The Poetics of Otherness and Transition in Naomi Aldermans Fiction [1 ed.] 1527543609, 9781527543607

Table of contents :
Dedication
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Conclusion
Bibliography

Citation preview

The Poetics of Otherness and Transition in Naomi Alderman’s Fiction

The Poetics of Otherness and Transition in Naomi Alderman’s Fiction By

José M. Yebra

The Poetics of Otherness and Transition in Naomi Alderman’s Fiction By José M. Yebra This book first published 2020 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2020 by José M. Yebra All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-4360-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-4360-7

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) and the European Regional Development Fund (DGI/ERDF) (code FFI2017-84258-P); and the Government of Aragón and the ERDF 2014–2020 programme “Building Europe from Aragón” (code H03_17R), for the writing of this book.

For my parents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ............................................................................................... 13 Radical Othering in Frum London Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 41 Oxbridge Otherness and Bisexual Arcadia in The Lessons Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 75 The Margins of Power: (Un)Authorized Voices from the Fathomless Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 111 Democratic Transhumanism in a Feminist Dystopia Conclusion ............................................................................................... 141 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 149

INTRODUCTION

In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,1 Jeanette Winterson delves into religious autobiography to explore lesbian Otherness. The protagonist is a subaltern who, drawing on Gayatri Spivak, can and cannot speak. Indeed, her coming out, no matter how accidental or forceful (it is her mother who catches her with her girlfriend in bed), is an act of speechless speech. Her acts speak for her because there is no language to utter her actual identity in the religious context she inhabits. Thus, as literature often does, Winterson’s text intrudes on so-called reality by addressing the undecidable. When Spivak argues that the subaltern cannot speak, it is because their “trueness” is too mediated – I would say ventriloquized – to come out. Since Spivak, however, the subaltern has been a common postcolonial concept and issue, often appropriated by Western voices. This appropriation of subalternity is dangerous, for it constitutes an act of emasculation and, eventually, violence. When Western countries, institutions, and individuals (even respectful ones) give voice to the subaltern, the latter is deprived of a voice of their own. Take, for example, processes of the democratization of non-Western countries. I am not saying that democracy is not a good regime for organizing people, bodies, and ideas. Yet, what is the point of imposing Western democracy on docile subaltern individuals to challenge the power of untamed ones? That unilateral conception of democracy, or rather of how to teach, learn, practice, and implement it, is bound to fail. Both history and current international politics bear witness to it. Strictly political conceptions of democracy are not the only ones that matter. Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran is a case in point.2 In a rather autobiographic fashion, the author recalls the days of the Iranian revolution and how women were confined to their homes and hidden behind their veils yet again. In this context, she sets up a clandestine readers’ club with seven female students to comment on their personal experiences and interests through Western books by Nabokov, Scott Fitzgerald, and Jane Austen, among others. The confluence between Western and non-Western cultures and traditions is desirable as long as Western Modernity is no longer the only referent that systematically 1 2

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (London: Vintage, 1991). Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran (New York: Random House, 2003).

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Introduction

downgrades and/or invisibilizes the non-Western Other. That is what Ziauddin Sardar’s and Enrique Dussel’s transmodernisms are about. However, is Nafisi’s book an example of the ethics of late postmodernism or transmodernism, or a new intrusion/ventriloquizing of the West onto the Other? The book vindicates female liberation and the role of literature as emancipator; the question is whether liberation comes from Western (particularly Anglo-Saxon) texts, hence Hamad Dabashi’s rough criticism of the novel as “American propaganda.”3 As Christopher Shea4 and Amy DePaul5 recall, Dabashi blames Nafisi for what he considers cultural emasculation, if not straight violence: “One can now clearly see … that this book is partially responsible for cultivating the U.S. (and by extension the global) public opinion against Iran.” Much in line with Edward Said’s Orientalism,6 Dabashi considers that the imagery of the East from a Western perspective is tendentious and simplistic as long as, instead of fighting the unquestionable iniquity of radical theocracies, it only serves to confirm hackneyed stereotypes and justify institutional violence. His argument is clearly related to Spivak’s notorious quote: “White men are saving brown women from brown men.”7 That there is male chauvinism in non-Western countries (as in Western countries) is well known. However, what Spivak addresses is the biased intentionality of this message. In view of the ineffectuality of Western invasions of third-world countries to liberate women (while other countries also violating female rights are sponsored by Western countries), it seems evident that the main target is not equal rights, but rather a question of cultural domination and control over the Other (male). To better understand this logic I will address Eve Sedgwick’s concept of the homosocial as the framework (virtually invisible, albeit implacable) that upholds the relations of power between males to institutionalize and normalize male supremacy and female subservience. Western politics of domination and foreign invasion are not envisaged to emancipate non-Western women. This is the excuse used to expunge the Others’ culture, arguing that half of that other culture 3

Christopher Shea, “A Prominent Scholar Accuses Azar Nafisi’s Bestselling Memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, of Being Neoconservative Propaganda Aimed at Islam,” Boston Globe (October 29, 2006), http://archive.boston.com /news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/10/29/book_clubbed. 4 Ibid. 5 Amy DePaul, “Re-reading Lolita in Tehran,” Iranian American Literature 33, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 74. 6 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003). 7 Gayatri C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: a Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1993), 93.

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– namely males – uses it against females. However, Nafasi’s book can also be read as one that bridges the hiatus between cultures, and especially as a reification of literature as a powerful weapon that upholds singularity and gives voice to the speechless. When the girls read and account for their lives through these texts, they are given the option to speak beyond the radical regime or the hegemony they suffer. From the above, one wonders who has the right to be regarded as subaltern? For Spivak, it is the removal from “all lines of social mobility”8 that makes up subalternity. This lack of access to mobility, she argues, “may be a version of singularity.”9 Critics like Peter Hallward have questioned Spivak’s very notion of subalternity as singularity and lack of mobility, because this prevents the subaltern from collective political action.10 In a very shrewd reading, Hallward makes reference to Spivak’s use of Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethics of alterity to address her notion of impossibility as “non-situational,” and suggests that “her understanding of singularity is ahistorical.”11 In other words, as happens with Lévinas’s radical alterity, Spivak’s subalternity may, in my view, be rendered ineffectual from a sociopolitical and ethical standpoint. However, I agree with Morton that Spivak (and I would add Lévinas) is not disregarding action against hegemonic power and discourses – she is rather pointing to the process of exclusion of the subaltern from narratives, which thwarts any claims to singularity. Back to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette, the protagonist, is removed from all lines of social mobility as a lesbian in a Pentecostal community. Moreover, as the novel is split into chapters named after parts of the Bible, like “Genesis,” “Exodus,” and “Leviticus,” her maturation process as a sexual dissident is marked and uttered through the hegemonic discourse that invisibilizes lesbianism itself. When Jeanette and her girlfriend are subjected to an exorcism, the traditional family and radical Christianity are ventriloquizing their identities and voices, somehow removing social mobility. I have started by addressing Winterson’s novel because it is a precursor of Naomi Alderman’s production, especially

8 Gayatri C. Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular,” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 4 (2005): 475. 9 Ibid., 475. 10 Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 66. 11 Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 66.

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Introduction

Disobedience,12 13 in more senses than one. Like Jeanette, Ronit is a lesbian belonging to an ultra-orthodox family, this time a Jewish one. Be that as it may, they are outsiders, the radical Other that must be ventriloquized to gain existence in the terms of the hegemonic discourse. This book explores the poetics of radical alterity, subalternity, intrusion, and influence that articulate identity in Alderman’s four novels to date. When the literary magazine Granta revealed its once-a-decade list of the twenty most promising British writers under forty in 2013, Naomi Alderman was one of them.14 At the time she had just published her third novel, The Liars’ Gospel.15 Disobedience, her debut novel, was successful and gave an almost unprecedented approach to Orthodox Jewish communities in England. The Lessons,16 her second, constituted a radical change. Here, Alderman’s discourse glides from the frum community in Hendon, London, to a group of friends’ nostalgic account of Oxford. The aforementioned The Liars’ Gospel returns to religion, this time from the historical viewpoint of prominent figures who give alternative accounts to those of the Christian canon. Her most recent novel, The Power,17 has gained her critical praise. A feminist dystopia which draws on, among other things, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale,18 Alderman’s text recalls the aesthetics of videogames. Indeed, the novelist is also a game writer. Being the co-creator and lead-writer of a game like Zombies, Run! (2011) points to the narrowing bridge between literature and new narratives such as videogames. Thus, in her short career, Alderman has covered a wide range of genres, styles, and concerns, from rewritings of sacred scriptures (she is the daughter of a London rabbi) to feminism from the standpoint of science fiction. All of them, however, also tackle the poetics of radical alterity and intrusion. What does it take to be the subaltern (i.e. below the other) when othering seems culturally redundant? Her characters are intruders, othered in different ways, which explains her multifarious discourses on current alterities. They are vulnerable and often dispossessed of social mobility, much in line with Spivak’s subalterns. Yet, in 12

Naomi Alderman, “Coming Out: Naomi Alderman on Leaving Orthodox Judaism Behind,” The Guardian (November 24, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/books /2018/nov/24/naomi-alderman-disobedience-faith-sexuality-leaving-community. 13 Naomi Alderman, Disobedience (London: Penguin, 2006). 14 “Britain’s Best Young Novelists at a Glance,” BBC (April 15, 2013), https://www.bbc.com/news/ entertainment-arts-22123175. 15 Naomi Alderman, The Liars’ Gospel (London: Penguin, 2012). 16 Naomi Alderman, The Lessons (London: Penguin, 2010). 17 Naomi Alderman, The Power (London: Penguin, 2016). 18 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Vintage, 1998).

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addressing the undecidable, literature allows Alderman to convey forms of ventriloquizing their displacement or non-identity. Alderman is also the author of a Doctor Who novel for the famous BBC series entitled Borrowed Time (2011). Although the novelist argued that in writing it she could be torpedoing her literary career,19 she actually proved her versatility. In any case, in the present book I will focus on her more traditional texts, so to speak, because they follow a common thread – namely an ethics of alterity much in line with current re-ideologized discourses. Her scripts for Zombies, Run! and Borrowed Time are valuable contributions and add to a multimodal writer like Alderman. It is increasingly difficult to only ascribe oneself to a non-audio-visual discourse when audio-visual texts and platforms are ubiquitous. However, for the sake of the thematic coherence and interest of this volume, especially the poetics of alterity in fiction, I will delve into her four novels to date. In the first chapter, “Radical Othering in Frum London,” I will explore the clash between Orthodoxy and the radical Otherness it occasionally begets and emasculates after the logic of Levinasian ethics. Rather than a neohumanist ethics, the analysis will rely on the turn to ethics that informs much post-postmodernist literature, Disobedience being a case in point. The chapter will also analyse how the cultural specificity of British Jewishness is particularly apt for exploring the hybrid poetics of the novel and its protagonist, silence, emasculation, intrusion, and trauma being key issues. The second chapter, “Oxbridge Otherness and Bisexual Arcadia in The Lessons,” is not related to Spivak’s subaltern, but instead the intruder as a recurring motif in British literature. The poetics of nostalgia and the sense of (non-)belonging rescue common issues like gender and, especially, class in Oxford. The sense of (non-) belonging is not only related to this poetics of a lost England from the perspective of both protagonists, but also affects the sense of disaffection that transcends and recasts the nostalgic logic of Oxbridge texts. As for the third chapter, “The Margins of Power: (Un)Authorized Voices from the Fathomless,” the sense of Otherness and estrangement is multiple. Drawing on the four gospels, the novel features four relevant figures of Christ’s times who witness his last days from different perspectives. All of them “are” as long as they relate to Christ, and hence their Otherness is a key feature of their personalities and discourse. However, their alterity is multifarious, giving a polyhedric account of Jesus: from Miryam’s subalternity, Judas’s paradoxical subservience, and Caiaphas’s alleged (yet dispossessed) 19

Rich Johnston, “Swapping Reputation for Time with the Doctor,” Cool (May 5, 2011), https://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/05/05/swapping-reputation-for-time-withthe-doctor.

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Introduction

hegemony to Barabbas’s encroaching (albeit dispossessed) transgression, they all ventriloquize Jesus’s spectral presence. In the last chapter, “Democratic Transhumanism in a Feminist Dystopia,” the estrangement of the protagonist comes from a radical reversal of the status quo. The Power fantasizes about breaking the principle of subalternity. Yet, in keeping its very structures intact, the result is distressing. The hegemony that disregards female power as an option is replaced by an analogous hegemony that only others powerful women. In the end, the fantasy features a dystopic scenario with women ventriloquizing prior hegemonic discourses. Alderman’s varied discourse, if well-grounded in feminist and Jewish traditions, gives voice to an increasingly transcultural and, I would add, transmodern paradigm. This is particularly obvious in her last two novels and virtually missing in The Lessons. Although the term transmodernity was first coined by Rosa Rodríguez Magda in 1987, as she herself recalls,20 it has been recast to meet new realities and respond to new challenges. Indeed, prestigious critics like Enrique Dussel and Ziauddin Sardar have recast the term in recent years to prove their “non-Western” standpoints. Rodríguez Magda maintains the Western origin and character of transmodernity. It constitutes “the description of a globalised, rhizomatic, technological society, developed from the first world, confronted with its others, while at the same time it penetrates and assumes them; and secondly, it constitutes the effort to transcend this hyperreal, relativistic enclosure.”21 However, outside the West, things are perceived otherwise. As Aliaga and Yebra point out, “Dussel’s conception of transmodernity as a utopian project that outdoes modernity itself and claims a symmetric dialogue between Western culture and subaltern third-world cultures”22 is the counterpoint to Magda’s. Both argue for a paradigm shift in the move that connects (hence the prefix trans-) transculturally in a world more globalized than ever before. But Magda focuses on the relation between transmodernity and the previous modernity, which gives way to a globalized newness still controlled by Western logic and rationalism. That is why she considers other cultures being penetrated and assumed by the

20 Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, “Transmodernidad: un nuevo paradigma,” Transmodernity, Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 1 (2011). 21 Ibid., 3. 22 Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen and José María Yebra-Pertusa, Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 11.

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West. Enrique Dussel23 24 and Ziauddin Zardar,25 much in line with Spivak, vindicate the speech of the subaltern. For this to happen, it is mandatory that the discourses, institutions, and dispositifs change. In other words, this change that non-Western transmodern trends claim implies a paradigm shift26 whose ultimate aim consists in undoing modernity. It is in this sense that transmodernism challenges the positive, albeit limited, changes conveyed by postmodernism. Critics like Jameson think postmodernism has not yet come to its end, and argue for a current late postmodernism. However, drawing on transmodern critics, I consider that there is a paradigm shift in the move which is more in line with Dussel and Sardar than the Westernized version of Rodríguez Magda. Although Alderman is a British-born writer, her Jewish roots, her wide-ranging texts, her ethical commitment with different expressions of Otherness, and her interests in alternative cultural and textual media like videogames make up her, let us say, transmodern status. Alderman’s texts belong in this shift because they are attentive and partake of the new paradigm. In levelling all cultural viewpoints, especially in her last novel, she is addressing a global world from a relational ethics which is transitional and liminal. Her novels are terrains for conflict and encounter where Western hegemony and hegemony in general are put to the test. Irena Ateljevic addresses the process as a “global relational consciousness … beyond the Western ideology [that] tries to connect the human race to a new shared story.”27 This is one of Alderman’s motifs, namely the connection of the ethical and the political in responding to global problems, especially the sense of Otherness and non-belonging and the dramatic effects of violence. This ethical (and, I would add, political) turn28 that rethinks the human in global(ity) terms is determined and connected with an epistemic turn. Onega makes reference to the dangers of the demise of transcendent knowledge after the Newtonian paradigm shift. 23

Enrique Dussel, Postmodernidad y Transmodernidad (Puebla, Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1999). 24 Enrique Dussel, “Transmodernidad e Interculturalidad (Interpretación Desde la Filosofía de la Liberación),” 2005, http://enriquedussel.com/txt/TRANSMODERNIDAD%20e%20interculturalidad.pdf. 25 Ziauddin Sardar, “Critical Muslim,” 2018, https://ziauddinsardar.com/articles/critical-muslim. 26 Susana Onega, “The Notion of Paradigm Shift and the Roles of Science and Literature in the Interpretation of Reality,” European Review 22 (2014). 27 Irena Ateljevic, “Visions of Transmodernity: a New Renaissance of Our Human History?” Integral Review 9, no. 2 (June 2013), 203. 28 Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau, Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2011).

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The question is whether this paradigm, based on strict rationalism and “unadulterated” by the emotional, the affective, and the imaginative, as Onega suggests, is coming to an end, and if a new one, as Magda, Dussel, Sardar, Ateljevic, and others (from their different standpoints) put forward, is coming. In my view, the new paradigm does not reject rationalism. It recasts it to meet new understandings, as well as an ethical, political, and epistemological variety (albeit not relativism) that responds to globality. It is in this sense, I contend, that Alderman’s novels convey the poetics of transition from a Western self-centred conception of reality to a much more open and empathic one that addresses and is informed by a multinodal standpoint. Alderman is a hybrid in many senses, which is valuable since fusion is a sign of the times. That is why her production is representative of many contending discourses. Her interest, respect, and criticism of Jewish culture and religion are coupled with her concern for gender representation, expression and dispossession, and violence. This makes her discourse particularly rich and polyreferential. Her literary style is also diverse. With only four novels published to date, she has tried out different genres. From a lesbian bildungsroman set between New York and London, to an Oxbridge coming-of-age university novel, to a revision of the biblical gospels, to a feminist science-fiction dystopia, Alderman has explored multifarious territories to understand the present through the past and the future. This liminality is grounded by a feeling of uncertainty and insecurity which, according to Gilles Lipovetsky, explains the rise of new spiritualities,29 a re-evaluation of the premodern,30 and the recognition of the Other.31 As mentioned above, Alderman’s literature belongs in the ethical turn that has terminated or challenged postmodernism to become new forms of understanding reality. If the effect of postmodernism since the 1960s is unquestionable, it is a fact that relativism has been redefined to meet new realities. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau insightfully address this ethical turn, being especially concerned with: its branching out into two main, antagonistic trends: a neo-humanist ethics, of a rather normative, deontic type, implying an overall moral dimension, generally associated with the stable ego of the character as present in classic realist texts based on linguistic transparency; and a newer, Levinasian 29 Gilles Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 64. 30 Ibid., 66–9. 31 Ibid., 65.

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and post-Levinasian ethics, of a non-deontic, non-foundational, noncognitive, and above all non-ontological type expounded by critics like Zygmunt Bauman, Andrew Gibson, Robert Eaglestone, or Drucilla Cornell, very much at home with experimentalism, that has come to be identified with the practice of postmodernism.32

This bifurcation, which started in the 1980s, has evolved unevenly. The second trend, more resolutely experimental and non-ontological, is, in my view, developing well beyond postmodernism into new isms, like the aforementioned transmodernism. Onega and Ganteau put forward this evolution into what they call “more specific and context-sensitive branches.”33 Among this they give some examples, namely “the ethics of truths … the ethics of alterity, or the ethics of affects, place, spectrality and pleasure.”34 Rather than a morally-charged discourse, which necessarily normalizes (Western) hegemony, these branches open the scope to new sensibilities and reject a univocal conception of ontology and, therefore, of reality. It is in this context that Dussel and Sardar’s transmodernisms arise and develop. The logic of the “Same,” as the ontologic imperative that represents Western Modernity, is being recast because it makes no sense in the era of globality. That which Lévinas argues is “otherwise than being” (1981)35 constitutes the essence of literature as undecidability, that which is not here. In short, the Same has been opened and exposed to the Other, but not necessarily in the radical sense and fashion that Lévinas defended. Given this, only a postontological understanding of reality can guarantee an appreciation of globality as much more than globalization. Literature, which is particularly related to the latter trend above, is the perfect scenario for this ethicallycommitted paradigm shift. When Jeremy Rifkin points out that “we are a fundamentally empathic species,”36 he is also addressing the shift discussed in the previous paragraphs. Maybe too optimistic for those who think that humans are violent and materialistic,37 the critic’s point is that the planet’s surviving entropy depends on humans’ natural empathy. As empathy is “the mental process by which one person enters into another’s being and comes to

32

Onega and Ganteau, Ethics and Trauma, 7–8. Ibid., 8. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: the Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2009), 1. 37 Ibid., 1. 33

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know how they feel and think,”38 it is attached to Lévinas’s ethics of alterity. It is also related to Onega’s concept of a paradigm shift that rescues the emotional and affective to combat the exclusivist rationalism of the prior Newtonian paradigm. Alderman’s novels are informed by the demise (or at least recasting) of the Age of Reason to accommodate other(s’) discourses. In Disobedience, the intimacy and affection of the protagonist challenge the logic of reason and faith of her community of origin. A rare conception of relationality, especially a revision of Oxbridge Arcadian bonds, relates and sets apart the group of friends of The Lessons. The Liars’ Gospel also recasts the classic conception of Christian Otherness and “the neighbour.” Empathy, rather than faith, determines the characters’ actions and discourses. Finally, The Power puts forward the fight of evil forces when empathy and care break down. The dystopia of the novel is as dangerous as the entropic forces that Rifkin forewarns of. In a similarly optimistic fashion, transmodern theorist Mark Luyckx Ghisi considers interdependency and mutual recognition.39 Only in recognizing each other do Alderman’s characters solve the challenges they come across. And when they do not, as is apparently the case of The Power, the entropic prevails and the humanness of humans is under threat. I would like to close these introductory notes by referring again to Ghisi. As Aitor Ibarrola explains, Ghisi warns about the normalizing dangers of globalization and argues for cultures to vindicate their specificities.40 This obviously goes back to Dussel and Sardar’s transmodernities, which demand for transcultural mutual recognition if dialogue is likely to take place. Alderman’s texts are a scenario of conflict and encounter, but also of undecidability. Before closing this introduction, a brief note on the use of the term “influence” rather than the postmodernist “intertextuality.” Drawing on Allan Johnson’s premise in Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence,41 I contend that “influence” is much wider than Harold Bloom claims in his seminal The Anxiety of Influence.42 Bloom’s Freudian reading of influence 38

Ibid., 12. Mark Luyckx Ghisi, The Knowledge Society: a Breakthrough toward Genuine Sustainability (Cochin: Stonehill Hill Foundation, 2008), 972–3. 40 Aitor Ibarrola-Armendáriz, “Signs of Transmodern Relationships in Richard Rodríguez’s Darling: a Spiritual Autobiography,” in Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English, eds. Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen and José María Yebra-Pertusa (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 171. 41 Allan Johnson, Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 42 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 39

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is insightful, but there are other approaches which are not so deterministic. Bloom’s Oedipal struggle between fathers and sons for prominence and authority through originality is very narrow and lineal. First of all, females are excluded from the fight (no matter if Bloom includes some female writers in his canon). Only the son is privileged and jeopardized to overcome his father, which brings him an anxiety of influence. Moreover, influence is always unidirectional, from fathers to sons, from the past to the present and, presumably, to the future. To break with Bloom’s straightjacketed conception of literature, Johnson focuses on visual images in Hollinghurst’s novels: “The textual influences in Hollinghurst’s work are the sequences of writing which most successfully portray and vitalise visual images from the aesthetic past.”43 In being a composite phenomenon that comprises many elements, these visual images in texts operate differently to classic influences. In short, whereas for Bloom the young poet is saturated and anxious because of the burden of his father’s superiority, Johnson argues for the innate character of some visual images, well beyond personal authorship, to make up a collective imagery. Bloom’s young poet can only overcome anxiety as long as the new generation is anxiously devoted to this young poet’s. However, for Johnson, the influence on others is not emasculating but enriching, as an aesthetic collaborative effort prevails. In this book, the textual and visual are considered as two sides of the same coin, and thus contribute to the fabric of the text. It is the persistence of visual and textual images from a hybridity between British and Jewish cultures that is evoked throughout Alderman’s novels; rites, traditions, and a sense of simultaneous cultural encounter and dispossession make up her rich imagery. The Jewish rites of frum London in Disobedience and the so-called British university traditions of The Lessons precede the hybrid imagery of The Liars’ Gospel and the dystopian post-apocalypse in The Power. Alderman’s influences are varied, all of them enhancing her discourse, particularly her poetics of Otherness. In using the term “influence,” I am focusing on fluency and the flowing between those that partake of the textual and cultural conversation. Thus, the conversation runs smoothly in different directions. For instance, Alderman catches up on frum culture in Disobedience to understand how Otherness is constructed in that context. Other than recipients of influence, this book understands texts as ventriloquizers. It is not so much that texts ventriloquize other texts, but that, drawing on radical alterity, most protagonists ventriloquize what their respective societies and communities do not dare to say out loud – be it frum-born lesbians, gay youths at a loss in Oxford, historical figures 43

Johnson, Alan Hollinghurst, 3.

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whose Otherness is exposed, or extraordinary women in a dystopic world they rule. All of them (though not altogether subaltern, responding to Spivak) can speak as long as they draw on different flows of influence that make up visual, cultural, and textual meeting points. Besides influence as a visual and textual phenomenon, one which makes texts overlap, dovetail, or contest each other, Alderman’s fiction is informed by social and interpersonal influence. In most cases, influence is essentially positive or negative from an ethical viewpoint. It is a point of encounter with the Other, but also, as will be seen, of violence and dispossession.

CHAPTER ONE RADICAL OTHERING IN FRUM LONDON

Naomi Alderman’s debut novel Disobedience (2006) earned her the Orange Award for New Writers. Disobedience is controversial because it reveals the ins and outs of the British Jewish community. As mentioned in the introduction, Alderman’s production, her first novel in particular, forms part of a transcultural trend. Although she argues it was not “in an attempt to ‘catch a trend’”44 that she wrote Disobedience, it followed the lead of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth,45 Monica Ali’s Brick Lane,46 and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices.47 In a more specifically Jewish context, Disobedience draws on Lesléa Newman and Judith Katz who, as Emma Parker points out, struggled “to integrate Jewish and lesbian identities … in the 1980s and … 1990s.”48 However, Alderman does not feel she was looking for a trend, but instead found one. Moreover, she has also conceded that her first novel is connected to some texts for which she feels “vaguely maternal,”49 namely Francesca Segal Costa’s The Innocents50 and Eve Harris’s The Marrying of Chani Kaufman.51 All these novels make up a frum-withdrawing community of writers in Britain who have opened the doors of Jewish Orthodox communities to their reading public. This emerging trend, Alderman points out, forms part of a much wider one, ranging from America to Israel.52 In her view, Smith’s White Teeth “ignited an interest in books that 44

Alderman, “Coming Out.” Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Penguin, 2001). 46 Monica Ali, Brick Lane (London: Black Swan, 2004). 47 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices (London: Transworld Publishers, 1998). 48 Emma Parker, “Contemporary Lesbian Fiction. Into the Twenty-First Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature, ed. Jodie Medd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 208. 49Alderman, “Coming Out.” 50 Francesca Segal Costa, The Innocents (London: Vintage, 2012). 51 Eve Harris, The Marrying of Chani Kaufman (Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2013). 52 Alderman, “Coming Out.” 45

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portrayed the different cultures that now live together in the UK,”53 which also informs her own text. Thirteen years after it was first published and coinciding with its Hollywood adaptation, the novelist has come to understand the reason why she wrote it in the first place: “It is a movie and a novel about three people who have reached a cul-de-sac in their lives; who have to face the realisation that the things they’ve been muddling along with all these years won’t work any more … A lot of people reach that point. Whole communities, whole countries get to that.”54 Alderman’s words resonate with necessary change, individual and communal, recalling the paradigm shift addressed in the introduction. The novel is set in Hendon, London, where Alderman herself was raised, and where the protagonist, Ronit, returns from New York to attend her father’s funeral. Rav Krushka is not only the rabbi of the Orthodox Jewish community of Hendon, but a prestigious religious leader whose books reach America, where Ronit went to start anew, away from the strict lifestyle of her father and his followers. Thus, no matter how far she goes, Ronit is haunted by her past, her father’s figure, and the culture he represents. Back in England, she finds out that her cousin Dovid is about to be elected her father’s successor and, more importantly, is married to Esti, Ronit’s former lover. Although the novel is not autobiographical, Alderman, like the protagonist, moved from England to New York. However, unlike Ronit, the novelist continued practicing the “Orthodox Judaism [she] was raised in”55 for some time. In any case, and beyond particular implications and trauma, the writer makes reference to a collective trauma to partially explain the conception of the novel and its plot. In autumn 2001, while she was in New York, the massive terrorist attack on the Twin Towers took place and, with it, a new era started. In rather millenarian terms, she argues, “lots of people living in Manhattan … reassessed their lives. People got married, got divorced, decided to have a baby, adopt a baby, foster a baby … And people came out.”56 A new beginning, a new Jerusalem – a particularly Jewish and American concept – commenced for many. Samdi Simcha DuBowsk’s Trembling Before Gd,57 a famous documentary on gays and lesbians coming out, became, she says, important in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. David Mattin addresses what for most critics constitutes both the main drawback and asset of the novel. In the task of cultural documentation, he 53

Ibid. Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Samdi Simcha DuBowsk (dir.), Trembling Before G-d (Cinephil, 2001). 54

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argues, Disobedience succeeds.58 However, it is at the expense of literature. Likewise, Dina Rabinovitch thinks the novel lacks character, since “none of the personalities here gets beyond the two-dimensional.”59 In her view, literature can go further, and explore plotlines in brand new ways, but in Disobedience, “storytelling is wielded like a blunt instrument, hammering home the message that small communities foster smallmindedness,”60 which for Rabinovitch is too hackneyed a territory. In other words, the novel often reads as the political and religious manifesto of a connoisseur against frum conventions and a traumatic testimony of ultra-orthodox repression against females. Feminism (particularly Carol Gilligan’s care ethics), ethics of alterity, and trauma theory thus constitute the theoretical framework for exploring the traumatic undertones of the love triangle of the novel. Indeed, according to Mattin and Rabinovitch, Disobedience is at its best when the narrator and implied author bear witness to British Jewishness in a detached fashion. Hendon is an urban area in North London with a high Jewish population. In fact, as often happens with writing about London, the city and a particular area or neighbourhood become another character of the novel. Rabidovitch recalls that Hendon is seldom seen in literature, except for an episode of Dickens’s Oliver Twist and a passing reference in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.61 When Ronit comes back home, Hendon is part of her Trembling Behind G-d experience. She comes out in more senses than one. That is, she comes out as a bisexual, first having an affair with her male boss in New York62 and later resuming her teenage love affair with Esti, but also as the Other within the Same. Being the daughter of the rabbi of the community, her disobedience constitutes a radical othering; coming from the “Same,” i.e. the frum community she was raised in, her transgression is a radical coming out to and from her roots, and the care and protection that community is supposed to provide its members. In Disobedience, coming back is akin to coming out because she cannot be part of the frum Orthodoxy anymore. Her return has much to do with trauma poetics. When she is back, she looks at Hendon as a place stuck in time, a Jewish Sleepy Hollow. Thus, the original wound, which coincides 58

David Mattin, “Disobedience by Naomi Alderman,” Independent (March 12, 2006), https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/disobedience-bynaomi-alderman-6106762.html. 59 Dina Rabinovitch, “This is Hendon,” Our Daily Read (March 4, 2006), http://www.ourdailyread.com/2006/03/this-is-hendon. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62Alderman, Disobedience, 35–6.

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with her split/withdrawal from the community, remains the same. Her father’s funeral only triggers the latent wound enclosed in Hendon’s rejection of the Other within itself. Rabinovitch says of Hendon that it “epitomizes London facelessness”63 because it allows each community to be itself without being disturbed. However, in my view, the neighbourhood is faceless in a Levinasian sense. For Lévinas, “the face of the Other”64 65 represents the radical Otherness of the Other, that which cannot be accessed by the Same. Furthermore, in his ethics of alterity, he contends that the Other (through the face as its metaphor) prevails, and the Same must surrender. In Disobedience, Ronit first adopts a Levinasian stance, more specifically when she leaves London for New York. She accepts and surrenders to the Otherness of the community she has been part of. This is the original trauma she leaves unhealed while in Manhattan. Only when her father dies, which releases her latent trauma, does she come to terms with the face of the Other, the Other within herself. Back in Hendon, she not only resumes her love affair with Esti, but also comes to terms with the community’s intrusions, triggering a crisis that is presumably the source of her, her friend’s, and the community’s working through. In analysing the traumatic references and memorialization of the Holocaust, Dominick LaCapra makes a distinction between acting out, “the tendency to repeat something compulsively … to relive the past, to exist in the present as if they were still fully in the past, with no distance from it,”66 and working through. In the latter case: the person tries to gain critical distance on a problem, to be able to distinguish between past, present and future. For the victim, this means his ability to say to himself, “Yes, that happened to me back then. It was distressing, overwhelming, perhaps I can’t entirely disengage myself from it, but I’m existing here and now, and this is different from back then.” There may be other possibilities, but it’s via the working-through that one acquires the possibility of being an ethical agent.67

63

Rabinovitch, “This is Hendon.” Frederick Young, “Lévinas and Criticism,” in Introducing Criticism in the 21st Century, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 65 Emmanuel Lévinas, Ethique et Infini (Paris: L’espace Interieur, 1982), 90. 66 Dominick LaCapra, “Acting-out and Working-through Trauma. Interview with Professor Dominick LaCapra” (June 9, 1998), https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203646.pdf. 67 Ibid. 64

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Drawing on trauma theory, Ronit gets to work through the wound she left behind and becomes an ethical agent who dismantles the status quo to come back to herself. Ronit’s case transcends the text itself. As Ruth Gilbert points out: “Alderman has discussed, in frank terms, the way in which the novel is in some respects a working through of her own background.”68 In the novel, Ronit’s recovering her mother’s candlesticks is a metaphor for her reconciliation with her past and origins. However, it is transgression that allows the novel and its protagonist to work through the trauma of being expunged from one’s roots. In being transgressive, Ronit brings about change, especially through her cousin Dovid, the next rabbi of the community.

The Outsideness of British Jewry While Hendon remains immobile and true to itself as Orthodoxy claims, Jewish literature is quite a different matter. For Jyl Lynn Felman, “Jewish literature is the history of transgression. From the story of Abraham smashing the idols to Sigmund Freud’s Power of the Unconscious; from Herzl’s Zionist dream to Jabotinsky’s transformation of that dream.”69 It is a paradox that Orthodoxy has often been questioned and coupled with transgression. The transgressor Other is thus as common a Jewish figure as the Wandering Jew, as Jack Nusan Porter’s The Jew as Outsider contends.70 Drawing on the example of Tony Kuhner’s assimilationist Angels in America,71 Felman argues: “In every generation there are questions that need to be asked and doors that need to be opened. Each generation of Jews asks the questions for those who follow; our survival depends on this truth telling.”72 Alderman is a voice of the new generation, and as such her novels ask questions and open doors to confront current and future challenges. Drawing on Donald Weber,73 Ruth Gilbert makes reference to the “Anglo-Jewish literary revival”74 in the early twenty-first 68

Gilbert, Writing Jewish, 134. Jyl Lynn Felman, “Transgression in Jewish Literature,” Judaica Librarianship 8, no 1–2 (1994): 119. 70 Jack Nusan Porter, The Jew as Outsider (Newtonville, MA: Spencer Press, 1981). 71 Tony Kushner, Angels in America (London: Nick Hern Books, 1992). 72 Felman, “Transgression,” 119. 73 Donald Weber, “Anglo-Jewish Literature Raises its Voice,” JBooks (July 12, 2007), http://www.jbooks.com /interviews/index/IP_Weber_English.htm. 74 Ruth Gilbert, Writing Jewish: Contemporary British-Jewish Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 9. 69

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century. Since Howard Jacobson’s Booker Prize win and thanks to the “high profile given to other contemporary British-Jewish writers,”75 among whom Gilbert includes Alderman, British Jewishness has been “arguably opened to a wider readership than ever before.”76 Maybe it is far too ambitious to say that Alderman’s production is truth telling. However, it is a way to move towards truth, of diversity within the frum, the (LGTB) Otherness that comes out of (Jewish) Otherness. Indeed, the Jewish LGTB community has been a major influence in the progress of Jewishness, as Nusan Porter argues, since the 1960s counterculture at least.77 If Jews have “inherited the status of outsiders”78 this is doubly so in the case of LGTB Jews. Thus, their voice must be preserved as Jewish civilization has done with its history, culture, and religion. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini examine the trans-fluency (drawing on the transmodern and influence) of queerness and Jewishness. Rather than outing people who happen to be Jews,79 they analyse “the complex of social arrangements and processes through which modern Jewish and homosexual identities emerged as traces of each other.”80 How the Jewish and homosexual bodies are lived and especially how they die have become commonplace since the nineteenth century, when Jewish masculinity was “downgraded” as effeminate, and hence homosexual. In this way, Boyarin, Itzkovitz, and Pellegrini argue, “modern Jewishness became as much a category of gender as of race.”81 This conception of Jewish masculinity as essentially inverted, effeminate, and complex is an archetype Dovid recasts in the novel. Jewish female queerness is even more complex. In often being regarded “at once too much and not enough woman,”82 the Jewess is a hybrid, more so when, like Ronit and Esti, she breaks with the expected. Zohar Weiman-Kelman recalls the genealogy of poetry by Jewish lesbians in queer terms, recasting the conception and perception of time. Thus, the historical impulse of her study “is based in the possibility of moving

75

Ibid., 11. Ibid. 77 Jack Nusan Porter, “Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Literature with Jewish Content: a Bibliographic Review,” Judaica Librarianship 8, no 1–2 (1994): 124. 78 Ibid., 120. 79 Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 1. 80 Ibid., 1. 81 Ibid., 1. 82 Ibid., 6. 76

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across time, allowing past and present … to pleasurably touch.”83 This view of transhistorical and transcultural Jewish poetry (Weiman-Kelman’s project addresses Jewish queer writing by women in different countries and languages) does not inform Disobedience. Although transgression has been a defining characteristic of Jewish literature and the Jew – both male and female – has been identified with sexual inversion, Alderman’s novel focuses on the here and now, and on the clash between tradition and transgression. The religious words recalled at the beginning of each chapter do not foster change and acceptance of Otherness. On the contrary, these prayers bear witness to, justify, and reinforce the cultural narrowmindedness of the frum community Ronit feels that she had been forced to leave. However, the lines and the matrices that, drawing on Adrienne Rich, Weiman-Kelman searches for in Jewish lesbian poetry work as interpersonal meeting points in Disobedience. “Webs, rafters, nets, connections of the body (hair, blood) and of the mind (telepathy) … are woven, flung … contrived”84 in these poems, as they are in the relationship between Ronit and Esti. Yet, Alderman’s novel confines these connections to the realm of the private and, more specifically, the intimate. Both women are contra mundum in a context of Jewish radicalism. This is precisely the main rebuke of some critics to Disobedience. It sometimes reads more like a pamphlet against intolerance than the piece of literature it actually is. As mentioned above, in Disobedience, every chapter starts by quoting lines from Jewish prayers, most of them offensive and/or discriminatory to women. For instance, chapter four starts with men praying and thanking God for not having been born a woman.85 In its turn, each chapter is split into two parts, easily recognizable because the font is different. The first part is narrated in the third person whereas the second, in the first person, accounts for Ronit’s viewpoint. The two sections are not complementary, and one is not the nemesis of the other. They are in fact incompatible, the Same and the Other, that must be split apart. From the very beginning, the novel denounces the male chauvinism of Hendon’s frum community; especially the way it segregates men and women and assigns them roles and physical spaces. In fact, while men sit on the front row, women are confined to the back of the synagogue.86 The prominence of males, which seems taken for granted within the community, is rendered discriminatory 83 Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Queer Expectations: a Genealogy of Jewish Women’s Poetry (New York: SUNY, 2018), xix. 84 Ibid., 1. 85 Alderman, Disobedience, 58. 86 Ibid., 5.

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and weird for the outsider. And here comes one of the key issues in Disobedience and Alderman’s production as a whole – the Other takes the centre stage and becomes the point of reference, or at least one of the points of reference in a nodal understanding of so-called reality. When I say outsider, I mean the reader, the implied author, and Alderman herself, as all of these are allegedly detached and critical of what is going on around Ronit. The Other’s point of view prevails from a political, ethical, ontological, and literary viewpoint. The novel does this by addressing facts in a rather documentary fashion when narrated in the third person, and from Ronit’s brand-new eyes when in the first person. When a young man tries to win Ronit round to her own father’s teachings in Manhattan, she rebukes him. In an ideologized discourse where Alderman’s voice is quite clear, the heroine argues how he and other orthodox Jews cannot understand that she no longer feels at home with religion and within the community, which has become constraining – “more like a prison than a safe harbour.”87 That is, Mattin would argue, Alderman is preaching behind the protagonist. Her New York lifestyle, being single and the lover of her boss, makes Hendon an uncanny space which eventually turns particularly hostile for her. As pointed out above, the power of words, which Orthodox Jews revere, is used against itself. This is indeed one of the novel’s main assets, albeit more a political than literary one. Hashem, the narrator says, “created the world through speech.”88 Hence, the one who controls speech also controls people’s lives and wills. That is why the rav’s words matter so much, and he pays peculiar attention to all units of the utterance.89 The power of words to name and thus construct realities has a dark underside in the novel, though. To utter is often to dispossess the non-normative Other. The worst act of dispossession is, however, not to deny a name, but to deny its utterance. This is the case with Esti Kuperman at the beginning of the novel. Although her problem is not obvious, it seems evident to the narrator that there is something wrong with her.90 This something, presumably her repressed lesbianism and nonconformity, falls “under the name of lashon hara,”91 which stands for the unspeakability of same-sex desire in Western culture. Thus, when the rav reifies speech as a spark of the divine granted on people because, of all living beings, “only we speak,”92 it is uncertain, to say the least, whether 87

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 7. 89 Ibid., 8. 90 Ibid., 3. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid., 7. 88

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the subaltern is included in this we. As for Ronit, being a rebel, the Other within, she self-excludes from the emasculating discourse her community practices. She answers back to the recriminatory discourse of the books she has been obliged to read. The prosopopeia comes to an end when the heroine silences the books instead of being silenced by them, against frum prescriptions. In any case, the fact that books address her in a nightmare, recriminating her lack of commitment with the community as long as she rejects being a mother, is culturally significant.93 She is the marked one because she withdraws.

Female Transgression and Trauma When the rav dies, Ronit comes back to the funeral and to Esti. She feels estranged from the burial, but deeply attached to her friend.94 Moreover, a new patriarch is needed, which problematizes Esti and Dovid’s lives. Thus, the novel’s intrigue starts. Ronit’s return, which coincides with the second chapter, focuses on fluidity. It is dirty in females’ case, as it is related to menstruation. In fact, the narrator recalls Jewish traditional teachings whereby, during the wife’s menstruation, she must keep apart from her husband.95 Like the Other in the couple, the man being the Same, she is forbidden, not the one who forbids. Moreover, she must be immersed in natural water before returning to her husband. In other words, purification is exogenous because there is no intrinsic purifying in Esti or any other woman.96 However, fluidity in males is quite different as they pour the water “to fill the enamel jugs.”97 Men are active ritualizers who transmute water from a purifying substance into a divine force. The triangle between Ronit, her cousin Dovid, and Esti serves for exploring the role of frum women when they go astray and frum men when they are chosen to perform in the name of power. Ronit’s return only unsettles Esti’s silent existence and brings up their teenage love story again. Memories are erotic, making it clear that female bodies matter. When Ronit recalls the corporeality of her rapport with Esti98 it is never done so in dirty terms but as moments of encounter, of radical relationality and mutuality with the other. Yet female eroticism, let alone lesbianism, clashes against the rules of the British Jewish community which, the 93

Ibid., 74. Ibid., 38. 95 Ibid., 21. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., 26. 98 Ibid., 47. 94

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narrator laments, is much stricter than the American one.99 Ronit and Esti confront their trauma in dissimilar ways: the former escaping, the latter remaining silent and losing weight. In both cases, though, they have built their lives “on resisting the process”100 – the process of submission and self-denial, be it marriage or “shielding … from unpleasant truths,”101 as Ronit’s psychoanalyst says. When Ronit is supposed to be mourning her father for a month according to tradition, she is indeed resisting the silence and invisibility she is compelled to.102 The heroine’s joie de vivre gained far from the community fascinates Esti, who finds out “unexpected desires.”103 Thus, the latent desire that has been haunting and tormenting them for years comes back, as trauma always does, belatedly, according to Cathy Caruth and other trauma theorists. For Caruth, trauma “is not located in an isolated event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its not-known/unassimilated nature returns to haunt the survivor later on.”104 In other words, “the full force of trauma [is perceived] as operating belatedly.”105 I am addressing trauma theory, not because I consider that both women’s love affair is intrinsically traumatic, but because it is constructed like that from the standpoint of the community that presses them in/out of existence. Trauma experience relies on silence because it cannot be named, at least not straightforwardly. It is an ontology that escapes the logic of the Lacanian Symbolic well into the Real. That is why the investment in silence and the absolute invisibility that Ronit detests in her Jewish community106 match the (im)possible discourse of trauma. The protagonist fights against the frums’ silence and darkness by speaking her “truth” to her psychoanalyst. Thus, like the Freudian talking therapy she practices, Ronit is the trigger that wakes a love that Hendon’s radicalism has turned into repressed trauma. Paradoxically, it is love that belatedly revives events that have long been silenced, as they are impossible to utter in a frum community. And not only are they impossible to utter, but also to experience. Drawing on Weiman-Kelman, after Ronit comes back, Esti experiences queer expectations, which break with everything from before. 99

Ibid., 54. Ibid., 51. 101 Ibid., 93. 102 Ibid., 54. 103 Ibid., 63. 104 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 3. 105 Andrew Barnaby, Coming Too Late: Reflections on Freud and Belatedness (New York: SUNY, 2017), 39. 106 Alderman, Disobedience, 55. 100

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While grasping Miss Schintzler’s arm, the narrator recalls, she not only feels driven to the former107 but also recalls her attraction for Ronit and forecasts new drives to come. Esti thus breaks the spell of frum secrecy and mystery. Although the community she belongs to prescribes silence and invisibility on sexual issues,108 she struggles for their return and hence re-presentation. She is haunted by trauma, which is not an event but rather its impossibility. In other words, while trauma victims are normally haunted by an event they are unable to bear witness to, Esti’s trauma results from inarticulate identity and expectations; there is an excess, not of events, but of nothingness, silence, and invisibility. The two women’s encounter is momentous. Once again, the unexpected is queer and triggers the arousal of the past, which proves to be as compelling as it is spectral and erotic. Ronit’s appearance draws on the scene of William Wyler’s Jezebel,109 in which Bette Davies, playing Julie, arrives at a New Orleans ball in red when it is mandatory for all nonmarried girls to dress in white. It is as scandalous as Ronit’s entrance is in contemporary Hendon, “rosily magnificent, dressed like a woman from a magazine or poster”110 as she goes down the stairs. All about her exudes sexuality – her clothes and her dark skin and hair, as well as her makeup and “disapproving smile.”111 Julie-Jezebel in the film argues it is 1852 to convince her fiancé Preston (Henry Fonda) to dress in red for the ball. Likewise, Ronit tacitly implies in her narrative voice that she is like a poster girl in old-fashioned Hendon. Yet, it is the tropes Ronit and Jezebel share that make them powerful and destabilizing forces. The former is the daughter of the rav in a frum community, which demands that rules are followed. The latter belongs to a plantation-owning family in antebellum New Orleans. Being a particularly obstinate girl in such a context, Julie can only bring shame to her family. Not only does she defy rules by dressing in red in front of everybody, but when she urges a duel between two men, resulting in one of them being killed, her mother states: “I’m thinking of a woman called Jezebel who did evil in the sight of God.”112 The legend of Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, king of Israel, goes well beyond history, Wyler’s film being just one example. Originally accused of worshipping fake idols – she even “organized the gilds of prophets, 450 of

107

Ibid., 63. Ibid., 79. 109 William Wyler (dir.), Jezebel (Warner Bros Pictures, 1938). 110 Alderman, Disobedience, 65. 111 Ibid. 112 Wyler, Jezebel. 108

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Baal, and 400 of Asherah”113 – she has come to represent promiscuity. Indeed, all female transgression is eventually reduced to sexual disobedience, and Ronit, Julie, and Jezebel are no exceptions. If Jezebel’s transgression was initially religious and Julie’s feminist, Ronit’s is both at the same time. Her feminism is a reaction to religious radicalism, as is evident when she rescues Esti. She does this by practicing something close to Gilligan’s ethics of care,114 namely an ethics that, from a feminist standpoint, vindicates traditionally female traits like caring, love, and mothering. As Virginia Held argues: “Care is both value and practice,”115 and constitutes an alternative to “dominant moral theories as Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, or Aristotelian virtue ethics.”116 In other words, it brings about a change in the conception of morality, no longer focused (at least not primarily) on “justice and rights or … utility and preference satisfaction.”117 The ethics of care is fundamentally relational and, in more sense than one, Levinasian, and the encounter with the Other is essential. It is not justice or a regulatory morality that prevails, but understanding and helping the Other as part of a continuum with oneself. It is in this sense that, Esti mulls, “loving Ronit seemed … to demand some denial of herself.”118 The heroine’s ethics clashes with those of the Hartogs, the wealthy family that, as part of the Orthodox Jewish elite in Britain, proves that “money can mean power.”119 Dovid is part of the Hartogs’ and other wealthy families’ plan to replace the rav. Ronit first defies her father’s legacy and his followers’ designs during a dinner which seems like a pamphlet against religious radicalism, an act of prearranged political activism. The young woman aims to épater le bourgeois, or rather the frum. She declares herself a lesbian,120 and in favour of surrogate motherhood. As a matter of fact, she confesses to having thought of doing it despite the hardships it involves.121 However, Ronit is all too obviously Alderman’s alter ego, and her denunciation is so obviously an antiorthodox manifesto than even the ethics of care is momentarily eclipsed. 113 Emil G. Hirsch, “Ira Maurice Price,” Jewish Encyclopedia, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/8675-jezebel. 114 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 115 Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political and Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 9. 116 Ibid., 9. 117 Ibid. 118 Alderman, Disobedience, 105. 119 Ibid., 91. 120 Ibid., 98. 121 Ibid.

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She soon retrieves the spirit of care, though, albeit in an allegorical tone, comparing her love for Esti to David and Jonathan’s illicit bond,122 or recalling her teenage story with Esti. Indeed, their love affair and the ethics of care are two sides of the same coin, like their story and the biblical one. When their bodies are next to each other, they feel warm,123 as one feels warm in welcoming the attention of the other. From both women’s reencounter, theirs is a fight to state their bond in opposition to Jewish Orthodoxy. Concerned and split, Esti believes that their love affair is the cause of her suffering and divine punishment.124 She goes further still in identifying her life with a lack as retribution as, she points out: “The wanting is a punishment too.”125 Instead of love, which is a central factor in the ethics of care, Esti’s life turns desire around as a lack (in somewhat Lacanian terms), and the resolution of such a lack is through punishment rather than fulfilment. In Hendon, females are not allowed to exchange love, much less with each other, for it discloses their lack, wanting, incompleteness, and impurity. Although their fluidity, as opposed to the male Word, is granted, it must be kept at bay and invisibilized. The story of David and Jonathan is illustrative of how tradition can be recast to accommodate new realities that frum communities are not ready to accept. The two historical religious figures form a covenant against the rule of Saul, Jonathan’s father. As the novel recalls, “David would hide,” thus missing “the feast to celebrate the start of the new month.”126 Only once Saul’s fury is appeased would Jonathan tell David to come back.127 However, in seeing that David has escaped and feeling his throne under threat, Saul is enraged and reprimands his son for bringing shame on his family.128 The homoerotic implications are more than obvious, threatening the old king’s rule and race. Drawing on its title, the novel fosters disobedience and hence vindicates the youths’ covenant over Saul’s genealogical logic and shame as a politically and ethically-charged affect. When danger is over, the youths surrender to one another in a homoerotic encounter and love that even Jewish tradition recalls as the apex of mutuality.129 The novel not only intersperses the biblical story with Ronit and Esti’s reencounter after some time. The story serves different 122

Ibid., 109. Ibid., 104. 124 Ibid., 117. 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid., 108, my italics. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid., 109. 123

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purposes; first, an aesthetic one, because the beauty of the scene works to convey the message of lesbian love against religious radicalism. It is also political because the story proves the homosocial character of the (Jewish) Orthodoxy, which necessarily expunges all female relations, let alone lesbian love, from a discourse of power. Finally, it has an ethical effect. The allegiance between these women is inspired by Jonathan and David’s love. However, against the rabbis’ record, they overcome these kings’ covenant. In the end, the love story between David and Jonathan is tinged with power undertones. Theirs is pure alterity and ethical encounter with the Other because it dismantles the epistemic and ontological foundations of Orthodoxy. While they are listening to Machar Chodesh, they recall that the day after is the festival of “the new moon.”130 The moon, as a symbol of femininity and the menstruation period, thus replaces the new month (as I highlighted above in italics) as the normative timing unit. Later on, the symbolism of the moon and its implications are even more obvious when, drawing on David and Jonathan’s encounter, the young women meet: “The moon was absent … [Yet,] tomorrow the moon will return as Ronit has returned to me.”131 Shame is a crucial aspect in Ronit’s return home and her love affair with Esti. Although, as mentioned above, feeling shame draws on the story of David and Jonathan, theirs is a feminist recasting of that in the Bible. For Tomkins, “shame occurs when positive affect is incompletely reduced. In other words, shame happens just when you are feeling good – say excited or joyful – and something gets in the way of your good feeling, but doesn’t stop you from wanting to continue with that good feeling. It could be any manner of obstacle.”132 The something that gets in the way in Disobedience is the patriarchal Orthodoxy of the frums, which frustrates these two women’s personal and sexual fulfilment. Ronit’s coming back home can be read as a trigger that, like in trauma theory, recalls for the ashamed that “at any time desire outruns fulfilment.”133 Her good feeling about living in New York is not cancelled, but returning is an obstacle that recalls her lack. In front of the frum community they belong to, despite their sense of non-belonging, Ronit and Esti feel exposed and vulnerable, which are feelings related to shame. The reaction they have to both the affect and the emotion of shame – i.e. renouncing temporarily to pleasure 130

Ibid. Ibid., 110. 132 Tomkins Institute, http://www.tomkins.org/what-tomkins-said/introduction/ positive-affects-when-interrupted-yield-to-the-affect-of-shame. 133 Donald Nathanson, Shame and Pride, Rreferring to Léon Wurmser, the Mask of Shame (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 288. 131

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and negative self-judgement respectively – 134 is complex. Drawing on Nathanson,135 Ronit first withdraws her desire for Esti, somehow compensating with a liberal lifestyle in New York; thus, she avoids shame within her community of origin. Esti, however, in remaining in Hendon, reacts to the shame triggered by her same-sex desire by attacking herself, and more specifically masochistically accepting the community rules when she marries Dovid. Drawing on Tomkins’s idea that “shame can be understood to be ‘faceconsciousness’” – in fact, the loss of face is more intolerable than the loss of life, because “the self lives in the face”136 – Ronit encourages Esti to reach her face-consciousness. Indeed, although all of Esti’s restraints and limitations exasperate the protagonist, it is the fact that she “can’t look herself in the face”137 that prevails. In heartening Esti, Ronit comes to terms with her own burden of shame and face-consciousness. She surprises herself by gazing at her face “crying and not knowing [her] reflection.”138 However, when she encounters Esti’s face, shame is neutralized and proves to be an obstacle to good feeling. She recalls how she “shifted … to look at [Esti’s] face” to finally turn and kiss her.139 In the end, shame is not completely cancelled, but Esti learns to be faceconscious and thus read her own, and cope with her shame of being inferior: “There was a time when Esti thought that Ronit’s face contained the world, but … it’s just a face. … It’s not good, to see the world in a face that doesn’t belong to you.”140 Hendon relies on shame to guarantee its survival as a constraining territory. Disobedience relies precisely on disobedience to come to terms with a shame that underscores the traumas the protagonists must work through. The face, like words, is a trope of control and coercion.

134 Richard Ostrofsky, Affect Theory, Shame and the Logic of Personality, 2003, http://www.secthoughts.com/Misc%20Essays/Shame%20and%20Personality.pdf, 22. 135 In Ostrofsky, Affect Theory, 22–3. 136 Tomkins Institute. 137Alderman, Disobedience, 180. 138 Ibid., 182. 139 Ibid., 184. 140 Ibid., 251.

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Words and Silence as Otherness The rav’s word is sacred. However, females’ words are gossip; in fact, as the Sages say in the Pirkei Avot, talking to a woman only brings sin.141 Moreover, spreading rumours is punished. Yet, when it comes to Esti and Ronit, things are otherwise. The marriage and health of the first and the lifestyle of the second are the community’s target, even in the synagogue. It is not speaking to them but about them that helps to assert and legitimate the community’s strict values in accordance with the Torah. The traumatic nature of the girls’ love affair is obviously not intrinsic to the event itself but to the way it resurfaces when Ronit is back in Hendon after a long silence. The trauma is mostly in saying what is impossible because it is forbidden,142 or rather in unsaying it and thus assuming that one is haunted by the trauma of non-existence. Women in the synagogue comment on Ronit and Esti’s care and love for each other as being unconceivable.143 As long as it is not said, it cannot exist. Yet, if it existed, it would be forbidden, which “paradoxically” happens. That is, the unconceivable is forbidden because it exists. This oxymoron, which is a characteristic of trauma discourses, makes the two protagonists excessive and invisible at the same time, hence Ronit’s shrewd conclusion to her coming back home if she wants to go mad.144 In returning home, Ronit fights her own traumatizing silences, particularly in how her father deprived her of her childhood first and of its remembrance afterwards.145 Hence, though unwillingly at first, she starts to cope with her trauma, her attempt “to fill the void of loss”146 that haunts her. It is not religion but psychoanalysis that helps Ronit to work through her silence. What at first she justifies as being due to her British repression and inarticulacy proves to be much more complex when she starts speech therapy with Dr Feingold. She fills the void, so to speak, with silence. The religious atmosphere she was brought up in enforces silence on women, but Ronit learns she can and must speak, no matter to what extent she has been rendered subaltern or Other within her own community. As Dr Feingold, an influential member of the community, argues, silence is a weapon of social control, not because it is powerful in itself but because it

141

Ibid., 122. Ibid., 129. 143 Ibid., 129. 144 Ibid., 118. 145 Ibid., 133. 146 Ibid., 136. 142

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helps maintain the status quo.147 Esti’s trauma is more conspicuous, even though she is quite passive and has followed the rules. Indeed, it is her commitment to rules that paradoxically makes her trauma symptoms visible; “her uncanny stillness … the strength of her silence”148 only give her away. Silence, which is to be expected from a frum wife, is disturbing in Esti’s case. Likewise, when Hartog decides that Ronit should not attend her father’s funeral, even offering her money to return to New York, her silence is disturbing, defying Hendon’s establishment.149 She overturns silence not only to overcome her traumatic rapport with the community, especially her (lack of) memories, but to disclose its dealings. It is in defying Hartog that Ronit (and Alderman) puts forward the novel’s concern with disobedience and particularly shame, the latter being an effect that renders marginality, Otherness, and exclusion. The ashamed must be expelled for the good of the community because, as Hartog says, her mere presence attacks Jewish Hendon. In other words, shame is the community’s legitimate vehicle to allegedly survive the attacks of the Other, of which Ronit has become the paradigm. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok speak of the crypt as the trace of the phantom that must be expunged.150 It is a foreign body, alien and other, which recalls its redundant presence/absence. This is the case of Ronit according to Dr Hartog, almost a caricature of the greedy wealthy Jew. For him, although she is the rav’s daughter, she is not a welcome presence in a religious festival like hesped. Being a lesbian and no longer part of the community, her mere presence is an attack for them, and as such she must be expunged.151 This is the toughest side of misrecognition of the Other in the name of God and religion. Rather than silence, it is disease that gives Esti’s repressive trauma away. From the beginning of the novel, her physical appearance only worsens. She gets thinner and thinner, eventually hurting herself.152 Esti remains silent, pale, and ill, she has nausea, and finally (though unwillingly) becomes pregnant. In a sense, it seems as if she wants to be ill as a political statement, using disease as transgression – thus reversing

147

Ibid., 153. Ibid., 146. 149 Ibid., 159. 150 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalyis, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 151 Alderman, Disobedience, 160–2. 152 Ibid., 22. 148

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Orthodox conceptions of illness153 – as a way to get the attention of her husband first and the community next. This she does when she comes out in private154 and public.155 In recalling the rav’s idea that speech draws humans near God, Esti vindicates the universal right to speak as a way to make up realities.156 Once she comes out not so much as a lesbian than a rebel, the trauma of silence, repression, and inarticulacy is cancelled. Also, as part of the working-through process, Esti gives Ronit her mother’s candlesticks which, the protagonist says, were left by her father to Esti “in case I [Ronit] should want them.”157 The candlesticks are thus a powerful trope of feminism that, despite religious Orthodoxy, has survived transgenerationally. They come to fill the void of Ronit’s lack of memory that torments her throughout the story. Thus, women liberate other women, caring about and remembering each other, making good Gilligan and Held’s ethics of care. As mentioned above, Esti does not want to become a mother, though the fact is only hinted at very indirectly. The narrator simply recalls how she buys contraceptives against the community rules.158 Esti’s decision is not because she refuses maternal care per se. Indeed, loving and caring the Other is her motto throughout. Hence, only out of love does she refuse mothering to prevent condemning a new generation from suffering the trauma she has undergone as a frum woman. In fact, she sublimates her wish to care for the Other that she suspends in rejecting motherhood by remembering her days with Ronit, when she touched her skin.159 This is the closest both women come to happiness, which is not exactly or simply a sexual understanding of joy, but an encounter with the Other that the narrator regards as transcendent. It is not “a sensation of ease and comfort”160 as desire could be, but “a deeper satisfaction” in constructing “a physical object, or compos[ing] a work of art, or rais[ing] a child,”161 Ronit concedes. As happiness is unattainable for Esti within the Orthodox framework where she is encaged, she goes on remembering. Moreover, in marrying Dovid, with whom there is care instead of sex, she swerves frum 153

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (London: Penguin, 2009). 154 Alderman, Disobedience, 219. 155 Ibid., 244. 156 Ibid., 245. 157 Ibid., 231. 158 Ibid., 171. 159 Ibid., 184. 160 Ibid., 188. 161 Ibid.

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prescriptions.162 Disobedience is a story of defiance against rules, but also of sublimation and substitution, of one person for another,163 a place for another, a feeling for another, all aimed at post-traumatic survival once beauty and genuine love seem unfeasible. The narrator even wonders how beauty, which Jews found in many places in their transcultural and transgeographical wandering around the world,164 can be somehow absent in Hendon. Thus starts the rebellion Esti and Dovid announce at the end of the novel. For all that said above, Disobedience is not without hope. Esti’s eventual pregnancy is supposed to change things. The penultimate chapter is rather transformative, giving Ronit new chances. She gets back her mother’s candlesticks and splits with her married lover in New York. As with Jacob when he was given a new name, the narrator points out how necessary the battle is against human and divine agents to start anew.165 In other words, the chapter begs for disobedience of tradition in the name of which Alderman’s novel claims women have been repressed and silenced. Hence, Disobedience appeals to a voice that, like those of the patriarchs before, “may argue with the Lord.”166 The ultimate act of subversion is, however, not Ronit’s or Esti’s, but Dovid’s, which is particularly relevant as long as he is the new rav. His is a performance of change, and although it is rather utopian it is effective, for it gives the novel a turn and some final tension. In standing in the ladies’ gallery,167 Dovid overturns social hierarchies and spaces, the female space thus turning into a place for speech. This way, the subaltern within the community can eventually speak. Esti is given the word to confess the truth to a silenced audience. The lesbian who married a man for safety after having an affair with his cousin is not the addressee, but the addresser. She is, she concedes, given speech to create anew, to follow rules as long as she can speak them. In using the first person plural to address women, she appeals to them all to create an alternative scenario of change.168 In other words, as a rabbi in pectore, she is vindicating the right to produce besides that of reproducing. Whether the British Jewish community will react to Esti’s performance is difficult to decide at first, however. The novel can be read more as a manifesto for change, more wish fulfilment than something attainable, at 162

Ibid., 211. Ibid., 242. 164 Ibid., 216. 165 Ibid., 233. 166 Ibid. 167 Ibid., 243. 168 Ibid., 245. 163

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least in the short term. Indeed, the last chapter, an aftermath to Esti and Dovid’s dramatic performance, features a more open-minded synagogue; one, however, that has lost many dissatisfied followers.

The Lesbian Bildungsroman Recast As pointed out above, Alderman is at her best when detached from the Jewish Orthodoxy she problematizes and questions in Disobedience. The Liars’ Gospels is a case in point, especially because the pedagogic tone of Alderman’s first novel gives way to a neatly literary rendering of Jewish historical and religious figures. The main asset of Disobedience is how it updates the lesbian bildungsroman as conveyed by Winterson in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.169 First labelled as a bildungsroman170 and later as autobiography,171 Marisol Morales contends that the novel is “a lesbian postmodernist bildungsroman.”172 In this, Morales relies on queer theory as a deconstructive practice in line with the postmodernist ethos. The novel is experimental, as Winterson herself states, breaking with the prescriptive linear and preferring instead a spiral narrative: “I don’t really see the point of reading in straight lines. We don’t think like that and we don’t live like that.”173 The experimentation typical of postmodernist literature informs Winterson’s deconstructive discourse. In blending socalled reality with fantasy and biblical scenes, the novelist is deessentializing identity and the binary discourses that uphold it. Moreover, the novel is narrated by an adult Jeanette who recalls her past, drawing on “reality” and fiction, and a young Jeanette, “who focalises the events in the present, problematises questions related to autobiography and the reinvention of the self.”174 Likewise, the narrative voice of Disobedience is split. The third-person narrator accounts for “what happens” in Hendon when Ronit is back from America. A short section in each chapter is 169

Alderman, “Coming Out.” Susana Onega, “I’m Telling You Stories. Trust Me: History/Story-telling in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are not the Only Fruit,” in Telling Stories, ed. Susana Onega (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 1995), 135–47. 171 Christy Burns, “Fantastic Language: Jeanette Winterson’s Recovery of the Postmodern Word,”Contemporary Literature 37, no. 2 (1996). 172 Marisol Morales, “Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. A Lesbian Postmodernist Bildungsroman?” in (Trans)formaciones de las sexualidades y el género, eds. Mercedes Bengoechea and Marisol Morales (Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de publicaciones de Alcalá de Henares, 2001), 168. 173 Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (London: Vintage, 1991), xiii. 174 Morales, “Jeanette Winterson,” 168. 170

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narrated in the first person by Ronit herself and accounts for “what happens in the protagonist’s mind.” The words of the third-person narrator are in a bigger font than those of Ronit’s narration, which very insightfully and graphically point to the smallness of her voice in her community. Yet, using a smaller font also helps to render one’s message more extensively in a shorter space as if whispering to those willing to listen beyond the norm. Be that as it may, although Alderman’s novel is no longer a postmodernist text, it still draws on some experimentalism, but to denounce rather than deconstruct. That is, Disobedience partakes of the current ethical turn which updates the queer theory that Winterson’s novel forecasts. Ronit has already found a place in life and overcome the bildungsroman itself, which in Oranges remains the main issue. The determined experimentalism of Oranges is however coupled with an ethical commitment which often faltered in classic postmodernism. Indeed, the novel fights back moral relativism and opts instead for addressing the malevolence of societies under religious radicalism. Hence, the ethical drive in Winterson’s novel and the experimentalism in Disobedience somehow neutralize the distance between the postmodernism of the former and the post-postmodernism of the latter. Both Jeanette and Ronit come to terms with religious radicalism. Winterson herself has called Oranges a “threatening novel” in her introduction, arguing that “it exposes the sanctity of family life as something of a sham; it illustrates by example that what the church calls love is actually psychosis and it dares to suggest that what makes life difficult for homosexuals is not their perversity but other people’s.”175 There is a moral lesson to both novels. Pentecostalism and radical Judaism are threatening. That is why both texts are threatening and threatened as well. Oranges has an influence on Disobedience because they partake of a common visual and cultural imagery of anti-feminist religious radicalism that “others” rebellious women as sexual dissidents. However, whereas Oranges features a young girl unable to understand the misdemeanours around her, Ronit is also threatening. Her alterity isolates her from her original community. But, in coming back, she brings about a small revolution in Hendon where Dovid and Esti redesign the church they have been a part of and victims of for a long time. After Jeanette is “exorcised,” the priest recommends her mother not to “let her out of this room, and [not to] feed her. She needs to lose her strength before it can be hers again,”176 after which her mother locks her up, taking the lightbulb away. The fairy-tale/horror-film aesthetics of the scene recalls the overall genre hybridity and fragmentation of Winterson’s 175 176

Winterson, Oranges, xiii. Ibid., 137.

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novel. However, Disobedience addresses especially the ethical conflict of Otherness in a transcultural context. As mentioned above, Jews – like gays – have been constructed as the perverse Other, a void, scattered across the world, which belongs to everywhere and nowhere at the same time, despite their long history of attachment to the land. Rebbetzin Goldfard, of the Hendon community, recalls how his offspring is dispersed all over the world, from Europe to America and Australia, drawing again on the transcultural wandering of the Jews.177 Ronit also personalizes this transness, so common for society at large and long-established in Jewish history. The encounter with the Other that transculturalism entails brings about a revision of alterity, as the novel proves. Ronit’s emigration to New York where, she says, everybody is a little Jewish, gives a brand new impression on Hendon. Being a free woman with a liberal profession in New York,178 she feels she has an ethical compromise with the women in her old community. That is why she thinks the transmutation of experiences between herself and Esti is necessary for them to understand each other and experience what they miss from the other.179 They thus get reconciled not with the other as an individual but with the Other as a concept that transcends individuality. That is, they help each other come to terms with their traumatic experiences and raise consciousness on other women’s invisibility. Be that as it may, the transmutation is as effective as transitory. Ronit leaves Hendon because, once she is reconciled with her past and has been able to work out her traumas, she can declare herself a renewed person. Although she has been living in New York for years, it is only after coming back to her origins and delving into herself that she can declare herself a New Yorker.180

British Jewishness in Context The novel also addresses the differences between British and American Jewishness. It is the British way of the Jews that explains the traumatic repression that has marked Ronit, Esti, and Dovid. From the very beginning, the former laments the self-imposed emasculating inarticulacy of the community.181 The combination of Jewish religious Orthodoxy and British prudishness can only result in an asphyxiating atmosphere that haunts the protagonist no matter where she goes. The main meeting point 177

Alderman, Disobedience, 97. Ibid., 50. 179 Ibid., 118. 180 Ibid., 53. 181 Ibid., 54. 178

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between Britishness and Jewishness in the UK in general, and Hendon in particular, is silence, which is a form of sanctioning the Same and invisibilizing the Other. It is in this context that Disobedience intervenes politically to let the subaltern speak: “They feed off each other so that British Jews cannot speak … [and] value absolute invisibility.”182 This troubles the protagonist’s status as long as she can withdraw religion, but never her Jewishness.183 Ronit delves here into the main oxymoronic aspect of the novel, namely her fight to work through (instead of act out) the trauma derived from her leaving her family, community, and religion. British Jewishness implies, in her view, a painful inarticulacy that constrains one out of existence. The leaders of Hendon enforce silence and invisibility, allegedly on the whole community. However, it is the women, gays, and lesbians within the community who are doubly compelled virtually to extinction because they are stifled as the other within the Other. Esti’s disease, Ronit’s subversion, and Dovid’s anxiety are all symptoms of a social trauma, and three forms of disobedience. The thirdperson narrator recalls how Esti and Dovid perform the break with Orthodoxy, the former addressing the community in the synagogue while the latter remains in the ladies gallery.184 This scene, which constitutes one of the climaxes in the novel, precedes Ronit’s comments. The protagonist explains the reaction of the congregation censoring the specificity of British Jews by contrast with the American ones. While the British keep silent, American Jews cannot help expressing themselves openly. To Esti’s speech, the narrator says, they would have reacted with “riotous applause, or perhaps angry shouting,”185 or in any case overtly. Unsurprisingly, the reaction to Esti’s momentous intervention against discrimination in the name of tradition is inaction and stillness. Instead of giving their views as part of a communal speech therapy, worshippers at Hendon do not come out with their opinion but with silence and inarticulate body language, which only stops the event for a while.186 They act out rather than work though the trauma derived from silence, inarticulacy, and internal phobia. Indeed, it is these internal phobias against members of the community that bring about pain, Disobedience being a symptom of them. It is a fact that the cultural impact of Jews in America is much higher than in Britain. Indeed, much in line with Alderman’s first novel, Josh Glancy wonders why American Jews are loud and proud, while British 182

Ibid. Ibid., 55. 184 Ibid., 243. 185 Ibid., 246. 186 Ibid. 183

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Jews are so reticent.187 In Glancy’s view, it is not only the size of the Jewish community in Britain that has prevented them from having a major influence, as has happened in America. In line with the European conception of Jewishness, “Jews took their place somewhere in the middle of the UK’s constrictive class system and got on with things quietly.”188 That is why transgression is a Jewish American discourse but still irrelevant in British Jews’ discourse. Although Anglo-Jewry is becoming more and more culturally relevant, Sacha Baron Cohen being the flagship of this move, there is still much to do. Take, for example, the case of the American television series Transparent by Jill Soloway.189 First aired in 2014, it has gained wide acclaim and proves the constant cultural impact of Jews in America, particularly the debate on Jewish traditions and new family lifestyles. The series features the Pfeffermans, a family of Jews whose ancestors left Nazi Germany and who live in Los Angeles. The story revolves around the transition from male to female of Mort Pfefferman, the family father. His ex-wife, their two daughters, and their son transition with him in a series that explores gender issues, although it is “not so much queer-friendly as queer-saturated.”190 As for Disobedience, Transparent features what it looks like when Jews work out their Otherness to come to terms with their traditions and the different territories they have inhabited after the Holocaust. Jill Soloway’s series finds “links between gender fluidity and Jewishness, between Fascism and other sorts of political shunning, locating the brutality in being ostracized from a family of any kind,”191 just like Alderman’s novel. However, the differences between both textual artefacts result from the different scenarios they depict and come from. Although each territory and community is culturally specific, I think that American Jewry can work as a sample for Jewish culture in Britain, Disobedience being a key text in this transition from silence to presence. This paradigm shift, which is related to Dussel and Sardar’s transculturalism and meeting the Other, is coupled in both the series and 187

Josh Glancy, “US Jews are Loud and Proud, so Why are Brits so Reticent?” The JC (December 16, 2012), https://www.thejc.com/comment/comment/us-jews-areloud-and-proud-so-why-are-brits-so-reticent-1.39538. 188 Ibid. 189 Jill Soloway (dir.), Transparent (Sony Pictures, 2014–17). 190 Emily Nussbaum, “Inside Out: the Emotional Acrobatics of Transparent,” The New Yorker (December 27, 2015), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/04/inside-out-on-television-emilynussbaum. 191 Ibid.

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the novel with a revision of sex and gender issues. In this sense, it seems as if Rabbi Raquel, Josh Pfefferman’s wife and a symbol of a renewed Judaism in Transparent, works as a sequel to Esti’s coming out – not so much as a lesbian as a rabbi. Even in America, where Jews’ sociocultural impact was much more significant than in Europe, their path did not always run smoothly. That is why Transparent very insightfully couples Jewishness and sexual dissidence: “Soloway is onto something deep: so much of American gay politics emerged from the pain of Jewish queers – Harvey Milk, Larry Kramer, Leslie Feinberg – who were rejected by their communities, and then, in a complex transference, applied Jewish models of identity to the lives of erotic outsiders.”192 This takes us back to the central issue of this book, namely the poetics of alterity. In looking through the Other, the discourse explores hidden territories and especially current transness worldwide. Disobedience closes with Ronit’s reflection on the confluence between racial and sexual Otherness, much in line with Soloway’s series and Eve Sedgwick’s own thoughts on the issue in her seminal Epistemology of the Closet (1991).193 For Ronit, gayness and Jewishness are highly related “states of being … [because] you can’t choose it,” and because they are invisible.194 Yet, timidly hinting at Butler’s performativity, she considers that, “while you don’t have a choice about what you are, you have a choice about what you show.”195 Ronit’s essentialism clashes with Sedgwick’s queer theory. However, there is still a lot to queerness in the protagonist’s words. One can perform one’s identity when showing or practicing, as she says,196 what one chooses. This is the characters’ field of action in an essentialist and essentializing scenario. This is the way for them to construct their Otherness from the other. Although there is still an intense debate on using the term “lesbian,” most contemporary fiction “also reflects the proliferation of gender and sexual identities celebrated by queer discourse.”197 Bisexual characters like Ronit and Esti can no longer be regarded as traitors to the gay cause, so to speak. They represent the transness of sexual identity well beyond the strict labels of decades ago. However, even when lesbians’ self-acceptance and coming out are no longer the primary concern of the twenty-first-century queer bildungsroman, “the 192

Ibid. Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 194Alderman, Disobedience, 255. 195 Ibid., 255. 196 Ibid. 197 Parker, “Contemporary Lesbian Fiction,” 209. 193

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dominant social and political issues of the day” are, however, explored “from a [pro-]lesbian perspective.”198 Sebastián Lelio’s film Disobedience,199 derived from Alderman’s novel, constitutes a rather close adaptation. The story remains mostly unaltered, as are the characters’ moves, actions, and words. The independent film received mixed criticism, generally very positive regarding the performances of Rachel Weisz (Ronit), Rachel McAdams (Esti), and Alessandro Nivola (Dovid). The main problems, so to speak, come from the treatment of the metaphysical.200 The aesthetics and the thematic of the original novel match Lelio’s craft for filmmaking, as his much-acclaimed Una Mujer Fantástica 201 proves. However, as Dargis and Hams argue, the film does not delve into the insights of British Jewish Orthodoxy. The film’s main flaw coincides with that of the novel. Feeling empathy for a couple of lesbians within a radically Orthodox community is understandable, and in this Lelio succeeds. However, taking sides with the protagonists makes the community they are victims of rather stereotypical. Dargis points out how the film “serves as a proxy for the secular viewer” who is invited to witness “the agony of faith” (2018).202 However, when the other side, in this case Orthodoxy, is not voiced, or is voiced in stereotypical terms, the effect can be almost caricature, which goes against the film and the original text. In other words, the novel and the film often preach against the preacher, sometimes looking more like a partisan pamphlet than a piece of art. There is a lot of investment of Alderman’s own experience in the text. In fact, as she has conceded, after some time in New York she started to question the frum community she came from. I do not mean, as the author herself has argued, that the novel (and indirectly the film) is autobiographical. But when the political clearly prevails over the aesthetic the result can feel “inauthentic.” The reader and spectator may feel “the character has no mystery, which in turn robs the audience of the very possibility of discovery or surprise.”203 Besides, in taking sides with the protagonist so unquestionably, there are some aspects that are 198

Ibid., 212. Sebastián Lelio (dir.), Disobedience (Braven Films, Element Pictures, Film Four, 2017). 200 Manohla Dargis, “The Flesh is Willing in Disobedience,” The New York Times (April 25, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/movies/disobedience-reviewrachel-mcadams.html. 201 Sebastián Lelio (dir.), Una mujer fantástica (Fabula, Complitzen Film, Setembro Cine, 2017). 202 Dargis, “The Flesh.” 203 Ibid. 199

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invisibilized. From a secular standpoint, the text may seem natural, particularly concerning the agony of faith. But, the “more discomfiting ecstasy” that the frum community experiences through religion is missing. Indeed, when religion turns up it is only portrayed as radicalism or a mere scenario to empathize with Ronit and Esti’s love affair and make their trauma understandable. One of the roles of literature is to address undecidability, that which cannot be said otherwise. The text ventriloquizes politics, ethics, and other discourses in aesthetic form, and it is in this that Disobedience sometimes falls short. Politics, ethics, religion, and life as a whole cannot be addressed directly and laid bare, as for the piece of art to be effective they have to be layered. In the introduction I mentioned the paradigm shift that critics like Rodríguez Magda, Dussel, and Sardar call transmodernism. In more senses than one, Disobedience responds to this shift as conceived by Dussel and Sardar. The novel partakes of the ethical turn that dovetailed postmodernism and transmodernism. This turn is evident in how the encounter between the Same and the Other is articulated, being more concrete in the difficult Otherness the protagonists embody. They are British Jews, whose hybridity has not made much of a cultural impact in the country so far. Moreover, Disobedience problematizes the issue further by confronting the conflicting ways of experiencing British Jewishness in a constraining atmosphere. Recalling Dussel’s conception of transmodernity as a utopian project that outdoes modernity itself and claims a symmetrical dialogue between Western culture and subaltern cultures, Alderman is setting the scene for such a dialogue. Obviously, I am not saying British Jews are not Western citizens. However, they have transmitted through generations a cultural background from a non-Western extraction. Unfortunately, and in this I agree with the reviewers of Lelio’s film, Disobedience (both the film and the novel) misses an extra opportunity for dialogue. The novel in concrete draws on the transgression characteristic of Jewish literature, but taking the side of the transgressors (even when it is politically and ethically worthwhile) and leaving aside Orthodox Jewishness somehow limits the transmodern ethos. Finally, Sedgwick’s homosociality is put to the test in Disobedience. The very title is a declaration of intent to approach Jewish homosocial orthodoxy. Tradition has been appropriated by a narrow-minded community which proves to be a territory where homosocial relations articulate the whole organic structure of the neighbourhood. Ronit becomes the main Other of the text because she rejects the homosocial status quo that uses women as an exchange value in political, religious, and economic transactions set out by men, be they fathers, husbands, or brothers. Her

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Otherness is only more intense when she comes out and fosters Esti’s own coming out. Their coming outs are ethical events that, rather than stating their non-normative desires and/or identities, distrust and problematize a status quo whose only alibi is an emasculating tradition. Yet, as Gilbert points out, both characters experience the dilemma of rejecting and belonging to a cultural background. As they are unable to remould tradition, “the challenge is to reposition themselves in relation to this fixed pole of orthodoxy.”204 That is why texts like Disobedience are threatening but also necessary for conveying this change of paradigm, despite its shortcomings.

204

Gilbert, Writing Jewish, 135.

CHAPTER TWO OXBRIDGE OTHERNESS AND BISEXUAL ARCADIA IN THE LESSONS

The Lessons and Influence Alderman’s second novel received good reviews in general terms. However, most of them referred to how the topic, a naïf student who falls under the spell of wealthier and more glamorous friends, “has a familiar ring.”205Although the genre of the Oxbridge novel is well-known territory, The Lessons has other intertextual references. The final effect is that the novel is traversed by visual, textual, and cultural motifs that make up an overall sense of influence. The central motif is the controversial figure of the sycophant Other who longs to be admitted by an elite that has always been associated with Oxbridge snobbery. Despite its different sources of influence, The Lessons does not suffer from Bloom’s anxiety of influence. Alice Fisher makes reference to three pieces of literature she considers key for Alderman’s novel: If you’ve read Brideshead Revisited, The Line of Beauty or The Secret History, elements of this plot will sound familiar. If you’ve read all three you’ll find it impossible to read The Lessons without attributing each story development to one of these predecessors. Which is a shame, because The Lessons is sturdily plotted and hooks you in: it’s a good read if not unique.206

Of these three novels, I will make reference to those by Evelyn Waugh and Alan Hollinghurst –Brideshead Revisited because it can be considered the referent of Oxbridge fiction, and The Line of Beauty because it is a current example of the Oxbridge novel featuring a sycophant of the British 205

Alice Fisher, “The Lessons by Naomi Alderman” The Guardian (April 4, 2010), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/04/lessons-naomi-alderman-bookreview. 206 Ibid.

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social class system. As for the first one, there seems to be consensus on its status of a cultural archetype of endless influence. Indeed, as Amanda Craig points out, Alderman is by no means the only writer who has revisited Waugh’s masterpiece or other classics. Martin Amis, Lucy Whitehouse, and David Nicholls are on the list of writers making a comeback with “novels about tight-knit groups of university friends … popular in the 1930s and 1980s.”207 Unlike popular campus novels, The Lessons belongs to what have been called “varsity novels.” The former are set at university and focus on academic life, often from a satirical viewpoint, like the iconic Lucky Jim208 by Kingsley Amis. The microcosm of the university works well as a scenario to explore the institution as an organic entity. Not only does the genre adopt a comic stance, it often explores the power structures the university upholds and to which it is stuck. In this sense, the genre has been particularly successful in Britain, especially because, as John Lucas points out, the country “is often marked by ‘empire-era myopia’ and ‘tacit approval of a class-ridden, exclusionist society’.”209 This ivory-tower atmosphere is coupled with a conservative aesthetics, as is evident in “the demands of traditional narrative [that] make extended classroom scenes difficult if not impossible to manage.”210 In short, the campus novel seems a priori a hackneyed territory of not much interest, except for those involved in or connoisseurs of the British class system as reflected in Oxbridge facilities. However, the genre survives, with new titles coming out every year. The elitist microcosm of boarding schools and old universities still maintains its appeal. However, if examined in some detail, many of the new novels, as well as their predecessors like Brideshead Revisited, are, as mentioned above, varsity rather than campus novels. In other words, it is not the learning and teaching, or, as Switaj recalls, “the struggle of teachers and students with and against administrators and buildings,”211 that matter. It is the personal, the private, and the intimacies of students’ and academics’ lives rather than the academic whereabouts of the faculty that focus the attention. Be that as it 207 Amanda Craig, “The Lessons, by Naomi Alderman,” Independent (April 9, 2010), https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-lessons-bynaomi-alderman-5533463.html. 208 Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (London: Penguin Classics, 2012). 209 Alex Pitofsky “Unseen Academy: John Knowles’s A Separate Place,” Papers on Language & Literature, 49 no. 4 (2013): 390. 210 Elizabeth K.Switaj, “Whither Teaching in the University Novel? American, British and Canadian Studies,” De Gruyter Open (2016): 15. 211 Ibid.

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may, as Stephen Wade argues, this type of novel seems “formidably closed and arcane”212 to the regular reader. And only when the genre recasts itself to meet new needs and respond to new discourses and concerns does it really come back to public attention. This is a main point of Elaine Showalter’s Faculty Towers.213 As Wade recalls, the interest lies “in the way in which the narrow world of the mind and the faculty reflects other themes.”214 In fact, Showalter criticizes the genre when it falls behind, and pushes it to “find ways round the inherent limitations in the subject matter and the characters.”215 This is the main asset of The Lessons. The novel partakes of the campus and, especially, the varsity novel to address a good many issues well beyond the Oxbridge microcosm. All in all, it can be regarded as an academic novel. The genius of Alderman lies in expanding traditional formulae to gain new meaning and relevance. The protagonists’ experiences in Oxbridge pass by and their maturation becomes the novel’s main concern. As happens with Brideshead Revisited, The Lessons transcends the purely academic territory, though it remains the leitmotif throughout the novel. There is nostalgia in Alderman’s text, but not of the intractable type that Thomas Marks points out: It’s a shame that Alderman seems content to wax nostalgic about the university’s fusty rituals and decadent college balls as her characters skip along in their conga-line of beauty, pausing to snack on quail’s eggs or a haunch of venison. Whereas Waugh’s halcyon vision is poignantly offset by the encroaching war that frames the narrative, the undergraduate episodes in The Lessons shirk their historical context: they are nominally set in the mid to late nineties but might just as well take place in one of those timeless fantasy worlds that Oxford incubates in its rabbit-holes and wardrobes.216

The atemporality that Alderman creates draws on the Arcadian stereotype that is crucial to Brideshead Revisited. To a lesser extent, it also draws on the comedy of classic campus novels like Lucky Jim. However, The Lessons is resolutely a varsity novel whose main focus is on the 212

Stephen Wade, “The Campus Novel and its Writers,” Contemporary Review 288 (2006): 376. 213 Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers: the Academic Novel and its Discontents (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 214 Ibid., 376. 215 In Wade, “The Campus Novel,” 376–7. 216 Thomas Marks, “Ways with Words: The Lessons by Naomi Alderman: Review,” The Telegraph (May 24, 2010).

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students rather than the faculty. As for the timeless fantasy Marks detects and derides, it also has a poetic feel and the emotional and developmental concerns of other polyphonic literature on young adults. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves217 recalls the voices of six youths as they grow into maturity in a very experimental and poetic fashion, one that hints at more than it says about these characters’ interaction and maturation process. Rob Thomas’s Slave Day218 is paradigmatic of the polyphony of youths’ voices that fight for personal fulfilment and agency, if not power directly. In this case, seven youths interplay in a structure that “casts some characters as ‘masters’ and others as ‘slaves’ [which] allows for a clear depiction of the ways in which various positions of power and influence are constructed within a larger understanding of various hierarchies.”219 Drawing on texts by Waugh, Woolf, and Thomas, among others, The Lessons evades temporality, at least in its first part. The poetry of youths coming of age is a literary motif that, if abstracted, can work as an ontology apart – one that only barely recalls the reality around it. If the first part of The Lessons tells of an ageless recall of youth at university, “the second part is far more incisive as James’s fascination with Mark drives the novel beyond Oxford, his financial dependence gradually shading into erotic obsession.”220 This is where The Lessons leaves the classic varsity and choral (rather than polyphonic) novel behind, and draws on Hollinghurstean homoerotic obsession. I am addressing Hollinghurst because, although there are many referents on erotic obsession and youth’s Otherness (Mann’s Death in Venice221 and Nabokov’s Lolita222 being two of them), The Line of Beauty proves to be a primary source of influence on Alderman’s second novel. Oxbridge is just a shadow that haunts the protagonists’ new lives and erotic affiliation. Class remains a central issue but is addressed from far many more angles that enhance and problematize the erotic rapport between the protagonists. Implicitly, Marks purports that the first part of The Lessons is hackneyed territory and far less worthy of note than the second (and, I think he means, the third) part, which expands the scope beyond the restricted and restrictive arena of the university campus. For Janet Aspey, however, it is the author’s “depiction 217

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2000). Rob Thomas, Slave Day (London: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 219 Sara K. Day, “Power and Polyphony in Young Adult Literature: Rob Thomas’s Slave Day,” Studies in the Novel 42, no. 1 and 2 (2010): 82. 220 Marks, “Ways.” 221 Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories (London: Vintage Classic European Series, 2001). 222 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (London: Penguin Classics, 2000). 218

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of Oxford … and the retelling of university life [that constitutes] the strongest element in the novel.”223 There is also a trend of academic murder novels which emphasizes secretive intimate relations in enclosed scenarios. However, although there are weird deaths, there is no murder running the plot of The Lessons, except for in metaphoric terms. Children either die or are about to die. There are inarticulate emasculating relations between mothers and sons, between friends and between lovers, but no crime to be solved as in crime campus novels. In Alderman, growing up implies leaving behind rather than simply erasing. Hence, the trace of Oxbridge is as haunting and deadly as it is past. The title of the novel and its third part is ambiguous. Do the lessons have a didactic or moral source and/or effect? Are the protagonists learning from experience or are they and the text adopting a moral understanding of the events reported? The Lessons is narrated in the first person by James, an impressionable middle-class student at Oxford where he meets an elitist group of youths whom are a priori out of his reach. However, in starting an affair with music student Jess, a naïf James approaches this coterie, albeit timidly and clumsily at first. This first impression of non-belonging, though gradually softened, remains throughout the whole novel. Like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited and Nick Guest in Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, James can only feel infatuated after being accepted where he does not belong. Otherness thus becomes one of the main issues of The Lessons. The leading light of the group is Mark Winters, an insultingly wealthy youth whose crumbling house becomes the centre of these youths’ early maturation process. Although James is the narrating voice, one soon notices that Mark is his nemesis and the guiding light of the novel. The brilliant scientist Franny, the wealthy and exotic Spanish student Emmanuella, and future politician Simon complete James’s dream team. The Arcadia they make up is, as mentioned above, hackneyed territory, having been previously strolled by the authors whose works The Lessons recasts. The bucolic undertones that the novel first recalls and celebrates, and later overcomes as just a phase in the “natural” development into maturity, set it apart from the primarily satirical concerns of academic management in the case of campus texts. It is, however, the more personal affairs of the group that recall the discourse of varsity novels. This The Lessons does by recasting the often polyphonic discourse of this genre into James’s first-person narration. In focalizing the six characters through the innocent protagonist, instead of doing it in a rondeau of three boys and three girls as Woolf does in The Waves, Alderman’s novel explores the 223

Janet Aspey, “The Lessons by Naomi Alderman,” Public TLS (May 21, 2010).

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limitations of representing the reality of Arcadia from a childlike position. Being a realist of the fin de siècle, Henry James intended to explore the psychological undertones and narrative possibilities of childhood as a concept and viewpoint to be redefined.224 At the turn of the new millennium, The Lessons recalls the traumatic undertones of Arcadia writing from the two protagonists’ arrested development. Mark and James’s love affair turns into the main driving force of the novel as Oxford is left behind. It is in this sense that the echoes of prior homoerotic Arcadian texts are obvious. However, whereas previous examples like E. M. Forster’s Maurice and Waugh’s Brideshead are neatly homosexual or homoerotic, The Lessons is more indefinite a novel, featuring bisexuality as a preferred option in Arcadia and post-Arcadia. I will briefly explore the school and university novels as precedents to Alderman’s text to later delve into the Arcadian element and how it has evolved to accommodate new issues, especially women’s inclusion and openly same-sex desire.

From Public School to Oxbridge Like Maurice and Brideshead Revisited, The Lessons represents a nostalgic reappraisal of a lost time and space through James’s memories of Oxford, the scenario of his naïve adolescence and youth. As adults, James and Mark still long for an “empty space,” which recalls Lacan’s imaginary stage. Following the example of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan postulates his own tripartite scheme whereby the “I” negotiates its place in the world: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real.225 The first is a pre-linguistic stage in which the child tries to make up their identity in a specular process. However, any sense of unity and coherence that the child perceives results in a mere illusion. Later, the child enters the symbolic order, one of “social and intersubjective signification,”226 which acquires coherence through language. Finally, the Real Order, unlike its precedents, “falls outside signification. It is where psychic materials remain unsymbolised, through processes such as trauma.”227 With this in mind, the hero apparently resists entering Lacan’s Symbolic order, recalling the door-less shelter at university buildings and Mark’s crumbling house where he and his fellow students enjoyed youth. The protagonists regret 224

Susan Honeyman, “What Maisie Knew and the Impossible Representation of Childhood,” The Henry James Review 22, no. 1 (2001). 225 Joseph Bristow, Sexuality (Abingdon; New York: The New Critical Idiom, 1997), 90. 226 Ibid., 91. 227 Ibid.

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the post-Arcadian losses, which coalesce in their idealized imaginary. Drawing on Maurice and Charles Ryder, James edifies his own nostalgic discourse of Arcadian homoeroticism. Unlike them, however, the hero comes to understand that his desire relies on Lacan’s “lack” – he finally knows his desire will never be fulfilled and he makes an irony of it. The public-school novel puts forward two essential factors of homosexual narration in late-Victorianism, namely social class and adolescence (or rather its tragic loss). Social class is one of the most influential aspects in English literature at large. In the case of homosexual fiction, usually set in the public school or Oxbridge, the role of class is even more relevant. As Stephen Adams points out, “in British fiction the question of homosexuality is invariably considered from the point of view of the middle or upper-class male; the working-class male may well be an object of desire, but he is rarely the protagonist.”228 With Victorianism, the bourgeoisie replaced aristocracy as the leading class in England. In its new role, the middle class used the public school as the training scenario to teach their children how to rule the empire. With this purpose, the Victorians established an educative system which followed the homosocial model of ancient Greece – that is, they promoted all-male institutions where the young aristocrats and bourgeoisie formed lifelong bonds and “engaged in a variety of sexual activities.”229 However, these homoerotic affiliations were expected to remain within the limits of homosociality and to take place exclusively before adulthood; if boys matured as homosexuals, they were considered perverts and excluded from society. As Sedgwick recalls, Disraeli himself praised Eton “friendships” effusively, as far as they were pre-adult experiences: At school, friendship is a passion. It entrances the being; it tears the soul. All loves after life can never bring its rapture, or its wretchedness; no bliss so absorbing, no pangs of jealousy or despair so crushing and so keen! What tenderness and what devotion; what illimitable confidence; what infinite revelations of inmost thoughts; what ecstatic present and romantic future.230

Disraeli’s discourse is shocking for a contemporary readership that would not hesitate to consider his words as an apology for homosexuality. However, the politician was writing about a homosocial community and 228

Adams, The Homosexual as Hero in Contemporary Fiction (New York: Vision Press, 1980), 131. 229 Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 176. 230 Ibid.

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would never have accepted a homosexual interpretation.231 In fact, the homoerotic undertones that characterized public-school relations finished once the adolescent became an adult: “Unlike the aristocrat, most gentlemen found neither a community nor a shared, distinctive sexual identity ready for adults who wanted more of the same.”232 According to the developmental narrative of sexuality predominant during Victorianism, homosexuality was identified with childhood and its traumatic loss, as the academic novel testifies.233 For many practitioners of public-school writing, the genre has several purposes. First, academic novels reflect and construct a strict class system in which homosexuals are always upper class; second, these upper-class homosexuals are attracted to working-class males who, therefore, became mere objects of desire; third, the education centre works as an Arcadian scenario where characters can recreate an imaginary childhood from nostalgia and thus sublimate their anxieties as adults. This Arcadia is a misogynistic territory – mental rather than physical – peopled by boys living outside social structures. Therefore, taking into account that “the homosexual novel is typically a description of a journey away from the everyday world,”234 Arcadia is the perfect genre and scenario for the samesex bildungsroman. Adams revises the main examples of school stories, from pioneering ones such as Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1856)235 and Denton Welch’s Maiden Voyage (1943)236 and In Youth is Pleasure (1944),237 to Simon Raven’s Fielding Gray (1967)238 or Michael Campbell’s Lord Dismiss Us (1967).239 240 In contrast to the first three novels, which 231

Walt Whitman also vindicated a homoerotic community – placed in nature and not at the school like Disraeli’s – and therefore rejected the overt homosexual reading of Leaves of Grass suggested by Carpenter, among others. 232 Sedgwick, Between Men, 176. 233 Once an adult, the gentleman should marry (i.e. interchange women with other men after Girard’s theory of triangulation) to keep homosocial structures intact. 234 Stephen Adams, The Homosexual as Hero in Contemporary Fiction (New York: Vision Press), 109. 235 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (London: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Form, 2015). 236 Denton Welch, Maiden Vogaye (London: Exact Change, 2013). 237 Denton Welch, In Youth is Pleasure (London: Exact Change, 1999). 238 Simon Raven, Fielding Gray (London: Beaufort Books, 1985). 239 Michael Campbell, Lord Dismiss Us (London: Valancourt Books, 2014). 240 For an extensive list of school novels, see Gregory Woods’s A History of Gay Literature: the Male Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 336.

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sublimated sexual dissidence under bucolic settings, those produced since the 1960s “put aside the language of reticence and indirection to deal explicitly with adolescent homosexuality.”241 242 These new novels dismantle the usual nostalgic revisions of past homosexual affairs focusing on episodes of blackmail and suicide. The educational centre is not a benign territory anymore. For instance, the protagonist of Fielding Gray sees how “his smooth passage towards the ‘glittering prizes’ is rudely interrupted by a homosexual scandal and his expulsion of the elite.”243 Campbell’s Lord Dismiss Us, heir to Forster and Firbank, also proposes prototypes “in a nostalgic recreation of the rituals of public school life, the halcyon days of the long summer term, cricket, choirboys, sneaks, crushes, love letters … the only snake in this little Eden being sexual guilt.”244 Thus, as happens in Fielding Gray, Campbell’s novel interrupts an initial state of bliss with emotional catastrophe. There is also a suicide which dismantles the Arcadian homoeroticism of childhood and replaces it with what Adams calls “the rhetoric of doom.” In other words, the utopian tone of the first school novels turns increasingly tragic. The impact of these texts – the increasing sexual explicitness and tristesse with which they narrate the loss of adolescence and its friendships – on later gay literature in Britain is unquestionable. The discourse of school novels is also applicable to novels set in Oxbridge. Like the school, the university was an all-male territory where middle or upper-class youths established spiritual bonds with each other (or High Sodomy), and felt sexually attracted to working-class men (or Low Sodomy). Like school stories, Oxbridge novels are normally narrated by upper/middle-class adults who recall with nostalgia a utopian past or the illusion of its existence. A paradigmatic example of the homosexual university novel is Forster’s Maurice. The text deals with the classic homoerotic, spiritual bond between equals at Oxbridge. However, the bond must finish when the hero leaves university. Unable to accept this traumatic end, Maurice turns to working-class Alec. Their affair trespasses on the boundaries of English decorum and thereby can only succeed outside society. They escape to an Arcadian “greenwood” that is, however, 241

Adams, The Homosexual as Hero, 132. The anti-gay policy of the government, and the Home Secretary in particular, during the 1950s made the situation untenable. Hence, the Wolfenden Committee was created to make a study of the legal situation of homosexuality in the UK. Ten years after its creation, the Wolfenden Committee recommended a reform of homophobic laws, which only decriminalized homosexuality partially in 1967. 243 Adams, The Homosexual as Hero, 132. 244 Ibid., 134. 242

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a symptom of emotional and social catastrophe. In fact, the happy end of the novel is a forced exile outside English society. Forster’s Maurice may then be said to foreshadow the rhetoric of doom characteristic of the school novels of the 1960s. Something similar happens in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited,245 whose narrator does not mourn the loss of Cambridge as an institution, but the loss of innocence after adolescence and the entrance to the world of compulsory heterosexuality. Thus, the naiveté that Beckford’s caliph Vathek longed for in his eponymous novel (1785) was still searched for and mourned after the Second World War. In these novels, the homosexual is represented as psychically arrested, immature like a child or youth,246 and thus feeling at home in all-male “playgrounds” as a young student, soldier, or imperial officer. That is why, when homosexual literature deals with grown-up gays (i.e. those who, according to Victorian discourses, would not leave their golden youth and reject mature heterosexuality), it has to sublimate their unspeakable desire. Refusing the possibility of moving on to the stage of normative heterosexuality, the post-Oxbridge homosexual establishes bonds in Arcadian scenarios with men of the working class (see Forster’s Maurice247 and Isherwood’s Berlin Stories248 or Christopher and his Kind249), from the colonies (Firbank’s Prancing Nigger250 or Forster’s The Life to Come251), or with adolescents (Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice). Other times, homosexual texts used codified language or tropes, camp humour (Firbank’s novellas or Joe Orton’s plays), or Girardian triangles (Wilde’s

245

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.201980/2015.201980.BridesheadRevisited_djvu.txt. 246 The identification of homosexuality with a primary stage in the subject’s sexual evolution is mostly due to Freudian psychoanalysis. Freudianism considers that human sexuality undergoes several phases. If subjects fulfil them successfully, they reach full heterosexual, “mature” sexuality. In contrast to psychoanalytic developmental narration, constructivists believe that the identification between homosexuality and childish immaturity is due to cultural stereotypes. 247 E. M. Forster, Maurice (London: Penguin Classics, 1998). 248 Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Stories (London: Vintage, 1993). 249 Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and his Kind (London: Vintage Classics, 2012). 250 Ronald Firbank, Five Novels: “Valmouth,” “Artificial Princess,” “Flower beneath the Foot,” “Prancing Nigger,” and “Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli” (London: New Directions, 1981). 251 E. M. Forster, The Life to Come and Other Stories (New York; London: Norton 2013).

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The Picture of Dorian Gray,252 Melville’s Billy Budd,253 or Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread254) to escape heteronormative rules.255 Otherwise, the gay hero had no option but to confront the tragic queer, i.e. the tragic fate of the pervert (Wilde’s own tragic end and its literary representation, De Profundis,256 or Forster’s The Life to Come257). Therefore, they had to confine themselves in ghettoes, whether urban spaces – discos, clubs, or gyms – or utopian scenarios.258 As Stephen Adams puts forward, Forster’s “greenwood” has its modern equivalents in “Vidal’s pastoral idyll on the banks of the Potomac; Baldwin’s France, Isherwood’s Berlin and California; Burroughs’ adventures in North Africa and ‘outer space’.”259 Forster and Waugh used elements of the pastoral and the elegiac to sublimate the homoerotic undertones in Maurice and Brideshead Revisited, respectively.260 The first chapters of Forster’s novel deal with Maurice’s sexual self-discovery in Cambridge. The university becomes an 252

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Wordsworth Classics, 1992). 253 Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales (Oxford: Oxford’s World Classics, 2009). 254 E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread (London: Penguin Classics, 2007). 255 Forster’s novella keeps the structure of the Girardian triangle – that is, women work as exchange value in the homosocial relation between Philip and Gino. By contrast, in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Billy Budd, women are excluded from the triangle. Melville and Wilde suggest the homoerotic (not yet homosexual) undertones implicit in Girardian triangles since, in both cases, three men interact in a structure where they fulfil different roles. Dealing with Melville’s novella, Sedgwick concludes that Captain Vere works as the powerful peak in the pyramid of the triangle, Claggart as the agent provocateur, and Billy as the victim. Lord Henry, Vladimir, and Dorian have parallel roles in Wilde’s novel. (For a detailed analysis of how these authors, especially Melville, use the Girardian triangle for homoerotic purposes, see Sedgwick’s The Epistemology, 91–130). 256 Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings (London: Penguin Classics, 2013). 257 E. M. Forster The Life to Come (New York; London: Norton 2013). 258 In a new display of schizophrenia, Western culture has systematically accused homosexuals of hiding their “true” identity behind codes and other artefacts. That is, same-sex desire has been forced into invisibility because its sight is unbearable, but this invisibility is also threatening because gays cannot be spotted and therefore controlled. In brief, homosexuals must be both visible and invisible. 259 Adams, The Homosexual as Hero, 109. 260 Rictor Norton states the adequacy of Pastoral Arcadia to express same-sex desire as follows: “If any particular genre can be called a homosexual genre, the evidence would point most convincingly to the pastoral tradition” (“The Homosexual Pastoral Tradition,” 1997).

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idealized scenario where youths can still love each other without the restrictions of adult heterosexuality. In Cambridge, Maurice builds up his sexual identity with the help of his mentor, upper-class Clive, and reading Plato’s Symposium. Although, as Maurice admits, he is afraid of being identified with Wilde and his “race,” he enjoys his own homoerotic Arcadia in Cambridge. However, all (homosexual) utopias collapse sooner or later, and Maurice’s is no exception. According to Victorian rules, upper-class Clive simultaneously abandons his youth and homoerotic inclination – paradoxically, during a trip to Greece. By contrast, middleclass Maurice goes on within his newly-discovered sexuality into adulthood. At the end of the novel, the pastoral scenario of Cambridge is replaced by the “greenwood,” a new and imaginary Arcadia where Maurice can fulfil his sexual desire with the working-class youth Alec. The first book of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, “Et in Arcadia Ego,” is also the nostalgic revision of the homoerotic youth of its protagonist, Charles Ryder. Oxford, Brideshead, and, above all, Ryder’s devotional friendship with Sebastian Flyte make up a homoerotic Arcadia, a prelapsarian state which, once lost, is irrecoverable. Arcadia is always narrated as once enjoyed, imagined, or dreamt of, but finally lost, as happens with Charles Ryder’s Oxford and Brideshead. The Arcadian tone at the beginning of Maurice and Brideshead Revisited progressively becomes elegiac and nostalgic. The good days come to an end, pastoral elegy being the adequate genre to express this loss, especially among homosexuals. The elegiac element in Maurice and Brideshead Revisited serves to lament the fall from innocence brought about by adulthood, rather than the death of the male beloved, as in the poetry of Theocritus, Virgil, Sir Phillip Sydney, or A. E. Housman. In homosocial literature, an obsessive yearning for a boyhood Elysium frequently precludes the “adequate” (i.e. heterosexual) transition to maturity, as prescribed by Victorian developmental discourses. Thus, Eton and Oxford became the sites where a transitory bond between males was considered legitimate and even desirable.261 Homosexuals found it difficult to leave adolescence, a traumatic experience which they could only overcome and sublimate through recurrent references to homoeroticism at school and university. The identification of homosexuality with immaturity and the primeval has

261

Connected with the Friendship tradition, the public school novel, inaugurated by Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth (1917) and followed by many others, proved a fertile territory for homoerotic stories between youths of the upper and middle classes. See Woods, A History of Gay Literature, 336.

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been common in social sciences and literature.262 In “Transvaluing Immaturity: Reverse Discourses of Male Homosexuality in E. M. Forster’s Posthumously Published Fiction,” Stephen Da Silva analyses how samesex desire has been linked to immaturity or preternaturally old age,263 i.e. to the extra-ordinary. His analysis is based on Eve Sedgwick’s association of the homo/heterosexual pair (and others, such as innocence/initiation, ignorance/knowledge, and old/new), as characterized by the opposition between underdeveloped children/gays and fully developed male adults. According to Da Silva, Forster’s writings “associate realizing homosexual desire with moving back in time or returning to childhood … Maurice represents the realization of homosexual fulfilment as the recovery of a lost childhood object of desire.”264 A “greenwood,” metaphorical or literal, placed in Greece or Africa (or Southern Italy in The Lessons), is the scenario whereby Forster, Waugh, and other writers represent and solve the loss their characters suffer on leaving childhood. The pastoral element in these novels can be read as mere escapism, a way to evade the political problematic of homosexuality in Edwardian England. However, there is some transgressive potential as well. Indeed, although homosexuality may have been read as the symptom of an arrested development or immaturity, Da Silva contends that childishness and immaturity – and therefore homosexuality – are positive values that must be vindicated. From the above, it follows that Arcadia and Oxbridge literatures have mostly evolved from homoerotic to homosexual to gay territories depending on the evolution of the sociopolitical consideration of same-sex desire. I am not saying there have been no accounts of bucolic university 262

Both Freud and Lacan considered homosexuality as the effect of an arrested development in the “normal” evolution of human sexuality. That is, homosexuals would be unable to reach the wholeness represented by heterosexuality, remaining instead as underdeveloped “perverts”. They would stay in a stage of sexual undifferentiation (Lacan’s “imaginary” or Freud’s “polymorphous perversity”). This developmental narration of human sexuality is clearly exposed by Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1917). 262 Although cross-class homosexuality acquired special social and textual relevance in England at the turn of the twentieth century, it is a recurrent topic in homoerotic literature from ancient Greece. Thus, Pilar Hidalgo makes reference to the story of Jupiter and Ganymede, “one that encodes a marked difference in rank between the two protagonists” as a prototype of early cross-class/rank homoerotic relationship (Paradigms Found [Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2001], 65). 263 Stephen Da Silva, “Transvaluing Immaturity: Reverse Discourses of Male Homosexuality in E. M. Forster’s Posthumously Published Fiction,” Criticism 40, no. 2 (1998): 240. 264 Ibid., 244.

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stories and scenarios other than homosexual ones in fiction, yet this is a predominant tendency The Lessons is committed to revising. The predominantly all-male or almost exclusively male casts in the classic texts are replaced here by a more (though by no means very) inclusive Oxford, James being working class, Franny a Jew, and Emmanuella a Spaniard. Thus, the articulation of Otherness and (non-)belonging takes new directions, although the homoerotic bond between the protagonists remains a motif that Alderman’s novel recalls and recasts from the texts addressed above.

Otherness in The Lessons: From Brideshead Revisited to The Line of Beauty A main difference with respect to Maurice, Brideshead Revisited, and even The Line of Beauty is that The Lessons features fluid, bisexual affairs rather than exclusively homoerotic and/or homosexual relationships. However, before delving into this transition from same-sex desire and Otherness in old institutions like public school and elitist university campuses to flexibility, an overview of the novel’s structure will be of help. It is split into three sections: “The Lies,” “The Trappings,” and “The Lessons,” which decrease in size. Thus, the first consists of thirteen episodes, the second of nine, and the third of four. “The Lies” focuses on James’s arrival and his involvement with this group of friends in Oxford. Drawing on Forster’s Maurice, each of the episodes recalls different moments of the academic terms. That is, the pace of James’s narration is shaped by the university’s timetable. It is remarkable that the section is entitled “The Lies” when it is supposed to be the core of the novel. However, lies must not be read in a moralistic sense. Maybe James is confronted with both lies and secrets. But the lies of Oxford are of an ontological nature. I say this because the university is featured as an Arcadian time and space, and as such a “lie” is about to vanish when “real” life starts in section two. The fact that the first section is longer than the other two also has a crucial role in understanding The Lessons. Oxford Arcadian life, its effect on the students’ life thereafter and, in particular, the loss and subsequent longing for that irrepressible time and space make up the protagonists’ maturation process and the nostalgic discourse of the novel. The title of the next section, “The Trappings,” is also ambiguous. Does it refer to Oxford as an insurmountable trap, to James’s infatuation with Mark, or to Mark’s bisexual dead end? Whatever the case, James points to a more abstract understanding of trappings. At the beginning of episode twenty-two, Mark is known to have suffered an accident resulting

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in his little daughter’s death. Drawing on the judicial reconstruction of facts, James mulls over how the symbolic (in Lacanian terms) traps socalled reality.265 Life is thus a text trapped in its necessary textuality, hence its undecidability and traumatic nature. The last section is named after the whole novel, “The Lessons,” and has both a pedagogic and moral appraisal. When Mark’s little daughter Daisy dies, the lesson James gathers is as relativistic as macabre. He feels ashamed as well as thrilled, not because of the child’s demise, but because, as long as Mark is desperate and vulnerable, James no longer feels redundant, but necessary: “I was not to be thrown away or beckoned with a gesture.”266 The lesson is not what could be expected from an Oxbridge novel, but that James apparently reconciles with himself and his self-esteem by acknowledging his Otherness as desirable, but renegotiable. In being recognized by Mark as vital to filling the void left by Daisy’s death, James closes the circle of his sadomasochistic bond with Mark, albeit at the expense of his shame. There is yet another lesson James recalls at the end of his individuation process which has to do with safety, an obsession he has been brought up with, and which, he concludes, is emasculating. In acknowledging the liminality between safety and lack of liberty, the hero can only regret his aversion to risk, which has thwarted his own fulfilment and dependence on the Other, not based on mutuality but on a constraining symbiosis. In this aporia, he regrets having been too careful (191),267 risk-taking being one of the features he most admires in Mark and his other upper-class friends. James’s Otherness comes, as is the case of the protagonists of Brideshead Revisited and The Line of Beauty, from middle-class conservatism, trust in safety, and common sense. Charles Ryder and Nick Guest feel infatuated by the upper-class lifestyles they come across but which they are never part of. Paradoxically, the excess of normalcy they represent makes of them the Other, the odd one out in contexts such as Sebastian Flyte’s Brideshead and the Feddens’ Notting Hill. Although the Arcadia they inhabit and enjoy is a state of bliss rather than an actual space, it is transient. Indeed, it is its very transience that makes Arcadia a blessing because it is more longed for than actually enjoyed, more haunting than real. It is, in sum, a desire which is, in Lacanian terms, the symptom of an underlying lack. Besides Arcadian Oxford, the paradise is addressed both in the prologue and at the very end of the novel. In the first case, James and Mark are enjoying and putting up with their life in San Ceterino in the 265

Alderman, The Lessons, 231. Ibid., 247. 267 Ibid., 191. 266

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south of Italy. Drawing on the Grand Tour tradition, the Mediterranean works as the backdrop for English aesthetes to admire beauty and construct their stereotypes, and those of the others. Performing the role of the wealthy eccentric Englishman he actually is, Mark hires a villa to which he invites youngsters from the town. Thus, the prologue starts with the swimming pool bursting with food and rubbish. The narrator and focalizer spots the “three nearly naked brown bodies”268 of three Italian adolescents draped over the sofas, while Mark is asleep and naked in the next bedroom.269 James’s eye records in a filmic fashion the aftermath of one of Mark’s excessive parties, from which the former is excluded. Hence, the paradise is doomed from the outset. The Mediterranean beauty is soon spoilt because there is a clash between the protagonists, Mark reproaching James for his obsession with being the essential Other in his rondeau. Jealousy and certainty prove to be some of James’s middle-class features when Mark demurs: “You do want me to yourself.”270 There is no paradise without tarnish, and San Ceterino, like Maurice’s “greenwood” and Charles’s Brideshead, is no exception. However, the key to how Arcadia works is uttered by Mark when he is drunk. Arcadia is not about what it is but what it could or is desired to be. This is the essence of the bucolic and elegiac traditions that, as mentioned above, Brideshead Revisited recalls and The Lessons recasts anew. The drunk Mark is clearheaded enough to see the “truth” of his self-edified Arcadia. Then, he realizes it is only memory that makes it up. In a context where he is just an eccentric foreigner without a name, James reifies him in an aura of recognition. In fact, what compels Mark to take James to San Ceterino is that the latter cares and will remember him like nobody else.271 Only when James recalls Mark’s world does it exist. The former is thus the necessary Other, the spectator who remembers and ventriloquizes a fantasy realm not their own, and at the same time too much their own. San Ceterino and Oxford exist not so much because they are but because there is a conscience that brings them back into existence time and again. In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder is the odd-one-out ventriloquizer. As a soldier, he arrives at Brideshead and the place instinctively conjures up the non-place in nostalgic terms. In other words, when the actual mansion materializes, the traces of its memory erase its materiality:

268

Ibid., 1. Ibid., 3. 270 Ibid., 4. 271 Ibid., 5. 269

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I HAVE been here before … I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.272

The Traumatic Nostalgia of Non-place and Non-belonging The idea of a non-place to return to and be haunted by persists in The Lessons as it does in Brideshead. It is, in a sense, a traumatic experience because infatuation prevents James Stieff and Charles Ryder from maturing. They remain stuck in a memory which, being irretrievable, is inarticulate and emasculating. Drawing on trauma theory and poetics, the two are wounded by a past (event) that is latent and recurs when a new event awakes the original one belatedly. Sigmund Freud calls this phenomenon Nachträglichkeit and although, as Bistoen, Vanheule, and Craps argue, it has been often neglected,273 it is crucial for understanding the logic of trauma re-presentation. Instead of reason, it is the heart, as Ryder points out, that memorializes the past. Since the past is an irretrievable void and the present fundamentally an attempt to recall that void, experience relies on an unbearable void, which explains the nostalgic discourse of both characters. Nostalgia comes etymologically from the Greek nostos (returning home) and algia (pain). Originally attributed to the disease of the soul that affected Swiss soldiers when driven out of their homes, it has often been related to the feeling of extreme sadness of displaced people. Ryder and Stieff are displaced not so much from a place as from a time, which makes it a particularly acute feeling. Oxford is the Arcadian scenario, as real and imaginary as the scars it leaves behind. The city, Ryder recalls, is a dreamlike fantasy land. It is: submerged now and obliterated, irrecoverable as Lyonnesse … in those days … still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days … when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang high and clear over the gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth.274 272

Ibid., 23. Gregory Bistoen, Stjin Vanheule, and Stef Craps, “Nachträglichkeit: a Freudian Perspective on Delayed Traumatic Reactions,” Theory & Psychology 24, no. 5 (2014). 274 Waugh, Brideshead, 23. 273

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Drawing on Ryder’s words, Oxford is thus more a state of mind than an actual space – one that has remained unalterable for generations of young men. Only in Eights Week is there “a rabble of womankind,”275 the narrator concedes. That is why, in Waugh’s novel, the university is a homosocial and homoerotic territory where male friendships and allegiances (like Disraeli’s, mentioned above) arise. It is the sense of timeless time that makes such relationships between men incomparable to any other these youths will experience. Nostalgia and the feeling of irrepressibility have no parallel from a psychic and sociopolitical standpoint. In other words, it is not that High Sodomy, as practiced in Brideshead Revisited, Maurice, and many others, more or less explicitly, is essentially superior to heterosexual bonds in adult age, it is the impression of unfulfilled desire and lack because that time and space (or rather their idea[lization]) have been lost that makes the experience particularly compelling and traumatic. In The Lessons, Oxford maintains the Brideshead spirit, an ageless scenario that first thrills, later infatuates, and finally traps forever, especially middle-class characters like Ryder and Stieff: “The beauty of the dream of Oxford … had beguiled me” (10).276 From the very beginning, the narrator feels dissociated from the city, being part of it, yet an outsider. He bears witness to his own infatuation, being a passive actor and impassive spectator. He is beguiled, dreamed, and painted in gold by Oxford, which thus proves to be one of the actual agents of his life. Maurice in Forster’s eponymous novel is paradoxically congratulated for his normalcy in meritocratic Cambridge: “He was a mediocre member of a mediocre school, and left a faint and favourable impression behind. ‘Hall? Wait a minute, which was Hall? Oh yes, I remember; clean run enough’.”277 Likewise, James is forgettable in a place where memorability is of the outmost importance. That is why he always remains the Other through which Oxford gains significance: “To be average, to be ‘normal,’ seemed beyond humiliation to me.”278 As mentioned above, the city and the university constitute a state of mind that classifies one as Same or Other, in or out, and, in cases like James’s, as the odd one out. The protagonist inhabits a liminal space in more senses than one, being lowermiddle class in an upper-middle class territory, and bisexual in a traditionally homosexual first and heterosexual later terrain. This inbetweenness is what makes The Lessons a successful recasting of 275

Ibid. Alderman, The Lessons, 10. 277 Forster, Maurice, 28. 278 Alderman, The Lessons, 12 276

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Oxbridge fiction. His is the lucid discourse of the odd one out who has understood his liminality and can bear witness to that status quo and his traumatic dissociation from it. Oxford is a weird place, almost a stage in The Lessons as it is in those school and university novels that featured it before. It is also duplicitous because, in being experienced rather than inhabited, it is a natural space for people like Mark, for whom, James recalls, “life is an endless round of Oxfords.”279 By contrast, for the others, for whom Oxford comes later in life, it is always foreign territory – one that always reminds them they are outsiders, intruders for a while. Oxford elitism slaps their faces all the way through their staying there, “reminding us that we do not belong.”280 Non-belonging is problematic for those who rebut their own extraction because only a void is left that haunts the “betrayer” forever. The trauma of non-belonging is also a crucial issue of The Line of Beauty. However, unlike The Lessons, where Otherness is deeply rooted in Oxonian life, Hollinghurst’s novel focuses on post-Oxbridge experience. Down from Oxford, Nick Guest is invited to live at the home of the Feddens, a wealthy Notting Hill family whose son, Toby, Nick has befriended as a student. A rather weird premise – what is a middle-class gay PhD student doing at a conservative MP’s residence? – allows the writer to explore the poetics of alterity. Thus, whereas James feels infatuated with Oxford and the myth of origins he experiences there and projects into his life afterwards through Mark, Nick’s infatuation is addressed to a whole family. Moreover, The Line of Beauty has a particular interest in gayness and its traumatic experience of AIDS, whereas The Lessons opens the scope into bisexuality and fluidity. The end of Oxford also terminates James and his friends’ Arcadia. Mark himself predicts: “We will never have a time like this again.”281 The Ubi Sunt motif looms large over Alderman’s novel. The sense of an ending is displaced in the case of Nick Guest. He experiences his golden age during his stay at the Feddens’, and only at the very end does he get the drift of his fate and the end of his belle époque, as Will Beckwith recognizes at the beginning of Hollinghurst’s The Swimmingpool Library.282 In returning to Oxford as an adult, James, the one who did not belong, argues how the void left by the university years is an issue the university knows how to exploit. The university, he points out, manages the lives of those who have been part of it – even of those who recall that they do not 279

Ibid., 155. Ibid. 281 Ibid., 156. 282 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-pool Library (London: Vintage, 1998), 3. 280

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fully belong, through memory: “Oxford, whose specialty is remembrance, remembers.”283 In this way, James explains the double dealing of Oxford as a territory of belongness and non-belongness until the end of one’s life – once you are in, even the limit between your life and death belongs to them. A prospective obituary would read: “this one belonged to us.”284 In other words, no matter the role within the institution and the degree of belongness, Oxford’s Arcadia beguiles its practitioners the same way as religions do. Memory and the memorialization of youth constitute the main discourse Oxbridge recalls as a cultural artefact. Memory is the raw material that nostalgia addresses and recasts, and that which is recalled is a symptom of what is forgotten and lost. Hence, in remembering, the rememberer comes to terms with an original void, namely the end of innocence, which is insurmountable but somehow haunts him forever. The Lessons recasts this feeling of loss which has traditionally accompanied homosocial and homoerotic literature. As hinted above, there is a conception of homosexuality and all-male friendships as arrested development in Oxbridge novels whereby there is a moment of naïf gay joy before heterosexual maturity. Brideshead Revisited and Maurice are just two cases in point. The Lessons maintains this premise, but, instead of a homosexual scenario, the arrested development as a state of bliss includes both boys and girls, gays, straights, and bisexuals. This is, in fact, Mark’s dream even after marrying young Nicola: “We could live like children forever … dependent on … others.”285 In Brideshead and Maurice, Ryder and Clive, the erastes286 to Sebastian and Maurice, respectively, withdraw their homoerotic bonds during youth to enter heterosexual adulthood. Meanwhile, Sebastian continues caring for Aloysius, his teddy bear, and looking for his place in vain, and Maurice starts an illicit and improbable affair with Scudder, a working-class servant with whom he inhabits an idealized “Greenwood.” The Lessons almost does the opposite – the erastes-eromenos couple at Oxford, namely Mark and James, only become a couple, so to speak, after Arcadia. Thus, Alderman recasts the stereotype, problematizing Arcadia beyond its usual scenario and reversing the common evolution from

283

Alderman, The Lessons, 213. Ibid. 285 Ibid., 181. 286 As Paul Hammond points out, “the older man (the erastes or lover) gives the younger man (the eromenos or beloved) his knowledge and experience, guiding the youth’s intellectual and moral development” (Love between Men in English Literature [London: Macmillan, 1996], 6). 284

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childhood/homoeroticism to adulthood/heterosexuality, and the complex dynamics of belonging and non-belonging in the case of the protagonists.

Space and (Non)Belonging In all three cases, Brideshead Revisited, The Lessons, and The Line of Beauty, there is a house that galvanizes the feeling of belongness in much the same way Oxbridge does. This is by no means exclusive to these three novels, and is almost a topic on its own. However, the three are related and make up a continuum (albeit not a regular one), or so the present book contends. Charles cannot overcome the spell of Brideshead and Sebastian: I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead. “Why is this house called a castle?” “It used to be one until they moved it” “What can you mean?” “Just that. We had a castle a mile away, down by the village. Then we took a fancy to the valley and pulled the castle down, carted the stones up there, and built a new house. I’m glad they did, aren’t you?” “If it was mine I’d never live anywhere else.” … “It’s thus I like to remember Sebastian, as he was that summer, when we wandered alone together through that enchanted palace.”287

The Marchmain mansion is firstly for Ryder a trope for his Arcadia with Sebastian. And, as such, it goes on during the first part of the book. However, as the novel moves to maturity, Brideshead is deserted, leaving Sebastian at a loss. As for Charles, though attached to his friend’s sister Julia, he feels displaced from the place where deep in his heart he would like to be. When Lady Marchmain finds out that he lends money to the bemused Sebastian, he is expelled from the house, an event that is as traumatic as it is meaningful. Being expelled from Brideshead as an adult recalls other traumatic episodes, such as birth as an expulsion from the mother’s body, to his leaving Oxbridge. Lady Marchmain firstly reproaches his alleged lack of empathy with the family he has been a sycophant for: “I don’t understand how you can have been so nice in so many ways, and then do something so wantonly cruel. I don’t understand how we all liked you so much. Did you hate us all the time? I don’t understand how we deserved it.”288 Her words are as unforeseen and cruel as they are necessary for Ryder’s maturation process to unfold. As 287 288

Waugh, Brideshead, 77. Ibid., 163.

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happens in all traumatic events, recognizing the event itself is impossible. Indeed, the victim is unable to bear witness to it and recalls previous episodes, in this case leaving Oxford, to displace the void of comprehension: I was unmoved; there was no part of me remotely touched by her distress. It was as I often imagined being expelled from school … But I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world … A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford.289

In brief, Ryder’s leaving Brideshead implies the end of Arcadia. Indeed, even the first part of the novel when Charles and Sebastian live their golden age is named after the memento mori expression “Et in Arcadia ego” – i.e. even there, death rules. Charles concedes, in being expelled, that the lack intrinsic to Arcadia resurfaces. From that moment onwards, only memory can redeem the pain of being expelled from oneself. Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty sticks to the protagonist’s estrangement from himself. Like Ryder, Nick Guest proves to be a guest of not only the family he has been a long-time sycophant for but also his conception of himself as part and parcel of a status quo that eventually betrays him. A PhD student writing on Henry James and style, Nick becomes the aesthete of the Feddens. Gerald Fedden, a conservative MP, and his wife Rachel, a wealthy and sophisticated British Jew, lodge the youth for no apparent reason except his friendship with Toby, and because he cares for Catherine, their unstable daughter. The romance between Nick and the family recalls that of Ryder’s. He is utterly in love with the family house which, as in Ryder’s case, is a psychic scenario rather than an actual space: “He loved letting himself in at the three-locked green front door, and locking it again behind him, and feeling the still security of the house.”290 He explores the house as if it is a museum, a character of the novel itself through which he articulates and sublimates his sexuality and Otherness. Thus, Nick rejects his own origins and edifies his new identity on his being the Feddens’ Other. He ventriloquizes that which they cannot speak due to their status. It is Thatcher’s era and, as Gerald is a Tory MP, he cannot voice and much less perform the new sexual discourses arising 289 290

Ibid. Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (London: Picador, 2004), 6.

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after the feminist and gay movements. Nick is the one to perform this change of paradigm the Feddens apparently uphold but finally expunge. The family house is not only a symbol of status. It has ideological implications in the Thatcher era that Nick’s presence only problematizes. That is why, when circumstances change, the house becomes a void that the protagonist cannot stand. Paradoxically, while Rachel Fedden visibly ejects him from the family, the youth cannot help admiring the “black-andgilt S-shaped balusters.”291 Catherine has tried to commit suicide and Gerald Fedden is in the tabloids due to an affair with his secretary. However, it is the fact that the papers refer to the Feddens’ link with Nick and his gay friends during the onset of AIDS that makes Nick’s presence intolerable. Thus, Rachel’s decorous tone turns threatening, questioning Nick’s presence in the house as well as his alleged failure to take care of Catherine.292 Rachel’s is only the first part of a three-staged reprimand aimed to expel Nick from the family house. As happens with trauma victims, the traumatic event recurs belatedly for it to be worked out, if at all. The protagonist’s encounter with Toby constitutes the second stage of this process of coming to terms with his ejection. When the young Fedden tells Nick, in a vicarious fashion, “I don’t see how you can stay here,”293 the latter still expects that Toby’s lovely gaze will contradict his words, which obviously never happens. His sycophancy prevents him from understanding his own Otherness and Toby’s irritation, “the one utterly unprecedented thing.”294 Whether the Feddens’ attitude is unprecedented or has simply been overlooked by an infatuated flatterer like Nick is not easy to determine. However, it is the clash with Gerald that makes the protagonist’s traumatic throwing out a dead end in his individuation process: “I mean, didn’t it strike you as rather odd, a bit queer, attaching yourself to a family like this?” Nick thought it was unusual – that was the beauty of it … Gerald said … “it’s an old homo trick. You can’t have a real family, so you attach yourself to someone else’s.”295

It is ironic that Nick is accused of a lack of loyalty, but in the end must be the scapegoat of Thatcherite homophobic politics. In Brideshead Revisited, 291

Ibid., 467. Ibid., 466. 293 Ibid., 471. 294 Ibid. 295 Ibid., 481. 292

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the whole process is more subtle and not related to sociopolitical circumstances – or at least not so overtly – like in The Line of Beauty. In the first case, non-belonging justifies Charles’s leaving the mansion. He is not socially apt for the family (which he eventually solves by marrying Julia), but it is his inadequate rapport with Sebastian that Lady Marchmain censures. She not only addresses the homoerotic nature of their bond, which is quite obvious to the reader, but in a sublimated fashion. This, I contend, is her ultimate message. Although Hollinghurst’s novel still plays with tropes to refer to and sublimate gayness in aesthetic terms, homosexual activity is overtly addressed and Nick is officially an out gay. Hence, the sense of non-belonging is coupled with not only class but also sexual orientation. It is true that he is welcome into the Feddens as a gay aesthete in a rather Jamesian fashion. However, with the outbreak of AIDS, Nick’s alienation is a must the novel portrays wonderfully. That is why the subtle expulsion of Charles, albeit traumatic, remains in the terrain of Arcadian nostalgia, whereas Nick’s has further psychic implications. His trauma comes to represent a mass trauma that affected a whole generation, which The Line of Beauty pays homage to. Brideshead is revisited, but the return is doubly so in Hollinghurst’s case. The 1980s are reappraised as a decade of sociopolitical change that Gerald Fedden embodies, but also the actual annihilation of a whole community after decades of fight and survival. Hence, when Nick “stare[s] back at the house, and then turn[s] and drift[s] on,”296 the (im)possibility of addressing the trauma of AIDS is patent. Although sharing similar visual and textual imagery with The Line of Beauty, The Lessons proves a much more atemporal space. Oxbridge remains inalterable, AIDS is absent, and James is not expelled, instead leaving Mark from shame. In The Lessons, it is Mark’s house that galvanizes the protagonist’s complex sense of Otherness at first, and of coming to terms with himself later. The first time James visits the house with his incipient girlfriend Jess it proves to be weird, decadent, and almost hostile territory. In coming across a sloppy garden where leaves, moss, and a mosaic pavement give way to a statue of the god Pan – Pan being an Arcadian god of enormous sexual power terrifying powerless nymphs (hence the origin of the word “panic”) – the implications in the relationship between Mark and James are quite ominous from the beginning. The house is therefore not a welcoming scenario at first sight, as it is in both Brideshead Revisited and The Line of Beauty, but a gloomy one: “We came … to a stone-flagged area … leading up to a crumbling Georgian house. It was enormous … and 296

Ibid., 501.

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its façade had faded into mottled beauty.”297 Like Oxford, the house is full of secrets and weird objects298 that announce the entrance of Mark himself, an extravagant youth that James is unable to empathize with at first glance.299 The encounter with both the house and its owner makes James the alien within the group, though Mark also follows the stereotype of the eccentric homoerotic/sexual Other embodied by, among others, Anthony Blanche and Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead. Be that as it may, Mark’s house becomes the group’s place during their time in Oxford and, as such, stays associated forever with a time and a state of mind and soul (drawing on the French êtat d’âme). Yet, as happens in its predecessors and the fiction that has had a visual influence on The Lessons, Arcadia comes to an end. When adulthood erupts in their lives – even Mark gets married and has a child – the house remains a memorable void to return to. The narrator even fantasizes about the idea of a return, which is a symptom of the trauma he experiences in reaching maturity: “I think that if Mark had suggested then that we all come back to live in the house we might have agreed.”300 The hardships of adulthood only increase the myth of youth, Oxford, and the house. Unlike Ryder and Guest, Stieff is not literally expelled from Mark’s. It is the developmental logic of maturation as natural and inexorable that drives the protagonist out. The transness of Alderman’s novel, evident in the mixture of genders, sexual orientations, and personal bonds, complements the respectively homoerotic and gay undertones of its predecessors. All three novels ironize Arcadia and its reification of immaturity and desire before the social order ends it. However, irony is not without both celebration and lack. Remaining stuck – in Brideshead, Notting Hill, or Oxford – is an unfulfilled desire that Charles, Nick, and James long for. They solve it, so to speak, in different ways. In starting a relationship (after a failed first marriage) with Sebastian’s sister Julia, Ryder metaphorically comes back to Brideshead while he moves forward into heterosexuality and maturity. However, the house and its memories remain intact. When, as a Second World War officer, he returns to Brideshead, the building is only the remains of what it used to be. This is the fabric that nostalgia is made of, and in Waugh’s novel it is really effective. When another soldier asks him about the place, Charles, who has been poking around, points out: “‘It belongs to friends of mine,’ and as I said the words they sounded as odd in my ears as Sebastian’s had done, when, instead of 297

Alderman, The Lessons, 31. Ibid., 31–2. 299 Ibid., 32. 300 Ibid., 215–16. 298

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saying, ‘It is my home,’ he said, ‘It is where my family live’.”301 As happens with trauma victims, the protagonist feels dissociated from himself and the things he has been deeply attached to. He is a spectator of his own saying. Listening to his utterance, he others himself as a permanent guest of the protagonists of his story, particularly of Sebastian’s. Likewise, Sebastian, he remembers, others himself from the Edwardian family he belongs to. Thus, Waugh’s novel addresses these two characters’ homoerotic affiliation and their Otherness (hence the expression duo contra mundum)302 as a myth of origins they are unable to work through, and instead act out in the forceful undertaking of remembering. Once that Arcadia is lost, there is only its haunting. The novel closes with Charles’s melancholic arrested development, stuck in the past as long as the present is, as usual, frustrating: “I never built up anything, and I forfeited the right to watch my son grow up. I’m homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless.”303 Nick Guest tries to solve his lack, being a middle-class gay down from Oxford who yearns for the Feddens’ lifestyle, through aestheticism. As mentioned above, he is the aesthete sycophant of the family. In this sense, he draws on Henry James for not only intellectual inspiration but also personal fulfilment. In line with Jamesian characters, Nick makes up “imaginary worlds which are doomed to collapse when brought into conjunction with the ‘facts’.”304 This is the irony of The Line of Beauty – the protagonist invests far too much on edifying his identity as an Other to his “true” self. Whereas Ryder goes through two heterosexual relationships, though to no avail, Guest remains in the homoerotic Arcadia he has built up to the very end. Yet, the result is equally catastrophic. In this case, the shadow of AIDS is what determines the traumatic outcome. About to leave the Feddens and learn about the results of his AIDS samples, Nick dissociates from himself once again. In rather traumatic terms, he bears witness to his own withdrawal from himself and his incapacity to work through what is going on. When the time arrives, he feels emotionally compelled to act out his rejection: “It was a sort of terror, made up of emotions from every stage of his short life, weaning, homesickness, envy and self-pity, but he felt that the self-pity belonged to a larger pity.”305 301

Waugh, Brideshead, 330. Mark Lilly, Gay Men’s Literature in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1993), 58. 303 Waugh, Brideshead, 330. 304 Roslyn Jolly, Henry James. History, Narrative, Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 37–8. 305 Hollinghurst, Line of Beauty, 501. 302

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Although the protagonist sublimates his internal homophobia through his multiple (albeit unfinished) projects, he must confront it in the end. The effect of AIDS, which kills two of his lovers, is appalling. Drawing on Susan Sontag,306 disease proves to be a cultural artefact often sexualized and related to women and gays, especially in cases like tuberculosis and AIDS. The disease was already a main referent in Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming-pool Library. In fact, according to many critics – Keen,307 Woods,308 Burton,309 Chambers,310 Dellamora,311 and Bristow312 – what lies behind the catastrophes in the novel is AIDS. As The Line of Beauty is a return to the 1980s, all that was applied to The Swimming-pool Library is recast to meet the post-gay politics of the turn of the millennium.313 Thus, Nick Guest is a guest not only of the Feddens’ but himself – art proves to be useful for him to edify his Otherness. However, the traumatic event the novel recalls is impossible to represent in individual terms, and art becomes the formula not to shun it (in Nick’s narration) but to address a massive annihilation (in Hollinghurst’s novel). Thus, the lack the hero feels at the end, whether with ironic or aesthetic undertones, is inassimilable. The arrested development, which in Ryder’s and Guest’s cases results in utter paralysis, in The Lessons turns into masochistic indolence. In arriving in Oxford, James gets injured, which he purposefully uses to other himself from his surrounding in isolation.314 This self-inflected isolation runs parallel to his intrinsic desire (i.e. before encountering Mark) to return to pre-symbolic childhood: “I wanted to be a child again … to be taken up into greater arms than mine.”315 And although he at first does not

306

Sontag, Illness, 2009. Susanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2001), 187–8. 308 Woods, History of Gay Literature, 368–9. 309 Peter Burton, Talking to … (Exeter: Third House, 1991), 48. 310 Ross Chambers, “Messing around Gayness and Loiterature in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-pool Library,” in Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices, eds. Judith Still and Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 217. 311 Richard Dellamora, Apocalyptic Overtures, Sexual politics and the Sense of an Ending (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 173, 191. 312 Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England. Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), 173. 313 Alan Sinfield, Gay and After (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998). 314 Alderman, The Lessons, 20. 315 Ibid., 22. 307

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like the eccentric Mark,316 he soon falls under his spell. Thus, James’s inborn tendency to isolation and self-othering only increases as the novel advances. The sadomasochistic relationship between the protagonists is forecast by Mark’s Catholic conception of sacrifice. He considers, James recalls, that the positions of the agent and the victim of sacrifice can be swapped: “Both partners in a sacrifice are one. Like God and His son, the one who demands the sacrifice and the one who is sacrificed are the same.”317 Mark’s life of paradoxes hides his dissatisfaction, and especially his sense of procrastination that he implacably passes onto James. From their first kiss, or rather Mark’s attempt,318 they yearn with postponing youth. As Mark reverses the developmental logic towards maturity, his family and the family priest often disapprove of his lifestyle.319 There are many reasons why the priest and society as a whole rebuke his attitude, especially his (homo)sexual explicitness. He is even arrested for cottaging320 at public urinals. However, it is the countercultural undertones behind promiscuity that are perceived as threatening, especially his wish to procrastinate and enjoy polymorphous perversity. I am not speaking about Freudian developmental phases, but of Mark’s “perverse” (or, rather, unconventional) sources of gratification. As children do in Freudian theory, he wants to keep on enjoying pleasurable drives beyond or apart from social conventions and norms. In this sense, Mark finds a midpoint between the two libidinal extremes resulting from the public-school system which provoked and fostered repression or self-indulgence.321 Winters simply comes out – not as a homosexual, but as a polymorphous pervert who enjoys bisexuality and, the novel hints, may even have experienced incest with his mother. Talking about his adolescence, he admits to having been intimate with his mother, feeling “much too close.”322 Yet, the ultimate act of Mark’s “perversion” is marrying Nicola, the very young sister of his friend and allegedly occasional lover of Simon. As she is a religious radical, their marriage constitutes Mark’s eccentricity in breaking with his predominant homosexual activity and controlling himself. However, he always goes further in his intentions and, 316

Ibid., 33. Ibid., 85. 318 Ibid., 91. 319 Ibid., 128. 320 Cottaging is the term used in the UK – instead of the more popular American “cruising” – in reference to gays’ moving around in search of clandestine casual sex in public spaces. 321 Alderman, The Lessons, 137. 322 Ibid., 226. 317

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even married to Nicola, Winters still longs for a continuum that draws on but transcends Adrienne Rich’s. For Rich, the lesbian continuum refers to a wide range of woman-identified experiences that join them together against homosocial discourses and institutions and compulsory heterosexuality.323 Mark wants an analogous transcontinuum to occur – one that also challenges the restrictions and liabilities of compulsory maturity and recasts the exclusively homoerotic discourse of the texts The Lessons is influenced by. There is a whole iconography of desire set in a transitional space, be it school or university, that Alderman’s novel both shares and transcends. Hence, the protagonist suggests all his friends marry one another in a poly-angular bond so that they “live together in a big house” in different places like “let’s say … Oxford.”324 They make up a rondeau that disconnects from developmental logic and classic allegiances in liminal terms, breaking with the boundaries between friendship and sexual love. Mark’s polymorphous perversity breaks boundaries as they would join in a multiple marriage, with himself as the connecting knot of affection.325 James’s masochistic impulses emerge again when he meets married Mark after some time apart. The first step in this process of self-negation implies that the former experiences life through the second in a vicarious fashion. In other words, it is as if James withdraws from himself and begins to ventriloquize the other’s experiences and desires as his own: “Being with Mark, I remembered happiness, not as it had been for me, but as I imagined it was for him.”326 Thus starts the story of James’s obsession – “the fulcrum of my life,”327 as he says. When Mark and Nicola have a baby, he cannot help desiring the child’s death.328 It is then that his masochism with Mark turns into sadism with others, which he justifies for the sake of desire. In other words, his surrender and dedication to Mark prevent James from addressing any other, thus rejecting relationality as an ethical principle.329 In the end, when Daisy dies, James feels guilty – not because he is actually responsible, but because he feels morally so. In this way, his sadistic desire for the child’s death following his masochistic 323

Adrianne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David Halperin (New York; London: Routledge, 1993). 324 Alderman, The Lessons, 180. 325 Ibid., 181. 326 Ibid., 201. 327 Ibid., 210. 328 Ibid., 211. 329 Ibid.

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surrender to Mark turns back to masochism anew. He even undergoes an internal phobia in wishing the unnameable; but, he argues: “desire has little to do with morality.”330 From this moment onwards, which coincides with the third part of the novel, James’s internal homophobia is coupled with his submission to the Other’s desire. Lévinas points out in his ethics of alterity the need of the Same to surrender in front of the Otherness of the Other.331 332 In his view, however, the Other is not a concrete individual or entity, but an abstraction that gives meaning to the impossible encounter with the “face of the other” as the “source from which all meaning appears.”333 In The Lessons, the encounter with the Other belongs to a more (so to speak) pragmatic nature, and hence has moral connotations as well as the ethical ones that Lévinas points to. James feels sexually attracted to Mark, but there are also economic reasons that justify his surrender to his authority. Money is not only an underlying reason for their attachment but also the cause of their isolation from others. That is, class differences can both boost attraction, as Mark and James’ bond proves, and neutralize other potential bonds for that same reason.334 Without a proper job, the protagonist goes to San Ceterino after Mark, and it is here the prologue makes sense at last. Drawing on a long list of gay northerners in love with the Mediterranean and its youngsters,335 Mark brings teenagers to the house,336 thus tormenting the sycophantic James. Indeed, the sadomasochistic undertones of their bond throughout the novel augment the last section, “The Lessons.” The title is disturbing because, as mentioned, lessons can be both moral and pedagogic, which is particularly problematic here. From the point of view of justice as restitution, especially from a lex talionis standpoint, James deserves Mark’s sadism because he wished for the death of the latter’s daughter. However, the novel disregards a classic conception of morality and pedagogy. There is no judgement of the characters’ behaviour but an ethical understanding which transcends classic moral considerations.

330

Ibid., 228. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: an Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1991), 277. 332 Lévinas, Etique et infini, 94. 333 Lévinas, Totality, 297. 334 Alderman, The Lessons, 248. 335 Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing Art and Homosexual Fantasy (London; New York: Routledge, 1993). 336 Alderman, The Lessons, 250. 331

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Literature addresses the undecidable, and this is what The Lessons does, in both the novel and the last section of the same title. I do not mean it supports Mark’s misuse of others. It simply recalls and intervenes in reality beyond the literal. Their sadomasochistic interaction helps to understand the nature of some relationships and the edification of identity in some extreme circumstances, such as Mark’s daughter’s death. This is the context in which Mark’s words aim at othering James: “All you can ever do is follow someone round, Jess, and now me … All you ever are is a reflection of other people … What are you really? Nothing.”337 James is thus attacked for his Otherness, or rather for his nothingness. He is a mere Other and ventriloquizer of the Same, be it Jess or Mark. However, drawing on the bidirectionality of sadomasochism, the protagonist is immediately asked to do what his puppeteer commands and ventriloquize what he is told,338 which he does “without [his] own volition.”339 Being persuaded to ventriloquize the Other eventually leads James to recognize himself. This is perhaps the lesson of the section and the novel – that is the value of individuality per se and its articulation through love as an encounter with the Other. It is in this sense that Mark proves to be an unlikely factotum – he punishes those around him, later redeeming them in a Christological fashion. He rescues Simon’s younger brother from being drowned and James from remaining a mere ventriloquizer of others with no initiative of his own. In front of a mirror, for the first time, the protagonist recognizes himself answering back to his reflection, instead of to that of Jess and Mark. That is, after acting out what is said to him, he works out his traumatized self and comes back to himself: “That is me … That face is me.”340 The individuation process has apparently succeeded. Nevertheless, it is only when the recognition of oneself is projected outwards in the encounter with the Other that love is actually fulfilled. It is a negation of the self, albeit not one that is dispossessed by the Other, but one that recognizes the true effects of alterity as mutual recognition. When I say recognition, I am drawing on Lévinas – that is, the acceptance of individuality within the encounter which is not and must not be symmetrical. The narrator speaks of a selfless affection “a love which … does not need to be returned … It is perfect love; more perfect than the love between equals.”341

337

Ibid., 256. Ibid. 339 Ibid. 340 Ibid., 273. 341 Ibid., 277. 338

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Coda: Transness in Arcadia Of the characteristics of the novels The Lessons draws on, I will finally refer to the conception of “immaturity” and sexual dissidence as recognizable values. In Brideshead Revisited the arrested development traditionally attached to homoeroticism allows the protagonist to come to terms with the passing of time. Yet, nostalgia is both the symptom of the traumatic loss of a presumed innocence and also the placebo for that loss. Thus, Charles feels comfort in remembering when he is childless and alone back in post-war Brideshead. The homoeroticism of that Lacanian pre-symbolic stage is also twofold. The bond between Charles and Sebastian grants them a golden age to remember thereafter. And it is precisely in remembering that an emasculating yearning is activated. The aesthetic beauty of Arcadia serves as a backdrop to convey homoerotic youth, but also as an omen of heterosexual maturity as the only socially acceptable option. Censorship on actual homosexuality is obvious as long as the deeds and identity of Anthony Blanche, the only overtly gay character of the novel, are disapproved of. When Charles’s cousin Jasper – a ludicrous former student at Oxford himself – visits him at his university lodgings, he identifies a difference between Sebastian and Anthony: “‘Flyte may be all right, but Anthony Blanche – now there’s a man there’s absolutely no excuse for.’ ‘I don’t particularly like him myself’ I said. ‘Well, he’s always hanging around here, and the stiffer element in college don’t like it. They can’t stand him at the house’.”342 The only reason why Jasper, other college students, and Charles himself do not like Blanche is his flamboyant homosexuality. Thus, whereas Flyte’s eccentricity is widely regarded as childish and hence forgivable, Blanche’s deeds are far too overtly unorthodox to be admitted, his affair with a German policeman in Munich343 being too much of an offence for Edwardian Oxford. The Line of Beauty also maintains a (so to speak) exclusively homosexual Arcadia. Nick turns up at the Feddens down from Oxford where he met Toby Fedden, with whom he is infatuated throughout. His inarticulate desire for the wealthy youth recalls the homoerotic scenarios of previous Oxbridge novels like Maurice and Brideshead: “Nick remembered an evening in Oxford, drifting out through the Meadows … and then saw what he’d hoped to see, Toby out in a single scull, shirtless, glowing.”344 However, The Line of Beauty is much more sexually explicit than its predecessors, Nick’s affairs being overtly gay rather than homoerotic 342

Waugh, Brideshead, 43. Ibid., 102. 344 Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, 327–8. 343

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idylls. When he has sex with Leo, his first lover and a black council worker, in the Notting Hill semi-public gardens where the Feddens live,345 Hollinghurst’s novel is recasting Arcadia. But it is still exclusively male territory. The same goes for Nick’s relationship with Wani, the son of a Lebanese tycoon. The two youths experience their own Arcadia that recalls Oxbridge as they cross the “men only” sign at the entrance of a gay steam bath that recalls the paradigmatic Corry – the Corinthian club where the protagonists of Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-pool Library meet: “This naked mingling, which formed a ritualistic heart to the life of the club, produced its own improper incitements to ideal liaisons, and polyandrous happenings which could not survive into the world of jackets and ties, cycle-clips and duffel-coats.”346 This seems to be a homoerotic continuum of homo-social/erotic texts by Hollinghurst and other writers (which Alderman evokes in The Lessons), where even after the school and university phases have passed, male characters make up spaces where they can re-experience pre-adulthood bonding. While in Brideshead Blanche is the odd one out in that all-male homoerotic Oxford because he crosses the border between homosociality and homosexuality, in The Line of Beauty it is Nick’s frantic aestheticism, his overt gayness, and prospective AIDSrelated death that eventually wreck Arcadia. The Lessons recasts these premises. The Oxford where James Stieff arrives is not the all-male territory Forster and Waugh depict, or even the one Hollinghurst addresses where girls are virtually absent. Alderman’s second novel portrays a university where ancient traditions merge with a new status quo. Thus, The Lessons revolves around a rondeau of three boys and three girls making up their own Arcadia at the turn of the millennium. In this context, the homoerotic is apparently just one more option that especially Mark keeps alive, having affairs with dons, deans, and male students alike. Jess and Emmanuella hold heterosexual relationships throughout. However, the rest of the group – Franny, Simon, James, and even, temporarily, Mark – can be labelled as bisexuals. This is a shift with respect to classic Oxbridge novels. Sexual orientation is fluid and transitional, which would make the classic association between maturity and heterosexuality something of the past. The Lessons cannot be considered a transcultural novel to the degree Disobedience is, the presence of (and especially interaction between) other nationalities and viewpoints being always marginal. But there is a fluidity that challenges Arcadia. At the end of the novel, Jess tells James about the 345 346

Ibid., 15. Hollinghurst, The Swimming-pool Library, 16.

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group. Simon has asked Franny to marry him.347 However Franny, who is teaching in America, “is a lesbian now. Or bisexual.”348 Simon, who apparently flirted with Mark, is now with an extremely tall French girl.349 And Emmanuella has broken with her aristocratic husband to join a religious order, sending cloth blessed by saints to her friends while volunteering in Africa with AIDS patients.350 Even James and Mark, who apparently yearn to return to Oxford, reverse the classic developmental logic. It is after university, when Arcadia is supposed to vanish and heterosexual maturity replaces former homoerotic bonds, that the two live a new Arcadia, and thus extend their youth. However, as the classic expression that gives a name to the first book of Brideshead, “Et in Arcadia ego,” recalls, even in Arcadia death roams. Thus, The Lessons recasts the genre, bisexualizing desire in Oxbridge and momentarily altering the Freudian developmental logic into maturity. But it is the management of othering the Other to explore the ethics of the Same from the undecidability of literature that prevails. The novel falls under the visual, cultural, and textual influence of canonical texts, but new territories and viewpoints are explored in the process of recasting, which prevents Bloom’s anxiety of influence, as an exclusively father-son bidirectionality would sanction. This is a starting point that Alderman’s third novel picks up from.

347

Alderman, The Lessons, 267. Ibid., 268. 349 Ibid. 350 Ibid. 348

CHAPTER THREE THE MARGINS OF POWER: (UN)AUTHORIZED VOICES FROM THE FATHOMLESS

Recasting the Scriptures In 2006, National Geographic published a translation of the Gospel of Judas which renewed the interest in the gospels as cultural texts where what it takes to be a human and its relation with the transcendental are issues that need to be revised. Once the authenticity of the gospel parchment was proved scientifically, the debate was of a religious and philosophical nature – and, I would add, a textual, literary debate. The engagement of the novel as a dialogic genre with religious narratives has been long and often iconoclastic.351 However, Maczynska focuses on recent postmodern fiction and how it relates to religious discourses. More specifically, the critic explores how religious and literary narratives are “shaped by the processes of transmission, translation, and interpretation.”352 Subsequently, she delves into the limits between these two narratives and discourses. Where is the limit between the sacred and the literary, and who or what grants the sacred scriptures their holiness, are questions she and, in her view, some postmodern novels address.353 Drawing on John McClure, she states that when postmodern literature “strips scriptures of their privileged status … their continued cultural resonance” is guaranteed.354 Among the large number of contemporary scriptural rewritings Maczynska analyses is Alderman’s third novel, The Liars’ Gospel. In the critic’s view, all these contemporary revisions of religious texts – those addressing the gospels being the most numerous by far – have much in common with the 351

Magdalena Maczynska, The Gospel according to the Novelist (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 1. 352 Ibid., 2. 353 Ibid. 354 Ibid.

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postmodern revision of the canon as a whole. She makes reference to some of the undertones and aims of these revisions, namely: Re-telling well-known stories from new points of view; placing familiar characters in unexpected, unorthodox contexts; splicing traditional and non-traditional material; levelling “high” and “low” levels and styles; experimenting with hybrid genres and alternate ontological structures; and treating serious subject matter with irreverent carnivalesque humour.355

From this quote, it follows that post-secular rewritings of the Scriptures would fit the classic features of postmodernism, as stated by, among others, Fredrick Jameson.356 Indeed, Maczynska draws on Jameson to defend her standpoint, arguing that current metascriptures “participate in Jameson’s textual play.”357 However, she very insightfully adds (to Jameson’s and Linda Hutcheon’s postmodern ethos) some ideological undertones which inform the “ambivalent but corrective relationship between sacred originals … and their novelistic correctives.”358 In any case, as mentioned above, Maczynska still considers that the experimentalism of classic postmodernism is the defining feature of these texts, which she calls “scriptural metafiction.”359 In this sense, she recalls Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction, and thus rejects Jameson’s conception of postmodernism as a pure and random play of signifiers.360 Instead, drawing on Hutcheon again, scriptural metafictions appeal to what is gone, which can only be accessed through texts,361 the traces of an elusive and inescapable past. In evoking past texts to address the past, postmodern historiographic metafictions, and allegedly those addressing the Scriptures, expose the narrativity of the resulting postmodernist text and its hypotext. In short, in deconstructing scriptural texts, the genre discloses their literariness as well as that of the new versions of sacred history.362 There is a long list of literary revisions of the sacred scriptures, which Maczynska recalls in her study. However, as it is not the main concern of this book, I will focus my attention on Alderman’s, and only occasionally on others 355

Ibid., 3. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). 357 Maczynska, The Gospel, 3. 358 Ibid. 359 Ibid., 4. 360 Jameson, Postmodernism, 96. 361 Linda Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York; London: Routledge, 1988), 125. 362 Maczynska, The Gospel, 4. 356

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that may be of interest to the analysis of The Liars’ Gospel. My point here is that the novel is not so much a postmodernist text, as Maczynska points out. It may present some postmodernist traits, but there are some postpostmodern (and more specifically transmodern) undertones that point to a paradigm shift whereby relativism has been superseded for the sake of a re-ideologized conception of ethics and politics. One of the reasons that would justify the postmodernity of novels like The Liars’ Gospel is that the literary, rather than sacredness, explains its undecidability. In other words, the fathomless can be accessed through the undecidability that both religious and literary texts convey. The problem comes when both converge in a single narrative or, as Maczynska points out, when “reading the Gospels as man-made narratives.”363 From a postmodern standpoint, what grants the sacred Scriptures their status is unknown, being sacred for believers, borrowing insights from narratology, anthropology, and a Wittgensteinian philosophy of language.364 That is, for Maczynska, The Liars’ Gospel and analogous novels put forward the human-made narrativity of religious texts, which are thus the result of a context and a community. However, I contend there is much more to Alderman’s novel than a postmodern reading of the gospels. Indeed, Maczynska herself regards the post-secularism of some current literature well beyond classic postmodernism. This turn to religion that she and other authors detect is coupled, in my view, with the ethical turn that has taken place in late postmodernism – a turn which has been intensified in the era of transness that some critics have called “transmodernity.” The ethical turn, thriving in recent decades, has branched out into two antagonistic trends: A neo-humanist ethics, of a rather normative, deontic type, implying an overall moral dimension, generally associated with the stable ego of the character as present in classic realist texts based on linguistic transparency; and a newer, Levinasian and post-Levinasian ethics, of a non-deontic, nonfoundational, non-cognitive, an above all non-ontological type … very much at home with experimentalism, that has come to be identified with the practice of postmodernism.365

However – and this is one of my main contentions – the ethical turn, which was originally identified with late postmodernism, is no longer essentially experimentalist. I do not mean that experimentalism is 363

Ibid., 7. Ibid. 365 Onega and Ganteau, Ethics and Trauma, 7–8. 364

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discarded. As a matter of fact, The Liars’ Gospel recasts the biblical genre in a somehow experimental way. But it is ethics, rather than form, that matters, or at least prevails. Dussel and Sardar argue for an overall shift of paradigm where Western logocentrism is not only to be questioned and/or deconstructed as postmodernism intended. There must be an actual dialogue with the Other so that a rational worldview characteristic of Western thought and history is replaced by a multitude of other options. When there is no referent that sets up the epistemological, ontological, and ethical norms the transmodern paradigm can be said to have succeeded. Non-Western cultures such as the pre-Columbian (in Dussel’s case), Islamic (for Sardar), and Jewishness in Alderman’s novel are nodes in a transmodern multi-nodal world. In other words, there is no centre or margins, as modernity claimed, which is not even to be questioned, as postmodernity did. There must be a translogue that substitutes the dialogue between the Western logos and the interpellated Other. This new framework is the scenario where, I argue, The Liars’ Gospel operates. From the Old English godspell, meaning “good story” or “message,” itself a translation of Greek evangelion meaning “reward for bringing good news,” the gospels recall the canonized life of Christ. The four canonical gospels were selected by second-century Bishop Irenaeus according to some criteria, especially their closeness to Christ’s lifetime. Meanwhile, many others were discarded for different reasons. Hence, when a writer like Alderman recasts the Scriptures there is a renewed process of canonization or decanonization. Moreover, there are two aspects I would like to underline in this process of revision: Alderman’s choice of the gospels’ voices being indefectibly related to her Jewishness, and, as I will address later, a current trend for “biofiction.”366 When referring to how she conceived The Liars’ Gospel, Alderman recalls her schooldays, particularly her studying both Hebrew and Latin.367 In her view, the two languages gave her “two quite interesting perspectives on the same period.”368 Moreover, she recalls, when she told her Hebrew teacher a book should be written on Jewish Jesus, the latter’s reaction was that “no one should write a book about this.”369 The result of this negative recommendation is The Liars’ Gospel, a novel which constitutes a 366

Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 367 Ada Brunstein, “The Liars’ Gospel Review,” Jewish Book Council (2014), http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org /book/the-liars-gospel. 368 Ibid. 369 Ibid.

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transition from a Christian Jesus to a Jewish one and back again. As the author acknowledges before the novel starts, in knowing both Latin and Hebrew she was granted a double perspective,370 which can easily crystallize in a multiple, mutable, and adaptable vision. It is quite significant that, in addressing the most important religious figure for Christians, Alderman compares him to “the charismatic guy at the centre”371 in Mormonism and Scientology. It is not that the author speaks of Christ out of disrespect. On the contrary, although Alderman starts from “the premise that he wasn’t the son of God,” she concedes “he’s clearly a thoughtful person who wants to dig into the meaning of rituals and laws.”372 In short, The Liars’ Gospel aims to reconcile Jewishness with Christianity by transitioning between both – not so much because the novel acknowledges Christ’s divinity, but because it delves into his religious and cultural significance as a Jewish man in first-century Palestine. The hybridity of the writer and the novel proves to be evident due to the choice of significant Jewish characters, Mary, Judas, Caiaphas, and Barabbas, and the use of the Jewish spelling (Miryam, Iehuda, Caiaphas, and Bar-Avo), recovering these historical figures from a new standpoint. Moreover, drawing on the Christian canon, Alderman adjusts the number of her gospels to four. Finally, it is crucial that The Liars’ Gospel levels the Jewish and Christian traditions. In other words, the Jewish conception of Christ as a false prophet does not imply that his message is incompatible with the Jewish religion, and well beyond into a message of trans-cultural/modern relationality. As a matter of fact, although he is not recognized as God’s son, his teaching and relevance are incontestable and resonate with the Jewish tradition he belongs in. To make Christ a credible human being, the novel recalls the Jewishness of his mother, the high priest, and a revolutionary leader against the Roman occupation. It is not out of disrespect that Alderman revises the Christian canon and its main figure, but as part of an act of reconciliation and transition.

Back to Religion through Biofiction In the introduction I called The Liars’ Gospel a hybrid of the predominant Jewishness of Disobedience and the characteristic Britishness of The Lessons. However, the transitional spirit of Alderman’s third novel is much more complex, being not only a transcultural artefact but also a post370

Alderman, The Liars’ Gospel. In Brunstein, “The Liars’ Gospel Review.” 372 Ibid. 371

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secular text. It is as if the textual and visual imagery of frum Hendon and Oxford reached a climax in returning to first-century Palestine in The Liars’ Gospel. Disobedience can be read as a post-secular novel as long as both the third-person narrator and the protagonist regard religion as a “residual formation,”373 a survivor of prior times. Ronit has assumed a secular lifestyle at odds with Hendon’s religion as ideologically and politically monolithic. It is in this sense that the novel draws on Edward Said’s conception of religion as surrender to “all progressive, ‘secular’ beliefs, values and projects.”374 Hence, it is religion itself that, according to Said, is “the Other.”375 However, besides Said’s rather Manichean view of religion, in recent decades there has been a return of religion to literary theory that, according to McClure, prestigious critics like Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Derrida have addressed.376 All three have delved into the religious event well beyond a mere renunciation or surrender to rationalism. Foucault returns to ancient communities to explain the current return of religiosity. However, he expands the conception of religion to a more ethical concern with the Other that is present in both pagan and Christian communities. In other words, the religious event transcends institutional religions and hierarchies, and is informed instead by an ethics of alterity. Against the current individualism, Foucault points out, those communities fostered “economic dependences, and relations of patronage and friendship.”377 More concretely, he makes reference to the Christian ascetic movement of earlier centuries – in which The Liars’ Gospel is inscribed – since it “presented itself as an extremely strong accentuation of the relations of oneself to oneself, but in the form of a disqualification of the values of private life.”378 Although he mostly refers to one’s caring for oneself in ancient times, he rescues their conception of care for the sick, wounded, or dead Other.379 Thus, the need “to fulfil one’s obligations to mankind, to one’s fellow citizens and to one’s family”380 constitutes “a salutary corrective to a secular modern culture.”381 The ethics of care, which has become an influential branch in 373

John McClure, “Post-secular Culture: the Return of Religion in Contemporary Theory and Literature,” Crosscurrents 47, no. 3 (1997): 333. 374 Ibid., 335. 375 Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 291. 376 McClure, “Post-secular Culture,” 337. 377 Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage, 1988), 42. 378 Ibid., 43. 379 Ibid., 50. 380 Ibid., 42. 381 McClure, “Post-secular Culture,” 336.

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feminist ethics from Carol Gilligan onwards, finds, in Foucault’s opinion, a privileged role in ancient times and in the return of religion in recent decades. Habermas rethinks religion as a “kind of spirituality (or ‘postmetaphysical philosophy’) that would underwrite political pluralism, social justice, and intellectual freedom.”382 That is, this return responds to a politically and ethically committed discourse well beyond the apparent post-ideological stance of postmodernism. Likewise, in a Levinasian fashion, Derrida makes reference to responsibility as an acknowledgment of the inexplicable383 and a move to “explain oneself … one’s actions or one’s thoughts, to respond to the other and answer for oneself before the other.”384 There is a responsibility towards the others which seems to be at the core of the return to religion. That is why, recalling Jan Patoþka, Derrida thinks it mandatory “‘to distinguish religion’ redefined in a particular way, from ‘the demonic form of sacralisation’.”385 This is what, I contend, is hinted at in Disobedience and fully developed in The Liars’ Gospel. The religious return that Foucault, Habermas, and Derrida herald is an ethical recast of dogmatic religion. That is why it is no longer mandatory “to accept the old choices between secularism and spirituality.”386 If at first Ronit chooses secularism, it is because in her youth she was confronted with religious radicalism, the “demonic form of sacralisation” mentioned above. This aporia is somehow cleared when Esti and Dovid redefine the congregation at Hendon. Obviously, their revolution finds retractors but, the narrator states, it is still possible. And “within what is possible, there is room to live. Those people who remain in the synagogue … value Esti and Dovid’s continued presence.”387 There are even people who prefer to listen to Esti rather than Dovid, the new rav.388 This return to religion, not in classic terms but in a renewed and ethically-committed fashion, is the final message of Disobedience. The transition from an anticlerical secular novel to a post-secular one is allegorical. In leaving London, Ronit speaks to the Lord and is interpellated by Him. Thus, she requires some patience in assuming that changes are lengthy when it comes to religion and social mores, especially in Orthodox communities 382

Ibid., 338. Ibid., 339. 384 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 3. 385 In McClure, “Post-secular Culture,” 339. 386 Ibid., 340. 387 Alderman, Disobedience, 253. 388 Ibid., 254. 383

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like the one she comes from.389 It is not only Hendon that changes thanks to Esti and Dovid’s “revolution.” Ronit somehow returns to religion, or at least overcomes the radical breaking apart of secularism and spirituality she embodies at the beginning of the novel. Thus, she leaves behind her prior refusal of an inner voice “in order to achieve the appearance of untroubled self-identity or unqualified intellectual command.”390 The protagonist reaches this stage in a precarious fashion. Her chaotic life before is sorted out in a way her visit to Hendon is presumably responsible for. She finds a liminal transitional territory to experience her personal transformation, one where some features and events of her fundamentalist background can be accommodated in her tolerant and open-minded routines in New York.391 Her new lifestyle can be read as a surrender to religion and its restrictive moral norms as long as she looks for a new job and leaves behind her affair with her adulterous boss. It is in that sense that, Ronit concedes, her return to religion is not akin to assuming fundamentalism but adapting it to her “good sense.”392 That is, she does not come back to Orthodox religion but to a spirituality she is able to reconcile with (her) secularism. She performs some of the religious routines she learned when she was a child. However, she does it as and when she wishes. In recovering her mother’s candlesticks, Ronit lights them not so much out of faith but as homage to and remembrance of her mother. However, she also admits to speaking to God in her own way, although “it’s not clear that her soul is humbled by it.”393 The return to religion is more problematic in The Liars’ Gospel. In recalling the canonical gospels from other viewpoints, the novel addresses the narrativity of life and the sacred well beyond the conception of lies, betrayal, and influence in authors like Saramago. It also makes reference to the ethical dimension of coming back to spirituality, as an ethical move, and to premodernity, as Foucault, Habermas, and Derrida argue. It is not a surrender to religion, but a post-secular return which transcends postmodern formal experimentalism. The reconciliation of the premodern and modernity to understand the current change of paradigm is also a transmodern trait, as Josep Carles Laínez puts forward, and is patent in The Liars’ Gospel.394 Moreover, Alderman’s revision of Christ as Messiah 389

Ibid. McClure, “Post-secular Culture,” 340. 391 Alderman, Disobedience, 255. 392 Ibid. 393 Ibid. 394 Josep Carlos Laínez, “La premodernidad olvidada,” in La condición transmoderna, ed. Rosa María Rodríguez Magda (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2013), 151–60. 390

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is by no means exclusive to Jewish writing and criticism. The Testament of Mary395 by Irish writer Colm Tóibín is a good example of this changing paradigm and trans phenomenon that connects voices transculturally and transhistorically. The gospels are biographical narratives, and more specifically of a hagiographic nature. Of the many accounts on Jesus’s life, the early church chose four, which have come to be recognized as the canonical ones. Yet, in this process of canonization, many texts were left aside which still fight for visibility. The gospel of Judas, with which this chapter started, is one of them. Alderman’s fiction adds to this process of rewriting which is (using Sarah Dillon’s terminology) “palimpsestuous.”396 397 According to the OED, a palimpsest is “a 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.” When the gospel of Judas was presented to the media a few years ago, the imagery of the palimpsest was almost inevitable. Layers of information conveyed by heavily spoilt parchments were necessarily influenced by their rescuers, restorers, and translators. The palimpsestuous, Sarah Dillon points out, “is an involuted phenomenon where otherwise unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other.”398 This is what surely happened in the process of writing and selecting the gospels, and yet again when they are currently reread and rewritten. It is inevitable to feel the refraction of texts whereby the prior and later ones refract each other backwards and forwards indistinctly.399 The resulting effect is a textual and visual imagery of Christ’s life that influences and is influenced by The Liars’ Gospel. Before Alderman’s novel starts, the cast of characters is presented after the dramatis personae fashion in plays. The characters are split into Jews, Romans and those from other nations. Moreover, the names of Jewish characters are given in Hebrew and their anglicized versions in italics. Thus, the hybridity and the performativity of the text are put forward. The hybrid character of The Liars’ Gospel in religious, cultural, and historical 395

Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary (London: Penguin, 2013). Sarah Dillon, “Reinscribing De Quincey’s Palimpsest: the Significance of the Palimpsest in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies,” Textual Practice 19, no. 3 (2005): 243–63. 397 Sarah Dillon, The Palimpsest (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). 398 Dillon “Reinscribing De Quincey,” 245. 399 Susana Onega and Christian Gutleben, Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2004). 396

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matters has been mentioned. As for its performativity, it does not deauthenticate the religious substratum of the narrative. As a matter of fact, the very origin of theatre is related to pagan rituals that later evolved into ceremonies to worship Gods: “Originally, the embeddedness of an artwork in the context of tradition found expression in a cult. As we know, the earliest artworks originated in the service of rituals – first magical, then religious.”400 It is in this sense that the performativity of Alderman’s novel must be understood. The dramatis personae perform their roles not because they are merely acting as if there was no essence to their performance. Queer criticism, itself an upshot of post-structuralism, has been “responsible” for the current understanding of performativity as a deessentializing concept in reference to gender. Drawing on Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble401 and Bodies Matter,402 gender is thus the effect of preestablished and culturally-grounded acts. Likewise, if the characters of The Liars’ Gospel were mere impersonations that ventriloquized the actual historical figures, it could be inferred that the return to religion is a groundless event itself. This would be in accordance with Maczynska’s reading of the novel and other religious metanarrative texts as a postmodern phenomenon: “Many of these fictions flaunt their metatextual engagements in irreverent or playfully serious ways of postmodernist writing.”403 In my view, The Liars’ Gospel is a metanarrative as it recasts Christian tradition and the biographical genre. But it does not focus (at least not predominantly) on the irreverent and playful. The novel belongs in the biofiction genre that, in its neo-Victorian trend, represents “the crude revenge of nineteenth-century realism on the cool ironies, unfixed identities and skewed temporalities of the postmodern.”404 In the case of these religious metanarratives, the focus of interest is displaced from Victorianism to the sacred Scriptures, particularly the non-canonical ones, whose vengeful discourse overcomes the playfulness of postmodernism. Roland Barthes’s seminal “The Death of the Author” (1967), I have argued elsewhere, “has made readers into

400

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 24. 401 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London; New York: Routledge, 2006). 402 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London; New York: Routledge Classics, 2011). 403 Maczynska, The Gospel, 11. 404 Kaplan, Victoriana, 37.

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‘orphans’ who still yearn for an authorial figure.”405 The subsequent anxiety “has triggered off the revision of Victorian masters from a new perspective.”406 In an analogous fashion, religious figures and religion itself have been recast as aiming, not at certainty, but at a constructive post-secular dialogue. Some of the characteristics of The Liars’ Gospel as a post-secular biofiction are in accordance with postmodernism, especially as concerns the fragmentation of the discourse and the updating of marginal and/or invisibilized voices. However, I contend that the way the novel ventriloquizes responds not just to the logic of a scriptural original recast by a postmodern hypertext, but to a more committed dialogue. Indeed, it is the dialogue as meeting point that matters, and more so when it fosters cultural transition and appeals to current anxieties. Unlike classic biographies, biofictions make up a “new ontological, epistemological, and representational framework where the boundaries between fiction and ‘reality’ are blurred.”407 In using biofiction to recast the sacred scriptures, liminality transcends the fiction-reality axis, which is also explored, and especially the problematic return of and to religion. Maybe Christ is not the Messiah in The Liars’ Gospel, but reaching out to him compels readers to reconsider political, ethical, and religious issues from a revision of authenticity and Walter Benjamin’s aura.

Authenticity and Aura Versus Lying It may seem a contradiction in terms to join together biofiction, authenticity, and aura. The fact that biofiction “rejects the constraining factuality of classic biographies”408 does not mean it rejects factuality. Indeed, Alderman includes an epilogue, which is more a historiographic reflection on the evolution of the events after Christ’s death and his reappropriation by Roman authorities than a piece of fiction. She insists on the fictionality of The Liars’ Gospel in her “Notes on Sources”: “This is, of course, a work of fiction … However, many of the most surprising parts of this book are based in fact.”409 Be that as it may, religious facts are conveyed as cultural artefacts, the biofictional narrative being one of them. The authenticity of the fictional text as an aesthetic event is not exclusively factual since it also relies on its faculty to dialogue and act for 405

José M. Yebra, “Neo-Victorian Biofiction and Trauma Poetics in Colm Tóibín’s The Master,” Neo-Victorian Studies 6, no. 1 (2013): 46. 406 Ibid., 46. 407 Ibid., 47–8. 408 Ibid., 48. 409 Alderman, Liars’ Gospel, 261.

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reality. This is what Alderman’s gospels do in raising other voices. Indeed, the fact that the title regards the evangelists as liars is problematic. Also, the choice and treatment of historical figures are controversial – a withdrawing mother, two traitors, and a criminal are not what one would expect from a canonical selection. The thought-provoking appellation to liars as conveyors of a sacred story is related to an idea that Maczynska recalls from post-secularism, namely that “the secularization story promoted by nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectuals fails to account for twenty-first century realities.”410 I am not implying that lying is a new way or an apt substitute for truth, nor, I think, is it the message of Alderman’s novel. The word “liars” is used because this is the way Jewish voices have been regarded from a Western perspective. They have been reappropriated, invisibilized, and ventriloquized to utter what Christianity considered as Christ’s truth. Hence, I would like to retrieve Walter Benjamin’s concept of authenticity and aura to address the spiritual undertones of Alderman’s post-secular fiction. As Walter Benjamin argues, the transformations of art are “an effect of changes in the economic structure,” and thus “art is coming to resemble economic production, albeit at a delayed pace.”411 Hence, as a result of economic liberalism, mass production, and the distribution of goods, objects are devoid of their fullness, and the role of art and its beholder changes from contemplation to distraction.412 What makes the aura aureatic is, for Benjamin, “its uniqueness.”413 Such uniqueness can only be protected if the work of art is kept at a distance from the admirer. Indeed, Benjamin regrets how this principle has been reversed to accommodate the requirements of economic liberalism, “the desire of the present-day masses to ‘get closer’ to things, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness [Oberwindung des Einmaligen jeder Gegebenheit] by assimilating it as a reproduction.”414 As long as the distance of contemplation is neutralized and distraction takes its place, the object is stripped of the veil and the authenticity of the aura is destroyed.415 This process of reproduction “extracts sameness even from

410

Maczynska, The Gospel, 10. Andrew Robinson, “An A to Z of Theory. Walter Benjamin: Art, Aura and Authenticity,” 2013, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/walter-benjamin-art-aura-authenticity. 412 Ibid. 413 Benjamin, Work of Art, 24. 414 Ibid., 23. 415 Ibid., 23–4. 411

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what is unique.”416 Although Benjamin’s writings were informed by (as well as being a reaction to) the soul-destroying effect of liberalism and headlong industrialization of Western countries, they are still relevant. In the case of The Liar’s Gospel and the current crisis of representability, the different characters prove to be singular and authentic, and thus maintain a sense of their former aura. They do not simply lie. Instead, they address the singularity of spirituality nowadays against the homogeneous religiosity evinced by religious institutions and hierarchy. This transitional shift to deregulated spirituality is a feature Gilles Lipovetsky puts forward in his hypermodern interpretation of reality as a consequence of a returning past. He speaks of an “awakening of spiritualities and [a] new quest for identity.”417 This religious renewal responds to “the culture of individualist well-being that … giv[es] a new importance to the need of self-esteem and esteem of others.”418 The four characters of The Liars’ Gospel experience and encourage a new, individualized spirituality which is related to a feeling of fullness. Thus, far from “seeing new spiritualities as a residual phenomenon, a regression to pre-modern archaism,”419 they point to “new forms of unity and meaning.”420 In other words, in recalling premodern voices, the novel is questioning not only the present and its epistemologies (especially rationalism), but, as Lipovetsky argues, “the revisionary memory, the remobilization of traditional beliefs, and the individualist hybridization of past and modernity. It is no longer a question merely of the deconstruction of traditions, but of the way they are used without any institutional backing, being perpetually reworked in accordance with the principle of individual sovereignty.”421 If Sameness used to be customary in conventional religions, the attention to and contemplation of the singularity of each human being and the relationality to the Other (from a Levinasian perspective) are central issues in Alderman’s novel. Of the different types of scriptural rewritings that Maczynska analyses, The Liars’ Gospel belongs in those where the “gospel events are presented from alternative points of view that significantly revise the canonical story.”422 All these novels complement the sacred texts and at times they recast by claiming “the status of eyewitness accounts – something that, on 416

Ibid., 24. Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times, 62. 418 Ibid., 66. 419 Ibid., 64. 420 Ibid. 421 Ibid., 67. 422 Maczynska, The Gospel, 12. 417

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scholarly consensus, the canonical gospels are not – to criticize orthodox ideologies and call attention to the fictionality of their biblical originals.”423 In recalling the hybridity of reality and fiction in these firsthand eyewitnesses’ accounts, these texts show how reality is constructed – a very postmodern note indeed. However, Alderman’s novel does not discard the possibility of truth when using liars and performers to convey so-called sacred events. The Liars’ Gospel bluntly explains how reality is configured from power discourses. In this sense, the re-appropriation of Christ by the Roman Empire to criminalize the Jews of their own subservience is a case in point: “A new god rose in Rome … And although one might say: this was the triumph of the Jews … nonetheless by the time he arrived there he was no longer a Jew at all, quite the reverse.”424 This the Romans do in a very shrewd fashion, as long as, in rejecting Christ as the Son of God and therefore the Messiah, they trigger God’s rage.425 Alderman is thus searching for a sense of truth compatible with the inspirational discourse that, according to Theodore Ziolkowski, characterizes sacred texts against the accurate discourse of fiction.426 This obsession with biography, Ziolkowski argues, explains the unprecedented nature of Jesus as a human being.427 Along this line, Alderman points out that “storytellers know that every story is at least partly a lie. Every story could be told in four different ways.”428 This is what the novel does – if any event is better accounted for by (un)reliable storytellers,429 the overlapping of these stories makes the truth closer. All four characters perform according to what is expected and available from their ethical, political, and cultural standpoints – a disappointed mother and follower of the first and second voices, a religious leader halfway between loyalty to tradition and political circumstances, and finally a rebel who “performs” against Roman domination. The fact that the novel is fragmented into four narratives delivered by “liars” seems to comply with postmodern relativism. However, their commitment to truth and ethics outdoes postmodern playfulness, and is more in accordance with how spirituality is currently experienced as singular and unique by each human being. This search for truth and ethical commitment is moreover closely related with 423

Ibid., 12–13. Alderman, Liars’ Gospel, 258. 425 Ibid., 259. 426 Theodore Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2002), 30. 427 Ibid., 30. 428 Alderman, Liars’ Gospel, 259. 429 Ibid. 424

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the premodern, whose revision and revaluation is a characteristic of current -isms. Lipovetsky, as mentioned above, appeals to a reconciliation with the premodern in what he calls “hypermodernism,” which is also a characteristic of transmodernism. In fact, the return to religion in postsecular literature is parallel to the transmodern coming back to premodern cultures, in Laínez’s view, who points out that the premodern is the enormous lapse of time that precedes modernity in European culture.430 The coming of transmodernism brings about a return to premodern vectors (using Laínez’s terminology) from the individual or from a premodern reinstauration.431 Although Laínez’s conception of the premodern is essentially Western, it could easily be extended to non-Western cultures. In other words, all that which stands outside and lacks the recognition of Western Modernity and Cartesian rationality is to be resurfaced from a trans standpoint. The premodern goes, in my view, much further than the Western premodernity, including a myriad of non-Western cultural manifestations before modernity became dominant worldwide. Of all premodernity, Laínez says, the Greek and Roman civilizations fell while Christianity has remained.432 Yet, current desacralization is a symptom of how Christianity is perceived as the last remnant of premodernity, and hence a foreign body to the predominant transmodern.433 The Liars’ Gospel belongs in this process of revision and revaluation of the premodern as necessary in coming to terms with transmodernity and transculturalism. The transition between Western and Jewish viewpoints and vice versa makes up this liminal territory of encounter. Miryam, Judas, and Caiaphas (the first two, in Maczynska’s view434) lie in their accounts of Christ’s last days. But the question is how and why they do so. My contention is that their lying is the truth of the marginalized others, of those whose truth is otherwise discarded. That is why I am not saying the novel encourages lying per se, but regards it as an ethically-grounded event in some circumstances. Miryam disbelieves what her son says – all his teaching and, in her view, blasphemous vanity. However, she makes up a story for Gidon which dismantles the gospels’ narratives. Although, in her account, Miryam argues that her son and his followers are making up a pseudo-religion following a narcissistic drive, she revises her own story to accommodate Gidon’s need to believe. Thus, 430

Laínez, “Premodernidad,” 163. Ibid., 163. 432 Ibid., 171. 433 Ibid. 434 Maczynska, The Gospel, 57. 431

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as a storyteller and carer, she confesses there was something extraordinary while she was pregnant with Jesus.435 Indeed, these signs, her story goes on, attract the attention of a bystander who blesses her and the future Messiah.436 Although she recognizes the lie in her words, once she has started she feels an obligation to continue. It is not that Miryam does not observe the moral implications of lying. Yet, the ethical commitment to the Other, here embodied by Gidon, transcends the very morality of truth. More specifically, Miryam is a practitioner of the ethics of care, and, as such, she feels not only attached but also in debt to the Other just because he is the actual other.437 It is very provocative to suggest that some episodes of the Scriptures, for example the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, are lies resulting from a wish to comfort willing believers and the destitute and persecuted like Gidon. Instead of Archangel Gabriel, it is a mere stranger that, Miryam contrives, announces Christ’s birth. Likewise, when Christ dies the chain of lies goes on, this time to appease Miryam’s sorrow: “Shimon, who was the kindest, tried to lie to her,”438 making up a primeval account of Christ’s resurrection. However, when Miryam asks to be taken there and thus remember the place where her son had been buried and later raised, the story that Shimon and Jesus’s other followers convey “didn’t hold.”439 In her story, Christ is not resurrected, and is not spotted by anyone after death. His body simply disappears because, as the leader of a new sect, it is a valuable relic and has presumably been stolen to be worshipped somewhere else.440 This is Miryam’s true version – pragmatic, sceptical, and deprived of any supernatural or religious implications; one that has nothing to do with the comforting narrative she has engineered for Gidon. The story Jesus’s followers are just creating and that reaches Miryam’s ears has not been canonized as a sacred text yet. Before Christ is granted his aura, his body is mourned by his mother only, its disappearance being almost a classic crime scene in first-century Palestine. Yet, for a twenty-first century reader, it will probably read as Alderman’s Jewish account of some facts before they have transitioned into Christian resurrection. In any case, in the novel it is the story of a liar with a cause, and more concretely of a disappointed mother who simply cares for the one in sorrow. 435

Alderman, Liars’ Gospel, 63. Ibid. 437 Ibid., 64. 438 Ibid. 439 Ibid. 440 Ibid. 436

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Drawing on the gospel of Judas mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the second part of The Liars’ Gospel contradicts the canonical gospels. The latter portray Judas as a reviled traitor, especially that of John’s. The restitution of Judas as a noble man who simply helped Christ to carry out his redemptive death is for some critics441 tendentious to say the least. They have accused those who, based on the analysis of the revised gospel of Judas, consider him as Christ’s favourite apostle, and that he was increasingly maligned as the four canonical gospels were written down, of malpractice. The identification of Judas with treachery and malignity has never receded. On the contrary, as the centuries have passed, Christian art and culture have portrayed Judas as the epitome of Jewish treachery. In Alderman’s novel, his status as traitor and liar is recast. I will come back to treachery later. As for his lying, he does so first to protect the destitute mass from Christ’s dubious miracles, and later to save himself in becoming an outcast. Judas witnesses how that mass of needy people went in search of Jesus’s miraculous healings.442 In his account, he does not directly deny Christ’s miracles – it is only that he paradoxically performed none the day he talks about.443 However, he denounces how Christ and his followers trade with people’s faith. Judas feels particularly embarrassed and ill at ease when a poor, desperate crowd worship and praise a self-indulgent Jesus as the authentic Messiah.444 Judas lies or at least hides the truth to protect the destitute mass from their vulnerability, their bare humanity devoid of Christ’s aura. However, after he becomes the odd one out in Christ’s circle, Judas lies for survival among the Romans. He performs as he is expected to – as the buffoon who once was Jesus’s most beloved follower and now features him as an emasculated pretender confronting Roman power.445 In his performance, Judas is the factotum who betrays his master to correct his narcissism. But the performance just conceals the truth: “While he tells this liar’s tale, Iehuda reminds himself of how it really was.”446 In other words, performing a false story once and again defers Judas’s true account, which comes afterwards. Performing a lie is thus a way for him to come to terms 441

“Gospel of Judas Story Critisized for Scholarly Malpractice,” CNA (June 11, 2008), https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/gospel_of_judas_story_criticized_for_ scholarly_malpractice. 442 Alderman, Liars’ Gospel, 108. 443 Ibid. 444 Ibid. 445 Ibid., 79. 446 Ibid.

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with his ethical unrest when he dissents from Christ’s politics, and to survive as an ex-rebel under Roman rule. While lying is mostly ethically grounded in the cases of Miryam and Judas, Caiaphas cheats with a political purpose. Indeed, when he comes across a complex problem on religious and/or political issues, he “finds his practised High Priest smile, the liar’s smile com[ing] quickly and naturally to his lips.”447 In first-century occupied Israel, Caiaphas succeeds his father-in-law as the high priest after his brothers-in-law fail to do so. His position is thus a metaphor for the Roman colony as a whole. He must keep a difficult balance between his in-laws, his wife being an adulteress and his father-in-law a constant threat, and also between the religious traditions of Israel and the political and religious power of Rome. His innate political instinct proves to be particularly useful, albeit not enough, to appease imperial anger when riots break out. It is in this context and from his politically-committed position that Caiaphas’s lying gains legitimacy. Induced by his father-in-law and puppeteer Annas to cooperate politically with Pilate to safeguard the Jews’ religion and the High Temple, the high priest performs his part. Caiaphas has a natural “gift to lie” that helps him convince everybody he is an ally.448 In what remains of this chapter I will explore how the post-secular return to spirituality applies to each of Alderman’s gospels and their edification of alterity. The novelist’s irony on the canonical gospels is related but by no means reduced to her Jewishness. The long list of revisions with different aims and from different angles on the sacred Scriptures proves my point. That said, a comparison with Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary will illustrate the specificity of the account of Alderman’s Miryam. To delve into Judas’s gospel, I will briefly address his poetics of dissent, treachery, Otherness, and shame. As Maczynska points out, The Liars’ Gospel is “a carefully researched novel”449 that aims at truth – the truth of Christ in the first two parts, and more specifically the truth around Christ in the other two. That is why the analysis will tackle the difficult balance between the political and religious narratives in Caiaphas’s account and biopolitics as evinced in violence and sacrifice in Barabbas’s gospel. All this will serve to track the transition from Christianity to Jewishness and from Sameness to Otherness, and vice versa.

447

Ibid., 151. Ibid., 186. 449 Maczynska, The Gospel, 56. 448

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The Ethics of Care and the Transition from Catholic Mary to Jewish Miryam, and from Spirituality to Religion Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary was published the same year as The Liars’ Gospel. Both novels respond to the post-secular return to spirituality. However, whereas Tóibín focuses exclusively on Mary’s account of Christ’s story, Alderman juxtaposes four narrative versions, thus drawing on the quadrangular structure of the original. Moreover, Tóibín’s is a novella and is called a testament rather than a gospel. The very choice of the terms “testament” and “gospel” has remarkable implications. While a gospel, as already mentioned, makes reference to the act of bringing good news, a testament refers to the person who bears witness. In other words, after Christian personalism, Mary focuses on her son’s figure to whom she bears witness. By contrast, Miryam is just one more voice in nonpersonalist Judaism, and thus brings news as valuable and contestable as Judas’, Caiaphas’, and Barabbas’. Be that as it may, both texts draw on the virgin as a vehicle to humanize religion and evince the spirituality of postsecular fiction. The two characters voice and embody the theories of Foucault and Derrida on the spirituality mentioned above. In particular, they recall the “economic dependences, and relations of patronage and friendship”450 that characterized ancient communities, and are lacking in current ones. Riane Eisler calls this the partnership model, where feminine care prevails over the masculine domination model. In this model, “social relations are primarily based on the principle of linking rather than ranking.”451 However, the eventual male dominance was widespread as “part of the shift from a peaceful and equalitarian way of organizing human society to a hierarchic and violent order ruled by brutal and greedy men.”452 Eisler has more recently argued that, although there is no system that is purely partnership or domination,453 the latter has proved to be very deficient, and hence there should be a tendency to replace it with the former. The Testament of Mary and The Liars’ Gospel belong in this return to spirituality and a more ethically committed society. Their main purpose is, echoing Derrida, to distinguish religion as spirituality from the demonic form of sacralization that Orthodoxy often upholds. This implies a recasting of leadership and hierarchy, and a reification of the ethics of care as a positive surrender to the Other. 450

Foucault, The Care, 42. Riane Eisler, The Chalice & the Blade: Our History, Our Future (New York: Harper One, 1995), xvii. 452 Ibid., 100. 453 Riane Eisler, The Power of Partnership (Novato: New World Library, 2002). 451

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Miryam and Mary question Jesus’s divine persona rather than his message. That is, Christ is questioned from not only a Jewish perspective but a Catholic one as well, because both novels adopt a feminist ethics of care to do so. However, the process of literary desacralization is more complex in Alderman’s novel, since “The Testament mostly vindicates the role of women in early Christianity and The Liars’ Gospel addresses the whole cultural confrontation in first-century Palestine from different angles.”454 In fact, Mary’s account is an intimate memoir narrated in the first person. A captive of her son’s followers once he has been crucified, she is unwilling to cooperate in their narration of a new faith based on Christ’s alleged divinity and resurrection: “They think I do not understand what is slowly growing in the world; they think I do not see the point of their questions and do not notice the cruel shadow of exasperation that comes hooded in their faces or hidden in their voices when I say something vague or foolish, something which leads us nowhere.”455 Hence Mary’s alternative narrative starts. In focusing on this character’s humbleness and vulnerability, Tóibín fosters her extraordinary nature and immanent divinity. That is how the novella, although recasting and challenging the sacred Scriptures, still draws on the Catholic Marian tradition that places Christ’s mother at the centre of the narrative. In fact, it is Mary’s refusal to speak that shapes her kidnappers’ Orthodox-to-be discourse. Miryam’s gospel is narrated in a more detached third-person voice, which reduces the intimacy, vulnerability, and truth of Mary’s. Indeed, the novel reifies the historical figure behind the character, but always within a Jewish framework. In this sense, Miryam disapproves of her son’s narcissism from not only a personal but also a theological point of view. Thus, she rebukes Jesus’s re-appropriation of Jewish dogma to meet his own political and religious ambition. She states that Jesus’s message of mutual love and radical alterity was not her son’s original idea but long a part of Jewish dogma, as old Rabbi Hillel’s words proved.456 As a matter of fact, Miryam inscribes herself in that tradition her son challenges. As a child, she learned from her parents and Rabbi Hillel that “our duty to love each other”457 is a crucial teaching of the Jewish religion. Both Mary and Miryam censure their respective sons’ claims, the former in an intimate fashion and the latter in a more political one. Moreover, in 454

José M. Yebra, “Be(com)ing Dispossessed: Relationality and Violence in Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospel,” Études Britaniques Contemporaines 53, no. 4 (2017): 4–5. 455 Tóibín, Testament, 3–4. 456 Alderman, Liars’ Gospel, 43. 457 Ibid., 20.

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censoring but also grieving for him, they embrace a Levinasian ethics of alterity and care that makes the transition between the Catholic and Jewish recasting of their respective Orthodoxies particularly straightforward. Mary’s humbleness and self-conscious vulnerability contrast with Jesus’s attitude. Unlike what the gospels say, the virgin does not believe her son to be God’s son, but the victim of his own egocentrism, which his followers only promote. After he is supposed to have revived Lazarus his legend grows, and the distance between mother and son increases. As a detached spectator, she bears witness to how Jesus has become not only a worshipped leader but one who thinks he is worth the divinity he is granted by his followers. Thus, when Mary approaches him she feels a physical and metaphysical distance between them, which he only confirms in uttering: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?”458 The scene is especially desacralizing because Christ is deprived of the human divinity he is granted in the gospels. In rejecting and not acknowledging his mother as the presumed son of God in his mother’s truthful account, he moves away from the figure of the gospels.459 Tóibín’s ability to represent the complexity of bonds between mothers and sons with an economy of language and emotional accuracy in contemporary Ireland (Mothers and Sons and The Empty Family being scattered with examples) is here moved to first-century Israel. The virgin and Christ are desacralized, thus granting a humanity that only literature can assign to sacred texts and figures. In this sense, The Testament of Mary recasts Benjamin’s conception of aura, transferring contemplation from Christ to Mary. He becomes the attraction, a mere reproducible prophet who claims to be the Messiah, whereas Mary keeps the capacity of genuine attention of (and to) the Other. Her blunt humanity makes her outstanding. If Mary questions her son’s divine nature and egotism, Miryam’s discourse on hers is especially harsh. In the novel, Christ is something from the past for his family, whom he has rebutted. For this reason, when Gidon turns up in Natzaret after Jesus’s footsteps and befriends Miryam, she reveals her son’s “true” personality since he was a child: “He was a traitor, a rabble-dealer, a rebel, a liar and a pretender to the throne.”460 He is a distant performer but, she concedes, he had a charisma that could attract others’ attention.461 However, his charisma is a psychological skill used to manipulate others and not a divinity-conferred grace, as the gospels affirm. In her account, he performs as if having the charis or grace 458

Tóibín, Testament, 47. Ibid. 460 Alderman, Liars’ Gospel, 14. 461 Ibid., 22. 459

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as a god, and thus being charismatic as the son of God at the same time. He is portrayed as different, but not as the pacific man of the canonical gospels. He is a furious man driven by bursts of violent rage. In short, his egotism and wrath make up a character that Miryam describes as mad for breaking with Jewish laws and calling himself the son of God.462 In this, the novel reverses the episode in Luke’s Gospel when a young Jesus is among the teachers at the temple listening and asking questions, whereas Luke recalls, “everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers.”463 In Miryam’s account, he challenges the old teacher Ezra, a guard of Jewish tradition, who rejects Jesus’s divinity. In fact, instead of acknowledging that Christ’s authority comes from God or Jewish patriarchs, the teacher points out that it “comes from a foreign god like Ba’al Zvuv!”464 Being called a demon, Christ not only flashes to a sudden wrath but performs as God’s ventriloquizer. Rising above the mass witnessing the dialectical fight between himself and Ezra, he utters words as if inspired by the divine: “as though reading from letters written in the air.”465 In brief, instead of Luke’s hagiography, Miryam’s gospel reads as a valuable version that bears witness to a man who re-appropriates Jewish tradition against itself to meet his purposes, or of those who intended to transform history. The real transformation in The Testament of Mary and The Liars’ Gospel is of an ethical nature, one that is closely related to post-secular spirituality. Both women reject because they have been rejected, yet the two find a way to relate to the Other after the ethics of care, as their sons announce but do not practice. Tóibín’s novella complies with Lévinas’s radical alterity, which is substantiated on a triple axis: “vulnerability, woundedness and spirituality.”466 From this three-fold standpoint, the protagonist finds the way to address and be addressed by the Other in a caring fashion. Drawing on Eisler’s partnership model, Carol Gilligan theorizes on a feminist ethics of care which other critics such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Naomi Weisstein, and Virginia Held later revised. Yet, the spirit of this ethics remains the same, namely the substitution of “an independent, autonomous, rational individual”467 for one whose main drive 462

Ibid., 26, 28, 31. Luke Gospel, 2: 46–7 464 Alderman, Liars’ Gospel, 36. 465 Ibid., 36. 466 José M. Yebra, “Re-framing Vulnerability and Wound Ethics: Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary,” The Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 65, no. 1 (2018): 39. 467 Held, Ethics of Care, 10. 463

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is caring for the needing others.468 Thus, the community prevails over the individual, who gains new meaning under current neoliberalisms. She rejects her son’s egotism and the nominalist, domination-model religion his followers are making up: “Gather together those misfits [and] it will lead to what I saw and what I live with now.”469 Instead of building up herself and her discourse on hierarchy and asymmetry, she relates to, experiences, cares for, and is cared about by the Other. That is, she revises Christian values, especially the adscription of caring to the virgin and women in general, because caring becomes a genderless communal value. That is how Mary transforms her attachment to those around her into a spiritual experience. The Sabbath, for example, gains new meaning as a comforting encounter with the Other when her son (and all his relatives by proxy) becomes an outcast. It is then that she finds the anonymous ethics of care returned to her: “I needed very little nourishment. Sometimes one of the neighbours left food hanging from a hook by the side wall and when night fell I collected it.”470 Not only do her neighbours protect her from the Roman and Jewish Establishment, but she also cares for her selfish son who, paradoxically, the weaker he seems to be, the more powerful he becomes. As a matter of fact, his pretention to power and divinity is, in Mary’s view, a symptom of his impotence. In fact, his performance of power encourages her to look after him more than when he was a defenceless child.471 Mary’s ethics of care is consequently linked to vulnerability. Indeed, her son’s apparent power is effectively pure vulnerability, and it is his helplessness that moves her, despite the danger of Roman rage. In the end, the narratives of Jesus’s new faith are desacralized as the product of the domination model that has historically neutralized and downgraded care and partnership as feminine features. As an alternative, Mary claims for a return to the essentials, to premodern Goddess Artemis and the pagan undertones that connect her with nature. This is a rather transmodern trait that The Testament of Mary clearly upholds. Spirituality, rather than religion, is present throughout Mary’s account, and particularly when she is about to die and embraces “the dry earth,”472 and not her son’s new faith. Miryam’s account is also one of relationality and Otherness, where the ethics of care remains the redeeming feature in a context of hatred, violence, and dispossession. After presenting the dramatis personae of the 468

Ibid., 21. Tóibín, The Testament, 10. 470 Ibid., 55. 471 Ibid., 54. 472 Ibid., 103. 469

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coming performance and the gospels themselves start, the novel recalls the Roman siege and the last sacrifice in the High Temple of Jerusalem. Thus, all the stories (Miryam’s included) are framed within this political context, which means her ethics of relationality are conveyed through her spiritual growth, and especially through religious tradition as sacrifice. Despite her son’s egotistic attitude towards her and the family as a whole, Miryam remains faithful and forgiving. Like Israel, which, as Caiaphas’s narration recalls, has been breached and penetrated by Rome for nearly a century,473 she learns to radically encounter the Other. In fact, “in being dispossessed by her son’s vulnerability and loss (as far as he is eventually crucified), she shows a disposition to alterity that, drawing on Butler and Athanasiou, ‘is a necessary condition of … survival’ … and consubstantial to Jewish culture.”474 Sacrifice – making sacred rites for one’s sake through and to the Other – is a distinctive feature of Jewish tradition that Christ reformulates and Miryam and the Jewish people have practiced and suffered on equal terms. Thus, Mary’s intimate spirituality is in Miryam’s case entrenched in her Jewishness. When Gidon arrives in Natzaret he first sees her “giving food to one of the beggars who pass through.”475 When he recalls Christ’s teaching that “the poor will always be with us,”476 Miryam cannot help questioning him and appealing to Jewish customs and practice. As she points out, hospitality is a must for Jews who are compelled to help the Other when in need.477 This universal commandment transcends the mere obligation to help with the indispensable need to survive and implies a more radical surrender to the Other. That is, in a Levinasian fashion, Miryam recalls the Jewish ethical code whereby the spiritual prevails over and moulds the corporeal.478 It does not follow, though, that caring for the Other’s bodily needs is disregarded since the spiritual and actual wellbeing are intrinsically related to each other. From this practice of care ethics, Miryam cannot understand Christ’s withdrawal from her. She appeals to mothering as the ultimate event of othering; that is, mothering as surrendering to the Other for the sake of love. Thus, she cannot help recalling how she gave him comfort and care, though to no avail: Was all this nothing?”479 she complains. Drawing from Jewish teachings, she reinscribes the corporeality in the metaphysical 473

Alderman, The Liars’ Gospel, 230. Yebra, “Be(com)ing Dispossessed,” 5. 475 Alderman, The Liars’ Gospel, 19. 476 Ibid., 20. 477 Ibid. 478 Ibid. 479 Ibid., 45. 474

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discourse that Orthodox religion has imposed. It is the body that holds the soul, and it is nourishment and actual help that edify an ethics of care that upholds the commandment of mutual love. Hers is a Levinasian message of surrender to the Other, but in practical terms, where the Other turns into an actual other with whom to establish reciprocity. And although The Liars’ Gospel puts Christ’s figure to the test, his extension of the Jewish teaching “love your neighbour” to his Levinasian “love your enemy” finds in Miryam its first practitioner. The ethics of care transcends the here and now and gains cultural and historical significance when coupled with sacrifice. When still a youth, Miryam recalls, she was taken by her parents to Jerusalem to celebrate the Savout, which closed Passover.480 A pagan festival where harvest is celebrated and farmers offer sacrifices in thanks to God, it soon turns into a revolt against Roman occupation. The slaughter of the lamb turns into a slaughter of human beings between the forces of occupation and the rebels. Miryam and her family fall in the ambush, her father being seriously injured. In the middle of the violence her ethics of care is even more meaningful, connecting with a Jewish tradition that these episodes only erase. When her father was about to die, “she moistened his lips from her water skin.”481 As soon as she noticed her father’s reaction to her caring gesture, “she wet the sleeve of her dress in the water skin and dripped a few drops into his mouth.”482 As if she was a mother nurturing her child, Miryam nourishes her father, performing love and care. However, her sacrifice for her father is against the backdrop of a cultural sacrifice which resonates historically. When the High Temple is burnt, the echoes of other slaughters and sacrifices are unremitting, particularly of the Nazi Holocaust.483 She recalls the sacrifice of a lamb, the smell of wood on fire reaching her nostrils484 and the cries of the animal reaching her ears.485 In fact, “the cries were so loud that after a time she could not think of anything else,”486 as if she were foreseeing the screams and pain of Holocaust victims. As always happens in traumatic events, the narrative 480

Ibid., 53. Ibid., 57–8. 482 Ibid., 58. 483 Although this book does not deal with the Holocaust, Ruth Gilbert argues that, for Alderman and her generation, it “was still a pervasive presence throughout her childhood” (Writing Jewish, 38) – one that explains “the tension between remembering and a traumatic collective past” (Ibid., 39). 484 Ibid., 58. 485 Ibid., 59. 486 Ibid. 481

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is impossible in a direct and immediate fashion. Drawing on Freud’s Nachträglichkeit, or belatedness, which trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth, Anne Whitehead, and Dominick LaCapra recalled in the 1990s, only after a period of latency and vicariously can the victim bear witness to the event that escapes but haunts them. Sacrifice, as a Jewish cultural feature, and ethics of care are tropes that the novel and Miryam’s account use to address Jewishness and the sacred in post-secular terms.

Dissent, Treason, Otherness, and Shame Recast in Judas’s Name While Miryam’s gospel appeals to the truth of care and alterity, Judas’s gets deeper into Otherness and undecidability. As mentioned above, the translation of the gospel of Judas has put forward a much more positive reading of the historical figure that contrasts with that given by the canonical gospels. Alderman’s text is, as always, never black or white. However, this account grants Judas a humanity he has been deprived of by Christian tradition. To fully understand the character it is mandatory to explore how influence determines his discourse and performance. Indeed, it is the heavy burden of influence, especially Christ’s and afterwards Roman rationality, which makes life unbearable so that he eventually fakes his own death.487 Being influenced in Judas’s story implies devoiding oneself to accommodate the Other’s textual and visual imagery. The act of conversion is the ultimate act of influence, because one assumes the Other’s viewpoint and lives accordingly. Thus, when Judas meets Jesus for the first time, the latter teaches him his most revolutionary message, that which distances him from the tradition he recasts. He transcends the Torah, which compels its practitioner to love one’s neighbour. In line with Lévinas, Jesus’s radical alterity goes further because his followers are required to “love [their] enemy.”488 And, although Judas argues that everybody will take them as mad if they follow this premise,489 his conversion crystallizes. Indeed, it is when the previously impossible becomes possible, or so it seems, that the transformative influence succeeds. It is the very act of depersonalization, more so when Christ’s message is one of extreme alterity, that makes Judas feel a spark of the divine. Following the lead of the Gnostics, when Judas is touched by Christ, he feels this spark inside him in very graphic 487

Ibid., 70. Ibid., 85. 489 Ibid., 88. 488

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terms, a “burst of warmth … sunburst[ing] along his body.”490 When this influence has entered the newcomer there is no way he can throw it away. The opposite of influence, but equally a strong drive in Jesus’s teachings, is empathy. Whereas influence as experienced by Judas comes from outside and fills him up, he directs empathy towards others, especially the destitute crowd. When he comes across a crippled child, “he felt the sore places as if they were on his own leg, and the crooked bone as if it were his bone, and the stiff, aching, oozing joint as if it were his own body.”491 His over-empathic feelings can be labelled as sentimental. Moreover, there is the risk, drawing on Dominick LaCapra, of making the Other’s pain banal.492 In other words, if the Other’s pain is appropriated by the witness or narrator, the actual trauma vanishes and becomes a mere transferrable narrative. Despite his conversion, Judas soon realizes some malfunctioning in Christ’s performance. It is then that dissent, treason, Otherness, and shame turn up in a four-staged process. The aim of The Liars’ Gospel is not to desacralize the religious and the spiritual but Orthodoxy. As a matter of fact, the novel protects the aureatic undecidability of religion as that of literature itself. Against his own performance, Jesus appeals to this undecidability that convinces Judas and, allegedly, his other apostles. He wonders where the divine could be found, “except in the grappling voices of those who care about the Torah and seek out its never fully graspable truth?”493 In the transition from conversion to truth is where the two protagonists of Judas’s gospel break away. This is the cause of their discord; indeed, within Jesus’s closest disciples, Judas is the only dissenter.494 His dissent is rooted in his fidelity to truth, as he has been taught. Thus, when he learns that Jesus is called the Messiah, he wants to confirm it as mere gossip that his master rejects. Instead, he finds that Jesus is an egotist, the self-proclaimed son of God, who does not accept fickleness or dissent495 in his devotees. Far from the classic Christian iconography which always features a loving leader, an enraged Christ, “his eyes reflecting the dying fire,” recriminates Judas’s knowledge of God. Besides this image of the Christ-turning-Devil character, it is the teaching that Judas recalls having obtained from his master that dismantles Christian dogma. Thus, he remembers, Jesus not 490

Ibid. Ibid., 97–8. 492 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 493 Alderman, The Liars’ Gospel, 94. 494 Ibid., 95. 495 Ibid., 104. 491

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only taught him to use affects but especially Greek rationality in search of truth.496 This is quite a revolutionary message that Judas vindicates, and which surprisingly comes from Christ himself. It is consequently Jesus’s inconsistency with his own arguments that leads Judas to a crisis of faith, and next to a new conversion under the influence of the Greco-Roman Calidorus. Once convinced by Jesus that truth is to be searched for, when he learns that lying is the discourse of his master and his followers he feels lost and in need of a new influence to live by. In this way, he comes across Calidorus, “someone to whom he would not have to lie.”497 In other words, when he is othered by his alleged friends because he hesitates, he is ready for treachery. However, the treachery that The Liars’ Gospel features has nothing to do with that which the historical character has been attributed. Influence is a sort of violence in the novel which destabilizes Judas’s own sense of faith and self. In this sense, Calidorus wonders how many times a man can lose his faith until faith is no longer possible.498 Being ruptured first by Jesus and later by the Romans, Judas is betrayed rather than betrayer – or at least he is betrayed before he betrays. Thus, Alderman’s novel problematizes Judas’s story to explore the limits and reasons of betrayal as a religious and cultural issue. In his transition from Jewishness to Christianity and further into Greco-Roman rationality and imperialism, Judas shows betrayal as Otherness and Otherness as betrayal. Being spotted as the outcast Other, Calidorus gathers him for his cause. At a loss, disappointed, and experiencing a crisis of faith and truth, Judas returns as a convert. His conversion is not simply religious but essentially political. As a matter of fact, he no longer understands the antiRoman discourse of Jesus and his apostles in the same way. As a Jewish transitioned to Roman, he feels his former master to be a revolutionary against the Roman status quo.499 In consequence, his second transcultural transition comes to an end, especially when Judas directly challenges Christ’s egotism as contrary to his teachings and the Torah, to which he eventually returns. The Torah rejects false idols and instead compels a humbleness and care of the Other. Hence, a twice-transformed Judas vindicates God as the One to be directly worshipped without any vicarious Messiah. In this light, he recriminates Jesus: “We are not here to glorify YOU.”500 This is Judas’s surrender to the Other, his adscription to an ethics of care that is central to a Christianity that challenges Christ. His 496

Ibid., 96. Ibid., 101. 498 Ibid., 102. 499 Ibid., 103. 500 Ibid., 114. 497

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awakening results in disappointment, which turns into dissent, and subsequently into withdrawal and eventually loss of faith. In first-century Israel, where religion configures one’s identity as conqueror or conquered, native or oppressor, Judas’s crisis is as problematic as it is illuminating: “Losing one’s faith is so very like gaining it.”501 It brings about similar affects, but especially “the same annihilation of self in the ecstasy of understanding.”502 In other words, the one who hesitates and dissents is an outcast deprived of their self as long as one is confronted with the possibility of nothingness. This very Freudian conclusion is at the heart of Judas’s complex development in the novel. In betraying Jesus, Judas feels intimately ashamed rather than publicly exposed. Only a Mattisyahu recognizes him as the man “who brought the soldiers”503 who murdered Christ. Yet, since shame, as Tomkins has argued, is “face-consciousness,” Judas intends to erase his former face as soon as he is revealed as a traitor. To prevent the “loss of his face” he transitions from a Jewish to a Roman one. This process of transition and Otherness is performed almost literally. He buys a blade in the market to shave his face.504 That done, he misrecognizes his reflection. He is no longer Jewish or pious, a man without faith,505 one without a sense of belonging. Thus, he dissociates from his face as a symptom of shame and of his transition from his prior self to the new one. The loss of the face, according to Tomkins, is akin to the loss of life. That is why Judas continues revering the face as malleable, the sign of transition and influence, from Jewish to pious and backwards, follower of Jesus, of Calidorus, and of the Torah. In rubbing his face, he ef-faces his identity because, back to Lévinas and the treatment of the face as a metaphor in Disobedience, the face stands for one’s identity. Thus, once shaved, “he stared at himself again in the water and saw a different man.”506 Looking at his reflection he misrecognizes himself, at least his former self. But misrecognition eventually brings about recognition when he others his former identity as dead, and bears witness to a new one coming up instead.507 Once he has become a Jew in Roman disguise, has dissented, been an outcast, felt ashamed, and sacrificed himself, Judas can only leave and let people think he is dead to go on living. He is a trope of 501

Ibid. Ibid., 114–15. 503 Ibid., 120. 504 Ibid., 121. 505 Ibid., 122. 506 Ibid. 507 Ibid. 502

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transculturalism that has been misunderstood and criminalized historically, which The Liars’ Gospel transforms into a trope of (im)possible dialogue.

Violence: When Politics Meets Religion in the Name of Space If all four gospels overlap at certain moments, this is particularly the case of Caiaphas’ and Barabbas’. They deal with the problematic relations between politics and religion in Christ’s Israel, though from different angles. In both accounts, even more than in Miryam’s and Judas’s, the novel explores what Jewish culture was like in the first century CE. Caiaphas is the High Priest of the Temple whereas Barabbas is a rebel leader. Thus, they represent two ways of performing resistance against Rome, especially in their conception of sacrifice and transcendence. Their Otherness responds to different factors. Caiaphas has become the new high priest because he has married the daughter of the previous and powerful High Priest Annas. Moreover, his liminal position between different powers, namely that of Rome and that of Jewish tradition and religious hierarchy, makes his status both prestigious and frail. Barabbas’s Otherness is consubstantial to his origin and deeds. Being a poor Jewish youngster in occupied Israel, he can only accept his fate or fight against it. In consequence, he becomes a rebel first and an important leader afterwards. Yet, his position is still that of the Other who intends to knock out Roman rule. In the canonical gospels, they are secondary characters – the former because he is too much of a Jewish man. That is, he embodies a number of Jewish rites and traditions, and a textual and visual iconography that Christianity intended to recast. The latter is just a criminal preferred to Jesus by the Jewish crowd, again a symptom of the alleged Jewish internal phobia. In giving them prominence the novel is rescuing part of the untold story of the gospels, which suggests that much is still unknown about the beginning of Christianity and the demonization of Jewishness. However, The Liars’ Gospel is not a simplistic account. Nor is it a relativistic one either, of which postmodern literature has often been accused. It is a transmodern text that opens the scope and relies on the fluent transition from one cultural standpoint to another. The Western view, the rationality that Carilorus embodies and Judas welcomes, is just the culture of the Same with which transmodernism and The Liars’ Gospel confront the (spiritual) Other. With the description of Jewish rites, sites, and traditions, especially the sacrifices in the Holy of the Holies, Alderman complements the Westernized account of Christ’s last days and death in the canonical

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gospels. However, as a post-secular novel concerned with the return of the spiritual, The Liars’ Gospel does not simply amuse itself by recalling the visual beauty of religious ceremonies, but also questions the distance between the religious hierarchy and Jewish people – hence the success of Christ or Barabbas’s discourses as actual reactions to an emasculation coming from authorities at home and abroad. Caiaphas’s story is both a simultaneous desacralization and resacralization of religion as a human and divine event. Thus, no matter the political opportunism of arriviste Caiaphas, the religious substratum of Jewish culture transcends Roman occupation. There is an aureatic sacredness in Jewish religiosity that is far too abstract for Romans to comply with. When the latter intend to place a small statue of Augustus in the courtyard of the High Temple, it goes against the Jews’ conception of sacredness as undecidable because it is fathomless. Jewish law is very strict on that: “Not to make an image of their one God … No man … can become a god and that is an end of it.”508 The Liars’ Gospel addresses this cultural clash between Roman downto-earth religiosity, which divinizes the Emperor, and Jewish ineffableness. That is why it was natural for the Empire to edify Christianity as a personalistic political and religious reaction against Judea. A man becomes God against Jewish laws. Moreover, he happened to be a Jew despised by his compatriots. Against Roman pragmatism, the sacredness of Jewish religion is as categorical as it requires. With all this in mind, for the Roman dramatis personae of the novel it is surprising that Jews are ready to die for the sake of their religion. It is not only the metaphysicality of that religion they fight for or resist that astonishes down-to-earth Romans, but the very undecidability of the metaphysical and the divine.509 The transcendence of the rites that Jewish people and Caiaphas defend against the invader persists even when the high priest deals with mundane issues like adultery. As in Disobedience, Alderman’s third novel puts forward how unfairly Orthodoxy treats women. But the focus in this case is on the essence of sacredness as a transcultural phenomenon. The link between language and the sacred was addressed in the chapter on Disobedience, particularly how prayers display and encourage female discrimination. In Caiaphas’s gospel, language is a religious event in its very physicality. Even when, as mentioned above, the priest handwrites a curse against an adulteress, the narrator recalls each trace as God-driven. The lines he draws with reverential care to make up letters recall recognizable shapes – a tadpole, a house, and a shelter made up with ink evoke concepts on the vellum. When the writing is finished, the narrator 508 509

Ibid., 182. Ibid.

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points out, “there is the name of God”510 on it. Letters, as well as the parchment and the vellum, maintain a resemblance with the nature they come from and address. However, they also transcend their apparent immanence and reach a transcendence when they are granted a religious significance that makes the undecidable utterable. The physical event transcends itself. The ceremony revolves around the parchment that holds the name of God and thus outdoes time: “An impossible tense of the verb ‘to be,’ which suggests somehow at the same time something which is and was, something which has been and will be.”511 And although the narrator concedes the name is unbreakable, Caiaphas plunges it into the water until the letters dissolve. Going on with the rite, he adds dust from the sanctuary. To finish the rite, he “pours the holy water into the skin”512 so that God’s name, as conveyed in the ink and water, is summoned. The scene recalls the sophisticated rituals of Jewish culture and religion, the protagonist performing a transubstantiation before Christ. Through rites, especially through language, natural elements are granted a divine aura the Romans cannot comprehend and the Jews are not ready to abandon. Like parchments that palimpsestuously recall messages past and present in a horizontal fashion, the Holy of the Holies is the heart of Jewish spirituality. As such, it is arranged in layers or circles, a common metaphor of ancient cultures to represent the disposition of the cosmos and beyond it into the sacred. At the heart lies the chamber, the navel of the world, the Roman umbilicus mundi.513 Taking Israel and its religion as its parameters, this arrangement intends to understand the universe and humans’ role and position in it. Drawing on a funnel-like iconography, the replica of the universe goes from the least to the most divine. It starts in the world beyond Israel, “and within that the holy city of Jerusalem. And within that the temple. And within the temple the courtyard of the nonJews, and inside that the courtyard of the Jewish women … of the Jewish men, and … of the priests.”514 The hierarchy Caiaphas tries to protect discriminates the Other, i.e. non-Jewish, non-men, and non-Jewish woman in opposition to the sacred Sameness. Indeed, at the core of the circles stands the temple and its holy centre, “the place where God is.”515 This conception of the sacred space which, according to Seth Daniel Kunin, “can be understood only through the interaction of the ideal and 510

Ibid., 183. Ibid., 184. 512 Ibid. 513 Ibid., 133. 514 Ibid., 134. 515 Ibid. 511

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functional levels,”516 is in accordance with the politics of dispossession and violence in The Liars’ Gospel, and the role of Caiaphas in particular. That is, the Holy of the Holies represents the inner circle of an ideal sacred space that echoes functionally in all synagogues. The coupling of idealism and functionality acquires a political dimension in the novel. In fact, the raid of the Holy of the Holies during the siege of Jerusalem is the ultimate act of dispossession and violence, especially taking into account that the chamber can only be entered by the high priest.517 In any case, as a religious leader, Caiaphas is also a politician whose main purpose is to keep the peace in occupied Israel. Hence, he views Barabbas and Jesus as rebels to be controlled paradoxically for the sake of Rome. As happens with religion in the novel, politics constitutes a performance. However, in the former, the performer ventriloquizes God’s word and in the latter they perform themselves. In his role as politician, Caiaphas is literal and metaphoric at the same time. In other words, he looks for some rebellious voice or voices he can use as scapegoats to convince Rome of his compromise with social and political order. In punishing them in public, the priest is performing a symbolic metaphorical act addressing Pilate and the Emperor.518 Caiaphas’s gospel resacralizes human spirituality as the keeper of faith, rituals, and traditions, but also desacralizes Christianity as long as Christ’s detention and crucifixion are political moves to find peace and the connivance of Rome. Barabbas’s gospel counteracts that of Caiaphas’s. Whereas in the former politics is subservient to religion as a primal move, in Barabbas’s account politics and violence prevail and religion is ancillary, if it is important at all. Caiaphas closes by looking back at his ancestors, who were vouchsafed miracles because they surely merited them.519 He looks back so as to look at God face to face, and thus regain resurrection and forgiveness for the people of Israel.520 This (which necessarily recalls and resacralizes Christ’s resurrection) is a transcendental event that clashes with Barabbas’s immanence. The rebel does not care about the past. Instead, he focuses on the here and now since, for him, “everything is constant present. Like a fight, where each blow must be landed or dodged now, and now, and now.”521 516

Seth Daniel Kunin (ed.), Themes and Issues in Judaism (London; New York: Cassell, 2000), 23. 517 Ibid., 25. 518 Alderman, The Liars’ Gospel, 161. 519 Ibid., 194. 520 Ibid. 521 Ibid., 198.

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In exploring the fact of humans being together, Rancière distinguishes two forms of action: police and politics.522 He explains that, as a rule, “politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution.” He proposes “to give this system of distribution and legitimization another name. I propose to call it the police.”523 In a very Foucauldian sense, Rancière points out that, “the policeman is one element in a social mechanism linking medicine, welfare, and culture. The policeman is destined to play the role of consultant and organizer as much as agent of public law and order.”524 In other words, the police addresses the whole engineering of coercion that “stems as much from the assumed spontaneity of social relations as from the rigidity of state functions.”525 This is the role for which both Caiaphas and Barabbas fight. It is not so much the disciplining of bodies, as Foucault would argue, but “a rule governing their appearing, a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed.”526 The high priest and the rebel leader are not only performers. They intend to control spaces as the scenario of social performance, be it through peace or violence, respectively. The question remains for Rancière of how to define politics when the former politics become the police: “Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise.”527 According to this definition, Jesus (and his message), though not Caiaphas and Barabbas, is a political agent. Barabbas uses violence when he aims to break with the places and silence assigned to the Jews. However, his discourse is not one that converts noise into recognizable speech, but sheer violence. He is violent as a reaction against Roman rule, but he does not make much of a difference. Roman authorities deal with Jews as the Other, bare lives they can play with at will. Indeed, the narrator points out how Roman political and military leaders pretend to save a man’s life while he

522

Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement. Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis; London: Minnesota University Press, 1999), 28. 523 Ibid. 524 Ibid., 28–9. 525 Ibid., 29. 526 Ibid. 527 Ibid., 30.

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is being killed.528 That is the performance of power presented socially as a legitimate lie or make believe. Although Barabbas is bare life to the Prefect who is about to judge him, the rebel also regards the Other’s life as bare and disposable if it does not meet his political aims. Thus, the narrator recalls, when men like the Prefect and Barabbas meet, they recognize one another529 as multiple murderers for whom the life of the Other bears no value. With all this in mind, politics is more complex and all-embracing than the police, which, as Rancière argues, is part of the former. Politics implies searching for egalitarianism, “the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being and by the concern to test this equality.”530 This is barely the case of Barabbas and Caiaphas, who aim to expel the Romans and keep the Jewish religion safe. However, Jesus’s discourse does (not) comply with this principle of politics. The Other is given an equal status to the Same when Jesus argues in favour of loving not only the neighbour but, more specifically, the enemy.531 This politics of equality is based on a principle of reciprocity and love that Christ is alleged to represent against the Romans and Jewish religious authorities. That is why Barabbas, who opts for violence as politics, discards Jesus’s love as politically inefficient. From the former’s pragmatic viewpoint, love can never compel men to fight along with you. Love only brings care for the diseased and a burial for those who pass away.532 In other words, Christ’s message can be of no help for one whose aim is to recover territories and end up with the actual dispossession triggered by Roman imperialism. It is true that the Christ of The Liars’ Gospel is not that of the canonical gospels. As a matter of fact, although he preaches on reciprocal love, he is also a narcissist who appeals to a vengeful God and challenges Barabbas as a mere rebel. Jesus addresses the rebel in patronizing terms, boasting that he, as God’s son, can understand his Father’s design and will, of which Barabbas is just a mere pawn. When God’s fury bursts out, the narrator summons up Christ’s words – namely, that the rebel is “as much a tool of His will in this as any Roman soldier.”533 The novel proposes a teleological narrative whereby all characters in the play ventriloquize their parts according to a preestablished pattern. Judas and Barabbas prove to be necessary for Jesus to fulfil his performative mission. This is the ultimate desacralization of The 528

Alderman, The Liars’ Gospel, 197. Ibid. 530 Rancière, Dis-agreement, 30. 531 Alderman, The Liars’ Gospel, 85. 532 Ibid., 216. 533 Ibid., 220. 529

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Liars’ Gospel. It does not mean though that the novel undermines the message of Christianity and, more specifically, the textual traces of Christ. However, the novel proves that Christology needs revision from a transcultural viewpoint, and more so when this transness revisits Christ’s actual origin. His follower Gidon the Yaffo, the one Miryam cares about, speaks the message that has reached the present. When Isaac takes Gidon to Barabbas, their ways of understanding politics clash. Gidon does not recognize violence in fighting the Roman invader, appealing instead to God’s all-powerful return to “cleanse the earth.”534 However, as happens with down-to-earth Romans, Barabbas cannot understand the practicality of God’s metaphysical message, which, Isaac states, looms large in Roman and Jewish cultures. The transitional and transcultural effect of Christ’s words and their religious implication escape Barabbas’s understanding. But most important is how Christ’s transcultural message, ranging from Egypt to Syria, Israel,535 and Rome, breaks identity boundaries in an inclusive fashion: “Slaves and women like it, for they say that they encourage all to join in, with no exceptions.”536 Barabbas’s actual violence and terror are incidental politics, as he intends to fight colonial dispossession. However, they soon turn political because they are addressed against not only the Roman invaders but also dissenting Jews. Hence, Barabbas’s activity is immanent and unable to understand the metaphysical transcendence and social reciprocity and care Gidon recalls from Jesus’s discourse. Inclusivity of the Other, no matter if that other is a slave, woman, or any other, makes up a trans discourse that The Liars’ Gospel invokes beyond Christianity, but which explains the religion’s success transculturally and transhistorically. It may include and recall postmodern characteristics, but the novel is mostly a transmodern dialogue between cultures that rejects a single point of reference and claims for an ethical dialogue from a multinodal perspective. The four-voiced narration is not so much a symptom of fragmentation as a return of actual voices that bear witness to ethically and politically committed discourses. The novel revalues the post-secular return to spirituality, not as dogma, but as reconciliation and relationality, as novels by Pynchon, Morrison, DeLillo, Kushner, Ondaatje, Atwood, and others have also done.537 In the next chapter, all these issues are even more central to Alderman’s narrative discourse, appealing to feminism and the potentiality of political change. 534

Ibid., 241. Ibid. 536 Ibid. 537 McClure, “Post-secular Culture,” 341–2. 535

CHAPTER FOUR DEMOCRATIC TRANSHUMANISM IN A FEMINIST DYSTOPIA

The Power as Emasculated Dystopia The Power, Alderman’s fourth and most recent novel, is a novel within a novel, namely Neil Adam Armon’s historical novel of the same title as (and framed inside) the actual text authored by Alderman. In this sense, it shares a priori the playful and metafictional characteristics of postmodern literature. However, The Power goes further, through the process that was noticeable in The Liars’ Gospel. The former is a transmodern product, both in its scope and geographical and cultural dimensions, being worldwide and ethically connected with what it takes to be a human. The power – which is an electric shock that girls develop and emit to protect themselves from male abuse – expands worldwide in a rhizomatic fashion that breaks with the classic pair Western (male) centre and non-Western (female) margins. The novel recasts the postmodern deconstructive principle whereby the centre still holds but is questioned from the margins. Indeed, for this deconstructive rapport to go on it is mandatory that the centre remains at the centre. Transmodernism, especially as conceived by Dussel and Sardar, no longer relies on a centre but on a multiplicity of points or centres in a relational web. This is exactly what happens in The Power. Although the novel focuses on a limited number of protagonists, they come from contexts far apart, in an allegory of current transness. Hence, their experiences bear witness to events that transcend those experiences and relate them to other beings in other places. As Alderman does in the epilogue to The Liars’ Gospel, she states that The Power is a work of fiction just before the novel itself starts. They greatly differ from one another, though – while the former is a revision of the sacred Scriptures, the latter is a dystopia envisioning a post-apocalyptic scenario. However, both narratives share analogous ontological scenarios. Neil Adam Armon, like the four “evangelists” of The Liars’ Gospel, gives an account of a liminal world which has undergone a transcendental event,

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being the redeeming resurrection of a Messiah and a great cataclysm, respectively. The transition from a patriarchal dystopia to a matriarchal one follows the lead of other current dystopias and revises iconic examples of the genre like The Handmaid’s Tale. As a matter of fact, Alderman was mentored by Atwood as part of a program to promote promising new writers. Atwood’s novel portrays a post-apocalyptic America where society has lost all rights and women in particular have bare lives as long as they are able to bear children. In such a scenario, which recalls Orwell’s 1984, Foucault’s discipline and punishment have become the rule, and any trace of mutuality and relationality is neutralized for the sake of a dystopic establishment. The dystopia is reversed in The Power, where it is women who are in control. It is true, though, that whereas in The Handmaid’s Tale a classicly insidious patriarchy has simply given way to a state of patriarchal terror, the female-controlled dystopia of The Power results from prior male domination. As David Ketterer points out: “Atwood’s concern is not with the destruction of either sex; it is with their mutual survival.”538 There is thus a call for empathy which, drawing on Jeremy Rifkin, is the only redeeming feature against an otherwise inevitable entropy.539 This mutual understanding, rather than symbiosis, is what underlies Alderman’s dystopia. In her review of Atwood’s dystopia, she shrewdly argues the novel (and the television series) is dystopian “only if you’re a man.”540 In this way, Alderman is putting forward how necessary it is to claim a partnership model when neoliberalism and male chauvinism are currently on the rise. There are two aspects Alderman points to in this review that somehow relate to The Power. First, no matter how dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale may look, what makes it so terrifying is that “it’s all plausible. In fact, everything has happened somewhere before.”541 Besides, the current political panorama, Donald Trump being the leader of the allegedly free world, makes this type of fiction more than relevant once again. As a matter of fact, Alderman recalls, “on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, one popular placard read ‘Make Margaret Atwood Fiction

538

David Ketterer, “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: A Contextual Dystopia,” Science Fiction Studies 16, no. 2 (1989): 216. 539 Rifkin, Empathic Civilization, 2009. 540 Naomi Alderman, “Dystopian Dreams: How Feminist Science Fiction Predicted the Future,” The Guardian (March 25, 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/25/dystopian-dreams-how-feministscience-fiction-predicted-the-future. 541 Ibid.

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Again’.”542 The Power is related to its predecessor with which it shares the visual and textual imagery of female dystopias by authors such as Angela Carter, Jenny Holzer, Laurie Anderson, and Cindy Sherman.543 However, Alderman’s fourth novel adds some new issues responding to new realities, especially a transness and interconnectedness that is more possible and problematic than ever before. Unlike The Handmaid’s Tale, the female-controlled dystopia of The Power is unlikely to be plausible. In fact, the matrilineal partnership model that, according to Eisler, preceded the patriarchal domination model prevalent nowadays, and was by definition pacific and ethically committed to the Other, seems lost forever. That this return is not plausible does not mean The Power is not politically and ethically relevant. Indeed, it blurs ontological boundaries, recalling and updating the aesthetic of postmodern metafiction, in doing so exploring the poetics of alterity, and the speech and power of the Other in current transness. The Power is the account by fictional novelist Adam Armon of the Great Cataclysm, namely the climactic moment when women take control of a world dominated by male violence against them. In other words, the novel features a transition from dystopia to dystopia to vindicate an alternative utopia. In more pragmatic terms, it is a response to the presentday “current regression to the woman-hating dogmas of both Christian and Islamic fundamentalism.”544 The starting point of the multifocalized account of the novel is the beginning of the power, an electrostatic discharge that abused girls first and all women later develop to neutralize their (potential) abusers. Thus, a worldwide movement spreads that changes gender articulation and relations forever. Indeed, as a historiographer, Adam Armon recalls the pre-Cataclysm era as a fathomless moment in history leaving just minor traces. Most of the remains bear witness to postCataclysm times when males and masculinity are devoid of much cultural significance and political relevance. Drawing on religious symbology, which is crucial to Adam Armon’s work, these are gospels that bring good news, not about a New Jerusalem or a Messiah as in The Liars’ Gospels, but on an overall reversal of the status quo I will return to later. There are again four main accounts: Roxy, “the daughter of a British drug baron; Margot, mayor of an unnamed city in the United States; Allie, a brown girl in an abusive foster home in 542

Ibid. Rosi Braidotti, “Cyberfeminism with a Difference,” 1996, https://disabilitystudies.nl/sites/disabilitystudies.nl/files/beeld/onderwijs/cyberfemi nism_with_a_difference.pdf, 2. 544 Eisler, Chalice & Blade, 153. 543

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Alabama; and Tunde, a young Nigerian journalist.”545 All four accounts grant different perspectives on the Cataclysmic process and a postCataclysm world which overlap and complement each other. Tunde, the only prominent male of the novel, bears witness to what is happening in realistic terms. As the leader of a new religion and even a gospel that combats patriarchal apocrypha, Allie addresses the problematics of postsecular spirituality. Margot embodies the underside of political power and its connivance with radical neoliberalism. Roxy stands for the other side of Margot’s politics, namely the sociopolitical opportunities of criminals and social outcasts. Thus, media truth-telling, religious fanaticism, and the social and economic consequences of a rotten political system are all the de facto powers that make up actual power, which Alderman recasts as a biological weapon. As El-Mohtar points out: “All their perspectives converge on the newly declared nation of Bessapara, previously Moldova, where the former sex-trafficking capital of the world becomes a staging ground for the new world order.”546 All this being said, The Power opens more windows than it closes, especially on the problematic hybridity of metafiction to account for the tension of discourses of power, gender, violence, and biopolitics after humanism. El-Mohtar criticizes the book’s indeterminate position, particularly concerning gender double standards and their effect on the poetics of justice and Otherness. A world dominated by women does not bend towards justice. On the contrary, it looks exactly the same but reversed. The Power is problematic because the current times are problematic, and hence no simple answers could satisfactorily respond to them. In order to entirely flip the status quo upside down, Alderman and Adam Armon’s speculative dystopias place men in the women’s position and beyond: “They have to imagine what it’s like to sense the imminent danger in those [gender] interactions – to be weaker than their aggressor in every way, and to have that weakness woven into the fabric of society itself.”547 The blurring of boundaries in (meta)fiction thus has a direct effect on the discourse of Otherness and how it is constructed. The power is hinted at for the first time when Roxy bears witness to her mother being abused while she is hidden inside a kitchen cupboard.548 545

Amal El-Mohtar, “Mach’s Book Club Pick: The Power, by Naomi Alderman,” The New York Times (October 25, 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/books/review/naomi-alderman-power.html. 546 Ibid. 547 Sophie Gilbert, “What if Women Had the Power?” The Atlantic (October 22, 2017), https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/what-if-womenhad-the-power/543135. 548 Alderman, The Power, 14.

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However, it is when Enuma, Tunde’s friend, is abused by a man in Lagos, Nigeria, that the power is fully activated. After prior symptoms of Enuma’s mysterious strength, the girl discharges against her abuser, as Tunde’s camera records. Enuma smiles while she discharges the power from her hand to her attacker’s arm, an event the video recording can reproduce ad nauseam.549 Tunde observes the scene and soon notices that “there’s the trace of a Lichtenberg figure, swirling and branching like a river”550 on the “victim’s” skin. The iconography of the power is not casual. It draws on the “the trees of knowledge and of life, once associated with the worship of the Goddess.”551 The event is recalled and revisited by the camera’s eye, as the man falls and coughs red mucus and cries while people argue he has been poisoned by a witch. That is, the objectivity of the camera and social superstitions mix in a scene that draws on the metaphor of the Lichtenberg figure. As a preface to the story itself, Armon includes a reference to the Book of Eve, a sort of gospel of Allie (aka Mother Eve), where the figure is explained in mythic and scientific terms. Yet, the most important aspect of the excerpt is how, in recalling the shape of a tree, the Lichtenberg figure links the human body to the world in pagan terms, which connects with both the Goddess’s imagery in Eisler’s quote and the concentric layers or circles that bring to mind the Holy of the Holies in The Liars’ Gospel. For the narrator, the power is a transcultural phenomenon that traverses villages, towns, cities, and states.552 This transition from centre to the margins and back553 recalls Braidotti’s nomadic transitionality,554 and, in a wider sense, the relationality that transmodernity puts forward and Alderman’s fiction conveys: “The communication is constant. Oceans cannot survive without trickles, nor steadfast tree trunks without budlets, nor the enthroned brain without nerve endings.”555 The inner and the outer are thus inextricably connected.

549

Ibid., 17. Ibid. 551 Eisler, Chalice & Blade, 101. 552 Alderman, The Power, 3. 553 Ibid. 554 Braidotti’s Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, first published in 1994 and revised in 2011, defends that the self should not be read as unitary or static but as a multi-layered entity that is in a permanent state of mutability. 555 Alderman, The Power, 3. 550

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Transitionality and Relationality: Zoe and Bios The characteristic relationality and transness of transmodernity are thus central to The Power, the world being intricately joined together through meeting knots that defy the classic correlation between centre and margins. It is in this sense that the novel draws on the pair bios and zoe, especially as conceived by Rosie Braidotti. The transness that derives from Braidotti’s position stems from bioethics and has important political undertones I will explore in Alderman’s novel. Braidotti’s seminal The Posthuman556 draws on many other critics, especially Donna Haraway and Michel Foucault. Of the many ideas Braidotti makes reference to, I will address how she articulates the discourse of life beyond the self. She claims for the need to transcend the Western conception of the human and the self (hence humanism) and move towards an anti and later post-humanism that breaks with that previous conception. Despite the obvious risks of rejecting individualism per se (especially because liberation movements have been edified on identity formation and its political defence), she considers that moving forward is mandatory. To do this, she ascribes herself to critical posthumanism: My inspiration for taking the jump into critical posthumanism comes from my anti-humanist roots, of course. More specifically, the current of thought that has gone further in unfolding the productive potential of the posthuman predicament can be genealogically traced back to the poststructuralists, the anti-universalism of feminism and the anticolonial phenomenology of Frantz Fanon (1967) and of his teacher Aimé Césaire (1955). What they have in common is a sustained commitment to work out the implications of posthumanism for our shared understandings of the human subject and of humanity as a whole.557

This is Braidotti’s main point. Relationality and global ethics must replace Western humanism as the only (or at least prevailing) epistemological tool. Her posthumanist standpoint is thus rooted in postcolonial, cosmopolitan, and environmentalist positions; in other words, drawing on, among others, Edward Said, Braidotti questions not so much humanism as such, but how Western Enlightenment has selfappropriated its principles in the name of “democratic criticism and secularism.”558 Hence, and connecting with the introduction to this 556

Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). Ibid., 45–6. 558 Ibid., 46. 557

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volume, Braidotti recalls Said’s claim to fight for subaltern secular spaces.559 As mentioned above, cosmopolitanism (versus nationalism) and environmentalism help build new forms of relationality, “within an ecophilosophy of multiple belongings.”560 This subject is complex, as it breaks with anthropocentrism and opens onto a new, wide sense of Otherness which Braidotti recalls in “expanding the notion of Life towards the non-human or zoe.”561 The difference between bios and zoe has been a constant issue in Western culture. It was already a concern for Aristotle, and in the last decades has been revised by critics such as Foucault and Agambem. Yet, to analyse The Power, Braidotti’s model is the most suitable because it adapts bios/zoe to current posthumanism and technophilic societies. Indeed, the solution she proposes against neoliberal individualism consists of a neo-monism that embraces all matter from a post-anthropocentric viewpoint.562 To do so, Braidotti reworks zoe as the “dynamic, selforganizing structure of life itself”563 – one which transcends the limitations of bios and classic humanism. Thus, the ethical and religious turns mentioned in previous chapters are now completed with a turn to (in Braidotti’s terms) the posthuman and, I would say, the transhuman. I find Braidotti’s formulas to overcome classic anthropocentrism especially illuminating for understanding the implications of The Power. She labels them “Becoming animal,” “Becoming-earth,” and “Becoming-machine.” All three draw on a zoe-centred ethics that aims at preserving life beyond bios and bare life, though they do it from different perspectives. It is obvious, in the first case, that Braidotti questions the anthropocentric commodification of animals and the need to rearrange this ethical unbalance and preserve an all-encompassing zoe or generic life. With “Becoming-earth,” the critic updates James Lovelock’s Gaia based on “a return to holism and to the notion of the whole earth as a single, sacred organism.”564 In fact, although Lovelock’s view is appealing, Braidotti finds it too anthropomorphic. The fact that the earth is perceived as sacred is akin to assuming that nature is reified as long as it is granted a cultural status. This is in accordance with Spinoza’s own theological monism which, for Braidotti, is more in line with generic relationality than with worshipping Gaia as Mother Earth. The third solution against radical 559

Ibid., 47. Ibid., 49. 561 Ibid., 50. 562 Ibid., 57. 563 Ibid., 60. 564 Ibid., 84. 560

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anthropocentrism, “Becoming-machine,” is also zoe-centred and empathetic. The critic is obviously attentive and concerned with technology in new insightful ways when it is exclusively understood as a commodity in neoliberal societies. She claims for a revision of the relation with machines from a playful and mutually enriching standpoint. This is what Braidotti inscribes in a new ethical paradigm whereof “the posthuman predicament is to rethink evolution in a non-deterministic but also post-anthropocentric manner.”565 Braidotti focuses on the post-ness of anthropocentrism to counter determinism. However, in line with the introduction and the chapters before, I still consider transness, whether in transculturalism and transmodernism, especially apt for addressing the change of paradigm that Alderman’s The Power both confirms and contests. Of the three formulae against anthropocentrism mentioned above, The Power is informed by “Becoming-earth” and, particularly, “Becoming-machine.” There are numerous texts addressing generic life on the Earth that could thus be inscribed in this “Becoming-earth” move. World cinema and literature prove it. Films like Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life566 and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel,567 and novels like Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room568 and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas,569 bear witness to a transcultural genre increasingly concerned with the world as a generic and relational experience. Although in most cases there remains an anthropocentric perspective that limits the possibilities of Braidotti’s zoe, the transness of these texts relies on a return to the premodern (as a stage before the Enlightenment) and zoe-centred metaphors. Thus, as I have argued elsewhere, Dussel’s metaphor of the “jungle” draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome” to meet Rifkin’s translation from egology to ecology in texts and films like those above, and many others.570 In fact, much in line with Braidotti, Dussel’s metaphor of the “jungle” fosters creativity, which “will also be needed if humanity is to redefine its relationship with nature based on ecology and interhuman solidarity, instead of reductively defining it on the solipsistic and schizoid criterion of increasing rates of

565

Ibid., 94. Terrence Malick (dir.), The Tree of Life (River Road Entertainment, Plan B Entertainment, 2011). 567 Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu (dir.), Babel (Paramount Pictures, 2006). 568 Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room (New York: Europa Editions, 2011). 569 David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (London: Spectre, 2004). 570 José M. Yebra, “Transmodern Motion or the Rhizomatic Updated in In a Strange Room, ‘Take Me to Church’ and Babel,” Anglia 136, no. 3 (2018): 511. 566

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profit.”571 Becoming-earth can also be related to the rhizome. I say this because, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, it relies on the complexity of nature, and more concretely on a number of principles – namely of connection and heterogeneity.572 There is an underlying relationality and holism in all these concepts and metaphors that make Becoming-earth feasible. Indeed, as Yebra points out, “the biosphere in the jungle supplies life and the rhizome a model for transmodern interconnectedness.”573 All this being said, I contend that The Power responds to Braidotti’s “Becoming-machine” rather than to the other two models or formulae to achieve zoe-centredness; or, to be more accurate, the novel recasts Braidotti’s optimism and opts instead for a dystopian fusion between human and technology. This transness, which the characters of The Power flaunt, does not result in generic conviviality. On the contrary, the biologically-induced cyborgness of women only reproduces the worst part of not only anthropocentrism but also violence and domination. Thus, in questioning Braidotti’s “Becoming-machine” and Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory, Alderman’s novel is paradoxically vindicating them. When the cyborg-like power in the novel escapes its original purpose, no longer protecting women from males’ abuse but taking revenge against males at large, it is not that becoming a cyborg is essentially bad. The problem results from a wrong interpretation of bioenhanced force. The rage that is first morally justifiable – the first girls with the power being victims of sexual abuse – becomes mere justice, reactive lex talionis, in the end. Haraway describes the cyborg as “a creature in a postgender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, preoedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.”574 That is, the cyborg breaks with the Western division of nature and culture, rejecting the delusive separation from the original mother as the drive that submits nature to culture. Hence, advancing Braidotti’s posthumanist manifesto, Haraway finds in the cyborg a potent redeeming feature that de-essentializes life, not as a commodity, but as 571

Enrique Dussel, “World-System and ‘Trans’-Modernity,” Nepantla: Views from the South 3, no. 2 (2002): 235. 572 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 7. 573 Yebra, “Transmodern Motion,” 512. 574 Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, Science, Technology and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century (University of Minnesota Press, ProQuest Ebook Central, 2016), 8, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=4392065.

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organic relationality. That is why she is optimistic in considering that cyborgs “can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy.”575 The Power is the story of a missed opportunity of transness against the apocalypse, especially when Mother Eve imposes her dystopian queendom worldwide.

Violence in Religion and (Bio)Politics It is my contention that The Power revises Haraway’s cyborg theory and Braidotti’s posthuman to address the dangers of biopolitics in a transmodern context. As mentioned above, Alderman’s novel portrays a scenario that has warped both critics’ utopianism into a dystopian biopower. The dislocation between this dystopia and the feminist utopia (that could be or have been) fits in the story-within-a-story structure of the novel. The incipient birth of the power that Armon describes at the beginning of his historical novel contrasts with the dystopia where women have adopted the domination model to their advantage. Be that as it may, biopolitics seems to be a continuum in human relations both before and after the power. Although much has been said and there are many different branches within the umbrella term biopolitics, it fundamentally makes reference to the political management of life. Drawing on Foucault, there is a wide and well-structured assemblage of techniques and technologies making up the governmentality through which power controls life.576 In this sense, biology is another discourse that power engineers to discipline and normalize bodies and behaviours. In his seminal History of Sexuality, Foucault addresses how power regulates life: This power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations – the disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed.577

575

Ibid., 9. Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984. Volume One, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1997). 577 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: an Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 139. 576

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When the power breaks out in Alderman’s novel, it is represented in objective documentary and biological terms. Tunde’s journalistic account is coupled with scientific explanations. This is, for instance, the case of an anthropologist who considers that the Darwinian development of the skein in those holding the power proves his theory that the origin of the hominids is in the water.578 Likewise, the novel recalls other studies arguing that the effects of the power are well identified and affect especially “the pain centres of the human brain.”579 The phenomenon spreads worldwide, and biopolitics only tries to understand it and control its expansion. The mass media also pays attention to the phenomenon in sensationalist and pseudoscientific terms. Thus, TV shows feature specialists on biology and historiography580 to convey an explanation of it all to a threatened population. After the alarm, biopolitics (or, drawing on Rancière, biopolice) begins with the discipline and surveillance of female bodies that have become machines. They are enclosed to be examined with maximum security.581 As babies, they trigger their “automatic nervous function with a series of low-electrical impulses,”582 which brings to mind the use of electric discharges to “correct” gays’ non-normative desire. In other words, when women, sexual dissidents, or non-whites are not under control, they are perceived as threatening and consequently must be threatened or rendered as threatening and disciplined, or simply invisibilized and neutralized. Authorities put in force programmes to produce machines to detect and monitor electric shocks, arguing that these procedures and instruments guarantee youths’ safety.583 Armon’s novel is historical and, as such, bears witness to and gives evidence of the emergence of the power, not only in textual form but also including visual imagery. On page seventy-two there is a drawing of a rudimentary machine that proves how these girls’ bodies are disciplined by biopolitics, though to no avail. The caption next to the picture reads that the machine is approximately one thousand years old, and gives technical explanations of how it was supposed to work and what its use could have been, as well as the archaeological site where it was found.584 Likewise, the novel features a drawing of a sort of torture machine for female

578

Alderman, The Power, 20. Ibid., 24. 580 Ibid., 63. 581 Ibid., 65–6. 582 Ibid., 67. 583 Ibid., 69. 584 Ibid., 121. 579

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adolescents585 found in Thailand. The textual evidence of how girls’ power was originally treated in scientific and technological (i.e. rational) terms continues when Armon includes a number of documents belonging to a secret archive explaining the origins of the power and how it spread and was dealt with by governments and agencies, though again to no avail.586 They comprise Second World War documents on protection against gas and a BBC programme on this episode, as well as classified conversations and documents exchanged by international authorities to confirm the spread of the power and later defend the population at large from it.587 Thomas Lemke argues that biopolitics has evolved in different long waves, the first one588 closely related to Darwinism and distorted in the Nazis’ eugenics. This worst face of biopolitics also reaches Armon’s dystopia, especially when women controlling the power intend to exterminate the least genetically healthy men589 and eventually carry out a male genocide.590 If, drawing on Eisler, women and matriarchal cultures have embraced partnership models which have resulted in the feminist ethics of care,591 The Power represents just the opposite – namely, how power transforms their alleged empathy into domination and disrespect for the Other. Indeed, although at first girls with the power are rendered the outcast Other, they are normalized as they gain supremacy.592 Biopolitics soon assumes different faces in The Power, namely religious, political, and social. And although the process is increasingly personalized in Mother Eve, it has a transcultural impact that, far from undertaking the principles of transmodernism, rebuffs them. The zoecentred generic life that Braidotti vindicates and the relationality and transness that breaks with Western domination and anthropocentrism in the transmodern paradigm do not flourish. Instead a state of terror, the worst face of biopolitics distorted into a female-dominated one, emerges. In the end, it is not girls’ bodies that are regulated and disciplined, but the boys’. When an abnormality occurs, namely that boys grow a skein, people do experiments on them to find out the reasons for their

585

Ibid. Ibid., 122. 587 Ibid., 122–7. 588 Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics: an Advanced Introduction, trans. Erik Frederick Trump (New York University Press, 2011), 15. 589 Alderman, The Power, 180. 590 Ibid., 278. 591 Ibid., 76. 592 Ibid., 208. 586

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malformation and possible solutions to it.593 Rather than an ethics of care and a Levinasian ethics of alterity, the new regime commodifies Otherness to carry on establishing new forms of normalcy. The religious, political, and social merge in the paradigm shift that Armon recalls after the Big Change or the Cataclysm.594 At first, though, the paradigm shift is legitimate and transversal, worldwide and just. It is Tunde who bears witness to the power revolution as a local phenomenon turning into a global one. As mentioned above, he is the first to see how the power emanates from his friend Enuma, and also the first to capture how this event grows with his camera. What starts as a malfunction in a few young girls soon becomes a wished-for good for women as a whole. Thus, as the narrator points out and Tunde focalizes, the sound of enraged women traverses streets, cities, and the country – not as something negative, but as a reason for joy.595 The journalist is the eye of the outburst that is soon a transmodern phenomenon, crossing territories and cultures. This revolution is extraordinary, and intended to overturn the status quo.596 The event soon becomes global, televisions from different countries showing “riots in faraway and unstable parts of the world, of women taking whole cities.”597 These episodes necessarily echo worldwide feminist movements today, from the Me Too and Femen movements, to feminist strikes and the Arab Spring revolts in Arabic countries. Tunde even records how, in Riyadh, “a handful of girls are beaten to death by their uncles for practicing the power.”598 This is apparently similar to what is happening in many countries, from the Middle East, India, and Asia599 to Moldova,600 Delhi,601 Bolivia, and Saudi Arabia.602 However, the revolution depicted in Alderman’s novel soon leaves behind the original feminist manifesto and turns into a terrorist regime which, as pointed out above, is articulated from religious, social, and political standpoints. Like The Liars’ Gospel, The Power draws on a post-secular drive of spirituality. However, whereas in the former, especially in Miryam’s and Judas’s accounts, there is a return to spirituality, the latter model, like 593

Ibid., 258. Ibid., 165. 595 Ibid., 59. 596 Ibid., 59–60. 597 Ibid., 63. 598 Gilbert, “What if Women.” 599 Alderman, The Power, 90. 600 Ibid., 92. 601 Ibid., 132. 602 Ibid., 170. 594

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Caiaphas’s and Barabbas’s accounts, returns to religion as dogma and exclusion of the Other. The Apocrypha excluded from the Book of Eve which are discovered in a cave in Cappadocia – a clear reference to the Dead Sea Scrolls – point to the pagan corporeal origin of Eve’s spirituality before it becomes an articulate religion. Her original message addresses the tree as a symbol of life and power that is related, as mentioned above, with “the worship of the Goddess.”603 However, in Eve’s discourse, “the shape of power is always the same: it is infinite … forever branching … like a tree.”604 Besides the tree, she appeals to the human being in biological and supernatural terms. It follows “the same organic, inconceivable, unpredictable, uncontrollable process”605 that makes trees and plants grow. Thus, the genderless human being is originally granted a corporeality that is metaphorical of a spiritual transcendence. This is close to Braidotti’s zoe-centred organic life. However, Mother Eve’s apocryphal message soon gives way to a theocracy. Allie, an orphaned sixteen-yearold mixed-race girl, is, like Ronit in Disobedience and Jeanette in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a lesbian who happens to be abused. In Allie’s case, the abuse is sexual, being repeatedly raped by her adoptive father, the ultra-religious (again a cliché) Mr Montgomery-Taylor. In murdering her rapist, Allie’s transformation into Mother Eve is just a question of time. Drawing on the emergence of the power and an invisibilized tradition of strong women, Eve finds inspiration in premodern Scriptures: “the God of the Israelites had a sister, Anath … a warrior … She killed her own father and took his place.”606 The Oedipal conflict is thus reversed, and Eve breaks with the anxiety of influence that males are alleged to suffer to overcome their fathers. As happens in The Liars’ Gospel with Christ, Eve’s original message is relational and inclusive. She is alleged to “have the power to heal,”607 as the Apocrypha recall. She baptizes those who believe in her, most of whom are young girls who are the victims of abuse and violence.608 Her ethics of care of the most vulnerable is hopeful in a scenario where preachers announce the apocalypse. But, the narrator says, the true religion is not about violence, “the true religion is love.”609 Surrounded by the

603

Eisler, Chalice & Blade, 101. Alderman, The Power, 330. 605 Ibid. 606 Ibid., 63. 607 Ibid., 78 608 Ibid., 79. 609 Ibid., 81. 604

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destitute crowd, Eve calls for a new beginning610 in Messianic terms, arguing that God is genderless, a mixture of masculine and feminine features.611 However, her discourse of transness, love, and inclusion is soon overpowered by a self-centred “rational” (in the sense of utilitarian) narrative. Like the Christ of The Liars’ Gospel, Mother Eve proves to be ambiguous, appealing simultaneously to a loving and vengeful God that may preach empathy and hope for the loved ones, and “vengeance against those who have wronged us.”612 Hence, after showing mercy for the most vulnerable girls, she announces that a soldier will eventually come and will condemn those in doubt. She argues that God remembers those next to Her (in the feminine) when her rule prevails.613 Religion, rather than spirituality, is thus automatically a warfare issue. Drawing on radical religious leaders, Eve makes up a discourse of hatred and domination against the Other. In this way, she forecasts a war between light and dark where, in her view, she and her cause stand for light.614 To justify her holy war she vindicates a long transcultural and historical tradition of female spiritual leaders who have been unfairly invisibilized, including Miryam, Fatimah, Tara, and Mary.615 This genealogy of female goddesses that the patriarchy has confined to silence was originally culturally dominant, not only in Alderman’s dystopia but also, in Eisler’s view, in prehistoric and premodern civilizations in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.616 However, the resurfacing of these women goddesses is more a political move than a religious one. Moreover, Eve disregards their ethics of love and empathy, desacralizing them to meet her political aims. As the novel advances, Eve’s project proves to be particularly radicalized. Echoing examples like the Christian crusades and Islamist jihad, she starts a war between genders that “has been a major unseen force shaping Western history,”617 and that she calls a sacred mission.618 Indeed, also echoing current terrorist training camps, her followers are organized in North Star day camps619 to combat in a war in God’s name where “everything will be overturned.”620 610

Ibid., 79. Ibid., 80. 612 Ibid., 187. 613 Ibid., 84. 614 Ibid., 103. 615 Ibid., 115. 616 Eisler, Chalice & Blade, 21. 617 Ibid., 134. 618 Alderman, The Power, 153. 619 Ibid., 153, 167, 212, 251. 620 Ibid., 190. 611

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The problem with Mother Eve’s religion is both its origin and teleology – it results from injustice, which it intends to neutralize, and aims to impose love as long as one accepts the sect’s strict rules. Unlike the radical love and Otherness that an ethics of care and Levinisian ethics vindicate, respectively, Eve’s faith is conditioned, like religious (ultra-)Orthodoxy often is. When exclusionist justice prevails over encountering the Other, ethics comes second. This is what happens in The Power and what the novel denounces. The limit between religion and politics is really thin in Alderman’s novel. When old churches are burnt or destroyed to build new ones or new rites are performed, it is a religious and political event of substitution. It is setting a new scenario to perform the police rather than politics, in Rancière’s terminology. The echoes of current cases of burning and destroying temples, idols, and other religious symbols and sites worldwide are thus echoed and denounced in Eve’s intervention. However, her appropriation of God’s all-seeing eye is fundamentally political, a revision of Foucault’s panopticon, wherefrom the one in power can see from all angles, and the watched one is under surveillance and their body disciplined. The iconography Mother Eve displays is meaningful and graphic, backed by the sacred tree and her pretension to be a Goddess anointed. She extends “her hand with the all-seeing eye at its heart,” which is not only the symbol of divinity but one that “watches over each of us.”621 In this dystopian 1984-like scenario, Tunde recalls that freedom is the main aspiration of the population. Being under control, for God’s or for power’s sake (if any difference still holds in The Power), is the exact opposite of the zoe-centred scenario mentioned above. Lives are bare lives exposed and watched by biopower governmentality. Eve’s religious radicalism finds its political nemesis in Tatiana Moskalev’s regime in Moldova. The Eastern European country is the “capital of human sextrafficking,”622 and therefore the breeding ground for the power-induced female revolution to succeed. The origin of the revolution is ethically and politically justifiable, gangs of women freeing themselves from sexual slavery.623 However, what starts from justifiable positions soon turns into police rather than politics, surveillance rather than liberating action. Drawing on Rancière, the “procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this

621

Ibid., 225. Ibid., 93. 623 Ibid., 95. 622

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distribution”624 are eventually controlled by Tatiana’s biopolice regime. When her husband and the president of Moldova, Victor Moskalev, dies unexpectedly, probably murdered by Tatiana herself,625 she becomes the new leader. In wearing a small brooch in the shape of an eye, she is appealing to the all-seeing eye and the panopticon, symbols of Mother Eve’s religion and biopolitics. In what remains, I will explore the politics of terror as evinced by these religious and political regimes which bring about a dystopia, replacing a prior one as if humans could only perform dystopian scenarios, one within another in concentric circles. Threatened by male leaders afraid of the expansion of a female biopolitics which menaces patriarchal institutions and male bodies, Tatiana puts in force a police that organizes power, distributes places and roles, and justifies this distribution through terror. Drawing on the iconography of feminist cyberfeminism626 and recent pop-culture icons like Game of Thrones (2011–19), Tatiana proves to be a tough leader. In her case, she builds up a female kingdom. Like the men she wants to replace in power, she does it in violent terms, fighting against neighbouring kingdoms. She chooses the name Bessapara for her new kingdom after the name of the priestess in the area.627 Like everything else in The Power, reappropriating the premodern to revise the present is not positive, as transmodernism defends. The past, particularly its sacred traces, comes back to justify the atrocities of Eve and Tatiana’s revolutions. In the name of religion and the sacred, male bodies are emasculated, like female ones were before the new regime.628 This is how The Power reaches its effectiveness. Men protesting against discrimination holding banners which read “justice for men”629 and performing terrorist attacks to claim for their rights make up the funny side of a dystopia that features the dangers of the police and biopolitics. The novel reverses the possibilities of post-secularism and post-politics, not only to question the patriarchy by holding a mirror up to it, but especially to point to the problematics of power as an inaugural concept of Western culture. In questioning the very roots of culture, Alderman is implicitly appealing for a paradigm shift which could coincide with transmodernism as articulated by Sardar, 624

Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 28. 625 Ibid., 98. 626 José M. Yebra, “‘Acheronta Movebo’: Violence and Dystopia in Naomi Alderman’s The Power,” Orbis Litterarum 74 (2019): 72–5. 627 Alderman, The Power, 98. 628 Ibid., 170. 629 Ibid.

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Dussel, and Rifkin. In other words, the dystopia underwrites a utopia-tobe. The state of terror and the acts of violence upholding it are the effect of the crisis of relationality and impotent power. The Power features a dystopian world where the life of the Other does not matter. In reproducing the male domination model, Mother Eve and Tatiana only foster hatred and violence, and the war between genders mentioned above.630 They intend to reverse gender roles, and this is the problem. The paradigm remains – it is only that the agents swap roles. Justice remains a reparatory technique to guarantee governmentality and the police that prevail over (Rancière’s conception of) politics and the ethics of the Other. In this sense, Eve does not hesitate. In her view, justice is on her side when they combat the patriarchy, especially when it comes to women who have been commodified and abused. This is what, she thinks, justifies and legitimizes female violence as a God-sent prerogative.631 Drawing on current religious radicalisms, Mother Eve argues that Bessapara is “God’s country, and this war is God’s war,”632 and, with this in mind, their triumph is as incontestable as it is ethically grounded.633 Although there is ethical legitimacy to set up Bessapara against female abuse, the fact of re-appropriating justice as a univocal discourse that precedes the relationality and empathy with the Other explains the outcome of Eve and Tatiana’s state of violence. With terrorist groups for male liberation and newly-formed matriarchal states claiming for justice alike, violence and revolution become common currency. In this dystopia of all against all, for the first time women gain supremacy through what Walter Benjamin calls “mythic violence.” As opposed to “divine violence,” which is far from “the terrorist violence executed by today’s religious fundamentalists who pretend they are acting on behalf of God and as instruments of the Divine Will,”634 mythic violence – or “the violence ruled by law”635 – is enforced by Eve and Tatiana. According to Walter Benjamin, “mythic violence is lawmaking … [it] sets boundaries … brings at once guilt and retribution … threatens … [and] is bloody.”636 And this is what, in my view, Eve and Tatiana do. They “make laws, set boundaries, bring guilt and retribution on their 630

Ibid., 178. Ibid., 190. 632 Ibid. 633 Ibid. 634 Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2009), 157. 635 Yebra, “Acheronta Movebo,” 78. 636 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 249–50. 631

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enemies and are bloodthirsty after mythic violence. They are moved by hatred and revenge – thus starting what Arendt calls a regime of terror637 – rather than by authentic resentment that leads to a legitimate revolution.”638 However, going a little further in the analysis of mythic violence in the novel, it can be related to Rancière’s police. If the police, the critic points out, consists in the control of collectivities, powers, places and roles (see quote pp. 128–29), this is the akin to the mythic violence Eve and Tatiana impose. In other words, their police, rather than politics, is violence and a lack of power. Indeed, drawing on Arendt, only when power falters is violence mandatory.

Life Still Matters, For Art’s Sake The Power’s dystopia aims to be a catalyser of change, the nemesis of the paradigm shift transmodern and trancultural theorists address. Hence, Butler’s liveability and grievability are relevant concepts for this novel which intends to move the reader physically and, especially, emotionally. When violence spreads at a global scale, Butler wonders: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?”639 When women with the skein become mere robotic agents640 targeted at men, the latter’s lives are an exchange value between female leaders and warriors. Paradoxically, men’s value in The Power is not intrinsic to themselves, or even relational. It depends on their ungrievable effacement. Rumour has it, especially on websites against males’ discrimination, that unbelievable things are happening in Bessapara. If, at the beginning of the novel, it is women who are tortured and experimented with, after Mother Eve’s regime succeeds it is men who are murdered and raped,641 their bodies dissected for fun or experimentation. This is, according to Eisler, the essence of the “dominator morality,” which explains how this model has portrayed and connived with sexual violence, rape, and sacrifice.642 Men do not count as humans and their lives do not count as lives because they cannot be grieved. Only Tunde remains a witness to male loss and vulnerability. Thus, when he records a Christ-like man being crucified, he can only apprehend his suffering rather 637

Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, 1970), 55. Yebra, “Acheronta Movebo,” 78. 639 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence (London; New York: Verso, 2004), 20. 640 Alderman, The Power, 255. 641 Ibid., 258. 642 Eisler, Chalice & Blade, 98–100. 638

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than recognizing himself because, in a state of terror, Butler’s frames of recognition falter:643 “It was a man with long, dark hair … He had been tied to the post … at his wrists and ankles … Around his neck was a sign with a single word in Russian: slut. He had been dead for two or three days.”644 The scene recalls Christ’s crucifixion which, as Eisler points out, is “the central mythical image of … male dominant religion [instead of] the birth of the young god.”645 The victim is hanged and signed with four letters, “slut” instead of “INRI,” recasting in this way the sacredness of the original iconography in the gospels. Resonances of homophobic attacks in Russia are also recalled, the sign calling him a slut being in Russian. However, the loss of this man’s life is not accountable and grievable because “something exceeds the frame that troubles our sense of reality; in other words, something occurs that does not conform to our established understanding of things.”646 There is only an artistic frame able to reconfigure the recognition of life as liveable and, in this case, grievable. When Tunde takes a photograph of the dead body, this re-presentation has an influence on our response to suffering. The photographer treats the body respectfully as he attempts to convey in the picture the beauty “in cruelty” and the hatefulness “in artful composition.”647 It is obvious that this picture does not have the feeling of reality of the photographs of torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.648 Drawing on the post-secular return to spirituality, Tunde aims to recall the liminality of cruelty and suffering as foundational and abject in Christianity. However, his photograph is much more than meets the eye. For Susan Sontag, paintings and prose exceed the power of photography. The latter can only affect the viewer, whereas the former artistic media convey representability.649 That is, they can potentially bear witness to life’s loss and grievability. In Tunde’s case, both prose and photograph are coupled, and hence his testimony is alleged to be both representational and responsive. Yet, his visual discourse, which can foster empathy in dystopian times and scenarios, proves to be insufficient when he learns his own life is threatened.650 643 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2006), 5–12. 644 Alderman, The Power, 264. 645 Eisler, Chalice & Blade, 103. 646 Butler, Frames of War, 9. 647 Alderman, The Power, 264. 648 Butler, Frames of War, 64. 649 In Butler, Frames of War, 66. 650 Alderman, The Power, 264.

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The question all the above leads us to is whether art can move its beholder to react. As Butler recalls, Susan Sontag referred to this issue in both On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others, namely if “photographs still had the power – or ever did have the power – to communicate the suffering of others in such a way that viewers might be prompted to alter their political assessment of war.”651 It is my contention that this is the case in The Power. The dystopian imagery conveyed by the different prose accounts and narratological levels, as well as the focalization of Tunde’s camera and photographs, is intended to move readers and alter their assessment of politics and ethics. Transmodernism has evolved from the poetics of celebration of the late 1980s, where Rodríguez-Magda places its beginning, to a more nuanced and pessimistic paradigm at the turn of the millennium.652 In this context of crisis of relationality and politics, when democracy itself is under serious threat, texts like The Power stir consciences. When Western people, who are usually recognized and, as such, in charge of setting up the frames for Others’ (mis)recognition, do not deserve grief, the dystopian change of paradigm forces a revision of these frames and the framing itself. Who decides whose lives are worth fighting for institutionally, whose loss is grievable and, especially, why there should be a frame to decide on this are questions to be answered. When the customary (Western male) dehumanizer is dehumanized, dehumanization as a valid frame is bared. Under Eve and Tatiana’s terror regimes, institutional violence against men is ritualized, as is often actually the case against women worldwide. Ablations, rapes, and other abuses against boys are ritualized as if they were unreal, i.e. negated lives: If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always … in this state of deadness … This derealisation of the “Other” means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral.653

One of the many rituals Tunde records recalls how men live in a state of deadness and misrecognition that results in spectrality. In one of them, which again desacralizes Christ’s crucifixion, a high priestess enslaves a young man surrounded by furious women. The victim admits violence as a 651

Butler, Frames of War, 68. Rodríguez Magda, “Transmodernidad,” 2011. 653 Butler, Precarious Life, 33–4. 652

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token of their power and his self-negation: “He wore a crown of branches in his hair … He was the willing sacrifice that would atone for all the others.”654 There is atonement rather than redemption in his willing withdrawal. Indeed, he is negated again and again by the priestess and her followers, those women who at the beginning of the novel are victims of male abuse. In other words, he is metaphorically making amends for the wrongs done to these and other women. Yet, his action does not bring redemption as Christ’s allegedly does. He is repeatedly negated as he is reminded of their superiority, and hence his derealization as the spectral “Other.” In binaries, which draw on those where the patriarchy has set up its privileges and the domination model, the priestess reminds the abused man of female supremacy and male inferiority and powerlessness.655 From this standpoint, where women are favoured with motherhood, the man deserves the sacrifice he is submitted to.656 In Christ’s martyrdom there is redemption, grievability, and deliverance. However, in The Power’s dystopia, violence only brings mutual misrecognition. It is the opposite to Lévinas’s ethics of alterity and transmodern relationality, and the rhizomatic displacement of the centre into a multitude of centres. Hence, the young man’s end can only be a yearning to end, his death being “ecstasy.”657 It is not even bare life he stands for, but a dissolution into nothingness. The effect of The Power is both ethical and political. Relationality is unfeasible in a violent dystopia that echoes many of the vortices of the current political panorama, especially the consideration of the destitute masses and the crisis of democracy. When Tunde escapes or wakes from the murder scene addressed in the paragraph above, he finds himself inside a cage.658 As a prisoner, he learns that women hunt men in the night.659 Once again, a dystopia only reverses reality to lay it bare – Tunde is not the prototype of the refugee. However, when he becomes one – i.e. he knows himself to be an illegal660 – the concept of destituteness changes. Anyone can be illegal if the frames of (mis)recognition change. Violence is politics before and after the Great Cataclysm. Thus, in reversing Braidotti’s posthuman and transmodern transculturalism, The Power features a political ground that has much to do with actual dystopias. 654

Alderman, The Power, 269. Ibid. 656 Ibid. 657 Ibid., 270. 658 Ibid., 271. 659 Ibid., 273. 660 Ibid., 277. 655

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Indeed, the current world is increasingly a dystopian scenario where regimes, both democratic and non-democratic, feel legitimized to practice a politics of exclusion. They do so because, like Eve and Tatiana in The Power, “they can.”661 That is the logic of a politics that is no longer politics but more akin to Rancière’s police. The police is established as an apparatus whereby actual governments control and distribute objects, bodies, ideas, and wills. The legitimacy of the frames whereby they perform their power may be questionable, but there is no effective politics to disrupt that police. Thus, when women in the novel hurt and kill men and children, they justify their performance in very simple terms – they do it as long as they have the option and capacity to do so.662 That is the logic of the police politics The Power represents and that brings to mind actual politics. Ultra-right-wing parties and totalitarian regimes, some of them theocracies like Mother Eve’s, justify their police politics in those simple terms – legitimized or not by democratic or other processes of representability, a growing number of politicians and regimes are exclusionary and repressive just because they can be. Once more, in reversing the status quo, the novel is addressing it and pointing to the way it excludes and abolishes the destitute mass. How can Mother Eve and Tatiana’s exclusionary regimes police the vast majority and accomplish an apocalyptic scenario? They do so using apocalyptic narratives to their benefit. Nature is portrayed in menacing terms, emphasizing the greyness and blackness of the sky, announcing both heavy rain and drought – in other words, recalling the chaos on Earth whereby “every living thing has lost its way.”663 In this context of narrative dystopia, there is, however, the promise of a Biblicallike flood. Thus, “the water gathers in … the sky”664 to cover all and eventually renew life in a new dawn Mother Eve repeatedly promises .

Transhuman Politics in The Power Drawing on the biblical apocalypse, the female supremacist regime that has replaced the patriarchy (fictional editor) Naomi and (fictional writer) Armon do not even recall brings about a traumatic status quo akin to the current political panorama. The state of violence and war, the exclusion of a destitute mass, and the global climate change are issues that Butler and Alderman put forward. Against the zoe-centred scenario Braidotti has vindicated with a balanced symbiosis between humans and machines, The 661

Ibid., 283. Ibid., 288. 663 Ibid., 293. 664 Ibid. 662

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Power features a transhuman state. What starts as a reaction to patriarchal Darwinian biodeterminism ends up being a biopolice state that can only result in a war of all against all.665 In fact, at the end of Armon’s novel, despite Naomi’s patronizing irony, women become cyborgs, whose superpowers and robotic movements are about to annihilate men666 and eventually life in a revised version of the biblical flood mentioned above.667 Echoing the vengeful God of the Old Testament, this is a message of atonement rather than redemption. Once again, The Power intends to stir consciences, pointing to relevant political issues, especially the very survivability of democracy. I already analysed how The Power tackles cyberfeminism and feminist science fiction to explore gender representation from a speculative framework.668 As a matter of fact, although “the rage of Riot Girls and the like might feed into Mother Eve’s dystopia instead of into a horizontal revolution … it is the confrontation of such a dystopia and actual patriarchy that begs for an ethical response.”669 That being said, I think this ethics of Otherness naturally entails fruitful political undertones. The horizontal revolution that Mother Eve and actual political leaders claim to embody is, however, an achievable and desirable aim that can help rearticulate representability and good politics. When social movements – especially those led by young leaders like Greta Thunberg who vindicate not only environmentalism but an overall paradigm shift – are ahead of conventional politics, governmentality must be rethought to meet people’s new needs, interests, and concerns. The Power’s dystopia is a move against the domination model that keeps submitting many social groups, animals, and the planet as a whole for the sake of a few. That is why, although the novel is concerned with the crisis of democracy and the rise of personalized populisms that Pierre Rosanvallon underlines, it is not just a revision of democratic institutions. The Power complies with transmodern principles, and hence, although apparently appealing to radical democracy to break with hegemony, as represented by vertical regimes like Mother Eve’s, it also questions Western hegemony and the conception of democracy as the only ethically-committed political option. The pre-Cataclysm patriarchal regimes were as unfair as Eve’s female supremacism, precisely because there is supremacism in both cases; i.e. the idea that the West can still decide on what can be considered as legitimate politics. That is why, 665

Ibid., 312. Ibid., 305. 667 Ibid., 325. 668 Yebra, “Acheronta Movebo,” 2019. 669 Ibid., 82. 666

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the crisis of democracy apart, The Power appeals to the crisis of truth and the challenges biopolitics still pose for gender and identity issues in transhumanism. I will not deal with post-truth, which is very roughly traced in Naomi and Armon’s exchanges, but on the underlying implications of identity politics when the very concept of humanness is being revised. James Hughes was the first to speak of transhuman democracy in 2002,670 and, although I find it problematically Eurocentric, it is relevant for Alderman’s novel. Against widespread opposition, and drawing on cyber-feminist voices like Haraway and Braidotti, transhumanism supports human enhancement thanks to technological development: “Transhumanists, people who embrace technologies that extend and enhance regardless of their effect on ‘natural’ life spans, limitations or social institutions, are the progressive end of the new biopolitical continuum.”671 Transhumanism is however controversial, bioenhancement being an ethical issue that affects the very essence of humanness, as Aline Ferreira points out in her analysis of feminist dystopias such as The Power.672 Technology allows humans to deconstruct and reconstruct humanness and control its possibilities. Yet this, which can be regarded as an asset, can have the opposite effect, humanness being just another commodity in a neverending market. This brings us to the political implications of transhumanism, Hughes’s democratic transhumanism being a case in point. In his view, the latter “stems from the assertion that human beings will generally be happier when they take rational control of the natural and social forces that control their lives.”673 At the beginning of this century, his central argument was that, since biotechnology is an unstoppable event, it is much better for democratic regimes to regulate it. In this way, it is not the market but social welfare that is in control of bioenhancement. A few years later he refined his view, and although his thesis was basically the same, he addressed the issue in a more nuanced fashion: The Enlightenment transformed the Christian teleological eschatology into a conviction that humanity would be able to continually improve itself. But the scientific worldview does not support historical inevitability and suggests that there are absolute limits on the advance of progress. Today 670 James Hughes, “Democratic Transhumanism 2.0,” Public Policy Studies (April 28, 2002), http://changesurfer.com /Acad/DemocraticTranshumanism.htm. 671 Ibid. 672 Aline Ferreira, “A Feminine Politics of Nonviolence: Genes and Moral Bioenhancement,” BAS, no. XXIV (2018): 153–62. 673 Hughes, “Democratic Transhumanism.”

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Hughes’s Western-biased discourse is obvious, the Enlightenment and Christianity being the two axes of his understanding of transhumanism. However, he acknowledges the aporia that transhumanist advocates are going through and that The Power recalls. The question the novel brings up is the difficult balance between two extremes and its political implications. The Western conception of progress has eventually proved to both increase and diminish human suffering depending on one’s socioeconomic status and nationality. As happens with transmodernism, transhumanism has evolved from the 1990s, which were “characterized by exuberant Enlightenment optimism about inevitable progress,”675 to the “2000 dot-com crash [when] transhumanists have tempered their expectations about progress.”676 Pessimism looms large in current politics and in Bessapara. In other words, personalized populism and dystopia, which have become recognizable narratives, are referential in The Power. Hughes devotes most of his discourse to articulating the rapport between transhumanism and democracy in an either-or fashion. If democracy does not assume and profit from transhumanism and vice versa, he argues, bioethics and biopolitics will develop equally but for the benefit of a few, and under the control of an elite he describes in terms akin to Alderman’s dystopia: “Whether it amounts to a Singularity or not, the coming decades will turn our world upside down and our expectations inside out. Radical times call for radical solutions.”677 His manifesto intends to move citizens towards a full democratization of technology. However, he imagines this from a Eurocentric position that assumes that developing countries must accommodate it. This is, I contend, what The Power aims to correct. The novel reveals the multiple threats of humanity by reversing the status quo, but the radical solution this dystopia demands is not simple and one sided. Gender discrimination, climate change, the risks of bioethics, bioenhancement, and biopolitics are crucial issues that Mother Eve’s reversed world tackles. Yet, there are cultural specificities her regime aims to suppress in the name of Western-oriented female liberation first and supremacy later. The Power is resolutely transmodern and transcultural, 674

James Hughes, “Contradictions from the Enlightenment Roots of Transhumanism,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 35, no. 6 (2010): 631. 675 Ibid., 632. 676 Ibid. 677 Hughes, “Democratic Transhumanism.”

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featuring characters and scenarios from all over the world. In fact, it is the political radicalism and the lack of sensitivity to singularities that condemn Eve’s project. Democracy is in crisis, but democratizing according to Western (US neoliberal or Eve’s radical Christian) standards only condemns democracy to a further crisis. In addressing singularities, democracy does not become perfect, but it solves its crisis and accepts its limitations of incapacity to cater for non-democratic cultures and countries. This is the lesson Eve – and many world leaders – does not learn or pay attention to; hence, the dystopia the novel conveys is but an allegory of the actual dystopia the world is undergoing. As mentioned above, The Power is a metafictional novel, working on different ontological and temporal layers. The effect is one of confusion and destabilization – Alderman’s text is an early twenty-first-century account framing the exchange between Naomi and Neil about his new novel in the far future. Indeed, his historical novel, entitled The Power, constitutes the core of The Power. His account recalls times of the patriarchy when all its traces have been erased. Before the exchange itself, Alderman (the author) ironically clarifies that it is a fictional text and quotes the biblical Samuel to frame Neil’s dystopia of female supremacism. The verses from the Bible she chooses are those where the people of Israel demand Samuel choose a new king: “The people came to Samuel and said: Place a King over us, to guide us.”678 The prophet tries to persuade them to relent, arguing that a king will abuse them in all possible manners. However, the people insist: “No. Give us a King over us. So that we can be like all the other nations. Give us a King to guide us and lead us into battle.”679 The people’s request is political rather than religious, mainly aimed at securing Israel’s security and warfare resources. His two sons being unsuitable for following his lead, Samuel chooses Saul, with God’s connivance. The choice of a king to rule in a despotic fashion forecasts how Mother Eve is chosen by her followers to rule the dystopian world Neil depicts. Once subaltern Others are ruled by the tyrant they are denied a voice, their will being ventriloquized by the king or queen. The same structure of despotism and repression is repeated in the different ontological and temporal layers, be it Alderman or Neil’s novels or the actual world. The transition from one narrative voice to another does not make any difference. Indeed, the shift from Alderman’s biblical verses to Neil’s account of Eve and Tatiana’s rise to power is smooth. Moreover, the echoes of the unforeseeable rise of current world leaders resonate throughout the novel. 678 679

Samuel, 8: 1–22. Ibid., 8: 1–22.

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If The Power as a whole is arranged in layers of possibility and ontology, this applies very especially to its gender discourse. Gender, Neil points out, “is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn’t … Tap on it and it’s hollow. Look under the shells: it’s not there.”680 In reversing gender roles and even evolutionary psychology, there is no subaltern or Other to frame a neutral (traditionally masculine) Same. The novel plays a specular (besides a shell) game whereby dystopias reflect each other and elicit new readings of politics, gender, and violence. The effect of this specularity is rather Butlerian because all three concepts above prove to be performative. Neil wonders, as he appeals to the reader, about essential masculine and feminine traits by reversing classic discourses. Thus, if men are naturally inclined to peace and mothering, the aporia he envisages is as funny as it is disturbing: “Are patriarchies peaceful because men are peaceful? Or do more peaceful societies tend to allow men to rise to the top?”681 From Neil’s futuristic viewpoint, gender is as performative as it is for queer theory, which is obvious as long as the gender roles in Neil’s account are arbitrary and utterly contradict those in past and current patriarchies. As for the performativity of (bio)politics and violence, I am not implying politics of life and violence are not true events. Indeed, the effects of both on the destitute masses are undeniable. Yet, The Power suggests, they can easily become commodities to regulate and distribute actual bodies, social interaction, and ideas. In this sense, the clash between opposite ontologies does not mean they do not exist, or could exist. It just means that in the post-truth era it is necessary to be attentive to how (bio)politics and violence configure the Same and the Other. The Power is an antidote because it bears witness to this binary and how, drawing on Foucault and Butler, life is deemed worthy or unworthy. It follows that, although the novel shares with postmodernism its evident experimentalism, there are many reasons to label it transmodern, not only because it is transcultural, rejecting the supremacy of the Western Enlightenment over non-Western positions. There is also a return to religion, ethics, and a concern for politics, all of which makes up its reideologized discourse. What does it take to be the Other when the centre no longer holds or when centres are multiple? What does it mean to speak when positions are so radicalized? Alderman’s novel draws on visual imagery – especially embodied by cyber-feminist voices and feminist dystopias like Sheri Tepper’s, Sally Miller Gearhart’s, and Sarah Hall’s – to put forward new discourses that replace Sedgwick’s male supremacist homosociality with a female supremacist alternative. As a consequence, 680 681

Alderman, The Power, 338. Ibid., 334.

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the very naturalness and invisibility of homosocial domination are not only rendered visible but also questioned. In using dystopia, Alderman and Armon are by no means surrendering to biopolitics and biopower. On the contrary, their stories explore how truth is entitled, how bodies are inscribed meaning and granted recognition and grievability, and how the ethics of relationality is suppressed to uphold a domination model. In other words, forecasting the consequences of a radical biopolitics in a fictional scenario conveys not only an aesthetics of terror but also political responsiveness.

CONCLUSION

As Naomi Alderman is a young writer, a Granta promise a few years ago and a relevant voice in British fiction today, she will surely continue a valuable literary career. For the time being, she has proved to be an author of wide-ranging interests and abilities. The four novels analysed here address and depict totally diverse scenarios, historical periods, and thematics. That is why it has not been easy to delimit a thread connecting all four texts. After much thinking I have concluded that, perhaps due to the author’s cultural hybridity, the ethics and poetics of alterity were a particularly apt starting point to tackle her literary production. In view of the analysis, the choice has proved to be a good one. My interest in radical alterity is linked to Lévinas’s conception of Otherness and the face of the Other. Lévinas’s radical theory can be impractical as long as he recognizes no reciprocity but an unbalanced relationality whereby the Other prevails over the Same, who must thus surrender to the Other’s Otherness. Besides, he rejects any physicality or singularity in this asymmetrical rapport – the Other cannot be reduced to any other in particular, but to a conception of Otherness in general. This said, Lévinas constitutes a helpful basis to explore Alderman’s discourse. However, her novels address Otherness in more practical terms. That is, Alderman’s fiction appeals to Otherness, as a rule – not in the abstract but reduced to the othernesses of concrete individuals with specific problematics. The recognition of the Other as an actual other is not only an ethical but a political event that Alderman explores from different angles and contexts. It is in this sense that I speak of the speech of and by the others in response to Spivak. All these novels give voice to those traditionally at the margins and grant them a centrality that redefines centrality itself, dispersing it into a network of equally valid and relevant centres. From the above and the analysis as a whole, it follows that this book has revised some faces of alterity such as subalternity, intrusion, sycophancy and subservience, ventriloquism, and radical destituteness. Besides the “face,” which is related to the poetics of (in)visibilization, the uttering mouth is an underlining metaphor throughout Alderman’s novels. The face that looks and is looked at and the mouth that utters and is uttered make up for a topography of the Other as singular and responsive. It is in this way that the author combats the silence of the subaltern. It is probable

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that Spivak would reject considering many of Alderman’s protagonists as subaltern as long as they are often Western citizens, and hence not deprived of all lines of social mobility. However, through them – a varied lot indeed – her novels delve into different forms of experiencing, configuring, and uttering (from) Sameness and Otherness. The status of Ronit, Dovid, and Esti in Disobedience is hybrid, being Jews in Britain. But there are many more things than meet the eye at first glance which determine their Otherness from within. Dovid is a rabbi, yet one who has been obliged by the community, or at least its leaders. As for the two girls, they are bisexuals who had lesbian relationships when very young, Ronit being the daughter of the former rabbi and Esti the wife of the new one making their status particularly fragile. Thus, the former ends up being an expatriate who feels like a stranger at home and the latter a stranger in her own marriage and community. Do the three have access to, as Spivak points out, the lines of mobility? In theory they do, as long as they assume the rules of the game which grants that mobility. Hence, the confluence between Sameness, a well-established Orthodox community, and Otherness, their veering away from the rules imposed by that community making up their transitional liminality. The Jewish Orthodoxy they are unavoidably related to confers individuality as long as the members of the community comply with its normative utterances. The post-secular return to religion and/or spirituality is indeed constant throughout Alderman’s novels and crucial in setting up the transition from Sameness to Otherness, and vice versa. As a matter of fact, one of the main features of Alderman’s discourses is how this return to spirituality is coupled with a reification of relationality. For a writer so concerned with the poetics, ethics, and politics of alterity, it is especially significant that she chooses terrains of exclusion, namely Jewish Orthodoxy and hierarchical Oxbridge. Whereas Ronit stands for Otherness from within, James stands for Otherness from outside. The former understands her alterity with respect to the excluding community she formerly belonged to; the latter’s case is far more complex because he is an intruder who dares to break social barriers. She transitions outwards to build up her bildungsroman from religious radicalism, while his transition is bidirectional. James’s role is ambiguous and his status liminal, being a transgressor and a sycophant at the same time. That is, he intends to transgress if that allows him to enter the Oxbridge establishment – an establishment that he both undertakes and questions, and that uses and despises him. In this way, Alderman revises the very concept of influence in its multiple dimensions, from the aesthetic to the ethical and political. Influencing the Other implies making that Other part of the

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Sameness the influencer represents. Yet, the Other always remains extrinsic, which is essential to the process of influence as transmission, but never as exactness and analogy. James is never akin to Mark but is a guest like Nick and Charles in Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty and Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. This is a somewhat British characteristic of Alderman’s. British literature (see, for example, Dickens and Austen) often features characters bearing witness to their exclusion from an elite according to which the limits between Otherness and Sameness are apparently negotiated. James’s case is as paradigmatic as specific in his relationship with Mark and his friends. Although the former is clearly subservient, a sycophant who flatters the latter to be part of the centre of interest he embodies, the process is rather nuanced. Indeed, Mark’s centrality is put to the test because, even though Oxbridge remains central to Britishness, it is somehow exceeded when it comes to reality. After Oxbridge’s spell, Alderman’s novel wonders, who is the encroacher? James intrudes in an a priori foreign territory where he does not belong. But Mark intrudes on James. That is why Otherness and intrusion mix, revising the concept of centre and marginality and the uniqueness of centrality. I am not implying that Alderman’s The Lessons negates hierarchy, but it delves into its dynamics. In the end, Oxbridge atomizes once youth has vanished, as is the case of the predecessors of The Lessons. However, James eventually withdraws from the system he has been driven to, and from Mark. That is the lesson of the novel which, despite its apparent classicism and atemporality, is informed by the atomization of reality and the classic centre into multiple centres. Otherness becomes an even more complex phenomenon as Alderman’s career advances. The Liars’ Gospel ventriloquizes the voices of marginalized historical and religious figures, thus confirming and rejecting their Otherness. The sacred Scriptures are hierarchical in their conception and narrative, Christ being the centre of the New Testament, the four evangelists and all other figures being in reference to Him. The actual gospels are texts originally authored by Jews but ventriloquized by the Romans so that the transition that Alderman designs in the novel is subtle, albeit effective. She aims to reverse the process, transitioning from a Christian to a Jewish account of Jewish voices. However, to do this it is mandatory to ventriloquize the Romans’ accounts back in a transcultural narrative. That is, Alderman’s novel adapts the Roman Christian canon of the four gospels to four alternative voices. Other writers have also explored the narrative possibilities of the sacred Scriptures, and even from various viewpoints, as Alderman’s novel does. But The Liars’ Gospel constitutes a reversal from a transcultural and feminist perspective that sets

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the limits between (and merges) Christian and Jewish traditions. The result is a revision of relationality that is both evoked and neglected by both traditions. Relationality and ventriloquism are consequently the two main axes from which transcultural transition takes place in the novel. In her review of Helen Davies’s Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets,682 Marie-Louise Kohlke points out how the book “evocatively explores and expands these interconnected concerns of a unique, autonomous vs. imposed, externally controlled subjectivity, of projected voice vs. imposed voicelessness, and of self vs. Other – or, perhaps more accurately, self-as-Other.”683 Davies does so “via close readings of select nineteenth-century texts and neoVictorian novels that employ ‘the ventriloquial metaphor’.”684 In similar terms, The Liars’ Gospel is a transitional text where the transmodern postsecular voice ventriloquizes the sacred Scriptures. In the process of revision, the uniqueness, projected voice, and selfhood of the religious originals are introjected (rather than incorporated) in the twenty-first century novel. To do this, the accounts Alderman puts forward serve to explore how the externally controlled subjectivity, voicelessness, and Otherness of Miryam, Judas, Caiaphas, and Barabbas are articulated. The meeting point between ones and others constitutes a liminal scenario that characterizes the current novel as Self-and-Other. This “conversation” between voices takes us back to the crucial role of influence in current texts which, although Kohlke attributes it to postmodernism, is, in my view, fundamentally a trans feature. There is something of the metafictionality and the “precariously unstable and contingently performative”685of postmodern subjectivity in the characters of The Liars’ Gospel. Yet, beyond precariousness and performativity, the novel focuses on the dialogue between past and present, the poetics of influence and the subsequent nomadism and transformation of texts. Even more than influence, it is the ethics of relationality or lack of relationality with the Other that determines the post-secular discourse of The Liars’ Gospel. Finally, the novel revises the classic conception of truth and lies to accommodate those narratives of alterity in a liminal space between one

682 Helen Davies, Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 683 Marie-Louise Kohlke, “Journeys in Ventriloquial Wonderland: Review of Helen Davies, Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets,” Neo-Victorian Studies 6, no. 1 (2013): 190. 684 Ibid. 685 Ibid.

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and the other. All in all, it is not, as already mentioned, a relativistic standpoint, but one that intends to understand the ethical reasons for lying. The poetics of othering in The Power stem from the radical destituteness of a large part of the world population and other global crises, particularly concerning gender, politics, and the health of the planet. If transculturalism is hinted at or partially addressed in Alderman’s previous novels, it is a main concern of The Power. Of the many possible answers to the current global crises, the novel finds that dystopian fiction is the most suitable genre. Dystopian fiction aims to move readers emotionally and politically, especially when the main focus is on the crisis of representation. With representation, I am referring not only to a narrative problem but also a political one. That is, the trauma paradigm that Roger Luckhurst regards as characteristic of current times686 is just one side of the coin – mass migration, climate change, and social differences, especially discrimination of the most vulnerable, are angles of a traumatized world. Transculturalism is not always a synonym of cosmopolitanism, at least not in the classic sense of the term.687 Appiah himself argues that the conception of cosmopolitanism cannot apply nowadays when the mirror is shattered.688 There is no room for former cosmopolitan optimism when globalization has brought global discrimination. The Great Cataclysm of The Power is a metaphor of this transcultural trauma paradigm that splits experience into before and after the catastrophe. This beforeness and afterness constitute a brilliant allegory of how violence and detachment, and especially the misrecognition of the Other, lead to new forms of discrimination and destituteness in the era of connectivity. Mother Eve’s regime can feel extreme. But the limits between worthy lives and bare lives split by Butler’s frames and countries’ actual borders are no-less real in the real world than in Bessapara. The destitute mass is as destitute as invisible nowadays. That is why, when a text like The Power points to such destituteness, literature regains its actual significance. As mentioned above, the crisis of representation in Alderman’s last novel makes literature resolutely political. All the movements of protest that prove that globalization is the new paradigm of transmodernity not only link people all over the world, but also reflect a global conscience and a sense of crisis which affect the most basic concerns, namely what it means to be human in the posthuman and transhuman, particularly when 686

Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2008) 687 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Penguin, 2006), 1–11. 688 Ibid., 1-13.

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citizens no longer feel represented by politics and the limits of humanness are being redefined. The threat of exclusion is more present than ever despite worldwide networking facilities, The Power being very graphic proof of this. Although new technologies make relationality theoretically easier than ever at a global scale, destituteness is also more extreme. The disenfranchisement of the many who are reduced to bare lives has a double effect that Alderman’s fourth novel deals with, especially in Mother Eve’s religion and Tatiana’s political regime – namely, the rise of new forms of spiritualism and deregulated religion against classic religions and the growth of personalized populisms that threaten representative democracies. This entrenches with the crisis of political representability mentioned above. Mother Eve’s new religion is allegedly a reaction against a JudeoChristian patriarchy which grants her followers a sense of justice, equality, and singularity. Likewise, the political system of Bessapara is supposed to repair historical injustice against women, granting them self-power. However, the novel insists on the crisis of representability, in emphasizing two points: no matter the apparent equality of new technologies and worldwide networks, globalization has not brought social wellbeing and fairness – on the contrary, the sense of an overall crisis has only increased. Moreover, The Power warns against easy solutions to complex problems. In the post-truth era, the regimes that Armon and Alderman portray prove to be as problematic and non-representative as those they are replacing. Yet, in the process of reversing the status quo, even when it is to warn against radical changes, the endemic malfunction of the structures of power – even the very frames the establishment constructs and is built from – is put forward. What is taken for granted is defamiliarized, which obliges characters and readers to question the familiar frames and search for alternatives, no matter the risk it implies. I have occasionally considered influence in this book. In coming to an end, besides its obvious literary undertones whereby Alderman’s novels share textual, cultural, and iconographic issues with British and Jewish (and British Jewry) traditions, Disobedience and The Lessons convey an influence of Otherness in more personal terms, while The Liars’ Gospel and The Power do so in more transcendental terms. In all four novels, relationality is a central issue. However, the first two deal with Otherness as a factor in youth’s maturation process, with implications which range from sexual and gender to cultural and identity concerns. In the last ones, Otherness is deconstructed and reconstructed in accordance with a neospiritualism that reframes the limits of relationality when politics and terror are threatening. I have also used two terms, transmodernity and transition, both derived from the prefix trans-. Every time a term is chosen,

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many others are discarded. Moreover, that term can feel insufficient or simply not always satisfactory, in this case in an author’s literary discourse. This is so with Alderman’s narratives. However, as the analysis of her novels has proved, they respond to this transness. They have evolved from texts that transition from Christianity to the Torah, from Britishness to Jewishness and back again, and finally to transcultural globality. As a matter of fact, this liminal territory is natural to a British Jewish writer. From her first novel, which recalls this liminality to perfection, to The Power there has been a transition. In fact, the latter has eventually transcended the former dual hybridity to embrace a globalized territory of change and a dispersion of centrality. The centre is no longer the West but a marginal imaginary state between Europe and Asia which is polarized as it is replicated in new centres of power worldwide. As mentioned above, Rodríguez Magda herself has evolved in her conception of transmodernity from the optimism of a few decades ago to the more pessimistic undertones nowadays. This is also the case with Alderman. Disobedience is not triumphal, but the protagonist can envisage a world and life beyond the limits of Hendon. The characters of The Power are trapped in a metafictional game that closely resembles the world today. The question is whether this last novel is a natural evolution which draws on a precarious reality and is to be resumed in future texts, or, by contrast, if Alderman will take a different track.

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