The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory 9781472542847, 9780826495457

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For Auntie Jean, Uncle Dave and Lynne. I miss you

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Acknowledgements

Many of the chapters in this book were originally delivered as papers at university conferences and seminars. I would like to thank the organizers of such events, and all those who listened and responded, in particular at the universities of Sussex, Stirling, Manchester, Nottingham, Oxford and Swansea. Some of this material has originally appeared elsewhere, in somewhat different forms. Distilled theoretical sections from chapters 1, 3 and 7 first appeared in ‘Reinscribing De Quincey’s palimpsest: The significance of the palimpsest in contemporary literary and cultural studies’ (Textual Practice, 19:3 (2005), pp. 243–63), and a very early version of Chapter 7 appeared belatedly as ‘Palimpsesting: Reading and writing lives in H. D.’s Palimpsest’ in a special issue of Critical Survey (19:1 (2007), Modernist Women Writers Using History, ed. Mark Llewellyn and Ann Heilmann). I would like to express my thanks to the editors and publishers of Textual Practice (www.tandf.co.uk/journals) and Critical Survey for their permission to reprint. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the research for this project, and to the Manuscripts and Special Collections department at the University of Nottingham for their help, patience and permission to reproduce a page from D. H. Lawrence’s college notebook (Figure 2). Quotations from Palimpsest, by H. D. (Copyright 1968 Norman Holmes Pearson) are used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, New York. Grateful acknowledgement is also made to the British Library for their permission to reproduce the palimpsest image in Figure 1. This book would not have been possible without the support of colleagues, friends and family. My thanks go to my colleagues at the University of Sussex and at the University of St Andrews, for their conversation, thoughts and comments. In particular, I would like to thank Nora Bartlett, Peter Boxall, Jennifer Cooke, Tom Jones, Eric Langley, Norman Vance and, especially, Nicholas Royle. Producing the history of palaeographic palimpsests for Chapter 2 required me to venture into an area beyond my

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own field of expertise – I owe my greatest thanks to Michael Apthorp for his overwhelming enthusiasm to guide me through that unfamiliar territory. For their specialist knowledge or technical help, I would also like to thank John Barrell, Bettina Bildhauer, Stephen Daitz, Jim Dillon, Mary Dove, Tatiana Kontou, Maarten van Ham, Christopher Pollnitz and, especially, Philippe Lejeune, for sharing the story of ‘palimpsestuous’ told in the Introduction. My particular thanks go to my family for their unfailing support, belief and love: to Mum and Jayne; to my father, who has been my constant intellectual companion and guide; and to Gav, who lived every day of the final revisions with me. This book would not have been possible without them.

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Chapter 1

Introduction: The Palimpsest

In 1845 Thomas De Quincey published an essay in Blackwood’s Magazine entitled ‘The palimpsest’. Coupling ‘palimpsest’ with the definite article ‘the’ (for the first time in a non-specific sense), De Quincey’s essay inaugurated – that is, both introduced, and initiated the subsequent use of – the substantive concept of the palimpsest. The palimpsest is implicitly related to palimpsests, which until 1845 were palaeographic oddities of concern only to those researching and publishing ancient manuscripts. However, the concept of the palimpsest exists independently of such phenomena – it is a strange, new figurative entity, invested with the stature of the substantive. De Quincey was not the first writer to use palimpsests in a figurative sense, but his inauguration of the concept of the palimpsest marks the beginning of a consistent process of metaphorization from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.1 Since 1845, the concept of the palimpsest has been employed in areas as diverse as architecture, geography, geology, palaeontology, glaciology, astrophysics, biochemistry, genetics, neuroscience, neurobiology, neurocomputing and information technology. Within and across these fields, the figure of the palimpsest is invariably found in areas of research which insist upon the interdisciplinary nature of their work. Referring to the interdisciplinarity of linguistics, anthropology, Marxism and psychoanalysis, Roland Barthes argues that: what is new . . . comes not necessarily from the internal recasting of each of these disciplines, but rather from their encounter in relation to an object which traditionally is the province of none of them. It is indeed as though the interdisciplinarity which is today held as a prime value in research cannot be accomplished by the simple confrontation of specialist branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression of a pious wish) when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down – perhaps even violently, via the jolts in fashion – in the interests of a new object and a new language neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in 1

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The Palimpsest classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to diagnose a certain mutation. (1977a, p. 155)

Palimpsests are precisely such objects. They embody and provoke interdisciplinary encounter, both literally (as the diversity of the experts currently working on the Archimedes Palimpsest discussed in the following chapter shows) and figuratively. The palimpsest cannot be the province of any one discipline, since it admits all those terrains that write upon it to its body; nor, indeed, does the palimpsest have a province of its own, since it is anything other than that which offers itself at first sight, the literal meaning of province.2 Disciplines encounter each other in and on the palimpsest, and their relationality becomes defined by its logic. In this way, the palimpsest becomes a figure for interdisciplinarity – for the productive violence of the involvement, entanglement, interruption and inhabitation of disciplines in and on each other. The disciplines that inhabit this particular palimpsest are those of literature, criticism and theory, with each chapter interweaving theorization of the concept of the palimpsest with close readings of literary texts in which it figures, including works by Thomas De Quincey, D. H. Lawrence, Arthur Conan Doyle, Umberto Eco, Ian McEwan and H. D. In this sense, my study is performative: at a time when the long-standing and fierce debate about the place of theory in literary studies still rages, this study demonstrates the palimpsestuous intimacy that can exist between theoretical and critical writing, an intimacy which manifests itself in a mode of writing I wish to call theoretical criticism. In the interview ‘“This strange institution called literature”’ (1989), responding to Derek Attridge’s question, ‘is it necessary to make a distinction between literature and literary criticism . . . ?’ (Derrida 1992, p. 49), Jacques Derrida outlines his belief that ‘“good” literary criticism, the only worthwhile kind, implies an act, a literary signature or counter-signature, an inventive experience of language, in language, an inscription of the act of reading in the field of the text that is read’ (p. 52). Good literary criticism involves a physical intimacy, an involutedness, between literature and literary criticism. Yet, at the same time, Derrida wants to preserve a distinction between these two forms of writing: ‘I would not say that we can mix everything up and give up the distinctions between all these types of “literary” or “critical” production’ (p. 52). Derrida is therefore left struggling to delineate the relationship between literature and literary criticism: ‘I wouldn’t distinguish between “literature” and “literary criticism”, but I wouldn’t assimilate all forms of reading and writing’ (p. 52). He argues that it is necessary, when making any such distinctions, ‘to give up on the purity and linearity of frontiers.

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They should have a form that is both rigorous and capable of taking account of the essential possibility of contamination between all these oppositions’ (p. 52). ‘Palimpsestuousness’ – a simultaneous relation of intimacy and separation – provides a model for this form, preserving as it does the distinctness of its texts, while at the same time allowing for their essential contamination and interdependence. The same model offers itself as a paradigm for the relationship between critical and theoretical writing manifest in theoretical criticism.3 This study brings together many of the creative, critical and theoretical texts in which the palimpsest has figured since 1845 in order to investigate its structure and logic and to demonstrate its crucial role in understanding and advancing modern thought. While discussing the palimpsest’s refiguration of concepts as diverse as history, subjectivity, temporality, metaphor and sexuality, this study returns repeatedly and relentlessly to the question of reading in its very broadest sense. In both theory and criticism, it investigates a practice that is the source of the most fundamental disagreements in academic and wider cultural belief: how do we understand the world around us, and ourselves? In other words, how do we read? For me, the answer to that question lies in a sustained interrogation, via the palimpsest, of the way in which we read texts (be they historical, literary, critical, theoretical, political, cultural, etc.). This study thus consistently investigates the nature of writing and textuality, accepts the insecurity of reading, and delights, unashamedly, in the pleasure involved in the most productive – because risky – reading. Despite the proliferation of the metaphor of the palimpsest, Josephine McDonagh’s ‘Writings on the mind: The importance of the palimpsest in nineteenth-century thought’ (1987) offers the only previous sustained study of its significance. McDonagh considers how the palimpsest functions as a psychological, historical and social model in various nineteenth-century texts, including De Quincey’s essay, Thomas Carlyle’s ‘On history’ (1830), and George Henry Lewes’ Problems of Life and Mind (1874–9). Her study is valuable in identifying the importance of the palimpsest in nineteenthcentury thought, as well as in drawing attention to the radical potential of De Quincey’s palimpsest model. Restricted to an investigation of nineteenth-century critical texts, however, McDonagh’s study makes no claim for the contemporary relevance of the palimpsest in modern literature, criticism or theory. McDonagh’s most significant theoretical insight is her observation that the palimpsest provides only an ‘illusion of depth’ – it ‘feigns a sense of depth while always in fact functioning on the surface level’ (1987, p. 211).4 Although the process that creates palimpsests is one of layering, the result of that process, combined with the subsequent reappearance of the

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underlying script, is a surface structure which can be described by a term coined by De Quincey – ‘involuted’. ‘Involute’ is De Quincey’s name for the way in which ‘our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects . . . in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled’ (1998b, p. 104). The adjective ‘involuted’ describes the relationship between the texts that inhabit the palimpsest as a result of its palimpsesting and subsequent textual reappearance. The palimpsest is thus an involuted phenomenon where otherwise unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other. Throughout each of the following chapters, I am concerned to interrogate and reformulate this complex structure of (textual) relationality embodied in the palimpsest. One of the ways in which I do so is through an extended theorization of the neologism ‘palimpsestuous’, employed as a near synonym of involuted. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the official adjective from ‘palimpsest’ is ‘palimpsestic’, meaning: ‘that is, or that makes, a palimpsest’. In contrast, ‘palimpsestuous’ does not name something as, or as making, a palimpsest, but describes the type of relationality reified in the palimpsest. Where ‘palimpsestic’ refers to the process of layering that produces a palimpsest, ‘palimpsestuous’ describes the structure that one is presented with as a result of that process, and the subsequent reappearance of the underlying script. The term ‘palimpsestuous’ first appeared in print in French in Gérard Genette’s Palimpsestes (1982) to describe the new type of reading provoked by his idea of the hypertext: ‘L’hypertexte nous invite à une lecture relationnelle dont la saveur, perverse autant qu’on voudra, se condense assez bien dans cet adjectif inédit qu’inventa naguère Philippe Lejeune : lecture palimpsestueuse’ (p. 452).5 This word is translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky in Palimpsests as ‘palimpsestuous’, which marks the first English use of the term: ‘The hypertext invites us to engage in a relational reading, the flavour of which, however perverse, may well be condensed in an adjective recently coined by Philippe Lejeune: a palimpsestuous reading’ (1997, p. 399). Although Genette attributes the invention of this word to Lejeune, he does not reference its textual source. Lejeune coined the word in a Barthesian pastiche, ‘Le Roland Barthes sans peine’, which he wrote during the summer of 1980 and intended for the journal Poétique’s forthcoming festschrift for Barthes, who had just died. Genette read the essay then, but it was not in fact published until 1984, two years after Palimpsests, when it first appeared in the journal Textuel. As Lejeune explains, ‘you understand now why, in his book, [Genette] refers to my invention, but without providing a reference – since at that time my text was unpublished . . . That is the little layered story of this palimpsest . . .’.6

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Just as De Quincey’s concept of the palimpsest made strange and revitalized palaeographic palimpsests, ‘palimpsestuous’ makes the concept of the palimpsest strange in a way that rewrites and refigures it in the context of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century literary and cultural thought.7 In doing so, ‘palimpsestuous’ performs Michael Dillon’s suggestion that, in attempting to ‘investigate what kind of economy of meaning is already installed (but generally overlooked) within’ (1996, p. 119) a word, it is useful also to estrange ourselves from the word, to put some distance between it and ourselves – so that it shows-up for us in a way that commands our attention, and makes us listen to what is invested in it. (p. 120)8 As a striking and unfamiliar neologism, ‘palimpsestuous’ immediately performs this function in relation to the concept of the palimpsest. In addition, like all words, it is also itself palimpsestuous – it is composed of meanings, sounds, and other words, which collide and collude on and in its surface. These constitute its imagined etymology and its linguistic and phonetic reverberations, both of which are explored at more length in Chapter 5. Like Genette’s description of Proust’s work, the word ‘palimpsestuous’ is ‘a palimpsest in which several figures and several meanings are merged and entangled together, all present together at all times, and which can only be deciphered together, in their inextricable totality’ (1982b, p. 226). Most obviously, ‘palimpsestuous’ is intimately related with the ‘incestuous’.9 As such, it draws our attention to the perverseness of Dillon’s suggestion, that we must make a word strange in order to enable a renewed and increased intimacy with it. Palimpsestuous relationality, ‘palimpsestuousness’, treads the line of the problematic of incest – the intimacy that is branded as illegitimate since it is between those who are regarded as too closely related. The utmost intimacy is only legitimate, and, one might suggest – recalling the biological myth supporting the taboo on incest – productive, between those terms that retain some amount of estrangement from one another. In order to provide a sustained interrogation and theorization of the concept of the palimpsest, and the relationality named by the term ‘palimpsestuousness’, then, this study adopts a methodology of metaphoric coupling. In each chapter, the palimpsest is coupled with – that is, enters into a palimpsestuous relationship with – a concept from contemporary critical discourse. According to the nature of that relationship, the two terms are intimate and yet remain distinct. They are involved

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in a movement of reciprocal elucidation in which the palimpsest reifies and aids an understanding of the other concept, and that concept enables a reinscription of the palimpsest that sophisticates our understanding of its complex structure and logic. For example, in Chapter 3, the palimpsest is coupled with Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s notion of the crypt in order to explain the cryptic structure of De Quincey’s idea of the palimpsest of the mind. This explains how the palimpsest functions as one of a number of resurrective fantasies in Suspiria de Profundis (1845) with which De Quincey attempts to secure the continued life of his dead sister Elizabeth. The coupling of the palimpsest and the crypt also draws attention to the complex ontological status of the concept of the palimpsest more generally. Like the crypt, the palimpsest is a concept with no literal meaning – since it is related to, but different from, palimpsests – that is, it obeys a different tropography than that represented by traditional constructions of metaphor. The nature of this new tropography is the subject of Chapter 4, in which I explain how a simultaneity of intimacy and separation defines both the palimpsestuous and the metaphoric relationship. Chapter 5 provides the most explicit demonstration of theoretical criticism, structured as it is as a palimpsest comprised of two critical and two theoretical texts. These couple the palimpsest with the very idea of the ‘text’ in order to explore reading and writing in relation to the palimpsest, the difference between classical and modern detective fiction, and the intimate yet distinct theories of structuralism and poststructuralism. Although distinguished by their subheadings, these texts inhabit and interrupt each other in ways not explicitly remarked in the discussion, but which will hopefully be detected by their readers. The final two chapters employ the same methodologies as their predecessors. Chapter 6 couples the palimpsest with Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality in order to argue for a reinscription of that concept in terms of palimpsestuous textuality. Drawing further on Kristeva’s theoretical criticism, in close readings of one critical and one theoretical text – Genette’s Palimpsests and Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) – this chapter investigates the relationship between palimpsestuous textuality and any singular text. Chapter 7 couples the palimpsest with the concept of ‘queer’ in order to argue for a changing approach to literary texts from traditional palimpsestic feminist criticism to more radical palimpsestuous queer theory. Since both these discourses derive their discussion of the palimpsest from the writing of H. D., the chapter performs palimpsestuous queer readings of two of the stories in H. D.’s volume Palimpsest (1926). Chapter 7 concludes the study by arguing that the coupling of queer and the palimpsest reveals that these terms must remain open to reinscription if they are to remain viable

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critical currency, an openness embodied precisely in and by the palimpsest. In addition to metaphoric coupling and theoretical criticism, this study employs a third methodology, one that is equally determined by the structure of the palimpsest: critical history, or, genealogy. In ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’ (1971), Michel Foucault elaborates, after Nietzsche, the concept of ‘genealogy’, thereby reinscribing the traditional understanding of the process of writing history. Integral to this reinscription is the refiguration of the subject of that writing – ‘history’ – as a collection of palimpsestuous documents: Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times. (1996, p. 139) In response to the palimpsestuous body of history, genealogy ‘must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality . . . it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles’ (pp. 139–40). Genealogy is not a search for ‘origins’ that attempts ‘to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities’ (p. 142). It does not assume ‘the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession’ (p. 142). While the search for origins ‘is directed to “that which was already there”, the image of a primordial truth fully adequate to its nature, and . . . necessitates the removal of every mask to ultimately disclose an original identity’ (p. 142), genealogy perceives the palimpsestuous structure of ‘things’, that there is ‘“something altogether different” behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms’ (p. 142). In its structure, the palimpsest embodies this new conception of a thing’s ‘essence’, since it is nothing other than the cohabitation of two or more alien texts. The palimpsest reifies Foucault’s assertion that what genealogy finds ‘at the beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origins; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity’ (p. 142). Genealogy must pay attention to this disparity, to the ‘vicissitudes of history’ (p. 144), to the palimpsest of ‘details and accidents that accompany every beginning’ (p. 144), to ‘the subtle, singular, and subindividual marks that might possibly intersect’ on the palimpsest that is history and that ‘form a network that is difficult to unravel’ (p. 145). It must discover, ‘under the unique aspect of a trait or a concept . . . the

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myriad events through which – thanks to which, against which – they were formed’ (p. 146). Genealogy does not create an evolutionary narrative, it does not ‘restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things’ (p. 146). Rather, it operates upon the field of history as palimpsest and identifies ‘the accidents, the minute deviations – or, conversely, the complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us’ (p. 146). Genealogy ‘shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself’ (p. 147). Foucault explains that, as such, in Nietzsche’s writing, genealogy is opposed to the form of history that reintroduces (and always assumes) a suprahistorical perspective: a history whose function is to compose the finally reduced diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself; a history that always encourages subjective recognitions and attributes a form of reconciliation to all the displacements of the past; a history whose perspective on all that precedes it implies the end of time, a completed development. (p. 152) This is not the form of history that this study presents, nor, in fact, that the palimpsest demands. Since the palimpsest figuratively represents the field of operation of genealogy, a history of the palimpsest could be nothing other than a genealogy. As such, this study does not describe a linear development of the concept of the palimpsest, nor does it provide a narrative of evolution. Rather, it traces the inscriptions, erasures and reinscriptions of the concept of the palimpsest in various texts that compete and struggle with each other, and that constitute the involuted palimpsest of the concept’s own palimpsestuous history. This study does not attempt to disclose the ‘origin’ of the palimpsest, nor to define its ‘exact essence’, ‘identity’ or ‘truth’, as those concepts might be traditionally understood. Rather, it shows how the concept of the palimpsest redefines these notions according to its own palimpsestuous logic – how it reveals that at the ‘heart’ of things is ‘the dissension of other things’, ‘disparity’. This study pays attention to the disparate essence of the palimpsest, to the involution of details, traces and texts that constitute its ‘essence’ and define (its) history. This genealogy thus partakes in the systematic dismantling of ‘the traditional devices for constructing a comprehensive view of history and for retracing the past as a patient and continuous development’ (p. 153) that Foucault demands and that genealogy performs.10 This study does not assume a ‘suprahistorical perspective’, nor does it

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record the history of the palimpsest with any ‘monotonous finality’. Rather, it reveals how writing about the palimpsest becomes an act of palimpsesting: any new text about the palimpsest erases, superimposes itself upon, and yet is still haunted by, the other texts in the palimpsest’s history. Writing about the palimpsest is a process of writing on the palimpsest – of partaking in its history and of adding another layer to the involution of texts that characterizes that history. Moreover, the palimpsest’s perpetual openness to new inscription ensures that this history will constantly be rewritten. Although in ‘The dark interpreter and the palimpsest of violence’, Robert Maniquis argues that ‘the palimpsest has suffered its own partial erasure and become only a remembered writing surface on which no more can be written’ (1985, p. 134), this assertion is directly contradicted by Maniquis’ essay – which adds another text to the history of the palimpsest even while denying that possibility – and by the weight of texts he cites, both past and present, in which the palimpsest as metaphor is continually rewritten. Maniquis’ assertion is further undermined by this study, which provides undeniable evidence of the palimpsest’s past, present and continuing figurative power and theoretical significance. In seeming recognition of this, Maniquis’ final attempt to close down the palimpsest at the end of his essay is infected by unexpected expressions of uncertainty and possibility in relation to it, by anticipation of the future event yet to come: Surely it [the palimpsest] will settle into some succeeding taxonomy of mental forms awaiting elaboration in our decentred culture . . . But whatever new rhetorics of figuration we may need, we know that few narrative and textual figures have claimed more ideological power than the circular route between the conscious and the unconscious in images such as the palimpsest. If that particular figure has drifted into the past, it is only replaced by others in a cultural power of figuration that, of course, has not weakened – and never will. [emphases added] (1985, p. 134) The palimpsest has not drifted into the past and never could. In its persistent figurative power and its theoretical adaptability it determines how we view the past and the present, and embodies within itself the promise of the future: ‘To invoke a word is to recall a history. To use a word is to set history on its way again’ (Dillon 1996, p. 115).

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Chapter 2

A Brief History of Palimpsests

You know, perhaps, masculine reader, better than I can tell you, what is a Palimpsest. Possibly you have one in your own library. But yet, for the sake of those who may not know, or may have forgotten, suffer me to explain it here: lest any female reader, who honours these papers with her notice, should tax me with explaining it once too seldom; which would be worse to bear than a simultaneous complaint from twelve proud men, that I had explained it three times too often. You therefore, fair reader, understand that for your accommodation exclusively, I explain the meaning of this word. It is Greek, and our sex enjoys the office and privilege of standing counsel to yours, in all questions of Greek. We are, under favour, perpetual and hereditary dragomans to you. So that if, by accident, you know the meaning of a Greek word, yet by courtesy to us, your counsel learned in that matter, you will always seem not to know it. A palimpsest, then, is a membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by reiterated successions. (De Quincey 1998b, p. 139)1 In this passage, De Quincey opens ‘The palimpsest’ (1845) with a playful negotiation of the problematic that still faces anyone writing on the subject of palimpsests – how do you ensure that your reader actually knows what a palimpsest is, without insulting his or her intelligence by presuming that he or she does not know? De Quincey negotiates this problematic by performing, even as he describes it, a subtle game of female coquetry in relation to his male readers in which he humbles himself in order to flatter their masculine ego. De Quincey thereby ensures that he does not alienate his male readers, while, at the same time, colluding with his female ones in satirizing the fragile superiority of man which is dependent only on woman’s pretended ignorance. Although less playful than De Quincey in their manner of doing so, since the nineteenth century most commentators on palimpsests have felt a similar need to preface their discussions with a brief definition and history of palimpsests, while at the same time asking their readers to 10

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excuse them if such information is unnecessary. In such a respect, this study is no different. This study thus has two introductions, as intertwined as the texts that inhabit a palimpsest, and which, ideally, would be read simultaneously, the one interrupting the other. The first, in Chapter 1, introduces the concept of the palimpsest and the neologistic adjective derived from it – palimpsestuous – and elaborates the three methodologies employed in this study: metaphoric coupling, theoretical criticism and critical history, or genealogy. The second, in the present chapter, introduces the palaeographic phenomena of palimpsests from which the concept of the palimpsest is derived. Although the focus of this work is the concept of the palimpsest in modern literature and thought, a full understanding of palimpsests – a knowledge of when, how, and why they were created, and how their significance as harbingers of the past was discovered – is crucial to the theorization of the concept of the palimpsest that occurs in these pages. The information on palimpsests presented here should thus serve as a factual foundation for the ensuing discussion of their metaphorical import; that knowledge is presumed in the rest of the text.

The Archimedes Palimpsest On 29 October 1998 – amid considerable Greek and American media attention, and despite attempts to gain a court injunction to prevent the sale – a small, mouldy and scorched 1,000-year-old manuscript was sold at Christie’s Auction House in New York for a staggering $2 million, double the expected price.2 In ‘Archimedes: The palimpsest and the tradition’ (1999), Nigel Wilson (the Oxford Professor of Classics who prepared the description of the manuscript for the Christie’s catalogue) explains just why such an unprepossessing manuscript sold for such a high price: The present manuscript is a Greek liturgical book, probably written in the second half of the 12th or conceivably in the first half of the 13th century, and as such has no obvious claim to be regarded as possessing special significance; but almost all the leaves are palimpsest, and most of them are derived from a uniquely important manuscript of Archimedes. This fact makes the volume one of the most valuable of surviving documents for tracing the history of Greek mathematics and engineering. (p. 89) The Archimedes Palimpsest, as it has now become known, is the most famous and important contemporary example of a palimpsest, ‘a

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parchment or other writing-material written upon twice, the original writing having been erased or rubbed out to make place for the second; a manuscript in which a later writing is written over an effaced earlier writing’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Palimpsests are created by a process of layering – of erasure and superimposition – but the most peculiar and interesting fact about palimpsests is omitted from The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition. Palimpsests are of such interest to subsequent generations because although the first writing on the vellum seemed to have been eradicated after treatment, it was often imperfectly erased. Its ghostly trace then reappeared in the following centuries as the iron in the remaining ink reacted with the oxygen in the air producing a reddish-brown oxide. This process has been encouraged by the use of chemical reagents and ultra-violet light in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by more advanced imaging technologies in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thus, as in the Archimedes Palimpsest, rather than erasing ancient texts, the practice of medieval palimpsesting in fact paradoxically preserved them for posterity. The underlying text of the Archimedes Palimpsest contains the earliest known transcription of mathematical treatises by Archimedes, made in the tenth century in Constantinople. Most significantly, it contains the only known copy of the Method of Mechanical Theorems.3 In 2006, it was also discovered to contain ten pages containing two previously unknown speeches by Hyperides, an important Athenian orator and politician from the fourth century BC. With a history that spans from the third century BC to the present day, the story of the Archimedes Palimpsest bears witness to the miraculous and ghostly nature of the palimpsest phenomenon. The manuscript was created in the twelfth or thirteenth century using material from a tenthcentury manuscript that itself recorded the theorems of an ancient Greek mathematician who had been dead for more than 1,000 years. The chances are that the transcription has only survived to the present day precisely because it was palimpsested and thus preserved on the leaves that provided the material for the liturgical text. As such, it is a prime example of the paradoxically preservatory power of an originally destructive procedure. The story of the Archimedes Palimpsest – of its phenomenal history, its continuing contemporary relevance, and the attention paid to it by the popular media – points to the enduring significance of palimpsests in the present day in bringing to light lost texts from the past which change the very way we interpret and know that past.4 It also displays the persistent fascination with palimpsests in the popular imagination, embodying as they do the mystery of the secret, the miracle of resurrection and the thrill

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of detective discovery. Palimpsests are not dusty palaeographic objects but uncanny harbingers to the present of the murdered texts of former ages. They are of the utmost palaeographic and historical significance but they also capture the imagination with their spectral power. As we will see, the tale of the Archimedes Palimpsest is just one small chapter in a story of the palimpsest phenomenon that spans from antiquity to the present day.

Creation: From Antiquity to the Middle Ages The practice of palimpsesting began as early as Egyptian times – two out of five of the earliest surviving written papyri, the Gebelein Papyri dating from the third century BC, are palimpsests.5 Early references to palimpsesting in Latin literature – in Cicero, Catullus and Martial – suggest that the practice may have been customary among the ancient Greeks and Romans on a domestic scale, but the peak period of large-scale palimpsesting of parchment for book production occurred in the West from the seventh to ninth centuries, primarily in the scriptoriums of the great monastic institutions such as Bobbio, Luxeuil, Fleury, Corbie and St Gall.6 Although in ‘Palimpsest literature, and its editor, Cardinal Angelo Mai’ (1867), Charles William Russell states that a shortage of papyrus in the West as a result of ‘the Mohommedan conquest of Egypt’ (p. 101) caused the increased palimpsesting of vellum manuscripts during this period, later research has shown that papyrus continued to reach Western Europe long after the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641. It is thus unlikely that any shortage caused by that conquest was a key factor in increased vellum palimpsest production at this time, especially since, as Colin H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat argue, ‘the gradual replacement of papyrus by parchment had begun much earlier’ (1983, p. 8). It is more likely that the high periods of palimpsest production are due to a combination of the general scarcity and expense of writing-material – both papyrus and vellum – and the increased demand for new books, both liturgical and other. Indeed, Elias Avery Lowe’s comparison of the dates of Latin palimpsest production ‘show the number of palimpsests increasing in greater ratio in periods of intense intellectual activity than during periods conspicuous for economic decline’ (1972, p. 483). The practice of palimpsesting only ceased towards the end of the fifteenth century when the increased availability of paper and the invention of printing rendered the production of manuscripts by handwritten copying obsolete. In palimpsest production, the methods used to erase the existing script vary between palimpsests, and between papyrus and parchment palimpsests. Since papyrus can be soaked without washing out the ink, the

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process of erasure in papyrus palimpsests must have involved more than water. In Papyrus (1995), Richard Parkinson and Stephen Quirke argue that it must have consisted of a joint process of washing and light rubbing. This accords not only with the etymology of the verb ‘to palimpsest’ but also with the Egyptian hieroglyph for ‘to erase’ which suggests a process of licking the finger and rubbing the parchment with it as a way to erase single words. A surviving letter written on papyrus in Thebes around 2000 BC shows the thumbprint of the scribe as he reused the old letter – he smudged out the name of the original addressee and replaced it with the new one, without altering the introductory greeting.7 Parkinson and Quirke argue that there was probably no need for any solvent in erasing papyrus manuscripts, however, they do draw attention to a third- to fourthcentury Greek chemical text which preserves a recipe for a paste to whiten pearls which it states could also be ‘used for palimpsesting written papyrus rolls’ (1995, p. 47).8 The process of palimpsesting vellum in book production, institutionalized from the seventh century onwards, followed a similar method of erasure and rewriting, but on a larger and more technical scale. An old codex was taken apart, and the leaves cut up and trimmed down to fit the new codex. The leaves were selected with regard to their suitability for reinscription. (No attention was paid to the order or completeness of the original text when rebinding a new codex, much to the despair of later palimpsest editors.) The existing script then had to be erased to make room for the new writing. There are various accounts of the methods used to effect this erasure. One of the earliest can be found in an eleventh-century Latin manuscript where there is a detailed recipe that prescribes bleaching in milk: Whoever wishes, compelled by necessity, to write again on parchment already written on should take milk and place the parchment in it for the space of one night. Afterwards, when he has taken the parchment out again, [let it be] sprinkled with grain, and, lest it should be contracted into wrinkles when it begins to be dried out, let him hold it under pressure until it has been fully dried. When he has done this, [if it is] rubbed with pumice and chalk it will regain its original shining whiteness.9 When the vellum had been cleansed, the new writing was superimposed on top of the old text. In some palimpsests it runs in the same direction as the original script, either written directly over the top of the old one, or between its lines; in others, the overlying script is at right angles to the original script, the scribe having turned the pages on their side. The newly

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inscribed vellum was then rebound to form the new codex. It was not uncommon for vellum to be reused numerous times in this way, thus creating double or even triple palimpsests, the most famous example of which is the palimpsest of Gaius’ Institutes deciphered by Barthold Georg Niebuhr at Verona in 1816, of which a fourth of the codex is a double palimpsest (Poste 1881, p. v). There has been much scholarly discussion about the motivation behind the practice of palimpsesting. Most commentators accept that it occurred due to the scarcity and expense of writing materials. However, there are varying explanations as to how and why particular manuscripts were selected to be erased, if indeed there was any process of selection occurring at all. Although many of the texts palimpsested by Christian monks contained copies of Greek and Latin authors such as Archimedes, Homer, Cicero and Gaius, this is not thought to indicate a decisive attack upon classical literature following the fall of the Roman Empire. Although, in ‘The palimpsest’, De Quincey delights in portraying the ‘bigoted yet perhaps holy’ (1998b, p. 142) medieval monk who purged the world of heathen literature and replaced it with Christian revelation, his more serious reflection is that vellum was recycled simply as the material it contained ceased to be of interest to successive generations. De Quincey thus represents the monk as disentangling the formerly interdependent value of the parchment and the text, in order to rescue the wealth of the former as the value of the latter faded due to ‘changes of opinion or taste’ (p. 140). As a result, it is not only classical texts that are found in palimpsests, but a variety of other texts such as heretical or superfluous Christian works, and liturgical and legal manuscripts rendered out of date by subsequent reforms (Bischoff 1990, p. 11).10 Bernard Bischoff explains that ‘in other cases texts were erased because they were written in a language that was no longer understood, as happened with Greek or Gothic works’ (p. 11) and that ‘only rarely was the deliberate elimination of a text the primary motive for its effacement, such as might occur, for instance, with the destruction of heretical works’ (p. 11). The condition of extant palimpsests suggests that manuscripts treated in this way were often already incomplete, illegible or in a state of disrepair. Existing palimpsest manuscripts often contain only a few palimpsest leaves, and/or palimpsest leaves taken from different sources.11 Russell seizes upon this fact in order to protect the reputation of the medieval scribes from ‘unfriendly historians’ (1867, p. 102) who have portrayed them as ‘recklessly sacrific[ing] the MSS. of the Greek and Latin classics, in order to provide parchment for the pious labours of the Scriptorium’ (p. 102):

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from the miserably fragmentary condition of every known ancient work deciphered from a palimpsest original, not only is it plain that the MSS. of these works must have been incomplete before their defacement, but it is even highly probable that, in most cases, the original parchments must have been mere refuse, made up of scraps of imperfect copies of ancient writers already thrown aside by reason of their incompleteness. (pp. 103–4) Russell even goes so far as to posit the existence of medieval parchmentvendors, similar to the papyrus-merchants of Alexandria, who carried on ‘a special trade in re-prepared parchment, which came to them in the form of refuse’ (p. 104). A more measured assessment of the case is put by Edward Maunde Thompson who argues that the fact that no palimpsest survives that contains a completely palimpsested manuscript does not prove that vellum was only selected from codices that were already in disrepair. Rather, he insists that the motivation behind palimpsesting was perhaps less complicated than has been supposed by other commentators and that ‘it is quite as probable that scribes supplied their wants indiscriminately from any old MSS. that happened to be at hand’ (1912, p. 65). Thompson’s assessment is supported by the fact that the practice of palimpsesting was so prevalent and indiscriminate that, in the last decade of the seventh century, the Quini-Sext Council passed a synodal decree which, as Samuel Prideaux Tregelles transcribes it, prohibited the destruction or cutting up of the books of the Old or New Testament, or of approved Ecclesiastical writers, for various purposes, especially for delivering them to those who are called βιβλιοκαπηλοι; unless, indeed, they had been rendered useless by moths, wet, etc. (1861, p. xxii)12 Extant palimpsests provide evidence that this decree did not prevent the palimpsesting of scripture in future centuries – the Codex Zacynthius, edited by Tregelles, contains valuable Biblical manuscripts palimpsested as late as the thirteenth century.

Resurrection: From the eighteenth to the twenty-first century Whereas the peak period of palimpsesting took place from the seventh to ninth centuries, the peak period of palimpsest discoveries occurred during the nineteenth century. As Reynolds and Wilson explain, the prolific recovery and publication of classical manuscripts during the fourteenth and fifteenth century – by Latin scholars such as Lovato Lovati,

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Petrarch, Boccaccio, Coluccio Salutati and Poggio Bracciolini, and Greek scholars such as Bessarion, Politian, Aldus Manutius, Marcus Musurus and Erasmus – meant that by the end of the fifteenth century the large proportion of classical literature known to us in the present day had already been recovered.13 In the following centuries, scholars therefore turned to other sources in their continued quest to recover classical texts and in this way they realized the significance of newly discovered papyri, epigraphic texts and palimpsest manuscripts. The earliest recorded palimpsest discovery was made in 1692 by Jean Boivin, sub-librarian of the Royal Library in Paris, when he discovered an early and important Greek transcription of large portions of the New Testament and some of the Old under a fifthcentury transcription of a work by St Ephraim.14 Other significant palimpsest discoveries occurred during the eighteenth century, but the full significance of these finds was often not realized until the nineteenth century, largely because eighteenth-century scholars were ignorant of, or refused to employ, newly developed chemical methods of resurrection.15 These methods aided the detection of palimpsested texts by making the underlying writing more legible thereby facilitating the accurate identification of the subscripts. They were used extensively by palimpsest editors during the nineteenth century and were deemed by Thomas de Quincey to be akin to the reanimative thaumaturgy of such mythical figures as Hermes Trismegistus, Paracelsus, Erictho of Lucan and the Phoenix. Describing the effect of such procedures in ‘The palimpsest’, De Quincey is both shocked by, and irresistibly attracted to, ‘the brazen profligacy marking our modern magic’ (1998b, p. 143) which for him performs nothing less than a resurrection of the dead: Such a problem, you say, is impossible. But really it is a problem not harder apparently than – to bid a generation kill, but so that a subsequent generation may call back into life; bury, but so that posterity may command to rise again. Yet that was what the rude chemistry of past ages effected when coming into combination with the reaction from the more refined chemistry of our own. (1998b, pp. 141–2) Up until the nineteenth century, the detection of palimpsested texts had been aided only by good light and good eyes. In some palimpsest manuscripts the underlying text had reappeared so visibly that such methods were adequate. However, there were other palimpsests in which the underlying script proved very difficult to decipher. When attempting to recover the underlying writing from these palimpsests, nineteenth-century palimpsest editors turned to the chemical sorceries that so caught De

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Quincey’s imagination, using various methods of resurrection. Reynolds and Wilson state that early editors used gallic acid and that later ones used potassium bisulphate or the recipe of Turin chemist Giobert which prescribed successive applications of hydrochloric acid and potassium cyanide (1974, p. 176). Russell also refers to the use of gallic acid for resurrecting ordinary atramentum ink, but states that ‘for the other inks the use of dilute muriatic acid, followed by prussiate of potash, is required’ (1867, p. 118). He adds that for sepia and animal ink ‘it has sometimes been found necessary to boil the parchment in oil in a close vessel heated to 400° R’ (p. 118). Both Tregelles (1861, p. xxii) and Thompson (1911, p. 633) refer to the use of ammonium hydrosulphate. The employment of such chemical methods by the palimpsest editors of the nineteenth century, combined with colonial expansion and advancements in imaging technologies, marks the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the most prolific period of palimpsest discovery. The most renowned palimpsest editor during this period was the Italian scholar Cardinal Angelo Mai who made his name through his industrious discovery and publication of palimpsest manuscripts from 1814 until his death in 1854. His work alone accounts for the dramatic increase in palimpsest publications during this period. Mai’s achievements were due to both the opportunities available to him in his successive positions as librarian of the Ambrosian and the Vatican libraries – together these housed a rich collection of palimpsests from Bobbio – and his effective use of chemical reagents to aid the recovery of palimpsested texts. In fact, Mai was the first editor to make fruitful use of such reagents. From 1814, he published a host of newly discovered texts including fragments of some of Cicero’s speeches, Fronto’s letters and a lost comedy of Plautus. Mai’s most startling discovery was of a text for which, Reynolds and Wilson explain, ‘men like Roger Bacon and Petrarch had passionately searched and which even the most optimistic scholars had given up as lost for ever’ (1974, p. 176).16 In 1819, Mai moved from Milan to the Vatican and discovered a fourth- or fifth-century copy of Cicero’s famous treatise on Roman law, the De Republica (Vatican Library, MS Vat. Lat. 5757). This had been written over at Bobbio in the seventh century with a text of Augustine’s ‘Commentarii on Psalms 119–140’ and an Arian fragment of the fifth century. Mai published the principal edition of the De Republica in 1822. Mai’s palimpsest research brought him international fame in the nineteenth century: an entry in the ‘Literature, Science, etc’ section of the English Gentleman’s Magazine in 1825 refers to news in a letter from Rome of new palimpsest discoveries made by ‘Monsignore Angelo Mayo . . . already celebrated for his discoveries in the “Palimpsestes”’ (p. 347);

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Russell’s palimpsest lecture is primarily a panegyric for ‘the celebrated Cardinal Angelo Mai’ (1867, pp. 98–9). Like De Quincey, Russell is captivated by the transhistorical power of palimpsests and the ghostly persistence of the underlying texts: . . . and in the faint and attenuated lines which had survived the application of the sponge and the scraping-tool, and still showed dimly out beneath the new characters to which they had given place, it might seem as if, while the grosser external forms in which the intellect of the ancient world was embodied had perished or had been buried beneath the new creation as in a tomb, the more subtle spirit had still lingered, struggling as it were against annihilation, and, like some parted soul, still fondly clinging to the last mouldering relics of its earthly tenement. (pp. 109–10) Although more heavy-handed, Russell’s imagery here recalls De Quincey’s. Like De Quincey, Russell depicts the activity of palimpsest editors as nothing short of resurrective sorcery. Their task is ‘to call back those shadows of the past – to give shape and vitality to these dim and unsubstantial essences’ (p. 110). Russell’s prime purpose in this lecture, though, is to add his own tones to ‘the grateful voice of Europe’ (p. 110) in recognizing Mai ‘as the great enchanter of this world of the spirits of a departed literature’ (p. 110). The astonishingly laudatory nature of Russell’s description of Mai and his work testifies to the romance surrounding palimpsests and their editors at that time. It is even more powerful evidence of this since Mai’s scholastic acumen was in no way as brilliant as Russell describes. Many of the details Russell provides about palimpsests and Mai are, in fact, inaccurate, not least Russell’s misinformation about Mai’s date of birth – he gets it wrong by eight years.17 Despite such errors, Russell’s lecture is valuable as one of the few nineteenth-century accounts of palimpsests to be found outside of the covers of an edition of a palimpsest manuscript, and it remains the only English language account of Mai’s life and work.18 As a result, with this lecture Russell secures for himself, as well as for Mai, part of the lasting aura that surrounds the palimpsest phenomenon. Mai’s industrious activity meant that, by the time of his death, he had succeeded in discovering and publishing the best of existing palimpsest manuscripts. However, extensive palimpsest research, editing and publication of works of varying significance continued after Mai, up until the early years of the twentieth century. One of the few finds to rival Mai’s discoveries was made in 1816 by the German historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr.

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On his way to Rome as the Prussian ambassador, he stopped at the Chapter Library of Verona and there, with the use of a reagent, he succeeded in reading the whole of Gaius’ Institutes in the lower script of a manuscript of St Jerome. Previously, only a summary of the first three books of this work had been known. (Scipione Maffei had originally discovered this palimpsest manuscript but without the help of such reagents had been unable to identify the underlying text.) The first edition of this work was published by Niebuhr in 1820 and Thomas Arnold uses the second edition (published by Göshen at Berlin in 1824) as a primary source in Volume One of his History of Rome (1857, p. 213, n. 6).19 Despite their initial success, the chemical methods employed by Mai and others proved to have long-lasting and irreparably damaging effects on the parchments treated. Such methods often blackened the surface of the parchment, rendering both the upper and lower texts illegible, and hindered the effectiveness of later, more advanced, methods of resurrection. Subsequent palimpsest editors were therefore faced with even more of a challenge than early ones, but, in the late-nineteenth century, the invention of photography and the discovery of ultra-violet light helped their task. Ultra-violet palimpsest photography – a technique perfected by Alban Dold at the Palimpsest Institute of the Abbey of Beuron in southwest Germany, which he headed from 1917 – was used to render the underlying scripts of palimpsests more visible.20 Its startling effect is described by Stephen G. Daitz in his preface to The Jerusalem Palimpsest of Euripides (1970) in spectral imagery reminiscent of that used by De Quincey and Russell over a century earlier. Much of the underlying writing of the Jerusalem Palimpsest of Euripides (Library of the Greek Patriarchate MS. 36) is illegible and, in some places, invisible to the naked eye. This writing dates from the eleventh century and contains several known plays by Euripides, including fragments of Hecuba. After tungsten and infrared light proved ineffective in enhancing the underlying script, Daitz secured the use of an ultra-violet lamp to examine the palimpsest and was awed by the effect it produced: For one brief but unforgettable hour the lamp shone on the palimpsest and I had the moving experience of participating in what can almost be described as a ‘resuscitation’. As the lamp glowed, letters, words, and lines of Euripides which had been dimmed or invisible for over sixhundred years gradually began to re-emerge from the parchment and to reveal their identity, seemingly coaxed or compelled by the ultraviolet light. (1970, p. vii)

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As manuscripts treated with chemicals in the nineteenth century continue to deteriorate, in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries further methods of palimpsest recovery have been developed, using the latest advances in digital imaging technology. At present, scientists in Italy are working on the palimpsest of Cicero’s De Republica discovered by Mai in 1819. This manuscript has been treated by nineteenth-century chemists and, more recently, by skilled photographers. However, the efforts of the latter ‘to evidence the underlying script by using the most advanced analog techniques’ (Alparone et al. 1995, p. 348) proved only partially successful. As an alternative, the Italian scientists have designed a system that ‘enhances palimpsest readability by means of image processing techniques’ (p. 348). Scientists are using similarly advanced techniques at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore on the Archimedes Palimpsest. A new method of resurrection known as ‘multispectral imaging’ is being employed. Fascinatingly, its name carries the ghostly imagery that has surrounded palimpsests since the mid-nineteenth century into the language of contemporary palimpsest technologies. In this technique, images of the palimpsest in infrared, ordinary and ultraviolet light are taken with a scientific camera. The Archimedes ink and the prayer-book ink have their own spectral signatures and thus respond differently to different light wavelengths. Therefore, when the digital images are loaded onto a computer, software used to analyse satellite photographs of Earth can be programmed to recognize only the Archimedes signature, suppress the overlying script, and make the Archimedes text stand out. One cannot but wonder what De Quincey would have made of such twenty-first-century conjurations. Returned to the Archimedes Palimpsest, we come full circle in this brief history of palimpsests from antiquity to the present. This is both a vitally suggestive substrate for the rest of this study, and, I hope, of practical use, in that it brings together for the first time in one place the many disparate English-language sources that provide information regarding palimpsests. In any case, I close by echoing Tregelles’ apology from a century and a half ago: Some into whose hands this volume may come, will possibly ask for a definition of what is meant by a Palimpsest MS. Those who are familiar with such terms will excuse what may seem superfluous to them in such a point being stated. (1861, p. xxi)

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Figure 1: Plate XIV 257–290 of Cureton’s Fragments of the Iliad of Homer from a Syriac Palimpsest (1851).

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Chapter 3

The Palimpsest of the Mind

In ‘Introjection–incorporation: Mourning or melancholia’ (1980), Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok define fantasy as ‘any representation, belief, or body state working . . . toward the maintenance of the topographical status quo’ (p. 3). Fantasy thus has ‘a conservative, preservative function, no matter how innovative in spirit it may be, how broad its field of action, or how great its hidden compliance with wishes’ (pp. 3–4). The task of understanding a fantasy is specific: one must ‘pinpoint, concretely, what topographical change the fantasy is called on to resist’ (p. 4). In ‘Introjection–Incorporation’, Abraham and Torok are particularly concerned with ‘fantasies of incorporation’ (p. 4) that resist the psychical topographical changes that are the necessary consequence of mourning: The magical ‘cure’ through incorporation dispenses with the painful task of readjustment. To absorb what has just been lost in the form of food, real or imagined, when the psyche is plunged into mourning, is to reject mourning and its consequences; it is to refuse to take within oneself the part of oneself contained in what has been lost, to refuse to admit the true meaning of that loss, which if admitted would make one different – in short, it is to refuse its introjection. (p. 5) In Suspiria de Profundis (1845) – the autobiographical sequel to Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) – of all the ‘mysterious handwritings of grief or joy that have inscribed themselves successively upon the palimpsest of . . . [his] brain’ (1998b, p. 146), the ‘intolerable grief’ (p. 92) of the loss of his sister, Elizabeth, haunts Thomas De Quincey most profoundly. In the conclusion to ‘The palimpsest’ fragment of Suspiria, he refers to her death, along with the death of his mother, as one of the childhood tragedies that will never be erased from that palimpsest: In the illustration imagined by myself, from the case of some individual palimpsest, the Grecian tragedy had seemed to be displaced, but was not displaced, by the monkish legend; and the monkish legend had seemed 23

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to be displaced, but was not displaced, by the knightly romance. In some potent convulsion of the system, all wheels back into its earliest elementary stage. The bewildering romance, light tarnished with darkness, the semi-fabulous legend, truth celestial mixed with human falsehoods, these fade even of themselves as life advances. The romance has perished that the young man adored. The legend has gone that deluded the boy. But the deep deep tragedies of infancy, as when the child’s hands were unlinked forever from his mother’s neck, or his lips for ever from his sister’s kisses, these remain lurking below all, and these lurk to the last. Alchemy there is none of passion or disease that can scorch away these immortal impresses. (p. 146) In the ‘Introductory notice’ to Suspiria, De Quincey describes the loss of Elizabeth as one of the ‘great convulsions’ that is ‘of a nature to alter the whole economy of . . . [his] mind’ (p. 91). However, the whole of Suspiria is devoted to resisting this alteration through the construction of fantasies of resurrection which, like the fantasy of incorporation, aim to resist the topographical changes that would necessarily occur from the normal mourning of Elizabeth’s death. Such fantasies include the figure of the Spectre of the Brocken, the drowned city of Savannah-La-Mar, and, the subject of this chapter, the figure of the palimpsest of the mind.

De Quincey’s Fantasies of Resurrection In ‘The affliction of childhood’, the account of his early life that precedes ‘The palimpsest’ in Suspiria, De Quincey says that when he was young he was deeply affected by ‘the fact of having connected a profound sense of pathos with the reappearance, very early in spring, of some crocuses’ (p. 97). De Quincey is puzzled by this response since ‘such annual resurrections of plants and flowers affect us only as memorials, or suggestions of a higher change, and therefore in connexion with the idea of death; but of death I could, at that time, have had no experience whatever’ (p. 97). De Quincey’s narrative reveals how, in his subsequent experiences of death, this attachment to natural resurrective cycles is transformed into a fantasy of supernatural resurrection. He explains that when his sister Jane died, the infant De Quincey knew ‘little more of mortality than that Jane had disappeared. She had gone away’ (p. 99).1 He thinks, though, that ‘perhaps, she would come back’ (p. 99): ‘I was sad for Jane’s absence. But still in my heart I trusted that she would come again. Summer and winter came again – crocuses and roses; why not little Jane?’ (p. 99). As he grows up, the child De Quincey’s faith in resurrection finds support in the Chris-

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tian story of Christ’s death and resurrection (the Biblical story to which, of all those that were read to him as a child, the young De Quincey was most attracted), in which violence and death are productive, and resurrection overcomes the fearsome finitude of human life. But De Quincey’s faith in this Christian fantasy of resurrection is challenged by the death of his favourite sister, Elizabeth, on 2 June 1792. De Quincey recounts how, at her funeral service, his child self finds most beautiful and most offensive the Biblical passages that console the mourner with the promise of an eternal life that negates the horror of death’s finitude: Elizabeth is committed to the ground, ‘“ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life”’ (p. 117), but, as a child, De Quincey is not consoled by this reassurance; he simply knows that Elizabeth is no longer with him.2 De Quincey explains that only as an adult does he come to recognize the ‘benignity’ (p. 118) and ‘mercy’ (p. 118) of this faith. In ‘The affliction of childhood’, De Quincey recounts how he is also profoundly affected by the closing prayer at Elizabeth’s funeral, which similarly promises the consolation of resurrection and eternal life: ‘Oh, merciful God! The father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the resurrection and the life, in whom whosoever believeth shall live, though he die; who also taught us by his holy apostle St Paul not to be sorry, as men without hope, for them that sleep in him; We meekly beseech thee, O Father! to raise us from the death of sin unto the life of righteousness; that, when we shall depart this life, we may rest in him as our hope is – that this our sister doth.’ (p. 119)3 In the narrative that follows, however, De Quincey does not describe an effect of consolation but, rather, depicts how, subsequent to Elizabeth’s death, he fell into the depths of grief from which he was distracted only by the requirement to ‘put on the harness of life’ (p. 121). De Quincey’s mourning of Elizabeth is arrested at its very depths. The remainder of his life, as it is narrated in his writing, plays out various alternatives to the failed Christian fantasy of resurrection in order that he might protect himself from the psychological topographical changes that would result from mourning, from admitting the true meaning of his loss. These substitute fantasies offer the same solace as the Christian one but, similarly, do not enact or effect that consolation; hence their proliferation, and their permanent recurrence. This is the context in which to understand De Quincey’s attraction to palimpsests and his construction of the fantasy of the palimpsest of the

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human brain. For De Quincey’s fascination with palimpsests – the palaeographic subject of the first two-thirds of ‘The palimpsest’ – is specifically focused on the possibility of resurrection which their retentive function provides. While he recognizes the founding acts of scriptural violence and death that create palimpsests, the images that populate his account of them all point to, and point up, not merely the possibility, but the positive success, of subsequent resurrective activity. De Quincey images the revitalization of the underlying script as the appearance and disappearance of a river or mole during the successive movement from night to day; as the undulation of a skimmed stone on and under the water’s surface; and, as we saw in Chapter 2, as an actual event of murder and resurrection: Such a problem, you say, is impossible. But really it is a problem not harder apparently than – to bid a generation kill, but so that a subsequent generation may call back to life; bury, but so that posterity may command to rise again. Yet that was what the rude chemistry of past ages effected when coming into combination with the reaction from the more refined chemistry of our own. (pp. 141–2) In De Quincey’s ‘tumult of images’ (p. 143), the resurrective activity of palimpsest editors always involves uncannily bringing the dead back to life: the footprints of the hunted wolf or stag are traced backwards, back to the start of the hunt, before the game was killed; each former Phoenix is restored, alive again, in the ashes from which the present one emerged.4 De Quincey is both attracted to, and fearful of, the ‘brazen profligacy’ (p. 143) that marks the ‘modern magic’ (p. 143) of palimpsest editors. For De Quincey, they and their chemistry are akin to pagan forces of magical reanimation as powerful and sinful as mythical transgressors such as Hermes Trismegistus, Paracelsus, Erictho of Lucan and Dr Faustus. In order to secure the palimpsest of the human brain from this paganism, De Quincey sanctifies it. Two-thirds of the way through ‘The palimpsest’, De Quincey moves from the particular instance of palimpsests to ‘the image, the memorial, the record’ (p. 143) which is derived for him from ‘a palimpsest’ (pp. 143–4): What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, O reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet in reality not one has been extinguished. (p. 144)

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The palimpsest shares with palimpsests the retention of all the impressions it has received. However, in rendering the palimpsest of the human brain ‘heaven-created’ (p. 144), De Quincey removes the resurrection such retention enables from the fearful realm of the human and transgressive into the realm of the Christian, the legitimate and the beautiful. This sanctification of the palimpsest (of the mind) is highlighted by the additions De Quincey makes in ‘The palimpsest’ to the story of the near-death experience which he first recounted in Confessions. In the two versions of this story, the essential details remain the same: a woman falls into a pool of water as a child, and as she descends into death – before she is fortunately rescued by a passing farmer – her whole life passes before her eyes: At a certain stage of this descent, a blow seemed to strike her – phosphoric radiance sprang forth from her eye-balls; and immediately a mighty theatre expanded within her brain. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, every act – every design of her past life lived again – arraying themselves not as a succession, but as parts of a coexistence. (p. 145) ‘The palimpsest’ version differs from that told in Confessions in its increased religiosity: the female subject of the story is said to have recounted the story at the point in her life when she had ‘become religious to asceticism’ (p. 145); De Quincey now compares the experience to no less than the revelation of Saul (afterwards St Paul) on the road to Damascus; and the woman’s power to perceive the simultaneous display of her life is described as ‘celestial vision’ (p. 145). De Quincey recites this story as evidence of ‘the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain’ (p. 144). What fascinates him most ‘is not the simultaneity of arrangement under which the past events of life – though in fact successive – had formed their dread line of revelation’ (p. 145) – De Quincey is not perturbed by the perversion of temporality and disturbance of chronology that this simultaneity entails. Rather, what appeals to De Quincey in relation to the palimpsest, just as in relation to palimpsests, is the deeper phenomenon of ‘the resurrection itself, and the possibility of resurrection, for what had so long slept in the dust’ (p. 145): A pall, deep as oblivion, had been thrown by life over every trace of these experiences; and yet suddenly, at a silent command, at the signal of a blazing rocket sent up from the brain, the pall draws up, and the whole depths of the theatre are exposed. Here was the greater mystery . . . (p. 145)

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‘The endless strata’ of the palimpsest of the mind may ‘have covered up each other in forgetfulness’ (p. 146), but, just as the underlying layers of palimpsests are susceptible to resurrection by the atmosphere and chemical or digital reagents, the layers of the palimpsest of the mind are ever-ready for revival and resurrection whether by ‘the hour of death’, ‘fever’, ‘the searchings of opium’ or some other ‘potent convulsion of the system’ (p. 146). De Quincey’s fantasy of the palimpsest of the mind reassures him that all the impressions made on it ‘are not dead but sleeping’ (p. 146). It gives form to his belief – voiced 24 years earlier in the passage in Confessions that prefigures ‘The palimpsest’ – ‘that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind’ (1998a, p. 69). As such, it offers the reassurance that erasure and death, even if they appear permanent, can always be reversed – that nothing can properly and truly die. This resurrective fantasy provides, above all, the assurance that Elizabeth is not dead, but sleeping; that in De Quincey’s mind, and through his writing, the ‘pall’ (not merely a dark covering but, literally, the cloth spread over a coffin or tomb) covering Elizabeth can be drawn off and revive the sleeping Elizabeth beneath. In constantly making Elizabeth visible, De Quincey’s fantasies of resurrection are indeed both resurrective and fantasies – the word fantasy, coming as it does, from the Greek phantasia, literally ‘a making visible’. De Quincey’s writing repeatedly performs this resurrection of Elizabeth; it continually enacts the impossibility of forgetting her. Although the imaginary Cynic of Suspiria charges De Quincey with forgetting Elizabeth – ‘“But you forgot her . . . you happened one day to forget this sister of yours?”’ (p. 115) – De Quincey insists that ‘for this once my Cynic must submit to be told – that he is wrong’ (p. 115). In ‘Introjection–incorporation’, Abraham and Torok explain that in the fantasy of incorporation ‘a thing or an object’ is introduced in whole or in part into the body, as a result of both the refusal to mourn a loss, and the refusal to acknowledge ‘the very fact of having had anything to lose’ (1980, p. 7). All the words, scenes, tears and trauma of this loss, all the unexpressed grief, build in the subject ‘a secret vault’ (p. 8): In this crypt reposes – alive, reconstituted from the memories of words, images, and feelings – the objective counterpart of the loss, as a complete person with his own topography, as well as the traumatic incidents – real or imagined – that had made introjection impossible. (p. 8) De Quincey’s fantasies of resurrection, including the palimpsest of the mind, are part of his refusal to mourn his sister Elizabeth’s death

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‘normally’. As a result, they create and consolidate a crypt in his mind that shelters Elizabeth and the trauma of her death. The palimpsest of the mind thus becomes an encrypted structure in which Elizabeth lives on. As Jacques Derrida describes it in ‘Fors’ – the foreword to Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word (1986) – the crypt is ‘a place comprehended within another but rigorously separated from it’ (p. xiv), ‘a parasitic inclusion, an inside heterogeneous to the inside of the Self’ (p. xvi), ‘a topographical arrangement made to keep (conserve-hidden) the living dead’ (p. xxxvi).5 The Wolf Man’s Magic Word is Abraham and Torok’s remarkable analysis of the subject of Freud’s famous case From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918) in which they employ and consolidate their theory of the crypt. One of the key insights of their text is that the notion of cryptic incorporation changes the traditional psychoanalytic topography of the self for ‘the crypt works in the heart of the Ego as a special kind of Unconscious’ (p. 80). The idea of cryptic incorporation provides a way of understanding the structure of the palimpsest (of the mind) that is not dictated by the psychical topography of Freudian psychoanalysis. For the palimpsest (of the mind), like the crypt, ‘no longer rallies the easy metaphors of the Unconscious (hidden, secret, underground, latent, other, etc.), of the prime object, in sum, of any psychoanalysis’ (Derrida 1986, p. xiii). As noted in Chapter 1, the so-called ‘depth’ of the palimpsest which invites such metaphors is, in fact, illusory.6 Rather, the impressions made on the palimpsest (of the mind) live on as cryptic incorporations on its surface. The so-called ‘underlying’ layer of the palimpsest is, in fact, like the crypt: ‘a kind of “false unconscious,” an “artificial” unconscious lodged like a prosthesis, a graft in the heart of an organ, within the divided self ’ (Derrida 1986, p. xiii). The palimpsest does not conform structurally to a psychoanalysis of surface and depth, latent and manifest. The palimpsest of the mind is not structurally akin to Freud’s first stratified topography of the unconscious, preconscious and conscious systems. Rather, the palimpsest presents a complex structure of cryptic incorporation. As we will see in the following section, the spectralization of the self that results from this structure indicates that the palimpsest of the mind has more in common figuratively with Freud’s second topography, in which the mind is haunted by the ghostly figures of the Id, the Ego and the Superego. It is important to note at this point, in contrast to previous critical commentary, the marked difference between Freud’s model of the Mystic Writing-Pad and De Quincey’s fantasy of the palimpsest of the mind. In ‘Writings on the mind’, Josephine McDonagh situates the palimpsest within ‘a wider tradition of psychological models of the mind’, specifically those of ‘the Empiricist’s tabula rasa and Freud’s Mystic Writing-Pad’

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(1987, p. 209). She notes that the difference between the tabula rasa on the one hand, and the Mystic Writing-Pad and the palimpsest on the other, is that the former lacks the capacity for the retention of the impressions it receives, whereas the latter retain those impressions. However, the only difference she identifies between the Mystic Writing-Pad and the palimpsest is that suggested by the limit Freud places on his analogy – the Mystic Writing-Pad cannot bring about by itself the recollection of the memory traces, whereas the palimpsest can. Throughout ‘Writings on the mind’, McDonagh discusses the model of the palimpsest, without reflecting upon either the idea of the model, or the strange substantivization of the palaeographic palimpsest that occurs in the title of De Quincey’s essay. Like other commentators, McDonagh does not draw attention to the consequences of De Quincey’s significant distinction between palimpsests and the palimpsest. Both the Mystic Writing-Pad and palimpsests may satisfy Freud’s and De Quincey’s shared belief in the non-possibility of forgetting, in the permanence of the memory traces laid down in the mind; McDonagh may therefore indeed be surprised at Freud’s excitement about the novelty of the Mystic Writing-Pad, since ‘in its capacity to retain inscriptions while always providing a clean surface, a palimpsest already answers both Freud’s requirements [my emphasis]’ (p. 209). It may also be surprising that Freud does not at any point refer to palimpsests in his discussions of the mind, especially as he was undoubtedly aware of their existence.7 It may even be that such an omission is an absence symptomatic of Freud’s comprehensive elision of De Quincey from his writing.8 However, this similarity between the model of the Mystic Writing-Pad and the potential model of the mind offered by palimpsests does not imply a necessarily corresponding similarity between the Mystic Writing-Pad and the fantasy of the palimpsest of the mind as it occurs in De Quincey’s essay. For De Quincey, the single most important fact about palimpsests and the palimpsest is that which Freud can do without in the model of the Mystic Writing-Pad – the possibility of recollection. For, as we have seen, the prime interest of palimpsests and the palimpsest for De Quincey is their implication in resurrection; their retentive function is merely a necessary means to that end. Moreover, the palimpsest is a fantasy in De Quincey’s writing, not a model. The Mystic Writing-Pad is the result of Freud’s lifelong search for a technical model that will seriously represent his hypothesis of the psychical structure of the mind; ‘A note upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad”’ (1925) is an essay collected among others on the metapsychological theories of psychoanalysis. In contrast, De Quincey’s figure of the palimpsest of the mind occurs in an autobiographical text as a personal fantasy of resurrection. It is not a model of the mind but a

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delusive imagining, a hallucination, a daydream arising from De Quincey’s unconscious wishes and attitudes, an extravagant and visionary fancy, a product of the imagination, a fiction, a figment, an ingenious invention.9 As such, the palimpsest is not an external model subject to the very limitation of modelling itself – that it will always remain an external representation, ‘a mechanism without its own energy’ (Derrida 1978, p. 227), a machine which is dead.10 Rather, as a psychological fantasy, it shares in the undecidable status of all fantasies. It is somehow real and not real, both internal and external to the mind. It has a psychical reality, however, that does not preclude its material reality. As with all psychological fantasies, it blurs the very boundaries between internal and external, life and death, presence and representation by which Freud’s model of the Mystic Writing-Pad remains bound. To return to mourning, in ‘Fors’, Derrida questions the theoretical distinction Abraham and Torok maintain between incorporation and introjection, and thus between ‘abnormal’ and ‘normal’ mourning. For Derrida, ‘the cryptic incorporation always marks an effect of impossible or refused mourning (melancholy or mourning)’ that is ‘never finished’ (1986, p. xxi). In fact, Derrida clarifies, ‘it should even be said: It never finishes anything off ’ (p. xxi). Incorporation always remains contradictory in its structure: By resisting introjection, it prevents the loving, appropriating assimilation of the other, and thus seems to preserve the other as other (foreign), but it also does the opposite. It is not the other that the process of incorporation preserves, but a certain topography it keeps safe, intact, untouched by the very relationship with the other to which, paradoxically enough, introjection is more open. (pp. xxi–xxii) Like the process of palimpsesting which so fascinates De Quincey, mourning is a necessarily doubled process for Derrida – it has the strange status of a successful failure and a failed success. For mourning consists of both ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ mourning: the interminability of so-called ‘abnormal’ mourning is a necessary part of mourning since that mourning could never be successful as that would mean the loss of the loved object which the mourner invariably wants to keep; yet, one must mourn, since the process of ‘normal’ mourning, of introjection, allows the loving appropriation and assimilation of the other as other. It therefore keeps the loved one inside the mourner in a way in which incorporation does not.11 The fantasies of resurrection which characterise De Quincey’s writing do not indicate an ‘abnormal’ mourning process – a psychopathology, as

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the subtitle of John Barrell’s analysis of De Quincey suggests.12 Rather, they are part of this necessarily doubled mourning process which confuses the very boundary between the normal and the pathological. De Quincey’s autobiographical writing is a process of double mourning – an ‘interminable task’ in relation to which ‘the ghost remains that which gives one the most to think about – and to do’ (Derrida 1994, p. 98). De Quincey provides a name for this work of double mourning – ‘exorcism’. In an intriguing footnote to ‘The palimpsest’, De Quincey clarifies the etymology of this word: Some readers may be apt to suppose, from all English experience, that the word exorcise means properly banishment to the shades. Not so. Citation from the shades, or sometimes the torturing coercion of mystic adjurations, is more truly the primary sense. (p. 143, n. 1) For De Quincey, exorcism is the continual calling forth of the living dead from the crypt, their continual resurrection, the maintenance of their living on. De Quincey’s autobiographical writing is an exorcism without purgation of the spectral traces that inhabit and define the palimpsest of his mind. It continually maintains those traces, and consolidates his very own cryptic incorporations.

Spectrality: Subjectivity and Temporality In ‘The dark interpreter and the palimpsest of violence’ (1985), Robert M. Maniquis reads the palimpsest of the mind, and the other resurrective figures in Suspiria, as De Quincey’s fictional autonomous psyches and explores the cycles of violence in which they are implicated. Maniquis is seeking to work through the complex connections between De Quincey’s multiple images of the psyche and Christian ideas of salvation and the Word, as well as psychoanalytic and linguistic concepts of the signifier and the signified. Maniquis argues that for De Quincey the palimpsest is a figure of the undying Romantic mind where no impression is ever erased, but he also draws attention to the palimpsest’s embodiment of the paradox of Christian salvation – the creative violences involved in palimpsesting resemble the creative violence of Christ’s sacrifice. Maniquis concludes his discussion of De Quincey’s palimpsest of the mind by briefly tracing its transmission into French literature. The figure has entered the writing of Gide, Proust and Genette, among others, via Baudelaire’s translation of De Quincey in Les Paradis artificiels (1860). Maniquis halts the palimpsest’s journey suddenly and absolutely in the work of Derrida.

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Arguing that all a Derridean text can ever do is ‘reveal only its own constantly rupturing order’ (1985, p. 133), he cites a passage from Derrida’s double text ‘Living on: Border lines’ (1979) as evidence of Derrida’s rejection of the concept of the palimpsest: An apocalyptic superimprinting of texts: there is no paradigmatic text. Only relationships of cryptic haunting from mark to mark. No palimpsest (definitive unfinishedness). No piece, no metonymy, no integral corpus. And thus no fetishism. (1999b, pp. 136–7) Maniquis argues that the palimpsest – as a figure of christological violence and resurrection, as well as of Romantic subjective totality – has no place in the writing of a ‘postmodern writer’ (p. 134), for such a writer has rejected the idea of Platonic sources and considers himself to be only a shadow in a network of shadows, subordinate to the productive violence of textuality not Christianity. However, attention to the French text of ‘Border lines’ reveals that the phrase ‘no palimpsest’ translates ‘pas de palimpseste’, which literally means both ‘no palimpsest’, and ‘a palimpsestuous step’.13 Undermining Maniquis’s argument, this study repeatedly reveals that there is a palimpsestuous intimacy between the structure and logic of the palimpsest and the ideas and formulations of Derrida’s thought. For instance, the idea of ‘living on’ which Derrida plays out in the companion text to ‘Border lines’ shares its uncanny nature with the ‘living on’ that De Quincey’s fantasies of resurrection, including the palimpsest of the mind, hope to secure for Elizabeth. If De Quincey cannot forget Elizabeth, if his writing can continually revive her, then Elizabeth can never really die. But the continued existence secured for her is not the Christian salvation of eternal life, about which De Quincey remains ambivalent. Rather, repeatedly resurrected and returning in his writing, preserved in the palimpsest of De Quincey’s scriptural mind, Elizabeth exists in the uncanny state of ‘living on’ described by Derrida as, ‘a reprieve or an afterlife, “life after life” or life after death, more life or more than life, and better; the state of suspension in which [life is] over – and over again, and you’ll never have done with that suspension itself’ (1999a, p. 77). The figure of the palimpsest of the mind is not, as Maniquis argues, a figure of Christological violence and resurrection, since, as we have seen, although it performs a similar function to the Christian myth, it is a psychological fantasy created by De Quincey precisely because that myth fails to offer him consolation. Moreover, the fantasy of the palimpsest of the mind does not secure a Romantic unity of mind for De Quincey but is instead implicated in a distinctly post-Romantic spectralization of the self,

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and of temporality, that is intimately related to Derrida’s theorization of spectrality in Specters of Marx (1994). The aim of De Quincey’s fantasy of resurrection is to secure the continued life of Elizabeth. As such, ‘the vellum palimpsest, lying amongst the other diplomata of human archives or libraries’ (1998b, p. 144) offers itself as an ideal base for the fantasy of the palimpsest of the mind. However, although palimpsests and the palimpsest share in the defining features of retention and resurrection, there is a limit to the correspondence that De Quincey posits between them. This limit lies in the fact that the layers ‘in the vellum palimpsest’ have ‘no natural connexion’ but ‘by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll’ (p. 144). De Quincey fears that there is something ‘fantastic or which moves to laughter’ in ‘the grotesque collisions of those successive themes’ (p. 144). He therefore insists that ‘in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies’ (p. 144). Although ‘the fleeting accidents of a man’s life, and its external shows, may indeed be irrelate and incongruous’ (p. 144), De Quincey posits the existence of ‘organizing principles which fuse into harmony, and gather about fixed predetermined centres, whatever heterogeneous elements life may have accumulated from without’ (p. 144). In the face of the interrelatedness and incongruity of the experiences, thoughts and feelings recorded in the layers of the brain, these principles do not merely defend against the convulsions that resurrect those layers. Rather, they define, create and constitute the harmonious and coherent ‘grandeur of human unity’ (p. 144) that is in need of such defence. These organizing principles are the interpretative powers of the inviolable ‘I’ of the human subject – their task is both to create and protect it. In a footnote to the ‘The affliction of childhood’, De Quincey reminds the reader that this ‘I’ is the narratorial subject position of any autobiographical writing, including his own: ‘The reader must not forget, in reading this and other passages, that, though a child’s feelings are spoken of, it is not the child who speaks. I decipher what the child only felt in cipher’ (1998b, p. 113, n. 1). For De Quincey, this is not a peculiarity of his narrative or nature, but is common to any self – a self that is defined by its childhood experiences and by the ‘I’ of the interpreter of those experiences at the moment of any act of retrospective narration: I, for instance, did not, as a child, consciously read in my own deep feelings these ideas. No, not at all; nor was it possible for a child to do so. I the child had the feelings, I the man decipher them. In the child lay the handwriting mysterious to him; in me the interpretation and the comment. (p. 113, n. 1)

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De Quincey here presents a doubled ‘I’ that incorporates both the child and the adult self. From the very outset of Suspiria, De Quincey thus acknowledges a disunity haunting the ‘I’ upon which autobiography, and the ‘grandeur of human unity’ (p. 144), depend. In fact, in the ‘Introductory notice’ to Suspiria, De Quincey recognizes that autobiography is only possible precisely because of constitutive difference within the ‘I’: An adult sympathizes with himself in childhood because he is the same, and because (being the same) yet he is not the same. He acknowledges the deep, mysterious identity between himself, as adult and as infant, for the ground of his sympathy; and yet, with this general agreement, and necessity of agreement, he feels the differences between his two selves as the main quickeners of his sympathy. (p. 92) De Quincey’s doubled ‘I’ is not simply another manifestation of, in Gerald Gillespie’s words, ‘the Romantic fascination for the productive interplay between “self” and “otherness”’ (1990, p. 4).14 Rather, in Suspiria, these two selves rapidly multiply until the unity of the self upon which De Quincey insists is ruptured by a distinctly post-Romantic realization of the temporal contingency of human identity: Man is doubtless one by some subtle nexus that we cannot perceive, extending from the newborn infant to the superannuated dotard: but as regards many affections and passions incident to his nature at different stages, he is not one; the unity of man in this respect is coextensive only with the particular stage to which the passions belong. (p. 107) In ‘Thomas De Quincey: Self-effacing autobiographer’ (1979), Stephen J. Spector argues that in De Quincey’s narratives ‘specularity is replaced not only by infinite displacement but also by radical estrangement’ (p. 519). Spector cites as his example a passage from De Quincey’s ‘The English mail-coach’ (1849): The dreamer finds housed within himself – occupying, as it were, some separate chamber in his brain – holding, perhaps, from that station a secret and detestable commerce with his own heart – some horrid alien nature. What if it were his own nature repeated, – still, if the duality were distinctly perceptible, even that – even this mere numerical double of his own consciousness – might be a curse too mighty to be sustained. But how, if the alien nature contradicts his own, fights with it, perplexes, and confounds it? How, again, if not one alien nature, but two, but three, but

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four, but five, are introduced within what once he thought the inviolable sanctuary of himself? (1998c, p. 201) Spector finds this passage difficult to understand because ‘what first seems to be a specular doubling (the separate chamber as double . . .)’ (p. 519) becomes endlessly multiplied. This passage makes sense, however, within the logic of the cryptic palimpsest of the mind which is here inhabited by De Quincey’s former selves. Spector does not engage in a cryptic reading of this passage but, following Paul De Man, replaces specularity with the structure of the linguistic. In this infinite regress, like cannot be replaced by like, as in language, ‘only difference remains’ (p. 519). For Spector, the self is structured according to the structure of language, and thus of difference. It is not based on a model of mimesis, nor of specular doubles. Spector illustrates this point by quoting a passage from Confessions in which De Quincey replaces the conventionally mimetic surface of mirroring water with ‘sheer, uncontrollable, sublime movement’ (p. 520): The waters now changed their character, – from translucent lakes, shining like mirrors, they now became seas and oceans. And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll, through many months, promised an abiding torment . . . Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically, nor with any special power of tormenting. But now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself . . . now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens: faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries: – my agitation was infinite, – my mind tossed – and surged with the ocean. (1998a, p. 72) Disappointingly, Spector merely concludes from this passage that ‘De Quincey’s mind has turned into moving water’ (p. 520): ‘all that survives of his identity is that he is able to say that on the surging waters are faces and that they are human’ (p. 520). Although Spector records a move in De Quincey from specular doubling to radical estrangement, he stops short of acknowledging De Quincey’s more dramatic move from specularity to spectrality, to the spectralization of the human subject. In this passage, the mirrored surface of the waters of the specular subject becomes undeniably haunted by the spectres of multiple human figures – both, it might be imagined, De Quincey’s former selves, and the others who haunt him in the cryptic chamber of his mind. This haunting is not abstractly

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linguistic in nature, but physically textual – the movement from doubling to spectrality occurs simultaneously with a movement, unremarked by Spector, to the written: it ‘unfolds itself slowly like a scroll’ (p. 72). The fantasy of the palimpsest of the mind, and the disunity of the self it implies, does not lead to a Romantic notion of the mirrored or doubled self, but to a post-Romantic notion of the spectralized subject. It represents the mind as a textual structure actively haunted by its encrypted traces. Despite the coherence that De Quincey’s interpretative ‘I’ is supposed to secure, the fantasy of the palimpsest of the human brain thus leads to a radical disjunction within the notion of identity, the self and the present. For Derrida, the (spectral) subject can only be the effect of iterability, of a repetition that is never quite the same. Thus the ‘I’ from which De Quincey is writing is at each moment a different ‘I’, spectrally constituted by all the ‘I’s that have preceded it and all the ‘I’s which it will become. This spectral structure of the self is also inevitably involved with a spectralization of temporality. The palimpsest visibly represents what Derrida describes as the ‘non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present’ (1994, p. xix). The ‘present’ of the palimpsest is only constituted in and by the ‘presence’ of texts from the ‘past’, as well as remaining open to further inscription by texts of the ‘future’. The presence of texts from the past, present (and possibly the future) in the palimpsest does not elide temporality but evidences the spectrality of any ‘present’ moment which always already contains within it ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ moments. In the following chapter, we will see how the spectralization of temporality reified in the palimpsest underlies D. H. Lawrence’s concept of ‘poetry of the present’ and T. S. Eliot’s ‘historical sense’; in the meantime, it is important to note that De Quincey gives direct expression to it in ‘Savannah-La-Mar’ (another fragment of Suspiria), in the scene in which the character of the Dark Interpreter explores the analogy of a Roman water-clock: You see, therefore, how narrow, how incalculably narrow, is the true and actual present. Of that time which we call present, hardly a hundredth part but belongs either to a past which has fled, or to a future which is still on the wing. It has perished, or it is not born. It was, or it is not. Yet even this approximation to the truth is infinitely false. For again subdivide that solitary drop, which only was found to represent the present, into a lower series of similar fractions, and the actual present which you arrest measures now but the thirty-sixth millionth of an hour; and so by infinite declensions the true and very present, in which only we live and enjoy, will vanish into a mote of a mote, distinguishable only by a heavenly vision. Therefore the present, which only man possesses, offers

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less capacity for his footing than the slenderest film that ever spider twisted from her womb. Therefore, also, even this incalculable shadow from the narrowest pencil of moonlight, is more transitory than geometry can measure, or thought of angel can overtake. The time which is, contracts into a mathematical point; and even that point perishes a thousand times before we can utter its birth. All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in its velocity of flight towards death. (1998b, p. 159) According to the logic of the palimpsest, both identity and presence are non-coincidental. They are disjointed, are ‘enjoined . . . , ordered, distributed in the two directions of absence, at the articulation of what is no longer and what is not yet’ (Derrida 1994, p. 25). For the spectral subject, ‘to be’ means ‘to inherit’: All the questions on the subject of being or of what is to be (or not to be) are questions of inheritance . . . That we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not. (p. 54) De Quincey is haunted no more strongly and definitely by Elizabeth than by his past and future selves which he inherits in each non-contemporaneous present moment of writing. In constantly resurrecting the encrypted traces within his mind – Elizabeth, his past selves, in fact, all the selves that at any infinitely divisible present moment of writing he has both been and is yet to be – De Quincey’s autobiographical writing inevitably frustrates any attempt to establish the inviolable unity of the human subject.

Inventive Reading In The Magic Word, Abraham and Torok provide an analysis of the Wolf Man derived from a re-reading of the many texts of, about, and surrounding him and his life – the documents through which they have their only access to him. Abraham and Torok propose that these texts reveal that the Wolf Man created a crypt within himself in which he sheltered the figures of his sister and father, the traumatic scene of her (imagined or real) seduction by him, and a whole host of other identities – Brother, Sister, Father, Mother, Therapist. The Wolf Man’s cryptic incorporation of these figures, and the traumas surrounding them, is his only way of loving them

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in order not to annihilate them, and annihilating them in order not to love them. The various texts of the Wolf Man serve to conceal and yet maintain that crypt, caused by this very contradiction within desire – that between aggressivity and the libido. The repression of this contradiction is the cause of the crypt, and yet the crypt always serves to maintain it. The crypt is thus built by a violence that performs a ‘simultaneous conservation and suppression, between which no synthesis is possible’ (Derrida 1986, p. xvii). As a result, the self becomes ‘the lodging, the haunt of a host of ghosts, and the dramatic contradiction of a desire, a desire that is, however, no longer even his’ (p. xxiii). The most inventive analysis of De Quincey to arise in recent years, John Barrell’s The Infection of Thomas De Quincey (1991), bears an uncanny similarity to Abraham and Torok’s analysis of the Wolf Man. Barrell ingeniously constructs two scenes of primal guilt visible in De Quincey’s narration of his encounter with his sister Elizabeth on her death bed. The first is the feeling of guilt that he was responsible for her death (or, at least, that he could not save her); the second is De Quincey’s association between ‘his last sight of his dead sister’ and ‘some appalling sexual sin and pollution’ (Barrell 1991, p. 27). Barrell also carefully exposes the implication of this personal guilt with De Quincey’s public guilt about British Imperialism. Barrell’s intention is to reveal the remarkable fact that, in the end, all De Quincey’s many and diverse texts, despite their varying directions and goals, ‘arrive, time and time again, in the very same place’ (p. 23) – the real or psychical location of his encounter with the dead Elizabeth: That place is, at times, a literal place, an upper chamber of a house where an appalling act of violence is imagined and believed to have been perpetrated; though it may not always be clear just which room – whose room – it was, or just what has been done to whom. Just as often, the place is represented as some other bedroom, somewhere else; or else it is ‘a chamber of the brain’, in one of De Quincey’s favourite phrases; or it is not a chamber at all, but it is still a place constructed by the same words and images that we find attached to other scenes of uncertain horror. (p. 23) Barrell argues that De Quincey’s writings ‘return in horror, certainly, but also in pleasure, to the redescription and refiguration of what is imagined to have happened there’ (pp. 23–4). He concludes that ‘De Quincey is at once haunted by a hateful memory, and actively colluding with the ghost’ (p. 24).

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Although not directly indebted to Abraham and Torok’s theory, Barrell’s analysis offers itself up for comparison with it, and for reinscription in its terms. Barrell’s construction of the sexual taint around De Quincey’s encounter with the dead Elizabeth provides an explanation for De Quincey’s inability to mourn her ‘normally’. De Quincey must encrypt Elizabeth due to the contradiction in his desire for her, and the necessary repression of that contradiction. Like the Wolf Man, De Quincey’s life and writing thus serves to maintain and conceal that cryptic incorporation in a multitude of texts as various as ‘novels, short stories, translations of fiction mainly from the German, works of literary theory, autobiographical writings in various modes, biographical essays, essays critical, essays economic, geographical, historical, philological, philosophical, political, scientific, and so on’ (Barrell 1991, p. 23). Thus the ‘secret chamber of the mind’ to which Barrell claims De Quincey’s writing is continually returning can be understood as the crypt inhabited by Elizabeth, as well as, Barrell’s analysis suggests, by the various figures of the Orient that haunt De Quincey’s life and mind and are inextricably entwined with the figures of his childhood.15 Abraham and Torok’s analysis of the Wolf Man and Barrell’s analysis of De Quincey share in a similar method of reading which might be described as palimpsestuous. In The Magic Word, Abraham and Torok’s project is to gain access to Sergei Pankeiev’s crypt. In doing so they are not attempting to save him, the Wolf Man, but ‘to save the analysis of the Wolf Man’ (1986, p. 16). They wish to save the very possibility of reading itself. At the same time, they want to save themselves, as readers, as analysts. The Wolf Man was resistant to Freud’s analysis, his case eluded and confounded Freud and his theories. Consequently, the aim behind Abraham and Torok’s investigation is to create a ‘new conceptual apparatus’ that will ‘fill out Freudian metapsychology in order to widen its scope of analytic effectiveness’ (p. lxxii). They wish to ‘push the limits of what is considered to lie “beyond analysis”’ (p. lxxii), what is considered to fall ‘into the category of “interminable”’ (p. lxxii). In doing so, they are seeking to preserve the very possibility of psychoanalysis. As a result, they have to adapt both the metapsychology of the mind upon which such analysis works, and the form that analysis might take. As we have seen above, the idea of cryptic incorporation introduces this new metapsychology with a seismic shift in the very topography of the ‘self’. In addition, the new mode of analysis which Abraham and Torok develop is based on texts, on the written documents of the Wolf Man’s life. They describe it as a method of translation – ‘the translation of an established text into an invented text’ (p. lxxii). It is a reading method that is both a process of ‘bringing to light’ and ‘creating’ (p. lxxii). This method,

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named cryptonymy, is founded upon the insight that ‘someone could be driven to take on the same attitude toward words as toward things, namely, objects of love, and that such word-objects could upset a topography to the point where incorporation would seem a self-therapeutic measure’ (p. 16). Their analysis of the Wolf Man is a linguistic investigation that deciphers the ‘cryptonyms’ of the Wolf Man’s texts. These are the words that hide the key word which the Wolf Man has encrypted, both psychically and linguistically – the Russian verb tieret, ‘to rub’. This word encrypts the palimpsestuous nature of the ‘simultaneous conservation and suppression’ that creates the crypt, since it shares the same meaning as the literal meaning of ‘to palimpsest’ – ‘to rub smooth’. This word had to be banished from the Wolf Man’s active vocabulary, but manifests itself in its cryptonyms: synonyms of the magic word’s allosemes. Each time they are used they imply a constant reference to the taboo word. Abraham and Torok do not claim that identifying this key word, carrying out this cryptonymy, provides the possibility of a ‘cure’ for the Wolf Man. Rather, it proves the fact that he is no longer beyond analysis, the method of analysis now having undergone such radical mutation. Similarly, Barrell is not seeking the salvation or cure of De Quincey. Rather, his method is also a process of palimpsestuous reading that traces the redescriptions and refigurations of what we now understand to be De Quincey’s crypt. These manifest themselves in De Quincey’s interchanging narratives of trauma and reparation, which together constitute ‘a synchronic myth whose different versions are not themselves easily susceptible of narrativisation, or not of that sort of narrativisation which can distinguish the stages of a case history of the phases of a neurosis’ (Barrell 1991, p. 22). Barrell’s reading of De Quincey’s texts exposes the complex meanings ‘that came to be attached to that real or imagined event’ (p. 28) of his primal encounter with the dead Elizabeth, tracing the ‘associative logic’ (p. 29) of words and of images that are attached to that scene. In doing so, Barrell invents – that is, both creates and brings to light – the ‘involute’ of ‘ideas or images that constitutes the story of sexual guilt attached to Elizabeth’s death – the closed door, the footfall on the stairs, the motionless woman, the kiss, the Wandering Jew’ (p. 32). As I noted in Chapter 1, the ‘involute’ is De Quincey’s name for the way in which ‘our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects . . . in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled’ (1998b, p. 104). In tracing the fabric of De Quincey’s involutes, Barrell employs an inventive reading method that is capable of responding adequately to the perplexed combination of texts that constitutes De Quincey’s palimpsestuous oeuvre.

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Palimpsestuous Tropographies In ‘The palimpsest’, De Quincey creates a personal fantasy of resurrection which forms an inseparable part of the exorcistic mourning of his sister Elizabeth that Suspiria performs. At the same time, De Quincey’s essay, with the definite article of its title, also marks the inauguration of the more general concept of the palimpsest for which this study, by tracing its major twentieth-century reinscriptions, invents a history. This history follows the Foucauldian genealogical approach elaborated in Chapter 1, but it also adopts the method suggested by Derrida’s reading of ‘the crypt’. In ‘Fors’, Derrida does not consider the crypt ‘as a metaphor in any ordinary sense’ (1986, p. xiii). Rather, instead of claiming to have access to this crypt through the ordinary meaning or common figure of a crypt, we must bend with a movement that it would be too simple, linear, and unilateral to think of as the opposite of that type of access . . . as if, by anasemia, the movement consisted of going back toward the rightful place and the proper meaning from out of this crypt. (p. xiii) Following Abraham and Torok’s description of psychoanalytic listening as ‘a special way of treating language’ (1986, p. 79) that does not deal with meanings but with symbols, Derrida is no longer seeking the ‘meaning’ of ‘the crypt’. This is why it seems to him that ‘the question “What is a crypt?” can no longer . . . be posed’ (p. xiii). ‘The crypt’ has ‘neither a metaphor nor a literal meaning’ (p. xiii): it follows a displacement that ‘obeys a different tropography’ (p. xiii), a tropography that ‘takes the form of everything a crypt implies’ (p. xiii). In ‘Fors’, Derrida explores the crypt following this new cryptic tropography – his methodological procedure is defined by the nature of the crypt, and its irreducible elements. Taking his lead from Abraham and Torok’s method of reading, Derrida explores the ‘allosemes’ of the crypt: ‘topoi’, ‘death’, ‘cipher’. These are ‘the crypt’s same’ (p. xiv): They can be neither dissociated nor hierarchically ordered. They do not form a multiplicity of separable predicates, the contingent or essential attributes of a crypt. Their being together did not just happen; their unity is irreducible only with respect to the crypt they constitute through and through: That unity is only thinkable from out of this crypt, here. (pp. xiii–xiv)

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The palimpsest shares the same strange ontological status of the crypt – ‘neither a metaphor nor a literal meaning’ (p. xiii). In reading its history, it is necessary to follow, as Derrida does, a different tropography, one, moreover, that is guided by the complex nature of the palimpsest. According to the method of metaphorical coupling described in Chapter 1, this study explores the palimpsest in, and through, its relationship with its allosemes which include ‘the crypt’, ‘belonging together’, ‘twilight’, ‘the text’, ‘the hymen’ and ‘queer’. These are the palimpsest’s ‘same’. Like the texts which inhabit the palimpsest’s surface, they cannot be hierarchically ordered, or dissociated; they are not separate predicates; they are not the essential attributes of the palimpsest; but their unity is irreducible with respect to it and only in fact thinkable out of it. The following chapter explores this strange status of the palimpsest and the nature of this new tropography.

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Chapter 4

On Poetry and Metaphor

In the Preface to The Collected Poems (1928), D. H. Lawrence refers to ‘a little college notebook’ (1993a, p. 849) in which he jotted down early compositions while he was a day student at Nottingham University from 1906 to 1908.1 Critical attention was drawn to this notebook by Vivian de Sola Pinto after it was lent to the Library of the University of Nottingham in 1955–6.2 In the appendix to ‘D. H. Lawrence: Letter-writer and craftsman in verse’, Pinto lists the poems contained in the notebook, numbered consecutively from the back cover. Entry 12 of Pinto’s list reads as follows: (12) Evening of a Week-day* (The darkness comes from the earth.) NP 33, CP 22. Title in NP: Palimpsest of Twilight, Title in CP: Twilight. (1957, p. 30)3 Figure 2 reproduces a facsimile of ‘Evening of a Week-day’ from the notebook. The text of the poem reads as follows: Evening of a Week-day The darkness comes up from the earth And swallows dip into the pallor of the west; From the hay comes the clamour of childrens mirth; But on me the forge of tomorrow is heavily pressed The woodlime oozes scent And a moonlight moth goes flittering by But the wings of my soul are utterly spent Brushed bare by a harsh day of the bloom which lent power to fly. The children are forsaking their play And a star glimmers awake behind the thin veil of light But I am too bruised by the hand of Day To revive or to dream at the first kiss of Night

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Figure 2: Page 72r from D. H. Lawrence’s college notebook, MS La L 2, Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham.

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‘Evening of a Week-day’, probably drafted in the summer of 1907,4 was subsequently published in a substantially revised form in New Poems (1918) under the new title ‘Palimpsest of Twilight’:5 Palimpsest of Twilight Darkness comes out of the earth And swallows dip into the pallor of the west; From the hay comes the clamour of children’s mirth; Wanes the old palimpsest. The night-stock oozes scent, And a moon-blue moth goes flittering by: All that the worldly day has meant Wastes like a lie. The children have forsaken their play; A single star in a veil of light Glimmers: litter of day Is gone from sight. (Lawrence 1918, p. 33) The crossings-out in the text of the notebook indicate the lines that were to be most significantly changed in the published version, notably, the last line in each of the first two stanzas, and the whole of the final stanza.6 Lawrence further revised and rearranged the poems appearing in New Poems for The Collected Poems, in which ‘Palimpsest of Twilight’ was republished under the revised title ‘Twilight’, although no further alterations were made to the body of the text. The textual history of ‘Twilight’ provides material evidence of the process of Lawrence’s poetic composition, one of erasures and superimpositions, of writing and rewriting. Lawrence’s similarly extensive revision of his prose works prompts Frank Kermode to describe them as having a ‘palimpsest-like construction’ (1973, p. 33).7 In ‘Palimtexts: Postmodern poetry and the material text’ (1989), Michael Davidson adopts the same metaphor in his discussion of poetry and the material text in order to argue for, at the same time as put into practice, ‘an alternate mode of analysis that takes the entire archive – including its material form – into account’ (p. 87):

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A palimtextual study of poetry would look not only at the poem in relation to similar poems (the traditional task of genre study) but to the writing each poem displaces, a displacement that is ‘represented’ in the manuscript as a kind of over-writing. (p. 92) Davidson coins the word ‘palimtext’ in order to combine ‘post-Structuralism’s emphasis on writing as trace, as inscription of an absence’ (p. 78) with ‘the material fact of that trace, an inscribing and re-inscribing’ (p. 78): ‘the palimtext is neither a genre nor an object, but a writing-inprocess that may make use of any number of textual sources’ (p. 78). Davidson argues that ‘as its name implies the palimtext retains vestiges of prior writings out of which it emerges. Or more accurately, it is the stillvisible record of its responses to those earlier writings’ (p. 78). Davidson is mistaken here, however, in appealing to the propriety of the name, for, since there is no necessary relationship between the texts that co-inhabit the space of a palimpsest – one text is not derived from the other, one does not serve as the origin of the other – the palimpsest does not properly figure the relationship between a text and its sources, including its own earlier drafts.8 Davidson’s use of the palimpsest to figure a relationship of emergence and response between the texts of the palimpsest is thus a catachrestic use of this metaphor defined, according to The Oxford English Dictionary as, the ‘perverted or improper misuse of a word’, the ‘application of a term to a thing which it does not properly denote’, the ‘abuse or perversion of a trope or metaphor’. As Jacques Derrida reads it, catachresis is ‘the violent, forced, abusive inscription of a sign, the imposition of a sign upon a meaning which did not yet have its own proper sign in language’ (1982, p. 255). For Davidson, there is no sign in language – ‘text’, it seems, is insufficient – that conveys both the intertextual and interdiscursive quality of all textuality, as well as the material representation of this intertextuality in the body of actual texts, thus, ‘for lack of a better term’ (p. 78), he invents the catachrestic neologism ‘palimtext’. Davidson’s catachrestic use of the palimpsest draws attention to ‘the degree to which writing is archaeological, the gradual accretion and sedimentation of textual materials, no layer of which can ever be isolated from any other’ (Davidson 1989, p. 79). His concept of palimtextual reading thus challenges the aims of traditional textual research which has provided a methodology for the investigation of textual materiality only with the aim of finding a definitive version – closest to the author’s intentions – from which to establish a copy text. To extend Davidson’s metaphor, whereas traditional textual criticism corresponds to traditional palimpsest reading which seeks to dismember the textual palimpsest in

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order to recover the underlying text, Davidson’s ‘palimtextual’ reading corresponds to palimpsestuous reading which seeks to trace the interwoven relations between the layers that constitute the fabric of a text. Palimtextual or palimpsestuous reading does not reduce the text to a single layer but takes all of a text’s layers into account and respects ‘the degree to which poems are a temporal process of marking and remarking, of response and contention’ (Davidson 1989, p. 93). Since in palimpsestuous reading no layer of the text represents the essential or definitive version of a work, such reading also challenges the biographical approach to textual materiality in which the history of the text merely provides evidence for a teleological critical narrative of the poet’s creative development.9 Focusing on the text, rather than the author, in this chapter I undertake a palimpsestuous reading of ‘Twilight’ which takes into consideration its encrypted texts – ‘Palimpsest of Twilight’ and ‘Evening of a Week-day’ – and enables a new understanding of the significance of this short but difficult poem. Before engaging in this close reading, I want to consider at some length the metaphorical construction of the poem’s palimpsested middle title – ‘Palimpsest of Twilight’ – in the context of Martin Heidegger’s writing around the concept of metaphor. This leads to a radical rethinking of metaphor – its structure and its mode of functioning – both in Lawrence, and in general, and provides the conceptual framework integral to understanding the relationship between the ‘twilight’ and ‘palimpsest’ semantic systems that function in the poem ‘Twilight’ and determine its significance.10

‘Belonging Together’: Heidegger and Metaphor In Metaphor (1972), a guide to theories of metaphor from classical times to the present, Terence Hawkes reminds the reader of the etymological origin of the word metaphor. It comes from the Greek metaphora which is derived from meta meaning ‘over’, and pherein, ‘to carry’. Hawkes explains that the word metaphor ‘refers to a particular set of linguistic processes whereby aspects of one object are “carried over” or transferred to another object, so that the second object is spoken of as if it were the first’ (p. 1). Metaphor thus relies upon an operation of similarity and difference whereby one object, phenomenon or concept is spoken of as another. This process illuminates some essential quality (or qualities) of that object, but at the same time each part of the metaphor retains its separate identity. In the traditional movement of metaphor, something known provides access to and illuminates something unknown. If the 1918 title of Lawrence’s poem ‘Twilight’ – ‘Palimpsest of Twilight’ – is considered as a metaphor in

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this traditional sense, ‘palimpsest’ is the familiar element of the metaphor that is carried over to ‘twilight’ (the unfamiliar element) in order to illuminate the essential qualities of ‘twilight’. However, this metaphor is made strange by the linguistic structure of its expression. The use, or implication, of the verb ‘to be’ which normally characterizes metaphors is absent. In its place we find ‘palimpsest of twilight’ – twilight is ‘of’ the palimpsest, the palimpsest is ‘of’ twilight. Although Roman Jakobson speaks of ‘words endowed with purely grammatical functions, like conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and articles’ (1987, p. 106), Eleanor Cook observes that ‘such words do not always function this way’ (1988, p. 30).11 The Oxford English Dictionary is curiously unhelpful in clarifying the relationality embodied by ‘of’. Its editors explain that the primary sense of ‘of’, meaning ‘away’ or ‘away from’, is now obsolete. All existing uses are derived from this primary sense but are often ‘so remote as to retain no trace of the original sense’. In fact, most of these meanings are ‘so weakened down as to be in themselves the expression of the vaguest and most intangible of relations’. What, then, is the nature of the relationality into which the ‘of’ is drawing ‘palimpsest’ and ‘twilight’? And if that relationality is still to be considered metaphoric, then how does ‘palimpsest of twilight’ in fact force us to reconsider or refigure the metaphoric relation? Heidegger performs precisely such a refiguration in his later writing, not least at moments when he engages with ‘metaphoric’ constructions that grammatically mirror ‘palimpsest of twilight’, such as, for example, ‘house of Being’. Derrida draws attention to these moments in his reading of Heidegger and metaphor in ‘The retrait of metaphor’ (1978). In this essay, Derrida highlights a paradox: namely, that ‘the Heideggerian text’ (1998, p. 105) irresistibly imposes itself from the moment one begins to (re)think metaphor, and yet ‘Heidegger has only very allusively treated metaphor as such and by this name’ (p. 105).12 Heidegger’s rare direct treatment of metaphor provides the impetus for Derrida’s analysis, which focuses around a characteristic Heideggerian movement which Derrida calls an ‘inverting’ (p. 119) – or even a ‘catastrophic’ (p. 119) – metaphor. This movement occurs at moments when Heidegger uses formulas that would normally be viewed as metaphors, but which he insists are not. For Derrida, this denial necessitates a rethinking of ‘metaphor’, since it ‘throws suspicion on what we believe assured and clear in this word’ (p. 119). Derrida cites a passage from Heidegger’s ‘Letter on humanism’ (1947) as an example of the movement he is exploring:

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Discourse about the house of Being (Die Rede vom Haus des Seins) is not a metaphor (Übertragung) transporting the image of the ‘house’ toward Being, but [by implication: inversely] it is by way of appropriating thinking the essence of Being (sondern aus dem sachgemäss gedachten Wesens des Seins) that we will one day be able to think what ‘house’ and ‘to inhabit’ are. (Heidegger cited in Derrida 1998, p. 119)13 Derrida explains that in this passage ‘house of Being’ does not ‘operate . . . in the manner of a metaphor in the current, usual, that is to say, literal meaning (sens) of metaphor, if there is one’ (p. 119). As explained above, in the current or common understanding of metaphor, ‘a familiar predicate’ is transported towards ‘a less familiar, more remote, unheimlich (uncanny) subject’ (p. 119). The purpose of this movement, or transport, is to appropriate the remote subject, to make it more familiar and more comprehensible. Thus one is able to name it ‘by the indirect detour of what is nearest’ (p. 119).14 In the case of Heidegger’s example, ‘house’ would provide access to ‘Being’, but what Heidegger seems to be asserting runs contrary to this traditional understanding. Derrida suggests that in the ‘quasi-metaphor’ (p. 120) of ‘house of Being’, Heidegger is maintaining that rather than ‘house’ enabling access to an understanding of ‘Being’, it is in fact a thinking of ‘Being’ that enables, or opens the way for, a thinking of ‘house’ and, by implication, ‘habitation’. The result is a ‘tropical inversion in the relations between the predicate and subject, signifier and signified, vehicle and tenor, discourse and referent, etc.’ (p. 120). The temptation, of course, is to formalize this inversion, whereby ‘Being’ would then say more to us about ‘house’ than ‘house’ about ‘Being’, but such a rendering misses the import and subtlety of Heidegger’s thought. ‘Being’ and ‘house’ have not exchanged places; ‘Being’ has not become the proper, known, familiar predicate in the metaphor that ‘house’ formerly was; ‘house’ has not become the strange, uncanny subject, even if it has become a little strange. ‘We are,’ Derrida asserts, ‘therefore no longer dealing with a metaphor in the usual sense, nor with simple inversion permutating the places in a usual tropical structure’ (p. 120). Rather, we are dealing with Heidegger’s concept of ‘belonging together’ – a thinking of the ‘of’ in these quasi-metaphoric constructions. The idea of ‘belonging together’ is Heidegger’s refiguration of the metaphoric relation. Derrida evokes this notion in ‘The retrait of metaphor’ through the idea of retrait, or ‘withdrawal’; it receives various different formulations in Heidegger’s later writings, for example, as ‘differentiation’ or ‘dif-ference’ (Unter-Schied), ‘perdurance’ (Austrag) and ‘the event of appropriation’ (Ereignis) in Identity and Difference (1969), and,

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as a translation of the Greek ‘diaphora’, as ‘dimension’, ‘pain’, and ‘language’ in the essay ‘Language’, collected in Poetry, Language, Thought (1975). These formulations are Heidegger’s attempt to say what cannot and must not be summed up in a single, unified concept or word. They denote an event or occurrence which is the basis of – and yet also the result of – all relationality, existence and beings, even Being itself.15 According to the logic of this relationality, in the quasi-metaphorical construction ‘house of being’, ‘house’ is no longer transported to ‘Being’, nor is ‘Being’ transported to ‘house’. Instead, the two ‘belong together’ – they are ‘of’ each other. Their ‘belonging together’ is not an imposed relation on distinct entities whose essences are already predetermined; rather, ‘house’ and ‘Being’ only gain what is proper to them in and through their belonging together.16 In the light of Heidegger’s thought, metaphor becomes the space of identity and difference that grants and holds apart the ‘between’ in which the two parts of metaphor – here ‘house’ and ‘being’ – are both borne away from and held toward each other. The two elements do not subsist alongside each other, but penetrate each other, traversing a middle in which they are at one, intimate. They are intimate, but not fused, since this intimacy obtains ‘only where the intimate . . . divides itself cleanly and remains separated’ (Heidegger 1975, p. 202). Metaphor is an event of appropriation – figured in the concept of Ereignis as the event – constantly occurring, without which there would be nothing; it is originary, in that it continues to originate; it is nothing less than ‘the relation of all relations’ (Heidegger 1993b, p. 425), the basis of, and yet only result of, all relationality. Metaphor is the space and event that brings its elements together while maintaining them as separate; it is an incestuous and interpenetrating intimacy which holds its terms both together and apart and is the function of each coming into its own meaning. In Lawrence’s metaphor, ‘palimpsest of twilight’, then, ‘palimpsest’ is not transferred to ‘twilight’ in order to enable us to understand ‘twilight’. Equally, ‘twilight’ is not carried over to ‘palimpsest’ in a simple inversion of this movement. Rather, in the metaphoric coupling signalled by the belonging together of the ‘of’, ‘palimpsest’ and ‘twilight’ come together while remaining distinct. Each term comes into its own meaning in this metaphoric space. Drawing ‘palimpsest’ and ‘twilight’ together enables us to understand them both as uncanny spaces of ontological doubleness, not as sequential movements from one state to another. The ‘twi’ of twilight comes from the Greek or Latin for ‘two’, with a noun meaning ‘twofold’ or ‘double’, or ‘twice’ or ‘a second time’. One special usage of ‘twi’ is in the word ‘twiform’ or ‘twiformed’, which means ‘having a double form’ or ‘being formed of two, especially different or incongruous, parts’.

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The process of palimpsest production is one of layering – of erasure and superimposition – but the subsequent reappearance of the underlying text results in the twiformed structure of the palimpsest, to which its coupling with ‘twilight’ draws attention. The palimpsest is a space in which two or more texts, often different and incongruous, coexist in a state of both collision and collusion.17 At the same time, the structure of the palimpsest draws attention to the status of twilight as the space in which day and night interpenetrate each other, where the one shows in and through the other. Twilight is a space that is defined by, and exists only as, the betweenness of day and night, in which day and night are both, crucially, still present; yet it is also the space that marks the transition from day to night, the space that marks their difference.

Metaphors of Metaphor In ‘White mythology: Metaphor in the text of philosophy’ (1974), Derrida argues that we can only understand the relation between metaphor and philosophy via a metaphor. More generally, we can only understand a ‘linguistic phenomenon’ (Derrida 1982, p. 209), such as metaphor, through a ‘figurative representation’ (p. 209) of it, for example, through metaphor.18 In ‘White mythology’, Derrida chooses usure as a metaphor that becomes a (not ‘the’, for usure is ‘merely an example’ (1982, p. 210)) metaphor of, or for, metaphor. Derrida explores ‘this metaphor of (the) usure (of metaphor)’ (p. 210) via an examination of the ‘logic implicit’ (p. 210) in a short dialogue at the end of Anatole France’s novel The Garden of Epicurus (1923), in which the characters Aristos and Polyphilos exchange views on ‘the sensory figure which is sheltered and used (up), to the point of appearing imperceptible, in every metaphysical concept’ (p. 210). For Polyphilos, in philosophy, the ‘natural wealth and original virtue of the sensory image’ (p. 210) – a physical image – ‘is deflowered and deteriorated by the history of the concept’ (p. 210) – a metaphysical concept. As Derrida summarizes: The primitive meaning, the original, and always sensory and material, figure . . . is not exactly a metaphor. It is a kind of transparent figure, equivalent to a literal meaning (sens propre). It becomes a metaphor when philosophical discourse puts it into circulation. Simultaneously the first meaning and the first displacement are then forgotten. The metaphor is no longer noticed, and it is taken for the proper meaning. A double effacement. Philosophy would be this process of metaphorization which gets carried away in and of itself. Constitutionally, philosophical culture will always have been an obliterating one. (p. 211)

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Usure is Derrida’s name – or metaphor – for this particular configuration of the relation between metaphor and philosophy. Derrida admits that the word usure is not actually to be found anywhere in France’s dialogue – ‘the word itself is not pronounced’ (p. 210) – but he insists that if one reads carefully enough one can ‘decipher’ its ‘double import’ (p. 210). This ‘double import’ is the double meaning of usure: both ‘erasure by rubbing, exhaustion, crumbling away’, and ‘the supplementary product of a capital, the exchange which far from losing the original investment would fructify its initial wealth, would increase its return in the form of revenue, additional interest, linguistic surplus value’ (p. 210). Usure is both a deterioration through usage and an excess of interest. The argument of France’s text, as Derrida presents it, is that ‘the history of metaphysical language is said to be confused with the erasure of the efficacity of the sensory figure and the usure [in both senses of the word] of its effigy’ (p. 210). Derrida tells us that the rest of the dialogue in France’s text is concerned with the possibility of a reading of philosophy that would restore or reactivate ‘beneath the metaphor which simultaneously hides and is hidden, the “original figure” of the coin which has been worn away (usé), effaced, and polished in the circulation of the philosophical concept’ (p. 211). Derrida’s choice of usure as a metaphor for metaphor is effective. At the same time, it is a strange choice in relation to France’s text, since Derrida’s readings almost always play with the words that he finds in the texts upon which he is writing. For example, his discussion of the ‘supplement’ and Rousseau in Of Grammatology (1976) derives from the appearance of that word in Rousseau’s text; his discussion of the ‘hymen’ and Mallarmé in ‘The double session’ (1970) derives from Mallarmé’s use of that word in ‘Mimique’. But in ‘White mythology’, Derrida chooses a word that does not appear in the text – usure. In doing so, he overlooks the metaphor that does figure very prominently in France’s dialogue, that of the palimpsest: All these words, whether defaced by usage, or polished smooth, or even coined expressly in view of creating some intellectual concept, yet allow us to frame some idea to ourselves of what they originally represented. So chemists have reagents whereby they can make the effaced writing of a papyrus or a parchment visible again. It is by these means palimpsests are deciphered. If an analogous process were applied to the writings of the metaphysicians, if the primitive and concrete meaning that lurks yet present under the abstract and new interpretations were brought to light, we should come upon some very curious and perhaps instructive ideas. (France 1923, pp. 201–2)19

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Omitted from Derrida’s discussion, the palimpsest offers itself as another metaphor for metaphor. It is the space in which two otherwise unrelated terms are brought together and held apart, and in the face of which the reader must not only pay attention to both elements but must deduce or work out the often complex relations between them.20 Since the palimpsest is coupled with ‘twilight’ in Lawrence’s metaphor, ‘twilight’ might also offer itself as another of these metaphoric metaphors. ‘Palimpsest of twilight’ is therefore not just a metaphor that throws light on ‘palimpsest’, ‘of’ and ‘twilight’, it is also a special metaphor in that its terms – ‘palimpsest’, ‘twilight’ and ‘of’ – offer themselves as metaphors for metaphor, as figurations of the structure within which they are embodied. Like Derrida’s usure, the palimpsest – metaphor of the place of metaphor in philosophy – has a double import. It contains within its structure and its definition both the wearing away of ‘original’ meaning which France argues occurs when words enter philosophical discourse, and the productive creativity that results from that erasure. Literal palimpsests were created by process of erasure that enabled a subsequent productivity; the concept of the palimpsest – which is at play in literary, critical and theoretical discourse subsequent to De Quincey – is a philosophical concept that has emerged from an erasure of its ‘literal’ or ‘proper’ meaning. At the same time, the concept of the palimpsest, by its very meaning, constantly draws one’s attention to the partiality of that erasure and to the persistent presence within the concept of the palimpsest of its ‘original’ meaning, the palaeographic palimpsest.21 Moreover, as a metaphor for metaphor, the palimpsest embodies a reminder that metaphor itself is a metaphorical concept. It thus reinforces Derrida’s critique of the configuration of metaphor and philosophy offered in France’s text – that ‘metaphor remains, in all its essential characteristics, a classical philosopheme, a metaphysical concept’ (1982, p. 219). As such, it cannot be used to explain the whole of metaphysics since it is a part of the very field it might seek to explain.22 In his discussion of style and metaphor in Proust, Gérard Genette is troubled by Proust’s profound justification of the indispensable expedience of metaphor. He wonders, how, in fact, can we say that metaphor, that is to say, a displacement, a transfer of sensations from one object to another, can lead us to the essence of this object? How can we admit that the ‘profound truth’ of a thing, that particular, ‘distinct’ truth sought by Proust, can be revealed in a figure that brings out its properties only by transposing them, that is to say, by making them strange? . . . and how can a description based

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on the ‘relationship’ between two objects avoid destroying the essence of each? (1982b, p. 208) Heidegger’s refiguration of metaphor shows exactly how this might be the case and, as Genette suspects, such a process is indeed paradoxical – it leads to familiarity through a making strange.23 This paradoxical movement also defines the consequences of Heidegger’s thought for the concept of metaphor, since we are made familiar with the functioning of metaphor via an estrangement from its traditional definition. Heidegger does not merely refigure the metaphoric relation, then, but catachrestically disfigures it, making possible a new concept of palimpsestuous metaphoricity. Palimpsestuous metaphoricity is the catachresis of metaphor, the perversion of metaphor itself. Since the palimpsest is a metaphor of metaphor – since the structure of the palimpsest embodies the new structure of metaphoricity – palimpsestuousness is in fact another name for the catachrestic-metaphorical relationality represented in and by the palimpsest. As a catachrestic perversion of the ‘proper’ adjective from ‘palimpsest’ – ‘palimpsestic’ – the word ‘palimpsestuous’ bears within it the sign of that catachresis. ‘Palimpsestuous’ is the adjective derived from the catachresticmetaphorical concept of the palimpsest. Its use signals the necessity to think that which the concept of the palimpsest is describing in, with, and at the same time as, rethinking that concept itself. For, in any palimpsestuous coupling, one is no longer assured of the familiarity, properness, or proximity of the concept of the palimpsest, no longer certain that one knows, for example, what it, and therefore what ‘palimpsestuousness’, might be. But, more than that, one is also no longer assured of the familiarity of the familiar, the properness of the proper, or the proximity of proximity. To assume such knowledge is to close down the space and the event of relationality. Remaining open to this event involves renouncing the security of what we believe we recognize under the name of the palimpsest, and that with which it is coupled, in order that we might come to understand each of these terms better in, and out of, their relation with each other. In palimpsestuous metaphoricity, as Genette’s questions lead him to suspect, we thus achieve knowledge of two ‘things’ only through a queer figure that makes them both strange.24

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Poetry of the Present: D. H. Lawrence The palimpsestuous relation between ‘palimpsest’ and ‘twilight’ in the metaphor ‘palimpsest of twilight’ brings into focus the relationship between the two texts which function in Lawrence’s poem ‘Twilight’ – the text of ‘Evening of a Week-day’ and the text of ‘[Palimpsest of] Twilight’. These texts, and the semantic systems they represent, are denoted by the signifiers ‘palimpsest’ and ‘twilight’. The ‘twilight’ text is the text of Romantic poetry inscribed by ‘Evening of a Week-day’; ‘palimpsest’ denotes the text of modern self-reflexivity and sexuality that Lawrence writes over ‘Evening of a Week-day’ when revising it for publication. The poem ‘Twilight’ – the result of this rewriting – is inhabited by both of these previous texts and a palimpsestuous (or palimtextual, as Davidson would have it) reading of it – one that takes into account its material history – reveals how the palimpsestuous intimacy of these texts and the kind of poetry they represent is in fact the subject matter of the poem. In the first line of ‘Evening of a Week-day’, the conventional representation of dusk as the sun setting or sinking is rendered unfamiliar – rather than light disappearing down below the horizon, in this twilight ‘the darkness come up from the earth’. The text of ‘Twilight’ retains this inversion, but Lawrence revises the line to present a more powerful and personified ‘Darkness’. He also substitutes ‘up from’ with ‘out of’. Whereas ‘up from’ allows the earth from which the darkness rises to remain an unpenetrated surface, ‘out of’ rips open the earth from which the darkness then ‘comes’. This line is undoubtedly more carnal and violent in ‘Twilight’ than in ‘Evening’, with the switch to ‘out of’ emphasizing the sexual connotation of the verb ‘to come’. This textual sexualization is further emphasized at the beginning of the second line in the phrase ‘And swallows’, for, in both texts, following the sense unit not the line, ‘swallows’ is inevitably initially read as a verb. The reader understands ‘swallows’ to refer to the continuing action of the darkness and, in ‘Twilight’, reads it as a companion verb to ‘to come’ in sexual discourse. With ‘swallows’ functioning as a verb, ‘dip’ becomes it subject, but the referential incongruity of this conjunction, reinforced by the sense of the rest of the line (the same in both texts) – ‘swallows dip into the pallor of the west’ – forces a retroactive reading: the reader returns to the beginning of the second line and rereads ‘swallows’ as the noun and ‘dip’ as the verb. This forced rereading divorces the first line from the rest of the stanza, highlighting it, and, in ‘Twilight’, its sexual play. At the same time, the word ‘swallows’ is emphasized by its double grammatical function, the significance of which I will come to in a moment.

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The third line of the first stanza is the same in both texts – the addition of the apostrophe in ‘children’s’ is the only amendment – but the final line of the first stanza exhibits the first major difference between the two texts of the poem. In ‘Evening of a Week-day’, the line reads ‘But on me the forge of tomorrow is heavily pressed’. ‘Me’ introduces the poetic self into the poem and the opening ‘but’ juxtaposes that self to the environment which has just been described. Whereas the earth, swallows and children are all engaged in the natural activities of the end of the day, the poet’s concern is already with the weight of tomorrow’s work. This line explains the specificity of the poem’s title – ‘Evening of a Week-day’ – and establishes the poem’s theme as the poet’s state of mind in contrast to his environment. The pattern introduced in this stanza, that of environmental description followed by the poet’s contrasting feelings, is repeated in the subsequent two stanzas. In each, the shift from the environment to the poet is marked by the ‘but’ which begins the penultimate line. In contrast, the last line of the first stanza of ‘Twilight’ reads ‘Wanes the old palimpsest’. Recalling the palimpsested title ‘Palimpsest of Twilight’, the ‘palimpsest’ of this line, like the initial reading of ‘swallows’ as a verb, is referentially anomalous within the descriptive context of the twilight system. Within that system, the meaning of ‘wanes the old palimpsest’ is difficult to determine. It is possible that the palimpsest represents the sun, or day, or even twilight itself, which is gradually diminishing as night approaches, but the use of the verb ‘wane’ complicates such an interpretation since ‘wane’ most commonly describes the moon and the gradual decrease of its illuminated area. ‘Palimpsest’ thus functions here as one of Michael Riffaterre’s ‘ungrammaticalities’ (1978, p. 2) which disrupt the descriptive or referential reading of a poem and draw the reader’s attention to its underlying significance, that is, what it really means.25 The line’s encrypted meaning is revealed if it is read alongside the poem’s former title, ‘Palimpsest of Twilight’, for both the ‘palimpsest’ of the title and the ‘palimpsest’ of the final line of stanza one are self-referential – they refer to poetry. Reading ‘Evening of a Week-day’ in ‘Twilight’ reveals that what has ‘waned’ between these two texts is the Romantic poetry of Lawrence’s precursors, represented by the explicit subject of ‘Evening of a Week-day’ and remaining still visible in the lines from that text that persist in the text of ‘Twilight’. ‘Evening of a Week-day’ resembles such poetry in its concern with the relationship between man and nature; in ‘Twilight’, modern selfreflections about the history and future of poetry write over this Romantic concern. ‘Twilight’ also incorporates a tentative gesturing towards the more modern sexuality that characterizes Lawrence’s mature work.26 The

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‘palimpsest’ of the final line thus triggers the reader’s awareness of the second semantic system functioning in the poem, that denoted by ‘palimpsest’, which is entangled with the Romantic semantic system denoted by ‘twilight’. The palimpsest system is visible in the lines that replace those that were the key textual markers of the Romantic twilight system in ‘Evening of a Week-day’ – such as ‘Wanes the old palimpsest’ – but it is also visible in the network of meanings surrounding other ungrammatical signifiers in the poem such as, for example, ‘swallows’. The swallow is not a bird conventionally associated with twilight, but, in Lawrence’s poetics, it is associated with poetry and poets, as are birds in general. Therefore, although a referential anomaly in the twilight descriptive system of the poem, the ‘swallows’ of the second line make sense within the palimpsest system of the poem. In ‘Poetry of the present’, Lawrence’s introduction to the American edition of New Poems (1920), he compares the singing of birds with poetry. He uses birds to illustrate his understanding of poetry as traditionally ‘either the voice of the far future, exquisite and ethereal’ (1993b, p. 181), or ‘the voice of the past, rich, magnificent’ (p. 181): It seems when we hear a skylark singing as if sound were running forward into the future, running so fast and utterly without consideration, straight on into futurity. And when we hear a nightingale, we hear the pause and the rich, piercing rhythm of recollection, the perfected past. The lark may sound sad, but with the lovely lapsing sadness that is almost a swoon of hope. The nightingale’s triumph is a paen, but a death-paen. So it is with poetry. (p. 181) Lawrence’s reference to the skylark and the nightingale are allusions to Keats and Shelley and their respective odes to these birds. Lawrence subsequently names these two poets as examples of the poets ‘of the beginning’ (p. 181) and ‘of the end’ (p. 181) whom he compares directly to birds. Like Homer for the Greeks, our birds sing on the horizons. They sing out of the blue, beyond us, or out of the quenched night. They sing at dawn and sunset. Only the poor, shrill, tame canaries whistle while we talk. The wild birds begin before we are awake, or as we drop into dimness out of waking. Our poets sit by the gateways, some by the east, some by the west. As we arrive and as we go out our hearts surge with response. But whilst we are in the midst of life, we do not hear them. (1993b, p. 181)

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As swallows are Britain’s most famous migratory birds (although they fly due south, not west), the flight of the swallows into the deathly pallor of the west in ‘Twilight’ represents the departure of Romantic poetry, such as that of Shelley or Keats, while the early lines of the poem introduce in its place the sexuality of ‘the poetry of that which is at hand: the immediate present’ (Lawrence 1993b, p. 182), represented most effectively for Lawrence in the poetry of Walt Whitman. A further figurative connection between birds and poetry, in this instance swallows in particular, can be found in a letter Lawrence wrote to Harriet Monroe during World War I, in September 1915. ‘How is poetry going in America?’, he opens. ‘There is none in England: the muse has gone: like the swallows in winter’ (Lawrence 1981, p. 393). The night-time ‘Twilight’ heralds is both literal night-time, in the twilight text, and the darkness of war, in the palimpsest text. In the latter, the dipping of the swallows and the waning of the palimpsest both figure the demise of poetry that Lawrence believed to be happening during the war years. At the same time, the poem promises a new, colourful and sensuous life that only, in fact, appears with darkness. The ‘woodlime’ of the first line of stanza two of ‘Evening of a Week-day’ is replaced in ‘Twilight’ by ‘nightstock’, a small herb whose fragrant lilac flowers only open at night. The night also brings the activity of a multitude of different creatures not active by day, represented by the flittering moth whose body is coloured by the light of the moon. In his letter to Monroe, Lawrence may mourn the flight of the swallow and the loss of the muse during the darkness of the war years but he is also determined, despite such loss and death, to ‘speak for life and growth, amid all this mass of destruction and disintegration’ (p. 394). This emerging new life, and new poetry, is represented in and by Lawrence’s writing – including its tentative emergence in this poem – and in the work of the young poets he was keenly discovering and fostering during the war years. The palimpsest text of ‘Twilight’ is manifest in the connotations of such ungrammatical signifiers as ‘swallows’, then, as well as in the reverberations of phonetic words within words.27 For example, ‘wanes’ of ‘wanes the old palimpsest’ contains within it ‘wains’. A wain is a large open vehicle for carrying heavy loads, especially of agricultural produce, drawn by horses or oxen. Following closely after reference to ‘hay’, this homonym calls to mind John Constable’s famous painting The Hay Wain. As a realist painter who was a major influence on Romantic painters and the Impressionists, Constable might also stand for the Romantic art represented by the twilight system. But ‘wain’ is also the name for the group of seven bright stars in the constellation called the Great Bear, with the Lesser Wain

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naming the similarly shaped group of seven stars in the Little Bear. This further meaning of ‘wain’ anticipates the glimmering of the ‘single star in the veil of light’ in the final stanza of ‘Twilight’. Former poetry and art may be ‘waning’ but beneath it, aurally inhabiting the very word heralding its decline, is the glimmer of hope this lone star represents – the hope of a new poetry. The palimpsestuous intimacy of the Romantic descriptive twilight text and the palimpsest text of modern self-reflexivity and sexuality is made visible in the further changes that Lawrence made from ‘Evening of a Week-day’ to ‘Twilight’. As in stanza one, the final two lines of stanza two of ‘Evening of a Week-day’ juxtapose the poet’s own human concerns to the description of the natural environment which precedes them: ‘But the wings of my soul are utterly spent / Brushed bare by a harsh day of the bloom which lent power to fly.’ The productivity of nature, even at nighttime, is contrasted with the exhaustion of industrialized people as darkness approaches. The wings of the poet’s soul, in comparison to those of the flittering moth, are ‘utterly spent’ – ‘spent’ alluding to the capitalist economy in which the poet ‘spends’ himself each day in order to make money to spend. ‘Bloom’ is another reference back to the natural environment, as is ‘fly’, but these natural abilities have been worn away – and were in fact only on loan to the poet, who has lost them during the harshness of daily commerce. In ‘Twilight’, these lines are replaced with ‘All that the worldly day has meant/Wastes like a lie’. As in the first stanza, the theme of the poet and his feelings in contrast to nature is replaced with the action of a more impersonal phenomenon. In the first stanza the palimpsest is ‘waning’; in this stanza, the ‘worldly day’ is ‘wasting’. ‘Worldly’ retains the contrast between the natural ‘world’ and the weariness of the more shallow and scheming ‘worldliness’ of the human, but evokes this more economically than ‘Evening of a Week-day’. As both subject and object of this line, ‘the worldly day’ both performs the wasting, and is, at the same time, the object of its own destruction. The poetry of ‘the worldly day’ – also the ‘wordy day’ – ‘wastes like a lie’: it lays waste, devastates and ruins, but also, as a synonym of ‘wane’, it loses its own substance by a gradual process of decay, it goes to waste. At the end of the day, both literal and metaphorical, the natural world continues in its inevitable cycle, but the poetry of that day, the product of the human, wastes away – it has no power, no import, no veracity, no truth. Repeating the pattern of changes made to the first two stanzas, the personal close to ‘Evening of a Week-day’ – ‘But I am too bruised by the hand of Day / To revive or to dream at the final kiss of Night’ – is overwritten in ‘Twilight’ by the impersonal ‘litter of day / Is gone from sight’.

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In ‘Evening’, the personified Day and Night take on the role of the poet’s lovers in a foretaste of the sexuality of Lawrence’s later work: day is a violent lover whose ‘hand’ bruises the poet; night is a tender one whose kisses unfortunately have little effect. In ‘Twilight’, the lovers disappear and are replaced by ‘litter’. The ‘litter of day’ may be ‘gone from sight’, but that does not mean that it has been completely erased. Rather, it implies that it will inevitably return with the natural and unending cyclical passage from day to night, and night to day. Inhabited by the Latin littera, litter is – like the palimpsest and the swallows – literature. It is the literature of the passing day which is now rubbish, like the ‘waste’ of the previous stanza. It is also the young, the new born and the parents of future generations. ‘Litter’, then, contains this poem’s farewell to the poetry of the past as well as, at the same time, denoting ‘Twilight’s acknowledgement of that poetry’s essential and inevitable role in the genesis of any new poetry emerging from the darkness. The relationship to past poetry that ‘Twilight’ delineates resembles that of modernism in general. For despite Ezra Pound’s brave declarations of modernism’s mantra to ‘make it new’, such ‘new’ poetry never represents a complete break with the past, as both T. S. Eliot and Lawrence profoundly knew. Like Eliot’s historical sense, which ‘involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’ (Eliot 1975, p. 38), the poetry that Lawrence eulogizes in the introduction to New Poems is a poetry of ‘the immediate present’ (1993b, p. 182). This poetry only lives off and through the future and the past: ‘it inhales the future, it exhales the past, it is the quick of both, and yet it is neither’ (p. 182). The palimpsest embodies such poetry which is not ‘complete and consummate’ (p. 182) like the poetry of the beginning and the end; it is not characterized by ‘finality’ and ‘perfection’ (p. 182). Rather, like the palimpsest which is haunted by previous texts and remains open to reinscription, ‘in the [poetry of the] immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished’ (p. 182): Give me nothing fixed, set, static. Don’t give me the infinite or the eternal: nothing of infinity, nothing of eternity. Give me the still, white seething, the incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of all change and haste and opposition: the moment, the immediate present, the Now. (pp. 182–3) The poetry that ‘Twilight’ heralds – even if it does not yet brilliantly achieve it – is the poetry of the immediate present, of the now. And yet, ‘the past is not past’ (Lawrence 1993a, p. 850). As the palimpsested title of

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‘[Palimpsest of] Twilight’ suggests, Lawrence’s poetry of the present is equivalent to a poetry of the palimpsestuous twilight in which the past and the future always infect and inhabit each other in any ‘present’ moment.

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Risky Reading

Critical Text (1): On classical detective fiction It was a wild, tempestuous night, towards the close of November. Holmes and I sat together in silence all the evening, he engaged with a powerful lens deciphering the remains of the original inscription upon a palimpsest, I deep in a recent treatise upon surgery. Outside the wind howled down Baker Street, while the rain beat fiercely against the windows. (Doyle 2001, p. 607) Thus the scene is set for ‘The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez’ (1904), a case that Dr Watson – Holmes’s faithful companion and narrator of the Holmes tales – selects from ‘the three massive manuscript volumes which contain [their] work for the year 1894’ as it ‘unites so many singular points of interest’ (p. 607). Watson declares that it is of interest both in itself, and ‘at the same time most conducive to a display of those peculiar powers for which my friend was famous’ (p. 607). The details of the case are brought to Holmes and Watson late on an inclement winter night by a young and promising detective called Stanley Hopkins. He has come to Holmes straight from the scene of a crime, the facts of which he proceeds to narrate to Holmes in the hope that the great detective can provide an accurate interpretation of them: ‘“I’ve got my facts pretty clear,” said Stanley Hopkins. “All I want now is to know what they all mean. The story, so far as I can make it out, is like this”’ (p. 608). Hopkins tells Holmes the story of Yoxley Old Place in Kent, a house inhabited by an elderly professor, his housekeeper, maid and Willoughby Smith – a secretary who assists the professor with his ‘learned book’ (p. 609). Smith has been murdered, with the only clues his incongruous dying words addressed to the maid who discovers him – ‘“The professor – it was she”’ (p. 610) – and a golden pince-nez found at the scene of the crime. The men journey to the house the following day and, during the course of the visit Holmes, naturally, solves the case. Holmes’ enthusiasm for philology and his study of ancient manuscripts 63

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is an established character trait, but his examination of a palimpsest at the beginning of ‘The Golden Pince-Nez’ has provoked a certain amount of critical speculation, since it seems to have no bearing on the case that is subsequently brought to him.1 Drawing attention to the absurdity of the story recounted by Watson, in ‘Eros and death: The true meaning of “The Golden Pince-Nez” (1997), Albert Silverstein argues that ‘there is another text which lies hidden by this implausible and trivial narrative; a subtext which would be too disturbing for the general Victorian audience’s sensibilities’ (1997, p. 38). Employing the ‘literary methods of detection’ (p. 38) practised by Holmes himself, Silverstein attempts ‘to unearth this ur-text with the clues that Watson has sprinkled so liberally among the lines of the surface narrative’ (p. 38). Identifying two major clues to the subtext of the tale ‘in the occupations that engage the hero and the villain at the beginning of the story’ and which ‘direct our attention to Egypt: more specifically to the doctrines of the Coptic Church’ (p. 38), Silverstein weaves together complex connections and clues, in order to reveal the ur-text of the palimpsest that is ‘The Golden Pince-Nez’, and to prove that ‘Holmes’ line of historical investigation was concerned with the practices of an ultra-ascetic group of neo-Monophysites whose obsession with sexual pessimism matched that of their Coptic progenitors’ (p. 42). Silverstein’s essay resembles the classical detective whodunit in concluding with a reconstruction of ‘the true nature of the tragic events that took place at Yoxley Old Place’ that reveals ‘the true narrative’ of the tale to be ‘a cautionary moral parable concerning overwhelming passion, suffering, and loss’ (p. 38). This is the ‘subtext’ that lies beneath the surface narrative of ‘The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez’ and is revealed by the clues to it that show in and through that narrative. Curiously immersed in the fictional world of the Holmes canon, Silverstein’s discussion does not recognize the self-reflexivity of Holmes’ examination of the palimpsest at the opening of the tale, which establishes a metaphorical connection between palimpsest reading and detective reading and, by extension, between the plot of detective narratives and the structure of palimpsests. This metaphorical relationship is symbolized by the ‘powerful lens’ (Doyle 2001, p. 607) Holmes regularly uses to examine clues in his cases which he here employs to help him decipher the palimpsest.2 Holmes turns his attention immediately from that activity to the case that Hopkins brings to him, establishing a further connection between these two demands on his powers. In fact, later in the story, Holmes directly compares the challenge of detective reading to the difficulty of deciphering a palimpsest. On learning that Hopkins has deduced little from evidence of someone’s passage on the grass next to the path to

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Yoxley Old Place, Holmes gives an ‘ejaculation of impatience’: ‘“It has been pouring rain and blowing a hurricane ever since,” said he. “It will be harder to read now than that palimpsest”’ (p. 611). The palimpsest references in ‘The Golden Pince-Nez’ – part of the tale’s self-reflexivity about the practice of reading that its protagonist employs – suggest that the classical detective plot is structured as a layered palimpsest, and that the detective reading exhibited in that plot is equivalent in its aims and methodology to the reading practice of palimpsest editors from the nineteenth century to the present day.3 Like a palimpsest, the classical detective whodunit contains two texts: the story of the ‘true’ version of events which the perpetrator has erased, or attempted to erase; and the story of the ostensible version of events superimposed upon it, in this instance, the story Hopkins brings to Holmes. The presence of the underlying text is announced by various clues visible in the overlying one, which, consequently, both conceals and reveals the story of the crime. The task of the detective as palimpsest reader is to recognize these clues and to uncover and reconstruct the underlying story. Confronted with the palimpsestic structure of the story of the crime, the detective is involved in a process of palimpsest reading that resembles the practice of palimpsest editors in that its sole aim is the reconstruction of the underlying script – of value is that which is hidden or concealed, rather than that which is visible. Similarly, when Holmes is studying the palimpsest, Watson reports that he is engaged in deciphering the underlying script – there is no mention made of the overlying one. Since the mid-nineteenth century, for palimpsest editors, to ‘read’ a palimpsest has meant to resurrect or uncover the underlying text; the overlying one is irrelevant. As Charles William Russell notes, ‘in a palimpsest MS. the chief, and perhaps the sole object of interest is the first or the more or less completely obliterated writing . . . the second writing has no direct interest’ (1867, p. 110). To the intrinsic value of the overlying script, ‘the palimpsest editor steadfastly closes his eyes; and he concentrates all his energy upon the effort to recover, as far as possible in their integrity, those relics of the ancient world of letters which lie beneath’ (Russell 1867, pp. 110–11).4 Like the fictional detective, the reader of detective stories is also involved in a type of detective reading which likewise responds to a textual palimpsest but, for the reader, this is not the palimpsestic structure of the story of the crime, but the ‘duality’ of the whodunit which, as Tzvetan Todorov argues in ‘The typology of detective fiction’ (1966), contains ‘two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’ (1977, p. 44). The former tells ‘“what really happened”’, while the latter ‘explains

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“how the reader (or the narrator) has come to know about it”’ (p. 45). Like the texts of the palimpsest, ‘in their purest forms, these two stories have no point in common’ (p. 44); like the underlying text of a palimpsest, the story of the crime ‘is in fact the story of an absence: its most accurate characteristic is that it cannot be immediately present in the book’ (p. 46); like the overlying text of a palimpsest, the second story ‘has no importance in itself’ but ‘serves only as a mediator between the reader and the story of the crime’ (p. 46). Todorov argues that these definitions concern not only the two stories in detective fiction, but also two aspects of every literary work which the Russian Formalists isolated forty years ago. They distinguished, in fact, the fable (story) from the subject (plot) of a narrative: the story is what has happened in life, the plot is the way the author presents it to us. The first notion corresponds to the reality evoked, to events similar to those which take place in our lives; the second to the book itself, to the narrative, to the literary devices the author employs. (p. 45) The whodunit is unique in that the sole aim of the plot is the revelation of the story; once this revelation is complete, there is no further hidden meaning to be discovered in the text. It is for this reason that Silverstein’s reading of ‘The Golden Pince-Nez’ appears so utterly fabulous, for it is dependent on the false belief that there is a hidden meaning in the tale, ‘an ur-text’ that can be discovered beneath the story of the crime revealed at the end of the narrative. The irony of the whodunit is that the detective reading methods the reader learns from it – in order to compete with the detective in uncovering the underlying story of the crime – cannot be used to further interpret the narrative as a whole. Although he employs ‘literary methods of detection much like the Master’s own’ (p. 38), Silverstein’s reading is not detective palimpsest reading but a process of inventive palimpsesting that imposes another textual layer on ‘The Golden PinceNez’, a layer not found in the text. With this interpretative excess, Silverstein unsuccessfully attempts to resist the ‘closed’ structure of the whodunit in which the writer ‘reasserts without ambiguity what has to be taken as true in his fictional world’ (Eco 1981, p. 34).5 Palimpsest reading and detective reading both require a skilled expert reader who is capable not only of seeing the clues inhabiting the overlying text, but also of recognizing the significance of these clues as clues. Holmes invariably detects the significance of events that remain meaningless to his companion Watson: ‘I could not myself see the bearing of this incident, but I clearly perceived that Holmes was weaving it into the

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general scheme which he had formed in his brain’ (Doyle 2001, p. 617). Similarly, in the introduction to Palestinian Syriac Texts From Palimpsest Fragments in the Taylor-Schechter Collection (1900), Agnes Smith Lewis describes how the underscript of Fragments I and II of this collection might have remained undetected if it were not for the presence of a more skilled eye than her own: The underscript of these [Fragments I. and II.] was mistaken by me for a faint brown streak of dirt; and it was thus left to Dr Schechter, who knew the appearance of the Hebrew script in the fragments of his own collection, to recognize that this streak was really an ancient text. (p. ix) In both detective and palimpsest reading, once these clues have been detected, the reconstruction of the underlying text depends upon a certain amount of ‘conjecture’ or ‘invention’. This is evident in Holmes’ method of reasoning, which is not, as is commonly supposed, deductive. Rather, as Simon Blackburn notes in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (1994) under the entry for ‘deduction’, ‘Sherlock Holmes’s methods were not typically deductive, but rather exercises of abduction’ (p. 96). Whereas deduction is reasoning in which a conclusion is drawn from a set of premises and in which the conclusion necessarily follows from those premises, according to Charles Sanders Peirce, abduction (also called ‘retroduction’ or ‘hypothetic inference’) is reasoning ‘which depends on our hope, sooner or later, to guess at the conditions under which a given kind of phenomenon will present itself’ (1958, p. 248). Whereas in deduction the conclusion should be logically valid, in abduction evidence is used to reach a wider conclusion by a method of inference to the best possible explanation. While Peirce describes it as a creative process but insists that its results are subject to rational evaluation, Thomas A. Sebeok explains that abductive reasoning’s creativity is in fact the key to its success: ‘the uberty, that is, the fruitfulness’ of abductive reasoning ‘increases, while its security, or approach to certainty, minifies’ (1983, p. 1). In other words, ‘the relationship of security to uberty is an inverse one, which means, plainly, that as the certainty of any guess plummets, its heuristic merit soars correspondingly’ (p. 2).6 An equally risky interpretative strategy is necessary in the reconstruction of the underlying texts of palimpsest manuscripts. Many editions of texts recovered from palimpsest manuscripts depend for their existence on the skill of the editor which has consisted, in part, in his or her ability to guess various obscured portions of the hidden script in order to reconstruct the whole.7 Neither detective nor palimpsest reading, then, are methods of

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deduction. Rather, both are practices of ‘invention’ – a word which means both ‘to come upon’, ‘discover’, ‘find out’, and ‘to devise’, ‘contrive’, ‘feign’ or ‘make-up’. Palimpsest detective reading is an act of invention that comprises a process of discovery – uncovering and revealing a text that is there prior to the act of invention – and an act of creation or original contrivance – the ingenious production of a new text that, consequently, runs the risk of being false or fictitious. The proof of successful detective reading is the confirmation by the author of the crime that the interpretation which the detective-as-reader has reached is not false or fictitious, but does in fact correspond to the true story of the crime. As Peter Hühn argues, although the detective novel puts a premium on innovative interpretations, in the final analysis innovation is only valued as the best strategy for discovering the truth. For ultimately it is always the adequacy of the reading, and not its creative quality, that is of paramount importance. That this should be so follows from the premise that there is one and only one true meaning . . . (1987, pp. 455–6) Although the readerly pleasure of the classical whodunit undoubtedly lies in the ingenuity of the detective reading, in the final account such pleasure would certainly be frustrated if that reading did not uncover the ‘true’ version of events as verified by the author of the crime. Inventive palimpsest detective reading therefore requires a balance of both its elements – discovery and contrivance – if it is to satisfy heuristically as well as entertain.

Theoretical Text (1): On structuralism Ferdinand de Saussure is best known as the founder of modern linguistics; that he also conducted extensive research into ‘the hidden motivic themewords embedded in poetic texts’ (Starobinski 1979, jacket blurb) is less well known. This research was brought to light in Jean Starobinski’s Les mots sous les mots (1971) – subsequently published in English as Words Upon Words (1979) – which, as the jacket blurb explains, presents excerpts ‘from more than one hundred of Saussure’s unpublished notebooks preserved in the Public and University Library of Geneva’, together with a ‘running dialogue’ from Starobinski which ‘opens to view a most illuminating text beneath the text of Saussure’. As this summary suggests, Words Upon Words is a multi-layered story of detection and uncovering: Starobinski brings to light Saussure’s exercises from the notebooks in which they lay hidden,

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reconstructing passages ‘often of an obviously provisional nature, very much erased and crossed out’ (Starobinski 1979, p. viii); Starobinski’s commentary on these exercises brings to light the text or hidden meaning lying beneath Saussure’s enterprise; and Saussure’s research itself aims to unveil the words hidden beneath the lines in a range of poetic texts including those of Homer, Vedic incantations, Virgilian epic and classical and neoclassical Latin poetry. Words Upon Words is thus a detective story about a detective story, in which Saussure’s palimpsest detective reading is paralleled by that of his reader, Starobinski. Saussure’s anagrammatic research took place between 1906 and 1909; it is therefore contemporaneous with the high period of classical detective fiction in the early twentieth century.8 Like the classical detective, Saussure works from a conception of the text as layered palimpsest, understanding the poem as a structure that, as Starobinski explains, ‘would take as its foundation a succession of theme-words and would, literally, construct its discourse on top of them by repeating their phonic substance’ (p. xi). Starobinski describes how Saussure’s research into Saturnian verse leads him to conclude that, the poet, in composing a line, uses the material furnished by the theme-word; and that the text is necessarily developed through an isolated vocable connected with either the addressee or the subject of the passage and acting as access route and reserve of privileged phonemes which support the completed poetic discourse. (p. 11)9 As Saussure explains, ‘if the theme, or one if its words, is Hercolei’, the poet ‘has available to him the fragments -lei- or -co-, or, with another division of the words, the fragments -ol- or -er-, and with still another rc or cl, etc.’ (Saussure cited in Starobinski 1979, p. 12). The poet ‘must then compose his piece so that the largest possible number of these fragments is incorporated into his lines, for example, afleicta, to recall Herco-lei, etc.’ (p. 12). In addition to this general use of the phonetic material of the theme-word, ‘it is essential also that, particularly in a line – or in part of a line – the vocalic sequence found in a theme like Hercolei or Cornelius should reappear, either in the same order, or with variations’ (p. 12).10 Although Saussure settles upon ‘theme’ to designate the underlying textual material, Starobinski informs the reader that ‘among the crossed-out words’ of Saussure’s notes, the antecedent to ‘theme’ is ‘text’, which is then crossed out and replaced by ‘theme’ (p. 11). Starobinski concludes that Saussure ‘had evidently been thinking of a text within the text, of a pre-text, in the literal sense of that word’ (p. 11). Throughout his notes, Saussure alternately employs

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the words ‘anagram’, ‘paragram’ ‘logogram’ and, most precisely, ‘hypogram’ (literally, ‘sub-text’) to denote this underlying text.11 As the French title suggests, Saussure’s exercises in decoding exhibit a detective palimpsest reading process that aims, as Starobinski explains, ‘to find, buried in the words deployed on the page by a text in verse or even in prose, the hypograms which constituted the point of departure of literary composition’ (p. xi).12 The hypogram can be ‘divined’ (p. 30) only by a reading that, as in detective and palimpsest reading, identifies the clues in the surface text that provide the key to the underlying one; in this instance, ‘reading which is alert to possible links between widely spaced phonemes’ (p. 30). Saussure’s approach differs from detective palimpsest reading in that he does not locate the hidden meaning of the overlying discourse in the underlying text. As Starobinski outlines, it is tempting ‘to see in the functional scheme of the hypogram the symbol of an emanatist conception of poetic production’ which views the developed poetic text as already ‘concealed in the concentrated unity of the theme-word which precedes it’ (p. 43). However, for Saussure, the theme-word is an instrument of poetic composition, not a vital germ of the poetic discourse. In detecting the hypogram, Saussure is seeking to expose a method of literary composition, not – in contrast to the palimpsest or detective reader – seeking to unearth the hidden or secret text which provides the key to the meaning of the overlying one: ‘Ferdinand de Saussure did not lose himself in a search for hidden meanings. His guiding thought was not that the poems say more than they openly admit but that they make this additional statement through a key word, a theme-name’ (p. 107). Despite the difference between the aims of Saussure’s reading and palimpsest detective reading, Saussure takes the same risks as such readers. For, like palimpsest detective reading, Saussure’s method depends upon a process of abductive reasoning; reasoning which, as we have seen, ‘depends on our hope, sooner or later, to guess at the conditions under which a given kind of phenomenon will present itself’ (Peirce 1958, p. 248). The inherent problem with such reading is that a certain phenomenon – in Saussure’s case, a certain poetic discourse – could present itself as a result of an incalculable number of possible conditions – in Saussure’s case, possible theme-words. As Starobinski explains, one wishes – by selective reading of the components of the phenomenon under observation – to reduce a complex structure to a simpler origin, and create a presumed antecedent which allows one to believe one has grasped the concrete substratum and adequate reason for the phenomenon, which is now reduced to the rank of an effect or, more precisely, of derived form. The presumed antecedent is entirely

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composed of elements deducted [read, here, abduced] from the phenomenon to be interpreted (in this instance, the phonic structure of the line). . . . [But] one can instantly appreciate that the developed poem (the whole) is simultaneously the carrier of the same sub-ensemble and the vector of an entirely different direction. (pp. 43–4) Saussure is as susceptible as any abductive reasoner to ‘the risks of illusion – risks of which’, Starobinski confirms, ‘Saussure was fully aware’ (p. 44). In fact, in Words Upon Words, the text that Starobinski reveals beneath Saussure’s research is precisely the subtext of Saussure’s anxiety about the validity of his detective palimpsest reading. Although Saussure’s decoding exercises may point undoubtedly to the existence of a conscious, hypogrammatic compositional practice in the writing of Homeric and Latin poetry and prose, Starobinski repeatedly draws out the subtext of Saussure’s doubts about the strength of his evidence. For Saussure is confronted with a paradox: on the one hand, he writes, a small quantity of hypograms suggests that ‘we are indulging ourselves in illusion, or that we wish at any cost to extract from the text something it is only barely able to provide’ (p. 99); but, on the other, a large amount of detected hypograms casts the doubt that ‘in any circumstance one can have the desired hypogram precisely as one wishes, that hypograms are commonplace, and inevitable through the workings of chance’ (p. 99). Saussure may be able to detect hypograms everywhere but it is precisely the ‘abundance of these facts – and not, in the end, anything else – which sheds, for the moment, an extreme vagueness over all of them’ (p. 98): When a first anagram appears, it seems like a flash of light. But when one sees that one can add to this a second, third, and even fourth anagram, far from feeling relieved of doubt, one begins to wonder if one might not find definitive proof of all possible words in any text, and to wonder to what extent those which appear without requiring a search are actually surrounded by characteristic guarantees, a query which implies a larger quantity of coincidence than is the case with the first word to appear, or with a word to which we have paid no attention. (Saussure cited in Starobinski 1979, p. 100) Saussure is not convinced that the abundance of textual evidence alone provides sufficient proof that the hypograms he detects are the result of a conscious compositional rule, rather than the effect of chance. He thus remains perplexed ‘about the most important point: that is, how one

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should judge the reality or phantasmagoria of the whole question’ (p. 106). Starobinski’s research reveals that, for Saussure, such judgement can only come in the end from another person; in order to be validated, his reading, like that of any great detective, must be verified by the author of the text that is being read.13 Despite extensive research, Saussure was unable to secure such verification from classical authors – he found no references to hypogrammatic compositional practice in classical literature. In the end, on 19 March 1909, he wrote to one of the few modern practioners of Latin versification – Giovanni Pascoli, a colleague at the University of Bologna – seeking authorial confirmation of his theory. Pascoli’s reply has never been discovered, but it was enough to prompt Saussure to write again at greater length on 6 April 1909, but Starobinski reports that ‘to judge by the terms of this letter, he seems to have received very little encouragement’ (p. 119). According to Léopold Gautier, a student working with Saussure on his research at that time, Pascoli did not reply to Saussure’s second letter, ‘the Italian’s silence was taken as a sign of repudiation, and the inquiry into anagrams was discontinued’ (p. 120). Saussure could not procure authorial confirmation of his readings, nor was he content to trust the evidence of the text, which he recognized could all too easily actually be the invention of the reader. As a result, Saussure abandoned his detective palimpsest reading. Like any good detective story, the tale of Saussure’s hypogrammatic research, and the ever-present need to secure his reading, is paradigmatic of the predicament of any reader of palimpsest texts; another such reader is Michael Riffaterre. In Semiotics of Poetry (1978), Riffaterre, like Saussure, conceives of the text as a layered palimpsest since it functions according to indirection: ‘to put it simply, a poem says one thing and means another’ (p. 1). The text consists of a layer of representation or mimesis – be it a narrative or a description – which is ‘distorted by a deviant grammar or lexicon (for instance, contradictory details)’ (p. 2) that Riffaterre calls ‘ungrammaticality’ (p. 2). These ungrammaticalities serve as clues that alert the reader to the significance of the poem, that is, ‘what the poem is really about’ (p. 167, n. 3). As Riffaterre explains in Text Production (1983), they ‘force us to read’ the text ‘as if a palimpsest or watermark’ (p. 46).14 In Semiotics of Poetry, Riffaterre elaborates two levels or stages of reading. The first – which Riffaterre calls heuristic reading – proceeds linearly from the beginning to the end of the text. It is a referential reading which assumes that words relate to things. ‘It is during this reading that meaning is comprehended’ (p. 5) – that is, ‘the information conveyed by the text at the mimetic level’ (pp. 2–3). During this reading, the reader perceives those

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ungrammaticalities in the text – ‘gaps and compressions in the text – such as incomplete descriptions, or allusions, or quotations’ (p. 5) – which trouble its mimesis. As a result, the reader performs a second stage of reading, called retroactive or hermeneutic reading. This reading also works from the beginning to the end of the text, but at the same time it carries out a process of ‘reviewing, revising, comparing backwards’ (pp. 5–6). At this stage, the reader ‘is in effect performing a structural decoding’ (p. 6) that ‘depends upon the reader’s gradual discovery of new coding rules, that is, upon working his way back to the structures that generate the text’ (p. 168, n. 13). ‘The reader’, Riffaterre adds in parenthesis, ‘is performing an abduction, in Peirce’s sense’ (p. 168, n. 13). Through his or her abductive reading, the reader comes to realize that the ungrammaticalities he or she has first been alerted to, are in fact ‘variants of the same structural matrix’ (p. 6). That is, the reader comes to perceive that ‘the text is in effect a variation or modulation of one structure – thematic, symbolic, or whatever – and this sustained relation to one structure constitutes the significance’ (p. 6). Thus, for example, even a poem as generically descriptive as Théophile Gautier’s ‘In Deserto’ (1845) should not be read in terms of the accuracy of its representation of the sierras across which its author had travelled. Rather, the poem derives from ‘an exclusively verbal given, the cliché a heart of stone’ (p. 9) and from the intertextual phrase alluded to by its title, vox clamens in deserto. These constitute the latent system of the poem to which every signifying feature in it relates back. For Riffaterre, the poem thus ‘results from the transformation of a word or sentence into a text’ (p. 164). Once the reader recognizes this, suddenly the puzzle is solved, everything falls into place, indeed the whole poem ceases to be descriptive, ceases to be a sequence of mimetic signs, and becomes but a single sign, perceived from the end back to its given as a harmonious whole, wherein nothing is loose, wherein every word refers to one symbolic focus. (p. 12) Echoing the language of resurrection found in early descriptions of palimpsest reading, Riffaterre celebrates the restorative effect of reading: ‘the text, raised from the ashes of familiar description, is made into a novel and unique significance’ (p. 12). For Riffaterre, the text is thus ‘a multilevelled discourse’ (p. 168, n. 13) in which the surface layer is in fact constructed out of variants of a semantic ‘given’ which might be a cliché, a quotation or a descriptive system (pp. 63–4). Riffaterre calls this given the matrix, paragram or hypogram: the text consists of ‘the hypogram and

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its palimpsest’ (Riffaterre 1978, p. 86); its significance ‘lies in its consistent formal reference to and repetition of what it is about, despite continuous variations in the way it goes about saying it’ (Riffaterre 1983, p. 76); and its truth does not lie in its reference to reality, but ‘in its faithful approximation of the semic configuration of a single given’ (Riffaterre 1983, p. 88).15 In ‘Paragram and significance’, Riffaterre argues that ‘Saussure understood that the truth or depth or real function of the text lies in this system of reference and repetition, and not in the content of what is repeated’ (1983, p. 76). At the same time, he is keen to differentiate his project from Saussure’s, as he does in a long footnote in Semiotics of Poetry which anticipates, and in some places corresponds almost word for word with, his discussion in ‘Paragram and significance’. In the footnote, Riffaterre states that he prefers to use hypogram rather than paragram since the latter is too closely associated with Saussure’s anagrammatic research. Riffaterre seeks to differentiate his theory from Saussure’s in relation to the way in which the paragram is visible in the text. Whereas, in the latter’s research, the paragram is ‘lexical or graphemic . . . made out of fragments of key words scattered along the sentence, each embedded in the body of a word’ (Riffaterre 1978, p. 168, n. 16), in Riffaterre’s theory, the hypogram ‘on the contrary, appears quite visibly in the shape of words embedded in sentences whose organization reflects the presuppositions of the matrix’s nuclear word’ (p. 168, n. 16). More importantly, Riffaterre seeks to differentiate himself from Saussure with regard to the question of proof. Riffaterre argues that the need to secure proof ‘is hard to reconcile with the reader’s natural experience of a literary text, namely, his greater awareness of the way things are said than of exactly what is meant’ (p. 168, n.16). The difficult question of proof can be obviated ‘if the analyst starts from what the surface features of the text, that is, its style, force him to perceive’ (p. 168, n. 16): These features can be defined as variants of a semantic structure that need not be realized in a key word present intact or as membra disiecta in the text, so long as decoding emphases and other formal distortions sensitize the reader to their recurrences and hence to their formal equivalences, and thus make him perceive them not just as forms but as variants of an invariant. The natural decoding procedure should obviate the difficulty of proving the existence of a key word, because the structure’s complex network of relations is self-defining outside of and above any word that may implement it. (pp. 168–9, n. 16)

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Riffaterre here dispenses with the aspect of Saussure’s analysis that leads to the need for proof – the assertion that the palimpsestic construction of the poem is a result of a conscious compositional practice on behalf of an author. Riffaterre quietly disposes of the concept of the author and is concerned only with what the text, once it is in existence, forces the reader to perceive. The decoding procedure is sufficient in that it reveals the key word and the way in which the poem is structured out of it – there is no need to prove that this key word was actually used in order to compose the poem in the first place. In other words, the reader’s perception of a network of variants of an invariant in a text is self-sufficient evidence that that network exists; its existence does not need to be proved by confirmation that this was how the text was in fact structured by its author. Thus, although Riffaterre conceives of the text as layered palimpsest and describes his concept of hermeneutic reading as a process of abduction, Riffaterre’s theory differs from that of detective palimpsest reading on its final and most significant point: he does not seek confirmation of the veracity of his reading from the author of the text. At the opening of Semiotics of Poetry, Riffaterre states that ‘it is my purpose here to propose a coherent and relatively simple description of the structure of meaning in a poem’ (1978, p. 1). He intends to show that these structures determine and delimit any reading: The reader’s freedom of interpretation is . . . limited because of the poem’s saturation by the semantic and formal features of its matrix: in other words, continuity and unity, that is, the fact that the semiotic unit is the text itself, forbid the attention to wander, deny the opportunities for hermeneutic deviance that the multiple facets of mimesis offer . . . he is therefore under strict guidance and control as he fills the gaps and solves the puzzles. (p. 165) ‘Far from freeing the imagination’, the structure of the text means that ‘reading is actually restrictive’ (p. 165). Reading is not a risky, insecure procedure, then, but rather a ‘natural’ process constrained by the structures of the text that powerfully control the reader’s decoding. However, as Semiotics of Poetry progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that, despite his claims, Riffaterre is not in fact describing the structure of the text, but rather elaborating a specific and ingenious method of reading. Jonathan Culler argues that this is revealed in Riffaterre’s treatment of previous critics, whose readings he is inclined to reject in favour of his own:

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At one moment he is explaining why a form or construction necessarily works in a certain way and produces a particular response; at the next he claims to be solving a puzzle that has always baffled readers and to have discovered the true but hitherto unknown meaning of a poem. (1981, p. 98) The assertion that the structure of the text forces a necessary reading is simply undermined by Riffaterre’s references to previous readings that have not responded in that way. In the end, Riffaterre does not produce a semiotics of poetry, but a theory of reading which circumvents reading’s insecurity by locating the proof of reading in the self-sufficient structures of the text.

Critical Text (2): On modern detective fiction ‘A fine mess,’ William said, nodding toward the complex pattern of footprints left all around by the monks and the servants. ‘Snow, dear Adso, is an admirable parchment on which men’s bodies leave very legible writing. But this palimpsest is badly scraped, and perhaps we will read nothing interesting on it.’ (Eco 1984, p. 105) Few critics have noted this early palimpsest metaphor in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, used by William of Baskerville, the novel’s detective, to describe the footprint-covered snow surrounding the vat of pig’s blood in which the murdered corpse of the monk Venantius is discovered on the Second Day of the novel.16 Recalling Holmes’ similar metaphor in ‘The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez’, William’s palimpsest metaphor identifies his reading activity with the detective palimpsest reading exemplified by Holmes, and characteristic of classical detective fiction. William is a palimpsest detective reader determined to uncover the ‘truth’, and to reconstruct, in this instance, the underlying text of the murders in the Abbey. In his first interview with William, the abbot welcomes William as a man ‘acute in uncovering’ (p. 29) and, appropriately, Adso (William’s novice and the novel’s narrator) describes William as motivated ‘solely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion – which I could see he always harboured – that the truth was not what was appearing to him at any given moment’ (p. 14). William’s palimpsest detective reading is exemplified later on the Second Day when he and Adso, investigating Venantius’s death, recover a palimpsestic sheet of parchment from the monk’s desk which contains an underlying text – written in either lemon juice or some kind of invisible ink – that appears only when warmed. When Adso holds

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the lamp too close to it by accident, William discovers this underlying text which reveals itself to be a further, cryptographic, palimpsest. This palimpsest can only be deciphered by inventing a rule of correspondence that is derived from nowhere but the reader’s own head: ‘“Invent it”’, William tells Adso, ‘“And then see whether it is the right one”’ (p. 166). This, the abductive method par excellence, is explained by William in more detail later in the novel: ‘. . . solving a mystery is not the same as deducing from first principles. Nor does it amount simply to collecting a number of particular data from which to infer a general law. It means, rather, facing one or two or three particular data apparently with nothing in common, and trying to imagine whether they could represent so many instances of a general law you don’t yet know, and which perhaps has never been pronounced . . . In the face of some inexplicable facts you must try to imagine many general laws, whose connection with your facts escapes you. Then suddenly, in the unexpected connection of a result, a specific situation, and one of those laws, you perceive a line of reasoning that seems more convincing than the others. You try applying it to all similar cases, to use it for making predictions, and you discover that your intuition was right. But until you reach the end you will never know which predicates to introduce into your reasoning and which to omit.’ (pp. 304–5) The incident of Venantius’ palimpsest pulls away the veil of rationality and logic that cloaks detective palimpsest reading and reveals its dependence on intelligent guess-work – in other words, on abduction, rather than deduction. William’s reading practice is thus not manifestly different from that of classical detectives, it is merely more explicit about the element of invention involved in that method. This necessary inventiveness is given symbolic form in William’s lenses which are stolen shortly after he discovers Venantius’ parchment. Without them, his ability to read ‘a normal manuscript’ (p. 165) is unhampered, but he has difficulty in tackling the cryptographic palimpsest that is Venantius’ encoded underlying script. Although William’s reading method is thus aligned with that of classical detective fiction, the outcome of his reading is different to that which occurs in the classical tradition. In the dénouement of The Name of the Rose, the final stage so crucial to detective palimpsest reading is frustrated: there is no revelation of an accurate correspondence between the detective’s conclusions and the ‘true’ version of the events as confirmed by their author. The Seventh Day of the novel contains a parody of the classical detective ending – the encounter between the detective and the murderer during

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which the detective demonstrates his skill by telling the true story of the crimes, which is then confirmed by their author and perpetrator. The chapter begins with the traditional rendering of this encounter. William begins to reconstruct the underlying script of the events of the novel; Jorge of Burgos confirms the story he is bringing to light: ‘“Is that what happened?”’, asks William; ‘“More or less”’, replies Jorge (p. 465). William explains how he discovered the story of ‘the fatal book’ (p. 467) at the centre of the novel’s mystery and recounts how each of the deaths related to it occurred. Again, he seeks confirmation from Jorge: ‘“Am I mistaken?” “No. Go on.”’ (p. 469). This classic pattern of explanation and confirmation is interrupted, however, when William realizes that the story behind the deaths – one of love, lust, curiosity and betrayal – does not correspond to the apocalyptic pattern he was ‘convinced the series of crimes had followed’ (p. 469). This ‘false pattern’ (p. 470) has helped William to understand ‘the story of the book better’ (p. 470); it has led him to Jorge (even after he has ceased believing in it); it may even correspond to a ‘divine plan . . . directing these deaths’ (p. 470); but it has not uncovered the plan of ‘a perverse and rational mind’ (p. 492) underlying the crimes. Thus Jorge, who precipitates but does not script the deaths, cannot verify this aspect of William’s reading: ‘I cannot follow you,’ Jorge said. ‘You are proud to show me how, following the dictates of your reason, you arrived at me, and yet you have shown me you arrived here by following false reasoning. What do you mean to say to me?’ (p. 471) At the end of the Seventh Day, William realizes that although a text will inevitably have an author, that author is equally inevitably ‘overcome by his own initial design and there [begins] a sequence of causes, and concauses, and of causes contradicting one another, which [proceed] on their own, creating relations that [do] not stem from any plan’ (p. 492). The Name of the Rose does not challenge the methodology of classical detective fiction but rather its underlying assumption that reading can uncover the ‘true’ interpretation of a text, an interpretation that can then be verified by an author who retains complete control over the functioning of that text. In The Name of the Rose, then, William’s detective reading shares the methodology of detective palimpsest reading but not its outcome. Although, as Adso consoles him, William does succeed in making some discoveries – ‘“it was true that the tracks in the snow led to Brunellus . . . that Adelmo committed suicide . . . that Venantius did not drown in the jar . . . that the labyrinth was laid out the way you imagined it . . . that the

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mysterious book was by Aristotle”’ (p. 492) – ultimately, William’s act of reading is a form of palimpsesting rather than palimpsest reading. He adds a further textual layer to the plot, rather than uncovering an underlying one. William’s palimpsesting is apocalyptic in that he is ‘convinced the series of crimes followed the sequence of the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse’ (p. 469), but it also bears a further, structural, affinity with apocalypse, since both acts are simultaneously destructive and creative. As Lois Parkinson Zamora notes, although in contemporary discourse apocalypse has come to be equated with the end of the world, in the biblical tradition apocalyptic narratives predict both the end of the world and the coming of a new age: In the canonic Hebrew apocalyptic texts – Ezekiel, Zachariah, Daniel – and in the Christian canon – the thirteenth chapter of Mark, the twentyfourth chapter of Matthew, the Second Epistle of Peter, the Revelation of John . . . – the apocalyptic narrator describes God’s revelation of the turbulent events leading up to the end of the present world, the subsequent millennium – a thousand-year period ruled by Christ – a last loosing of Satan, then the New Jerusalem, the timeless paradise promised to God’s elect. Apocalypse is eschatological (here the root is exchatos, ‘furthest,’ ‘uttermost’); it is concerned with the end of the present age, the Last judgement, and the age to follow. (1988, pp. 32–3)17 Palimpsesting and apocalypse are processes of partial destruction – the trace of the erased text remains in the palimpsest, certain of God’s chosen people remain in the new age – that enable creation. William’s apocalyptic palimpsesting points towards, and in fact preserves, an actual past, but it also points towards, and determines, a projected future – William’s belief in the apocalyptic sequence causes Jorge to tell Malachi that the book has the power of a thousand scorpions, recollecting the threat heralded by the fifth trumpet of the Apocalypse.18 As reader, as apocalyptic palimpsestor, William has in fact become co-author of the text he is reading: ‘“I conceived a false pattern to interpret the moves of the guilty man, and the guilty man fell in with it”’ (p. 470). Moreover, The Name of the Rose differs from classical detective fiction in that it does not contain, at its close, the definitive interpretation of its own events. Rather, it presents itself as a palimpsest open to further apocalyptic palimpsesting by its readers. It thus exemplifies Eco’s theorization of the ‘openness’ of narrative structure, ‘the flexibility of the text in validating (or at least in not contradicting) the widest possible range of interpretative proposals’ (1981, p. 33): ‘“open”

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works, insofar as they are in movement, are characterized by the invitation to make the work together with the author’ (p. 63). In ‘Apocalyptic visions and visionaries in The Name of the Rose’ (1988), Zamora observes that Adso’s narration is ‘surprisingly modern in its emphasis on the apocalyptic iconography of disaster rather than of triumph, in its resignation to the end of the world’ (p. 34). In contrast, the plot of The Name of the Rose more accurately represents the dual temporality of traditional apocalypse. The book does not end with the burning and destruction of the library, but with Adso’s return to the ruined monastery many years later. There, he collects the palimpsestuous remains of the library: Mine was a poor harvest, but I spent a whole day reaping it, as if from those disiecta membra of the library a message might reach me. Some fragments of parchment had faded, others permitted the glimpse of an image’s shadow, or the ghost of one or more words. At times I found pages where whole sentences were legible; more often, intact bindings, protected by what had once been metal studs . . . Ghosts of books, apparently intact on the outside but consumed within; yet sometimes a half page had been saved, an incipit was discernible, a title . . . Along the return journey and afterward at Melk, I spent many, many hours trying to decipher those remains . . . At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books. (p. 500) These remains constitute the palimpsestuous apocalyptic landscape of the novel, since the tale that Adso has told in The Name of the Rose ‘is only a cento, a figured hymn, an immense acrostic’ – a palimpsest, perhaps – ‘that says and repeats nothing but what those fragments have suggested to [him]’ (p. 501). The literary text that Adso produces is nothing but the apocalyptic palimpsesting of the remains of former literature. In ‘No apocalypse, not now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)’ (1984), Jacques Derrida argues that the possibility of literature is founded on precisely that which both the palimpsest and apocalypse represent – the nonpossibility of remainderless destruction. The Name of the Rose is paradigmatic of all literature in that it is formed from remains, and because, in remaining open to further palimpsesting, it maintains the possibility of literature’s survival. Literature is that which ‘lives on’, sur-vivre, and that which lives on other texts, those written, and those yet to come. Literature ‘is dependent on the possibility of archivizing, indeed consti-

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tuted in itself by the archivizing act’ (Derrida 1984, p. 27). The simultaneous destruction and preservation of this archivizing act is epitomized in the process of apocalyptic palimpsesting. The Name of the Rose is a palimpsest of classical detective fiction – its surface is marked by the palimpsestuous intimacy of both the old and the new kind of detective reading. This defines The Name of the Rose as a modern detective novel, not a classical one. In ‘Whodunit and other questions: Metaphysical detective stories in post-war fiction’ (1971), Michael Holquist identifies this palimpsestuous structure of the modern detective novel when discussing a series of three metaphorical posters in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur (1958). The first poster is ‘a metaphor for what would have been the traditional literary treatment of his subject – garish, hyperbolic, narrative’ (pp. 151–2). The second poster is ‘a metaphor for the novel he actually writes, a metaphor for the structure of The Voyeur itself’ (p. 152): The new advertisement represented a landscape. At least Mathias thought he could make out a moor dotted with clumps of bushes in its interlacing lines, but something else must have been superimposed: here and there certain outlines or patches of color appeared which did not seem to be part of the original design. On the other hand they could not be said to constitute another drawing entirely; they appeared to have no relation to one another, and it was impossible to guess their intention. They succeeded, in any case, in so blurring the configurations of the moor that it was doubtful whether the poster represented a landscape at all. . . . Underneath was spread in huge letters what must have been the name of the film: Monsieur X on the Double Circuit. Not conforming to the trends of recent productions, this title – which was scarcely enticing, having little or no relation to anything human – provided remarkably little information about what type of film it described. Perhaps it was a detective story, or a thriller. Attempting once again to decipher the network of curves and angles, Mathias now recognized nothing at all – it was impossible to decide whether there were two different images superimposed, or just one, or three, or even more. (Robbe-Grillet 1958, pp. 143–4) Discussing this passage, Holquist comments that ‘there is a suggestion of two different posters, one on top of the other, in other words, a palimpsest, and remaining, therefore, still slightly visible under the new text’ (p. 152). Holquist argues that the non-conventionality of The Voyeur is suggested ‘by

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the double track of the palimpsest metaphor: it is a new text, a new kind of plot, written over the face of the old detective story, whose traditional elements still are legible underneath the new message’ (p. 153). The same metaphor defines the modernity of The Name of the Rose.19

Theoretical Text (2): On poststructuralism In ‘Theory of the text’ (1973), Roland Barthes’s description of traditional interpretative criticism recalls the aims and objectives of palimpsest detective reading. Such criticism ‘seeks to demonstrate that the text possesses a total and secret signified, varying according to critical doctrine: a biographical sense, for psychoanalytic criticism; a project, for existential criticism; a socio-historical sense, for Marxist criticism, etc.’ (1990a, p. 37). In such criticism, the text is perceived as a palimpsest in the most conservative sense, simply as a layered phenomenon containing a hidden meaning: ‘the text is treated as if it were the repository of an objective signification, and this signification appears as embalmed in the work-asproduct’ (p. 37). In relation to such a text, the only operations available to the reader are those of ‘restoration and interpretation’ (p. 33): the literality of the text is made the repository of its origin, of its intention, and of a canonical meaning which has to be maintained or rediscovered. The text then becomes the very object of all hermeneutics. From the ‘restitution’ of the signifier one passes naturally to the canonical interpretation of the signified: the text is the name of the work in so far as it is inhabited by one, and one only, meaning, a ‘true’ meaning, a definitive meaning. It is that scientific ‘instrument’ which defines in an authoritarian way the rules of an eternal reading. (p. 33) Barthes goes on to describe the move in poststructuralist criticism towards a more complex understanding of the text as ‘a tissue, something woven’ (p. 39), since the word ‘text’ comes from the stem ‘to weave’ (tex-êre, literally, ‘that which is woven’, ‘web’, ‘texture’).20 Barthes conceives of this new textual palimpsest as ‘a polysemic space where the paths of several possible meanings intersect’ (p. 37). When reading it, ‘it is necessary to cast off the monological, legal status of signification, and to pluralise it’ (p. 37). The move Barthes describes represents a perceptual shift in relation to the text as palimpsest. It is no longer regarded as a layered phenomenon in which the hidden text is of the only significance, and can be uncovered and separated from the layer it lies beneath. Rather, the perception of the text as ‘something woven’ corresponds to the figuration of the palimpsest as a

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surface phenomenon in which two or more texts are inextricably entangled and intertwined. Jacques Derrida’s definition of the ‘text’ in ‘Living on’ (1999) reflects this perceptual shift – he describes the text as ‘a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces’ (1999a, p. 84). For Derrida, the text is not a layered phenomenon, nor simply a polysemic site, but an involuted palimpsestuous space. Structuralist criticism responds to the text as layered palimpsest and seeks to uncover the underlying text in a doubled inventive movement of discovery and creation that is analogous to traditional detective palimpsest reading. Poststructuralist criticism responds to the palimpsestuous text. It is thus a process of reading that attempts to negotiate, and do justice to, the interrelatedness of the texts on the palimpsest’s surface. In doing so, it does not dissect the palimpsest, taking its layers apart. Rather, ‘in the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, “run” (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced’ (Barthes 1977b, p. 147). Since the texts of the palimpsest bear no necessary relation to each other, palimpsestuous reading is an inventive process of creating relations where there may, or should, be none. As such, it always runs the risk of being false or fictitious. Palimpsestuous reading is caught up in the palimpsestuous intimacy of security and insecurity. It struggles not to ‘fall down’ (this is the literal meaning of the Greek word for security, asphaleia), while inevitably – as a material part of ‘palimpsestuous’ suggests – ‘limping’: it ‘proceeds slowly and with difficulty’; it is always ‘falling short’; such a process is continually ‘happening to’, continually ‘befalling’ every person, and every text. (All these expressions are palimpsested early meanings of ‘to limp’.)21 As another material element of the word ‘palimpsestuous’ implies, palimpsestuous reading is also a process of ‘imping’, of extending, lengthening, enlarging and adding to the palimpsest one is writing on. Since in the process of reading the reader adds yet another text to the palimpsest’s involuted surface, apocalyptic palimpsesting is an inevitable element of any palimpsestuous reading. Barthes names this new type of reading ‘textual analysis’, or hyphology (where hyphos is ‘fabric’, ‘veil’ and the spider’s web): whereas criticism . . . hitherto unanimously placed the emphasis on the finished ‘fabric’ (the text being a ‘veil’ behind which the truth, the real message, in a word the ‘meaning’, had to be sought), the current theory of the text turns away from the text as veil and tries to perceive the fabric

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in its texture, in the interlacing of codes, formulae and signifiers. (1990a, p. 39) Barthes’ theory of the text is a palimpsestuous theory that ‘insists strongly on the (productive) equivalence of writing and reading’ (p. 42).22 It requires ‘full reading’ to be a process in which ‘the reader is nothing less than the one who desires to write, to give himself to an erotic practice of language’ (p. 42). For Barthes, ‘the theory of the text . . . the blossoming which justifies it, is not this or that recipe for analysis, it is writing itself ’ (p. 44). His pronouncement ‘Let the commentary be itself a text: that is, in brief, what the theory of the text demands’ (p. 44), is a call for reading as apocalyptic palimpsesting. For Derrida, the least violatory reading of the palimpsestuous text would be to ‘leave [the] text on its own power’ (1999a, p. 152): We should neither comment, nor underscore a single word, nor extract anything, nor draw a lesson from it. One should not, one should refrain from – such would be the law of the text that gives itself, gives itself up, to be read (qui se donne à lire). (p. 152) But the text also calls for a violence that matches it in intensity, a violence different in intention, perhaps, but one that exerts itself against the first law in order to attempt a commitment, an involvement, with that law. To move, yieldingly, towards it, to draw close to it fictively. The violent truth of ‘reading.’ (p. 152) Apocalyptic palimpsesting is a counter-signing of Derrida’s idea of what this ‘reading’ might be. It is a countersignature of his concept of ‘countersignature’, of ‘good literary criticism, the only worthwhile kind’ as ‘an act, a literary signature or counter-signature, an inventive experience of language, in language, an inscription of the act of reading in the field of the text that is read’ (Derrida 1992, p. 52). The invention of a name for ‘those “critical” inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits’ (p. 52), apocalyptic palimpsesting is a process that is entwined in an unavoidable and aporetic movement of violation, preservation and production.

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Chapter 6

Refiguring Intertextuality

Since the texts inscribed on a palimpsest bear no necessary relation to each other – one text is not derived from the other, one does not serve as the origin of the other – the figuration of the text as palimpsest does not describe the relationship between a text and its sources. The palimpsest is not a metaphor of origin, influence or filiation; it is not a synonym for intertextuality as that term has come to be used and abused in contemporary critical discourse.1 There is, however, a productive relationship between the concept of the palimpsest and the concept of intertextuality as coined by Julia Kristeva and as it functions in poststructuralist theory. At the end of the previous chapter, I drew attention to the relationship between the palimpsest and the poststructuralist theory of the text. It is precisely in the context of an elaboration of that theory that Kristeva coined the word ‘intertextuality’. In ‘The bounded text’ (1969), Kristeva describes the text as ‘a permutation of texts, an intertextuality’ (1980a, p. 36); that is to say, ‘in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another’ (p. 36). The text is not comprised of other texts, but of ‘utterances’ – a type of speech or writing such as, in the case of the novel, narration or citation – taken from other texts. For Kristeva, intertextuality therefore describes the nature of all textuality, comprised as it is of diverse utterances or discourses. Kristeva does not understand intertextuality ‘in the banal sense of “study of sources”’ (1984, p. 60), but rather, as she states in an interview in 1985, as ‘perhaps the most global concept possible for signifying the modern experience of writing’ (1996, p. 192). It is my suggestion here that the palimpsest presents us with another global concept for this experience, a more appropriate one than intertextuality since, while retaining the emphasis on the textual, it distances itself – by the very irrelatedness of the texts that constitute it – from the confusion with source study from which the term ‘intertextuality’ can now no longer be disentangled. Kristeva uses various images, figures or metaphors to describe the concept of the text. She describes it as an intertextuality, as a permutation (originally, an interchange, exchange or communication) and as a mosaic. 85

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In ‘The bounded text’, she describes Antoine de La Sale’s writings ‘as heterogeneous mosaics of texts’ (1980a, p. 41), and this figure arises again in her further description of the text as an intertextuality in ‘Word, dialogue and novel’ (1969). Here Kristeva argues that ‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations’ (1980b, p. 66), but her further statement that ‘any text is the absorption and transformation of another’ (p. 66) renders the image of the mosaic curiously inadequate to represent the interpenetration of utterances, discourses, sign-systems or, here, texts, that constitutes the text and that characterizes the nature of textuality (or writing) as Kristeva understands it.2 A more compelling figurative and theoretical metaphor of the text is that of the palimpsest: according to its logic, the concept of palimpsestuousness overwrites Kristeva’s ‘intertextuality’, and palimpsestuous textuality provides a new and more apposite name for that permutation of texts in, on, and as, the space of textuality. In this chapter, I want to explore the nature of the relationship between any singular text and this vast field of palimpsestuous textuality, a relationship that bears interesting similarities to the relation Kristeva elaborates between the pheno-text and the geno-text. In ‘Intertextuality and the psychic model’ (1988), Christopher M. Johnson argues that this theoretical distinction is ‘an important aspect of Kristevan intertextuality’ (p. 74). He locates the first systematic elaboration of these terms in Kristeva’s ‘The engendering of the formula’, an essay first published in Semeiotikè (1969). (Johnson’s article provides a useful discussion of this essay as well as translations of its key passages.) Johnson summarizes Kristeva’s concepts of the pheno- and geno-text thus: The pheno-text is the surface phenomenon of a text present before us, whereas the geno-text is the operation which engenders the pheno-text, is the cause and condition of its genesis. The pheno-text is characterized by the language of communication: it partakes of the linguistic sign and is thus open to structural description and semantic interpretation. The geno-text, on the other hand, is not linguistic per se, though it may be detectable through certain linguistic elements in the pheno-text . . . (1988, p. 74) The geno-text ‘contains an infinity of signifying possibilities which exceed, but include, any pheno-textual expression of sense’ (Johnson 1988, p. 81).3 Kristeva’s theory of the pheno- and geno-text thus reminds Johnson of ‘Leibniz’s theory of compossibles, according to which the elected entity that comes into being is but one of a whole host of other possible entities’ (p. 81). Significantly, ‘the elected entity must by necessity bear marks of

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the virtual entities which have not been realized in its place, but which could have been’ (p. 81). Thus, the pheno-text must bear the mark of the geno-text, ‘its realization does not preclude the perception of the subjacent infinity of compossible textual formations from which it was created, and which are continually operating in and transforming it’ (p. 81). The pheno-text is inhabited by the infinite possibilities of the geno-text with which it has a one-to-multiple correlation. Kristeva calls the linguistic elements that mark the operation of the geno-text in the pheno-text ‘signifying differentials’ (when they are at the level of the minimal phonic unit), and ‘signifying complexes’ (when they are at the level of the sentence, phrase or ‘extract’ – ‘the quotation of undesignated origin’ (Kristeva cited in Johnson 1988, p. 84)). ‘The specificity of the text’, according to Kristeva, ‘lies in the fact that it is a translation of the genotext into the pheno-text, discernible to the reader through the opening of the pheno-text to the geno-text’ (Kristeva cited in Johnson 1988, p. 74), an opening marked by these signifying differentials or complexes. In his reading of ‘The engendering of the formula’, Johnson draws attention to the most evident Freudian and Lacanian references and parallels in Kristeva’s system, ending his essay with the brief suggestion that Freud’s model of the Mystic Writing-Pad provides an interesting analogy for Kristeva’s textual model. In contrast, I would argue that another more productive analogy is that of the palimpsest, according to which the geno-text corresponds to the infinite possibilities of palimpsestuous textuality, the pheno-text to the ‘singular’ text which is marked by and cut through by those possibilities, and which bears the trace of the virtual entities that it could have been. The plurality of the geno-text, of palimpsestuous textuality, constantly operates in, disrupts, and yet engenders the meaning of, any text – this is the specificity of the text, of writing, as opposed to the work or the book.4 In order to explore how this theory of the relationship between palimpsestuous textuality and the text is manifest in the body of actual texts, the following two sections of this chapter engage in close readings of two very different texts, one critical and theoretical – Gérard Genette’s Palimpsests (1997) – and one fictional – Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001). Identifying the signifying complexes at work in these texts – at the level of rhetoric in one, and at the level of narrative structure and verb tense in the other – discloses the disruptive and founding presence of palimpsestuous textuality in each of them, and provides a new way of understanding their complex textuality.

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Genette’s Palimpsest Gérard Genette’s Palimpsests (1997) (first published in French as Palimpsestes (1982)) has been identified by commentators as a key text in the field of intertextuality studies understood, as it now inescapably is, as the study of the relationships between texts. As its title suggests, Palimpsests is also the major text that brings the concept of the palimpsest to bear within this field. Critical or theoretical writing that refers to Genette’s work tends to employ the terminology he develops to describe intertextual relations; to my knowledge, no reader has actually analysed the structure and movement of Palimpsests as a text. If one does so, it becomes apparent that Palimpsests is an intertextual (in Kristeva’s terms) palimpsest defined by the tension between two texts: the pheno-text of Genette’s strict categorizations and intertextual analysis, and the geno-text which ruptures that pheno-text with its insistent reminder of the infinite possibilities of palimpsestuous textuality. The specificity of Palimpsests as text lies in the opening of its pheno-text to the geno-text, an opening which occurs, paradoxically, at the rhetorical moments when Genette is attempting to deny or suppress the existence of the geno-text and resist the radical implications of palimpsestuous textuality. Palimpsests follows on from and updates Introduction à l’architexte (1979) in which Genette argues, as he recalls at the beginning of Palimpsests, that the subject of poetics is ‘the architext or, if one prefers, the architextuality of the text’ (1997, p. 1). The architext is ‘the entire set of general or transcendent categories – types of discourse, modes of enunciation, literary genres – from which emerges each singular text’ (p. 1). In Palimpsests, Genette extends his thinking on the subject of poetics, redefining it as ‘transtextuality, or the textual transcendence of the text’ (p. 1) – ‘all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts’ (p. 1). Transtextuality ‘goes beyond, but at the same time subsumes’ (p. 1) architextuality, as well as four other types of transtextual relationship: intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality and hypertextuality. In Genette’s system intertextuality has a more restricted sense than that which it carries in the work of Kristeva, naming, as it does, ‘a relationship of copresence between two texts or among several texts: that is to say, eidetically and typically as the actual presence of one text within another’ (pp. 1–2). This intertextuality is manifested in such practices as quoting, plagiarism and allusion. Paratextuality is ‘the generally less explicit and more distant relationship that binds the text properly speaking, taken within the totality of the literary work, to what can be called its paratext: a title, a subtitle, intertitles; prefaces, postfaces, notices, forewords, etc.’

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(p. 3). Metatextuality is ‘the relationship most often labelled “commentary”’ (p. 4), and architextuality, as already discussed, is ‘the most abstract and implicit of all’ (p. 4), most clearly manifest in the text’s relationship to its genre or its form. Finally, hypertextuality is ‘any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary’ (p. 5). Genette is keen to emphasize that hypertextuality is not commentary: text B [is] not speaking of text A at all but being unable to exist, as such, without A, from which it originates through a process I shall provisionally call transformation, and which it consequently evokes more or less perceptibly without necessarily speaking of it or citing it. (p. 5) In Palimpsests, Genette categorizes a number of different types of hypertextual transformation – parody, travesty, pastiche and caricature, forgery and transposition – exploring them through extended textual analyses of the nature of the relationship between many sets of two, sometimes three, literary texts. These double textual sets are the palimpsests of his title, although, surprisingly, this only becomes apparent towards the end of Palimpsests: That duplicity of the object, in the sphere of textual relations, can be represented by the old analogy of the palimpsest: on the same parchment, one text can become superimposed upon another, which it does not conceal but allows to show through. (1997, pp. 398–9)5 Genette uses the palimpsest to figure the doubleness of the literary text and his meta-textual categories attempt to describe the relationships that exist between the otherwise unrelated texts that inhabit that text’s surface. Avoiding metaphors of origin, influence or filiation, Genette recognizes that all works are in fact ‘hypertextual’ – ‘there is no literary work that does not evoke (to some extent and according to how it is read) some other literary work’ (p. 9).6 Thus hypertextuality is to be understood as an aspect of textuality, not just as a category of texts, and the same applies to transtextuality and all its diverse components. Genette recognizes that transtextuality is, in fact, the prerequisite ‘a fortiori of literariness’ (p. 8) – ‘since there are no texts without textual transcendence’ (p. 8) – but he fears the consequences of accepting this insight. Firstly, it would ‘subsume the whole of universal literature under the field of hypertextuality, which would make the study of it somewhat unmanageable’ (p. 9); secondly, it

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would ‘invest the hermeneutic activity of the reader – or archireader – with an authority and a significance that [Genette] cannot sanction’ (p. 9). Refusing to accept the radical consequences of palimpsestuous textuality, Genette chooses instead to deal with what he terms, ‘the sunnier side of hypertextuality: that in which the shift from hypotext to hypertext is both massive (an entire work B deriving from an entire work A) and more or less officially stated’ (p. 9). In doing so, Genette refuses to recognize the reader-dependence of even this selection of texts and does not question the canonical authority which might make their interdependence ‘official’. Despite his sunny resolve, Genette admits that immediately he began his study he was compelled to move away from the ‘officially’ hypertextual categories such as parody, travesty and pastiche, and that he was led to practices that are less official, so unofficial, in fact, ‘that they cannot be designated by any accepted term and will require newly coined ones’ (p. 9). Of course, these are not, he insists, in any way similar to the ‘local and/or optional hypertextuality’ (p. 9) that he banishes from his study. In the end, Genette’s attempt to contain and delimit hypertextual relations by imposing a difference of degree – some texts are more hypertextual than others – only serves to expose the disturbing palimpsestuous fact that creating links between texts is always a matter of the reader’s ‘critical ingenuity’ (p. 9); that a reader could ‘trace in just about any work the local, fugitive, and partial echoes of any other work, be it anterior or ulterior’ (p. 9). At the end of Palimpsests, Genette acknowledges that his survey is subjective, influenced by his own personal readings, and his unconscious preferences and desires: The corpus mentioned above is as good as another (which may not be saying very much for it), but it can in no way claim to be exhaustive: this survey of the various types of hypertexts evidently owes much to the vagaries of my personal readings, and even more to a network of preferences that I would be in the worst position to judge. (p. 394) In Palimpsests, the pheno-text of Genette’s painstaking attempt to categorize, through detailed literary examples, the different types of hypertextual transformation possible remains open to the geno-text of palimpsestuous textuality, an opening marked by the signifying complex of Genette’s repressed but resurfacing acknowledgement of a textual transcendence that renders any such attempt at finite categorization always already impossible: we will always be confronted with ‘“assez d’infini sur la planche” [more infinity than we can handle]’ (Genette 1997, p. 10).

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In Palimpsests, Genette struggles to accept the radical consequences for the responsibility of the reader and the transtextuality of literature that arise from the figuration of textuality as palimpsestuous. In the closing pages of his study, however, he does recognize that the hypertext – or literature as hypertextuality – invites a certain type of reading: The hypertext invites us to engage in a relational reading, the flavor of which, however perverse, may well be condensed in an adjective recently coined by Philippe Lejeune: a palimpsestuous reading. To put it differently, just for the fun of switching perversities, one who really loves texts must wish from time to time to love (at least) two together. (p. 399) Genette suggests that palimpsestuous reading might be understood as an ‘open structuralism’ (p. 399) which combines the deciphering of the text’s inner structures characteristic of readers such as Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, with the intertextual (in its Kristevan sense) approach of a reader such as Roland Barthes. Curiously, Genette immediately qualifies his reference to Barthes as ‘perhaps an impudent one’ that ‘requires neither elaboration nor comment’ (p. 399). He closes down the avenue for further elaboration of what this palimpsestuous reading might be, resorting to the more conventional structuralist figuration of literature as a game and of reading and writing as a form of play. Genette’s reference to Barthes is, however, a crucially important one, serving as another signifying complex that alerts the reader to the geno-text of Palimpsests. For, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Barthes’s conception of the text, and of a new type of reading called ‘textual analysis’ or hyphology, is complicit in the poststructuralist concept of the text which leads to the palimpsestuous textuality that Genette is so desperate to resist. Genette’s unwilling allusion to Barthes is also significant in that it reinforces the move into a concern with perversity, eroticism and love that occurs in Palimpsests with the introduction of the idea of palimpsestuous reading and that characterizes Barthes’ writing and thought.7 Subsequent work in intertextuality studies has taken up these themes, not least drawing attention to the gendered nature of the divisions which characterize its theories. In their introduction to Intertextuality (1990), Judith Still and Michael Worton note that ‘theories of intertextuality have, from the outset, referred at least obliquely to sexual hierarchies’ (p. 29): On the one hand, there is phallic monologism or the illusion of unity and self-sufficiency. On the other hand, there is liquefaction, the vehicle of passion – even madness, polyphony, the receptive object penetrated

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by other voices and so on. The latter pole has been admired, but, more particularly, feared for many centuries. We would argue that it can be read as a figure of ‘femininity’, of that particular ‘other’ to the same. (p. 30) Such a gendered binary might easily also be applied to Kristeva’s genoand pheno-texts. In its fluid plurality, as well as its etymological link to birth (‘geno’ means ‘offspring’ from the same Latin and Greek root as ‘genius’ meaning ‘to beget’, ‘to be born’, ‘to come into being’) the genotext aligns itself with the feminine side of this binary; on the other hand, with its origin in science (‘pheno’ is a formative element in chemistry that comes from the Greek for ‘shining’ and means ‘to bring to light’, ‘to appear’) the manifest pheno-text might easily be aligned with the masculine side. However, if any textual palimpsest consists of both of these texts, what place does the palimpsest take in this gendered system? In the following discussion of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, we will find that the text as palimpsest serves as the hymen that holds the masculine pheno-text and the feminine geno-text both together and apart.

Atonement (1999/2001) Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) is an explicitly intertextual – as that term is commonly understood – novel, from the opening epigraph taken from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) to the references to Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehman in the text, to the source of inspiration for its plot in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953). In interviews and commentaries, McEwan has repeatedly identified and acknowledged his sources and influences, and readers have found a plethora of other intertextual echoes in the novel.8 Writing in the Observer in 2001, Hermione Lee states that all through Atonement, ‘historical layers of English fiction are invoked – and rewritten’ (2001). In addition to its explicit intertextuality and the celebrated realism of its war description in Part Two, the aspect of the novel that has been commented upon most repeatedly by reviewers and critics alike is its ‘surprise ending’ contained in the postscript entitled ‘London, 1999’. Here the reader learns that the text she has just read is the most recent draft of a text which Briony – the protagonist now revealed as author – has been writing and rewriting since falsely accusing her sister’s lover of rape as a child: I’ve been thinking about my last novel, the one that should have been my first. The earliest version, January 1940, the latest, March 1999, and

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in between, half a dozen different drafts. The second draft, June 1947, the third . . . who cares to know? (McEwan 2001, p. 369) The reader learns from Briony’s reflections that the version she or he has just read, Atonement (1999), may be neither a ‘truthful’ account of events, nor, in fact, the final one – Atonement ‘ends’ by remaining open to the possibility of a further reinscription: It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicaemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by a bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station . . . I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration . . . Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It’s not impossible. But now I must sleep. (McEwan 2001, pp. 370–2) It is common for readers to feel framed, betrayed, cheated and deceived by this ending; in ‘Briony’s stand against oblivion: The making of fiction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement’ (2004), Brian Finney identifies such a response in a minority of primarily British reviews of the novel.9 In a convincing and coherent argument against such a reaction, Finney argues that the feeling of betrayal arises from a sense that the self-consciousness at the end of Atonement undermines what is essentially understood to be a realist fiction. To expose this assumption as a ‘radical misreading of the novel’ (2004, p. 70), Finney identifies those aspects of the novel which mark it ‘as a work of fiction that is from beginning to end concerned with the making of fiction’ (p. 69). These include the identity of the protagonist as an aspiring author; McEwan’s own description of his work – ‘“I sometimes feel that every sentence contains a ghostly commentary on its own processes”’ (2002a, p. 59); and narrative devices such as variable internal focalization and temporal prolepsis (terms borrowed from Genette’s work in narratology).10 They also include the intertextuality alluded to above, although Finney is keen to use this term in its Kristevan and Barthesian sense. He argues that McEwan’s citations function ‘as intertexts rather

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than sources’ (p. 73) since Atonement participates in two aspects of intertextual productivity in relation to former literature and the social context of the twentieth century as identified by Kristeva – rereading and displacement. In this section I want to push a reading of Atonement in the light of Kristeva’s ideas around intertextuality further, in a different direction to that taken by Finney, in order to provide a new interpretation of the function of the final section of Atonement, and to suggest another explanation of the sense of betrayal it arouses in many of its readers. In ‘The bounded text’, Kristeva considers the ideas of structural and compositional finitude in relation to the novel. In an analysis of La Sale’s Jehan de Saintré, she argues that the novel is structurally bound in advance due to the characteristics of the ideologeme of the sign which determines the text’s ‘initial programming, arbitrary ending, its dyadic figuration, its deviations and their concatenation’ (1980a, p. 38) – these can all be discovered by ‘a suprasegmental analysis of the utterances contained within the novel’s framework’ (p. 38). Of more pertinence to the present discussion is the second kind of analysis Kristeva proposes: ‘an intertextual analysis of these utterances’ which reveals ‘the relationship between writing and speech in the text of the novel’ (p. 38). Showing that ‘the novel’s textual order is based more on speech than on writing’ (p. 38), Kristeva argues that it is only ‘the expliciting of the narrative as a written text’ (p. 57) that bounds the novel ‘compositionally and as cultural artifact’ (p. 57): Nothing in speech can put an end – except arbitrarily – to the infinite concatenation of loops. The real arresting act is performed by the appearance, within the novelistic utterance, of the very work that produces it, here, on the actual page. Speech ends when its subject dies and it is the act of writing (of work) that produces this murder. (p. 56) Kristeva notes that ‘this function of writing as work destroying literary representation (the literary artifact) remains latent, misunderstood and unspoken, although often at work in the text and made evident when deciphered’ (p. 58). The final section of Atonement, with its blatant exposure of the narrative as written text, unmercifully shatters the illusion of ‘literature’, breaking open ‘the object that our culture consumes as finished product (effect, impression) while refusing to read the process of its productivity’ (p. 55). The final section of Atonement forces the reader to recognize the text as a productivity – it disallows him or her the comforting illusion of the monological (realist) book and transgresses the law of ‘any so-called “realist” writer, [that] writing is speech’ (p. 58). In this way, Atonement performs the

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‘re-evaluation of the bourgeois social text’ that Kristeva awaits, enabling ‘a reevaluation of “literature” (of discourse) to take place through the advent of scriptural work within the text’ (p. 58). The final section of Atonement (2001) functions as a signifying complex that reveals the infinite possibilities of palimpsestuous textuality which engendered the palimpsest text Atonement (1999). Recalling Johnson’s description of the pheno-text, Atonement (1999) is just one of a whole host of other possible narratives that bears the marks of the virtual narratives which have not been realized in its place but which could have been. This opening of the text to palimpsestuous textuality, like the expliciting of the narrative act as writing, is vertiginous – it can evoke either disgust or delight in its readers, depending on their predisposition, desires and expectations. Atonement is a text precisely about these expectations and desires, and about the disastrous consequences of refusing or failing to acknowledge the palimpsestuousness of textuality, sexuality and the world. In Part One of Atonement, the reader witnesses a transformation in the protagonist Briony’s perception of the world, manifested in a revision of her views about reading and writing. As a child, she reads the world as a simple layered palimpsest: in her early attempts at writing literature she brings to light the narrative of good, evil and moral truth which she believes underlies the surface appearance of both people and things. Her first play is a gothic romance, The Trials of Arabella, and her first story is ‘a foolish affair, imitative of half a dozen folk tales’ (McEwan 2001, p. 6). Briony interprets the exchange between her sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner by the fountain in the light of such stories and the generic expectations they create: Closer, within the boundaries of the balustrade, were the rose gardens and, nearer still, the Triton fountain and standing by the basin’s retaining wall was her sister, and right before her was Robbie Turner. There was something rather formal about the way he stood, feet apart, head held back. A proposal of marriage. Briony would not have been surprised. She herself had written a tale in which a humble woodcutter saved a princess from drowning and ended by marrying her. What was presented here fitted well. Robbie Turner, only son of a humble cleaning lady and of no known father, Robbie who had been subsidised by Briony’s father through school and university, had wanted to be a landscape gardener, and now wanted to take up medicine, had the boldness of ambition to ask for Cecilia’s hand. It made perfect sense. Such leaps across boundaries were the stuff of daily romance. (p. 38)

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Caught on the cusp between childhood and adulthood – ‘at this stage in her life Briony inhabited an ill-defined transitional space between the nursery and adult worlds which she crossed and recrossed unpredictably’ (p. 141) – Briony interprets the events she witnesses in terms of the romantic fictional world which she still inhabits. But the sequence of events that unfolds before her does not make sense according to romance conventions: ‘the sequence was illogical – the drowning scene, followed by a rescue, should have preceded the marriage proposal’ (p. 39). This illogicality forces Briony to admit that ‘she did not understand, and that she must simply watch’ (p. 39). While watching, Briony’s imaginative hymen between childhood and adulthood is ruptured at the moment when Cecilia’s head breaks the surface of the water in the fountain, a moment which anticipates the actual rupturing of Cecilia’s hymen that is soon to occur during her first sexual intercourse with Robbie: Even as her sister’s head broke the surface – thank God! – Briony had her first, weak intimation that for her now it could no longer be fairytale castles and princesses, but the strangeness of the here and now, of what passed between people, the ordinary people that she knew, and what power one could have over the other, and how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong. (p. 39) Standing with her back to the outside world, staring ‘unseeingly down the nursery’s length’ (p. 39), Briony is still tempted by the childlike magical and simplistic interpretation of events that it signifies. But such an interpretation fails to make sense of the exchange between Robbie and Cecilia and, at this pivotal moment, Briony begins to perceive the palimpsestuous structure of reality and relationality. Whereas Briony’s childhood view of the world is implicitly related to the gothic and romantic literature she reads and writes as a child, her dawning sense of life’s complexity leads her to reject such fiction. Excited at ‘the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains’ (p. 40), she perceives the possibility of a richer form of literature that might replace it. At the moment her imaginative hymen between adulthood and childhood is ruptured, Briony conceives the idea of a palimpsestuous story in which the same scene is described from three different points of view – Cecilia’s, Robbie’s and her own. Briony does not immediately give birth to this story, instead, she returns to the business of her childhood and the rehearsals and performance of The Trials of Arabella: ‘Now was not the time to begin’ (p. 41).

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During the period of gestation that her new conception of literature requires, Briony remains in the hymen between childhood and adulthood. The concept of the hymen represents, generally, marriage or wedlock (Hymen being the god of marriage in Greek and Roman mythology); but the word ‘hymen’ originally comes from the Greek meaning ‘thin skin’ or ‘membrane’, both the virginal membrane – the fold of mucous membrane stretched across and partially closing the external orifice of the vagina – and the ligament between the opposite valves of a bivalve shell. The concept of the hymen thus represents both marriage and division, a doubleness which renders the hymen an appropriate figure for the relationship between the texts of the palimpsest. Like the hymen, a palimpsest is a thin skin or membrane – we might remember that, in the opening of his essay on the palimpsest, De Quincey defines it as ‘a membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by reiterated successions’ (1998b, p. 139). In a palimpsest, two or more texts are held together and apart on and by this membrane as a result of its palimpsesting, a process that eliminates the spatial heterogeneity between them. As a result, they exist in a hymenic fusion or marriage which at the same time preserves their separate identities and inscribes difference within the heart of the identity of the palimpsest. The vellum of the palimpsest thus represents the ‘inter’ – the between of the texts – a between that is no longer that of difference, but of identity, an identity redefined as, and traversed by, difference.11 Any text exists as the hymen – the marriage and division – of the phenotext and geno-text, of the text and the infinite possibilities of palimpsestuous textuality that engenders it. In Atonement, the scene in which Cecilia’s physical hymen is ruptured by her virginal intercourse with Robbie represents, metaphorically, the moment of conception of the text that is Atonement; it is thus symbolic that this scene occurs in a library. Briony produces Atonement (1999) in response to the effects of her (mis)reading of this scene, a text which, as we have seen, is marked by the other possible narratives which it could have been. Briony’s misreading of Cecilia and Robbie’s lovemaking is the result of her suspended transition into adulthood; the tragedy of Atonement is that although adult-Briony may write and rewrite the events following that moment of misreading and the false accusation of rape in which it results – her attempt at atonement – she can never rewrite that moment itself. She can never erase the need for atonement, but her perpetual attempt to atone obscures this fact: ‘novelistic writing is an immense and very powerful means of guiding us most deeply into our crises and farthest away from them at the same time’ (Kristeva 1996, p. 194). In this respect, Atonement plays out the psychoanalytic element of Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality, since it shows ‘to what extent narrative construction is the result of a “working-out”

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of the self, but also a defense and consolidation of the self in relation to its experience of crisis’ (Kristeva 1996, p. 194). In her Atonement, Briony consolidates her self as writing subject in relation to the crisis of her childhood, as Leon S. Roudiez explains in his introduction to Revolution in Poetic Language, ‘“writing subject” rather than an “author,” for the latter term emphasizes the conscious intent of a writer who has author-ity over the meaning of his work’ (1984, p. 7), whereas the writer comes into being only in and as the act of writing. As Barthes puts it: The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. (Barthes 1977b, p. 145) Barthes’ description points up the queering of temporality involved in the move from author to writer, from work to text, a queerness echoed in Jacques Derrida’s theorization of the concept of the hymen and figured in the strange temporal status of the palimpsest, inhabited as it is by texts from different historical periods: Thanks to the confusion and continuity of the hymen, and not in spite of it, a (pure and impure) difference inscribes itself without any decidable poles, without any independent, irreversible terms. Such difference without presence appears, or rather baffles the process of appearing, by dislocating any orderly time at the center of the present. The present is no longer a mother-form around which are gathered and differentiated the future (present) and the past (present). What is marked in this hymen between the future (desire) and the present (fulfillment), between the past (remembrance) and the present (perpetration), between the capacity and the act, etc., is only a series of temporal differences without any central present, without a present of which the past and future would be but modifications. Can we then go on speaking about time, tenses, and temporal differences?’ (1981, p. 210)

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In About Time (2007), Mark Currie attempts to answer precisely this question through ‘a theoretical account of time which might rescue the analysis of temporality from some of the vagueness of new historicism, cultural history, Derridean hauntology, the uncanny and the culture theory of postmodernism’ (2007, p. 1). Currie maintains that it is in relation to contemporary fiction in particular that such an analysis of time is necessary, specifically in the light of ‘the strange temporal structures that have developed in the novel in recent decades’ (p. 1). Crucial to Currie’s account is the notion of the ‘anticipation of retrospection’ (p. 29) – derived and developed from Peter Brooks (1984, p. 23) – ‘which is involved in all narrative, and which offers the beginnings of a theory which connects the temporality of reading with the temporality of living’ (pp. 30–1). It does so in the sense that, when we read a narrative, ‘we decode the preterite [past perfect] as a kind of present, the process is one of presentification, whereas in living we use a kind of envisaged preterite to deprive the today of its character as present’ (p. 30). This temporal mode of living in the envisaged preterite is exemplified conceptually, if not quite grammatically, in Atonement when Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life – with gratitude, or profound and particular regret. (p. 47) According to Currie’s argument, ‘the present of a fictional narrative and the lived present outside of fiction are both experienced in a future anterior mode: both are, in a sense, experienced in the preterite tense in relation to a future to come’ (p. 30). Currie’s use of the expression ‘future anterior’ derives, as he acknowledges, from Derrida’s description in Of Grammatology of ‘a future which will come before as well as a past which will exist in the future’ (Currie 2007, p. 50, n. 2). However, the future anterior is also the grammatical tense paradigmatic of the anticipation of retrospection. Also known as ‘future in the past’, The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar defines the future anterior as ‘a tense that from a time in the past looks towards its own future’ (Chalker and Weiner 1994, p. 166). As the dictionary explains, ‘traditionally this label is given to a certain type of verb phrase containing the word would such as: They did not realize then that by 1914 the two countries would be at war’ (p. 166). ‘However’, it continues, ‘other structures can be used to describe what was seen as future time when viewed from a past perspective’ (p. 166). Examples of alternative structures are

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‘We were bitterly to regret our decision’ and ‘I was going to tell you (when you interrupted me)’ (p. 166). While helpful, the dictionary definition gives no sense of how strange the future anterior tense is, nor does it examine the temporal position of the narrator in the examples. The speaker of the future anterior has to live, or at least have lived, in the future, in order to have knowledge of that future, and yet she or he must speak from a position prior to that future. The future anterior tense is possible, therefore, only in a narrative – be it fictional or actual – in which the present becomes strangely elided by a tense that must necessarily speak from the past while having knowledge of the future. The present exists, in the mode of the future anterior, as nothing other than the anticipation of retrospection. While Currie is interested in the similarity between the temporality of reading and the temporality of living, the appearance of the future anterior tense in Briony’s narrative in Atonement draws attention to a third temporality: the temporality of writing, a temporality that intrudes upon and disrupts the temporality of reading with the living temporality of the writing subject. The intrusion of the future anterior into the past tense of the narrative occurs most significantly in the novel just after Briony’s crucial observation of the fountain scene: It was a temptation for her to be magical and dramatic . . . It was also a temptation to run to Cecilia’s room and demand an explanation. Briony resisted because she wanted to chase in solitude the faint thrill of possibility she had felt before, the exclusive excitement at a prospect she was coming close to defining, at least emotionally. The definition would refine itself over the years. She was to concede that she may have attributed more deliberation than was feasible to her thirteen-year-old self. At the time there may have been no more precise form of words; in fact, she may have experienced nothing more than impatience to begin writing again. [emphases added] (pp. 39–40) It appears again a page later signalled by the indexical reference ‘six decades later’ and by the characteristic use of the verb ‘would’: ‘six decades later she would describe how at the age of thirteen she had written her way through a whole history of literature . . . She would be well aware of the extent of her self-mythologising . . .’ (p. 41). The future anterior disrupts the secure temporality of reading whereby the past tense narrative of a complete and finite book is experienced in the quasi-present of reading, with the intrusion of the living temporality of the writing subject which opens the finitude of the book and the present of reading

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to the vertiginous, insecure, open futurity of writing.12 The employment of the future anterior in Atonement serves as a further signifying complex that, uncomfortably or delightfully, exposes the text as productivity and alerts the reader to the infinite possibilities of palimpsestuous textuality.

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Chapter 7

Queering the Palimpsest: H. D.

In The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar summarize their argument about the ‘odd’ narrative strategies of nineteenth-century female writers in the following way: In short, like the twentieth-century American poet H. D., who declared her aesthetic strategy by entitling one of her novels Palimpsest, women from Jane Austen and Mary Shelley to Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson produced literary works that are in some sense palimpsestic, works whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning. Thus these authors managed the difficult task of achieving true female literary authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards. (2000, p. 73) Gilbert and Gubar use the palimpsest as a figure for the structure of nineteenth-century texts by women writers, a structure understood in the palimpsestic terms of layering and superimposition, suppression and oppression. When reading such texts, the task of feminist criticism is to uncover and bring to light the suppressed narratives concealed within them. Such a reading practice is comparable with that of traditional palimpsest reading in which, as we saw in Chapter 5, ‘the sole object of interest is the first or more or less completely obliterated writing’ (Russell 1867, p. 110). However, this practice risks ignoring or disregarding the overlying script of these texts, as well as the complex relationality of the different narratives which constitute their fabric. It is for this reason that Toril Moi fears that Gilbert and Gubar ‘end up at times in a dangerously reductionist position: under the manifest text, which is nothing but a “surface design” which “conceals or obscures deeper, less accessible . . . levels of meaning” (p. 73), lies the real truth of the texts’ (1985, pp. 61–2). Ironically, the limitations of such a critical practice are powerfully exposed by the texts of the author from whom Gilbert and Gubar derive the figure of the palimpsest: the title of H. D.’s first published prose work – Palimpsest (1926) – may well declare her aesthetic strategy, but this is not one of 102

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layering and superimposition, of suppression and oppression. Rather, H. D.’s prose works are queer palimpsests in which the involution of autobiographical and fictional, heterosexual and homosexual, feminine and masculine texts presents a challenge to reading that cannot be fully met by the disclosive reading practice of traditional Anglo-American feminist criticism. Such criticism has had a crucial role in recent years in re-evaluating H. D.’s writing, particularly her prose works. Generally, these had been undervalued or ignored in the history of H. D.’s reception prior to the new feminist criticism of the 1980s. In H. D. and Freud (1991), Claire Buck explains that the imagist aesthetic that determined the reception of H. D.’s early poetry acted as an interpretative straitjacket in relation to the rest of her work, which does not conform to imagism’s emphasis on objectivity, impersonality and concision: The use of an imagist aesthetic to place H. D. led to the dismissal of much of her later poetry which takes the form of very long associative and investigatory poems with a female subject at the centre. Not surprisingly the considerable amount of autobiographical, often streamof-consciousness prose, in the form of diaries and fictional narratives, was condemned even more strongly or simply ignored, except when it could be read with reference to the ‘important’ male figures with whom H. D. was at various points associated, such as Pound, Lawrence and Freud. (p. 2) In key works such as Psyche Reborn (1981) and H. D.: The career of that struggle (1986), as well as in a host of essays, Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis in particular have provided a new interpretative framework for reading H. D.’s prose and later poetry.1 In ‘Return of the repressed in H. D.’s madrigal cycle’ (1990), Friedman describes this interpretative model in relation to the figure of the palimpsest. Drawing off the figuration of the self or psyche as palimpsest, and the critical figuration of the text as palimpsest, which she argues can be found – despite significant differences in emphasis and concern – in critics such as Julia Kristeva, Jonathan Culler, Shoshana Felman, Frederic Jameson and Michael Riffaterre, Friedman states that ‘like a palimpsest, both psyche and literary text are layered, with repressed elements erupting in disguised forms onto the manifest surface of consciousness, of a text’ (p. 239). Since both text and psyche thus have ‘an unconscious accessible to interpretation through a decoding of its linguistic traces and effects’ (p. 369), Friedman formulates and puts into practice a psychoanalytic,

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intertextual, political and hermeneutical reading which adapts the decoding and intertextual practice of Freud’s dream interpretation to a feminist project. Although literary narratives are neither dreams nor symptoms, she argues that they often share with these a similar mechanism of palimpsest production through the psychodynamics of repression and desire. As a result, Sigmund Freud’s interpretative procedure as exemplified in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) can provide a useful model for literary interpretation, one that bears close similarities to that of palimpsest reading. For Friedman argues that Freud’s method decodes the dream-work (a process of condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision that produces the dream) and is variously imaged by him as ‘an archaeological dig, a journey into the labyrinth, an unravelling of woven threads, a translation of pictographic ruins, a detective analysis of mystery and disguise, a removal of the layers in a palimpsest’ (p. 237).2 Friedman argues that this process of decoding is always qualified by the possibility of ‘overinterpretation’ – the ever-openness of the text to a further interpretation even after one has been achieved that is consistent and seemingly complete. The possibility of over-interpretation provokes a fundamentally intertextual reading practice ‘in which fragments of the dream become departure points into a labyrinth of associations that radiate without end into the dreamer’s recent and distant past, the linguistic and visual artefacts of culture, and the events of history’ (p. 238).3 Adhering to the feminist palimpsestic understanding of women’s texts formulated by Gilbert and Gubar, Friedman argues that such texts serve ‘as the textual and political unconscious of the dominant phallocentric narrative tradition’ (p. 237), as well as containing ‘a textual and political unconscious that can be deciphered in relation to the repression and oppression of women in history’ (p. 237). In her psychopolitical hermeneutic she decodes women’s narratives ‘as articulations of what has been forbidden to women’ (p. 237), reads them ‘as effects of ideological and psychological censorship’ (p. 237), and overinterprets them ‘as part of an endless web of intertexts’ (p. 237). Friedman understands the structure of the palimpsest, and the women’s writing which it represents, only in terms of suppression and oppression. Although she equates the palimpsest with such complex textual figures as the ‘trace’ and the ‘web’, she does not consider the radical textual and sexual implications of these figures, and that of the encrypted, incestuous, involuted, hymenic (whichever of these allosemes one might choose to use) palimpsest. Rather, for Friedman the palimpsest merely represents women’s writing as ‘an insistent record . . . of what has not or cannot be spoken directly

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because of the external and internalised censors of patriarchal social order’ (p. 241). Friedman’s palimpsestic understanding of women’s texts not only risks the dangerous reductionism Moi finds in Gilbert and Gubar, it also risks an ‘unstated complicity’ with what Mary Jacobus in a review of The Madwoman in the Attic describes as ‘the autobiographical “phallacy”, whereby male critics hold that women’s writing is somehow closer to their experience than men’s, that the female text is the author, or at any rate a dramatic extension of her unconscious’ (1981, p. 520). It is precisely in such terms that Claire Buck formulates a respectful critique of Friedman and other feminist critics’ work. In H. D. and Freud, she argues convincingly that H. D.’s texts consistently interrogate the stability of such concepts as the self and the feminine, concepts upon which Gilbert and Gubar’s celebrated ‘true female literary authority’ depends, and which Friedman’s analysis leaves unchallenged: By reading the poems as ‘encoded’ versions of the woman author, Friedman makes that authorial self the source of the poem’s meaning. The significance of the female self thus acquires an illusory stability located with the authorial self. The opposition that Friedman, DuPlessis and Alicia Ostriker all adopt between an ‘encoded’ representation and an uncoded feminine subjectivity leaves the status and meaning of that authorial self unexamined. The authorial self is as much a construction derived from letters, memoirs and journals as the self of H. D.’s poetry. The difference lies in the ways these sources represent subjectivity rather than in a distinction between coded and uncoded texts. (1991, p. 16) ‘In H. D. criticism,’ Buck argues, ‘“identity”, “self”, and “sexuality” often acquire a pregiven and unchanging status identified with the biographical H. D.’ (p. 14). Buck’s study aims to remedy this by taking a different approach to that of previous feminist criticism – rather than examining the way in which H. D. can ‘claim a voice as a woman’ (p. 3), she explores the nature of the self that H. D. constructs in her writing. She is interested in ‘what model or models of the self she [H. D.] creates; from where she derives the models of subjectivity and sexuality which her work deploys, and what is their relationship to sexual difference, sexuality and textuality’ (p. 3). In this way, Buck’s study provides a poststructuralist critique and a sort of meta-narrative of traditional feminist criticism. She is not concerned to establish the way in which H. D.’s work achieves ‘a new mode of identity or femininity’ (p. 12) but to expose the fact that the interest of

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H. D.’s work lies ‘in her persistent questioning of the terms of subjectivity itself, and the questions she raises about the process of reading the self as feminine’ (p. 12). Not least of these questions is that which interrogates the desires that ‘we’ (p. 12) invest in that reading.4 Buck’s study is crucial in freeing H. D.’s prose and late poetry from the feminist biographical criticism that had, in its turn, been so important in releasing those same texts from their devaluation within a history of reception governed by an impersonal and distinctly masculine imagist aesthetic. Buck’s study would not have been possible without the feminist recovery work that preceded it, but, at the same time, it demonstrates the possibility of reading H. D. otherwise, in a way determined by neither the imagist nor feminist traditions. In Women of the Left Bank (1986), Shari Benstock shares in that project, offering a revised understanding of the palimpsest that derives from a critique of the palimpsestic feminist reading outlined in Gilbert and Gubar. In ‘Palimpsests’ – a short sub-section of her chapter on H. D. and Bryher – Benstock argues that Susan Gubar’s reading of H. D. in ‘The echoing spell of H. D.’s Trilogy’ (1978) is right in suggesting that ‘inheriting uncomfortable male-defined images of women and of history, H. D. responds with palimpsestic or encoded revisions of male myths’ (Gubar 1978, p. 197). Benstock’s point of disagreement is with Gubar’s ‘definition of the palimpsest and the suggestion that H. D. “wrote . . . verse so that it could read two ways” (p. 198) [which] oversimplify H. D.’s literary contributions’ (1986, p. 349). Against Gubar’s palimpsestic understanding of H. D.’s texts, Benstock proposes what can be described as a palimpsestuous understanding of the palimpsest and the texts it represents, although she does not go so far as to use this adjective herself: The creation of a palimpsest that would counter predominant male myths is not produced by ‘encod[ing] revisions of male myths’ (p. 197). Rather, the palimpsest exposes through the layers of its compositions the feminine countersign of the male myth already present in the culture. An understanding of the palimpsest reveals that masculine and feminine myths, male and female ‘texts’, are not separate from each other, but entwined and encoded in each other by the very fact that they are culturally produced. There is not a second text (‘a hidden meaning’) embedded in and enclosed by the parent figure and surviving like a nut inside the shell. The second text cannot be ‘lifted’ from the parent text complete and whole to refute the premises of the primary text. Indeed, the notions of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’, ‘parent text’ and ‘subtext’, ‘surface meanings’ and ‘hidden meanings’, do not describe the operations of the palimpsest. Female experience cannot be

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extracted from the male experience, cannot be separately examined . . . ; it is both indivisible from male experience and different from it. Indeed, in patriarchal societies, the ‘difference’ of female experience is only known through its ‘indivisibility’ from male cultural inscription. It is revealed in palimpsestic cultural texts that simultaneously write and erase the history they would contain. Although certain of H. D.’s writings . . . exploit the language of enclosure . . . that would promise to reveal the ‘one-truth’ of female experience encoded in the male world, they do so to expose the very fallacy of secret, embedded, encoded meanings that might reveal the ‘one-truth’ to any reader – male or female. (p. 350) Benstock understands H. D.’s texts as complex palimpsests in which science and art, heterosexuality and homosexuality, ‘traditionally masculine forms of art (epic poetry) and the feminine (psychological fiction)’ (p. 335), the public and the private, London and Paris, exist in a palimpsestuous relationship in which ‘each component of the oppositional pair is defined by the other, is inhabited by the other’ (p. 335). This cohabitation is neither harmonious nor easy (as Benstock’s analysis of H. D.’s Her (1981) demonstrates (pp. 335–41)) and it demands a reading that does not reduce the texts to one or other of their component parts. In H. D. and Sapphic Modernism (1999), Diana Collecott defines such a reading as akin to that of Michael Riffaterre’s ‘informed reader’ – ‘one who makes the connections between text, interpretant and intertext’ (Riffaterre 1978, p. 164). Collecott links this practice with the palimpsest as ‘a metaphor for the collective process of reading and rereading [H. D.’s] work’ (p. 2). For Collecott, palimpsest reading does not follow ‘the literal meaning of the Greek to achieve a rubbing smooth, by biographical decoding or reductive interpretation’ (p. 2). Rather, it is an ‘inevitably tentative procedure’ (p. 2) which ‘involves reading through layers of significance, living with multiple meanings, and being alert to the play of meaning between a given text and its intertexts’ (p. 2). The new tradition of H. D. criticism represented in the work of Buck, Benstock and Collecott is dependent upon a revised understanding of the concept of the palimpsest in H. D.’s work, and in general. However, none of these critics has yet turned her attention back to the prose work from which this concept derives. In the following two sections of this chapter I do just that, performing readings of two of the texts that constitute H. D.’s Palimpsest – ‘Murex: War and Postwar London (circa AD 1916–1926)’ and ‘Secret Name: Excavator’s Egypt (circa AD 1925)’. These readings take their place in, and extend the scope of, this new vein of H. D. criticism by

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employing a palimpsestuous reading that does not attempt to uncover ‘hidden’ or ‘repressed’ narratives, but traces in the fabric of two of Palimpsest’s texts the interlocking narratives of fiction and autobiography, masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality and homosexuality that characterize writing, gender, sexual identity and the writing and written subject that is ‘H. D.’.

Queer Frills: ‘Murex’ Palimpsest is inhabited by three texts about three different women set in three different historical periods, their relationship to each other signalled only by their collection in the same volume and by the connotations of the title it bears. The interpretative onus is thus on the reader to invent the palimpsestuous relationships between the three stories, to tease out the ways in which they inhabit and encrypt each other. Doing just that, in ‘Style in H. D.’s novels’ (1969), A. Kingsley Weatherhead draws attention to the ‘minor details and motifs’ (p. 541) of Palimpsest which, ‘mutually illuminating or justifying each other and linking together the parts of the whole’ (p. 541), serve to create the impression of each part, and the whole novel, as ‘a tissue of sensations lightly matching one another, woven together by mysterious thin threads of plot and theme’ (p. 541). Weatherhead notes, however, that perhaps more interesting than these small and subtle interconnections are the more substantial patterns between the stories: ‘we are presumably intended to remark the superimpositions – at one end of the scale, of images, and, at the other, of large situations’ (p. 543). Margaret M. Dunn draws attention to the structural similarities between the stories in ‘Altered patterns and new endings: Reflections of change in Stein’s Three Lives and H. D.’s Palimpsest’ (1987). Drawing off DuPlessis’s argument in Writing Beyond the Ending (1985) concerning the narrative strategies of twentieth-century women authors, Dunn pinpoints the most significant relationship between the stories as the repetition of the structural innovation of ‘writing beyond the ending’ of traditional female plots. In Palimpsest, the stereotypical fates of the archetypal ‘loose’ woman (Hipparchia), betrayed married woman (Raymonde Ransome), and apparent spinster (Helen Fairwood – she is referred to as ‘Mrs’ in the text, yet there is no mention of a husband) are disrupted. In their place, H. D. devises plots in which the characteristic movement is from an entanglement with a man, or men, to a period of self-questioning or breakdown from which the protagonist is in some sense ‘rescued’ by another female character. In H. D. and Freud, Buck identifies the repetition of a basic situation as

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one of the ways in which H. D.’s poetry participates ‘in the construction of a link between the subjectivity of the author and that of the poem’ (1991, p. 32), a link already encouraged by ‘both the conventions governing lyric poetry as the terrain of the subjective, and the post-romantic, twentiethcentury assumption that literature is the expressive vehicle of an authorial self’ (p. 32). In the same way, the repetition of a similar plot across the three stories of Palimpsest has encouraged critics to identify this plot and its protagonists with H. D. and the events of her life, particularly her experiences during World War I.5 Such biographical criticism is reinforced by H. D.’s letters and diaries (kept in the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) which comment explicitly on the link between her life and writing, particularly in relation to the therapeutic value of her creative work. For instance, on 15 May 1933 during her first round of therapy with Sigmund Freud, H. D. wrote a letter to her long-term partner Bryher in which she discusses her traumatic experiences during World War I and the success, or, rather, lack of it, of her early works in dealing with them: Evidently I blocked the whole of the ‘period’ and if I can skeleton-in a vol. about it, it will break the clutch . . . the ‘cure’ will be, I fear me, writing that damn vol. straight, as history, no frills as in Narthex, Palimp. and so on, just a straight narrative, then later, changing names and so on. (H. D. cited in Friedman 1981, p. 30) In H. D.’s Freudian Poetics (1992), Dianne Chisholm takes her cue from H. D.’s therapy with Freud, as well as from biographical material such as this, in order to investigate ‘the cathartic and curative facility of H. D.’s writing’ (p. 6). Within such an interpretative framework, H. D.’s early, preFreudian, prose works suffer critical condemnation because they are cathartic failures – Chisholm’s reading precludes any alternative hermeneutic within which they might retain some value. As H. D. notes above, her early narratives such as ‘Narthex’(1928) and Palimpsest (1926) failed to provide her with a cure – they are the mark of the trauma of the war years, but they do not free her from that trauma. Thus Chisholm argues that, after surviving the trauma of World War I, H. D. began life-writing . . . The result of this undertaking was the ‘ghosted’ prose and ‘hallucinated writing’ of Hedylus (1928) and other works that failed to satisfy her need to relive the war years in her own way (TF, pp. 148–9). None of these works could claim to have the healing charisma of the later, (post-)

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Freudian writing: instead, they amounted to the sterile labour of an overworked and ‘detached intellect’ (TF, p. 149), to the symptomatic signature of a traumatized memory. (1992, p. 68)6 Biographical criticism such as this, however, fails to pay attention to the fictional ‘frills’ H. D. refers to in Palimpsest, which prevent it from ever being simply ‘straight’ history. A ‘frill’ is not just, literally, an ornamental edging, nor just, figuratively, an embellishment; it is also ‘a kind of scallop-shell’ of precisely the kind that a murex has, the shell-fish that provides the title for the second story in Palimpsest.7 Palimpsest is not a ‘straight’ narrative – a direct and unswerving transcription of the events of H. D.’s life – because of the ‘queer’ frills to which H. D. refers directly in this letter, and to which she alludes in the title ‘Murex’. These may make Palimpsest less successful as a form of therapy for its author, but these queer frills make the text more interesting than H. D.’s later and straighter histories (such as Bid Me To Live (1960)) for readers who are not simply concerned with biographical decoding. In particular, the self-reflexivity of ‘Murex’ with regard to the relationship between life and writing undermines the possibility of any such biographical reading, since it exposes the palimpsestuous relationship between the two, and deconstructs the fantasy of a stable authorial identity upon which such criticism depends. ‘Murex’ is the stream of consciousness of a writer named Raymonde Ransome during one afternoon in London in 1926, before, while and after she is visited by a beautiful Hampstead Jewess called Ermentrude. Ermentrude’s lover Martin has recently been stolen by the same woman (Mavis) who stole Raymonde’s husband Freddie ten years previously. Prior to Ermentrude’s visit, after six months’ occupancy in London, Raymonde’s thoughts and feelings are in a state of blurred obliteration that is part of her attempt to forget that past. London enables her to achieve this state of forgetfulness since ‘it blurred over too alert perception, it, so to speak, snuffed out vibration of too keen thinking’ (H. D. 1968, p. 95). Raymonde’s mind, and the text which exhibits it, achieves a lack of clarity, a sense of ‘merging’ (p. 95), that reflects that of the surrounding environment. In London, the natural markers of temporal change such as day and night and summer and winter lose their distinction and merge together in ‘an ineffable half-light’ (p. 95) that corresponds to Raymonde’s ‘twilight of the spirit’ (p. 95). But the ‘delicious over-blur’ (p. 96) of Raymonde’s mind and the environment is strained, interrupted and intruded upon by that which it is trying to cover up. Raymonde’s insistence on forgetting – her assertion that ‘she had utterly forgotten’ (p. 98) – is disturbed and haunted by the ‘sound of feet’ (p. 98) of young men

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marching to war: ‘There were feet, feet, feet, feet passing up Sloane Street on the way to Victoria. London had forgotten. She was one with London. She had forgotten. She came to London to forget – feet, feet, feet, feet’ (p. 98). These feet haunt the streets of London and Raymonde’s mind, just as their repeated refrain echoes, from this point onward, throughout the lines of the text. They also anticipate the poetic feet that inhabit the latter part of the text, since Raymonde’s attempt to forget the war is intimately connected with a repression of her poetic creativity, both of which are unwillingly released after Ermentrude’s visit. This visit disturbs Raymonde’s blurred state, reactivates the past she is attempting to forget – both her own and history’s past – and causes her to begin writing again. In the early part of ‘Murex’, both history and the psyche are structured palimpsestically containing layers that have been covered over and repressed, only to be resurrected by some form of reagent. Ermentrude acts as this reagent, bringing to light the layers of Raymonde’s past that she has repressed. Ermentrude resurrects the figures of Mavis and Freddie, just as palimpsest editors used reagents to resurrect the underlying scripts of palimpsests. In fact, ‘Ermentrude was some sort of witch, some mage, some clairvoyant who had power as well to let others see what she so oddly must be seeing’ (pp. 108–9). Ermentrude is ‘a witch as potent as the Erictho of Lucan’ (De Quincey 1998b, p. 143), the Thessalian witch who specialized in reanimating the dead to whom Thomas De Quincey compares the sorceries of nineteenth-century palimpsest editors. Due to Ermentrude’s reagency, Raymonde realizes that the layers of her past have survived precisely because of her burial of them, just as in a palimpsest the underlying script is preserved as a result of its palimpsesting. Raymonde’s repression has preserved, concealed from sight, ‘a whole realm of past memories with their corresponding vistas’ (p. 139). They ‘had been there all the time and it was Mavis who had kept them there, kept them fresh, for Mavis had been the very obstruction, the lava, the ashes, as it were, of that past disruption’ (p. 139). In the simultaneously destructive and creative act of palimpsesting, Mavis has both obscured and preserved Raymonde’s husband for her: By facing that straight, a whole area of Raymonde’s subconsciousness was shifted, was opened up as if a layer of hardened, protective sand and lava had been sifted. Behind that layer, the things that had been (really because of that layer) blighted were, by the same token, now fresh. The thing that had ruined her memories, had kept them from her consciousness, left them forever static, frozen eternally, images, eternal witness of the spirit. Mavis had blighted Freddie. She had saved him. (p. 143)

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Raymonde resists Ermentrude’s reactivation of the suppressed layers of the past for to confront the past, to pull any one thread out of the complex weave ‘of her life’s fabric’ (p. 101), would be to open up the present to the past in an ‘odd searing gash and tear’ (p. 101). Raymonde wishes to resist this rupturing and would rather ‘let well enough alone’ for ‘the past was the past’ (p. 101). But the reactivation of the underlying layers of the palimpsest of Raymonde’s life undermines this platitude and provokes a change in the text’s figuration of history and the psyche. The reactivation of the underlying layers of the palimpsest, which have hitherto remained unseen, forces Raymonde to confront the interwoven palimpsestuousness of her life’s fabric in which the present is inhabited by the past, in which temporality is defined by what Geoff Bennington, after Jacques Derrida, has called ‘the necessary non-coincidence of the present with itself’ (1987, p. 17).8 The present is inseparable from the past, in fact, it only has meaning for Raymonde – she only exists in it both emotionally and literally – precisely because it is part of the past: ‘the present only as it was part of that past was part also of her’ (p. 101). With the reactivation of the underlying script of Raymonde’s life and mind, the language of obliteration and blurring of the opening part of ‘Murex’ dissolves.9 At first it is replaced by images of veiling and unveiling, of things hidden behind other things which are now revealed. This occurs in relation to Raymonde’s perception that Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ ‘“has some sort of veil across it. You can almost pull it aside and see them dancing. Back of the Botticelli there is another Botticelli”’ (p. 103). But it also occurs in relation to the figure of Raymonde ‘herself’. Ermentrude’s reactivation of the repressed layers of Raymonde’s past causes the resurrection of Raymonde’s poetic under-self, the androgynous poet Ray Bart: ‘Behind the Botticelli, there was another Botticelli, behind London there was another London, behind Raymonde Ransome there was (odd and slightly crude but somehow “taking” nom-de-guerre) Ray Bart’ (p. 104). Ray Bart is ‘the poet, the young spearman who was Raymonde’s genius. Ray Bart held a sword of pure steel and it was Ermy who recalled her’ (p. 127). Once this resurrection occurs, the language of the text shifts away from the palimpsestic, beyond even images of veiling and unveiling, and moves into the palimpsestuous. Raymonde progresses from thinking of things as ‘over-lapping’ (p. 133), and of ‘over-layers’ (p. 135), to perceiving things as ‘overlayed and interworked’ (p. 134), to thinking of the ‘interlayer’ (p. 163). As this shift occurs, the prose becomes increasingly inhabited by the insistent poetic refrain – ‘Feet, feet, feet, feet’ – which eventually transforms into the lines of the poem which Raymonde-Ray Bart, unwillingly, begins to compose:

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Feet, feet, feet, feet. No, Freddie, no Freddie not metres. Not poems. Not that kind of feet. Not trochaic, iambic or whatever, not verse, free or otherwise. I am listening to something. To feet, feet, feet, but not that kind, not your kind Freddie. No not iambic feet, not beat and throb of metre, no Freddie. I don’t want to write it. Now she may say that I adore her face – (pp. 145–6) In ‘Deconstruction and fiction’ (2000), during a discussion of the relationship between fiction, autobiography and truth, Derek Attridge cites an interview with the South African writer J. M. Coetzee in which Coetzee describes the process of writing as he understands it: It is naive to think that writing is a simple two-stage process: first you decide what you want to say, then you say it. On the contrary, as all of us know, you write because you do not know what you want to say . . . Writing, then, involves an interplay between the push into the future that takes you to the blank page in the first place, and a resistance. Part of that resistance is psychic, but part is also an automatism built into language: the tendency of words to call up other words, to fall into patterns that keep propagating themselves. Out of that interplay there emerges, if you are lucky, what you recognize or hope to recognize as the true. I don’t see that ‘straight’ autobiographical writing is any different in kind from what I have been describing. (Coetzee 1992, p. 18) Coetzee’s reference to ‘straight’ autobiography recalls H. D.’s language in her letter to Bryher and the direct equivalence between her life and writing which she thinks is necessary in order to ‘cure’ her psychic trauma. But Coetzee’s description of writing is also significant in drawing attention to the unconscious at work in the process of composition, as well as the resistance to writing that one can experience even as one undertakes it. Coetzee suggests that this is a psychic resistance and also a resistance caused by the self-propagating nature of words themselves. Coetzee perceives the independent life of words as something to be contended with, since it threatens the achievement of ‘the true’, a concept Coetzee retains even if that ‘truth’ is only arrived at in and through the process of writing. In ‘Murex’, as Raymonde-Ray Bart begins to compose her poem, the reader witnesses her psychic resistance to this process since it involves a return to the poetic creativity which she associates with the act of remembering the past. Raymonde resists writing for the same reason that she resists confronting the past: ‘it was easier to forget than to remember. To

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remember. Poetry was to remember’ (p. 155). Nevertheless, in the latter stages of the text, Raymonde-Ray Bart’s stream of consciousness is repeatedly interrupted by lines of poetry which push through into it, at the same time both sought and unbidden.10 Raymonde’s mind wanders through, among other things, thoughts about the process of writing poetry, Cret-d’y-Vau, Mavis and betrayal, hospitality, whether it’s too late to eat supper, borrowings from other poets, the quality of her verse, Ermy, art and antiquity; she even holds a telephone conversation with Mavis. At the same time, both produced by, and producing, this stream of consciousness, the lines of verse begin to appear: sometimes they appear in the prose, and are then transcribed as verse; sometimes they appear in the verse and are then repeated and considered in the prose; sometimes they are rewritten, sometimes they remain the same. Raymonde-Ray Bart recopies, makes corrections, alterations. She produces a poem that arises from her experiences with and thoughts about Ermentrude, Mavis and herself, but also from a picture on a rug in her room, her thoughts about the far past (antiquity), the influence of other writers, the sound of the words together on the line. The poem produced is a palimpsest of every aspect of Raymonde’s past and present life, thought, reading and experience. It is, in part, Raymonde’s address to Ermentrude on the subject of Mavis and Martin, but the ‘automatism built into language’ (Coetzee 1992, p. 18), ‘the tendency of words to call up other words, to fall into patterns that keep propagating themselves’ (p. 18) also gives this poem a life of its own which cannot be reduced to that of its author, not least since the identity of that author is not stable but in constant formation in and by the act of writing. ‘Murex’ provides evidences of the reciprocal interrelation of biographical experience and poetic writing: Raymonde’s conscious and unconscious prose thoughts produce and modify the poetry; the poetry produces and modifies her identity and her lived experience both in the past and as and in the very moment of writing. Jacques Derrida’s understanding of the autobiographical in relation to philosophy can usefully be adapted in order to account for and explain this movement. In ‘Deconstruction and psychoanalysis’ (2000), Maud Ellmann explains that ‘for Jacques Derrida, the “autobiographical” refers not to the fullness of a human presence, nor to the intentions of the author, but to the intrusion of the accidents of writing into the abstractions of pure reason’ (p. 228). In a similar way, ‘Murex’ exhibits the interpenetration of autobiography and fiction, the inhabitation of the fictive by the biographical, the haunting of the biographical by the fictive. In Derrida and Autobiography (1995), Robert Smith suggests that the autobiographical that cannot be eradicated from philos-

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ophy might be described ‘(very gingerly) as the dehiscence of the literary into the philosophical’ (p. 4).11 I would suggest that the title of the volume in which ‘Murex’ appears offers a more effective metaphor for the relationship of life and writing, retaining, as it does, an emphasis on the textuality of each. Life and writing exist in a palimpsestuous intimacy that queers the very notions of the ‘fictive’ and the ‘autobiographical’: the ‘straight’ autobiographical narrative to which H. D. aspires is always queered by the fictionalizing frills of memory and narrative; any fictive narrative is always already inhabited and queered by the life of the writing subject who is formed by it.12 ‘Murex’ warns against ‘the fallacy of psychobiography’ (Ellmann 2000, p. 228) – a non-gendered version of the autobiographical phallacy – which Derrida perceives as the tendency ‘to subordinate the writing to the writer, to treat “the work” as merely the representation of “the life”’ (Ellmann 2000, p. 228). As Ellmann argues, the very concept of representation relies on the ‘violent hierarchies’ that structure logocentric thought, privileging origin over derivative, signified over signifier, presence over re-presentation. Psychobiography colludes in this violence when it construes unconscious motives as the prior cause of which the text is the delayed effect. This is what Nietzsche called the error of ‘mistaking the last for the first’. In the time of reading, the text comes first, the motives of the author second, deduced from our interpretation of the text; it is only through a chronological reversal that the author is promoted to the cause, the text demoted to the consequence. (pp. 228–9) In this context, Ellmann suggests that Derrida’s now infamous pronouncement that ‘there is nothing outside of the text’, can be understood to mean that a writer ‘is known to his readers only in and through the texts he wrote, and those that others wrote about him’ (p. 229). The palimpsestuous relationship between writing and experience figured in ‘Murex’ may lend support to the reader’s own desire to draw connections between Raymonde-Ray Bart’s life and writing process in this text, and that of the life and writing process of the signature on that text, Hilda Doolittle-H. D. In playing out the life–writing relationship, the text offers the possibility of such a critical activity, as does the similarity of Raymonde’s experience to that of H. D.’s: like Raymonde-Ray Bart, Hilda-H. D. suffered great loss and romantic betrayal during the war years which provoked a writer’s block that was only relieved with the reactivation of the past by an uncannily perceptive Jew. But ‘Murex’ exhibits the fact that just as fiction is always

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queered by its palimpsestuous relationship with life, so too is life always queered by its relationship with fiction. The insistent emergence of the poetic lines in ‘Murex’, against Raymonde-Ray Bart’s will, enforces the realization that the writer is not the source of language and meaning but rather ‘subject to and positioned by language’ (Buck 1991, p. 36). Thus, ‘Murex’ does not reveal H. D. to the reader; rather, it reveals that the issues of textuality, subjectivity and sexuality explored in the fictional prose are part of an elaborate and continuous working through of these issues in H. D.’s texts – be they fictional or non-fictional – texts through which the ‘identity’ of ‘H. D.’ was, and to some extent still is, in a constant process of palimpsestuous production: There is no fixed or constant self to be expressed, no authenticity within or beyond these texts to which the reader might gain access through the writing. What Derrida calls autobiography, therefore, does not consist of the reflection of a fully realized personality, but refers to scattered fragments of contingency . . . This flotsam escapes, rather than expresses, the self; it testifies to the dispersal and dismemberment of subjectivity in writing rather than to any prior plenitude of consciousness. (Ellmann 2000, p. 229)

Palimpsestuous Choreographies: ‘Secret Name’ In Queer Poetics (1999), Mary E. Galvin begins her discussion of H. D. by explaining that H. D.’s reputation is based primarily on her status as imagist poet and that, despite H. D.’s bisexuality, critical attention has invariably focused on the impact of her heterosexual relationships on her poetry – most significantly her engagement to Ezra Pound. In contrast, Galvin argues that the publication of Her in 1981 and Asphodel and Paint It Today in 1992, ‘brings to light the significance that H. D. gave to two lesbian relationships in her psychic and poetic development’ (p. 106). Galvin argues that, in contrast to the predominantly heterosexual interpretation of H. D.’s life, what the evidence of these novels indicates is the need for a complete critical reevaluation of H. D.’s bisexuality. Such a reevaluation must include a consideration of H. D.’s active engagement with a poetics of disruption, especially as it relates to the deconstruction of a binary system of gender identity. (p. 107)

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Rather than providing such a re-evaluation, Galvin’s discussion focuses on H. D.’s first published poem – ‘Hermes of the Ways’ – which, Galvin argues, is a palimpsest of the transformed identities of the figure of Hermes which delineates ‘the encroachment of patriarchal thinking on the earlier matriarchal systems’ (p. 112). Galvin explores H. D.’s use of the palimpsest as a figure for myth, history and temporality, but there is no discussion, despite the promise of the chapter’s title – ‘“A Curious Secret”: H. D. and the palimpsest of sexual identity’ – of the relationship between the palimpsest and the issue of sexual identity. This relationship can, however, be productively explored in a reading of the third story in Palimpsest, ‘Secret Name’, which prefigures two of the key components of contemporary queer theory’s deconstruction of the binary gender system: queer sexuality and the performativity of gender. Just as H. D.’s writing resists biographical decoding, it also, as Buck has noted, resists hermeneutic authority since it anticipates the critical theory that simultaneously elucidates and is elucidated by it.13 As a result, the exploration of sexuality and subjectivity in ‘Secret Name’ contributes both towards an understanding of the complex sexuality of ‘H. D.’, as well as towards contemporary critical theory’s ongoing interrogation of such issues. In ‘Choreographies’ (1982), Jacques Derrida dreams of deconstructing the binary system of gender identity: . . . what if we were to reach, what if we were to approach here (for one does not arrive at this as one would at a determined location) the area of a relationship to the other where the code of sexual marks would no longer be discriminating? The relationship would not be a-sexual, far from it, but would be sexual otherwise: beyond the binary difference that governs the decorum of codes, beyond the opposition feminine/ masculine, beyond bisexuality as well, beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality which come to the same thing. As I dream of saving the chance that this question offers I would like to believe in the multiplicity of sexually marked voices. I would like to believe in the masses, this indeterminable number of blended voices, this mobile of non-identified sexual marks who choreography can carry, divide, multiply the body of each ‘individual’, whether he be classified as ‘man’ or as ‘woman’ according to the criteria of usage. Of course, it is not impossible that desire for a sexuality without numbers can still protect us, like a dream, from an implacable destiny which immures everything for life in the number 2. And should this merciless closure arrest desire at the wall of opposition, we would struggle in vain: there will never be but two sexes, neither one more nor one less. Tragedy would leave this strange sense,

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a contingent one finally, that we must affirm and learn to love instead of dreaming of the innumerable. Yes, perhaps; why not? But where would the ‘dream’ of the innumerable come from, if it is indeed a dream? Does the dream itself not prove that what is dreamt of must be there in order for it to provide the dream? Then too, I ask you, what kind of dance would there be, or would there be one at all, if the sexes were not exchanged according to rhythms that vary considerably? In a quite rigorous sense, the exchange alone could not suffice either, however, because the desire to escape the combinatory itself, to invent incalculable choreographies, would remain. (p. 66) Derrida’s words echo in Buck’s argument that in H. D.’s quest for an unmediated language and an autonomous subjectivity, ‘the impossibility of either . . . is in a sense beside the point’ (1991, p. 54). Just as Derrida suggests that the dream of a sexuality beyond binary difference proves this very possibility, even if its actuality is impossible, Buck argues that ‘by holding the fantasy open H. D. also represents and sustains the desire itself, which in turn represents the possibility of a subjectivity not reducible to the terms of a phallic organisation of sexual difference’ (pp. 54–5). Buck’s work already goes some way towards providing the critical re-evaluation of H. D.’s bisexuality of which Galvin dreamt eight years later. For although Buck admits that H. D.’s ‘bisexuality’ has much in common with the freeing creative androgyny espoused by Virginia Woolf – wherein ‘bisexuality stands for the possibility of a new sexual identity, bringing together masculinity and femininity into a new unity which is also a transcendence of difference’ (p. 11) – Buck also crucially argues, ‘that a different understanding of bisexuality is also relevant here’ (p. 11). She locates this understanding in the work of the feminist psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell, who argues that bisexuality stands as the mark of the instability of sexuality and sexual difference. Instead of providing the basis for a more complete sexual identity, bisexuality, she suggests, is the sign that masculinity and femininity are not identities but positions of desire to which the subject has an uncertain and shifting relationship. Her basic proposition is that we cannot have one without the other – each implies and defines the other. Yet neither can we have both together in the sense of a unified whole, since each cancels the other. (p. 11) Buck suggests that this is the model of bisexuality to be found in H. D.’s writing, as well as one which offers itself as ‘a model for reading her

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because H. D. undoes the division between self and text in her work. Thus the way we read bisexuality as a structuring of subjectivity is fundamental to the way we read H. D.’s text’ (p. 11). Buck identifies the duality of bisexuality – ‘“a little bit of both”’ (p. 86) – which strategically marks ‘the uncertainty of the sexual division itself’ (p. 86) and which is also present in Freud’s use of the term. She does not, however, although it underlies her argument, make explicit another duality in the term bisexuality, referring as it does to gender on the one hand, and to sexual desire on the other: bisexuality means having both sexes in the same individual and the state or condition of being sexually attracted to individuals of both sexes. In the first instance, bisexuality becomes an indicator of (gender) identity, even if that identity is a dual one; in the second, it becomes an indicator of desire, a far more shifting ground for (sexual) identity and one which does indeed make ‘bisexuality the mark of the difficulty or uncertainty of sexual identity, rather than the foundation of an alternative identity’ (Buck 1991, pp. 87–8). Buck is concerned to argue, against previous commentators, that H. D.’s concept of bisexuality does not lead to a comfortable synthesis of masculine and feminine, nor does it ‘fulfil the role of support for an image of the woman conceived as a unified sexual identity’ (p. 88). Her concern, then, is primarily with the first aspect of bisexuality, that is, its relationship to gender identity and, specifically, with the feminist quest for a unified female subject. In contrast to Buck, in reading ‘Secret Name’ I am curious to explore the second meaning of bisexuality – bisexual desire – and to consider how the text exposes the palimpsestuousness of the queer subject who is continually crossed by both heterosexual and homosexual desire. The title of ‘Secret Name’ is derived from the epigraph which H. D. takes from a Hieratic papyrus of the XXth dynasty. The papyrus tells how the goddess Isis tricks Ra into telling her his ‘secret name’, the source of his, and subsequently her, magic: ‘But Isis held her peace; never a word did she speak, for she knew that Ra had told her the names that all men know; his true Name, his Secret Name, was still hidden in his breast.’ (cited in H. D. 1968, p. 173) In the Osiris Legend, Isis needs to acquire Ra’s magic in order to resurrect her dead and dismembered lover Osiris and so conceive his child. Osiris, resurrected, cannot live in the land of the living but presides over Duat, the abode of the dead, until the final battle in which his son Horus defeats his enemy Seth one last time, and Osiris will be able to return to the world again.14 The epigraph thus alludes to a legend about female power, about

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resurrection and living on, and about the ‘secret name’, the individual’s hidden identity, which is a source of power and must remain concealed. Following this epigraph, the text of ‘Secret Name’ opens with the cryptic reflections of Helen Fairwood, the story’s protagonist: She didn’t know what it was. She could pretend to be very stupid. It was not, though, after all a pretence: she was. But hardly, with her sense curiously attuned, could she in all consciousness, put her finger on the thing or the absence of the thing, a sort of ache, that made her that. Intellectuality. Brain. (p. 173) The title, epigraph and opening reflections make the reader curious as to what Helen’s ‘secret name’ might be: what is it that she decides that ‘she was’? What does this ‘sort of ache’ (p. 173) signify, that is dulled or subdued by the presence of the man, Rafton, sitting next to her in the opening scene? What does it mean that the presence of Rafton’s ‘firm-knit figure’ is ‘a pleasant reminder that the thing, the avid ache, was gone’ (p. 173)? ‘Secret Name’ is a palimpsest of two texts. The first is the text of Helen’s flirtation with Rafton, a fellow guest at the Egyptian hotel in which she is staying. Its story is told in the events of the plot – a conversation, an evening stroll, a late night trip to Karnak, a refused night-cap – and in the direct speech between Helen and Rafton. Intertwined with this is another text constituted by the free indirect narration of Helen’s thoughts and feelings throughout this liaison. The ‘identity’ of ‘Secret Name’ is dependent on the palimpsestuous intimacy of, and tension between, these two texts. Likewise, Helen’s sexual ‘identity’ is determined by the intimacy of, and tension between, the heterosexual and homosexual desire they respectively depict. For Helen’s ‘secret’ is that which Michel Foucault argues is ‘the subject’s secret and the secret of subjectivity’ (Buck 1991, p. 7) – sexuality – and, here, its name is ‘queer’. The word ‘queer’ surfaces repeatedly in ‘Secret Name’; it is clearly being used in its original sense of strange, odd, peculiar or eccentric, but the homosexual connotations of the word (recorded by The Oxford English Dictionary as early as 1922) also inhabit the text. Helen is queer because of her intellectuality, but she is also queer because of her sexuality, both of which she seeks to conceal from the other characters in the story and, primarily, from Rafton. When conversing with Rafton, ‘lest he should think her “odd”, lest he should think her “queer”, she valiantly pursued her plan of indolence’ (p. 183):

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She was making remarks that she believed in no way betrayed her. She didn’t want him to know of these constant aberrations, these psychohysterical visionary sensations. Lest he should think her ‘queer’, lest he should think her ‘odd’, she continued pitter-patter of a sort. (p. 187) Rafton is not simply ‘ex-captain of the Great War, now on the way to Assuan, requisitioned by the offices of Public Works in Cairo’ (p. 176), but a figure symbolic of all men whom she is using in order to play out ‘something psycho-emotional in her nature’ (p. 177). Helen fears that her heterosexual attraction to Rafton might disturb the queer balance she is constantly struggling to maintain between her heterosexual and homosexual desire. However, in the end, her very queerness, even as it contains within it her heterosexual desire, haunts and disrupts that desire. No matter how much she may want to embrace the heterosexuality that Rafton represents, she cannot. Symbolically, Helen is unable to take the gifts that Rafton presents to her: ‘He seemed, rock-still in his chair, to expect her to take, to examine the trifles. Perversely she didn’t. She knew it was perverse. She wanted to so awfully’ (pp. 178–9). Helen wants to discover mankind’s history, and secret, of heterosexual relations, ‘to dive deep, deep, courageously down into some unexploited region of the consciousness, into some common deep sea of unrecorded knowledge and bring, triumphant, to the surface some treasure buried, lost, forgotten’ (p. 179). She craves the revelation that would enable her to make sense of heterosexuality and thus ‘seal herself to him with that curious green stone, in some recognized relationship’ (p. 179), but she cannot. Rather, Helen resurrects from the past an image of the former owner of the ring, an ‘incredibly slender Graeco-Egyptian’ (p. 179) who – like Hiapparchia in the opening story of Palimpsest – is drowned in a moment by ‘the heavy, heavy, scarab’ (p. 179) as the ‘heavy carnal Roman’ (p. 179) weighs down upon her. Helen’s liaison with Rafton convinces the Americans wintering in Egypt of her heteronormativity, her acceptability. While Mrs Thorpe-Wharton is initially suspicious of Helen – ‘is she actually one of them?’ (p. 196) – ‘the little duet on the grey stone flagging of the piazza’ (p. 196) sets her in ‘another category, “my dear, actually ogling”, discovering in spite of presumed cleverness that this secretary something-of-the-sort, was a woman’ (p. 196). However, throughout the text Helen Fairwood’s stream of consciousness constantly points to the performative quality of her flirtation with Rafton and her adoption of heterosexual femininity. In an attempt to conform to this code, she dresses in feminine attire entirely inappropriate for their night-time trip to Karnak, but she also wears a

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‘heavy unsuitable glove that she had put on at the last thinking less of elegance than of comfort’ (p. 215). During the course of his unsuccessful advances, Rafton symbolically worries at, but cannot get past, this practical non-feminine glove. Adopting feminine attire allows Helen to anticipate her heterosexual success with Rafton: She was dressed and knew from the startled tilt of the girl Mary’s fine chin a premonition of what was about to happen to the captain when he should stroll, in dinner jacket, searching coffee tables, settees in the lower hall, ‘what, you?’ In well-feigned surprise, hadn’t she in that spider consciousness practised it? (pp. 197–8) Although it also causes her to imagine making a ‘“set” at Mrs ThorpeWharton’s latest colonel’ (p. 198) later in the evening, in the end she realizes that ‘No, no, no. It was unthinkable. This was really silly, it was the girl Mary she was, in all conscience, after’ (p. 198). The following day, Mary and Helen make a return trip to Karnak when she is now ‘dressed in her usual work things, great pocketed dust-coat and wide straw hat’ (p. 224). As a result, ‘she was ready now for anything’ (p. 224), ‘“and you know queer things do happen in these old temples”’ (p. 236). On returning to Karnak, Helen momentarily achieves the harmony which has previously proved such a constant struggle to achieve and maintain. The partitions she has established within herself, the boundaries between the selves encrypted within her self – ‘self and self carefully housed, and self and self carefully guarded by herself ’ (p. 227) – melt away. Sitting with Mary in the same spot where Rafton made his unsuccessful advances the previous evening, Helen makes a ‘formal constatation’ (p. 230) in which she explicitly acknowledges the homosexual part of her palimpsestuous queer identity: Deep in some dark layer and layer of inwash and overwash and interplay of current, leaving one released, free, inundated thus and indisseverable. Today, at noon (now it must be) the sun at its tropic intensity (beating through the rough linen and thinnish layers of shantung beneath) brought out a secondary layer of inter-related potentialities. For weren’t she and Mary in their outlook singularly . . . alike? . . . Thin and virile, the two were temperamentally matched and physically. The sun smote alike on her and on young Mary (for all her school-girl insistence on the romantic character of this ’steenth proposal) alike, indifferently. Infatuated, both of them, come down to dots, with life, with some adventure, wherein Love might come, would

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come, temperamentally, destructively, but which in the end would free them. (pp. 230–1) Recognizing her homosexual desire, Helen’s perception of her surroundings changes – what last night had appeared in black and white is now infused with colour. Nike’s birth-house – by which Helen had been attracted the previous evening – has disappeared. This does not trouble Helen since ‘it was obvious enough in all consciousness that the small Nike edifice had been a dream’ (p. 234), analogous to the dream of heterosexuality which she had entertained in her liaison with Rafton. Helen wonders ‘if she had gone further’ the previous evening, ‘would she, fourth dimensional, have followed Rafton, fourth dimensional, up those steps that utterly she had proved, were of another element?’ (p. 235). If she had gone further with Rafton, she would have moved into a different, heterosexual, dimension symbolized by Nike’s birth-house, which had been ‘placed at the exact end of the narrow straight path, the path that led straight, continuing the line to the wall upon which they had been sitting [emphases added]’ (p. 236). Her refusal to follow that path the previous evening has enabled the truthful self-awareness of the day: ‘What she herself was, she could, with the heavy sun a weight across her linen shoulders, actually up to a point consider’ (p. 235). This queer reading of ‘Secret Name’ offers a critical re-evaluation of the ‘bisexuality’ explored in H. D.’s texts by refiguring it in terms palimpsestuous queerness. The advantage of this figuration is that it emphasizes, in a way that the term bisexuality does not, the troubling interpenetration, transversing, ‘movement’, ‘eddying’ (all words Eve Sedgwick uses to describe the term ‘queer’) within queerness of homosexual and heterosexual desire.15 It also enables an understanding of Freud’s theories of psychosexual development in relation to the palimpsest, theories by which H. D. was influenced. According to Freud, each individual is essentially bisexual and has to repress either their masculine or feminine self, and their heterosexual or homosexual desire.16 Whereas heterosexual adult sexuality is the result of an effective process of palimpsesting in which the underlying text is successfully erased, in queer sexuality both texts coexist on the surface of the palimpsest, transversing, twisting and troubling the other. This troubling is the source of the obliteration and paralysis that Helen experiences in her heterosexual relationship with Rafton, a version of the heterosexual relationship described by DuPlessis as ‘romantic thralldom’:

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Romantic thralldom is an all-encompassing, totally defining love between apparent unequals. The lover has the power of conferring selfworth and purpose upon the loved one. Such love is possessive, and while those enthralled feel it completes and even transforms them, dependency rules. The eroticism of romantic love, born of this unequal relationship, may depend for its satisfaction upon dominance and submission. Thralldom insists upon the differences between the sexes or partners, encouraging a sense of mystery surrounding the motives and powers of the lover. Because it begins and ends in polarization, the sustenance of different spheres is both a cause and an effect of romantic love. (1985, pp. 66–7)17 DuPlessis argues that ‘viewed from a critical, feminist perspective, the sense of completion or transformation that often accompanies such thralldom has the high price of obliteration and paralysis’ (p. 67). ‘Secret Name’ highlights that the significant point here is precisely the location of the initial perspective, for in this text it is the queerness of the initial perspective, or identity, that determines heterosexuality as an untenable relationality. This is not an essential quality of heterosexuality as such, but rather the price of such relationality for those women whose identity is palimpsestuously queer, and therefore whose spiritual, romantic and creative fulfilment lies beyond the realm of heterosexual erotics, narratives and culture, even if, at the same time, she might still desire to lie within the arms of a man.

Conclusion: Queering palimpsestuousness In Queer Theory (1996), Annamarie Jagose provides a brief history of the word ‘queer’ in order to explain and contextualize its most recent semantic manifestation in the context of late-twentieth-century poststructuralist thought. Jagose explains that the development of the term ‘queer’ in the 1990s has arisen out of poststructuralism’s influence on lesbian and gay studies, specifically its destabilization of the concept of a unified or stable identity. This has led to criticism of the terms ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ as identity categories and opened the space for ‘queer’ as a model of difference, not of identity. Jagose places the emergence of queer at the most recent end of the modern history of the decentring of the Cartesian subject, a history populated by such figures as Louis Althusser, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Since, as we saw in Chapter 3, the palimpsest also takes a significant place in this history as a figure for the poststructuralist notion of the spectralized subject,

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‘queer’ and ‘the palimpsest’ can be understood as structurally comparable figures for the essential involutedness of identity, be it sexual, gender or racial. The concepts of queer and the palimpsest share a similar aetiology: the construction of queer as an intellectual model has been made possible by the insights of lesbian and gay studies; that of the palimpsest by Thomas De Quincey’s essay and the subsequent figuration and refiguration of the palimpsest from 1845 to the present day. Both terms have been further realized in the context of the ‘historically specific knowledges which constitute late-twentieth-century western thought’ (Jagose 1996, p. 77). While Jagose demonstrates how this is the case in relation to ‘queer’, in the theoretical and literary engagements in this study – which are guided primarily by poststructuralist thought, at the same time as critically engaged with it – I aim to have examined and performed this reinscription in relation to the palimpsest. In order for concepts like the palimpsest and queer to remain critically effective they must stay open to the possibility of further reinscription. Such is Judith Butler’s argument in a critical assessment of the term ‘queer’ at the end of Bodies that Matter (1993). Here Butler insists of queer that, if the term . . . is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes. (p. 228)18 Butler’s insistence applies as equally to the concept of the palimpsest as it does to that of queer. For both concepts are governed by the history of the usages that one never controlled, but that constrain the very usage that now emblematizes autonomy; by the future efforts to deploy the term against the grain of the current ones, and that will exceed the control of those who seek to set the course of the terms in the present. (Butler 1993, p. 228) The concept of the palimpsest is not only determined by, but structurally embodies, this historicity of critical terms and their perpetual openness to critical and imaginative reinscription – an openness that is necessary for the exposure, affirmation and reworking of that historicity, as well as for their present and future effectivity. The palimpsestuous coupling of queer

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The Palimpsest

and the palimpsest draws attention to both the queerness of the palimpsest and the palimpsestuousness of queer, not just as both these terms are applicable to descriptions of identity, but also as they can be extended, as has been done in this study, to queer traditional understandings of history, identity, temporality, metaphor, reading, writing, sexuality and textuality. Identifying the queerness and queering power of palimpsestuousness – this study’s end, in both senses of that word – points up its continuing capacity to reinscribe otherwise traditional literary, critical and theoretical modes of thought.

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Chapter 1

Notes

Chapter 1 1 The Oxford English Dictionary’s citation of De Quincey’s essay as the first figurative use of palimpsests is misleading here. Earlier figurative uses can be found in Plutarch (1957, p. 411, 504D) and (1960, p. 47, 779C) and in St John Chrysostom – see Edward Maunde Thompson (1912, pp. 64–5) and Charles William Russell (1867, p. 100). Moreover, in the preface to ‘The Wanderings of Cain’ (1828), Samuel Taylor Coleridge declares that ‘I have in vain tried to recover the lines from the Palimpsest tablet of my memory’ (1997, p. 218). 2 The word ‘province’ comes from the Latin provincia meaning an official duty or charge, a province. But its derivation is uncertain – its literal meaning is ‘that which offers itself at first sight’, from pro and vincêre to conquer, but this does not explain the earliest known usage in Latin. The word ‘province’ itself, then, is strangely of no province, not even the province of the meaning attached to it. 3 Many writers have sought to examine and explain the relationship between criticism and theory in their practice. See, for example, Gérard Genette’s preface to Narrative Discourse (1980): ‘What I propose here is essentially a method of analysis; I must therefore recognize that by seeking the specific I find the universal, and that by wishing to put theory at the service of criticism I put criticism, against my will, at the service of theory. This is the paradox of every poetics, and doubtless of every other activity of knowledge as well: always torn between those two unavoidable commonplaces – that there are no objects except particular ones and no science except of the general – but always finding comfort and something like attraction in this other, slightly widespread truth, that the general is at the heart of the particular, and therefore (contrary to the common preconception) the knowable is at the heart of the mysterious’ (p. 23). In the end, Genette explains his ‘methodological giddiness’ thus: ‘perhaps the real relationship between “theoretical” dryness and critical meticulousness is one of refreshing rotation and mutual entertainment. May the reader also find in that relationship a sort of periodic diversion, like the insomniac turning over and over in search of a better position: amant alterna Camenae’ (p. 23) – ‘alternate strains are to the Muses dear’ (Virgil 1952, III.59). 127

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4 The conclusion McDonagh draws from this insight is markedly different from the figuration of history, culture and identity that I argue the palimpsest performs. McDonagh argues that since the palimpsest functions on the surface level, and ‘physical depth represents historical distance’, that ‘all texts are joined together on the surface of the palimpsest, their temporal distance slipping away into an eternal present that is somehow completed in the presence of the original ancient text’ (p. 211). In disagreement with McDonagh, in my engagement with De Quincey in Chapter 3, I argue that the palimpsest does not elide temporal difference but performs a spectralization of temporality theorized in poststructuralist discourse and recognized by De Quincey himself. In that Chapter I also take issue with McDonagh’s identification of De Quincey’s palimpsest as a ‘model’ that she misplaces in a history of psychological models of the mind which includes the Empiricist’s tabula rasa and Sigmund Freud’s Mystic Writing-Pad. 5 Chapter 6 provides a detailed discussion of Palimpsests, hypertextuality and Genette’s concept of palimpsestuous reading. 6 This is a translation of a personal email correspondence with the author in which Lejeune kindly explained the origin of the term ‘palimpsestuous’. I am grateful to Lejeune for allowing me to reproduce that correspondence here. The French reads as follows: ‘vous comprenez maintenant pourquoi, dans son livre, il renvoie à mon invention, mais sans donner aucune référence . . . – puisque mon texte, à l’époque, était inédit . . . Voilà la petite histoire des couches de ce palimpseste . . .’. ‘Le Roland Barthes sans peine’ was reprinted in Moi Aussi (1986), where, under the subtitle ‘S/Z’, Lejeune marvels over the new invention of typewriter typex sheets used to correct typing errors: ‘j’achète chez le papetier de U. de petites feuilles dont P. L. m’a révelé l’existence: elles sont revêtues sur une face d’une substance blanchâtre, on en glisse une sous le ruban (après avoir fait régresser la machine d’un cran pour lui mettre le nez sur son erreur). Alors se passe une chose particulière: mon corps doit, volontairement cette fois, répéter la faute pour l’effacer. La lettre mauvaise se réinscrit sur elle-même, elle s’oblitère, elle s’oublie. Elle est alors palimpsestueuse. Le lieu litigieux est redevenu blanc, ou presque, imperceptiblement plus épais. Mais il y a retour du refoulé: l’encre de la lettre bonne que je retape ensuite mord moins bien sur le tracé crayeux surimprimé que sur la page blanche ellemême. Les parties communes aux deux lettres sont plus pâles, comme une cicatrice’ (1986, p. 115). 7 In that context, ‘palimpsestueuse’, and its English counterpart, ‘palimpsestuous’, have begun to gain critical currency. For example, in Papier Machine (2001), Derrida adopts Lejeune’s expression to describe precisely the kind of ‘literary memory’ evidenced in the story of its origin: ‘Rousseau y aurait gravé son nom dans l’économie archivale d’un palimpseste, par des quasi-citations prises dans l’épaisseur palimpsestueuse et ligneuse d’une mémoire quasi littéraire’ (p. 46); Peggy Kamuf translates ‘palimpsestueuse’ as ‘palimpsestuous’ in the English version of this text – ‘Rousseau would have inscribed his name in the archival economy of a palimpsest, by means of quasi-quotations drawn from the palimpsestuous and ligneous thickness of a quasi-literary memory’

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(Derrida 2002, p. 83); and, in The Uncanny (2003), Nicholas Royle evokes ‘a palimpsestuous phantom text’ (p. 284). I would like to thank Nicholas Royle for first drawing my attention to this term. 8 To do this in relation to the subject of his own inquiry in Politics of Security, Dillon includes an etymological and genealogical interlude on the word ‘security’ which returns to the Greek and Latin roots of the word (1996, p. 113–28). 9 In our correspondence, Lejeune suggested that this connection was present in his invention of the term: ‘je me suis amusé à lui [Barthes] attributer cette espèce de “mot-valise” qui me plaisait – dans un developpement inspiré par mes propres rapports avec ma machine à écrire, et qui sait peut-être aussi avec l’inceste!’; ‘I amused myself by attributing to [Barthes] this type of portmanteau word that I took pleasure in – in a development inspired by my own relationship with my typewriter, and, who knows, perhaps also with incest!’ It is a delightful coincidence that the text I have found most useful in my elaboration of the concept of palimpsestuousness here was written by my father. 10 For an excellent discussion of the palimpsest and Foucault’s concept of genealogy in the context of a critical reading of the heuristics of film restoration see Giorgio Bertellini (1995, pp. 277–90).

Chapter 2 1 De Quincey’s identification of a palimpsest as a ‘membrane’ may serve as a punch-line to the sexual play in this passage, marking out the palimpsest as inextricably involved with the physicality of the female hymen. See Chapter 6 for a discussion of the palimpsest in precisely this context. 2 For details of the sale and the challenge made by the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, who claimed the manuscript was stolen in the 1920s and in fact belongs to him, see Malcom W. Browne (1998a; 1998b). 3 In this text, Archimedes explains how he drew upon mechanical means to elucidate his mathematical theorems. The text also shows that he had devised a procedure similar to the integral calculus. The palimpsest is also the only source in the original Greek (a Latin translation by William of Moerbeke does exist) for the treatise On Floating Bodies in which Archimedes explores the physics of flotation and explains the formal proof for the principle of specific gravity. 4 For full details of the history of the Archimedes palimpsest including information on its conservation, imaging and the scholarship surrounding its present study, see: www.archimedespalimpsest.org. Media interest is evident in articles on the Archimedes Palimpsest that have appeared in the UK and US popular press, for instance in the New York Times and the Sunday Times Magazine. See, for just a few examples, Malcome W. Browne (1998a; 1998b), William Peakin (2001) and Gina Kolata (2003). See Netz (2000) for a discussion of the impact the palimpsest has had on our understanding of the origins of mathematical physics.

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5 See Richard Parkinson and Stephen Quirke (1995, p. 47). For further evidence of papyrus palimpsests see Plate 40 – ‘MEANDER, Sikyonios. P. Sorbonne Inv. 2272b. Later iii BC’ in E. G. Turner (1971, pp. 74–5). 6 Responding to a letter from his friend Trebatius in 53 BC, Cicero praises his friend for his thrift in writing on palimpsest parchment – ‘Nam quod in palimpsesto, laudo equidem parsimoniam (As to your using a palimpsest, I admire your thrift)’ (1959, pp. 56 and 57). Contemporary with Cicero’s letter is a poem by Catullus in which he gently satirizes his friend Suffenus’ blindness to his own weakness as a poet. Instead of making modest palimpsest copies of his poor attempts at poetry, Suffenus inscribes them on new material with all the trappings of grandeur: nec sic, ut fit, in palimpsesto / Relata: chartae regiae, noui libri, / Noui umbilici, lora, rubra membrana, / Derecta plumbo et pumice omnia aequata. (Catullus 1951, pp. 41–2). A free translation of this reads: ‘No palimpsest copies but new books with new ivories inscribed on Augustan Royal, the lines lead-ruled, red tabs and red wrappers, the ends shaved with pumice’ (Catullus 1966, p. 75). A further allusion to palimpsesting occurs in one of Martial’s epigrams written around AD 100 in which he describes a gift of reusable tablets of parchment to be given at a feast: ‘Esse puta ceras, licet haec membrana vocetur: / delebis, quotiens scripta novare voles (Imagine these tablets are waxen, although they are called parchment. You will rub out as often as you wish to write afresh)’ (Martial 1961, pp. 442 and 443). Scholarly discussion surrounding these early references primarily focuses on the nature of the writing material being referred to in each instance, whether papyrus or parchment, and thus on the accurate early meaning of the word ‘palimpsest’: see Edward Maunde Thompson (1911, p. 633), Colin H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat (1983, p. 16–17), and Elias Avery Lowe (1972, p. 481). Although modern palaeographers generally use the term ‘palimpsest’ with reference to rewritten parchment manuscripts, as the ancient evidence shows, the term equally applies to rewritten papyrus manuscripts. The transition from the use of papyrus to parchment in the history of the manuscript is discussed by Roberts and Skeat. In summary, the process of transition was a long one, covering many centuries, during which both materials were in concurrent use. It seems safe to say that (for a combination of reasons) by the fourth century AD parchment had replaced papyrus as the writing material of choice. Prior to this date, there is evidence of extant papyrus palimpsests; after this date, the majority of extant palimpsests are vellum. For an extended account of the major centres of Latin palimpsest production see Lowe (1972, pp. 484–8). 7 See Figure 32 in Parkinson and Quirke (1995, p. 47). 8 Robert and Skeat identify the source of this recipe as the Papyrus Holmiensis which states: ‘αυτη δε και χαρτας γεγραµµενους παλιν ψα, ωστε δοκειν µηδεποτε γεγραϕθαι κτλ . . . εαν δε εις χαρτην, µονα τα γραµµατα χριε’ (cited in Roberts and Skeat 1983, p. 17) – ‘You must erase the inscribed papyri, so as to make them (appear) as if they have never been written upon etc. . . . if on a papyrus, erase only the letters’. The Greek translation here was kindly provided by Tatiana Kontou.

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9 This recipe, together with its source, is cited in Latin in W. Wattenbach (1958, p. 303): ‘Quicunque in semel scripto pergameno necessitate cogente iterato scribere velit, accipiat lac inponatque pergamenum per unius noctis spacium. Quod postquam inde sustulerit, farre aspersum, ne ubi siccari incipit, in rugas contrahatur, sub pressura castiget quoad exsiccetur. Quod ubi fecerit, pumice cretaque expolitum priorem albedinis suae nitorem recipiet.’ My thanks go to Mary Dove for providing the English translation. F. W. Hall describes this method (1913, pp. 83–4, n. 1) and, although he does not cite his source, it is presumably the same codex. 10 Hall corroborates this argument: ‘The monks do not appear to have had any special animus against classical authors, in using ancient codices as palimpsests. Any codex no longer in use might be taken for this purpose, e.g. Vindobonensis 17 originally contained an uncial text of the Bible, but was used in the ninth century for the works of Probus and other grammarians’ (1913, pp. 83–4, n. 1). 11 The Wolfenbüttel Palimpsest, discovered by F. A. Knittel around 1756, contains parts of two manuscripts of the Greek Gospels in the older writing, as well as part of the Gothic version of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, and other fragments. A Syriac palimpsest manuscript held at the British Library (part of the Syriac collection of manuscripts obtained from the convent of St Mary Deipora in the Nitrian Desert, Egypt, in 1847) famously contains 59 leaves from a sixth-century transcription of Homer’s Iliad, but also contains 50 leaves of St Luke’s Gospel in Greek, and five leaves from Euclid’s Elements. The Homeric layer of this palimpsest was first brought to light by William Cureton (1851) and a facsimile of a page from this palimpsest is reproduced in Figure 1, with kind permission of the British Library. For more recent work on this palimpsest see M. J. Apthorp (1995; 1996). 12 Tregelles dates this decree to AD 692; Thompson dates it to AD 691 (1911, p. 633). 13 See Reynolds and Wilson (1974, pp. 108–46) for clear and detailed information on these individuals and the significance of the Renaissance for the history of the transmission of classical literature. 14 In ‘Palimpsest literature’, Russell praises ‘the bold and far-seeing genius’ (1867, p. 111) of Dom Bernard de Montfaucon for being the first scholar to suspect the hidden value of palimpsest manuscripts in his Palaeographia graeca (1708) but Boivin’s discovery took place 16 years before the publication of Montfaucon’s book. Russell misdates this discovery, placing it after Palaeographia graeca. Much of the underlying text that Boivin discovered was later deciphered by Küster and then J. J. Wettstein, and it was finally collated and published in the nineteenth century by Constantine Tischendorf. 15 The next significant palimpsest discovery was made by Wettstein in 1715–16, although he failed to attribute the underlying text correctly – the sixthcentury codex Claromontanus of the Pauline Epistles (Paris gr. 107) had been repaired by the insertion of two palimpsested leaves containing 100 lines from a fifth-century manuscript of Euripides’ lost play Phaethon. ‘This

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Notes to pp. 18–25 manuscript,’ Reynolds and Wilson explain, ‘supplemented in 1907 by a papyrus of the third century BC (P. Berol. 9771), gives us all we have of Euripides’ play’ (1974, p. 174). Around 1756, F. A. Knittel read and edited portions of the underlying script of a palimpsest in the Wolfenbüttel Library. This script was discovered to contain two manuscripts of the Gospels (P and Q), and large fragments of the Gothic version of the Epistle to the Romans by Ulphilas, bishop of the Goths in the fourth century. In 1772, Paul James Bruns discovered a portion of the 91st book of Livy in a palimpsest held at the Vatican (Vat. Pal. lat. 24). In the following year, G. Migliore deciphered two fragmentary texts from the lower scripts of the same manuscript. Although he believed them to be Cicero, they were in fact the remains of a fifth-century copy of Seneca’s De amicitia and parts of De vita patris (Vat. Pal. lat. 24) written over in the late-sixth or early seventh century with a copy of the Old Testament. They were later re-edited by Niebuhr and Studemund. Finally, in the last years of the eighteenth century, a large fragment of the Gospel of St Matthew (chaps. i. 17 to xxvi. 71) was discovered in a palimpsest in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, by the then Vice-provost, Dr Barrett. See also Russell (1867, pp. 122–4) for an account of the history of this manuscript and the search made for it. Reynolds and Wilson describe Mai as ‘hasty and uncritical and not overscrupulous’ (1974, p. 176). Two other nineteenth-century accounts that occur outside of the covers of an edition of a palimpsest manuscript are De Quincey’s essay ‘The palimpsest’ (1845), discussed at further length in the following chapter, and Mrs R. L. Bensley’s Our Journey to Sinai (1896). References to comprehensive accounts of extant palimpsests and further non-English language sources on palimpsests can be found in the notes to Chapter 5, Section VI, (a) of Reynolds and Wilson (1974, p. 245) and in Bischoff (1990, p. 12, n. 30). For just a few examples of the effective use of such photography in the examination of specific palimpsests see plates in E. S. Buchanan (1907), Matthew Black (1939) and Ian A. Moir (1956). As a side note of interest, using this method it is possible to determine if there has ever been an underlying script, even if it is now lost forever. Moir says that ‘it has been possible to establish by ultra-violet light and to confirm by infra-red photography that folios 47–55 originally contained Greek text, though this has been too thoroughly removed from the vellum to allow decipherment’ (1956, p. 15).

Chapter 3 1 Jane, his youngest sister, died in 1790. Note that De Quincey confuses this chronology and actually refers to Jane as his elder sister in Suspiria (1998b, p. 97). 2 De Quincey is citing here from ‘The order for the burial of the dead’ in The

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Book of Common Prayer. The precise phrase can be found in the service for ‘The Burial’ (1928, p. 323). Again, De Quincey is citing from The Book of Common Prayer, this time from ‘The Collect’ at the end of the funeral service (1928, p. 324). In ‘Writings on the mind’ (1987), Josephine McDonagh misreads De Quincey’s images as a ‘figuration of recollection as a kind of undoing, a nonproduction, even death’ (p. 213); she does not recognize that they portray the miracle of uncanny resurrection. Based on this misreading, McDonagh argues that De Quincey’s uncertain attitude towards the palimpsest arises because of this contradictory act of recollection: even as it restores former events, this act occurs with a violence that undoes the context and production of those events, disturbs the order of ‘natural’ chronology and causes an elision of difference (temporal, psychological or social) about which De Quincey is decidedly ambivalent. McDonagh does not recognize that in ‘The palimpsest’ De Quincey moves from the particular instances of palimpsests to the substantive concept of the palimpsest. As a result, she does not perceive that De Quincey is not disturbed by the chronological and temporal displacements occurring as a result of successful resurrection in the palimpsest of the mind, since this is ‘heaven-created’ (De Quincey 1998b, p. 144). Rather, the ambivalence which McDonagh detects in ‘The palimpsest’ arises from De Quincey’s Christian horror at the ability of man to perform successful resurrection with regard to palaeographic palimpsests – an action that alone should be performed by God. For an extended discussion of ‘the model of the palimpsest’ as the epitome of ‘the operation of a parasitical network’ (p. 245) see Jan B. Gordon (1985, pp. 245–51). Gordon’s reading differs from mine in that he reads the vellum as ‘a usurping parasite with respect to its message’ (p. 246), rather than the underlying text of the palimpsest as a parasitic inhabitation. McDonagh first highlights this point in commenting that the palimpsest ‘feigns a sense of depth while always in fact functioning on the surface level’ (1987, p. 211). Freud uses the palimpsest to figure the superimposed structure of the meanings of dreams which he describes as ‘one of the most delicate, though also one of the most interesting, problems of dream-interpretation’ (1991d, p. 312, n. 1). In a footnote added to The Interpretation of Dreams in 1914, he prints, in spaced type, a quotation from James Sully’s essay ‘The dream as revelation’ (1893) which reads ‘Like some letter in cipher, the dream-inscription when scrutinised closely loses its first look of balderdash and takes on the aspect of a serious, intelligible message. Or, to vary the figure slightly, we may say that, like some palimpsest, the dream discloses beneath its worthless surface-characters traces of an old and precious communication’ (Sully 1893, p. 364; cited in Freud 1991d, p. 216, n. 2). Moreover, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) Freud quotes the German Romantic poet Heine who writes that ‘her face resembled a palimpsest, on which, beneath the fresh black monastic manuscript of the text of a Church Father, there

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Notes to pp. 30–33 lurk the half-obliterated lines of an ancient Greek love-poem’ (Heine cited in Freud 1991c, p. 128). (The source of this quotation is Heine’s prose work Die Harzreise (1826 [1912a, p. 56]).) Heine also uses the palimpsest figuratively in Italien (1828), in which he describes Herculaneum and Pompeii as ‘jene Palimpsesten der Natur, wo jetzt wieder der alte Steintext hervorgegraben wird’ (1912b, p. 282) – ‘those palimpsests of nature, where now the old stone text is being dug out again’. The translation of the German here has been kindly provided by Bettina Bildhauer. Such is the argument of Robert J. C. Young in ‘Freud’s secret: The Interpretation of Dreams was a gothic novel’ (1999). For a discussion of the similarities between De Quincey and Freud in a very different vein, see Charles L. Proudfit (1985). In ‘Reasons to forget: Scientists count the ways we get it wrong’ (2004), John McCrone explains that it is only recently that social psychology and basic neuroscience have begun to break down the persistent fantasy of the brain as perfect archive and the general belief that memories must be captured as fixed traces. Recent advances have revealed that ‘brains are evolved not for retrospection and contemplation but for intention and anticipation – for looking forwards rather than backwards, outwards rather than inwards, for being selective rather than merely retentive’ (p. 3). What we understand as recollection is better understood as imaginative reconstruction, or, in fact, anticipatory images. Such is the insight of Derrida’s reading of Freud in this text, a text in which he formulates his reservations about what he calls, in Archive Fever (1996), ‘the presuppositions of modelling itself’ (1996, p. 15). For Derrida’s concise statement of this ‘double constraint of mourning’ (1995, p. 152) see ‘“Dialanguages”’: ‘Hence the impossibility of completing one’s mourning and even the will not to mourn are also forms of fidelity. If to mourn and not to mourn are two forms of fidelity and two forms of infidelity, the only thing remaining – and this is where I speak of semi-mourning – is an experience between the two. I cannot complete my mourning for everything I lose, because I want to keep it, and at the same time, what I do best is mourn, is to lose it, because by my mourning, I keep it inside me. And it is this terrible logic of mourning that I talk about all the time, that I am concerned with all the time, whether in “Fors” or in Glas, this terrible fatality of mourning: semi-mourning or double mourning. The psychoanalytic discourse, despite its subtlety and necessity, does not go into this fatality, this necessity: this double constraint of mourning’ (1995, p. 152). See Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A psychopathology of imperialism (1991). This may explain Barrell’s strange worry in the conclusion of his study about De Quincey’s apparently ‘normal’ and well-adjusted family life. Earlier in ‘Border lines’ Derrida in fact comments precisely on the untranslatability of the French ‘pas’: ‘I have published a text that is untranslatable, starting with its title, “Pas,” and published in “La double séance,” referring to “dissemination in the refolding (repli) of the hymen”: “Pas de méthode [“no

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method,” but also “a methodical step”] for it: no path comes back in its circle to a first step, none proceeds from the simple to the complex, none leads from a beginning to an end’ (p. 96). I am indebted to Nick Levett for drawing my attention to the double meaning of ‘pas’. 14 In ‘Here comes everybody/nobody: Self as overly edited palimpsest’ (1990), Gillespie traces the breakdown of the notion of the unitary self in Hume, Schopenhauer and Stirner in order ‘to provide a backdrop against which to appreciate the artistic cooptation of the notion of the dissolution of self in Modernism’ (p. 7). Gillespie provides a brief and fragmentary account which is significant for drawing attention to the larger picture of the post-Kantian breakdown of the concept of unitary identity in a proliferation of writers other than those normally attributed with the fictionalization of identity; that is, Nietzsche, Bergson and Freud. His sketch is thought-provoking, but dismisses the place in such an account of twentieth-century thought in this area, particularly that of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, the work of the former being passed off as ‘the epigonal reverberations of nihilistic deconstruction’ (p. 7). Considering the essay’s title, the absence of any discussion of the place of the palimpsest in, and the elision of De Quincey from, this history seems strange. Gillespie’s only discussion of the palimpsest occurs in the context of an engagement with John Barth’s writing, at the end of which he argues that ‘in effect, in the wake of Joyce, Kafka, and Borges, Barth reconfirms the status of our identity as something we apprehend through constructs of language. Caught in the web of Language, the self as a rewritable fiction resembles an overly edited palimpsest and not a unified, distinct, stable manuscript’ (p. 11). 15 This explains Barrell’s claim in the introduction that ‘De Quincey was all the figures from the Orient that appear in his writings. He was Chinese; he was the Malay that haunted his dreams; he was the crocodile’ (1991, p. 19).

Chapter 4 1 There are two versions of this preface. The passage in which Lawrence refers to the notebook is from the longer version, ‘Foreword to Collected Poems’ (Lawrence 1993a). 2 Egon Tiedje (1971) also discusses the notebook, providing correction, supplementation and additional information to Pinto. The notebook is currently manuscript LA L 2 in the ‘Literary papers of D. H. Lawrence, 1890s–1936’, part of the D. H. Lawrence Collection, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Hallward Library, University of Nottingham. 3 The asterix denotes that the poem is crossed out in the manuscript, NP refers to New Poems (1918) and CP to The Collected Poems (1928). Tiedje (1971) provides a number of corrections to Pinto’s list, but none that affects entry number 12. 4 The exact date of the draft of ‘Evening of a Week-day’ is uncertain. Pinto argues that the alterations in handwriting and ink colour in the notebook

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Notes to pp. 46–48 indicate that the poems were written over a considerable period of time: the earliest, in the same handwriting as some French exercises, date from his time as a student at Nottingham from 1906 to 1908; others, written in ink or sometimes pencil, are from a later date, referring in their subject matter to his life as a schoolmaster in Croydon from 1908 to 1911, and to the death of his mother in the winter of 1910 (1957, p. 12). ‘Evening of a Week-day’ is most certainly of the earlier group. Tiedje provides a more rigorous, if speculative, discussion of the composition dates of the notebook poems, dating ‘Evening of a Week-day’ more exactly to the summer of 1907 (1971, pp. 235–6). The process of these revisions can be seen in the two drafts of the poem in the Porthcothan notebook (f.59r and f.20v of MS La L 10 at Nottingham), in the autograph manuscript which provided the setting-copy for Secker’s edition of New Poems (Box 13, MS. 1 of the D. H. Lawrence Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin), and in the page proofs of New Poems (f.33 of La L 13 11 at Nottingham). Dating from 1916–18, the Porthcothan notebook contains both a draft of ‘Evening of a Week-day’ which makes some small changes to the first two stanzas, more extensive ones to the third, and experiments with a fourth, and the first draft of ‘Palimpsest of Twilight’. In the interests of clarity, in this chapter detailed reference will only be made to the draft of ‘Evening of a Week-day’ contained in the college notebook and to the published text of the poem, but the detailed history of revisions found in these further texts supports my reading of the poem. Despite its title, like ‘Palimpsest of Twilight’, many of the poems chosen for New Poems were not in fact new poems at all but revised versions of early poems. Fourteen poems from the notebook make their first appearance in print in this volume. Lawrence offered New Poems to the publishers under the title ‘Come Awake’; it was they who suggested the misleading alternative. Kermode explains how Lawrence rewrote much of his early prose work, both fiction and non-fiction: he radically altered Sons and Lovers (1913), Twilight in Italy (1916) and Studies in Classic American Literature (1923); he also reimagined other people’s texts, for instance, in The Trespasser (1912) and The Boy in the Bush (1924) (1973, pp. 32–3). This point is discussed at more length in Chapter 6, where it is the basis for a rethinking of the concept of intertextuality in relation to the palimpsest. Such a narrative is told by Pinto who values the early poetic drafts in Lawrence’s notebook because, he argues, comparing them with the later versions of the poems reveals Lawrence’s poetic craftsmanship and enables the reader ‘to witness the process by which a young artist of genius sets his “demon” free and converts the fumblings of his youth into the “real say” of a mature poet’ (1957, p. 20). Similarly, in The Phoenix Paradox (1952), Gail Porter Mandell – perceiving The Collected Poems as ‘the strata of successive selves’ (p. 9) – is interested in the material history of Lawrence’s poems only for what they reveal about the poet, not about the text: ‘uncovering layer

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upon layer of what remains of the previous forms of the poems will add yet another dimension to our understanding of Lawrence’s creative development’ (p. 9). A number of recent studies of Lawrence’s work have focused upon metaphor – or, more precisely, metaphoricity – in his writing. See, for example, John B. Humma (1990) and Michael Black (1992). Others have discussed the relationship between his work and Heidegger’s – see, for example, Michael Bell (1992). In D. H. Lawrence: The thinker as poet (1997), Fiona Becket combines these two concerns with an ‘emphasis, via Heidegger, . . . on the poetic, and principally Lawrence’s alertness to the efficacy of metaphor as a mode of thought’ (p. 204). As she explains in the introduction, her study ‘does not deal with the poetry of D. H. Lawrence or with “local” instances of metaphor, which have attracted critical attention, but examines Lawrence’s deeply metaphorical idiom in prose, initially, and particularly in nominally “discursive” contexts’ (p. 1). Becket reads Lawrence’s philosophical prose and major novels to show that ‘Lawrence challenges the merely rhetorical function of metaphor and opens us up to “metaphoricity” as a non-analytical mode of thinking about language itself’ (pp. 8–9). She distinguishes her project from analyses of ‘singular events of metaphor in Lawrence’ (p. 3), which she believes can only lead ‘to a purely stylistic analysis’ (p. 3). Like Becket, I bring Lawrence and Heidegger’s texts together, but my intention in doing so is to examine precisely one singular event of metaphor in Lawrence’s poetry – ‘palimpsest of twilight’ – in order to rethink this concept in the light of Heidegger’s thought. In Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens (1988), Cook draws attention to Stevens’ ‘play with the buried tropes of words that appear to have purely grammatical functions’ (p. 30). See Cook, Chapter 9, for an excellent discussion of metaphor in Stevens’ poetry. Derrida explains that ‘this very rarity will not have been insignificant. That is why I speak of the Heideggerian text: I do so to underscore by a supplementary line (trait) that it is not only a question for me of considering the stated propositions, the themes and theses on the subject of metaphor as such, the content of his discourse treating rhetoric and this trope, but of his writing, his treatment of language and, more rigorously, his treatment of the trait, of “trait” in every sense, and more rigorously still of “trait” as a word in his language, and of the trait as a tracing incision (entame) of language’ (1998, pp. 105–6). The translation of the passage in the revised and expanded edition of Heidegger’s Basic Writings (1993a, pp. 236–7) does not include the word metaphor, therefore the translation cited in Derrida’s text has been retained here. For an iteration of this standard view of metaphor see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson: ‘The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’ (1980, p. 5). These formulations constitute a palimpsest, not a series: they belong

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Notes to pp. 51–54 together only in the same way as do the elements of the various pairings – such as ‘house of Being’ – by way of which Heidegger arrives at them. In other words, one can come to an understanding of the relationality of these formulations only as and when one comes to an understanding of the relation to which they are pointing. See Gerald L. Bruns (1989) for a discussion of these different formulations which he describes as ‘a series of wild substitutions – wild, because none of them fits in with the others to form anything like a coherent pattern, say a metaphorical structure or theoretical narrative’ (p. 89). Bruns argues that the effect of these different formulations, ‘Heidegger’s figural license’ (p. 90), is ‘to block any attempt to reduce [these formulations of] difference to a unitary concept’ (p. 90). For another example of this movement, see Heidegger’s discussion of the belonging together of man and Being in Identity and Difference (1969, pp. 29–31). These are the terms Karsten Harries uses to describe metaphor in ‘Metaphor and transcendence’ (1979, p. 71). Derrida reiterates this point in ‘The retrait of metaphor’: ‘I am trying to speak about metaphor, to say something proper or literal on this subject, to treat it as my subject, but through metaphor (if one may say so) I am obliged to speak of it more metaphorico, to it in its own manner. I cannot treat it (en traiter) without dealing with it (sans traiter avec elle), without negotiating with it the loan I take from it in order to speak of it. I do not succeed in producing a treatise (un traité) on metaphor which is not treated with (traité avec) metaphor which suddenly appears intractable (intraitable)’ (1998, p. 103). The use of the verb ‘to lurk’ here echoes Thomas De Quincey’s description of ‘the deep deep tragedies of infancy’ which ‘remain lurking below all, and these lurk to the last’ (1998b, p. 146) in the palimpsest of the mind, and Sigmund Freud’s citation in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) of Heine’s words: ‘her face resembled a palimpsest, on which, beneath the fresh black monastic manuscript of the text of a Church Father, there lurk the half-obliterated lines of an ancient Greek love-poem’ (Heine cited in Freud 1991c, p. 128). The source of this quotation, as noted in Chapter 3, is Heine’s prose work Die Harzreise (1826 [1912a, p. 56]). Derrida does pick up on the palimpsest two pages later but only in a rhetorical flourish: ‘White mythology – metaphysics has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest’ (1982, p. 213). In this sense, in Derrida’s terminology, the palimpsest might be said to be placing ‘palimpsest’ ‘under erasure’, sous rature – both writing the word, crossing it out and then printing (and thus retaining) both the word and the deletion. The explicitly palimpsestuous logic of this ‘strategically important practice’ (Spivak 1976, p. xiv) in Derrida’s early work is derived from Heidegger. Derrida says that ‘if one wished to conceive and to class all the metaphorical

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possibilities of philosophy, one metaphor, at least, always would remain excluded, outside the system: the metaphor, at the very least, without which the concept of metaphor could not be constructed, or, to syncopate an entire chain of reasoning, the metaphor of metaphor’ (1982, pp. 219–20). For further clarification of this point, and on Derrida and metaphor in general, see Geoffrey Bennington (1993, pp. 119–33). Although Genette identifies the palimpsest-like quality of Proust’s vision – ‘Time metamorphoses not only characters, then, but faces, bodies, even places, and its effects are sedimented in space . . . to form a blurred image the lines of which overlap in a sometimes illegible, almost always equivocal palimpsest . . . This palimpsest of time and space, these discordant views, ceaselessly contradicted and ceaselessly brought together by an untiring movement of painful dissociation and impossible synthesis – this, no doubt, is the Proustian vision’ (1982b, pp. 212–13) – he does not enter into a Heideggerean understanding of metaphor but, rather, argues that ‘between its conscious intentions and its real execution, Proust’s writing falls prey to a singular reversal: having set out to locate essences, it ends up constituting, or reconstituting, mirages; intended to reach, through the substantial depth of text, the profound substance of things, it culminates in an affect of phantasmagoric superimposition in which the depths cancel each other out, and the substances devour one another’ (p. 214). Chapter 7 provides an extended discussion of the queerness and queering power of palimpsestuousness. My reading of ‘Twilight’ here is indebted to the reading theory and practice of Michael Riffaterre which is discussed at more length in ‘Theoretical Text (1): On structuralism’ in the following chapter. Phyllis Bartlett argues that the more overt expression of sexuality is characteristic of Lawrence’s revisions for The Collected Poems: ‘it is in the realm of plain talk about sex needs and of sexual symbolism that the demon is most obviously released’ (1951, p. 585). On phonemic reading see Garrett Stewart (1990).

Chapter 5 1 For just one example of Holmes’ interest in philology see ‘The Adventure of the Three Students’ (1904), which opens with Holmes and Watson in residence in ‘one of our great university towns’ where Holmes is ‘pursuing some laborious researches in early English Charters’ (Doyle 2001, p. 596). 2 Holmes is first depicted using a magnifying glass in A Study in Scarlet (1887) (Doyle 2001, p. 31) and it appears regularly in subsequent stories. See, for just a few examples, ‘The Boscombe Valley mystery’ (1891) (Doyle 2001, p. 212), ‘The Red-Headed League’ (1891) (Doyle 2001, p. 187), ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ (1892) (Doyle 2001, p. 246) and ‘The Adventure of the Norwood Builder’ (1903) (Doyle 2001, p. 506). 3 The self-reflexivity of detective fiction with regard to reading and writing has

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Notes to pp. 65–72 become a critical commonplace. See, in particular, Peter Hühn (1987) and S. E. Sweeney (1990). For a general summary see Heta Pyrhönen (1994, pp. 32–6). Although Russell figures the palimpsest editor as an ‘explorer’ (p. 110) rather than a detective, the subject of his lecture – Cardinal Angelo Mai, the most famous palimpsest editor of the early nineteenth century – is as celebrated for his near-magical skills of detection as have been the fictional heroes of traditional detective narratives. According to Umberto Eco’s theory in The Role of the Reader (1981), closed texts ‘aim at producing univocal effects and . . . seem not to call for cooperative activity on the part of the reader’ (p. vii). He explicitly identifies the detective novel as a ‘closed’ text: ‘typical from this point of view are detective novels’ (p. 34). In his introduction to The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (1983), Sebeok explains that ‘uberty’ is ‘a vocable that has all but vanished from modern English’; it was ‘first attested, from 1412, in an obscure work by the “Monk of Bury”, John Lydgate’s Two Merchants; it appears to be equivalent to “rich growth, fruitfulness, fertility; copiousness, abundance”, or, roughly, what Italians used to call ubertà’ (1983, p. 1). The amount of conjecture involved in reading palimpsest manuscripts can be seen clearly in a sample of digital imaging of the Archimedes Palimpsest reproduced in William Peakin’s magazine article ‘The sum god’ (2001, p. 31). The inset image for Stage 5 of ‘How Archimedes “came back from the dead”’ shows that a large proportion of the reconstructed text is conjecture – represented in the image in pink, rather than confirmed text – represented in green. Note that this research is thus largely of an earlier date than Saussure’s more famous Course in General Linguistics which was developed between 1907 and 1911. In order to distinguish more easily between the two, in the body of Words Upon Words, Starobinski’s text is printed in italics, Saussure’s in normal type. Starobinksi includes a number of highly developed examples of Saussure’s research in Chapter 3, ‘The question of origin’ (1979, pp. 46–77). Saussure is keen to emphasize that the theme word is broken down into its phonemic parts, and that he does ‘not in any way mean to introduce the idea of writing’ (p. 14). As Starobinski glosses, ‘reading, in this instance, applies to deciphering combinations of phonemes not of letters’ (p. 15). See Sylvère Lotringer (1973) for a sophisticated discussion of the consequences of Saussure’s attempted exclusion of writing. Starobinski describes this process as x-raying but never as palimpsest reading: ‘Saussure’s whole attention is oriented toward this work of extraction. The successive phrases are, so to speak, x-rayed; the bony structure on which they are built must be revealed’ (p. 58). Just as Peirce rejects mathematical probability as a test of abductive reasoning, Saussure also rejects the same measure for the test of his palimpsest

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detective reading: ‘one is two steps from a reckoning of probabilities, as a final resource, but . . . this reckoning, spatially, would defy the powers of a mathematician’ (p. 100). Although the term significance has a specialized meaning in Riffaterre’s theory, he notes that this meaning does not contradict the common dictionary meaning of the term as recorded in Webster: ‘“the subtle, hidden implications of something, as distinguished from its openly expressed meaning”’ (Riffaterre 1978, p. 167, n. 3). For example, in Baudelaire’s ‘Alchimie de la douleur’, the key word ‘alchimie does not refer to its referent. It simply programs the grammar of the text by restricting it to variations on one formula of change. It also programs the lexicon of the text by making it into a code: every word will be a statement of transmutation, or of its results . . . ’ (Riffaterre 1983, p. 84). Rocco Capozzi provides an exception here, citing this allusion in ‘Palimpsests and laughter: The dialogical pleasure of unlimited intertextuality in The Name of the Rose’ (1989) in order to introduce his argument that the novel, ‘far from being “badly scraped”, is a clear “palimpsest” that allows readers to recognize numerous and various forms of intertextual traces/prints’ (p. 418). However, Capozzi gives no further attention to the textual significance of this palimpsest reference. Zamora explains that: ‘In our own times . . . the imagery of Revelation is frequently applied to political events and situations to suggest their cataclysmic potential, with no explicit expectation of recuperation or renewal. Although the word apocalypse was not originally a synonym for disaster or catastrophe, nor does it literally mean the end of the world, we currently use it almost exclusively in this way’ (1988, p. 34). The Oxford English Dictionary does not record any cataclysmic meaning as one of the senses of ‘apocalypse’. These terms allude to Zamora’s discussion: ‘detection and apocalypse are analogous modes. Both involve the inference of cause from effect; both attempt to decipher meaning from the signs available in the present (though detection points toward an actual past, apocalypse toward a projected future)’ (1988, p. 36). Note that the third poster in the series represents ‘the new metaphysical detective story’ that ‘finally obliterates the traces of the old which underlie it’ (Holquist 1971, p. 153). The Name of the Rose is a modern detective story, not a metaphysical one, because the traces of the classical detective text still remain so visible in it. For a reiteration of this point and further elaboration of the poststructuralist concept of the text see Barthes (1977a, p. 159; 1997, p. 64). The coexistence of allusions to incest, to ‘sons’ or ‘descendants’ (another meaning of ‘imp’) and to limping in ‘palimpsestuous’ draws the mind inevitably to literature’s most famous incestuous limper – Oedipus. In Politics of Security (1996), Michael Dillon plays out the palimpsestuous intimacy of security and insecurity reminding us that the Greek for security is ‘asphaleia – the privative of sphallo, to fall/fail or trip-up’ (p. 77). His reading of

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Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (pp. 162–98) focuses on the play’s punning on the etymology of this word, since Oedipus – the limping man who is thus most prone to falling or tripping up – is charged with the task of ‘securing’ his state. 22 In this respect, see David Darby’s discussion in ‘The narrative text as palimpsest’ (1987) of the inseparability of reading and writing in Peter Handke’s overtly self-reflexive palimpsest narrative Die Hornissen (1966): ‘Die Hornissen is a self-reflexive text in . . . that it overtly describes the process of its own reading. The novel illustrates a reciprocal relationship between the process of reading and writing. The act of narrative-production performed by Handke’s narrators – and by subsequent extra-textual narrators – always involves a receptive element, in that each of these narrators works with a narrative he has read or heard. Conversely, each of the readings that have been observed is in part a creative process, that of constructing a new discourse. In the palimpsest model, reading and writing are inseparable elements of a layering process which produces narrative. What is remarkable about Die Hornissen is that it provides the opportunity to observe this process applied both by two narrators (of whom one also functions as a character) in the printed text and by subsequent reader-narrators in independent constructions. It is beyond the scope of my present intention to question whether this model may be applicable to other, less overtly self-reflexive, narrative texts’ (pp. 261–2).

Chapter 6 1 The palimpsest has been used prolifically and erroneously in this way. See, for example, Mary Flowers Braswell (1995), Gordon Brotherston (1992) Dorothy Colmer (1970), Frederick A. De Armas (1992), and Judith Plotz (1994). Most interesting in this category is Ruth Waterhouse’s ‘Beowulf as “Palimpsest”’ (1992) in which Waterhouse recognizes the potential of intertextuality to allow the reading of old texts in the light of modern ones, thus inverting the process of traditional source hunting. She also describes the palimpsesting activity of readers, whereby ‘decoders of an OE text like Beowulf can make of it a “palimpsest” on which they inscribe their own preoccupations and assumptions’ (p. 6). Waterhouse’s tentative use of the palimpsest throughout this essay is signalled by her use of ‘palimpsest’ only in scare quotations. 2 Kristeva uses the image of the mosaic again in the 1985 interview with Margaret Waller previously cited, to describe American multiculturality (Kristeva 1996, p. 200). 3 There is of course a connection here that Johnson does not identify between the geno-text and pheno-text and Kristeva’s ideas of the semiotic and the symbolic. Compare her description of these in relation to intertextuality in ‘“Nous deux” or a (hi)story of intertextuality’ (2002): ‘Intertextuality is a way of placing us, readers, not only in front of a more or less complicated and interwoven structure (the first meaning of “texture”), but also within an on-

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going process of signifying that goes all the way back to the semiotic plurality, under several layers of the significant. Intertextuality accesses the semiotic, that trans-verbal reality of the psyche from which all meanings emerge’ (p. 9). The metaphor of the text as palimpsest is of a productive equivalence to Kristeva’s textual model in other respects also: it represents a dynamic topography of illusory depth which contains the potential for reinscription and, as we have seen in Chapter 3, it partakes in the ‘equivocal circulation of metaphor between script and psyche, psyche and script’ (Johnson 1988, p. 87) so central to Kristeva’s thought. Genette mentions the word ‘palimpsest’ only once before this when complaining of the difficulty of analysing hypertexts whose hypotexts have been lost: ‘The curious (and ever frustrated) readers find themselves in the position of a palaeographer who already knows that his text conceals another but does not yet know which one. This is the most irritating palimpsest of all, which reduces me to hunches and to questionings’ (p. 383). Genette argues that even if there were a text that did not evoke another literary work, it would still be a palimpsest of all its former notes and drafts – what he terms an ‘auto-hypertext’ – as the narrator of Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ (1944) famously asserts: ‘I have reflected that it is legitimate to see the “final” Quixote as a kind of palimpsest, in which the traces – faint but not undecipherable – of our friend’s “previous” text must shine through’ (2000, p. 42). See, for example, S/Z (1990) and The Pleasure of the Text (1997). See Ian McEwan (2002a), (2002b) and Omer Ali (2001). I am indebted to Brian Finney (2004) for these references. See Finney (2004, p. 74) for examples of the other literary allusions readers have found in Atonement. See, for example, Brookner (2001), Eagleton (2001) and Moseley (2002). For further details see Finney (2004, p. 70, n. 6). Finney employs the metaphor of the palimpsest when discussing the metatextuality of the novel: ‘To complain about the metafictional element in the book is to fail to understand that we all are narrated, entering at birth into a pre-existing narrative which provides the palimpsest on which we inscribe our own narratives/lives’ (2004, p. 79). For a theoretical elaboration of the concept of the hymen in relation to desire which has informed my reading here see Jacques Derrida, ‘The double session’ (1981, pp. 209–12). Note that ‘The double session’ is not Derrida’s title for the text that goes by this name. Rather, it was proposed by the editors of the journal Tel Quel in which the essay first appeared in 1970. If this text were to have a title, Derrida suggests it might be ‘Hymen: INTER Platonem et Mallarmatum’. The editor of the English translation explains that the French ‘L’hymen: ENTRE Platon et Mallarmé’ is translated into Latin, not English, because ‘the Latin makes clear that the word “hymen” is to be read both as “membrane” and as “marriage”’ (Derrida 1981, p. 182, n. 10).

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12 Currie indeed uses the example of moving a bookmark through a physical book to illustrate the temporality of reading (2007, p. 5).

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See, for example: Friedman (1975), (1985) and (1990); DuPlessis (1979) and (1985); DuPlessis and Friedman (1981); and Friedman and DuPlessis (1990). Freud figures the superimposed structure of the meanings of dreams palimpsestically in a footnote added to The Interpretation of Dreams in 1914, in which he cites in spaced type, a quotation from James Sully’s essay ‘The dream as revelation’ (1893): ‘Like some letter in cipher, the dream-inscription when scrutinised closely loses its first look of balderdash and takes on the aspect of a serious, intelligible message. Or, to vary the figure slightly, we may say that, like some palimpsest, the dream discloses beneath its worthless surface-characters traces of an old and precious communication’ (Sully 1893, p. 364, cited in Freud 1991d, p. 216, n. 2). Friedman’s reading practice in ‘Return of the repressed’ depends upon a palimpsestic understanding of the self and the text which has been subject to critique throughout this study: the psychoanalytic figuration of the self as layered palimpsest, with its supposed equivalence to Freud’s model of the psyche, is challenged in Chapter 3 via Abraham and Torok’s notion of the crypt; the palimpsestic understanding of the text has been subjected to poststructuralist critique in Chapter 5. It is unclear who Buck intends to be included in, and excluded from, this ‘we’. For example, in the jacket blurb of the 1968 edition of Palimpsest, Harry T. Moore says that ‘the use of the palimpsest motif gives the reader the impression that one story has been imposed upon another and that the protagonist is always the same woman – in essence H. D. herself’; Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis describe Palimpsest as ‘a work composed of three stories about three seemingly different women whose lives at different historical eras in fact constitute versions of the same life story – near H. D.’s own’ (1990, p. 205); Sarah E. Witte summarizes Susan Stanford Friedman’s reading of Palimpsest in Psyche Reborn as ‘a palimpsest of “personal disaster” which records H. D.’s enslavement and betrayal by men during the years of World War I’ (1989, p. 121). ‘TF’ refers here to H. D.’s Tribute to Freud (1944). The Encyclopaedia Britannica explains that a ‘murex’ is ‘any of the marine snails constituting the family Muricidae (subclass Prosobranchia of the class Gastropoda). Typically the elongated or heavy shell is elaborately spined or frilled’. The queer temporality of the palimpsest is discussed at various other moments throughout this study, for instance in ‘Spectrality: Subjectivity and Temporality’ in Chapter 3, in ‘Poetry of the Present’ in Chapter 4, and at the end of Atonement (1991/2001) in Chapter 6.

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9 On this point, my reading of ‘Murex’ takes issue with that of Deborah Kelly Kloepfer to whose excellent close reading of Palimpsest in ‘Fishing the murex up: Sense and resonance in H. D.’s Palimpsest’ (1986) my reading here is indebted. Kloepfer is sensitive to the language of the text as well as to the metaphor of the palimpsest, offering an alternative reading of Palimpsest to that of Chisholm by giving it a more significant role within the therapeutic grand narrative of H. D.’s career. However, in her reading, Kloepfer does not differentiate between the initial state of blurring in ‘Murex’ and the subsequent state of palimpsestuous vision – Kloepfer herself blurs these two states, referring to ‘H. D.’s pervasive sense of and preoccupation with the “ineffable quality of merging” that underlies palimpsest’ (p. 564). Such a conflation leads Kloepfer away from theorizing more precisely the textual and sexual relationality embodied in the palimpsest. 10 These terms echo Kloepfer’s opening engagement with the palimpsest in which she describes its ‘strange, marginal writing that is both intentional and accidental; it must be excavated, sought after, at the very moment that it is seeping through unbidden’ (1986, p. 553). 11 Whereas in the history of philosophy, the desire has always been to eradicate the autobiographical – associated as it is with the literary – which undercuts its ‘aspirations to universality’ (Ellmann 2000, p. 228), in literary criticism, a focus on the autobiographical all too often overlooks the play of language which gives life to the writing, to the literary text as such. As Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle argue, in similar figurative language, ‘consistently to present the meaning and power of novels in terms of the “experience” and “sensibility” of their author is to strangle such novels, so to speak, at birth. The “life” of the novel is blotted out by the focus on the “life” of the author’ (Bennett and Royle 1995, p. xv). 12 For reflections on the relationship between the palimpsest and the genre of autobiography (as opposed to the ‘autobiographical’) see Michael Meyer (1997) and Linda Chown (1991). 13 Buck argues that ‘critical theory does not master her writing, by classifying, explaining and giving it closure. Rather, the relationship between H. D. and post-structuralist, psychoanalytic theory is one which brings issues of hermeneutic authority and mastery into question’ (1991, p. 5). 14 On the Osiris legend see J. G. Frazer (1906) and J. Gwyn Griffiths (1980). 15 Sedgwick explains that ‘queer is a continuing moment, movement, motiverecurrent, eddying, troublant. The word “queer” itself means across – it comes from the Indo-European root – twerk, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart’ (1993, p. xii). I am grateful to Michael O’Rourke (2006) for drawing my attention to Sedgwick’s etymology of queer. 16 See Freud (1991b) and (1991e). Freud draws attention to the palimpsestic structure of sexuality through Silberer’s notion of ‘error of superimposition’: ‘we may suspect that in the course of the development of the concept “sexual” something has happened which has resulted in what Silberer aptly

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called an “error of superimposition”’ (1991e, p. 345). The editorial footnote explains that ‘what Silberer . . . seems to have in mind is mistakenly thinking that you are looking at a single thing, when in fact you are looking at two different things superimposed on each other’ (1991d, p. 345, n. 1). Freud returns to this concept in his lecture on ‘Femininity’ (1991b, p. 148) where he further elaborates his ideas about bisexuality. 17 DuPlessis’s concept of ‘romantic thralldom’ is also discussed in DuPlessis (1979), (1985) and (1986b). 18 The term queer has interestingly always been in the flux which Butler advocates, for Sedgwick’s account of its etymology glosses over the fact that the word ‘queer’ is, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘of doubtful origin’: although commonly regarded as coming from the German quer meaning ‘cross, oblique, squint, perverse, wrongheaded’, ‘the date at which the word appears in Scottish is against this, and the prominent sense does not precisely correspond to any of the uses of German quer’.

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Chapter 1

Index

Entries marked in bold refer to an entire chapter or subsection of a chapter.

Bennett, Andrew, and Royle, Nicholas 145n. 11 Bennington, Geoff 112, 139n. 22 Benstock, Shari 106–7 biographical criticism 48, 105–7, 109–10, 115 bisexuality 116–19, 123, 146n. 16 Borges, Jorge Luis 135n. 14, 143n. 6 Buck, Claire 103, 105–6, 108, 117–20 Butler, Judith 125

abduction 67, 70–1, 73, 75, 77, 140n. 13 Abraham, Nicolas and Torok, Maria 6, 23, 31, 42, 144n. 3 ‘Introjection–incorporation: Mourning or melancholia’ 23, 28 The Wolf Man’s Magic Word 29, 38–41 allosemes 41, 42–3, 104 anagram 69–72 apocalypse 33, 78–81, 83–4 see also palimpsesting: apocalyptic Archimedes 15, 129n. 3 The Archimedes Palimpsest 11–13, 21, 140n. 7 archive 34, 46, 80–1, 128n. 7, 134n. 9 Arnold, Thomas 20 Attridge, Derek 2, 113 autobiographical the autobiographical 114–16 phallacy 105 writing 30, 32, 35, 38, 103, 113, 116

Carlyle, Thomas 3 catachresis 47, 55 Catullus 13, 130n. 6 Chisholm, Dianne 109–10 Christianity 15, 25, 27, 32–3, 79 Cicero 13, 15, 18, 21, 130n. 6 Coetzee, J. M. 113 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 127n. 1 Collecott, Diana 107 critical history 7–8 see also genealogy crypt 6, 28–9, 32, 36, 38–41, 42–3, 144n. 3 Culler, Jonathan 75–6, 103 Currie, Mark 99–100 Daitz, Stephen G. 20 Davidson, Michael 46–8, 56 De Quincey, Thomas 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 15, 17, 19, 23–43, 97, 111, 125 Confessions of an English Opium Eater 27, 36 fantasies of resurrection 24–32, 33–4

Barrell, John 32 The Infection of Thomas De Quincey 39–41, 134n. 12 Barthes, Roland 1, 4, 82–4, 91, 98 hyphology 83–4, 91 Baudelaire, Charles 32, 141n. 15 ‘belonging together’ see Heidegger 161

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mourning 23–4, 25, 31–2, 42 Suspiria de Profundis 6, 23–4, 28, 32, 35, 37, 42 ‘The Palimpsest’ 10, 23–4, 26–8, 32, 42 Derrida, Jacques ‘Border lines’ 33 ‘Choreographies’ 117–18 ‘Fors’ 29, 31, 42 ‘Living on’ 83 ‘No apocalypse, not now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)’ 80 Of Grammatology 53, 99 Papier Machine 128n. 7 Specters of Marx 34 ‘The double session’ 53, 143n. 11 ‘The retrait of metaphor’ 49–50, 138n. 18 ‘“This strange institution called literature”’ 2 ‘White mythology’ 52–4 detective fiction classical 63–8 modern 76–82 Dillon, Michael 5, 9, 141n. 21 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, ‘The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez’ 63–8, 76 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 103, 105 romantic thralldom 123–4 Writing Beyond the Ending 108 Eco, Umberto 66, 79–80 The Name of the Rose 76–82 Eliot, T. S. 37, 61 Ellmann, Maud 114–16 exorcism 32 fantasy 23, 28, 31 of incorporation 23–4, 28–9, 31–2, 38–40 feminist criticism 6, 102–8 film 129n. 10 Finney, Brian 93–4, 143n. 10

Foucault, Michel 120, 124, 129, 135n. 14 ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’ 7–8 France, Anatole, The Garden of Epicurus 52–4 Freud, Sigmund ‘Femininity’ 146n. 16 From the History of an Infantile Neurosis 29 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious 133n. 7 Mystic Writing-Pad 29–31, 87 The Interpretation of Dreams 104, 133n. 7 Friedman, Susan Stanford 103–5 future anterior 99–101 Galvin, Mary E. 116–17 genealogy 7–8 Genette, Gérard 4, 5, 6, 32, 54–5, 87, 88–92, 93, 127n. 3 hypertextuality 88–91 Introduction á l’architexte 8 Palimpsests 4, 6, 87, 88–92 transtextuality 88–9 geno-text 86–7, 88, 90, 92, 97 see also pheno-text Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan 102, 104–5 H. D. 102–26 Bid Me To Live 110 bisexuality 116–19 ‘Murex’ 107, 108–16 ‘Narthex’ 109 Palimpsest 102, 107, 108–24 ‘Secret Name’ 107, 116–24 Heidegger, Martin ‘belonging together’ 43, 50–1 and metaphor 48–52 Heine, Heinrich von 133–4n. 7 heterosexuality 107, 108, 117–18, 121, 124 see also sexuality history 7–9

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Index see also critical history and genealogy Holquist, Michael 81–2 homosexuality 107, 108, 117–18 see also sexuality hymen 43, 53, 92, 96–8, 129n. 1, 134n. 13 hypogram 70–4 identity 7, 8, 35–8, 48, 51, 97, 105, 110, 114, 116–20, 122, 124–6, 128n. 4 incest 5, 51, 104, 141n. 21 incorporation see fantasy of inheritance 38 interdisciplinarity 1–2 intertextuality 6, 47, 85–101, 104, 107 introjection see fantasy of incorporation invention 4, 31, 67–8, 72, 77, 84 see also reading: inventive involute 4, 41 iterability 37 Jagose, Annamarie 124–5 Johnson, Christopher M. 86–92 Kermode, Frank 46 Kristeva, Julia 6, 85–98, 103 ‘The engendering of the formula’ 86–7 signifying complex 87, 90, 95, 101 see also intertextuality, pheno-text, geno-text Lawrence, D. H. ‘Evening of a Week-day’ 44–6, 48, 56–62 New Poems 46, 58, 61 ‘Palimpsest of Twilight’ 44, 46, 48, 56–62 poetic composition 46 ‘Poetry of the present’ 58 ‘Twilight’ 44, 46, 48, 56–62

163

Lejeune, Philippe 4, 91, 129n. 9 Lewes, George Henry 3 literature 2, 80–1, 91, 94–5 living on 32–3 McDonagh, Josephine 3, 29–30 McEwan, Ian, Atonement 6, 92–101 Mai, Cardinal Angelo 18–19, 140n. 4 Maniquis, Robert M. 9, 32–3 memory 30, 110, 113–14, 115, 127n. 1, 128n. 7, 134n. 9 metaphor 48–55 and Heidegger 48–52 metaphoric coupling 5–6 metaphors of 52–5 see also catachresis model 30–1 mourning 23–4, 25, 31–2, 42 Mystic Writing-Pad see Freud palimpsesting 9, 12–16, 31, 32, 66, 97, 111, 123, 142n. 1 apocalyptic 79–81, 83–4 palimpsests 2, 3–4, 5, 10–21, 64, 89 relation to the palimpsest 1, 6, 25–8, 29–30, 34, 54 see also The Archimedes Palimpsest palimpsestuous 3, 4–5, 11, 55, 126–7, 141n. 21 metaphoricity 55 reading 4, 40–1, 48, 56, 83, 91, 108 textuality 6, 86–8, 90, 95, 97, 101 paragram 70, 73–4 Peirce, Charles Sanders 67, 73 pheno-text 86–7, 88, 90, 92, 95, 97 see also geno-text Plutarch 127n. 1 poststructuralism 6, 47, 82–4, 85, 91, 105, 124–5, 128n. 4 Proust, Marcel 5, 32, 54–5, 139n. 23 psyche 23, 32, 103, 111, 143n. 3, 143n. 4 topography of 29, 31, 40–1 psychoanalysis 29, 30, 40

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queer 6–7, 43, 98, 103, 110, 115–16, 119, 120–4, 124–6 theory 6, 117 reading 3, 63–84 inventive 2, 38–41, 66, 68, 77, 83–4 palimpsestuous 4, 40–1, 48, 83, 91, 108 retroactive 56, 73 see also feminist criticism and palimpsesting: apocalyptic resurrection 12, 16–21, 73, 133n. 4 see also fantasy of Riffaterre, Michael 57, 72–6, 103, 107 Semiotics of Poetry 72–6 significance 48, 57, 72–4 Text Production 72 ungrammaticalities 57, 58, 72–3 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, The Voyeur 81–2 Royle, Nicholas 129n. 7, 145n. 11 Russell, Charles William 13, 15–16, 18–19, 20, 65 Russian Formalism 66 Saussure, Ferdinand de 68–72, 74–5, 124 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 123, 146n. 18 self see psyche and subjectivity sexuality 56, 57, 58, 61, 95, 105, 116–18, 120, 123 see also bisexuality, heterosexuality, homosexuality Smith, Robert 114–15

Sophocles 141–2n. 21 source study 47, 85 spectral imagery 20–1 spectralization of the subject 29, 33–8, 124–5 of temporality 37–8, 128n. 4 Starobinski, Jean 68–72 structuralism 6, 68–76, 91 subjectivity 32–8, 105–6, 109, 116–20 Sully, James 133n. 7 tabula rasa 29–30 temporality 27, 37–8, 98–100, 112, 128n. 4 text 6 closed 66 material 46–8, 56 open 79–80 palimtext 46–8 poststructuralist concept of 82–4, 85–6, 91 textual criticism 47–8 theoretical criticism 2–3 Thompson, Sir Edward Maunde 16, 18, 127n. 1, 130n. 6, 131n. 12 Todorov, Tzvetan 65–6 trauma 28–9, 38, 109–10 tropography 6, 42–3 twilight 43, 51–2, 54 unconscious 9, 29, 103–4, 113, 115 violence 2, 25, 26, 32–3, 39, 84, 115