103) to live with the villagers. Naturally, his daughter and her friends will not hear of this plan, which they see as an abandonment of English civilization, and they remove him bodily. Mr Lucas’s experience is a modern successor to Oedipus’s supreme moment of realization at Colonus. Having his transcendent vision, Mr Lucas inherits Oedipus’s heroic stature, but his companions do not see his insight as the transfiguring wisdom that it exemplifies for Forster. Lucas has a Nietzschean or Heraclitan vision of humanity’s reintegration into nature; he is suddenly convinced that his own life is part of a vigorous, universal current: ‘all things were a stream, in which he was moving’ (CSS 98). But Lucas’s role as a modern-day Oedipus is explicitly reiterated and trivialized by his fellow tourists. Forster reproaches his characters for their misinterpretation of what the Oedipus myth means for modern human beings – exactly what D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis argue that Freud has done. Forster’s message, it would seem, is not that Mr Lucas loses his chance to be like Oedipus, but rather that we are no longer capable of understanding Oedipus’s insight into human nature at Colonus. This insight entails Oedipus’s emergence as a superhuman hero whose life and death are tied to forces beyond human control; indeed, his body’s disappearance seems to imply that, by virtue of his divine affiliations, he has merged into the natural world outside human identity. Forster’s story parallels this aspect of the Oedipus myth when Mr Lucas is convinced of humanity’s ability to commune with the life around it: ‘There was no such thing as the solitude of nature, for the sorrows and joys of humanity had pressed even into the bosom of a tree’ (CSS 98–9). In discovering this ‘shrine,’ Mr Lucas has come to imagine a wholly humanized world very much like that described by Forster’s own mentor at Cambridge, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, who in The Greek View of Life argued that to the ancient Greeks nature’s otherness could be absorbed by deciding ‘It is something like myself’ (Dickinson, Greek View of Life, 3). For the Greeks, Dickinson contends,

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‘Nature has become a company of spirits; every cave and fountain is haunted by a nymph; in the ocean dwell the Nereids ... the Dryad in the wood’ (Dickinson, Greek View of Life, 3). This sentimental picture of humanity’s continuity with nature is attractive for Forster; indeed, Rickie Elliott, the Oedipal hero of his later novel The Longest Journey, writes stories about just such dryads in the woods. Yet Forster gives only an ironic hint about the magnitude of Mr Lucas’s experience. After Mr Lucas’s fellow tourists force him to return to England to live out his days in lonely misanthropy, his daughter reads an account of a tree’s collapse in a Greek newspaper, and informs him that if he had stayed the night he would have been killed: ‘those poor half savage people … tried to keep you, and they’re dead. The whole place, it says, is in ruins, and even the stream has changed its course. Father dear, if it had not been for me ... you must have been killed ... Such a marvellous deliverance does make one believe in Providence’ (CSS 107–8). The invocation of ‘Providence’ is deeply ironic, in that Ethel’s prudent, all-too-human efforts have cheated her father of his superhuman (or more fully humanistic) destiny. In his influential study of Forster, Lionel Trilling states the story’s obvious meaning: ‘it tells of a commonplace English Oedipus who does not die properly at his Colonus and who therefore loses the transfiguration he might have had’ (Trilling, Forster, 39). Forster clearly implies that Ethel’s meddling has frustrated the unification of the human race in death (or, to put in more Forsterian terms, connecting the ‘savage’ modern Greeks and the ‘civilized’ English tourists). Yet Trilling leaves the Oedipal overtones of the story unexplained, and ignores its thematization of humanism. Moreover, Trilling mentions Freud here only in relation to Freud’s interpretation of King Lear and its connections with Norse myths. Trilling’s treatment of the story exemplifies his tendency to connect twentieth-century writers to his beloved Victorians and Romantics: Forster’s story is juxtaposed with a Matthew Arnold poem and assimilated to Wordsworthian pantheism, blurring its modernist engagement with the anti-humanistic side of the Oedipus myth. Thus, while Trilling’s reading makes the story’s general point clear, it misses the transfiguration in Forster’s conception of human nature. Trilling’s oversight here is especially surprising, since Mr Lucas’s vision of a newly whole humanity is a counterpart to Freud’s project of unifying humanity around the Oedipus complex. Thanks to

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Oedipus, Freud also brings apparent perversity into a relationship with more ‘normal’ practices by suggesting where difficulties in the resolution of the Oedipus complex resulted in aberrations. By mending the gap left by the mysteries of sex, which he sees as the weak spot in our narrative of human cultural progress, Freud is able to imagine human nature and history combining into a meaningful, interrelated whole; Freud rescues humanism from the threat posed by sexuality. Forster’s Mr Lucas does something very similar, both via the incestuous overtones of the tree and through the story’s homosexual subtext, the source of Mr Lucas’s prophetic insight into the lives of the Greek peasants around him. As he stands in the tree, Mr Lucas sees ‘beauty’ and ‘sincerity’ in a young Greek muleteer (CSS 98). This acceptance of the Greek peasants contrasts sharply with the racist attitudes of his companions, who warn him that the peasants ‘might knife’ him and dismiss ‘the modern Greek’ as a money-grubbing ne’er-do-well (CSS 103–4). The unhappy encounter between the tourists and the ‘simple savages’ (CSS 104) concludes with a fistfight in which one of Ethel’s male friends bloodies a young Greek’s mouth. Clearly, the cross-cultural connection desired by Mr Lucas (and achieved later in A Passage to India) is frustrated, and ‘The Road from Colonus’ portrays a failed attempt to forge a new, homoerotically tinged patriarchy (Mr Lucas has no sons, and wishes to spend time with Greek men). The homosexual connotations of Mr Lucas’s experience in the spurting water link him to Oedipus’s sexual aberrations, yet they suggest that an unusual aspect of sexuality can be reconciled to humanity. Forster leaves homosexual themes undeveloped in this story, but hints at them in his book about Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. Forster calls Greece ‘a stronghold for sentiment’ and poignantly likens its refreshing waters to his own sexual and/or emotional resources: ‘I too have sweet waters, though I shall never drink them. I can understand the draughts of the others, though they will not understand my abstinence’ (quoted in Heine, ‘Introduction,’ xxxix). This passage seems to refer to Forster’s sexual inhibitions, but it also underscores that ancient Greece, the birthplace of Western humanism, tolerated, even encouraged, homosexual practices outlawed in England. Mr Lucas’s desire to stay among the Greeks may have roots in Forster’s wish to escape from his homophobic culture; Lucas, a widower, is unlikely to experience sensual renewal through the usual heterosexual channels, so to speak. Mr Lucas’s telling comment at the

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end of the story that ‘there’s nothing I dislike more than running water’ (CSS 106) suggests that he is troubled by a repressed memory of the (sexual) stream in Greece that once gave him a sense of pleasure and possibility. For Forster, homosexuality was an important part of the possibilities of human nature, and he gravitated towards any culture that took this truth seriously. As Elizabeth Heine has remarked, ‘the link between Forster’s own sexual sense and his interpretations of Greek humanity is firm; it was a civilization in which he could imagine his homosexuality being accepted simply as part of the spectrum of human realities’ (Heine, ‘Introduction,’ xxxix). Homosexuality becomes a way for Forster to imagine the same redemptive connections between polarized human opposites that he outlines in ‘The Road from Colonus.’ In a letter to a friend, Forster rewrites Genesis to suit his situation as a homosexual: ‘Male and Female created He not them ... one is left with “perverts” (an absurd word, because it assumes they were given a choice) ... My defence at any Last Judgment would be “I was trying to connect up and use all the fragments I was born with”’ (quoted in Heine, ‘Introduction,’ xxiv). Forster implies that homosexuals must unify the two sexes coexisting within, to create a human identity out of competing gender traits. They, like Oedipus, are ideally placed to champion a more comprehensive human identity, precisely because their actions have excluded them from what many regard as normal or universal. The difficulty with this homosexual humanism as a viable alternative to a heterosexual humanism is the persistent misogyny that accompanies it both in Forster’s early, most Oedipally inflected works and in the covert discourse of turn-of-the-century homosexuals. As Ashis Nandy has written: ‘“The ideology of higher sodomy,” aestheticism and neo-Hellenism to which many creative persons subscribed in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain cannot be explained without reference to the way British society had devalued femininity as low-status, contaminating and anti-social, and rejected the presence of femininity in man as virtually the negation of all humanness’ (Nandy, Intimate Enemy, 43). Advocates of what Nandy calls ‘higher sodomy’ share much with patriarchal thinkers, including Freud himself, who infamously insisted on the inevitability of women coming ‘into opposition to civilization’ and displaying ‘their retarding and restraining influence’ (CD 50). Forster too devalues femininity in ‘The Road from Colonus’ (where Ethel contrasts with

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the heroic Antigone) and, more overtly, in The Longest Journey, whose title, an allusion to Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion,’ is an insulting reference to marriage.6 The Longest Journey and Humanism In his neglected novel The Longest Journey, Forster again takes up humanism and homosexuality with reference to the Oedipus story. The novel also revives Oedipal motifs employed in ‘The Road from Colonus,’ but with important differences. Club-footed Rickie Elliott hates his father and loves his mother in orthodox Freudian style, and marries Agnes, a woman he doesn’t love, because of his attachment to her lover, Gerald. Forster’s choice of Oedipus as the mythic backdrop for Rickie Elliot’s struggles may have roots in an essay by Dickinson, in which he implicitly compares himself as a homosexual to Oedipus: ‘I am like a man born crippled’ (quoted in Heine, ‘Introduction,’ xxii). Following up this clue, Elizabeth Heine has explored the equation between homosexuality and physical deformity in Forster’s novel: ‘Forster for many years did ... believe his own homosexuality to be congenital, and ... Rickie’s lameness is to that extent equivalent to Forster’s homosexuality’ (Heine, ‘Introduction,’ xxiv).7 She then connects Rickie’s sexual problems and Oedipus’s crimes: ‘Granted that another hereditary defect would have done as well, Forster perhaps chose lameness as the marker because Rickie’s failure to act by what he knows of himself [his homosexual desires] links him to Oedipus, whose limp also signifies his ancestry and whose pride and love ... allowed him to make a mistake like Rickie’s, marrying the wrong woman ... despite all prophecy’ (Heine, ‘Introduction,’ xix). Throughout the novel Forster suggests that the heterosexual couple originate in a suppressed homosexuality that produces a tragedy as ruinous as Oedipus’s. Rickie’s love is transferred to Agnes only when Gerald dies in a fittingly manly sporting accident. Heterosexual love, in Forster’s novel, seems like a diluted, displaced version of same-sex attraction, and it carries guilt comparable to that deriving from the disastrous incest of Oedipus and Jocasta. In loving Agnes after Gerald’s death, Rickie imagines himself to be guilty of a ‘crime’ that ‘no penance could ever purge,’ while his youthful affection for Gerald seems pure (LJ 66). Rickie’s choice of Agnes for a wife is

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symptomatic of his desire to imitate an older, stronger father figure. René Girard, in Violence and the Sacred, has suggested that the ‘Oedipal,’ seemingly incestuous desires Freud assumes spring from just such an imitative urge. Forster’s implication that Rickie’s infatuation with Agnes merely echoes his love for Gerald reminds us of Judith Butler’s argument that ‘it is not primarily the heterosexual lust for the mother that must be punished and sublimated [in resolving the Oedipus complex] but the homosexual cathexis that must be subordinated to a culturally sanctioned heterosexuality’ (Butler, Gender Trouble, 59). As Forster makes clear, however, Rickie has not emerged from the Freudian Oedipal phase, since he still hates his father and adores his mother, and his feelings for Gerald are therefore an unresolved Oedipal attachment rather than Butler’s primordial homosexuality. This is not to suggest that Forster was covertly critical of homosexuality; his insistence on the destructive quality of Rickie’s relationship with Agnes suggests that any attempt to return to heterosexuality is bound to produce tragedy. While Agnes would clearly be the means by which Rickie is intended to achieve adult status (in Freudian parlance), he merely repeats with her the unnatural crimes that Oedipus committed with Jocasta, as their misshapen child suggests. Although the Oedipus myth itself need not be seen as inherently misogynistic, it plays into the anti-feminine animus that pervades The Longest Journey. This animus is also a legacy of the Hellenistic humanism Forster absorbed from Dickinson. For the Greeks, as Dickinson points out, ‘woman ... was conceived to be so inferior to man that he recognized in her no other end than to minister to his pleasure or to become the mother of his children’ (Dickinson, Greek View of Life, 169). Having established Dickinson’s convictions about women’s inferiority, Forster asserts that Dickinson ‘assisted in the unchaining of women, but without enthusiasm’ and describes his mentor’s reluctant political progressivism as a tragic flaw: ‘His suicidal sense of fairness left him no choice here. If women wanted a degree of a vote or anything else which men monopolized, it was his duty to help them get it ... There were a few women to whom ... he would have confidently entrusted the destiny of mankind’ (GLD 88). In The Longest Journey Rickie is insistent upon seeing his wife Agnes as someone on whom he could centre his love of ‘mankind’; Rickie ‘loved Agnes, not only for herself, but because she was lighting up the human world’ (LJ 108), and his unwill-

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ingness to keep her ‘in line’ as his half-brother Stephen Wonham recommends he ought to do (LJ 107) stems from his recognition of her rights as a human being. As if to warn people like Rickie away from such magnanimity, Dickinson argues that the ‘sanity and balance’ of the Greeks’ ethical ideal was ‘destroyed’ when the possibility of virtue was extended to all humankind (GLD 196). As he implies, a coherent notion of virtue was only possible for the Greeks ‘because of its limitation’ to those who could achieve it (GLD 196). Dickinson seems to anticipate the views of Irving Babbitt, whose ‘humanism’ was only made possible by its limitations, yet his greatest (and necessarily covert) value for Forster lay in his implication that, since the Greeks’ conception of virtue included homosexuality, modern notions of humanity ought to embrace a multiplicity of sexual identities: ‘Dickinson loved humanity – so far as the phrase has any meaning; and it still has some meaning, though not as much as it promised in the nineteenth century. He believed, furthermore, in something more definite: in love between two individuals’ (GLD 31). Forster is reluctant to state Dickinson’s views on homosexuality, but Dickinson’s reference to the Greeks’ acceptance of ‘passionate friendship between men’ (Dickinson, Greek View of Life, 178) is certainly a reference to homosexuality. Dickinson suggests that homosexual love is a higher, more humanistic love than heterosexual love; as he says, ‘some of the best of them set the love of man for man far above that of man for woman’ (Dickinson, Greek View of Life, 182).8 Given Forster’s Dickinsonian loyalties, and his own resentment towards the heteronormative culture, it is not too surprising that he paints a dismal picture of the relationship between Agnes and Rickie. His rather sadistic decision to have their first child be born with a clubfoot (only to die within days) reflects contemporary attitudes about the fate of children of homosexuals. In 1897, Havelock Ellis argued that the children of homosexuals ‘bear witness that they belong to a neurotic and failing stock. Sometimes, indeed, the tendency to sexual inversion in eccentric and neurotic families seems merely to be Nature’s merciful method of winding up a concern which, from her point of view, has ceased to be profitable’ (Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 145–6). Forster’s anxiety about homosexuality and procreation is transferred to Rickie through the Oedipal trope of lameness; as Gerald says of Rickie: ‘He says he can’t ever marry, owing to his foot ... He thinks it’s hereditary, and may get worse next generation’ (LJ 50). The fact that Rickie does marry is

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the clue to his downfall; for Forster, heterosexual marriage by the wrong people or for the wrong reasons is as disastrous as incest was for Oedipus. Although Agnes ought to ‘humanize’ Rickie and help him to emerge from his Oedipal conflicts, she forces him to ignore his human and familial ties to his illegitimate half-brother, Stephen Wonham. Agnes’s respect for ‘purity’ (LJ 139), a contrast to Forster’s heterogeneous conception of human identity, makes her unwilling to accept Stephen, a vulgar drunkard and a product of the transgressive love affair between Rickie’s upper-class mother and a farmer. Forster’s narrator blames Agnes’s femininity for this intolerance: ‘she was a woman, and [purity] meant more to her than it can ever mean to a man; partly because ... it is ... obvious, and makes no demand upon the intellect’ (LJ 139). Although this sexism implies that Rickie’s masculine intellect enables him to accept departures from ‘purity,’ it is really Rickie’s intense dislike for his father that makes him eager to accept any external strain in his family. When he learns of Stephen’s true parentage he is delighted. Moreover, after Stephen’s mysterious origins are made plain, his bond to the ‘earth,’ with which he is constantly associated, is strengthened.9 Stephen’s biological father Robert is an agricultural god figure whose fecund sexual powers are related to his irrational knowledge of seasonal rhythms: ‘he knew when the earth was ill ... he spoke of her tantrums – the strange unscientific element in her that will baffle the scientist to the end of time ... As he talked, the earth became a living being ... a symbol of regeneration and of the birth of life from life’ (LJ 232). Stephen and his father stand for the ancient idea of an autochthonous human nature that springs from the earth rather than sexual intercourse – what Bachofen might have termed pre-Oedipal ‘telluric’ or chthonic figures who escape the Oedipal bonds that doom Rickie.10 Rickie does have non-Oedipal traits that seem to link him to Stephen: his stories of Dryads are fantasies of a supernatural connection between people and the land. Agnes’s disdain for these autochthonous daydreams is expressed in an attempt to sever the potentially healing connection between Rickie and Stephen, depicted as a form of humanistic fellowship. Yet Forster misogynistically implies that such hostility is only to be expected from a woman (whose role in reproduction is elided by any theory of autochthonous origins). The narrator points out that Agnes, like Ethel Lucas, lacks humanistic tolerance for otherness; she feels that Stephen is ‘illicit, abnormal,

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worse than a man diseased’ and therefore ‘she could not feel that Stephen had full human rights’ (LJ 139). Agnes’s refusal to see Stephen as a human being is understandable; his status as an ‘animal’ with just enough ‘refinement’ to contemplate its own ‘soul’ (LJ 212) is emphasized, and when he rides in on horseback he is described as ‘a centaur’ (LJ 115), as though his identity and that of the horse could merge. Yet Forster’s classical studies would have enabled him to realize that, from the point of view of the ancient Greeks, Stephen’s Dionysian excesses (his drunkenness and violence) make him potentially redemptive, and indeed centrally human; without such extreme possibilities, the human identity is incomplete. As Martha Nussbaum points out, ‘if human beings close themselves off from Dionysus’ call, they apparently become less than fully human. But if they listen to Dionysus, this carries ... the risk of ... beastliness’ (Nussbaum, ‘Introduction,’ xx). Nussbaum sums up the Dionysian problem: ‘Humanness appears as an unstable and temporary achievement, poised among dangers of many kinds’ (Nussbaum, ‘Introduction,’ xx). Thus, Forster implies that Stephen’s very drunkenness and violent habits make him the perfect vehicle for the humane values against which he seems to transgress: ‘He was alive and had created life ... Though he could not phrase it, he believed that he guided the future of his race, and that ... his thoughts and his passions would triumph in England. The dead, who had evoked him, the unborn whom he would evoke – he governed the paths between them’ (LJ 289). Stephen is a tangible though inarticulate token of human brotherhood; he asks Rickie to ‘Come with me as a man’ (LJ 257), implying that even their status as brothers is less important than their shared humanity.11 The Longest Journey provides an indirect commentary on Nietzsche’s assertion that the Oedipus myth ‘seems to whisper to us that wisdom, and particularly Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural abomination; that he who by means of his knowledge plunges nature into the abyss of destruction must also suffer the dissolution of nature in his own person’ (Nietzsche, Birth, 200). Although few authors would seem less likely to be in sympathy with Nietzsche than Forster, Rickie does end up in the position of being ‘behind right and wrong’ (LJ 278) – not far from Nietzsche’s goal of going ‘beyond good and evil.’ Rickie is also dismembered by the train (as Dionysus is dismembered by Maenads), whereas Stephen, who ‘was great enough to despise our small moral-

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ities’ (LJ 309), is even closer to being a Nietzschean ‘superman.’ Notably, however, Stephen lacks any self-consciousness; he drinks, brawls, and fornicates without second thought. He is perhaps unique among Forster’s characters in remaining sympathetic while preserving a nearly beastlike obliviousness to his motives and the consequences of his behaviour. Stephen’s anti-intellectualism appears to be the real inheritor of English tradition. Stephen’s near-death at the end of the novel suggests that the final crisis of human existence has been averted by the doomed Rickie’s self-sacrifice: Rickie pulls a drunken Stephen off the railroad tracks, only to die after having his legs cut off. Perhaps because of Stephen’s bizarre antics, critics have been highly ambivalent about this relatively obscure and often puzzling novel; Frederick Crews sees it as an allegory of the difficulty of ‘arriving at a moderate and discerning humanism’ (Crews, E.M. Forster, 53). Crews is inconsistent in his assessment of Forster’s views on humanism; at first he argues that ‘The moral victory of humanism in The Longest Journey is costly but unmistakably plain. Rickie dies ... but in dying he saves Stephen’ (Crews, E.M. Forster, 64), yet he later decides that the ‘humanist’ is faced with an ‘impossible task’ in Forster’s novel (Crews, E.M. Forster, 69–70). Forster seems to recognize the difficulties of Stephen’s oddly self-contradictory identity, and his narrator tries to minimize them by telling readers that ‘such a type was common in Greece’ (LJ 212). Placing Stephen in the context of ancient Greece is a telling move; it links him with the images of rebirth in ‘The Road from Colonus’ and reminds us that for Forster, as Crews points out, ‘the Greeks stand for a reasonable and civilized acceptance of man’s full nature’ (Crews, E.M. Forster, 43). As in ‘The Road from Colonus,’ the deeper mythical and humanistic preoccupations in The Longest Journey have largely eluded critics who have attempted to understand its Oedipal traits. Trilling notes that both The Longest Journey and Oedipus Rex share a common theme, the gap between ‘appearance and reality’ (Trilling, Forster, 77), but his analysis fails to expand on the similarities, and other critics have similarly overlooked the strength of the theme. As we have seen, Forster employs Oedipal tropes, as well as a self-professedly humanistic point of view (albeit a rather misogynistic one), to explore the taboo subject of his homosexuality and critique the views of his own heteronormative society. The scholarly neglect of this aspect of Forster’s work is the

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more surprising given the fact that Virginia Woolf, his fellow Bloomsburyite, does something very similar in To the Lighthouse, her most autobiographical novel. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Freudian Humanism Like Forster, Woolf suggests that the heterosexual relationships that were once deemed the source of human renewal and redemption are flawed, if not futile. Of the eight Ramsay children we meet in To the Lighthouse, two have died by its end (the woman in childbirth) and none have begun successful families of their own. The couple that Mrs Ramsay spent so much time bringing together, Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle, are estranged and have no children to show for their unhappy marriage. Against these heterosexual disasters (which correspond to the inhuman slaughter of the First World War), many critics have seen Lily Briscoe’s artistic ambitions and spinsterhood as affirmations that a single (possibly lesbian) woman can create an alternative existence for herself outside of marriage. But as we shall see, Lily Briscoe’s final rapprochement with Mr Ramsay suggests that for Woolf masculinist humanism and androgynous creativity could be reconciled through the Oedipus myth. Given that Woolf’s Hogarth Press was Freud’s first English-language publisher, it is not surprising that Woolf’s relationship to Freudianism and the Oedipus complex is unusually close, especially by comparison with her British contemporaries. Woolf’s affinity with Freud’s theories unquestionably resulted from her profound psychological disturbances, which ultimately led to her suicide. These difficulties stemmed from Woolf’s early family life, which exposed her to incest and a guilty animosity towards both parents. According to her biographer Mitchell Leaska, Woolf’s father Leslie Stephen termed her a ‘flirt’ where he was concerned (quoted in Leaska, Granite, 51). Woolf even wished that her mother’s first husband and only great love, Herbert Duckworth, were still alive, thus, in Leaska’s words, ‘freeing her father to love her, Virginia, in a deeper, more vital way as a grown man’ (Leaska, Granite, 252). During childhood, moreover, Woolf was her father’s apparent favourite, which made matters worse. By contrast, Woolf’s mother Julia Stephen was emotionally withdrawn with her daughters, instead bestowing her affection on the sick, who could not challenge her. In Moments of Being, Woolf asked ‘Can I remember ever being alone with [her mother] for more

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than a few minutes?’ (MB 83). Precociously jealous of her mother’s apparently greater concern for a younger sibling, Woolf tried to ‘remain her mother’s baby,’ as biographer Panthea Reid puts it, by refusing to speak until she was nearly two years old (Reid, Art, 16). Reid argues that Woolf repeated this pattern of repressing speech after Julia’s untimely death, when a thirteen-year-old Woolf fell into a deep depression: ‘Virginia retraced the pattern of her infancy ... [and] raged against her mother for abandoning her’ (Reid, Art, 43). No doubt still feeling this resentment, Woolf later attacked ‘maternal passion’ for being ‘unscrupulous’ and inhumane, suggesting that her sister Vanessa would ‘fry us all to cinders to give [her daughter] a day’s pleasure’ (Letters, 3:366). Yet this antagonism towards Julia was accompanied by guilt. In the last weeks of her mother’s life, Virginia herself fell ill; Reid notes, ‘Virginia must have known that her own illness had troubled Julia and have feared that she had exhausted Julia’s strength’ (Reid, Art, 40). Perhaps in part because of this guilt, Woolf at first refused to mourn her mother, but eventually ‘Guilt over her ... initial failure to grieve lacerated Virginia’ (Reid, Art, 43). Virginia was annoyed by her father’s demonstrative mourning, and she began to think of her mother as ‘an unlovable phantom’ (quoted in Leaska, Granite, 65). She also soured on Leslie, and later complained that ‘it never struck my father that there was any harm in being ill to live with’ (MB 28). As if acknowledging Oedipal parricidal impulses, she referred to Leslie Stephen as ‘the alternately loved and hated father’ (MB 116). Still, Woolf was disturbed when Leslie transferred his emotional attentions to Woolf’s elder sister Stella, who took over her mother’s role as female head of the household, and who, in essence, became a ‘surrogate mother’ to her sisters (Leaska, Granite, 69). This quasi-incestuous bond was dissolved when Stella married, leaving Leslie clearly ‘jealous’ in Woolf’s eyes (MB 106). Woolf felt rejected by her father’s shift in affections, and, as Leaska puts it, ‘the motherless [Virginia] turned to the maternal Vanessa [her sister]’ for comfort and affection (Leaska, Granite, 66). Woolf’s lifelong tendency to regard ‘intimacy’ as ‘maternal coddling’ would make Woolf’s later lesbian relationships a bit one-sided (Leaska, Granite, 248). The Stephen family’s intricate emotional dynamics were further complicated by the inappropriate behaviour of Virginia’s half-brother George Duckworth, who solicited physical affection from his halfsisters, and with whom Virginia had a series of awkward quasi-sexual

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encounters. Woolf describes one such occasion, when she was four or five years old: ‘as I sat there he began to explore my body ... I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking it’ (MB 69). The damage such incestuous abuse did to Woolf’s psyche was complex; in Leaska’s words, ‘George’s embraces aroused in her some forbidden or ambivalent or, as she said, “mixed” feelings ... it was George she later blamed for the sexual “cowardice” of her adulthood’ (Leaska, Granite, 66). Woolf also suffered trauma when an exhibitionist exposed himself to her. She certainly developed a fear of male sexuality. Woolf was consequently wary of delving too deeply into the human psyche, her own or another person’s; at thirteen, Woolf wrote, ‘human beings would find it very difficult to exist together if they knew each other’ (quoted in Reid, Art, 39). In To the Lighthouse, however, Woolf wrote that she ‘did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients’ (MB 81), making it tempting to read the novel primarily in light of Woolf’s biography. In this spirit, Leaska argues that To the Lighthouse is designed both to rediscover Woolf’s early familial problems and extend the ‘fantasy life’ Woolf created as a child. Such an approach has some advantages: we might well see Woolf’s sister Stella as the real-life model for Lily Briscoe, who becomes the focus of Mr Ramsay’s demands for love after Mrs Ramsay’s death. Thus the novel removes the taboo against father-daughter incest, while making the implication that Lily is the object of Mr Ramsay’s affections an incestuous wish-fulfilment for Woolf herself. Furthermore, the initially unsympathetic Mr Ramsay’s endless ‘demand’ for love from his wife may represent Woolf’s neversatisfied wish for maternal affection. Even Lily’s love for the dead Mrs Ramsay resembles that of a classic Freudian male Oedipal child (as does her initial dislike of Mr Ramsay); she yearns for the dead woman as keenly as any child: ‘To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness ... Oh Mrs Ramsay! she called out silently, to that essence which sat by the boat, that abstract one made of her ... as if to abuse her for having gone’ (TTL 165). That such Oedipal feelings might occur in the minds of young girls as well as boys was perfectly normal to Woolf; her narrator describes the ‘deep … buried ... speechless feeling that one had for one’s mother at Rose’s age’ (TTL 77), making it clear that for her, any repressed emotions towards a mother figure are shared by girls. Disappointed in her impossible love

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for Mrs Ramsay, Lily consoles herself by concentrating on Mr Ramsay, whose embattled heroism is the best substitute for his wife’s presence. Most importantly, however, the major narrative movement of To the Lighthouse is constructed around a Freudian-Oedipal clash between James Ramsay and his father: James wants to go to the lighthouse, but his father, by assuring him that the weather will not permit it, symbolically denies him access to his desire. This conflict nearly becomes violent; like Paul Morel, James has a strong urge to murder his father: ‘Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it’ (TTL 3). The fact that James is standing between his mother’s knees when his father ruins his plans underscores the Oedipal situation. James’s hatred of his father stems in part from a fear of castration; he sees Mr Ramsay as a ‘black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold and hard, that struck and struck at you (he could feel the beak on his bare legs, where it had struck when he was a child) and then made off’ (TTL 170). This castration anxiety, however, is centred not on the penis but on the legs and feet; just as in Oedipus’s identity is informed by his injured feet, James’s coming to adulthood centres on a picture of a ‘beak’ striking at his legs. This fixation on legs and feet functions as a leitmotif. For instance, James casts about for a way to overcome his feelings of anger at his father and conjures up another image of a foot: ‘he sought an image to cool and detach and round off his feeling in a concrete shape. Suppose then that as a child sitting helpless in a perambulator, or on someone’s knee, he had seen a waggon crush ignorantly and innocently, someone’s foot?’ (TTL 171). James and his father are eventually reconciled, albeit very gradually. Woolf’s picture of this father-son rapprochement recalls Freud’s description of how the possibility of castration assists maturation and frees one from incestuous desires: ‘the acceptance [by men] of the possibility of castration ... makes an end of both the possibilities of satisfaction in the Oedipus-complex ... If the gratification desired in consequence of the love is to cost the child his penis ... the child’s ego turns away from the Oedipus-complex’ (Freud, Sexuality, 168). Yet Woolf adds a non-Freudian, anti-humanistic edge to James’s mature acceptance of his father. The reconciliation involves James’s realization that it is not a simple murder of a human being that he wishes for, but a symbolic banishment of fundamentally inhuman forces he sees acting

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upon his father: ‘now, as he grew older, and sat staring at his father in an impotent rage, it was not him, that old man reading, whom he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that descended on him – without his knowing it perhaps’ (TTL 170). James recognizes that his father is not fully in control of his own identity, and is thus not the masterful castrating figure he once feared and hated. Thus James pities the embattled human being who sits before him: ‘there he was again, an old man, very sad, reading his book’ (TTL 170). James has finally accepted Mr Ramsay as the tragic figure his father has repeatedly claimed to be. In a provocative article, Elizabeth Abel reads Woolf’s discussion of James’s castration fears both as a ‘disguised reminder of an Oedipal story in the swollen foot (the literal meaning of “Oedipus”)’ and as evidence of James’s habit of ‘Disavowing both his father’s responsibility and his own pain’ (Abel, Virginia Woolf, 50–1). Abel argues that the troubled relationship between James and his father symbolizes the conflicts that underlie the continuation of intellectual tradition. Abel suggests that ‘Woolf uses the [Freudian] Oedipal narrative to subvert the affirmations that surround James’s development, to puncture the illusion that he can both be his father’s heir and retain his mother’s heritage’ (Abel, Virginia Woolf, 52). Abel concludes that Woolf’s intellectual project ‘graft[s] the Oedipal narrative onto the epistemological quarrel that traverses To the Lighthouse,’ arguing that ‘James reads his developmental story as a positive accession to his father’s philosophical realism’ (TTL 49) and thus a rejection or evasion of his mother’s humanity. Such a reading, while intriguing, is ultimately more Freudian than Woolfian, since Woolf implies that the conflicts of human nature (especially gender) can be reconciled. Nevertheless, Woolf’s text resists complete recuperation by Freud’s theories. Despite her familiarity with Freud, Woolf reacted against fiction that was too easily viewed through a Freudian lens. In ‘Freudian Fiction,’ a review of J.D. Beresford’s Oedipally charged 1920 novel An Imperfect Mother, Woolf writes, ‘The triumphs of science are beautifully positive. But for novelists the matter is much more complex ... Yes, says the scientific side of the brain ... that explains a great deal. No, says the artistic side of the brain, that is dull’ (Woolf, Essays, 3:194). Woolf emphasizes the book’s indebtedness to Freud, noting that its protagonist is ‘the victim of an unacknowledged passion for his mother’ who ‘returns his affection in the inarticulate

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manner of those who lived before Freud’ (Woolf, Essays, 3:196). All this is, as Woolf points out, ‘strictly in accordance with the new psychology,’ and raises the question of how far novelists ‘should allow themselves to be influenced by the discoveries of the psychologists’ (Woolf, Essays, 3:196). Beresford has gone too far, in Woolf’s view, even if we grant that in Freud he has found a ‘key’ that seems to ‘fit the human mind’ (Woolf, Essays 3:197). Woolf disqualifies such theories of human subjectivity from the realm of art, and relegates them to the pages of The Lancet and other medical journals: ‘in An Imperfect Mother the new key is a patent key that opens every door. It simplifies rather than complicates, detracts rather than enriches. The door swings open briskly enough, but the apartment to which we are admitted is a bare little room with no outlook whatever ... in the ardours of discovery, Mr Beresford has unduly stinted his people of flesh and blood. In becoming cases they have ceased to be individuals’ (Woolf, Essays, 3:197). As if to imply that there is no need for this arid psychoanalytic approach,12 in other essays Woolf champions art’s ability to sum up the world in human terms, especially in ‘A Sketch of the Past’: ‘we – I mean all human beings – are connected ... the world is a work of art ... we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world’ (MB 72). Woolf carefully divides the triumphs of science from those of art, and she deplores Mr Ramsay’s deprecation of art in favour of philosophy, suggesting that it is motivated by jealousy and a misplaced concern for the good of the average person. The Oedipal blindness of such figures as Mr Ramsay suggests the tragic consequences of their pretensions to objectivity and universality. Freud’s preoccupation with the problems of ordinary people, summed up for his English readers in the title The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (translated into English in 1914), would have made him a suitable model for Mr Ramsay, whose concern with ‘the average man’ and ‘his’ role in the progress of civilization is one of his few sympathetic qualities. Mr Ramsay meditates on issues similar to those that Freud would later ponder in Civilization and Its Discontents; Woolf’s philosopher muses, ‘Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded ... in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man?’ (TTL 35). Yet this concern for the ‘average’ man causes Mr Ramsay to denigrate Shakespeare, and, surprisingly (from our contemporary perspective), marks him has a ‘tyrannical’ (TTL 46) figure.

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We may better understand this apparent paradox by referring to the work of Jane Ellen Harrison, whose work influenced Woolf greatly. Harrison observes that ‘a Greek “tyrant” was not in our sense “tyrannical” ... The tyrant ... stood for democracy, for trade and industry, as against an idle aristocracy ... for the rights of the many as against the few’ (Harrison, Ancient 153). This is very much applicable to Mr Ramsay, a ‘tyrant’ (TTL 24) whose energy has earned him a place of importance in the world of philosophy. Yet, predictably, Mr Ramsay’s supposedly humanistic position is contradictory, since an absence of human beings is the predicate for his philosophical concerns. We do not hear directly about his philosophical ideas, but we can infer their nature when Lily asks Andrew Ramsay what his father’s work is about. Andrew answers: ‘“Subject and object and the nature of reality” Andrew had said ... she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant. “Think of a kitchen table then,” he told her, “when you’re not there”’ (TTL 26). Such abstract, non-anthropocentric concerns marked the intellectual world in which Woolf and Forster circulated, and Woolf was doubtless familiar with G.E. Moore’s argument that a beautiful thing was better ‘in itself’ than an ugly thing, and such an idea’s anti-humanistic consequences. Moore puts it thus: ‘if in any imaginable case you do admit that the existence of a more beautiful thing is better in itself than that of one more ugly, quite apart from its effects on any human feeling, then ... we shall have to include in our ultimate end something beyond the limits of human existence’ (Moore, Principia, 84). This picture of a world beyond human perceptions seems antithetical to a novelist, but Woolf mistrusts human nature enough to make it attractive. We may recall Lily Briscoe’s sense that ‘it was a miserable machine ... the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment’ (TTL 178). Although Woolf had always seen the novel’s subject as ‘the relation of human being to human being’ (ROO 71), Lily Briscoe discovers that ‘human relations,’ especially those ‘between men and women,’ are ‘insincere’ (TTL 86–7) and submerged in ‘extreme obscurity’ (TTL 159). Hence Woolf’s ambition to ‘escape a little from the common sittingroom and see human beings not always in relation to each other but in relation to reality’ (ROO 114). She nearly attains this dehumanized ‘reality’ in the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse. Here Woolf imagines a world gradually voided of human beings (Mrs Ramsay’s death being a symbolic death of the human principle uniting the

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Ramsay family). The question of nature’s place in human affairs (and vice versa) is thus raised, not surprisingly: ‘Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, condoned his meanness, and acquiesced in his torture. That dream ... of sharing, completing, finding in solitude on the beach an answer, was but a reflection in a mirror’ (TTL 125). Woolf’s narrator sides with Moore, rhetorically affirming the existence of forces beyond the human whose values may differ radically from ours. Yet without Mrs Ramsay, human life is basically unlivable at the Ramsays’ summer cottage; there is no objective correlative (to use T.S. Eliot’s phrase) to link the outside world to our private feelings: ‘no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul’ (TTL 120). The sense of a hostile supernatural force plays over the deserted scene, dramatizing the incoherence of life without a maternal presence: It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking, which, did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail ... so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole. (TTL 119)

Upon her return to this desolate scene, Lily must conjure up memories of her lost friend: ‘the whole scene on the beach ... seemed to depend somehow upon Mrs Ramsay sitting under the rock ... That woman sitting there, writing under the rock, resolved everything into simplicity’ (TTL 150). Yet Mrs Ramsay’s death means that Lily has to look elsewhere for human meaning. She turns to Mr Ramsay for a clue to surviving after Mrs Ramsay’s maternal presence is gone. He provides it by embodying aspects of the Oedipus myth as represented by Sophocles, Bachofen, and Freud. Woolf expressed admiration for Sophocles’ work, which she read in translation. In Three Guineas, Woolf terms Sophocles one of the ‘great psychologists,’ whose analysis of power relations locates the sources of a masculine desire for dominance in a ‘fear of ridicule’

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(TG 275). Woolf applies this logic to Creon, whom she sees as relevant to the twentieth century, since he is ‘typical of ... Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini’ (TG 259). Woolf’s initial portrayal of Mr Ramsay as an exacting, insecure egomaniac always ‘demanding sympathy’ (TTL 38) mirrors the Sophoclean tyrant; Woolf goes on to argue that, precisely because of Sophocles’ genius, ‘we sympathize ... even with Creon himself’ (TG 259). Woolf strove to clarify that even the more unappealing men in her fiction (such as Mr Ramsay) are similarly sympathetic, or in desperate need of sympathy (not ridicule). Moreover, reading Mr Ramsay’s development against the backdrop of Sophocles’ Oedipus plays reveals that the novel’s pattern is very close to that governing the plays: it is divided in two sections (with an interval, the ‘Time Passes’ section) that trace the gradual fall and redemption of a doomed but heroic male figure. Mr Ramsay is proud and ‘tyrannical’ (TTL 46) in the first part of the book, but after losing his wife – an event, like Jocasta’s death and Oedipus’s self-blinding, that occurs off-stage – he re-emerges as a meeker, though still occasionally angry, figure, like a ‘king in exile’ (TTL 140). This narrative arc follows that traced in Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus. Woolf’s rehabilitation of Mr Ramsay as a humbler patriarch accords with Harrison’s view of Oedipus at Colonus. In this play, according to Harrison, ‘Oedipus asks to be taught to pray aright’ (Harrison, Prolegomena, 254), revealing a new humility but also a change from his anti-religious pride in intellectual independence. Mr Ramsay arguably shows a similar humility in ceding authority to James, who symbolically steers the boat that will bring him, Mr Ramsay, and Cam to the lighthouse. Woolf’s views of human identity and its relationship to Greek myths were undoubtedly influenced by Harrison. Harrison was very much a feminist politically, but she allied herself with classical humanism for strategic purposes, since she was convinced that ‘woman qua woman, qua sex, is in subjection’ but that ‘woman qua human being, and even qua weaker human being, is not in subjection’ (Harrison, Alpha, 100). For Harrison, even a sexist humanism is better than none. But she ardently wishes the same fully and universally human status for women as for men: ‘A man sanely and rightly refuses to have his activities secluded into the accident of sex ... and to this language bears unconscious witness – that “man” connotes and comprises “humanity.”

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Dare we say as much of women? The whole Woman’s Movement is ... the demand that in the life of woman, as in the life of man, space and liberty shall be found for ... humanity’ (Harrison, Alpha, 85). Yet, in Harrison’s view, women must break free from their instincts to deserve this larger human position: ‘Woman ... sets her face always against comradeship, against the free association of equal ... brotherhoods ... broadly speaking, woman is of the individualistic instincts ... Ethnologically speaking, woman is of the family; man of the Man’s House’ (Harrison, Alpha, 109). Thus Harrison paradoxically views women as anti-humanists who nevertheless stand to gain from humanism, if unwittingly.13 Harrison regarded humanism as the best possible means to reply to the ‘Medieval logicians’ who, as she reminds us, ‘loved to raise the question ... are women human beings or monsters?’ (Harrison, Alpha, 118). The knowledge promised by classical humanism is the best way for women to answer in the affirmative: ‘the power to know is at least one, if not the chief, hall-mark of humanity. If women are not to know, they may be sirens, but they are not human’ (Harrison, Alpha, 119). This comment resonates with Woolf’s work, including her discussion of the dehumanization of women in A Room of One’s Own, and her demonstration of her knowledge of Freudianism and classical humanism in To the Lighthouse. For Woolf, as for Harrison, refusing to engage with humanism and its potentially liberating politics would have been to discard the best tool to assist women in their struggles. Yet a difference between the two writers should be noted: Harrison is committed to humanistic discourse whereas Woolf criticizes humanism and suggests its limitations even as she deploys it. This philosophical difference produces a further divergence, since whereas Woolf was very much interested in the Oedipus myth and its modern significance as an unstable part of humanism, Harrison’s uncritical acceptance of humanism caused her to deal lightly with the Oedipus myth.14 Given Harrison’s relatively scant interest in the Oedipus myth itself, we should not rely too much on her work in reading Woolf’s treatment of the Oedipus story as more than a mere echo of Freud. The work of J.J. Bachofen, one of Harrison’s key sources, gives a better understanding of Woolf’s discussion of Oedipus and his humanistic significance. Viewed in light of Bachofen’s theories, To the Lighthouse may be said to trace the transition from matriarchal power

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(when Mrs Ramsay is still alive, and Mr Ramsay is an unsympathetic ‘tyrant’) to patriarchal power (when Mrs Ramsay is dead, and the more likable Mr Ramsay becomes central). Moreover, patriarchal succession becomes crucial in the novel’s final stages, when Mr Ramsay and James clash and are reconciled on the long-awaited voyage to the lighthouse: Mr Ramsay’s praise for James’s work in steering the boat marks the transmission of patriarchal authority from father to son. Harrison’s unwillingness to undertake a direct feminist critique of Bachofen’s model of upward development from regressive matricentric chaos to orderly patriarchal rationality may partly explain Woolf’s resignation to patriarchal dominance in To the Lighthouse, where Mr Ramsay survives his more influential wife to become a beneficent, magnanimous ruler of his family, outliving his status as a ‘tyrant.’ Lily Briscoe is the main agent of Mr Ramsay’s transformation into an Oedipal, humanistic hero. She initially sees that Mr Ramsay is ‘absorbed in himself’ but she nevertheless feels that ‘one liked [him] all the better for thinking that if his little finger ached the whole world must come to an end’ (TTL 46). Mr Ramsay reminds Lily of her fantasy that Mrs Ramsay was the human crux upon which all depended. The emotions between Lily and Mr Ramsay at the end of the book may seem surprising, yet they have been carefully foreshadowed throughout. Like Mr Ramsay, who knows that his books will be forgotten, Lily hopes for ‘her own exemption from the universal law,’ an exemption which will enable her to ‘be herself’ (TTL 50). Both characters wrestle with agonizing doubts, Lily’s having to do with her artistic goals: ‘Before she exchanged the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting she had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul ... exposed without protection to all the blasts of doubt’ (TTL 148). Mr Ramsay questions the duration of his reputation, and Lily identifies his philosophical struggles with her uncertainties: ‘He must have had his doubts ... she supposed; whether the table was a real table; whether it was worth the time he gave to it; whether he was able after all to find it. He had had doubts, she felt, or he would have asked less of people’ (TTL 146). In going to the lighthouse, Mr Ramsay atones for his neglect of his wife (who is identified with the lighthouse) and assumes the central status Mrs Ramsay enjoyed in Lily’s eyes. He even becomes the long-

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sought objective correlative for the unexpressed thoughts of his children (especially James), as far as Lily is concerned: ‘He looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds – that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things’ (TTL 186). Mr Ramsay’s final plight (as he humbly solicits sympathy from his children) is so pathetic that it seems to move Augustus Carmichael, the Sphinx-like poet who has presided inscrutably over the action, to symbolically forgive all humankind: ‘He stood there spreading his hands over all the weakness and suffering of mankind; she thought he was surveying, tolerantly, compassionately, their final destiny’ (TTL 191). Woolf seems to say that once the principle of maternal consolation has gone, we can find comfort in the Oedipal figures (like Mr Ramsay) who feel the loss most keenly. Whether these mourners are male or female matters less than their shared humanity. Thus, despite Woolf’s sporadic dismissal of humanity from her writing – as in sections such as ‘Time Passes’ – she cannot avoid affirming the human presence. Indeed, what is remarkable in ‘Time Passes’ is the persistence of human presence (as questions addressed to inhuman objects: ‘Will it perish?’) in a setting emptied of people. As Paul Sheehan puts it, in this section ‘nonhuman nature reveals the after-images of human lives, which can never be entirely obliterated’ (Sheehan, Modernism, 145). For Sheehan, although ‘Woolf’s ... unrelenting demonstrations of instability, lack of fixity, and metamorphic change entail the dissolution of many of the traditional distinctions between human and nonhuman,’ she ultimately ‘restores human experience to the forefront of novelistic practice’ (Sheehan, Modernism, 127). Woolf described To the Lighthouse as ‘more human’ than her previous work (Woolf, Diary, 3:106–7), and it is clear that To the Lighthouse is her most determined effort to define human nature, if only to veil her own self-examination. Woolf’s friend and admirer Roger Fry constructed an aesthetic theory that tried to define how seemingly abstract works of art might retain ‘their amenity to the human mind’ (Fry, Cézanne, 58–9). In using Oedipus to explore the treacherous, deeply private terrain of her personal grief and longing, Woolf followed Fry’s lead: she had hit upon a method of uniting the universal and intelligibly human with the mysterious, private, and inaccessible. Woolf, like Forster (and Samuel Beckett), appropriates Freudianism and the Oedipus myth strategi-

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cally, as a way to engage with the problem of humanism and the anxieties of personal life. For Woolf and Forster, therefore, the truth of Freudian claims about Oedipus’s universality mattered less than the fact that Oedipus could be relied upon to stand for what human beings had in common, whether it be potentially transgressive sexual desires or a desperate wish for self-knowledge and acceptance.

Ontario 149

Conclusion: Oedipus Reconsidered: Humanism as a Post-Structuralist Narrative in Christine Brooke-Rose and Zadie Smith

The thinking of the end of man ... is always already prescribed ... in the thinking of the truth of man. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Ends of Man,’ from The Margins of Philosophy, 121

In 1978 Jean Michel Benoist asserted, ‘Oedipus is the first to make the humanist pronouncement; he is also the first to witness its ruins’ (Benoist, Structural Revolution, 123–4). This verdict is both a succinct, anti-Freudian reading of the myth itself, and a useful – albeit unwitting – summary of the conclusions of twentieth-century British writers about Oedipus’s mythic significance. Such authors as D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Virginia Woolf all used Oedipus to sidestep or reject Freud’s confidence in his ability to explain the hidden aspects of human nature. These authors suggest instead that Freudian humanism is inadequate and self-contradictory, that human nature is not subject to rational or empirical definition, or that humans are inherently given to self-deception and self-destruction. They see Oedipus as a perfect demonstration of the principle, articulated by Paul Sheehan, that ‘anthropological self-importance is more effectively undermined by being taken apart from within’ (Sheehan, Modernism, 16). To retell the Oedipus myth in a modern context is, by and large, to assert that our attempts at self-knowledge are not only doomed to fail, but doomed to dehumanize us even further. The recent thinker whose anti-humanist view of the Oedipus myth most closely resembles that of twentieth-century British writers is the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Indeed, Lacan’s thought is a

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meeting place for Freudian thought and modernist anti-humanist critiques of it. Lacan viewed himself as Freud’s successor, but he professed to have abandoned all of Freud’s humanistic assumptions that modernists had found problematic, partly by foregrounding humanity’s dependence on language; as Lacan puts it, ‘Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him man’ (ES 65). Lacan argues that Freud’s work meant that ‘the very centre of the human being was no longer to be found at the place assigned to it by a whole humanist tradition’ (ES 114), and rejoices that Freud’s work has helped to dissipate ‘the mirage that renders modern man so sure of being himself even in his uncertainties about himself, and even in the mistrust he has learned to practice against the traps of self-love’ (ES 165).1 In Lacan’s words, for human beings, ‘truth proves to be ... akin to death and, all in all, rather inhuman’ (ES 145). Lacan sees himself uncovering fatal contradictions within humanism, and even claims that ‘death ... is that which is hidden behind the very notion of humanism, at the heart of any humanist consideration’ (FFC 223). Given that Lacan saw himself as Freud’s successor, it is unsurprising that Oedipus has a specific role in Lacan’s conception of the ‘second death.’ Whereas Freud uses Oedipus in a humanistic line of enquiry regarding a universal psychological problem, Lacan emphasizes the anti-humanistic overtones of Oedipus’s fate. Lacan claims that ‘Sophocles presents us with man and questions him along the paths of his solitude; he situates the hero in a sphere where death encroaches on life, in his relationship, that is, to what I have been calling the second death here. This relationship to being ... is directly attached to language as such’ (S 7:285). For Lacan, Oedipus’s ‘malediction’ of his sons, indeed of all humanity, at Colonus is informed by knowledge of ‘the true subsistence of a human being, the subtraction of himself from the order of the world’ such that ‘He [Oedipus] doesn’t die like everybody else, that is to say accidentally; he dies from a true death in which he erases his own being’ (S 7:306). Simply to decide to forgo what Oedipus wishes to avoid (incest and parricide) is not enough, in Lacan’s mind, to learn the lesson that Freud drew from the myth: how to become human. For Lacan, humans have many important things in common: the ‘mirror stage’; the ‘second death’; our self-formation through the ‘Real,’ the ‘Imaginary,’ and the ‘Symbolic’; our reckoning with the ‘Phallus’ as a representative of the power of language; and, of course, the Oedipus complex. On Oedipus, Lacan writes, ‘the Oedipus

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complex ... mark[s] the limits that our discipline assigns to subjectivity’ since analysts ‘recognize it as covering the whole field of our experience’ (LS 40). Clearly, Lacan is willing to generalize about the human condition, despite his apparent quarrel with humanism. For Lacan, every human being ‘can know of his unconscious participation in the movement of the complex structures of marriage ties ... by verifying the symbolic effects in his individual existence of the tangential movement towards incest which has manifested itself ever since the coming of a universal community’ (LS 40). Elizabeth Grosz elucidates Lacan’s neo-Freudian Oedipal humanism: ‘Instead of the Freudian commitment to a phylogenetic, pseudo-biological explanation of the oedipal structure, Lacan will use social, unconscious and linguistic explanations ... Agreeing with Freud that the castration complex is the pivot of the child’s entry into culture, Lacan confirms Freud’s conflation of patriarchy with culture in general’ (Grosz, Jacques Lacan, 70). Although Lacan shifts the grounds of his defence of Oedipus’s centrality, and acknowledges that Sophocles’ plays contain an anti-humanistic warning, he nevertheless affirms that humans must reckon with the Oedipus myth to arrive at any selfawareness. The response to Lacan’s universal Oedipal dilemma is not merely to renounce one’s mother and accept one’s father as a model, but to submit to ‘the symbolic order,’ the linguistic precondition of all taboos and prohibitions. But this submission to the signifier fundamentally changes our notion of what it is to be human: the very idea that a reality exists behind ‘humanity’ is thrown into ontological instability. Our wish to end that instability is a desire to end the condition we want to understand. To wish to know the human is to wish to kill the human, since the drive to know is the death drive; thus Lacan sees the ever-curious Oedipus’s trajectory as ‘a triumph of being-for-death’ (S 7:313). But Oedipus’s apparently self-destructive gesture is really a move towards post-humanistic revelation; as Lacan puts it, ‘If [Oedipus] tears himself free from the world through the act of blinding himself, it is only because he who escapes from appearances can achieve truth ... Homer was blind and so was Tiresias’ (S 7:310). Lacan’s interest in Oedipus stems largely from his view that language, which operates in what he calls the ‘symbolic’ realm, is Oedipally charged by the ‘Nom/non du père’ (‘the name/no of the father’), a version of the Freudian father’s threat of castration that

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denied an infant son unrestricted access to the mother. Lacan’s ‘Nom/non’ is not a physical threat; instead, it is a mark of the presence of language, and a clue that this language overshadows all desires (conscious or unconscious). As Fredric Jameson writes, thanks to Lacan ‘the very cornerstone of Freud’s conception of the psyche, the Oedipus complex, is transliterated ... into a linguistic phenomenon’ (Jameson, ‘Imaginary,’ 359). Thus the message Lacan gleans from Oedipus differs sharply from that Freud saw, though it is no less important for human self-understanding: for Freud, Oedipus was the clue we needed to understand ourselves; for Lacan, Oedipus reminds us that we cannot understand ourselves except through words – metaphors, which are deceptive and ambiguous signs. Thus Lacan sees Sophocles’ portrait of Oedipus as wholly inconsistent with the modern notion that Sophocles was a ‘humanist’ (S 7:274). Bolstered by this ancient precursor, Lacan speaks for those who ‘consider ourselves to be at the end of the vein of humanist thought’ and announces that Oedipus proves that ‘man is in the process of splitting apart ... along the joint between the imaginary and the symbolic in which we seek out the relationship of man to the signifier’ (S 7:274). Whether we sympathize with Lacan or not, Oedipus exemplifies human impotence in the face of divine authority and a language he cannot quite master. Indeed, his Greek name, ‘Oidipous,’ evinces his involuntary subjection to ambiguous language. Oidipous can mean either ‘he who knows the foot’ or ‘swollen foot’; the former meaning implies his rational understanding of his body, whereas the latter recalls Oedipus’s infant injuries, which were beyond his control. (Oedipus’s feet were pierced when he was left to die on a mountainside by his parents, who abandoned him after hearing about his horrific destiny, and he walked with a limp for the rest of his life.) Although his name may imply knowledge, he cannot ‘know’ his swollen feet, since he did not know his biological parents or the true significance of his pierced feet.2 The linguistic turn in Lacan’s Oedipally influenced work is very similar to the main thrust of Jacques Derrida’s anti-humanism. Derrida claims that ‘grammatology must not be one of the sciences of man ... because it asks first, as its characteristic question, the question of the name of man ... to refuse the name of man and the ability to write beyond its own proper community, is one and the same gesture’ (Derrida, Grammatology, 83). In evading traditional Western philoso-

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phy’s errors, Derrida ‘tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics ... has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play’ (Derrida, Margins, 292). Much of Derrida’s anti-humanistic thought is connected to the Oedipus myth. Oedipus haunts ‘White Mythology,’ Derrida’s essay on metaphor: Oedipus Tyrannus is quoted in three epigraphs, and comments on Oedipus by Aristotle and Boileau appear. Derrida quotes Jean-Pierre Vernant’s reading of Oedipus at length in the section of Dissemination that deals with the pharmakos, and in Glas he intersperses texts by Hegel and Genet with remarks about Oedipus’s sexual crimes. Derrida himself writes that Glas is an extended meditation on ‘what it might mean to write oedipally’ (Derrida, Post Card, 341). Richard Goodkin explores these Oedipal themes in ‘Tracing the Trace: Oedipus and Derrida.’ Given the interest in Oedipus these two post-structuralist antihumanists share, it is unsurprising that references to Oedipus and humanism recur in THRU, the radical experimental novel by Christine Brooke-Rose, an avant-garde postmodernist heavily influenced by Lacan and Derrida. THRU, published in 1975, depicts an academic community in which Oedipus is a scapegoat for Freudian humanism’s errors, which ambitious post-structuralist intellectuals must disavow. One rebellious student cries out, ‘down with Oedipus he’s been deposed like they said there has been a complete reform of pregenital organisation and we don’t get swaddled in mythical complexes anymore’ (THRU 732–3). The referent for ‘they’ is unclear, but Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, authors of The Anti-Oedipus, are strongly indicated. Thus the Freudian Oedipus is excoriated in the novel, especially from a feminist academic, who fumes, ‘who do you think you are, bourgeois little boys dipped carefully into a bloody eye and swaddled in a castration complex to preserve the dirty little family secret that structures society each tale-bearer carrying his code in his mouth until he has eaten himself silly and soft and flabby?’ (THRU 726). Brooke-Rose reminds us that the ‘castration complex’ is part of the ‘Oedipus complex’ as a whole (since, for Lacan, the father’s ‘No’ subordinates the infant’s supposedly incestuous desires for language and social taboos), and the ‘dirty little family secret’ that Brooke-Rose alludes to is in part the secret of the phallus as the goal of symbolic initiation (in which Lacan’s threat of ‘castration’ takes place).3

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Brooke-Rose’s impatience with phallocentric Oedipal humanism can be gauged from THRU’s declaration that ‘the phallus-man should simply be fizzled out’ (THRU 730), but she suggests that phallocentric thought is already being phased out – that the Oedipus ‘phallus-man’ is a fizzling man. This suggestion explicitly comments on the failure of philosophical movements such as phenomenology (the occasion for some of Derrida’s most eloquent attacks on humanism),4 which only succeed in showing that ‘man realises retrospectively that he has accomplished more than he desired and worked at something infinitely beyond him’ (THRU 621). Brooke-Rose addresses a valedictory to this old, bad, Oedipal, humanist subject, which she sees as already being dismembered: You are a speaking head on a platter, narrating yourself to an earful of crabs at the bottom of the ocean or shouting in the wilderness with a mouthful of locusts and wild honeybees and blind as well maybe, since eyelessness is not a provisional state but a structure, a blind spot in your own youdipeon discourse and discourse only occurs insofar as there is lack of (in) sight. The fall was into language. Thus even the provisional other is only a verbal icon who carries the image of your head on a piece of texture. (THRU 675)

As Derrida has argued, a text is ‘the system of writing ... which we know is ordered around its own blind spot’ (Derrida, Grammatology 164). Brooke-Rose’s thematization of the Oedipus myth appears to attempt to expose and disrupt the unconsciously Oedipal Freudian humanistic narrative that has tried to define human beings. For Brooke-Rose, as for Lacan and Derrida (and Sophocles), Oedipus represents an embattled human identity that clings to life by concealing its true meaning. As Brooke-Rose puts it, ‘A human being lives to the end on his lack of definition’ (THRU 711), and Oedipus is no exception. As THRU suggests, ‘The humanist theory has all the beautiful coherence of psychosis’ (THRU 659), and her text dramatizes the schizoid effect of the ambiguity of language. Brooke-Rose creates portmanteau words such as ‘hystery’ – a combination of ‘history,’ ‘mystery,’ and ‘hysteria’ (THRU 590) – a tactic reminiscent of Finnegans Wake’s attempt to dramatize the consequences of the ‘fall’ into ‘language.’ For instance, an ‘oedipiano’ is said to have a ‘treble sound,’ which – since ‘treble,’ aside from its musical connotations, suggests a threefold nature–implies a lack of coherence (THRU 723). Through

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such plays on words, Brooke-Rose reduces the Oedipal, humanistic narrative to a ‘disembodied voiceless logos’ (THRU 742), ‘in a text like the world or the human / body that merely / engenders / itself in / to / writing’ (THRU 593). Although THRU stages powerful critiques of Freudian Oedipal humanism, Rose has tended to view feminist attempts to circumvent Oedipal motifs as flawed or hypocritical. In ‘A womb of one’s own?’, whose title comments ironically on Woolf’s classic feminist piece, Brooke-Rose discusses recent French feminist theorists and notes that ‘feminist critics like Kristeva and Cixous have both defined écriture feminine as an eruption of the feminine pre-Oedipal, or pre-symbolic (which Kristeva calls “the semiotic”) into avantgarde masculine writing,’ while nevertheless paying homage to male writers like Joyce, thus implying that ‘écriture feminine is the male avant-garde’ (STT 223). Puzzled by such apparent contradictions, Brooke-Rose confesses, ‘I am not at all sure how “subversive” [feminism] really is, on its wombish own’ (STT 233). Still, in trying to define a non-Oedipal écriture feminine, Brooke-Rose quotes Cixous: ‘a feminine text goes on and on and at a certain moment the volume comes to an end but the writing continues [...] The quest for origins, illustrated by Oedipus, doesn’t haunt a feminine unconscious. Rather it’s the beginning, or beginnings [...] not promptly with the phallus in order to close with the phallus, but starting on all sides at once’ (Cixous, ‘Castration,’ 53). Cixous sees écriture feminine as independent both of the need for closure and of the ‘quest for origins’ and thus, to some extent, free of the restrictions of linear narrative. Cixous’s rejection of both narrative and Oedipal tropes5 is partly motivated by the fact that in the postmodern imagination Oedipus represents not a universal identity but the universal need to tell stories, regardless of truth.6 This is the view of Roland Barthes, who in The Pleasure of the Text wonders, ‘Doesn’t every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn’t storytelling always a way of searching for one’s origin, speaking one’s conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?’ (Barthes, Pleasure, 2:518 [my trans.]). Barthes complains, ‘Today we dismiss Oedipus and narrative ... we no longer love, we no longer fear, we no longer narrate. As fiction, Oedipus was at least good for something ... to tell good stories’ (Barthes, Pleasure, 2:518). The feminist Lacanian Julia Kristeva echoes this identification of Oedipus with storytelling, asserting that all fictional narratives

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‘share the economy of a traversal of Oedipus’ (Kristeva, ‘Bataille,’ 250). To cede the paradigmatic place in storytelling to any male hero would seem unthinkable for a feminist, yet Kristeva is explicit: ‘it is at the time of Oedipus that the first tale was formulated as an attempt to reconstruct and to formulate the past experience of the individual, as an attempt to master this experience ... Fiction ... reiterates the constitution of the subject in Oedipus as desiring and castrated subject’ (Kristeva, ‘Bataille,’ 249–50). In trying to reconcile the conflicting versions of the Oedipus myth presented by Kristeva and Cixous, feminist scholar Teresa de Lauretis argues that ‘the Oedipus story’ is ‘paradigmatic of all narratives’ (de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 112) and links Oedipus’s victory over the Sphinx with the narrative triumph of masculine over feminine desire: ‘the Sphinx ... only served to test Oedipus and qualify him as a hero ... her question is now subsumed in his ... her fateful gift of knowledge [is] soon to be his’ (de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 112). Nevertheless, de Lauretis envisions the Sphinx as ‘the enunciator of the question of desire as precisely enigma, contradiction, difference not reducible to sameness’ (de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 157) and tries to salvage Oedipus for feminist narrative: ‘The most exciting work ... is not antinarrative or anti-Oedipal ... It is narrative and Oedipal with a vengeance, for it seeks to stress the duplicity of that [Oedipal] scenario ... the contradiction by which historical women must work with and against Oedipus’ (de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 157). This simultaneous mistrust and accommodation of Oedipus’s gendered legacy is typically postmodern, and it has proved remarkably productive for Brooke-Rose, who accepts the implication that narrative itself is Oedipal. Brooke-Rose’s identification of Oedipus with narrative is suggested by her transformation of Oedipus’s name into three words (‘you dip us’), which links Oedipus with the ‘narrator’s omniscience’ that ‘dips into many minds with varying degrees of presence of mind’ (THRU 689). Underlining this idea of Oedipal narration, a character/narrator in THRU (it is frequently difficult to tell them apart) asks, ‘who is we to dip royally into an age-old narrative matrix before we gouge out the I in order carefully to gauge its liquid essence?’ (THRU 595). Here, as elsewhere in THRU, narrative is blindness-inducing incest, and Oedipus ‘dips’ us in this amniotic fluid, swaddling us in storytelling. This Oedipal storytelling is certainly a gesture of solidarity with tradition, as Brooke-Rose acknowledges when she quotes Barthes’s S/Z at

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length: ‘a finger, with its silent, deictic movement, always accompanies the classic text: the truth is of the sort long desired and avoided, maintained in a sort of pregnant fullness, whose puncturing (which is both liberating and catastrophic) accompanies the end of the discourse; and the personage, the very space of these signifieds, is never anything but the passage of the enigma which Oedipus (in his debate with the Sphinx) has inscribed onto western discourse’ (quoted in THRU 592). The finger appears simply to be a sign of the Lacanian phallus, to which one accedes by one’s ‘passage’ through the meanings of Oedipus’s story, a passage which the ‘classic text,’ as Barthes describes it, typically presents through narrative. For such an experimental author as Brooke-Rose, Barthes’s Oedipal narrative-driven ‘classic text’ might seem to lack appeal, yet she suggests that it is inescapable; hence a character refers to ‘the enigma with which you dip us all in the eternal debate with the sphinx that has stamped the whole of occidental paradismatics’ (THRU 692). All Western thought and literature has been ‘dipped’ into the Oedipal narrative, it seems; even those who would like to avoid Oedipal tropes become ensnared in them. Thus the rebellious student who shouts ‘down with Oedipus’ is immediately needled by a friend: ‘then why are you so anxious to pick up all the loose ends and wrap them around yourselves like winding sheets?’ (THRU 7323). To want to tie up the ‘loose ends’ of narrative is to participate in the intellectual project in which Sophocles’ Oedipus engages and that has driven Freud’s humanistic project. In quoting and altering lines from Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,7 Brooke-Rose playfully suggests the inevitability of the Oedipal presence in any self-conscious literary text: ‘Oh the moving finger points and having pointed itself out moves on, will not stay for an answer, tetrapod biped or tripod, two and a stick, a fang for an eye a foot in it for an unintentional phallusy but an intentional literality: gently dip but not too deep: you dip me I dip you I I sir you dip us’ (THRU 592). We all help produce these Oedipal narratives, Brooke-Rose implies, because our all-too-human curiosity drives us to resolve the riddles of our identity. In reading any text we end up like Oedipus facing the Sphinx (‘tetrapod biped or tripod, two and a stick’ alludes to the Sphinx’s riddle). Brooke-Rose also reminds us that in trying to find meaning we commit ‘unintentional phallusy,’ in that we are building on the humanist project, whether we like it or not.

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Brooke-Rose’s engagement with the Oedipus story’s humanist overtones and paradigmatic status is echoed strongly in Zadie Smith’s 2001 novel White Teeth. This theoretically sophisticated, self-consciously postmodern novel is peppered with references to Oedipus to a degree that would be surprising, were it not that, like Brooke-Rose, Smith comments on the narrative drive that has kept Oedipus at the forefront of postmodern texts even after Freud’s humanistic assumptions have been rejected. For instance, Smith’s narrator hints that White Teeth is structured around the same principle as Oedipus Tyrannus, ‘anagnorisis,’ or recognition; in a symbolically charged scene, the character ‘Mad Mary’ looks at Samad Iqbal, one of the novel’s most important protagonists, with ‘recognition’ during his obsessive affair with Poppy BurtJones: ‘She had spotted the madman in him’ (WT 149). The most telling recognition in the book occurs when Iqbal realizes that his and Archie’s lives will make a good narrative: ‘He gets to the fundamental truth of it, the anagnorisis: “This incident alone will keep us two old boys going for the next forty years.” It is the story to end all stories. It is the gift that keeps on giving’ (WT 441; Smith’s italics). Given Barthes’s, Kristeva’s, and Brooke-Rose’s insistence on Oedipus’s enduring paradigmatic status, Smith’s words might suggest that Oedipus’s tale is exactly this kind of paradoxical ‘story to end all stories’ (it contains the germ of every narrative, making new stories unnecessary) and that is also a never-ending ‘gift that keeps on giving’ (we never entirely leave it behind). Yet Smith does not refer to the Oedipus myth primarily in these selfreflexive postmodern narratological terms. Like many modernist texts, Smith’s novel uses the Oedipus myth to express a familiar scepticism about humanistic theories that offer a totalizing vision of humanity, and to suggest that such a project is inherently self-destructive. Smith’s ambitious novel synthesizes many aspects of the Oedipus myth in twentieth-century British literature: it not only engages with the ‘high’ modernist anti-humanism of Eliot and Lewis, but it also invokes the dystopias of Huxley and Orwell. Like Joyce and Woolf, White Teeth keeps humanism and anti-humanism in tension, never endorsing a Hegelian or Freudian humanist picture of Oedipus. But Smith has not completely abandoned Freudian Oedipus, as we see when her narrator describes the Chalfen family as follows: ‘The children had their oedipal complexes early and in the right order, they were all fiercely heterosexual, they adored their mother and admired their father, and, unusually, this feeling only increased as they reached adolescence’

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(WT 261). To have already ‘had’ one’s ‘oedipus complex’ implies that one has achieved a comfortable identification with one’s father, but at least one Chalfen boy still harbours significant animosity towards his father, Marcus. Joshua Chalfen is in desperate Oedipal rebellion against the smug confidence of ‘Chalfenism,’ his tight-knit family’s self-serving ethos. Joshua sees his father’s genetic experiments with mice as the crux of his family’s mistakenly anthropocentric world view, and he joins an animal-rights group. Smith varies the Oedipal theme when Iqbal exhibits highly self-conscious and intellectual Oedipal traits. Exasperated by his son Millat, who has temporarily blinded himself to his surroundings with a video game that wraps itself around his head, Samad forces the video protagonist to die. Millat denounces this symbolic reversal of Oedipal roles, shouting, ‘YOU KILLED ME WHILE I WAS WINNING!’ (WT 124). At this, Samad gives his most explicit imitation of Oedipus: ‘Samad closed his eyes and forced his eyeballs to roll up as far as possible in his head, in the hope that his brain might impact upon them, a self-blinding, if he could achieve it, on a par with that other victim of Western corruption: Oedipus. Think: I want another woman. Think: I’ve killed my son. I swear. I eat bacon. I regularly slap the salami. I drink Guinness’ (WT 124). Samad’s guilt overwhelms his anger at his son, and he links his crimes with those of Oedipus. Yet this parallel is puzzling; whereas Samad feels he has been tempted by loose Western morals, Oedipus is hardly a ‘victim of Western corruption.’ Smith here seems to refer to the fact that many see Oedipus as the self-confident hero of Western rationalism and humanism, and to Nietzsche’s view that Oedipus’s excessive faith in his rationality begat the Dionysian madness that led him to blind himself. For Nietzsche, rationality was a madness, a form of the self-blinding ‘corruption’ that Iqbal associates with the West. If Iqbal’s Oedipal identity seems a trifle arbitrary, Dr Marc-Pierre Perret, who has worked ‘in a scientific capacity for the Nazis since before the war’ (WT 90), is a complex, suggestive Oedipal figure. Perret worked on ‘the sterilization policy’ and ‘the euthanasia policy’ and was ‘one of the very loyal’ (WT 90); he parallels Josef Mengele, the sadistic mastermind of Nazi experiments. Yet the mythic resonance with which Smith imbues Perret suggests that he is more than an evil Nazi doctor. Perret suffers from ‘diabetic retinopathy,’ which, as he says, means that ‘when I do not receive insulin I excrete blood ... [t]hrough my eyes’ (WT 97). The image of

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bleeding eyes inevitably recalls Oedipus’s bloody eye sockets at the end of Oedipus Tyrannus. Moreover, known as ‘Dr. Sick’ in the Greek village of his self-exile, Perret evokes Oedipus, the man who sets out to cure the Theban plague only to find that he is its cause and chief symptom. When Perret pleads with Archie Jones for his life, he bases his appeal on his humanity: ‘I am a man ... I breathe and bleed as you do. And you do not know for certain what kind of man I am. You have only hearsay’ (WT 444). This plea, which succeeds, does more to discredit the humanistic ideal than almost anything else in the novel. Perret’s appeal is riddled with contradictions; the doctor’s own words in this scene show him to be an unregenerate eugenicist. He muses, ‘A terrible thing not to have perfection, human perfection, when it is so readily available ... If only we were brave enough to make the decisions that must be made ... between those worth saving and the rest’ (WT 446).8 Perret’s attempt to win over Jones in some respects re-enacts Oedipus’s confrontation with the Sphinx. Cementing this parallel, Perret mentions Oedipus: ‘I may yet redeem myself in your eyes ... or you may be mistaken – your decision may come back to you as Oedipus’s returned to him, horrible and mutilated. You cannot say for sure’ (WT 445). Implicit in this warning is Perret’s own self-comparison to Oedipus; he has seen his decision to work with the Nazis become ‘horrible and mutilated.’ Yet this is also a self-condemnation; given Perret’s own Oedipal identity, the analogy suggests that Jones’s decision to spare him will not benefit humanity. The last sections of Smith’s novel centre on the problem of defining a universal human nature in an age when technology threatens to usher in ‘post-human’ beings and values. As its Francis Fukuyama–inspired title suggests, chapter 18, ‘The End of History Versus the Last Man,’ 9 is dominated by meditations on the nature of humanity. The plot centres on the unveiling of a creature called FutureMouse© (a version of the OncoMouse used for cancer research by DuPont and discussed in Donna Haraway’s Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium_FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience), a cloned mouse genetically marked for early death by the apparently well-meaning but nevertheless cruel medical research undertaken by Perret and his partner, Marcus Chalfen. In the final chapters, we are privy to the plots of various radical groups, who all echo Nietzsche in denying that human beings

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are the universe’s most important beings or only source of intelligence. FATE (the animal-rights group to which Joshua Chalfen belongs), KEVIN (the extremist Islamic movement Samad Iqbal’s son Millat joins), and the Jehovah’s Witnesses (of whom two more of Smith’s protagonists, Hortense Bowden and Ryan Topps, are members) all converge on the FutureMouse© experiment because, for them, it represents the hubristic human wish to dominate the universe and control our ‘good genes.’ As Brother Shukrullah says, scientists and humanists wish to convince others that ‘it is human intellect and not Allah that is omnipotent, unlimited, all-powerful’ (WT 393). Smith’s irony makes these movements seem either hypocritical or hopelessly naïve; the hypocrisy of KEVIN members who persist in smoking marijuana or having illicit sex is noted repeatedly, and the all-too-human calculations of the apocalypse’s date by the (intensely sexist) Jehovah’s Witnesses is ridiculous. Even the uncompromising animal-rights activists need ‘an originating myth that explained succinctly what people could and should be’ (WT 395), but that myth has more to do with the sexual appeal of Joely, the female half of the group’s founding duo. Indeed, Joely and her husband Crispin take an interest in animal rights only because they are disillusioned with the infighting they encounter at left-wing groups. Even the Jehovah’s Witnesses are as eager to see ‘rivers of blood’ in the streets (WT 27) as would-be racist followers of former British right-wing politician Enoch Powell (whom the narrative usually associates with this phrase). In a similar yoking of religion and racism, Samad (a Muslim) has no real quarrel with the outcome of Perret’s project, only with the means he proposes to use: ‘He wants a race of men, a race of indestructible men, that will survive the last days of this earth. But it cannot be done in a laboratory. It must be done, it can only be done with faith!’ (WT 100). After the chaotic climax of the novel, during which Archie Jones saves Marcus Chalfen from terrorists and is shot in the leg, Archie calls the escaping mouse his ‘son’ (WT 448), thereby suggesting that humans may offload their Oedipal burdens onto other species. Yet the fact that the mouse vanishes makes this revelation into a private, imaginative act rather than a kind of public gesture or proof that could win over opponents such as KEVIN or FATE. Smith’s cheerful, colourful prose conceals a stark dichotomy between religious fundamentalists and animal-rights activists (who deny human supremacy by worshipping God or nature) and scientific rationalists (who justify their

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tyranny over nature by referring to the hopeful ‘human significance’ of technology [WT 436]). Neither side offers a vision that even a self-critical humanistic viewpoint can embrace, and the tension between the two competing world views seems apocalyptic. The relief of finding familiar mythic patterns in Archie’s heroism or Samad’s hypocrisy pales in comparison to the exasperation of recognizing the mutually destructive forces that have repeatedly brought human history to the same violent Oedipal ‘crossroads.’ Because of Smith’s interest in exploring the paradoxes of improving human lives by tampering with the genes that form our biological identity, her work has clear affinities with so-called post-humanism. Yet Smith’s work also privileges Oedipal tropes so as to reinscribe Freudian obsessions and thus to affirm an aspect of Freudian humanism. This apparent contradiction reveals the territory shared by the ‘post-human’ and the humanist tradition it supposedly supplants, as well as some tensions between different versions of the post-human. N. Katherine Hayles, the most celebrated theorist of the post-human, refuses to provide a ‘prescriptive’ definition, but she argues that in some forms, post-humanism assumes that ‘informational pattern’ is more important than ‘material instantiation,’ and thus that ‘embodiment is ... an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life’; she also notes that other versions of post-humanism consider that ‘consciousness’ is merely ‘an epiphenomenon, an evolutionary upstart’ (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 2–3). These versions of post-humanism share an assumed separation between mind and body. This separation, however, is not apparent in another post-humanist view articulated by Hayles: the description of ‘human being’ as something that can be ‘seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines’ so that ‘there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals’ (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3). This final and ‘most important’ post-humanism posits a ‘material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction’ (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3). Such a concept is suggestive, but hardly provides grounds for disentangling post-humanism from its humanist predecessor. Indeed, Hayles suggests that the cultural, technological, and intellectual ‘changes’ leading to the replacement of ‘the human’ by ‘the posthu-

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man’ were ‘never complete transformations or sharp breaks’ and that therefore ‘“human” and “posthuman” coexist in shifting configurations that vary with historically specific contexts’ (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 6). Hayles argues that, at its inception, ‘cybernetics was a means to extend liberal humanism, not subvert it. The point was less to show that man was a machine than to demonstrate that a machine could function like a man’ (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 7).10 Thus Hayles notes that ‘many attributes of the liberal humanist subject, especially ... agency, continue to be valued in the face of the posthuman’ (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 279).11 There is an explicitly ‘performative’ dimension to Hayles’s definition of post-humanism, whereby, as she put it, ‘people become posthuman because they think they are posthuman’ (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 6). Paul Sheehan echoes this view in the context of humanism, saying that in the post-human age, ‘We must … become accustomed to … performing our humanness rather than possessing it’ (Sheehan, Modernism, 192). Such claims make us wonder whether human identity could ever have been more than a performance; indeed, the processes outlined by Hayles and Sheehan are precisely those in Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, when Oedipus’s answer to the Sphinx both enacts a performance of his human identity and constitutes a human self-definition. For Hayles, post-humanism differs from traditional humanism by refusing to see the human subject as ‘an autonomous self with unambiguous boundaries’ (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 290). This refusal seems characteristic of Smith’s novel, where many characters are linked through Oedipal tropes and manipulated by uncontrollable forces (rather like the unfortunate FutureMouse © itself). Yet it is hard to imagine Freudian humanism, for instance, excluding the interrogation of a subject’s autonomy or boundaries (the unconscious undermines both). Hayles ignores the biological basis of humanism as posited by psychoanalysis, and only mentions Freud once in How We Became Posthuman. Although Hayles asserts that ‘posthuman’ texts ‘reveal the fragility of consciousness’ in a way that is ‘distinctively different from ... Freud,’ she does not explain how these differences occur or why they matter (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 279). Indeed, Freud might fit comfortably into the post-human tradition, if Hayles is right that ‘the posthuman is likely to be seen as antihuman because it envisions the conscious mind as a small subsystem running its program of self-construction and self-assurance while

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remaining ignorant of the actual dynamics of complex systems’ (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 286). This sounds like Freud discussing the conscious mind’s attempts to repress the unconscious. Hayles reminds us that the liberal humanist world view supposes that ‘conscious agency is the essence of human identity’ (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 288). If ever anyone systematically questioned this supposition, it was Freud, though Hayles credits only the ‘posthuman view’ for recognizing that ‘conscious agency has never been “in control”’ (How We Became Posthuman, 288). Studying posthumanist rhetoric, paradoxically, shows how radical Freud’s challenge to humanism was, and how powerful was his attempt to reconstitute it under Oedipus. One might conclude that the post-human is a deliberately meaningless category concocted to elude humanism’s basic paradoxes, or, worse, to prolong the humanist moment by pretending it has been eclipsed by intellectual fiat. Yet the post-human offers us a sense of belatedness relevant to humanism as a whole. It echoes the belated, recuperative nature of J.A. Symonds’s Renaissance humanist project (see the introduction), which sought to ‘restore’ a former high point of human learning, deferring to a ‘classic’ version of the humanistic ideal (Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, 52). Thus Renaissance humanism, frequently seen as the most dynamic and enduring Western version of humanism, is already a kind of post-humanism. Jeff Wallace claims, ‘Posthuman thinking generates a dual sense of the relative lateness of the human condition, at once biological and conceptual’ (Wallace, D.H. Lawrence, 29). Yet one need not be a post-humanist to recognize the retrospective nature of human intelligence; as the classicist Jane Harrison puts it, ‘man ... feels and acts long before he definitely thinks’ (Harrison, Alpha, 161). Although post-humanism does not escape humanism’s paradoxes, it multiplies and intensifies them by foregrounding the belatedness of our shared condition; thus Wallace asserts that ‘we have always been posthuman; “human” is a much more recent invention’ (D.H. Lawrence, 29). Wallace’s paradoxical view of the belated, denatured origins of the humanist subject no doubt stems from Michel Foucault’s claim, articulated in The Order of Things, that ‘Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist ... He is quite a recent creature, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than two hundred years ago’ (Foucault, Order of Things, 308). Foucault contends

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that ‘man’ has ‘grown old so quickly that it has been only too easy to imagine that it had been waiting for thousands of years in the darkness for that moment ... in which he would finally be known’ (Foucault 308), and concludes that ‘It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance’ (Foucault, Order of Things, 342). Yet Foucault has been accused of an undeclared humanistic agenda. For Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Foucault’s world view is essentially ‘an antihumanist (or posthuman) humanism’ which partakes of that which it is intending to critique (Hardt and Negri, Empire, 91–2). The example of Foucault and his critics points to an irony of intellectual history: we can only (or only wish to) recognize humanism in retrospect, when we are already inclined to dismiss it as uninteresting received wisdom or reject it as a tainted inheritance. Stephen Yarbrough touches on this paradox when he notes that ‘humanism has seldom been the mainstream of thought in the West but has usually seemed ... outrageous at the time it appears, though it is often judged later to have been representative’ (Yarbrough, Deliberate Criticism, 18). The history of humanism bears a strangely Oedipal character (in keeping with Harold Bloom’s theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’), with each generation of thinkers rebelling against the previous one, only to adopt a revised version of the old humanist stance. Oedipus’s trajectory embodies the continuity between humanism and post-humanism; his solution to the Sphinx’s riddle seems to offer him a blank slate on which he can create his own identity in the image of rational humanity, but his fate has been decided long before, by forces far from human. As Lacan writes, ‘Oedipus’s unconscious is nothing other than his fundamental discourse whereby ... Oedipus’s history is out there – written, and we know it, but Oedipus is ignorant of it, even as he is played out by it since the beginning. This goes way back ... the Oracle frightens his parents, and ... he is consequently exposed, rejected’ (S 2:245). Oedipus’s humanistic pride in his autonomy and intelligence comes too late to alter his destiny; his humanity is an instance of the ‘(post)human’ at its most poignant and ironic. In Oedipus at Colonus, having learned his lesson, Oedipus refers to himself as ‘the dim shadow’ of someone who was ‘once a man’ (Murray, Colonus, 24), but his human identity is not altogether lost. Indeed, for Lacan, it is precisely when Oedipus seems to have outlived his human identity that he becomes most universal and meaningful.

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Lacan theorizes that ‘the last word on life, when life has been dispossessed of speech, can only be this ultimate curse which finds expression at the end of Oedipus at Colonus’ (S 2:272). The ‘expression’ Lacan refers to is Oedipus’s question, asked during his final moments at Colonus, when he is informed that his grace is to be made sacred to Thebes: ‘Is it now that I am nothing, that I am made to be a man?’ (quoted in S 2:250). Lacan asserts that ‘Oedipus’s psychoanalysis ends only at Colonus ... This is the essential moment which gives its meaning to his history’ (S 2:250). This phrase is so ‘essential’ because Oedipus equates his human identity with its annihilation. For Lacan, this gesture shows that ‘the last word of man’s relation to this discourse which he does not know is – death’ (S 2:245). Although Lacan is determined to see in Oedipus’s pronouncement evidence for certain Freudian theories, among them the death drive, and what Lacan calls ‘primordial masochism’ (S 2:272), we may read these words slightly differently, as a comment on the death drive that belongs, not to individual human beings, but to the discourse of humanism. Here we may adduce Jacques Derrida’s assertion in his essay ‘The Ends of Man’ that ‘The thinking of the end of man ... is always already prescribed ... in the thinking of the truth of man’ (Derrida, Margins, 121). In claiming that ‘Man is that which is in relation to his end’ (Derrida, Margins, 123), Derrida plays on the ambiguity of the word fin (which in French has the same double meaning as ‘end,’ both ‘goal’ and ‘cessation’). Derrida’s remark further glosses and endorses the idea that humanistic thought must have its cessation as its essential goal. After a century of absorbing Freud’s influence, humanism not only is Oedipal in its movements but also seems to possess a version of the death drive. Humanism is not so much a stable set of universal concepts as a commitment to finding new concepts that might be universal, and in Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud shifted his emphasis from the erotic trope of Oedipal desire to the desire for death. Humanism must always destroy itself in a search for a new image, a new understanding of what history has shown us we are. Humanism, as Yarbrough recognizes, is committed to destroying itself even as it formulates itself anew; though a purely formal exercise, it endlessly seeks out new, troublesome, and unstable areas to replace its existing contents. It must periodically, like Oedipus, become ‘nothing’ to survive as relevant. Thus even persuasive ideas, such as Freud’s claims about the universality of the Oedipus complex, must

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be annihilated to make way for new modes of self-understanding (or misunderstanding). Shoshana Felman has articulated this self-transcending aspect of humanism as an aspect of science itself: ‘only when this (mythical, narrative) movement of “going beyond” stops, does science stop’ (Felman, ‘Beyond Oedipus,’ 1051). Following Lacan’s lead, Felman recognizes that Oedipus is crucial to what she refers to as the ‘death-instinct of psychoanalysis’ (Felman, ‘Beyond Oedipus,’ 1043). This ‘death-instinct’ is present in any humanistic discourse, which must seek (and exceed) its own limits in order to live up to its task. Felman also provocatively links science to myth, reminding us of the need to question the claims of science to rationality: ‘Only when the myth is not acknowledged, is believed to be a science, does the myth prevail at the expense of science ... There is no “beyond” to myth – science is always ... a new (generative) myth’ (Felman, ‘Beyond Oedipus,’ 1051). If humanism may be a kind of myth, then any rejection of or antithetical sequel to it (such as post-humanism) is also a myth. If Levi-Strauss is right in saying that each new interpretation of the Oedipus myth, however revolutionary, becomes another aspect of the original myth, then the same may be said of humanism. In this sense, humanism, being always already post-humanist, is in the condition of Oedipus at Colonus, a place where he (in Shoshana Felman’s words) ‘assumes his own relation to the discourse of the Other’ and thus ‘awaits – and, indeed, assumes – his death’ (Felman, ‘Beyond Oedipus,’ 1028). Yet the awaited death of humanism never quite arrives; Felman puts it as follows: ‘while psychoanalysts may take Freud at his word, believe ... that ... in the meaning of Freud’s story of desire, the tale is ended – , Lacan is there to tell us ... this ultimate discovery, this ultimate enigma: that the tale has, in effect, no end’ (Felman, ‘Beyond Oedipus,’ 1037). To reappropriate Zadie Smith’s words about narrative, humanism is both a ‘story to end all stories’ (containing in itself a drive for its own obsolescence) and a ‘gift that keeps on giving’ (continually renewing itself, even in such apparently antithetical forms as post-humanism). It would be hard to separate twentieth-century humanism from its Oedipal tropes, and this may be one reason why humanism has proven so hard to move past; even when Freud has been dismissed, the Oedipus myth gives us pause. Even anti-Freudians as implacable as Deleuze and Guattari grant Oedipus his central status, Freud notwithstanding: ‘Oedipus is nevertheless the universal of desire, the

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product of universal history – but on one condition, which is not met by Freud: that Oedipus be capable ... of conducting its autocritique’ (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 271). A postmodern humanism grounded in even a basic sense of Oedipus’s classical heroic traits and modernist Oedipal narratives would certainly meet Deleuze and Guattari’s conditions for universality. Despite the currency of post-human theory, some literary scholars and philosophers are drawn to a ‘postmodern humanism’ defined not by its content (a universal definition of human nature), but by its forms. In Stephen Yarbrough’s words, ‘humanism ... emerges’ when ‘critical practice reaches the point where it recognizes that what it is opposing is the product of its own practice’ (Yarbrough, Deliberate Criticism, 19). For Yarbrough, humanism ‘can bring itself to the point of self-recognition and therefore can exercise a will capable of selfnegation’ (Deliberate Criticism, 19). Thus Yarbrough’s ‘postmodern humanism’ is already a post-humanism consonant with Hayles’s resolutely historicist approach. Indeed, Hayles’s method might itself exemplify a certain kind of ‘postmodern humanist’ enquiry, whereby all supposedly universal truths (including the assertion that we have entered the ‘post-human’ era) are examined within their historical context(s). The application of Yarbrough’s ‘postmodern humanism’ to literary texts is limited, since his is a formal, procedural stance, positing humanism as an empty dialogical structure whose content is always changing. This may be an attractive position for an academic, but for an artist or activist it is untenable. For Yarbrough, ‘contemporary humanists need ... to dispel the commonly held assumption that humanism always expresses a belief in the idea of a fixed “human nature”’ (Yarbrough, Deliberate Criticism, 23), yet without some common ground on this ‘nature,’ any political or social application of humanism is forfeit. If we are all different and in endless flux, then the concept of ‘human rights’ is vitiated, a loss for which participation in the unlimited dialogue of opposing views proposed by Yarbrough would be scant consolation. Still, Yarbrough’s concept reminds us that there is a basic human value to formal ideas such as dialogue, narrative, and critique. In the context of this book, the complex relationship between humanism and its auto-critique means that the Oedipus story is neither entirely tragic nor comic. For instance, if Zadie Smith implies that our need

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for a narrative (any narrative) makes us human, she also demonstrates that we need no longer feel trapped by the old, overdetermined definitions of humanity that dominated the twentieth century, since we can change our natures as easily and suddenly as scientists alter the genetic identities of their doomed mice. Perhaps even Oedipus has a new face to wear for the new millennium, having escaped, like Smith’s genetically altered FutureMouse©, from history’s fatal cage. No doubt we too should feel fortunate to have escaped, with Smith, Beckett, and Brooke-Rose, from the need to accept or reject Freudian Oedipal theory, and to be able to treat it simply as one narrative among many, a narrative about the need for narratives. Then again, perhaps Smith merely argues that we should be glad to have got out of the twentieth century alive; that century, so rich in declarations of universal human rights, was also the bloodiest one in human history. British modernists who reacted strongly against Freud were perhaps unusual in that they saw a certain intellectually respectable version of humanism popularized in their lifetimes. They did not, however, content themselves with mere elitist reflections on the watering-down of this conception of the human; instead, they took issue with Freud’s pretext: his interpretation of the Oedipus myth as a prototypical narrative of human nature and destiny. If Oedipus is a prototype of anything, they seem to say, he represents the intellectual’s inevitable (perhaps unwitting) rejection of the static conception of human nature that holds sway over large numbers of people. In this sense, Oedipus may have been the first post-humanist, and modernist British writers (some prompted by Freud, some not) realized and dramatized this. Yet the fact that postmodern writers such as Brooke-Rose and Smith are still intrigued by the Oedipal story signals that the demise of humanism, or its subordination to the ‘post-human,’ may be illusory; if apparently anti-humanist, self-consciously postmodern narratives cannot forgo Oedipal themes, then there may be no reason to view humanism as a thing of the past. As we have seen, Oedipus can stand for both humanism and anti-humanism, suggesting that the two positions may not be quite as far apart as they appear. Furthermore, the Oedipus story, as told and retold over millennia, warns against constructing binary oppositions based on any particular conception of human identity. Just as Oedipus could not quite repress or banish the inhuman forces that brought him low, so must our supposedly post-

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human condition remain inextricably linked with the humanist tradition and tropes it negates. Unless we recognize how central interrogations and negations of human identity have been to the humanist tradition, then we cannot hope to transcend or even understand it.

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Notes

Introduction: Oedipus Before Freud: Humanism and Myth in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine 1 The first published use of the phrase ‘Oedipus complex’ occurs in Freud’s 1910 essay ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men.’ Freud writes of one boy: ‘He begins to desire his mother ... and to hate his father anew as a rival who stands in the way of this wish; he comes, as we say, under the dominance of the Oedipus complex’ (On Sexuality, The Penguin Freud Library 7:238). 2 Freud’s little-known monograph On Aphasia was published in 1891, but it is very unlikely that Wells was familiar with its contents. 1. Oedipus Against Freud: The Origins of D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-Humanism 1 We know that Lawrence read Murray’s work, and admired it; in March 1913, Lawrence asked his friend Arthur McLeod to lend him, among other ancient plays, the Gilbert Murray translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus, King of Thebes (which Lawrence refers to as Oedipus Tyrannus) saying these classical dramas ‘have a fearful fascination for me still’ (Lawrence, Letters, 1:525), a comment that implies a previous familiarity with the text. 2 Frieda was not always so tolerant; indeed, there is a record of conflicts between her and Lawrence over his earlier writings with similar themes. In an exchange that John Worthen tentatively dates to the summer of 1912, Frieda took umbrage at a highly Oedipal poem

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Lawrence had written in 1910 entitled ‘My Love, My Mother.’ Far from finding Lawrence’s mother ‘adorable’ (as she had done when reading Paul Morel), Frieda wrote ‘I hate it’ repeatedly in the margins of this poem. It would seem that in the matter of Lawrence’s expressions of affection towards his mother, as in so many other things, Frieda was inconsistent. We might compare this passage with the following one from Paul Morel: ‘Paul watched tiny figures, shadows, a man, a horse and wagon ... a minute human drama of labour such as the Gods may see, diminished as we are in their sight’ (PM 22). Here, the narrator speaks confidently of the bond between humans, implying that we are united, if only in triviality, but does not attribute such thoughts to Paul. As usual in the earlier draft, Paul remains unconscious of the implications of his experiences. Furthermore, in Paul Morel humans seem to be in a kind of petty solidarity with each other, whereas in Sons and Lovers they are isolated individuals facing extinction in the natural landscape. Mitchell sees the Sphinx’s riddle as containing an ‘implied question’ about whether Oedipus himself is human (Mitchell, ‘Sons and Lovers,’ 210) and argues that ‘Clara presents the Riddle, the message of humanness, to Paul; and Paul answers the riddle correctly. But, like Oedipus, he does not, until the end, accept the meaning of his answer’ (Mitchell, ‘Sons and Lovers,’ 217). For Lawrence, in Paul Sheehan’s view, ‘a human being is a fallen being, suffering terrible losses from the determined march of modernity’ (Sheehan, Modernism, 94). Sheehan argues that Lawrence’s real interest is in not in the human at all, but in a ‘transhuman “metasoul”’ (Sheehan, Modernism, 107), and thus his characters yearn for ‘posthuman transcendence’ (Sheehan, Modernism, 16). This last formulation aptly describes Oedipus’s heroic status in Sophocles’ play. The theme of nothingness is also pertinent to the novel’s discussion of knowledge and sexuality. According to the narrator, if there is any knowledge to be gained in the sexual act, it is simply for lovers ‘[t]o know their own nothingness ... they knew they were only grains in the tremendous heave that lifted every grass-blade its little height’ (SL 398). Lawrence is not always so crude; indeed, he is often eloquent and moving in his conviction that the quest for an end to humanity (whether in theory or in reality) is the central purpose of aesthetic achievement: ‘this is beauty to me, to be lifted and gone / In a motion human

Notes to pages 53–63 173 inhuman, two and one / Encompassed, and many reduced to none’ (Lawrence, Complete Poems, 252). 2. Anti-Humanists at Colonus: The Oedipus Myth in Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot 1 Lewis’s political views were extreme and self-contradictory; he once irreverently described himself as ‘partly communist and partly fascist, with a distinct streak of monarchism in my marxism, but at bottom anarchist with a healthy passion for order’ (quoted in Bridson, Filibuster, 97). 2 Concerned about the blindness that would eventually result from this ailment, doctors tried to persuade Lewis to have the tumour removed, but he refused. Part of the reason for Lewis’s refusal was a fear that his brain would be damaged by the operation to save his vision; hence Ezra Pound’s claim that ‘Wyndham Lewis chose blindness / rather than have his mind stop’ (quoted in The Enemy, 303). Choosing clarity of mind rather than of vision seems in itself to be a form of heroism worthy of Oedipus himself. 3 ‘The greatest effort of any man, if he is sincere, is to make his personal impressions into laws’ (my translation). 4 The Greek hypocrites was also associated with the often deceptive answers given by oracles; this is the meaning that has persisted into modern English. 5 ‘Gerontion,’ which Eliot considered publishing alongside The Waste Land, also offers interesting Oedipal parallels. Like Oedipus at Colonus, Gerontion is blind and in the care of a younger person; also like Oedipus, he finds it difficult to imagine ‘forgiveness’ after the ‘knowledge’ he has acquired, which seems to involve the same ‘Unnatural vices’ that ‘Are fathered’ by his and all human ‘heroism’ (CPP 38); Oedipus’s unnatural acts with Jocasta were a result of his heroic defeat of the Sphinx. Perhaps because of his ‘impudent crimes,’ Gerontion, the ‘dry brain,’ seems to be to blame for the ‘dry season’ around him, just as Oedipus is the cause of the plague afflicting Thebes. 6 Eliot’s dissatisfaction with Hamlet may also stem from Freud’s analysis. Eliot’s claim that ‘Shakespeare tackled a problem which was too much for him’ (SP 49) may well have derived from Freud and Ernest Jones, who, like Eliot after them, are confident that ‘Shakespeare did not understand’ (SP 49) something of vital importance. Eliot would certainly have

174 Notes to pages 67–89 been familiar with Freud’s explanation of why Hamlet cannot kill Claudius: he is crippled with guilt, since he knows Claudius only did what he himself wished to do – kill his father and marry his mother. 7 We recall the plagued atmosphere of The Waste Land, and also the climate of illness described in Eliot’s Four Quartets: ‘Our only health is the disease ... to be restored, our sickness must grow worse ... The whole earth is our hospital / Endowed by the ruined millionaire, / Wherein, if we do well, we shall / Die of the absolute paternal care / That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere’ (CPP 181). 8 Eliot argues that the basic problem with Babbitt’s idea of the ‘inner check’ (individual self-awareness that preserves human society by regulating behaviour) is that ‘The sum of individuals, all ideally and efficiently checking and controlling themselves, will never make a whole’ (SP 281). For Eliot, a ‘whole’ such as the human race needs a religious belief to unify and define it. 3. Dystopian Oedipus: Freudianism and Totalitarianism in Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Malcolm Lowry 1 John is haunted by images of ‘white Linda and Popé almost black beside her, with one arm under her shoulders and the other hand dark on her breast, and one of the plaits of his long hair lying across her throat, like a black snake trying to strangle her’ (BNW 157). 2 Helmholtz, although a would-be artist, seems to seek an objective correlative for his ambitions; he has ‘a feeling that I’ve got something important to say and the power to say it – only I don’t know what it is’ (BNW 82). He responds derisively to John’s suggestion that he look to family life for his subject matter: ‘“You can’t expect me to keep a straight face about fathers and mothers ... We need some other kind of madness and violence”’ (BNW 221). It seems clear that Helmholtz will neither be a real artist nor understand John, as long as he cannot accept that there is some validity to the Oedipal narrative. 3 Lowry reflects Bachofen’s Oedipus story, whereby Oedipus’s sacrifice ennobles heterosexuality and humanity. Through Oedipus’s embrace of what Bachofen calls ‘the Demetrian stage grounded in marriage,’ he earns veneration from women as ‘the institutor’ of their ‘higher condition,’ which brings them ‘peace and all the happiness of a love life regu-

Notes to pages 97–103 175 lated by exclusive marriage’ (Bachofen, Myth, 183). This vision of Oedipus’s redemptive function accords with Lowry’s portrait of Firmin as sacrificial hero. 4. Freudful Mistakes in Sphinxish Pairc: Oedipal Humanism and Irish Nationalism in W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett 1 In Words Upon the Window-Pane, Yeats implies that Swift too was a protofascist who ‘foresaw Democracy’ and therefore ‘must have dreaded the future’ (YCP 615). 2 Yeats has picked up on Hegel’s use of Oedipus as an example of the limits of human knowledge. According to Hegel, ‘Actual reality ... does not show itself to consciousness as it fully and truly is. In the story of Oedipus the son does not see his own father in the person of the man ... whom he strikes to death, nor his mother in the queen whom he makes his wife’ (Hegel, Phenomenology, 490). Hegel never confronts the contradiction between this reading of Oedipus and the more positive one in his Aesthetics. 3 Yeats’s view of historical cycles, which he conceived as alternating between ‘primary’ and ‘antithetical’ eras, was informed by his awareness of the periodical intermingling and separation of cultures: ‘When I look in history for the conflict or union of antithetical and primary I seem to discover that conflict or union of races ... as universal law. A people who have ... acquired ... purity of breed unite with some other people ... A race (the new antithetical) emerges that is neither one nor the other, after somewhere about 500 years it produces ... its particular culture’ (AV 205). 4 Lacan’s version of Oedipus’s grim message fits that of Purgatory: ‘That is what Oedipus at Colonus shows us – the essential drama of destiny, the total absence of charity, of fraternity, of ... human feeling’ (Lacan, Seminar, 2:230). 5 Rhodes writes that ‘Thebes has been afflicted by a crushing plague ... Stockmann’s town is also afflicted by a filthy pollution. In this case, it is the water system buried beneath the town which has become unsanitary due to a bacterial poison drifting down from infected mills in the mountains ... Like Oedipus, Dr. Stockmann vows to bring the truth to light. He believes this is the only salvation for the town, even though it might take years to clean up the mess’ (Rhodes, Ibsen and the Greeks, 145).

176 Notes to pages 124–30 5. Oedipus Que(e)ried: Humanism, Sexuality, and Gender in E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf 1 Harrison acknowledges Bachofen’s Mutterecht as ‘the fullest existing collection of ancient facts’ about ancient Greek matriarchal practices, though she deplores ‘the wildness of its theories’ – presumably referring to the supposed promiscuity of pre-patriarchal sexual connections, as Bachofen describes them (Harrison, Prolegomena, 262). Harrison does not go very far towards refuting such theories; indeed, she quotes an account of the importance of Cecrops in introducing patriarchal monogamy: ‘At Athens Cecrops was the first to join one woman to one man: before the connections had taken place at random and marriages were in common’ (Harrison, Prolegomena, 262). 2 In Yarbrough’s words, ‘humanism ... emerges’ when ‘critical practice reaches the point where it recognizes that what it is opposing is the product of its own practice’; thus humanism ‘can bring itself to the point of self-recognition and therefore can exercise a will capable of self-negation’ (Yarbrough, Deliberate Criticism, 19). 3 Forster may or may not have eventually learned of Freud’s view about the roots of homosexuality, according to which the link between an unresolved Oedipus complex and same-sex desire is strong. Freud observed that ‘future inverts ... pass through a phase of very intense but shortlived fixation to a woman (usually their mother), and that, after leaving this behind, they identify themselves with a woman and take themselves as their sexual object ... they proceed from a narcissistic basis, and look for a young man ... whom they may love as their mother loved them’ (Freud, Basic Writings, 560n.1). 4 The incestuous overtones of this tree are made quite clear: pictures of the Virgin Mary are hung inside the tree, reinforcing Mr Lucas’s sense of the space as an intact yet fertile womb, which he is reluctant to ‘violate,’ yet which he feels he must enter and ‘possess’ in an almost sexual way (CSS 97). 5 This unifying vision is typically Forsterian; recall the famous refrain from Howards End: ‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die’ (Forster, Howards End, 167). 6 Shelley’s poem reads: ‘With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe / The dreariest and the longest journey go’ (ll. 158–9).

Notes to pages 130–4 177 7 Heine argues persuasively that by the time Forster wrote The Longest Journey, Forster ‘knew of the contemporary view that some homosexuality was congenital, expressed in such books as Edward Carpenter’s Homogenic Love (1894) or Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1897)’ (Heine, ‘Introduction,’ xxi). 8 Forster notes an incident that suggests he was convinced that love between men was superior to heterosexual affection. Forster observed two Italian youths walking and embracing; for him they represented a friendship that ‘first shone in ancient Greece, proclaiming to barbarians that human affection need not be confined to the home circle or extended to the harem’ (quoted in Furbank, E.M. Forster, 90). These men are linked to an older ideal of sexual relationships that Forster finds more ‘human’ than the practices of the ‘barbarian’ English; Forster laments that there is no English word to describe the kind of men he has observed, since ‘in England they do not exist’ (quoted in Furbank, E.M. Forster, 90). 9 Forster’s portrait of Stephen was in part inspired by a meeting with a lame shepherd boy who offered him his pipe, and whose unaffected friendliness moved him to feel that, in Furbank’s words, ‘the boy was one of the most remarkable human beings [Forster] had ever met’ (Furbank, E.M. Forster, 117). The intense emotion Forster felt at the boy’s ‘enormous’ but ordinary ‘wisdom’ suggests that the episode redeemed his faith in his fellow men to a large extent, and allowed him to express his love for them (quoted in Furbank, E.M. Forster, 117). As Furbank puts it, the episode had ‘many elements with meaning for him: the ideal English landscape, heroic human quality in a working-class guise, and an inherited handicap (as it might be, homosexuality) courageously overcome’ (Furbank, E.M. Forster, 119). In The Longest Journey, Forster splits this lame shepherd boy into the club-footed Rickie and Stephen Wonham, suggesting that the two are alter egos. 10 As Frederick Crews has pointed out, ‘Both Robert and Stephen are in agreement with Ansell over the necessity of maintaining a human code of values in opposition to the blind wastefulness of nature, but ... their own virtues – masculinity, practicality, independence of though – seem somehow to have been drawn from the soil’ (Crews, E.M. Forster, 62). 11 Perhaps inspired by Dickinson (a Fabian Socialist), Forster adds a political twist to Stephen’s identity in a sympathetic picture of Stephen’s adoptive father Mr Failing, who fights for the enlightened left wing against ‘the shoddy reticence that prevents man opening his heart to man ... the class shibboleths, ladies ... the Conservative Party – all the things that

178 Notes to pages 141–52 accent the divergences rather than the similarities in human nature’ (LJ 207). 12 In accounting for Woolf’s anti-Freudian pronouncements, many scholars have suggested that Woolf had become acquainted, through her brother Adrian, with Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic theories by the time she was composing To the Lighthouse. Scholars often see Klein’s theories, which emphasize the importance of the mother’s breast to childhood development, as a ‘rival to Freud’s Oedipus complex’ (Reid, Art, 285), but they do not alter our view of Woolf’s engagement with the Oedipus myth. Indeed, the compatibility of To the Lighthouse with Klein’s work makes it all the more important to explain why Woolf chose to focus on Oedipal figures and tropes if she was looking beyond Freud’s theories for insight. 13 The vexed relationship between women and humanism in Harrison’s work is clearly a product of her immersion in the mythic narratives of ancient cultures. Harrison writes of the gendered humanistic progression she deems typical of ‘man’: ‘Before he has himself clearly realized his own humanity ... he makes his divinities sometimes wholly animal, sometimes of mixed, monstrous shapes ... [that] long haunted his imagination: bird-woman souls, Gorgon-bogeys, Sphinxes, Harpies and the like ... But as man became more conscious of his humanity and ... grew more humane, a more complete anthropomorphism steadily prevailed, and in the figures of wholly human gods man mirrored his gentler affections, his advance in the ordered relations of life’ (Harrison, Prolegomena, 257–8). This increasing repression of the feminine or ‘other’ in human self-conceptions is, for Harrison, not necessarily a bad thing. 14 Tellingly, Harrison is more interested in humanizing the Sphinx than in using Oedipus as a window into humanism. For instance, in her description of a particular vase painting from a cylix, she terms the Sphinx ‘a very human monster’ who is not only a creature with a ‘lion-body’ but also a ‘lovely attentive maiden’ (Harrison, Prolegomena, 208). Conclusion: Oedipus Reconsidered: Humanism as a Post-Structuralist Narrative in Christine Brooke-Rose and Zadie Smith 1 Catherine Belsey argues convincingly that it not Freud’s work but rather ‘Lacan’s reading of Freud’ that, through its emphasis on language, ‘constitutes the basis of a genuinely Copernican revolution’ in the way we view subjectivity (Belsey, Critical Practice, 131). 2 Peter Brooks has made a case for Oedipus’s universality on this score, claiming that ‘Like Oedipus ... we are condemned to reinterpretation of

Notes to pages 152–60 179

3

4

5

6

7

8

our names,’ but Brooks acknowledges that ‘it is rare that the names coincide so perfectly with a fullness and a negation of identity as in the case of Oedipus’ (Brooks 142). In Grosz’s words, Lacan believes that ‘oedipal renunciation of incestual desire of the mother’ is enforced by the ‘replacement’ of this desire ‘by the internalized authority of the father’ thanks to the child’s accession to the signifier of the ‘phallus’ (Grosz, Jacques Lacan, 104). Derrida has written of the anti-humanistic agenda behind phenomenology: ‘The anthropologistic reading of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger was a mistake ... the Phenomenology of Spirit ... does not have to do with something one might simply call man. As the science of the experience of consciousness, the science of the structures of the phenomenology of the spirit itself relating to itself, it is rigorously distinguished from anthropology’ (Derrida, Margins, 117). For Derrida, phenomenology shows us that ‘one may have a consciousness without man’ (Derrida, Margins, 118). Cixous evokes the Oedipal story’s gender divide to suggest the marginal yet subversive position of women (cast as the Sphinx) in the masculinist/humanist Oedipal world: ‘She is kept in place in a quite characteristic way – coming back to Oedipus, the place of one who is too often forgotten, the place of the sphinx ... the sphinx doesn’t recognize herself, she it is who poses questions. Just as it’s man who holds the answer ... “Man,” simple answer ... but it says everything. “Watch-bitch,” the sphinx was called: she’s an animal and she sings out. She sings out because women do ... they do utter a little, but they don’t speak’ (Cixous, ‘Castration,’ 49). Peter Brooks sees a narrative impulse behind Freud’s use of Oedipus as a central myth: ‘It is as if the individual, in order ... to narrate his life story to himself ... to make it coherent and significant, had to reach back toward the idea of a providential plot which ... would subsume his experience to that of mankind, to show the individual as a significant repetition of a story already endowed with meaning, were it only to be the painful and inevitable story of Oedipus’ (Brooks 280). The original lines read, ‘The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, / Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line. / Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it’ (Fitzgerald, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, LI, 66) Intriguingly, this narrow, implicitly racist image of ‘human perfection’ is precisely what humanism’s critics have cited as the result of any attempt to define human nature. In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Jean-Paul Sartre claims, ‘there is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters’ (Sartre, Critique, 21–2).

180 Notes to pages 160–3 9 Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) famously argues that liberal democracy is human development’s final, and optimal, stage, a view that Smith tries to confute, thanks to the optimistic uniformity of Fukuyama’s Hegelian conception of human nature and destiny. Like Smith, Fukuyama has engaged with biotechnology and its threat to any stable concept of humanity: in the later Our Posthuman Future (2002), Fukuyama laments the ‘posthuman’ impulse to question human nature, and argues that ‘Human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species’ (Fukuyama, Posthuman, 7). 10 Literary scholars who invoke the ‘post-human’ often locate its beginnings earlier. Stefania Forlini posits that ‘the movement toward the posthuman began much earlier’ than Hayles contends, and sees its signs in the nineteenth century (Forlini, ‘Machinic-Human Body,’ 111). 11 Other literary scholars have emphasized the overlap between humanism and post-humanism: in ‘Subject to Change,’ Laura Shackelford deploys ‘a strain of posthumanism’ that ‘suggests technological shifts open up a new perspective on humanism rather than break with the human altogether’ (Shackelford, ‘Subject to Change,’ 64–5).

Ontario 181

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190 Bibliography Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Francis Golffing. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956. – Human, All Too Human. Translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. – On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1969. – The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968. Norton, Andrew. ‘Deconstructing the Oedipus Myth in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.’ Acta Litteraria 32, no. 4 (1990): 551–6. Nussbaum, Martha. ‘Introduction.’ In The Bacchae of Euripides. Translated by C.K. Williams. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990. O’Hara, Daniel. Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Orwell, George. A Collection of Essays. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954. – Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Text, Sources, Criticism. Edited by Irving Howe. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. – My Country Right or Left. London: Secker & Warburg, 1996. – The Road to Wigan Pier. London: Secker & Warburg, 1937. – ‘The True Pattern of H.G. Wells,’ Manchester Evening News, 14 August 1946. Pritchard, William. ‘Wyndham Lewis and Lawrence.’ Iowa Review 2, no. 2 (1971): 91–6. Reid, Panthea. Art and Affectation: A Life of Virginia Woolf. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Rhodes, Norman. Ibsen and the Greeks. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995. Sartre, Jean-Paul. A Critique of Dialectical Reason. Vol. I. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Humanities, 1976. Shackelford, Laura. ‘Subject to Change: The Monstrosity of Media in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl; or, a Modern Monster and Other Posthumanist Critiques of the Instrumental.’ Camera Obscura 21, no. 3 (2006): 63–101. Shakespeare, William. Coriolanus. In The Works of William Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938. Shapiro, Gary. Nietzschean Narratives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Sheehan, Paul. Modernism, Narrative and Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. New York: Vintage, 2000.

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Ontario 193

Index

Abel, Elizabeth, 140 anti-humanism, 7, 31–48, 53–7, 64–70, 94–102, 152–8, 169 Anti-Oedipus, The, 47, 71–2, 82, 85, 91–2, 153, 167–8 Apes of God, The. See Lewis, Wyndham, works Arkins, Brian, 99–100 Asals, Frederick, 85, 87–8 Babbitt, Irving, 53, 65, 67–8, 132, 174n8 Bachofen, J.J., 5–6, 79, 89, 123–4, 133, 143, 145–6, 176n1; on matriarchal culture, 5, 89, 124, 145–6, 176n1 Baker, Phil, 114–15 Bair, Deidre, 114–16, 118 Barthes, Roland, 155–8 Beauman, Nicola, 125 Beckett, Samuel, 93, 94, 114–22, 147, 169 – works: ‘Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce,’ 116; Endgame, 115, 119, 121; How It Is, 120; Malone Dies, 118; Molloy, 116–17, 120; The Unnamable, 118, 120; Waiting for Godot, 118–19, 121; Watt, 115–16

Begam, Richard, 115 Belsey, Catherine, 178n1 Benoist, Jean-Michel, 47, 149 Benstock, Bernard, 112, 114 Beyond Culture. See Trilling, Lionel, works Beyond the Pleasure Principle. See Freud, Sigmund, works Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, The. See Nietzsche, Friedrich, works ‘Blood and the Moon.’ See Yeats, W.B., works Bloom, Harold, 95, 98–9, 101, 165 Brave New World. See Huxley, Aldous, works Bridson, D.G., 173n1 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 16, 19, 153–8, 169 – works: THRU, 16, 153–7; ‘A womb of one’s own?’ 155 Carrier, Hervé, 82 Cixous, Hélène, 155, 156, 179n5 ‘Colonus’s Praise.’ See Yeats, W.B., works

194 Index Coriolanus. See Shakespeare, William, works Crews, Frederick C., 135, 177n10 ‘Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce.’ See Beckett, Samuel, works Davies, Tony, 7 Day, Douglas, 90 de Lauretis, Teresa, 155 Deleuze, Gilles. See Anti-Oedipus, The Derrida, Jacques, 91, 149, 152–4, 166, 179 – works: Dissemination, 163; Of Grammatology, 152, 154; Margins of Philosophy, 149, 153, 166, 179n4 Diary of Virginia Woolf, The. See Woolf, Virginia, works Dickinson, G.L., 126–7, 130–2, 177–8n11 Dissemination. See Derrida, Jacques, works Do What You Will. See Huxley, Aldous, works ‘Double Vision of Michael Robartes, The.’ See Yeats, W.B., works Elder Statesman, The. See Eliot, T.S., works Eliot, T.S., 8, 16, 48–50, 53, 57–71, 101, 121, 143, 158, 173n5, 173–4n6, 174nn7, 8 – works: The Elder Statesman, 50, 59, 64–9; ‘Gerontion,’ 173n5; ‘Goldfish,’ 59–60; ‘The Humanism of Irving Babbitt,’ 65, 67; ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ 59; ‘Review of Son of Woman,’ 57–8, 68; The Waste Land, 60–4, 173n5, 174n7

Ellis, Havelock, 132 E.M. Forster. See Trilling, Lionel, works Emmet, Robert, 100 Ellmann, Richard, 93, 102–3, 110, 121 Endgame. See Beckett, Samuel, works Fagles, Robert, 92, 100 Fantasia of the Unconscious, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. See Lawrence, D.H., works Feinstein, Elaine, 2 Felman, Shoshana, 167 Finnegans Wake. See Joyce, James, works Fitzgerald, Edward, 157, 179n7 Forlini, Stefania, 180n10 Forster, E.M., 16–18, 69, 123–36, 142, 147–8, 176nn3–4, 177nn7–10, 177–8n11 – works: Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Related Writings, 131–2; Howards End, 176n5; A Passage to India, 128; The Longest Journey, 18, 124, 127, 130–5, 176n6, 177nn7, 9, 10, 177–8n11; ‘The Road from Colonus,’ 18, 124–30, 135 Foster, R.F., 95, 100–1 Foucault, Michel, 164–5 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 8–9, 13–19, 21–3, 25–8, 32, 34, 36–42, 45–52, 55–8, 63, 69, 71–5, 79–82, 86–7, 91–5, 102, 104, 106–7, 113–14, 116, 119–20, 123–31, 136, 138–55, 157–8, 162–4, 166–70, 171nn1–2, 173–4n6, 176n3, 178n12, 178n1, 179n6; and humanism 4, 8, 14–19, 46, 49–50, 72–3, 123, 149–50, 153, 162, 164, 166–8

Index 195 – works: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 166; The Interpretation of Dreams, 4, 13–15, 18, 21–2, 125; Studies in Hysteria, 9; Totem and Taboo, 72 ‘Freudian Fiction.’ See Woolf, Virginia, works Fromm, Erich, 15, 73, 81, 123–4 Fukuyama, Francis, 160, 180n9 Furbank, P.N., 125, 177nn8–9 ‘Gerontion.’ See Eliot, T.S., works Girard, René, 51, 77, 86–7, 131 Gluck, Barbara Reich, 116 ‘Goldfish.’ See Eliot, T.S., works Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Related Writings. See Forster, E.M., works Goodkin, Richard, 173 Gordon, Lyndall, 58–9, 63–5 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 6–7, 70, 104 Grammatology, Of. See Derrida, Jacques, works Griffith, J.W., 11 Grosz, Elizabeth, 151, 179n3 Guattari, Felix. See Anti-Oedipus, The Hamlet. See Shakespeare, William, works Hardt, Michael, 165 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 123–4, 142, 144–6, 176n1, 178nn13–14 Hayles, N. Katherine, 162–4, 168, 180n10 Hegel, G.W.F., 3, 5, 16, 59, 97–9, 109, 116, 153, 158, 163, 175n2, 179n4, 180n9 Heidegger, Martin, 179n4 Heine, Elizabeth, 128–30, 177n7

Howards End. See Forster, E.M., works How It Is. See Beckett, Samuel, works Hulme, T.E., 7, 49, 54, 65 humanism, 4–9, 11, 13–31, 33–4, 37, 42, 46–50, 52–4, 56–7, 64–5, 67, 69, 71–2, 77, 79, 81–5, 88, 91–4, 101, 106–7, 111, 113–14, 116–17, 119–21, 123–4, 127, 133, 135–6, 139, 142, 144–6, 148, 149–55, 157–70, 176n2, 178nn13–14, 179nn4–5, 179nn4–5, 8, 180n11. See also anti-humanism; post-humanism; postmodern humanism ‘Humanism of Irving Babbitt, The.’ See Eliot, T.S., works Huntington, John, 10 Hutter, Horst, 99 Huxley, Aldous. 19, 71–81, 83, 92, 149, 174nn1, 2 – works: Brave New World, 19, 72–81, 83, 174nn1, 2; Do What You Will, 78; Music at Night, 75, 78 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 12 Interpretation of Dreams, The. See Freud, Sigmund, works Jameson, Fredric, 92, 152 Jewinski, Ed, 47 Jones, Ellen Carol, 104 Joyce, James, 18–19, 52, 93–6, 102–16, 118, 120–2, 149, 155, 158 – works: Finnegans Wake, 18, 106–7, 110–14, 116, 121, 154; ‘A Painful Case,’ 104–6; Stephen Hero, 103–4; Ulysses, 1–2, 106–8, 110–11

196 Index Kenner, Hugh, 62 Keogh, J.G., 60–2 Klein, Melanie, 124, 178n12 Knox, Bernard MacGregor Walker, 5 Kristeva, Julia, 155–6 Kuhns, Richard, 14–15

Longest Journey, The. See Forster, E.M., works ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The.’ See Eliot, T.S., works Lowry, Malcolm, 71–3, 85–92, 175n3 – works: Under the Volcano, 73, 85–91, 174–5n3

Lacan, Jacques, 47, 104, 149–55, 157, 165–7, 175n4, 178n1, 179n3 Last Books of H.G. Wells, The. See Wells, H.G., works Last Decade, The. See Trilling, Lionel, works Lawrence, D.H., 8, 16, 18–19, 21–51, 54, 57–8, 63, 68–9, 71, 81, 120–1, 126, 149, 164, 171n1, 171–2n2, 172nn3–5, 172–3n7 – works: Fantasia of the Unconscious, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, 35, 39–43, 48; The Man Who Died, 43–6; Paul Morel, 22, 27–34, 48, 171–2n2, 172n3; Sons and Lovers, 18, 27–39; Studies in Classic American Literature, 41–2; Women in Love, 41 Lawrence, Frieda, 22–3, 25–7, 32, 34, 39, 48, 171n2 (ch. 1) Leaska, Mitchell, 136–8 Leonard, Garry, 104, 106 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 5–6, 167 Lewis, Wyndham. 8, 16, 19, 48–57, 69–71, 121, 126, 149, 158, 173nn1–2 – works: The Apes of God, 51–3; Men Without Art, 51, 53; Paleface: The Philosophy of the ‘Melting-Pot,’ 50–4; Self Condemned, 53–7; Time and Western Man, 52 Lloyd, David, 101

MacIntosh, Fiona, 3–4 Malone Dies. See Beckett, Samuel, works Man Who Died, The. See Lawrence, D.H., works Margins of Philosophy. See Derrida, Jacques, works Marx, Karl, 85 McCarthy, Patrick, 112, 114 Men Without Art. See Lewis, Wyndham, works Meyers, Jeffrey, 53, 55 Mind at the End of Its Tether. See Wells, H.G., works Mitchell, Giles, 36–8, 172n4 modernism, 4, 7, 13–14, 16–19, 21, 49, 65, 93, 107, 123, 127, 158, 168–9. See also postmodernism Molloy. See Beckett, Samuel, works Moments of Being. See Woolf, Virginia, works Moore, G.E., 142–3 Murray, Gilbert, 3, 23–5, 28–9, 38, 94, 165, 171n1 (ch. 1) – works: Oedipus at Colonus, 165; Oedipus, King of Thebes, 3, 23–5, 28–9, 38, 94, 171n1 (ch. 1) Murry, John Middleton, 38, 40, 57–8, 68 Music at Night. See Huxley, Aldous, works

Index 197 Nandy, Ashis, 129 Negri, Antonio, 165 Nehls, Edward, 23, 39 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6–7, 16, 22, 25, 40, 48, 72, 78, 99, 105–6, 126, 134–5, 159–60 – works: The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, 6, 25, 40, 134 Nineteen Eighty-Four. See Orwell, George, works Norton, Andrew, 85, 90–1 Oedipus at Colonus (Murray). See Murray, Gilbert, works Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles). See Sophocles, works Oedipus at Colonus (Yeats). See Yeats, W.B., works Oedipus, King of Thebes (Murray). See Murray, Gilbert, works Oedipus Tyrannus (Sophocles). See Sophocles, works Oedipus Tyrannus (Yeats). See Yeats, W.B., works O’Hara, Daniel, 15 ‘On Extinction.’ See Wells, H.G., works Orwell, George, 19, 52, 71–2, 79–85, 87, 92, 158 – works: Nineteen Eighty-Four, 19, 52, 72, 79–85 Othello. See Shakespeare, William, works

‘Parnell’s Funeral.’ See Yeats, W.B., works Passage to India, A. See Forster, E.M., works Paul Morel. See Lawrence, D.H., works Playboy of the Western World, The. See Synge, John, works post-humanism, 19, 22, 47, 49, 151, 162–5, 167–9. See also anti-humanism; humanism; postmodern humanism postmodern humanism, 20, 168–9 postmodernism, 7, 16, 19–20, 153–6, 158, 168–9. See also modernism; postmodern humanism Prefaces to The Experience of Literature. See Trilling, Lionel, works Pritchard, William, 50 psychoanalysis, 13, 17, 82, 104, 141, 149, 163, 167, 178n12. See also Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques Purgatory. See Yeats, W.B., works ‘Rediscovery of the Unique, The.’ See Wells, H.G., works Reid, Panthea, 137, 178n12 ‘Review of Son of Woman.’ See Eliot, T.S., works ‘Road from Colonus, The.’ See Forster, E.M., works Rhodes, Norman, 103, 175n5 Room of One’s Own, A. See Woolf, Virginia, works

‘Painful Case, A.’ See Joyce, James, works Paleface: The Philosophy of the ‘Melting-Pot.’ See Lewis, Wyndham, works

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 179n8 ‘Second Coming, The.’ See Yeats, W.B., works Self Condemned. See Lewis, Wyndham, works

198 Index Shackelford, Laura, 180n11 Shakespeare, William, 24, 34, 61–4, 74–6, 109, 141, 173–4n6 – works: Coriolanus, 62–5; Hamlet, 24, 34, 74–5, 106, 109, 141, 173–4n6; Othello, 76–7; The Tempest, 61 Shapiro, Gary, 78 Sheehan, Paul, 35, 38, 49, 114, 120, 147, 149, 163, 172n5 Smith, Zadie, 19, 158–63, 167, 180n9 – works: White Teeth, 158–63 Sons and Lovers. See Lawrence, D.H., works Soper, Kate, 8 Sophocles, 3–5, 9, 14–18, 22–3, 25–6, 38–9, 48, 52, 55, 58, 61–2, 65, 69, 86, 91, 94–8, 111, 124–5, 143, 151–2, 154, 157, 171n1 (ch. 1), 173n5 – works: Oedipus at Colonus, 53, 65, 69, 90, 96–8, 100–1, 144; Oedipus Tyrannus, 3–5, 14, 17, 22–3, 25, 37, 55, 61, 70, 86–7, 91, 94, 102, 111, 124, 144, 153, 158, 160, 171n1 (ch. 1) ‘Statues, The.’ See Yeats, W.B., works Steinman, Michael, 97 Stephen Hero. See Joyce, James, works Studies in Classic American Literature. See Lawrence, D.H., works Studies in Hysteria. See Freud, Sigmund, works Symonds, J.A., 8–9, 164 Synge, John, 93, 107–8, 111 – works: The Playboy of the Western World, 107–8 Tanner, Stephen, 18 Tempest, The. See Shakespeare, William, works

THRU. See Brooke-Rose, Christine, works Time and Western Man. See Lewis, Wyndham, works Time Machine, The. See Wells, H.G., works Totem and Taboo. See Freud, Sigmund, works To the Lighthouse. See Woolf, Virginia, works Trilling, Lionel, 15, 18, 113, 127, 135 – works: Beyond Culture, 15; E.M. Forster, 127, 135; Prefaces to The Experience of Literature, 18; The Last Decade, 113 Ulysses. See Joyce, James, works ‘Under Ben Bulben.’ See Yeats, W.B., works Under the Volcano. See Lowry, Malcolm, works Unnamable, The. See Beckett, Samuel, works Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 153 Vico, Giambattista, 116 Vision and Related Writings, A. See Yeats, W.B., works Waggoner, Hyatt Howe, 67 Wagner, Geoffrey, 51 Waiting for Godot. See Beckett, Samuel, works Wallace, Jeff, 22, 46, 164 Waste Land, The. See Eliot, T.S., works Watt. See Beckett, Samuel, works Wells, H.G., 9–13, 17, 171n2 – works: The Last Books of H.G.

Index 199 Wells, 12; Mind at the End of Its Tether, 12–13; ‘On Extinction,’ 11; The Time Machine, 9–13; ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique,’ 12 White Teeth. See Smith, Zadie, works Williamson, Jack, 10, 12 ‘womb of one’s own?, A.’ See Brooke-Rose, Christine, works Women in Love. See Lawrence, D.H., works Woolf, Virginia, 18–19, 123–4, 136–49, 155, 158, 178n12 – works: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 147; ‘Freudian Fiction,’ 140; Moments of Being, 136–7; A Room of One’s Own, 142, 145; To the Lighthouse, 18, 136–47, 178n12 Worthen, John, 27, 172–3n2

Writing of Sophocles’s King Oedipus, The. See Yeats, W.B., works Yarbrough, Stephen R., 20, 124, 165–6, 168, 176n2 Yeats, W.B., 4, 71, 93–103, 109–10, 112, 120–1, 149, 175nn1–3 – works: ‘Blood and the Moon,’ 97; ‘Colonus’s Praise,’ 98; ‘The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,’ 99; Oedipus at Colonus, 100; Oedipus Tyrannus, 96, 99–100; ‘Parnell’s Funeral,’ 96–7; Purgatory, 100–2; ‘The Second Coming,’ 98–9; ‘The Statues,’ 98; ‘Under Ben Bulben,’ 100; A Vision and Related Writings, 95, 97–100; The Writing of Sophocles’s King Oedipus, 94