Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel 9781442688834

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Post-Apocalyptic Culture
PART ONE: THE END
1. Characters in Search of the End
2. Viral Endings
PART TWO: HISTORY
3. Modernism and the End of the End of History
4. Futures That Have Not Been: Postmodernism and the Limits of History
PART THREE: NATION
5. Apocalyptic Communities: The European Nation, Islam, and Hinduism
6. Unveiling Nations
PART FOUR: MAN
7. Anti-Apocalypse and the New Man
8. The ‘Fag End’ Again and the New Woman
Conclusion: The Return of End Times
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

PO ST-AP O CALY PT IC CULT UR E: M O DE R NI S M , P O S T M O D E R NI S M , A ND TH E T WEN TI ETH -CE NT URY NO VE L

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TERESA HEFFERNAN

Post-Apocalyptic Culture Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel

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

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9815-3

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Heffernan, Teresa, 1962– Post-apocalyptic culture : modernism, postmodernism and the twentieth-century novel / Teresa Heffernan. ISBN 978-0-8020-9815-3 1. English fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. American fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. 3. Modernism (Literature). 4. Postmodernism (Literature). 5. Apocalypse in literature. 6. Order in literature. 7. Redemption in literature. I. Title. PN3503.H39 2008

823c.9109112

C2008-903853-3

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

For my parents, Gerald and Geraldine Heffernan

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Post-Apocalyptic Culture

3

PART ONE: THE END 1 Characters in Search of the End

29

2 Viral Endings 43 PART TWO: HISTORY 3 Modernism and the End of the End of History 59 4 Futures That Have Not Been: Postmodernism and the Limits of History 71 PART THREE: NATION 5 Apocalyptic Communities: The European Nation, Islam, and Hinduism 89 6 Unveiling Nations 101 PART FOUR: MAN 7 Anti-Apocalypse and the New Man

119

viii Contents

8 The ‘Fag End’ Again and the New Woman Conclusion: The Return of End Times Notes

157

Works Cited Index

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175

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Acknowledgments

It is hard to know where to begin with the acknowledgments and thanks I owe to the many people who have made this book possible. I feel a little like Tristram Shandy as he wondered where to begin his story: at the point of birth, or maybe at the point of conception, or maybe with the invention of the printing press. The genesis for the book was a PhD thesis I wrote under the supervision of Linda Hutcheon, who introduced me to the complications of postmodern thinking and who was and remains an enormous source of support. A number of journals and individuals supported earlier versions of this work: Chapter 2, ‘Viral Endings,’ first appeared as ‘Can the Apocalypse Be Post?’ in Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, edited by Richard Dellamora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). Chapter 4, ‘Postmodernism and the Limits of History,’ was first published as ‘Beloved and the Problem of Mourning,’ Studies in the Novel 30.4 (1998): 558–73, copyright 1998 by the University of North Texas, and reprinted by permission of the publisher. A version of chapter 6, ‘Unveiling Nations,’ was originally published in an altered form as ‘Apocalyptic Nations in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’ in a special issue of Twentieth Century Literature 46.4 (2001): 470–91, dedicated to twentieth-century apocalypse and edited by James Berger. Gayatri Spivak read an early version of the chapter on Salman Rushdie and was very encouraging, and this book is greatly indebted to the body of her work. I have learned a lot from the many reading groups I have participated in over the years; in particular I want to thank Jill Didur, Danny O’Quinn, Marlene Goldman, Reina Lewis, Erik Steinskog, and Joyce Goggin for their friendship and conversation. At Saint Mary’s University, I am also grateful to the many colleagues in various

x Acknowledgments

departments who have made it a pleasant and stimulating place to work and think, in particular, Renee Hulan, Elissa Asp, and Goran Stanivukovic. I owe a great debt to the anonymous readers of the manuscript who vetted it for the University of Toronto Press, and, in particular, to James Berger, whose thorough, engaged, and thoughtful analysis was of enormous help in revising this manuscript. Jill McConkey, my editor at University of Toronto Press, has been a pleasure to work with, and I am grateful to all the people at the Press who have worked on the design and production of this book, in particular, Barb Porter and James Leahy, and to the many library staff at the University of Toronto, Saint Mary’s University, and the British Library who have helped me track down sources. I have benefited from the help of many research assistants on this project: Basil Chiasson, Kaley Joyce, Shawna Ferris, and, in particular, Natasha Hurley, whose insightful comments, keen reading skills, and facility with computers have made my life so much more enjoyable. Saint Mary’s University has also provided me with internal grant support, course releases, and a sabbatical year without which this book would never have been completed. I am grateful to the students at Saint Mary’s University who have shared my enthusiasm for modernism and postmodernism over the years and have actively participated in classes. Thanks to Shelagh and Peter for hosting me and putting up with me on my trips to London; to Virginia, Roger, and Graham for hosting me on my visits to Toronto; and to Madeleine for her late-night walks around the city discussing the problems of concluding a book on the post-apocalypse. Finally I would like to thank David Vainola for his many years of reading chapters, formatting endnotes, cooking dinners, and discussing the apocalypse with me.

POST-APOCALYPTIC CULTURE

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Introduction: Post-Apocalyptic Culture

Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller draws attention to both the end in fiction and the fiction of the end. A commentary on reading, writing, and narrative expectations, the novel begins with the hero settling in to read his newly purchased Calvino novel. But just as he gets absorbed in the opening story, he loses its trail, and, trying to find it again, gets caught up in other stories. By the end of the novel, all of these stories are, from his perspective, still awaiting their rightful end. In the penultimate chapter, the frustrated hero announces to his peers: ‘Gentleman, first I must say that in books I like to read only what is written, and to connect the details with the whole, and to consider certain readings as definitive; and I like to keep one book distinct from the other, each for what it has that is different and new; and I especially like books to be read from beginning to end. For a while now, everything has been going wrong for me: it seems to me that in the world there now exists only stories that remain suspended or get lost along the way’ (256–7). Here Calvino’s hero voices one of the most prevalent dilemmas of twentieth-century fiction: If the ‘end’ has traditionally secured a sense of order, meaning, originality, and autonomy to the narrative as it progresses from start to finish, what is at stake in a world that no longer offers up narratives with conclusive endings? Narrative order intimates a worldly order, and, hence, in wanting to read from ‘beginning to end,’ the hero wants to fight ‘formless and meaningless life,’ seeking ‘a pattern, a route that must surely be there,’ a pattern that will be unveiled in the final moment (27). The anxious musings of the hero – his concern that the world lacks definitive readings and that stories now trail off rather than conclude – find a parallel in the work of a prominent critic of the apocalypse, Frank

4 Introduction

Kermode.1 He has argued that in abandoning a sense of an ending, which, he suggests, finds one of its most impressive expressions in apocalyptic texts like Revelation, we may find ourselves succumbing to the ‘intolerable idea that we live within an order of events between which there is no relation, pattern, mutability, or intelligible progression’ (‘Waiting’ 250). Drawing on the biblical model, Kermode’s use of the apocalypse is positive in its connotations – it is about resolution and revelation. Endings in fictional narratives, he argues, are mini-expressions of a faith in a higher order or ultimate pattern that, though it will remain perhaps forever obscure, nevertheless lends a sense of purpose to our existence in the world. The belief in the actual or imminent end of the world as foretold in Revelation receded with the rise of modernity, but as Kermode has convincingly argued, ‘the paradigms of apocalypse continue to lie under our ways of making sense of the world’ (Sense of an Ending 26). With the shift from God’s plan for humanity to secular dreams, the prominent and interconnected Enlightenment narratives that have given rise to certain versions of modernity – History, the Nation, and Man – continue to be secured by the spirit of the Christian apocalypse, a narrative that posits an origin and moves definitively, through a series of coherent and concordant events, towards an end that will make sense of all that has come before it. In keeping with this biblical model, the old corrupt world is defeated in the French, American, and English Revolutions – that are so often portrayed in apocalyptic terms – and the modern world emerges. The secular narratives that comprise it all promise purpose, perfection, and permanence. Apocalypse, from the ancient Greek apokalupsis, is literally understood as a revelation or unveiling of the true order. The spirit of it is there in Immanuel Kant’s pronouncement of ‘man’ as a rational creature and ‘an end in himself.’ The end in his work is understood as both eternal and foundational: ‘Man’ is an absolute as opposed to a relative end. Whereas relative ends are grounds only for hypothetical imperatives, absolute ends are grounds for universal principles: ‘Suppose that there were something the existence of which in itself had absolute worth,’ Kant writes, ‘something which, as an end in itself, could be a ground of definite laws. In it and only in it could lie the ground of a possible categorical imperative, i.e., of a practical law’ (52). In the slide from religion to philosophy, rational Man is imagined as capable of ‘unveiling’ ultimate truths as he advances to a state of perfection. Connected to this view of Man, Friedrich Hegel understood History as a

Post-Apocalyptic Culture 5

progressive narrative that would move toward an end as the struggle for human freedom found its full expression and was guaranteed by modern institutions. As the purpose or plot of Man came to fruition, so too would History, as a process, terminate. Francis Fukuyama has, in his reading of Hegel, more recently announced that ‘we’ have now more or less reached that end, with what he sees as the triumph of the liberal-democratic system of the state.2 Related to this version of History is the nineteenth-century teleological narrative of the Modern Nation, where the emergence of the Nation, as a right of self-determination, is understood as the point of arrival for an ‘imagined community.’ These modern narratives – History, the Nation, Man – thus come to satisfy the desire for continuity, truth, transcendence, and a sense of purpose, longings traditionally satisfied by the Genesis to Revelation story, and they rely on that positive understanding of the end and apocalypse as culmination and resolution. Yet this faith that the end will offer up revelation has been challenged in many twentieth-century narratives. The present world is portrayed as exhausted, but there is no better world that replaces it – these narratives refuse to offer up a new beginning or any hope of rebirth or renewal; the end is instead senseless and arbitrary. There is no overarching critique, there is no cataclysmic destruction that promises to cleanse the world and separate the righteous from the damned, good from evil, and there is no resolution or salvation.3 In Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things, one of the best literary examples, the source of disaster is never revealed, foreclosing the possibility that it might have been averted had another course been taken, and no vision of a better or more perfect world is offered up. Auster’s working title, Anna Blume Walks through the 20th Century, suggests this novel is very much a comment on the present world. America is in irrecoverable ruin. Pregnancies are unheard of, food is scarce, and people, exhausted with scavenging, spend most of their time trying to invent ways to die. There is death but there is no birth, and memory and language fade as books are burned. As things disappear, so too ‘little by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whirling phonemes, and finally the whole thing just collapses into gibberish’ (89). The letters, sent out hopefully by the narrator to her childhood friend, simply stop. They represent a last attempt to record and archive the world, but they are also among the disappearing things – they peter out, as does the novel, which finishes without concluding. Like the stories Calvino’s frustrated reader encounters, this novel

6 Introduction

merely trails off without reaching any climax, reflecting, in the logic of Kermode, a randomness and pointlessness to life.4 Kermode has bemoaned the ‘fashionable’ use of the term apocalypse as having ‘only vague connotations of doom,’ arguing that apocalyptic writings are always caught up with the idea of ‘renovation,’ of a ‘better future’ (‘Apocalypse and the Modern’ 84). However, James Berger argues in his book After the End that ‘in the late twentieth century the unimaginable, the unspeakable, has already happened, and continues to happen’ (42). In his analysis of American culture in the latter half of the twentieth century, he suggests that the ‘catastrophe has already occurred’ and that environmental disasters, the holocaust, the bomb have allowed us a glimpse of what the end might look like. Foregrounding the historical uniqueness of this particular sense of the end as post, he writes: ‘The visions of the End that Frank Kermode analyzed in terms of a sense of an ending have increasingly given way to visions of after the end, and the apocalyptic sensibilities both of religion and modernism have shifted toward a sense of post-apocalypse’ (xiii). Berger’s book is taken up with analysing and diagnosing the remainder, the ruins of the world that persist after the unspeakable trauma, after its end. It works to restore representation to what has been unrepresentable in order to come to terms with a catastrophic past and move toward a future (xx). The post-apocalyptic narrative is the symptom that demands to be read in terms of its underlying traumatic history, and the historical specificity of the event must be restored to interrupt readings of trauma as a bloodless universal trope. The absent referent that haunts these narratives of rupture and ruin, he argues, must be identified in order for us not to be trapped by them. However, whereas for Berger all apocalypses are inflected by the post-apocalypse, qualifying his claim about the particular manifestation of it at this historical moment, this book suggests that the twentiethcentury sense of the post-apocalypse is of a different order than apocalypse. Although in popular discourse, as Kermode has suggested, apocalypse is increasingly understood as synonymous with catastrophe, in the history of both its religious and secular usage it is intricately linked to the emergence of a better world, to revelation and disclosure. Catastrophic narrations (and catastrophe is defined as the ‘final event’) that are bereft of redemption and revelation are not apocalyptic in the traditional sense. This book then employs the term post-apocalypse to suggest that we live in a time after the apocalypse, after the faith in a radically new world, of revelation, of unveiling, and it considers the his-

Post-Apocalyptic Culture 7

torical and cultural reasons for this shift in understanding. Further, while Berger works to restore the repressed historical referent that underlies the symptomatic narrative in order to counter overly generalized accounts of trauma, this book argues that post-apocalyptic culture understands loss as existing alongside the historical archive, further complicating the desire to unveil. Whereas he maintains that the unspeakable needs to be situated historically, I suggest that while it haunts recorded history, loss cannot always be translated into language not because it is a transhistorical and universal trope but rather because the destruction of archives is itself a historical event.5 This book then examines the varied responses to the post-apocalyptic climate that haunts or inspires twentieth-century texts and considers the implications and repercussions of living in a world that does not or cannot rely on revelation as an organizing principle. Through an examination of modernist and postmodernist texts, it considers what a world that operates with a diminished faith in revelation looks like. The terms modernist and postmodernist themselves suggest the twentieth-century crisis over teleological narratives precisely because they beg the inevitable question of what can possibly come after the modern or ‘after’ its after. The discomfort that the term ‘post,’ in particular, generates has led to the recent attempts to jettison it from critical discourse or repress it or get over it, but I hold onto the term ‘postmodern’ in this book as a marker of an important critical moment. Catastrophic Events and Post-Apocalyptic Thinking By the end of the nineteenth century, the faith in the apocalyptic model underlying the narratives of modernity was already diminishing. Although Fredric Jameson has characterized the postmodern as a shift away from ‘premonitions of the future’ to ‘senses of the end of this or that,’ in fact, there is already evident in the works of the modernists a growing disillusionment with teleological narratives that posit clear future destinations (Cultural Logic 1). Many modernists feel in some way not only that the catastrophe has already happened but also that the ‘sense of an ending,’ implicit in the narratives of modernity, is, for various reasons, no longer viable. In other words, it no longer secures the dream of the future, and the idea of apocalypse is widely associated in these works not with revelation and renewal but with disaster and a sense of exhaustion with the model itself. Referring to the devastation of Europe following the First World War, D.H. Lawrence’s final novel

8 Introduction

Lady Chatterley’s Lover famously opens: ‘The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins’ (5). William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is set in the post-apocalyptic South, in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Quentin, one of the main characters, gives voice to the major dilemma in the novel when, traumatized by the lack of any meaningful conclusion, he laments: ‘If things just finished themselves’ (50). So too, T.S. Eliot mournfully sums up the condition of the twentieth century in ‘The Hollow Men’: the modern world will end ‘not with a bang’ but ‘with a whimper.’ The power of the end to conjure up meaning is spent, these writers suggest, and the twentieth century can no longer rely on it to give their world meaning and order. While the modernists, at the outset of the twentieth century, were already expressing doubts about narratives of the future, dismantling the belief in a meaningful end, postmodernists were further affected by the events of the middle of the century. The holocausts (the Nazi death camps, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, fascism, and the Soviet gulag) undermine the faith in the apocalyptic narratives of History, the Nation, and Man. These events, occurring in the heart of European civilization, cannot be accommodated within the redemptive Western story of progress, the apocalyptic model of disaster to renewal. Thus Maurice Blanchot writes: ‘The holocaust, the absolute event of history – which is a date in history – that utter-burn where all history took fire, where the movement of Meaning was swallowed up’ (47). The Enlightenment dream that through the application of reason, science, and objectivity one could determine universal laws, a process which would lead to the amelioration of Man and the civilizing of society, is shattered in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau. In the death camps, reason and science are harnessed for genocide; perfection expresses itself in ethnic cleansing. The faith in Man as an ‘end in himself’ dies as man reduces man to a number and subjects him to the anonymity of a mechanized, technological death. Theodor Adorno writes, countering the hopes of Kant and Hegel: ‘In the concentration camps it was no longer an individual who died, but a specimen – this is a fact bound to affect the dying of those who escaped the administrative measure ... What the sadists in the camps foretold their victims, “Tomorrow you’ll be wiggling skyward as smoke from this chimney,” bespeaks the indifference of each individual life that is the direction of history. Even in his formal freedom, the individual is as fungible and replaceable as he will be under the liquidators’ boots’ (362). The concentration camps, Adorno suggests, in their efficient slaugh-

Post-Apocalyptic Culture 9

ter of humans, have forever undermined Kant’s position that Man exists as ‘an end in himself’ and that rational beings ‘may not be used merely as means.’ The rational being in Kantian philosophy secures the possibility of universal value and truth: ‘For, without them [rational beings], nothing of absolute worth could be found, and if all worth is conditional and thus contingent, no supreme practical principle for reason could be found anywhere’ (53). But, according to Adorno, after Auschwitz, it is impossible to claim ‘the positivity of existence as sanctimonious’ or to squeeze ‘any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate’ (361). The difficulty of reviving the Enlightenment project with its commitment to a rational observation of the world and to progress is underscored by Adorno’s analysis: to go on living after this catastrophic event ‘calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz’ (363). If reason is the guarantee of what it means to be human, it is also the source of its inhumanity, which manifests itself in the very attempt to get over the event and get on with History. ‘The inhuman part of it, the ability to keep one’s distance as a spectator and to rise above things, is in the final analysis the human part, the very part resisted by its ideologists’ (363). Conor Cruise O’Brien’s On the Eve of the Millennium exemplifies the inhumanity of humanism as identified by Adorno. O’Brien insists that ‘we’ must continue on with the project of modernity. We must ‘rise above’ the atrocities of the world and renew our commitment to the Enlightenment, which he argues is currently under attack both by the Third World and by proponents of multiculturalism on university campuses in the West. Continuing his 1994 Massey Lecture with an analogy he first developed in a 1970 article, he compares the ‘advanced’ world to a lifeboat that cannot accommodate any more passengers. Without even a passing mention of the exploitation of resources and labour of the ‘Third World’ by the ‘first,’ he writes of ‘the pressures from the poor on the rich world’ (133). Thus the ‘advanced world,’ to avoid being swamped, must cut off the hands of those in the Third World, who, with populations out of control, are trying to climb aboard the boat (132). Another analogy he develops in describing the state of affairs on the eve of the second millennium is that of the ‘advanced’ world as ‘a closed and guarded palace, in a city gripped by the plague’ (141). Although O’Brien insists that ‘we’ can no longer afford to delude ourselves about the ‘true’ state of the world, the metaphors he invokes in the description of this ‘true’ state are disturbing: references to other

10

Introduction

humans in terms of plagues, rats, disease, and uncontrolled breeding disturbingly echo an earlier historical moment.6 The world ‘outside the palace,’ he continues, is overpopulated and destructive, and ‘we’ must protect ourselves from it. Like Fukuyama, he argues that Enlightenment values contribute to the amelioration of Man and are the foundation of any civilized society. These values, he argues, were at the ‘heart of abolitionism’ and the feminist movement. Yet the hierarchical ‘us’ and ‘them’ division he relentlessly maintains between the ‘advanced world’ and the ‘Third World,’ between the palace and the streets, between the survivors and the victims, seems to suggest that these very divisions (along with white and black and man and woman) are also at the heart of the Enlightenment belief in a universal ‘we.’7 What is the alterative to this ‘rising above’ or ‘getting over’ or ‘profiting’ from the Holocaust? Adorno writes that the guilt of the survivor leads to the disturbing dream of the post-apocalypse: ‘By way of atonement he [the one who survives] will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier’ (363). The Enlightenment ideal of Man – Man as a ‘specimen’ – dies in the death camps, in Adorno’s view, and nothing replaces it even as we live on as ghostly reminders of that lost ideal. The world then is proven to be ‘conditional and thus contingent’ as there is no rational Man securing its origin or end. Jean Baudrillard is plagued by the very dream that Adorno forecasts. He is haunted by the sense that Man is already dead, existing only as a ghostly remainder. The bomb, according to him, has already been detonated and we survive in an ‘irreversible coma,’ on life support. The destruction of faith in core narratives of the Enlightenment – Man, Nation, History – ‘is a curve in the road, a turning point. Somewhere, the real scene has been lost. The scene where you had rules for the game and some solid stakes that everyone could rely on’ (Forget 69). ‘History has stopped meaning, referring to anything’; it exists only as simulation; the ‘reality principle’ finds itself ‘collapsing with the dissolution of the subject’; the word ‘the end’ is ‘meaningless’ (67–70). Disconnected from history and its ‘destination,’ Baudrillard concludes his essay ‘The Anorexic Ruins’ with the comparison of humanity to a space ship, in which all life has ceased but vital functions continue (39). In another work, driving through the desert of America, aiming for the ‘point of

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11

no return,’ Baudrillard envisions ‘the extermination of meaning’ and the ‘end of the scene of the journey’ (America 10). Here, as he says, ‘the end’ is pointless and arbitrary – it offers up no vision of the future, no picture of a better world. This then is one response to the catastrophic events of the twentieth century: The world is over. History is a spectacle in reruns. We cannibalize the past but have no vision of a future. Meaning has ‘been swallowed.’ We ‘survive’ only as the walking dead. Apocalypse as the story of renewal and redemption is displaced by the post-apocalypse, where the catastrophe has happened but there is no resurrection, no revelation. Bereft of the idea of the end as direction, truth, and foundation, we have reached the end of the end. However, if one line of thinking from modernism to postmodernism is that the world has ended, another line suggests a discontentment and impatience with the very investment in the idea of the end. In other words, the very rhetoric of the end as a unifying telos is understood as partaking in catastrophe. This impatience with the focus on ends is there in its nascent state in some modernist works and finds fuller expression in many postmodernist works. For instance, while Calvino’s hero may well be frustrated and traumatized that the stories he comes across get ‘lost along the way,’ the novel itself revels in the multiple directions or headings any of the various stories can take as they veer off and get tangled up and spill into new worlds. Rather than ‘formless and meaningless life,’ the lack of finality to the stories in Calvino’s novel playfully suggests infinite possibilities and openings, where no one ending can foreclose all others. Michael Bernstein asks why it is that the end of the story is privileged: Why is it that we look back on history and read it as inevitably leading up to a particular event as opposed to looking at all the alternative paths that might equally have been taken? Rather than accepting the Christian apocalyptic model that underlies modernity as Kermode does, Bernstein asks: ‘How much of a specifically Christian theological perspective has been unwittingly imported into a historiographic context by this privileging of what sounds remarkably like a secular Last Judgment?’ (29). Lee Quinby also challenges the dominance of the Christian apocalyptic model, suggesting as an alternative ‘skeptical revelations’ that, rather than looking forward to the end of time, ‘point toward the importance of timeliness, of being time-bound, grounded in time’ (Millennial Seduction 21). So, too, Lawrence’s work is marked by a frustration with end-driven narratives that have been inspired by the Genesis to Revelation model

12

Introduction

and that shut down other possible readings. In his last work, Apocalypse, published after his death, Lawrence writes of the Christian apocalyptic model that has ‘contaminated’ modern thinking and encouraged rampant individualism, the worship of capital, and contempt for the body and the earth. The Great War, Lawrence argues, proves how woefully inadequate the Christian apocalypse’s ‘thwarted collective’ is as a model for ‘a nation, or society at large,’ concluding that ‘the collective must have some other inspiration’ (23). Lawrence is critical of the Western progress model with its built-in Antichrist, who, in his modern manifestation, is ‘just the fellow who is different from me.’ Thus, the secular apocalyptic models of the nineteenth century, like the Christian scenario, set up their ‘Antichrists’ – those who are necessarily excluded from the redemptive utopic narratives of Man, History, and the Nation. Here we might think of the ‘naturally’ irrational – women, children, natives – excluded from Kant’s rational public sphere; and of Africa, which is dropped from History in Hegel’s model; of Albania and Burkino Faso, which are exiled from Fukuyama’s; and of the entire ‘Third World,’ which is ejected from O’Brien’s ‘lifeboat.’ Modern nations are also caught up in their own stories of minorities and majorities, insiders and outsiders, as borders that are drawn and redrawn are imagined as eternal and natural; the dark side of the nationalist narrative expresses itself in genocide and ethnic cleansing. The exclusion of the ‘fellow who is different than me’ on which, Lawrence argues, these teleological and utopic narratives depend also often both produces and rationalizes catastrophic events – the decimation of aboriginal peoples, slavery, wars, colonialism, and patriarchy. Lawrence argues that the problem with the modern world is precisely its obsession with the end: ‘We all want a “conclusion,” an end we always want to come, in our mental processes, to a decision, a finality, a full stop ... We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to’ (Apocalypse 32). He thus looks back to a non-teleological and non-eschatological pagan understanding of the world which, he argues, had no vision of the end but was satisfied that it has been created and ‘would go on for ever and ever.’ This openness, this world without end in all its creative potential, is what Calvino makes explicit in the very form of his novel despite the protests of his reluctant hero, the reader, who wants a definitive end. The resistance to apocalyptic structures, the Genesis to Revelation trajectory, is also to be found in the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gayatri Spivak. Countering Kant’s theory of ‘man as an end in

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itself,’ Foucault suggests that Man, the autonomous, rational subject of modernity, arose out of the changes in the ‘fundamental arrangements of human knowledge’ in sixteenth-century European culture, and that these arrangements can just as easily crumble and give way to something new. The disappearance of Man is not to be mourned but Man himself is to be understood as no more than a temporary construct: ‘Like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea,’ it awaits the wave that will wash it away (Order of Things 386–7). Derrida’s ‘Ends of Man,’ responding to both Foucault and Kant, suggests multiple origins and endings of Man, so that Man is not limited to a singular abstract category – whether as an end in itself or at its end – making it impossible to speak of a ‘we.’ In Derrida’s work, the beginning and end of humanity are displaced by the ‘post,’ a post that is already there in the very origins of apocalyptic narratives and that opens them to all possible directions, none of which can claim the right to the end. The inability to claim this right that results from this mixture of codes and languages produces the very condition for love in the world: ‘In the beginning, in principle, was the post, and I will never get over it. But in the end I know it, I become aware of it as of our death sentence: it was composed, according to all possible codes and genres and languages, as a declaration of love. In the beginning the post, John will say, or Shaun or Tristan, and it begins with a destination without address, the direction cannot be situated in the end’ (Post Card 29). As in Lawrence’s work, the abandonment of an ultimate ending, or at least a recognition that the focus on a particular end limits other imagined worlds, is an ethical move that breaks down the binary of the Christ and Antichrist model as it allows for a world that remains open in its direction, available to other headings. Spivak too has argued that the deconstructive morphology itself involves a ‘stalling’: ‘The stalling at the beginning is called différance and the stalling at the end is called aporia.’ She writes that her interest is in the ‘middle,’ a place ‘where something like a practice emerges by way of mistake,’ a productive mistake that cannot be measured against or replaced by a correct version (Post-Colonial Critic 158). The use of the term ‘Man,’ throughout this chapter, is in keeping with the idea of ‘Man’ as a universal construct. The Enlightenment thinkers, in the sense that they are committed to the revelation of the truth of the world, are dependent on the notion of a shared community. At least part of the anxiety about the fragmentation and meaninglessness of the modern world stems from the diversity of perspectives in contemporary global culture and from the resulting breakdown of a shared sense

14

Introduction

of language. The sense of ‘loss’ that pervades the late twentieth century is, thus, due in part to the abandonment of the sense of ‘Man’ as universal. Yet this book also calls into question the very premise of this sense of loss, pointing to the logical contradictions in the very construct of ‘Man.’ See, for instance, Dale Spender or Teresa de Lauretis, who writes: ‘As studies in language-usage demonstrate, if “man” includes women (while the obverse is not true, for the term “woman” is always gendered, i.e., sexually connoted) it is only to the extent that, in the given context, women are (to be) perceived as non-gendered “human beings,” and therefore, again, as man’ (‘Semiotics and Experience’ 161). Woman as figure and women as agents are thus a critical aspect of the post-apocalyptic climate and many of the subsequent chapters return to the question of gender as a site that refuses resolution. The sense that the power of the end in narrative is exhausted leads on the one hand to the anxiety that we exist after the catastrophe, after the end, and on the other to the hope that the very openness of a narrative that cannot be claimed by a unifying telos, that resists the pull of imagined or real absolute ends, keeps alive infinite directions and possibilities. This double sense of the post-apocalypse operates in and through twentieth-century literature and criticism. The impossibility of revelation – which provokes anything from a mournful to a celebratory response – is one of the defining features of the period, and the issue of language is central to debate. Does the ruptured relationship between language and the world, where the ‘world’ is no longer believed to be accessible through language, open up or shut down meaning? Is it productive or destructive? Language as Revelation In the biblical apocalyptic model, the revelation of the eternal order occurs only when the text is overcome or destroyed. One school of twentieth-century literary criticism has assumed a similar separation between the world and the word: the end of the literary narrative is the point of revelation as the end marks the move out of fiction into the real world. The task of the critic is to disburden the fiction from its fictiveness in order that it can reveal the truth of the text and ‘the object,’ in Eliot’s words, ‘as it really is.’ Kermode argues that the sequential narrative of the Bible with its clear beginning and ending – Genesis to the Apocalypse – is evident in varying degrees in all literature, and that this formal structure reflects a reoccurring pattern, suggestive of a transcen-

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dent order. ‘The sense of an ending’ traditionally orders narrative and reveals the truth or meaning of the work of art. Closure is the point of revelation; the end allows us to look back on the whole of the work and make sense of it. Kermode maintains the apocalypse is like a ‘primeval pattern’ and the created ‘end’ continues to stage, even if in a more complex manner, the heuristic moment of fiction: ‘Those [fictions] that continue to interest us move through time to an end, an end we must sense even if we cannot know it; they live in change, until, which is never, as and is are one’ (Sense 179). Yet the historic change ‘from a literature which assumed that it was imitating an order to a literature which assumes that it has to create an order, unique and self-dependent’ threatens to install a fiction that is only about the structures of fiction (Kermode, Sense 167). Kermode suggests that some contemporary literature has abandoned a sense of closure: foregrounding the arbitrariness of structures such as time, modern fictions are lost in a timeless random world, played out in the extreme in, for example, Robbe-Grillet’s novels. Kermode’s concern that the revelatory power of literature is diminishing, however, is much more widespread than he acknowledges.8 The ‘primeval pattern’ suggested by the ‘creative end’ that promises (even if forever unrealized) an absolute is under siege: the global threatens the ‘cohesiveness’ of the community; the infiltration of the market into every sector of life corrodes the immutable; and technological reproduction threatens to undermine the ‘original.’ T.S. Eliot thus tries to preserve the category of the aesthetic from the ‘anarchy and futility which is contemporary history’ in order to ensure that literary language can still offer up some ‘truth,’ however provisional (‘Ulysses’ 177). He stresses the autonomy of poetry in order to rescue it from this diversity and from the ‘vast accumulations’ of information circulating in modern society. Arguing that the production and dissemination of information dilute the meanings of words, he complains ‘what they have lost is definite, what they have gained is indefinite’ (‘Perfect Critic’ 55). This dilution subsequently interferes with the ability of the poet/critic to look ‘solely and steadfastly at the object,’ and he is thus likely to substitute ‘indefinite emotions’ for ‘definite meanings.’ In his essay on the ‘The Metaphysical Poets,’ Eliot suggests that these seventeenth-century poets ‘are more mature’ and ‘they wear better’ because they engage with ‘the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling’ (65). Eliot’s praise for the pre-modern metaphysical poets is just one of many examples that suggest his desire for a return to

16

Introduction

a cohesive community that shares a common language, a community that has since been infected by globalization and technological reproduction. The eighteenth century, marked by a rise in technologies (like the printing press) and a growing middle-class readership, is, for Eliot, the beginning of the arbitrariness of the sign and the referent and the subsequent loss of meaning that pervades the twentieth century.9 Although Eliot works to repair this rupture in his criticism, in his own poetry his faith in the revelatory possibilities of literature is clearly diminished. ‘The Waste Land’ is haunted by the impossibility of connecting with a past. Lost in the madness of a fragmented present, in a ‘dead land,’ we are unable to pull order or meaning, prophesy or revelation, from the rubble of modernity: ‘Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images’ (63). Eliot invokes the great tradition of the past – Chaucer, Dante, the Bible, Goldsmith, Shakespeare, Marvel, Spenser, St Augustine, Webster – but in the modern world the invocation is reduced to an impotent chant. The ‘heap of broken images,’ words that have lost their history and meaning, can only be repeated not built upon. Disconnected from history, lacking any creative potential, modern Man is ‘hollow,’ a mere shadow of his historical predecessor. He inhabits a dying world that will end in a ‘whimper’ (‘The Hollow Men’ 92). For the hollow men, neither dead nor alive, neither good nor evil, the power of the end is spent – the world merely fades out as the end refuses to offer up revelation. At the other end of the century, as we have seen, Auster’s novel similarly concludes: ‘and finally the whole thing just collapses into gibberish.’ Eliot’s poetry anticipates at least one version of postmodernism. Jameson refers to postmodernist art as only capable of imitating ‘dead styles’ in its ‘random cannibalization of all styles of the past’ (Cultural Logic 18). Elsewhere, he writes that our society ‘has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve’ (‘Postmodernism’ 125). Acknowledging his debt to Baudrillard, Jameson describes this age as one of spectacle, image, surface, simulation, an age that has lost any connection to a referent and is ‘bereft of all historicity.’ The same concerns that are there in Eliot are voiced by Jameson – the break from History, the loss of tradition, the futile invocation of past styles. All contribute to the rupture between world and word and signal the fact that the revelatory power of art is exhausted. Terry Eagleton, agreeing with Jameson, concludes that if art in the age of postmodernism ‘no longer reflects, it is not because it seeks

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to change the world rather than mimic it, but because there is in truth nothing there to be reflected, no reality which is not itself already image, spectacle, simulacrum, gratuitous fiction’ (61). At this stage of late capitalism, where Shakespeare is used to sell cereal and Picassos and Monets are reproduced on anything from towels to T-shirts, art falls from its historically privileged and semi-autonomous position.10 Thoroughly saturated by the market, art – like any other commodity – is reproduced on demand. In the face of the endless possibilities for reproduction of the image, the ‘uniqueness’ or ‘greatness’ of the art piece is lost. How can art offer any critical insight or reveal the truth of the moment if, subject to reproduction, it is shorn from its historical context to accommodate the mass market? Meaning, autonomy, originality are lost and revelation proves impossible; life itself becomes ‘formless and meaningless.’ Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) exemplifies this anxiety about the inability to determine the authentic. The secret mass production of Americana that mimics historically ‘rare’ objects provokes one of his characters, who had been a collector of rare pieces, ‘to prove that he was right, that the word “fake” meant nothing really, since the word “authentic” meant nothing really’ (60). Now a producer of ‘fake’ Americana, he sells ‘authenticity’ to hungry Japanese collectors. To prove the irrelevance of ‘authenticity,’ he gives a woman two lighters, one of which belonged to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Her inability to distinguish the authentic item from the reproduction illustrates that ‘no mystical plasmic presence’ radiates from the historic item, leading him to conclude the ‘whole damn historicity business is nonsense’ (58). The simulated authentic is indistinguishable from the historically authentic even as the market continues to manufacture and sell, to a hungry populace, the idea of the original, the rare, the real. In Dick’s novel, which is set after the Second World War, this loss of historicity is connected to the death of Man. The Germans and Japanese win the war. Mass genocide has occurred in Africa, slavery is legal, and Americans are treated as second-class. In this desperate world, people actively search for meaning in art and religion. Fixated on reading the future, the characters obsessively consult the I Ching, a book of oracles. An alternate history that speculates on a world in which the Allies win the war gains a devoted readership. This subversive story is actively suppressed and the author becomes a cult hero. But the hope that this alternative fiction offers dissolves when the I Ching reveals that the Allies have won the war. The oracle that predicts the future decrees that

18

Introduction

there is no future. Like Adorno, Dick’s novel suggests that who won the war is irrelevant because it is ‘Man’ – as a specimen – that has died in the death camps. The Holocaust marks the end of History. Cut off from History, Man loses his uniqueness. The drama that unfolds after the end has no purpose; the market exploits the nostalgia for what no longer exists. For these writers, the loss of the revelatory possibilities of language – aggravated by technological reproduction and the market, which sever the relationship between the artwork and its historical context – imprisons us in spectacle, leading to an end without the possibility of rebirth or resolution. Walter Benjamin, although having argued for the revolutionary potential of the mass dissemination of art in his influential essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ nevertheless concludes with a telling warning about the capitalistic and fascistic exploitation of images. Under the power of these influences, imaginative and empathetic engagement is displaced by alienation and insulation from the image, and the watcher, desensitized, is encouraged to derive pleasure from exhibitions of mass destruction. From TV news shows to Hollywood disaster films to the weather channel to the endless replaying of the collapse of the World Trade Center, Benjamin’s mid-century warning has grown perhaps even more relevant. Indifferent to human life, divested of history, disconnected from any referent, Man, unmoored from the ideal of Man and lost to himself, has succumbed to the enjoyment of the spectacle of his own destruction. Benjamin writes: ‘Humanity that, according to Homer, was once an object of spectacle for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it is capable of experiencing its own destruction as an aesthetic enjoyment of the highest order’ (243). Baudrillard further develops the alienating potential of mechanical and electronic reproduction of the text/image. In his discussion of a television series on the Holocaust, he argues that the simulated image destroys memory and annihilates history: ‘TV, the veritable final solution to the historicity of every event’ (Evil Demon 22). For Baudrillard, history and meaning are tied to the linear model of progress which contemporary culture, governed by the logic of consumption, has abandoned in its surrender to and saturation by a diet of hyperreal media representations; thus it neutralizes all opposition and forecloses all emancipatory struggles, allowing us no escape. We are already dead, Baudrillard concludes: ‘There is no life anymore, but the information and vital functions continue’ (‘Anorexic Ruins’ 39).

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The subtle concerns in Eliot and Kermode about whether or what literary texts can reveal about the world are brought to the fore by critics who point out that the desire for illumination must overcome the very thing that allows the text to convey meaning – language. The paradox of traditional literary studies, the attempt to work through and out of language, informs Paul de Man’s theoretical work. He argues that literary language, as the New Critics like T.S Eliot rightly noted, by definition is that which foregrounds its separation from the world or referent. The simultaneous denial of the implications of the uniqueness of literary language, the attempt to repair this rupture or separation, however, leaves New Critics mired in a ‘barely veiled nostalgia for immediate revelation’ (‘Dead-End’ 243). The attempt to demystify literature in the face of this knowledge points to the blindness of the traditional critic, who refuses to acknowledge that the literariness of literature cannot be done away with but reappears everywhere (in linguistics, anthropology, history), testifying to ‘our nothingness,’ the void at our core; fiction points to nothing but itself as fiction: ‘the fiction is not the myth, for it knows itself and names itself as fiction. It is not a demystification, it is demystified from the start. When modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in fact being demystified by it; but since this necessarily occurs in the form of a crisis, they are blind to what takes places within themselves. At the moment that they claim to do away with literature, literature is everywhere ... The human mind will go through amazing feats to avoid facing “the nothingness of human matters”’ (‘Criticism and Crisis’ 18). Thus post-apocalyptic criticism, which finds its inspiration in the initial observations of Eliot on the separation of literary language and the world, insists that the opaqueness of the word blocks out the world. If Kermode insists fiction must, even if impossibly, move us to a time when the ‘as and is are one,’ for de Man there is no ‘is’ to get back to. He argues instead that literary language is by definition that which foregrounds the rupture between the word and the world (the referent); literary language exposes the fictiveness of all language, which points to nothing but itself as fiction and hence offers no possibility of revelation, of accessing the real or true. The text divides us from the world, and the referent and the real are not just complicated by language but lost to it. The sign points nowhere but to itself. Resisting this deconstructive move, Kermode suggests that what is at stake in these debates over language is not only the entire study of literature but the very possibility of meaning: ‘In opposing deconstructionism of the most absolute kind,

20

Introduction

this [genre] theory may protect not only texts but us, and our assumptions of teachable competence’ (‘Sense Endings’ 151). The end as marking the move out of fiction not only stabilizes the categories of the literary text but stabilizes the world; the fictional text ends, permitting us to move back into the world. The world then provides us with a locus of meaning that allows us to teach something and to know ‘the differences between historical record, historical myth and historical poem’ (Poetry 66). What Kermode and de Man share, however, is a belief in an absolute divide between the world, the organic, the real, on the one hand, and the text, the technological, the simulated, on the other. Yet other twentieth-century critics and writers suggest it is precisely the openness of narrative, its very potential for reproducibility, which renders it both politically and historically relevant. Technological reproduction and an increasingly global world do not unhitch the sign from its referent, rendering meaning arbitrary and meaningless, as Eliot, Jameson, and Eagleton fear, but rather expose the unstable, creative power of language itself as it reaches and collides with new audiences and worlds. Between the extremes of Kermode, who invests in the revelatory possibilities of language, and de Man, who rejects them, are critics who suggest that the world and the word are never divisible but that meaning happens in the interconnectedness between the two as language both constructs and reflects worlds. Despite his concluding warning, Benjamin makes a case in his essay for the liberating effects of technological reproduction, which divest the artwork of its ‘aura’ of originality and its dependence on ritual, ‘the location of its original use value’; art thus extends beyond the dome of tradition and becomes available to the masses as political practice. In a similar vein, in an essay first published in 1964, Umberto Eco traces the anxiety about the culture industry to the eighteenth century, which saw an increase in the dissemination and commercialization of literature and the beginnings of a large and heterogeneous reading audience. However, Eco, like Benjamin, argues in Apocalypse Postponed that it is precisely technological reproduction and the dissemination of texts that allow for ‘democracy, the political awakening of the subordinate classes’ and ‘the birth of political and social egalitarianism’ (22). So too, critics, including Mikhail Bakhtin and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, have challenged the absolute division between world and word (on which the readings of the end and the end of the end in the works of Kermode and de Man depend), arguing that an understanding of the fluidity of

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the relationship between the world and fiction allows for a more radical reading of both literary and social conventions. Bakhtin, in The Dialogic Imagination, demonstrates that the modern novel is a product of a ‘polyglot’ world. Just as the borders between national languages begin, in the modern age, to dissolve, so too the novel, the response of a modern creative conscious to this dissolution, incorporates multiple and conflicting genres that destabilize traditional literary boundaries. Whereas the epic is complete and absolutely past, one of the novel’s defining features is its ‘open-endedness.’ Readers of the novel, Bakhtin argues, are thus encouraged to participate in its unfolding as it partakes in an ‘inconclusive and fluid’ reality. Similarly, in Writing beyond the Ending, DuPlessis points to the ideological implications of the romance narrative that traditionally ends with either the marriage of the female character and her submission to social convention or her death and the end of her transgression of these conventions. The attempts of twentiethcentury women writers to ‘write beyond the ending’ involve disrupting this social and narrative closure because, DuPlessis argues, ‘narrative outcome is one place where transindividual assumptions and values are most clearly visible, and where the word “convention” is found resonating between its literary and its social meanings’ (3). If we return to the concerns of Calvino’s hero, this debate about the end is exemplified. The end, for his reader, serves as the boundary or border that makes the work complete and unified; this bounded work defeats the randomness of time. The end gives the work definition, unveils its unique meaning, and places it in an autonomous relationship to other works. The origin of the story is not arbitrary but already moving toward its destiny, marking the work as ‘original.’ The end is concealed in the origin; the origin awaits its end. On the far side of the fictive end, across the border, behind the veil, is the ‘real’ world, a world where fiction can be identified, labelled, catalogued, and contained, leaving the world free of fiction. But in Calvino’s novel the reflexive gesture of pointing to the end as a mere convention undermines everything the end promises: stories leak into one another, change direction, and frustrate the expectation of revelation and originality as they mimic various literary styles. Further, if the end is recognized as a mere convention, we are driven to ask where the text ends and how and what it reveals. Calvino’s reader laments that he is trapped in a world of stories that do not end, and thus can find no exit, no point beyond the veil, no border to secure the meaning of the work or the world. As he struggles to read to the end, to read out of the text,

22

Introduction

he is thrown back into a layered and resonant archive from which there is no escape. Yet it is precisely this recognition of ‘the end’ as a convention that suggests not the exhaustion of meaning but meaning as a contested site. A year before Kermode’s influential The Sense of an Ending was published, Derrida, at a conference at Johns Hopkins University in 1966, concluded: There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology – in other words, through the history of all of his history – has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game. (‘Structure, Sign, and Play’ 294)

The source of this rupture – this apocalyptic event that shifts us from the dream of an origin and end to a dream where there is no foundation and no end to the game – is, according to Derrida, when ‘language invaded the universal problematic’ (278). What comes forth from this tear or this shift, however, is ‘the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity’ (294). This book then is about exploring what in 1966 Derrida could refer to only as the ‘yet unnameable’ as we have lived with that diminished sense of revelation or this rupture for just over a century. Is the postapocalypse redemptive or traumatic? Is it revolutionary or conservative? What does a world that has abandoned a ‘sense of an ending’ look like? Is it about ruins and ghosts? Is it about possibility and plurality? What does it mean to be stuck in the game? And what does it mean to try to ‘pass beyond man’? This study of the post-apocalyptic climate begins with the modernists, who reflect on why it is that no ‘intelligible progression’ is operable, no ‘pattern’ is discernible, and no origin and ending are viable in the twentieth century. It continues with the postmodernists, who are left with the task of teasing through how the nar-

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ratives of modernity, which rely on endings for definition, might be reimagined. The first part of this book looks at the very question of how the end is understood by modernists and postmodernists. Faulkner characterized The Sound and the Fury as a ‘failure’ because the story of this Southern family, torn apart by the Civil War, remains incomplete and irresolvable. Nineteenth-century narrative conventions, which include closure, cannot accommodate this story of pathos. Like his characters, the author searches for a new version of the ‘end’ that will secure some meaning, a sense of completion that will transcend the arbitrariness of time. This failure to resolve thus introduces the twentieth-century sense of the apocalypse as exhausted as opposed to redemptive and the postapocalyptic as being on the other side of offering up revelation. But whereas the modernist takes this inability to reach a conclusion as a failure, the postmodernist Don DeLillo sheds a more critical light on this desire for a conclusive end. DeLillo counters Faulkner’s nostalgia for the end as a source of meaning in his questioning of the very premise of the equation of endings and meaning. In White Noise it is the very striving for something definitive and solid that finds Jack Gladney, a late twentieth-century professor, flirting with Nazi Germany and attracted to the power of Hitler in order to escape the insubstantiality of simulated culture that surrounds him and to alleviate his own obsessive thoughts about death. In his attempts to escape death, to get beyond the end, he wants to close that gap between the sign and the referent. DeLillo’s novel, however, suggests that death productively keeps these tensions alive. The very openness that Faulkner understands as failure, DeLillo in turn embraces as productive. The subsequent sections of this book investigate the apocalyptic models that underlie the idea of History, the Nation, and Man in modern and postmodern novels. In the second section, which opens with a discussion of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, John Dowell discovers that in the post-Victorian world the past cannot be secured by objectivity but is instead caught up in subjective readings that are governed by the contingencies of place and time. The accompanying sense of extreme isolation leads him to retreat from the world and assert the primacy and the autonomy of the artistic vision, understanding it as something that withstands the chaos and disorder of the modern world that has resulted from the loss of a communal sense of History. But if Dowell’s attempts to map himself onto History ultimately fail, Ford himself begins to suggest that this failure might in the end prove valuable. The

24

Introduction

movement of History has, in its thrust forward, neglected lost histories, histories that can never be told because the archives have been destroyed, and it is this relationship of loss to History that is the concern of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The intentional destruction of the records of the Africans brought over as slaves to America and the millions who died in the Middle Passage, who are untraceable because they were rendered nameless, can never be mapped onto or written into the movement of History, and yet they continue haunt it. Rather than concluding that this loss requires a retreat from the world in the style of Dowell, Morrison suggests lost histories are critical to our very understanding of it. The third section considers the apocalyptic underpinnings of the secular Nation that draw on the book of Revelation’s imaginings of a fully integrated community at the end of the world. However, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, completed in the aftermath of the Great War, is disillusioned with the modern Nation. Forster looks to both Hinduism and Islam as alternative models of community, but it seems nothing can bridge the colonial and racial gap between the Indian Aziz and the British Fielding, as, at the end of the novel, even the very earth opposes their union. The revolutionary and apocalyptic possibilities of the Nation are also explored in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which is set after the Second World War as India gains its independence from the British Empire. Yet this Western and Christian teleological model of nationalism necessarily requires that some voices be marginalized or exiled. Thus the dream of a cohesive community that exists peacefully within the bounds of the new Nation quickly cracks under the pressure, as does the body of the Nation’s chronicler, Saleem, who attempts to hold competing and divergent national narratives within his tale of India. Saleem then draws on an apocalyptic understanding of the umma, the Islamic Nation that, unlike the Christian-based version, does not rely on teleology. But this model of the Nation similarly proves untenable and cannot unify India’s diverse population. The sense of the incommensurability of different narratives and the unbridgeable gulf between people that renders impossible the dream of a cohesive community, the very problem that plagues Forester’s novel, is in Rushdie’s postmodern work, however, recovered as potentially positive. Midnight’s Children, in a gendered critique of the modern and Islamic Nations, suggests that the discourse of ‘unveiling’ that underlies these apocalyptic models needs to be challenged. The fourth section looks at the relationship of apocalypse and the

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narrative of Man. In his final work, Apocalypse, Lawrence considers the disastrous repercussions that the Christian book of Revelation has had on the modern world as it encourages a sense of self-righteousness and moral superiority that divides man from man. Further, this end-driven model encourages us think that there is some point to reach, some final destination. The rejection of the idea of consciousness as a movement ‘onward’ is at the heart of Lawrence’s remodelling of the masculine self. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which is also set after the Great War, Lawrence mocks the attempts to rebuild the world on the same paradigm that has led to its demise and insists that a radical reimagining of what it means to be human is the only way to heal the sickness of the twentieth century. This reimagining involves the dissolution of the autonomous ego – the very core of Man – and a reconnection to the cosmos. Yet the unveiling of Man in Lawrence’s work, his insistence on the phallus as the foundation of life, requires the violent suppression of the very thing that has unleashed his critique of modernity, the feminine. Angela Carter’s novel Nights at the Circus responds to this displacement of Woman and considers the ‘unveiling’ of women at the end of the nineteenth century with its explicit parallels to the end of the twentieth century. Like Lawrence, in Carter the unleashing of the feminine challenges the very core of Man, but she does not then, as he does, violently suppress women and reassert the primacy of the phallus. Rather, she exposes the very secret of masculine performance. However, the question of how to explain the performance of women remains, and this is the subject of Carter’s tale of the winged female aerialist Fevvers. Exploring the question of whether she is ‘fact’ or ‘fiction,’ the novel tackles the problem of how to narrate women. If the twentieth century has been characterized by open-ended narratives, the twenty-first has witnessed the resurrection of both religious and secular apocalyptic scenarios of disaster and rebirth and a renewed investment in the end. From the explicitly messianic language and ambitions of America’s President George W. Bush and Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who both speak about eliminating ‘evil’ from the earth; to the rise of evangelical Christianity and Muslim fundamentalism, which both invest in similar end-of-time scenarios; to scientific narratives that warn of environmental ruin on the one hand and promise to treat aging and eliminate death on the other – apocalyptic scenarios have returned with a vengeance. The Conclusion considers some of the implications of this re-emergence as it plays itself out in Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, which welcomes the end of Man

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Introduction

and the end of History. Investing in the promise of new technologies, the novel envisions the creation of a new immortal species – the posthuman. Derrida, in a paper on the human genome published in 1996, argues ‘that the risk that is run at this unique moment in the history of humanity is the risk of new crimes being committed against humanity ... against man, against the very humanity of man, no longer against millions of representatives of real humanity but against the essence-itself of humanity, against an idea, an essence, a figure of the human race, represented this time by a countless number of beings and generations to come’ (‘The Aforementioned’ 207–8). The climate of the post-apocalypse can never leave behind the apocalyptic tone – the singular end of Man, the end of the game, still haunts the world without end. Does the post-apocalypse give way to the posthuman? Was this the ‘monstrosity’ still in the offing that Derrida refers to when he refers to trying to ‘pass beyond man’? Can the post-apocalypse interrupt the posthuman? These are the questions that will be taken up in the Conclusion. This doubled approach to the post-apocalypse is kept alive in the ensuing chapters of this book. The post is both after and continuous with the apocalypse. The risk of the game without end does not exist without the risk of the end of the game. Stylistically and philosophically, this work mixes genres and critical schools, art and criticism, modernists and postmodernists. It makes use of many methodologies – psychoanalytic, feminist, postcolonial, deconstructive, and new critical – without giving full allegiance to any particular school. So, too, the book, understanding literature as both constructing and reflecting culture, resists the examination of it as an entirely autonomous category. Rather, it considers literature as the playing out of a cultural moment and therefore also saturated in and in dialogue with philosophical, historical, and scientific discourses.

Part One The End

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1 Characters in Search of the End

At the heart of the modernist and postmodernist debates over the end is how the end is imagined, figured, defined, and understood and what is at stake in the twentieth century’s abnegation of and exhaustion with it. In nineteenth-century novels, which often take up the political and social concerns of the day, the ending conventionally resolves tensions and restores an order that has been disrupted at the outset of the story. The codes that have been thrown into disarray, the seemingly incommensurable perspectives, and the misunderstandings that initiate the story are forcefully and conclusively settled at its end, suggesting the return to firm ground, to a world righted. Mimicking, in secular fashion, the book of Revelation and its promise to offer up the truth of the world at the end of the narrative, to reveal the eternal order as the text dissolves, these novels equate social order with narrative resolve – the one reflecting the confidence in the other.1 By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the faith in the secular version of this apocalypse-influenced narrative is already diminishing and in many modernist works there is a sense that the end can no longer offer up or secure meaning. Its inability to do so suggests not only the loss of the revelatory powers of art, the rupture between art and the world, but more profoundly the sense that there is no functioning symbolic code or underlying universal order that can be reflected in art. The world cannot be righted because there is no right. Thus Nietzsche, countering Kant, writes that we have no claim to synthetic judgments a priori: ‘In our mouths they are nothing but false judgment’ (Beyond 19). The repercussions of the killing of God are just beginning to be felt, he argues, and claims to a secular foundation cannot be made in the wake of his murder. Rather we are forced to acknowledge ‘the

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nothing’ that remains: ‘To sacrifice God for the nothing – this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty was reserved for the generation that is now coming up: all of us already know something of this’ (67). Modernist narratives that do not or cannot resolve expose the underlying anxiety about ‘the nothing’ that Nietzsche predicted would come to unsettle the twentieth century. The diminished sense of the end that haunts modernist works is understood by some of its practitioners to threaten the very possibility of arriving at some stable point, of producing meaning in the world, of restoring the social order. The chaos that initiates the narrative is never resolved and the text cannot be left behind but continues to provoke and plague its author. The inability to reach a definitive conclusion and move out of the text is best exemplified by The Sound and the Fury, as Faulkner is driven to return over and over again to this novel that refuses completion. In interviews about this work, Faulkner repeatedly refers to his many attempts to tell the story of a little girl with muddy drawers, all of which, in his words, result in a failure that leaves the novel incomplete: I had already begun to tell it through the eyes of the idiot child since I felt that it would be more effective as told by someone capable only of knowing what happened, but not why. I saw that I had not told the story that time. I tried to tell it again, the same story through the eyes of another brother. That was still not it. I told it for the third time through the eyes of the third brother. That was still not it. I tried to gather the pieces together and fill in the gaps by making myself the spokesman. It was still not complete, not until 15 years after the book was published when I wrote as an appendix to another book the final effort to get the story told and off my mind, so that I myself could have some peace from it ... I couldn’t leave it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I’d probably fail again. (The Sound 233)

The five attempts to finish the tale result in a novel that Faulkner refers to as his ‘most spectacular failure,’ and here he understands failure as a lack of definitive closure that would then get the story ‘off his mind’ and give him some ‘peace.’ The inability to ‘tell it right,’ the very openness of the narrative and its lack of resolve, disturbs the author. In an interview with a graduate class in American fiction, Faulkner again refers to his many attempts to tell the story, repeating that he had ‘still failed’ (235). In working toward narrative closure, the nineteenth-century realist novel often stages a battle over the female body. The novels of this era

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usually end as tragedy with the death of the heroine, who is punished if she transgresses the social order, or as comedy, with the marriage of the heroine, who is ‘rewarded’ if she overcomes her initial rebellion and conforms to societal standards. She must, in the end, be tamed by them and be willing to reproduce them or be exiled for order to be re-established.2 For instance, Thomas Hardy’s heroine in Tess of the d’Urbervilles expresses sexual desire, succumbs to seduction, but then resists being defined by this act. Thwarting the societal expectations of a poor girl’s response to a wealthy man, Tess refuses to be kept by her seducer and falls in love and marries another man. Her transgression, however, cannot be recuperated into the Victorian moral order that offers to women the extreme and limited roles of either the pure wife or the corrupt mistress. The social order is dependent on the strict division between the two. Both too good and not good enough for the world, she must be killed off at the end of the novel for not conforming to these roles. In contrast, Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet learns, by the end of Pride and Prejudice, to check her rebellious nature and conform to a social order she is initially critical of. Like Tess, she too refuses the limited roles offered to women and mocks the marriage contract, an economic transaction, she points out, that renders middle-class women little more than chattel as they are passed from father to husband. Elizabeth thus initially identifies with her progressive father, who renounces his role as masculine head of the household, respecting his daughter’s independence and intellect. However, in the latter part of the novel, Elizabeth criticizes her father for his rejection of paternal authority and begs him to use it on her wayward sisters. The father is no longer presented as progressive but as weak and negligent, while Elizabeth learns to respect and appreciate Darcy’s benevolent paternalism, finally accepting his offer of marriage. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the limitations of narrative resolution, which are so often played out at the expense of women, are foregrounded by several female novelists. George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss reflexively acknowledges these limitations. Her heroine, the dark-haired, intelligent, passionate, rebellious Maggie Tulliver, who is unhappy with a paternal social structure that allows her less gifted brother access to an education from which she is excluded, is doomed to die, just as from the outset of the novel, her sweet, blond, demure cousin, Lucy Deane, is inevitably bound for marriage. Eliot makes the fate of her heroine explicit in the example of the woman whom Maggie reads about as a child. Accused of being a witch, the woman has no chance of surviving the test by drowning that will determine whether

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or not she is a witch. Either way, the deck is already stacked against her. While Maggie naively reads the story of the witch, the reader, watching her read, knows Maggie, like the witch, is already doomed as much by narrative conventions as by social ones: it is clear from the beginning of this novel, with its repeated references to drowning, that there is, just like all the other dark-haired, rebellious heroines who have preceded her, no way out for Maggie. Like the test for the witch, the very convention of the nineteenth-century novel, its equation between closure and social order, fatefully traps its heroines in marriage or death. By the end of the century, the constraints of narrative resolution are even more pronounced, at least among female authors. In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, there is still no escape or alternative for the rebellious heroine, Edna Pontellier. She too refuses the forced submission of women to a paternalistic social order, understanding marriage as another form of death, a loss of self. She tries to reclaim this self by leaving her husband: ‘I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of or not. I give my self where I choose’ (167). But, in the end, she realizes that ‘the shore,’ as a metaphor for society, cannot accommodate her choice, and she drowns in her final swim. Unwilling to submit to marriage, she must face that other death. Edith Wharton’s heroine in The House of Mirth, Lily Bart, also resists marriage and pays for it. Unwilling to surrender herself entirely as an object of exchange, as a woman who is ‘asked out as much for her clothes as for herself,’ she is finally unable to survive the consequences of this resistance (12). Virginia Woolf is one of the first writers to challenge this suffocating closure, and in shifting the narrative conventions and leaving the fate of her heroine unresolved, she also challenges the social conventions: Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse neither marries nor is killed off. The female is not sacrificed at the end of the narrative to restore a social order; instead the very order itself is exposed as inherently problematic. Mr and Mrs Ramsay exemplify the Victorian gender dynamic that plays itself out in marriage. The male ego demands such attention that the woman is left with ‘scarcely a shell of herself for her to know herself by’ (44) in her ‘self-surrender’ (164) even as she is supported by the ‘iron girders’ of the ever-expanding male self, by the ‘admirable fabric of male intelligence’ (115). Resisting this relentless gendered hierarchy and binary social structure that requires women to sacrifice their selves to men in return for men’s support and protection, Lily pursues her ambitions as a painter. At the dinner party she thinks, There is a code of behaviour she knows, whose seventh article (it may be)

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says that on occasions of this sort it behoves the woman, whatever her own occupation may be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old-maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube was to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there smiling. (99)

Lily not only refuses to play this gender game, which requires the female to support the male ego at the expense of her own, but she also refuses to model herself on the masculine model. Unlike Mr Ramsay, who craves recognition and a permanent legacy, Lily is ready to accept that her painting may remain in the attic – that her ‘vision’ is momentary. Keeping the tension alive between masculine and feminine, she draws a ‘line there, in the centre’ that ‘finishes’ the painting. Like the line, the novel refuses the ‘harmony’ and symmetry of the Victorian social order as it breaks the convention of closure. Not that this openness doesn’t have its terror as when Lily feels herself ‘step off her strip of board into the waters of annihilation’ (196), but it also offers a sense of release, as when Cam imagines his father saying ‘“there is no God” ... as if he were leaping into space ... lightly like a young man’ (224). Yet the open-ended narrative, which characterizes the modern novel and which Woolf embraces as it releases its female characters into an unscripted future, is the source of immense anxiety among some of the male modernists. The Sound and the Fury is perhaps the most dramatic example of a reading that stages this open-endedness as a ‘spectacular failure’ even as it makes its many attempts at completion. Faulkner’s rebellious little girl with the muddy underpants, Caddy, escapes all five of the narrative strategies – objectivity, art, reason, religion, and genealogy – that are deployed in the attempt to tell her story. In the end, the girl, although banished from the family, is not sacrificed for the sake of narrative resolution, but her rebellion does cause a crisis of meaning. Framed by a quote from Macbeth, from which the title is taken, Caddy’s escape, which in turn forecloses the possibility of a conclusion, is the source of continued stress in the novel as this openness suggests time will continue to corrode meaning. The relentlessness and tedium of a ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’ of a time that does not conclude, reduces life to ‘sound and fury signifying nothing.’ The novel purports that only ‘a sense of an ending’ can provide some measure of order and coherence to the narrative.

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However, in the post-apocalyptic and godless world, in the aftermath of the Civil War, the novel also suggests, morals are transient and any continuity between past and present has been irrevocably ruptured (51). Quentin’s desperate plea that ‘things just finish[]themselves’ leads him to indulge in the perverse fantasy of committing incest with his sister so that they could do something so ‘dreadful’ that they would bring down a final judgment and be condemned to Hell. As with the biblical model, this finality presupposes a moral absolute and permanence: ‘Because if it were just to hell; if that were all of it. Finished’ (50). Worse than hell, for Quentin, is his father’s response that there is no moral standard, no measure, no climax. Relativity aggravated by a historical and cultural amnesia governs their universe: ‘people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today.’ For Quentin, as for Faulkner, the lack of an ending that fails to connect to any larger moral universe is reason for despair: the individual is alienated and isolated, and the characters are trapped in their stream-of-consciousness narratives, cut off from any larger sense of community. Kermode writes that in connecting to a community through the establishment of things like a shared calendar and genealogy, ‘each life might require a meaning beyond itself in the interval between its beginning and its end. It was not just a simple progress towards one’s own death, not just one damned thing after another. Instead of remaining at the mercy of the passage of ordinary time a life could be felt as making sense in terms of a far more universal system of counting; and a lifespan is thus given significance by solidarity not only with those who shared membership of one’s particular epoch but also with ancestors and descendants’ (‘Lawrence and Apocalyptic Types’ 15). In the fragmented, modern world of the novel, however, the tyranny of ‘tomorrow after tomorrow,’ ‘just one dammed thing after another,’ prevails. Members of the Compson family, a family in decline as the men are unwilling or unable to reproduce, are facing extinction and have no way of connecting to anything outside the solipsism of their present. Why does each section fail to conclude? Benjy’s section, as Faulkner mentions in his interview, works on the level of ‘what happened.’ It is an attempt at an objective presentation of the world as it is the most unmediated of the sections – that is, the reader is presented with the world, unshaped, untouched, by an individual consciousness. The ‘idiot’ observes what happens but does not have the mental power to explain or interpret the events.3 Unlike nineteenth-century novels where, for the

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most part, the world, apprehended via the senses, is solid, coherent and ordered, this twentieth-century narrative presents the observable world as absolutely terrifying. For both Benjy and the reader, the external world lacks any intrinsic order. The ‘what happened,’ the world, revealed in all its transparency, is concrete and material but also hopelessly random and arbitrary, foreclosing the possibility of any shared apprehension of it. Chronology, coherence, time, connections, order, all of which allow for some semblance of communication, are not natural but human constructs, and bereft of them the world is full of chaotic noise, lights, and shapes. Benjy, incapable of imposing any order on the world, lives in its meaningless fury. If finalities, endings, and closure intimate a stable moral order, this section cannot even begin to offer any resolution to the story of a little girl with muddy underpants, peering in at her grandmother’s funeral and trying to make sense of loss and death. Order is restored at the end of the novel, but it is merely a facade – as absurd, ineffective, and lifeless as the broken narcissus, held upright by a splint, that Benjy holds in his hand. Luster sets out with Benjy to visit the graveyard, but wanting to show off the carriage, he takes the horse around the left side of the Confederate soldier, an arbitrary disruption that sends Benjy into a fit: ‘horror; shock; agony; eyeless; tongueless.’ Jason intervenes, righting the direction of the carriage around the monument, striking Luster and then Benjy, breaking anew his flower: ‘Ben’s voice roared and roared. Queenie moved again, her feet began to clop-clop- steadily again, and at once Ben hushed. Luster looked quickly back over his shoulder, then drove on. The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place’ (199). Benjy’s howls subside with the restoration of order, but this ‘conclusion,’ which, in its reinstatement of a deadly routine that temporarily lulls the tormented cries of an idiot, satisfies neither the reader nor Faulkner. The order and serenity are mocked by the empty eyes, and the broken flower recalls a scene in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.4 The suicidal Father Time, ‘the aged child’ in this novel, remarks while at the fair: ‘I should like the flowers very very much, if I didn’t keep on thinking they’d be all withered in a few days!’ This child, who signals the ‘beginning of the universal wish not to live’ (266), does not see the flowers as part of the cycle of nature or the cosmos but as governed by ‘tomorrows’ without purpose or logic as they move toward a senseless end.

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Benjy’s howls are provoked as much by Caddy’s disappearance as they are by the temporary disruption of his route in the carriage or by the broken flower, suggesting an arbitrariness to his trauma – set off as it is by the trivial as much as by the tragic. Yet Benjy’s ‘longing’ (if someone who is forever living in the moment, unable to differentiate past from present, is capable of this) for Caddy is pre-Oedipal. Smelling of trees, she represents, for him, the hope of a cosmic oneness and connection. She did soothe his tormented cries, but what he felt in her presence is broken and can never be repaired as Caddy does not and will not return for him. Her escape from his story thus frustrates meaning. Caddy is the central subject of the novel but almost entirely absent from the text. The inability to tell this story of this girl foregrounds the sense that, in de Man’s words, fictional language always points to our desire for ‘pure nothingness, our nothingness’ (‘Criticism and Crisis’ 19). She cannot be conjured up or recreated on the page, but as an impossibly lost figure, she haunts all four of the sections. Unlike de Man, however, this novel puts this sense of loss and nothingness in a historical context that is attentive to both race and gender politics. If the ‘what happened’ of Benjy’s section provides no relief from the modern world, Quentin’s offers a different strategy. Rather than Benjy’s unmediated rawness, in Quentin’s section we are given a poetic world fully shaped and ordered by an individual conscience. In preparing for his death, he exerts meticulous control over his last day, carefully putting all his things in order; his narrative tries to impose or rather break from the chaos and senselessness of the world to create its own structure. Art, fantasy, imagination are pitted against the harsh, objective, concrete, random world. Yet like the order that is restored by the righting of the carriage in Benjy’s world, Quentin’s much more sophisticated version is no less futile. Quentin breaks his watch trying to escape the deadliness of time, heeding his father’s advice that ‘only when the clock stops does time come to life’ (54). The sash on the windowsill that is affected by the movement of the sun, however, continues to obsess him as he understands it as marking clock time, and he finds himself bringing his watch in for repair. Witnessing the other ones on display, Quentin is struck by the arbitrariness of time as a human construct, even as it presents itself with such confidence: ‘a dozen different hours and each with the same assertive and contradictory assurance that mine had, without any hands at all’ (54). The random and inconsistent watches mock Kermode’s confidence in a ‘universal system of counting’ and fail to offer any greater solidarity. Neither of Quen-

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tin’s attempts to be in time or to free himself from it provide any meaning. Trying to impose a temporal, narrative order, Quentin creates a fiction about his incestuous relationship with Caddy that satisfies his desire for, perversely, both purity and a moral foundation. Quentin’s nostalgia for an older heroic past is dependent on the control of women’s wombs, and his overwhelming distress at Caddy’s expression of her sexual desires is tied up with his fears of miscegenation and the contamination of the family line: ‘why must you do like nigger women do in the pasture the ditches the dark woods hot hidden furious in the dark woods’ (59). In imagining himself the father of her child, Quentin makes transparent his desire to assert the power over women’s bodies that is necessary for a coherent racial and genetic lineage, the foundation of the Southern family.5 Yet while Quentin hopes for this connection to a larger and continuous community, to ancestors, to something beyond his individual ego, his father tells him ‘men invented virginity’ precisely for this purpose and this ‘invention’ points to the fiction of paternity, the family name, that underlies Quentin’s desire. The fiction of paternity can only be sustained by denying women’s sexual autonomy and by imagining women as virgin territory that can be exchanged between men. The ‘lost’ order that informs Quentin’s nostalgia, of which both Quentin and Faulkner seem quite aware, is bound up in misogyny and racism. In the post–Civil War South, Quentin’s desire to resurrect a traditional and definitive moral order and, with it, the hierarchical binaries of heaven and hell, good and evil, to counter the arbitrariness of the modern world, inevitably also suggests the pre–Civil War social order that puts man above woman and white above black. As in Benjy’s section, Faulkner refuses to secure his narrative by having his ‘little girl’ sacrificed to this moral order, but this also leaves Quentin stranded and without a viable alternative to the postapocalyptic world of the South. Quentin’s nostalgia, confirmed by the perversity of its expression, is untenable, but he can also find nothing meaningful to replace it. Ending in despair and taking place outside of the Easter story, his narrative cannot even begin to offer any hope of redemption. Like Benjy’s, Quentin’s story fades out as the sentences get increasingly disjointed and out of control. Quentin does finally escape time as time slows almost to a halt in the final moments before his suicide, and thus he does escape the ‘mausoleum of all hope and desire,’ but his escape is – like Benjy’s timeless world, where the ‘idiot’ cannot distinguish past from present – ultimately pointless, solipsistic,

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and absurd. If the world has no inherent order, the attempt to impose a poetic order on it proves fruitless. Jason is the pragmatist. Faulkner describes him as the first ‘sane Compson’ and as ‘logical rational contained,’ which at first seems like an absurd description. Donald Kartiganer argues that the most obvious revision in Noel Polk’s corrected text of The Sound and the Fury was the removal of Faulkner’s appendix, which the author had added to his novel in 1945. Without Faulkner’s description of his character, Kartiganer writes, Jason ‘assumes, unobstructed, his original characterization as a man not only angry and frustrated, but in fact quite mad’ (88). However Irena Kaluza, in her 1967 linguistic study of The Sound and the Fury, suggests that the sentence structure and diction in each of the sections reflect the perspective of the characters, and that Jason’s rhetoric reveals him as ‘pseudo-rational’ (102). She notes that he never allows his mental experience to operate beyond the conscious speech level and always tries, ‘by indefatigably inserting words like because, when, where, and if, to organize his experience logically’ (100). Andre Bleikasten also argues: ‘True, cold rationality is what he is striving for, as can be seen from his meanly legalistic approach to all practical questions and from his propensity to reduce all relationships to business arrangements’ (163). Both Kaluza and Bleikasten maintain that Jason ultimately fails to behave rationally, but I would suggest instead that reason itself, as it does in many modernist text, fails. It is not that Jason does not behave rationally; it is rather that reason offers no defence against the chaos of the modern world. Reason depends, for instance, on the separation of subject and object, on commonsense, on the conscious mind, on the solidity of external appearances, on a distance from the other, and yet Jason himself is tormented and driven by the unseen, the irrational, the unconscious, which undo his rationalist discourse. Reason thus collapses into rationalization.6 Jason is not troubled by racism or sexism or a higher order as is his brother. His concerns are practical: how to make money, how to get ahead, and how to command deference. Yet ‘sanity’ and ‘rationality’ are no more tenable than Benjy’s idiocy or Quentin’s poetry. Jason ends as much trapped by the sound and the fury as his brothers as he rails against the very things he is also caught up in, collapsing the distance between subject/object and self/other that is critical to rational thought. Contradictions pile up between his words, slowly mounting till he spins completely out of control; he accuses women of always being late and thus incapable of business, when he himself is consis-

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tently late for work; he despises meddling but cannot stay out of his niece’s business; he scorns dependency, referring constantly to the mouths he has to feed and to his pride in standing on his own two feet even as he is conning his mother and fraudulently cashing his sister’s cheques that are supposed to go to the support of his niece; he values hard work but does very little of it himself. Even as he seeks to fiercely assert order in the world around him and make time answer to him, it is time that defeats him over and over again – he is always arriving too late for the event. He ‘can’t waste any more time,’ but he aimlessly follows Quentin and her lover around the town missing both the close of the stock market and Quentin, who manages to escape with her fortune that he had been hoarding (136). Reason as an ordering mechanism is not a sufficient response to the world; unpredictable and random events shatter Jason’s rational discourse, leaving him impotent and floundering like his brothers. Reason cannot grasp emotional subtleties, those things that take place beyond the observable and measurable world. As in other modernist texts, like Mrs Dalloway, reason fails to accommodate complexity and profundity, and Woolf’s novel points to the limits of this approach. Referring to the effects of the passing car of an important person that has riveted the attention of the London crowd, she comments on the failure of science to grasp emotion: ‘no mathematical instrument, though capable of transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration ... in its fullness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional’ (15). Like Jason, Dr Holmes and Dr Bradshaw, in their treatment of Septimus, are vicious in their application of a rational approach, practising ‘an exacting science’ on what lies outside of reason (84). By the end of the novel, tormented by a pounding headache, confused and disoriented, sentences and thought breaking down, Jason ends his futile chase and returns home. For Jason, Caddy’s abandonment of her marriage and her illegitimate child represent the loss of a lucrative job at a bank and powerful familial connections. His niece’s escape with the fortune that is rightfully hers replicates that loss. Faulkner does not sacrifice his female characters and reduce them to objects of exchange between men to secure a paternal logic and order, and yet the novel is also haunted by a sense of failure – its inability to provide an alternate, meaningful conclusion. While all the other sections fail, Dilsey’s section is generally put forth as offering a conclusion that releases the narrative from the relentlessness of a time that eats away at meaning.7 Dilsey’s section seems to

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work as a conclusion because she is able to do what all the other characters attempt but are not able to do: not just escape time, but escape it in a meaningful way. Like T.S. Eliot, who reads Joyce’s Ulysses as responding to the chaos of the modern world by invoking the circularity and transhistoricity of myth, Dilsey adopts the preacher’s sermon as she says she has seen ‘de first en de last’ (187). While this literally refers to the Compson paternal line, which will not reproduce itself because Jason does not want children, Benjy is castrated, Quentin is dead, and Caddy’s daughter is illegitimate, this end of the family is ultimately insignificant in light of Revelation. The final book of the bible promises to connect the beginning to the end, and this cyclical or mythic dimension offers transcendence, permanence, eternity, so that, as Faulkner spells out in his appendix, Dilsey ‘endures’ while the rest of the characters are consumed in an endless stream of tomorrows. Despite the critical reception of the Dilsey section (and it is not really hers as it is dominated by male voices), Faulkner himself clearly was not satisfied with it and did not see it as providing any sense of completion as he states repeatedly in interviews. Why does this section also fail to conclude the novel? Like Benjy’s, this section is objective, but instead of the world appearing random and chaotic as it does in his, the world seems once again ordered. Yet the nostalgia expressed here is in many ways as problematic as it is in Quentin’s section. The return to a nineteenth-century omniscient narrator, to realism, and to the resurrection of God in the post-Nietzschean age also suggests a return to pre–Civil War values and a restoration of its hierarchical gender and race structures. Faulkner, progressive and clearly aware of the problem with Quentin’s ‘white’ nostalgia, which he foregrounds, attempts to deflect attention from this issue of reviving the pre–Civil War Southern racial paradigm by setting up Dilsey, a black woman, as the conduit for these sentiments. But Dilsey does not really work as a believable or viable character, despite this return to realist form, as there is no explanation as to why she should want things to ‘endure.’ Her comment that Luster is not ‘free’ of Compson blood points to a legacy of rape and slavery, and she continues to be abused by all members of the family. Even Quentin, who is mothered and protected by Dilsey, brushes her away and refers to her as a ‘damn old nigger.’ This treatment is irreconcilable with Dilsey’s desire to ensure the continuance of this family even as Faulkner writes ‘she held that family together for not the hope of reward but just because it was the decent and proper thing to do’ (237). This reason, however, rings false – why, other than an internalized self-

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hatred, would it be ‘decent and proper’ for a black woman to hold together a family, and more broadly a system built on slavery, that has the racist, sexist, lying, and cheating Jason at its head? Dilsey, as strong, smart, moral, and capable but also impossibly good, patient, long-suffering, and servile, reads more like the ‘Aunt Jemima’ black woman of a white fantasy. In contrast to Faulkner’s portrayal of a black woman in the post– Civil War South, Zora Neale Hurston, writing in the same period, presents a more believable alternative in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie, as the daughter of slavery and rape, has no reason to feel invested in or nostalgic about the past and the patriarchal and racial hierarchy that sustained it: ‘She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up’ (24). Rather than wanting endurance, Janie challenges the reigning hierarchies and embraces, much more convincingly, change, renouncing the past as she breaks even with the familial connections of her mother and grandmother.8 Faulkner’s own sense that the final section of his novel fails to conclude despite its appearance of resolution points to the lack of viability of Dilsey as a character. Writing the appendix, fourteen years after the publication of the novel, Faulkner attempted one more time to conclude it.9 Its genealogical structure, this connection to ancestors, as Kermode suggests, takes the individual out of the arbitrariness of an isolated life and into a more meaningful and universal structure. The mere random passing of days, the relentlessness of endless tomorrows, is replaced by a sense of purposeful continuity. But Faulkner’s appendix is full of inaccurate and contradictory statements, confused dates and chronologies, and more significantly it makes completely unreliable statements about his characters. For instance, his unqualified description of Jason as ‘logical, rational, contained’ (212) jars with his representation of this character, who has spun completely out of control by the end of the novel. Similarly he describes Luster as not only capable of caring for Benjy but also able to keep him entertained; yet, Luster, in the course of the novel, often torments the idiot, taunting him with Caddy’s name in order to upset him: ‘Caddy. Beller now. Caddy’ (35). Rather than continuity and connection, this document, full of misrepresentations, can only further contribute to the sound and the fury that haunt the other sections. Despite the theme of resurrection that runs through the novel, the title seems to counter the very possibility of it. The problem is that Caddy, like her daughter Quentin, escapes from the narrative.10 The

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girl, as Faulkner describes her, had the courage ‘to climb that tree to look in the parlour window with her brothers who didn’t have the courage to climb the tree’ but are below ‘waiting to see what she saw’ and hear her report on the funeral (234). The Eve-like Caddy, taking in the forbidden knowledge – the inevitability of loss and the arbitrariness and randomness of death – is not then sacrificed for being the messenger. Nor is her daughter, who climbs out the window, down the rain pipe, and escapes the Compson family. Unlike many nineteenth-century novels, this novel does not tame and silence the disruptive heroine armed with her dangerous knowledge, forcing her to reproduce a paternalistic social order, but neither is she killed off to preserve it. The boys are left on their own to grapple with this anxiety-producing openness that Caddy has unleashed, and they fail miserably. The nineteenthcentury ending cannot be revived in the modernist novel. All Faulkner’s attempts to arrest the ‘sound and the fury’ – through objectivity, art, reason, religion, genealogy – ultimately fail. Modernists are left with the Nietzschean challenge to either cower in terror at the randomness of the future, a future without a definitive course and without an end, or to embrace this liberation as from a chain. ‘The earth unchained from its sun’ is directionless. It moves through infinite darkness, inducing a terrifying liberty that also makes possible the charting of an alternate direction. The active remaking of the world demands a different model, one that does not depend on a solid foundation. The twentieth century is in many ways defined by this struggle. While Faulkner sees no way for him or for his characters to turn that loss of solid ground, with all the fear and angst that follow in its wake, into something positive, he opens up a space for that possibility by refusing the traditional means of resolution that depends on the silencing of women and the co-option of their bodies.11 The ‘problem’ of the text not resolving in modernist literature opens up the very question of both the function and fiction of the end in postmodernist literature. Don DeLillo’s White Noise, the subject of the next chapter, takes up this challenge as it considers the ways in which the end has traditionally and problematically secured the divide between the world and word, the real and the simulacrum.

2 Viral Endings

If at the outset of the twentieth century the ‘unchained’ earth provokes a terrifying freedom where humanity, ungrounded, is free to reinvent itself, by the century’s close this is displaced by the sense of humanity as caught in reruns, as exhausted and finished. While Nietzsche suggested that the death of God left us adrift in an infinite darkness, certain postmodernists suggest that we are now frozen in an all-encompassing spotlight. Everything has been exposed. There are no new directions to chart, no alternate courses to follow, no new worlds to explore. Baudrillard writes: ‘Everything has already been liberated, changed, undermined; what more do you want? It is useless to hope: things are there; born or stillborn, they are there, done. Imagination reigns; enlightenment and intelligence reign. We are already experiencing or soon will experience the perfection of the societal. Everything is there. The heavens have come down to earth. We sense the fatal taste of material paradise. It drives one to despair, but what should one do? No Future’ (‘Anorexic Ruins’ 34). If ‘liberation from the chains’ finds Faulkner grappling, unsuccessfully, for a meaningful sense of an end that will reveal an eternal order and prevent the corrosion of meaning by time, it finds Baudrillard on the other side of the end. The apocalypse has already happened – all is unveiled, time has stopped, heaven reigns on earth. Thus, at the close of the millennium, Baudrillard announced ‘the year 2000, in a certain way, will not take place’ (39). For Baudrillard, the proliferation and (re)producibility of the apocalypse are signals that the world has already ended: ‘Everything has already become nuclear, faraway, vaporized. The explosion has already occurred; the bomb is only a metaphor now’ (34). From the Last Judgment to the nuclear holocaust,

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the drama of the end has played itself out; emptied of meaning, the end of the world is now only a spectacle on replay. In this post-apocalyptic period, he suggests, the real has imploded and the subject has disappeared; history, culture, and truth have been absorbed by the simulated image.1 In this nuclear age we have been (over)exposed, rendered transparent; in the reign of the obese, the obscene, the visible, the ecstatic ‘pure and empty form’ dominates, leaving no resonance, no remainder, no archive.2 In this ‘material paradise,’ this ‘timeless area,’ disconnected from but nostalgic for the past, we inhabit a future that has no future. We are beyond history and at the end of difference. However, Baudrillard’s seductive call to embrace this post-suicidal understanding of the contemporary moment begs a number of questions: What is at stake in this narrative about a future without a future? And have we heard this prophecy before? In other words, is this post-apocalyptic rhetoric still infected by the language of apocalypse? Baudrillard looks to America as the land of the post-apocalypse, of exposure, speed, space, fluid capital, simulation, the bomb, Star Wars, a ‘paradise,’ a ‘desert for ever’ – the site of the end of the end. He writes, in America, ‘We [Europeans] philosophize on the end of lots of things, but it is here [America] that they actually come to an end. It is here, for example, that territory has ceased to exist (though there is indeed a vast amount of space), here that the real and the imaginary have come to an end (opening all spaces up to simulation). It is here, therefore, that we should look for the ideal type of the end of our culture’ (98).3 America has in some sense always served as the site of apocalyptic imaginings, from the many films and books envisioning its end (to name just a few, Testament, The Day After, The Stand, In the Country of Last Things, The Postman) to Puritans, evangelicals, and the post–September 11 rhetoric of some American politicians.4 And, despite his postapocalyptic discourse, Baudrillard continues in this tradition of reading America as the place of unveiling. As Derrida writes, and, as Baudrillard’s work demonstrates, even announcements on ‘the end of the end, the end of ends’ partake of an apocalyptic tone (‘Apocalyptic Tone’ 81). Joining a long line of Europeans, Baudrillard leaves behind the Old World and voyages to the New World; he leaves behind history for the end of history; he leaves behind the past for an eternal future; he leaves behind darkness for light – ‘America ... has the coherent light of the laser, the homogeneity of the single elements scanned by the same beams’ (America 29). In 1630, John Winthrop, on a ship travelling from England to America, delivered a sermon in which he also envisioned

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the New World in apocalyptic terms as a land of homogeneous light: ‘For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty vpon a hill’ (44), echoing Matthew 5.14: ‘You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.’ There is a long tradition of looking to America as ‘a heaven on earth,’ a ‘utopia achieved,’ the land of the ‘chosen.’ In the crossing of the Atlantic, the gap between the world and paradise, the sign and the referent, the old and the new closes. Douglas Robinson argues in his reading of Michael Wigglesworth’s Puritan apocalypse, The Day of Doom (1662), that fixity or stasis is the promised result of crossing to the other side – ‘the transference or translation across the gaps of spatial difference (earth-heaven) and temporal deferral (nowthen) that would heal the negative dialectic of differance’ (59). The eradication of ‘differance’ (in the sense of both deferral and differ) in the name of truth and freedom finds expression once again in George W. Bush’s America. The Pilgrims think of themselves as the chosen in a millennial city, yet they are caught in the dilemma of reading the signs of election. Confused about their arrival in a not-so-new land and trapped in a rhetoric of ruins and speed, they become more intent on proving that they are the light and truth of the world. In spreading the light, Jonathan Edwards was inspired to distinguish the saved from the damned, ‘the aliens from the common wealth of Israel,’ so ‘that every tree which brings not forth good fruit, may be hewn down, and cast into the fire’ (‘Sinners in the Hands’ 2:12). After clearing the forest and standing among the remaining good trees, Edwards imagined that his was ‘most properly the time of the kingdom of heaven upon earth’ (‘The End of Time’ 1: 609). Baudrillard, in his vision of America as ‘paradise,’ the land of simulation and ‘coherent light,’ is also excited by ‘this overall dynamism, this dynamic of the abolition of differences’ (America 89). Disconnected from history and its ‘destination,’ humanity, Baudrillard insists, is like a spaceship, where all life, except for vital functions, has ceased. Driving through the desert of America, aiming for the ‘point of no return,’ Baudrillard envisions ‘the extermination of meaning’ and the ‘end of the scene of the journey’ (America 10). Rocketing into space or travelling through the ‘desert forever,’ he, however, is trapped by a past he thought he had escaped. Like the Europeans who preceded him, he becomes entangled in a rhetoric of ruins and speed. In ‘The Anorexic Ruins’ and America, which both invoke a dialectic of absence and presence, incompletion and completion, Baudrillard is the narrator of the end of the end. Yet, in his memory of a history that had a destination, of

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a world that did have meaning, of a self that was unified, of a real that was transcendent, he, nevertheless, perseveres in the post-holocaust. Richard Klein asks an important question about the interests that are served, ‘the pleasure being taken’ or ‘the profit being made – here now’ by the adoption of a tone of the nuclear sublime, which he describes as ‘that all too familiar aesthetic position from which one anticipatorily contemplates the end, utter nuclear devastation, from a standpoint beyond the end, from a posthumous, apocalyptic perspective of future mourning, which, however appalling, adorably presupposes some ghostly survival, and some retrospective illumination’ (‘Future of Nuclear Criticism’ 77). The Europeans who arrive in America, leaving behind the Old World and imagining a radically new beginning, also confront the problem of ruins. The Europeans find they have voyaged not to a ‘new’ land, but to one already populated with other people, and beginning to be populated, by force, by Africans who think of America as the end of their world. The Europeans are mired in a confusion of multiple beginnings and endings that makes it difficult to determine where (and what) Old World stops and what New one begins, a confusion that complicates their desire to name themselves as the ‘chosen’ people. It is only by remaining blind to the multiplicity of peoples in America – African, Irish, Asian, Jewish, Arab, European, Russian, Mexican, Greek, Muslim, Catholic – that America can imagine itself as a new and dominant race, a place where difference has been melted away by a homogenizing light. In the European tradition of violently imposing ‘origins’ in the sonamed New World, which in turn gives rise to such myths as the Founding Fathers giving birth to the Land of the Free, Baudrillard persists in reading America as ‘completely original.’5 However, even as he desires to be beyond the end of man, he remains caught in the middle ground. Announcing that the world has already ended, he carries and preserves (in memory) what has ended. Pointing to the irony of post-apocalyptic imaginings that hold on to some archival memory, Derrida writes: ‘At the beginning,’ ‘there will have been speed’ (‘No Apocalypse’ 20). In ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),’ Derrida distinguishes between individual death and the apocalypse by pointing to the difference between the remainder of cultural and social memory that limits individual death and the total obliteration of the archive in the apocalypse. Nuclear obliteration, at this point, can only be a fiction, and ‘literature has always belonged to the nuclear epoch’ (27). Hence, the

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name can only meet its referent at the moment of the catastrophe, which is also the moment of unveiling, of truth. The war then would be fought in the ‘name of nothing,’ the ‘pure name,’ the ‘naked name’ (31). The archive, the remainder, the fiction, the ongoing conversation, in Derrida’s view, necessarily prevent the triumph of the ‘name of nothing’ that Baudrillard insists has already arrived. In the war, the word speeds towards its referent and the referent speeds towards the word. The early Europeans imagined America to be the fulfillment of the Divine Order and envisioned, in the movement from the Old to the New World, a movement out of decay and into innocence, a movement from prophecy to revelation, from sign to referent. But this idea of America presented a dilemma. Imagining themselves, as Cotton Mather wrote, ‘a colony of chosen people’ in the New World, they continued to battle over signs as they tried to read, in accordance with Calvinist doctrine, the evidence of election. Derrida has argued that signs, even as they emerge from the desire to repair a sense of loss, stand in for a presence and thus necessarily testify to the absence of that presence. The Puritans come up against a problem that plagues literal predictions and originates in the very book that often inspires them: the book of Revelation can only point to the desire for the presence of the eternal; the book itself, as language, points to the absence of this presence, the referent. Reading and arguing over the interpretation of signs, the Pilgrims were also grappling with the absence of Divine Order in America. Searching for a resolution to this dilemma and hurtling into space at an accelerating velocity, Baudrillard, in his writing, speeds – according to the theory of relativity which proposes that time slows down as speed increases – towards immortality as time decelerates, ‘as it nears its end.’ In the post-lapsarian world of simulation (after the fall from the real), Baudrillard posits the possibility of resurrection not of the referent but of the sign. In the inert world ‘it is useless to dream’ (‘Anorexic Ruins’ 34), announces Baudrillard, and, yet, caught in a rhetoric of ‘ruins and speed,’ he dreams of immortality and of a world that escapes death as it is already beyond it. Delillo’s White Noise takes on this view of a post-nuclear America, the place that invented and detonated the atomic bomb, making real the possibility of the end, but it also punctures this scenario. Interrupting this discourse of the post-apocalypse, the novel can be read as a comment on Baudrillard’s sceptical and melancholic narrative. In a world of flickering TV screens, of tabloids, of floating toxic clouds and post-

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modern sunsets, of children with receding hairlines who volunteer to play victims in simulated disasters and who chant advertising slogans in their sleep, Jack Gladney, in his choice of spouse and career, turns towards the grounded and stable as an antidote to simulation. Babette, unlike his former wives, several of whom were employed by the secret service or engaged in espionage, trusts in ‘the tangible and real’ (185); ‘She was not a keeper of secrets’ (213). Her ample size suggests a presence and a ‘seriousness’ (5). Jack is not naturally endowed with what he reads as Babette’s ‘seriousness,’ but he works hard to generate the ‘aura.’ When Jack proposes the establishment of a Hitler Studies department, the chancellor warns Jack about his ‘tendency to make a feeble presentation of self’ (16). In response to the chancellor’s concerns, Jack gains weight, changes his name, and adopts glasses with thick frames and dark lenses. When Babette asks him about the naming of his son, Heinrich, Jack responds: ‘‘I thought it was a forceful name, a strong name. It has a kind of authority ... I wanted to shield him, make him unafraid ... There’s something about German names, the German language, German things. I don’t know what it is exactly. It’s just there’ (63). In the midst of a simulated, post-nuclear, surface-obsessed America that deflates the idea of self to image and engages in an extreme relativism that places courses on Elvis Presley and Hitler in the same camp, Jack desires the solid, serious, and real to neutralize the poison of postmodern culture. On an outing with Murray, a professor of American Environments who wants to do with Elvis what Jack has done with Hitler (‘“He is now your Hitler, Gladney’s Hitler”’ [11]), Jack visits the most photographed barn in America. Murray lectures on the barn while Jack remains silent. Frank Lentricchia provides an interesting reading of this passage that points to the common but problematic assumption that Murray’s ‘miniature essay’ on postmodernism transparently reflects DeLillo’s own views on the subject. Lentricchia points out that Murray’s lecture is filtered through Jack, who reports on ‘long silences and background noises’ (90). Murray argues in his lecture that, ‘“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn ... We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies”’ (DeLillo12). Jack’s silence suggests his discomfort with a world in which signs dominate. His attraction to his corporeal wife and to things German marks his nostalgia for the real, the tangible, the certain. However, given that Jack’s nostalgia is rooted in Nazi

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Germany, can the ‘real’ really stand unproblematically as a site of resistance to the sign? Or is there a similarity between these apocalyptic discourses? As Jack himself comments: ‘“In the middle of it all is Hitler, of course”’ (63).6 While Baudrillard in his crossing of the Atlantic finds the true experience of America in ‘the feeling that Europe ha[s] disappeared’ (America 105), and ‘Europe’ in America stands in for meaning, ideas, history, White Noise reflects back on the ‘Old’ world and Nazi Germany, reversing the crossing – renouncing the new for the old. Yet, whether the crossing (and closing) is imagined in the name of the sign and the end of meaning or in the name of the end of the sign and the triumph of the real, the novel is interested in exploring the very stakes of closing the gulf. Several of the critical works on Don DeLillo’s White Noise have noted the similarities between Baudrillard’s theory and the novel. For instance, Leonard Wilcox, reading the novel in this light, describes the world of White Noise as a world of surfaces, simulation, and signs that ensure the erasure of the real world and the dispersal of the self (30). Wilcox tries to salvage the novel from Baudrillard’s position of ‘radical scepticism,’ where there is ‘no real in which a radical critique of the simulational society might be grounded’ (363). Wilcox argues that in Gladney’s persistent attempts to recuperate a heroic narrative that works itself out in terms of boundaries and ends, a narrative which in turn allows for the possibility of ‘self-knowledge’ and ‘vision,’ the hero battles postmodern discourse: ‘The passion for meaning that animates readers is the desire for an end; to eradicate a sense of ending in life or narrative is to extinguish meaning. Yet the sense of boundaries and endings that define the self and give life or narrative meaning (or “heroic” possibilities, moments of self-knowledge, moments of vision) are erased in postmodern society’ (361). He concludes: ‘DeLillo’s sympathies surely must be with his protagonist as Gladney holds tight to his fear of death in a society where the fear of death, like other aspects of the deep structures of subjectivity, is being transformed into images, codes, simulations, and charismatic spectacle’ (364). Yet Wilcox, in his invocation of Gladney as the bounded, coherent, autonomous, heroic agent that defeats postmodern spectacle and surface, seemingly turns a blind eye to Gladney’s attraction to Nazi Germany: the bounded, strong, masculine self that is celebrated by Wilcox, in DeLillo’s novel, overlaps with the dangerous self/other binary that set Germans against Jews, gypsies, and gays.

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Yet even if we consider the return of this patriarchal narrative with its guarantee of a certain kind of agency for a select few, we might ask whether restoring a ‘meaningful’ end that secures narrative (or life) is a viable option, given the thinking about life in a nuclear age. In DeLillo’s novel, Jack Gladney, as a ‘doomed man,’ terrified of dying, listens to a great deal of advice on how to meet the end. This advice ranges from Murray’s ‘disease of the week’ scenario: ‘“I’m saying you can’t let down the living by slipping into self-pity and despair. People will depend on you to be brave. What people look for in a dying friend is a stubborn kind of gravel-voiced nobility, a refusal to give in, with moments of indomitable humor”’ (284) to Winnie’s Hemingway-like scenario involving a macho confrontation with nature as a heroic moment of selfdiscovery: ‘“It is a grizzly bear, enormous, shiny brown, swaggering, dripping slime from its bared fangs ... You see yourself in a new and intense way. You rediscover yourself. You are lit up for your own imminent dismemberment. The beast on hind legs has enabled you to see who you are as if for the first time, outside familiar surroundings, alone, distinct, whole”’ (229). Murray’s and Winnie’s advice on how to meet the end exposes the end as a posture, a set of conventions, a role to be performed by the dying hero, undoing Wilcox’s hope of restoring the end as the moment of truth. In a novel that offers a variety of narratives on the end and in which ‘all plots tend to move deathward’ (26), it is difficult to read Gladney’s attempts to hold on to a sense of an end as meaningful as anything but ironic, given Baudrillard’s reading of the catastrophe as the loss of the end or Derrida’s reading of a nuclear end as the loss of the possibility of loss. Wilcox sets up the real as a site of resistance to simulation, an opposition which is necessary in his attempt to recuperate a sense of death. However, the difference between real meaningful death versus simulated tabloid death that he tries to sustain is problematic given the fantasies of a nuclear end, which document a future without a past, a future that cannot make sense of or give meaning to the past. Because, as Derrida suggests in his article on the nuclear apocalypse, in this absolute absence there could be no record, no archive of the history of presence or even a history of loss of presence, nuclear destruction (even as a fiction) disrupts the binary of death/life or absence/presence in the here and now and forces us to think of the future differently. In this disruption, how can the real take precedence over or be distinguished from the simulated? If the hierarchy is levelled, how do we know

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whether we are witnessing the real imagined or the simulated image? The scenes in White Noise that are populated by the SIMUVAC (short for simulated evacuation) people point to this dilemma. As they regularly stage impressive rehearsals for real disasters, they in turn use the real event, the airborne toxic event, to practise their simulation: ‘But this evacuation isn’t simulated. It’s real.’ ‘We know that. But we thought we could use it as a model.’ ‘A form of practice? Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?’ ‘We took it right to the streets.’ ‘How is it going?’ I said. ‘The insertion curve isn’t as smooth as we would like. There’s probability excess. Plus which we don’t have our victims laid out where we’d want them if this was an actual simulation. In other words we’re forced to take our victims as we find them. We didn’t get a jump on computer traffic. Suddenly it just spilled out, three dimensionally, all over the landscape. You have to make allowances for the fact that everything we see tonight is real. There’s a lot of polishing we still have to do. But that’s what this exercise is all about.’ (139)

What is real and what is simulated? Which is the act and which is the image? The simulated takes precedence over the real as the real event is used as a rehearsal and the disaster is a dry run for the simulation. In this absurd twist, the real is absorbed by the simulated and the simulated is taken as more real than the real even though the ‘real’ event must be accommodated.7 Like the death scenarios, it is difficult to distinguish the truth from performance and convention as the two are hopelessly intertwined. Caught between a world of advertising logos and the postmodern obsession with the image and Nazi Germany and the nostalgia for the real, White Noise suggests that perhaps we have never known the difference between the true and the false, the saved and the damned, the sign and the referent. Announcements on the end of the end give way to the triumph of simulation while the restoration of the end suggests the resurrection of meaning and truth. Yet in all our attempts to dramatize an end or the end of the end, the difference has never become clear, so perhaps we are asking the wrong question and instead should ask: What is at stake in the relationship between the real and the image? The

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‘end’ or the ‘after the end’–the apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic – both participate in fantasies of control where ambiguity, difference, and uncertainty are banished. In White Noise, crowded in the barracks where the town has gathered to escape the toxic cloud, a Jehovah’s Witness converses with Jack: ‘You’re either among the wicked or among the saved. The wicked get to rot as they walk down the street. They get to feel their own eyes slide out of their sockets. You’ll know them by their stickiness and lost parts. People tracking slime of their own making. All the flashiness of the Armageddon is in the rotting. The saved know each other by their neatness and reserve. He doesn’t have showy ways is how you know a saved person.’ (136)

In a reflexive moment, Jack thinks: ‘He was a serious man, he was matter-of-fact and practical, down to his running shoes. I wondered about his eerie self-assurance, his freedom from doubt. Is this the point of Armageddon? No ambiguity, no more doubt’ (137). Jack’s fascination with an earlier Holocaust, in which the line between good and evil was also neatly drawn, suggests that ‘freedom from doubt’ is what drives him in his attraction to things German, in his resistance to Babette’s dark secret, and in his unwillingness to face mortality. Jack chooses German studies as a way of guarding himself from fearful thoughts about his own death. After his presentation about the crowds that gather around Hitler in the name of death ‘to form a shield against their own dying’ (73), Jack thinks: ‘Death was strictly a professional matter here. I was comfortable with it, I was on top of it’ (74). Following Jack’s exposure to the toxic cloud, Murray comments on Jack’s interest in Hitler studies: ‘“Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death. You thought he would protect you”’ (287). When Babette finally reveals her dark secret, her own fear of death, Jack, in an absurd and desperate moment, tries to convince her that she is really afraid of something else, perhaps weight gain, arguing: ‘“There must be something else, an underlying problem”’ (197). Although Jack is plagued by doubt, he needs to read Babette as true, transparent, exposed, untouched by death. The fear of death is the fear of the random and the uncontrollable. The world of the sign and the world of the real collide in Jack’s confrontation with Dylar, a drug that proposes to alleviate the fear of death. In Jack’s plot to kill Mr Gray, the seducer of his wife, the foreigner in Germantown, Jack plays out a Hitlerian narrative of eradicating the other. In the act of murder, he searches for the authentic moment

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as a ‘cure for death.’ ‘“Be the killer for a change. Let someone else be the dier,”’ says Murray, invoking a strategy with a long tradition. He advises Gladney, ‘“You can’t die if he does. He dies, you live”’ (291). But the authentic moment, the moment of heroic self-realization, fails, and Gladney does not transcend the world of signs. More importantly, this passage, in the search for the authentic moment, also points to the desire for the collapse of time and an eternal present, an escape from the past, and a future without future. Yes, we have heard this prophecy before. Faced with the infeasibility of transcending the sign (and the end) and gaining access to the real, Jack is drawn to another ‘cure’ in the form of Dylar. Almost mimicking a Baudrillardian strategy, the drug implodes in the body. Like the implosion of the real, the drug collapses the difference between the word and the referent so that, when Jack says ‘plunging aircraft,’ Mink, who ingests Dylar pills by the handfuls, overcome by panic, jumps into crash position.8 The drug abolishes the material referent – the sign thus transcends or absorbs the real, and Baudrillard’s heaven on earth is realized. However, as is clear from Mink’s terror, Dylar, like Baudrillard’s narrative, is not very successful in its attempt to move beyond the end of the end. Fuelled by a faith in exposure and clarity, Jack first yearns for the real and the authentic and then is seduced by the perfect postmodern pill with its promise of the triumph of the sign, and both strategies, he hopes, will defeat death. Whether the subject engages in the discourse of the real or in that of simulation, there is no unspoken; everything is transparent. In the comfortable arena of either the real or of the image, the world is fully readable; catastrophe happens elsewhere and is exposed, framed and contained by the TV set and tabloids. Although he employs different strategies, Jack, like Baudrillard, imagines a world beyond and immune to death, a world without difference and without a future: ‘Don’t let us die ... Let us both live forever’ (103) is his frequent refrain to Babette. Babette approaches death as the last frontier of rational knowledge, an experience waiting to be conquered. She tells Jack, ‘“You know how I am. I think everything is correctible. Given the right attitude and the proper effort, a person can change a harmful condition by reducing it to its simplest parts. You can make lists, invent categories, devise charts and graphs”’ (191). Whether we are living death, as Baudrillard announces, or conquering it with reason, death is assumed to be knowable. So, what has been exposed in our hero’s exposure to the toxic air-

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borne event and in this novel about death? The impossibility of final exposure. When Jack reveals the circumstances of his exposure to the toxic cloud to the SIMUVAC man, Jack is in turn exposed on the man’s computer screen. However, despite the ‘pulsating stars’ that show up on the computer screen and the mass that is traceable on the X-rays, death resists examination and categorization. For all the technology that is working towards mastering death, Jack’s mortality remains vague, ambiguous, and indeterminate: ‘Am I going to die?’ ‘Not as such,’ he said. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Not in so many words.’ ‘How many words does it take?’ ‘It’s not a question of words. It’s a question of years. We’ll know more in fifteen years. In the meantime we definitely have a situation.’ ‘What will we know in fifteen years?’ ‘If you’re still alive at the time, we’ll know that much more than we do now. Nyodene D. has a life span of thirty years. You’ll have made it halfway through.’ ‘I thought it was forty years.’ ‘Forty years in the soil. Thirty years in the human body.’ ‘So, to outlive this substance, I will have to make it into my eighties. Then I can begin to relax.’ ‘Knowing what we know at this time.’ ‘But the general consensus seems to be that we don’t know enough at this time to be sure of anything.’ (140)

There are not enough words or years to answer Jack’s question, ‘Am I going to die?’ And sure only that ‘we don’t know enough at this time to be sure of anything,’ we are left with death itself as a random, untraceable, uncontrollable thing that upsets the neat divisions that underlie both apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios. Rather than looking to the end to stabilize meaning, to draw the division between absence and presence, the real and the simulated, we might look at the end or death as the impossibility of the stabilization of either the referent or the sign, as a ‘viral agent.’ And you well might ask, as Jack asks of the foreigner: ‘“Are you saying death adapts? It eludes our attempts to reason with it?”’ (308). The apocalypse, thus, cannot be post. America is neither the site of the

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revelation of meaning, a ‘paradise,’ nor the site of the end of meaning, a ‘desert forever.’ Death, as a viral agent, is the lacuna that sustains the tension between the sign, the word, and the referent, the world – preventing the triumph of either. At the heart of these works by Faulkner and DeLillo is the twentieth-century anxiety about endings. Faulkner recognizes the problems with the traditional novelistic ending but mourns its loss as, facing the impossibility of its resurrection, he can see no other option than futility and the all-pervasiveness of ‘sound’ and ‘fury.’ Yet Faulkner’s dilemma opens up the opportunity for DeLillo to rethink the very function of the end. Challenging the idea that the end has ever worked to secure and ground the narrative – whether apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic – his novel suggests it operates as a viral agent that refuses the security and clarity of the real or the simulated; death in all its randomness keeps the future open and un-known.

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Part Two History

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3 Modernism and the End of the End of History

Alan Ryan writes: ‘The belief that history – or History, since it is the process as a whole, not the stream of particular events that is in question – could come to an end or has come to an end is a philosopher’s variation of the Judeo-Christian theme. The Greeks saw history as cyclical and repetitive, where significant patterns recur, such as the movement from good to bad government and back again, but one without overall direction or purpose to it’ (1). Recalling the book of Revelation and its promise of eternal perfection, nineteenth-century historians, such as Hegel and Marx, imagined History to be moving toward some future state which would culminate with the perfection of man on earth. However, just as the faith in the ability of the novel’s ending to offer up resolution and the restoration of social harmony begins to lose ground with modernist writers, so too does this idea of the Judeo-Christian–influenced version of History.1 For many modernists, the idea of History as a collective and forward-moving process is displaced by the sense of a loss of purpose and a fear that there is no overall direction. The belief in the march of civilization is dealt a severe blow with the Great World War, a barbarous event that explodes right in the heart of Europe. In Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Septimus eagerly volunteers to go and fight for England and Shakespeare and love, and returns traumatized, wondering whether ‘it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning’ (75). Yet even before the war, the sense that there is no great purpose or teleological plan that will unfold in time is already evidenced in the work of writers like Joseph Conrad. Chinua Achebe’s well-known attack on Heart of Darkness as one of the most ‘racist’ novels establishes its case by arguing that Conrad sets Africa up as dark and primitive, a foil against which Britain is comparatively bright and

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civilized. In other words, Africa is positioned as at the very beginnings of civilization while Britain is presented as at the height of it. While Achebe’s reading perceptively points to the pervasiveness of the racist characterization of Africans, his reading ignores the novel’s view that it is no longer possible to invest in the idea of the amelioration of man: African and European are equally adrift. In the novel, there is no clear development from primitive to civilized – no forward movement of History. Epic in structure, the novel follows Marlow as he descends to the underworld, through the ‘door of Darkness,’ and we expect him, as the hero of an epic should, to return from his descent with a golden bough to cure the ills of the modern world. But what cure does Marlow bring back to heal the blighted European world – figured as the ‘white sepulcher’ – shiny and beautiful on the outside but ‘rotted at the core’? Africa, imagined as ‘the earliest beginnings of the world,’ offers the hero no divine directive, no firm ground, no course or purpose: he finds only a ‘great silence’ and a ‘stillness’ (59–60). Marlow thus emerges from this underworld, not with a remedy to heal the modern world, to set it on its rightful course, but with a sense of the ‘nothingness’ at its core. The progress narrative of primitivism to civilization on which Achebe’s reading depends is undone by the failed conquest of the hero, who returns only with a sense that there is no definitive direction for History. If there is only silence at the origin, modern man, like Nietzsche’s madman, is left with the question about where this earth is moving: ‘Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up and down left?’ (Gay 181–2). The break from the sense of History as a collective process encourages the turn toward the subjective in modernist art and literature, a concern which preoccupies a number of the century’s writers and thinkers. Isolated, alienated, solipsistic, the modernist artist no longer sees him or herself as part of a larger utopic movement or as part of a whole that is moving toward some brighter future. ‘History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,’ Stephen Dedalus proclaims in Ulysses (42). In To the Lighthouse, Woolf, shifting the focus from the public to the domestic, reduces the big events of History, such as the Great War, to parenthetical brackets. But, perhaps most famously, this dilemma is taken up by T.S. Eliot, who describes contemporary history as nothing but ‘an immense panorama of futility and anarchy’ (‘Ulysess’ 177). Disconnected from the great tradition of the past, the present is empty, nothing more than a ‘wasteland,’ populated with ‘hollow men’ and ‘heaps of broken images.’ While his poetry often despairs of the possi-

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bility, Eliot’s critical work focuses on the impossible task of repairing this fissure that has opened up between the individual and tradition, between the solipsism of the contemporary world and the movement of History. The urge in Eliot to close these gaps is suggestive of Gayatri Spivak’s comments about the ways in which the modern individual has traditionally used memory to map herself onto an outside history: ‘Structurally, memory is a “there was.” It is a signal toward what is not here. And it also contains within it the possibility of what is to come, because it is a structural signal outside of the present. In the human subject, whether thought chronologically or logically, the structure of time is always looking back and forwards. The constitution of individual memory has at its origin a kind of ruse, at the origin the presupposition of a “there was.” An individual memory opens into a history larger than its own by way of that ruse’ (‘The Staging of Time’ 91). At the core of the modernist sense of the impasse between the individual and History is this unwillingness to accept the ‘ruse’ of a ‘there was’ of memory, a subject which is treated in some depth in Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel The Good Soldier. But while the novel, like many modernist texts, seems to despair of this impasse ever being resolved, it also, in its nostalgia for feudalism, seems to suggest an alternative understanding of memory that finally can embrace this rupture as productive, opening up the postmodern possibilities for understanding of the multiple and lost histories that are the subject of the next chapter. The narrator of the novel, John Dowell, following the death of his wife Florence, the death of his best friend Edward Ashburnham, and the revelation of their adulterous relationship, tells us he writes because ‘it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people, to desire to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads’ (Soldier 11). Thus he writes to bear witness to the past and to make sense of it in the name of the future, as well as for personal therapy. The naming and narrating of loss, as Freud has written, transforms it from an unrepresentable thing that cannot be resolved to a linguistic or symbolic code that can be processed and gotten over, getting ‘the sight’ out of the ‘head’ (‘Mourning’ 14: 243).2 Dowell in his attempt to make sense of what has happened to him thus expresses the sentiments of a thoroughly nineteenth-century individual who understands his memories as critical to the formation of his identity, which, in turn, connect him to

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a larger History, ‘to unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote.’ As Hume writes of the modern self, ‘Had we no memory, we never should have any notion of causation, nor consequently of that chain of causes and effects, which constitute our self or person’ (262). It is this continuous identity that is produced in time that can then map itself onto History, also imagined as continuous and as ‘looking back and forwards.’ Hume continues: ‘Having once acquir’d this notion of causation from memory, we can extend the same chain of causes, and consequently the identity of our persons beyond our memory, and can comprehend times, and circumstances, and actions’ (262). In the post-Victorian modernist setting of the novel, however, Dowell comes to recognize the impossible gulf between individual memory and History. In his attempt to narrate his past, he finds his memories cannot be secured by objectivity and reason but are instead governed by the contingencies of place and time: narration is at the mercy of the present moment, leading to a constant re-evaluation of the event and culminating in the traumatic realization that the ‘witnessed’ past cannot be accurately documented or recovered. Dowell is thus left unable to connect with a world outside of himself. We find him, at the end of the novel, completely disconnected from society as he locks himself away in his English manor. In his very attempts to recount what happened, Dowell finds the past is never contained but bleeds into the present, interrupting the representation of the memory of the event as originary. The frequent reflexive gestures in the text foreground the process of writing. For instance, Dowell tells us: ‘It occurs to me that some way back I began a sentence that I have never finished’(23). In so doing, he calls attention to his act of narration and the impossible gap between the event and its representation. There is no neat frame narrative that separates the narrating Dowell from the Dowell implicated in the event; ‘what happened’ is continually open to revision as conversations and events in the present cause him to rethink his understanding of those involved in the betrayal, but this rethinking, based on new revelations, never resolves the question of ‘what happened.’ Here is one example of just such a moment: Having described Lenora and Edward Ashburnham as a perfect ‘country couple’ and Lenora as ‘so extraordinarily the real thing,’ he then remarks, ‘yet only this afternoon, talking over the whole matter [Lenora] said to me: “Once I tried to have a lover”’ (13). This new information does little to clarify or stabilize Dowell’s reading of the event or the characters involved; it merely constructs more corridors in the ‘maze’ of the narrative (119). Of Lenora’s

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revelation he concludes: ‘I don’t know; I don’t know, was that last remark of hers the remark of a harlot, or is it what every decent woman, country family or not country family, thinks at the bottom of her heart?’ (13). The past is not fixed and recoverable but is constantly revised as new information comes to light, and Lenora cannot possibly be ‘the real thing’ as she inevitably shifts, as all events and people do, with the passage of time. In the context of modernity, the understanding of memory as the accumulation of ‘sense impressions’ of ‘past perceptions’ is only to be trusted in a rational universe (Hume 260). The modernist distrust or awareness of the limitations of empirical knowledge that fuels the interest in the supernatural and the occult (Yeats and William Carlos Williams), the ‘primitive’ (Picasso), the spiritual (Kandinsky), madness (Woolf ), dreams and the unconscious (Freud), deep structures (Mondrian, Marx) also points painfully to the ‘ruse’ of a ‘there was’ of individual memory. Prior to the traumatic breakup of the two couples, Dowell’s ‘safe castle’ is based on a faith in appearances. The Enlightenment, with its privileging of sight – that the modernists ultimately reject in their interest in deep structures – locates truth in the proposition that what you see is what is. So the Victorian Dowell, fittingly, writes of people who might have observed the foursome: Supposing that you should come upon us, sitting together at one of the little tables in front of the club house, let us say at Homburg, taking tea of an afternoon and watching the miniature golf, you would have said that, as human affairs go we were an extraordinary safe castle. We were, if you will, one of those tall ships with the white sails, upon a blue sea, one of those things that seem the proudest and the safest of all the beautiful and safe things that God has permitted the mind of men to frame ... Permanence? Stability! I can’t believe it’s gone. I can’t believe that the long tranquil life, which was just a stepping minuet, vanished in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks. (11)

Appearances, he learns, are deceptive, and memory as based on sense perception – particularly sight – is no longer about a ‘there was’ but is open to endless interpretation that refuses to restore the longedfor ‘stability’ and permanence, leaving him in the end with ‘nothing to catch hold of.’ ‘Yes,’ Dowell writes, ‘that is how I most exactly remember [Florence], in that dress, in that hat, looking over her shoulder at me so that the eyes flashed very blue – dark pebble blue ... And what the

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devil! For whose benefit did she do it? For that of the bath attendant? of the passer-by? I don’t know. Anyway it can’t have been for me, for never, in all the years of her life, never on any possible occasion, or in any other place did she so smile to me, mockingly, invitingly’ (22). But in another passage, this same memory is subjected to a new reading, so that Dowell thinks, forty pages later, that her look is directed at him: ‘the enigmatic smile with which she used to look back at me over her shoulder when she went into the bathing place was a sort of invitation ... It was as if she were saying: “I am going in here. I am going to stand so stripped and white and straight – and you are a man”’ (63). In Dowell’s shifting memory of this scene, Florence first directs her gaze at other men and never at him and then directs it only at him. The past cannot, in any absolute way, be mapped as there is no ‘there was’ that can be recovered. The source of much of the humour of the novel is precisely Dowell’s resistance to interpretation and his unfailing investment in appearances, surfaces, and ‘first impressions’ of people (102). Dowell’s wife, whom he assumes is faithful because Florence presents herself as such, has an affair with his best friend, whom he assumes is loyal because Edward acts the role of the ‘good soldier.’ As the unwitting cuckold for over a decade and as the betrayed friend, it is beyond ridiculous that Dowell writes: ‘I have generally found that my first impressions were correct enough’ (102). While Dowell receives hardly subtle warnings about his soon-to-be-wife’s flirtatious nature that include the explicit declaration from Florence’s aunt not to marry her niece – ‘Don’t do it, John. Don’t do it. You’re a good young man ... We ought to tell you more. But she is our dear sister’s child’ (60) – Dowell insists that he never had the least suspicion that she had lovers. His deadpan reporting of his wife’s instructions that he never enter her bedroom, locked in any case, without first knocking ‘really loud several times,’ coupled with his absolute faith in her fidelity, is both comic and tragic. When Lenora, after Florence looks up into Edward’s eyes and lays a finger on his wrist as she explains the significance of Luther and the Protestant reform, runs from the room exclaiming about the affair, ‘Don’t you see, don’t you see what’s going on’ (37), Dowell, despite his own feeling (after witnessing this exchange between his wife and best friend) of something ‘treacherous,’ feeling as though his ‘heart had missed a beat,’ responds: ‘No! What’s the matter? Whatever’s the matter?’ (38). He then describes the massive transformation in Lenora’s expression, from the devastated and tortured wife to ‘Mrs Ashburnham

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again,’ as she processes and then represses the trauma of this public flirtation, telling him she was upset because of the implied insult to her Catholicism. Dowell, although fully observing this repression, refuses to probe the depths of Lenora’s expression but accepts her answer at face value, concluding ‘Those words gave me the greatest relief’ (38). On the night of his wife’s death, which Dowell tells us he had no idea was a suicide until it is revealed in a much later conversation with Lenora, he writes: ‘I fancy that the only people who knew that Florence committed suicide were Lenora, the grand-duke, the head of the police and the hotel keeper’ (75). This absurd list of people ‘in the know’ gathered about his wife’s dead body would surely be a red flag, and Dowell himself confesses about his ignorance in this matter: ‘You may think that I had been singularly lacking in suspiciousness; you may consider me even to have been an imbecile’ (74). The reader – ‘the you’ – will consider Dowell unable to glean much from ‘first impressions,’ appearances, and surfaces even as he doggedly puts his faith in them. Dowell’s persistent unwillingness to probe beneath the surface – beneath the conscious and the rational – is also at the heart of ‘the saddest story’ (9). As Michael Bell has convincingly argued, the dilemma of modernists ‘is not just that external appearances, and the commonsensical or rational means of understanding them, are limited and fallible. It is that such appearances and reasoning may be actively disguising contrary truths to which, by definition, there is no other access. The very principle of reason collapses unnervingly into possible rationalization while reason remains the only means of negotiating this recognition’ (‘The Metaphysics of Modernism’ 10).3 For Dowell, to abandon his faith in appearances and accept a depth model ultimately means to abandon the very possibility of a stable reading of the past: any rational description of events that relies on interpretation and probing may only bring to light a ‘rationalization’ that conceals yet other and conflicting truths that lurk below an ever-replicating and impenetrable surface. Appearances and the face value of words are the only truth that provides the stability Dowell longs for, and so he refuses, despite all the evidence of their unreliability, to give up on his allegiance to them. Dowell, resisting knowledge of his shattered world and desperately wanting to accept the appearance of the foursome as truth, clings to this illogical hope: ‘And yet, I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true ... For, if for me we were four people with the same tastes, with the same desires, acting – or no not acting – sitting here and there unanimously, isn’t that the truth? If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that

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is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn’t it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?’ (12; emphasis mine). In other words if the apple appears on the surface to be good, he queries, doesn’t that make it good? The social unanimity and shared values and tastes that the Victorian Dowell trusts in are incompatible with the private desires of the characters that fragment the social world and plunge Dowell into a place where he finds himself, as he continually tells us, ‘horribly alone’ and unable to fathom ‘the hearts of men.’ Dowell, confronting the ruse of a ‘there was’ of History, unable to use memory to map himself onto an outside world, retreats from it, becoming increasingly solipsistic. The narrative mimics this retreat. Adopting the strategy of a cubist painting, the original event (and memory as a record of it) is displaced by the narrative itself so that art does not replicate nature or life but removes itself from it. As George Braque argued about his technique, the artwork, in asserting its autonomy, no longer corresponds to the subject, but rather the subject is made to correspond to the artwork. Joan Miró is similar in his approach to art as he refuses to use the outside world as a model but lets the act of painting be the origin of the creative work. He wrote about his 1925 painting ‘Birth of the World’: ‘Rather than setting out to paint something, I begin painting and as I paint, the picture begins to assert itself’ (qtd in Rubin 68). And both Roger Fry and Clive Bell, in the 1912 Catalogue of the Second PostImpressionist Exhibition, make an argument for the purity of form that transcends the inconstant world of experience.4 So as Dowell mourns the loss of a static, knowable, shared universe and in the wake of his realization that there is no originary ‘there was,’ the narrative itself becomes the new origin: inviolable, permanent, and stable – it is an end in itself. It bears no relation to the daily world and thus is protected from its chaos. There is no way of reconstructing the event as the narrative, like cubist and abstract paintings, does away with perspective, chronological time, telos. The absurdity of statements such as ‘the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking-up of our little four-square coterie was such another unthinkable event’ (11) makes it impossible for the reader to situate the significance of the event as all of History is reduced to a radical relativity. Every event – from the death of a mouse to the sack of Rome – has the same value as every other event and hence no value. So, too, the

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technique of describing the same character or event in terms of polar opposites cancels out meaning as it is impossible to reconcile or make sense of the competing descriptions: the foursome is described at once as a harmonious, stately ‘minuet de la cour’ and an out-of-control ‘prison full of screaming hysterics’ (11–12); Edward is ‘a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour’s womenkind,’ but then the narrator also insists that Edward was not a ‘promiscuous libertine’ (45); Dowell tells us that he was sure he ‘never had the beginnings of a trace of what is called the sex instinct towards [Lenora]’ (28) but then tells us that his dislike of her might stem from jealousy and ‘the fact that [he] desired [himself] to possess Lenora’ (160); he tells us that Florence was not out of his sight for a minute (12) but he then tells us he has ‘misled’ us as he realizes Florence ‘was out of [his] sight most of the time’ (64). This ‘tale of passion’ is told by a self-described ‘eunuch,’ and this ‘saddest story’ has ‘a happy ending with wedding bells and all’ (160). As these competing readings continue to pile up, like the addition of a negative and positive number, they cancel each other out, leaving the reader with nothing, a blank. Further, the inconsistencies in the chronology and facts of Dowell’s story, which Thomas Moser has so thoroughly documented, also suggest the resistance of the narrative to continuity. Two examples here will illustrate the point: after the evening that Lenora enters Nancy’s room and tries to convince the girl to give herself up to Edward, Edward announces, the next day, that he has cabled Dowell and asked him to visit (148). But earlier in the novel, Dowell mentions that he is actually living in the house at the time of this same eventful night. So too there is confusion over 4 August 1904, which is both the date that the foursome travel to M— in the day and return to find Maisie Maiden dead, and the date, impossibly, that the Ashburnhams and Dowells first meet in the evening (Moser 355). Like Dowell, the reader is left unable to reconstruct the story as a linear, causal narrative. In its very resistance to interpretation, the narrative becomes that ‘safe castle’ that Dowell longs for – the very impossibility of deriving any meaning from it ensures its stability.5 So we find Dowell, at the end of the novel, refusing to map himself onto outside narratives: Yes, society must go on; it must breed like rabbits. That is what we are here for. But then I don’t like society – much. I am that absurd figure, an American millionaire, who has bought one of the ancient haunts of English

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Having retreated from the world, locked in an old English manor, where no one disturbs him and he disturbs no one in his daily routine, he resides with the vacuous Nancy, who, like the narrative itself, is a beautiful ‘picture without meaning.’ Appearances are restored and depths flattened as Nancy’s very attempt to ‘remember something’ is negated by both her faith in a deity and her dismissal of it with her pronouncement of the nonsensical ‘shuttlecocks.’ In this retreat, Dowell, like the narrative, cannot now be disturbed by the contingencies of the world, and once again he finds the ‘safe castle’ he feared he had lost at the outset of the novel. On the one hand Dowell’s nostalgia for feudalism, evident in his idealization of the ‘good soldier’ and the ‘castle,’ is about wanting a benevolent hierarchical world where the social roles are, as divinely ordained, respected and fixed. He manages to perversely reproduce this ‘order’ in his English manor as the fully dependent woman is under the care of the man and the servants, tenants, and workers all defer to the landowner, each going through a routine that, like the minuet, is comforting to Dowell in its absolute predictability. On the other hand, the resistance of the narrative to a meaning that can be subsumed by causal relations seems to subtly critique this very model. It is the acknowledgment of the ‘ruse’ of an ‘originary there was’ at the core of individual memory, of the

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impasse between History and the individual, that allows the narrative to open up to what Spivak has referred to as the ‘heterogeneous time’ of history and a refusal of the ‘quest for an essentialized and originary History’ (‘Staging of Time’ 87). Dowell’s feudalism shuts down the histories of the others who populate the novel – his ‘darky servant’ (66), his wife, whom he dismisses as a ‘personality of paper’ (83), the women Edward takes advantage of, the working class, and the colonized – in its desire for a fixed order. But feudalism also offers up a different understanding of memory that checks this tyranny. Rather than Dowell’s model, which is inward in focus as he attempts to force History to defer to his modern consciousness and his memory of ‘what happened,’ medieval memory is ‘directed outward,’ where individual memory is made to defer to the external world.6 As Ian Hacking has argued, medieval memory ‘was truly a techne, a knowing how, and not a knowing that.’ It is only ‘most incidentally concerned with remembering one’s own experiences. The whole point is to provide instant recall of any body of desired facts, things, or texts. One arranges external material in a vivid picture in one’s mind, to which one has direct access’ (202). As modernism is preoccupied with the problem of subjectivity, a dilemma that comes to a head in the First World War, Ford (or Hueffer, his original name)7 himself seems to posit an alternative understanding that embraces as productive the impasse of the individual and history. Following the completion of The Good Soldier, he wrote: ‘We are fighting to answer the question whether it is right to thank God for the deaths of a million fellow human-beings. Is it then right? Is it then wrong? I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore; nobody knows anything. We are down in the trenches of right and wrong, grappling at each other’s throats, gouging each other’s eyes – and amazed, still, to think that we can be doing such things’ (Hueffer 15).8 The outward awareness, not of an absolute, not of a clear direction, but of a ‘million fellow humanbeings’ displaces the I ‘that knows’ with the I that ‘doesn’t know’ that is then open to something other than Dowell’s obsessive desire to map himself onto History. The nineteenth-century secular versions of History, in their promise of a coherent integrated process that is moving toward the unveiling of a heaven on earth and the perfection of society, mimicking the Genesis to Revelation trajectory, begin to falter with the emergence of modernism. In the solipsistic, fragmented modern world the individual loses faith in his or her ability to partake in the understanding of History as a

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shared event as the individual is irrevocably cut off from a ‘there was.’ However, embedded in this sense of collapse and crisis that pervades many modernist works is already the suggestion of an alternative understanding: the postmodern acknowledgment of apocalyptic History as a collective process that necessarily shuts down the heterogeneity of history.

4 Futures That Have Not Been: Postmodernism and the Limits of History

The rupture between the individual and the forward movement of History, imagined by many modernists as irreparable, gives way to the postmodern understanding of it, in the words of Spivak, as an ‘already digested archive.’ The growing awareness that the ‘there was’ of memory is a ruse prevents the triumph of a chronological, collective History as it insists on the heterogeneity of history and time. Toni Morrison is one of the authors who is interested in challenging the traditional view of History. Despite the numerous readings that suggest the contrary, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is not about Sethe’s attempt to imprint an individual ‘I’ on the current of History. Rather, this novel addresses the impossibility of an ‘originary’ event as it reflects on the post-apocalyptic aspects of histories – on destroyed archives, on irrecoverable loss, and on futures that have not been that interrupt any sense of History as a collective and shared process. At the heart of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Sethe, at a critical moment, is unable to tell her lover, Paul D, the story of her dead child. ‘Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn’t get it right off – she could never explain’ (163). Paul D, at this point, has already seen the newspaper article featuring Sethe’s picture and a story about a runaway slave who kills one of her children when the owner catches up with her. Desperate, he confronts Sethe and demands an explanation. But she realizes that it is not a question of filling in or countering this ‘official version’ with her own version: ‘Sethe could recognize only seventy-five printed words (half of which appeared in the newspaper clipping), but she knew that the words she did not understand hadn’t anymore

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power than she had to explain’ (161). For Sethe, language cannot contain the event. Yet, despite her insistence about the failure of language to explain her story, much of the critical literature on Beloved emphasizes the importance of the novel in terms of the ‘writing’ or ‘recovering’ of it. Pamela Barnett, for instance, argues that the characters in the novel are forced by Beloved (the ghost of Sethe’s child) to confront traumatic memories. This confrontation in turn begins the process of healing, which she describes as ‘conscious meaning making about what is inherently incomprehensible’(426). And Jean Wyatt, in a tempered Lacanian reading of Beloved, argues that ‘the hope at the end of the novel is that Sethe, having recognized herself as subject, will be able to narrate the motherdaughter story and invent a language that can encompass the desperation of the slave mother who killed her daughter’ (484).1 I want to challenge these readings of Beloved that argue that Sethe is finally able to narrate her story, and instead suggest some of the reasons why the novel frustrates storytelling, bearing in mind what Gayatri Spivak refers to as ‘the mark of untranslatability’ (Outside 195). The Europeans who travelled to what they imagined to be a New World and who envisioned America as ‘mankind’s last great hope, the Western sight of the millennium,’ a place of freedom and possibility, were, of course, also fleeing religious persecution, social ostracism, and economic hardship in Europe (Sally Robinson xi). This transference of libidinal energies from the Old World to the New is what Freud understands as the ‘normal’ process of mourning, where the loss of ‘one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on’ is overcome in the process of mourning (‘Mourning’ 243). The process involves an identification of the object that has been lost and a ‘reality-testing’ that determines that the object no longer exists. This testing ‘proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that [lost] object’ and that the object be incorporated into memory (244). The process of representing loss, translating it into symbolic language, then allows the ‘freed’ libidinal impulses to be redirected at a new object (244). As several critics have pointed out, the ‘New World’ model is inappropriate in the context of African-American history. Maxine Loron Montgomery describes the European experience as involving ‘a gradual decline in social, economic, and moral conditions, a major catastrophe, then a new beginning – an unreliable model when imposed upon the Black American experience’ (127). And, as Susan Bowers writes, for the African-American (unlike Europeans travelling to America) ‘the

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good life lay not before them, but behind them; yet, every attempt was made to crush their memories of the past’ (61). For the African in America, then, the ‘normal’ process of mourning, as Freud describes it, cannot take place given that there is no new object (certainly not the New World) at which the slave can be expected to redirect his or her libidinal impulses.2 Yet, neither can there be a conscious identification of the lost object, given that, in some cases, the memories of it have been destroyed. There are, in some instances, no testimonies or documents that preserve in memory this ‘lost Africa’ – the people, the genealogies, the practices.3 Although Henry Louis Gates, Jr, writes of Africans in the New World that ‘no group of slaves anywhere, at any other period in history, has left such a large repository of testimony about the horror of becoming the legal property of another human being’ (ix), there is also a pervasive silence around – as Morrison’s dedication to Beloved puts it – the ‘Sixty Million and more’ who died as slaves, many in the Middle Passage. Referring to those who died en route, Toni Morrison writes: ‘Nobody knows their names, and nobody thinks about them. In addition to that, they never survived in the lore; there are no songs or dances or tales of these people. The people who arrived – there is lore about them. But nothing survives about ... that’ (qtd in Darling 5). The destruction of the records of these memories happens in several ways. Morrison suggests that the classic slave narratives involved, in the ‘rushing out of bondage into freedom,’ a ‘veiling’ of ‘proceedings too terrible to relate’ (‘Site of Memory’ 301). Both the psychological need to escape the horrors of slavery and the limitations around what could be put into slave narratives, given their largely white audience, contributed to this ‘veiling.’ This desperate need not to remember left the Africans in the Middle Passage ‘disremembered.’ Furthermore, in the Masters’ records, there is little evidence of documentation of the histories of the Africans who were transported on slave ships. In ‘Names of American Negro Slaves,’ Newbell Niles Puckett comments on the lack of records of names of slaves and cites one collection that lists evidence of only sixty-five names prior to 1700. Puckett attributes this lack to the general tendency of early slave traders to see slaves as undifferentiated, as mere merchandise, and points to a slave ship’s journal (1675) that refers simply to a ‘neaggerman’ that died suddenly and a New England slave notice that advertises a ‘negro man’ for sale (158). It is precisely this loss of names which plagues the ‘Dead’ community in Morrison’s Song of Solomon. As one of the characters,

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Macon Dead, reflects: ‘Surely, he thought, he and his sister had some ancestor, some lithe young man with onyx skin and legs as straight as cane stalks, who had a name that was real. A name given to him at birth with love and seriousness. A name that was not a joke, nor a disguise, nor a brand name. But who this lithe young man was, and where his cane-stalk legs carried him from or to, could never be known. No. Nor his name’ (17). The desire for ancestors, for a genealogy, for a connection to some sense of community and History is foreclosed for Macon Dead and his sister both because the archive is just that, an archive and not the originary event, and because the record of the event has been actively erased and is unrecoverable. In the interests of sustaining the Masters’ myth that Africans had no culture and no history, there was an intentional destruction of the archive in the separation of Africans who spoke the same languages, who were of the same families, and who practised the same traditions, making it difficult for slaves to communicate with one another, but also making it difficult for stories to be passed on and histories and names to be traced. Throughout Morrison’s novel Beloved, there are questions about the nameless and the lost. Children, friends, and spouses, ‘moved around like checkers,’ are untraceable. Sethe, an exslave, remembers Nan, the woman who nursed her, telling her of her mother in her mother’s language, ‘which would never come back,’ of the other babies she bore in the Middle Passage, the product of rapes by the crew, whom she threw away ‘without names’ (Beloved 62). Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law, referring to her lost children, tells Sethe: ‘My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that’s all I remember’ (5). When Mr Garner asks Baby Suggs what she calls herself, although she has many names – given to her by her husband (whom she never locates), Garner, and her former owner – she answers ‘I don’t call myself nothing’ (142). And at the end of the novel, it is Beloved herself, who is also the ghost/child of Sethe and the voices of those who died in the Middle Passage, who disappears so completely that ‘by and by all trace [was] gone’ (275). The question that remains about the exact number of those who died in the Middle Passage, which is signalled by the ‘and more’ in Morrison’s dedication to Beloved, suggests an ‘occurrence’ which has not and cannot be recorded, documented, quantified to the satisfaction of historians. According to the laws of knowledge that have governed the writing of History, then, there can be no ‘unveiling’; the ‘veil’ cannot be ripped away to disclose the records of the names of the ‘disremembered and unaccounted for’ (274).4

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How do we write or remember a history without documents, without ‘any songs or dances or tales’? How do we read the story of the ‘unaccounted for’? Morrison’s novel is a testament to this untranslatable loss, a loss that is embodied in Beloved and that explains, in part, why Sethe cannot tell her story. Beloved, the figure through which the murmurings of these millions who were dislocated, who lost their names, languages, families, traditions, and lives are transmitted, is herself an impossible figure to represent: ‘Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name?’ (274). The impossibility of recovering an origin also shuts down the possibility of an ending as a meaningful unveiling, of History as a full integrated narrative, of a book ‘writ out’ as Dilsey, disturbed by Benjamin’s name change from Maury and referring to Revelation, suggests in The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner 38). Yet, in this novel, the past, whether recorded or unrecorded, is also what cannot be kept at bay. It lives alongside the present, seeking revenge, haunting the living: Stamp Paid thinks about ‘the mumbling of the black and angry dead’ that surround 124 (198), and Baby Suggs realizes that ‘“not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief”’ (5). These ghosts, like Beloved, are a reminder that the past can never really be past, that it cannot be escaped or ignored, because it is always already living alongside the present, dismantling the authority of the word, interfering with the linear narrative of history: ‘Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm – every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there – you who never was there – if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again’ ... Denver picked at her fingernails. ‘If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.’ Sethe looked right in Denver’s face. ‘Nothing ever does,’ she said. (36)

‘Rememory’ impedes the logic of symbolic language, which cannot master loss but is only a mechanism that allows for a documentation of History that leaves much of the past suppressed, repressed, buried in

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the name of order and outside of the order of the name. Whether the past is crushed or forgotten, the novel suggests, it never really goes away because the present does not rule it just as the symbolic does not rule loss.5 Beloved, who returns from the dead to disrupt Sethe’s household and the community, refuses to allow the present to feel ‘at home’ – comfortable and reconciled with the past. She refuses to participate in the museum of history, to be part of a past that is exchanged, or sacrificed, for a future ideal. This ghost/woman is a reminder of lost futures, of futures that have failed to be, and thus she counters the dreams of a future to come that reconciles itself to the past. While, at the end of the novel, Beloved disappears without a trace, she ‘disappears,’ paradoxically, pregnant, carrying a future, like her own, that will not have been. Beloved foregrounds what Rebecca Comay refers to as ‘countermemory which calls all accounting memory into question’ (32). Accounting-memory seeks redemption from and reconciliation with the past. Counter-memory ‘memorializes itself as the will-have-been of what was-not-to-be: a future whose only moment inscribes the missed moment of betrayed and relinquished hope. Its presence is thus its forgone absence, its possibility just its impossibility: its self-disclosure just the gap left by its prior failure to appear’ (32). This understanding of loss, which destabilizes historical accounts, is not a rejection of history, but rather an acknowledgment that loss is a condition of history. When Paul D goes to visit Sethe at the end of the novel, she, still tormented by the memory of Schoolteacher telling his students to list her animal characteristics, says to him, ‘“I made the ink, Paul D. He [Schoolteacher] couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t made the ink”’ (271). In order to prevent her own child from undergoing this listing, she slits her baby’s throat, convinced that this is a better fate than being written into the order of language, which could ‘dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up’ (251). The loss of identity that Sethe fears at the pen of Schoolteacher is, in her mind, worse than death, worse than killing her child. Why is it that symbolic language proves so destructive that Sethe would choose to kill her child rather than have her named by it? We can begin to understand the problem of the symbolic if we consider it in the context of both African-American history and Hélène Cixous’s critique of Freud’s model of mourning. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison argues that the Old World was abandoned in favour of the New World,

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to some extent because it was overly ‘free.’ The state had turned its back on God’s laws and the aristocrats had forsaken their sense of duty. The Old World was rife with licentiousness and lawlessness, and it tolerated the abuse of many. The desperate and persecuted, in turn, fled to the New World. Thus, Morrison writes, ‘the desire for freedom is preceded by oppression; a yearning for God’s law is born of the detestation of human license and corruption; the glamour of riches is in thrall of poverty, hunger, and debt’ (35). Arriving in America with expectations of liberty, the immigrants continued to be haunted by this dark side of freedom, a fear that was displaced onto the large African population, where anxiety about the ‘terror of freedom’ (the unbounded, the unrestricted, the uncivilized) could play itself out on the bounded black body, leaving the concept of freedom as an escape from tyranny a cherished national dream. Morrison concludes: ‘In other words, this slave population was understood to have offered itself up for reflections on human freedom in terms other than the abstractions of human potential and the rights of man’ (38). If we contemplate Cixous’s critique – which investigates the question about what is lost to the symbolic order – in the framework of Morrison’s reading of freedom, one of the central dilemmas in the novel becomes clear. Cixous argues that the Freudian model of mourning, which encourages the translation of loss into symbolic language, originates in the fear of castration. Mourning, the incorporation of the lost object, allows the lost object to be recovered in the language of the symbolic, so that you can ‘refuse to admit that something of your self might be lost in the lost object’ (355). In the privileging of the symbolic, the fear of loss is displaced onto what it names as other in order to avoid losing the self. Hence castration anxiety, which stems from an imagined unity of self, also virulently opposes the other within, which threatens this unity. Cixous writes: Man cannot live without resigning himself to loss. He has to mourn. It’s his way of withstanding castration. He goes through castration, that is, and by sublimation incorporates the lost object. Mourning, resigning oneself to loss, means not losing. When you’ve lost something and the loss is a dangerous one, you refuse to admit that something of yourself might be lost in the lost object. So you ‘mourn,’ you make haste to recover the investment made in the lost object. (355)

Reading Cixous into Morrison, we see that the newly arrived Ameri-

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cans mourn the loss of their freedom in the Old World and withstand castration by refusing to admit that something of themselves has been lost to the lost object. The then-sublimated object – freedom as an ideal – is incorporated and mourned. The dream of freedom remains pure, while the anxiety about castration (the self lost to freedom) is displaced onto the black body. In Beloved, where the white masters imagine the black body as uncivilized and animal-like, the ‘dream’ of freedom finds expression when Schoolteacher and company witness Sethe make her attempt to save her children from enslavement by killing them. Schoolteacher concludes that Sethe’s violent protest is ‘all testimony to the results of a little so-called freedom imposed on people who needed every care and guidance in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred’ (Beloved 151). Schoolteacher’s anxieties about the dark side of power and freedom, about his own abusive behaviour in the ‘free’ world, are displaced onto Sethe, signalling his desire to keep pure the dream of freedom in America. The more radical his attempts to separate himself from the other, the dark side of freedom – the wilderness, the cannibal, the jungle – the less able he is to recognize ‘the screaming baboon’ that ‘live[s] under [his] own white skin’ (199). Motivated by the fear of castration (the loss of self), Schoolteacher understands freedom in terms of mourning (the translation of loss into the symbolic) and thus perpetuates an even greater loss in displacing the otherness of freedom onto Sethe. It is this greater loss that Sethe interrupts in killing her child and that finds expression in the figure of Beloved. Both Sethe’s violent act and Beloved’s return disrupt the Freudian model of mourning, exposing the logic of the symbolic and challenging the idea of a unified self.6 Sethe’s ‘barbarous act of love upon her child’ (Otten 86), as one critic has described the killing, is also an act against herself – a self-mutilation which puts in crisis the boundaries between self and other and rends the master/slave hierarchy. In Morrison’s other work, as Susan Willis has pointed out, self-mutilation is a common strategy and ‘represents the individual’s direct confrontation with the oppressive social forces inherent in white domination’ (277). This act stops Schoolteacher, momentarily, ‘in his tracks’ – confronted with the transgression and confusion of identities, boundaries, and names, he is destabilized, implicated in the violence, enslaved by his own image of the slave, an image he quickly steps away from in wanting to maintain his autonomy. After watching Sethe slit the throat of her baby, Schoolteacher dismisses her as having ‘gone wild,’ but the description

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of Sethe looking ‘him dead in the eye,’ holding ‘something in her arms that stopped him in his tracks’ (164), while the nephew stands shaking and lost in a confusion that his uncle had warned him against (150), suggests that the violent event exceeds the explanations of the witnesses. Schoolteacher’s ‘place of knowing,’ the Law of the Father/Master, is momentarily usurped by the witnessing of the bodies of Sethe’s children. Sethe’s act – the killing of her child – suspends the order of the word, exposes the implicit violence of the symbolic, points to the arbitrariness of a system that names her as slave and Schoolteacher as master, and traps the messenger in his own message and the definer in his own definition. Or, as Stamp Paid finally comes to realize: ‘“She ain’t crazy. She love those children. She was trying to out-hurt the hurter”’ (234). Beloved, on her return, continues this confusion of identities. She cannot be translated into the symbolic and relegated to memory because she is the other that invades and constitutes the self: ‘You are my face; I am you. Why did you leave me who am you? / I will never leave you again / Don’t ever leave me again / You will never leave me again / You went into the water / I drank your blood / I brought your milk’ (216). The milk and blood suggest the embodiment (as opposed to the symbolization) of loss, while the confusion of pronouns – the ‘I’ that is at once Denver, Sethe, Beloved, and the slaves of the Middle Passage – renders fluid the barriers between self and other. In classic slave narratives, the argument is often made, the slave moves from object to subject through the act of narration. Yet, significantly, Sethe never ‘writes’ her story, and the affirmation of herself as subject at the end of the novel – ‘“Me? Me?”’ – is qualified by the question marks. The classic slave narratives in their recounting of the movement from old to new, from privation to salvation, echo the European narratives of the New World. The slave narratives – for all sorts of practical reasons having to do with the author’s concern with her or his legal status, the largely white audience, and the influence of European literary models – move from orality and slavery to literacy and freedom. Toni Morrison and Henry Louis Gates suggest some of the inherent problems in the slave narratives’ embrace of literacy and freedom, given that these concepts, as they were developed in early American society, were marked out in opposition to the African. Gates writes in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‘Racial’ Self that, according to the European model of the order of things, the human was distinguished from the animal on the basis of literacy (25). Difference

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from the European literate tradition confirmed for the advocates of slavery the inferiority of the African. Hence the abolitionists were trying to publish slave narratives as proof of blacks’ humanity, while the antiabolitionists were busy putting laws in place that forbade the teaching of reading and writing to slaves as a way of continuing to withhold from them the title ‘human’ (17). Further, as Toni Morrison discusses, the concept of freedom in America was also complicit with slavery: ‘The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom – if it did not in fact create it – like slavery’ (Playing 38) If, as Morrison and Gates intimate, the white, literate, and free American defined himself against the enslaved, preliterate, black, how can the ‘freed’ black slave conceive of freedom? Although we cannot underestimate the significance of the classic slave narratives in aiding abolition, Beloved suggests the importance of examining the limits of these narratives which, in their necessary acceptance of Enlightenment notions about literacy and freedom, rejected an oral culture and an African heritage. Part of the problem with the classical slave narratives is that in fleeing the oppression of slavery, the ex-slaves moved into the free states, but unlike the Europeans, who displaced their anxieties about freedom onto another population, AfricanAmericans had no such option. Hence, freedom continued to be highlighted against an African past. For instance, Olaudah Equiano, an ex-slave, in his 1792 dedication to his narrative, insists that the trauma he experienced as a slave and the loss of Africa were more than ‘compensated’ for by his free life in America: ‘By the horrors of that trade was I first torn away from all the tender connections that were naturally dear to my heart; but these, through the mysterious ways of Providence, I ought to regard as infinitely more than compensated by the introduction I have thence obtained to the knowledge of the Christian religion, and of a nation which, by its liberal sentiments, its humanity, the glorious freedom of its government, and its proficiency in arts and sciences, has exalted the dignity of human nature’ (3). But, as Morrison has suggested, freedom in America has always been implicated in slavery, and so the question that remains in classical slave narratives is what happens to the sense of trauma, loss, and anxiety – the dark side of freedom? This is the question Beloved takes up. As long as the African past (the memory of ‘torn connections’) is ‘disremembered’ in the name of a better future, there is no context for Sethe’s violent act, and the master/slave, civilized/uncivilized dialectic continues to reign unchallenged in the ‘free’ world, in her commu-

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nity. In Beloved, this past is trapped in Paul D’s tobacco tin and withheld from Denver; it is something that Sethe struggles to ‘keep at bay’ and Bulgar and Howard run away from; it lives in exile with the Cherokee in the forest; and Baby Suggs (and later Sethe) escapes from it in her contemplation of the colours of a quilt – ‘pure’ colours without histories. With the past suppressed, the ideal of freedom continues to be played against black bodies and Sethe finds herself the victim of this logic. Following the incident with the four horsemen, twenty-eight days after the feast, Sethe, locked away in 124, on the periphery of the town, once again, is trapped, as Mae Henderson asserts, by ‘the dominant metaphors of the master(’s) narrative – wildness, cannibalism, animality, destructiveness’ (79). Ella, who has helped many runaway slaves, including Sethe, claims that she does not ‘know who Sethe is or none of her people’ (Beloved 187), and Ella’s suspicions about the ‘white [thing] floating around in the woods’ (187) that helped Sethe deliver her baby further marks Sethe as unnatural and alien. Stamp Paid and Paul D betray Sethe by trusting the white newspaper’s account of her act (79). And, Paul D, echoing the words of Schoolteacher, reminds Sethe that she has ‘“two feet ... not four”’ (165). It is Beloved’s return that finally releases the African-American body from the anxieties about the dark side of freedom, which have been displaced onto it, and, momentarily, offers something other than the tyranny of the symbolic. Beloved enables the community to ‘break’ the words that continue to keep them hostage in the ‘free’ world, words which have made them forget who they are. Instead of ‘beating back the past’ (73), Sethe finds Beloved allows her to talk of it: ‘she found herself wanting to, liking it’ (58). For Denver, from whom the past is withheld, just looking at Beloved keeps the original hunger, ‘the beforeBeloved hunger,’ away, and it is not symbolic language that Beloved provides but ‘sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be’ (67). Paul D, in his escape to a ‘free’ America and prior to his encounter with Beloved, having internalized the order of the symbolic, keeps the past buried in his tobacco tin. He grows up thinking that ‘of all the Blacks in Kentucky, only the five of them were men’ (125) and he displaces his own doubts about his self-worth onto Sethe when he alludes to her animal characteristics (165). Further, when he moves in with Sethe and Denver, he tries to throw the baby ghost out of the house: ‘It took a man, Paul D, to shout it off, beat it off and take its place for him-

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self’ (104). Trudier Harris writes: ‘He therefore enters it [124] like the teeth-destroying tricksters of tradition entered the vagina, in the heroic vein of conquering masculine will over feminine desire’ (155). Thus, Paul D tries to mark his place at the expense of both the female (in the name of the male) and the African past (in the name of the American future). But, after Paul D’s encounter with Beloved and the release of the contents of his tobacco tin, he begins to realize that there is something beyond the tyranny of the symbolic. When the tin springs open it releases memories of ‘Alfred, Georgia, Sixo, Schoolteacher, Halle, and his brothers, Sethe, Mister, the taste of iron, the sight of butter, the smell of hickory, notebook paper’ (Beloved 113). Yet along with these painful memories is the memory of some other past: ‘Each time she came, pulled up her skirts, a life hunger overwhelmed him and he had no more control over it than over his lungs. And afterward, beached and gobbling air, in the midst of repulsion and personal shame, he was thankful too for having been escorted to some ocean-deep place he once belonged to’ (264). The ‘ocean-deep place’ is not recoverable or translatable, but it does allow Paul D to ‘want to put his story next to [Sethe’s]’ rather than throw hers out and break from Garner and Schoolteacher and the idea of naming as absolute: For years Paul D believed Schoolteacher broke into children what Garner had raised into men ... Now, plagued by the contents of his tobacco tin, he wondered how much difference there really was between before schoolteacher and after. Garner called and announced them men – but only on Sweet Home, and by his leave. Was he naming what he saw or creating what he did not? That was the wonder of Sixo, and even Halle; it was always clear to Paul D that those two were men whether Garner said so or not. (220)

Finally, at the end of the novel, the community comes to Sethe’s aid, releasing her from the Father’s/Master’s metaphors by claiming what Sethe has already claimed, the lost other as their own, which breaks the symbolic.7 While Sethe feels like she must persuade Beloved ‘that what she had done was right,’ Beloved sits ‘uncomprehending everything except that Sethe was the woman who took her face away, leaving her crouching in a dark, dark place, forgetting to smile’ (251–2). This slippage, from Beloved as Sethe’s daughter to Beloved of the slave ships, suggests that the novel is not, finally, about Sethe having to answer for

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the death of her baby girl, but about the community, who need to embrace Beloved as the lost and unaccounted for. Outside of the order of the word, without fear, the women see the beauty of Beloved ‘thunderblack and glistening.’ In this confrontation with Beloved, they remember the past as something which refuses to be entombed and which offers other possible origins of the world. Breaking ‘the back of words,’ the tyranny of the symbolic, the women ‘stopped praying and took a step back to the beginning. In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like’ (259). It is sound that foregrounds the undifferentiated, arbitrary nature of language and that ‘baptizes’ Sethe. But this remembering is temporary. At the end of the novel, put into narrative, into ‘tales’ that were ‘shaped and decorated,’ Beloved once again is ‘deliberately forgotten,’ written out by the order of the symbolic (274). When Sethe’s mother displays her branding mark, the circle and cross that is burnt into her skin under her breast, so that her little girl will ‘know’ her, Sethe, as a young girl, also wants a mark so that she too will be ‘known.’ Her mother slaps her face, a reaction that Sethe does not understand until she has a mark of her own (61). This mark of identification, the mark that brands the slave, that is knowable, transferable, translatable, exchangeable, is the mark of the owner and is already caught within a (re)productive framing. As Sethe tells the story to her daughter, Denver, the story of the slap, like the original slap, interrupts the understanding of identity as something to be uncritically reproduced, as history, as something to be recovered or passed on. Comparing this scene to one in John Maxwell Coetzee’s Foe, Spivak writes: ‘This scene, of claiming the brand of the owner as “my own,” to create, in this broken chain of marks owned by separate white male agents of property, an unbroken chain of rememory in (enslaved) daughters as agents of a history not to be passed on, is of necessity different from Friday’s scene of withheld writing from the white woman wanting to create history by giving her “own” language. And the lesson is the (im)possibility of translation in the general sense’ (Outside 195). The process of translation of loss into the symbolic, which, as Cixous has argued, can be motivated by castration anxiety and defers to the phallus, the Law of the Father/Master, is forcefully interrupted in the novel, but the maternal does not replace it. Although in Beloved the maternal body is given a prominence not normally allotted to it (foregrounding, pregnancy, childbirth, and breast milk), this merely highlights how absolutely caught it is within a reproductive framing and

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made to serve phallic production as Sethe’s body and her children’s bodies are harnessed in the name of future profit. Schoolteacher, trying to figure out the value of Sweet Home, calculates it in the following terms: ‘And maybe with the breeding one, her three pickaninnies and whatever the foal might be ... Sweet Home would be worth the trouble it was causing him’ (227). The maternal as an alternative to the symbolic is not viable in the novel. Rather it is the ‘uterine social order’ which services the hierarchical binaries in the novel – white/black, male/female, master/slave – that is finally challenged in Sethe’s refusal to write her story.8 Beloved’s ghostly return testifies to the untranslatable, that which lies outside the paternal/maternal order ‘and before,’ as Spivak writes, ‘the reproductive coupling of man and woman’ (Other 153). Beloved’s return disrupts the order of the symbolic, which in its insistence on the separation of self and other, white and black, male and female, past and future, orders both the racist and patriarchal paradigms in the novel. This approach to documentation has made a mockery, a hopelessly inadequate representation, of her story. Even her name, Beloved, which is inscribed on her tombstone, is borrowed from the preacher’s funeral sermon, seven letters exchanged for the ten minutes of sex Sethe has with the engraver. Hence, she in turn mocks the desire to represent, to categorize, and to name. She is both adult and child, woman and ghost; at the same time that she is the unspeakable and the unknown, she is culturally and historically situated. The figure of Beloved dislodges the very site of the opposition between identity and non-identity in her insistence that history accommodate loss. She cannot be named in any absolute way. In the novel she plays a multitude of parts – she is the voices of the slaves in the Middle Passage; she is the brutalized girl who escapes from the white man’s cabin; she is the daughter looking for her lost mother; she is the ghost of Sethe’s baby girl and the sexual female who torments Paul D; she is among the freed slaves wandering the roads. She is the boundless, transgressive, illegitimate, disruptive other who breaks up the peaceful ordering of the free and non-free; who disregards the contract of presence and absence, legitimate and non-legitimate; who disregards the laws of gender and race; who puts in crisis identity and history; she is the guest who refuses to accommodate the host. Even as she feeds on narrative, her story cannot be accommodated by narrative conventions; her words, like her body, are broken, dislocating, foreign, and she can never be integrated into the community; ‘no rocking can hold [her] down’ (276). Beloved can neither survive nor die.

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Hers is not ‘a story to pass on’ because it cannot be ‘passed on,’ documented, or effaced. But even as Beloved remains the ‘unspeakable,’ she offers the possibility of imagining another origin to the world. Beloved is a call from elsewhere. As the sister of Beloved, the daughter of Sethe, and the granddaughter of Baby Suggs, Denver calls into question representability and permanence and accepts in language both the possibility and impossibility of meaning. Denver as the transitional figure, born in a river that separates the free from the non-free, born with the help of a white woman and bearing her name, operating in both an oral and literate culture, also encounters a schoolteacher, but one who, instead of confining names, opens up the possibilities of language, ‘the beauty of the letters in her name’ (102). Denver’s sense of the beauty of words seems to be inspired precisely by her ingestion of Beloved (she drinks her blood along with Sethe’s breast milk), who topples symbolic logic, a logic which has forced the other to bow to the self, the world to kneel to the word, and the past to submit to future dreams. In ‘The Site of Memory,’ Morrison writes of the Mississippi River, which was straightened out to make room for homes and farms. When the River overflows, Morrison suggests, it is not flooding but ‘remembering where it used to be’ (305). She imagines the act of writing as an effort to return, like the River, to a place of origin. The origin, the lost place, is as much a part of history as the documents and facts that testify to the ‘here’s and now’s.’ Even as she works within the genre of existing slave autobiographies, which she wants to ‘fill in and complement,’ Morrison wants to hold onto the memory of where she was before she ‘straightened out’; working with what is there, she holds onto the force that has been lost to the order of the symbolic, the futures that have not been. The apocalyptic stream in her postmodern version of history works with revelation and unveiling as much as their impossibility as she addresses the equally post-apocalyptic sense of history as the destruction of archives and lost voices.

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Part Three Nation

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5 Apocalyptic Communities: The European Nation, Islam, and Hinduism

In the book of Revelation, John is living in forced exile on the island of Patmos.1 Opposed to and alienated from the existing social and political rulers, he predicts the overthrow of a corrupt world and the everlasting reign of the New Jerusalem. In this revolutionary prophecy, John imagines himself as the consciousness of the collective; the boundary between the world and the word and narrative and history must dissolve, and all margins, including the one he presently inhabits, must be eradicated to complete this dream of a perfectly integrated community at the end of history.2 National narratives have long been infected by a secular version of this dream. Kermode suggests that while the belief in the actual or imminent end of the world has receded, ‘the paradigms of apocalypse continue to lie under our ways of making sense of the world’ (Sense of an Ending 28).3 With the shift in faith from God’s plan for humanity to secular understandings of the world, apocalyptic paradigms, as Kermode argues, continue to inform, more generally, social structures. For instance, nationalist narratives both replace and echo Revelation and are one of the ways the Apocalypse continues to play itself out in a secular context, where the emergence of the nation is understood as the point of arrival for an imagined community. As the novels of Rushdie and Forster, among others, demonstrate and as Benedict Anderson has suggested, in the wake of the religious age, national narratives come to satisfy the desire for origins, continuity, and eternity – for a New Jerusalem on earth (11). Like the biblical story, secular apocalyptic writings about the nation express the dreams of the ostracized and oppressed about the renewal or rebirth of a community because the call from beyond (the interfer-

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ence from the Other) that characterizes apocalyptic writing challenges the established order, confuses accepted rules, and ignores the prevalent codes of reason. As Derrida writes, ‘by its very tone, the mixing of voices, genres, and codes, and the breakdown [le détraquement] of destinations, apocalyptic discourse can also dismantle the dominant contract or concordat’ (‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone’ 89). It is not surprising then that the Romantic poets and, in particular, Blake conceived of the French and American Revolutions in millennial terms – the violence and upheaval of these events marked the dawn of a new earthly order, freeing man from the tyranny of monarchy and church.4 In Writing the Apocalypse, Lois Parkinson Zamora reads both the Hebrew (Ezekiel, Daniel, Zechariah) and Christian (Mark 13, Matthew 24, the second epistle of Peter, and Revelation) apocalyptic texts, with their emphasis on the merging of private and public destinies, as inspiring the national fictions of Latin American writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar. It is in the context of the promise of this apocalyptic aspect inherent in modern nations that Aziz, in Forster’s A Passage to India, joins this revolutionary chorus, declaring ‘India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one!’ (289). The narrative of the modern nation, like that of Revelation, envisions the eradication of margins and the closing of gaps in the formation of a cohesive community that emerges fully formed at its end. Cutting across class, race, and language boundaries, differences are circumscribed by a national boundary; thus Aziz insists on the unity and oneness of Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus. Frederic Jameson mistakenly argues that this sense of community distinguishes Third World literature from the private, individualistic, fragmented, and alienated narratives of the West. The novel, a child of Western capitalism, he contests, is born out of the radical split between private and public; however, in the Third World, the novels resolve this division necessarily by taking the form of ‘national allegories,’ ‘where the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself’ (‘Third-World Literature’ 85). Yet Forster is equally frustrated with what he understands as the nineteenth-century novelistic convention that one must view the action through the mind of one of the characters and say of the others ‘perhaps they thought’ or at any event adopt their viewpoint for a moment only (Selected Letters 26). He is aware of the limits of the reification of individual consciousness.

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Not unique then, as Jameson argues, to Third World novels, the resistance to the privileging of private individualistic narratives is very much evident in A Passage to India, which seeks to de-centre, like many modernist novels, narrative authority, so that no one character’s point of view is exclusively privileged. The growing impatience with the fixation on the individual celebrated by Enlightenment thinkers is evident, although differently expressed, in modernist writers from Eliot to Joyce. The conflicting and incommensurable voices that emerged with the influx of new immigrants, the women’s rights movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and the working class were coupled with the loss of faith in a common objective rational world that formed the basis of community and authority in many nineteenth-century novels. The modern individual thus finds him or herself isolated and alienated, imprisoned in his or her consciousness, unable to connect with others. Sally in Mrs Dalloway concludes that the individual goes through life scratching on the wall of his or her cell: ‘Are we not all prisoners?’ she asks (163). Similarly, John Dowell in The Good Soldier finds himself ‘horribly alone’ as the ‘hearts of men’ are impossible to penetrate. Confronting this isolation, modern novels such as A Passage to India also attempt to break down the walls of the cell. Unlike Jameson, however, Forster does not present ‘national allegories’ as an alternative to this isolation, and the problems he encounters with them in some ways parallel his frustrations with the conventions of the novel. For him, the events of the twentieth century have cast doubt on nationalist narratives, and the same limits that plague the novel form – the difficulties of representing the collective, the many voices within a bounded space – are also present in the nation. Thus, while Forster suggests that the colonial presence in India is intolerable, he is clearly no longer convinced by the revolutionary promises of nationalism when he has Fielding taunt Aziz, who is hopeful about the Indian nation, with the remark ‘India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth-century sisterhood!’ (289). Edward Said writes that Forster’s novel, despite its sympathies with India, maintains that Indians were not yet ready for ‘self-rule’ (Culture 205).5 But Fielding’s response to Aziz, in which nationalism is understood as an invention of the nineteenth century that has already grown tired and drab, suggests a profound exhaustion with this model. Nationalism was an ongoing concern in Forster’s work, and, frustrated by the wars fought in its name, he made the oft-cited comment in his essay ‘What I Believe’ (1939) that ‘if I had to choose between betray-

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ing my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country’ (76). What Forster is concerned with in A Passage to India, as he writes in ‘Three Countries’ (1959), is ‘something wider than politics’; the novel, though, as broadly political, is about community and ‘the search of the human race for a more lasting home’ (298). Forster’s critique then is more in keeping with that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who write in Empire: ‘Many contemporary analyses of nations and nationalism from a wide variety of perspectives go wrong precisely because they rely unquestioningly on the naturalness of the concept and identity of the people. We should note the concept of the people is very different from that of the multitude’ (102). The difference between ‘people’ as a homogeneous group that defines itself against an outside and is close to the ‘concept of race’ and the multitude as a diverse grouping, a ‘plane of singularities,’ with no definitive relationship to the outside, echoes Forster’s distinction between a ‘country’ and a ‘friend,’ a ‘nation’ and the ‘human race.’ ‘Country’ and ‘nation’ suggest racial and ethnic coherence and boundedness, while ‘friend’ and ‘human race’ suggest connection, heterogeneity, and openness. The crux of the problem with modern nationalism lies in Aziz’s wish that there be ‘no foreigners of any sort.’6 Like the construction of the individual that depends on a self/other dynamic that Forster is critical of, so too the construction of the nation, he suggests, depends necessarily on the shutting down of other ‘viewpoints.’ In A Passage to India, the modern nation merely extends the problematic model of the bounded modern self to the very idea of community, whether Indian or English. It is not so much that the isolation of the individual is broken down by the national collective, but, rather, that the nation, in mimicking this boundedness, attracts the individual into a larger structure based on an ‘imagined’ unified community that defines itself against the foreigner or other. Nietzsche had already warned about the disease of European nationalism in 1880, writing of the ‘national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning with which European peoples nowadays delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if with quarantines’ (Gay Science 242). In the novel, communication across national or cultural boundaries falters, language breaks down, and communities are isolated from one another and at war; this model then provides no common or lasting ‘home for the human race.’ The question that drives the novel then is whether, despite this structure, an Englishman and an Indian can be friends. The modern nation’s policing of borders leads to questions about

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who is inside and who is outside, who is a ‘foreigner’ and who belongs, and who defines this ‘imagined community.’ When Aziz is asked by Fielding to imagine a lineage, the necessary framework of the modern nation, he suggests ‘Afghans’ as a viable basis of the ‘motherland’ without being able to ‘quite fit’ them in the Hindu Native State of Mau. As a Muslim himself, Forster’s Aziz is only half-taken with the idea of the European modern nation as he experiences, at a microcosmic level, its limits – its privileging of the accident of birth and race as the basis of connection and community. His passionate but also half-hearted cry of ‘no foreigners’ reflects both his desire for the liberation of India from British rule and his unease with the model of nationalism he is espousing. In D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, Birkin and Gerald state unequivocally that ‘race is the essential element in nationality, in Europe at least’ (31), and Aziz’s cry cannot help but echo the earlier moment in the novel when he, as a ‘foreigner’ in his own land, has to refuse Mrs Moore’s invitation to join her in the English club, a little England. He is excluded, in the logic of nationalism, because of his race and place of origin – ‘Indians are not allowed into the Chandrapore Club even as guests’ (A Passage 41). So, too, once the British leave, in struggling to define the boundaries of the modern nation, as the novel accurately predicts, Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim will vie for dominance: ‘As long as someone abused the English, all went well’ (119). After they leave in 1947, Muslim Pakistan will come into being, Hindu fundamentalism will dominate India, and Sikh separatists will agitate for their own state. Said argues that this passage in the novel implies that ‘the English had better go on doing it [ruling India], despite their mistakes: “they” are not ready for self-rule’ (Culture 205). However, the problem has nothing to do with the particulars of being Indian anymore than it has to do with being British; rather it has to do with the very limits of this teleological model of the nation as its homogeneous identity – its insistence on the idea of a ‘people’ as natural – depends on exclusion of the other, the foreigner, both inside and outside its borders. The nation necessarily depends on a mythic origin and lineage as it moves toward its liberation, its final destiny – a teleology with which Fielding confronts Aziz as he asks him about who will come to dominate India once the English leave. Aziz looks forward to the expulsion of the English and, as he says, to ‘“our time”’ even as he struggles awkwardly to respond to Fielding’s question about who the ‘our’ might be. When he refers to ‘“our time,”’ ‘the scenery, though it smiled, fell like a gravestone on any human hope’ as the ‘divisions of daily life were returning’ (288–9).

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The novel foregrounds the limits of the relatively new raced-based modern European nation as it turns its attention to an exploration of both Islam and Hinduism as alternative models of community, as more lasting homes ‘for the human race.’ In contrast to Aziz’s exclusion from the Chandrapore Club, a mini-version of England, where he cannot be invited in as ‘British’ because of an accident of birth, Aziz, significantly, enabled by Islam, is able to extend an invitation to Adela and Mrs Moore to ‘all be Moslems together’ on the train (130). Unlike the community of the modern nation, which, as Aziz experiences it, restricts its members to the arbitrary criteria of birth within territorial boundaries, the Islamic nation – the umma – is not restricted by the narrative of birth, race, or geography. Hence Aziz thinks of Islam as ‘his own country, more than a Faith’ (38) and openly embraces his female guests as part of this ‘country.’ But if this model is more expansive and inclusive than European nationalism, it still must exclude the other ‘hundred Indias’ as India is claimed by Aziz and his friends as ‘one and their own’ (38). The mosque is privileged above the temples of ‘Hindu, Christian or Greek,’ and when Aziz looked at it, ‘he seemed to own the land ... What did it matter if a few flabbby Hindus had preceded him there, and a few chilly English succeeded?’ (45). Further, Aziz is critical of the Mogul Emperor Akbar, who invented a new religion ‘to embrace the whole of India’ instead of remaining true to the Koran. Seemingly contradicting his earlier gesture toward the women and protesting Adela’s recommendation of a ‘universal brotherhood’ that he also ‘sometimes dreamed of,’ Aziz tells her: ‘You keep your religion and I will keep mine. That is the best. Nothing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing, and that was Akbar’s mistake’ (156). The reading of Ghalib’s poetry gives Aziz and his friends ‘the feeling that India was one; Moslem, always had been,’ but this feeling only lasts ‘until they looked out the door’ (119). Like modern nationalism, then, Islam, as Forster renders the religion, requires that the door be shut in order to foster the illusion of unity. But if Aziz’s conclusion seems dismal as it abandons the hope of breaking down barriers between individuals, cultures, nations, and races, the novel also presents the problem inherent in the very desire for unity. If these boundaries create exclusive and limited communities, the crossing of all boundaries is equally problematic. This dilemma, which is raised in each of the sections, is first posed by the Christian missionaries, who question the logic of inclusion. If everything is included is one left with nothing?

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‘In our Father’s house are many mansions, they taught, and there alone will the incompatible multitudes of mankind be welcomed and soothed. Not one shall be turned away by the servants on that veranda, be he black or white, not one shall be standing who approaches with a loving heart. And why should the divine hospitality cease here? Consider, with all reverence, the monkeys. May there not be a mansion for the monkeys also? Old Mr Graysford said No, but young Mr Sorley, who was advanced, said Yes; he saw no reason why monkeys should not have their collateral share of bliss, and he had sympathetic discussions about them with his Hindu friends. And the jackals: Jackals were indeed less to Mr Sorley’s mind, but he admitted that the mercy of God being infinite, may well embrace all mammals. And the wasps? He became uneasy during the descent to the wasps, and was apt to change the conversation. And oranges, cactuses, crystals and mud? And the bacteria inside Mr Sorley? No, no, this was going too far. We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing.’ (58)

The debate the Christian missionaries engage in over the merits of inclusion and exclusion echoes the questions raised about nationalism and Islam in the novel. If the first restricts its membership to ethnicity or race and the second to religion, the missionaries, influenced by Hinduism, ponder an even more expansive version of community that for Mr Graysford includes all of the ‘incompatible multitudes of mankind’ and for the younger more ‘advanced’ Mr Sorely ‘all mammals.’ This very open-hearted embrace, however, starts to break down with the question of ‘wasps’ and even more so the ‘bacteria,’ as to include these would mean to leave their heavenly gathering without any definition, ‘with nothing.’ Definition and identity are formed in the very act of exclusion, so if, on the one hand, inclusion mimics God’s infinite love, overcoming divisions and breaking down boundaries in the imagining of a harmonious community, on the other, this very boundlessness, the missionaries seem to agree, threatens to dissolve into nothingness. In the second section, the caves seem to confirm this very sentiment. Like Africa in Heart of Darkness, which is figured as a beginning, the caves in the novel are ‘older than anything in the world.’ They are not representative of India specifically as they predate the concept and are described as being at the very origins of time.7 The hills that contain the caves still hold the memory of the unity of the universe: the sun ‘may still discern in their outlines forms that were his before our globe was torn from his bosom’ (137). But, like Conrad’s novel, at the origin is a

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vacuum, a great emptiness – so the caves offer up no solution, no direction, no teleology: ‘Nothing is inside them, they were sealed up before the creation of pestilence or treasure; if mankind grew curious and excavated, nothing, nothing, would be added to the sum of good or evil’ (139). In searching for unity, Forster encounters the dilemma posed by the caves: if race, culture, customs, religions, nations divide humanity and are in any case arbitrary, there is nothing at the core, at the origins of the universe – no foundation or first principle – that can hold it together. The British, at their best, rule with the belief in universal reason as the binding force among men, as the very foundation of the law. Yet whatever happened between Adela and Aziz in the darkness of the caves cannot be determined at the trial because the caves themselves mock the very light of reason as a foundation. Secondly, the boundlessness of the caves, the absence of all difference, like the all-inclusive heaven of the missionaries, is, in its vacancy, a no more comforting home than the bounded, separate worlds of classes, races, religions, and nations. In Fielding’s conversation with Godbole about whether he thinks Aziz is guilty or not, Fielding, irritated by Godbole’s suggestion that everyone participates when evil occurs in the universe, responds: ‘“and everything is anything and nothing something” ... for he needed the solid ground’ (169). The caves, however, retain the memory of the origins of the universe, when the sun and earth were still one – the nothingness at their core suggests there is no ‘solid ground’ to return to. Mrs Moore’s early intuitive sense of inclusion (to be ignorant of arbitrary social and cultural boundaries) is evidenced, for example, in her failure to indicate, when she is describing her encounter with Aziz to her son, ‘by the tone in voice that she was talking to an Indian’ (52). Mrs Moore concludes that the motives Ronny ascribes to Aziz, his description of him as ‘unreliable, inquisitive, vain,’ are ‘all true,’ but also a slaying of ‘the essential life of him’ (55). She, too, seemingly capable of imagining a community more expansive than even that of the missionaries, gestures to the wasp, referring to it as ‘pretty dear.’ Yet these magnanimous gestures turn sour as she experiences in the caves a great absence; the caves force her to confront, again like the missionaries and Fielding, the logical conclusion of this model of inclusiveness. If everything is included then everything is relative and nothing means anything: ‘The echo in a Marabar cave ... is entirely devoid of distinction. Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed into the roof. “Boum” is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it, or “bou-oum,” or

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“ou-boum” – utterly dull. Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce “boum”’ (159). It is that echo that haunts her and speaks to her: ‘Pathos, piety, courage – they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value. If one had spoken vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same – “ou-boum.” If one had spoken with the tongues of angels and pleaded for all the unhappiness and misunderstanding in the world, past, present, and to come, for all the misery man must undergo whatever their opinion and position, and however much they dodge or bluff – it would amount to the same’ (160–1). Mrs Moore is confronted with monotony and sameness – a world where ‘everything exists, nothing has value.’ Here then the dream of unity culminates in extreme and paralyzing relativity, while the allegiance to racial, national, and religious difference ends with division and violence. Mrs Moore is defeated by the caves; her believe in ‘essence’ and that ‘God is love’ is undermined by her experience of their hollowness, and she grows bitter (70). However, Mrs Moore is also resurrected during the trial as Esmiss Esmoor and her ‘God is love’ is restored as ‘God si love’ during the festival of Shri Krishna. So, too, at the end of the novel, Godbole, remembering her, makes a conscious attempt to include the wasp (as Mrs Moore does earlier in the novel) while the ‘whole universe’ seemed to ‘melt in the universal warmth’ (283). He tries to go even further than Mrs Moore and include the stone on which the wasp sits but fails in this attempt; he feels, nonetheless, that he has broken the prison walls of the self: ‘It does not seem much, still, it is more than I am myself’ (288). The celebration of Krishna in the final section furthers this mixing and embrace as the boats of Aziz and Godbole collide and all end up in the water with oars, the letters of Ronny and Adela, and the sacred tray. How are we to read this Hindu festival? The unity brought about here, unlike the caves, is full of joy as the ‘human spirit tried by desperate contortions to ravish the unknown’ (285). This oneness cannot be written and cannot be grasped because as soon as this is attempted it ‘becomes history, and falls under the rules of time’ (285), and history, language, and time are what necessarily divide. Does the universal warmth of the festival counter the coldness of the caves? Are Mrs Moore and the missionaries unable to think of unity as anything more than profound relativity, as nothingness, because of the limits of Christian thinking? Is the rational Fielding wrong to be exasperated by Godbole when he visits him after Aziz’s arrest as he assumes

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the Hindu is ‘preaching that good and evil are the same’? Godbole corrects Fielding, saying that ‘God is present in the one, absent in the other ... yet absence implies presence, absence is not non-existence, and we are therefore entitled to repeat, “Come, come, come, come”’ (186). Does Godbole’s understanding provide a corrective to Mrs Moore’s despair over a sense of nothingness and Fielding’s desire for ‘solid ground’? Does she fail to distinguish as Fielding does the difference between absence and non-existence? Or is the misspelling of ‘is’ as ‘si’ and the confusion of the religious ceremony proof that India is a ‘muddle’? Hinduism offers the most expansive version of community in the novel, but even so the caves seem to mock the ‘human spirit’ awoken by Hinduism as ‘Hinduism has scratched and plastered a few rocks, but the shrines are unfrequented, as if pilgrims, who generally seek the extraordinary, had here found too much of it’ (137–8). Is the ‘too much of it’ offered by the caves that pre-date any religion in the end a more profound and terrifying unity than this very ancient polytheistic religion can even imagine? Both Fielding and Aziz, much closer in thinking and philosophy than the Hindus, cannot come together at the end of the novel; they cannot be friends across the unequal power divide. Fielding, now married, no longer feels the freedom to ignore or betray his tribe: ‘He had thrown in his with Anglo-India’ (313). Aziz adopts a nationalistic stance, resisting the British colonization of India and wants ‘no Englishman or Englishwoman to be [his] friend’ (298). When the English leave, then perhaps, Aziz announces, they can be friends. Fielding responds, asking ‘“Why can’t we be friends now? ... It’s what I want it’s what you want”’ (316). The answer seems in one sense obvious: given that England is there as a colonial presence in India, they cannot be friends across such an unequal power divide. Forster himself writes, as if in response to Fielding’s question, that although his first impulse was to think of the book ‘as a little bridge of sympathy between East and West,’ his ‘sense of truth’ lead him to conclude ‘that most Indians, like most English people, are shits, and I am not interested whether they sympathize with one another or not’ (Furbank xx). But the final paragraph of the novel suggests a more profound response to this barrier between Fielding and Aziz than either colonialism or the author’s cynicism: ‘The horses didn’t want it – they swerved apart, the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single-file, the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they

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didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there”’ (316). Why do the earth, the animals, this collection of buildings and inanimate objects want to keep them apart? Why is it that not just the cultural/political climate but also the nonhuman world seems to be invested in their separation? Is the ‘No, not yet’ something akin to Godbole’s ‘Come, Come, Come’ in that both suggest a forever deferred and delayed arrival? Throughout the novel most attempts to communicate across national, racial, and cultural boundaries go terribly wrong as conversations and conventions are misread. Aziz tells Fielding, who has ruined his own collar stud, that he has an extra one in his pocket. Aziz then removes his own, praying his collar will not ride up, and gives it to Fielding. This act of generosity is in turn read by Ronny, a colonial administrator, as an example of ‘Indian’ carelessness: ‘Aziz was exquisitely dressed, from tie-pin to spats, but he had forgotten his back collarstud, and there you have the Indian all over: inattention to detail; the fundamental slackness that reveals the race’ (89). Aziz extends an invitation to Adela and Mrs Moore to visit his home, playing at ‘eastern hospitality’; then the ‘stupid girl’ (Adela) takes this gesture in earnest, causing Aziz great distress, given his modest abode. The ‘Bridge Party,’ meant to overcome this divide as its name implies, is a mockery of the very attempt and only intensifies the divide between East and West. Miscommunication drives the novel and culminates in the incident or non-incident in the cave. Social and cultural boundaries, prejudices, and codes foster division and isolation, preventing any unity or ‘common home’ for the human race as nationality continues to ‘exert its poison,’ religion imposes its own limits, and colonialism infects the country. Nature, however, mocks these categories and constructs – race, class, religion, nation – that humans use to order their world: it is the godlike untouchable at the trial, who is condemned by caste and race and yet also beautiful in his physical perfection, who ‘prove[s] to society how little its categories impress her [nature]’ (220). It is this punkah-wallah, oblivious to the court proceedings, who draws Adela’s attention, making her reflect on how the British had come to claim so much importance and took themselves to represent the very definition of civilization. What ‘suburban Jehovah,’ she thinks, legitimated these claims and narrow opinions? The untouchable, who stands in defiance to the naturalization and normalization of human constructs, unsettles Adela’s colonial posture and internalized racism. She withdraws her

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accusations against Aziz, much to the irritation of the English who have passionately come to her defence against the ‘dangerous’ and ‘unruly’ native, a characterization they willingly indulge in to justify their rule and sense of superiority. By 1939, as England is just entering its second war over racialized nationalism, Forster is still pondering this dilemma. To revive the novel form and save it from tedious convention, Forster suggests that novelists ‘must recapture their interest in death.’ He ends his 1939 piece ‘What I Believe’ with the comment that humans ‘are obliged to be born separately and to die separately’ (84). It is this separateness that is also perhaps the ‘lasting home of the human race’ and, paradoxically, the underlying source of its commonality. The false unities that are sought through group identities of race, religion, nation, and culture, mirroring the novelistic convention of privileging a singular voice, transgress and betray this more fundamental divide, a divide that unsettles and mocks societal categories. Attentiveness to this divide allows Mrs Moore, despite her exposure in the cave that seems to reduce all to an extreme relativity, to assert, without doubt, Aziz’s innocence. It allows Aziz, despite his poor treatment at the hands of the British and her family, to continue to value Mrs Moore even after his ordeal. And it allows Adela, after her encounter with the beautiful untouchable, to renounce her accusation against Aziz. This concrete separateness is also what connects, so that the ‘hundred voices’ that murmur ‘no, not yet’ at the conclusion of the novel embrace this divide as necessary and constructive. Nationalism as an apocalyptic narrative that holds out the promise to heal divisions in its realization of a oneness, a perfectly integrated community, is revealed to aggravate that very desire as it instead promotes the divisions emerging from an investment in social categories and human constructs that have been presented as natural. A Passage to India begins to displace and interrupt this constructed and problematic sense of homogeneity implicit in the apocalyptic model for the productive aspects of diversity: the ‘natural’ division among all humans. A function of birth and death, this insurmountable separateness is integral to the human condition and the source of its commonality. If the modern novel provides the groundwork, postmodern novels like Midnight’s Children take up more explicitly the limits of apocalyptic narratives of nations.

6 Unveiling Nations

Forster was writing A Passage to India during the height of nationalistic fervour in Europe that precipitated the First World War, and thus he was sceptical about Aziz’s talk of the emergence of nationalism in India. While nationalism draws on Revelation’s apocalyptic model that promises the arrival of a fully integrated community at the end of history, Forster’s novel suggests that this model, with its investment in teleology and racial and ethnic homogeneity, instead produces more rigid divisions. In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the narrator, Saleem Sinai, like Forster’s Aziz, draws on the revolutionary legacy of apocalyptic nationalism as an obvious frame for his account of India’s struggle for liberation: ‘I shall have to write the future as I have written the past, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet’ (462). Readings of Midnight’s Children tend to insist on Salman Rushdie’s allegiance to nationalism. Josna Rege, in an article that traces national narratives in India in the novels of the eighties, suggests that ‘despite its conceptual freshness and vitality, Midnight’s Children remains very emotionally committed to the narrative of the nation’ (366) and that the novel romanticizes the Congress Party ideal of ‘unity in diversity’ (360). Other readings insist Rushdie is disillusioned not with the nation per se but with the corruption of the postcolonial nation because those who came to lead it were, as Timothy Brennan argues, ‘sell-outs and power brokers’ (27). However, in this chapter, I want to suggest that Midnight’s Children, in casting a character named Aziz and drawing on Forster’s scepticism, is from the outset suspicious of the model – with its apocalyptic underpinnings – of the modern nation. Discontented with this narrative of origins and ends implicit in this model, Rushdie, like Forster, explores alternative concepts for the human community. A na-

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tional boundary must be closed; an arbitrary or contingent boundary would be open to dispute. Like Aziz and his insistence on the unity of Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus, Saleem, the chronicler of the nation, insists on the idea of community as a ‘mixing of voices’ in a contained space. Reminiscent of Jameson’s argument that Third World novels merge private and public destinies in their commitment to ‘national allegories,’ Saleem writes: ‘To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world’ (Midnight’s 109). But he also suggests that this process of ‘telling ... the experience of the collectivity’ is quite a bit more complicated than Jameson suggests (‘Third-World Literature’ 85). Even as Saleem invokes the metaphor of swallowing as inclusion, he encounters the problem of containment, boundaries, centrality, and marginality that plagues modern nations and apocalyptic visions. More than just lines on a map, national boundaries are legitimated through an appeal to destiny in the form of continuous and sacred historical narratives. Nationalism, Jawahar Lal Nehru writes to Saleem in Midnight’s Children, is merely ‘the newest bearer of that ancient face of India’ (122). Although India as a nation is both a modern and an imported concept, Nehru, in an article written long before he was leader of India, insists (in an attempt to counter British imperialism) that ‘India’ has always shared a common and continuous history: ‘even in the remote past there has always been a fundamental unity to India – a unity of common faith and culture. India was Bharata, the holy land of the Hindus’ (119). As an Indian nationalist, Nehru invokes a ‘spiritual’ India as distinct from the rational secular sense of state, both to distinguish the new nation from its colonial heritage and to suggest that liberation from colonial rule involves a return to a national identity that has been interrupted by colonialism. Yet his appeal to a historical origin in turn lends legitimacy to the idea of a majority and reinforces the centrality and sovereignty of the state.1 When transferred to the context of nations, Kermode’s argument that ends (and subsequently origins) lend meaning to the body involves a particular trajectory that conflicts with the rhetoric of community and inclusion. Apocalyptic narratives of nations, immersed in teleological arguments, introduce the problem of majorities and minorities, insiders and outsiders. The ‘unity of common faith and culture’ and the sense of destiny masquerade as tradition but draw directly on the legacy of the modern myth of the nation. Nehru’s invocation of India as destiny recalls, according to Anderson, one of the defining features of the modern nation.

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While nations are born in Europe at the dusk of the religious age, nations are more than a rational construct. The mythic dimension of the nation provides a sense of continuity, destiny, and meaning that fills the void left by religion. Hence, while ‘nation-states are widely conceded to be “new” and “historical,” the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past ... It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny’ (19). As Saleem tries to conjure up the abstractions of destiny and purpose – ‘the Prime Minister wrote me a letter’ – at the Midnight Children’s Conference, his alter ego Shiva interjects with the other side, the paradoxical side of the modern nation – material well-being, self-interest, the particular, and the contingent: ‘“What purpose, man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping world got reason, yara? For what reason you’re rich and I’m poor? Where’s the reason in starving, man? God knows how many millions of damn fools living in this country, man, and you think there’s a purpose! Man, I’ll tell you – you got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you got to die”’ (220). The irony of course is that they have been switched at birth, proving Shiva’s point that what Saleem is reading as destiny is really a question of chance. Although Saleem thinks of himself as born to be the prophet of India, if it had not been for this switch, Shiva would have been rich and the chronicler of the new nation, foreclosing Saleem’s sense of purpose. Saleem finally has to shut Shiva out of the conference, but he cannot avoid the issues Shiva has raised about who defines the nation and whose interests are served by these narratives, which shut out contingency as the origin moves purposefully towards its destined end.2 Saleem confronts the underlying problem of the particular posing as the universal in the invocation of destiny as he seeks to legitimize his tale of the nation. While he insists, ‘I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country’ (9), as soon as he begins his history of the new nation, other histories interfere. The rivalry to control the centre is fierce, and Saleem finds himself competing with politicians (‘Indira is India’) and rich gurus, such as Lord Khusro Khusrovand, formerly known as Cyrus, a childhood playmate of Saleem’s. ‘When set beside Cyrus’s India,’ complains Saleem, ‘my own version seems almost mundane’ (269). Saleem tries, without much success, to negotiate the tensions that arise from Shiva’s comments – public versus private, community versus the individual, centrality versus marginality, representation versus obscurity – tensions which plague the modern nation.

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Like the exiles in the apocalyptic texts, in order to realize ‘meaning’ or continuity and escape ‘absurdity’ or contingency (9), Saleem must become the consciousness of this new ‘nation that had never previously existed’ (112); Saleem must be India (420). The pressures of ‘unity’ lead Saleem to believe that he is in control of the world, that there is nothing beyond his knowledge and that there is no boundary he cannot cross. But, in retrospect, he realizes that this belief is a defensive strategy, ‘an instinct for self-preservation,’ to protect himself against the flooding multitudes who threaten to annihilate him with their own unique visions (175). In this contemporary world, ‘truth’ has nothing to do with the fierce competition over differing narratives of the nation; but, perhaps, Saleem suggests, as he reflects on some of the ‘lost’ prophets of Arabia (Maslama, Hanzala ibn Safwan, and Saleem’s namesake, Khalid ibn Sinan), it never has: ‘Prophets are not always false simply because they are overtaken, and swallowed up, by history’ (305). Saddled with the task of accommodating diversity within the bounds of a unified narrative of the nation and motivated by his own imminent dissolution, Saleem battles to narrate an official version of History – India’s destiny – but is plagued by some of the problems inherent in the task: How can he present the History of India as a collective process that all Indians participate in? How can he both claim to represent the teeming multitudes he has ingested and acknowledge that other voices have been excluded, ‘swallowed up’ by History? In other words, how tenable is India’s nationalist slogan ‘unity in diversity’ that Saleem tries so desperately to adhere to in his narrative of independence? As committed as Saleem is to writing a chronological history of India, the crush of other conflicting stories, which must be ignored in order for Saleem’s narrative to secure its origin and reach its end, forces Saleem to ask, ‘If I began again, would I, too, end in a different place?’ (427). Saleem, like India, begins to crack under the pressure of ‘unifying’ the multitudes: ‘But how can I, look at me, I’m tearing myself apart, can’t even agree with myself, talking arguing like a wild fellow, cracking up, memory going, yes, memory plunging into chasms and being swallowed by the dark, only fragments remain, none of it makes sense any more! – But I mustn’t presume to judge; must simply continue (having once begun) until the end’ (421). Saleem’s physical disintegration parallels that of India. Even as the country dreams of a unified community, it starts to ‘crack’ under the various and incommensurable communities that vie for power and fight to define the nation. The problem Saleem is having with the chronological ordering of the

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narrative – of having no time for digressions (other stories) because of the pressure of telling the central story, which introduces the whole problem of origins and endings and centres and margins in documenting the history of the nation – is imported, as is the novel genre, from another time and place. In Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel Tristram Shandy, which foregrounds the implicit tensions in the Enlightenment project and thus is an appropriate intertextual reference for Rushdie’s novel, the narrator faces the dilemma inherited by Saleem: ‘For, if he [the author] begins a digression, – from that moment, I observe, his whole work stands stock-still; – and if he goes on with his main work, – then there is an end to the digression’ (73). Sterne’s work offers a critique of the newly emerging genre of the novel and the very idea on which the novel is based – the interior private and autonomous bourgeois self, a teleological construction of self which points to, as Jameson has suggested, the split between the private and public self that is also at the crux of the modern nation. Since Saleem is hopelessly stuck in this divide and tries to reconcile the sense of national community with his particular life through a coherent narrative of his private self that will mirror perfectly that of his community (hence his absurd attempts to connect his personal life with the more widely publicized ‘official’ version of India), perhaps we should turn to the likely origin of this divide. It is after all ‘Mountbatten’s ticktock ... English-made’ (106) that has fathered the children of midnight, ‘the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history’ (118). We cannot fully understand Saleem’s problem from the vantage point of a country where ‘“yesterday” is the same as their word for “tomorrow”’ (106); to understand the idea of a nation’s history as progress (as measured by a British clock), which has catapulted Saleem into progress/digression, centre/margin, private/public dilemma of his narrative, we have to go elsewhere, to another prophecy on the end of history. Fukuyama’s narrative (via Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel) of the fully evolved – ‘the last’ – man and the triumph of Western liberalism begins with the French Revolution and the ideals of liberty and equality.3 Although there was some work to be done after 1806, he argues – abolishing slavery and extending rights to women, workers, blacks, and other racial minorities – history effectively ended with the Battle of Jena (‘The End of History?’ 5). Since then, there have been a few complications (world wars, communism, fascism, the threat of a nuclear apocalypse brought about by an ‘updated Marxism’),4 but finally, it is

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safe to say, Western liberalism has won. He writes: ‘What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’ (4). Fukuyama’s victory speech, in the name of universal man, which draws on secular apocalyptic rhetoric, raises an important question about rights: is it merely a question of extending and readjusting the rights of man to accommodate what has historically been left out, as Fukuyama suggests, or are the rights of man legitimated in and bounded by narratives? Homi Bhabha points to John Stuart Mill’s work On Liberty (1859) as evidence of the contradictions inherent in the Enlightenment project: the paradox of rights in the context of imperialism. Bhabha suggests that ‘not all were as conscious as Mill was of the ambivalence of colonial rule, the incompatibility of being a despot and a democrat’ (27). Toni Morrison has drawn out ‘the historical connection between the Enlightenment and the institution of slavery – the rights of man and his enslavement’ (Playing in the Dark 42). Mary Astell asked in 1700: ‘If all Men are born Free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?’ (107). And Fatima Mernissi asked of the American government, after the ‘othering’ of the Arab that legitimated the Gulf War in 1991: ‘Can one trumpet universality and erect frontiers at the same time?’ (168). Fukuyama himself continues this pattern of a bounded narrative of rights when he insists on locating the origin of ‘universal man’ in Europe and on exempting some from his definition of mankind, arguing that ‘it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in what one could in some sense call the common ideological heritage of mankind’ (‘The End of History?’ 9). This tension between the impulse to universalize and the erection of boundaries stems from the very document, the Declaration of 1798, which serves as the basis for Fukuyama’s essay. As Jean-François Lyotard writes, the members of the Constituent Assembly ‘hallucinated humanity within the nation’ (The Differend 147). He argues that there is no possibility of reconciling the rights of universal man, which are authorized by a transcendent Ideal (the Supreme Being), with the rights of man as authorized by the nation, which relies on the authority of necessarily exclusive names and narratives of origin. Because of this double and irreconcilable authorization, after the French Revolution, ‘it will

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no longer be known whether the law thereby declared is French or human, whether the war conducted in the name of rights is one of conquest or liberation, whether the violence exerted under the title of freedom is repressive or pedagogical (progressive), whether those nations which are not French ought to become French or become human by endowing themselves with Constitutions that conform to the Declaration, be they anti-French’ (147). This is the dilemma – the understanding of nations as being natural and universal versus the understanding of them as emerging out of a very specific and particular moment in history – that haunts modern nationalist movements organized around resistance. Do nationalist movements, in the ‘search for a legitimating mode of nomination and origin’ (Deane 19), serve as an effective counter to imperialism or do nationalist narratives, in this quest for legitimation, remain trapped in the legacy of imperialism? These are some of the questions that complicate Saleem Sinai’s narration of Indian independence. Saleem begins his and India’s story, which he insists are bound together, with his grandfather, who is appropriately named, for a tale of origins, Aadam Aziz. Aadam has studied medicine in Germany and returns to his village only to find his ‘new’ knowledge and ‘modern’ ways greeted with both scepticism and contempt by the ancient boatman Tai, a historian who scorns the very idea of progress (21). Disheartened, Aziz departs from Kashmir for Amritsar, where, after witnessing the massacre of peaceful demonstrators protesting British occupation, Aadam becomes an ‘Indian’ (40). Thus, Saleem begins his tale of the birth of the nation at the moment when the ‘modern’ Aadam becomes conscious that he is ‘Indian,’ a moment which is awakened by the brutality of imperialism. However, this ‘beginning’ is complicated by Saleem’s discovery that both his own and the nation’s origins also lead him back to Britain. Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that, as subjects of Britain, colonized Indians wanted to become ‘legal subjects’ or ‘modern individuals.’ The colonized Indian dreamed of being European. In contrast, Indian nationalists abandoned the desire to be ‘European,’ and, assuming that the concept of ‘individual rights’ was universal, wanted to be both Indians and citizens (7). However, Saleem discovers not only that his biological father is the Englishman William Methwold (and, to make matters worse, his nose is inherited from a French grandmother), but that Methwold’s ancestor, an East Indian Company officer, initiated the dream of Bombay, which gave way to the dream of ‘India’ (92). Further, the Indian nationalists

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suffer from the problem of ‘turning white,’ ‘a disease which leaked into history,’ Saleem writes, ‘and erupted on an enormous scale shortly after Independence’ (45). Saleem’s lineage suggests the idea of individual rights, the basis of the modern nation, is historically specific. Further, if the advocates of the social contract write of the particular, while all the time legitimating their argument with the myth of the universal, so, likewise, do the Indian nationalists in Midnight’s Children invoke the myth of public communities while at the same time ensuring their own private interests. Referring to the Indian businessmen who profited enormously from the first Five Year Plan, the plan to modernize, Saleem writes: ‘It seems that the gargantuan (even heroic) efforts involved in taking over from the British and becoming masters of their own destinies had drained the colour of their cheeks ... The businessmen of India were turning white’ (179). This scenario repeats itself in the examples of the Pakistani nationalists, The Muslim League, and ‘landowners with invested interests to protect,’ who agitate for the partition of India, all the while claiming to represent all Muslims but serving no one’s interests but their own. The problem that Saleem encounters in trying to merge private and public destinies under the umbrella of the nation is also identified by Karl Marx. In his essay ‘On the Jewish Question,’ Marx suggests the private and public can never really be reconciled in the modern nation, and that versions of nationalism based on the social contract inevitably end up securing private interests. The state is not the voice of the public, but the protector of the private: ‘It is difficult enough to understand that a nation which has just begun to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between different sections of the people and to establish a political community, should solemnly proclaim (Declaration of 1791) the rights of the egoistic man ... The matter becomes still more incomprehensible when we observe that the political liberators reduce citizenship, the political community, to a mere means for preserving these socalled rights of man’ (43). Thus, Saleem, in his attempt to narrate the birth of an independent nation, finds at least one road persistently and unwittingly forcing him back to Europe as the newly ‘liberated’ India adopts this model of nationalism. As Spivak has argued, unlike America and the story of the founding fathers, where British merchants are able to secure an origin for their nation in a scarcely populated land, ‘in the case of [a populated] India, colony and empire step forth as place-holders for a “failed originary moment”’ (In Other Worlds 264). Although nationalism was

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instigated in the name of the masses5 and, it is argued, ‘Indians had for years demanded a constitution establishing parliamentary democracy’ (Austin xiii) to mark their liberty from British rule, this demand is not only predicted and pre-empted but celebrated as a British triumph by Thomas Macaulay, Secretary to the Board of Control, in 1833. In a speech he made to the British House of Commons, he said of the Indian public ‘that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may in some future age demand European institutions ... Whenever it [such a day] comes it will be the proudest day in English history’ (qtd in Appadorai xxvii). Given Fukuyama’s reading of the end of history, how is the violence that tears post-independence India apart today to be explained now that India has adopted the European constitutional model based on the ideals of liberty and equality? Is it India that has failed to meet the demands of ‘modernity’? Has the country failed to evolve? Or has the very apocalyptic rhetoric of ‘arrival’ contributed to the exclusion of large populations from the constitutional ‘we, the people of India’? As Saleem is born, a ‘wiry’ man in Delhi (Nehru) announces, ‘“A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new”’ (116). Caught in an evolutionary version of history that has largely been manufactured in Europe, India, having adopted a European constitutional model, continues to be assessed in terms of this model. The arrival of India, the nation-state, signals the end of all history and full ideological evolution, while any violence or opposition (Fukuyama insists that this is true of most of the Third World) ‘remains very much mired in history’ (Fukuyama ‘The End of History?’ 15). In keeping with the apocalyptic understanding of the emergence of the nation as the end of history, Gyanendra Pandey writes that the history of India as it is taught in schools and universities ends in 1947 (29), while what is often referred to as communalism but, in fact, is any voice of protest (women, tribal peoples, the poor) is persistently read as an ‘aberration.’ This violence occurs outside the parameters of the harmonious ‘we’ and is marked as anti-national. The ‘we’ represents official history, the ‘state-centred drive to homogenize and “normalize”’ (Pandey 29). Some suggest that this political violence occurs in a zone where different and conflicting versions of nationalism meet. For instance, Partha Chatterjee argues in The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories that while this violence is often referred to as ‘bad nationalism,’ a perversion (along with drugs and terrorism) that has

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infected the Third World, the violence, in fact, is indicative of the inherent conflict between capital and community. The anti-colonial movements marked a division between the inner spiritual world of national culture (for example, the resistance organized by figures like Gandhi)6 and the outer material domain that adheres to the colonial model. Having rejected membership in civil society (individualistic and capitalistic), the postcolonial nation adheres to a sense of community that invites the rhetoric of love and kinship that must in turn be suppressed by the state governments that try to accommodate the modern world and its narrative of capital. India is not of course a blank slate upon which only the British have inscribed a destiny. India’s long and complicated history has other streams that conflict with the European nationalist model, and Saleem, fathered by many, invokes another prophetic current. Tai, the boatman, draws on a sense of community that is founded not upon individualistic and private historical narratives of progress but on a sense of humanity as universal, ahistorical, and timeless, a model he seems to embody: ‘Nobody could remember when Tai had been young. He had been plying this same boat, standing in the same hunched position, across the Dal and Nageen Lakes ... forever’ (14). Vehemently opposed to the idea of progress, Tai is ‘the living antithesis of Oskar-Ilse-Ingrid’s belief [Aadam’s German friends] in the inevitability of change’ (15). The stories he tells the young Aadam are not of national boundaries and private narratives, but of the Mughal emperors, such as Jehangir, the ‘Encompasser of the Earth.’ Tai articulates the Muslim sense of community and nation, the umma, which, like the Christian and Hebraic traditions, has been read as revolutionary. In the Koran, the stories of Hud and the Tribe of Ad, Salih and the destruction of Thamud, and Shu’aib and the destruction of Midian establish a similar pattern of destruction and renewal as prophesied by the exile and intimate the Last Judgment.7 However, this group of stories does not exist within the same teleological (Genesis to Revelation) framework as the biblical stories but rather suggests a spatial totality – ‘the whole in every part,’ the infinite in every moment. Even as Islam claims Mohammed as the last in a long line of both Christian and Hebrew prophets (from Abraham to Jesus), it is troubled by this teleological narrative. Ahmed Sinai (Saleem’s father and one of the businessmen who suffers from the disease of turning white) wants to figure out the proper order of the Koran; the implied ‘disorder’ marks the resistance of this sacred book to linear or chronological forms (82).

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Nevertheless, this transhistorical, anti-linear, anti-progress version of apocalypse of the Koranic tales has inspired, like the apocalyptic biblical tales, hopes for the rebirth or renewal of a community. According to Islam, Mohammed was sent to end the violence and corruption that reigned among the Arabs of the jahiliyya (the pre-Islamic era) and ensure peace. Norman O. Brown argues that it is precisely the metahistorical structure of the Koran which breaks or ‘junks’ Christian and Hebraic traditions, reduces them to rubble, and introduces a ‘new civilization’ that works ‘to change the imagination of the masses, the folk who shape and are shaped by folklore and folktales’ (169). This new civilization, the umma (the Islamic nation), is secured by the sharia. Unlike the Declaration of Rights, which serves to protect individual freedoms, the sharia, as a legislative body, serves to unite the community and thus discounts the particulars of location or historical circumstance. It ‘is seen as static and immutable, free from the currents of time, applicable to all societies that accept Islam as religion’ (Amin 223).8 It is this spirit of community that kindles Aadam’s optimism about the Hummingbird, a magician who rises from the ghetto in Delhi and is the ‘moving spirit’ of the Free Islam Convocation that stands on the motto, borrowed from the poet Iqbal, ‘Where can we find a land that is foreign to God?’ (47). This informal organization promotes the idea of a universal community that does not pander to private interests or bounded narratives, an idea that finds renewed expression in another ghetto magician, Picture Singh, who is ‘no lover of democracy’ (400). However, this ‘universal’ community is unquestionably a community of men, conveyed both in the Hummingbird’s ability to attract ‘members’ by inducing erections with his voice (‘Padma laughs, “no wonder he was so popular with the men!”’ [46]) and in Picture Singh’s (the ‘patriarch of the ghetto’) fight for supremacy in the Metro Club, where blind women with painted eyes live in ‘a world without faces or names’ in ‘that place outside time, that negation of history’ (454). Saleem also offers a more cynical account of the surrender of the individual to the community, at least as an official policy. From its creation, Pakistan has attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to reconcile the logic of the rights of the private liberal citizen with its commitment to Islam, the popular ideological basis of the nation, because ‘in Muslim theory, church and state are not separate or separable institutions’ (Lewis 28). After suffering a blow from a spittoon in the ‘Land of the Pure’ (Pakistan), Saleem forsakes his private narrative, forgets his mothers, fathers, and midnight origins, and, abandoning his ‘lust-for-centrality’

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(356), achieves purity. Saleem’s newly adopted ‘philosophy of acceptance’ in the army life, which requires the abandonment of self-interest in the service of the ‘greater good’ of the nation, however, leads him to commit horrible acts in the name of a fraternal community. Working as a bloodhound, he ruthlessly tracks down enemies of national unity. In his other role as buddha, ‘abstracted,’ ‘emptied of history,’ ‘anaesthetized against feelings as well as memories,’ Saleem denies his in-theworld, material being (350). The metaphor of swallowing the world that Saleem repeatedly invokes in his attempt to narrate the nation exposes the weakness of both the historical and ahistorical models: the rhetoric of democracy and individual rights inevitably leads him to the problem of the particular posing as the universal, while the rhetoric of community, the pressures of having to transcend place and time, literally leaves him abstracted and disembodied. Both the umma and the modern nation are secured by the figure of the (un)veiled woman, who, in her very exclusion, is critical to these models. Padma, to whom Saleem tells his tale, remains on the periphery of Saleem’s story of nations. Her comments and suggestions are available to the reader but are never incorporated into Saleem’s narrative. The fact that there is no sexual union further suggests the asymmetry of their relationship. Yet, although this is clearly a hierarchical relationship, Saleem is also entirely and utterly dependent on her: she sits at his feet and holds him together; when she leaves, his cracks widen and he cannot write (149). Padma’s peripheral status reflects the position of women in nationalist struggles, where they are at once absolutely crucial and, on matters of gender, silent partners in the revolution. MarieAimée Hélie-Lucas, founder and member of the international organization Women Living under Muslim Law, qualifying what she refers to as her earlier blindly nationalistic stance in Algeria, writes: ‘Defending women’s rights “now” (this “now” being ANY historical moment) is always a betrayal – of the people, of the nation, of the revolution, of Islam, of national identity, of cultural roots, of the Third World’ (13). Referring to nationalist struggles in the Third World in general, and to India in particular, Kumari Jayawardena writes: ‘While Indian women were to participate in all stages of the movement for national independence, they did so in a way that was acceptable to, and was dictated by, the male leaders and which conformed to the prevalent ideology on the position of women’ (107). Ketu Katrak further argues that although Gandhi mobilized women in the nationalist struggle, his coding of passive resistance in accordance with the traditional ideology of the femi-

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nine (self-sacrifice and purity) and his valorizing of the role of women as wife and mother (in other words, within a marriage contract) ensured the continued harnessing of female sexuality to serve a patriarchal order. The brotherhood of the umma finds expression in Midnight’s Children, as already noted, in the struggles of the patriarch Picture Singh in the den of blind women and in the Hummingbird’s commanding voice that calls male ‘members’ to attention. In its official form, in Pakistan, the brotherhood takes on a more insidious hue as it is dependent on the absence of the female. The Brass Monkey starts out as a reckless, disrespectful child, outraged by gender inequity, particularly, by her brother’s favoured stance in the household (152). But in her reincarnation she becomes Jamila Singer, ‘Pakistan’s Angel,’ the ‘Nation’s Voice,’ submissive and pure. President Ayud tells her: ‘“Your voice will be a sword for purity; it will be a weapon with which we shall cleanse men’s souls”’ (315). Jamila Singer, hidden away behind her ‘famous, all-concealing, white silk chadar,’ secures the brotherhood and serves the state by her very absence. The umma or nation realizes solidarity only when sexual difference is hidden away behind a veil. Fatima Mernissi, a Koranic scholar, writes: ‘Their [women’s] invisibility made it possible to forget difference and create the fiction that the umma was unified because it was homogeneous’ (127). And, specifically, in the context of South Asia, Ayesha Jalal argues: ‘The Islamic social order lay in ... the social control of women’ (80). The blank sheet or veil, pure and white, that stands in place of Jamila’s body reflects back the unity of the nation. The sheet held up by the female wrestlers behind which Jamila Singer sits brings us to another tale of women and the nation, this time of the modern nation, which provokes us to ask whether women’s liberation is merely a question of tearing away the Islamic veil. Aadam ‘emancipates’ his bride, Naseem, from behind her sheet, slowly cutting her way to freedom. But ‘liberation’ of course has a complicated history in the context of postcolonial nations. Many have argued that the colonial fixation with ‘white men saving brown women from brown men,’ an attitude that Aadam has internalized (‘start thinking about being a modern Indian woman’ [34; my emphasis]) in his partial enthusiasm for the West, merely supports the ‘civilizing the savages’ argument from which colonialism drew its raison d’être.9 When Aadam tries to insist that his wife abandon Purdah, she protests not on behalf of modesty (the unveiling of her face and feet), but because ‘they will see my deep-

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est shame!’ Aadam is not really interested in the wishes of his wife. His act of liberation is also an act of violation as he ‘drags all his wife’s purdah-veils from her suitcase ... and sets fire to them’ (34). Naseem’s ‘deepest shame’ is thus her double violation by colonialism and patriarchy that leaves her literally without a place, ‘for all her presence and bulk ... adrift in the universe’ (41). Aadam, half-enamoured with Western narratives of citizenship, liberates Naseem only to insist that she be ‘modern’ and submit to the sexual/social contract that guarantees the European model of nationalism: ‘“move a little, I mean, like a woman,”’ Aadam demands of his newly ‘liberated’ bride. In this model, women are also ‘veiled’ or cut off from the public sphere as the social contract of modern nations, as Carole Pateman argues, is also a ‘sexual contract’ that divides and genders public and private spaces. The public sphere of ‘individuals,’ who make up the pact guaranteeing rights, equality, and freedom, belongs to men, who also rule in the private sphere of blood ties and passion, the world of women. Thus Aadam, actively involved in the liberation struggle from the paternal colonial order, is still free to command his wife to perform sexually. Pateman writes that the social contract is fraternal to the extent that it guarantees men’s rights over women: ‘Civil individuals have a fraternal bond because, as men, they share a common interest in upholding the contract which legitimizes their masculine patriarchal right and allows them to gain material and psychological benefit from women’s subjection’ (‘Fraternal Social Contract’ 113). Aadam is outraged when he discovers this contract that appropriates the womb in the service of the teleology of the modern nation has been violated. On discovering that his daughter (living happily with a man she loves) is still a virgin, he promptly ends this threatening relationship and transfers his daughter to another man. On the discovery of his married daughter’s virgin state, the narrator queries: ‘Can you imagine how the insides of his nose must have felt?’ (60), a nose that has ‘dynasties waiting inside it’ (14). In her second marriage, Amina is exchanged between the men, Aadam and Ahmed Sinai, completing the social/sexual contract and guaranteeing the right of men to claim women as their property to ensure the continuity of the paternal lineage: ‘And now Aadam Aziz lifted his daughter (with his own arms), passing her up after the dowry into the care of this man who had re-named and so reinvented her, thus becoming in a sense her father as well as her new husband’ (66). Like her mother, Amina is forced, in the modern nation, to surrender to the paternal/fraternal order.

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Why is it impossible to accommodate women in either the modern nation or umma? Charu Verma, arguing that Midnight’s Children is a thoroughly sexist novel, asks, with respect to Padma, ‘Where is her story?’ (160). Yet Padma’s exclusion is not an oversight. Padma’s role as the outsider is the constant reminder of the impossibility of women’s inclusion in either of Saleem’s tales of the nation. Saleem confesses: ‘The feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a world’ (174). However, Padma’s persistent sexual overtures and Saleem’s sexual impotency underlie the irony of his desire to ‘give birth’ to the nation and suggests the reason why women are ‘never central’ and could never be central to his story (192). Pateman argues that the social contract theorists’ appropriation of a capacity unique to women, giving birth, in turn means women must be denied access to the public realm, ‘bodily removed from civil society.’ She writes: ‘The social contract is the point of origin, or birth, of civil society, and simultaneously its separation from the (private) sphere of real birth and the disorder of women. The brothers give birth to an artificial body, the body politic of civil society; they create Hobbes’s “Artificial Man, we call a Commonwealth,” or Rousseau’s “artificial and collective body,” or the “one Body” of Locke’s “Body Politick”’ (‘Fraternal Social Contract’ 115).10 The narrative of origins that occurs in the public sphere and that lends a foundation to the modern nation, outside the ‘disorder of women,’ gives rise to the illusion that legislation can articulate and rationalize humanity. Simply suppressing narratives of historical origin in order to guarantee a sense of community that transcends necessarily bounded and thus private interests, however, does not lead us out of the dilemma of the patriarchal construction of nation. As Mernissi has argued, the homogeneity of the umma is an abstraction that is threatened when you introduce sexual difference and the womb, which gives birth to the material, the particular, and the mortal. She writes: ‘Because the child of the womb of the woman is mortal ... the law of paternity was instituted to screen off the uterus and woman’s will within the sexual domain. Islam offered the Arabs two gifts, the idea of paternity and the Muslim calendar – gifts that are the two faces of the same thing, the privilege of eternity. The new code of immortality was to be inscribed on the body of woman’ (128). In light of Fukuyama’s apocalyptic pronouncement on the end of history, the question What happens next? that Padma, the illiterate factory worker, persistently asks is perhaps not as ‘naive’ as some critics have

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argued.11 Even as Saleem as prophet announces the end of history with the arrival of India, Padma continues to ask what comes after the end, reminding Saleem of his mortality and hence of the limits and boundaries of narrative – ‘“You better get a move on or you’ll die before you get yourself born”’ (38). Further, countering the abstracted notions of community, she holds things together for Saleem; she reminds him of the body and prevents him from literally splitting apart. Padma’s voice makes us aware that there are limits to knowledge, which prevent entirely inclusive narratives of the nation. Political identities are not born and cannot be secured in narratives of origins; nor can they be secured by abstractions that necessarily seclude or disavow women’s bodies. Padma forces back upon Saleem’s versions of the nation the recognition of sexual difference, of identities that are ‘born’ only in and of this difference. The obligation of the nation is not to claim histories and names but to understand them as contested and liminal spaces – unclaimed by origins, marked by death. The post-apocalyptic nation would thus involve the ‘unveiling’ of women not as an act of liberation but as the mark of identity as difference. This unveiling would, paradoxically, thwart the very apocalyptic rhetoric that underlies the idea of the modern nation and the Islamic nation, the umma. Saleem contemplates the meaning of his own name and concludes ‘when all that is said and done; when Ibn Sina is forgotten and the moon has set; when snakes lie hidden and revelations end, it is the name of the desert – of barrenness, infertility, dust; the name of the end’ (304). The name disappears into the desert – the ‘name of the end,’ the name of nothing. The body is thus bereft of inscription. Neither historical foundations nor transcendent abstractions can lend it ultimate legitimacy; the surplus of the body is always already the post (not the end, but the nascent state)12 of the apocalyptic nation.

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7 Anti-Apocalypse and the New Man

Frank Kermode, a product of the postwar, post-Holocaust era, writes: ‘Whether you believe the age of the world to be six thousand years or five thousand million years, whether you think time will have a stop or that the world is eternal; there is still a need to speak humanly of a life’s importance in relation to it – a need in the moment of existence to belong to, to be related to a beginning and an end’ (Sense of an Ending 4). In his view, the individual must mark out his or her existence in relation to the world, be it eternal or finite, by claiming an origin and ending. This sense of a self that is defined and shaped as it moves from a starting point through time towards a conclusion, where the two points provide a pattern and coherence to the events lived in between, is suggestive of the commonplace metaphor of an individual’s life as a journey.1 For Kermode, the sense of an ending is absolutely critical in making one’s life comprehensible: ‘It seems to be an essential,’ he writes, ‘whether one’s poverty is real or figurative; tracts of time unpunctuated by meaning derived from the end are not to be borne’ (162). D.H. Lawrence, however, writing after the Great War, not only abandoned this teleological and temporal narrative of self but saw this focus on moving toward an ending as the very source of the problems with the modern world.2 In Apocalypse, written while he was dying and published a year after his death, Lawrence turns away from the idea of the end as the place of resolution: We always want a ‘conclusion,’ an end, we always want to come, in our mental process, to a decision, a finality, a full stop. This gives us a sense of satisfaction. All our mental consciousness is a movement onwards, a movement in stages, like our sentences, and every full stop is a mile-stone

120 Man that marks our ‘progress’ and our arrival somewhere. On and on we go, for the mental consciousness. Whereas of course there is no goal. Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to. While men still thought of the heart or the liver as the seat of consciousness, they had no idea of this on-and-on process of thought ... it was no stage in a journey. There was no logical chain to be dragged further. (50)

Kermode insists that the model of Genesis to Revelation, the movement from beginning to end, however faint or remote, is necessary to modern fictions even as the world grows more complex and open and fictions in response more subtle and varied. Fictions provide a pattern, he argues, that defy time. In imagining the ‘concords of past, present, and future,’ ‘the soul extends itself ... out of time’ so that the gap between an individual’s end (the meaningless succession of ‘tomorrow and tomorrow’) and the sense of the world as eternal shrinks (Sense of an Ending 89). In contrast to Kermode, Lawrence points to the problematic aspects of the biblical apocalypse despite the glimpses of cosmic nature in Revelation. The enslaving ‘chain’ that the modern self drags with it toward some point of arrival or end, to some ‘full stop,’ he argues, is at the heart of St John’s narrative, which excitedly looks forward to the destruction of the world. It is this lust for the end that continues to infect the idea of self and will just as surely lead to the obliteration of humanity unless the fixation with getting somewhere, this progress model, is abandoned and the individual and society reconnect with the cycles of nature and the cosmos.3 Lawrence writes: The cosmos became anathema to the Christians, though the early Catholic Church restored it somewhat after the crash of the Dark Ages. Then again the cosmos became anathema to the Protestants after the Reformation. They substituted the non-vital universe of forces and mechanistic order, everything else became abstraction, and the long slow death of the human being set in. This slow death produced science and machinery, but both are death products. No doubt the death was necessary ... It is death none the less, and will end in the annihilation of the human race – as John of Patmos so fervently hoped – unless there is a change, a resurrection, and a return to the cosmos. (Apocalypse 31)

The post-apocalyptic mood that infects the modern period, this resistance to conclusions, to life as a journey towards some final revelation,

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and to human identity as intimately bound up with a progression to ‘somewhere,’ is understood by Frances Carey as about the loss of the belief in the ‘redemptive vision.’ With the advent of modernity, she argues, science and art continued to provide a version of eschatological purpose, yet many of the modernist artists and writers employed apocalyptic terminology, but emptied it of hope, promising only nihilism. Carey writes: ‘Even when that vision has failed, the language, motifs and mood of the Apocalypse have survived, though without the belief in redemption its original meaning is destroyed’ (270). The loss of hope in a redemptive plan for mankind, she suggests, results from the modernist experience of ‘cultural pessimism and social alienation’ that manifests as ‘a metaphysical void’ that runs through much of the creative works of the period (270). Carey’s impressive survey of the use of the apocalypse in the works of modernists, however, does not take account of Lawrence, who not only rejects the ‘redemptive vision’ inspired by a belief in the end, but also suggests that the whole drive towards it has deadened modern society. The rejection of faith in the end does not in Lawrence’s view result in nihilism. Rather, the realization that there is ‘nowhere to go,’ his criticism of the ‘journey’ as a metaphor for life, is a critical factor in understanding his re-envisioning of modern man. Lawrence’s last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, opens in the aftermath of the end: ‘The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins. We start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes ... We’ve got to live no matter how many skies have fallen.’ This implicit faith in progress and the building that carries on despite, or even in the midst of, falling ‘skies’ is mocked in the opening pages. The ‘new little habitats’ and the ‘new little hopes’ – these diminutive actions in the midst of catastrophe – appear pathetic in the aftermath of the Great War. The drive to carry on – the hope that somehow Europe can ‘rebuild’ after the apocalypse – not only perpetuates the wilful blindness that leads to this catastrophic event, but it ignores the lasting damage inflicted by it. Like the shattered counties left in the wake of the war, Clifford Chatterley is shipped back from the battlefield ‘more or less in bits.’ These bits ‘grow together again,’ but he is left with a ‘blank insentience’ and a ‘slight vacancy’ that are continuous with his physical paralysis and impotence. ‘Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent left him’ (6). In this half-deadened state, having almost lost the ability to suffer, Clifford remains cold and insensitive to the suffering and destruction he inflicts on the world around him. Like the post-

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war society that surrounds him, he ignores the ‘cataclysm’ and carries on in the same vein, hoping to restore the family name at Wragby Hall.4 However, the sickness, the cataclysmic wound to the soul, does not go away because people carry on in the aftermath of the war even if things appear to have been righted. Rather, the horror spreads its tentacles, infecting all human relations: ‘So it was with Clifford. Once he was “well,” once he was back at Wragby, and writing his stories and feeling sure of life in spite of all, he seemed to forget, and to have recovered all his equanimity. But now, as the years went by, slowly, slowly Connie felt the bruise of fear and horror coming up and spreading in him ... And as it spread in him, Connie felt it spread in her. An inward dread, an emptiness, an indifference to everything gradually spread in her soul’ (49). She feels as if ‘she had lost touch with the substantial and vital world’ (20), and her body follows suit, going ‘meaningless’ and ‘dull,’ ‘with no gleam or sparkle in the flesh’ (70). As Clifford carries on, ignoring the very source of his wound, investing in the myth of progress, sure there is something to achieve and somewhere to get to, he and those around him grow sicker as the wound festers. Clifford, in his forward thrust and passion for a mechanistic order, reproduces the same deadly conditions that lead to the war. Clifford and the other ‘half corpses’ of the modern era promise an even more hellish future as the industrial landscape he builds up produces a smut from the ‘under-earth’ that rains down like ‘black manna from the skies of doom’ (13) – if the cataclysm has already happened, the damaged leftover inhabitants, suffering under the illusion that they are progressing, are in fact in their final death throes, suffocating in the surrounding horror and apocalyptic doom of which they are barely conscious. Unlike Clifford, Connie is sensitive to the surrounding horror but sees no option but to deny, repress, and finally passively resign herself to it: ‘She took in the utter soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands at a glance, and left it at what it was: unbelievable, and not to be thought about ... there it was: fated, like the rest of things! It was rather awful, but why kick? You couldn’t kick it away. It just went on. Oneself also went on’ (13). The need for it to just go on is precisely the thinking that the novel sets out to interrupt. Clifford, ‘vague’ and ‘absent,’ experiences ‘fits of depression’ as ‘the wound to his psyche’ bleeds into the world around him (63). ‘Struggling to shove himself forward’ (97), rattling through the woods in his mechanical car, he destroys nature with his ‘ready-made words and phrases sucking all the life-sap out of living things’ (93). Under Mrs

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Bolton’s care, Clifford further suppresses the wound that turns his interior into ‘soft pulp’ and reduces him to an emotional and sexual child as he focuses entirely on the ‘outside of things’ and forcefully chases the ‘bitch-goddess by brute means of industrial production’ (107). Dominating the ‘very dirt of Tevershall pit,’ ruling over the hundreds of colliers working for him, he feels himself ‘re-born’ – a ‘machine’ with a ‘hard, efficient shell’ (110) even as he impotently fondles Mrs Bolton’s breasts for comfort, his rapidly shrinking interior still searching desperately for some connection. Clifford’s onward march ensures the destruction of nature and the triumph of capitalism; privileges the external rational, conscious self; requires the dominance of mind at the expense of body, feeling, and sense; and demands the sacrifice of human relations to economic hierarchies and individualism that further alienate man from man. Thus, Clifford believes ‘there is a gulf and an absolute one between the ruling and the serving classes’ leaving no room for, as Connie interjects, a ‘common humanity’ (183). Challenging the obsessive preoccupation with the end, Lawrence suggests a radical reimagining of the world that involves a return to the cosmos, ‘the primeval root of all full beauty,’ as a means of reviving the post-cataclysmic half-corpses that haunt the modern world (175). Rejecting the primacy of reason, consciousness, the individual ego, mechanization, and progress that dominate the social order, he is interested in cracking the prison walls, ‘the hard efficient shell,’ enclosing the modern self and reaching inward to the pulse of life, the cosmos, that exists in all things, the ‘vast living body, of which we are all still part’ (Apocalypse 29). ‘Modern people’ who suffer from loneliness, Lawrence writes, ‘have lost the cosmos ... the sun in us and the moon in us’ (30). In the drive forward, they have shut themselves off from the vital forces and cosmic cycles. Clifford, outwardly successful, is ‘not in touch ... not in actual touch with anything or anybody’; distant and removed, he is ‘like a man looking down a microscope, or up a telescope’ (Lady 16). In ‘A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,”’ Lawrence describes him as ‘purely a personality, having lost entirely all connections with his fellow-men and women ... All warmth is gone’ (Lady 333). While Clifford turns outward, Mellors, the gamekeeper, in his retreat to the wood, works to reimagine both himself and the world by fostering a connection with the vital forces of the cosmos. Nature and sex, what Mellors refers to as ‘really only touch’ (277), offer this chance to return to a pre-modern state when ‘man lived with the cosmos, and knew it greater than himself’ (Apocalypse 27). The wood is also where

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Connie, ‘hating Wragby and its walls,’ first turns in her despair. Feeling that the ‘only reality was nothingness, and over it, a hypocrisy of words’ (Lady 50), she experiences her body, sacrificed to the mind, ‘going meaningless, going dull, opaque’ (70). Yet when she first turns to the woods, the narrator comments: ‘It was not really a refuge, a sanctuary, because she had no connection to it. It was only a place where she could get away from the rest. She never really touched the spirit of the wood itself’ (20). Eventually, though, she finds herself freed, ‘loose and adrift,’ among the pine trees and daffodils (86). So too sex offers the possibility of unveiling the ancient truth of man as alive to the cosmos – in the powerful act that has to be treated with reverence, the conscious external self dissolves into the undifferentiating flame of passion and, in Lawrence’s utopic view, heals the fragmented and alienated inhabitants of the modern world. Yet sex in the modern world, Lawrence suggests, has become nothing more than a commodity. Connie’s experience with Michaelis – who, when naked and exposed, stripped of his wit, fame, and charm, proves as stunted as any modern man with his ‘two-second spasms’ and his lack of any ‘human sensuality’ – is typical (71). Sex was like a ‘cocktail – they lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to the same thing,’ thinks Connie (64). The bright, shiny porcelain bodies of fashionable women, who put all their attention into such external trappings as lingerie, are as imprisoned as their Oxford-educated or working-class lovers, who miss the nice trappings more than the women themselves. Lawrence writes in ‘A Propos’ that he is wearied by the brilliant young people around him who understand sex as no more than ‘just plainly and simply lady’s underclothing, and the fumbling therewith ... when it comes to actuality, to today, sex means to them meaningless young women in expensive under-things’ (Lady 315). Tightly bound in their own egos, they are too self-conscious and narcissistic to understand sex as anything but ‘just trimmings,’ ‘a functional act and a certain fumbling with clothes’; England cannot possibly be regenerated by these sexless creatures (315). Connie, in her encounters with Mellors, finds herself apart and alone when she refuses to surrender her conscious self: ‘She willed herself into this separateness’ (126). Her ‘tormented modern woman’s brain’ understands sex as nothing more than function as she watches the ‘thrusting of the man’s buttocks ... supremely ridiculous’ (126). Again she finds herself hyper-conscious, ‘cold and derisive her queer female mind stood apart,’ and she remains imprisoned in herself as she ob-

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serves ‘the butting of his haunches’ and ‘the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis’ (172). Yet when she stops resisting, ‘from herself she wanted to be saved’ (173), like her growing connection to the wood, she begins to ‘melt,’ ‘yielding with a quiver that was like death’ (173). Daring ‘to let go everything, all herself, and be gone in the flood,’ she experiences a ‘primordial tenderness, such as made the world in the beginning’ (174). Risking the ‘death’ of the self, she is open to the cosmos and returns to its origins. Unlike Forster, who describes the caves as ‘older than anything in the universe’ but as containing ‘nothing,’ or Conrad, who describes Africa as ‘the earliest beginnings of the world’ but finds there a deadly ‘silence,’ Lawrence imagines a foundation of tenderness at the beginning, and Connie’s nagging sense of ‘nothingness’ dissolves as she returns to it. This turn away from the end and the return to the source of life necessitate a rejection of the idea of the fixity and eternity of self.5 If for Kermode the individual is grounded and given meaning in the world as she or he claims an origin and end, for Lawrence the individual is never anything more than a temporary and contingent construction: ‘Our ready-made individuality, our identity, is no more than an accidental cohesion in the flux of time’ (Phoenix 384). An absolute commitment to self is what keeps Clifford hard and cold, is what keeps Connie (at points) unable to connect sexually with Mellors, and is what keeps human society closed off to cosmic energy. But the understanding of identity as ‘accidental’ allows Connie to surrender the self and experience the freedom of being adrift and unbounded. While in the post-feudal world identity can no longer be secured by divinity (the name as ‘Writ out’ in the Book as Dilsey says in The Sound and the Fury), the rational faith in the autonomous, coherent individual of secular modernity that replaces it and dominates the nineteenth century is also rejected by the modernists. Lawrence’s understanding of identity in flux is not the same as contemporary versions of subjectivity that have been influenced by late capitalism and which promise that one can consume different images and strike different poses. The self in flux by the late twentieth century is the ‘ready-to-wear self.’6 Increasing rather than eliminating modern alienation, this popular version of postmodern identity is still highly individualistic even if it promises multiple and flexible identities. Lawrence’s, in contrast, promises the dissolution of individualism as a means of acknowledging a shared humanity; it involves the sense of being in the world that is open and connected to life beyond a rational,

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empirical, capitalist order; it remains open to an other. Mellors retreats from the external world, from titles and promotions, into the womb of the woods; and Connie follows him as they strip away social labels, class divisions, and thwart social conventions in order to connect and confront the vital core of life as ‘they lay, and knew nothing, not even of each other, both lost’ (134). It is only by losing the self, refusing to invest in individuality and ego that one can break down the barriers that block out the energy of the cosmos, the ‘primordial tenderness.’ Yet, if Lawrence considers identity ‘an accidental cohesion,’ he refuses to abandon the label of man and woman, which remain obstinately fixed in his work. The border between the two is absolute. Sexual identity at birth is not accidental nor the product of the ‘flux of time’ – it is destiny. Lawrence argues in Fantasia of the Unconscious that a ‘child is born with one sex only’ (137), and even when Connie’s identity dissolves and melts, she is still, at the ‘primordial’ source, essentially a woman: ‘She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman’ (Lady 174). At the origin there is already a binary, a separateness, as Lawrence writes: ‘The great thing is to keep the sexes pure ... We mean pure maleness in a man, pure femaleness in a woman. Woman is really polarized downwards, toward the centre of the earth. Her deep positivity is in the downward flow, the moon-pull. And man is polarized upwards, towards the sun and the day’s activity’ (Fantasia 215). For Lawrence, intelligent, knowledgeable women are a perversion, and he advises the man who encounters such a woman to insist on her deference: ‘Reduce her once more to a naked Eve, and send the apple flying’ (218). The problematic gender relations in the novel – most famously noted by Simone de Beauvoir – suggest some of the limits of Lawrence’s recipe for sex as a healing power in the universe: Reciprocal gift, reciprocal fidelity: have we here in truth the reign of mutuality? Far from it. Lawrence believes passionately in the supremacy of the male. The very expression ‘phallic marriage,’ the equivalence he sets up between ‘sexual’and ‘phallic marriage,’ constitute sufficient proof. Of the two blood streams that are mysteriously married, the phallic current is favored ... Thus the man is not only one of the two elements in the couple, but also their connecting factor; he provides their transcendence ... He almost never shows a man agitated by a woman; but time and again he shows woman secretly overwhelmed by the ardent, subtle, and insinuating appeal of the male. (218)

As much as Lawrence is interested in breaking down hierarchies and

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social labels that interfere with human relations and in embracing identity as a momentary performance, and even as he allows Connie some expression of sexual desire, ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are not social constructs but remain absolutes in his work: It is the woman who must ultimately submit to the man and forgo being ‘the active party’ (Lady 203). He relentlessly portrays men’s and women’s sexuality in terms of a hierarchical binary: she is the ‘gate’ and he is the ‘erect phallus rising darkish and hot-looking,’ the ‘king of glory’ (209–10). It is the woman who must stand ‘behind’ the man (279) and ‘must submit to [his] purpose’ (Fantasia 219), while the man must offer the woman ‘some meaning in his life’ (Lady 276). But what is the source of this explicit sexism that has been well documented in the literature on Lawrence?7 Both open to the feminine and relentlessly sexist, Lawrence celebrates what has been traditionally coded as female: nature, the senses, tenderness, feeling, the body, creativity, and the unconscious. At the same time, he violently suppresses and displaces women as creative. He reduces women to passive receptors of the male ‘seed’ as he excludes them from an active role in engendering life. He forcefully insists they accept a subservient position, while men, like Mellors, are endowed with life-giving powers, and their sexual parts are credited with ‘giving birth’ to life and at the very source it: ‘The woman had to uncover the man again, to look at the mystery of the phallus ... soft like a little bud of life’ (211). The unveiling of modern man thus necessitates, even as it privileges ‘feminine creativity,’ the violent denial of women as subjects.8 This is most evident not only in Lawrence’s appropriation of women’s capacity for giving birth, but in his contempt for the clitoris or for women’s agency. The link between women’s subjectivity or agency and the clitoris is made explicit in Mellors’s vitriolic outbursts against women, like his wife, who ‘want to be the active party’ in sex (202; my emphasis). He complains to Connie that his wife’s ‘beak’ tears at him as she tries to bring herself to climax: ‘Self! self! self! all self! tearing and shouting! They talk about men’s sensuous selfishness, but I doubt if it can ever touch a woman’s blind beakishness, once she has gone that way. Like an old trull! And she couldn’t help it. I told her about it, I told her how I hated it. She’d try and lie still and let me work the business. She’d try. But it was no good. She got no feeling off it, from my working. She had to work the thing herself, grind her own coffee’ (202). What Mellors wants from his wife is passivity and stillness as he acts on her. Her independence infuriates him. Further on in his diatribe, he reveals his violent hate for ‘lesbians,’ and in his view most women fit this defini-

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tion: ‘It’s astonishing how Lesbian women are, consciously or unconsciously. Seems to be that they’re nearly all Lesbian ... I could kill them. When I’m with a woman who’s really Lesbian, I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her’ (203). What is at the source of this hatred? Allowing the terrifying and fascinating force of the ‘feminine’ to escape, Lawrence must also then claim it as male to keep it in his control not only by denying women as lifegivers but by refusing them agency. Lesbians are particularly suspect, and women are ‘nearly all’ lesbians, because they refuse to be defined by male sexuality and thus threaten to disrupt the boundary of masculine/feminine. Explicitly asserting an autonomous identity that functions outside a male–female binary, lesbians drive Mellors to murderous thoughts. While Lawrence refers to his characters’ sexual organs as John Thomas and Lady Jane, the penis and the ‘cunt,’ a term that in itself flattens the varied sexual parts of a woman’s genitals, lesbians insist on a self-sufficiency that refuses to accept the phallus as the ‘little bud of life’ (Lady 211), ‘the king of glory’ (Lady 209), and are unwilling to ‘submit to [his] purpose’ (Fantasia 219). They reject an identity that is defined in terms of a symmetrical sexual relationship, throwing a wrench in Lawrence’s theory and provoking from him an intense hatred. Spivak writes of this historical and theoretical ‘double displacement’ of women that is at once where women’s creative force is co-opted and their agency denied: Male and female sexuality are asymmetrical. Male orgasmic pleasure ‘normally’ entails the male reproductive act – semination. Female orgasmic pleasure (it is not, of course, the ‘same’ pleasure, only called by the same name) does not entail any one component of the heterogeneous female reproductive scenario: ovulation, fertilization, conception, gestation, birthing. The clitoris escapes reproductive framing. In legally defining woman as object of exchange, passage, or possession in terms of reproduction, it is not only the womb that is literally’ appropriated; it is the clitoris as the signifier of the sexed subject that is effaced. All historical and theoretical investigation into the definition of woman as legal object – in or out of marriage; or as politico-economic passageway for property and legitimacy would fall within the investigation of the varieties of the effacement of the clitoris. (Other Worlds 151)

Lawrence’s work exemplifies this investment in the false sexual binary between male and female sexuality. It is women’s connection to the

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darkness, the flux, the chaos, the downward pull to the bowels of the earth that the man must return to each night so his own self can be undone and remade, so that he can venture upward to ‘the sun and the day’s activities.’ Ideally, Lawrence’s man is a hybrid of Clifford and Mellors; the external and the internal combining, facilitated by the woman. For the man the dissolution of the self is a necessary but momentary event. The woman, however, must accept the constancy of her own absence – any self is merely a performance that the man must make her aware of and beat out of her, forcing her to accept their ‘symmetrical’ nature by making her aware that she only comes to life in his light: men are the ‘sons of god’ while women are the ‘daughters of men’ (174). The fear of women then comes back to the very thing Lawrence has simultaneously unleashed and rejected: the fear that at the very creation, the origin, there is perhaps only nothingness – the very thing that both Conrad and Forster in their representations of the jungle in the Congo and the Malabar Caves in India have traumatically explored. If Faulkner refuses to sacrifice women to secure an ending, Lawrence willingly rejects apocalypse and ends while still insisting on the solid ground of sexual difference. His fascination with the ‘feminine’ is limited as he tries to contain within the figure of the woman the sense that there is no foundation on which the world can ultimately rest. He aggressively asserts the solidity, the sun-directed, life-giving energy, of the phallus by turning the woman into an absence, a creature of reflected light – the moon – and insisting on the absolute complimentary and symmetrical relationship of male to female. The distinction keeps the male free from the contamination of the female. He projects his fear of nothingness on to her, even as he appropriates her creative force and the liberation it offers up. Committed to the Christian paradigm of the apocalypse, Kermode writes: ‘If time cannot be felt as successive, [the] end ceases to have effect; without the sense of a passing of time one is virtually ceasing to live, one loses “contact with reality”’ (Sense of an Ending 160). Falling out of time, ignoring its successiveness, we run into the danger of regressing towards myth, he argues (176). Mellors concludes at the end of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: ‘I don’t believe in the world, nor in money, nor in advancement, nor in the future of our civilization. – If there’s got to be a future for humanity, there’ll have to be a very big change’ (277). For Mellors, as for Lawrence, the real vital world is already dead so there is no reality to lose ‘contact with.’ Its revival involves a rejection of pre-

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cisely the thing Kermode wants to hold onto, a ‘sense of an ending.’ While Kermode refers to the problematic ‘substitution of a counterfeit spatial for the temporal mode’ (Sense of an Ending 178), Lawrence reclaims the Apocalypse as pagan and sees in it ‘not the modern process of progressive thought, but the old pagan process of rotary image thought. Every image fulfills its own little circle of action and meaning, then is superseded by another image’ (Apocalypse 52). An ancient spatial Apocalypse is offered as an alternative to the modern temporal Apocalypse, which, in Lawrence’s reading, is the source of the sickness of contemporary man. Trapped in the confines of his personality, isolated and ego-driven, he is unable to connect with humanity let alone the cosmos. Driven by progress, and obsessed with going forward to some conclusion, he is trapped in a mechanistic rational universe. Alternately, the pagan spatial Apocalypse pronounces the unveiling and revelation of the ancient truth of man, which promises to restore life, feeling, vitality, warmth, touch, the body, and sensuality to humanity – what has traditionally been associated with the feminine. Yet this can only take place in Lawrence’s work with the violent suppression of women as sexed subjects and their forced subservience and deference to the male phallus. This simultaneous embrace of the feminine and rejection of women as agents is the source of the many contradictions in his work. In Apocalypse, Lawrence criticizes the Christian era for reducing the pagan ‘woman clothed with the sun,’ the ‘woman of the cosmos,’ to a ‘travesty’ and replacing her with the ‘half-women’ of the modern era (88). Yet he, in turn claiming the sun as masculine, participates in a similar reduction of women. So too Mellors’s sense of ‘integrity as a man’ depends on Connie’s willingness to ‘stand behind’ him (Lady 279; my emphasis); she must play the moon to his sun, absence to his presence. His hatred of lesbians and his ‘wanting to kill’ them further participates in the very thing he condemns in the tone of John the Divine with his ‘grandiose scheme for wiping out and annihilating everybody who wasn’t of the elect, the chosen people, in short, and of climbing up himself right on to the throne of God’ (Apocalypse 9). The unveiling or revelation of the truth of man, in Lawrence, which unleashes the feminine, also provokes a traumatic response to gender that demands the veiling of women. In the next chapter, I will examine how Angela Carter explores the sources of this trauma and the interests at play in men’s veiling and unveiling of women. Carter opens up a space for her heroine’s tale and for female agency without falling back on identity politics.

8 The ‘Fag End’ Again and the New Woman

The ends of centuries or millennia inevitably lead to questions, speculations, and pronouncements about what has ended and what might be beginning. The ultimately arbitrary but culturally weighted boundary of a century or millennium offers the revolutionary and conservative alike a way to measure what has been lost and what might be gained – a chance to ‘project our existential anxieties on to history’ (Kermode, Sense of an Ending 97). The apocalyptic tone that characterizes the ends of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries suggests this desire to unveil the truth of the past or coming age, and, at both moments, this unveiling plays itself out most dramatically on the body and at the boundary of women. At both the fin de siècle and the end of the second millennium, the New Woman and feminists have shared with the Decadent and the poststructuralist, respectively, an interest in freeing the subject from the constraints of such things as rationality, chronology, History, and unified subjectivity as they reintroduce the idea of play, the body, creativity, and multiple and competing histories.1 However, at the end of both centuries, from Nietzsche to Derrida, women as historical, social, and sexual subjects have been effaced and Woman as hypothesis or metaphor or object continues to dominate.2 This persistence of Woman as metaphor perpetuates a universalist approach to criticism, and, despite the theoretical pretense of difference in certain strains of poststructuralism and Decadent writing, women’s difference often operates only as a ruse in a male code.3 While the issue of gender is at the foreground of both the poststructuralist and the Decadent agendas, Teresa de Lauretis argues that the simultaneous persistent denial of the lives of

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women suggests, despite the appearance of a coalition, ‘more subtle attempts to contain this trauma of gender’ (‘Technology of Gender’ 19). In the last chapter, we saw this trauma emerge in Lawrence’s work, which both embraces the feminine and suppresses women as sexed subjects in its attempts to reimagine a role for modern man that is not bound to Enlightenment notions of autonomy and progress, modelled as they are on the Apocalypse. This chapter will consider Angela Carter’s 1984 work Nights at the Circus, which is set at the end of the nineteenth century but also comments on the twentieth. While this novel shares some of Lawrence’s concerns about the restrictive role allocated to modern man, its main focus is the erasure of women as agents that spans the centuries. Given this context, the novel asks how the heroine might come to tell her story. Why is it that Fevvers, Carter’s circus performer, is so vehemently resisted and suppressed, and what is at stake in the telling of her tale? Fevvers is clearly located in the liminal state between a woman as a historical and social agent and Woman as object. While she is heralded as ‘“the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground”’ (25), she also serves her ‘apprenticeship in being looked at – at being the object of the eye of the beholder’ (23). Trapped in the gaze of the beholder, Fevvers has to figure an escape route. At the end of the nineteenth century, the New Woman, disrupting the social order, mocking the marriage contract that sealed her fate in a private world, and rending the veil of modesty and chastity that had ‘protected’ the Victorian Angel, breaks out onto a public stage. Elizabeth Lynn Linton, in one of her many articles attacking the New Woman and her disruptive politics, mourns the loss of this ‘veil’ of modesty. In 1891, she writes: ‘Aggressive, disturbing, officious, unquiet, rebellious to authority and tyrannous to those whom they can subdue, we may say emphatically that they are the most unlovely specimens the sex has yet produced, and between the “purdah-woman” and the modern homasses we, for our own parts, prefer the former ... At least she has not forgotten the traditions of modesty as she has been taught them’ (604). Preferring the veiled and sequestered ‘purdah-woman,’ Linton vehemently opposes the modern woman’s emergence in public. At the same time as the New Woman rends the veil, claiming agency and parading in public, women’s bodies are increasingly subject to an unveiling. At the fin de siècle, when the world has largely been ‘discovered’ and there are no ‘new’ worlds to explore, the private world of

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woman remains an exotic and curious enigma and invites examination by science, medicine, and reason, the very ordered discourses that have produced her as disordered.4 Noting that the veiled and thus the unveiled male body has no cultural currency, Elaine Showalter details the various works concerned with the unveiling of women’s bodies at the fin de siècle, from Oscar Wilde’s Salome to Gustave Courbet’s painting of the female genitals, L’origine du monde (1866), to Louis Ernest Barrias’s 1895 statue depicting a woman disrobing, La Nature se dévoilant devant la Science (Nature Unveiling Herself before Science), to Freud’s essay on the gaze of the Medusa as analogous to exposed female sexual organs (144). The proliferation of images of the female in various states of undress during the mid- to late nineteenth century also marks it as the era of the ‘institutionalization’ of the female nude.5 Why does the female body emerge as this object of interest and scrutiny at the very moment she is vocal about claiming an agency? In other words, in what sense are these two acts – the liberation of the New Woman as sexed subject and the unveiling of women’s bodies – related? If the fin de siècle derives its apocalyptic tone from this double unveiling, what is liberated and who benefits? Who is behind the cast-off veils? Earlier in the century, Eugène Delacroix painted his famous and frequently reproduced Liberty on the Barricades, which depicts the events of 25 July 1830, when the spontaneous uprising of workers and students in Paris culminated, in a matter of days, in the overthrow of Charles X’s monarchy. A woman wearing a dress that has fallen around her waist leaving her breasts exposed poses as the figure of Liberty. Bare-chested, she steps over dead men and leads an armed populace. Unlike the idealized classical nude, Liberty in this painting is a ‘real’ woman, some have suggested a prostitute, with her clothes in disarray, hair under her arms, and dirt on her face. Yet, as I have argued in the chapter on Rushdie, there is a long tradition of harnessing the energy of women in revolutionary or nationalist struggles, while there has rarely been any concerted effort to incorporate her, radically and fundamentally, as gendered into the state. In Delacroix’s painting, there is, similarly, a tension between Liberty figured as a woman of the people struggling for freedom and Liberty as a sexualized woman wielding a musket in a public space. Marcia Pointon has explained, in her reading of this painting, that the erotically splayed man in the forefront of the picture – with the delicate features, an exposed nipple, one sock, and visible pubic hair (but absent penis) – suggests ‘the déshabillé of the boudoir as much as the spoliation of the battle-ground’ (76). Read in this context

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and underscoring the anxiety about women as sexed subjects in public, the woman with thrusting breasts, armed and carrying the tricolour, wading through the pile of dead (possibly castrated) men suggests a traumatic figure that is somewhat at odds with the more popular reading of this painting as the ‘common’ woman leading the (male) populace to liberty.6 Exposing this anxiety, Fevvers, the fin-de-siècle heroine of Carter’s novel, in one of her many roles, plays ‘Victory with Wings’ in a whorehouse. But as trade falls off, she comes to realize that ‘“a large woman with a sword is not the best advertisement for a brothel,”’ for when the young men’s eyes fell upon the sword ‘“Louisa or Emily would have the devil’s own job with them, thereafter”’ (38). As all the women in the brothel work as prostitutes out of economic necessity, Fevvers can only attribute the behaviour of the prospective clients to the influence of Baudelaire, ‘“who loved whores not for the pleasure of it but, as he perceived it, the horror of it,”’ convinced as he was that women worked in the profession ‘“solely to lure men to their dooms, as if we’d got nothing better to do”’ (38). The anxious reaction of the men to the figure of Liberty inside the brothel of committed suffragists suggests that the unveiling of the female body and female liberation co-exist in, at the very least, an uneasy relation. While, from a societal perspective, the nineteenth-century brothel is a place of unlicensed sexual freedom, Lizzie (Fevvers’s foster-mother) also suggests that the brothel is where the bird is caged. Within the brothel walls, a woman’s body is produced, outside her control, as an object of fascination and horror. The gulf between the liberation of women as sexed and desiring subjects and the unveiling of women’s bodies as objects of male desire complicates the apocalyptic dreams of the fin de siècle. In the words of Edith Lees, a nineteenth-century critic, ‘This was either the end of the world or the beginning of a new world for women ... Was it revelation or disaster?’ (qtd in Showalter vii). The fin de siècle was dominated by apocalyptic pronouncements about women who were disrupting the Victorian social order; they were another version of Eve leading men to a second fall and were charged with destroying civilization. In a pamphlet circulating in San Francisco around 1895 entitled Humanity’s Wrong alias Woman’s Rights, the author writes: ‘Are you ready to see your race perish from the earth, and strangers take your place, or are you desirous of seeing this AngloSaxon race of yours still lead the march of civilization? If so let us vote to bury this woman suffrage down deep in the depths of hell, from

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whence it sprung’ (Fitch 33). The liberated, pipe-smoking, sexually provocative, public New Woman, protesting the confines of her private prison, threatened to open up the borders of ‘civilization’ to all foreigners. In disrupting the paternal hierarchy, the Darwinian order, she was accused of weakening the social fabric sufficiently to allow for the invasion of the stranger – the racial other, the working class, the homosexual – destroying the ‘Anglo-Saxon race.’ She was accused of befriending degenerate and decadent men, of emasculating the country, of turning away from the refined and civilized manners of the upper classes and of sympathizing with and mimicking the manners of the working class.7 To ensure that civilization marched in one harmonious direction (with premonitions of the goosestep), she had to be pushed back into the private, silent world of the Victorian Angel, a world that had been built for her at the end of the previous century. As the New Woman breaks out into the public, she confuses the order of public and private and of reason and passion, and those who opposed the conservatives of the day welcomed her escape; hence, alliances were forged between the New Woman and the Decadent. However, despite the extraordinary amount of controversy the New Woman provoked, and despite the fact that her novels and short stories met with great success (in terms of sales) and fuelled the debates concerning the direction of civilization, most of the canonical fin-de-siècle writers are men.8 The New Woman and the Decadent challenged issues around class, race, and gender, questioned the model of progress, broke from the constraints of realism and naturalism, and violated the laws of nature. Noting these similarities in their work, Linda Dowling has argued that in the minds of most late Victorians, ‘the decadent was new and the New Woman decadent’ (436). Yet it is probably more accurate to say that the prevalent perception was and is that the Decadent was new and the New Woman was fathered by the Decadent. Not only are the works of the New Woman ignored, but men, such as Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw, have been credited or charged (depending on the slant of the critic) with her very creation. Max Nordau, author of Degeneration (1892), warns women, who, he contends, need the protection of marriage far more than men, that Ibsen is not their friend. He condemns Ibsen’s plays for their unrealistic depiction of women who happily break the bonds of marriage in search of liberty (412). Nordau insists that although a man might benefit from abandoning his marital duties, women, as weak and dependent creatures, could never themselves desire this freedom. This New Woman is nothing

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more than the invention of the playwright, and Nordau advises women to reject Ibsen and thus ‘abandon a company which can never be their own’ (415). While Woman was an increasingly obsessive subject for the Victorian male artist, many before Virginia Woolf noted ‘the peculiar nature of woman in fiction; the astonishing extremes of her beauty and horror; her alternations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity – for so a lover would see her as his love rose or sank, was prosperous or unhappy’ (A Room 79). In a short story by George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne), ‘A Cross Line’ (1893), the heroine ‘laughs softly to herself because the denseness of man, his chivalrous conservative devotion to the female idea he has created blinds him, perhaps happily, to the problems of her complex nature’ (59). Yet, as the New Woman is trying to articulate herself as historical agent, the ‘institutionalized’ unveiling of women’s bodies seems to patrol her escape rather than parallel her liberation. Referring to the tradition of the nameless or generic female nude that flourished at the end of the nineteenth century, Angela Carter writes: ‘It is a central contradiction of European art that its celebration of the human form should involve subsuming the particularities of its subjects in the depersonalizing idea of the nude, rendering her – in the name of humanism – an object’ (‘A Well-Hung Hang Up’ 103). Commenting on the tensions in Rodin’s sculptures, John Berger has argued that the latter half of the nineteenth century was characterized by the conflicting drives evidenced in Rodin’s art – on the one hand ‘strong sexual desire’ and on the other ‘the fear of women escaping (as property) and the constant need to control them’ (184). In Berger’s description of this tension, however, there is already a (re)writing of the nineteenth century that defines it as the era of male desire. Woman’s rending of the veil of ‘modesty’ and chastity – her unveiling as historical subject – has been displaced utterly by the unveiling of her body – her unveiling as object. The emphasis on the nude or woman as fetishistic object of the male gaze has dominated discussions of the nineteenth century, evidenced for example in Peter Brooks’s Body Work: Objects of Desire and in Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture, while relatively little attention has been paid to the works by the New Woman.9 Writings that engage with the complexities of female experience have often been dismissed as a hold-over of essentialism or interpreted, reductively, in a critical climate that assumes that the fin de siècle is defined by male desire, thus foreclosing

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any discussion about how the New Woman’s writings might challenge the established conventions and canon of modernism.10 The theme of displacing women and then professing mastery over Woman plays itself out in the myth of Pygmalion, which was very popular with turn-of-the-century artists.11 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pygmalion, disgusted with the public women in the market, prostitutes ‘who had lost all their sense of shame,’12 and repelled ‘by the many vices that nature had implanted in the feminine mind,’ creates a statue of a woman ‘lovelier than any woman born’ (231). Passionately attracted to his creation, Pygmalion caresses, dresses, undresses, and sleeps with his statue. At a festival in honour of Venus, he prays for a wife and returns home to discover that his ‘ivory maiden’ has come to life. Peter Brooks reads this myth as ‘the story of life, of enlivening, where the object of desire is both created according to one’s wants and also other, a legitimate object of desire ... It is the story of how the body can be known, animated, and possessed by the artist of desire, and of how the body marked, imprinted, by desire can enter narrative’ (24). However, it is not clear in what sense this object of desire is ‘also other’ except as other than woman. While the statue in Ovid’s version is imagined ‘as more lovely than any woman born,’ as more than woman or more to the point not woman, women born of women are derided, irreparably marred by their ‘feminine nature.’ The ‘ivory maiden’ whom Pygmalion loves and creates in his bachelor pad, outside of the world of women, is not woman ‘as other’ but woman born of his mind. Woman as other has been effaced in this ‘perfect realization of desire’ that culminates in marriage. Part of the New Woman’s platform was to challenge the idea of woman as born of man’s mind and to displace the abstracted object with an embodied subject. For instance, Laura Marholm Hansson, in a review of the work of six women artists and writers in 1896, writes of their representations of women: ‘They are no longer a reflection which man moulds into an empty form[;] they are not like Galatea, who became a living woman through Pygmalion’s kiss – they were women before they knew Pygmalion’ (70, 72). Why does this displacement of women come about, given the shared interests of feminists and poststructuralists and the New Woman and the Decadent? John McGowan, in an essay that explicates some of the similarities between fin-de-siècle thinking and postmodernism, argues that Oscar Wilde, echoing contemporary concerns about the subject, ‘was torn from the start between a belief that the

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self is a fiction that can be reinvented in each successive moment and more traditional notions of destiny and identity that were grounded on a belief in an essential character or soul possessed by each individual’ (426). Women in Wilde’s work, however, are not torn by the same dilemma as they have no essential self; nor are they capable of creating fictional selves. As Lord Henry insists in The Picture of Dorian Gray, women are ‘charmingly artificial but they have no sense of art’ (115). Dorian falls madly in love with the actress Sibyl Vane, who performs parts that have been carefully scripted for her (Imogen, Juliet, Ophelia). But when she strays from these parts Dorian rejects her, exclaiming: ‘“You are shallow and stupid ... Without your art you are nothing”’ (99, 100). After the news of Sybil’s death, Lord Henry comforts Dorian and convinces him that the parts Sybil played were much more real than she; there is no need to mourn her, Henry tells Dorian, because ‘the girl never really lived, and so she has never really died’ (117). Nietzsche, in a similar gesture, values women only as performers: ‘Reflect on the whole history of women: do they not have to be first of all and above all else actresses?’ (The Gay Science 317); ‘her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty’ (Beyond Good and Evil 163). Derrida, concurring with Nietzsche, writes in Spurs: ‘Feminism is nothing but the operation of a woman who aspires to be like a man’ (64).13 Woman, capable of performing only performances that have already been written by men, cannot herself write or effect the script. Commenting on this ‘displacement’ of woman, Gayatri Spivak reads the male philosopher’s obsession with woman’s performance ‘within the historical understanding of women as incapable of orgasm.’ Even at the moment of ‘the greatest self-possession-cum-ecstasy, the woman is self-possessed enough to organize a self-(re)presentation without an actual presence (of sexual pleasure) to re-present’ (Spivak, ‘Displacement’ 170). Having no self to lose, she nevertheless simulates loss to enhance the man’s enjoyment. This effacement of the clitoris, of women’s capacity for orgasm, is the effacement of the ‘sexed subject,’ which in turn ensures the use of woman within the binary logic of reproduction that I argued in the last chapter is evident in Lawrence’s work. Nights at the Circus both investigates this displacement, playing with the prevalent understanding of women as metaphor, and asks how its heroine might come to claim some agency. During her early years in the brothel, Fevvers explains, ‘“I existed only as an object in men’s eyes”’ (39). Following her brothel days, she takes up a full-fledged career as the object of the male gaze as she moves into the ‘museum of woman mon-

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sters’ run by Madame Schreck and then into the circus, as a birdwoman, where she perfects her role and performs with a smile that says ‘Look at me! With a grand, proud, ironic grace, she exhibited herself before the eyes of the audience as if she were a marvellous present too good to be played with ... Look! Hands off! LOOK AT ME!’ (15). From the brothel to the circus, Fevvers as Woman lives in the bounded spaces of a freak, cut off from the world of the normal viewing public. She traffics herself, from her gilded cage, as a fascinating object and draws the world’s attention, as Post-Impressionists vie to paint her and photographs and posters of her abound. Walser, who wants to write Fevvers’s story, adopts her as the object of his gaze. He is impelled by the exotic dynamic of unveiling Fevvers both as a sexual body and as the body in his story. As a reporter, he is trained in fact collecting, and while he is intrigued with her act, he resolutely discounts Fevvers’s performance as the ‘impossible squared.’ He sets out to ‘puff’ her, to expose the truth, to solve the mystery of whether she is ‘Fact or Fiction,’ of whether or not she has (as she claims she has been hatched) a bellybutton. The mystery that Fevvers performs has a logic that works within or in conjunction with Walser’s logic: ‘Do not think the revelation she is a hoax will finish her on the halls; far from it. If she isn’t suspect, where’s the controversy? What’s the news?’ (11). Just as the figure of Woman exists not outside but within the discourse of man (and the freak constructs the normal, the object constructs the subject), so is Fevvers as a mysterious body necessary to the world of fact, observation, and science. Woman must be available to man. He must be able to locate or control her through identification and naming. For the social order to be maintained, her tantalizing performance must end in her capture. Walser’s desire to unveil Fevvers is thus a desire to limit her, to bound her, to restrict her flight, and to expose her. Her capture is critical to his desire to be free of limits; even as a lad he eyed ‘the tangled sails upon the water until at last he, too, went off with the tide towards an endless promise’ (10). As he pursues the truth of Fevvers, he never has to turn the gaze on himself and reflect on his own bounded subject position, for ‘it was not his self which he sought.’ He sets out with his disembodied eye – ‘seeing’ is ‘believing’ (17) – to decipher her performance, holding her accountable to the laws of reason. Like Descartes’s ‘I think therefore I am,’ Walser effaces the body in his equation, so that sight is not an imperfect or qualified means to knowledge but is knowledge. As a voyeur, he never feels fear and never experiences experience, since he is habitually ‘disengaged,’ ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with conscious-

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ness’ (10). He has suppressed his senses and survives because he has made his body into an armour that is invulnerable to ‘cataclysmic shocks,’ shocks that rattle his bones only enough that he knows he is alive (10). Like Clifford in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who looks at life as if he were ‘looking down a microscope, or up a telescope,’ Walser watches with his disembodied, technological eye and subjects his armoured body to disaster – plague, rape, war – and survives. Yet Walser, slowly seduced by Fevvers and convulsed by ‘seismic erotic disturbances,’ gets disoriented by her performance. Fevvers, throughout the narrative, is in the thick of the liberation of society’s others from their bounded worlds – the whores from the whorehouse, the female freaks from the museum, the circus performers from the ring. She unleashes the carnival on the world, disrupting established orders, leaving an apocalyptic trail in her wake: ‘Everywhere she went, rivers parted for her, wars were threatened, suns eclipsed, showers of frogs and footwear were reported in the press’ (11). She ‘has all the éclat of a new era about to take off,’ and Walser is at first dead set on re-establishing societal order by capturing and controlling her in his narrative. Yet, like Derrida and Nietzsche,14 intrigued by veils and boundaries and the limitless play of difference, he abandons the chase, taking pleasure in his own dissimulation: ‘Walser felt the strangest sensation, as if these eyes of the aerialiste were a pair of sets of Chinese boxes, as if each one opened into a world into a world into a world, an infinite plurality of worlds, and these unguessable depths exercised the strongest possible attraction, so that he felt himself trembling as if he, too, stood on an unknown threshold’ (30). The release of the figure of Woman initiates man’s dilemma over truth and appearance, essence and performance. Man, like Buffo the clown, must wrestle with the myth of his own self-creation. Buffo is left to ponder these questions: ‘“Am I this Buffo whom I have created? Or did I, when I made up my face to look like Buffo’s, create, ex nihilo, another self who is not me? And what am I without my Buffo’s face? Why, nobody at all. Take away my make-up and underneath is merely not Buffo. An absence. A vacancy”’ (122). But this dissimulation, although an important moment of understanding, is still his story. Having gained some insight into the myth of his disembodied self, Walser (like Lawrence and his problematic view of women; his denial of their agency) is incapable of understanding Fevvers. At what point might Walser be able to hear Fevvers’s story? When might he attempt to engage with woman as other? Walser must come to understand the

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why of his self-creation. He must come to understand his own performance as a Man. As Man is preoccupied with giving birth to himself ex nihilo as a rational, omnipotent, autonomous creation, in the style of Fukuyama’s Last Man, he covers over his sense-driven penis with a sheath made of phallic armour, so that, like Walser and Clifford, he is invulnerable to cataclysmic shocks. He is a ‘kaleidoscope’ or ‘telescope’ or ‘microscope’ that observes but cannot feel. Susan Buck-Morss writes: ‘Curiously, it is precisely in this castrated form that the being is gendered male – as if, having nothing so embarrassingly unpredictable or rationally uncontrollable as the sense-sensitive penis, it can then confidently claim to be the phallus. Such an asensual, anaesthetic protuberance is this artifact: modern man’ (8). When Ham walks into the tent and sees his father Noah drunk and naked, he is cursed not because he has seen the power of the phallus as some have suggested,15 but because he has seen the phallus as a mere sheath covering the irrational penis. He has seen Noah, the leader of the ark, drunk and out of control. The autogenic modern man, ‘doing one better than Virgin birth’ (Buck-Morss 7), deflects attention from his own fantastical creation by displacing the secret of life and death onto the figure of Woman, which he is then at liberty to explore from a safe distance. He rejects anything that might derail his project – the body, unreason, sensuality, sexuality; the varied but static figure of Woman becomes the container for all that is excised and women are in turn contained in a private world. She is an object, occulted in order to be revealed, continually open to reinvention in accordance with the desiring (male) subject – she is alternately Life and Death, Nature and Artifice, Virgin and Whore, Angel and Animal, Truth and Deceit. The private, silent, secret Woman can be uncovered, revealed, exposed, unveiled; she is the site of infinite exploration by sight, the Enlightenment’s technology of choice. Nights at the Circus is populated by these Monstrous Women and Warrior Men. Mr Rosencreutz, a regular customer of Madame Schreck’s museum of female freaks and a member of parliament, buys for a large sum of money the services of Fevvers, a woman with many roles, but, who, at the time of the purchase, is playing the Angel of Death. Mr Rosencreutz, who is violently opposed to votes for women on account of their absolute difference from men, sets out to cheat death and discover the secret of eternal life by sacrificing Fevvers in an attempt to reconcile those very opposites he is so violently insistent about. Reminiscent of Lawrence’s description of women and their ‘downward pull’

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and men and their affinity with the sun, Mr Rosencreutz explains to Fevvers that the female sex is an ‘“absence, or atrocious hole, or dreadful chasm, the Abyss, Down Below, the vortex that sucks everything dreadfully down, down, down where Terror rules”’ (77). Fevvers thus comes to understand the inscription on the gold medallion that Mr Rosencreutz wears around his neck: ‘The penis, represented by itself, aspires upwards, represented by the wings, but is dragged downwards, represented by the twining stem, by the female part, represented by the rose’ (77). But if Fevvers has a hard time recognizing herself or her orifice as the ‘abyss,’ she is, nevertheless, forever seduced by profit, willing to play the game: ‘“You may take me exclusively by the rear entry, oh, great sage, due to my feathers!” I warned him hastily, though I question in my mind his dislike of the orifice, and, even then, as in a flash of understanding, it comes to me that his idea of sex-magic and my own might not concur’ (82). She is also aware, although the point seems lost on Rosencreutz, of the huge gap between the winged phallus inscribed on the gold medallion and the ‘poor thing, that bobbed about uncharged, unprimed, unsharpened’ inside his robe. Mr Rosencreutz’s real power is not the ‘poor thing’ but the shiny blade that also hangs down along his ‘gnarled old thigh’ with which he intends to kill Fevvers. Fortunately, Fevvers, playing out the fantasy of a Woman hatched in a male mind, is well prepared. Like Athena, the warrior virgin born from the head of Zeus, Fevvers has her own gilded sword. When the New Woman enters the public scene, her very performance suggests she is not identical to the role of Woman she performs.16 Fevvers, playing the part of object, is already different from Galatea in that she is conscious of the role she has taken on. In the whorehouse, Fevvers offers her own take on life as a statue: ‘I was as if closed up in a shell, for the wet white would harden on my face and torso like a death mask that covered me all over, yet, inside this appearance of marble, nothing could have been more vibrant with potentiality than I! Sealed in this artificial egg, this sarcophagus of beauty, I waited, I waited ... although I could not have told you for what it was I waited. Except, I assure you, I did not await the kiss of a magic prince, sir! With my two eyes, I nightly saw how such a kiss would seal me up in my appearance for ever!’ (39)

In Fevvers’s version of Pygmalion, Pygmalion’s kiss is, for Galatea, the

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kiss of death not life. The kiss of the prince would tie Fevvers to the logic of a male–female binary and would efface her mark of singularity. The ‘I,’ the sexed subject, is, as Spivak has argued, marked by the clitoris. Fevvers’s wings, the appendages that Walser finds alluring but which he cannot comprehend or ‘know,’ stand in for this mark of difference. Fevvers does not, however, naively assume that she can capture or expose this ‘I’ in narrative. She speaks of her own life in chapters (50), borrows liberally from the ‘masters’ (Swift, Shakespeare, Yeats), and never misses a beat (56), drawing attention as much to the greatness of her own performance as to the facts of her life. But there is never any doubt that her performance is motivated by the vibrant ‘I’ behind the mask. Yet, at the end of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the suggestion by women that women are more than the sum of their masquerade is vehemently discounted and, at times, met with violent accusations.17 Her public appearance causes anxiety among conservatives (those who want to maintain the social order) and progressives (those who want to disband the social codes determined by this hierarchical order) alike. For the conservative, she is the return of what he has repressed and what he needs to repress in order for society to remain ordered.18 For the progressive, who looks forward to the disruption of societal order, she represents the return of sexuality, passion, and unreason. But despite their very different interests, both the progressive and the conservative (in Europe and America) charge women who stray from the role of Woman with being a ‘man.’19 Walser, following suit, accuses Fevvers of being a man. Trying to decipher Fevvers’s performance, he briefly entertains the idea that Fevvers might be a genuine bird-woman, who, in order to make a living, has to pretend she is artificial. If Fevvers’s wings, her mark of singularity, signify her clitoris and mark her as a sexed subject that cannot be recuperated by the male– female binary, Walser briefly glimpses Fevvers as a woman (17). But quickly dismissing this possibility that she might be a ‘genuine’ woman, he speculates, several pages later, that it is more plausible that there is a man behind her performance (35). But why this violent denial of women as anything other than metaphor? In Freudian theory, fetishistic desire in the man arises from the woman’s supposed castration. The fetish ‘remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it. It also saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual objects’ (Freud,

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‘Fetishism’ 21: 154). Traumatized by his early discovery that the mother lacks a penis, the fetishist tries to compensate for the lack. He desires objects on the woman that stand in for or cover over her lack. Hair, shoes, lingerie, furs, and velvet act as imaginary substitutes for the lost and longed-for penis. Yet, aside from the generally phallocentric structure of society, there is no logical reason why a boy would see his mother’s different sexual organs as absent. However, in light of man’s self and societal creation as armoured, we can come to understand a slightly modified version of Freud’s theory of the fetish. The obsession with Woman as object or metaphor or symbol at the fin de siècle and at this end of the millennium mimics fetishistic desire. Woman as object stands in for the lost penis, but the castration is self-inflicted. It is not, as Freud argued, the ‘castrated’ woman that produces anxiety and longing, but Modern Man who, donning a hard phallic sheath, finds himself castrated. Man subsequently longs for his sense-driven penis, which he has displaced onto the figure of Woman. Des Esseintes, the hero of J.-K. Huysmans’s Against Nature, reflects, in his fascination with Salome, the obsession with Woman as fetishistic object at the fin de siècle. He is particularly taken with Gustave Moreau’s figure of Salome because she rouses the ‘sleeping sense of the male.’ He muses on this watercolour: ‘Here was a true harlot, obedient to her passionate and cruel female temperament; here she came to life, more refined yet more savage, more hateful yet more exquisite than before; here she roused the sleeping senses of the male more powerfully, subjugated his will more surely with her charms’ (68). Here, the fetishized Woman allows man the opportunity to reconnect with the senses that he has suppressed in his auto-creation. Taking into consideration the rereading of the castration complex and the fetish, we can begin to understand why women are effaced and the symbol of Woman is privileged. Both the conservative and the progressive have a vested interest in insisting that women are identical to Woman. Underlying the aggressive attack on women who stray from the part is men’s fear that Woman is also a suppressed figure of man, a figure that, only when suppressed, enables his performance as Man. He vigilantly denies this performance because of anxiety, his inability to ‘fake’ an orgasm. The figure of Woman is instrumental in securing man as a rational being and alternately is embraced as proof of his unreason. But this figure of Woman, both her confinement and her release, largely serves the interests of Man, who effaces the clitoris and is adamant that woman and man exist in a symmetrical and reproductive relationship.

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A question remains: Why might women as sexed subjects – not motivated by anxiety around performance, not concerned with paternity and the passing of the name from father to son, not able to cover the unreason of her body, unable to shut away the womb and imagine an autonomous birth – perform the role of Woman? Freud argues that whereas men engage in a transference of an original childhood narcissism to a sexual object, women invest narcissistically in themselves. This ‘self-containment’ of women compensates for the ‘social restrictions that are imposed upon them’ (‘On Narcissism’ 14: 88). A woman’s need does not manifest itself in loving but in being loved. She does not seek a love-object but turns herself into a love-object. Thus, according to Freud, ‘normal’ women accept their subordinate position, their ‘castration,’ and transform themselves into phallic objects in order to attract the male. The masquerading woman, donning make-up and veils, preening and pampering her body, seeking compliments and adoration, offsets her genital lack by investing narcissistically in her body. The masquerading woman, disguising her deficiency, can, through her narcissistic investment and phallicization of her body, gain access to the phallic. Adorned with the accoutrements of the masquerade – diamonds, sequins, pots of rouge, and furs, batting her eyelashes and dependent on the admiration of an audience to keep her trim – Fevvers seems to exemplify the Freudian theory of feminine narcissism. For money or pleasure Fevvers is always willing to play at exchanging herself, but, as she learns with the Grand Duke, it is a dangerous game. Hoping to entrap his bird, the Grand Duke, plying her with diamonds, invites Fevvers to join him for dinner. When it dawns on Fevvers that she is meant to fill the as-yet empty gold cage in the Duke’s palace, she, unwilling to contemplate ‘life as a toy,’ abandons her diamonds and makes a hasty exit. In the struggle she loses ‘her magic sword,’ the symbol of her phallic power, and things start to get progressively worse for her. Fevvers ends up lost in Siberia, and, battling brown hair roots and short on peroxide, she starts to look less like a ‘tropic bird’ and more like a ‘London sparrow’ (271). ‘Freed from the confines of her corset, her once-startling shape sagged, as if the sand were seeping out of the hour-glass’ (276). But it is not in the end her sword, her access to phallic power, that motivates her performance. Fevvers seems to perform, not out of an acceptance of her inherent lack, but, contrary to Freudian theory, in order to protect herself from loss. It is Fevvers’s performance which saves her from dissolving into a metaphor or idea under the domineering gaze of the Shaman: ‘Fevvers felt

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that shivering sensation which always visited her when mages, wizards, impresarios came to take away her singularity as though it were their own invention, as though they believed she depended on their imaginations in order to be herself. She felt herself turning, willy-nilly, from a woman into an idea’ (289). Struggling against this male gaze, ‘she felt her outlines waver; she felt herself trapped forever in the reflection in Walser’s eyes. For one moment, just one moment, Fevvers suffered the worst crisis of her life: ‘“Am I fact? Or am I fiction?”’ (290). On Lizzie’s advice she shows them her feathers, her mark of difference, and recovers her sense of presence despite the tremendous resistance to it, confident that she ‘would be the blonde of blondes, again, just as soon as she found peroxide ... and, meanwhile, who cared!’ (290). The admiration of the crowd, gathered in the doorway of the hut, ‘restored her soul.’ Freud’s theory of castration, already presuming the superiority of the male, never really addresses the question of why the young girl, noting the difference of male genitals, would assume she is lacking. As Charles Bernheimer suggests, the logic of Freudian theory breaks down on the question of motive: ‘It is not clear just what narcissistic reward she obtains through her swift and unquestioning assumption of her inferiority. As I see it, the reward is entirely theoretical: by accepting the ontological truth of her lack, the girl becomes the perfect object of male fetishism. She collaborates in transposing the seen, her own difference, into a theoretical framework that defines the seeable’ (82). Fevvers’s larger-than-life performance does seem to compensate for some sort of loss as she, at six-foot-two with a face as ‘broad and oval as a meat dish,’ works hard to make an impression of presence: ‘It was impossible to imagine any gesture of hers that did not have that kind of grand, vulgar, careless generosity about it; there was enough of her to go around, and some to spare’ (12). It is not her lack of penis that is at issue but the general disavowal by society of women as sexed subjects.20 When Lizzie suggests that her pursuit of Walser can only end in marriage, Fevvers protests, ‘the essence of myself may not be given or taken, or what would there be left of me?’ (281). Understanding marriage as ‘legally defining woman as object of exchange, passage, or possession in terms of reproduction’ and the appropriation of the womb, which in turn enacts the effacement of the clitoris as the ‘signifier of the sexed subject’ (Spivak, In Other Worlds 151), Lizzie, ‘with mournful satisfaction,’ responds, ‘“Precisely.”’ The theory of lesbian desire that Teresa de Lauretis puts forth offers a

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thoughtful analysis of women’s possible response to this social effacement and is also useful for thinking through women’s performances in a heterosexual context. She writes: ‘The instinctual investment represented by the fetish is an investment not in the mother (negative Oedipus) or in the father/father’s child (positive Oedipus), but in the female body itself, ultimately in the subject’s own body-image and body-ego, whose loss or lack it serves to disavow’ (Practice of Love 289). Unlike Walser, who, disembodied, watches catastrophe but never feels its effects, Mignon (another member of the circus troupe) suffers catastrophe. Mignon lives the disavowal of women in a phallic society. She is orphaned when her father murders her mother and then kills himself; she is raped by many men and beaten by her spouse; she exists for men only as the ‘the cause of discord between men.’ ‘She had the febrile gaiety of a being without a past, without a present, yet she existed thus, without memory or history, only because her past was too bleak to think of and her future too terrible to contemplate; she was the broken blossom of the present tense’ (139). Picked up by a con artist who entraps desperate and grieving relatives, Mignon enacts the return of the recently departed. The very devastation and loss experienced by Mignon make her ideally suited to play the generic ghost of deceased girls. But when she sees a picture of herself playing the ghost of a dead girl, her own grief is triggered by the memory of her mother’s face. In this case, mourning the loss of the mother is not, as Freud has argued, triggered by her supposed castration, by her missing penis; rather, it is the mourning for the female as disavowed in society. When Walser asks Fevvers at the end of the novel why she has tried so hard to convince him that she is the ‘“only fully-feathered intacta in the history of the world?”’ he is finally ready to understand her story. He is beginning to comprehend that her performance is not motivated by her resignation to a phallic norm, to her castration and subsequent acceptance of her self as the phallic object. He comes to understand her as a desiring subject seeking to repair the damage of a metaphorical castration, the disavowal of the clitoris. She masquerades as ‘intacta’ as a way of resisting the violation imposed on her by the phallus. Her mysterious birth, hatched from an egg and without a navel, challenges the erasure of women as sexed subjects that occurs in the reproductive model. Leda, raped by Zeus, who appears to her as a swan, gives birth to Helen, the fetishized object fought over by armed men. In one very popular version of the myth, invented by the seventh-century poet

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Stesichorus, Helen as a desiring subject is so thoroughly effaced that it is merely her image, a phantom, that accompanies Paris to Troy. Fevvers, who claims a similar swan lineage, resists her erasure, and refusing to surrender passively to the violence of the phallus, she parades her difference triumphantly. Walser, entranced with the feathers, asks in a ‘rhapsodic rush’: ‘“What is your name? Have you a soul? Can you love?”’ (291). After experiencing the frustrating limits of life as a symbol in the Shaman’s reductive theory of the universe, where the Shaman insists that Walser is nothing more than a part of his dream, Walser is ready to accept the limits of his knowledge and to consider Fevvers as more than a metaphor or object. Walser, transformed by ‘a combination of a blow on the head and a sharp spasm of erotic ecstasy,’ admits to his own performance, which in turn enables him to acknowledge Fevvers as a desiring subject. Finally, at the end of the novel, he is ready to ‘start the interview.’ Brooks reads the myth of Narcissus, about a boy who gazes into a pool and desires the impossible, as a ‘sterile’ story about the ‘desire of death’ in opposition to the story of Pygmalion, a story about ‘life’ (24). But perhaps it is Pygmalion, who believes he knows his object and hence perfectly realizes his desire, who is trapped, like the Shaman, by a more deadening story. As Linda Hutcheon has argued, ‘far from sharing the fate of a drowned or dead Narcissus, covertly self-reflective narrative often presents the story of its own coming to life, its own creative processes’ (86). Although narrative can never capture the real, can never really absolutely draw the border between fact and fiction, nor expose the truth of being, forever qualifying the Apocalypse – the promise of an unveiling and the merging of world and word – it can reflect on its own desire to be. As the new century passes unmarked by Walser and Fevvers, the unveiling of the performance is already doubled, causing us to consider the imprinting of history from different locations. Angela Carter writes of her angel: ‘How inconvenient to have wings, and by extension, how very, very difficult to be born so out of key with the world’ (Katsavos 13). Stuck in a material world, where things like gravity and body size hinder her apocalyptic flight, Fevvers, nevertheless, can, through her performance, ‘change the rules and make a new game’ (13), loosening the fetters that bind her to someone else’s game. As we have seen, Lawrence questions the apocalyptic model of self that secures the narrative of Modern Man, with its obsessive focus on progress and ends and its insistence on pitting self against other, a model that produces its own catastrophic event – the Great War. He fur-

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ther suggests that what has traditionally been coded as feminine – the body, nature, the irrational, touch, creativity, sexuality – must be recovered if society is to be healed. But if on the one hand he embraces the feminine, he is also traumatized by women as agents and violently insists on their dependence on men, claiming the phallus as the creative (and procreative) power. Carter shares Lawrence’s critique of Modern Man – armoured and impervious as he is to cataclysmic shocks – but she also wants to investigate the traumatic response to gender that spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her unveiling of women as differently sexed subjects (as opposed to castrated men) challenges the assertion of a phallic origin and exposes man’s performance. Women as irreducibly different, giving birth to the temporal and mortal, and refusing the symmetry of male/female, have consistently, as I have argued, interrupted apocalyptic narratives that, in wanting to make claims to the origin and end, necessarily need to suppress this difference. The final chapter considers the resurrection of apocalyptic narratives at the turn of the twentieth century. Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles is explicit and literal in its need to eradicate sexual difference in order to ensure its vision of a utopic future.

Conclusion: The Return of End Times

If the twentieth century begins with a sense of exhaustion and frustration with the end as revelation, at its turn, the Apocalypse – with its strange pleasure in the catastrophic cleansing of the world, its reassuring division between the righteous and the damned, and its disturbing comfort in knowing absolute finality and order – dramatically reasserts itself. The terrifying liberty that accompanies the abandonment of apocalyptic narratives is rejected at the twentieth century’s close, and the end of time – as both catastrophic and redemptive – is resurrected across the cultural spectrum in film, literature, science, politics, and religion. George W. Bush encourages the apocalyptic legacy in America with its particular brand of righteousness and exceptionalism, and the millions of evangelical Christians who support him eagerly await Armageddon; Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad counters his opponent with his own version of Islamic apocalypse as he awaits the impending return of the Mahdi, the saviour of mankind who is expected to reappear at the End of Days. Science is engaged in its own version of the end – Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth forecasts environmental disaster, and in the wake of such predictions extreme groups like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement have emerged, inviting humans to die out so that the earth’s biosphere can be restored. At the other end of the spectrum, Ray Kurzweil’s book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (2004) argues that new developments in biotechnologies will lead to immortality. Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (2003); Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2007); Danny Boyle’s film 28 Days Later (2002) and its sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007), directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo; and Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men, based on P.D. James’s novel, explore environmental and nuclear

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ruin, biotech plagues, and warn of the end of humans. While the unprecedented proliferation of these apocalyptic scenarios recalls Benjamin’s prediction that man might come to enjoy the spectacle of his own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure, it also suggests both the cultural anxiety that we may have reached, like the dinosaurs, the end of our species and the cultural arrogance, common to apocalyptic narratives, that we live at a unique moment in history. Particularly vocal on this issue of the end is Michel Houellebecq, the controversial French author, who welcomes the end of man and comments in an interview in 1999 on the nature of the pleasure these scenarios hold: ‘Deep down, I am with the Utopians, people who think that the movement of History must conclude in the absence of movement. An end to History seems desirable to me’ (Bourriaud 244). Kermode cites two reasons for our continued interest in millennium, ends, and apocalypse: One such is precisely our attachment to a past, which, despite the historiographical nihilism of the post-modernists, we can still think of as ours, and as relevant to us ... For another good reason we may look beyond the historical record and ask whether human beings have not generally had, what in some form they still retain, a need to make more sense of the world than is available without some grasp of the idea of an end in relation to an origin. (‘Millennium and Apocalypse’ 21–2)

The desire for apocalyptic narratives as Kermode sees it is caught up with the need to understand ourselves and find meaning in relationship to a community that is larger than the individual self. The sense of the individual imprisoned, disconnected, and isolated in the shell of the self – ‘horribly alone’ – that runs through modernist literature is exasperated by late capitalism and the increasing commodification of life. Yet, in its extreme, as the modernists and postmodernists in this book have suggested, the desire for a coherent, stable community to map oneself onto is an equally problematic solution to the sense of alienation that haunts the twentieth century. It is not just postmodernists but modernists, such as Faulkner, who were already sceptical about the possibility of claiming an end in relation to an origin and aware of the costs of doing so; while Lawrence explicitly rejected the apocalyptic narrative and its drive towards a conclusion, and Forster, like Conrad, envisioned a great emptiness at the origin of the universe that offers no forward direction. Further, as the works considered in this book sug-

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gest, it is not so much ‘historiographical nihilism’ that contributes to the doubt about apocalyptic narratives and an investment in the end as it is a question of who makes up the ‘we,’ the ‘our,’ the ‘us,’ and the ‘human,’ both inside and ‘beyond’ the historical record that Kermode refers to. This issue is at the centre of Ford’s novel, which asks how we can know the past, and Morrison’s novel, where the focus is on the lost and irrecoverable voices of history; Rushdie’s novel also broaches this question as it examines who gets included and who gets excluded from the narrative of the nation. It is also present in DeLillo’s novel as it explores the troubling division of the damned and the saved and the real and the simulacrum, and in Carter’s questioning of whose self or which gender gets counted as authentic. The question of the ‘us,’ and the ‘we,’ and the ‘ours’ cannot then be divided from Kermode’s point about the desire for an origin and end. Yet by the end of the twentieth century, concerns emerge once again about abandoning the collective sense of the human. In his 1968 ‘Ends of Man,’ Derrida challenges the persistent understanding of man as a unity, a concept that negates the varied history of the term as it relates to evolution, individualism, and humanism: ‘Everything occurs as if the “sign” man had no origin, historical, cultural, or linguistic limit’ (116). Yet almost thirty years later, Derrida voices the fear that new technologies are rapidly forcing and foreclosing a question that has been the subject of philosophical speculation for centuries: What is the ‘essence’ of man, he asks, that needs to be protected from ‘techno-science programming’? I quote this passage again: ‘The risk that is run at this unique moment in the history of humanity is the risk of new crimes being committed against humanity ... against man, against the very humanity of man, no longer against millions of representatives of real humanity but against the essence-itself of humanity, against an idea, an essence, a figure of the human race, represented this time by a countless number of beings and generations to come’ (‘The Aforementioned SoCalled Human Genome’ 207–8). Derrida returns, even if momentarily in this essay on the human genome project and its threat of ‘new crimes against humanity,’ to an invocation of a singular, collective end of man that both recalls and is different from the Holocaust, begging the question of whether post-apocalyptic thinking gives way to the posthuman as the end of man or whether it interrupts this end.1 What Derrida refers to as ‘crimes against humanity’ Houellebecq celebrates as a solution to the horrors of the twentieth century and the slow decay of civilization as he looks forward to the end of the human,

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the literal passing of man.2 His controversial 1998 novel Les particules élémentaires (translated as The Elementary Particles in North America and Atomized in England) is in many ways conservative in its analysis of society. Nostalgic for the nuclear family, bemoaning the redundancy of men and the ‘castrating’ effects of feminism, distressed by the ‘infiltration’ of other races, rejecting queerness, the narrative lumps abortion, euthanasia, sexual freedom, the breakdown of the family, and divorce in with individualism, materialism, and consumerism as the causes of Western decline (58–9). In this novel, the late twentieth century has succumbed to the individualistic consumerist culture that has rendered its inhabitants numb, isolated, and atomized: ‘Often haunted by misery, the men of [this] generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared’ (Prologue). The half-brothers in the novel, abandoned by their fathers and mother, from broken homes, products of the post1960s sexual liberation movement, are incapable of love. Bruno is enslaved by transient sexual desire and the cult of the young beautiful body, ‘passively’ giving himself up to hedonistic pleasures that had shaped ‘an entire generation’ reared on market forces (146). Michel removes himself from the current of life, insulated in ‘a protective armor’ (72). The women – Christiane and Annabelle – are still capable of love but are martyrs to it, and they die painful deaths as the whole of Western culture moves slowly towards suicide. Bruno’s addiction to sex originates in a pre-sexual desire to be touched and loved: ‘Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so difficult to give up hope’ (45). Driven and dominated by this longing and his loneliness, and not particularly attractive or well-endowed, he engages in sexual adventures that are for the most part cold and brutal and that get less frequent with age. But when he meets Christiane, who facilitates his sexual life and organizes multiple partners, he finally thinks he feels ‘happy’ and in ‘love’ (183). For the first time his profound sense of alienation is relieved. The ‘democratic’ nudist resorts like Cap d’Agde promise, Bruno thinks, ‘an aesthetics of goodwill’ where individual desires converge, allowing for a sense of community. They continue their adventures in various clubs even as the ‘exhaustion of sexual pleasure’ is always there – the barely repressed possibility in all the orgies (174). When Christiane is crippled, however, Bruno cannot bring himself to care for her broken body, saturated as he is by a culture that places such tyrannical value on physical youth, market beauty, and instant pleasure. She commits suicide alone

154 Conclusion

in her low-income apartment, and he comes to realize he was no more capable of love than his hedonistic parents (205). He finishes his days in an asylum. His good-looking half-brother Michel was traumatized as a child by his grandmother’s death, which provoked ‘abject animal fear.’ Detached and rational, he watches the futility of life around him and remains on its periphery. He lives a completely intellectual life in contrast to Bruno’s physical one, but he is no more able than his brother to love or care for another, not even for his beautiful childhood sweetheart Annabelle. Michel and Annabelle reunite at forty. When she requests that he impregnate her, he imagines the ‘fusing gametes, followed immediately by the first cell divisions. It felt like a headlong rush, a little suicide’ (226). Understanding that all species that depend on sexual reproduction are mortal, Michel finds life from the very moment of conception already in decline, already doomed and futile. Annabelle must abort in any case as she has uterine cancer, and when it metastasizes, she overdoses. The Elementary Particles, in positing a posthuman future made possible through technological intervention, understands man as itself the problem and looks forward to his end. Difference, in the novel, produces atomized, anaesthetized, autonomous individuals who without any buffer from the market are completely at the mercy of its trends. Separation and isolation, ultimately the products of mortality and sexual difference, are ‘evil.’ Thoroughly egocentric and self-absorbed, humans require ‘a fundamental shift if society [is] to survive – a shift that would credibly restore a sense of community, of permanence and of the sacred’ (262). Thus, Michel moves to Ireland to work on his project on immortality, inspired by the Book of Kells and the memory of Annabelle’s love that he could never return or understand, and then kills himself. Michel, who is responsible for the new posthuman species, concludes: ‘Nature deserved to be wiped out in a holocaust – and man’s mission on earth was probably to do just that’ (29). In the novel, the twentieth century, in its rejection of an end-based narrative, stalls. Rudderless and without direction, man turns to violence and instant ego gratification, and the only cure is to get back on course, to move toward an end: ‘Without regular and continuous progress, human evolution took random, irregular, and violent turns for which men – with their predilection for risk and danger, their repulsive egotism, their violent tendencies – were directly to blame’ (137). Technology is proposed as

The Return of End Times

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the solution to the problem of humanity as it promises to eradicate economic and sexual difference. Hence the work of the scientist, Michel, leads to the posthuman race: ‘Mankind must disappear and give way to a new species which [is] asexual and immortal, a species which had outgrown individuality, separation, and evolution’ (258), and the few remaining humans look on with envy at this paradise, where everyone shares the same genetic code. The ‘excess’ DNA is excised, death is eliminated, and along with it difference. The ending of The Elementary Particles is ambiguous. Is a new version of the world inspired by Michel, a man who ‘had grown pitiless and mechanical’ (75), any more hopeful than the bankrupt human world it replaces? The novel dramatizes the tensions between the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic worlds: If the twentieth-century novel entertained the complicated ethical possibilities of living in a world that valued difference and death, was open, in flux, and without a definitive direction or end, this moment is abandoned in this end-of-the century work that yearns for the simplicity, purity, eternity, and universality inherent in apocalyptic narratives. In Houellebecq’s novel, humans are passive victims of the forces of history, evolution, biology, the market, and individual pasts: ‘Human behavior is predetermined in principle in almost all of its actions and offers few choices, of which fewer still are taken’ (71). The human bears no responsibility as it moves towards its future already determined by a past that it also bears no responsibility for shaping – the end determines the course, and the inevitably of this end is one of the attractions of apocalyptic scenarios as humans are relieved of any duty to change the course of history. But paradoxically humans in the novel are also granted an absolute freedom to recreate or destroy themselves. Indulging in another of the attractions of apocalyptic scenarios, they understand themselves as at the pinnacle of history: ‘Humanity in its current state could and should control the evolution of the world’s species – and in particular its own evolution’ (259). The conflicting desire to both succumb to destiny and take charge of the future ends with humanity greeting its demise with ‘meekness, resignation, perhaps even secret relief’ (263). According to the novel, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault are, by the early part of the second millennium, all subject to ‘global ridicule’ as there is a return to a neo-Kantian model. The ‘human sciences’ have failed and science emerges as the ‘irrefutable truth.’ Thus, we have come full circle to the place that initiated the critique that largely began with the modernists at the outset of the twentieth

156 Conclusion

century. The ‘fundamental shift’ announced in the novel is also a return to the dream of the Enlightenment and the end. What is proposed as different and new and wholly other in the novel is also very familiar. Let me finish with what has been the subject of this book – what gets shut out in narratives that posit a singular collective end. Identity conceived in difference, in Derrida’s sense, is not the same as Houllebecq’s notion of difference as extreme individualization and atomization.3 If the self is constituted in a play of difference it is always also necessarily reaching out and responsible to an other that is also within. As Derrida writes: ‘If there is responsibility, if there is an ethical and free decision, responsibility and decision must, at a given moment, be discontinuous with the normative or the “normal,” not in their misrecognition of norms, not in their ignorance of knowledge about norms – rather they must take a leap and welcome a sort of discontinuity, a heterogeneity in relation to the normative as such’ (‘Aforementioned’ 200). The Elementary Particles appears to be open to a future, to an absolute other of man, the ‘non-normative,’ the posthuman, suggesting an ethical response. Yet, the narcissistic desire to recreate the other in the image of the self, to institute an absolute norm, to share the same genetic code, to eliminate difference (particularly sexual difference), to create a species as its own end (beyond evolution), also forcefully shuts down ethics. This version of the posthuman replicates a more extreme and literal version of the Enlightenment’s universal man in that it refuses to understand the self/other as a liminal, interconnected place where responsibility involves a singular response that needs to be negotiated, that needs to make space for the other that is discontinuous with the self, that is capable of the love of an other. It never occurs to Michel, who is inspired by Annabelle’s love but incapable of understanding or feeling it, that it might be the ‘gift of death,’ the very thing he is determined to eradicate, that makes her capable of love.4

Notes

Introduction: Post-Apocalyptic Culture 1 Frank Kermode’s continuing importance in the field of apocalypse has been acknowledged by, among others, Oxford University Press, which reissued his 1967 book The Sense of an Ending (with a new epilogue) in 2000. 2 Fukuyama has recently retracted the statement in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City as it seems ‘History’ is still able to invade the West. In his more recent book, Our Posthuman Future, he has also suggested that History is not over yet as science and technology continue to change our understanding of the world. 3 Kermode argues that after modernism, which still held on to the sense of the new, apocalypse in Western literature has ‘gone out of fashion’: ‘Popular fundamentalist apocalypticism thrives, but the educated, the heirs of Joachim of Fiore and his heirs, have given it up. Deconstructors write no gospels’ (‘Apocalypse and the Modern’ 103). 4 There are critics who point to Anna’s perseverance and courage in the face of the adversity she faces as she even manages to get pregnant, but given the title and the bleak setting, this at best seems like a deludedly optimistic reading. 5 Dominick LaCapra distinguishes between structural trauma, which is transhistorical and suggests some originary loss, and historical trauma, which is specific and which can be worked through. Yet I argue this distinction does not always hold when one considers the historical destruction of the archives that happens for instance with Africans brought over in the Middle Passage (see chapter four). There is nothing to recover – the loss cannot be worked through by translating it into narration, and yet this loss is not transhistorical or universal.

158 Notes to pages 10–11 6 In economically or socially trying times, the labelling of those who are expendable has a history. The war reparations imposed on Germany by the Allies at the end of the First World War left the country close to bankrupt. High unemployment rates, economic instability, and shortages of basic goods, in part, enabled the rise of Hitler. Mobilizing the German masses, Hitler isolated minority groups and charged them with perpetrating social unrest. During the Holocaust, Nazi propaganda films compared Jews to disease-infested rats who were breeding uncontrollably in the Warsaw ghettos and threatening not only the economic well-being of Germany, but the very foundations of ‘civilization.’ See for instance the documentary The Architecture of Doom (Peter Cohen, 1989), which incorporates clips of these Nazi propaganda films. 7 Invoking the same apocalyptic rhetoric as O’Brien – the rise of Islam, the poverty of the inner cities, the chaos of the Third World, ethnic and racial tensions, the breakup of the Soviet Union – the investment strategist James Dale Davidson offers advice on how to profit from this social climate. In a pamphlet entitled The Plague of the Black Debt: How to Survive the Coming Depression, Davidson, reading onto history a 500-year cyclical pattern, argues that his financial strategists can forecast the future. The premise of his argument is that the ‘apocalypse’ is inevitable, and so it gives advice on how to profit from it. This pamphlet might seem ‘fringe,’ both because of its claims of prophecy and because of its extremely reactionary position. It arrives by mail heralding the coming apocalypse much like The Watchtower, the Jehovah’s Witness literature. Yet its author co-wrote with William ReesMogg (the former editor-in-chief of The Times of London) two best-selling books, The Great Reckoning (1991) and Blood in the Streets (1987), which both invoke a similarly apocalyptic tone in their analysis of current economic conditions. Referring to the inner cities of America, he writes: ‘This is your wake-up call. Pack your bags and check out now. Is this too alarming? Some of our critics would say so. But in 1992 during the U.S. Presidential primaries I ran into one of the Democratic contenders, a very well-known politician. He was jogging on the streets of my neighborhood, a wealthy Washington suburb, a few blocks from his posh hotel. His question to me: “You still live here? Are you nuts? This city is going to burn.” He couldn’t believe I lived near “ground zero” of the coming social disorders. (As it happens, I was just renting. And I’ve moved since then. You see, the Establishment knows what’s going on. Or at least some of its members do)’ (26). Complete with subscription forms for a newsletter detailing the secret of profiting in this economic climate, this pamphlet is blatantly uninterested in examining the role of ‘profit’ or the role of the ‘Establishment’ in contribut-

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ing to wealth disparities and the poverty of inner cities and the Third World. It does not consider the possibility of alternate futures, and it does not consider addressing any of the problems it lists because its ‘profits’ are dependent on people believing in the inevitability of this ‘end,’ the truth of this description. What the strategists promise is not just revelation but the profits to be gleaned from revelation: ‘The world is shaped by big, powerful forces or trends that nobody can control and that 999 out of 1,000 people don’t even see. However, if you know what the trends are, you can reap tremendous wealth’ (13). 8 It is interesting that Kermode never refers to Lawrence’s scepticism about apocalypse and instead reads Lady Chatterley’s Lover in terms of a Christian apocalyptic model (see chapter seven). 9 In an article entitled ‘T.S Eliot and the Cultural Divide,’ David Chinitz tries to rescue Eliot from the prevalent reading of him as a ‘hero or antihero’ devoted to protecting high art from the contaminating influence of mass culture. Chinitz argues that Eliot’s earlier fascination with vaudeville, the music halls, and jazz suggests that he is also aligned with the postmodernist interest in popular culture as articulated by theorists such as Andreas Huyssen. Chinitz writes: ‘The Eliot I portray is more complex and, from a postmodern vantage point, more interesting – one who, despite his ambivalence, developed a quite progressive theoretical position on the relation between high culture and popular culture’ (237). However, it could be argued that Eliot’s romanticization of ‘lower-class’ art forms stems not so much from a revelling in the diversity that the mass allows for and that postmodern artists and theorists have expressed interest in, but rather from a desire to restore the ‘spontaneity’ and ‘immediacy’ to art; in other words, in order to overcome the mediation of the sign and restore the word to the world. In his essay on the death of Marie Lloyd, a music-hall artist, Eliot argues that the working man in her audience was able to participate in the chorus and thus engage with the art. However, with her death and the general decline in these popular art forms, the working man will now attend the cinema, where his mind will be ‘lulled’ by images and where he will fall into a ‘listless apathy’ (‘Marie Lloyd’ 458). Lamenting the increase in art forms such as this ‘cheap and rapid-breeding cinema,’ Eliot idealizes lowerclass art as the last bastion of, as Chinitz himself argues, an alliance between thought and feeling. 10 Albert Barnes, the collector of modern art who died in 1951, would not allow his collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, the largest in America, to be reproduced or to travel. If you wanted to study the work, you had to make an appointment to visit the original. Barnes wanted

160 Notes to pages 29–37 the collection to be accessible to the ‘common man,’ but, in keeping with the modernists he collected, he did not want the works to participate in the cultural industry machine. In 1992, however, as the collection was in debt, his conditions were disputed in court and the board of directors won the right to allow the collection to travel to six cities. In 1994, I attended the show at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Not only did the paintings travel, but gallery visitors were forced through the gift shop on exiting, where the Picassos and Cézannes were reproduced on everything imaginable – postcards, coffee mugs, towels – all for sale. 1 Characters in Search of the End 1 Bakhtin has argued that the novel itself, in its formlessness, is open in structure. And Margaret Anne Doody has argued that novels ‘get away from the apocalyptic mode of ultimate Revelation preferred by St. John to the world of eros and process ... We come to the actual stoppage of a novel’s narrative through having learned both to live with and to repudiate endings’ (46). Certainly within Austen’s works, for instance, the social critic that is opened up in her novels – the tension between women’s economic dependence and their desire for romantic independence – cannot be shut down by the happy coincidence of finding a man whom one loves and who has the good fortune to be rich. Nevertheless, nineteenth-century novels invoke closure through comic or tragic conventions much more than do modernist novels. 2 See Rachel Duplessis’s Writing beyond the Ending, which I mentioned in the Introduction. I am indebted to her work for its analysis of twentieth-century women writers and their attempts to write themselves out of – both literally and figuratively – the closure of Victorian conventions. 3 Michael Millgate, in his influential study of Faulkner, argues that the first and last sections of the novel both offer a ‘high degree of objectivity.’ Although Benjy’s section is in the first person, his ‘observations do not pass through an intelligence which is capable of ordering, and distorting them.’ Millgate refers to Benjy’s ‘camera-like fidelity,’ and his analysis of versions of the manuscript highlights Faulkner’s gradual working towards ‘pure objectivity’ (95). 4 This was Hardy’s last novel and also one that he had problems ending, rewriting the conclusion several times. 5 Although this ‘foundation’ is of course mythical given the rape and abuse of black women on slave plantations; as Dilsey tells Luster, he may well have Compson blood in him.

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6 In chapter three, I take up in more detail how modernists come to understand reason as a limited means of comprehending the modern world and the unnerving results of having to admit this limit. John Dowell, in Ford’s The Good Soldier, tries like Jason to hold onto reason as a means of negotiating the world, and his attempts render him an equally absurd character. 7 See, most notably, Noel Polk, who argues that in the final section Shegog’s sermon reaches beyond words, which are the ‘sound and the fury.’ Although offering only temporary respite, this final scene, Polk argues, offers ‘word-less images of an idealized maternal love, of salvation and resurrection’ and thus stands as a ‘powerful and peaceful’ contrast to ‘the verbal armageddons of the Compson brothers’ monologues’ (‘Trying Not to Say’ 173). 8 It is this challenging of racial and sexual hierarchies and her use of parody and playfulness that lead Lee Quinby to refer to Hurston’s ‘irreverent stance toward apocalyptic logic,’ a stance that dismantles ‘two pillars of the apocalyptic edifice: intolerance of differences and impatience for the future’ (Anti-Apocalypse 100–1). 9 There has been much critical debate about the status of this appendix. Noel Polk notably leaves it out of his ‘corrected’ version of the novel, arguing that it should be treated as a stand-alone document. Nevertheless I think it is useful to think about the appendix in the context of Faulkner’s difficulties concluding this work. 10 Arguing that critical readings of Caddy that reduce her to a singular and largely absent figure are reductive, Dawn Trouad suggests that Caddy has ‘never been one’ and these ‘contradictory Caddys resist finality, closure and coherence’ (27). I would suggest that not only do the multiple Caddys resist closure in terms of character but this dynamic figure in turn prevents narrative closure. 11 Jean-Paul Sartre was critical of Faulkner for being so invested in the past that he could not imagine a future. This chapter, however, has suggested that Faulkner was quite critical of the paternalistic and racist past of the South and that this in itself opens up space for an unknown future. 2 Viral Endings 1 See, for instance, Baudrillard’s Simulations. 2 See, for instance, Baudrillard’s Fatal Strategies. 3 In Faulkner’s novel, the hierarchical racialized and gendered order collapses and America is left wrestling but failing with the struggle for mean-

162 Notes to pages 44–53

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ing in its aftermath. In the Coen brothers’ film Barton Fink, which portrays a defeated Faulkner as an alcoholic writer in Hollywood, capitalism and materialism triumph, confirming that meaning in America is anachronistic. The writer is rendered redundant and the real gives way to the simulated. Faulkner himself, after winning a prize in a mystery magazine contest, wrote: ‘In France, I am the father of a literary movement. In Europe, I am considered the best modern American and among the first of all writers. In America, I eke out a hack’s motion picture wages by winning second prize in a manufactured mystery story contest’ (qtd in Polk, An Editorial 217–18). Paul Boyer surveys the pervasiveness of prophetic belief in America, from Hal Lindsey’s best-selling The Late Great Planet to touring evangelists to representations of Russia and the atomic bomb. He argues: ‘To fail to understand the enduring power of these ancient apocalyptic texts is to fail to understand contemporary America’ (164). See, for instance, Baudrillard’s interview ‘The Politics of Seduction,’ in which he says, ‘American culture or rather non-culture is in itself completely original’ (54). There is, of course, a dark irony underlying this admiration of things German. DeLillo echoes Philip K. Dick’s bleak novel The Man in the High Castle. One of the characters in Dick’s novel comments on the American fascination with a Germany that they imagine as strong and healthy: ‘The article showed the Reich electronic engineers at the New York site, helping the local personnel with their problems. It was easy to tell which were the Germans. They had that healthy, clean, energetic assured look ... One of the German technicians could be seen pointing off somewhere, and the Americans were trying to make out what he was pointing at. I guess their eyesight is better than ours’ (71). As DeLillo states, and as Dick’s novel suggests, in the middle of this fascination is Hitler. Recent DeLillo moments: In Dallas, Texas, real guns are legal, but Dallas City Council is considering banning fake ones ‘to stop the proliferation of violence’ (‘Dallas’). So too in films like the The Matrix or computer games like Second Life, the virtual generates the real. Virtual clothes, designs, real estate that are created within the game now sell for ‘real’ dollars. James Berger argues that this scene, where Mink – addicted as he is to Dylar – tries to avoid bullets when Gladney says ‘hail of bullets,’ is the moment when ‘every sign becomes latched to its proper referent in an unveiling of true significance’ (‘Falling Towers’ 352). The gap is closed as Berger suggests, except there is no referent here – there are no bullets. The material has been effaced in the perfect ‘hyper-real’ postmodern moment as the sign triumphs, absorbing the real.

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3 Modernism and the End of the End of History 1 See also Patrick Brantlinger for a review of some of the influential proponents of the end of History, from Hegel to Fukuyama. 2 Many of the most important events in the novel take place on 4 August, and this of course was the date that England declared war on Germany in 1914. Yet Ford claims to have finished the novel in July 1914, and if this is true, the novel itself pre-dates the war. Was Ford prophetic? Is there another reason for the significance of this date as James Scott suggests: the second epistle for 4 August in St Paul’s Second Epistle to Timothy (54)? Did Ford in fact complete or revise the novel after the outbreak of the war? While Dowell’s breakdown is explicitly over the breakup of the foursome in the novel, the sense of crisis that pervades the novel may also have the outbreak of the war as its source. For many modernists, the Great War signalled a complete rupture with the Victorian past and its belief system. Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse is structured by this division of a before and after of the war – the ‘Time Passes’ section marks the divide. 3 Andy Warhol, in his piece entitled ‘Rorschach’ (1984), mocks modernist art and its attempts to probe and expose deep truths in his depiction of the famous inkblot. Rather than revealing the truth beneath the surface, Warhol’s postmodern ‘meaningless’ inkblot suggests the futility of the attempt of penetrating the surface. 4 Fry wrote that the Post-Impressionists ‘do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life’ (n.p.). 5 As Miriam Bailin has written of this novel: ‘Those readers then who seek a path through Dowell’s maze to a consistent vision offered by the novel ... will find the task not merely “difficult,” as Dowell coyly suggests, but impossible. Attempts to make logical connections between discrete elements of the story and to trace cause-and-effect relations between those elements are impeded by the divagations of his fireside chat; and what connections one finally chooses to draw depend on which elements and versions of the plot and character one chooses to connect’ (633). 6 Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy makes a very convincing argument that Ford adamantly disagreed with the turn in British modernist art toward ideal form and pure abstraction. Ford, McCarthy argues, was insistent that art be engaged with the world, and Dowell’s unhappiness at the end of the novel suggests that Ford in no way endorsed his character’s retreat from it. McCarthy writes that, despite Dowell’s attempts at narrative as therapy, he ‘adopts a model of knowing that shapes events into aesthetic forms and that precludes constructive interaction with the world of those events’ (330).

164 Notes to pages 69–76 7 Ford Herman Hueffer changed his name in 1919 to break his connection to his estranged wife and, as he said, because ‘a Teutonic name is in these days disagreeable’ (qtd in Taylor 134). 8 The Good Solider was completed just before the outbreak of the Great War, but in July 1915 Ford joined the British Army and the next year fought in the Battle of Somme, where he was injured and suffered short-term memory loss. In 1928, he completed his four-volume novel Parade’s End, which is based on his experience in the war. Also see Ford’s War Prose and Max Saunders’s Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life. 4 Futures That Have Not Been: Postmodernism and the Limits of History 1 See also Linda Krumholz, ‘The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved’; Andrew Levy, ‘Telling Beloved’; and Margaret E. Turner, ‘Power, Language and Gender: Writing “History” in Beloved and Obasan.’ 2 The slave does redirect her or his libidinal energy to the ‘free’ north, but, as I will argue later in this paper, this desire is complicated by the fact that freedom in America is defined against the black body. 3 This loss is, of course, not unique to African-American history. See, for instance, Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. He writes that with Auschwitz ‘something new has happened in history (which can only be a sign and not a fact), which is that the facts, the testimonies which bore the traces of the here’s and now’s, the documents which indicated the sense or senses of the facts, and the names, finally the possibility of various kinds of phrases whose conjunction makes reality, all this has been destroyed as much as possible’ (57). 4 Although LaCapra agues that ‘specific phantoms that possess the self or the community can be laid to rest through mourning only when they are specified and named as historically lost others,’ he does not address the case where the very names are lost and thus cannot be ‘named’ and ‘laid to rest’ (713). 5 Lyotard, in The Differend, compares the mass murders at Auschwitz and the destruction of the records of those murders to an earthquake that destroys not only lives and buildings but also the instruments used to measure, directly and indirectly, the seismic force. The inability to produce accurate records of the destruction does not in any way dispel the feeling that something has happened. The rules governing knowledge do not interfere with knowing: ‘The silence imposed on knowledge does not impose the silence of forgetting, it imposes a feeling’ (56). Lyotard concludes: ‘The historian

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must break with the monopoly over history granted to the cognitive regimen of phrases, and he or she must venture forth by lending his or her ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge’ (57). Sustaining the paradox of Beloved as both disremembered and known, Morrison breaks with the ‘rules of knowledge’ in her account of slavery and searches not for what has been represented, not the ‘symbol,’ but the unrepresented, the ‘feelings’ that accompany a ‘picture’ (‘Site of Memory’ 302). Morrison, in part, was inspired to write Beloved after reading a newspaper clipping about Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who killed her children rather than see them return to a life of slavery. But Morrison is also careful to point out the limitations of this documentation: ‘Recording her life as lived [as described in the research material] would not interest me, and would not make me available to anything that might be pertinent’ (‘In the Realm of Responsibility’ 5). 6 The maternal in Beloved is not the site of original unity, something which must be killed off in order to express an autonomous self, as Jean Wyatt has argued in ‘Giving Body to the Word,’ but the undoing of the binary of self and other. ‘Loss’ is thus not located in some original separation from the mother. See, for instance, Domna C. Stanton, ‘Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva.’ She argues, in her critique of the maternal metaphor, that ‘the problematic of the unrepresented is not peculiar to the maternal metaphor’ (164). 7 The ‘you are mine’ that is murmured in the section of the novel which poetically renders the Middle Passage is not the claim of ownership that mimics the slave owners’ claim (as Jean Wyatt suggests [482]), but the claiming of the other as part of the self. 8 Gayatri Spivak uses this term in In Other Worlds (152). 5 Apocalyptic Communities: The European Nation, Islam, and Hinduism 1 Some critics disagree about this interpretation of Revelation. Leonard Thompson argues, for instance, that the wording – ‘on the island of Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus’ – is ambiguous and that John may have chosen to live on the island; however, it is generally agreed that John suffered some degree of persecution and was living in exile. 2 Walter Schmithals, in his study of apocalyptic literature, argues that the apocalyptic ‘comprehends reality as history,’ understood as a ‘unitary whole, moving toward a goal’ (33). 3 With the proliferation of end-of-the-world cults, the rise in religious funda-

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mentalism, and the predictions of nuclear and environmental disaster, for many, the belief in the actual end of the world is alive and well. Steven Goldsmith argues that Blake invokes the apocalypse as change but, simultaneously, in his cryptic codes, layered images, and dedication to revision, resists the idea of apocalypse. ‘His apocalyptic imagery collides with one of his most characteristic political and textual strategies – the subversion of apocalypse through representation’ (14). Susan Standford Friedman also writes that ‘Forster’s discomfort with the Indian nationalist movement and his at-best ambivalent attitude toward the British Empire and Indian nationalism raise inevitable questions about ways in which his novel perpetuates the racism that underlay the British Empire even as he attacked the racism that upheld it’ (250). Although I think she is right in pointing to Forster’s complicity with Empire, I suggest in this chapter that his ambivalence about nationalism extends beyond that of the Indian movement. Arguing that Indian independence is an important backdrop to the novel, Frances B. Singh suggests that the drive toward unity and harmony in the novel, particularly in the last section of the novel with the festival of Gokul Astami, suggests the closeness of ‘Forster’s and Gandhi’s ideas about the national movement and about India’s future as an independent nation in the early twentieth century’ (277). In her reading, Hinduism is thus seen as extending into the political, bringing about the ‘salvation of India’ (270). I suggest, however, that nationalism and Hinduism cannot be conflated in the novel as they offer different models of community and that modern nationalism, as much as it might strive to be inclusive, as an apocalyptic model, necessarily requires, as Aziz says, the exclusion of ‘foreigners.’ Sara Suleri argues that it is India itself that is figured as ‘a hollow, or a cave’ and that the novel, in representing India as an ‘empty site that is bounded only by an aura of irrationality,’ participates in an Orientalism: ‘To the imperial English mind, India can only be represented as a gesture of possible rape’ (109). I do not want to discount the orientalism of Forster’s novel, but a more careful reading of the caves suggests that they hold the memory of a time before the creation of the earth and thus are not representative of India as a country but of an originary unity in the universe.

6 Unveiling Nations 1 Hindu fundamentalism is an obvious repercussion of the introduction of the democratic tenet of ‘majority rule.’ See for instance the propaganda pamphlet, ‘Hindu Brothers Consider and Be Warned,’ circulated in Bhagal-

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pur and reprinted and translated by Gyanendra Pandey in his article. After citing with alarm the increase of the Muslim population, the pamphlet concludes: ‘Vow to sacrifice your wealth, your body, your all for the protection of the Hindu people and nation and for the declaration of this country as a Hindu nation’ (44). James Harrison compares Saleem’s ‘vague do-goodism’ with Shiva’s ‘ruthless self-interest’ (43). While Saleem can afford to be liberal, Shiva forces him to confront the problem of self-interest. See Fukuyama, The End of History. The quotations are taken from an earlier article entitled ‘The End of History?’ (1989) in which he argued that man has reached the end of history with the spread of the ‘ideal’ form of government, liberal democracy. In his book, Fukuyama expands on the idea of liberal democracy as ideal by reviewing both the economic benefits and the ‘struggle for recognition’ or human dignity that, he argues, accompany this system of government. Ironically, this threat of a nuclear apocalypse is announced by a man who, in an interview with James Atlas, said that he had abandoned the ‘nihilism’ of Derrida and Roland Barthes for the ‘real world’ of nuclear weapons (40). Derrida has also noted the complicated matter of the signature of the ‘good people’ on the Declaration of Independence who declare themselves free and independent. At what point are the people freed – do they sign as free individuals or are they emancipated by the contract in the act of signing? And if the ‘people’ are invented by the Declaration, where representatives sign on behalf of the people, then the invocation of ‘the people’ is forever complicated by the fact that the ‘signature invents the signer’ (‘Declarations of Independence’ 10). See, in particular, Chatterjee’s earlier work on nationalism and colonialism, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. After an exhaustive examination of various nationalist models, he details the attributes of Gandhi’s model for the postcolonial world. Koran 41.1 and 42.53. These tales are grouped together in the section ‘Revelations Well Expounded.’ Each tells of a messenger from God who arrives with warnings and prophecies but is ignored by the people. The people in turn suffer as a result of their arrogant dismissal of the messenger. For a more detailed analysis of the modern vs. the Islamic state see Sami Zubaida, who describes the ideal of Islam as the ‘unity of state and the community of the faithful’ (41). However, Zubaida goes on to argue that the practice has differed from the theory. See Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Leila Ahmed argues that the veiled woman, the most visible mark of difference between Islam and the West,

168 Notes to pages 115–16 was read by colonialists as proof of the orientals’ inferiority. Lord Cromer, who shared this view and championed the ‘liberation,’ the unveiling, of Egyptian women, at the same time discouraged the practice of medicine in Egypt by women and actively opposed the women’s suffrage movement in England. Ahmed concludes: ‘Feminism on the home front and feminism directed against white men was to be resisted and suppressed; but taken abroad and directed against the cultures of colonized peoples, it could be promoted in ways that admirably served and furthered the project of the dominance of white man’ (153). See also Ella Shohat’s work on cinema and the veiling and unveiling of women in Hollywood films, which, she argues, perpetuate the colonial myth of liberation. Her analysis of orientalist films leads her to conclude that the role of the Arab woman in Hollywood is one in which she is first saved from her oppressive and backward culture and its villainous men and then claimed as the victory prize by the Western hero. Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem, a study of postcards of Algerian women by French photographers, also provides an interesting analysis of the colonialist interest in unveiling the veiled woman. 10 In The Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman points to the problem of ‘origins’ as the source of legitimacy for a society. Citing the case of Australia, she examines the radically different ‘founding’ moments of the nation: five days after the male colonist convicts arrived in 1788, the female colonist convicts were released ashore into the possession of and for the pleasure of the men. Which narrative, Pateman asks us to consider, reveals the historical origin of the nation? She concludes: ‘Political argument must leave behind stories of origins and original contracts and move from the terrain of contract and the individual as owner’ (232). 11 See for instance Keith Wilson’s article on reader responsibility in Midnight’s Children in which he contrasts the naive reading of Padma with the more sophisticated reading that Saleem’s work demands (34). Given Padma’s status in the novel as an illiterate factory worker in a postcolonial nation and given the role education played in colonialism, her comments do more than support a hierarchy of reading based on the ability to pick up on references to British literature. 12 Here, I borrow from Lyotard’s sense of ‘post’ from his work on The Postmodern Condition (79). Also see Geoffrey Bennington’s article on ‘Postal Politics and the Institution of the Nation’; ‘post’ in the context of his piece is antiapocalyptic in that it refers to putting into circulation (into a circuit that is open) something that necessarily has no definitive point of departure or arrival.

Notes to pages 119–25

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7 Anti-Apocalypse and the New Man 1 Margaret Anne Doody points out that apokalypto, the Greek verb for ‘to uncover,’ can also ‘be a middle voice reflexive verb – to reveal oneself’ (25). This section explores the apocalyptic structure that underwrites modern man. 2 Kermode reads Lawrence as the great figure of modern apocalypse: ‘Lawrence brought to the intellectual life and the literature of the period an apocalypticism that was more naked, more literal than that of any of his contemporaries’ (‘Apocalypse and the Modern’ 95), and argues that despite their ‘enormous prominence,’ these ‘apocalyptic aspects are rarely discussed’ (98). Yet Kermode ignores the very prominent anti-apocalyptic strain in Lawrence’s work that is the subject of this chapter. 3 Here Lawrence rejects what Lee Quinby refers to as the ‘divine and technological apocalypse’ and its ‘drama of the End,’ but does not succumb to what Quinby refers to as ‘ironic apocalypse’ that accepts with cynicism the inevitability of the cruelty of the human condition which will bring about its own end. Quinby argues: ‘What makes apocalypse so compelling is its promise of future perfection, eternal happiness, and a godlike understanding of life, but it is this very will to absolute power and knowledge that produces its compulsions of violence, hatred, and oppression’ (AntiApocalpyse 161–2). If Kermode reads Lawrence’s work in terms of an ‘apocalyptic fervor,’ I think it is also possible to read his work (in keeping with Quinby’s understanding) as at times explicitly anti-apocalyptic. 4 Kermode also makes the connection between Lawrence’s last book, Apocalypse, which he refers to as ‘ideologically a climax of Lawrence’s work,’ and his final novel, which he refers to as ‘impregnated with this sexual eschatology’ (20). I argue, however, that both works are anti-apocalyptic and that sex in Lawrence is much more about beginnings than it is about ending. Anti-apocalypse, however, as Derrida has argued, is often inflected by apocalypse, which may suggest the reasons for these contrary readings. 5 Michael Bell argues that ‘impersonality in Lawrence is not just to be defined negatively as the anti-sentimental; it is the non-moral awareness of a “beyond self” which provides the ultimate imperative for all life decisions, the non-teleological “purpose” of existence’ (‘Lawrence and Modernism’ 186). 6 Suely Rolnik’s ‘Politics of Flexible Subjectivity: The Event-Work of Lygia Clark’ is the best thing I have read on the ways in which capitalism has both co-opted the subject in flux and managed a ‘successful way to reinstate the

170 Notes to pages 127–31 anesthesia of the modern subject and its disassociation from the effects of the living presence of the other.’ She dates the emergence of this subject in the 1960s, but it is perhaps already present in Lawrence’s idea of ‘readymade individuality.’ I first heard Rolnik’s paper at a conference at the University of Pittsburg, ‘Modernity Contemporaneity: Antinomies of Art and Culture after the Twentieth Century,’ November, 2004. 7 Lawrence’s embrace of the feminine and simultaneous misogyny and his anti-apocalyptic strain that sometimes sounds apocalyptic suggests another debated aspect in his work, the question of his relationship to fascism. Generally, Lawrence’s embrace of patriarchal leadership models and authoritarian politics connected him to a proto-fascism. His anti-Semitic and racist remarks have also often been noted. Contrarily, however, Lawrence wrote in a letter to Gordon Campbell in 1913 that it ‘is no use hating a people or a race in mass. Because each of us is in himself humanity’ (Boulton and Zytaruk 301). Also, in his epilogue, not published until 1971, to Movements in European History, he wrote that both communism and fascism were forms of ‘bullying,’ and what he supported was ‘a good form of socialism, if it could be brought about.’ On Lawrence’s conflicted relationship to fascism see, for instance, Sachidananda Mohanty’s Lawrence’s Leadership Politics and the Defeat of Fascism and Catherine Frost’s Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism . 8 See Marianne Dekoven’s Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism for an analysis of how the feminine is both celebrated and feared by modernists. Also see Luce Irigaray, who writes that the connection between masculine and feminine ‘must forge an alliance between the divine and the mortal, in which a sexual encounter would be a celebration, and not a disguised or polemic form of the master-slave relationship’ (127). 8 The ‘Fag End’ Again and the New Woman 1 For works that draw comparisons between the end of this century and the fin de siècle, see Richard Dellamora’s Apocalyptic Overtures, Elaine Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy, Jonathan Dollimore’s Sexual Dissidence, and John McGowan’s ‘From Pater to Wilde to Joyce.’ 2 Sally Robinson writes of the tensions between feminism and poststructuralism: ‘Paradoxically, that which originally helped to provoke the crisis in masculine self-representation – that is, feminism – is now itself represented as the masculine perspective’ (82). The similar assumption, that the New Woman was fathered by the Decadent, suggests a history to this co-opting. 3 See, for instance, Teresa de Lauretis’s ‘The Technology of Gender’ for a

Notes to pages 133–5

4

5

6

7

8

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detailed analysis of the interest in woman as a figure and the erasure of women as subjects in contemporary theory. She writes: ‘By displacing the question of gender onto an ahistorical, purely textual figure of femininity (Derrida); or by shifting the sexual basis of gender quite beyond sexual difference, onto a body of diffuse pleasures (Foucault) and libidinally invested surfaces (Lyotard), or a body-site of undifferentiated affectivity, and hence a subject freed from (self-) representation and the constraints of identity (Deleuze); and finally by displacing the ideology, but also the reality – the historicity – of gender onto this diffuse, decentered, or deconstructed (but certainly not female) subject – so it is that, paradoxically again, these theories make their appeal to women, naming the process of such displacing with the term becoming woman (devenir-femme)’ (24). See also Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Displacement and the Discourse of Woman.’ See, for instance, Sander L. Gilman’s ‘Black Bodies, White Bodies.’ For a critical view of Gilman’s article, which considers the production of white and black bodies in the literature and science of the period, see Mieke Bal’s ‘The Politics of Citation.’ Bal argues that in Gilman’s work the critic is contaminated by the very materials he overtly criticizes (29). Although Gilman’s article is problematic in that it too readily subsumes race under gender, Bram Dijkstra has argued that the grouping of white women and other races with animals or beasts is prevalent at the fin de siècle. The Darwinian hierarchy places women, blacks, and Jews on a lower social rung (280). See Marcia Pointon, from whom this term is borrowed (30). See also Peter Brooks’s review of the history of the nude. In both Greek and Renaissance art, the male nude dominates, but by the nineteenth century ‘the female emerges as the very definition of the nude, and censorship of the fully unclothed male body becomes nearly total’ (16). Brooks further argues that, generally, while the classic male nude is heroic, the female nude is erotic. For a more standard reading of Delacroix’s paintings, see, for instance, Timothy Wilson-Smith, who writes that this painting ‘enshrines the legend of the July Revolution and the myth of all struggles against oppression’ (91). See, for instance, Max Nordau, Elizabeth Lynn Linton, or Geo L. Fitch, who wrote: ‘Woman is not to blame if you permit her to take the scepter which your effeminate and unmanly hands can no longer hold’ (11). For a contemporary analysis of the relationship between woman and decadence at the turn of the century, see Sandra Siegel’s ‘Literature and Decadence.’ Lyn Pykett notes that Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins ‘sold 30,000 copies in its first year (1893), and George Egerton’s [Mary Chavelita Dunne’s] Keynotes, which came out the same year, went into its seventh edition by 1896’ (7).

172 Notes to pages 136–41 9 However, recently (post-1990), there has been a growing interest in the work of the New Woman. See, for instance, Ann Ardis; Lyn Pykett; Elaine Showalter; and Vivien Gardner and Susan Rutherford. 10 See, for instance, Janice Helland’s ‘Frances Macdonald: The Self as Fin-deSiècle Woman.’ Helland argues that the reluctance to consider Francis Macdonald’s art in the context of women at the fin de siècle has led to its displacement by a ‘Modernist critical discourse.’ In turn the reductive labelling of her work as ‘mysterious, feminine, or fairytalelike’ has resulted in ‘her subsequent disappearance from the discourse and from the archive’ (16). See also Ann Ardis for a review of the negative reception of the works of the New Woman. She points out that even Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their Own (1977) and Patricia Stubbs in Feminism and the Novel: Women and Fiction 1880–1920 (1979) have been dismissive of these writers’ works. 11 For turn-of-the-century references to Pygmalion, see, for instance, excerpts from the autobiography of Isadora Duncan about her experiences with Auguste Rodin, quoted in John Berger’s About Looking (180–2); paintings on the subject by Gérôme and Burne-Jones; and plays on the subject by William Morris and George Bernard Shaw. 12 Here, we must be careful to distinguish the prostitute in ancient Rome from the prostitute of England and America at the end of the nineteenth century. Prior to the nineteenth century, there was no sense of prostitution as a profession or ‘specialized occupation within the patriarchal capitalist division of labour’ (Pateman, Sexual Contract 196). 13 Although Derrida suggests that feminists ‘are men,’ he argues elsewhere that ‘philosophical practice first pushes the word to its very greatest obscurity, in a highly artificial way, in abstracting it from every context and every use value, as if a word were to regulate itself on a concept independently of any contextualized function’ (‘Sending’ 299). ‘Feminist,’ but perhaps even more so ‘man,’ have, in Derrida’s work on feminism, been wrenched from a context. The intention of this chapter is to restore some of the context. 14 Derrida on Nietzsche writes: ‘Woman (truth) will not be pinned down ... That which will not be pinned down by truth is, in truth – feminine. This should not, however, be hastily mistaken for a woman’s femininity, for female sexuality, or for any other of those essentializing fetishes which might still tantalize the dogmatic philosopher, the impotent artist or the inexperienced seducer who has not yet escaped his foolish hopes of capture’ (Spurs 55). 15 See, for instance, Peter Brooks, who writes: ‘Precisely because it is the norm, the male body is veiled from inquiry ... In this view, the nakedness of the drunken patriarch Noah would be the central scandal of our culture, one

Notes to pages 142–3

16 17

18

19

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that must at all costs be veiled since it reveals the very principle of patriarchal authority’ (15). See Sally Robinson for a detailed reading of the relationship between Woman and women in Nights at the Circus. While Mary Ann Doane argues the importance of disentangling the woman from the veil (141), it is perhaps first necessary to consider how and why women and the veil became tangled. In Joan Riviere’s ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade,’ the author so fully accepts masculinity as the norm or essence of being that she insists that ‘genuine womanliness’ and the ‘masquerade’ are the same thing: ‘Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it’ (38). Bram Dijkstra argues that Darwin’s theory of evolution replaced the older ‘chain of being’ order: ‘The nineteenth century had been seeking an image that might replace the much too static earlier conception of a “chain of being” ... The ladder of success was a much better image [given the flux of a capitalist society] – and what more perfect ladder than that which had been constructed by evolutionary science?’ (160, 161). See, for instance, Max Nordau and Elizabeth Linton Lynn on the conservative end of the debate; the latter wrote that the wildwoman ‘smokes after dinner with the men; in railway carriages; in public rooms ... after dinner, our young married women and husbandless girls, despising the old distinctions and trampling underfoot the time-honoured conventions of former generations, “light up” with men’ (597). On the progressive side, see Nietzsche’s criticism of George Sand and other women who adopt ‘male’ personas (Beyond Good and Evil 164); Derrida, agreeing with Nietzsche’s criticism, writes: ‘And in truth, they too are men, those women feminists so derided by Nietzsche’ (Spurs 65). This accusation of being a man in drag is also levelled at Angela Carter. Robert Clark writes: ‘Her writing is often a feminism in male chauvinist drag, a transvestite style, and this may be because her primary allegiance is to a postmodern aesthetics that emphasizes the non-referential emptiness of definitions. Such a commitment precludes an affirmative feminism founded in referential commitment to women’s historical and organic being’ (158). Carter is of course concerned with the performance, what Clark refers to, mistakenly, as ‘the non-referential emptiness of definitions.’ However, his dismissive accusation that she is a performing ‘male’ echoes a more widespread trend of men being derisive about ‘maleness’ and underscores, as this chapter has tried to argue, a general anxiety that masculinity itself is a performance. J.S. Bratton suggests that male reviewers’ lack of ‘interest’ in women cross-dressing in the music

174 Notes to pages 146–56 halls at the end of the nineteenth century might point to this anxiety: ‘Few of the male impersonators’ acts ever get more than a blandly appreciative line or two. One is led to ask whether the reticence is because of their unimportance – these are acts chiefly appreciated by women, which the men find dull – or perhaps because of their unhandlability, their potential dangerousness – exciting acts in the hall, but impossible to translate safely into words’ (87). 20 Also see Susan Swan’s The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, which, similarly, addresses the historical disavowal of women in society by stressing the ‘unnatural’ presence of the heroine. Swan, as a postmodernist feminist novelist, chooses to denaturalize the modern subject not by putting her ‘sous rature’ under erasure, but by emphasizing the size of her GIANTESS, who boasts a seventeen-inch vaginal tract. See my article on Swan for a discussion of the tensions between feminism and postmodernism in the novel. Conclusion: The Return of End Times 1 Later in the essay, however, Derrida also asks whether a sixteenth-century man would recognize contemporary man, with all his technology, as fully human, bringing us back to the historical and cultural limits of the concept of man. 2 There is a growing body of literature on posthumanism (some of the most important theorists in the field are Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, and Bruno Latour). I take up this question of the relationship between poststructuralism and posthumanism in much more depth in an essay entitled ‘Bovine Anxieties, Virgin Births, and the Secret of Life,’ which appeared in a special issue on posthumanism in Cultural Critique. 3 Rolnik’s essay ‘Politics of Flexible Subjectivity: The Event Work of Lygia Clark’ is an excellent analysis of how the flexible subject of the 1960s and 1970s (the eras Houellebecq blames for the further atomization of individuals) that promised the reactivation of public life was exploited by the ‘readyto-wear-worlds’ that capital offered, further exasperating the disassociation and anaesthesia of the modern subject. 4 I borrow the term from the title of Derrida’s The Gift of Death (1995).

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Index

abolition(ism), 10, 80 absence, 45, 47, 50, 54, 76, 84, 96, 98, 113, 129, 130, 140, 142, 151 abstract, 13 abstract art, 66 abstraction, 77, 103, 112, 115, 116, 120, 137, 163n6, 172n13 absurdity, 35, 38, 51, 52, 65, 66, 67, 104, 105, 161n6 accommodation, 8, 9, 17, 23, 32, 39, 51, 84, 104, 106, 110, 115 accumulation, 15, 48, 63 Achebe, Chinua, 59–60 Adorno, Theodor, 8–10, 18 adultery, 61 advertising, 48, 51, 73, 134 Africa, 12, 17, 59–60, 72–4, 95, 125 African-American, 72–4, 76, 77, 79– 80, 81, 82, 164n3. See also black Africans, 24, 46, 72–4, 77, 79–80, 82, 157n5 agency, 14, 49, 50, 83; viral agent, 54– 5; women’s, 14, 127–8, 130, 132–3, 136, 138, 140, 149 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 25, 150 Albania, 12, 106 Algeria, 112, 168n9

allegory, national, 90–1, 102 Allies, 17, 158n6 Alloula, Malek, 168n9 America, 25, 44–9, 54, 72–3, 77, 78, 80, 81, 108, 143, 150, 158n7, 159n10, 161–2n3, 162n4, 164n2, 172n12; North, 153; post-nuclear, 47 American, 44–9, 67–8, 73, 79, 81, 106, 162nn5, 6; fiction, 30; Latin, 90; Revolution, 90. See also AfricanAmerican; Baudrillard, America Americana, 17 American Civil War, 8, 23, 34, 37, 40, 41 amnesia, 34 Anderson, Benedict, 89, 102 anthropology, 19 Antichrist, 12, 13 anti-Semitism, 170n7 anxiety, 13, 14, 17, 20, 30, 33, 42, 55, 77–8, 80, 83, 125, 134, 143, 144, 145, 151, 173–4n19 apocalypse, 3–26, 29, 43–5, 46, 52, 54, 55, 89, 102, 109, 111, 121, 122, 129, 132, 133, 134, 140, 148, 150, 151, 155, 157n1, 158n7, 166nn4, 6, 169nn1, 3, 170n1; anti-apocalypse,

190 Index 119–30, 168n4, 169nn3–4; and the Bible, 4, 5, 11, 12, 14, 111, 120, 160n1; Christian 4, 11, 12, 14, 45, 129, 130, 131; Fukuyama and, 115; ‘ironic,’ 169n3; Islamic, 150; Kermode and, 3–4, 6, 11, 15, 89, 119, 157nn1, 3, 169nn2, 4; Lawrence and, 159n8, 169nn2, 3, 4, 170n7; and nationalism, 90, 100; nuclear, 50, 105, 167n4; pagan, 130; Puritan, 45; secular, 4, 12, 24, 25, 89, 106. See also end; Lawrence, Apocalypse; post-apocalypse; revelation apocalyptic communities, 89–101 apocalyptic discourse, 49, 90 apocalyptic dream, 134 apocalyptic event, 22 apocalyptic history, 70, 85 apocalyptic logic, 161n8 apocalyptic narrative, 7, 11, 13, 24–5, 29, 100, 101, 102, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155 apocalyptic rhetoric, 106, 109, 116, 158n7 apocalyptic text, 4, 6, 90, 104, 162n4 apocalyptic writing, 90, 121, 131, 133, 160n1, 165n2, 166n4 apokalupsis, 4 apokalypto, 169n1 Appadorai, A. (Angadipuran), 109 appearance(s), 38, 41, 63, 64, 65, 68, 132, 138, 140, 142, 143 Arab, 46, 106, 111, 116, 168n9 arbitrariness 5, 11, 15, 16, 20, 21, 23, 35, 36, 37, 41, 42, 79, 83, 94, 96, 102, 131 archive, 5, 7, 22, 24, 44, 46, 47, 50, 71, 74, 85, 157n5, 172n10 Ardis, Ann, 172nn9–10

arrival, 5,45, 89, 99, 101, 109, 116, 120, 168n12; rhetoric of, 109 art, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 26, 29, 33, 36, 42, 61, 66, 121, 136, 138, 159nn9–10, 163nn3, 6, 170n6, 171n5, 172n10 Art Gallery of Ontario, 160n10 Asian, 46 Astell, Mary, 106 Atlas, James, 167n4 atomic bomb, 47, 162n4 atomization, 153, 154, 156, 174n3 atrocity, 9, 142 Atwood, Margaret, 151 Augustine, St, 16 Auschwitz, 8, 9, 164nn3, 5 Austen, Jane, 31, 160n1 Auster, Paul, 5, 16 Austin, Granville, 109 Australia, 168n10 authenticity, 17, 52–3, 152 authority, 48, 75, 106, 132, 173n15; narrative, 91; paternal, 31 auto-creation, 144 autonomy, 3, 15, 17, 23, 37, 66, 78, 132 Bailin, Miriam, 163n5 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 20, 160n1; The Dialogic Imagination, 21 Bal, Mieke, 171n4 baptism, 83 Barnes, Albert, 159n10 Barrias, Louis Ernest, 133 Barthes, Roland, 167n4 Battle of Jena, 105 Baudrillard, Jean, 10, 17, 18, 47, 50, 53; America, 11, 44, 45–6, 49; ‘The Anorexic Ruins,’ 10–11, 19, 43–4, 47; Evil Demon, 18; Fatal Strategies, 161n2; Forget Foucault, 10; ‘The Pol-

Index itics of Seduction,’ 162n5; Simulations, 161n1 beginning, 3, 5, 13, 14, 16, 20, 29, 32, 34, 40, 46, 60, 67, 72, 83, 95, 107, 119, 120, 125, 130, 134, 147, 169n4 Bell, Clive, and Roger Fry, 66 Bell, Michael, 65, 169n5 Benjamin, Walter, 18, 20, 75, 151 Bennington, Geoffrey, 168n12 Bergen-Belsen, 8 Berger, James, 6–7, 162n8 Berger, John, 136, 172n11 Bernheimer, Charles, 146 Bernstein, Michael, 11 Bhabha, Homi, 106 Bible, 15, 16, 40 birth, narrative of, 94 black, 10, 37, 40, 41, 72, 75, 77, 78, 79–80, 81, 83, 84, 95, 105, 160n5, 164n2, 171n4. See also AfricanAmerican Blake, William, 90, 166n4 Blanchot, Maurice, 8 blank slate, 110 Bleikasten, Andre, 38 blindness, 19, 46, 49, 111, 112, 113, 121, 136 body, 12, 24, 53, 54, 102, 116, 123, 130, 131, 137, 140, 141, 149, 153, 167n1; artificial, 115; black, 77, 78, 81, 83, 84, 164n2; body-ego, 147; female, 30, 65, 83, 84, 113, 115, 122, 124, 127, 131, 133, 134, 136, 139, 145, 147, 148, 165n6; feminine, 149; male, 133, 140, 171n5, 172n15; politic, 115; sexual, 139, 171n3 Book of Kells, 154 border(s), 21, 126; of civilization, 135;

191

the end as, 21; between fact and fiction, 148; national, 12, 92, 93; linguistic, 21 boundary(ies), 49, 94, 95, 104, 106, 131, 140; class, 90, 102; cultural, 92, 94, 96, 99; end as, 21; between individuals, 94; linguistic, 90; literary, 21; between masculine and feminine, 128; narrative, 116; between narrative and history, 89; national, 90, 92, 93, 94, 99, 101–2, 110; race, 90, 94, 99; between self and other, 78; social, 96, 99; territorial, 94; of women, 131; between word and world, 89 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 151 Bowers, Susan, 72–3 Boyer, Paul, 162n4 Boyle, Danny, 150 Brantlinger, Patrick, 163n1 Braque, George, 66 Bratton, J.S., 156n19 Britain, 59–60, 107 Brooks, Peter, 136, 137, 148, 171n5, 172n15 brothel, 134, 138, 139 Brown, Norman O., 111 Buchenwald, 8 Buck-Morss, Susan, 141 Burkina Faso, 106 Burne-Jones, Edward, 172n11 Bush, George W., 25, 45, 150 Calvinism, 47 Calvino, Italo, 3, 5, 11, 12, 21 Campbell, Gordon, 170n7 capitalism, 17, 18, 90, 110, 123, 125, 126, 151, 162n3, 169–70n6, 172n12, 173n18 Carey, Frances, 121

192 Index Carter, Angela, 25, 130, 131–49, 152, 173n19 castration, 40, 77–8, 83–4, 134, 141, 143–7, 149, 153 catastrophe, 6, 7–14, 47, 50, 53, 72, 121, 147, 148, 150 Catholicism, 46, 65, 120 causality, 67, 68 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 107 chance, 31, 51, 103, 123, 131 chaos, 23, 30, 36, 38, 40, 66, 129, 158n7 character, 8, 17, 21, 23, 29–42, 60, 62, 66, 67, 72, 73, 90, 91, 101, 128, 138, 161nn6, 10, 162n6, 163nn5–6 Charles X, King, 133 Chatterjee, Partha, 109–10, 167n6 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 16 child(ren), 12, 30, 31, 35, 37, 39, 40, 48, 64, 71, 72, 74, 76, 78, 79, 82, 84, 90, 105, 113, 115, 123, 126, 132, 145, 147, 154, 165n5 Chinitz, David, 159n9 Chopin, Kate, 32 Christ, 13 Christianity, 4, 11, 12, 24, 25, 59, 80, 90, 94, 95, 97, 110, 111, 120, 129, 130, 150, 159n8 chronology, 35, 41, 61, 66, 67, 71, 104, 110, 131 circulation, 15, 134, 156n1, 168n12 citizenship, 100, 108, 111, 114 civilization, 8, 10, 59–60, 77–8, 80, 99, 111, 113, 129, 134, 135, 152, 158n6 Cixous, Hélène, 76–7, 83, 165n6 Clark, Robert, 173n19 clitoris, 127, 128, 138, 143, 144, 146, 147 closure, 15, 21, 23, 30, 32, 33, 35, 160nn1–2, 161n10

code(s), 13, 29, 49, 99, 115, 127, 131, 149, 166n4; of behaviour, 32–3; genetic, 155, 156; linguistic, 61; of reason, 90; social, 143; symbolic, 29, 61 Coen, Ethan and Joel, 162n3 Coetzee, J.M., 83 Cohen, Peter, 158n6 coherence, 4, 33, 35, 37, 44, 45, 49, 69, 92, 105, 119, 125, 151, 161n10 Cold War, 106 collective(ity), 12, 59, 60, 70, 71, 89, 90, 91, 92, 102, 104, 115, 152, 156 colonial(ism), 12, 13, 24, 26, 91, 98, 99, 101, 102, 106, 109–10, 113, 114, 167n6, 168nn9, 11 Comay, Rebecca, 76 commonsense, 38 communalism, 23, 109 community(ies), 5, 13, 15, 16, 24, 34, 37, 73, 74, 76, 81, 82, 83, 84, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 110, 111–12, 115, 116, 151, 154, 164n4, 166n6, 167n8; apocalyptic, 89–100 completion, 21, 23, 30, 33, 40, 45, 69, 89, 163n2, 164n8; incompletion 23, 30, 33, 40, 45 conclusion, 3, 5, 8, 12, 16, 23, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 39–40, 41, 94, 96, 100, 119–20, 129, 130, 151, 156n4, 161n9. See also ending conflict, 21, 65, 91, 102, 104, 109, 110, 136, 155, 170n7 Conrad, Joseph, 59, 95, 125, 129, 151 conscience, 36 consciousness, 25, 34, 69, 89, 90, 91, 104, 119–20, 123; stream-of-, 34 conservative, 22, 131, 135, 136, 143, 144, 153, 173n19

Index consumerism, 153 consumption, 18, 125 continuity, 5, 34, 41, 67, 89, 103, 104, 115; discontinuity, 156 contract, 85, 90, 167n5, 168n10, 172n5; marriage, 31, 113, 132; sexual, 114, 168n10, 172n5; social, 108, 114, 115 contradiction, 14 38, 41, 94, 106, 130, 136, 161n10 control, 9, 36, 37, 38, 41, 52, 67, 82, 103, 104, 109, 113, 128, 134, 136, 139, 140, 141, 155, 159n7 convention, 21, 50, 51, 99, 100, 160n1, 173n19; the ‘end’ as, 22, 29, 33, 50; literary, 21; narrative, 22, 23, 32, 84; novelistic, 90, 91, 100; social, 21, 32, 126, 137; Victorian, 160n2 Cortázar, Julio, 90 cosmos, 25, 35, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126, 130; cosmic, 36, 120, 125; microcosmic, 93 counter-memory, 76 Courbet, Gustave, 133 crimes against humanity, 152 Cromer, Lord, 168n9 Cuarón, Alfonso, 150 cubism, 66 culmination, 5, 59, 62, 97, 99, 133, 137 Dachau, 8 Darling, Marsha, 73 Darwin, Charles, 173n18 Darwinism, 135, 171n4 Davidson, Dale, 158n7 Day After, The, 44 Deane, Seamus, 107 death, 5, 12, 13, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52–4, 55, 61, 65, 66, 69, 76, 83, 100, 116, 120, 122, 125, 138,

193

141, 142–3, 148, 153, 154, 159n9, 174n4; Angel of, 141; dying, 8, 16, 50, 52, 119; elimination of, 25, 53–4, 155; ‘gift of,’ 156; of God, 43; individual, 46; as loss of self, 32, 125; of man, 17; Nazi death camps, 8, 10, 18, 21, 23, 25; randomness of, 42; as viral agent, 55 decadence, 131, 135, 137, 170n2, 171n7 decay, 47, 152 deception(ive), 63 Declaration of Rights, 107 deconstruction, 19. See also Derrida deep structure, 49, 63 definition, 19, 21, 23, 65, 79, 95, 99, 106, 128, 171n5, 173n19 DeKoven, Marianne, 170n8 Delacroix, Eugène, 133, 171n6 DeLillo, Don, 23, 42, 43–55, 152, 162nn6–7 Dellamora, Richard, 170n1 de Man, Paul, 19, 20; ‘Criticism and Crisis,’ 36; ‘The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism,’ 19 democracy, 20, 106, 109, 111, 112, 167n3 demystification, 19 dependence, 13, 20, 31, 37, 39, 68, 112, 113, 135, 145, 149, 159n7, 160n1 Derrida, Jacques, 12, 50, 131, 140, 152, 155, 156, 167n4, 169n4, 171n3, 174n1; ‘The Aforementioned SoCalled Human Genome,’ 26, 152, 156; ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,’ 44, 90; ‘Declarations of Independence,’ 167n5; ‘Ends of Man,’ 13, 152; The Gift of Death, 174n4; ‘No

194 Index Apocalypse Not Now,’ 46–7; The Post Card, 13; ‘Sending: On Representation,’ 172n13; Spurs, 138, 172n14, 173n19; ‘Structure, Sign, and Play,’ 22 Descartes, René, 139 desensitization, 18 despair, 34, 37, 43, 50, 60, 61, 98, 124 destiny, 21, 93, 102–3, 104, 110, 126, 138, 155 destruction, 5, 7, 10, 18, 24, 50, 73, 74, 85, 110, 120, 121, 123, 151, 157nn2, 5, 164n5 Dick, Philip K., 17–18, 162n6 difference, 44, 45, 46, 50, 51–2, 53, 79– 80, 92, 96, 131, 140, 143, 146, 148, 149, 154, 155, 156, 161n8, 165n6, 167–8n7, 171n3; national, 90, 97; racial, 97, 167–8n7; religious, 97; sexual, 113, 115, 116, 129, 131–2, 141, 146, 149, 154, 155, 171n3 digression, 105 Dijkstra, Bram, 136, 171n4, 173n18 direction, 8, 11, 13, 14, 21, 35, 43, 69, 96, 135, 151, 155 directionlessness, 42, 59, 60, 154 disaster, 5, 7, 8, 25, 134, 140; as dry run, 51; environmental, 6, 150, 166n3; film, 18; real, 51; simulated, 48 disclosure, 6, 74; self-disclosure, 76 discourse, 26, 133, 167n6; apocalyptic, 49, 90; critical, 7, 172n10; of man, 139; popular, 6; post-apocalyptic, 44, 47; postmodern, 49; rational(ist), 38, 39; of the ‘real,’ 53; of ‘unveiling,’ 24; of woman, 171n3, 172n10 disembodiment, 112, 139, 140, 147

disorder, 23, 110, 115, 133; social, 158n7 displacement of women, 25, 138, 171n3, 172n10; double, 128, 137 disremembering, 73, 74, 75, 80, 165n5 disruption, 21, 29, 35, 36, 42, 50, 76, 78, 84, 128, 132, 134, 135, 140, 143 dissimulation, 140 diversity, 13, 15, 24, 92, 100, 101, 104, 159n9 divide, 20, 25, 42, 96, 98, 99, 100, 105, 159n9, 163n2 DNA, 155 Doane, Mary Ann, 173n17 document(ation), 41, 50, 62, 67, 73, 74, 75, 84, 85, 105, 106, 127, 158n6, 161n9, 164nn3, 5 Dollimore, Jonathan, 170n1 Doody, Margaret Anne, 160n1, 169n1 doubt, 8, 52, 81, 91, 143, 152 Dowling, Linda, 135 dream(s), 22, 47, 63, 81, 85, 94, 107, 148; apocalyptic, 134; of cohesive community, 24, 89, 97, 104; Enlightenment, 8, 156; of freedom, 78; of the future, 7, 76; national, 77; of the post-apocalypse, 10; secular, 4, 89 Duncan, Isadora, 172n11 Dunne, Mary Chavelita (George Egerton), 136, 171n8 DuPlessi, Rachel Blau, 20–1, 160n2 Eagleton, Terry, 16, 20 earth, 12, 24, 25, 42, 43, 45, 53, 59, 60, 69, 89, 90, 96, 98, 99, 110, 122, 126, 129, 134, 150, 154, 164n5, 166n7 Eco, Umberto, 20 Edwards, Jonathan, 45

Index effacement, 85, 128, 131, 137, 138, 139, 143, 144, 146–7, 148, 162n8 Egerton, George (Mary Chavelita Dunne), 136, 171n8 ego, 25, 32–3, 37, 103, 108, 123, 124, 126, 130, 147, 143 Egypt, 168n9 Eliot, George, 31 Eliot, T.S., 14, 16, 19, 20, 40, 91, 159n9; ‘The Hollow Men,’ 8; ‘The Metaphysical Poets,’ 15; ‘Perfect Critic,’ 15; ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth,’ 15, 60–1; ‘The Wasteland,’ 16 emotion(al), 15, 39, 101 end(ing), 3–26, 29–42, 43–55, 59–70, 101, 102, 103, 120–1, 123, 125, 129, 131, 150–6, 159n7, 160nn1–2, 4, 169nn3–4; and characters in fiction, 3, 29–42, 72, 74, 76, 79, 82, 83, 90, 97, 98, 104–5, 139, 147, 148, 150–6, 163n6; End of Days, 150; and end of history, 18, 26, 44, 59– 70, 89, 101, 105–6, 109, 115–16, 151, 163n1, 167n3; fiction of the, 3, 42; of humanity, 13, 151–6; impossibility of, 14, 75; sense of the/an 4, 6, 7, 15, 22, 33, 89, 119–20, 129–30, 131, 157n1; and/of time 150–6; viral, 43–55; of the world, 4, 24, 44, 89, 134, 165–6n3. See also apocalypse; conclusion; fin de siècle; postapocalypse Enlightenment, 4, 8, 9, 10, 13, 43, 63, 80, 91, 105, 106, 132, 141, 156 environment(al), 6, 25, 48, 150, 166n3 epic, 21, 60 epoch, 34, 46 equality, 105, 109, 98, 114 Equiano, Olaudah, 80

195

eros, 160n1 eschatology, 12, 121, 169n4 establishment, 34, 48, 158n7 ethics, 13, 155, 156 Europe(an), 7, 8, 13, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 59, 60, 72, 79–80, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 114, 121, 136, 143, 162n3, 170n7; nation, 89–100 evangelical, 25, 44, 150, 162n4 event(s), 4, 6–7, 19, 34, 39, 51, 54, 59, 60, 62–3, 65, 66–7, 70, 71, 72, 74, 79, 90, 91, 119, 129, 133, 163nn2, 6, 169n6, 174n3; apocalyptic, 22; catastrophic, 7–14, 121, 148 evolution, 106, 109, 152, 154, 155, 156, 173n18 exchange, 32, 37, 39, 76, 83, 84, 114, 128, 146 exit, 21, 145, 150n10 exoticism, 133, 139 expose(ure), 19, 20, 25, 30, 32–3, 43, 44, 50, 52, 53, 54, 78, 79, 100, 112, 124, 133–4, 141, 149 failure, 23, 30, 33, 39, 72, 76, 96 faith, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 16, 29, 53, 59, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 89, 91, 94, 102, 121, 125, 167n8 family, 23, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40–1, 63, 74, 75, 100, 122, 153 fascism, 8, 18, 105, 170n7 Faulkner, William, 8, 23, 30–42, 43, 55, 75, 129, 151, 160n3, 161nn9, 11, 161–2n3 feminine, 25, 33, 82, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 136, 137, 145, 149, 170nn7–8, 171n3, 172nn10, 14 feminism(ist), 10, 26, 131, 137, 138, 153, 168n9, 170n2, 172nn10, 13–14, 173n19, 174n20

196 Index fetish(ism), 136, 143–4, 146, 147, 172n14 feudal(ism), 61, 68, 69, 125 fiction, 3, 4, 14–15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 25, 30, 36, 37, 42, 46, 47, 50, 90, 113, 120, 136, 138, 139, 146, 148, 172n10 fin de siècle, 131, 132, 135, 136, 137, 143, 144, 155, 170n1, 171n4, 172nn10, 12, 174n19 First World War (The Great War), 7, 59, 69, 101, 158n6 Fitch, Geo L., 135, 171n7 Ford, Ford Madox, 23, 61–9, 152, 161n6, 163nn2, 6, 164nn7–8 foreign(er), 52, 54, 84, 90, 92, 93, 111, 135, 166n6 form, 3, 11, 12, 14, 17, 22, 40, 44, 66, 90, 91, 100, 102, 136, 137, 159n9, 160n1, 163nn4, 6 Forster, E.M., 24, 89, 90–100, 101, 125, 129, 151, 166nn5–7 Foucault, Michel, 12–13, 155, 171n3 Founding Fathers, 46, 108 fragment(ation), 13, 16, 34, 66, 69, 90, 104, 109, 124 France, 4, 107, 151, 162n3, 168n9 freedom, 5, 8, 43, 45, 52, 72, 73, 77–9, 80–1, 98, 107, 111, 113, 114, 125, 133, 134, 153, 155, 164n2. See also liberty French Revolution, 90, 105, 106 Fresnadillo, Juan Carlos, 150 Freud, Sigmund, 61, 63, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 133, 143–4, 145, 146, 147 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 166n5 Frost, Catherine, 170n7 Fry, Roger, and Clive Bell, 66, 163n4 Fuentes, Carlos, 90 Fukuyama, Francis, 5, 10, 12, 105,

106, 109, 115, 141, 157n2, 163n1, 167n3 future(s), 6, 7, 8, 11, 17–18, 33, 42, 43– 4, 46, 50, 53, 55, 59, 60, 61, 101, 109, 120, 122, 129, 147, 149, 154, 155, 156, 157n2, 158n7, 159n7, 161nn8, 111, 166n6, 169n3; alternate, 72–85 Gardner, Vivien, 172n9 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr, 73, 79–80 gays, 49 gaze, 64, 132, 133, 136, 138, 139, 145, 146, 148 gender, 14, 24, 32, 33, 36, 40, 84, 112, 113, 114, 126, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 141, 149, 152, 156n3, 161n3, 164n2, 170n8, 170–1n3, 171n4 genealogy, 33, 34, 42, 74 Genesis, Book of, 5, 11, 12, 14, 69, 110, 120 genocide, 8, 12, 17 genre, 13, 20, 21, 26, 85, 90, 105 Germany, 17, 23, 48–9, 51, 52, 107, 110, 158n6, 162n6, 163n2 Gérôme, Léon, 172n11 Ghandi, Mahatma, 110, 112, 166n6, 167n6 ghosts, 10, 22, 46, 72, 74, 75, 76, 82, 84, 147, 164n1 Gilman, Sander L., 171n4 globalization, 16 God, 4, 29–30, 33, 40, 41, 43, 63, 69, 77, 89, 95, 97, 98, 103, 111, 130, 165n1, 167n7 godless(ness), 34 Goldsmith, Oliver, 16 Goldsmith, Steven, 166n4 Gore, Al, 150 government, U.S., 106

Index Grand, Sarah, 172n8 Greek(s), 4, 46, 59, 94, 169n1, 171n5 Gulf War, 106 gypsies, 49 Hacking, Ian, 69 Hansson, Laura Marholm, 137 Haraway, Donna, 174n2 Hardt, Michael (and Antonio Negri), 92 Hardy, Thomas, 31, 35, 160n4 Harris, Trudier, 82 Harrison, James, 167n2 hatred, 41, 128, 130, 169n3 haunting, 6, 7, 10, 16, 24, 26, 30, 36, 39, 41, 75, 77, 97, 107, 123, 151, 153 Hayles, Katherine, 174n2 heaven, 37, 43, 45, 53, 69, 95, 96, 136, 171n8 hedonism, 153, 154 Hegel, G.F.W., 4–5, 8, 12, 59, 105, 163n1 Hélie-Lucas, Aimée, 112 Helland, Janice, 172n10 Hemingway, Ernest, 50 Henderson, Mae, 81 heroine, 31–2, 42, 130, 132, 134, 136, 138, 174n20 heterosexuality, 147 ‘Hindu Brothers Consider and Be Warned,’ 166–7n1 Hindu fundamentalism, 93, 166–7n1 Hinduism, 24, 89–100, 102, 166n6 Hiroshima, 8 history, 4–5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23–4, 26, 44, 45, 49, 50, 97, 102, 103, 104, 105–6, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 131, 138, 147, 148, 151, 152, 155, 157n2, 158nn6–7, 163n1, 164nn1, 3, 164–

197

5n5, 165n2, 170n7; end of, 5, 18, 26, 59–70, 101, 116, 167n3; limits of, 71–88; traumatic, 6 Hitler, Adolf, 23, 48, 49, 52, 158n6, 162n6 Hollywood, 18, 162n3, 168n9 holocaust, 154; Nazi, 6, 8, 10, 18, 46, 52, 119, 152, 158n6; nuclear, 43 Homer, 18 homosexuality, 135, 143. See also gays; lesbians Houellebecq, Michel, 25, 149, 151–6, 174n3 Hueffer, Ford Herman, 69, 164n7. See also Ford, Ford Madox human(s), 9, 10, 14, 18, 26, 35, 36, 54, 61, 63, 69, 73, 79, 80, 92, 94, 98, 99, 100, 101, 107, 120, 125, 136, 150–1, 152, 154, 155, 169n3, 174n1; nonhuman, 98; posthuman, 26, 153, 143, 155, 156, 157n2, 174n2 human genome project, 26, 152 humanism, 9, 22, 136, 152; posthumanism, 174n2 humanity, 4, 10, 13, 18, 25, 26, 43, 45, 80, 89, 96, 106, 110, 115, 120, 123, 125, 129, 130, 150–1, 152, 155, 170n7; inhumanity, 9 Humanity’s Wrong alias Women’s Rights, 134 Hume, David, 62, 63 humour, 64 hunger, 77, 81, 82 Hurston, Zora Neale, 41, 161n8 Hutcheon, Linda, 148 Huysman, J.-K., 144 Huyssen, Andreas, 159 Ibsen, Henrik, 135–6 I Ching, 17

198 Index identity, 61, 62, 76, 83, 84, 92, 93, 95, 102, 112, 116, 121, 125, 126, 128, 138, 156, 171n3; non-identity, 84; as performance, 127; politics, 130 ideology, 112, 171n3 image, 16, 17, 18, 44, 48, 49, 51, 53, 60, 78, 125, 130, 133, 147, 148, 156, 159n9, 161n7, 166n4, 173n18 imagination, 21, 36, 43, 76, 111, 146 immigrants(s), 77, 91 immortality, 26, 47, 115, 116, 150, 154, 155. See also mortality imperialism, 102, 106, 107, 166n7 import, nationalism as, 102, 105 impossibility, 9, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 24, 36, 41, 54, 55, 61, 62, 66, 67, 71, 75, 76, 85, 91, 115, 139, 146, 148, 163n5, 174n19 Impressionism, 66, 159n10; PostImpressionism, 139, 159n10, 163n4 incest, 34, 37 independence, 24, 31, 104, 107, 108, 109, 112, 127, 160n1, 166n6, 167n5 India, 24, 90–100, 91–116, 129, 166nn5–7 indifference, 8, 18, 122 individual(ism), 8, 12, 34, 36, 37, 41, 46, 61, 62, 63, 68, 69, 70, 71, 78, 90, 91, 92, 94, 103, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 114, 119, 120, 123, 125–6, 138, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 167n5, 168n10, 170n6, 174n3; transindividual, 21 inevitability, 7, 11, 31, 37, 42, 63, 108, 110, 112, 131, 155, 158n7, 159n7, 166n5, 169n3 insiders, 12, 103 interpretation, 22, 47, 63, 64, 65, 67, 165n1

interrupt(ion), 6, 26, 47, 62, 71, 78, 83, 100, 102, 122, 149, 152 intertextuality, 105 Ireland, 46, 154 Irigary, Luce, 165n6, 170n8 irony, 46, 103, 115, 162n6 irrational(ity), 12, 38, 141, 149, 166n7 Islam, 24, 89–100, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 150, 158n7, 167n8, 167– 8n9 isolation, 23, 91, 92, 99, 154 James, P.D., 150–1 Jameson, Frederic, 20, 105; Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 7, 16; ‘Third-World Literature,’ 90–1, 102 Japan(ese), 17. See also Hiroshima Jayawardena, Kumari, 112 Jehovah’s Witness, 52, 158n7 Jews, 46, 49, 108, 158n6, 171n4 Joachim of Fiore, 157n3 Johns Hopkins University, 22 Joyce, James, 40, 91, 170n1 Kaluza, Irene, 38 Kandinsky, Wassily, 63 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 8–9, 12–13, 29, 155; neo-Kantian, 155 Kartiganer, Donald, 38 Kermode, Frank, 3–4, 6, 11, 14, 19, 20, 22, 36, 41, 102, 120, 125, 152, 157n1, 159n8, 169nn3–4; ‘Apocalypse and the Modern,’ 6, 157n3, 169n2; ‘Lawrence and Apocalyptic Types,’ 34; ‘Millennium and Apocalypse,’ 151; Sense of an Ending, 15, 89; 119, 129–30, 131, 157n1; ‘Sense Endings,’ 19–20; ‘Waiting,’ 4 Ketu, Katrak, 112 Klein, Richard, 46

Index knowledge, 13, 19, 42, 53, 63, 65, 74, 80, 104, 107, 109, 139, 156, 164–5n5, 169n3; dangerous, 42; limits to, 116, 148; self-, 49 Kojève, Alexandre, 105 Koran, 94, 110, 111, 113, 167n7 Krumholz, Linda, 164n1 Kurzweil, Ray, 150 Lacan, Jacques, 72, 155 LaCapra, Dominick, 157n5, 164n4 lacuna, 55 language, 5, 7, 13, 14, 47, 72, 74, 75, 76, 83, 85, 90, 92, 97, 121, 164n1; of apocalypse, 44; common, 16; fictional, 36; German, 48; literary 16, 19; messianic, 25; national, 21; as revelation, 14–26; symbolic, 72, 75, 76, 77, 81 Latour, Bruno, 174n2 Lauretis, Teresa de, 14, 131–2, 146–7, 170–1n3 Law of the Father, 79, 83 Lawrence, D.H., 11–12, 13, 34, 119–30, 132, 138, 140, 148, 149, 151, 159n8, 169nn2–5, 170nn6–7; Apocalypse, 12, 25, 119–20, 123, 169n4; Fantasia of the Unconscious, 126, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 7–8, 121–30, 159n8; Phoenix II, 125; Women in Love, 93 Leda and the Swan, 147–8 Lees, Edith, 134 legitimacy, 85, 128, 137, 168n10; illegitimacy 40, 39, 85 lesbians, 127–8, 130, 146–7 Levy, Andrew, 164n1 liberalism, 105–6 liberation, 20, 42, 43, 93, 101, 102, 107, 108, 113, 114, 116, 129, 133, 134, 135, 136, 140, 153, 168n9

199

liberty, 42, 72, 77, 105, 106, 109, 133, 134, 136, 141, 150 libido (libidinal), 72–3, 164n2, 171n3 Lindsey, Hal, 162n4 linguistics, 19, 38, 61, 152 Linton, Elizabeth Lynn, 132, 171n7, 173n19 literacy, 79–80 literature, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 26, 42, 46, 60, 72, 90, 102, 127, 150, 151, 157n3, 158n7, 165n2, 168n11, 169n2, 171nn4, 7, 172n10, 174n2 logic, 6, 14, 18, 36, 38, 39, 40, 61, 75, 78, 81, 85, 93, 94, 96, 111, 120, 138, 139, 143, 144, 146, 161n8, 163n5 loss, 7, 14, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 29, 32, 35, 36, 39, 42, 47, 50, 55, 59, 61, 66, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 91, 121, 132, 138, 145, 146, 147, 157n5, 164nn8, 3, 165n6 Lyotard, Jean, 106, 164nn2, 5, 168n12, 171n3 Macaulay, Thomas, 109 majority, 102, 166n1 man/Man, 4–5, 8, 9, 10, 12–14, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23, 25–6, 37, 46, 50, 59, 60, 77, 81–2, 84, 90, 105, 106, 108, 132, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140–1, 143–4, 148, 149, 151, 152–3, 154, 156, 167n3, 168n9, 169n1, 172n13, 174n1; ‘Artificial Man,’ 115; mankind, 72, 95, 96, 97, 106, 121, 150, 155; New Man, 119–30 map, 102 margin (marginalization), 24, 89, 90, 102, 103, 105 Márquez, Gabriel García, 90 marriage, 21, 31, 32, 39, 114, 126, 132, 135, 137, 146; contract, 31, 113

200 Index Marvel, Andrew, 16 Marx, Karl, 59, 63; ‘On the Jewish Question,’ 108 Marxism, 105, 108 masculinity, 25, 31, 33, 49, 82, 114, 128, 130, 170n8, 170n2, 173nn17, 19 Massey Lectures, 9 mass market, 17 master(s), 79, 81, 82, 83, 108, 143; slave, 73, 74, 78 master–slave hierarchy, 78, 84, dialectic, 80, 170n8 Mather, Cotton, 47 Matrix, The, 162n7 Matthew, Gospel according to, 45, 90 McCarthy, Cormac, 150 McCarthy, Jeffrey Mathes, 163n6 McGowan, John, 137, 170n1 meaning, 3, 8, 10–11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19–20, 21–2, 23, 29, 30, 33, 36, 37, 39, 43–4, 45–6, 49, 50, 51, 54–5, 59, 67–8, 72, 85, 102, 103, 104, 119, 121, 125, 127, 130, 151, 162n3; social, 21 meaningfulness, 39–40, 41, 43, 50, 75 meaninglessness, 3, 10, 13, 17, 35, 120, 122, 163n3 media, 18 medicine, 107, 133, 168n9 memory(ies), 5, 18, 45, 46, 61–2, 63, 64, 66, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76, 79, 80, 82, 85, 95, 96, 104, 112, 147, 154, 165n5, 166n7; accounting-memory, 76; archival, 46; individual, 61, 62, 63, 68, 69; collective, countermemory, 76; cultural, 46; ‘rememory,’ 75, 83; short-term, 164n8; social, 46. See also Morrison, ‘The Site of Memory’

Mernissi, Fatima, 106, 113, 115 metahistory, 111 metaphor, 9, 32, 43, 81, 82, 102, 112, 119, 121, 131, 138, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 165n6 microcosm(ic), 93 Middle Passage, 73, 74, 79, 84 Mill, John Stuart, 106 millennium(a), 9, 11, 43, 45, 72, 90, 131, 144, 151, 155 Millgate, Michael, 160n3 minority, 158n6 Miró, Joan, 66 misogyny, 37, 170n7 misrepresentation, 41 missionaries, 94–6, 97 modernism, 6, 7, 8, 11, 22, 23, 26, 29, 30, 33, 38, 39, 42, 59–70, 71, 91, 121, 125, 137, 151, 155, 157n3, 159– 60n10, 160n1, 161n6, 163nn2–3, 6, 169n5, 170nn7–8, 172n10. See also postmodernism modernity, 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, 16, 23, 25, 63, 109, 121, 125, 170n6 Mohanty, Sachidananda, 170n7 Mondrian, Piet, 63 Monet, Claude, 17 monotony, 96, 97 monstrosity, 22, 26, 141 Montgomery, Maxine Loron, 72 Morris, William, 172n11 Morrison, Toni, 71–85, 152, 165n5; Beloved, 24, 71–85, 152, 164n1; Playing in the Dark, 76–7, 80, 106; ‘In the Realm of Responsibility,’ 165n5; ‘Site of Memory,’ 73, 165n5; Song of Solomon, 73–4 mortality, 52, 54, 115, 149, 154, 170n8. See also immortality Moser, Thomas, 67

Index mourning, 46, 61, 72–3, 76, 77, 78, 147, 164n4 multiculturalism, 9 museum, 76, 138, 140, 141 Muslim, 25, 46, 90, 93, 102, 108, 110, 111, 112, 115, 167n1 myth, 19, 20, 40, 46, 74, 93, 102, 103, 108, 122, 129, 137, 140, 147, 148, 160n5, 168n9, 171n6. See also Leda and the Swan; Narcissus; Pygmalion Nagasaki, 8 name(ing), 22, 37, 41, 46, 47, 48, 49, 61, 73–6, 77, 78, 79, 82, 84, 85, 99, 106, 107, 114, 116, 125, 139, 145, 164nn3–4, 171n3; namelessness, 24, 48, 111, 136; unnamable, 22 narcissism, 124, 145, 146, 156 Narcissus, 148 narrative(s), 3–5, 7, 14, 21, 24, 33, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 62, 66, 67–8, 69, 75, 79, 83, 84, 105, 106, 160n1, 163n6; apocalyptic, 8, 13, 29, 55, 100, 102, 111, 120, 143, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155; authority, 91; closure, 21, 30, 161n10; conventions, 23, 32, 84; and/of the end; 11, 14, 29, 32, 49, 154; Enlightenment, 4, 10; expectations, 3; of the future, 8, 44; of History, 5, 12, 59– 85, 89, 102, 105, 115; of Man, 5, 12, 25, 105–6, 119–49; modernist, 30; of modernity, 7; of Nation, 5, 12, 24, 89–116, 152; open-ended, 25, 32; openness, 20, 30; order, 3, 15, 29, 33, 37, 104–5; patriarchal, 50; postapocalyptic, 6, 55; of progress, 5, 60, 110; resolution, 32, 33; romance, 21; secular, 4; slave, 73, 79–81;

201

stream-of-consciousness, 34; teleological, 5, 7, 110, 119; utopian, 12 narrator, 40, 61, 105, 114 nation, 4, 5, 8, 10, 12, 23, 24, 89–116, 152, 168n10, 168n12; apocalyptic, 166; Islamic, 24, 94, 111, 116; narratives of, 100, 102; postcolonial, 110, 113, 168n11 nationalism, 24, 91–3, 94, 95, 100, 101–2, 103, 108–10, 114, 166nn5–6, 167n6; apocalyptic, 101; as apocalyptic narrative, 100; teleological, 24 nature, 35, 50, 66, 99, 120, 122, 123, 127, 133, 135, 137, 141, 144, 149, 154 Nazism, 8, 23, 48–9, 51, 158n6. See also propaganda negative dialectic, 45 Negri, Antonio (and Michael Hardt), 92 new criticism, 26 New Critics, 19 New Woman. See women New World. See world Nietzsche, Friedrich, 29, 30, 42, 43, 60, 92, 131, 138, 140, 172n14, 173n19; post-Nietzschean, 40 nihilism, 121, 151, 152, 167n4 non-existence, 98 non-identity, 84 non-normative, 156 non-species, 22 Nordau, Max, 135, 136, 171n7, 173n19 normalization, 99, 109 nostalgia, 18, 19, 23, 37, 40, 48, 51, 61, 68; white, 40 nothingness, 19, 36, 60, 95, 96, 97, 98, 124, 125, 129 novel, 21, 23, 33, 34–5, 55, 59, 89, 90,

202 Index 91–2, 100, 105, 160n1; modernist, 42, 91; nineteenth-century, 29, 30– 1, 32, 42, 90, 160n1, 174n20; postmodern, 100; Third World, 91, 102; twentieth-century, 155 nuclear family, 153 nude, 133, 136, 171n5 object, 14, 15, 17, 18, 38, 72–3, 77–8, 79, 144, 145; of exchange, 32, 39, 128, 146; woman as, 128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148 objectivity, 8, 24, 33, 34, 36, 40, 42, 62, 91, 160n3 obliteration, nuclear, 46 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 9, 12, 158n7 Old World. See world, old oneness, 36, 90, 97, 100 optimism, 111 oracle, 17–18 order, 3, 8, 14,15, 16, 18, 22, 29, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 68, 69, 76, 79, 90, 110, 120, 122, 135, 140, 150, 161n3; capitalist, 126; Darwinian, 135, 173n18; disorder, 23, 110, 115, 133, 158n7; Divine, 47; of events, 4; higher, 4, 38; maternal, 84; moral, 31, 35, 37; narrative, 3, 37, 104–5; paternal, 39, 42, 84, 113, 114; poetic, 38; social, 29, 30, 31, 32, 37, 42, 84, 113, 123, 132, 134, 139, 140, 143; (of the) symbolic, 77, 81, 83, 84, 85; transcendent, 14–15; universal, 29; of the word, 79, 83 originality, 3, 13, 15, 17, 20, 21, 38, 46, 66, 81, 83, 121, 145, 159n10, 162n5, 165n6 origins, 4, 10, 13, 21, 22, 46, 47, 60, 61, 62, 66, 68, 69, 71, 74, 75, 77, 83, 85,

89, 93, 95, 96, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 115,119, 125, 126, 129, 133, 149, 151, 152, 157n5, 166n7, 168n10; historical, 102, 115, 168n10; narrative of, 101, 106, 115, 116; of the nation, 168n10; of universal man, 106; of the universe, 96, 151 other, 38, 49, 79, 82, 84, 85, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 106, 126, 135, 137, 140, 148, 156, 164n4, 165nn6–7, 170n6 Otten, Terry, 78 Ovid, 137 pagan, 12, 130 Pandey, Gyanendra, 109, 167n1 paradise, 43, 44, 45, 55, 155 passivity, 112, 122, 127, 148, 153, 155 past, 11, 16, 23, 34, 36, 37, 41, 44, 45, 50, 53, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 73, 75–6, 81, 83, 85, 131, 152, 161n11; catastrophic, 6; heroic, 37. See also history Pateman, Carole, 114, 115, 168n10, 172n12 paternalism, 31 pathos, 23, 97 patriarchy, 12, 41, 50, 84, 111, 113, 114, 170n7, 172n12, 172–3n15 pattern, 3–4, 14, 15, 22, 59, 106, 110, 119, 120, 158n7 penis, 125, 128, 133, 141, 142, 144, 146, 147 performance, 51, 127, 145–6, 148, 173n19; masculine 25, 141, 143, 144, 148, 149; self as, 129; of women, 25, 138, 139–40, 142, 143, 147, 173n19 permanence, 4, 34, 40, 63, 85, 154 phallus, 25, 83, 127, 128, 129, 130, 141, 142, 147, 148, 149

Index philosophy, 4, 9, 26, 59, 98, 112, 138, 152, 172n13 Picasso, Pablo, 17, 63, 160n10 Pilgrims, 45, 47, 198 poetry, 15, 16, 38, 60, 94, 97 Pointon, Marcia, 133, 171n5 politics, 36, 92, 130, 132, 150, 162n5, 168n12, 169n6, 170n7, 171n4, 174n3 Polk, Noel, 38, 161nn7, 9, 172n3 polyglot, 21 post-apocalypse, 6–7, 10, 11, 14, 22, 23, 26, 34, 37, 44, 47, 52, 54, 55, 116, 120, 155 post-apocalyptic criticism, 19 post-apocalyptic history, 71, 85 post-apocalyptic nation, 116 post-apocalyptic thinking, 7–14, 152 post-holocaust, 46, 119 posthuman, 26, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157n2, 174n2 Postman, The, 44 postmodernism, 7, 8, 11, 16, 22, 23, 26, 29, 42, 43, 48, 71–85, 137, 151, 159n9, 174n20 presence, 22, 45, 47, 50, 54, 84, 98, 130, 138, 146 Presley, Elvis, 48 primitivism, 59–60, 63 profit, 10, 46, 84, 142, 158n7 progress, 9, 12, 18, 105, 107, 110, 112, 123, 130, 132, 135, 148, 154; history as, 105; story/narrative of, 8, 60, 110, 112 progressives, 143, 144 proliferation, 43, 133, 151, 162n7, 166–7n3 propaganda, 166n1; Nazi, 158n6 prophesy, 16, 44, 47, 53, 89, 105, 110, 158n7, 167n7; prophet, 101, 103, 104, 110, 116, 162n3, 163n2

203

prostitution, 133–4, 137, 172n12 Protestantism, 64, 120 public, 60, 90, 102, 103, 105, 108, 109, 135, 139; sphere, 12, 114, 115, 132, 134, 142 Puckett, Newbell Niles, 73 Puritans, 44–5, 47 purpose, 4, 5, 18, 35, 37, 59–60, 103, 121, 127, 128, 169n5; sense of, 4, 5, 103 Pygmalion, 137, 148, 172n11 Pykett, Lyn, 171n8 Quinby, Lee, 11, 161n8, 169n3 race, 36, 40, 84, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 135, 153,170n7, 171n4; Anglo-Saxon, 134–5; human, 26, 92, 94, 99, 100, 120, 152; posthuman, 155 racism, 37, 38, 99, 166n5 randomness, 6, 21, 42, 55 rape, 40, 41, 74, 140, 147–8, 160n5, 166n7 rationality, 4, 9, 38, 41, 53, 63, 65, 91, 97, 102–3, 115, 123, 130, 131, 141, 144, 154; irrationality, 12, 141, 149, 166n7. See also reason rationalization, 12, 38, 65, 115 reader(s), 12, 16, 17, 20, 21, 32, 34, 35, 49, 65, 66, 67, 112, 163n5, 168n11 reading, 3, 17, 20, 21, 23, 44, 45, 47, 62, 64, 65, 67, 80, 134, 144, 157n11 real, the, 10, 14, 17, 19, 20, 42, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 62, 63, 148, 152, 162nn3, 7–8; world, 14, 129 realism, 40, 135 reality, 10, 17, 21, 72, 124, 129, 164n3, 165n2, 171n3

204 Index reason, 8, 9, 33, 38, 39, 42, 53, 62, 65, 90, 96, 103, 123, 133, 135, 139, 161n6; unreason, 141, 143, 144, 145 rebirth, 5, 18, 25, 89, 111 recovery, 62, 63, 64, 72, 75, 77, 82, 83, 122, 149, 157n5, 164n1; irrecoverable, 5, 63, 71, 74, 152 redemption, 6, 11, 37, 76, 121 Rees-Mogg, William, 158n7, 172n9 referent, 6, 7, 16, 18, 19, 20, 23, 45, 47, 51, 53, 54, 55, 162n8, 173n19 reflexive(ity), 21, 31, 52, 62, 169n1 religion, 4, 6, 17, 33, 42, 80, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 103, 111, 150. See also Catholicism; Christianity; Hinduism; Islam; Protestantism; secularity remainder, 6, 10, 44, 46, 47 rememory, 75–6, 83 Renaissance, 91, 171n5 renewal, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 25, 89, 110, 111 repetition, 16, 30, 32, 40, 98, 108, 112 replay, 18, 44 repression, 7, 65, 75–6, 107, 122, 143, 153 reproducibility, 17, 20 reproduction, 15, 16, 17, 18, 31, 34, 40, 42, 68, 83, 84, 122, 128, 133, 138, 144, 146, 147, 154, 159–60n10 resolution, 4, 5, 14, 18, 31, 32, 33, 35, 41, 42, 47, 59, 119–20 resurrection, 11, 25, 40, 41, 47, 51, 55, 120, 149, 161n7 return, 11, 15, 25, 29, 30, 36, 40, 45, 50, 59, 60, 67, 68, 76, 78, 79, 81, 84, 85, 96, 102, 107, 120, 123, 125, 129, 137, 143, 147, 150–6, 165n5 revelation, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 14, 47, 55, 61, 62–3, 85, 116, 120, 130, 134, 139, 150, 159n7; Book of, 4, 5, 11, 12, 24,

25, 29, 40, 47, 59, 69, 75, 89, 90, 101, 110, 120, 160n1, 165n1, 167n7; language as, 14–26; ‘skeptical,’ 11 revolution, 112; American, 4, 90; English, 4; French, 4, 90, 105, 106; July, 171n6 revolutionary, 18, 22, 24, 89, 90, 91, 101, 110, 131, 133 rhetoric, 11, 38, 44, 45, 57, 102, 110, 112; apocalyptic, 106, 109, 116, 158n7; of the end, 11; post-apocalyptic, 44; secular, 106 rights, 77, 91, 105, 106–8, 111–12, 114, 134; Declaration of, 111; of man, 77, 106, 108; women’s, 91, 112, 134 Riviere, Joan, 173n17 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 15 Robinson, Douglas, 45 Robinson, Sally, 72, 170n2, 173n16 Rodin, Auguste, 136, 172n11 Rolnik, Suely, 169n6, 174n3 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 17 ruin(s), 5, 6, 8, 10, 18, 22, 43, 45, 46, 47, 121, 151; environmental, 25; rhetoric of, 45, 47 rupture, 6, 14, 16, 19, 22, 29, 34, 61, 71, 163n2 Rushdie, Salman, 24, 89, 133, 152; Midnight’s Children, 24, 101–16 Rutherford, Susan, 172n9 Ryan, Alan, 59 Said, Edward, 91, 93 salvation, 5, 79, 161n7, 166n6 sameness, 66–7, 74, 97, 128 San Francisco, 134 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 161n11 Saunder, Max, 164n8 scepticism, 11, 47, 49, 101, 107, 151, 159n8; radical, 49

Index Schimthals, Walter, 165n2 science, 8, 39, 80, 120, 121, 133, 139, 150, 155, 157n2, 171n4; evolutionary, 173n18; human, 155; techno-, 152 Scott, James, 163n2 sculpture, 136. See also statue Second Life, 162n7 Second World War, 17, 24 secularity, 4, 6, 11, 29, 89, 102, 125; apocalyptic, 12, 25, 106; history, 69; narratives, 4; Nation, 24. See also apocalypse, secular self, 32, 38, 46, 48, 49, 62, 77–8, 79, 84, 85, 92, 97, 103, 104, 105, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 137–8, 139, 140, 147, 148, 151, 152, 156, 164n4, 165nn6–7, 169n5, 172n10; bourgeois, 105; masculine, 25, 49, 156n2; ready-to-wear, 125; selfrealization, 53; self-rule, 91, 93 senselessness, 36 sensuality, 124, 130, 141; asensuality, 141 sentiment, 40, 61, 80; anti-sentimental, 169n5 separateness, 100, 124, 126 September 11 (9/11), 44 sermon, 40, 44–5, 84, 161n7 sex, 67, 84, 112, 114, 115, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 132, 138, 142, 144, 153, 169n4, 170nn8, 1 sexed subject(s), 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 138, 143, 145, 146, 147, 149 sexism, 38, 41, 115, 127 sexual autonomy, 37 sexual body, 139 sexual child, 123 sexual contract, 114, 168n10, 172n12 sexual desire, 31, 37, 127, 136, 153

205

sexual difference, 113, 115, 116, 129, 149, 154, 155, 156, 171n3 sexual freedom, 134, 153 sexual hierarchies, 161n8 sexual identity, 126 sexuality, 113, 127, 128, 133, 141, 143, 149, 172n14; asexuality, 155. See also gays; heterosexuality; homosexuality; lesbians sexual object, 143, 145 sexual reproduction, 154 Shakespeare, William, 16, 17, 59, 143 sharia, 111 Shaw, George Bernard, 135, 172n11 Shohat, Ella, 168n9 Showalter, Elaine, 133, 134, 170n1, 172nn9–10 Siegel, Sandra, 171n7 sight, 63, 139, 141. See also vision sign(s), 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 45, 47, 48–9, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 79, 152, 159n9, 162n8, 164n3 signifier, 128, 143, 146 simulacrum, 17, 42, 152 simulation, 10, 16, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 161n1 Singh, Frances B., 166n6 slave, 24, 71, 72, 73–4, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 106, 160n5, 164n2, 165nn2, 7, 170n8; autobiographies, 85; master–slave relationship, 78, 80, 84, 170n8; narrative, 73, 79–80 slavery, 12, 17, 40, 41, 78, 79, 80, 83, 105, 106, 153, 164n1, 165n5 social contract, 108, 114, 115 society, 8, 12, 15, 16, 32, 49, 62, 67, 69, 99, 120, 121, 122, 125, 140, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 153, 154, 168n10, 174n20; capitalist, 173n18;

206 Index civil(ized), 10, 110, 115; early American, 79, phallic, 147 solipsism, 34, 37, 60, 61, 66, 69 Soviet, 8, 158n7 species, 22, 151, 154, 155, 156; new, 26, 155; non-species, 22; posthuman, 26, 154–6 spectacle, 11, 16, 17, 18, 44, 49, 151 speed, 44, 45, 46, 47; rhetoric of ruins and, 44, 45, 47 Spender, Dale, 14 Spenser, Edmund, 16 Spivak, Gayatri, 12, 71, 143; ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ 167–8n9; ‘Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,’ 137–8, 171n3; In Other Worlds, 84, 108–9, 128, 146, 165n8; Outside in the Teaching Machine, 72, 83; Post-Colonial Critic, 13; ‘The Staging of Time,’ 61, 69 stability, 63, 65, 67 Stand, The, 44 Stanton, Domna C., 165n6 Star Wars, 44 state, 5, 77, 80, 93, 102, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 116, 133; Islamic, 167n7; of Mau, 93; nation-, 103, 109 statue, 133, 137, 142 Sterne, Laurence, 105 Stesichorus, 148 story, 3, 11, 17, 30, 32, 35, 36, 37, 67, 71–2, 79, 82, 83, 84–5, 115, 132, 137, 139, 140, 147, 148; of America; 108; biblical, 5, 89; end of the, 29, 105; India’s, 107; individual, 90; of nations, 112; origin of, 21; of progress, 8; of Pygmalion, 148; ‘saddest,’ 65, 67; subversive, 17; of the unaccounted-for, 75, 84–5 stream-of-consciousness, 34

struggle, 5, 18, 42, 81, 93, 101, 112, 113, 114, 133, 145, 161n3, 167n3, 171n6 Stubbs, Patricia, 172n10 subject, 10, 13, 36, 38, 44, 53, 61, 66, 71, 72, 79, 107, 127, 131, 136, 137, 139, 141, 147, 152, 169–70n6, 171n3, 174nn2–3; desiring, 134, 147, 148; sexed, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 138, 143, 145, 146, 147, 149; subjection, 114 subjectivity, 9, 49, 69, 125, 127, 131, 169n6, 174n3 sublimation, 77, 78 sublime, nuclear, 46 suicide, 37, 65, 153–4 Suleri, Sara, 166n7 suppression, 17, 25, 75, 81, 110, 115, 123, 127, 130, 132, 140, 144, 149, 168n9 surface, 16, 48, 49, 49, 64, 65, 66, 163n3, 171n3 survival, 10–11, 32, 46, 73, 84, 121, 140, 154, 158n7; survivors, 10 Swan, Susan, 174n20 tabloid, 47, 50, 53 tangible, the, 48 tear, 22, 113 technology, 8, 15, 16, 18, 20, 26, 54, 132, 140, 141, 150, 152, 154, 157n2, 169n3, 170–1n3, 174n1 teleology, 5, 7, 12, 24, 59, 93, 94, 96, 101, 102, 105, 110, 114, 119; nonteleological, 12, 169n5 television, 18, 47, 53 telos, 11, 14, 66 territory, 44; virgin, 37 Testament, 44 text(s), 14, 18, 19–20, 21, 29, 30, 42, 69,

Index 171n3; apocalyptic, 4, 90, 104, 162n4; modernist, 38, 39, 61; postmodernist, 7; twentieth-century, 7 therapy, narrative as, 163n6 Thompson, Leonard, 165n1 time(s), 15, 21, 23, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 62, 63, 66, 96, 97, 105, 111, 112, 119, 120, 125, 126, 129; arbitrariness of, 21, 23, 36; end, 150–6; end of, 11, 25, 45, 150; heterogeneous, 69, 71 timelessness, 15, 37, 44, 110 timeliness, 11 tone, 46, 90, 96, 130; apocalyptic, 26, 44, 131, 158n7 transcendence, 5, 40, 53, 66, 106, 112, 115, 116, 126 transgression, 21, 31, 78 transhistoricity, 7, 40, 111, 157n5 transindividual, 21 translation, 7, 45, 72, 77, 78, 83, 157n5, 174n20; untranslatability, 72, 75, 79, 82, 84 trauma, 6, 7, 8, 11, 22, 36, 59, 62, 65, 72, 80, 129, 130, 132, 134, 149, 154; of gender, 132, 134, 144, 149; historical, 157n5; structural, 157n5 Treblinka, 8 trope, 6, 7 truth, 4, 5, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 22, 29, 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 52, 63, 65, 98, 104, 124, 130, 131, 139, 140, 141, 146, 148, 150, 155, 163n3, 172n14 Turner, Margaret E., 164n1 tyranny, 34, 69, 77, 81, 82, 83, 90 umma, 24, 94, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116 unanimity, 66

207

unconscious, 38, 63, 126, 127 university, 9, 22 unreliability, 41, 65, 72, 96 unseen, 38 unveiling, 101–16, 131–49 utopia, 45 Utopians, 151 value, 9, 10, 20, 21, 39, 40, 66–7, 97, 100, 153, 172n13 veiling, 101–16, 131–49 Verma, Charu, 115 victim(s), 8, 9, 10, 48, 51, 81, 155 Victorian, 23, 31, 32, 62, 132, 134, 135, 136, 160n2, 163n2 violation, 114, 147 violence, 78, 79, 90, 97, 107, 109–10, 111, 148, 154, 162n7, 169n3 viral endings, 43–55 virginity, 37, 114, 141, 142 virtuality, 162n7 Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, 150 Warhol, Andy, 163n3 Webster, John, 16 Wharton, Edith, 32 Wigglesworth, Michael, 45 Wilcox, Leonard, 49–50 Wilde, Oscar, 133, 135, 137, 138, 170n1 Williams, William Carlos, 63 Willis, Susan, 78 Wilson, Keith, 168n11 Wilson-Smith, Timothy, 171n6 Winthrop, John, 44–5 women, 12, 14, 25, 31, 32, 37, 38, 42, 67, 83, 105, 106, 109, 111, 112–16, 125, 126, 127–30, 160nn1, 5, 168n9, 170–1n3, 171n4, 172n10, 173nn16–

208 Index 17, 173–4n19, 174n20; masquerading/as masquerade, 143–7, 173n17; the New Woman, 131–49; performance of, 25, 143–7; veiling and unveiling of, 25, 101–16, 131– 49; writers, 25, 137, 160n2. See also lesbians Women Living Under Muslim Law, 112 women’s rights, 91, 105, 112 Woolf, Virginia, 32, 33, 39, 59, 60, 63, 136, 163n2 world, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 62, 66, 68, 69, 78, 89, 95, 97, 99, 104, 110, 115, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 132, 135, 139, 140, 155, 157n2, 159n7, 160n1, 163n6; advanced, 9– 10; of advertising, 51; beginning of (birth, origin), 60, 66, 83, 85, 119, 125; cleansing of, 150; contemporary, 61, 104; end of, 4, 24, 43–4, 46, 89, 119, 120, 134, 165–6n3; Euro-

pean, 60; free, 78, 80, 81; without meaning 59; modern, 4, 8, 12, 13, 16, 23, 25, 34, 36, 37, 38, 40, 60, 69, 110, 119, 123, 124, 161n6; new, 6, 11, 43, 44–5, 46, 47, 72, 73, 76–7, 79, 132, 134; non-human, 99; old, 41, 44–5, 46, 47, 49, 72, 76–7, 78; postcolonial, 167n6; post-lapsarian, 47; private, 132, 140–1; readable, 53; ready-to-wear, 167n3; real (of the real), 14, 21, 49, 52, 129, 167n4; reimagining of, 123; separate, 96; shattered, 65; of signs, 52, 53; social, 66; spiritual, 110; Third World, 9, 10, 12, 90–1, 102, 109–10, 112, 158–9n7; underworld, 60; of women, 114, 134, 137; and word, 42, 55, 85, 89, 148, 159n9 World Trade Center, 18, 157n2 Wyatt, Jean, 72, 165nn6–7 Yeats, William Butler, 63, 143 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 90 Zubaida, Sami, 167n8